Re: thoughts occasioned by Lou's post Re: Rethinking Marxism

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Gary MacLennan wrote:

> But there are other continuities within the cultural realm which gobble de
> gook about 'digital' and 'virtual' tend to obscure.  For a start there is
> no new art form.

Nonsense. There are a *ton* of new art-forms out there: (1) hip hop music,
based on advanced studio technology, scratching, etc.; (2) video culture,
based on the work of artists like Yimou Zhang, John Woo, and countless
others; (3) videogame culture, based on the work of John Carmack (id
Software), Shigeru Miyamoto (Nintendo), the folks at Valve Software, and
others; (4) a blossoming Web culture, with its concomitant forms of
l*stserv culture, Web-design culture, Net-gaming, etc. Everywhere you
look these days, the multinational proletariat is on the aesthetic,
political and organizational move.

My own feeling is that radicals ought to fight multinational capital's
takeover of the university system with multinational fire.  So they want
media studies? Then let's have classes which study in detail what the
media multis own, how they manipulate and distory the news, and how you
can fight back.  Do they want management studies? Then let's study
codetermination and worker self-management around the planet, and the gory
details of wealth polarization. Do they want Business English? Give them
Comparative Literature instead.

-- Dennis