Re: [Marxism] RE: Downloading

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 12/21/03 8:47:01 AM Pacific Standard Time,
daveamis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
The reality is that this is a clash between an old and outmoded business
company - the record label which has tight control olver its artists - and
newer forms of enterprise that focus on software that enables storage and
distribution and the attendant hardware that goes with it. The consumer does
benefit for sure but as to whether downloading music is a political act in
any sense of the words is doubtful.

Regards,
Dave A

Comment

Yep . . . I understand this to be a spontaneous movement - involving tens of
millions of people world wide, generated on the basis of a qualitative
reconfiguration taking place in the material power of production. This of course
sounds very dry and dull. Nevertheless, people become conscious of their 
activity
as the result of learning why a given set of actions arise and revolutionaries
fighting to make them politically conscious of their actions.

My personal beef with the Recording Industry goes back to the mid 1970s when
the Industry banned car cassette players from having a recording button or
recording capacity. A generation of car cassette players were being sold that
could tape music from the radio and the Recording Industry screamed that this
meant their death and theft of music. I was somewhat upset with the demise of 
the
8 track player because the music sounded better than the narrow tape band of
the cassette.

Then I was upset with the demise of metal tape in the market. I resisted the
early CD format because the sound was flat and crappie. Actually, I have a
spot of hate for the American music industry. I remember getting a European
import - vinyl, from Germany of John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" and "Giant
Steps" and could not believe what I had been missing in sound reproduction.

OK . . . let me come clean . . . it's more than a spot of hate. For perhaps
ten years I followed the writings of Dave Marsh on the music industry and on
that basis wanted to go to the dictatorship of the proletariat and was willing
to offer compromise with various sections of capital, under specific and
limited conditions except the Recording Industry. I believe some of these guys 
need
jail terms.

The Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) has a more or less
permanent scorched-earth campaign against the artist and consumer - and other
sections of capital, and need to be exposed for what they are - bandits and
criminals. The peoples of America and the world have a profound contempt for the
RIAA and their minion. Our job number one is to presents the facts of capital.
This contempt is not yet political consciousness but a spontaneous mass social
consciousness. The contempt is an objective development - A Theme In Search of
a Movie, that lacks its subjective components.

I hate these guys. I hate not having access to Eddie Harris, Donald Byrd and
Grant Green. Grant Greens "Seize The Bombing" - recording during the height of
the Vietnam war has been basically banned from public consciousness. And it
sounded good.

Freaking bourgeois degenerate . . . money grabbing . . . don't know nothing
about music in the first place . . . not wanting to pay a mutherfucker anyhow .
. . fu*king over the sound of music . . . needing to be put in jail
mutherfuckers. We need to launch a Jihad against the RIAA. Here is the real 
terrorists.

Melvin P.
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