Re: [Marxism] Buying off the German people

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Now, me being anti-revs and all that, this might sound funny, but I think
Hebert Marcuse has already solved all this for us:

"This is a goal within the capabilities of advanced industrial civilization,
the "end" of technological rationality. In actual fact, however, the
contrary trend operates: the apparatus imposes its economic and political
requirements for defense and expansion on labor time and free time, on the
material and intellectual culture. By virtue of the way it has organized its
technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be
totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political
coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical
coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested
interests. It thus precludes the emergence of an effective opposition
against the whole. Not only a specific form of government or party rule
makes for totalitarianism, but also a specific system of production and
distribution which may well be compatible with a "pluralism" of parties,
newspapers, "countervailing powers," etc."

Herbert Marcuse. One-Dimensional Man
One-Dimensional Society
1. The New Forms of Control

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/ch01.htm

http://tinyurl.com/42ojm


More recently, Noam Chomsky, has also explored the same theme.

It saddens me that except for a few exceptions, nominally Marxist writers
have ignored such questions as "superstructural", or worse, accepted them as
part of what is required to run a State, in other words, accepting
totalitarian statism as principle.

sks

----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2005 10:25 AM
Subject: [Marxism] Buying off the German people


> In arguments elsewhere over comparisons between U.S.A. today and the
> pariah
> regime of our era, I mentioned that most German's were not victims of Nazi
> repression. This is evidence to support that. The image of Germany as a
> "police state" for most Germans from '32 to '45 would seem to be
> misleading.
> It was a police and murder state only for certain repressed and
> minorities,
> sadly and famously named from memory by most of us. I guess maybe I have
> had
> in the past the image in my mind that certain minorities were
> fascistically
> imprisoned and murdered, while the vast majority sort of cowered around,
> timidly watching, and fearing that they themselves might be subject to the
> same cruelty. But , probably contrariwise, for most Germans there was,
> under
> the Nazis, a qualitative difference between their lives and
> mental/emotional
> states and those of the victim groups.


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism