[PEN-L:7742] Re: Re: exaggeration

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim, I am guilty of exaggeration on that point.
Yet when Japanese Americans were moved from their native home in California to the
Mid-West into concentration camps, their actual living condition were not bad and
there were certainly no brutality from the guards, many of whom, after the initial
emotional weeks, actually sympathized with the dentendees and were befriended by
some of them.  So physical condition alone is not the determining characteristic of
concentration camps.  The salient caharacteristics are concentration by type and
inability to leave.  The working class ghetto has both of these characteristics.
What saves the Aemrican working class is, as you have identified, America wealth.
Yet the mal-distribution renders the American working class relatively more
exploited than their counterparts in some less rich nations.  To prove this point:
the welfare payment in the US would support a middle class existence in rural
Indonesia.  Poverty is not caused by absolute income deficiency. It is cause by the
social pathology associated with a certain relative income level.  The urban and
rural slums of America have higher per capita income, albeit from unearned
government transfer payments, than most middle class neighborhood in the Third
World.  It is the social despair in the slums that make them unlivable.
As for Levitt Towners not wanting to leave, that can be explained by the syndrom of
longtime prisoners not wanting to leave their familiar prison.  Park Avenue in New
York also qualify as a concentration camp.  The children of these inmate families
yean to escape from that environment and the majority do as soon as they are old
enough, to the East Village where freedom for youth can be found.
My point is that capitalism has evolved sophisticated control devises that are not
physically painful or psychologically recognizable.
They are controls nevertheless.  Every summer, rich New Yorker spend their week
ends in the Hamptons.  The standard greeting among members of this elite class is:
"you are serving time here too?"
The joke have enough truth to support the humor.
One way to guard against the spread of capitalism is to point out the model of its
success as not at all what it seems.
At least in China, where the temptation of capitalism is powerful at this juncture,
that is a very urgent task.

Henry

Jim Devine wrote:

> >Capitalism's concentration camps are the Levitt Towns and similar suburbs
> >and the
> >"job" in the corporate system.  The plants of GM are frightenly similar to the
> >network of concentration camps, albeit more outwardly humane, but not less
> >violent.  Harlem is an occupied zone.
>
> Except for the part about Harlem, this seems an exaggeration. This is one
> of the richest countries in the world you're talking about. Working-class
> suburbs like Levitt Town may be drab and alienating, but I think you'll
> find that the vast majority of the people who live there would disagree
> with your analysis. It's true that they have a superficial analysis of
> what's going on (missing the totality of the capitalist mode of
> production), but that contrasts with _actual_ concentration camps, in which
> the people know that they're in such camps. (In other words, you don't have
> to accept what people see, but it's good to respect their point of view.)
>
> It's also unfortunate that the phrase "concentration camp" (as in most
> anti-insurgencies) has been merged in popular language with Hitlerian death
> camps. It leads to the wrong connotations. But that's hardly your fault.
>
> Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
> http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html
> Bombing DESTROYS human rights. Ground Troops make things worse! US/NATO out
> of Serbia now!