Dallas Smythe Student

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

And my juvenile point was that a lot of this critique is a rather
undigested rehash of a lot of Puritan hair-shirt crap. You may think
the quote is out of context - I think it's a revealing expression of
anxiety over pleasure and sensuality. It is also likely to have
little political appeal beyond a rather affluent gang of PC lefties
(or the voluntarily poor).

I'm with Mandel on this one.

Doug

^^^^^^^^
CB: I certainly agree that Marx and Engels spoke against "barracks socialism". But on the other hand I've always thought that Marx's notion of commodity fetishism implied that consumer tastes under capitalism would be inevitably contaminated in some sense by that "fetish".  Wouldn't we expect some significant portion of commodities in capitalism to be "use-"values that would disappear with the "clearer" state of mind in socialism/communism ?