MDDM Who ain't a Slave (a theoretical perspective)

[Richard Fiero]

Terrance wrote:

>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
>
>With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are
>implicit . . .
>where wife and children are the slaves of the husband.
>This latent slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first
>property, but even at this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the
>definition of modern economists who call it the power of disposing of
>the labour-power of others. . .

Marx wrote this just eighty years after the real Mason and 
Dixon began their line. Terrance is out to prove that M&D is 
postmodern text by appealing to Marx's writings of political 
economy where the term "slavery" is conveniently used. This 
causes me (at least) to enter into what I suppose to be Marx's 
head where he is using metaphors from the physics of the prior 
century in a theory along with his rather astute social 
observations. Next I find I must empathize with Mason and Dixon 
who use the physics of the previous century to explain their 
real world. This further traps me into the cusp of the 
18th-19th century and there is -no- way out since the text has 
successfully been turned inward on itself.
We can identify three forms of alienation for starters: 1) 
alienation through intelligence which tells us it's pointless 
to die since no heroic rebirth or transformation is possible 2) 
alienation through language where the world is hopelessly 
fragmented 3) alienation through toil that saps our lives and 
prevents us from finding vital selfhood.

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" . . . the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing
compared to the misery of not being exploited at all."
Robinson, Joan. 1962. Economic Philosophy (Chicago: Aldine). 45.