TR & Tanner on Real reality // the marx connection

[Michael Bailey]

nobody even mentioned the Blithedale Romance in my presence before, or
if they did I wasn't listening - Hawthorne is all about the scarlet
letter and the 7 gables - found a copy of the book you mention, Alice,
in a nearby library via worldcat, will pick that up posthaste

so now let's see, it's all about work
- was poking around on marxists.org, that old Marx has a 50 volume
collected works that they recommend which was compiled and published
by a joint effort of a CCCP, London and New York publishing concern
betwixt 1975 and 2000
http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/index.htm

sure was prolific.  I admire that.
(would also like to read the collected works of Rudolf Steiner sometime)

So they urge you to have your library purchase the set, or buy a CD
for $1000 that has them all

Meanwhile, they've already transcribed the first 10 volumes on the
website (is that legal?)

anyway, old Marx, right - has this theory of surplus value, which is
where the hoity toity make the hoi polloi work for less pay than the
value of what they produce

it's really not so hard to imagine things working a different way.  a
lot of things about the above system "bite the weenie"

but I don't really get what he intended to happen instead (naturally,
I have plenty of ideas for a replacement system, myself) or why so
many peasants had to be killed - weren't they the ones this was
supposed to help?

obviously a major malfunction

Anyway, there is this other mysterious entity called "base and
superstructure" which means that he was able to discern the most
important thing and show how everything else flowed from, or grew
upon, that, right?

Somebody - maybe Bellow? - refers in several places to "book 3 of
Capital" to reading which there was some cachet attached - only one
reason why it's evidently worth some study, though.  A lot of people
acted on that vision and did cool things they would not otherwise have
done (like acid...???)

 Also there was this guy, Theodore W Allen, who wrote about the
invention of the white race: apparently Irish were not white for a
long time.

But interestingly, a search on "base and superstructure" among other
things yields a bunch of science fiction crit...
we have Gnostic criticism of Pynchon and Lacanian, I suppose there is
a lot of Marxist critique also?

anyway, it's all about the work.  maybe work is the base, and play is
the superstructure?

or, work is the play, and bass is the subwoofer