Rich/Poor, or: Fall Into the Gap

is this surprising news or something? apparently the majority of americans find the widening gap between rich and poor problematic. they're right. it is problematic. can you say "immanent critique"?

i'm sorry, i can't resist... i just love quoting marx and engels. ( many selections from The Communist Manifesto* behind cut )

and this i don't want to hide behind the cut. an oft-cited passage (my favorite, i think):

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. (233)

* Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Trans. Samuel Moore. Ed. Gareth Stedman Jones. New York: Penguin, 2002 (1888)

taking things too far?

ok...i'm sorry, but...

fredric jameson's (aka freddie-J) new book, "archaeologies of the future" is making me wet. intellectually, i mean, of course. god! you all have such dirty minds. i was up late last night reading it. (serves me right--the toilet flooded this morning...)

actually, reading about cultural revolution and the utopian impulse (also evident in the stuff i quoted from marx/engels in my previous post) always makes me wet.

seriously, too, does anyone else out there get physically, sexually excited by intellectual stimulation? i remember once, when i was at michigan state, my first quarter of biochemistry class...the teacher was lecturing us about globular protein structure...and i nearly came. seriously. i wanted to fuck the geeky guy sitting next to me. alas, i did not. if i had, i never would have gotten married (i was dating my ex-husband by that time), i never would have moved to vermont, i never would have gone to graduate school, and i never would have moved to seattle.

a butterfly flaps its wings...and before you know it, mandelbrot sets are busting out all over the place.

shit. complexity theory makes me wet too!