Tentatively,’s Comments (group member since Jul 06, 2021)

Tentatively,’s comments from the Working Class Readers group.

"I think that archaic forms of consciousness can be inherent in modern people, regardless of their class affiliation.": Yes, agreed.

Well, as some of you know by now, I am absolutely opposed to everything police state that's been done in the name of 'public health'. Anyway, what I'm about to ramble on about isn't relevant to a specific book, it's observations inspired by going to a local diner for breakfast this morning.

During the beginning of the lockdown, one acquaintance of mine, who was once a Socialist but had started identifying more with the Situationists, & another friend of mine & I went out together. I was curious about his, the Situ-sympathizer, take on the quarantine. He was absolutely uncritical of it, happy to be able to stay home & collect unemployment instead of working a low-paying job. I was very disappointed. To my mind, he was very easily bought off.

More than a year later, the restaurants that weren't economically destroyed have reopened & masks are no longer required. When this phase started a month or so ago there were very few workers, it was hard to find anyone who wanted a job because they'd generally had it easier during the lockdown. The local diner that I go to was a case in point - they were consistently understaffed. Now, in the last week or so, they have a substantial new staff.

Last week, there was a young hostess, maybe in her early 20s or even late teens, & I felt depressed at seeing her there. I'm sure the job doesn't pay well & after all the grief of the last 16 months it was saddening to see people forced back into the marketplace, taking jobs that're mind-numbing & underpaid - dead ends.

Today felt like a whopping reminder of working-class doom: there're plenty of new workers but they're mostly pretty scattered-brained & probably over-extended. Almost EVERY CUSTOMER, similarly working-class, IS CRIPPLED IN SOME WAY. One regular has obviously had a stroke & is paralyzed on his left side. Most of the men walk with a limp. Being there is like being in some casualty ward but everyone seems to be a casualty just as a result of their class-induced life conditions.

I suppose what I'm getting at is: that regardless of how much I've hated & continue to hate the lockdown there was at least some relief for some people from being fed into the grinder. Now that that relief is mostly over it's even more striking to see business back to usual again with the cripples going out to eat & being served by mostly friendly but definitely psychologically injured people. & there I was, as usual, right in the midst of it - wondering how much longer I can hold on before I just don't care anymore whether I drop dead tomorrow.

I finished watching "Heart of a Dog". Given that it was only written something like 7 years after the Russian Revolution its critique of revolutionary conditions is important. It's interesting, there aren't exactly any sympathetic characters. The doctor is, perhaps, the most sympathetic - but Sharikov, the dog, is sympathetic too. 'We can't turn animals into men' can certainly be taken as a counterrevolutionary statement because it implies that the workers were just animals & can't be turned into humans just because the revolution happens. There is no solution, extraordinary people will never be absorbed into the masses & as long as the masses congeal to peer pressure conformity they will never be extraordinary - but a problem with the working class isn't that it's incapable of producing extraordinary people but that class conditions are such that upper class people get lauded as extraordinary when they're not & extraordinary working class people are expected to 'stay in our place' because the privileged people hang onto that privilege by pretending that they can only be produced by upper class entitlement.

I only got through the 1st 5:38 of "Geopolyps" before I felt impatient to work on my own movie. I liked it so far. I hope to watch more.

Coincidentally, I worked for the Electrical Engineering Dept of a large medical lab in 1989. One of the reasons why I was hired was b/c a friend of mine who worked there was opposed to the lab's drug-testing policies & knew that I wd be too. Even tho I wasn't using drugs (illegal or legal) I had no intention of going along w/ any invasive testing. I was competent but I hadn't studied electrical engineering. I mainly ended up running 32 pair telephone cable & optical fiber but I'd also fix centrifuges by hitting them on the side. That actually worked.

Anyway, since we're on the subject of the rat race here I have amusing stories about that job. Here's a sample one: One of my coworkers had agreed to be on-call in exchange for something like $150 more a wk. He had to carry a beeper & be to the lab in a half hr of being beeped. W/ the extra money he bought a boat. The problem was that where he docked the boat was more than a half hr's drive away so he cdn't use it w/o risking being in violation of his on-call contract. I didn't work there for very long before I had a chance to go to Hawaii for free w/ my girlfriend so I quit. The coworker who was on-call cd've never done that, I cd afford a better life b/c I cd blow the job off on a whim.

MKArEn wrote: "Did you see Vladimir Bortko's film Heart of a Dog? About working class? I highly recommend it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_o..."

Based, I assume, on the Bulgakov novel? I've read the book but, alas, I don't remember a single thing about it. I just pulled it off my bookshelves & read the back-cover blurb & it seems interesting. Originally written in 1925!

MKArEn wrote: "Homo faber производит множество вещей, которые составляют среду, искусственный мир, который его окружает. Всякое создание насильственно, оно разрушает природу для своего предмета. Например, вырубаю..."

English translation: Homo faber produces many things that make up the environment, the artificial world that surrounds him. Every creature is violent, it destroys nature for its object. For example, a tree is cut down to obtain wood. Arendt stresses the distinction between artisans and slaves in ancient Greece. While artisans with their minds created something new with their own hands and “went to work as people, freely moving in the public sphere” [8], slaves with the help of their bodies provided the needs of their own and their masters. Moreover, those who create, leave their mark on the world, can devote themselves to mastery and focus their energies on creativity and thinking.

In modern times, there have been changes in the consideration of work and creativity. This phenomenon has also been expressed by great thinkers such as John Locke, Adam Smith and Karl Marx. However, Marx did not grasp the difference between labor and creation, so, according to Arendt, he came to the wrong conclusions.

MKArEn wrote: "Я тоже Нет-Нет Класс!"

English translation: Me too No-No Class!

I wrote a fairly detailed reply to the above & then accidentally deleted it. Let's hope I do better this time. What even constitutes "working class" is somewhat ambiguous to me. Sure, we can eliminate people who are born privileged enough to be able to live off inherited wealth. To me, it's a misunderstanding to equate working class w/ poor. After all, tradesmen like plumbers & electricians make a bundle. & are homeless alcoholics working class? When I lived in South Baltimore there seemed to be plenty of guys who'd been, say, house painters whose drinking led to their gradual self-destruction & unemployment. The drinking is often part & parcel of the working lifestyle. I was a hard-wood floor finisher for a decade. It wasn't uncommon for me to work 10 or 12 hr days w/ only a 10 minute lunch break & no other breaks. The work was grueling & as soon as we got off we'd go to a beer store & start drinking on the drive home. The booze was a muscle relaxant. How many workers become alcoholics under similar circumstances? I'm suspicious of any homogenizing of being working class. Not every working class person is actually good at their job, not every working class person can use the difficulty of their work as an adequate excuse for being an asshole. I often consider myself to be working class b/c I had to work roughly from age 18 to age 65 to make the money to pay the bills to SURVIVE - but I also escaped from it as much as I cd so that I cd concentrate on the things that were more important to me than just surviving. As such, I'm a working class intellectual - but I've also coined the term: No-No Class - so maybe I'm more No-No Class than anything.

You might be interested in knowing that one of my "bookshelves" here is "working-class-intellectuals". The URL for it is this: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list... . There're only 29 books on this "shelf", 16 of them are mine. It would be easy to debate who actually 'belongs' & who doesn't. There are plenty of people who should be on there but aren't - either by oversight or because I haven't reviewed their books. Perhaps Primo Levi doesn't belong but then I think his book "The Monkey's Wrench" is genius.