A Good Communist

            When I was visiting my parents back in 2008, I went into the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee. My father was leaning against one of the counters, his left hand in his pocket and a coffee mug in his right. He looked into his cup and then at me and said, You'd make a good communist,  and then looked back into his mug. He had a sad smile and dimples formed at his cheeks. I'm not sure what brought on that observation, my dad sometimes makes statements out of the blue. He might actually be right. The bullet points on page 166 seem to reflect some of my biases. Of course I don't think economic and social conditions are the end all that dictates what people believe and value.

            Page 169 Bressler points out that the theory considers that "individuals are cut off from the full value of their work as well as from each other" and that if the government owns all the stuff then the problem is solved. I don't see how this would work. Our production apparatus is to complicated not to have people specializing or working in separated  sections. Someone eventually tells you what to do whether it's the godless government or the bourgeoisie pigs. If waiting on Jesus to bring utopia to earth is pointless, then we're responsible for creating a paradise on earth. I've been giving it a lot of thought lately and it makes me uncomfortable to think that some group should tell another person what to do (except within reason like murder and stuff right?) and infringes on autonomy. I'm not exactly sure what that means anymore.

            Perhaps it's that after leaving such a tightly controlled environment, the idea of joining or working to create another controlled environment seems to defeat that purpose of leaving the first to begin with. However, I would like to believe that reality can be defined and understood and that self deception is a terrible thing. I think that we are always discussing issues of morality in the classroom even though we don't really like to use that particular word.

            I do like the a lot of the aspects of Marxist theory. The focus on the empirical world social structures of production has some appeal, something that seems very grounded such as a "person's consciousness is not shaped by any spiritual entity; through daily living and interacting with others, humans define themselves" (167). I was unhappy working at Fred Meyer's as a cashier. I don't know if it was that I was separated from my labor as a whole by scanning product that I didn't stock or if it was the manner in which customers interacted with me. Maybe it was my heavily entrenched middle class identity that didn't let me find enjoyment working in retail. Even Lenin referring to people as "cog and screw" seems to be forcing individuals into compartments where they are disconnected from the whole (170). In a way, I suppose teaching is still in a sense disconnected with the labor as a whole as students go onto many other classes. We're not privy to their entire education.

            I'm concerned that a lot of the later theories propagate foregone conclusions. New Historicism seems to side step this issue by focusing on the importance of cultural context; another school of thought that is concerned with empiricism. If critics are using a theory that has a political agenda it seems that they find exactly what they are looking for. Perhaps that's the point: collecting evidence for their theories. I'm not sure what the literary value is of a theory if the selected work singled out for criticism is just used for an end and not valued in itself.