Waking up: Freeing ourselves from work by Pamela Satterwhite
November 21st, 2009An open letter to the author:
Dear Pamela,
Thanks for sending me a copy of your book. It was good of Len B. to mention my name. I have read your book . There are alot of good things and some stuff needs to be criticized.
First on page 28 , you rightly mention the coltan mining, but I find the six million deaths over the top. Where did you get these figures? 6 millions Congolese have probably not been killed since the Congo became free from Belgian rule.
On page 22 you quote Naomi Klein’s support for the Zapatistas. The whole saga of so-called subcom Marcos needs to be taken apart. The whole thing smacked of marxist-leninism -it reminds you of maoism with guevarism. Marcos even forbid alcohol and nude bathing by both sexes. It was no good for the revolution. Revolution that start banning stuff always end up badly. the Marcos experiment was bound to fail. Peasants or peones lack cohesion, they remind you of the lumpenproletariat, as Marx once said.
But the worse thing of all was characters from the city telling poor peones what to do and think. Naomi Klein will have to go back to square one. She as many others are surface specialists, they never speak of the core of the problem.
On page 40 , you regret that capitalists never “feel allegiance for their country”. It is true they only have allegiance to capital , but they also fight for their own patch. See how Chinese capitalists are getting hold of many raw materials in the world. But capital is a gigantic automaton that no one controls in the end. Have a look at Moishe Postone’s book: Time, labor and social domination. Because even if we get rid of the bosses as you suggest , we will still have a society to run. And if it is on transitional lines value will not be abolished. At best the “Transitional project” is a reformist idea. Some shopkeeper in Lewes in England , said he wanted to get rid of his Lewes pounds that were still in his till, and that was before the credit crunch crisis! We hear stories of Transitional people who transmute their normal hourly rates into transitional rates, for example a pyschotherapist will say to a labourer :” I am worth £40 per hour”, so I require so much labour-time from you”. It makes you think, in fact the TRANSITIONAL PROJECT does not want to abolish value, it wants a “different” value based on the normal one.
It was good of you to write your book, but as I have pointed out there are many things that need to be criticized and superseded. I will pass Waking up to my friends here for discussion.
All best wishes,
Michel Prigent
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book//lookupid?key=olbp48272
November 21st, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Hello Good Folks at Principia Dialectica:
Please convey my thanks to Michel Prigent for his review of the book I’ve written, Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work…
…and please thank him as well for sharing it with others, hopefully for further discussion — one of the primary reasons I wrote it. It’s imperative that we, those of us who see our future freedom without bosses, begin addressing forthrightly any popularly perceived barriers to achieving that freedom. I hope my book has contributed to that.
Again, my thanks.
Pamela Satterwhite