From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin@ricochet.net>
To: <extropians@extropy.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2001 8:18 PM
Subject: Re: Sweatshops (was Re: Made in China)
> Travas Gunnell wrote a post about sweatshops that
> began:
>
> > A sweatshop involves much more than just being
> > underpaid. Sweatshops typically feature several of
> > the following: threats and intimidation, human rights
> > abuses...
>
> At the end of the post, there appeared a very large
> number of links, one of which I clicked on by accident
> (I swear). And in it beheld...
>
> > C.7.1 What role does class struggle play in the business
> > cycle? At its most basic, the class struggle (the
> > resistance to hierarchy in all its forms) is the main
> > cause of the business cycle. As we argued in section
> > B.1.2 and section C.2, capitalists in order to exploit
> > a worker must first oppress them. But where there is
> > oppression, there is resistance; where there is authority,
> > there is the will to freedom. Hence capitalism is
> > marked by a continuous struggle between worker and
> > boss at the point of production as well as struggle
> > outside of the workplace against other forms of
> > hierarchy.
>
> > http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secC7.html#secc71
>
> Ah, it makes me nostalgic for the old days. It has
> been so long since I savored good old Marxist prose,
> "class struggle", "exploitation", and "oppression".
>
Yes indeed. And what of those classic debates, e.g., should the
intelligentsia be spared in the bloody revolution, and if so, how many?
Really, what happen to the high tradition of rhetoric? In this spirit I
offer the following as opening statement for the transhumanist manifesto: ;)
A spectre is haunting the world -- the spectre of transhumanism. All the
powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German
police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as
transhumanistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has
not hurled back the branding reproach of transhumanism, against the more
advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Transhumanism is already acknowledged by all the world powers to be
itself a power.
II. It is high time that Transhumanism should openly, in the face of the
whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet
this nursery tale of the spectre of transhumanism with a manifesto of the
party itself.
To this end, Transhumanists of various nationalities have assembled on the
net and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English,
French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
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