Scott Adams is a bit more capitalist friendly than you give him credit for, though. There\'s many intelligent people in the IT sector and similar locations who hate their bosses and mock them for incompetence but still like markets and so on.

There really has been a mainstream percolation of what would just thirty years ago be considered radical values. I think that\'s the real source of the bitching by conservatives about the left domination of Hollywood and so on. (Ironically, it\'s less to do with leftism in Hollywood and more to do with Hollywood trying to sell a product that resonates, exactly what capitalism supports). The Hitchhiker\'s Guide to the Galaxy has tons of progressive material. The Stepford Wives was a wonderful, if a little hackneyed, bit about sexism. And so forth.

The popularity of Dilbert says the same thing.  Scott Adams describes the coordinating class as a bunch of "drunken lemurs." 

Given that engineers clearly recognize the suboptimality of the decisions made by their managers, it\'s not unreasonable to suggest that a parecon social arrangement would provide faster technological progress than the modern capitalist arrangement.

The Free Open Source Software movement offers a corroborating data point...

I was a bit surprised by how progressive Grisham is after watching him on Bill Moyers (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01252008/watch4.html)... I had figured he was just an apolitical writer of legal potboilers.. i guess this goes to show how mainstream anticapitalist and antiestablishment sentiments have become (probably largely thanks to all the work by the Left).. like in Shooter no one notices how radical some of the ideas in it are, everyone just takes them for granted, as Albert pointed out..

Hi Michael!

I think the thing you\'re talking about--I think of it as a "desensitization" program--is the crucial thing. There are quite a few things in our culture, often very popular things like Grisham\'s novels, that make no bones about the horror that is everybody\'s daily life, to varying degrees, on this planet. I suppose there are a million theories about how the desensitization has been accomplished--video games, TV, WWII movies, horror film gore, etc. Around 1950 Aldous Huxley (I believe it was) made a startling comparison between two phenomena: the sign that  (reportedly) transporteees read as they entered some Nazi camp that said (in German) "You Are Already Dead"; and the effect on the human mind of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. They\'re equivalent. It\'s like  the world is a big concentration camp. Torture, disappearance, deprivation, death can appear unexpectedly, arbitrarily, at any moment. If hope is taken away--if we are pronounced "already dead"-- no matter how subtly it is done--we are totally malleable, it doesn\'t matter how much truth we know. I suppose it\'s in Kafka too. Or Machiavelli or the Marquis de Sade. I can\'t  tell why it\'s so different now--or is it different? Have the relations between power/privilege and the masses always been like this? Has hope always been merely an intellectual "gap" available to that tiny group who are of the masses (or perhaps higher, but sympathize with them) but can also think beyond the daily crush of their oppression?

I can see one big difference: This is the last chance for the human species. Maybe it\'s that, for the first time ever, we\'re thinking in the rock-bottom terms of life itself, not just of me and those I love. This kind of species awareness, although relatively common among us leftists, is very rare (if it indeed exists) among most people I talk to or most of what I read. The absolute imperative of capitalist culture is: Look out for yourself, forget the other guy. If we can succeed in eviscerating capitalism at that level, I think we have a chance. But it\'s hard to convince a person that someody else is just as important as he/she is (pace Christ!), especially when the whole culture is telling him (1) you\'re #1, and (2) watch your step or we\'ll torrture/maim/kill you.

Terence

I have to say, I pretty much like them all a lot - and the movies too. I am now a bit further - I have a touch of bronchitis and between that and work and other reading, it is slower going than usual - but, progressing, and so far it is a devastating account, in some ways more revealing about the character of capitalism than usual left treatments... but it is not intentionally leftist, I think, rather just saying what is rather obvious, very well...

Oh wait, I meant "The Rainmaker", that\'s the one with the insurance company.

Michael,

It\'s strange, I was thinking about John Grisham just today. I wonder if you\'ve read "The Client"? The one about the insurance company denying the claim of a leukemia patient? I read that one a few years ago.And I was reflecting on it today.

It had all the ingredients of what\'s wrong. Health insurance, old age, loneliness, bankruptcy, wife beating, racism, murder. But all through the book, there\'s a current of one against the system (ok he gets his girl in the end, so two). It was just left to the ingenuity of the guy to wriggle through the system. No solutions regarding joining with others and so on.

Would be glad to hear your comments on that.

I think you\'d like this Marxist literature professor I had for several classes. His name is William Burling and he teaches a lot of utopian/dystopian speculative fiction: fantasy, sci-fi, and horror. He distinquishes between the "just live with it even though you know" and fiction that is more hopeful, while not loosing its biting edge, such as books by Ursla K LeQuin and Kim Stanley Robinson. I often argue, however, that beneath the seemingly bitterest cynical criticisms is a huge hope.

I don\'t think I have read any of Grisham\'s books, but your entry reminds me of a non-fiction book I recently finished called An Unreasonable Woman, an autobiography about a shrimper on the coast of Texas who was fighting a huge chemical company that was poisoning the gulf. She kept escalating her protests in different ways, often exasperating regular activists and those close to her with her risk talking, but it worked to some degree, though it also showed the minute the pressure was off the company, they went back to old ways where they could. Amazing story.