“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, June 23, 2011

You Put Your Left Foot In

UC Davis student Jordan Carroll has a post in which he grapples with Tool-Being. Now as a “recovering Marxist” of course I don't mind that OOO has nothing particularly dogmatic to say about Marxism as such.

But that doesn't mean you couldn't be an OO Marxist.
That's my journey but it doesn't have to be yours. I'm pretty sure you could be an OO almost anything. This to me is a sign of strength, not of weakness.

Now OOO might be challenging for certain kinds of Marxism—in particular, the very Hegelian ones that are almost forms of idealism. The ones that involve something like the academic performance of Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta.

But the one thing that OOO isn't is a form of individualism. How on earth could it be, if it allows all manner of collectives and affiliations to be objects, to count-as-one?

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