Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

In The Republic, Plato compared life on earth to a cave, in which prisoners are shackled to the floor, seeing only shadows flickering across the wall from the light of a fire. When one prisoner escapes and makes his way to the surface, he discovers that the world he had been living in was nothing but a web of illusions. He returns to the cave bearing the news, yet finds his former companions are still embroiled in petty disputes and bickering. He finds it difficult to take these "politics" seriously.
-- Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

Traditional political activism is useless. It's like trying to reform political institutions inside the Matrix. What's the point? What we really need to do is wake people up, unplug them, free them from the grip of the spectacle. And the way to do that is by producing cognitive dissonance, through symbolic acts of resistance to suggest that something is not right in the world.
-- Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

There is no single, overarching system that integrates it all. The culture cannot be jammed because there is no such thing as "the culture" or "the system". There is only a hodge-podge of social institutions, most tentatively thrown together, which distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation in ways that we recognize to be just, but that are usually manifestly inequitable. In a world of this type, countercultural rebellion is not just unhelpful, it is positively counterproductive. Not only does it distract energy and effort from the sort of initiatives that lead to concrete improvements in people's lives, but it encourages wholesale contempt for such incremental changes.
-- Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

...while Cobain and the rest of us punks may have rejected most of the ideas that came out of hippie counterculture, there is one element of the movement that we swallowed hook, line and sinker. This was the idea of counterculture itself. In other words, we saw ourselves doing the exact same thing that the hippies saw themselves doing. The difference, we assumed, is that, unlike them, we would never sell out. We would do it right.

Some myths die hard.
-- Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

Some myths die hard. One can see the same cycle repeating itself in hip-hop. The countercultural idea here takes the form of a romantic view of ghetto life and gang culture. Successful rappers must fight hard to retain their street cred, to "keep it real". They'll pack guns, do time, even get shot up, just to prove that they're not "studio gangstas." So instead of just dead punks and hippies, we now also have a steadily growing pantheon of dead rappers. People talk about the "assassination" of Tupac Shakur, as though he actually posed a threat to the system. Eminem claims his arrest for possession of a concealed weapon was "all political," designed to get him off the streets. It's the same thing all over again.
-- Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

With the so-called bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century, there was a gradual elimination of aristocratic privilege in Europe and, above all, in the United States. But rather than abolishing class domination altogether, the effect of these revolutions was primarily to replace one ruling class with another. Instead of being peasants, ruled by aristocracy that had control of all the land, the masswes were gradually transformed into workers, ruled by capitalists who controlled the factories and machines. As the nascent market economy began producing wealth on an unparalleled scale, money quickly become more important than either land or lineage as the basis for privilege.
-- Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

In the 19th Century, capitalism seemed to be clearly in the process of dividing society into two antagonistic classes. The division between rich and poor was as stark as it is in many underdeveloped countries today. Most people had to work for a living. this meant a life of dangerous toil under unbearable conditions in the factory, combined with grinding poverty at home. Then there were those who lived off the work of others, enjoying fabulous returns on their invested capital. There was not much in between.
-- Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

$author = "Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter";
$sql = "SELECT node_revisions.title, node_revisions.body, node_revisions.nid FROM node_revisions WHERE (node_revisions.title='$author')";
$result = db_query($sql);
while ($node = db_fetch_object($result)) {
print "";
print ($node->body);
print "
-- ";
print l($node->title, "node/$node->nid");
print "

";}
?>
-- Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

Technorati Tags: Quotations