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View Full Version : Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview



Comrade Samuel
25th August 2013, 05:50
http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/crossroads_labor_pains_of_a_new_worldview/

I am uncertain if philosophy is the correct classification for this documentary but I am sure that hearing revleft's response to this will be enlightening.

While I would like to voice my own thoughts I am a bit short on time at the moment thus my response will be a tad condensed...


Perhaps the whole thing was a bit too 'new age-y' but from a Marxist perspective there were quite a few things I liked about this. Sometimes even for the most rational of individuals thinking about things from a broader perspective can do wonders for how you develop your world view and feel in general. For starters this thought of inevitable global change in the near future coupled with accepting the 'do or die' nature of our situation regarding interdependence just seems to scream communism to me.

After watching this I felt like my own mindset and relation to my peers had some kind of impact on the world as a whole, that I don't live in some kind of vacuum of stupidity; furthermore to think that I do is elitist and unbecoming of someone who claims to be a Marxist.

Sure, there were tons of metaphors used to get the viewer to think in a certain way, at one point I even had to pause it and say to myself "What is a living thing but cellular communism?" but perhaps that is just personal bias playing into something that is intentionally vague.

One part that threw me off was when they said that change 'won't come from the top for they have too much to lose and not from the bottom either but from the middle as they are the ones with the mean to observe and make informed decisions about the world around them." Is that to somehow say that the petty bourgeoisie are the revolutionary class? Obviously their numbers have swelled in this age of "the service economy" but that alone cannot possibly change the concrete truth that oppressed must overthrow the oppressor, can it? Maybe they are speaking strictly from the perspective of how the modern American views class (upper, middle and lower) therefore making my previous statements moot but I guess you can be the judge of that.

While I would love to think and talk about this more I am quite tired and the majority of this is probably gibberish anyways so....Mods feel free to move it to wherever you see fit and I look forward to reading some responses.

Strannik
26th September 2013, 18:07
I watched this movie. It was incredibly liberal and contained some really bad science.

Social darwinism does not follow from Darwin's theory of evolution but from its deliberate misunderstanding.
Energy is a form of matter, not something altogether different.
Society can't be changed by petty bourgeoise "choosing" to buy less stuff and making advertisements for being nice. Society is not just an opinion.
We are not living in a very narrow zone of life; it reaches up to Mars. It is not micromanaged by Mother Nature with unerring wisdom, but has evolved into homeostatic balance through subsystem interactions that have several times led to mass extinctions.

Systems theory and cybernetics are useful stuff for any marxist, I think, but without historical materialism this is where they end up - in new age-y idealistic spiritualism.