Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Sun, 30 Aug 1992 17:33:06 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      [2]: The theoretical significance of deleting this posting
              unread: Reich's 'Clintonomics 101'

   What mad manner of RDRLIST screen shows PF2 for DISCARD? Most surely an
uncanonical computer; if not of the Devil then surely of Digital; a VAX upon
thee. But your site, UICVM, adheres to the true faith of Vurtual Machine System
Product, and this House of God, VM/SP-ESA, if not State of the Art, is surely
all the fiscal artifices of the State, Mario Cuomo, Governor & Supreme Mandator
Of Budget Cuts, allows: O Saint Mario! Thou hast spared the Murderer, but hast
as surely slain the SUNY System!
   The Creator of the Software, itself Creator of files, did not will that Man,
this software assuming it's interacting with a male consciousness, should
DELETE, that is, DISCARD e-mail unread from the RDRLIST screen. Hence but one
PFnn is unassigned as is displayed below the Command Line, thus PF10=     .

   To set the key I merely consult the useless online HELP, find I need to
know the syntax and opitons of the RDRLIST command, just step into the next
room, and find the documentation absent. I could in theory walk to the
Computer Center, but Experience I cannot walk but am actually insane with
toedium vitae on top of that. And, for proof it's God's will, damn Her, the
Center's *closed*.

   With deep regrets, one envisions the learned Dr Barrahona spotting some
"surlong" file, having to go to the dreadful exertion of typing DISCARD on the
RDRLIST screen, then discovering to his horror that it's something by Haines
Brown he cannot hold his head up in polite society without. That's why Great
Blue has given unto Man the Pf11 PEEK key, providing for reading it *before*
purging it. But one has already made a fool of oneself wasting Valuable
Professional Time on inanities when there's Serious Business at hand! If it
*wasn't* by Haines Brown, that is.

   Great Blue, more precisely, does not want you to read e-mail or do anything
except - not to mystify, but this is shorthand for "Management of Great Blue"
- buy (or lease or something) their Things. And it has been thus since ancient
times of the god Perot. Yet it is happy happenstance that the more e-mail, the
more computers must be acquired to receive it, the more nimble fingers of the
ubiquitous female slaves must be acquired, shorn if possible of their obscene
benefits, degraded to Temps or subminimum-wage Trainees, to DISCARD it. True,
there are automatic kill files; you have to tell them Daniel A. Foss, DAF,
George Papoon, and all the others, but it is worth it, What A Mighty Thing Of
Work Is Man, untouched by Human Hands!

   I have merely repeated the above, which I have said on several occasions,
for the benefit of new affiliates just now joining our Network. By requiring
the user to DISCARD (SYNONYM DISCARD DELETE) e-mail construed functionally
irrelevant or dysfunctional to the organizational system functioning, whether
by inspection or by supposition, it is my explicit intent to compel the user
to acknowledge the dynamic of the irrational consumption of human labor by
the subjective and ideologically postulated need or imperative for expansion
of the processing capability of computers and other office equipment. Moreover,
the easier it becomes to SEND (PF5), RECEIVE (PF9), SUSPEND (PF6) then (RESUME,
(REPLY, and such, e-mail becomes a disease precisely because it's something one
is *so good* at. In younger days, furthermore, there were times when the screen
would drive me forth; or there was that EAT exec I wrote which, in the hour and
a quarter it took to execute all PGMs, bade me do just that WHILE I WAS OFFICI-
ALLY WORKING (and then briefly I became a patriot that capitalism had done
thing), and I'd do something they called "curl up with a good book." But my
eyes grow dim. "To thine own screen be true, for if thou canst not see thy
screen it follows as the night the day [no windows in here] thou canst not
see any man." Women, I don't need to see, they Complain. So, like or no, when
this dose wears off, I must go home and stare at ceiling till Kingdom or time
of next Ingestion come, and practice not-smoking. (Computers don't *cause*
obsessive-compulsive disorder; they just don't, uh, obstruct it and, returning
the favor, put you in the mood for a Benson & Hedges.)

   Normal people, I warrant you, do not need to worry about vastly speeded up
and multiplied computer-assisted pathology, but recalling now the passages of
purple prose in old Karl Marx about the labourer becoming an appendage of the
machine, I find this now literally true. And not in manufacturing industry, as
Marx assumed, but in office work and, for me, diddling around with learned
scholars *instead* of doing office work. Think of the industrial proletariat
as a "stage" that capitalism went through en route to the maturation of its
actual central contradiction (and not the one between capital and labor, which
was a mere diversion). What that is will be taken up later in the week.

   It turns out, though, that the agent of human emancipation, the liberator of
the human species, is not your sturdy man of stone, your industrial
proletarian, broad brawny back groaning under the lash, but Bob Cratchit,
Ebenezer Scrooge's faithful green-eyeshaded toadstool, who as the *faux frais*
of capitalist production as Marx assured the Scrooges of this world he was,
could be paid a sum just exiguous enough to induce incipient death in Tiny
Tim, requiring in its turn the salvation of Scrooge's immortal soul, amen.

   What Bob Cratchit was for a living was Ebenezer Scrooge's mind, so that
Scrooge would not need one. The commerce in mental life was, in 1851 when
A Christmas Carol was written or 1857-1858 when Marx wrote the Grundrissse,
such a tiny part of the industrial capitalist economy, dominated as it was by
commodity production (making-up of standardized lumps, tons of coal, yards of
cloth, quintals of wheat), that for instructional purposes it need best be
disregarded. And forevermore after, the categories of economic thought would
continue, have continued, to make no qualitative distinction whether under
capitalism or under the late socialism, between the commerce of mental life,
information and art and science and education-knowledge-learning-scholarship,
vs the commerce of standardized lumps.

   What the hell does it mean, that the productivity of office work increased
(as determined by conventional methods of measurement) between 1960 and 1990,
what with High-Tech having meantime become so "hip," you know, between zero (0)
and one (1) percent?

   To get a whiff of just how muddled our thinking is about this strange NEW
economy we have, wherein 60% of economic activity, I read, is the industrial-
ization, buying, and selling of mental life [where did I read it, In an
article by Robert B. Reich, see below, back in 1989] one should turn to the
words of the Savior. The one I mean is Robert B. Reich, the heralded economic
version of Henry Kissinger.

   We are out of space, so until next time, please, *you* think about what is
stupid about the following; I'll give my $0.02 next time:

   "[The rich] tend to consume and speculate. But not even the portion of their
   windfall that they *do* invest is likely to have much of an impact on
   *human* capital. High-tech factories and equipment are worthless without
   skilled workers. For fifteen years American firms have loaded on computers,
   for example, but haven't reaped the benefits because employees don't know
   how to use them to improve output and quality.
      "The rates of return on investments in people - in their education and
   training - are thus high, and appear to be accelerating. One piece of
   evidence is the growing wage gap between workers who have college degrees
   and those who don't. In 1980 graduates earned about 50 percent more than
   non-grads; ten years later they were pulling in in twice the non-grad wage.
   New evidence suggests that every additional year of schooling increases
   future wages by 15 percent. Compounded over a working lifetime, we're
   talking big money." (Robert B. Reich, "Clintonomics 101 and why it beats
   Bush-Reagan," The New Republic, August 31, 1992; note: NR is Clintonphile.)

   Please read the above and, in addition, the following from the Clintonphobic
Nation: Andrew Kopkind, "Doctor Reich's Economic Rx," The Nation, August 17/24,
1992. Also read if possible: Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations, wherever
finer, liberally educated, genuine Harvard books are sold. Prof Reich is
tenured at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard.

Daniel A. Foss
FOR THOSE WHO CANNOT MAKE HEAD OR TAIL OF THE ABOVE: You are free to query me
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