Goble
At the center of the information state as sold by the multinationals
and their spokesmodels in Wired is the "virtual" destruction
of public space. By extension, the land itself is to be rendered a
commodity for the well-off, a ghetto for the less-fortunate, and
an agar for the food we will still be eating. But in the remade
virtual world, there will still be production. "Globalization"
means that Capital will intensify the chase for the cheapest labor.
Nikes, for example, come from female chattel labor in Burma, not from
Star Trek-style replicators. This fact will not change because we may
in the future buy our Nikes by pushing a button in the comfort of our
homes instead of driving to the nearest Athlete's Foot. What will
change, and change for the worse, is our understanding of these facts
of production. A world in which the planet's real geography is
displaced by fiber optic shopping web will not change this: Things
will need to be made and people will have to make them.
Source: "The New American Frontier: Electronic Space and the Virtual Public,"
Mark Goble, Lumpen, Vol.4, No.3.
Scully
The North American pacifist, historically bourgeois, wishes to abolish
"Vietnams." All well and good. But if "No More Vietnams" means "No more
Vietnam Wars," it does not mean "no more colonies of systematic oppression and
super-exploitation." For that, the slogan would have to admit means
by which "Vietnams" (colonies of super-exploitation, not the struggles
against them) might be eliminated. "No More Vietnams," morally attractive
though it is, is a class slogan: a slogan of those who can afford to have
nothing happen. Or of those who, under the sway of bourgeois ideological
hegemony, against their better interests think they can afford to have
nothing happen. But it is also a slogan of those who openly wish to
maintain those colonies--who say "No More Vietnams" in the same breath
as they say "No More Cubas."
Source: "In Defense of Ideology," James Scully.