Day: May 6, 2010

Caveat: Here and there

Banalities & Journaling

I still have no internet at home.  I'm at a public PC since I'm not at work these several days due to the sudden unexpected holiday.  For 500 won I can check my email, etc., but I'm not really missing it that much.  I went on a long wandering exploration today.  I took a bus to Mokpo, a city I've never been to before, and walked for 5 hours.  Down avenues, past the harbor, up a mountain, and through the downtown.  It's a pretty OK city.  The cool thing about walking everywhere in a new city, is that one can get oriented pretty fast to its layout.  I know where the bus terminal, ferry terminal, train terminal and city hall are, as well as the Homeplus department store and the main market and downtown shopping areas.  All by having walked past them.

Anyway, more later.  I'll try to get internet at my home next week - I'll need to have a coworker interact with the company in Korean to pull it off, I think – I'm just not that competent yet.

Caveat: On Marxism

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable

Just a brief thought.  I often describe myself as a marxist.  I'm careful to use a small "m".  The way I see it, it's a philosophical stance more than a political program – a way of analyzing the world with a focus on economic forms and causes, and with an interest in how ideologies interact with class (and social) consciousness.  It is not – and for me, at least, never has been – a set of prescriptions about politics.

In fact, politically, I have tended to lean somewhat libertarian, although as that ideological current gets more and more hijacked by the "tea-party" right in the U.S., I grow less comfortable with the term.  Lately, I've been thinking of myself as an anarcho-syndicalist, which is really just code for the libertarian left.

For those who confuse philosophical marxism with, for example, Soviet history, Terry Eagleton makes an important point when he says, "What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian."

[This is a "back-post" added 2010-05-23, from handwritten materials]

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