Susan
The Amazing Adventures
of Sara Corel
A novel by Toomey
Second Interlude
Jecel Assumpcao, Jr.
[Toomey]
The part of Karl Marx was
played by Karl Marx - a dozen of his more famous quotations culled
from the 'Net. The part of Crom was played by Ed Howdershelt.
[Jecel]
Thanks -- I had great fun! If
anyone bothers you about not explaining how Sara spent the
previous night you just mumble, "there are certain things
that a gentleman does not mention." :-)
I do wish Sara had given Marx
a good whack on the head, though. After the Berlin wall fell down
I felt silly that I had never looked too deeply at what the fuss
was all about. So I read The Communist Manisfesto. It was
amusing enough, though I wondered how much he would enjoy true
proletariat art such as Rock and Roll (in contrast to such noble
entertainment as the Bolshoi Ballet). He was a very weak prophet
and would be very surprised to see such things arise in capitalist
countries (and denounced by those calling themselves
'communists'!).
But then I tried Das
Capital. He replaced the notion of value as a matter of supply
and demand with one of embedded human work. He even is reasonably
convincing until he got to the first problem with his theory -- a
chair that took twice as long to build should cost twice as much,
even if it is identical to the others in all other regards.
So he invented the idea of
'socially useful work'. If somebody paints rocks red all day long
and nobody has any need for that, then that person has performed
zero socially useful work and should be paid nothing at all. If a
person is lazy or incompetent and takes four days to build a chair
that other people could finish in two, then they have only
performed two day's worth of socially useful work and should be
payed only for those two days. If a guy is really good and can get
a chair done in only one day, then he should be payed two days
even so. But how do you find out that a chair always has two day's
worth of human labor in it no matter how long it actually took to
build? A comittee defines it!!!
Of course I had to stop
reading right there (I had never not finished a book before). This
is the same as carefully developing a complex equation, then
multiplying it by zero and adding 15 to get the answer! Since I
didn't get to the end of the book, it might be that he somehow
fixes this later on, but I really doubt it. This was a really bad
case of intellectual fraud, so Sara should have given him a
beating for me.
© Patrick Hill, 2000 |