Friday, January 3, 2014

domestic prison

My mother and one of her helpers are dissing me. They are laughing at what they imagine to be my inability to tidy the kitchen---my mother's kitchen which is crammed full of pointless items which she no longer uses and never needed in the first place.  Pizza cutters,e.g., are a pointless and wasteful typically capitalist extravagance, and one certainly doesn't need two of the abominable things!

This typifies the degraded human misery that capitalism produces---not democracy, not true culture (only idiotic television), and not solidarity or community---but, instead, my mother can have twelve different sizes of plastic food bags, with various sorts of openings--a wholly unnecessary extravagance, which leads to unnecessary trips (in a planet-destroying vehicle) to the grocery store to be sure we are always stocked with all twelve sizes.......Capitalism has always produced only misery and degradation---even when it is not in crisis.

I am silent, but inside I am fuming.  I don't bother about things here that I don't bother about in my own home.  And why not?  My accommodation is a cluttered room, with stacks of papers and books unorganized because I've not got time to beautify my surroundings.  Why not?  Once upon a time I taught philosophy and at the end of each semester I slept for three days, and then spent three or four days organizing and cleaning up.  I had the time to do that, and, afterwards devote weeks or months to reading and writing.  These days I have no such free time.

I am willing to do a certain amount of domestic work in order to stave off chaos, but I am not willing to turn my life into unending slavery to domestic work and abandon more important matters--such as reading and writing.

No comments:

Post a Comment