Producing Transformations

From a photocopy of a work by Eli Zaretsky the catchword in the formwork reads "Capitalism and Personal Life" [could be a chapter or a running head for the title of a whole book] and the page number is "63". I quote here leaving out a bit from the middle:

In the United States the split between the traditions of personal liberation and of social transformation began to occur in the early twentieth century. The rise of corporate capitalism led to the emergence of forms of personal life that were seen as independent of the mode of productions. The split was accelerated by the domination of the American left by the Soviet Union and the emergence of a model of socialism based simply on the planned expansion of goods production. [...] The development of corporate capitalism in the United States, where the overwhelming majority of the population depends on wages in order to survive, entails the development of a separate personal life. This in turn sets new tasks for a socialist movement — tasks that the Communist Party barely began to address, and that have only recently begun to take political form.

Now to quilt and restore the elided section:

Currents based upon the new sphere of personal life such as psychoanalysis and bohemia tended to play down or ignore the importance of the economy. For this reason the Communist movement has downgraded these currents as "petit-bourgeois" or "middle class." But the idea that personal life could be transformed directly through the transformation of production had its major relevance in pre-industrial societies like Russia and China where the family as a whole was still a unit of commodity production.

Immediately mediated. A recapturing of personal time is the ecological idea that may reform the relations of production in the twenty-first century.

And so for day 135
28.04.2007