The Fix
Ursula Le Guin
In 2014, she attacked publishers, including her own, for treating books as commodities. "The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism," she told an audience of science-fiction luminaries at the 2014 US national book awards. "Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art – the art of words."Terry Eagleton reviewing How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 by Eric Hobsbawm in the London Review of Books
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/03/ursula-le-guin-rebuts-charge-that-science-fiction-is-alternative-fact
Marxism is about leisure, not labour. It is a project that should be eagerly supported by all those who dislike having to work. It holds that the most precious activities are those done simply for the hell of it, and that art is in this sense the paradigm of authentic human activity. It also holds that the material resources that would make such a society possible already exist in principle, but are generated in a way that compels the great majority to work as hard as our Neolithic ancestors did. We have thus made astounding progress, and no progress at all.The means. The end.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/terry-eagleton/indomitable
And so for day 2145
27.10.2012
