Goble

At the center of the information state as sold by the multinationals and their spokesmodels in Wired is the "virtual" destruction of public space. By extension, the land itself is to be rendered a commodity for the well-off, a ghetto for the less-fortunate, and an agar for the food we will still be eating. But in the remade virtual world, there will still be production. "Globalization" means that Capital will intensify the chase for the cheapest labor. Nikes, for example, come from female chattel labor in Burma, not from Star Trek-style replicators. This fact will not change because we may in the future buy our Nikes by pushing a button in the comfort of our homes instead of driving to the nearest Athlete's Foot. What will change, and change for the worse, is our understanding of these facts of production. A world in which the planet's real geography is displaced by fiber optic shopping web will not change this: Things will need to be made and people will have to make them.

Source: "The New American Frontier: Electronic Space and the Virtual Public," Mark Goble, Lumpen, Vol.4, No.3.


Scully

The North American pacifist, historically bourgeois, wishes to abolish "Vietnams." All well and good. But if "No More Vietnams" means "No more Vietnam Wars," it does not mean "no more colonies of systematic oppression and super-exploitation." For that, the slogan would have to admit means by which "Vietnams" (colonies of super-exploitation, not the struggles against them) might be eliminated. "No More Vietnams," morally attractive though it is, is a class slogan: a slogan of those who can afford to have nothing happen. Or of those who, under the sway of bourgeois ideological hegemony, against their better interests think they can afford to have nothing happen. But it is also a slogan of those who openly wish to maintain those colonies--who say "No More Vietnams" in the same breath as they say "No More Cubas."

Source: "In Defense of Ideology," James Scully.