By Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Casey Nelson Blake
Paul Goodman’s starting to be Up Absurd was once a runaway most sensible vendor whilst it used to be first released in 1960, and it turned one of many defining texts of the recent Left. Goodman was once a author and philosopher who broke each mould and did it brilliantly—he was once a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, between a bunch of alternative things—and the book’s shock good fortune demonstrated him as certainly one of America’s most original and trenchant critics, combining large studying, an astute brain, utopian sympathies, and a splendidly hands-on manner with words.For Goodman, the disappointment of adolescents was once a targeted type of the sadness of yank society as a complete, run by means of enterprises that offer employment (if and after they do) yet now not the type of significant paintings that engages physique and soul. Goodman observed the younger because the first casualties of a humanly repressive social and financial system and, as such, front line of capability resistance. Noam Chomsky has acknowledged, “Paul Goodman’s influence is all approximately us,” and positively it may be felt within the strong localism of today’s renascent left. A vintage of anarchist idea, growing to be Up Absurd not just bargains a penetrating indictment of the human expenses of company capitalism yet issues the best way ahead. it's a story of yesterday’s adolescence that speaks on to our universal destiny.
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Additional info for Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
Sample text
Since we have the technology, the capital, and the labor, why should we not have livable cities? Should it be hard to bring back into society the 30 per cent who are still ill fed and ill housed, and more outcast than ever? What is necessary is directly addressing definite objective needs and using available resources to satisfy them; doing things that are worth while just because they are worth while, since we can. Politically, what we need is government in which a man offers himself as a candidate because he has a new program that he wants to effectuate, and we choose him because we want that good, and judge that he is the best man to effectuate it.
The unemployment will be still more drastic. (To give the most striking example: in steel, the annual increase in productivity is 4 per cent, the plants work at 50 per cent of capacity, and the companies can break even and stop producing at less than 30 per cent of capacity. These are the conditions that forced the steel strike, as desperate self-protection. ) Everybody knows this, nobody wants to talk about it much, for we don’t know how to cope with it. The effect is that we are living a kind of lie.
But if they don’t watch what they broadcast, then they are utterly irresponsible and on what grounds do they have the franchises to the channels? We may offer them the choice: that they are liars or incompetent or irresponsible. The later direction of the investigation seems to me more important, the inquiry into the bribed disk-jockeying; for this deals directly with our crucial economic problem of synthesized demand, made taste, debauching the public and preventing the emergence and formation of natural taste.