Susan
The Amazing Adventures of Sara Corel
A novel by Toomey


Second Interlude
Jecel Assumpcao, Jr.

[Toomey]
      The part of Karl Marx was played by Karl Marx - a dozen of his more famous quotations culled from the 'Net. The part of Crom was played by Ed Howdershelt.

[Jecel]
      Thanks — I had great fun! If anyone bothers you about not explaining how Sara spent the previous night you just mumble, "there are certain things that a gentleman does not mention."  :-)
      I do wish Sara had given Marx a good whack on the head, though. After the Berlin wall fell down I felt silly that I had never looked too deeply at what the fuss was all about. So I read The Communist Manisfesto. It was amusing enough, though I wondered how much he would enjoy true proletariat art such as Rock and Roll (in contrast to such noble entertainment as the Bolshoi Ballet). He was a very weak prophet and would be very surprised to see such things arise in capitalist countries (and denounced by those calling themselves 'communists'!).
      But then I tried Das Capital. He replaced the notion of value as a matter of supply and demand with one of embedded human work. He even is reasonably convincing until he got to the first problem with his theory — a chair that took twice as long to build should cost twice as much, even if it is identical to the others in all other regards.
      So he invented the idea of 'socially useful work'. If somebody paints rocks red all day long and nobody has any need for that, then that person has performed zero socially useful work and should be paid nothing at all. If a person is lazy or incompetent and takes four days to build a chair that other people could finish in two, then they have only performed two day's worth of socially useful work and should be payed only for those two days. If a guy is really good and can get a chair done in only one day, then he should be payed two days even so. But how do you find out that a chair always has two day's worth of human labor in it no matter how long it actually took to build? A comittee defines it!!!
      Of course I had to stop reading right there (I had never not finished a book before). This is the same as carefully developing a complex equation, then multiplying it by zero and adding 15 to get the answer! Since I didn't get to the end of the book, it might be that he somehow fixes this later on, but I really doubt it. This was a really bad case of intellectual fraud, so Sara should have given him a beating for me.


Proper Waffles
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© Patrick Hill, 2000