Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized by Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Casey Nelson Blake

By Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Casey Nelson Blake

Paul Goodman’s becoming Up Absurd was once a runaway top vendor whilst it used to be first released in 1960, and it turned one of many defining texts of the recent Left. Goodman used to be a author and philosopher who broke each mildew and did it brilliantly—he used to be 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 method with words.For Goodman, the disappointment of youngsters was once a targeted type of the sadness of yankee society as an entire, run by way of enterprises that supply 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 stated, “Paul Goodman’s effect is all approximately us,” and positively it may be felt within the robust localism of today’s renascent left. A vintage of anarchist notion, turning out to be Up Absurd not just deals a penetrating indictment of the human expenses of company capitalism yet issues the way in which ahead. it's a story of yesterday’s early life that speaks on to our universal destiny.

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Additional info for Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society

Example text

To have a high standard of living of whose quality we are not ashamed? to get social justice for those who have been shamefully left out? to have a use of leisure that is not a dismaying waste of a hundred million adults? The large group of independent people who have been out of the swim, with their old-fashioned virtues, suddenly have something admirable about them; one is surprised that they still exist, and their existence is relevant. And from the members of the Organized System itself come acute books criticizing the shortcomings of the Organized System.

But they are thwarted. Is not this the “waste of our human resources”? The case is that by the “sole-prerogative” clause in union contracts the employer has the sole right to determine what is to be produced, how it is to be produced, what plants are to be built and where, what kinds of machinery are to be installed, when workers are to be hired and laid off, and how production operations are to be rationalized. ) There is none of this that is inevitable in running a machine economy; but if these are the circumstances, it is not surprising that the factory operatives' actual code has absolutely nothing to do with useful service or increasing production, but is notoriously devoted to “interpersonal relations”; (1) don’t turn out too much work; (2) don’t turn out too little work; (3) don’t squeal on a fellow worker; (4) don’t act like a big-shot.

But they hover in the background of the great subject that it is about. For it is impossible for the average boy to grow up and use the remarkable capacities that are in every boy, unless the world is for him and makes sense. And a society makes sense when it understands that its chief wealth is these capacities. I. Jobs 1. It’s hard to grow up when there isn’t enough man’s work. There is “nearly full employment” (with highly significant exceptions), but there get to be fewer jobs that are necessary or unquestionably useful; that require energy and draw on some of one’s best capacities; and that can be done keeping one’s honor and dignity.

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