In Cambodia last winter at the orphanage, there was a school teacher. He was five or six years older than the American students I travelled with. We sat in a line, over-looking the sand soccer pit. He knelt and faced us, rested his hand on someone’s bare knee, leaned in, smiled.
He wanted to be an accountant and was going to the night school in the heart of the city. He said he loved America and wanted to go there. He wore slacks and a clean white shirt each day we saw him. But on the last day I saw that it was soiled. And I wondered why the color white.
It has bothered me for a long time. Ever since it was first said to me. But I could not understand it; or rather, I understood it too well and could not say it properly. It was under the illusion of so many ‘cultural’ misunderstandings, but I will attempt to understand it now.
A woman who ran the orphanage later explained that the night school for accounting (as well as most other institutions of higher education) were draining students of their money. Those degrees obtained were not respected in the financial world, in the first world, she said. But what else could he do? What else, if that is his dream?
He is mistaken. He praises the thing that robs him and abandons the superiority of his position to strive toward an ideal that he has been barred from since birth. It is not individuality. It is not the case of the individual. But he and I and you are taught to believe that it is the individual: that living in America will benefit the Khmer people when in fact it is a reproduction of that dilemma. That selling drugs in the American inner-city will elevate a family, while it strengthens the forces of addictive self-annihilation for that family and all the others. That travelling to the third world with a “conscience” absolves me.
I am not absolved.
To them, their own social action, takes the form of the action of objects which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.
Filed under: Getting With the TYMZ, In the Media, Cambodia, Capitalism, False Consciousness, Marx
I am working my way through Foreign Affairs magazine. Reading this and Lukacs at the same time really help the material I am studying stew around; it’s great. Check Csothbeg144 for my comments and responses to some of its articles in the July/August issue.
Posted the second half of my response and rehash of “What is OM?”
