Hi Diane,
I appreciate what you are saying about being a single mother. I am
not in your skin, and don't have your identity and biography. Just
the following thoughts to link us further back to Marxist psychology.
When I grew up, we were so poor that we couldn't buy meat or
butter... there were many things we didn't have. I wore the old
collars of my father's shirts buttoned into a sweater because there
was not money for shirts. And when I was done, my brothers had to
wear it. And so not to wear out the pants, my parents bought leather
knickerbocker that could be worn 5 years and then passed on.
But the one thing my parents did was grow a garden and we had lots
from it that got us through. ANd here comes Marxist psychology--Klaus
Holzkamp said that the most fundamental human capacity is the power
to act. We are not dopes, delivered to the rules and laws that
structuralist sociologists nor the internal laws that classical
psychologists want us to reduce to. Rather, the power to act means
that we not only act but shape the very lifeworld we inhabit. We
shape the worlds, and in this, also ourselves, and we grow.
But I think my parents never went the next step, namely to analyze
the situation at a societal level, which would have turned up the
contradictions at a different level than at the one that they
experienced them, the personal one. And so they thought it was their
fault that they were poor and that the kids didn't have this or
that...
The other thing I wanted to say was that the people in southern
Labrador might have had minimal incomes, but not living in the city
allowed them to hunt, fish, get wood, gather berries, shell fish, and
many other things so that the little bit of money that they did have
went a long way. Land cost $100, and they cut all the wood, each
helping the other. When I wanted to build a boat, there were others
helping me. And when they built a boat or a house or a shed, I was
there to help, and others too. So in all the poverty, there was a
sense of solidarity, and the people had functioning families...
Again, these people drew on their power to act to shape their
situation...
Michael
------------------------------------------------------ Wolff-Michael Roth Lansdowne Professor Applied Cognitive Science MacLaurin Building A548 Tel: (250) 721-7885 University of Victoria FAX: (250) 472-4616 Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4 Email: mroth@uvic.ca http://www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/ ----------------------------------------------------
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