Crow, Maurie (1976) Mobile privatism or convival community. unpublished. (Unpublished)

Abstract

Let me start right in with a value judgment in place of the customary self-deprecating joke to prove that the lecturer is only human. However, I am conscious that one person's sacred value judgment may be, for another person, an uproarous joke: so I will not be offended if you laugh. My value judgment is this : that 80% or so of Melbourne's people who are working people (whether industrial, white-collar or professional workers) are severely alienated, both from the products of their labor and from each other; that this inhuman condition, endemic to a capitalist industrial system, has been accentuated in recent decades by the development of what I have called "mobile privatism" whereby, ironically, one half of them are suffering from an excess of mobility and an excess of consumerist hardware, while the other half are suffering from a deficiency of mobility or consumer goods or both; that therefore both halves of the working population and their dependents are deprived, and not merely those who appear to be "have-nots", and all this is bad. And lastly, the way out of this impasse is not simply more mobility and more consumer goods for the deprived sections, but a new society, differently organised, in which a condition of self-management of production and convival community arangements for leisure-time pursuits replace the system that has given rise to our present malaise.

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