that is, we become
>non-ideological to the extent that we realize that race does not lend a
>group a unified disposition or provide a group with a disposition
towards
>maximizing the inclusive fitness of its own racial kind or cannot on
its
>own cause or even explain social phenomena (Barbara Fields emphasizes
>this).
>
> Again, race simply cannot and does not really have these mystical
qualities.
>The unique power of commodities to determine our social relations
however
>is no such illusion. Commodities actually do have such mystical power
and
>will only cease to have them through the actual transformation of our
>social relations in which presently the distribution of social labor
time
>can only be and indeed is really accomplished through the exchange
value of
>commodities.
Rakesh-
Given the formulation, and here I hope I'm not doing violence to your previous post (let me know), that race relations are social relations mediated by commodities, that identity (racial, ethnic) is something like an enchantment-precipitate of value relations between things (including other people) and individual subjectivites--although here I would stress that the subject/object relationship is problematized,--that we become non-ideological "to the extent that we realize that race does not lend a group a unified disposition or provide a group with a disposition towards maximizing the inclusive fitness of its own racial kind or cannot on its own cause or even explain social phenomena", there is still the begging question of how to live non-ideologically. Should not Ideology, after all, be used effectively as an organizing principle among people who desire collective unity and who see in it a tactic towards "actual transformation of our social relations"? And can't commodities, like books filled with ideological signs, be a part of this tactic?
I do think I agree with you, but there are still the questions: what to act? How to do?
-Alec
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