On Sat, 06 Feb 1999 19:24:07 -0600 Carrol Cox <cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu> writes:
>How can anything about which masses of people care be *at all* "beyond
...the
>class struggle"? Every so often, Alex, you come up with the most
incredibly
>mindless questions.
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, I think asking "mindless" questions is necessary in order to provide a foundation for understanding. Who knows, maybe I should junk the Socratic method, but I think asking things at the most basic level facilitates learning. Maybe I come of as a jackass, but if I learn something, it's worth it.
>Let's put it this way. A working class (or fraction of a class) that
does not
>defend the unhassled right of women to abortion (with no moral nagging)
is a
>pretty damn worthless working class and will never be able to confront
>capital.
No disagreement there, but really, how often is the issue of abortion framed in class-conscious terms? I'm not one of those Mao/Avakian cultists that thinks feminism is bourgeois and counterrevolutionary, but I do think abortion is discussed mainly in bourgeois libertarian terms of "rights."
A while back in The Nation, Cockburn took the human rights groups to task for not adequately addressing the political context of "rights" talk. And now I see that Verso has got a new book out basically dealing with this. So I guess what I was asking in my previous post was: how are Marxists expanding the terms of the abortion debate so that it isn't framed in narrow bourgeois libertarian terms of "rights?" Has anyone written anything on this?
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