hidden injuries of class [was something about populism]

kelley oudies at flash.net
Thu Jul 22 10:52:33 PDT 1999


carrol writes,


>Sorry -- I know you have an explanation in some post, but I got so
>tired of your use of "upper middle class" that Ihaven't been reading
>more than a sentence or two from any of your posts, so I guess your
>views will have to remain a mystery to me.

oh thank the god i don't believe in that you've acknowledged that you read nothing i type. you've told me this before, but i didn't believe it coz you were always arguing with me or asking me about something i'd typed. anyway, thanks for this because i was beginning to wonder how on earth it could be possible that you recently characterized me as taking a position different from yours wrt how to engage people in political practice. i'd written, in a few posts to chaz, precisely what you typed! and i thought, geez whiz! how can carrol have missed what i'd typed? how could he have mischaracterized my position? i was beginning to think that all my spilling and grandma errrrrs were just too annoying. maybe they are, but at least i now know that you don't understand what i type because you don't bother to try.

of course, your retort is that it's all subjective, idealist nonsense--the use of these various 'class' distinctions. where this charge comes from is beyond me because there is much more to the materialist/idealist debate than you pose it. furthermore, there is plenty of theoretical and empirical work that lays out an argument for how to understand 'class' in the way i use it as very much about real, material, practical living in the world--that the ideas people have about what class position they and others are are the result of practical, material forces particularly those in the workplace. a marxist material analysis of "how things work now" does not abjure the use of these categories coz marx surely used them in his historical analysis in the 18th brumaire and he alludes to them many times elsewhere. where the great division between proletariat and bourgeois comes into play is the development of class consciousness and a socialist struggle. so, the two modes of analysis are not incompatible.

smooches, kelley



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