> Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
>
> > Speaking of which, a Zizekian approach to the whole Satanic ritual
> > abuse madness might be very fruitful. It seems to me there's a
> > collective fantasy apparatus at work there, a playing out of
> > anxieties about changed family structures, gender relations, and
> > childcare arrangements, compounded by profound anxieties about the
> > sexuality of children filtered through American piety. It'd be nice
> > if Alex had written a column about that, but we all know that guys
> > with guns are more fun to think about.
>
> Gee doug -- do you need Zizek for that? Radical america ran an article
> maybe fifteen years ago that made these points about overblown fears of
> kids being kidnapped-- hugely inflated statistics that overlooked fact
> that most kidnapped kids are taken by noncustodial parents, pictures of
> missing kids on milk cartons etc.
Actually, one doesn't even need a very sophisticated marxism. One of the clumsier versions of base/superstructure would probably do very well. A (perhaps *the*) distinguishing feature of capitalism is that (in contrast to direct forms of surplus extraction) the enemy is never visible. And of course: "The individual can never appear here [all pre-capitalist forms] in the dot-like isolation [*Punktualitat*] in which he appears as a mere free worker." (*Grundrisse* [Penguin], p. 485) In this dot-like isolation, recognizing as agents only others in dot-like isolation, suffering untold injuries to body and spirit, the individual strives to understand his/her world -- and to understand those injuries as inflicted by *someone*. The young Marx's observations on religion can be then generalized to account for all the wild beliefs with which these dot-like individuals make sense of their world.
Doug likes to quote Fitch on vulgar marxism being a 95% adequate account of reality. The phenomena Doug lists belong to that 95%. One can and for entertainment perhaps should write several 10s of thousand more pages dotting the i's and crossing the t's, but that is all Zizek can add to what we have already known at least since Milton.
Carrol