Average family

[kelley]

At 02:31 PM 6/27/00 -0400, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>yeah, so subjective carrol, that marx felt compelled to write about these 
>>kinds of class categories in a number of his works.
>>do you have tourette's syndrome when it comes to this topic? exacerbated 
>>by amnesia as if you've never once, ever read marx and engels or me about 
>>189 times on the fact that you can use these categories because the 
>>polarity between subjective and objective that you pose is completely 
>>unfuckingtenable.  yoshie likes to blather on about bhaskar.  and yet, 
>>his work makes it clear how these categories are *very* real and quite 
>>*objective*
>>
>>kelley
>
>Surely Marx didn't speak of the "middle class" in a way that Ruth Cowan does:
>
>*****   [F]or the purposes of this initial study, deliberately limited 
>myself to one kind of technological change affecting one aspect of family 
>life in only one of the many social classes of families that might have 
>been considered.  What happened, I asked, to middleclass American women 
>when the implements with which they did their everyday household work 
>changed?  Did the technological change in household appliances have any 
>effect upon the structure of American households, or upon the ideologies 
>that governed the behavior of American women, or upon the functions that 
>families needed to perform?  Middleclass American women were defined as 
>actual or potential readers of the betterquality women's magazines, such 
>as the Ladies' Home Journal, American Home, Parents' Magazine, Good 
>Housekeeping, and McCall's." Nonfictional material (articles and 
>advertisements) in those magazines was used as a partial indicator of some 
>of the technological and social changes that were occurring. (Ruth 
>Schwartz Cowan, "The 'Industrial Revolution' in the Home: Household 
>Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century," available at 
><http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/r_uth.html>)   *****
>
>For Marx, the middle class = the bourgeoisie.
>For Cowan, "middleclass American women were defined as actual or potential 
>readers of the betterquality women's magazines, such as the Ladies' Home 
>Journal, American Home, Parents' Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and 
>McCall's"!!!  As Carrol noted, "it does not hold the same connotation 
>(Mill's use) for almost any two writers or readers," and Marx's usage 
>differs sharply from how the term gets used variously in American common sense.
>
>Yoshie

yoshie, sell yourself a klew and try learning about social science research 
methods and how that works.

then read marx 18th brumaire among other places.

then, read my comments again:  was i talking about cowan anywhere.  i was 
defending, in general, the SOCIAL FUCKING SCIENCE PRACTICE OF examining 
class just exactly the way marx did in the above, among other fucking places.

you're insufferable since i've written about this time and time again and y 
ou cannot be bothered to read what i write and take it on in THAT c ontext

that'll teach me to go looking in my trash bin for messages.
you give me an ulcer because you represent all that is disgusting about 
piss poor scholarship in this country.

kelley