perhaps also to those who have not given up on morality. whatever that means. and, i guess, it's an answer to chuck: perhaps ehrenreich is advocating an alternative to testosterone politics and is behind what i write below. maybe doug can ask her what she thinks about below. i'd be interested in what liza thinks.... so, it's not really an answer to you, yoshie. we'll never agree on this issue and i'm back to filtering....
for one thing, ehrenreich is being pragmatic and she's asking people to engage in political practice. get involved and *do* something that will help people and in the process you might bridge the consumer divides, instead of investigating one's navel for lint and classifying it according to some ossified typification of real politics. to wit:
> I know it sounds scary, but it will be a lot less so if we can make
>sharing stylish again and excess consumption look as ugly as it actually
>is. Better yet, give some of your time and your energy too. But if all you
>can do is write a check, that's fine: Since Congress will never
>redistribute the wealth (downward, anyway), we may just have to do it
>ourselves.
---------------
yoshie:
>Ehrenreich is the Martha Stewart of progressive politics, for Ehrenreich
>thinks that housework is a _moral_ issue _for women_, a spiritually
>uplifting testimony to women's industriousness .
actually, she's talking about how the *shared* experience of gendered labor in the form of housework--the social conditions of labor--gave us something in common. now, the division of labor and the commodification of what was once unpaid labor presents us as enemies, as she astutely notes. the answer, at least one, for her is to create alternative political practices, as i mentioned above. no, it's not radical or marxist as you would have it. but if we sit around waiting for the time to be right for radical, marxist change we'll be sitting around forever. marx surely didn't say that we could only pursue radical political practices, but must take a side in the struggles and wishes of the age and move them progressively forward.
she's drawing on an approach that in sociology is evident in the lit on "civil society". it is in civil society--in the practices of commitment to something greater than one's self (in union struggles, in organizing, in volunteering, etc) that we create shared lifeworlds with people we might not ever come in contact with otherwise. in the process we learn to see the world from the perspective of someone besides our selves and those in our "chosen" lifestyle enclaves. in the process, (and this is habermas's schtick) we learn to create alternative social isntitutions in which *we* negotiate the rules through which we decide to live together. these are social practices that might, just might, present real alternatives to the colonizing logics of the market and state.
this involves morality. the market encourages a morality of self-interest maximization. "let me keep my own and i will become, without ever thinking about it, my brother's keeper".
the state encourages a morality of obedience to rules said to be in the service of the greater good: people who one does not know, but nonetheless depends on through vast intricate divisions of labor.
civil society, on the other hand, creates andis sustained by practices of reciprocity and we learn how to create, for ourselves, the rules by which we are to live together. (and this, i think, is what sam, brett, eric, i [and maybe angela] often are on about: where do people fit in? where do we in this coming utopia become part of the process of deciding how it is that we ought to organize our lives. which is why i think brett's parecon model is interesting but also problematic ]
we might get involved for all the wrong reasons, too. moralistic, selfish, whatever. my students, for ex, talk about working with the special olympics simply because they wanted to put that work on their applications to college. however, in the process, they learned about a world they never would have known existed and that turns them into people who are much more sympathetic to the struggles of the disabled, if not outright activists on some level.
to bore frances to tears, i'll mention, yet again, the anti nuke dump protests. while people started out protesting from a nimby position, their involvement in that struggle put them in contact with people engaged in similar struggles all over the world: latino communities in texas, ukrainian communities, etc. rural whites were in contact with those from worlds that, from a disctance, they could easily ignore and belittle. but the shared experience of capital/state oppression made them realize connections they would never have realized had they not gotten involved with. they can no longer take the view of observer and ignore and belittle. "those" people are no longer "those" people.
as demonstrated by numerous social movement studies done on that community and others, these people went on to get involved in other environmental issues. issues they might never have cared about before.
also, their nimby critique turned into a larger critique of, at first, the state and then of capitalism -- a critique of the capitalist economy that produced nuclear waste in the first place. they got involved, too, in issues they might not have cared about were it not from direct involvement--involvement that they took up themselves for selfish, moralistic, pious reasons to begin with.
this had real consequences when plant closings hit the communities. 1. they were much more cognizant of the rippling effects of the economy and much more concerned about the people in mexico who were the would be beneficiaries of the relocation. this, i would contend, is very likely a direct result of their political engagement in the anti nuke dump protests.
2. their active engagement in struggle meant that they felt a sense of efficacy--that they could accomplish something, that it was do-able.
a decade of such struggle and involvement, in turn, meant that the last time a plant announced that it would be closing up shop, the workers walked out on the spot. just up and left. and, unlike earlier plant closing announcements, many more people spoke out against the practice. and many more people were on the side of the workers who were working for minimum wage in a plant that had promised all kinds of things to that community in order to get tax abatements: we tore down houses, an entire street, at county expense for that plant and they paid not one red cent in taxes. five years later, they packed up and left. a normally very docile community was radicalized by their involvement in alternative institutions in civil society.
twenty years before, a community sat idly by with a "fuck us over we like it attitude" toward corporations. twenty years before, the town fathers posted a billboard on the highway that pretty much announced to the world that we liked getting fucked over.
no more. not after the nuke dump protests. no more, not after the engagement in protests against the last plant closing. and those engagements in protest were made possible by civil society *and* by the work of people thinking about ways to strengthen civil society and to create public spheres of active, practical engagements with the struggles and wishes of the age. yes, that would be lousy shit fer brains social scientists, often involved because they needed the r.a. monies or the research experience or the publications or because they wanted to piously demonstrate their moralizing concern for the down trodden. whatever. they couldn't have lasted long in that project without being affected by it and without learning to see what it's like in another world-- a world of the rural working poor that they often disparaged.
it was civil society that provided the foundation for the community's engagement in political practices to begin with. what were they? voluntary organizations that people often joined out of a sense of pious moralism: churches, little leagues, the grange, the ywca, book reading groups, women's league of voters, quilting circles, etc etc etc.
how were they the backbone of a (compartively) insurrectionary struggle against the state? these organizations provided the resource and practical infrastructure that enabled that protest to get off the ground in the first place. they provided a group of people who were used to donating their time for this or that project. people who were willing to do the shit grunt work, like typing letters, licking envelopes, making phone calls, digging up info. people who knew how to interact with peope they didn't always get along with. people who brought you donuts and hot coffee when you were standing outside the county office building freezing your tail off waiting from some government official.
while enrenreich ought to go further in advocating such an approach, she at least did hint that it wasn't enough to write a check out to an organization. perhaps doug couuld press her on this. nonetheless, i suspect from reading ehrenreich carefully over the years, she is coming from the above analysis of what it takes to make social movements work and why it is necessary to engage in and strengthen altenative social institutions and practices rather than denouncing them as insignificant. that may well be true in the long run. i don't know. but my hopelessly optimistic side, one nurtured by witnessing the transformation i witnessed above, makes me suspect it's worth a shot.