and yet, you claim this:
>>I don't think that *anyone* on this list (and certainly no one
>>on marxism or leninist-international) has ever advanced "not
>>marxist" or "not radical" as an argument.
rubbish. this is a continual point of argument. you yourself have told people that they shouldn't argue without referring to marx {see just one such in your comment to margaret of last april mairead at mindspring.com} you yourself complain that the list isn't marxist. you, yourself, complain in another post that ehrenreich's claims are trivial and banal, because they are trivial and banal to you and they are so, carrol, precisely because you are schooled in marxist thought. therefore, you are basically saying that BE's article is not marxist or radical enough for you and so, not radical or marxist enough. period.
if you choose to ride around on a unicycle wearing a scary fright wig, don't be surprised when people laugh.
furthermore, the argument charles made recently was that doug wasn't marxist. angela and chaz both ref marx in their attempt to claim that their diametically opposed arguments are more in line with marx.
your and yoshie's denunciation of morality and moralism derives from your claim that marx must not be understood or read as having a concern with injustice. in other words, the argument is always that talk of morality, justice, etc is "not marxist". that argument has been round this list about ten times.
yoshie IS complaining that ehrenreich's is moralizing --and is not marxist enough because of that. she's wrong about the moralizing and you're wrong that what she says is trivial and banal. it's not trivial or banal to harper's readers or readers of in these times.
>>Carrol
>>
>>P.S. For about 200 years the moldiest cliche of political
>>discourse has been to undercut a position not by arguing
>>against it concretely but by suggesting its motive (e.g.,
>>"being radical") is somehow suspect.
well, school yoshie in this then, because this is continually her approach and her argument against enrenreich in a nutshell. she wrongly claims that ehrenreich's argument is exhorting women to feel guilty about their advantages. and yoshie has gone round the bend in claiming, ferchrisake, that ehrenreich is the martha stewart of left politics. by invoking that metaphor she is basically saying that ehrenreich is the pop version of marx for the masses -- not marxist enough. to call ehrenreich martha stewart??!! what is that other than a slam against someone who is mocking martha stewart leftists who think its okay to get down and pretend like you're doing housework? it is a misreading of what enrehreich has actually written and a refusal to actually attend what ehrenreich has written and why.
she simply does not argue that anyone should feel bad about their own personal advantages or for the advantages women have gained in the past thirty years. (what yoshie claims) no where does ehrenreich say this. she specifically addresses the issue in the harper's article in fact.
she does suggest that women have become complacent. and she does suggest that this is, in part, the result of the division of labor and the consumption based lifestyles that result. these very different "lifestyles" create huge gaps between women that aren't easily overcome. our thinking, our politics, etc are shaped by the worlds we live in. we live in worlds demarcated by a division of labor that throws us into very differing conditions under which we labor and provides for very different "lifestyles". if being determines consciousness, as charles argues, then this matters because those very different "beings" shape rather different consciousnesses -- neither of which has been claimed to be superior to any other.
this is a very important point to understand in terms of social movements. i refer you to the book, _freedom summer_ which is a fine historical sociology of the people involved in freedom summer and how they created the infrastructure that would lead to more radical political engagements. they did so by working with people they never would have worked with. they did so, often enough, because they felt they owed a debt to society somehow or other.
by actually engaging in freedom summer, what was initially a not especially radical politics, they were radicalized by what they learned: about a different world, about the lives of black men and women in the south, about a world they never knew of, etc. and they learned about the churches, the neighborhoods, the norms and habits and mores of peple who lived in the south. they also learned of the back breaking labor, the racism and so forth that these people had had to endure. and yep they felt guilty and ashamed for their privilege. but they kept in the struggle and went on to create the social movements that would resonate throughout the 60s and 70s.
if i live in the world of pottery barn, typing email on lbo, and meetings in conference rooms where i'm servilely served and cleaned up after by poorly paid women, then i'm not going to understand particularly well the struggles of the women who servilely serve me. as such, i will advocate things like welfare reform: if i work andraise a family, then she should too.
ehrenreich quotes women friends who say similar things. that is the reason why she talks about, with qualifications, the housework issue. she's not glorifying. she's not engaged in some fall from grace narrative because she actually does try to address and undermine that in the little space she has (ted's comments about journalistic writing apply here btw. you cannot expect journalists writing in harper's or in these times to say all that you'd like them to say. it's just not possible or even advisable, strategically. hint: you said the same thing re hitler recently.)
she's explaining where such attitudes come from. not from thin air, but from the very real differences in the social conditions of our labor--paid and not--and the very real differences in our experiences that result. she's accounting for them. she's helping to explain, for example, why feminists have infrequently attended to welfare reform issues or the concerns of poor women.
Joe Green over on
>>marxism is an asshole not because he is a doctrinaire
>>marxist-leninist or a sectarian but because his concrete
>>ideas are simply wrong. I don't care to engage in mind
>>reading (which is what you are engaging in above) by
>>speculating on Green's private mental processes.
>>And for those who are obsessed with jargon. I don't know
>>any politcal phrase, marxist or anti-marxist or even just
>>plain bizarre, that is more overused than "not marxist enough"
i don't engage in mind reading when it comes to the claim that you, yoshie and charles very often engage in the rhetoric of not marxist enough. you have done it often in the past. charles continues to do it, particuarly to doug and those he thinks it might bother. he just did it yesterday for pete'sake.
where else does the obsession with "correct" come from if not from a concern with making it all correctly marxist?
>>used to characterize someone else's presumed objections to
>>one's pet political progject. It is always shorthand for saying,
>>"I disagree with you, but I am too lazy right now to actually
>>argue the point, so I'll just claim that your only objection
>>to me is that I'm not marxist enough." Thirty-two words.
>>It only takes seven words to say "You just think it's not
>>radical enough." See -- Jargon does save a lot of words,
>>for anti-communists as well as for economists, physicists,
>>race-track touts, and maoists.
now why don't you actually take a look at the fine details of my "pet political project" and explain to me what is wrong with it rather than this nonsense above?
why insinuate that i'm an anti communist after a diatribe about the ills of "not marxist enough" eh?
btw, yoshie should try reading dorothy smith sometime too, if she wants to understand what i'm arguing rather than projecting a bunch of crap into my posts that isn't there.
and she really ought to read bhaskar and take him to heart, apply his critique to her own posts. she violates the spirit of what he's up to, as do you, everytime you rail against self, individual, etc.
>>The prototype for the kind of argument Kelley advances here
>>is all those studies of Marx that claimed he deduced socialism
>>from Hegel without paying any attention to reality.
>>
and you have the nerve to rail against Not Marxist Enough when you just now have claimed that what i've engaged in is not marxist enough!?
actually, what i typed was all about real practical political struggle and how theorizing ought to work in concert with that. what i wrote hardly had anything to do with some assinine argument as you've attributed to me above. more guilt by association eh? i can hardly see how it is that my argument--that people must become involved in creating the alternative political practices and institutions that will actually challenge and, perhaps, subvert capitalism--is one that would support of an idealistic reading of the development of marx's theoretical oeuvre.
i really shouldn't bother. replies are more than you deserve after this performance
kelley