Historical Materialism and Racism/Sexism/Heterosexism

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Tue Mar 13 13:34:48 PST 2001


You say "functionalist" like it's a bad thing, Leo. I'm not a Parsianin functionalist who thinks that everything on society can be explaineda s functional. I'm a historical materialist, who thinks there is a dialectic between functional explanation of social stability and nonfunctional, anti-functional (fettering) explanation of social change. I don't have to say, I reject, the proposition that class is the fundamental cause of everything.

My point way that class relations provides an overarching explanatory structure that accounts for why various ecletic causes have their eclectic effects. The way it provides that structure is via a quasi-Darwinian (really Lamarckian) filter of the sort described. T

The argument that class is the structural explanation rather than race or sex or whatever is pragmatic: in principle, race, etc. might be, but in practice we see that class-based explanations of the sort I am talking about are the most powerful, systematic, and cohesive explanations.

Since some theory is more attractive than none, your eclectic alternative of giving up on a general grand narrative is to be resorted to only in desperation. I don't think we are that desperate. It's not that you have a better alternative: you have no alternative.

--jks


>But if historical materialism is to retain any coherence as a doctrine for
>understanding human history, certainly it does insist upon the notion that
>the relations of production, and thus the class struggle, is determinant in
>human history, . . . .
>
>Remove the ultimate primacy of class struggle throughout human history, and
>historical materialism dissolves. Once you allow that there are instances
>where class struggle is not the determining force in and of human history,
>you have left the realm of historical materialism, and entered a far more
>eclectic and pluralist version of human history. . . . . I don't think that
>a view that sees the relations of production and class
>struggle as a sort of historical selection mechanism, one which simply
>takes
>discourses which first develop independently in the realm of civil society
>and the state and incorporates them into its dynamic of surplus extraction,
>can meet the test of a coherent historical materialism; it is simply a more
>developed, more refined version of functionalism, in which the relations of
>production are one of many distinct historical logics at work. Justin's
>account below simply provides a functionalist description of the
>intersection
>of race and class [note his use of the terminology "functionally useful"
>and
>"functionally harmful"]; the same intersection could be just as easily
>described from the viewpoint of the relations of racial domination and
>subordination, with an account of how capitalist relations of production
>become functional for relations of racial domination and subordination.
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