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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