> you're subscribed to a list that has as its mission an attempt to get
>over the economism of traditional marxism... !
This sounds suspiciously like a demand to toe the party line to me. Is there an LBO line on 'the economism of traditional Marxism'?
If there is, let me protest.
First off, the term 'economism', coined by Lenin plainly does not mean what Kelly means here. Lenin (Nascent Trends of Imperialist Economism) meant something like 'unconscious adaptation to trends in capitalist society'. (In which case, a contemporary expression of economism is more likely to be an over-emphasis upon race, rather than a refusal to give it space, since that is the dominant trend.)
Second, the radical left's critique of the exclusive trade union orientation of the traditional left may have had some point to it a thousand years ago, but it also smuggles in a load of Cold War pluralist clap-trap that is a lot more reactionary than any working class orientation.
In message <5.0.0.25.2.20011107235922.03bf9eb0 at mail.gte.net>, Kelley <kwalker2 at gte.net> writes
>the point at issue, intially, was that someone claimed that socialist
>meant that economic class issues were far more important than gender
>issues. firstly, i don't see how one could possibly disentangle class
>analysis from and analysis racialization, nationalism, and sexuation.
>how could you even start with a "class analysis"?
well of course one can disentangle different dimensions of social reality, theoretically, that's what analysis means. This looks suspiciously like a sandstorm, thrown up to blind us, rather than a serious contribution.
As to class analysis, well, why not, for sure. But as Karl Marx wrote to Kuglemann, 'I claim no priority in talking about class struggle' (this is from memory) on the contrary, bourgeois economic theory begins with class struggle, i.e. the division of the social product into profit, wage and rent.
> racialization, nationalism, and sexuation are processes (not things,
>processes) of that work together to form a system of oppression that is
>constitutive of and constituted by a capitalism mode of production AND
>reproduction. racialization, nationalism, and sexuation --all of these
>are intimately bound up with the rise of capitalism and have evolved
>along with the changes in capitalism in significant ways.
Well, yes, but that is all mystification, not explication. Some trends are more decisive than others at any point in time. Race and gender certainly influenced the formation and re-formation of the working class at various points, but take the present, for instance, sex differentiation is of declining importance in the labour market, while sexuality is of rising importance, as leisure is of rising importance.
>
>that is why one can't given pride of place to "class" analysis because
>it doesn't exist separately in some archimedean point, untainted by
>icky sex stuff and uncomfortable race stuff or the embarrassing
>imperialism stuff.
Well, again, nothing exists in isolation from anything else, but the method of abstraction an analysis allows us to consider things in their specificity, before forcing them into a generalised schema.
As to why the Taliban hate women - they don't. They have a distinctive attitude to what women should be. That view takes its intellectual form from antecedent ideas in Islam and in Afghan and Arab society. But its pertinence comes from the exigency of restricting access to the labour market - which at the moment is being done on sexual lines in Afghanistan. No difficulty in understanding that the economic motivation is more decisive than its ideological justification. -- James Heartfield