no, it's surprise that anyone would sign up to this list, read the intro and not have a clue what doug wrote about his intentions. and, gordon's been on the list for years. the issue's come up before....? pointing out that the mission of the list was to put these issues on the table for discussion is not to say that they aren't up for debate, but that they are, in fact, contestable. to say that socialism is about workers owning and controlling the means of production leave out--and glaringly so--the realm of "reproduction" -- culture, socialization, etc. i expect that, were someone to advance the argument that production is to be our focus, they'd be willing to foreground--_foreground_--an awareness that what they've said is contestable, rather than received wisdom.
>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.)
i'm not a leninist, i wouldn't know. i take it to mean an emphasis on "real" marxist issues related to the sphere of production: union organizing rather than gay pride parades, for instance. or, a discussion about why about 3/4 of women in the US are in clerical, teaching or nursing jobs, rather than a discussion of a debate over the populist forms of feminism advanced by madonna or the spice girls. (mike yates complained about that). or, to take another real example, a dismissal of may-december romances as not especially important since such things will go away if we get rid of capitalism (brett and eric took this position, tho they changed their minds). or, another one, carrol's and yoshie's rejection of any talk whatsoever of white privilege or of white middle or upper middle class cultures as divisive to the struggle
>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,
feeling hyperbolic today, jim?
>but it also smuggles in a load of Cold War pluralist clap-trap that is a
>lot more reactionary than any working class orientation.
check. jim doesn't like it, it's reactionary.
>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.
i agree. however, my interlocutor wasn't saying that, was he? he's saying that in the actual messiness of lived reality, some things are just about sex, race, ethnicity, gender and that these have nothing to do with production.
>This looks suspiciously like a sandstorm, thrown up to blind us, rather
>than a serious contribution.
do you have an example of an issue that can be analyzed as unrelated to production? i'm quite serious. i thought about it for quite awhile and i couldn't think of much. granted, i was at work and distracted by work matters. even so, i rilly rilly would like an example.
>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.
i have no truck with this. what i have a problem with is the assumption that there is a realm of our lives unrelated to production and that it is somehow a residual category. even if one thinks of it in terms of reproduction--where the labor involved in reproduction is seen as not "real labor" (as Stainsby would have it)--it is still related.
further, it seems to me that any claim as to the priority of production/labor/class issues rests on a theoretical framework that has been undermined by history (consider your own critique of state socialism in the UK here).
i'm simply saying that class analysis, while it might focus on a specific social process, must be part of a wider research program aimed at the development and elaboration of a theoretical framework. no, i don't expect a specific analysis to cover it all. for instance, in mina's critique of Ehrenreich, she complained that Ehrenreich didn't talk about Jerry Falwell' types and their "hatred of women". well, Ehrenreich was writing about the Taliban at the moment. It was an article, limited space. We're fallible and can't do it all. Perhaps relating a personal experience will help:
When I've done research on upper middle managers, mostly men, feminist nudged me for not doing "gender" -- as in studying women managers. in fact, i couldn't get a feminist methodologist to support it as a dissertation project b/c i didn't study women.
I was doing an ethnography--of a particular place, at a particular historical moment. Yet! they thought I ws remiss for not seeking our more women to interview and observe. WELL! i had access to a look at the inside of a corporation and they were all men, save for 1 woman. In order to do what they wanted, I'd have to find another site. Now, that would be nice for comparative analysis, something ethnograhpies often lack, but it wasn't exactly practical. more importantly, i don't think i have to twist my research aims around to satisfy feminist concerns that we should study women's lives--specifically, make the study of women's lives central to my focus.
my response to them is that i'm studying gender by studying men. i was also studying the way they maintained the boundaries of their upper middle class strata by defining who belonged and who didn't. and so forth.
my research, then, would fit in a wider body of research on upper management, corporate organization, bureaucracies, etc. i consider myself to be doing "class" analysis, but i didn't forget that i was studying a particular group of people, mainly upper middle class white men. not just men, but upper middle class white men. that's where gender and race analysis comes in.
>kelley