<HTML>Justin: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">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.</BLOCKQUOTE> I am not sure I understand you correctly here. Are you saying you are not a structural functionalist a la Talcott Parsons [Parsonian functionalist] or are you sayiong that you would differentiate yourself from the so-called French "structuralists" as some sort of generic category, in the way that a Foucault often makes a functionalist, almost Weberian argument [Parisian functionalist]?  It's not clear to me from the context. I see both forms of functionalism as flawed, but for somewhat different reasons. In that sense you are correct; I do see functionalism as a 'bad thing.' In any case, I think there are two discrete issues here: (1) how your "grand narrative" interprets history, and (2) whether your particular "grand narrative" of history remains on the terrain of historical materialism. I am more prepared to cede you your functionalist narrative of history, and see how well it works, than I am prepared to accept a claim that one can deny the premise that class struggle is the ultimately determining force in human history and still be considered to hold a variety of historical materialism. On this point, I must agree with Poulantzas: once you jettison the primacy of class struggle, if only in the 'last instance,' you have abandoned the terrain of Marxism and historical materialism. The claim of a Cohen that one could abandon the primacy of class struggle, and replace it either with the primacy of the forces of production, or the primacy of some sort of structural contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production [based primarily on his reading of A Preface to the Contribution to A Critique of Political Economy], I find a tortured, tendentious and overly scholastic reading of the Marxist tradition. Justin: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">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.</BLOCKQUOTE> I read this statement as the application of Darwinian [or Lamarckian] natural selection to history as a metaphor for the development of historical process. Certainly this choice of metaphor will allow for positive developments in a theory of history [appreciation for the role of randomness, the removal of teleology, etc. -- although I would think that a Lamarckian perspective would obviate the role of revolutionary change in favor of a more steady, continuous evolution], but I don't see how it can be properly called historical materialist in the Marxian sense.  Historical, yes; materialist, yes; but not in a Marxian sense, for not all theories of history and not all materialisms are Marxian. There is, I am afraid, a reason in history for Marx; he truly does invert Hegel, and sees class struggle, rather than Geist, as the dialectical mover of human history. I just don't see how you can give that up, and still reasonably claim to be within the Marxian tradition; it is like giving up a belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and still claiming to be a Roman Catholic. Justin: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">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.</BLOCKQUOTE> We might have some agreement here; it is not entirely clear to me. When I was writing the piece of the class/social identity question which !@#$%^&*() AOL ate, I started with what I saw as a pragmatic judgment that, in the current historical conjuncture, class organizations and movements [trade unions, labor/social democratic/socialist groups and political parties] will necessarily be at the center of any project of social emancipation and political democratization with any hope for success. For at least the foreseeable future, and even if class forces are now on the wane, it is impossible to conceive of any other combination of social forces which can match the political weight and capacity of working class forces. With all of the Gramscian provisos about the need to articulate class and other radical democratic [racial, gender, sexual] demands and movements [just as it can not happen without the working class, it can not happen with a working class narrowly defined to exclude the rest of civil society], I am prepared to accept a certain form of the primacy of class at this historical conjuncture. What I do not accept is a need to make this anymore than a pragmatic judgment at this point in history: once we go beyond the pragmatic position, and try to establish such broader grand historical narratives, we inevitably move onto very troublesome terrain, where we get into the metaphysical arguments concerning human nature, or historical determinism, or the functionalist, and therefore, circular, narratives of historical development which tell us very little of what we need to know. Why go there?  What does historical materialism, in any of its forms, give us that we need and can't get from a simply pragmatic analysis of political forces? And when it is a matter of just doing good historical scholarship, outside of any political concerns, what does it add? Do you really think that an E. P. Thompson or an Eugene Genovese needed historical materialism to do their research? If anything, the best historians in the Marxian tradition do their best history when they move away from the orthodoxies of historical materialism. Justin: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">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 </BLOCKQUOTE> Well, of course, it is not an alternative in the sense of an alternative 'grand narrative,' for it does not seek to establish one. But why should this be an act of desperation? If you can accomplish the political qua analytical goals you need with a considerably more modest explanatory framework, why the need to take on the explanation of all human history?   Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869) Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass -- </HTML>