budge wrote:
>
> On Sat, 7 Dec 2002 at 5:39pm Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
> > They have a world to win." We have yet to lose the
> > chains, despite constant struggles before and after
> > 1848.
>
> Catherine is not a Marxits.
>
> (sorry, that was BAD of me)
Why? It seems a reasonable thing to point out.
Or do you mean that it is an interference with Catherine's subjectivity to point it out for her? :-)
Ordinarily I don't explicitly (and usually not even implicitly) appeal to marxist principle as the grounding of my posts, nor does Yoshie either for the most part. That seems to me, on the whole, proper practice. I filter out one poster on pen-l who always grounds his arguments on explict appeals to Marx. (Not lnp3) And I filter out those who usually or always ground their posts on a priori repudiation of any kind of marxism.
But if there weren't sometimes explicit marxist arguments or explicit anti-marxist arguments, the list would get pretty sterile. And this chain analogy is a good place, I think, to bring in explicit marxist principles. I don't know whether Yoshie had Norman Geras's critique of Laclau & Mouffe in mind, but there Geras uses an analogy of a chain (but on his own ankle) in a very powerful way. Mouffe & Laclau attack a caricature of marxism, claiming that Marxists _must_ adhere to a very mechanical notion of social determinism. Geras notes that if he is attached by a chain to a post, that _constrains_ but does NOT determine his actions. And I don't see how anyone can rationally deny that our actions are _constrained_ by innumerable conditions. We are constrained by our class situation, by our gender, by innumerable other conditions of our history. (Does anyone want to claim that they freely chose not to be a headhunter? Or that they freely chose to gain subsistence through employment rather than producing all their own needs?)
Yoshie's argument holds, of course, even for non-marxists. They would differ on the _particular_ chains, but on marxist or non-marxist grounds, we are all constrained in our choices by metaphorical chains.
Carrol
>
> --
> no Onan