> >So Yoshie, looks like a lot of people don't want to be excluded from
> >the Marx club, even Catherine Driscoll! So what is it? They just not
> >your kind of Marxists?
> >
> >Doug
>
> Ah, yes, "'even' Catherine Driscoll," you say. What does the adverb
> "even" -- Cf. "c. Used as an intensive to indicate something that is
> unexpected: declined even to consider the idea," _The American
> Heritage Dictionary of the English Language_ 4th ed., 2000
Yes, "even" me. Because, as Doug knows all too well, I continually plot to encompass the demise of Marxism. Of course any reference to the archive will demonstrate that when I am participating on the list references to Marxism are either disparaging or non-existent. At times, when at my most subtle, I will appear to engage in some tenuously "historical-materialist" discussion, all the better to dismiss the possible contributions of Marxist thought. It's subversion from within if you will, and I obviously only hang out on this list for the moments when Marxism is revealed as the nostalgia industry it really is, and I can scoff at the demise of Marxist thought with my equally frivolous colleagues.
> -- say
> about you, Catherine, and Marxism as a political project (rather than
> merely a useful social theory or, worse yet, a "leftover" -- see
> below), as well as relations among them?
I'm going to pretend this is clearer than it is for the sake of saying your distinction between "useful social theory" and "political project" is unproductive and at best not very Marxist.
> The adverb "even" with which you modify Catherine's relation to
> Marxism as a political project has something to do with the
> production of obsolescence, as perceptively analyzed by Evan Watkins
> in _Throwaways: Work Culture and Consumer Education_ (Stanford, CA:
> Stanford UP, 1993):
>
> ***** ...[R]ather than simply producing the conditions of change,
> whether new technology or whatever, dominant social positions must
> depend on an emergent distance between what henceforth can be
> temporally marked as "old" and "new"....That distance functions like
> a kind of "surplus value," over and above the "fact" of change and
> the labors of innovation, and is available to be realized as the
> social capital of distinction from "the others" [in this thread,
> Marxists who regard Marxism as a political project, rather than
> merely as a useful social theory] condemned to a now rapidly
> disappearing configuration of what used to be. (32) *****
I can only assume that you must be joking.
> The adverb "even," as well as other rhetorical tics, gives you the
> distance necessary for the production of "a kind of 'surplus value'"
> by condemning "the others" to obsolescence.
I am not accusing you of obsolescence, still less those on your encompassing list of people-whose-posts-you-like. I merely said that while I am not a Marxist, not by any definition I think useful, your attempt to compile the list of your-type- of-people as a list of "real Marxists" has in fact lead you to a definition that would include me.
Catherine
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