Marxism and Bodies

[Thomas Seay]

Re-reading Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy" last night,
it occured to me how little some marxisms treat the
question of the body (instincts, etc) and the
liberation of the body.  Why is this?  Could it be
that
some marxisms emphasize teleology in which the body
figures only as a means to an end and de-emphasize
ontology?  Is this the root of the problem?  If not,
what is?

In such marxisms, the body is referred to in passing
rather negatively.  At best it should be "free from"
starvation, war, etc....but no mention of "free to",
no affirmation.Apart from that the body seems not to
exist or only abstractly as the "v" in variable
capital.  Very often any attempts to speak of a
liberation of body is cast off as "petit bourgeois
individualism" and the persecution of homosexuality by
certain tendancies of the left (especially in the
past) is one of the terrible outcomes of such an
orientation.  Then, too, there were the adoptions of
the taylorist methods and enclosure of bodies inside
factories and inside States.

But which threads of marxism AFFIRM the body and argue
for its liberation?  What is their vision of the body?
Since there seem to be many different points of view
on LBO, I would like to hear about that.

Thomas

=====
"Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

"Money eats quality and shits out quantity"
-William Burroughs

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com