> To take one example, culturalist explanations of poverty -- e.g.,
> blaming the "culture" of the poor (individuals or nations) for their
> poverty -- _are_ quite obnoxious.
> - --
> Yoshie
Exactly ... I finally found a quote I was looking for in relation to these matters:
"Demystification is always valuable, even when it is done by people who have no social vision. It is obviously always useful and always painful - it does not work unless it is painful - to demystify the illusions that we all have, all the time, in our own individual heads and then floating through society. Marxism was certainly a very powerful form of demystification and can always still be one, since the economic is what bourgeois people least want to think about and class is something they would always rather ignore." (Fredric Jameson, 1998, quoted in Xudong Zhang, 'Marxism and the Historicity of Theory: An Interview with Fredric Jameson', _New_Literary_History_, 29, 3.)