Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
> I agree with her that psychosexual factors are important in politics
> - but she needs to integrate them with a political economy
> perspective.
This is tautological. Take away pscyho-social factors and the onion isn't there any more. But the psycho-social factors are unique to each individual. I have yet to see anyone explain a social event in terms of pscycho-social factors without reaching the same conclusions that he/she would have reached _not_ invoking psycho-social factors. They are always (this is especially true of what I've read in Zizek) either tacked on at the end to a conclusion already established without invoking them or they are state broadly at the beginning then ignored in the actual analysis.
I would like to see a contrary example to this, but I never have yet. And until I do, I don't see why I should pay much attention to abstract assertions that if we took into account psycho-social factors then we would understand such and such a concatenation of social/political events.
Actually, Engels makes an analogous point to this in respect to dialectics. It is useful to know that the truth is the whole, and that one must abstract from it to arrive at a lesser whole, the internal relations of which may be identified. But that needs to be tacit. See Engels's remarks, in Anti-Duhring, of one of the passages in _Capital_ in which Marx explicitly invokes a "law" of dialectics, but does so only as an appended remark after having made his point by concrete historical description.
Carrol