A very curious notion, Carrol. Presumably you agree that people think and feel and act on what they think and feel, so their thoughts and feelings play a large role in explaining their behavior. Moreover, it is a truism that thought and feelings aboiut sex are important to people. ANd yet you and Yoshie apparently think it is either implausible or trivial to suppose that such thoughts and feelings might have any relevance in explaining political behavior. I find this baffling -- why should we exclude the hypothesis that P/S factors are politically relevant a priori? I note, moreover, that you two offer no alternatives. Since you are both mechnaiciacl reductionist Marxists, I presume your alternative is that political behavior is to be explained exclusively by reference to class interests. This vieww has been so effectively demolsihed over the last 150 years -- and was rejected by every serious Marxist theorist -- that it is puzzling to me that anyone could hold it in this day and age. Carrol challenges me to offer examples of P/S explanation. The problem is not coming up with them but winnowing them down. I have already mentioned two: (1) Luker's account of the importance of motherhood in the abortion wars and (2) Jordan's account of the sexual dynamics of race in America before the 19th century. Carrol then adds the methodologically impossible demand that it be shown that the phenomena cannot be explained in any other way, without reference to P/S factors. This is absurd: choice among explanations is al;ways comprative. So, it's up to you to show how the phenomena in question can be explained without reference of P/S factors. Personally, I think it's a mug's game, I don't know why you;d bother. I am a historical materialist. But a sensible HM does not hold that the only real final explanations are economic. That is false and demonstrably so. It is simply not the case that every significant historical phenomenon can be exhaustively explained solely by reference to economic causes, class interests, forces of productiona nd the like. People often fail to act on their class interests, as westen socialists know all too well. And the explanation for this cannot be that other people (the ruling class) act too effectively on theirs, because that cannot explain why people in similar situations facing similar or greater ruling class strength do sometimesa ct on their class interests. Rather I think that, as Milton Fisk argued in his great and neglected book The State and Justice, which every Marxist and historical materialist should study carefully and read through several times slowly, the basic idea of HM is not that every political event has an exclusively economic clause, but that the economy forms an explanatory framework that relates (often non-economic) causes to noneconomic (and economic) effects. Causes and effects in politics can be of any kind, economic, political, psychosexual, whatever, but the way that hey are structured deoends on the economy, The economy provides a background that makes the causes (whatever they are) causes of the effects. One way this works is quasi-Darwinian: people have various psychosexual impulses (for example) that can be and are manifested in different ways. The structure of the economy at a particular time and place selects among those manifestations, offering incentives and disincentives for particular sorts of manifestations. Patterns emerge. But the phenomena (e.g., racism) cannot be understood without reference to the psychosexual impulses that cause the racist effects, e.g., the would you wabt one to marry your suster attitudes, lynching blacks who look sideways at white women, castration and the like. jks
Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:As I suggested (predicted) in my opening post in this thread, those who claim the usefulness of psycho-sexual explanations (=psychoanalysis?) have devoted their posts to claiming that such explanations _could be_ useful. No one that I know of has _ever_ actually defended a political proposition with psychological evidence -- I exclude those cases where the proposition can be defended _without_ appeal to such evidence.
If our interest is understanding social phenomena, we will find that psychological theories are _either_ tautological _or_ fail to tell us anything that we do not already know.
That is a generalization based on my own remembered experience of reading such attempts at analysis. The refutation of it can't consist of claims that this or that psychological theory _could_ explain this or that. Rather it must consist of defending an actual political proposition with such evidence PLUS a demonstration that that proposition cannot be arrived at by other routes.
I don't think any such non-trivial proposition exists.
Carrol
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