>P.S. The point is not whether my particular predictions are correct or
>not; the point is that you shouldn't talk about socialism without
>incorporating that discussion into a discussion of how we get from here
>to there. The world does change. Whatever happens in the next 20 years,
>2025 won't be like 2003, and if socialism triumphs in 2026, it will do
>so in the c onditions of 2025, not 2003.
i agree. but, i think what you say here is exactly why people think politicizing consumer choices now matters. it matters how we get from here to there. "people who drive SUVs are selfish assholes who glorify power and individualism and use societal resources recklessly. good leftists would never drive SUVs! leftists who do can't possibly have the best interests of everyone at heart if they can't even make personal choices now that judiciously use scare natural resources. Huzzah!"
:)
it is what is motivating Ehrenreich's argument that, while she refuses to generalize as to who should or shouldn't hire a housekeeper, our goal should be to "make housework visible again." she's concerned about how we get from here to a socialist feminist future and, to her, it matters what we do, if we think of ourselves as identified with a socialist feminist struggle.
now, in the past, you've suggested that, in the absence of political practice, these discussions revert to a meaningless waste of political debate over lifestyle choices. i agree with you, to some extent, which is the point of my rant. OTOH, i'm not so sure--not if you take a socialist feminist or marxist feminist view of the matter. why? for the very reasons yoshie once mentioned when i complained about gender dynamics on this list: gender oppression isn't about some system "out there" that oppresses us, it's about our relationships with one another. and naming those practices that are problematic can make life witho ne another pretty messy and painful.
similarly, this is what motivates ehrenreich: one feminist achievement was to integrate the micro/macro, the personal/political, by recognizing that housework was a relationship between a man, a woman, (their children), and a dustbunny. and those relationships were made and remade in a wider socio-historical context of interlocking systems of gender oppression, racial oppression, heterosexism, class exploitation, status-privilege, etc.
social structures and processes don't exist "out there" doing their dirty work behind our backs. they exist in the relations between us, too.
racism doesn't exist out there as a separate structural system of oppression, it operates in and through our daily practices, relationships, struggles. Social structures made and re-made (reproduced) and changed (transformed) by _us_. When I advance a claim about healthy dietary practice, am I reproducing racism. Possibly. What about if I advance a claim about a healthy body fat percentage? That claims does, in fact, have implications since people have genetically determined differences in the weight of their bone and connective tissue mass. Blacks have a heavier bone and connective tissue mass than 'whites' and 'whites' heavier than Asians. If I measure blacks and asians against a white standard, I reproduce structural racism where standards or norms associated with whiteness become the measure against which all others are judged.
my reason for griping about the topic was precisely because i don't know how we get from here to there if we don't make ourselves more cognizant of the ways in which we reproduce class/gender/racial/heterosexist status privilege. elsewhere, i've called this "conscious social reproduction": the demand that leftists make these issues more visible--politicizing them.
but, taking a devil's advocate position, i've wondered about the problems that might accompany this process. http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0108/1033.html
i don't think there are any easy answers, but i do think the discussions have to be had, no matter how painful and messy they might be.
kelley