***** Smith and Ricardo still stand with both feet on the shoulders of the eighteenth-century prophets, in whose imaginations this eighteenth-century individual -- the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century -- appears as an ideal, whose existence they project into the past. Not as a historic result but as history's point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by nature.
(Marx, _The Grundrisse_, _The Marx-Engels Reader_ 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker, NY: W.W. Norton, 1978, p. 222) *****
What Marx said about "the Natural Individual" applies to LBO-talk discussion of sexuality and pornography: the projection of "the product on one side of the dissolution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of production developed since the sixteenth century" into the past, creating an illusion that it is "history's point of departure" that is "posited by nature."
The projection serves to make capitalism seem timeless and eternal, the projection ("The most common way of explaining the origin of capitalism is to presuppose that its development is the natural outcome of human practices almost as old as the species itself, which required only the removal of external obstacles that hindered its realization," p. 11) that Ellen Meiksins Wood criticizes in _The Origin of Capitalism_ (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1999).
>I gave up. If people want to parade mere personal opinion,
>unsupported by either argument or data (or any available research),
>that's their problem I guess. I don't know whether it falls under
>Zizek's willed ignorance or under your "conversation over a beer"
>(which I recognize as valid), but in any case it is a social
>phenomenon to be explained, not a position to be critriqued.
>
>Carrol
It's in part commodity fetishism, in part the idea that what pertains to sex does not require a serious study (much less a feminist analysis!), in part a cause and consequence of what Doug, Liza, and Christian Parenti discusses in "'Action Will Be Taken': Left Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents" (at <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Action.html>). The fundamental part of Marxist theory is to see what is (be it the stand-alone genre of pornography in particular or capitalism in general) as having emerged as a historical result of struggles and as being subject to future transformation, marginalization, and even disappearance, depending on future results of struggles. By freeing the past from the grasp of the present, Marxist theory serves to free the future from capitalism. American activists stuck in the feeling of TINA stand to benefit the most from Marx's perspective on history, but they, alas, tend to read Marx less often than activists in many other nations who don't need Marx as much as American activists do. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>