shorter chomsky: ok ok. i don't want to be accused of sexism, so i won't say it's secondary, i'll just ramble. I think economic institutions are more powerful and more important to fight than, say, the way conceptions of psychiarty and what counts as mental health can hold a great deal of power over people's lives. yea yea yea fags and lezbeans are always portrayed as crazed murderers in popular film and television, but class war! class war! we'll worry about that later.
does chomsky know the difference between repression and oppression? i'm sure he does, but has he ever explained it? because you have to wonder if he's ever read anything on the topic. he uses the two terms and then acts like he doesn't really mean what leftist generally mean by oppression: the way social norms turn out to be reproductive of social inequality is what oppression and oppressive institutions are all about. So when he says oppression he's signalling he 'gets it' but he apparently doesn't because he goes on to suggest that this isn't all fired important. it's the economy, stupid!
and to dismiss foucault's task as somehow philosophical and abstract... foucault was talking about real things with real people being thrown in mental insitutions, criminalized, and murdered by the state for fuck's sake. and feminists who worked int he same tradition were talking about women made to take valium for twenty years b/c they were labeled mentally unhealthy when they complained of what friedan called the feminine mystique.
but it's the economy stupid!
let's move straight to anarcho-syndicalism without asking the hard questions of how we might just carry right into that society a world where women might still get drugged up disproportionately or a world where people *still* hold dismissive views of whatever ain't hetrosekshule. they look progressive, even radical, and smell like progressives and radicals. but don't be confused: if they look progressive, smell progressive, then they ARE progressive!
garshes. garshes. lawdy me o my.
i mean: it' skind of fucked up to not care about this shit if you're into anarcho-syndacalism b/ec you aren't aware of the way power is operating elsewhere, beyond the market and state. TG anarcho-syndaclists caught klew!
"You know how it is, come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
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