*grin*
can I use that in a sidebar quote for the blog?
http://www.chomsky.info/debates/1971xxxx.htm (I've excerpted, below, where C begins speaking in the video)
the paraphrase is rude, but is probably very accurate for the era, 1971, when most male Marxists and Heavy Users of Marx advanced an altogether too mechanistic marxist framework. Which reminds me, if Charles trots out Engels and Marx on the family one more time in response to something I write, I'll have to get out the cat o' nine and make him read Gayle Rubin's 'The Traffic in Women' and Heidi Hartmann's 'The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism'. BTW, Carrol, to a question you asked offlist about this same subject, Hartmann tries to spell out what patriarchy is as a system _separate_ from but necessarily related to capitalism.
She also points the way toward the need for a systematic research program to flesh out a theory of patriarchy much like Marx's theory -- and this included, for her, an explanation of how patriarchal society contains within it its own mechanism for historical change (just as Marx did). This project was largely abandoned as far as I know and few people seem to be working on it, let alone even seem to be aware of Hartmann's work. Hartmann's work is more familiar these days in terms of her empirical research on women in the labor force.
The debate shown in the video begins here:
CHOMSKY:
I'll overcome the urge to answer the earlier very interesting question that you asked me and turn to this one.
Let me begin by referring to something that we have already discussed, that is, if it is correct, as I believe it is, that a fundamental element of human nature is the need for creative work, for creative inquiry, for free creation without the arbitrary limiting effect of coercive institutions, then, of course, it will follow that a decent society should maximise the possibilities for this fundamental human characteristic to be realised. That means trying to overcome the elements of repression and oppression and destruction and coercion that exist in any existing society, ours for example, as a historical residue.
Now any form of coercion or repression, any form of autocratic control of some domain of existence, let's say, private ownership of capital or state control of some aspects of human life, any such autocratic restriction on some area of human endeavour, can be justified, if at all, only in terms of the need for subsistence, or the need for survival, or the need for defence against some horrible fate or something of that sort. It cannot be justified intrinsically. Rather it must be overcome and eliminated.
And I think that, at least in the technologically advanced societies of the West we are now certainly in a position where meaningless drudgery can very largely be eliminated, and to the marginal extent that it's necessary, can be shared among the population; where centralised autocratic control of, in the first place, economic institutions, by which I mean either private capitalism or state totalitarianism or the various mixed forms of state capitalism that exist here and there, has become a destructive vestige of history.
They are all vestiges that have to be overthrown, eliminated in favour of direct participation in the form of workers' councils or other free associations that individuals will constitute themselves for the purpose of their social existence and their productive labour.
Now a federated, decentralised system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions, would be what I refer to as anarcho-syndicalism; and it seems to me that this is the appropriate form of social organisation for an advanced technological society, in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine. There is no longer any social necessity for human beings to be treated as mechanical elements in the productive process; that can be overcome and we must overcome it by a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that I consider intrinsic to human nature, will in fact be able to realise itself in whatever way it will.
And again, like Mr. Foucault, I don't see how any human being can fail to be interested in this question. [Foucault laughs.] <...>
"You know how it is, come for the animal porn, stay for the cultural analysis." -- Michael Berube
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