[lbo-talk] 3 videos I uploaded to YouTube, enjoy

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Tue May 23 17:49:29 PDT 2006


Doug Henwood wrote:


>> Oooh, "the workers' movement never really had the revolutionary
>> potentialities that Marx attributed to it." The factory programmed
>> workers' minds to be regimented & obedient. So MB turns to anarchism
>> as a critique of all hierarchies. But what if the original
>> parent-child relationship is the source of our longing for hierarchy?
>
The parent-child relationship is not a single thing. How you relate to your parents changes as you get older and more able and they get older and less so. It also matters a great deal what kind of parents you wound up getting: psychopaths? drug addicts? alcohoolics? CPA's? musicians? artists? teachers? and what their ideas of raising kids is about. So I have a hard time attributing any particular quality to this relationship whose essence is only that at a certain point of utter helplessness, we survive only because we are taken care of. This may have a lot to do with our tendency toward identification and introjection, but otherwise.... it definitely matters who we identify with and what we introject -- so essentialisms about the child/parent relationship immediately relate to the larger culture.

There is nothing inherently wrong with heirarchies; in some situations they can be efficient or entertaining; in others, they get in the way.

Most of the time however, hierarchies and meritocracies are simply ways to rationalize an unjust distribution of goods and goodies. That's the problem.

Joanna



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