> Try to find evidence of that as our ancestors sat around and skinned
> bison. Or evidence of commodity fetishism, either. And these features
> of our capitalized psyches have to retard and twist any attempt to
> build a better society. That, and the inhibitions against rebellion
> that help the system reproduce itself. Hegemony is a psychological
> phenomenon. How can you do radical politics without dealing with all
> that?
>
> Doug
Yes, I agree that any radical politics has to deal with that. Let me clarify my argument. When I say "we don't need to study individual psychologies to analyze social structure", I'm making a very specific claim. For sociologists, analyzing social structure entails specifying the social characteristics of different parts of society and explaining how they relate to one another. Say, identifying the imbrications of social institutions such as economy, politics, family, religion. The task of analyzing social structure is distinct from the task of fomenting or blocking social change. Sure, political activists may use this social analysis to further their own political ends, but the task of analyzing social structure is not tantamount to doing radical politics.
Another analogy: I want to analyze how a gun works. I examine the object using various measurement tools, I discharge it, I take it apart and identify the functions of the different parts. With time, effort, and adequate curiosity, I can explain how the gun fires projectiles at a specific speed. Note that this analysis does not require me to ask questions about how the gun is used by people, how gun use affects the psychology of its users, and how individual psychologies affected the invention of the gun. Those are all interesting questions, but they are distinct from the question, "how does the gun work"?
I suggest that the same logic applies to the analysis of social structure. Just as with the gun, we can analyze the different parts of society and understand how society works without analyzing individual psychologies. --I'll push the analogy even further: just as bringing up questions about the individual psychologies of gun users or gun victims would distract us from our specific goal of understanding how the gun works, bringing up questions about the individual psychologies of people who are affected by social structure distracts us from our goal of understanding how social structure works.
That said, Doug's question persists: how do we build a socialist society among people who have (I love Doug's term) "capitalized psyches"? I know this is probably where I part company with Carrol and Yosh, but the analysis of social structure does not provide an answer to this important political question, and I agree with Doug that psychological research and theory could inform the answer to his question.
Miles