>So defined "capitalist" is a far better term than "the
>rich" (your alternative), an ahistorical category that
>fails to distinguish between Crassus and Carnegie, and
>is not anchored to any theory about the way society
>works or why "the rich" are, in any particular
>instance, rich.
boy, do i really hate the use of the word rich. i suspect ravi doesn't use it this way, but in common parlance, a lot of people seem to like to use it is that it's used in just an individualistic way. particular people -- the rich -- oppress other particular people, the poor. and the most important thing about that is, the speaker is almost invariably neither. people position themselves like golidlock's porridge, in between (and just right)
they also see it as about the amount of personal wealth or income someone has -- and so the term "rich".
and also, the whole anti-commie,redbaiting strain in our culture. people don't like saying "capitalist" or "capital" because they've been taught that it's a sign that you might be one of those commie pinko fagz. i had problems with misunderstandings around tis issue recently, so i wrote a post, "Mighty Quare Cunt" and "Immanent Critique" where I tried to concretize what I mean and how you'd use these tools in every day life -- after some questions and confusions made it clear that I had to straighten things out.
Speaking of which, did anyone ever read this article from Ellen Willis. It's quite wonderful and I'll have to take a stab at Jacoby some time.
A clip:
To this end, Jacoby distinguishes between two categories of utopianism: the dominant "blueprint" tradition, exemplified by Thomas More's eponymous no place or Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and the dissident strain he calls "iconoclastic" utopianism, whose concern is challenging the limits of the existing social order and expanding the boundaries of imagination rather than planning the perfect society. While he does not simply write off the blueprintersfussy as their details may be, he regards them as contributors to the utopian spirit and credits them with inspiring social reformshis heroes are the iconoclasts, beginning with Ernst Bloch and his 1918 The Spirit of Utopia, and including a gallery of anarchists, refusers, and mystics ranging from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse to Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber.
<...>
These questions are an obvious project for a third book, though it's one Jacoby is unlikely to write: he is temperamentally a refusenik, like the iconoclasts he lauds, more attuned to distant hoofbeats than to spoor on the ground that might reward analysis. It is perhaps this bias that has kept him from seeing one reason why the anti-utopian argument has become so entrenched: although there is perversity in it, and bad faith, there is also some truth. Jacoby is no fan of authoritarian communism, but he is wrong in thinking he can simply bracket that disaster or that there is nothing to be learned from it that might apply to utopian movements in general. The striking characteristic of communism was the radical disconnection between the social ideals it professed and the actual societies it produced. Because the contradiction could never be admitted, whole populations were forced to speak and act as if the lies of the regime were true. It is not surprising that victims or witnesses of this spectacle would distrust utopians. Who could tell what even the most steadfast anti-Stalinists might do if they actually gained some power? Who could give credence to phrases like "workers' control" or "women's emancipation" when they had come to mean anything but? Jacoby persuasively analyzes 1984 to show that it was not meant as an anti-socialist tract, yet he never mentions the attacks on the misuse of language that made Orwell's name into an adjective.
Communism was corrupted by a scientific (or more accurately, scientistic) theory of history that cast opponents as expendable, a theory of class that dismissed bourgeois democratic liberties as merely a mask for capitalist exploitation, and a revolutionary practice that allowed a minority to impose dictatorship. Similar tropes made their way into the sixties' movements, in, for instance, the argument that oppressors should not have free speech or that the American people were the problem, not the solution, and the proper function of American radicals was to support third world anti-imperialism by any means necessary, including violence. A milder form of authoritarianism, which owed less to Marxism than to a peculiarly American quasi-religious moralism, disfigured the counterculture and the women's movement. If the original point of these movements was to promote the pursuit of happiness, too often the emphasis shifted to proclaiming one's own superior enlightenment and contempt for those who refused to be liberated; indeed, liberation had a tendency to become prescriptive, so that freedom to reject the trappings of middle-class consumerism, or not to marry, or to be a lesbian was repackaged as a moral obligation and a litmus test of one's radicalism or feminism. Just as communism discredited utopianism for several generations of Europeans, the antics of countercultural moralists fed America's conservative reaction.
the rest: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=190
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