On 6/16/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> The Old Man is, as usual, a good place to start.
> Explaining why French peasants of the 1850s did not
> constitute a class but only an aggregate of families,
> "much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes",
> Marx writes:
>
> Insofar as millions of families live under economic
> conditions of existence that separate their mode of
> life, their interests, and their culture from those of
> other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to
> the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is
> merely a local interconnection among these
> small-holding peasants, and the identity of their
> interests begets no community, no national bond, and
> no political organization among them, they do not form
> a class
>
> (The Class Struggles in France, MECW 11: 187 (1975)).
>
> Marx lists seven distinct factors here, and of course
> he's talking about class, but with necessary changes
> being made one might depart from here for thinking
> about other kinds of solidarity.
>
> In this connection and in a more coolly reflective
> moment than I had in face of the torrent of economic
> reductionist stupidity that gripped the list
> yesterday, and which deserved harsher words than I
> gave it, though not directed at a specific person --
> apologies for that, Carl, but not for the sentiment --
> with respect to class that if we think of things this
> way, we will not be able to ignore sex, sexual
> orientation, race, or even civil rights or liberties
> in thinking about class. A class is not a
> gender-neutral (meaning male), sex-orientation neutral
> (meaning straight and nonkinky), color-blind (meaning
> white), etc., entity. It's a process (E.P. Thompson's
> term, from The Making of the English Working Class)
> that involves contest about lots of these issues.
>
> We can't get to "cl;ass" by stripping them away. We
> can only grasp "class" as it's constituted. In
> America, many of the things leftists find most
> frustrating about the "working class," the ugly racism
> of the white working class, the rampant homophobic
> machismo and sexism of all the working classes, the
> cult of violence and xenophobia, all that is tied up,
> as better analysts than I have observed, with a
> profoundly sexualized and racialized conception of
> self and class.
>
> I tried to explain this to Rorty, but he remained, as
> I told him to his considerable resentment, a vulgar
> "Marxist" to the core, unshakable in his belief that
> all of us are really fairly directly linked in our
> behavior to our economic interests understood in
> pretty narrow terms as wages and benefits. This
> hypothesis makes pretty good sense of the behavior of
> the upper classes, and I hope people have read Doug's
> brilliant preliminary essay on the ruling class in the
> new LBO, but it makes utter nonsense of the behavior
> of the working class. The fact is that whatever the
> defects of the finer points of Thomas Franks' What's
> The Matter With Kansas?, he's got a crucial point that
> American workers do not conceive themselves as narrow
> economic maximizers and don't act in what Marxists (or
> for that matter neoclasscists) would predict would be
> in their "best economic interests." So trying to
> ignore racism, homophobia, and sexism and "concentrate
> on class instead" involves a fatally wrong notion of
> class. As Chuck says above, shared economic interests
> are only a part of it.
>
> Marx hated moralism and rejected morality for lots of
> reasons, not all of them good. But maybe the amoralist
> "ethics is ideology" stance is one that can be useful
> for some purposes. Let's forget whether it's wrong to
> write off women, minorities, and gays until after the
> revo, and ask whether there is going to be a revo or
> even significant political change if we do.
>
> We can put this in terms of analysis of the problem
> for struggle -- since class is so deeply sexualized
> and racialized, we can't hope to understand why the
> working classes act as they do without those
> assumptions about sexual and racial identity. Yes,
> identity. We can put it in terms of numbers. Taking
> women, gays, and minorities together, you have the
> majority of the working class. We can put it in terms
> of solidarity: what kind of culture and common bond
> can we have unless we also address the sexual and
> racial constituents of the working class identities
> that are formed or deformed by capital?
>
> All that said, the handful of people who say that race
> or sexuality or sex is "more important" than class
> are, in my view, misguided or (in some cases, like
> Harold Cruse) worse, But they're not a real major
> problem.
>
>
>
>
>
> --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > On Jun 16, 2007, at 11:37 AM, ravi wrote:
> >
> > > A [genuine] question: what is the basis of
> > solidarity? Surely it is
> > > more than back-scratching?
> >
> > With class, in part, a common role in production,
> > broadly conceived.
> > But that's not necessarily visible to the naked eye
> > - it takes a lot
> > of organizing and educating to make it clear. On
> > nonclass things,
> > common humanity. It was touching to read the story
> > in the NYT
> > yesterday about the Massachusetts legislators who
> > switched their vote
> > on same-sex marriage:
> >
> > <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/us/15gay.html>
> >
> > > One legislator who switched his vote was
> > Representative Paul
> > > Kujawski, Democrat of Uxbridge, saying meetings
> > with gay and
> > > lesbian constituents convinced him that "I
> > couldn't take away the
> > > happiness those people have been able to enjoy."
> >
> > Doug
> > ___________________________________
> >
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
>
>
>
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