--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 18, 2007, at 12:10 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi
> wrote:
>
> > You mean wage workers in the formal sector,
> especially in the North,
> > since they probably produce the most capital by
> conventional
> > accounting or Marxist accounting (for instance, by
> those Marxists who
> > still try to get to value from price)?
>
> The world working class is a lot larger than that -
> the working
> classes of Asia, Latin American, peripheral Europe,
> and parts of
> Africa number in the hundreds of millions. You seem
> to be embracing
> the completely marginalized as some sort of
> revolutionary vanguard,
> but they're too disorganized, too disconnected, and
> too powerless to
> do the job.
>
[WS:] I do not think Yoshie is using the concept of slum dwellers/lumpen in an empirical sense, as you (or I) tend to interpret it. She uses it as an emotive hot button, an empty place holder to be filled by the audience with their projections, or objet petite a - to use Zizek's terminology. But then again, she is not alone here - most lefties use the concepts such as "the masses" as objet petite a thus placing themselves in the long and venerable tradition of religious discourse that mastered this genre - god, heaven, salvation, hell, the list of empircially vague or empty emotive placeholder concept is long indeed.
Wojtek
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