[lbo-talk] new spirit of capitalism

Lenin's Tomb leninstombblog at googlemail.com
Sun Oct 7 13:01:56 PDT 2007


On 10/7/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> You're turning into some weird hybrid of Louis Farrakhan, Thomas
> Byrne Edsall, Christopher Lasch, and Todd Gitlin, all wrapped up in a
> hijab. What is the point of this? We should try to recover some race-
> segregated patriarchal nuclear family world because it's more
> organic? Because it provides a better basis of resistance to
> capitalism? We should have subordinated the fight against racism and
> sexism to the class struggle, like the most idiotic of Stalinists
> used to argue?

Straight from the CIA's Cold War handbook, Doug. The more pressing question is why Yoshie's arguments drive you this crazy.

I suspect that Yoshie is arguing for what marxists sometimes call a 'dialectical' understanding of patriarchy and racism. In fact, the upshot is quite the contrary to what you suggest. It is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism should be subordinated to class struggle, but that these struggles are contiguous, and the attempt to separate them has been fatal, allowing the preservation of the worst forms of class rule, and patriarchy, and racism, while also stripping away the defensive aspects of traditional units of organisation, reducing people to atomised and practically defenseless agents in the face of a ruling class onslaught. It doesn't mean we embrace patriarchy or defer the struggle against it, for example: it means we take it up as part of the class struggle.



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