I take it as a symptom of the atomizing tendency of capitalism, especially in the USA. Nowadays, sectarianism expresses itself against an individual, not against a political party. But it is also because I say we ought to question and reject liberalism. These days, many leftists explicitly or implicitly accept liberalism as the last ideology, so Doug apparently can't imagine that there can be any historical materialist case to question and reject it -- any case against liberalism, in his view, _has to be_ a "cultural conservative" case, a la Eugene Genovese.
> 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.
That, too, was once a commonly accepted argument on the Left, but bringing it up now, as we are doing here, gets in the way of manufacturing consent to a liberal feminist empire.
BTW, it makes sense to distinguish between (A) patriarchy, which subordinates not only women but also younger men to the patriarch of an extended family, in a society where the relation of hierarchical dependency and obligation is the norm, and (B) sexism, which justifies subordination of women to men (often rationalized as biologically or culturally grounded exception to the rule of independent individuals with equal rights) but not younger men to older men, in a society where kinship has contracted greatly. In the global South, patriarchy predominates; in the global North, sexism prevails. That's one way we can think of the North-South sexual gap.
On 10/8/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Someone (not Lou Proyect)
<snip>
> Someone else (also not Lou Proyect)
Seriously, there is no one else in the world who is as obsessed with my thought as you and Louis Proyect, as if your lives depended upon my NOT thinking UNLIKE you two. Now, that's creepy! For all your argument for liberal feminism, you fail to apply even that to your own conduct. -- Yoshie