[lbo-talk] new spirit of capitalism

Lenin's Tomb leninstombblog at googlemail.com
Tue Oct 9 04:31:44 PDT 2007


On 10/9/07, bhandari at berkeley.edu <bhandari at berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
> No Lenin I don't think you are being clear at all. You write: "the
> unintended and
> obviously baleful conditions resulting from one partially successful
> period
> of struggle"
>
> So please spell out how successful struggle resulted in or itself caused
> unintended or obviously baleful conditions? With your theoretical acumen
> you seem aware of all kinds of unintended conseqences which escaped these
> humble activists who became--in the words of your comrade
> Yoshie--neutralized, or agents of Empire.

So heavy on sarcasm and light on argument? Well, I'm happy to regurgitate what I said, where in fact I did spell it out: the *partially* successful struggle against forms of oppression, in part as a result of the way in which the demands were raised and absorbed by the system, abolished the visible system of oppression while conserving it in its more occult form. So, for example, the struggle against the legal disenfranchisement of women at various levels has produced real and necessary successes, but due to the limited nature of the gains, due to the fact that they were separated from the issue of the labour system that perpetuates the subordination of women, they have enabled capitalism to persist with a gender hierarchy while declaring formal equality. The gains are very real - the viciousness and violence of that hierarchy has been attenuated - but the limitations of those gains are obvious, and the ways in which they enhanced capitalism's cultural hygeine by removing its association with formal oppression are also obvious.

Now, instead of trying to harness the sentimental education of American lefties about heroes of the past to your personal sense of indignation about fantasy arguments, why not take the time to absorbe the perfectly modest points that are in fact being made?



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