>[Your final paragraph, not quoted here, is classic and cannot be
>improved upon. But I wish to pursue a slightly different tangent from
>this quoted paragraph.]
huh. for some reason, I'd thought that it would be the paragraph you'd dislike most -- because it was rude, and psychologizing..... :)
>Understanding exploitation (in the Marxist sense) is necessary to
>understand the unity of capitalism (a unity which I have expressed in
>the only partially flippant suggestion that Marx can be reduced to the
>historicity of capitalism and commodity fetishism). But that
>exploitation (surplus value) is core to the abstract understanding of
>capitalism as a unity does NOT mean that exploitation should or even can
>be the _political_ organizing principle of a political movement for the
>overthrow of capitalism.
do you think it's worth discussing it though? I mean, do you think it's important to get people to understand what exploitation is -- that it's not just about stoop labor or sweatshop labor? This is what the woman wrote:
"recently was in an economics class learning about capitalism...my first formal educational experience concerning capitalism - and nearly everyone violently wrestled with how to absorb the fundamental stone that capitalism rests on the concept of pure exploitation. Our business practices, jobs, and consumeristic mentalities are steel pro-exploitative rods thrust into the backbone of "developing" countries. ...
On an extremely basic level, few people can acknowledge and accept that our lifestyle as US citizens rests on the throats of womyn and girls of color all over the world who are DYING. They're not just sick and denied benefits, they're not just developing asthma from the textile factories, they're not just being denied every kind of justice while they're alive. They're dying."
My response on the blog (I didn't bother to get involved in the discussion, which was held elsewhere) was that we are all dying -- and admittedly I was ranting to the people who read my blog, people who tend to be marxists of one stripe or another:
"it's not just about 'lifestyle' or just about consumption at all. it's about LABOR. bloody fucking labor. all of it is dead labor. all of it. capitalism kills you every hour you work.
the pockets of capital are lined with the dead bodies of ALL labor, not just, uh, deserving labor. the minute you get that and realize that your exploitation is no better or worse than the exploitation of someone in a "developing" country is the minute you realize you are united and that it's not just about them over there, and feeling guilty and ashamed about the way your lifestyle is made possible by their labor and endeavoring to do something oooo radical about it so that, what?, you can stop feeling ashamed? or so that you can just run around and make sure everyone feels ashamed and guilty too?"
>As an agitational slogan, exploitation (in any of its many variations)
but why is that? if we recognize that we're all exploited, isn't that unifying? See, I'm not sure sure the problem lies with the poverty of a slogan based on labor as universally about exploitation.
(What would be a couple of examples of these slogans? Just so I can have a more concrete understanding of the way such organizing principles were used historically...)
I think it has a lot to do with the appeal of what is sometimes called the Oppression Olympics, where people -- drawing on the identity politics that sprung out of leftist tendencies to focus on third world oppression in the 60s -- gravitated toward epistemologies based on a group's social location in a system of oppression conceived of as hierarchical -- where, if you were a woman, poor, lesbian in the third world, you were the most oppressed of all.
It has to do with the appeal of being able to appeal a rhetoric of suffering victims, battered by whatever system is under attack. The tendency is to trump everything else with visual and verbal imagery designed to focus on pain, suffering, death. Hence, the woman above dismisses anyone merely suffering sexism or poor health care benefits, dismissed anyone merely suffering from having to work unpaid overtime, dismisses anyone who's sick from their job, dismissed anyone merely without benefits. the only *real* oppression is the oppression of people who are dying.
and this imagery of death and extreme, super-exploited victimization is drawn on, in the U.S., to elicit sympathy to the need to make women of color the center of a feminist movement. As brown skinned women, they draw on the plight of the dying of Other brown-skinned women over there, in order to bolster their demands for _recognition_ of their similar victimized identities, here, in the u.s.
but it a demand for recognition of a pain and suffering, here in the u.s., that is simultaneously disavowed: it is not our pain and suffering that matters, it is the deaths of those Others, over there, we are really fighting for.
I'm not sure if I'm making sense.
But anyway, yes, to what you've said below. i can't fathom that demands for a 20 hr work week will fly with anyone though. Open borders, yes.
the 20 hr work week, though, that would probably be seen as the whining of the clothing privileged and not worthy of struggle.
>has the concrete effect of dividing the working class: in fact, of
>dissolving the working class into an identity (often expressed in the
>silly phrase, "poor and working people"). This is the dissolution of
>class politics into identity politics (working class as identity rather
>than as relation and process), and bizarre arguments over whether such
>and such a group are "really" working class as not.
>
>There are two absolutely core demands for a working-class movement, and
>those two demands generate an accurate conception of class and of the
>aims of our political activity. ( I have discussed one before.)
>
>1. Open Borders.
>2. Twenty-Hour Week
>
>When Marx speaks of the degradation or dehumanization of the working
>class, he means above all, and centrally, that they must sell their
>time, that is their life to live. And it is this alieanation of living
>human activity that (potentially) unites the working class from the most
>oppressed migrant stoo-laborer to the $300K IT consultant and the
>multi-million dollar professional athlete: their life is not their own.
>Both demands together operationalize "this land was made for you and
>me." Both demands celebrate the unity of the working class; the second
>grasps the destructive nature of capitalism as such. Both point to the
>socialist world beyond.
>
>Carrol
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