On Oct 30, 2009, at 1:55 PM, Eric Beck wrote:
> On 10/30/09, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>> Life isn't about people. It's about Historical Forces.
>
> Since you are a Marxist and have been, at least in the past,
> sympathetic to poststructuralism, I find it odd that you get so
> endlessly exercised about this aspect of Carrol's thinking. Because
> he's right: Life is about the interaction of forces, and people only
> matter as indexes to those interactions.
They do and they don't. Dennis C is right that gossip is fun, and Carrol's moralizing isn't. But it's a cop out always to point to grand forces without at all examining human agency or institutional specificity. Rates of profit matter, but so do historical figures like Ronald Reagan. And surely there are things that a left can learn from history, and can do better if we think things through. Obviously there are forces larger than us, but we're not passive lumps either. We make history but not with tools of our own choosing, as the guy said.
Doug