> Still, I have some problems with your list. Women have more capacity now to
> control their reproduction than ever. What's so great about the unity of
> home and work? What's wrong with a multiplicity of realms? Why is migration
> always a bad thing? Should people stay in the village where they were born?
> This is all deeply conservative, very close to the romantic anticapitalism
> of the right, more so than the revolutionary anticapitalism of Marx.
>
fair enough, but I don't see the difference between this and the Desai celebration of Marx as a sort of forerunner to Hayek who would love neoliberal capitalism almost unreservedly, i.e. Lenin's statement about the freedom of women in factory life as opposed to patriarchal feudalism--which was supposed to be a teleological march towards industrialism, but has, as you've mentioned dozens of times, obviously stalled out for a good portion of the world's population.
Also, I'd say that there is a real problem with saying this is conservative and then saying that is necessarily a bad thing. When people are interested in preserving a way of life precisely because it allows them to live I don't know how I can argue that them sloughing it off will inevitably produce more freedom. When an indigenous community sees what the introduction of capitalist social relations did for a neighboring indigenous community--i.e. turned them all into indebted, landless, workers--it is not "romantic anti-capitalism" it is resistance to the real, empirical effects of a fucked up system of exploitation--effects they have witnessed first hand. If the Sarayacu or the residents of the Intag valley in Ecuador want to resist the oil and mineral industries from destroying their way of life, I don't think my feelings of ickyness about their gender dynamics should figure at all into the moral or even political judgement about the rightness of their cause. When conservative means making it possible to exist, it's hard to argue with that--especially when there is absolutely no guarantee (and very slim odds) that a transformation in the capitalist direction will result in something better at this point.
In other words, it is precisely because the history of the past 300 years or so is such a mixed bag that saying capitalism=technological innovation is incredibly reductive. And I think most of what Marx found innovative in it was the conjoined effort of many humans working together: this force was always more important to him than the profit motive per se and I sense that the direction James and brad want to take this is to say that he was a proponent of labor discipline rather than labor as a font of all value.
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