[lbo-talk] Philip Mirowski - Social Physicist

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Mar 6 05:39:58 PST 2010


Joanna wrote:
>
> Carrol wrote there were no oppressed minorities before Capital.
>
> What's in a word? The larger point was there was an Epictetus, there was
> a Spartacus.

But Spartacus did not challenge slavery as an institution, nor did his followers. They aimed at achieving their own freedom by fighting their way out of the Roman Empire and establishing their own state (where they undobtedly would have been slave-oweres themselves.

You spoke of minorities themselves -- not of a few unique individuals from the outside. And like homosexual8ty and working class, self-conscious "oppressed minorities" are a social creation of an individualist socialorder grounded in human equality. (Capitalism is an egalitarian social order, and that is why it is possible and inevitable that the oppressed will be blamed for their own oppression. That was never the case in the past. No one ever blamed a peasant for being a peasant.

Carrol



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