> On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> > Your friend is mis-reading my piece.
>
> Okay, Robin and I agree then. His claim that "however much coercive
> power the state wields–and it’s considerable—it’s not, in the end,
> where and how many, perhaps even most, people in the United States
> have historically experienced the raw end of politically repressive
> power" is silly, a distinction without a difference.
>
>
In this case, however, I think Doug's point about sympathetic readings
trumps yours about a silly distinction. Robin's point, it seems to me is
an empirical one more than a theoretical one. Sometimes the cops thump on
you, which feels like the government, and sometimes your boss does, which
feels like the market, and sometimes your partner does, which feels like
the domestic, etc., and so on down the line. This means that when the
folks he is writing about deemphasize repression in sphere's beyond "the
government" by focusing too much on the cops/city hall the distinction has
political efficacy - even if the writer, as a political intellectual, isn't
silly enough to personally reify the distinction.
Now, listening to Doug's interview with Robin and starting (it is important, here, to emphasize that I've only started it) his book, I've had the beginnings of an inkling of exactly the opposite reaction to his work.
There are moments in Robin's work/words where I hear echoes of anarchists' (in this case Bookchin's) reification of domination - a form which transcends and supersedes qualitative changes in the relations of its content. I love the analysis of the iterative/evolving/learned-from-left-opponents characteristics of the Reactionary Mind but have been a little concerned that these learned and evolving iterations seem to always return to the same form of relationship - one based on a feudal model of domination (each capitalist's business is a fiefdom, each male workers' home is a fiefdom, each white southern community is a fiefdom, each administrative bureaucracy is a fiefdom, etc.)
I am still working this out but I am - at the moment and at the meta-analytic level - more drawn to Eagleton's insistence on differentiating conservatisms, as he does here in the context of a discussion of whether Eliot was a Fascist:
In fact, Eliot was not a Fascist but a reactionary, a distinction lost on those of his critics who, in the words of Edmund Burke, know nothing of politics but the passions they incite. Ideologically speaking, Fascism is as double-visaged as the Modernism with which it was sometimes involved, casting a backward glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming dynamically ahead into the gleaming technological future. Like Modernism, it is both archaic and avant-garde, sifting pre-modern mythologies for precious seeds of the post-modern future. Politically speaking, however, Fascism, like all nationalism, is a thoroughly modern invention. Its aim is to crush beneath its boot the traditions of high civility that Eliot revered, placing an outsized granite model of a spade and sten gun in the spaces where Virgil and Milton once stood.
Fascism is statist rather than royalist, revolutionary rather than traditionalist, petty-bourgeois rather than patrician, pagan rather than Christian (though Iberian Fascism proved an exception). In its brutal cult of power and contempt for pedigree and civility, it has little in common with Eliot’s benignly landowning, regionalist, Morris-dancing, church-centred social ideal. Even so, there are affinities as well as contrasts between Fascism and conservative reaction. If the former touts a demonic version of blood and soil, the latter promotes an angelic one. Both are elitist, authoritarian creeds that sacrifice freedom to organic order; both are hostile to liberal democracy and unbridled market-place economics; both invoke myth and symbol, elevating intuition over analytical reason.
This is from: Terry Eagleton 2000. Nudge-Winking. London Review of Books 24(18): xx-xx. Sept. 19. http://www.lrb.co.uk/article.php?get=eagl01_2418