[WS:] I interpret it differently - it has nothing to do with feudalism but rather with a symbiotic relationship between state or political oppression and private oppression in personal everyday life relations. An oppressive regime gains popular legitimacy only when it "democratizes" oppression, that is, allows oppression or perhaps only the possibility of it to exist in the private sphere of everyday life.
Robin makes this point rather clear in discussing Southern "slavocracy: - it gained support of non-slave owning whites because it "democratized" slavery by making it possible for every white to be a "master" over another human being in private everyday life. From that pov, Southern states were nothing more than an outgrowth of private slave economy - an institution created by plantation owners to manage their collective interests - and that is the grounds of its popular legitimacy.
If memory serves, some feminists (Heidi Hartmann?) arguing that male workers accepted their subordinate position in the workplace because the wage system in which they were "breadwinners" allowed them to be "masters" over their wives at home. Michael Burawoy made a similar argument about social relations at the workplace.
It is also interesting to note that authoritarian regimes that did not "democratize oppression" - or perhaps did not feed off oppressive relationships in the private sphere did not get that much popular legitimacy as the ones that did. For example, the main source of popular opposition to Eastern European communism came from its egalitarianism, or perhaps its flattening of social hierarchies. The intelligentsia resented being put on equal footing with the proles. I've seen that a lot myself.
To sum it up, there is a symbiotic relationship between state and private oppression, but in the political discourse of this country the former gets most of public attention while the latter tends to be overlooked. Or as someone on this list observed, the American public tends to blame government for everything bad going with the economy while forgetting that this is the normal operation of the market, which is dominated by private businesses. In America, private is beautiful and can do no wrong - only government can screw things up. Therefore I appreciated that Robin brought private oppression to our attention.
Wojtek
On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 12:02 PM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 11:32 AM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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
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