[lbo-talk] Noam Chomsky is losing it

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Fri Sep 30 17:33:40 PDT 2011



>> "The text" at hand concludes thusly:
>
> I've read this three times before reading it again just now, and each
> time I've been frustrated at how he manages to start to approach
> what's at stake in these arguments but manages to miss it. Namely, he
> moves from the racial to the economic, but never combines them; we
> have race on one hand and capitalism on the other, and though those
> things frequently intersect, it's an accidental relationship and not
> actually ("essentially") constitutive of social relations. He sorta
> kinda approaches treating them as mutually constitutive when he says
> "the struggle against racial health disparities, for example, has no
> real chance of success apart from a struggle to eliminate for-profit
> health care," but then makes clear that questions of class/capitalism
> take precedence, are more determinative, than race. It's his
> prerogative to believe that, but I think he's wrong.
> ___________________________________

Pretty much. What is also irritating is that this piece is constantly trotted out because, somwhow, I'm supposed to be persuaded by it because a black man wrote it.

Reminds me of this internet war that went on once, where various feminist blogs had at each other, each one trotting out their own special person of color to speak to the issue of whether something was "racist" or not.

shag



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