Joanna
----- Original Message ----- Further on the text Michael cites from MR. The two chapters in Jack Belden, China Shakes the World_, dealing with women in the Chinese Revolution, are relevant here.
Belden goes on a raid by an "irregular" guerilla group (one not under the rule or guidance of the PLA or the Party). They slip into a village guarded by Nationalist troops & kidnap the landlord and his wife, march them a number of miles, and execute the husband. Belden sympathizes with the wife, who reacts by in effect glorifying in the execution of that prick her husband! It is that episode that leads Belden to examine more closely the position of women and their importance to and in the Revolution. In terms of the present thread, this woman, probably illiterate woman, excluded from public life, is an exact instance of what the Greeks meant by "idiot," and she is reacting against that isolation imposed on her. And of course the "irregulars" Belden accompanied were themselves the kind of "ignorant" (isolated) peasants, who make up the personae of Hinton's book. (I would nominate Fanshen as the most important book of any kind written by an American in the 20th-century It stands in the company of Thucydides and Gibbon.) And in this context, probably Mao's work of most continuing relevance to left thought is Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. Its approach transcends its immediate occasion.
And other perspectives come to mind. Is not Eliot's TWL among other things a study in Urban idiocy? (For those who have not read it for years or decades, the translation of the closing chant, the peace that passeth understanding, was Keynes's judgment of the Peace of Versailles. Keeping that in mind can illuminate much that precedes.
Another perspective. The radio transformed actual rural life in the U.S. I grew up on a small fruit farm in Michigan and attended a rural elementary school. But when some third cousins from Chicago visited once, it turned out that my brother and I (both under 10) knew more about _their_ mode of life than they knew of ours. On the other hand, I've been trying lately to listen to an audio version of Brideshead Revisited, & it got too dull -- precisely, perhaps, because the characters did illustrate the id idiocy of rural life (even when they lived in the City).
Carrol
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk