I had written: >> my presumption is that racist and sexist practices change
due to impacts from capitalism which (1) disrupt the power of the
dominators and/or (2) strengthen the struggles of the dominated.<<
Colin and Charu answer: >First, thanks to Jim for emphasizing that these
are *assumptions* -- simplifications imposed to make a particular model
analytically tractable.<
_Of course_ I emphasize their role as assumptions. I'm not talking about
_fuzzy thinking_ here. I'm talking about (social) science, developing
theory to understand empirical reality and help to guide political
practice. To think that there are certainties without assumptions is silly,
since the exact nature of the empirical world will always involve unknowns
and uncertainty.
>Yet any set of assumptions can be criticized on grounds of realism.
Moreover the act of simplifying to gain insights in one area inevitably
creates blind spots in others, and we should be clear on what those are.<
So what is else is new? _All_ theories involve simplifying assumptions
(i.e., abstraction), including your theories (e.g., about the inherent
racism of Enlightenment thinking). If one wants to say anything besides
simply listing the "facts" in random order, assumptions are needed. And the
idea that "facts" can be theory-less is silly, the worst kind of empiricism.
Since all theories involve assumptions and empiricism is not an
alternative, criticizing one theory's assumptions cannot knock it down. You
have to argue that your theory has better assumptions and/or that it
provides greater understanding of the world and a better guide to practice
(perhaps based on equally bad assumptions). Criticism of a theory's
assumptions doesn't trump that theory; but having a better theory does. I'd
like to see your theory concerning these issues, including its assumptions.
>The statement above omits the possibility that racist and sexist practices
may change because of the impact of other modes of production beside
capitalism. <
Of course it did, given the subject of the discussion, i.e., capitalism.
Other modes of production have different impacts. Capitalism involves an
aggressive competition-cum-accumulation (leading to crisis) that tends to
disrupt other institutions, including its own status quo (modes of
regulation, SSAs, "accords," etc.) Soviet-style bureaucratic socialism (BS)
tried imitate capital's accumulation drive and disrupted non-BS
organizations, but eventually ground to a halt. Pure feudalism mostly
involves military competition and using direct force to squeeze the direct
producers to produce surplus-labor, so the ability to produce fell behind
population growth, encouraging plagues and famines, which disrupt
established institutions. I could go on to talk about slavery, etc., but I
won't.
The point is that institutions like patriarchy and racism are fundamentally
reactionary. The main dynamics involves efforts to preserve order, to
preserve privilege, to preserve relations of domination.
> It omits from consideration sources of *change* that are not modes of
production, including struggles by those dominated, and various cultural
resources. <
I don't know how a "cultural resource" (whatever that is) can do anything.
It's _people_, not resources (or ideas), who do things.
Anyway, my theory _includes_ the role of the struggles of the dominated, if
you haven't noticed. I posited a rough balance of the struggles by the
oppressed to end their domination and those of the oppressors to perpetuate
their domination as a way of conceptualize most social organizations. Such
institutions may change, but my reading of history suggests that relations
of patriarchy or ethnic domination don't change quickly unless impinged
upon from the outside by such things as the rise of the Roman Empire in the
Mediterranean area in classical "Western" history or the modern rise of
capitalism.
>The quote also highlights those impacts of capitalism on racism and
patriarchy that weaken them, either by harming dominators or aiding the
dominated, and not impacts that strengthen them, though Jim clearly
believes that both kinds of effect are possible.<
Right: I didn't talk about both types of impacts in the missive that you
reply to, because I don't want to repeat myself too much. However, I'd say
that (1) capitalism dynamism tends to _temporarily_ weaken racist and
sexist dominance but that (2) the dominators try to reassert their power,
often backed by the capitalists (who are often the same people), so that
(3) the actual progress against racism and sexism (if it happens) comes not
from the impact of capitalism but from the struggles of the dominated.
Colin and Charu, I'm glad you criticized what I said, because it provoked
me to be much clearer than what I said before.
>It's easy to argue that in most of the world capitalism has tightened the
bonds of racism and patriarchy. <
I don't know if that's true. Just thinking about sexism and the US, the
wage gap between men and women has been narrowing for quite awhile. Sure
there's still a glass ceiling and the "double day" (not to mention the wage
gap itself) and sure, a lot the narrowing is due to the stagnation of male
wages. Not only that, but abortion rights are increasingly being threatened
and most people seem to equate "feminism" with people like Linda Tripp. But
the narrowing gap tells us to avoid one-dimensional views that a degree of
sexism exists that can be quantified so that we can talk about a simple
"tightening" of the bonds. Capitalism works unevenly, as do the struggles
against the various kinds of oppression that exist.
Methinks that it's only capitalism that can be quantified in the way that
Colin and Charu seem to want to reduce social relations to a single
dimension ("tightening"). Capitalism's one dominant dimension is dollars
and cents (exchange value). In practice, even capitalism's drive to reduce
everything to one dimension is thwarted by resistance by people, including
the other institutions they have created. (Even reactionary institutions
like slavery and patriarchy resist the reduction of everything to commodity
status.)
>>Why? because racist and sexist practices aim to produce specific
use-values for the dominating groups. These are typically use-values that
cannot be accumulated. In Marxian terms, it's a matter of C - M - C,
production and social relations for use.<<
>*Do* racist and sexist practices aim to produce mainly non-accumulating
use values? Surely prestige and power can be accumulated -- ask anybody
trying to break into an old boys' network. Similarly, white privilege has
definite accumulating material benefits for those who dominate, as does
patriarchal privilege.<
Let's think of a simple and extreme case of patriarchy, i.e. polygyny. A
patriarch can "accumulate" a lot of wives, which at first seems a
reasonable counter-example to my opinion that sexism doesn't involve
accumulation. In pure patriarchy of this sort, the wife-slaves provide
sexual "services" and the like, but don't provide the basis for further
accumulation, since such services can't be accumulated. In other words,
having a harem does not produce the resources -- the equivalent of
surplus-value -- that the patriarch can use to accumulate further wives.
This is very different from the way in which hiring labor-power under
capitalist rule creates the surplus-value which finances further accumulation.
That means that the patriarch can only accumulate wives on the basis of
extracting surplus-value or surplus-labor of some other sort. Patriarchs
with big harems are also "big men" in their societies, i.e., in their modes
of production (usually agrarian-type systems such as feudalism, slavery, or
the tributary mode of production). They gain the power to accumulate wives
not from the wives themselves but from their control of land, political
power, military force, financial resources, etc.
Of course, they could mix patriarchy with capitalism or other modes of
production, by putting their wives out as prostitutes or selling their
offspring as slaves, but that's going beyond patriarchy _per se_.
Can power and prestige be accumulated? Both of these "things" are deeply
relational. In any event, power and prestige are both aspects of societal
structures. One doesn't simply "have power" or "have prestige," as if these
were physical substances. One has power or prestige within the parameters
of a societal organization. For example, the "old boys' network" is one
aspect of bureaucratic organization (under capitalism, BS, the tributary
mode of production, etc.) It blocks women from getting status and power --
and pay -- within the organization.
Within such organizations and within modes of production such as capitalism
and BS, an _individual_ or a group might accumulate power and prestige. But
if the organization which defines power and prestige is static, not
accumulating and growing larger, then the individual's accumulation of
power and prestige is at the expense of others. It's a zero-sum game. The
accumulation of power and prestige can make bureaucratic organizations hard
to run, due to increasing dissatisfaction down below. New methods of
control are needed -- such as increased job insecurity. All of this is less
needed if the organization as a whole is growing, i.e., the capitalists who
really run the show are accumulating. This in turn is dependent on the
extraction of surplus-value or surplus-labor of other sorts.
>And if capitalist exploitation depends, in some
>cases, on racism and/or patriarchy, then
>untangling what produced the accumulation of
>use-values becomes difficult.
So, social science is difficult. No one said that it was easy. Instead of
using chemical reagents, we use the power of abstraction to make this
separation (to paraphrase some out-of-date old German). We can then bring
them together again for empirical analysis, testing our abstractions
against real-world experience, seeing if they shed new light on old
questions, and seeing if they provide a reasonable strategy for fighting
exploitation and domination.
>Jim's formulation
>cuts that particular analytical knot by assuming
>that it's all due to capitalism.
Not true. See the above. Please don't misrepresent my opinions. You've read
my missives on pen-l and should know better.
>> On the other hand, capitalism is a process of M - C - M', where M' > M.
>> Money can be accumulated without limit (as long as crises don't
>>intervene), as can the kinds of use-values that capitalists amass
(machinery,
>> factories, etc.)
>In India the types of values one can attain with
>an increasingly money-based system of dowry are
>definitely not non-accumulating, and it is under
>the system of accumulatable use-values of M-M'
>that the worst horrors of gender oppression around
>dowry death have been unleashed (dowry may be old,
>but the unfettered dowry leading to dowry
>killings is new and linked to the move to an M-M'
>system of accumulation of wealth and property).
This fits with the Marxian view very well and I don't see why you think I
would disagree. On pen-l, I've quoted Marx on how slavery is made worse
when intertwined with commodity production. This is a very similar case.
Instead of _dissolving_ all precapitalist relations, capitalism can reach a
modus vivendi with the more resilient ones, preserving them for a long time.
>> I theorize racism or patriarchy as basically reflecting an "equilibrium"
>> between the efforts by the dominators to dominate and the resistance
>>of the dominated.
>If this is simply the truism that any structure
>of domination needs to maintain and reproduce
>itself over time otherwise it will disappear,
>then it is unclear why this applies just to
>patriarchy or to racial orders.
It's not a _truism_, since mainstream social science rejects such ideas. My
statement was not about the _need_ for balance but was a stronger statement
that such organizations tended to be _in_ rough equilibrium unless
disrupted from the outside.
It applies to most social organizations (and I never said otherwise). What
makes capitalism different (more than most social modes of production) is
that the accumulation/competition dynamic tends to disrupt capitalism's own
conditions of reproduction.
>If these are
>simply theoretical *definitions*, Jim's point
>about the conservatism of racism or patriarchy
>tautologically true because he has *defined*
>them that way.
Since they are not simply theoretical definitions, this point is irrelevant.
> The theoretical formulation of
>progressive capitalism given in the bare-bones
>model in Jim's post assumes that such equilibria
>are stable and never challenged except by
>capitalism, which is the sole motor of history
>remaining in the model.
I did _not_ assume that capitalism was "progressive." I don't really like
that word. Also, if my story was so "bare-bones" (as it was), I don't quite
get the point of such insistent criticism.
As noted above, capitalism is not the "sole motor of history."
>Best, Charu and Colin
>(S. Charusheela wrote much of the above.)
Good to hear from you both,
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html
