--- Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On such questions as race, gender, and sexuality, > most of them are > content with the liberal discourse of rights;
This illustrates the problem with statements like "socialists have xyz..." Many socialists I know do not discuss these things in terms of liberal "rights" talk, and instead also pursue a course of understanding race, gender, and sexuality as reified categories. This also implies some understanding of the historicity of these phenomena. That many people who call themselves "socialists" have lost faith in their ability to transform social reality cannot be disputed. But I don't think the one necessarily has a direct correlation with the other. A basic problem that many socialists have with thinking critically about the categories of social existence ** has nothing to do with faith in the transformative power of social movements. Even if we had a relevant social movement tomorrow which was capable of effectively transforming social reality, that wouldn't change the fact that many socialists are poorly equipped to think about social reality. Carrol correctly pleads for the centrality of commodity fetishism and the historicity of capitalism. Any transformative movement automatically implies the latter. But how many self-described socialists really grasp the former? I'm not saying we need perfectly trained critical thinkers before we can have effective and successful social movements, but I do think it would help to avoid a lot of mistakes and stupidity. ** (I don't want to unnecessarily provoke Charles when I don't have access to my library at the moment to dig up passages to support inflammatory statements like this, so please just bear with me for the moment) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
