On 12/31/06, Angelus Novus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
--- 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.
It looks to me that the "lost faith in their ability to transform
social reality" tends to be accompanied by reification of prevailing
social categories. Though most socialists would hotly contest Francis
Fukuyama's theory of liberal democracy as the end of history, they, at
the same time, implicitly suggest that gender practice and concept of
sexual orientation that prevail in capitalist metropolises, for
instance, are the destinations to which the rest of the world either
tend or should aspire.
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?
Few grasp commodity fetishism, for sure, but a transformative movement
doesn't automatically imply the historicity of capitalism (unless you
are defining the word "transformative" in such a way that only a
movement that seeks to build a communist future qualifies as a
"transformative" one). A lot of people, including socialists, believe
either that capitalism is likely to last as long as humanity will last
or that a majority of people will always prefer capitalist development
to socialism or both, though they may not openly admit it.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
