>Correlation is not causation, fer sure, but I notice that the assertion of >all these new ways of knowing and doing have coincided with the rise of the >right. If these new modes were of such great practical utility, why aren't >we seeing some results? And why is it that in the U.S. at least the right >has been the great beneficary of class resentments? > >Doug Doug, of course you are absolutely right about the importance of class processes and class struggles. But attacking people associated with RETHINKING MARXISM on this point has got to be a losing proposition. Recall that just yesterday Ron was accusing Wolff and Resnick of being dogmatic traditional Marxists. People around RM are the ones *most consistently* raising issues of class, insisting on the necessity of integrating class concepts into social analyses, asserting that class has its own, independent (overdetermined) effects, and that left, radical, and democratic analyses and strategies that don't take class into account are likely to be weaker and less successful, that even if successful on their own terms they are likely to produce continuing difficulties associated with continued exploitation, etc. Diskin and I, for example, in our critique of Laclau and Mouffe, showed that their rejection of the "basic economic categories" or Marxism is the result of *insufficient committment*, one might say, to their post-modern insights. We demonstrated clearly the hollowness of their economic analysis due precisely to the rejection and consequent absence of class concepts, and showed how their own post-modern ideas implied, contrary to their stated positions, precisely the *need* to retain a Marxian concept of class. Similarly, my own work on environmental economics argues that the Eco-Marxism of Jim O'Connor (who, no doubt about it has done great work around ecology and whose journal, _Capitalism, Nature, Socialism_, is an oasis in a desert of environmental garbage) is fundamentally based on neo-classical externality theory. I elaborate, on the other hand, an understanding of the relationship between capital and environment based not primarily on relationship to the market but on surplus labor. Perhaps part of the problem in this discussion on PEN-L is that while many post-modernists (like most modernists) are indeed anti-Marxist (the correct term for which post-Marxism is just an excuse), the people on *this* list most closely associated with post-modernism are confirmed and committed Marxists who have nonetheless been able to garner from post-modernism certain insights we feel helpful to our understanding and application of Marxism in our political and theoretical work. To answer your immediate question, I would think that someone of your persuasion (hell, and mine: I read the WSJ every day, too. Far and away the best writing of any mainstream rag :) would want to focus on the differential access to wealth and power held by the right and the left. Brief historical perspective: in the post-war (WWII) era, the right crushed the left (McCarthyism). Resistance springs eternal, and in the space created perhaps by a certain complaisance on the part of the right, a new left arose during the 60s. Taken by surprise, the right was slow to respond, but respond they eventually did, and their superior resources (among other things, like our own mistakes) enabled them to reassert their power during the course of the latter 70s and 80s and into the present. If I'm not mistaken, you recently agreed with something very much like just this characterization in a recent (private) post, Doug. In other words, I think blaming the current counterrevolution (of the past 20 some odd years) on post-modernism is according to post-modernism much more power than it actually has in academia, on the left, or among the massess. Much regards, Blair P.S. Still planning to write some of my own perspectives on pomo (those three books), but keep wanting to respond to specific things that come up and I'm already stealing time from other deadline things I need to do. Blair Sandler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
