hey gar, >I don't know if this is true. If class, race, and gender can all be >traced to some single root cause then we could use this root cause as >base and the others as superstructure. If not, then we need to start >with three categories, and three (probably interactive) explanation. well, there's the problem right there: you begin by assuming that 'base' should stand in for a strict causal (and exhaustive) explanation. what laclau and mouffe do - rightly i think where it pertians to economistic marxism, which i would not see as marxism per se - is simply amplify the base to include other identities. this is why i think their solution is a multiplication of the problem, not a solution. ie., i wouldn't begin with assuming that class is an identity politics, as social democrats tend to do. in this sense, laclau and moffe give an answer to the problems of social democracy, though i would not say they themselves are social democrats - but they leave intact the presumptions of sd. in short, i think they acknowledge the essentialist ways that vulgar marxism conceives of class, but to simply expand the range of essentialisms is not a solution - i would much rather acknowledge the clearly non-identitarian character of marx's understanding of class. ie., not only is the aim of communist politics to abolish class, but he increasingly saw it as a problem when socialists used labour in a superstitious way (see 'critique of the gotha programme'). >Explicate please. Is your problem that class, race/nation, and gender >can overlap? I.E. one can belong to the oppressed in all three >categories or to the oppressed in one and the oppressor in others? Or >is it that they are using different classification schemes -- i.e. >that where man, woman are plotted on the same axis, woman and working >class require the use of two different "maps" at one time? yes, both in a way are important to note, especially in noting the falsifications that would be necessary to any pluralism. i would add that pluralism, in order to remain coherent as a political view, would have to insist at some point on where the boundaries should be, hence the fact that multiculturalism for instance only ever works in a hobbesian way by insisting on 'that which unites us', on a new, or maybe not so new, monism at its core. >Well if laclau and mouffe are social democratics I'm sorry I defended >them. I certainly think we need an analysis which includes class >struggle, with the abolition of capitalism as our aim. no, i meant that they are still within the social democratic way of seeing things, even though they have some good criticisms of it. i would regard them as 'on side', but then i think we need to be expansive about our political alliances, not fake puritanical. >But I still >don't see why starting class, race and gender processes is not a good >fundamental base for analysis. well, the same problems would arise if you did this like they would if you only picked one and did it: you would begin by having a prior set of identities which function as causal explanations for any subsequent analysis. that means that you would probably not only miss stuff, but it wouldn't be interesting in the way that class analysis (for instance) can and should be: an analysis of how, if at all, those identities are formed and changed, or even the point at which those came to be seen as identities. >In terms of historical materialism: I do see in what sense racism or >gender oppression are less material and historical realities than >class oppression. i take it you meant to write 'don't'. and i agree, wholeheartedly. with laclau and mouffe, i think the problem i have with their stuff is not that it is too anti-essentialist, but not anti-essentialist enough, since they don't acknowledge the historicity of those identities and - perhaps more importantly for me - seem to collapse an analysis of capital and the ways any give society organises the extraction of surplus value into class as an identity politics. >But oppression of peoples, enslavement of >peoples, genocide against peoples was carried out quite happily >without any concept of race. The invention of race as a category is >merely the latest mutation in a very old and virulent disease. I agree that there is something too progressivist about thinking that racism is a throwback, the return of the past, anti-modernist. capitalism gets to look good and pure, almost like our salvation, don't it? but maybe we need to add something to this: pre-capitalist societies in every way worked with a naturalisation, even deification, of all social relationships. that the bourgeoisie had to make space for itself and capital through an assault on this will be something that will always haunt capitalist societies. racism papers over the contradictions between capital as denaturalisation and the necessity of ongoing hierarchy, theft and impoverishment (not to mention slavery) to capital's existence by making 'other races' appear as the source of the incompleteness of the liberal promises to human rights, etc. angela
