It's absurd to think that Marx, who campaigned against child labor, would have considered such a situation even possibly consensual. It's more than clear that he would have also thought the conveniently negligent mother nothing more than a hawker of a slave. And there are those who think that the state has socially constructed adulthood at 16 years of age and that nothing lies beyond this demarcation than--to wax Foucauldian-- the classifying technology of the state which is then understood as the primary instrument of oppression, instilling in youth a fear or even disdain for their own bodily pleasures that adult proletarian life will never be able to satisfy. Yet Katha and others are not inveighing against sexual experimentation among roughly same age teenagers; no one here is signing on to the Palin abstinence movement. I am in favor of sex education and birth control.
And this white hot anarchist radicalism pays no attention to the actual maturity and biological and social development of a ninth grader in our culture, and no one who pays attention to this material reality--that is anyone who does not think that the achievement of adulthood is only an arbitrary state classificatory action, per radical social constructionism (see the criticism by Andrew Sayer in the Moral Significance of Class)-- can say that ninth graders can be consensual sex partners of forty year old adults. Those who rise here to the defense of Polanski sully Marx's name and discredit the great struggle for emancipation to which he devoted his life. And perhaps their intention is to discredit Marx by enlisting him in support of Polanski. At the very least what we have here are men concerned only with themselves, and they make me certain that I am not a Marxist. Rakesh ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
