--- Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > CB; Was Occam a Marxist ? Aren't you a Marxist ?
I am a communist. I think the Marxian critique of political economy is the best analytical toolbox for understanding modern society. I do not self-apply the term "Marxist". Too much baggage to be of much use. Nothing against people who still use the term. But it means so many things to so many people. Yoshie calls it a "Theology of Discontent", which sounds right to me. > What is the materialist > component of your explanation? Not a rhetorical question: what is "materialism"? What would be a "materialist" explanation? Given that the defining characteristic of capitalism is an abstract fetish which defines and structures productive activity and social life, I think "materialism" (if it means what I suspect it means) might be entirely the wrong approach. "Materialism" to me implies some sort of determinant role for productive forces in the last instance. You don't need Marx if that is your worldview. Better to go straight to somebody like Jared Diamond. Value as a fetish certainly has material force, but I do not see this fetish structure as necessarily derived from specific productive forces. If anything, the logic of valorisation determines the shape those productive forces take, and to what use they are put. > The lynching of Negroes is not only an expression of > the will to lynch > Negroes. What is it an expression of? White racists as merely the pawns of productive forces? Do you not attribute agency to racists? If we clarify the class character of society to Neo-Nazis, they will stop being vicious assholes? > It also has to do with slavery and > sharecropping, the Jim Crow > class structure and class struggles in the U.S. > South. It certainly "has to do" with all of those things. I would not dispute this. > Racism and > anti-semitism have material undepinnings. You would have to elaborate what you mean by this (again, I am not being rhetorical. I have a vague notion of what you might mean by "material", but I would rather have you say what you mean). > Who won by > the lynching of Negroes > or murder of Jews in those times and places ? "Who won?" Do you think Auschwitz is purely the product of rational cost-benefit calculation? This ascribes too much rationality to Anti-semitism and racism. Who won when American soldiers brutalized detainees at Abu Ghraib? ____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com
