File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_1999/bourdieu.9907, message 82


From: "kent strock" <sigmund5-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Bourdieu and Reformism
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 12:57:18 PDT



>
>kent strock wrote:
>
>>Yet I sense an Idealism or a negation of history in holding these
>>figures up as the archetype of the True Marxism. Ya, it would have
>>been nice if the Marxists hadn't given up the students, but they
>>did, and it was the practice of Marxism, not theory that led to this.
>
>The practice of Marxism? Dennis & I practice Marxism, and we don't do that.
I find this out of context quotation unfair and in the Derridian sense 
violent. Your response, in leaving out the questions raised previous to it 
which doesn't address the philosophical/textual questions I raised.  The 
point, which you aptly demonstrated, is that this not about intentionality.  
You can intend or do what you want, and have very good reasons for it. What 
I was addressing were issues of textuality, time and meaning which Derrida 
has raised, and which I think Boudieu respects, but which too many Marxist 
dismiss as ideology or not practical, without taking his insights of 
deconstruction seriously.




>
>>  A more concrete historical anaylsis must acknowledge that these
>>events had a profound effect on Marxists of the lineage you site who
>>realized this discourse wasn't doing the trick..I am thinking here
>>particularly of Baudrillard, to a lesser extent perhaps Foucault.
>
>For all the professed anti-Marxism of Foucault and Foucaultians, I
>think there are a lot of affinities between F & M. But that's another
>story.
I agree there are affinities, as their are with every set of thinkers you 
want to match up.
>Baudrillard doesn't understand capital at all, which is one way to
>avoid mirroring it. His debt essay
><http://www.ctheory.com/e31-global_debt.html> is a hilarious, utterly
>demented as a reading of the political economy of finance. Evidently
>he's never gotten a call from a collection agency.
>
>>This raises an issue that I am uncomfortable in Bourdieu text: he
>>maintains a discourse of scarcity; a discourse by which Baudrillard
>>shows that Marxism is merely the mirror image of captialism.
>
>I don't know a Marxist who doesn't think scarcity is socially
>constucted, and doesn't have a critique of capitalist notions of
>scarcity. After that, they bifurcate into those who'd aim to ramp up
>industrial production and those who think the whole social/material
>sphere has to be transformed. But even the "brown" Marxists (as
>opposed to the "green" ones) would want fewer consumer durables and
>more social forms of consumption and investment. Even orthodox CP
>types have a critique of the calculating bourgeois monad.
>
>Marx and Marxism are criticized for their obsession with production
>and scarcity and all the categories of capital. I'll concede that
>there are mathematical and value fundamentalist types of Marxists who
>don't distance themselves from capital's categories enough for my
>taste. But the names that Dennis mentioned don't do that. And that's
>the kind of Marxism I see in Bourdieu.
>
>>At a purely phenomenolgical level Baudrillard and Baitille, ring
>>incredibly more true in understanding the obscene affluence/exess(no
>>merely monetary) of contemporary American capitalism, than
>>Bourdieu's scarcity discourse.
>
>Evidence of the success of capital's ideology that you should see
>only the excess and not the scarcity that excess creates by its side.
>In their obsession with media excess, for example, Wired editors and
>some cultural critics forget the fact that half the population of the
>world has never made a phone call. I live in New York City, certainly
>an epicenter of excess, but I'd only have to walk about 2 miles to be
>in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the U.S., with health and
>social statistics worse than "Third World" averages. In fact, one of
>the richest neighborhoods in the U.S. (Fifth Av in the 90s) is next
>to one of the poorest (East Harlem). The polarization of incomes
>within nations and especially between nations is the greatest it's
>ever been.
>
>
>Doug Henwood
>Left Business Observer
>250 W 85 St
>New York NY 10024-3217 USA
>+1-212-874-4020 voice  +1-212-874-3137 fax
>email: <mailto:dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
>web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>
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