File spoon-archives/bourdieu.archive/bourdieu_2000/bourdieu.0001, message 43


Date: Mon, 17 Jan 2000 04:40:57 -0800 (PST)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
Subject: Re: comprendre


On Sun, 16 Jan 2000, Simon Beesley wrote:

> up its own dictatorship. I mean you and other grad workers are indeed
> proletarianized but not in the effective sense demanded by a Marxist or
> Frankfurt Marxist theory of history.

You mean, just because we don't work in steel mills, we're somehow not 
"real" proletarians? I don't own the silicon means of production, I don't
own any stock, I don't own a business. According to Adorno and Marx, I'm
objectively a member of the working-class, even if I'm not consciously
aware of this. 

> Surely the lesson of the failure of Marxism (as a political programme) is

How has Marxism failed? Seems to me the working-class has won some pretty
significant victories against capital over the past three hundred years:
higher wages, benefits, the welfare state, tougher laws on polluters, a
modicum of public education, suffrage for all, etc. Adorno once said that
the chief characteristic of dialectics is that it doesn't stop, it doesn't
end somewhere: its restlessness is how it keeps faith with the possibility
of the new. In many ways, the best of Marxism is yet to be.

-- Dennis

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