Date: Mon, 6 Oct 1997 12:29:03 -0500
Subject: Re: M-I: Promise Keepers


Rakesh Bhandari wrote:

>I hope Marxists don't make the mistake of thinking that such new movements
>are of not central and decisive importance today.

Movements like PK and the NOI, as disturbing and reactionary as they are,
also fill a great political vacuum - a response to alienation and
atomization. With no left and no unions, conservative religious forces have
stepped in. The typical bourgeois liberal/feminist reaction of alarmed
contempt doesn't do justice to the complexity of these phenomena. (How to
understand the huggy confessional reforumulation of masculinity, for
example?) I really don't know how to respond to them, either, but the
standard liberal approach of litigating to prevent their meetings will only
encourage them. Liberals have no critique of alienation and are
antipathetic to the utopian impulse; socialists should be able to do better
than that, but we're not.

Doug





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