Date: Mon, 6 Oct 1997 12:29:03 -0500 From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com> 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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005