Date: Wed, 3 Sep 1997 11:58:51 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: Re: M-TH: A time to Di -- the Di-ification


Yo Thaxalites!

Rob S writes:

>G'day Thaxists,

>>Poor little rich girl. Not all bourgeois (or aristocrat) women are like
>>Thatcher. Most are capable of hiding the predatory reptile inside them.
>>After all, it's what they spend their childhood and youth training for.
>
>is a bit strong, isn't it?

Christ, if you can't call a spade a spade when the news and hysteria is
piping hot, when can you?


>We've all got reptile in us - and most of us
>are happy to bare the fangs on this very list.  There's nothing
>constitutionally predatory or reptilian about anyone simply because of
>their class origin.  That's reductionist theory at work and the politics of
>hate in foetal form.

Sorry Rob, but this is crap. People who are loyal to the bourgeoisie are
constitutionally (in a social sense) predatory, exploitative, callous and
destructive of the life and love of their victims in the proletariat. In a
word, reptilian. Di was not just loyal to the bloody bourgeoisie but she
married into the machinery of state repression and this makes her stand on
landmines stomach-churning in its hypocrisy. Hers was the state that
slaughtered and sodomized the Argentine youth you appropriately bring up.
Her battle with the Windsors was an entirely internal thing, the way
factions of the bourgeoisie try and kill each other off.

The politics of hate in the sense I think you're trying to use it, and the
politics of class hatred are not the same thing.


>I maintain that Di had the freedom to indulge herself
>in the perks of her parasitic class (which she did) and eschew all
>aristocratic (and therefore anachronistic) notions of 'noblesse oblige'
>(which she didn't - some good has come of her time on earth, and some of
>that good was precisely a consequence of her conscious interventions).
>Plenty of her class, and much of that ridiculous family take the smooth and
>leave the rough for others.  Di was a bit silly, a bit manipulative, a bit
>vacuous, a bit self pitying and a bit self-indulgent.  So what?

So her antics are an affront to the most minimal principles of democracy.
Think about the social prerequisites for her strutting her stuff on the
stage of media attention, and the millions if not billions of equally
well-meaning, slightly silly but on the whole pretty damn nice working
women who are kept from strutting their even more interesting stuff by Di's
class monopoly on information and public expression. I'm with Bob M all the
way on this bit of class injustice. Fuck her and her revolting antics --
not revolting in themselves, but revolting because of the cost to others of
her being able to do it, and the world getting to know about it.

>Hating her
>personally is just bloody silly.

I hope what I just wrote makes it plain I don't hate her or any of them
personally. There are very few people I hate personally.

>Given her origins, it would have taken a
>lot to be a better person than she was, and not much at all to be a lot
>worse.

So what. Sweden is still better than most capitalist countries in a lot of
ways, but as a capitalist country its shit has the same smell as the rest
of them. It doesn't take long to get to hate the stench of the
air-freshener they use as much as the stink of the shit they're trying to
cover up.

>If important questions rise to the public mind as a consequence of the
>carnage then well and good.  But joyous responses to the unpleasant death
>of an individual who did not seem to take pleasure or see benefit in the
>death of others - well, I can't come at that.

Joyous is not my idea of how I'm reacting. Gleeful I'd probably go along
with to some extent. Chris B is probably right about the element of anger
involved, but in his usual pussy-footing way he didn't make any attempt to
characterize the kind of anger he sensed.

Rage is perhaps what I feel, and outrage, and being from a tradition of
satirists and ironizers (Swift and Monty Python, an Anglo-Irish united
front, you might say) this gleeful sarcasm seems to come more naturally
than some maudlin jeremiad about the way some poor little rich girl had it
rough.

Perhaps someone feels like opening a thread on responses to death here or
on Marxism-Psy.

>That said, I agree with, and enjoy, the balance of Hugh's beautifully
>concocted posts on this thread.

Now that's what I like to hear!

>And to Chris, I say

>I see only bad news for marxists in the way the Poms are reacting.  I'm
>with Lou Godena on this.  I last saw the Poms through eyes this jaundiced
>when I watched them morphing into baying dingoes at the prospect of
>slaughtering some conscripted Argentinian teenagers back in '82.  A sick
>culture - apparently as far from redeeming itself as ever.  And I realise I
>throw stones from the interior of my own glass house here ...

Fetishized, substitutional reactions will continue until society becomes
transparent. There's nothing national about any of this. What's national
about it is the surface expression of the general drive. I might write
about all this with an individual style and emphasis, but the things I
write about and the reasons I write about them are socially and
historically determined.

ciao4now!

Hugh




     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---