Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 17:53:04 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Re: M-FEM: All Work and No Play? No Way!


Carrol wrote:
>Doug is of course correct when he speaks of "too many Marxists...
>think that play and desire are decadent," but I wish to suggest (in light
>of Jurriaan's perspective, that such marxists are minimally correct in
>seeing marxism having only a *negative* grip on individual behavior. That
>is, a marxist does *not* in his/her private life engage in certain
>practices: I can recall one from my involvement in marxist groups: a
>comrade who tried to use marxism to deny his companion the right to break
>off their relationship. But I don't see how marxism, for the reasons
>given by Jurriaan, can generate positive prescriptions for the conduct
>of sexual relationships or daily recreation that differ in any way from
>ordinary daily practice of non-marxists.

I do not mean to offer positive description--not to mention
prescriptions--for the correct private conducts regarding free time, play,
desire, or anything else. I agree that such exercises are--if not
impossible--largely speculative. But I don't think that ideas + practices
that concern free time, play, desire, etc. fall under the rublic of
"privacy" either. How much free time people have and what people do with it
is social practices that become differently concretized through group and
individual identities. I am interested in how universals become concretely
singular and how concrete individuals and groupd are shaped by and in turn
reshape universals. In fact this might be an area where feminism would
productively fertilize marxism, in that one of the theoretical and
practical strands of feminism concerns the redrawing the boundary between
the public and the private.

How much free time workers have, to take a most telling example, is an
index of workers' power. What individual workers do with available free
time is not free from social forces. One might, for instance, look at mass
cultural regimentation of leisure and how people are taught to spend their
free time as if they were still at work. (Disneyland, video games,
"lifetime learning," etc.)

>We can fight against the attempt of *some* marxists to condemn play and
>desire, but I think the burden of going further, of developing a "marxist
>theory of play" or a "marxist theory of pleasure," is on those who think
>such a thing possible.

I happen to think such fights against the attempts of not only some
marxists but the ideology to condemn play and desire are rather important.

Carrol wrote, I think several months ago, that we should have said and we
should be saying, "No Pasaran!," to those cuts in welfare and other
programs. I agree. But why did the better situated parts of the American
working class not put up much fight against welfare cuts? Racism is one of
the reasons, of course, since any program that is perceived to serve racial
minorities comes under harsher attacks. But possibly a bigger reason is
that "work" is made so "sacred" by the dominant ideology that workers,
including those who are on welfare, cannot even *desire*. much less demand,
the right to survival outside the labor market. This is a tragedy.

Gary talked about how a decade-long assaults on workers have produced "the
collapse of desire" on the part of the working class. Many of us have come
to grudgingly accept the diminished expectations, living standards, free
time, etc. Marxists are not immune to this gloomy zeitgeist. A utopia does
not seem to be on the horizon. History does not always feel as though it
were on our side (though we still believe that Truth is--that is why pomo
relativists bother some of us so much. If we were confident of our eventual
triumph, we would not be spending so much time criticizing pomo.)  This
must change. We must attack hegemonic ideas that say to the worker class,
"you don't deserve this, you are not entitled to that." I hope I don't
sound too voluntaristic, but I think this sort of ideological battle--even
though it is primarily negative one of saying No to naysayers--is worth
fighting.

No pasaran!

Yoshie Furuhashi




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