Date: Sun, 28 Apr 1996 23:23:37 -0800
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Gorz



>The Husserialian attack on the mathematization of the life-world 

Patrick,  I am embarrased for myself that you reproduced from my post this
rather grotesque expression, including the misspelling of Husserl, 

 Gorz does not attack; he does examine critically both how action comes to
be guided  by calculating technique according to technical rules and the
resultant loss of self-reflexiveness and normative judgement about ultimate
ends.   

The discussion here is similar, if I am correct, to Z Bauman's analysis of
instrumental rationality in Modernity and the Holocaust (don't have the
book, so can't give the full cite right now). 

> The US has been able to avoid the European problem of unemployment to a large
>>extent by transfering work that was previously performed gratis and thus
>>remained outside the marketplace into the marketplace. In the process the
>basis >of human solidarity, sympathy and caring that is sustained by the time
>>consuming relation of face to face relations have been torn up and in their
>>place  products of the culture industry are offered as a substitute.

I would imagine that the most important example of this would be the
commodification of child care.  

Responding to those who on the basis of what he calls the ideology of work
have argued that mothers should be paid for child care, Gorz has written:

"In this formulation, the intensely affective and relational bodily
activity by which the mother gives a lfie and cherishes it--a life which
takes the incomparably unique form of *her* child--is reduced to women's
participation in the social process of production of *life* in general,
life as a socially useful product.  The relational activity which brings
into play the mother's entire sensibility, and all her senses, is bracked
out and reduced to a service rendedered to society.... [It] amounts to
*defeminizing* the biologically, corporeally and affectively specific
dimension of motherhood, as though women could gain equality with men only
by reducing motherhood to an asexual *job* that has the same nature as male
work."
              --Capitalism, Socialism and Ecology (London: verso): 62

Some criticism:

1.  Is Gorz assuming that it is not in male nature to participate in
child-rearing? While this may not be central to the point he is making, I
raise the question, remembering the discussion of female-centered
child-rearing in Isaac Balbus' Marxism and Domination...

2. I have read industrial policy advocates whose case is based on the need
to retain high wage industries in order to allow wives to return to the
household to take care of  children and engage in a active voluntary
community life.  

But wouldn't this leave women's 'social bond' in their husband's pocket,
leave women dependent upon their husbands for income.  Why not make sure
women have direct access to income?  Why would this undermine their
affective relationship with their children? It may of course change the
nature of their relationship to their husbands? Perhaps this, not the loss
of parent/child affectivity, is what Gorz fears...

3. In the following paragraph however Gorz does raise a very important
concern: that the attempt to rationalize child care or enter it into the
realm of the commodity threatens to remove child rearing from the personal
control of each mother and transfer it socially dependable, functional and
efficient apparatus.

4. Of course some of us are quite worried that as we don't enjoy good
health care and reasonable assurance of future income that pregnancy has to
be put off, often to the detriment of a young woman's body.  But this is
another problem.  Yes, abortion as a choice should be affirmed, but often
it is not in a capitalist system.  

Rakesh



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