Fambly Values was - RE: AUT: America Implodes

[".: s0metim3s :." <s0metim3s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Harald:

: here. But voting
: Bush and 'family values' most likely
: must in a certain
: sense also be understood as
: anti-capitalist response.
: Something to hold on to when the whole
: world seems
: as a disentigrating into chaos and
: irrationlity ( and I
: think this has terrible little to do
: with the question of
: 'race' ).  And here, in the real world,
: the difference
: "between the world of essences and the world of
: appearances" is absolutly critical,
: even if the marketing
: gurus and the dominating ideology
: aggressively agitates
: for the opposite viewpoint.

I'm sorry, but I don't see these remarks as
particularly useful.  Part of the problem -- not
just in Harald's remarks, but in the way the Left
tends to approach the issues which 'family values'
politics raises -- is in making nice, neat
demarcations between gender, sexuality,
exploitation, racialisation, labour etc.

The result often being that 'class' is teased out
of the mix in such a way that the "essence" of the
class means 'white, straight men.'

I think this is a working assumption that goes
well beyond the overtly homophobic drivel from
NewDem/Dave. The politics of representation and
identity are in need of some shaking up here.

I've just as much distaste for narratives of
"progress" as I have for narratives of
"disintegration and chaos."  While the former tend
to be extremely blinkered about the material
conditions of any ostensible progress (eg. that
the period of so-called 'full employment'
presupposed unpaid domestic labour); the latter
are similarly premised on confining the sense of
the world to 'white, straight men,' and as if this
exhausts the experience and meaning of the class.

Any ostensible decline in relative advantage
(relative to others in the class, esp women), even
granting that such declines are generally
overstated, are rendered in paranoid terms --
NewDem's "they're taking over!" -- and as licence
for hatreds which are anything but a hatred of
capitalism as such.  They're struggles for
relative advantage within the class, based on a
particular version of identity politics which
marxism, anarchism, syndicalism etc have tended to
accomodate and oftentimes embrace.

(And no, I do not think the concept of 'the
multitude' has fared much better in challenging
such paradigmatic self-aggrandisements of the
'white, straight man'; it just obscures those
behind the more upbeat formal proceduralisms of
pluralism.)

As I see it, the 'family values' thing is as
inseparable from racialisation, gender and
sexualilty as it is from labour and exploitation.

'Family values' is about the 'proper' forms of
reproduction and production, of what is deemed
appropriate and innapropriate to do with one's
body (and to the bodies of others); as well as the
ways in which divisions of labour are taken as
indicating values (monetised values, among other
things) which are supposed to inhere, naturally
and a priori in the 'differences' of bodies.

All this converges under the slogan of "Working
Families," which are meant to behave like a firm,
with assets, debt management strategies, a
corporate ethos, etc.

Angela
_______________

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