Re: Capitalism and Heterosexism: Judith Butler & Nancy Fraser

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
<<Malgosia wrote:
I guess what I am partly asking is, what is to be learned from, say, the
Fraser/Butler controversy?  What new knowledge can come out of it, and
by means of what methodology?  How do we approach it so that new
knowledge _can_ come out of it, rather than just another re-hearsal of
what we already think we know?>>

Yoshie replies:

I already posted the questions they pose, different approaches they take
to the questions, etc., and my questions with regard to Fraser's take on
the subject, so I won't repeat them here. What do you think about them?
Or anyone else for that matter? That's what I want to know. It can be
that no one here has nothing to say about the matter. In that case, I'll
just go read more books & articles on it and talk to different people, I
guess.

=========================================

Yoshie,

Preliminary: The following remarks are both deliberately and unavoidably
fragmentary and tentative: deliberately so because I think the questions
I raise need much more exploration and are more open then my discussion
here even pretends to offer; unavoidably because I enter an arear, that
of the concrete *political* analysis needed now, where not only my own
thought but almost everyone's is in an inchoate state -- which probably
requires a good deal more thought but ALSO and more importantly, a more
advanced state of the spontaneous struggle than exists now to provide
the necessary basis for a more complete analysis.

I had started reading Fraser & Butler shortly before your original post,
and my preliminary response to both is that they were both raising false
questions, that falsity being based on a false assumption as to the
reach of political theory. Both think (as far as I can tell) that
political theory is (a) not capable of explaining much and (b) capable
of explaining everything. Left liberals, social democrats (variously
self-labeled), non-sectarian marxists, sectarian marxists, have in their
attempts to explain contemporary capitalist reality and the tasks of the
resistence developed a habit that can be as obfuscatory as the endless
hyphenation of marxism (marxism-leninism-maoism-hoxhaism-gonzollo
thought-etc.-etc.-etc.) The habit is the proliferation of "isms" to
include all possible additions to the basic pair of racism and sexism.

Perhaps it was the 1970s coinage of "sexism" on the model of "racism
that began the habit. It is extremely difficult, as some recent
discussions on lbo-talk revealed, to convince even sincerely anti-racist
leftists that racism is not mainly (or even at all) an attitude or an
entity with a "life of its own." It is and will continue to be
incredibly difficult (though I conceive of that as a central concern of
this list) to dissociate "sexism" from mere attitudes, having a "life of
its own." Nevertheless, racism and sexism have substantially different
material grounds-- racism having been a capitalist *creation*, while
sexism being a capitalist *mode* of a repression which is at least as
old as the earliest class societies. The only thing they have in common
is that both can be effectively dismissed as merely a set of attitudes,
requiring a change of mind on the part of the oppressors before material
conditions can be changed. And that (as readers of *Paradise Lost* can
know) is the oldest of all bourgeois convictions:

Now homo-phobia has become heterosexism; age discrimination has become
agism; mistreatment of or indifference to the disabled (mentally or
physically) has become ablism. In an old Peter Arno cartoon from the 30s
or 40s his little mustached man in the role of physician stands with a
nurse looking through the window of a *very* large nursery. "When will
it ever end, Miss Jones," he queries, "When will it ever end?"

One of the most immediately relevant of these potential isms has not yet
been given a name: the intense hatred and fear of "criminals" and
convicts that occupies the headlines and the letters-to-the-editor
columns. Another is the public obsession (which I believe you have
commented on in past posts on other lists) with crimes that are a
serious concern but which have been fetishized to block consideration of
other (and more destructive) legal crimes -- namely abuse of children
(physical, emotional, sexual). I am aware of the seriousness of such
acts -- too many of my friends in the Depressive Manic Depressive
Support Group suffered horribly from them. The fact is that the various
public policies the media and the politicians (and probably a majority
now of citizenw) advocate will not make a damn bit of difference,
serving only to transfer more police power to the state and to obfuscate
issues which public policy or collective action *can* have an effect on.

It is more or less of a tautology that capitalist relations of
production infiltrate and transform every human relation. It does *not*,
however, follow from this that every social ill has to be incorporated
into one's analysis of capitalism, or that that analysis must offer an
explanation of all such ills. This demand to understand everything and
the subsequent discovery that we don't and won't be able to is one of
the sources of at least one of the threads given the general label
"postmodernism": that is, discovering that real knowledge is incomplete
and dotted with error (i.e.,is corrigible), it is an easy debunking step
to simply deny the possibilty of knowledge. (It is also behind the
destructive and sectarian assumption held by too many marxists that
without agreement on such ultimate issues as "the dialectic" or "Stalin"
there can be no marxist unity.)

Now while an understanding of these ills is not essential to a
fundamental analysis of capitalism, nor does an anlysis of the
capitalist mode of production necessarily lead to an understanding of
these ills, a *political* theory for the resistance to capitalism does
depend on its success in incorporating the struggle against those ills.
That is what was so frustrating to me in the recent debate on lbo-talk
over the legitimacy or need for the Black Radical Congress. All the
critics of that Congress were (a) non-black and (b) in some sense
intelligent and committed marxists, but all of them wished, stupidly I
think, to make abstract marxist principles (which I share) on the
working class do the work of concrete political analysis of a given
society (the U.S.). A slogan of the Commnist Party of China (when it was
still a revolutionary party) is fitting here: One divides into two (as
opposed to two combine into one). "The Working Class" as an abstract
entity or as a combination of various elements simply butters no
parsnips -- politically. The unity of the working class politically
requires us to see that it divides into two (actually more) groups in
the U.S., black and white, and that an analysis of that division and an
honoring of it is a precondition to unity.

It is this whole set of political tasks involved in any minimally united
working class that Butler and Fraser obfuscate with their obsessive need
to somehow theorizea those ills which Fraser calls "injustices of
recognition." In her NLR 228 "Comment" she argues: "In my conception,
therefore, misrecognition is an institutionalized social relation, not a
psychological state." This is to substitute definition for analysis. She
*labels* a general feature not only of capitalism but of all class
societies, but the mere labelling carries us no closer to the political
understanding of the matter. In fact, I think it forcloses serious
attempts at political understanding.

She continues: "In essence a status injury, it is analytically distinct
from, and conceptually irreducible to, the injustice of
maldistribution." This will not do at all, for it immediately throws us
back to pre-marxist working-class politics, essentially a form of
utopian socialism, essentially that is, moralistic. To give
(mal)distribution this high a theoretical status is to reject marxism
and materialism, period, and to start all over again with an
understanding of the world based purely on subjective moral premises.

This post has been mostly negative, both because I am not prepared
myself to carry the analysis forward *and* because I think that such
analysis must be political, not some return to the eternal forms of
justice and injustice, and all the other obscurantisms which Marx so
successfully trashed in his earliest fully marxist work, *The Poverty of
Philosophy*. I will suggest, very tentatively, a possible line of
inquiry, related to but not the same as the traditional marxist critique
of racism and sexism as barriers to class unity. This critique in its
simplest form simply sees racism as dividing whites from blacks (which
it certainly does do) but does *not* see racism as a terrible barrier to
*effective* unity even among whites. And here I believe an important
guide is Marx's *Wages, Price & Profit* -- in which he argues that if
the workers do not defend themselves within capitalism "they would be
degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation....By
cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would
certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger
movement." (_Selected Works_ Vol. 2 (Progress), p. 75.) We do *not* need
to theorize, certainly not as part of our basic analysis of capitalism,
homophobia, indifference to the disabled,  acquiescence to the "war
against crime" and the "drug war," in order to see that failure to
struggle against these abuses disqualify workers for initiating any
larger movement. In fact, I suspect that is a judgment capable of
empirical justification.

I break off here -- but perhaps I have given some basis for seeing why
there should be a certain lethargy on the part of subscribers to this
list to respond to the questions Fraser and Butler raise, or to become
overly concerned with responding to their approaches.

Carrol