Re: [Marxism] Sick to death of Oba-mania

[Mark Lause <markalause@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 12:37 PM, s.artesian <sartesian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I myself and others maintain and have maintained that in fact Obama
> represents no different section of the ruling class or section of
> the country than Bush
>

This is the position I've said you were taking and which you've been
denying....  But let's not be sidetracked.   Your "Marxism" tells you
that their common bourgeois identity means that that politicians don't
represent a "different section of the ruling class or section of the
country." This latter view you ascribe simply to Frederick Jackson
Turner.

I sincerely welcome Sartesian's honest expression of this view.  Now,
maybe we can get someplace....

To start with, it's not just Turner but Algie M. Simons, Marxist
scholars generally, and all the scholars broadly identified with the
economic and materialist view of history acknowledge the reality of
divisions within the ruling class and the historically sectional
nature of those divisions.  They got these ideas, in part, not from
Turner but from Marx, who functioned under the disadvantage of never
having been enlightened by the Sartesian alternative.

The Sartesian alternative challenges the idea of historical
materialism.  It renders it a coincidence that every elected president
since 1960 has been from the Sun Belt...an accident that the
presidents from LBJ to Dubya had built their careers servicing the
petrochemical with allied industries and the defense
industries...those forces that transformed and dominated the Sun Belt.
 And it leaves the shift to black big city politician from the
opposite end of the country with no compelling materialist
explanation.

It is good to get a solid position to discuss rather than the
continued fluttering of advertising labels,

However, I think the position offers as much a basis for understanding
the world as the hope that we can put on our ruby slippers, click our
heels together and wish ourselves back in Kansas...and, when it
doesn't happen, console ourselves that Oz is really, really the same
thing as Kansas anyway...

ML

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