(Fwd) Re: PKs and Apologies

["Max B. Sawicky" <maxsaw@xxxxxxxxx>]

> From:          bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Rakesh Bhandari)
> Subject:       Re: PKs and Apologies

> First, men are  to leave these gatherings emboldened to make women serve
> them--their children, the sick, the aged and themselves--as long as they
> button-up, sit up straight and go to work (though of course the majority of

That wasn't what the gatherings were about.
The dominant theme was atonement for past
sins, much more than your parody ("button-up,
etc.").  People are reading domination into
this more than MAY be warranted, was my point.

> .  .  .
> Second, what's this crap about making men feel they have a moral obligation
> to keep their promises. Men are obligated to make a family wage to support
> their wives and children?! So men are obligated to work however many hours
> and in whatever conditions it will take to keep their pututative promises
> to be economically responsible for their families?!

YES.

>  Of course to keep the family-based promises, male workers have to agree to
> give up more labor time in their contracts with capital. This seems to me

Not necessarily.  To keep their promises, maybe men
have to challenge the rule of Capital.  As far as it goes,
PK doesn't really preclude a world of possibilities.
Once again, I think you're reading too much into,
rather than drawing from.  You may not know that
the evangelical movement early 20th century was
aligned with populism and included many bone-rattling
denunciations of Capital, if not of capitalism in its
entirety.

If you don't mind, I would say all this commends
to us all another homely virtue .  .  . being a good
listener.  Tomorrow we'll cover eating your
vegetables.

> Family values of the Walton's type (catch it on the family channel) is the
> utopia of the bourgeoisie on the precipice of catastrophic depression.
>
> And it seems to me to be the family values that Schumpeter found so
> attractive in Hitler's vision.

Yipes.  We're on the precipice of catastrohpic
depression??!?  Schumpeterian Hitlerism?

I love PEN-L.


Meanwhile, Doug said:

Why can't we imagine an even better scenario - drunkard & fornicator
gives it up and pledges himself to an equal partnership with his wife?
Why does a return to "health" have to come with a reassertion of
patriarchy?

To which I reply, of course we can, and of course it
doesn't.  Now, don't you think that getting past the
drunkard/fornicator part is more difficult than moving from
virtuous patriarch to equal partnership?  In the first case, you've
got some meathead who can't even carry on a serious
conversation.

I liked the Zizek quote and agreed with Wojtek that it is more
difficult to read than it needs to be.  I'll leave the translation
debate to Tom and W.

Cheers,

MBS



===================================================
Max B. Sawicky            Economic Policy Institute
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