Re: [Pen-l] Obama and the Cult of Personality

[Doyle Saylor <doylesaylor@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
On Jan 22, 2009, at 4:05 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:

> And even within
> capitalism, the concept of "identity" seems mostly something humanist
> professors or some psyichiatric cults concern themselves with,

Doyle;
People associate culture with identity.  Grow up in an African  
American household and you develop a sense of how you are treated by  
the majority population.  Culture is often really just about the  
connection process one has with familiar groupings of people.  And  
dominating that connection process for the influence and depth of  
meaning is language.  So people with the same language will see  
themselves as 'English'.  Capitalist do not authorize or make these  
sorts of identities and they last into socialist experiments.  And is  
a long term argument in socialism about what is to be done.

The Jewish bunds that represented socialist ideals for an ethnic group  
was I think rightly recognized as not true to the class concept of  
workers unity.  Nations form around creating a mass identity, but use  
that as a tool of control over non membership in the identity.  And  
this foments sharp divisions which national boundaries instill.

To me the weakness of Carrol's statement is about how little Carrol  
understands the work process of making knowledge in human activities.   
While being well educated in English, Carrol seems to me to have  
little background in science about cognition.  Carrol may call  
cognition 'psychology' of course as a means of disparaging the  
knowledge gained from neuroscience, but to me it's hopeless to not see  
'identity' as an important real political issue.  For example, in the  
U.S. the demand for one language is racist.  That culture is anti- 
working class.  Yet Carrol would have it identity is a figment of  
capitalism.  What is real is language differences that make it  
difficult for people to understand each other because sharing  
knowledge is difficult.  And those problems are not figments, nor are  
people just blowing smoke when they say they are English.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
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