From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sat Feb 12 2005 - 20:09:21 EST
At 7:17 PM -0500 2/12/05, Gerald_A_Levy@MSN.COM wrote: > >Women dining with men may well indicate a change in status! > >Rakesh: > >That is shifting the terms of the discussion. We were not >discussing what may represent a "change in status." >You claimed that "People who ... dine together are already >recognizing their status equality." That claim is simply false -- >as I have indicated through many examples. You are simply missing the point of what I was getting at. If status is equalized through dining together, this is easier to recognize than if the status of labor is equalized through the equation of commodities in exchange. The difficulty results from the mediation of social relations by things. At any rate, the point does not depend on all cases of shared dining meaning an equalization of status. People from hitherto alienated groups may come to feel comfortable with dining with each other or intermarrying; it is easier for them to recognize in these emergent practices a common estimation of their equal status or at least a partial dissolution of an older status hierarchy. Marx seemed to be saying that people do not necessarily recognize that the equating of commodities in exchange implied the equalization of the status of all labor. Yet due to this very implication of their practice commodity exchangers may feel comfortable with Christian cult of abstract man. Some kind of elective affinity between general commodity exchange and this form of religion. Marx was interested in such sociological analysis of implications of his discovery of abstract labor as substance of value. I was merely trying to get a conversation going about it, but you refused to understand what I am getting at.Are you trying to understand what I am writing? Or are you picking at any thesis that you can caricature, rip out of context and attack? What was the point of your comments on what I was saying? Have you helped me better understand what Marx was trying to get at? Was your criticism constructive in regards to the problem that I was trying to raise? > >*Of course*, men and women dining together *may* well >indicate a *change* in status. That does not mean, though, >that the mere fact that they now dine together recognizes their >status *equality*. > >> I think you are simply wrong that women and men sharing >> a meal has not indicated a partial dissolution of superior male >> status. > >That was not my claim. Had you read my post you would >know it. I was challenging your mistaken claim that people >who dine together recognize their status *equality*. They often do. Are you denying this? > >> This is argumentative, and silly. > >I'm out of this discussion. When were you in it? When were you speaking to the interpretation and criticism of the point that Marx was trying to make? Rakesh > >In solidarity, Jerry
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