stacy-
 
just a few quick notes before i head off to campus to read...thanks so much
for the post.  i don't mind the length at all...but i will have to wait
till later to respond to most of what you wrote.  but a couple things for
now before i forget.
 
yes i have read ebert's text.  i also worked with her husband, ma'sud
zavarzadeh, and donald morton at syracuse and am quite familiar with their
work.  i am not too entusiastic about their work though...i was at one
time, not now, but not because of their leninist bent--i think that would
be an improvement in their work actually--but rather in their reductive
notion of class and the mode of production.  i'll come back to this,
because i think i have a different understanding of the mode of production
than many marxists out there.  have you ever read ellen meiksins wood??  if
not, she is a must.  she is a marxist from york university in toronto, but
more important than where she resides, i think she understands the marxist
dialectic better than most.  in her most recent book, _democracy against
capitalist: renewing historical materialsim_ she goes through an analysis
of the separation of the political and economic under capitalism which has
lead, and i would agree, to many distortions and vulgar appropriations of
the base superstructure distinctions that marx made.  but i'll elaborate
more at another time.  anyway, to go back to ebert...i think she has got it
backwards.  i think marxism cannot afford to overlook feminism.  she, like
morton and zavarzadeh, still considers gender as primarily a "cultural"
phenomena, and there-by subordinates gender to class without ever
attempting a synthesis...this has been a major methodological problem for
marxism throughout the 20th century.  but again, i will elaborate more later.
 
in terms of the idealistic danger of imagining global collectivity, i agree
on one level--especially if that collectivity is supposed to look like one
big happy family.  however, i think that global collectivity is a
historical necessity, and is one that is now more than ever possible as a
PROCESS.  what i mean is, BECAUSE of globalization there are few places in
the world that are not involved in the simultaneos production and
reprodction of capital.   we have lost the concentration of capital in one
location.  production has become decentered.  yet at the same time CAPITAL
has become more centralized than ever in history.  in other words, fewer
people own more of the worlds wealth and a single corporation now controls
the livelihood of a greater amount of people.  capital's new "flexibility"
allow it to play regions, nations, cultures against one another in order to
thwart collective efforts...international collectivity, as i am thinking of
it, is not then about organizing a single-minded organization...blah blah
blah...i am losing my thoughts....
 
brief comment...the notion that "we" are always implicated in commodity
relations, is true, but that does not mean that we have lost the ability of
action or that revolutionary action has been undercut.  nope.  this is
where marxism, as i mentioned in my last post, NEEDS feminism especially.
feminism has never assumed an "outside" like marxism has tried to.
feminism (no, not all feminism) here has a more advanced and i believe
accurate theory of political collectivity--of political process--than
marxism.  this is because women, historically, and women's labor have never
had the luxurary (sp)  of standing outside labour...their labor is the
precondition of wage labor...damn, i don't have enough time to go into this
one right now...but it is frustrating, these are conversations i have been
waiting to have.  anyway...this won't be the last you hear from me.
 
hey, you don't need a "grad collective excuse to come out...it would be
great to meet you and be able to talk about some of this stuff more
thoroughly in person.  oxford can always use a little reason for fun.
anyway...more later.
 
kevin
 
p.s.  i grew up on punk, sporting a mohawk and everything...dead kennedy's,
MDC, subhumans, crass, false prophets, apple, then a little goth with
bauhaus, christain death, sisters of mercy, and a slew of others...there
you have it.