by
Eva Illouz
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[...] What should be discussed, then, is the question of how sexuality should be made a domain of conduct regulated both by freedom and by ethics. The sexual revolution, anxious to put taboos aside and to reach equality, has by and large left ethics outside the realm of sex. Ultimately, this book suggests that the project of self-expression through sexuality cannot be divorced from the question of our duties to others and to their emotions. We should thus not only stop viewing the male psyche as inherently weak or unloving, but also open for discussion the model of sexual accumulation promoted by modern masculinity and too enthusiastically endorsed and imitated by women; we should also rearticulate alternative models of love, models in which masculinity and passionate commitment are not incompatible and are even synonymous. Instead of hammering at men their emotional incapacity, we should invoke models of emotional masculinity other than those based on sexual capital. Such cultural invocation might in fact take us closer to the goals of feminism, which have been to build ethical and emotional models congruent with the social experience of women. For when detached from ethical conduct, sexuality as we have known it for the last thirty years has become an arena of raw struggle that has left many men and especially women bitter and exhausted.
[...] You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism. It indicates that the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon that it is. Moreover, whatever was born can always die, which is why social systems like to present themselves as immortal. [...] Marx unmasked our everyday life to reveal an imperceptible entity known as the capitalist mode of production.
[...] What bred the culture of postmodernism, with its dismissal of so-called grand narratives and triumphal announcement of the End of History, was above all the conviction that the future would now be simply more of the present. [...]
[...] the Bolesheviks were to march their starving, despondent, war-wearing people into modernity at the point of a gun. Many of the most politically militant workers had perished in the Western-backed civil war, leaving the Bolshevik party with a dwindling social base. [...] Russia's economy lay in ruins, and its social fabric had disintegrated. In a tragic irony that was to mark the twentieth century as a whole, socialism proved least possible where it was most necessary.
[...] So-called market socialism envisages a future in which the means of production would be socially owned, but where self-governing cooperatives would compete with one another in the marketplace. in this way, some of the virtues of the market could be retained, while some of its vices could be shed. At the level of individual enterprises, cooperation would ensure increased efficiency [...]
describing one train of Marxist thought
The class struggle is essentially a struggle over the surplus, and as such it is likely to continue as long as there is not a sufficiency for all. Class comes about whenever material production is so organised as to compel some individuals to transfer their surplus labour to others in order to survive. When there is little or no surplus, as in so-called primitive communism, everyone has to work, nobody can live off the toil of others, so there can be no classes. [...]
or even long after there is
[...] the need for capitalism in order to have socialism. Driven by self-interest, ruthless competition and the need for ceaseless expansion, only capitalism is capable of developing the productive forces to the point where, under a different political dispensation, the surplus they generate can be used to furnish a sufficiency for all. To have socialism, you must first have capitalism. Or rather, you may not need to have capitalism, but somebody must. [...]
[...] changes of institution do indeed have profound effects on human attitudes [...] Such reforms have been become built into our psyches. What really alters our view of the world is not so much ideas, as ideas which are embedded in routine social practice. If we change that practice, which may be formidably difficult to do, we are likely in the end to alter our way of seeing.
If Marx also retained a good deal of hope for the future, however, it was because he recognized that this dismal record was not for the most part our fault. If history has been so bloody, it is not because most human beings are wicked. It is because of the material pressures to which they have been submitted. [...] these things have been partly the effect of unjust social systems, of which individuals are sometimes little more than functions, then it is reasonable to expect that changing that system may make for a better world. [...]
[...] Production is carried on within specific forms of life, and is thus suffused with social meaning. Because labour always signifies, humans being significant (literally, sign-making) animals, it can never be simply a technical or material affair. You may see it as away of praising God, glorifying the Fatherland or acquiring your beer money. The economic, in short, always presupposes a lot more than itself. It is not just a matter of how the markets are behaving. It concerns the way we become human beings, not just the way we become stockbrokers.
horrific struggle, etc