Secession in the Formal-Legalist Paradigm by Kenneth E. Bauzon

Author:Kenneth E. Bauzon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811575013
Publisher: Springer Singapore

In the US, efforts to dismantle the New Deal coalition and reverse its lingering accomplishments were also afoot. These efforts gained impetus during the McCarthyist witch hunts of the 1950s and continued on to one degree or another in the subsequent decades of the Cold War. The effects of the Cold War on the academia, on its framing of issues, and on the predetermination of its knowledge production are aptly described by San Juan, Jr. in an essay, quoted in part as follows:The implacably zombifying domination of the Cold War for almost half a century has made almost everyone allergic to the Marxian notion of class as a social category that can explain inequalities of power and wealth in the “free world.” One symptom is the mantra of “class reductionism” or “economism” as a weapon to silence anyone who calls attention to the value of one’s labor power, or one’s capacity to work in order to survive, if not to become human. Another way of nullifying the concept of class as an epistemological tool for understanding the dynamics of capitalist society is to equate it with status, life-style, even an entire “habitus” or pattern of behavior removed from the totality of the social relations of production in any given historical formation. Often, class is reduced to income, or to voting preference within the strict limits of the bourgeois (that is, capitalist) electoral order. Some sociologists even play at being agnostic or nominalist by claiming that class displays countless meanings and designations relative to the ideological persuasion of the theorist/researcher, hence its general uselessness as an analytic tool. This has become the orthodox view of “class” in mainstream academic discourse. (San Juan 2003)

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