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1. i do not accept the notion that the material well-being of members of a particular social class functions to legitimate any political structure in general---ideology 1---capitalist governance is about the regulation of social life in general in the interests of a particular class. it pretends to operate in the name of all, but any analysis of the social system reveals this to be false.
actors who occupy positions of privilege within that present order are obviously inclined to support that order. the move to make that support general at any level, by generalizing their own situation to all, making of it something like a normative ground for thinking about how others might percieve that order, is simply a mirror of the dominant ideology.
2. you can confuse formal and substantive freedom quite easily if you reject modes of analyzing the social environment out of hand. it worked for stalinism. it works for americans.
the characterization of sociology posted above, for example, is simply idiotic. it is not uninteresting to think about social identity as constructed across processes of social differentiation, for example. it is not uninteresting to see how these patterns of differentiation function to obscure general questions about the operation of the political status quo. it is not uninteresting to see in these studies of social differentiation the effects of class stratification as they play out in, say, access to cultural capital, to educational capital, how economic class is diffused across cultural questions, how that diffusion tends to obscure the reality of class. it is not uninteresting to find in some sociology a window onto the gap between formal and substantive freedom in the states--- without some kind of window, you could actually come to believe crap like the argument that because in principle actors enjoy the formal possibility of social mobility, that it follows that everyone has equal access to the preconditions for such mobility, and that poverty, inequality, etc. are therefore and necessarily a function of some moral failing on the part of individuals. which works out quite nicely as a mode of self-justification for holders of wealth that derives from the material and cultural options that circulate within the system as a whole--but it says nothing about the system itself, nothing about anything except that those beneficiaries prefer to extend their self-congratulation to all spheres.
conservatives prefer to dissolve thinking about the social, to stay focussed on the level of formal freedom, and to dream about their world on that basis.
simple trust the dominant political system supposes that "everything works itself out in the end"----which is of a piece with the notion that the universe is rational because behind the scenes somewhere a benevolent god pulls all the strings. as a piece of fiction, that position operates quite nicely, but in fact it often functions to justify the inequalities generated by the order, to reduce the space of political thinking or action to nothing, because if history is ordered by some god, what is there to complain about?
there are real problems for nation-states in general that follow from the increasing globalization of capitalism for example--this is a period of extreme uncertainty in all sectors--what is the state to regulate? what happens to the already distorted regime of wealth accumulation that has arisen over the past say 6 decades of capitalism once the systems of economic and political power start to shift away from the nation-state as the center of policy making? "(this list could go on).....in the immediate run, how is the american state to deal with these problems if the worldviews of members of the political class are shaped entirely by the horizons of the nation-state? you can see much of neocon ideology in practice as attempts to run away from these problems by reducing the purview of the political (privatization) and to shift the main focus of the state to questions military (the iraq war a theater of the conflict between the american state and international or transnational institutions that are symbolized, accurately or not no matter, this is american damn it...)
at the same time, it is obvious that these are incoherent as responses. what to do then? assume the rational universe theory, assume that everything will work out in a way that does not affect you?
there are **real** problems, **real** questions to be considered if you like anything about the existing order of things. people should be informed, they should debate, they should think--if they dissent, they should articulate that dissent, put it out into the public domain, argue their position. and why not?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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