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NEWS & LETTERS, August-September 2001 bell hooks circumscribed by capitalism "The socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.... [I]t but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie." -Karl Marx, COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, 1848 Last year, African-American feminist and cultural critic bell hooks felt called to write a book on class, WHERE WE STAND: CLASS MATTERS (New York: Routledge, 2000). In the 14 chapters of this work, hooks relies on her own personal experience growing up in a working-class Black family in rural Kentucky, making her way through academia, renting and buying housing, and experiencing affluence herself. This is the most compelling aspect of the book. But what mars her attempt to interrogate class in the U.S. is that she misunderstands the nature of capitalist society. To hooks, what drives capitalism is greed, rather than what Marx projected: capitalism's "werewolf hunger" for production and more production. hooks doesn't understand that it's not a question of whether the capitalist has a good heart or a greedy one. In either case he must look for ever cheaper labor, drive his workers ever harder, and invest in the most productive machinery, throwing his workers into the growing ranks of the unemployed in order to cut the cost of living labor and compete on the world market. If he doesn't-kind or greedy-he will fail, crushed under the juggernaut of capitalism's relentless drive for value and more value. Because hooks starts from a misunderstanding, her solution to greed is that all must learn to live simply so that those with wealth can share it. It is not only the rich who must live simply, but the poor too, by learning to manage the money they have. They can be happy, despite their poverty: The poor "offer a vision of a good life despite poverty... They survive by living simply " (p. 128). There is no dialectic here. It doesn't seem to dawn on her that in her vision of the future the poor will always have to live a lot more simply than the rich. Her aim is not a class-free society, but one where the poor remain poor, the workers remain workers, but everyone "lives simply" and shares. FEMINISM AND CLASS One would expect bell hooks' chapter on "Feminism and Class Power" to transcend some of these problems. She does make a distinction between revolutionary feminism and "the reformist model"-something many writers fail to do-and praises revolutionary feminists who did raise the issue of class. But then the chapter goes downhill, ascribing to radical feminism the goal of calling for "models of mutuality and equality [to] replace old paradigms" (p. 101). But revolutionary feminism was about more than equality or replacing "old paradigms." It was about a total transformation of society. Most troubling is what she leaves out in this book. There is not one word about socialist feminism, a movement that arose specifically to bring together a class and feminist analysis. She singles out Rita Mae Brown: "Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act" (p. 103). At first I thought she liked Brown's dismissal of Marx, but it is really the second part that appeals to hooks because she can't deal with the economics of class, rather she wants to deal with the culture" of class. TRUNCATED VISION This chapter also suffers from hooks' emphasis on greed. Rather than grapple with the real problems feminism encountered in the 1990s-the discrediting of the idea of revolution, what it meant to live under 20 years of retrogression, and so on-hooks reduces the problem to well-off women wanting class privilege "more than freedom for themselves and their...oppressed sisters" (p. 106). Nor does this chapter escape the ever present solution of sharing the wealth. In a section about her decision to go to graduate school, she claims that experience proved some could "gain class power" and still claim solidarity with the poor. How? "[B]y living simply, sharing our resources, and refusing to engage in hedonistic consumerism and the politics of greed" (p. 108). The fact that hooks sees nothing wrong in her truncated view of social change is evident in her last chapter, where she names her ism: "democratic socialism, with a vision of participatory economics within capitalism that aims to challenge and change class hierarchy. I like that the money I make, which places me in an economic upper class, can be used in the service of redistribution of wealth, can be used to enhance the economic well-being of others through vigilant practices of giving and sharing" (pp. 156-157, my emphasis). WHERE WE STAND seems an unconscious example of a tired intellectual who has given up on genuine revolution because she can't see the real forces and Reason of of a fundamental transformation of society-and she rejects the theory that would help her do so. |
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