Thursday, November 10, 2005

From the Pen of the Ever-Provocative Eugene McCarraher

...At the same time, the political economy of death is the precondition for the emergence of "choice" as the holy grail of our moral culture. It's neither coincidental nor unironical that the word so decisive in the legitimation of corporate hegemony is also pivotal to the defense of abortion. First, both abortion and corporate capitalism are justified in the liberal individualist language of self-ownership and autonomous will. Second, the language of choice obscures and even nullifies the moral substance of the choices made. And third, the alacrity with which "choice" is now invoked is, I suspect, an indication of how meaningless--and therefore how few--our choices have really become. Abortion becomes more conceivable as a practice, not only when sex is utterly divorced from pregnancy, but when the organization of work hampers or precludes the reproductive practices of sex, birth, and child-rearing. If we are going to combat abortion, then I would suggest that we appropriate and transform the language of choice, and argue that abortion is the hallmark of a culture that forces everything to pivot around the accumulation of capital. we must tie abortion to a political economy that controls our work, warps our practices of love, and compensates with the perverse but beguiling enchantments of commodified freedom.

Mammon's Deadly Grin (PDF!) via Holy Ghost Parishoner, linked below.


His essay full of lively rhetoric and not a few declamatory passages, McCarraher goes on to claim that capitalism emphasizes scarcity, and Christianity plenitude. Curiously enough, my political science professor Thad Tecza claimed that Liberalism's attitude was formed by the discovery of the abundance and possibilities Europeans perceived in the New World. This, Tecza thought, lead to deprecations of the poor as stupid, lazy, crazy, or evil.

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