CULTURE, GENDER AND ECOLOGY: Beyond Workerism

Culture, Gender and Ecology: Beyond Workerism is certainly not about the irrelevance of class realities of the working class. It is about the strengthening and consolidation of the gains of the working class movement. Such a consolidation is already taking place at the level of practice though it is not articulated at the level of theory. The working class movement is increasingly seen to combine its political activities with the feminist, ethno-communal/cultural and ecological movements (non-class movements). Thus, the present work is an attempt at achieving consolidation at the level of ideas/theory. A considerable re-working of Marx’s historical materialism has been attempted, subtly guided by some of Mao’s critical notions. The reconstructive effort has contributed to the development of a number of ‘novel’ ideas and arguments: the notion of communism has been re-examined; a new ontological category ‘individual-in-relations’ has been introduced as a substitute for relations of production; the Self-Other dynamics have been reconsidered introducing the idea of open self-mediation, replacing the Hegelian closed self-mediation, which is the enlargement of dialectical universalism to dialogical universalism; the emancipatory subject has been conceived of as a multi-self, multi-identity one enlarging the notion of the proletarian subject; the role of the body has been carefully inserted in relation to our universality and contingencies, to self-and-the-other-as-distinction and self-and-the-other-as-difference; the notion of power has been elaborated to include its articulation at the political and the cultural terrains; the resolution of class reality is problematized by introducing the reality of seemingly unity-rupturing non-class segmentary social forces; and the idea of dialectical transcendence has been critically related to dialogical co-existence/co-evolution of multiple social totalities. The result of this reconstructive effort is the conception of a new trajectory of Non-Workerist Model of Historical Materialism.