Re: Oppression is political, not circumstantial

"... the domain of ‘sympathy’ was ring-fenced as that of women, marriage and family...." "the consistent feature of pre-industrial economies was that ‘man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships’" Except that you can't take for granted that being embedded in those social relationships is a net positive for everyone. As I said before, no one is being atomized against their will. It's their economic self-sustainability that enables them to opt out of those social relationships. Anyone who wants to maintain those relationships is still free to do so (so long as the other person consents). There are certainly trade-offs in either case, but I don't find it enviable to live in a world where others are being forced into relationships by circumstance to a greater degree than is the case today. "I can't hope to shake your faith in markets-equal-freedom fundamentalism" What fundamentalism? It's entirely definitional that freedom is about having more choices (and if these were just meaningless choices, then Harrington wouldn't be writing a book about it). What could be more fundamentalist than taking the side of denying people those choices just so that you can have your idyllic little commune? This is what it always comes down to with you people: You refuse to go live in a commune with others who actually want to and then you deny that you want to force it on everyone. "...the replacement of interdependent social relations with abstract economic and technological ones." Wrong. Not "replaced." Supplemented. It's not the market's fault that people now have better things to do than associate with whom they otherwise wouldn't. Does that pose new challenges in the formation of relationships? Of course. But the reverse has been tyranny everywhere it has been tried except maybe in some small short-lived corner here or there.