>the problems with anarchism are numerous, but it's as diverse a set of
>positions as marxism is, or else we'd all be lumbered with absurdities.
Yeah, you'd think all these whingeing lefties didn't know what it was like to be characterised as a monolithic lump of naive or nefarious freedom-killers! Carn the anarchists, I say!
>(and to katha: many anarchists as well as marxists advance all sorts of
>essentialising positions, including humanism, of the rousseauan kind or
>no -- unfortunately. and as miles astutely notes, the rhetorical force of
>'nature' seems to be a fairly tempting one all round.)
Alluding to allusions to nature as 'tempting rhetoric' is pretty rhetorical, too, I reckon. As SJ Gould reminded us the other day, human culture doesn't cancel biology.
And I'm still confused about your (eloquent and consistent) antihumanism, Ange! You're a very politically motivated person. Who is it you seek to emancipate from what? If there be no human essence, what's being alienated by the prevailing exchange relation? Are humans malleable enough eventually to be made as content under conditions of exploitation as they would be in any contending scenario? If 'system' dissolves 'lifeworld', can human being be transformed to meet what the system requires/ordains for it?
>look around you: capitalists have more freedom, we have less. the latter
>unfreedom is organised through the state. i could cite examples of
>anything from the expansion of the scope of criminalisation, the role of
>the state in migration these last few years, laws relating to unions, and
>so on. maybe you didn't notice the state of emergency in seattle, but that
>would be supposing an amazing degree of blindness.
All very well put, but what is a human such that freedom is good for it? Is violence being done to our enduring social 'nature' under the exchange relation and private consumption of capitalism? Is it human to be creative, and correspondingly inhuman to alienate that human from what, how, with what and for whom s/he labours? Is sexuality human, such that to constrain its expression more in one sex or sexual preference than another is inhuman? Is the need for recognition human such as the denial of full recognition to members of selected groups is inhuman? Is language human such that the denial of free speech is inhuman?
Excuse this bout of implicit theoretical and naturalistic humanism, but at least one stubbornly dull mind wants to know!
Cheers, Rob.