My point is that this is not a matter of assumption, but of evidence. The historical record is replete with examples of conspiracy. We can't deny facts on ideological grounds. Rather, we must adjust our ideology to deal the world as we find it.
> The Kennedy Assassination is archetypal here: If Kennedy was
> assassinated by a lone kook, Vietnam is an open conspiracy of the
> U.S. ruling class against the people of the third world. If Kennedy was
> assassinated by CIA in cahoots with the House of Windsor, Vietnam
> is an open conspiracy of the U.S. ruling class against the people of
> the third world. It makes *no* difference in our understanding of the
> world whether such grand conspiracies exist or not. The positing of
> conspiracies has the same distorting effect on rational analysis of history
> as the positing of The Unconscious has on the rational analysis of individual
> behavior.
To POSIT conspiracies is indeed as useless as to posit The Unconscious. To deny that conspiracies have existed (and do exist) is just wrong. Unlike The Unconscious, conspiracies are in some cases verifiable, as the tape recordings in the ADM case demonstrate.
If Oswald acted alone, it ends there. If Kennedy was assassinated by forces within the ruling class, this exposes a contradiction within that class which could concievably be exploited to further working class ends.
>
> This is true even with the ADM case. There is no difference between
> a world in which ADM "conspired" and a world in which ADM did
> not conspire -- in both cases it is tautological that ADM conspired, and
> the attempt to prove (or to give significance to) the contingent (non-
> tautological) conspiracy blurs the validity of the tautology. And grasping
> the tautology is crucial to understanding capitalism.
>
I'm at a loss here. ADM conspired whether it did or didn't? Would the younger Andreas have been convicted in either "world"?
> Carrol
-- Bill
Consciousness is a social product. - B.F. Skinner