These are valuable documents to us Marxists, but it sort of like rigorously holding Engels and Marx to what they would say on an e-mail list.
Yet, I understand , Doug, that you are saying that sometimes we can't get mental progress without struggling with some difficult text.
Jefferson was contradictory, very contradictory relative to our socio-historical location, but probably not more contradictory than Hegel.
As to the Declaration of Independence, we practical-critical (that is revolutionary) activists have to extract a rational kernel like "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends ( of Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness) it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government" or "all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." The latter gives a long empirical tail to some of today's analyses of self-reification and self-subjagation , and maybe subjection.
Isn't Jefferson one of the lawyers on Law and Order ?
Charles Brown
>>> Rob Schaap <rws at comserver.canberra.edu.au> 02/08 1:10
But Marx wrote the Grundrisse to himself - Butler is writing to us.
And Doug writes of the DecofInd:
'Clear language, yes, but a bunch of crap. Proclaiming a truth as self-evident is a lot easier than arguing the point. And remember, that document was written by a slaveholding anti-urbanite who was in many respects deeply reactionary. Just goes to show that things don't always mean what they seem to mean, even if the prose is as clear as beer pee.'
Still the best practical and inspirational document a Christian liberal capitalist order ever promulgated though. The document is worshipped by most Americans, no? Ozzies have nothing like that ('cept maybe the Easybeats' 'Friday on my Mind').
And the points it makes did not require argument - it was a manifesto.
Firstly, they spoke in the material interests of America's nascent bourgeoisie and, very probably, everyone else in America who they counted as fully human. And I'm sure women, indigenous Americans, Afro-Americans and a host of others variously oppressed have found handy rhetorical and legally practical tools in the Declaration since.
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