i didn't say everyone had to read kant. i did say that everyone should be encouraged to read as widely as possible. that is, i wouldn't exclude anyone you cited. and no, i wouldn't settle for anyone else's reading of kant or marx or derrida or weber or doug or chaz or jim -- because no reading is ever innocent of either the time/place in which such reading occurs or the performative requirements of the space in which a reading takes place. sometimes that means being cognisant of the location of the interpretation (the publish or perish requirement), sometimes it means noticing that "some folks are treating this as if we're arranging a list of prescribed readings for 'others' who are as incapable of reading critically as 'we' are capable of resisting being affected by what we read. a bit like the fictional self-portrait of our resident censorship board, making decisions about what others can and can't watch, whilst they're allowed -- indeed this is their apparently dutiful role -- to watch everything in order to be able to make decisions which presume the infantilisation of everyone else."
> There has to be some division of mental labor.<
no, there does not. claiming that there ain't enough time is not sufficient grounds to, or rather not the same thing as, argue(ing) the necessity of a division of mental labour. i wouldn't try and reproduce the academic division of labour within the left, and nor would i reproduce a division between mind work and activist work -- they are inseperable. that's not to say those things don't happen, but i wouldn't make a virtue out of them.
> Do you want to read a bunch of original legal texts, or would you rather
rely on secondary texts , even though mediated by the conjunctural concerns
of others ?<
i'd do both and have done. migration law, labour law, some constitutional law, property law, etc. all of this is a necessary part of being an activist in any of those areas. reading secondary texts is invaluable, but so is reading the texts themselves. but the difference between reading legal texts and interpretations thereof is not quite the same thing as reading (say) marx and reading interpretations of his work. especially because a) no interpretation is going to be exhaustive nor should it try; b) different conjunctures ask quite different questions of marx; c) i wouldn't rely on any one secondary text of marx, ever, to substitute for reading the original, and indeed asking quite specific questions of it.
>Why don't you think the Australian government will censor the Left and not
censor the Right at the same time ?<
because the state does not stand above the class struggle like an umpire. but that is not what i wanted to draw attention to. in marx's article, he clearly argues that censorship has the effect of making what is censored desirable. i think this is both easily verified in recent australian history, and something that, for those calling on the state to censor hate speech, should be taken seriously.
>What would be the form of this strengthening of the autonomous character
of the wc movment ?<
a reliance on autonomous working class organisations. if the state delivers reforms, it will be because of a need to reintegrate the working class -- just like the golden age of keynsian social democracy.
>How is it that outlawing fascist speech is not a revolutionary demand ?<
because fascist speech is not the problem. and because, as marx argued, outlawing something makes it desirable.
> Bourgeois liberal reformists seem to oppose it .<
not here. the only people calling for racial villification laws have been liberals -- all that guff about treating speech as circulation and removing (apparently) exogenous barriers to trade, like removing racism from speech leads to pure communication.
Angela _________