>>> "rc-am" <rcollins at netlink.com.au> 10/20/99 02:36AM >>>
Chaz,
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."
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Charles: Yea, last night I was boning up on my Kant. Critique of Pure Reason, Practical Reason. Human's are distinguished by having purposes. Then I fell asleep. He is an agnostic though. He just says human categories and thought can't comprehend God. OK lets say Kant is one of the nodal points in the history of philo that everybody reads (But doesn't "do" ,as Yoshie says) . But there has to be some dividing up of the some of the others.
Rather than a bourgeois censorship board, I think of my proposal as more of a workers's study collective ( sort of a literary soviet), which, reflecting the socialization of productive labor, uses the trust that workers must have of each other in the real world, since every worker can't and shouldn't do every job.
This trust of other people occurs everyday in the 10's of millions on the expressways We all trust perfect strangers not to drive recklessly and run into us. This is especially true in two lane highways with no divider.
As far as reading as widely as possible, the definition of "possible" must include setting aside many hours for organizing for action (not to mention tiem to have fun, not that some study isn't fun).
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> 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.
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Charles: I was specifically NOT proposing continuation of the current division of mental and physical labor. I was proposing a way in which it should be abolished. In other words, intellectuals would become less specialists in reading. Even if Kant is one that everybody reads, most of what is written would have to be divided up, and then I trust you to give me a synopsis and vica versa.
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> 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.
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Charles: Ok, but do you want to read enough to pass a bar exam ? Few people seemed to be familiar with the international law principles pertinent to the NATO attack on Yugoslavia.
Marx is one who I would say everybody reads the main original. I'd even say we have workers'committees develop tests on Marx. Perhaps , we agree on that.
But, still I am troubled by your emphasis on not trusting or at least down playing interaction between the readers/writiers, the social dimension of the scholarship. There has to be a unity of the opposites of individual reading and group study, but I'd see socialist scholarship as a major shift away from individualist study toward group study. The bourgeois concepts of "cheating" , "copycats" , intellectual property/copyright/plagerism would be whithering away in the Marxist style. Unlike most bourgeois individual "geniuses", the Marxist genius was a team of Marx/Engels.
This is one of the communistic dimensions of e-mail : communal cogitation. In the future , it will be "The LBO-TALK list discovered" , not "Charles Brown discovered "
>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.
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Charles: Correct. The state is on the side of the rightwing and against the leftwing. So, for the left to see a government crackdown on the left as a RESULT of the left calling for censorship of the right is exactly to see the government as a neutral umpire, that acts evenhandedly. In other words, the government will crackdown on the left regardless of the left's statements regarding the right.
Although, there is some unrealism in the left speaking out against rightwing racism by calling for govenment crackdown, the left cannot remain silent about rightwing racism, and the form of their statements must be "legal", otherwise the left subjects itself to threat for advocating illegality. This is one of the lessons from McCarthyism in the U.S. The left cannot just hand the government a stick to beat them with by making openly illegal proposals, such as vigilante violence against rightwing racists. The form of "legal"left proposals is forced on the left by this dilemma.
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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.
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Charles: Yes, Marx is making part of the liberal analysis on this. The U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brandeis used the metaphor of releasing noxious doctrine to the light of day rather than burying it. This is the metaphor of mold, which grows out of the sun and dies in the sun.
I prefer the metphor of toxic gas or nuclear waste. Don't release it into the air. Bury it in titanium containers or put it in a rocket and shoot it into the sun.
The basic common sense point is that , in general, making something illegal discourages it more than making it legal, despite a slight but much lesser counter tendency noted by Marx, Brandeis and you.
I would say Marx was making an argument most likely to be listened to in that specific time and place, Germany 1800's ,which didn't have much bourgeois democracy even. He couldn't very well say, that "oh by the way I think the tyrants of the Prussian state ( the equivalents and ancestors of today's fascists) should be denied freedom of speech if we get the chance. ". That wouldn't have been very pragmatic. " In a country with more than two hundred years of bourgeois democracy, press and speech freedom, post-fascism, we can make more advanced arguments than Marx could in that time and place.
>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.
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Charles: I see the reforms of keynsian social democracy as desparate concessions to fierce , world wide working class struggle by autonomous wc organizations including especially communist parties and the Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution, national liberation revolutions. These autonomous working class organizations certainly had revolutionary goals, but their programs included minumum and maximum demands, and the former included demands of the bourgeois state short of revolutonary overthrow.
>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.
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Charles: It is not THE problem. It is part of the problam.
Marx didn't seem to think that demanding a shorter work week , i.e. outlawing a the 10 hour day, would make a longer work week desirable. Marx advocated a whole program of reformist demands that he didn't seem to think would make the opposite of desirable. Marx advocated abolition of private property, i.e. outlawing it. He didn't think that would make it more desirable. I believe you are overgeneralizing Marx's concrete argument.
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> 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.
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Charles: Interesting. That's a concrete difference between here and there. Your liberals should talk to our ACLU. On second thought, lets not encourage liberals to talk to each other.
CB