kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca:
> Actually, the notions of responsibility and accountability does apply to the
> critique of existing institutions. It wouldn't be difficult to establish that
> certain political and economic structures are fundamentally incompatible with
> being held responsible. In effect, the measure of responsibility *demands* that
> certain "irresponsible" or "unaccountable" institutions be abolished. Likewise,
> anything that hinders those attempted to determine guilt or innocence must also
> be abolished. The heart of accountability resides with the question: how much
> damage (actual and potential) does an institution have to inflict before we
> question its right to exist? Justice is not exhausted by passing a series of
> questions through a preloaded Kantian test (Kant found it impossible to
> conceive of a world without private property). Questions of responsibility and
> accountability are determined within a community, and this community
> *generates* or *creates* its own discursive and political measures and rules,
> in which nothing is left unquestioned. This does not necessarily exclude
> questioning the existence of certain institutions. Certainly one paradox would
> be using arguments to critique the validity of other arguments. When this
> happens I understand it to indicate that the structures in which arguments are
> raised need to be questioned... and not necessarily arguments themselves... so
> I think it completely appropriate to criticize existing democratic norms
> without calling for an abandonment of democracy or autonomy. So, yeah, I agree
> with you in some respects. In some cases we need "better" institutions. In
> other cases we need to eliminate institutions. In both cases, the question of
> responsibility is crucial. Who is responsible for the damage. Who is
> responsible for setting up new institutions? or transforming the idea of
> institutionalization altogether. My point is that the creative ideals of
> democracy (autonomy, whatever) are not *essentially* or *inherently* tied to
> specific notions of class or state. Human rights and liberty, two sides of a
> paradox, need not disappear after the revolution. Historically they are
> connected, and in a very practical sense these things are related. But that's
> part of the challenge, to brush these ideals against their existing conditions
> - to transform them and imagine something different. Right now responsibility
> and accountability are among the most political effective ideas that make
> criticism of existing institutions possible. If we ditch responsibility then
> criticism becomes irrelevant.
>
> And if I can be permitted to speculate... I can't help but think that the
> guiding idealistic vision of statelessness and classlessness is a bad utopia.
> It is an inspiring ideal, but it is well beyond the capacity of current
> historical configurations. Nation and class are categories that are inherently
> antagonistic - we need to struggle with them because we exist in them. This
> does not justify the status quo, rather, calls for an immanent critique of
> their existing logic and reality. What may come after that I do not know, I
> hope it will be something better, something different.
My notions of abolishing the State, the nation (in the political sense) and class may be far-fetched, but they are not utopian. I reject the _values_ which make these incarnations of domination and subjugation desirable. It might well be the case that people who adopted values like mine would be worse off or unhappier than those who didn't; I don't see that as something one could predict in advance.
Now, one of the things you say is that the application of the ideas of responsibility and accountability to State institutions and activities (will or may) support a fundamental challenge to their existence. Looking at recent history, this does not appear to be the case; the bourgeoisie seem highly adept at presenting various mummeries to the public which simulate responsibility of some sort while they go about their business as usual. When the folk become restless, the mummeries are rewritten and the acting staff changed, and then the show goes on. It's true that a radical notion of responsibility, that is, of holding _persons_ responsible for their actions upon other persons, might theoretically promote such a challenge, but we don't see this happening in fact; if we did, Bush-1 and Clinton would have been tried as war criminals (for example), and most great corporations would cease to exist in their present form as the rich tried to hide their personal wealth from the threat of lawsuits and their persons from the threat of criminal proceedings.
Instead, we still see people earnestly taking the oxymoron of _good_government_ seriously.
Indeed, even if one is merely interested in improving the quality of the mummery, I suggest that challenging the existence of the government, the corporations, and other agencies of the State -- if it spread around a bit and became halfway popular -- might produce a much higher and more satisfactory level of it and do people some material good. The rebellions of the '60s, naive though they were, led to a mighty flood of social workers and social work and even some actual stuff that people could use. But the main advantage of a radical approach would be that one would not be depressing people with the theory that there was no choice but to submit to the basic arrogance and ignorance of their present masters, hoping for bigger crumbs. And if something interesting _did_ get started as a result of one's efforts, it would not contain the seeds of its own cooptation as, obviously, have social democracy, reform, progressivism, and general uplift.
If you strike at the State, you had better try to kill it.
LeoCasey at aol.com:
> I think that your stance is interesting and thoughtful, but it becomes
> tangled up in the contradictions of a rigorously Foucaultian politics, unable
> to conceive of any basis for resistance which is not internal to the
> relationship of power itself. Yet you are not pleased with where the logic of
> that politics leads, so you end up jettisoning it at the last moment without
> acknowledging it.
>
> The contradiction is clearest, I think, in this passage:
> << If we want a society based where 'the free development of each is the
> precondition for the free development of all' (still to me about the best
> way to express my desire for a utopia), then I doubt that the
> falsely-disinterested language of justice is the best way to get there. >>
>
> But what is this classic Marxian formula, if not very clearly a principle of
> distributive justice? If you want to forego the language of justice, you
> can't very well appeal to this formula -- or to the common good -- as if it
> is somehow outside of that language. Rather, you must grapple with how it is
> possible to construct at least provisional concepts of "justice," which
> escape some of the strictures you see in the common use of the language.
I believe "the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all" might be simply a practical consideration, as follows: Either we are at war with one another, or we find some way of getting along freely. If we are at war with one another, we get slavery and other caste and class systems, the State in other words, a kind of frozen phase of the conflict except when the State intermittently unfreezes and we have overt, physical war. Within the State one can construct systems of justice so-called, for example the justice of liege and vassal or the justice of meritocracy. One can have a Department of Justice just like one has a Department of Defense or a Department of Sanitation. Indeed, there may be great piles of justice in the State reaching to the skies, but there can never be the "free development of all" because a class system obviously precludes such a thing. So it seems that justice is one thing and freedom is another. I am tempted to say that they are even enemies, since justice is always concerned with the past and the gods, and freedom, one would think, would attempt to escape from both.