Kelley wrote:
>
>
>
> what happens when you have a severe disagreement--pick any of the
> disagreements we have here.
Such disagreements cannot be resolved except with reference to ongoing practice. Disagreements on a maillist are more or less automatically unresolvable. We can clarify our own thought on a maillist, and we can find points of agreement with others widely scattered about the globe. And within shared agreement we can sometimes work out secondary disagreements.
On a maillist I would not try to convince anyone, including myself, of the wrongness or rightness of democratic centralism. I tend to think that _either_ it can be made to work _or_ an overthrow and/or replacement of it will have to be achieved on the basis of a provisional acceptance of it within an organization. In the latter case, the battle against it or to amend it will be fought out _in the context of_ discussion regarding ongoing practice. But I wouldn't try very hard to argue anyone into that position in an academic (i.e. maillist) context. (In the two d.c. organizations I belonged to, the Center in both instances used its power to dissolve the Center -- i.e., itself and in effect the organization.)
I more or less warned you from the beginning of this thread that I was only participating marginally, so I really don't understand why you expected me to attend carefully to your arguments. And in any case, your test for an argument being taken seriously (that it gets a response) won't do: the arguments recently that I attended to most closely were on a thread which I did not post on at all (the discussion you, Yoshie, and Marta had). That topic (I don't quite know how to label it) will sooner or later make an organizational difference: i.e. will be argued out within the framework of ongoing mass struggle. Discussion of it now is important, but reaching an overall conclusion is not.
I simply don't see the importance of an ethical foundation for the left.
how are they to be resolved. how do you
> justify, for example, ending a conversation, as doug just did? doug
> justifies it, ultimately, because he's the list owner and administrator. he
> can make it stick because he has charismatic authority to do so.
How does it need any justification. You said it. He owns the list. We are still living under capitalism, where ownership counts for a lot. And if he misused those powers of ownership the penalty would not be being labelled "unjust" or "unjustifiable" but suddenly finding himself the owner of a list with no subscribers on it that interested him. And the subscribers who unsubbed would feel no need to find an ethical foundation (or justification) for their unsubbing.
Reporter: What Is?
KM: Struggle.
Carrol