>The feeling is mutual, I'm sure.
>
>Why'd you sign on here? Just to be a pain in the ass?
>
>Doug
obviously. the posts are from someone who is pretty damn ignorant of the origins of WWI anyway, who thinks he can judge Davis' work from a book review AND be taken seriously and who thinks that the economy and the polity are somehow separate entities.
and i don't believe, justin, that we've ever entertained people with those sorts of hostilely conservative ideas, have we? who?
but worse, we are being accused of wearing "marxist glasses" and not looking at "the facts" and other nonsense -- as if she somehow isn't wearing tinted glasses and as if he hasn't done his homework. we are kneejerk and have an axe to grind and don't do our homework?
come on.
>(((((((((
>
>CB: I like him . He makes you all sound like me, defending Marxism, Cuba,
>denouncing the world historic murderousness of capitalism. A dash of
>gross anti-communism is the way to unite the left.
don't you think it would be better were we able to develop unity without relying on an external attack from the ignoramuses of the world who think that we have to defend ourselves to a capitalist world view? i mean, we're supposed to take seriously that the right ALSO IMAGINES itself to be the party of freedom and inequality so therefore when the left lays claim to that title it, too, can only be lying to itself and others. and now, we're supposed to take seriously the ridiculous claims of someone who doesn't know jack about world history so that in defending ourselves against infantile charges we can finally unite?
that is not a dialectic charles and it's exactly what is wrong with the dialectic as conceived by hegel -- where there is a legitimate argument against this line of thought as inherently universalizing and totalitarian. i put it this way in my thesis:
"Habermas, though, rejects the cultural critique that so obsessed the early Frankfurt theorists during their exile in the United States: The fundamental aporia of culture critique as exemplied by Horkheimer in The Eclipse of Reason and Marcuse in One Dimensional Man is that it remains entrapped in a dyadic conception of societal domination and liberated subjectivity. That is, it tends to bind the realization of a critical subjectivity to the social conditions of domination which, paradoxically, are described as the absolute suppression of subjectivity. Yet, this situation is the "prerequisite" for the emergence of an emancipated subjectivity capable of redefining needs and concomitantly constituting a truly liberated future (cf. Horkheimer, 1947; Marcuse1964:245). Habermas is skeptical that critical theory can be a means of emancipation if it confines itself to the task of revealing the contradictions of late capitalism. Instead, critical theory must confront contemporary crises in order to explain them in terms of the processes of societal rationalization. In doing so, critical theory presupposes a normative vision of a better society which guides the assessment and critique of contemporary life (Habermas 1974: 110-103).
footnote to above:
The binary opposition between societal domination and the subject of history is also evident in The Communist Manifesto. Here, Marx essentially argued that the emergence of a proletariat class consciousness reciprocally required the full development of capitalism. In order to distinguish itself as a class struggle different from all previous ones, the proletariat must experience the abject poverty of a fully developed capitalism. The proletariat has "nothing of (its) own to secure and fortify" (p. 18). As such it represents a new development in the history of class struggle; it is a struggle that is not premised on the need to instantiate new forms of oppression.
Formulations such as this fail to retain an Hegelian sphere of objectifying or mediating activity. Ideology critique, in other words, is reminiscent of the thesis of Hegel's master-slave dialectic: the truth of mastery is revealed as slavery and slavery is revealed as mastery. Hegel, however, negotiated the binary opposition of mastery and slavery with his narrative of the slave who, through sensuous , objectifying activity, "discovers and reveals the objective reality of his humanity'" (Kojeve 1969:27). Ideology critique retains no sphere of mediated activity in which men and women might realize themselves in an intersubjective world. Rather, it all too often regresses toward an unrelenting critique of all forms of life which appear to be subsumed in the web of capitalist ideology.
thort ya'd enjoy a little phil of social science from the snit! been a long time, chaz!
kelley