> dangerous). It is possible to develop, I think, valid standards for human
> rights.
Sure, the 1947 UN Declaration does a pretty good job of that already, though some stuff is obviously missing from the original document (cultural rights, economic rights, etc.). But that's not the point; anyone can sit back and say, gee, people ought to be really, really nice to each other, and all that torture and murder and exploitation is, like, you know, bad. That just doesn't explain *why* the total system exist, and how it perpetuates itself, through the most terrible and continuing violence; any discussion of communicative rationality would have to rise to the concrete level of mediatic capital. Where is Habermas' analysis of Eurocapitalism? Heck, where's his analysis of *German* capitalism? Fantasms of phenomenological life-worlds won't cut it against Bertelsmann, my friend.
> regards to this 'insane total system' - if the system is total, than any
> dialectical experience is moot, since we would be living in a
> post-dialectical world. Perhaps it is more accurate to say, totalizing...?
"Total" does not mean "static". It means that the marketplace encompasses everything and everyone on the planet, and that vast flows of capital ceaselessly mediate everything and everyone; not an iron cage, rather silicon patterns, each time a little different, running non-identical software codes.
-- Dennis