> > Lacking a normative foundation, everything slides off into
>Machiavelli's lap. The proletariat may as well slit their throats now, because
>there is no hope for them, or anyone one else.
>========
>Second sentence does not follow from the first.
Without normative grounds, there is no distinction possible between a supernova, for instance, and the snapping of bones. Speech makes differentiations possible. It is the medium of our social lives. It is only in language and through language - or some form of internalized symbolic action - that objects appear to us at all - as anything other that Robin William blurry image in that Woody Allen film the name of which I forget. To distinguish between a supernova and the sound of bones snapping is a cognitive activity, i.e. it is a rational activity (how else are we to understand reason if it isn't linked to our everyday cognitive processes... I'm not into this idea of reason being high and mighty, neither is Habermas).
This is a really elementary point. Human beings coordinate their activity on the basis of communication. No, not solely [should i have to say that?!?]. When we do so, build into the structure of speech - which is onto-genetic... if this term doesn't fit Party loyalties, then let's say that built into the means of production and reproduction - is a presupposition that someone that once told you what the words meant (a parent for instance), will understand them when you repeat them back to them.
>"Private property is normative"
>
>"No, it's ideological"
>
>"No it isn't"
>
>"Yes it is"
>
>...and on it goes....
Until someone points out that private property is a social relation, and then the person that denies this is either an idiot (Habermas's term, not mine [I have a page ref]), dogmatic, or stunned (in the best possible sense of the term).
>the ideology/normative boundary/opposition is at the point of
>diminishing returns, imo.
Well, apply the law of diminishing returns to itself and then we can start over.
>Isn't that what collective action and
>majoritarianism in political movements are all about? Politics ain't
>like science and it's undecideable whether homo idioticus can
>'transcend' politics.
And yet, we possess the capacity to coordinate our action consensually. Go figure, eh?
> > I have to get myself a bumper sticker and a car to go along with
>this; "End the 'end of ideology thesis' now!"
> > ken
>========
>How about "question capitalism"?
>Ian
What's the difference?
love, ken