Ethical foundations of the left

Kenneth MacKendrick kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca
Tue Jul 31 23:21:15 PDT 2001


At 07:28 PM 7/31/01 -0700, you wrote:


>On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
> > People, you can't criticize ideology without a normative foundation.


>Sure you can.

What is the difference between criticism and commentary?

I'd wager the difference is normative. I stand to be corrected, but only if someone demonstrates that an error in my thinking here... and what did I err from?


> Capitalism is beyond morality; it's not good or evil in that
>sense, and every morality, if you push it to its limit, turns into very
>concrete class interests, of who gets what.

Well, I'll accept the idea of class interests, but only in the emphatic sense. As for everything being a winding road of interests... bingo. That's Habermas.


> Habermas' notion of rationality is a polite synonym for the EC's social
> democratic public
>sphere -- which, as we know, has been absorbed into the mitochondria of
>the EU; what should be a diagnosis of (tele)communicatory capital, who
>owns it, who accumulates it, and who doesn't, ends up as just another
>neo-national morality play.

And so we should dismiss the empirical evidence on cognitive development because?


> It's to Habermas' credit that he wants to hold
>on to the utopia of a progressive neo-nationalism; he's certainly not a
>conservative or neolib. But that neo-nationalism is sharply limited to the
>very specific confines of the Bundesrepublik and the political situation
>of the 1970s and early 1980s; the Underground Euro-express to Genoa, where
>the comrades put up the most magnificent and awe-inspiring show of
>resistance to Eurocapital yet, only books reservations on the Bourdieu
>Mag-Lev theory-shuttle.

Have you read his new book, The Postnational Constellation? You might be correct, I can't say. Habermas's public 'interventions' have mostly had to do with Germany, that's true. But this political interest, which Habermas sharply distinguishes between a knowledge-based interest, can't be used against his theoretical work. I mean, a mathematician might be a member of the Conservative Party, but that doesn't make them a terrible theoretician of math... does it?


>Have we broken the thread-record yet?

Not even close.

ken



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list