<HTML><FONT FACE=arial,helvetica>Carrol is so internally contradictory here that it is impossible to
<BR>reconstruct a coherent argument from what he says.
<BR>
<BR>Carrol # 1 insists, in the form of his adoption of a classical mind-body
<BR>dualism, that body is prior, ontologically and logically, to mind. Carrol # 2
<BR>maintains that the primacy of social relations, derived apparently from an
<BR>ontological premise about the social nature of humanity, means that you can
<BR>not separate mind and body, and that thought is implicit in every action.
<BR>These are not logically consistent positions.
<BR>
<BR>Are human being always involved in action? Of course.
<BR>
<BR>Does our thought take off from that action? Of course.
<BR>
<BR>But what Carrol refuses to recognize, in his refusal to understand the
<BR>relationship of mind and body dialectically, is that action also takes off
<BR>from thought. He might do well to go back to the famous line in Capital where
<BR>Marx notes that what distinguishes the architecture of humans from the rather
<BR>impressive 'architectural' creations of ants and bees is that human beings
<BR>conceive of the work in their minds before they execute it. In his reduction
<BR>of human action to the instinctual mating of other species, Carrol entirely
<BR>misses this fundamental distinction of Marx. This vulgar materialism is,
<BR>indeed, the 'materialism of fools.'
<BR>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Leo probably doesn't know any better, but Doug should. It isn't only (or
<BR>even mostly) a matter of neuroscience or chronology -- those matters (as
<BR>with the ritual) being cited as illustrations. It is a matter of social
<BR>relations. What does it mean to find ourselves involved in social relations
<BR>(always already so find ourselves)? It means that we are _always_ in the
<BR>midst of an action, and our thought takes off from that action. So if
<BR>anyone here is indulging in the materialism of fools it is Leo and Doug.
<BR>They mechanically separate "motion" from the thing that moves. Then they
<BR>have to get involved in one sort of mysticism or another to explain how an
<BR>unmoving object can move. And they start out with the isolated individual,
<BR>separated from all social relations, thinking about how to enter into those
<BR>relations from the outside. As to ritual it goes back at least to the
<BR>mating behavior of some insects -- obviously "brainless" except in the most
<BR>mechanical sense. If one accepts this sort of vulgar materialism, as Doug
<BR>and Leo do, then one must either deny that thought actually exists (it's an
<BR>illusion of some sort) or that it has a mystic or instinctive source. And
<BR>social relations disappear, to be reduced to a mere exhaustive account of
<BR>individual facts. (In this particular thread Doug apparently chose to deny
<BR>the existence of thought, in his claim that the topic had no relevance to
<BR>politics.) Doug has sometimes claimed that the _Grundrisse_ is his favorite
<BR>book -- but he either hasn't read it very carefully or the stress of
<BR>composing the one-line zingers that he substitutes for conversation he
<BR>forgets everything he ever learned from it.
<BR></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE=3 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BR></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"> </FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE=3 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0">
<BR></FONT><FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"><BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">Anyone who affirms the reality of relations will seem a fool to those (like
<BR>Doug and Leo) caught up in what Marx called the "dot-like" isolation of
<BR>workers in bourgeois society. It is also this dot-like isolation which is
<BR>partly at least the source of the pathological obsession with communication
<BR>so characteristic of capitalist thought. Thought, of course, can (roughly:
<BR>thought never catches up with actuality) reconstruct and understand the
<BR>action (social relations) humans person always find themselves in, and on
<BR>the basis of that reconstruction project further actions -- which always go
<BR>beyond the plan or thought, thereby again placing the individual in the
<BR>situation I describe as action prior to thought. Carrol
<BR>
<BR></XMP></FONT><FONT COLOR="#0f0f0f" SIZE=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" FACE="Arial" LANG="0"></BLOCKQUOTE>
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<BR>
<BR>
<BR>Leo Casey
<BR>United Federation of Teachers
<BR>260 Park Avenue South
<BR>New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
<BR>
<BR>Power concedes nothing without a demand.
<BR>It never has, and it never will.
<BR>If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
<BR>Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
<BR>want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
<BR>lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
<BR><P ALIGN=CENTER>-- Frederick Douglass --
<BR>
<BR>
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