"=?iso-8859-1?q?Cian=20O'Connor?=" <cian_oconnor at yahoo.co.uk>
Below, Tahir gets into the Marxist critique or supercession of the liberal democratic concepts of freedom. The idea really is to preserve liberal liberty values, but underpin them with material based freedom. However, it is elementary that promotion of unmitigated bourgeois theory without placing it in the historical development of socialist liberation theory is not given "freedom of expression" in a socialist society.
Charles
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood at uwc.ac.za> Subject: Superceding liberal democracy?
Justin: Though why should we weant to supercede them? I mean, I reall am open if someone has a better idea, but I haven't heard one yet.
Well this is really ABC isn't it? Hegel's critique concerns the contradictions within what he called relative ethical life, which he saw as corresponding to bourgeois property relations. In marxism this appears as the contradiction between formal equlaity and substantive equality. Why is this not good enough, because it alienates us to the core of our being, i.e. from what makes us human, namely our species bond with our fellow human beings. This alienation creates cynicism, despair, outsiders, meaninglessness, etc. (That's before we get onto starvation, disease, etc.) The whole of modern literature from Kafka to Coetzee screams about this. The idea that we have developed the most rational system of governance, implied in Justin's quote above, is frightening in its "end of history" type of sentiment. The view from a suit? Tahir