Chuck Grimes wrote:
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> But just to sketch out what I think are the implications, if the
> tautology is accurate (never mind truth for the moment), then the
> prospects for a humane, just, and progressive reformist movement are
> only improved if such a movement occurs within an already relatively
> humane, just and progressive society. The more authoritarian,
> repressive, and brutal a society is, the less promising it becomes
> that such a reform movement will succeed in producing a relatively
> more humane, just and progressive society---provided it wins at all.
>
I don't think so. This argument raises the question of who will educate the educator. In other words, you are claiming to know, more or less _a priori_, what kind of climate of ideas can produce good ideas or good actions. Within a relatively humane ect society there is no need for a movement, certainly not a resistance movemenbt.
Where did your ideas of a humane etc society come from? Did they drop from the sky? Do they represent a divine inspiration vouchsafed you?
No. In fact they come from struggles, and even the struggles that ultimately, and in the short run, lost, didn't wholly lose because they possessed _SOME_ might -- enough to impress themselves on human social relations and leave a residue of thought and feeling which you picked up in the course of struggles which in their turn exercised some might, or else you could not have spoken of their later having been rolled back.
A thousand pages of the most sophisticated analysis here can't really improve on or go much beyond the Third Thesis on Feuerbach.
The proposition is tautological because any social relation or theoretical formulation of that relation that did not have enough might to communicate to us would not be around for us to judge as good or bad.
Crudely put, worries about foundations interfere with the search, in the give and take of struggle and discussion and criticism and self-criticism for the ideas/ideals which hold us together and relate us to each othe in struggle.
Carrol
Carrol