----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Friday, May 10, 2002 1:00 PM Subject: Re: Cheap Morality, was Re: anti-zionism
> Luke Weiger wrote:
>
> >Marxism, like any other substantive set of political positions, relies
in
> >large part on value judgments for whatever force it may be said to
possess.
> >Slightly more succinctly: the Marxist eschewal of "rigorous moral
positions"
> >is ultimately self-defeating.
>
> Or a self-delusion. I know that moral/ethical positions are
> unscientific, and Marx wanted heroically to be scientific, but really
> now - why care about exploitation, immiseration, polarization,
> alienation and the rest if you don't have some moral/ethical notion
> of what the good life should be like? Why not drop the pretense? It
> might have made sense at one time, but now it looks false and silly.
>
> Doug
=================
If he admitted them as unscientific and irreducibly perspectival, hence pluralistic, he would have undercut his desire to claim that capitalism was the last social system based on structural antagonisms and conflict. He was a conflict theorist who viewed the good life as a realm beyond substantive social conflict.
Abundance would make the need for terms like justice and rights unnecessary because we had harnessed our intellectual capacities developed via science and technology to meet our needs and desires hence relieving us of the emotional baggage that comes with conflicts brought about by scarcities/absences induced by capitalism.
I'm probably wrong on this but to my knowledge, amongst Marxists only G A Cohen has explicitly said we have to give up the abundance approach, hence we have to reexamine the meanings of Justice. This means working even harder to understand how pluralism produces and attenuates conflicts.
Ian