----- Original Message ----- From: "Todd Archer" <todda39 at hotmail.com>
>
> >To condemn an action is to make a moral judgement.
>
> Yes, but isn't Carrol making a distinction here between moral judgements?
A
> moral judgement made about the action doesn't neccessarily have to be
> accompanied by a moral judgement about the actor, does it?
=================
In at least some cases it does:
"Hitler ordered the deaths of millions but that doesn't mean he was an evil person." I think we can see the problems in those kinds of judgements.
At the same time, making judgements about those who make judgements we happen to disagree with *because* they made a judgement -irrespective of it's content- invites the ol' reflexivity alert that Carrol gets pummeled with.
>
> >You can't make judgments regarding an abstraction without pointing to
>the
> >responsibility of the agents that intend it's perpetuation and
> >applicability.
>
> Does that responsibility and intention have to be willed out of a positive
> desire towards perpetuation of the abstraction? Workers and capitalists
> keep capitalism going, to the greater benefit of the capitalists, of
course.
> But it's not necessary that these people keep it going because they like
> it or they find it self-evident to keep doing so. They could do it out of
> what they see as necessary self-preservation (Marx described something
like
> this about the petit bourgeois, didn't he?) or even "habit" (for want of a
> better word). This doesn't mean that the poor capitalists must be
> absolutely absolved from what they do, but neither does it mean that they
> must absolutely be responsible for the abstraction. That latter sort of
> thinking promotes, I think, a belief that eliminating capitalism must
> involve killing or otherwise harming people who are capitalists, rather
than
> "taking their power away from them" (crudely put, but I can't think of a
> more subtle formulation).
======================
Fair enough Todd, but I think it's more fruitful, in terms of analyses as a guide to action, that we think of capitalism as a form of collective action constantly pursued by those within the capitalist class in the manner Martin Sklar suggests. Pinning too much of our economic and technological history on 'the law of unintended consequences' as Carrol is often wont to do leads to a variety of fatalisms.
Regarding US style consumer activism, my guess is that ever since the so-called "Keynesian revolution" the US citizenry has had so many myths of consumer sovereignty hurled their way in light of the notion that demand drives supply along with the legal decisions which solidified the Taylorist paradigm of "management knows best" that, and here the law of unintended consequences does raise it's ugly head, many do indeed think that if there's enough agitation on the consumption side - everything from boycotting Wal-Marts to Robert Monks style shareholder activism- the very composition of production will change.
In that sense, leftists are kind of 'reverse' supply siders; we cajole citizens to think about the various ways the institutionalization of production, technology, labor relations etc. *drive* the demand side of the equation, precisely because our reading of the historical record of the last 400 years suggests that that is a more effective focus for strategies that seek to eradicate as many of the social pathologies that arise from capitalism as possible. We have no Archimedean point "outside" the current system to say just what kind of system we'll end up with precisely because history is not a teleological deus ex machina driven by the law of unintended consequencses. I think pointing out the responsibility of consumers makes sense as long as it doesn't drift into "moralizing" and it opens a channel of communication with citizens to talk about the current regime[s] of production itself. But we shouldn't kid ourselves that we're not making judgements, let alone make the judgement that we shouldn't make judgements as best we can given our circumstances.
Ian