andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>
> People will disagree, and not just because of class
> and other group conflict. They will just see things
> differently because answers to questions about What Is
> Good and What Is The Meaning of Life are inherently
> disputable.
I more or less agree with this, though perhaps on different premises than Justin's. This is one of the reasons I think mass movements for emancipation have to be primarily organized and inspired by negative reasons rather than by any at all concrete shared vision of the good. In the local BNCPJ most probably either are or think they are moved by positive visions, but gradually I have brought most of them around to seeing that for the most part our "principles of unity" (not the term used locally, by me or anyone else) consist of what we are against.
> Even if there are Right answers -- which I
> believe, actually, or anyway that there are wrong ones
> -- in a free society we let people make their own
> mistakes. (That's Mill.)
(I suspect there are some contradiction here: we don't let children try out for themselves whether cyanide is a good thing to take for dessert. So it's a question of where a line is drawn rather than an absolute principle of letting people choose for themselves.)
> So all we have to say about Buddhism vs. Eudaimonsim
> is that capitalsim does not allow either of these ways
> of living for most people, but makes us all greedy and
> competitive, etc. And socialism doesn't, but rather
> does allow us to be Buddhist or Self-Realized as we
> choose.
Postives are emergent from collective struggle. So obviously in a socialist order we don't let people develop themselves by organizing pogroms. But there again, what I still think is the core of Marxism holds. When asked, "What is?" Marx replied, "Struggle."
Carrol