Eubulides wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Louis Kontos" <Louis.Kontos at liu.edu>
>
> what a rosy view. microsoft windows (clicking icons versus typing
> commands)
> is based on the Apple operating system -- no? microsoft explorer is based
> on
> navigator -- no? this is a corrupt company as they all are in various
> ways -- no?
>
> ====================
>
> Has Msoft been found legally guilty of any of these claims? The issue of
> exploiting and appropriating knowledge spillovers in the economy, if not
> forbidden explicitly by law, is simply part and parcel of capitalist
> competition with it's attendant systemic coercion, no?
>
Much, not all, in this thread seems driven by a necessity to find capitalists (the enemy) to be morally guilty (of something or other), and to ground socialism in a moral judgment of capitalism. There are two problems with that. The first is shown in Louis's post: he wants to see Corporation X as immoral in comparison to Corporation Y. That leads towards a politics which takes Capitalism as a social system off the hook and places the blame on bad capitalists rather than on the social system. (Any social system creates the character types it needs to survive. If it doesn't, it doesn't survive.)
But perhaps worse is that the moralistic habit of mind slops over, as it were, to moral condemnation of the general populace for being what they are. Several posters on this list regularly attack u.s. workers for their complicity with u.s. imperialism (or even for their poor taste in food or clothing), but a left politics, it seems to me, has to be grounded in a recognition of the perfect rationality of the person who, hassled by any of the thousand trivial and major things that hassle one, simply says "Whatever, Bush probably kows what he is doing." It makes perfect sense not to worry about what the truth is in any situation over which one has no power.
Proving over and over again to one's own satisfaction that capitalism and capitalists are bad seems to me to verge on a mild pathology.
Carrol
> Last for the day,
>
> Ian
>
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