[lbo-talk] Re: biz ethics/slavery/groups/constitutional

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Sep 3 08:26:07 PDT 2004


andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> Carrol's alrernative is civil war -- he thinks we are headed that way, right Carrol?

Yes, no, maybe. And it's a prediction rather than an "idea" or a program.

AND no one knows what a future civil war will look like. Some people keep insisting foolishly on a scenario, but human history is neither a musical comedy nor an engineering project. Scenarios are few and far between, and aren't worth much when we do have them.

If you've ever seen any films, the final stage of the Iranian Revolution looked more like an imitation of a Fifth Avenue Easter Parade (with less elbow room) than a scene from Dr. Zhivago. The Shah's generals told him they couldn't trust the troops to obey orders.

What I know is that history isn't over and there is no way in which present social arrangements can survive indefinitely. It simply boggles the mind that some second-rate 19th century thinkers could have edited a couple centuries of thought into a system that will last. (I was just reading the passage in Marx where he cites the preeminence of John Stuart Mill among bourgeois thinkers as evidence that capitalism has exhausted its intellectual powers when such small hills can appear as mountains in comparison with their rivals.)

You've been winning the argument with Charles and Brian, but the kind of arguments they offer, while unpersuasive and even incoherent, reflect historical reality rather better than your case does, I believe. There will not be peace or stable social relations until the kind of demands/needs their arguments echo are somehow satisfied.

Incidentally, I really don't like change, and I'm not all that crazy about variety. One of the achievements of capitalist ideology has been to lead people to think that what capitalism forces on them is also desirable. (Apparently, the human immune system doesn't like change very well either; too many changes, desirable or undesirable in themselves, and rates of infection and even of heart disease increase. Manhattan, for example, is very bad for the human heart, increasing the rate of heart attacks even among visitors.) So probably Civil War is a very bad idea, but so is hurricane Frances.

Carrol



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