Listening to Marian Wright Edelman on Democracy Now today reminded me of everything that's wrong with the moral/ethical approach. She was defending the SCHIP program against Bush's veto but the appeal was entirely for "the children," playing on the idea of children being innocent, deserving etc. blah blah. Why did she not throw in somewhere that this SCHIP things is a horrible half-measure and what we really need is national health care? She wasn't about to do it because that brings up questions in which she can't make this appeal that everyone, "90% of America," cares about health care for children. She kept saying that Bush was not properly informed. This whole approach is a way to avoid acknowledging competing interests, either because she hopes to avoid offending various Senators or because she really believes that 'if the powerful only knew...'
The answer to Doug's question about another basis for revolutionary politics is class (and race, and sex) solidarity born out of the desire for self-emancipation. Morality is a red herring not only because it diverts from bourgeois supremacy as a whole to the character of individual members of the bourgeoisie, as Michael Perelman says, but because it depends for its appeal on the worthiness of the supplicants. But to secure my right to health care, I must secure the rights of the sleaziest, most ne'er do well, least 'worthy' member of my class. I don't care, though, because it's not about that, it's about a strategy to win. To be even slightly secure, the gain must be universal. For Edelman, the appeal to morality is enough, because she's trying to help others, not herself. She wants to 'save the children,' but that approach never will, at least not without threats from a more radical position.
As I mentioned replying to Charles Brown recently in a similar thread, the difference between 'communist' and 'socialist' in the Communist Manifesto is that socialist was essentially an idealist, utopian reformer's word, while communist was the word that was used by workers interested in self-emancipation. (Later the meanings changed and even reversed.) According to Engels, that's why they called it the Communist Manifesto, not the Socialist Manifesto.
Jenny Brown </HTML>