Brian Charles Dauth, Wojtek Sokolowski, Dennis Claxton,
Carl Remick, Doug Henwood, Turbulo at aol.com, andie nachgeborenen ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---
Messages in this digest:
* Re: A question regarding list member identities...
* Re: Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!)
* Re: Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!)
* Re: Solidarity and Class (Was Re: Taibbi )
* Re: Class v. Identity (was Taibbi)
* Re: Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!)
* Re: Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!)
* Re: Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!)
--8<-- New Message ---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---
/// Subject: Re: A question regarding list member identities... ///
On 16 Jun, 2007, at 5:16 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> joyce brothers wrote:
>
>> They are obsessed with
>> sports. Why? Maybe because it's a common language?
>
Re-quoting Paul Fussell:
Two motives urge middle-class and prole fans to obsession with their sports. One is their need as losers to identify with winners, the need to dance and scream "We're number one!" while holding an index finger erect. In addition to this appeal through vicarious success, sports are popular for middles and proles to follow because they sanction a flux of pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge, and pseudo-scholarship of the sort usually associated with the "decision-making" or "executive" or "opinion-molding" classes.
;-)
--8<-- New Message ---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---
/// Subject: Re: Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!) ///
On 16 Jun, 2007, at 10:10 PM, Brian Charles Dauth wrote:
>> Regarding the second: it is the contrary point that is of
>> significance
> here, me thinks: if you oppose efforts to end X, Y, Z do you halt the
> elite doing its work?
>
> No, you facilitate it, since the elite wants those hostilities to
> remain
> unabated.
>
I wrote that wrongly, above. It should read: "if you support efforts to end X, Y, Z...". The rest of the paragraph developed on that question.
>> Don't be condescending, for you do not not what I do when I am
> away from my keyboard. And nor should it matter.
>
> Of course it does. The question is whether a person just types the
> type or lives the life.
Well, do you have any reason to believe I do "not live the life"... or anyone else? It should not matter because the only way it can be made to matter is to assume the opposite, which is, at best, condescending.
>> I am absolved of having to support any gay rights (or other)
> struggle if I calculate that there is no likelihood of payback for my
> cause (say "animal welfare")
>
> But you can only know this with any certainty by supporting a
> struggle and seeing what you get in return. Otherwise you are just
> playing with theories which can be twisted to whatever outcome you
> desire.
This doesn't compute at all. I do not want to attain certainty about the "pro-life" movement by supporting the bombing of abortion clinics and seeing what I get in return (and if some fool is now going to read this as me "equating gay rights or other movements to the 'pro- life' movement", I pity him/her!). "Playing with theories" suggest that theories have no checks or verifications, no requirement of [internal] consistency, etc.
>> I can be easily bought off: the "elite" only need to offer me a
>> better
> deal than the gay activists do
>
> If a person is capable of being bought off, a commitment to a struggle
> won't prevent it.
I use "bought off" because, by my view, I can. By my view, I have some means to measure if an individual struggling for a cause shares a broader framework or not and his collaboration with the "elite"s provides me a contradiction because it betrays this or that axiom of the broad framework. Hence _I_ can write "bought off". But by the back-scratching theory, there is no such thing. I (the fellow back- scratcher) am not being bought off at all -- I am back-scratching for the best returns.
>> without some predefined shared notion such as [at least]
> "commitment" we are stuck with a bootstrapping problem (w.r.t
> common action).
>
> What about helping ending the oppression of other human beings?
>
Bingo!
--8<-- New Message ---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---
/// Subject: Re: Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!) ///
On 16 Jun, 2007, at 7:18 PM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> <...> - but that no one who gets
> his head out of his, er, keyboard and actually thinks
> about the implications of what he's saying for other
> human beings would say with a straight face that the
> concerns of other human beings in not being killed
> because of his/her sexual preference, or even in
> receiving respect and equal treatment regardless,
> should be ignored or abandoned as "impediments" to the
> struggle for "the cause of humanity." No one who lives
> life with people in a way that involves any empathy at
> all would say such a stupid and vile thing.
And as far as I know, nobody has, on this list. Or have they? I may have missed it. But empathy -- that's an interesting word to use here. From what I can tell that emotion does not seems to be atomic enough or useful enough, at least to some. I do not wish to put words in your mouth -- rather let me take your words and put them in my mouth: to say thus: "I feel solidarity with you on the basis of the fundamental sense of empathy that we possess as non-sociopathic beings". To say thus, does it suffice? Does it say any less than the talk of calculations of mutual benefits, or of mirror neurons, or of class analysis?
--8<-- New Message ---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---
/// Subject: Re: Solidarity and Class (Was Re: Taibbi ) ///
On 16 Jun, 2007, at 1:17 PM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Marx writes:
>
> Insofar as millions of families live under economic
> conditions of existence that separate their mode of
> life, their interests, and their culture from those of
> other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to
> the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is
> merely a local interconnection among these
> small-holding peasants, and the identity of their
> interests begets no community, no national bond, and
> no political organization among them, they do not form
> a class
>
i.e., a class is not a set, or rather, vice versa! I am glad to see Marx write of "community" and "bond", not mere syntactic fluff (i.e., syntactically coherent fluff).
--8<-- New Message ---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---
/// Subject: Re: Class v. Identity (was Taibbi) ///
On 16 Jun, 2007, at 1:06 PM, Turbulo at aol.com wrote:
>
> Nevertheless, class and class struggle is more fundamental if you
> agree that capitalism is the term that best describes the kind of
> society we live under and want to transform into non-capitalism.
> Capitalism is possible w/o the oppression of gays, blacks, women
> and national minorities, but you can't have capitalists or
> capitalist society w/o workers. The class struggle is thus central
> to the struggle against capitalism in a way that others aren't. If
> you believe this, then you must also advocate putting class loyalty
> before group identity. There is no way around this. In class-
> struggle situations, female, gay and black bosses are the enemy,
> and male, straight and white workers are (at least potential)
> friends. Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama are in the political camp
> of the class enemy, and any appeal they make to gender and racial
> solidarity should be rejected out of hand.
This is superbly reasoned and lucidly written (irrespective of my view of the conclusion) and I thank you for it.
I am not sure I understand yet, leave alone agree, that capitalism is a/the term that describes the kind of society we live in/under. With regard to the second part of your reasoning above, the idea of solidarity with Hillary Clinton or Powell (I will leave Obama alone for a bit) is laughable, but there are more troublesome examples: if class is the primary determinant of one's condition, then we should be all the more sensitive to attempts to escape its perniciousness... the examples here are not the parasites, but the corner cases... people like Michael Moore (who claims that the working class folks in Flint are proud that he made it big enough to own a multi-million dollar home in New York, and its only the left intellectuals who condemn him for his wealth), or any old "sell out" minority, woman, gay person, whatever, who moved to the other side of the divide so that he could own a house, or some such.
--8<-- New Message ---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---
/// Subject: Re: Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!) ///
On 16 Jun, 2007, at 12:33 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Jun 16, 2007, at 11:37 AM, ravi wrote:
>
>> A [genuine] question: what is the basis of solidarity? Surely it is
>> more than back-scratching?
>
> With class, in part, a common role in production, broadly conceived.
> But that's not necessarily visible to the naked eye - it takes a lot
> of organizing and educating to make it clear. On nonclass things,
> common humanity.
Does not humanity apply (or even suffice?) in class matters?
--8<-- New Message ---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---
/// Subject: Re: Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!) ///
On 16 Jun, 2007, at 11:37 AM, Carl Remick wrote:
>> From: ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org>
>> On 16 Jun, 2007, at 1:26 AM, Bill Bartlett wrote:
>>>
>>>> They're right and you're wrong.
>>
>> Time will tell.
>
> I wouldn't count on it.
You are quite right. I won't.
--8<-- New Message ---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---8<---
/// Subject: Re: Taibbi (was Re: Fwd: Antioch College Closing!) ///
On 15 Jun, 2007, at 12:19 PM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> As Doug once noted on this forum, only intellectuals love poverty
> and, I may add, hate the middle class.
This is one of those clever phrases (which is not to accuse Doug of resorting to turn of phrase) that sounds like it clinches an argument but a closer examination demonstrates otherwise. The fatal flaw in the above is that for its insight to hold, intellectuals are to be non-poor. Which is not necessary at all. So we have this much less convincing situation: the intellectual poor and the non-intellectual poor (along with the intellectual non-poor, etc), of which only the former love poverty or hate the middle class. So? The "walk a mile in my shoes" knock-out punch is found ineffective and we are once again left with having to analyse the content of the intellectual's argument.
--ravi