> James Heartfield wrote:
>
>> Carrol
>> 'between Marx & xtianity,the sharpest contrast: there are no "ethical
>> precepts" in Marx. He doesn't even condemn capitalism morally:
>> it is not evil, it's history.'
>>
>> Yes, broadly I would agree with that, though there is a moral goal, just
>> not one that takes the form of an abstract imperative. The moral goal in
>> Marxism is human development. He thinks that social organisation ought to
>> promote the widest possible human development. The case against capitalism
>> is, as Carrol says, that it has outlived its usefulness, it has become a
>> barrier to human development. The difference between Marx's morality and the
>> moral imperative is that it is relative to the possibilities of the given
>> stage of development. It is well captured by Engels, when he says that even
>> (ancient) slavery was an advance over what went before (killing of
>> prisoners), though at a higher stage of development, of course, persisting
>> in slavery is depraved.
>>
>
> ==============
>
> Of course, one could gerrymander through KM's corpus and make the argument
> that the collective habituation to varieties of vocabularies called "moral"
> were themselves overcomeable fetters on human development; that aesthetics
> would displace the desire to speak moralese with all the attendant coercions
> involved....Moral discourse misanalyzes and misprescribes social behavior
> and creates ever more constraints on the "free development of each..." when
> what is desirable is all that stuff Ted writes about when he's lucid.
>
>
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>
This seems to rely on an "epistemological break" conception of knowledge which I discussed briefly earlier, which allows for one type of "restrictive" discourse to be absolutely "superseded" by another more benign type of discourse and thus allows for no continuity between these discourses - in this case that aesthetics could completely displace "moralese" (presumably without incorporating any of its elements...). I don't think this is a realistic approach to cultural change (or social change for that matter - the "absolute transition" to Communism comes to mind here).