> I've asked this question three times now, and everyone who
> thinks morality matters, that there is something wrong with
> carrol, have refused to answer me.
>
> What improves politics? What advantage do you get? Why does
> a politics based on morality -- Julio's "The rejection of
> any social order by masses of people is fundamentally a
> moral act" -- take us to a place that's preferable to a
> politics not based on morality?
My point is not that morality or a particular set of moral precepts *should be* the basis for the political struggle.
My point is that morality (the distinction between right and wrong, good and bad in human relations) *is* a source and element of the actually existing collective struggles that constitute what we call the working-class or left-wing movement or socialism or what have you.
We -- and by "we" I mean we regular people, not political leaders or organic intellectuals (but I'm sure also them, as Doug suggests) -- make explicit or implicit ethical value judgments whenever we reject markets or inequality or imperialism or homophobia or sexism or any other form of oppression inherent to the status quo. We're clamoring that those things are all bad, wrong, stupid -- bad, wrong, stupid for us.
If we don't believe from our guts to our brains that the existing U.S. foreign policy, banking system, or health care system "suck," are "bad," "make no sense" (or, in Hegelian terms, are "irrational"), "are just wrong," then how come we're denouncing them and fighting against them?
IMO, the basis of our politics, the starting point of our politics, the politics of the left, is those struggles, as they are. The role of the left is to take part, help in enlightening those struggles, grasp and expose the inner relations, emphasize the broader unity of the direct producers, the longer-term and overall direction of march, etc. (and, in the process, get enlightened and transformed by the struggles themselves).
And, again, this is perhaps Carrol's point lost in translation, enlightening those struggles doesn't mean imposing on them or overlaying on them some pulled-off-the-hair, patronizing moralistic code of conduct, or limiting the struggle to the mere moral denounciation of the status quo as "evil" or "wrong" or "stupid" but without exposing how and why it is contrary to our needs as humans here and now. Ultimately, what I say is, if that's Carrol's point, he should make it clear.