[lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Jul 27 15:41:37 PDT 2009


For Rousseau capitalism was evil; for Marx it was history. (Tomas, quoted from memory.)

Murder was not always a crime. In ancient Athens, if I remember correctly, it was a tort, and ignored unless relavtives of the victim sued the perpetrator. Through a historical process we have come to see killing another except under carefully defined circumstances is undesirable, and we take action to prevent it from happening. Under bourgeois morality it is regarded as immoral, and the perpetrator is immoral. We therefore have a system of retributive justice (which is itself a historical relic which needs to be abolished) to _punish_ the offender. But the political agreement to prevent the act is sufficient. To call it immoral is a mere reedundancy, amd dpes nothing to prevent the frequent occurrence of the act. This is always the case with moral judgments: they are redundant and if anything intefere with eliminating or controlling the undesired acts or institutions.

If we describe capitalism accurately we see that it is destructive, and it is desirable to generate collective action to destroy it and build new systems of social relations. Calling capitalism "immoral" is redundant and interferes with organizing colelctive action against it. For one thing, it creates the ideological illusion that we can "teach" men and women to see its immorality and then they will vote it out. This illusion is one of the chief ideological defenses of the capitalist system. And repeat: it is purely redundant and adds nothing to the description of how it works.

Carrol

P.S. Of course this is highly abstract. It is "universal," however, only for capitalist societies, and is irrelevant to pre-capitalist and post-capitlaist social orders.



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