[lbo-talk] Blue Dogs cashing in

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Mon Jul 27 18:10:25 PDT 2009


At 12:30 AM 7/27/2009, Miles Jackson wrote:
>I know we've had this discussion before, but I will offer my opposing
>perspective for consideration: moral distinctions are the product of
>collective struggles, not the source of them. To attribute the causes of
>complex social movements to individual moral beliefs is capitalist
>ideology through and through.
>
>Miles

yeahbutt, this is where Roy Bhaskar's work on critical realism is helpful. He addresses the over-determinism of Berger and Luckman's social constructionism. If I recall correctly, he argues that such an approach is *merely* dialectical and advance an ahistorical approach to social change -- because too one-sidedly deterministic. A Critical Realism accounts for the interaction between social structural forces creating moral principles and then the small scale social practices people engage in that feed back into those moral pricniples, but not in any one-to-one pointer-reader way. People *make* history but not in any way they please, as the Old Man said.

too lazy to retrieve the book and summarize it properly but I think I've finally figured out why, while I agree with you in this debate, there's always a point where I pull back from the super-structuralism that statement seems to advance, if only by virtue of the typical DSM-IV 302.9 that goes on during this eternal debate. :)

shag



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list