[lbo-talk] Is Obama Running Interference to ProtectBankers' Pay?

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Mar 23 08:49:24 PDT 2009


On Mar 22, 2009, at 11:43 PM, Mike Beggs wrote:


> It seems to me that people are arguing at cross-purposes here... the
> Doss-Henwood position is that of course we make value-judgements all
> the
> time. But the Cox-Eubulides-Jackson argument is not so much about
> value
> judgements regarding states of affairs, but against 'moralising' in
> the
> sense of reducing these states of affairs to bad/evil/immoral
> _individuals_.

I can agree with this. We live in a society that shapes a certain moral sense, so that exploitation, for example, isn't merely normalized, it's virtually invisible. But on the other hand, I don't see how you can generate any serious political movement to transform and/or surpass capitalism without changing that sense of the normal. There's a tendency among Marxists to drain agency completely out of human affairs - we're just puppets manipulated by objective reality. Related to that is the unfortunate notion of economic crisis doing a lot of the political work for us.

Doug



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