"...Not only is (Fredric) Jameson mistaken to believe that all ethics displaces politics; he also assumes inaccurately that the ethics is always a rigid binary matter of good versus evil. It is an oversimplifying account of a supposedly oversimplifying phenomenon.("After Theory," p.143)
"Because politics had been redefined as purely calculative and pragmatic, it was now almost the opposite of the ethical. But since it was hardly barefaced enough to shuck off the ethical altogether, politics had to be conducted in the name of certain moral values which at the same time it could not avoid violating. Power needed those values to lend itself legitimacy, but they also threaten to get seriously in its way. This is one reason why we could now be witnessing the dawn of a new, post-ethical epoch, in which world powers no longer bother to dress up their naked self-interest in speciously altruistic language, but are insolently candid about it instead.("After Theory," pp.148-149)
Mark : It reminds me what Warren Buffett said a couple of years ago, “There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.”
"The political left, however, cannot define the political in this purely technical way, since its brand of emancipatory politics inescapably involves questions of value. The problem for some traditional leftist thought was that the more you tried to firm up your political agenda, making it a scientific, materialist affair rather than an idle utopian dream, the more you threatened to discredit the very values it aimed to realize. It seems impossible to establish, say, the idea of justice on a scientific basis; so what exactly did you denounce capitalism, slavery or sexism in the name of? You cannot describe someone as oppressed unless you have some dim notion of what not being oppressed might look like, and why being oppressed is a bad idea in the first place. And this involves normative judgements, which then makes politics look uncomfortably like ethics.
Mark : It strikes me that morality is not the same as moralism and the latter is indeed less of value to the leftists than the former. Also, morality or ethical arguments and politics cannot be absolutely separated; they have some organically internal interconnections between them. The capitalist class plays a lot of politics in the name of morality such as the claim that poverty originates from morally depraved idleness. Of course, one can cite statistical data and social investigative proof that would point out its falsehood but then people are usually prone to believe moral arguments more than cold numbers. It is therefore simply impractical to exclude normative judgments from any seemingly pure political criticism.
Carrol Cox on Saturday, December 04, 2010 12:01 AM wrote (among other things):
> And let's keep moralism out of politics. See the chapter on the working
> day.
> Where equal rights collide, force decides it. Not complaints about
> injustice.
>
> Carrol
>
>
> ___________________________________