[lbo-talk] corporate personhood

[Chris Doss]

I'm not sure if I should point out the obvious or not, but if you cannot state what socialism is (roughly), then the word "socialism" means nothing at all, and therefore there is no reason for anybody to support socialism (whatever that is, since it hasn't been defined). I believe Carrol would say that socialism should be defined negatively as some sort of great big NO! (we can only know socialism via negativa I suppose), but this does not work. "No to capitalism" does not work, because anticapitalism is a really big category and there is no reason given as to why we should be against capitalism in the first place. "No to injustice" does not work, because what "injustice" means is not formulated and what is "injust" is different for different people. "No to the shittiness of current society" is sort of like asking everybody to kill themselves, without having any idea what the afterlife is like or even if there is an afterlife at all.

----- Original Message ----
From: SA <s11131978 at gmail.com>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Thu, January 28, 2010 9:41:23 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] corporate personhood

Matthias Wasser wrote:


> I think you're assuming that people have a far more concrete idea of
> socialism than they actually do. For far more than 1% of Americans, at
> least, socialism is any public expenditures they don't like.
> 
> I once was arguing with a guy who defined socialism (which he considered a
> very bad thing) as "government redistribution of wealth."  

Yes, but Marxists will be there to inform them that we have no way of knowing what socialism is - except that we definitely know it's not "government redistribution of wealth."

SA

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