Carol
On 8/30/2011 10:45 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> Julio - yeah, used to be enamored of this position but I'm not any
> longer. As I said earlier, to Joanna, I think the whole project of
> basing a politics on a perspectivist epistemology is less than
> useless: "it's looking for a subject of history at all that's the
> problem."
>
> Unlike Carrol, though, I think that folks who buy into this approach
> are pretty harmless. They're wrong, on my view, but they aren't going
> to do any serious damage and will end up sittingin a corner, with
> other believers, staring at their navels trying to decide who has a
> more legit right to speak, who is the true subject of history, who is
> more or less alienated, etc. based on their social location. As such,
> y'all are a pretty harmless bunch - in practice - cause y'all will
> never get shit done.
>
> So, if you want to take that path, go for it! I'll bring y'all coffee,
> tea, and juice boxes once the lints been extracted and it's on display
> for all to see. I'll stand around and admire the feat, pouring drinks.
> my treat.
>
> shag
>
>
>> This is a very long thread. It would take some time to go over each
>> argument, but I'll be reckless and object strongly to some of the
>> things shag wrote (and Carrol endorsed):
>>
>>> It creates a hiearchy of who is more oppressed
>>> because, underlying most western marxist and
>>> western marxish politics, there's the endless
>>> search for the subject of history - the "most
>>> oppressed" class which is supposed to truly
>>> understand how to struggle against capitalism
>>> and with whom we must align ourselves.
>>
>> The "hierarchy" of oppression -- i.e. the distribution of alienation
>> among each individual, group, or class -- is absolutely *essential* to
>> any critique of society and to any real attempt to overthrow it and
>> build a different one. And that is the way it should be.
>>
>> This is, in fact, the inverted hierarchy of power and wealth
>> ("physical," "human," and "social") in society -- the up-side-down
>> hierarchy of ownership. If we don't expose inequality, the disparity
>> in the degrees of ownership (and, therefore, of alienation) between
>> people, then on which basis exactly are we questioning the existing
>> social order? If that is not our beef with the existing society, then
>> which one is it?
>>
>> It is true that, under existing social conditions, all individuals --
>> no matter how wealthy and powerful -- are not full owners of their
>> social outcomes. However, the extent of alienation varies from
>> individual to individual, group to group, and class to class. If so,
>> then shouldn't we expect that the compulsion to see through and change
>> society vary similarly? Doesn't it make sense to assume then that, on
>> average, a banker on Wall Street will be more vested in the status
>> quo, less willing to question its fundamentals and rock the boat, than
>> an oil worker in Nigeria? Isn't that differential in alienation what
>> makes the class struggle a requisite and changing society such a
>> formidable thing?
>>
>> And does that not suggest that, by the same token, workers in
>> different settings will also experience different degrees of
>> alienation? IMO, the issue of the "workers' aristocracy" is a bit
>> more complex than it is usually thought. I wouldn't take Engels' and
>> Lenin's remarks as directly applicable to every situation, or even as
>> conceptually or analytically clear as we'd want them to be. But, as
>> rough as they may be, for the reasons above, I wouldn't go as far as
>> to deny them a certain degree of plausibility.
>>
>> This doesn't mean that it is impossible for wealthy and powerful
>> people to see where the roots of society's ills may lie. In fact,
>> their wealth and power give them access to the highest cultural
>> achievements of humanity. In that sense, they are best equipped to
>> grasp the inner structures that hold our societies together. It is
>> just that they are not as compelled to abolish social alienation as
>> those who are most alienated, or who strive to adopt the perspective
>> of the most alienated.
>>
>> The converse is also true. Alienated people, lacking the tools of
>> formal education, may have a harder time making sense of things, let
>> alone resolving in practice their myriad collective-action
>> difficulties. However, by their location and role in the social
>> structure, they are less compelled to defend the status quo.
>>
>> Other non-sequiturs:
>>
>> - The obvious fact that, say, workers in Nigeria are more alienated
>> than bankers on Wall Street (or college professors in Brooklyn)
>> doesn't imply that fighting against the threat to local public
>> education in Brooklyn is a waste of one's time and that we all should
>> move to Africa and do organizing there. Aside from the obvious
>> practical reasons why such a call, even if heeded, would not be highly
>> productive, and assuming generously that underlying it is a true
>> intent of solidarity (rather than the patronizing belief that those
>> poor workers abroad are incapable of liberating themselves without our
>> assistance), who exactly is asking anybody to do that?
>>
>> This is not discourage young people from trying to develop a political
>> experience in solidarity struggles abroad, which I believe can be
>> highly educational; especially for them, although the educational
>> effect on the communities involved is not to be discounted either. I
>> find it inspiring that a young smart and educated person like Joe, at
>> some personal risk and sacrifice, decided to engage in solidarity work
>> with the Palestinians. I can only applaud efforts of the kind. I
>> feel as bothered as anybody here by anything (or anybody, let alone
>> Joe, whom I've met personally) reminding me that I enjoy a measure of
>> privilege, which -- like all privilege -- rests on a foundation of
>> social inequality. But if that is the price of encouraging younger
>> and older people to try things that can only redound in one's own
>> good, it seems like a very modest price to pay.)
>>
>> The fact that there are different degrees of alienation *does imply*
>> that, should there be a clash of interests between groups of working
>> people (e.g. tariffs on imports from poorer countries that may
>> preserve jobs, benefit small local farmers, etc.), solidarity with the
>> struggles of working people in poor does take precedence and impose
>> concrete obligations on us to support them. On similar grounds, we
>> are obligated to oppose imperialist interventions abroad (yes, even if
>> they are to overthrow Omar Ghaddafi), etc. Yoshie has that right.
>>
>> - The repudiation of "moralism" and "moralizing" (in the religious or
>> quasi-religious sense of the term) is not extensive to the necessary
>> *moral* rejection of the social order. This *moral* rejection is --
>> to paraphrase Engels -- the beginning of the end of the status quo. A
>> symptom that the social order has to go. And socialism, as a movement
>> and at its core, has a *moral* dimension. Yes, it is about right and
>> wrong, and guilt and shame do matter, because we are social animals
>> (otherwise Carrol would have not objected to Joe's post). I think
>> that Marx was correct when he referred to the impetus to uproot all
>> forms of alienation as a (moral, Kantian) "categorical imperative"
>> (see Marx's Critique of Hegel's philosophy of right). This *moral*
>> imperative is the *practical* anchor of Marxist socialism. (Practice
>> = *subjective* activity. Revolutionary practice< *conscious*, i.e.
>> necessarily *moral*, subjective activity.) The defining essence of
>> Marxism is not fidelity to a method, doctrine, theory, organization,
>> leader, or whatever, but this fundamental categorical imperative to
>> oppose social inequality (i.e. alienation, the opposite of ownership)
>> wherever and whenever we face it.
>>
>> Of course, if we fail to do it, we won't go to Dante's hell. We'll
>> just be helping to raise the temperature in the existing hell that we
>> have here on earth. True, in some of our settings, that will feel
>> like a nice sauna. But we shouldn't assume that is the case
>> everywhere.
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