[lbo-talk] Quick Note

[Dissenting Wren]

Yes, "barbarism" has connotations we might well wish to avoid.  I take the slogan "socialism or barbarism" to be a shorthand reference to this passage from the Communist Manifesto:  "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."  Combine a capitalist class unable even to manage affairs in its own long-term interest with a proletariat too weak to reconstitute society in a revolutionary manner, and you have the recipe for the common ruin of the contending classes.  Austerity in a time of crisis?  Global warming?  "Barbarism", anyone?

________________________________
From: Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Thursday, July 7, 2011 4:45 AM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Quick Note

I'm sure there's more substance to your thinking than this, but at my most
cynical, I could assume you're using "barbarism" as a euphemism for "things
I don't like," as others have done with "fascism" or "liberalism." There's
certainly no clear indication to the contrary here.

If you're instead tying it to precarity, or repression, or some combination
of those and other things, I see no reason to not just say them instead.
When I hear talk of "barbarism" today, I instinctively assume it's coming
from some racist crackpot. Maybe 5% of the time, I'm wrong and it's a
Marxist. Why carry all that baggage voluntarily, especially for a term with
no clear meaning? Maybe I'm wrong, and there's something in it worth
redeeming, but I don't see what it is ...

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
> wrote:

Here's an article dealing with an example of contemporary barbarism:
>
> http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/may2008/clim-m07.shtml
>
> But really, examples abound.  Pick up any newspaper.

-- 
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
lytlað."
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