[lbo-talk] Susan Abulhawa on WITBD for Palestine (rights vs. statehood

[Carrol Cox]

The American conception of  / attitude toward slogans is encapsulated in 
a feature that used to appear in the New Yorker: "Shouts we doubt ever 
got shouted."  But political slogans are not necessarily meant to carry 
their actual content; they are meant to point a direction, open an 
ongoing discussion: it is of their essence that that discussion changes 
the initial meaning of the slogan. There is no way for those _outside_ 
that discussion to be at all confident that their understanding of the 
slogan is correct, because it in effect has no meaning independently of 
that discussion. "Natural rights" is indeed cringe-inducing, but I have 
not the slightest idea of what it means for its intended audience; Joe 
has a point here.

Carrol

The reason the Civil-Rights slogans were so clear and precise is that 
they were all cliches that had been taken for granted by the white 
population for a century or two. They became much less clear as soon as 
the movement went beyond the destruction of the legal foundations of 
southern segregation. An anti-Lynch law unfortunately could not touch 
the lynching of Troy Davis. Nor could that rhetoric do much when it 
reached Chicago, where Mayor Daley had no  trouble whatever in chasing 
King from town. In any case "civil" rights stretch no further than the 
workings of bourgeois democracy: they represent an the abstract equality 
of citizenship in the bourgeois republic. They are not substantive.

Carrol

On 10/15/2011 3:45 PM, Joseph Catron wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 10:24 PM, Doug Henwood<dhenwood at panix.com>  wrote:
>
> I'll bracket the "rights" talk but the fight for full civil equality is a
>> very specific demand, kind of like our own civil rights movement, and not
>> like that other airy-fairy stuff that James quoted.
>>
>
> Yeah, but the airy-fairy stuff has specific rights attached to it. The fact
> that political rhetoric is cringe-inducing doesn't mean there's nothing of
> substance behind it. It may just mean you're not the target audience. ;-)
>