>Nah. Not in the way I read the standard delimitation of material and social
>I am projecting on to your thoughts. If you add a component called
>"natural", I'll be in your corner. If I'm wrong, tell me how I'm wrong.
When you say "natural," I'm assuming you are referring to material. As
opposed to super-natural. The point being the material world, including
whatever you wish to further categorize as natural, absent conscious social
action, is incapable of critical intervention to "correct" anything.
> 4. The developing crisis is developing endogenously with the system, which
>> is capitalism.
>
>Nah. That's like saying all these glaciers melting are melting just from the
>heat on Wall Street. It's bigger than capitalism. If capitalism were gone
>tomorrow, and the heat it generates was removed, 6 billion politically
>neutral innocents would still be killing the planet. Capitalism is just a
>single shark swimming in a cruel sea.
This is where you are categorically wrong. The reason you are wrong is you
do not understand what I am saying when I say capitalism. The Wall Street
comment demonstrates that. "Capitalism" is liguistic shorthand for a
thoroughgoing and complex set of realities, for which there are a few very
simple key mechanisms in operation... sorry at the klutzy prose here. It's
early. I don't have the time or space here to become didactic about
historical materialsm, again. People's actions are impelled by a
combination of material and social circumstances. The social system, not
just the economic, that we live in, worldwide, is capitalism. It has its
own inherent motive forces that are inescapable based on things like
commodity production, property relations, etc. When a Haitian peasant
scours the deforested hillsides in search of ever smaller trees to make
charcoal to cook on, and sell, he is not a capitalist... but the
circumstance is brought about by capitalism. Capitalism overshoots.
Economically, environmentally, in all ways. That is its nature. It can't
help it. And we can't escape it without despotic inroads against those at
the top.
>
>> 5. Since the problem is developing endogenously, restructuring solutions
>> within that system can not address the roots of the problem.
>>
>> 6. The people who run this system and benefit from it are not hearing your
>> appeal to their long-term self interest, and they have no intention of
>> voluntarily letting the system go. They will kill or jail or declare war
>> on everyone of us before they do.
>
>Unless they can figure a way to make a profit from doing otherwise. <g>
>(sorry, couldn't resist.)
>
>[snip of 7, 8 & 9 which are very good points, btw]
>
>> 10. That question is not moral or academic. It's strategic. It means we
>> have to identify specifically WHO will do it, HOW will they do it, WHEN,
>> WHERE, and WHY to aim our strategic blows--NOT to effect the changes we
>> both want to see... because we already know that siezure of political
>power
>> is a precondition of any solution... but to take that material power.
>>
>
>yep. so .... why are so many of " the Left" focused on those largely
>irrelevent issues I identified instead of beginning to specify who, how,
>when, where, and why? That's my question, and I think Mark's.
I'm still confused by what's called "the left." But even when we clarify,
I can only speak for myself. I don't think issues are irrelevant just
because someone on this list proclaims them so. I have worked with other
people on electoral reform, against the swine industry, for the right to
organize a union among public workers, and on and on. I don't apologize
because these activities didn't begin the revolution. I had never come in
contact with the information I have found through this list anywhere else.
Was I expected to just understand it? So based on my own experience, I am
now engaging others on the left, whose work I will not denigrate so
cavalierly as some here in their armchairs (yes, it pisses me off), to
bring consciousness up.
>
>Is the Left afraid to tackle the bigger issue of [who, how, when, where, and
>why]? It seems so. Far easier to lose oneself in the debate over who is the
>bigger butthead, Chomsky or Marcuse; now THATs really some relevent
>discussion toward averting the disaster!
Agreed. But I don't know many people outside of net denizens who do a lot
of that. Not a single activist I know spends much time doing this. Most
of them are too busy. Don't confuse this list with "the left." It's
valuable, as I have indicated, but it's not reflective (in and of itself)
of any larger reality I know.
"...all truly great scientific abstractions are both universal and simple.
They are simple not because they explain so little but because they explain
so much. Generality does not arise because an abstraction represents
everything that could possibly happen, but because it remains valid no
matter what happens."
Alan Freeman
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