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1111 [lbo-talk] Marx and Justice -- rank: 1000

Doug writes: "I've long thought that Marx was being ironic about this - that labor power is paid at a "just" rate is just evidence of how preposterous the notion of capitalist justice is (liberty, equality, and Bentham). The notion that the value of labor power is its cost of reproduction makes sense under bourgeois norms, for sure. Why else should we care about exploitation if it isn't unjust?" Well he was often ironic, but he was pretty forthright on this question. In parti ...

Document Size:	7373
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jul 23 09:59:59 PDT 2007

1112 [lbo-talk] Marx and Justice -- rank: 1000

I can't help feeling that Rakesh gives too much ground to the idea that exploitation is unjust. I think Marx is very clear when he says that labour power is paid at the proper rate. The struggle over hours is different. Here Marx is introducing a different dimension - the capitalist as vampire sucking the life blood out of the workers, i.e. exploitation dehumanises. It is understandable that the working class experience the historical redundancy of capitalism as an injustice, Marx is saying, but ...

Document Size:	6485
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Jul 22 16:04:50 PDT 2007

1113 [lbo-talk] Cultural Revolution Revisited -- rank: 1000

Yoshie: "Violence in the case of Japan's cultural as well as politico-economic transformation eventually escalated into imperialism and then fascism." Chris: "How accurate is it to describe imperial Japan as fascist?" Not, very, in my opinion - though I guess a lot depends on your definition of Fascism. Mine (following Trotsky's, I think) would turn on the mobilisation of a mass petit bourgeois movement to take on the workers' movement. On that score, Japanese militarism is a ...

Document Size:	7172
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Jul 21 13:35:53 PDT 2007

1114 [lbo-talk] Heartfield on Henryk Grossman and more -- rank: 1000

Rakesh, very kind about my review of Henryk Grossmann, objects to my characterisation of him trying to bring about the downfall of capitalism algebraically. OK, I probably should not have stuck him in a list of Marx scholars, which does tend to minimise the differences between them, and looking again, I see that he gives more weight to the 'counteracting tendencies'. Still, reading the passage of his that Rakesh cites I think the meaning of it is that evidence of economic recovery ('the apparent ...

Document Size:	5344
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jul 20 11:05:21 PDT 2007

1115 [lbo-talk] Miliband gossip -- rank: 1000

I interviewed Miliband a while ago. He seemed very likeable, and quite smart. It was mostly about housing, so probably not so interesting here. It was around the time of the New Orleans floods, and he said in an aside that the violence in the stadium showed that the US had failed to create a robust civil society. I said that I thought the reports of roaming gangs in the British press would turn out to be scaremongering, and I remember he looked surprised at that. I didn't have to wear a black br ...

Document Size:	4982
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jul 6 05:31:37 PDT 2007

1116 [lbo-talk] Left hand puritanism the lost re-bottle -- rank: 1000

Making the case for De Sade over the Puritans, Shane Mage cites the massacres at Drogheda, the illegal execution of King Charles I as negatives and De Sade's pamphlet against capital punishment (a noble against capital punishment in revolutionary France - you don't say!) as a positive. Following the BDSM thread, it was always nagging in the back of my mind that the problem with BDSM was not that it was violent, but that it wasn't. On this side of the Atlantic, we radicals still name our children ...

Document Size:	6144
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Jan 12 00:29:27 PST 2007

1117 [lbo-talk] Left hand puritanism the lost re-bottle -- rank: 1000

Anthony Kennerson writes: "Ahhhh...so I see that Charles Brown has finally decided to attempt a response to my criticism of his baiting and bashing of BDSM sex practioners and their defenders on the Left. ... I am NOT an practioner of BDSM, but I am a sex radical who simply refuses to deny them their humanity or use them as guniea pigs or human pinatas for your own elitist myopia." This really is beneath contempt. I wouldn't agree with Charles' argument that BDSM sex makes a negative c ...

Document Size:	5501
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Jan 11 15:46:44 PST 2007

1118 [lbo-talk] the latest skirmish in the sexpositivity wars -- rank: 1000

andie writes, solipsistically, "why would you think that your world is the only world" because there is only one world (and no doubt all of our conceptions fall short of the whole). in full: "You are a little bit extreme here, James. Also kind of solipsistic or maybe imperialistic: why would you think that your world is the only world or that I would think that your world is the only world? In fact I think "your world" -- your conception of the world -- is misguided here ...

Document Size:	5114
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Jan 10 14:32:58 PST 2007

1119 [lbo-talk] the latest skirmish in the sexpositivity wars -- rank: 1000

andie writes, among other things: "Maybe it's different in your world. In that case, I don't care top inhabit your world." Is this a suicide note? Whatever it is, it is a bit over the top.

Document Size:	4857
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Jan 10 10:47:27 PST 2007

1120 [lbo-talk] the latest skirmish in the sexpositivity wars -- rank: 1000

andie nachgeborenen: "Nothing can stop you from being amused at whatever, although it may reflect certain things about you what you are amused about.. I am not sure that it is silly to take any aspect of human sexuality seriously..." Grimly serious stuff then, this transgressing of norms, and here was me thinking that all sex is pretty comical

Document Size:	5002
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Jan 10 08:12:05 PST 2007

1121 [lbo-talk] The personal is not political (was Nepalese Maoists, privilege etc) -- rank: 1000

Wise words from Joanna, who strikes me as no prude in saying: "I have no problem with whatever happens between consenting adults. The only thing I have taken issue with is the idea that fetishes are a sign of sexual freedom; they are, to me, the very opposite. Freedom is not scripted." It really is narcissistic for the self-appointed kinksters to pretend outrage at other people's outrage. After all, the appeal of crossing boundaries is precisely that you are breaking conventions. That ...

Document Size:	6056
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Jan 9 04:27:37 PST 2007

1122 [lbo-talk] Maoist cleanup drive hits Nepal gays -- rank: 1000

Maybe the difficulty here is one of expectations. If you have big expectations of what Nepal's Maoists are likely to achieve then they will fall short of that. But I have to admit that once you say "Nepalese Maoist" to me, my expectations plummet. Let's face it, it is not the wealthiest part of the world. And Maoism has tended to become an ideology that makes a virtue out of underdevelopment - hence its appeal amongst small-plot farmers. Just the fact that they are not involved in some ...

Document Size:	5775
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Jan 8 01:32:05 PST 2007

1123 [lbo-talk] Stalinism's record (was Fidel) -- rank: 1000

Andie writes: "And you might blame some impossible-to-calculate millions of the 25 millions of the Great Patriotic War on Stalin's criminal negligence with regard to Hitler's intentions after the Pact. (That one, Doug, you can probably pin on the Father of Peoples personally.)" Well, no, I would blame that on the Nazi regime and the Wehrmacht personally. Stalin and the rest of the party leadership can be blamed for not being prepared (see Berezhkov, At Stalin's Side, p. 202). But it wa ...

Document Size:	7361
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Jan 2 02:50:02 PST 2007

1124 [lbo-talk] Marxism and religion -- rank: 1000

"On the relative ranking of religions according to some criteria of progressivity, the later corpus is silent." Not so, here it is, in Capital, Volume one, Chapter one, Section 4, that most important bit about fetishism of commodities, ('fetishism' being first and foremost a concept of critique brought to bear upon primitive religions by protestant missionaries). Marx finds a parallel between the development of christianity and the development of the commodity form, in which 'Christian ...

Document Size:	6502
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Feb 28 22:47:09 PST 2007

1125 [lbo-talk] Marxism and religion -- rank: 1000

"fruitlessly alienate people to no purpose and miss the point. " well it is always good to alienate some people, the better to talk to the others. Marx did not pursue the critique of religion, because he thought that it was complete, i.e. Feuerbach had done it already, it was time to move on to the critique of civil society. It did not mean that he thought there was anything in it. But as against Feuerbach he did not think that you could shift people's alienated belief systems except b ...

Document Size:	6402
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Feb 28 06:11:34 PST 2007