John Ransom wrote:
>Clearly I lack not only all power to persuade (I already suspected that)
>but the ability to communicate with other humans. This bodes ill for what
>follows!
>
>Is your argument a logical one? In the form of:
> all governments exclude and oppress
> the S.U. under Stalin excluded and oppressed
> the S.U. under Stalin is no different from all other governments
>
>But don't you think that at a certain point, as the dialecticians say,
>"quantity turns into quality"?
Well, this started as commentary on a preposterous quote from Foucault, who
claimed to have discovered a racist-purifying essence underlying Marxism in
a letter Marx wrote to Engels. It somehow devolved into an extraordinarily
tired barrage of cliches about Stalinism. My point was that some of the
claims you & others made about exclusion and "purification" are common to
all governments, and the crack about Madisonians in disguise was motivated
by the suspicion that behind it all lurked an unexamined pluralism. (I
don't think Foucault would have approved, not that that matters.) To
Madison should I add Fukuyama?
>No. That is the fate American Foucaultians are trying to avoid. The battle
>against the seeming self-evident logic of the pluralist interest-group
>driven approach to politics is not in my view advanced, however, by a
>return to clearer, emotionally satisfying, but bankrupt approaches to the
>modern world.
I assume that means Marxism specifically and socialism in general. What are
non-bankrupt approaches to the modern world?
Doug
>Clearly I lack not only all power to persuade (I already suspected that)
>but the ability to communicate with other humans. This bodes ill for what
>follows!
>
>Is your argument a logical one? In the form of:
> all governments exclude and oppress
> the S.U. under Stalin excluded and oppressed
> the S.U. under Stalin is no different from all other governments
>
>But don't you think that at a certain point, as the dialecticians say,
>"quantity turns into quality"?
Well, this started as commentary on a preposterous quote from Foucault, who
claimed to have discovered a racist-purifying essence underlying Marxism in
a letter Marx wrote to Engels. It somehow devolved into an extraordinarily
tired barrage of cliches about Stalinism. My point was that some of the
claims you & others made about exclusion and "purification" are common to
all governments, and the crack about Madisonians in disguise was motivated
by the suspicion that behind it all lurked an unexamined pluralism. (I
don't think Foucault would have approved, not that that matters.) To
Madison should I add Fukuyama?
>No. That is the fate American Foucaultians are trying to avoid. The battle
>against the seeming self-evident logic of the pluralist interest-group
>driven approach to politics is not in my view advanced, however, by a
>return to clearer, emotionally satisfying, but bankrupt approaches to the
>modern world.
I assume that means Marxism specifically and socialism in general. What are
non-bankrupt approaches to the modern world?
Doug