Re: Catastrophism, an infantile disorder....

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Comrades,

Comrade Owen titles this thread,

Owen,
Catastrophism, an infantile disorder,

Doyle
Then Owen adds in this remark at the beginning of his posting,

Owen,
 My god these people have been at the wacky backy. This catastrophist
diatribe is so far in cloud cuckoo land I think they are talking about a
Britain in some other Europe in some other solar system in some other galaxy
in some other dimension...

Doyle
I first ran into the label, Catastrophism, in regard to Mark Jones on the
LBO list where Mark's assertions about the Stock Market being on the verge
of a crash was labeled, Catastrophism.  The term is meant to associate fear
of disaster with unreality of theory.  Mark was wrong about the market, and
his fear ruled his thinking.  That is the basic premise behind the label.

There are significant problems with this sort of attack upon other comrades.
For example how does one not be fearful of the periodic crises of
Capitalism?  By that I mean how does the theory become so rational that
feelings no longer count?

Even more of problem with this terminology is the next assertion that Owen
makes about the "craziness" of the people asserting that issue.  Owen calls
this an "infantile disorder".  Perhaps the group that asserts this had a
common recruitment tactic.  Find people with infantile disorders to organize
around.  They started out being aware of their disabilities, but in trying
to expand away from that narrow outlook their infantile disorder propelled
them into insanity.  So they are now double disabled, having an infantile
disorder, and are perhaps schizophrenic, or depressed, or just plain crazy.

What goes on with this thinking is that how people feel as a means of
creating social structure in groups, is not well understood.  Lenin wrote a
pamphlet titled "Leftwing Communism, An Infantile Disorder", and this has
legitimated the association of problems with group social dynamics in
polemics on the left to disabled people.

There is no such thing as a scientific connection between "infantile
disorders" and political sectarianism.  What is sectarianism is no doubt a
group management scheme for regulating how people feel in the group.  These
sorts of cognitive issues cannot be approached realistically in a Marxist
method without discarding the attack upon disabled people that people assume
makes sense about such labeling of opponents.  The label is roughly, they
are crazy because they say such and such, I call them crazy and this makes
it clear how marginalized they are because we all know that disabled people
are marginalized.

>From a Marxist perspective of course, we want to understand what causes
people to be marginalized in Capitalism.  We would not treat disabled people
like the Capitalist do.

Through the use of the metaphor of disability Owen no doubt did not mean to
be literally true he was talking about "craziness".  But the only way to get
past the intellectual difficulties that arise with the comparison to
disabilities is to understand that what makes for group problems is not the
"craziness" of a people.  To understand why groups themselves fail for
non-crazy reasons.  That is that people cohere into a group, and what is it
that creates their subsequent isolation, reliance upon unstable methods of
social being etc.  Hence to make room for disabled people to be a part of
the whole social system rather than as the margins that metaphor describes.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor