RE: Re: Keeping focus after the WTO

["Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman@xxxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:owner-pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Carrol Cox

> No doubt. But equality is a tricky concept. In traditional
> liberal thought, for example, it is often argued that equality and
democracy are
> incompatible, that the drive for equality dissolves freedom. And
(depending on how, in
> actual practice, "freedom" and "equality" are defined) there is an element
> of truth in that argument. (Others have argued, and I would agree, that
> equality is a precondition of freedom, but in terms of getting there the
> contradictions posed by bourgeois idealogues still are very real.)

I go by the old stand-bys: freedom without equality is just privilege.
Socialism is the pursuit of the universalization of privilege where freedom
is privilege made universal.  In fact, the fight for democratic reform has
always been one of taking privileges of the elite -- their definition of
freedom -- and making them universal.

> Also, note that I did not include in my short list of forms of
> authoritarianism that exercised by a revolutionary movement. That would
have moved me
> from posing questions to writing recipes for the cookshops of the future.

But those forms of authoritarianism are exactly at issue, since the Right
wants to argue that "their" authoritarianism is better and the only
alternative.  And a lot of Leftists fall into the debate on those terms
feeling that if "their" left authoritarians are attacked, that means that by
definition capitalist authoritarianism is being defended.

The point is to argue that it is equality that drives progress -- economic,
political and cultural -- and the debate is over how best to pursue that.
This changes the map of debate quite a bit, since it focuses on the
occasional successes of authoritarianism not as an end in itself but as
merely a contingent means that happened on equality as a means.  But that
also implies that equality without authoritarianism would do the job as
well.

-- Nathan Newman