"Alienation"? was Re: ETUR@Î

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

[I agree with Jim Devine's suggestion that we keep names of posters out
of subject lines; hence my change of this subject line.]



Carl Remick wrote:
>
>
> That said, I have never felt so alienated from my fellow Americans as I do
> at this moment -- not during Vietnam, not during Desert Storm.  There's a
> bloodthirstiness and worship of raw military power abroad in the land that I
> have never seen before.  It's damn ugly.
>

Carl, I accepted this word (alienation) in one of my earlier posts, but
I think I was wrong to do so. It's a piece of jargon that simply doesn't
say anything.

What do you mean by it? That you are pissed off?

But why? You warn against being affected by the media -- and yet it is
on the evidence of the media that you ascribe a "bloodthirstiness" et
cetera to the populace. I still maintain that it makes sense for people
to trust their leaders -- see Brad DeLong's lbo post on primitive
cultures that I copy at the end of this post. For political analysis it
works best to assume good faith on the part not only of individuals but
of whole populations. And bring the same perspective to bear on one's
own culture as Brad brings to the culture of the Australian aborigines.

It's the task of conscious leftists, I suppose, to build a material
actuality that challenges that culture. That is what, ultimately, the
discussions on these lists revolve about, how to create that challenge.
It doesn't help to be personally pissed off at "American
bloodthirstiness" -- that (as Mark Jones's post showed) only makes it
impossible to think. But it is also absolutely necessary to deny the
right of the U.S. government to respond _in any way_ to 911 that would
not be equally available to Luxemburg or Mexico (or for that matter, to
France or Germany: they would not dare act in such a way without U.S.
acceptance).

I have a question. Granted that some hundreds of millions of people have
a real gripe against the U.S., and granted that they are utterly
powerless to express that gripe in legitimate ways, what should they do?
Those leftists who have labelled 911 a "crime against humanity" have
objectively taken the position that any or all resistance to U.S. power
is illegitimate.

Carrol

Subject: Re: Pre-historic human societies (Grant Lee)
Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2001 18:17:20 -0800
From: Brad DeLong <jbdelong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: lbo-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Brad DeLong wrote:
>
> >What do we make of such casual brutality? It sounds obscene that
> >someone might be killed for such a minor social problem, but of
> >course in these small desert bands this was no minor problem, it
> >threatened collective existence. Those that took the decision were
> >the elders, though discussion had been widespread - does this equate
> >to the dominance of the elders who merely for the sake of an easy
> >existence would kill this young man? Or was it simply one of the few
> >options open to them - as I think was the case.
>
> I would say that hunter-gatherer bands in which the elders were not
> "brutal" were unlikely to survive--so that it wasn't for the sake of
> an easy existence, but for the sake of any existence at all. Or
> perhaps the right way to say it is that the structure imposed on
> society enforces brutality...
>
> It's hard. On the one hand you don't want to minimize the fact that
> Abaroo does not seem to be realizing her species-being. On the other
> hand, there is a qualitative difference that you don't want to
> minimize between Benalong fulfilling a social role that is part of a
> successful long-term tribal survival strategy and, say, the behavior
> of the Guatemalan army...
>
> Brad DeLong