|
slims---the thread is busy--and it may be that i responded to an argument that really was directed at will--i saw the beria reference and assumed it started one way then went another. so much for the next sentence, in a way. bashing onward regardless:
i think you're mixing things up a bit.
i'll start with the topic we're discussing--how one sees taxes. at that level, the relation is of people to the social form they're part of. that's pretty straightforward--and it holds in general (within the context of the capitalist system)--and it's a general argument, in that we're not talking about rationalities (a shorthand for patterns of thinking and acting that make up the various logics, if you like, that we perform as a function of our backgrounds, class positions, trajectories etc.).
my argument concerning ethics/morality was directed at the way you were arguing, not at you as a person--i don't know anything about you, really, beyond the sentences you write and impressions that i form, which may or may not be right, about the viewpoint you write from. i spend alot of time playing around with the distance that separates sentences about my experience from that experience, so i assume it's there across the board. so i made no claim about whether you are or are not an ethical person yourself. nor would i, without actually knowing you in 3-d.
the argument about beria was just turning the ethics-based way of talking about general relations of people to the social form they're part of back onto you--i think it was pretty clear--to address it, you had to back out of the register you were arguing in and make a second-order claim about capitalism being preferable to stalinism. that's beside the point--the real claim is that these social darwinist arguments dressed up as moral arguments which claim that those who accumuate more advantages do so because they possess greater virtue is basically an affirmation in moral language of *any* social order. so you could say the same thing about beria. i expect that folk who benefitted from stalinism--particularly those who benefitted from it in a way that enabled them to avoid seeing or thinking about what stalin actually did--would have been inclined to think more or less in those terms about it.
as for what i think about what possibilities folk have to do things, to devote their attention to what they love, to make things that expand their capabilities--that has nothing to do with what we're talking about. we could talk about it if you like, but it'd involve a shift in register--it's possible to get from where we started to it---but it is definitely a change of direction.
all i'll say about it is that the class system capitalism relies on squanders unbelievable amounts of human potential because it pushes folk through ways of thinking about the world, about themselves and what they can do that are far more about assuring that most folk stay in the socio-economic place assigned them from the outset that they are about enabling folk to explore much of what they might otherwise be able to do.
another way: if your argument concerning the linkages between thinking in holistic terms about the social world and what individuals can do held, i wouldn't be anything like i am in 3-d. neither would most of the people i know.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|