c_man posted:

Panopticon posted:

i'm just inclined to believe that the katyn massacre was a result of the arbitrary exercise of power in the soviet union, stemming from a lack of rule of law

is there a reason that you think that, as opposed to maybe that it was the nazis, that isnt related to books or other media that were created with the explicit intent of generating hatred for the ussr? if the presence of the "rule of law" is so important for you here, do you feel like the nazi commitment to the rule of law was so much stronger than that in the ussr that they are much more trustworthy?

the ussr admitted responsibility in 1990 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8648275.stm

i don't believe the nazis had stronger rule of law. in fact the holocaust was carried out extralegally. a fascist judge who was also obsessed with rule of law executed camp commandants on minor corruption charges because he had no way of stopping the holocaust, which was ordered by hitler and thus not under his jurisdiction. himmler had to order him to stop shooting camp officials.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-07-46.asp

Panopticon posted:

the ussr admitted responsibility in 1990 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8648275.stm

i don't believe the nazis had stronger rule of law. in fact the holocaust was carried out extralegally. a fascist judge who was also obsessed with rule of law executed camp commandants on minor corruption charges because he had no way of stopping the holocaust, which was ordered by hitler and thus not under his jurisdiction. himmler had to order him to stop shooting camp officials.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-07-46.asp

so if your position is that it's more important whether or not the admission is real and not forged than whether it was some sort of inevitable outcome of lack of commitment to rule of law on the part of stalin then this business about the rule of law has been a bit of a red herring. if the most important thing for you would be whether or not the order is genuine then you should probably take grover furr seriously and read his long-ass thing about the actual history of the event, because i dont think you can plausibly make the argument that there would be no reason to forge a document like that in 1990.

c_man posted:

i dont see why you're willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to opportunist anticommunist pop-historians whose sole goal in writing is to discredit the ussr but not extend the same to grover furr. not very liberal of you.

i try, and then i see stuff like him citing a wikipedia page as his source and i give up again

Panopticon posted:

grover furr is a couple of steps away from time cube.

catchphrase

tpaine posted:

why are you people even...*just kind of trails off*

defending Grover Furr is the shit. you should try it some time.

conec posted:

wasn`t crow also obama crazy just a few years ago?

citation needed

getfiscal posted:

i think you are confusing hegel. the point about necessity is a reply to kant. moral imperatives do exist but they have no force in themselves, only within a specific situation. that situation has an institutional and individual context. ethics for hegel involves the unity of the particular and the universal, it is not just a restatement of an abstract moral imperative. this is not rejecting the idea of morality, it is saying that morality operates within history and cannot be separated from it into a pure regulative idea.

i'm not actually suggesting hegel himself does this, obviously that would be fruitless, hegel delineates categories of the natural world that are explicitly tied to the pure idea, the absolute and the divine. marxists aren't hegelians, though - marx and engels inherit much of the logical distinctions of hegel's thought but very specifically reject the conception of god, the idea and the absolute and by so doing invert the hegelian system

if you retain a concept of the necessary without the hegelian notions of the closed and the pure idea, the absolute liberation, the absolute truth of the divine etc. then you strip it of its moral weight because those are the principles the moral dimension of hegel's thought is predicated upon. we instead have an explicitly physical principle of necessity

Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.

that is, this is the rationalist deduction of the physical necessity of the maintenance and preservation of life as the condition of its continued existence. to quote engels from the anti-duhring again, "Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends." that is, again, presenting necessity as the quality of natural laws. while of course hegel's presentation of the system of nature and natural law are bound to the absolute and the divine, the marxist conception of nature is solely materialist in character

the elevation of moral principles to that of natural law would be trans-historical and as such not consistent with the marxist position even by your understanding, as such we can't understand the marxist conception of necessity as being moral in character

and again, contrary to you claims, in the german ideology marx does explicitly distinguish morality as a distinct sphere from a real, positive science and undermines the former as a phantom of human mind. that marx subsequently rehabilitates a notion of morality as consistent with science simply because he stops talking about it is really not a convincing argument

the fact that he advocates a notion of freedom isn't a rehabilitation itself of some proletarian morality, because as is my entire point, freedom in the marxist schema is the recognition and fulfilment of natural law and physical necessity (and as such necessarily contrary to moral presupposition, because the elevation of moral principles to physical necessity or natural law is to make moral principles trans-historical). for hegel freedom, as is all existence, ultimately a moral vector but this is precisely in hegel what marx and engels reject - their notion of freedom and necessity resembles hegel in form and structure but not in content

the fact that marx advocates for political principles such as freedom of speech is not necessarily indicative of a moral reasoning behind such principles but a functional and agent relative reasoning that is ultimately grounded in the recognition of physical necessity

that being said, obviously marx doesn't suggest that the phantoms of the human mind spring out of nothingness, they are echoes and reflexes of and toward real life-processes

this means we can talk about a morality as something that exists but this is in the same sense we can talk about religion being a thing that exists. accounting for that, we can perhaps speak of a "proletarian morality" that will exist under the conditions of socialism that would cohere with the physical necessity presented by marxist thought. however this is not in itself a moral reasoning, it's just a recognition of the propensity of human agents to moral reasoning

Edited by blinkandwheeze (March 1, 2016 20:03:48)

blinkandwheeze posted:

Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.

that is, this is the rationalist deduction of the physical necessity of the maintenance and preservation of life as the condition of its continued existence. to quote engels from the anti-duhring again, "Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends." that is, again, presenting necessity as the quality of natural laws. while of course hegel's presentation of the system of nature and natural law are bound to the absolute and the divine, the marxist conception of nature is solely materialist in character

That Marx quote doesn't mean that. Marx is making a point similar to Aristotle, that higher moral ends are ends in themselves and not instrumental to those ends. In capitalist class society, labour is estranged from its aim because the worker is alienated from the object it produces and must also do that work to survive. Marx is saying that communism will bring harmony between aim and effort.

You excised the final sentence: "The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite." This is Marx's point. There are two basic types of labour: Instrumental labour which is not satisfying, and satisfying ends in themselves. For example, someone needs to collect the garbage, and someone needs to perform great music. That section refers to the fact that socialism allows the work of garbage-collecting to be minimized, since socialized production will aim at the reduction of that work, and allow more people to spend time making great music. This is because instrumental labour is necessary but not the aim of life in itself. Marx is specifically saying that the moral life is one where the focus is less on necessity and more on free human creation.

This is also why there is no (systematic, economic) exchange under communism - needs are met in a conscious way. Which is the related notion - by "Nature" here Marx is making an analogy to, say, bad weather. A worker under capitalism doesn't decide what to produce for any real conscious reason, it's because of what the capitalist thinks the market says will be profitable. So the worker treats economic choices as one might plan for weather - they don't (generally) know what they might produce in their life, or whether they will even get a job. Conscious planning allows this "Natural" element to disappear as far as possible, because socialized producers determine what to do with their days, and don't have to worry about going hungry (barring total catastrophe).