From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Thu Nov 16 2006 - 09:44:07 EST
Hi Ian Hunt, On your satire which does indeed raise very interesting problems. 1. As Maurice Godelier has asked in the Enigma of the Gift, why in today's society in which almost everything can be bought and sold the individual may not be bought or sold by a third party. Not everything is negotiable in our profit oriented society. Not all that is sacred melts into air. Individuals as corporeal and spiritual singularities cannot be put on the market as commodities where as they deal in the market as economic agents. And why can people be deprived of their freedom by putting them in prison for debt while they cannot be sold to reimburse that same debt? 2. Ethical argument may prove less decisive than we wish in countering not a liberal/contractualist defense of slavery but a Nietzschean one which would rest on three assumptions, as laid out by James R. Flynn in How to defend Humane Ideals: "only superman merit moral concern; therefore, worrying about what people deserve applies only to superman; therefore, superman can treat herd mean as means to their own ends, with the proviso that supermen should not do anything that would demean themselves in their own eyes." 3. I think what's lost in the satire is the ways in which the 'free' sale of labour power for a wage (behind which stands the only legal apparatus of private property) already shares and indeed sharpens some of the key features of chattel slavery. Rakesh
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