[OPE] Productive labour and capital redistribution

Jerry,

Personally I was raised to "to experiment, and find my own way" but also to
scrutinise rationally, critically and judiciously the moral implication of
actions, and the varieties of human ways, with independent thinking and a
grasp of the evidence. So for me at least, Marx and my personal life are not
in separate bureaucratic compartments insofar as his ideas speak to me
across one and a half centuries of world history.

I don't "defend caricature" per se - I just think that if Marxists
caricature their opponents, it is healthy also to caricature Marxism, for
the sake of objectivity - as Castoriadis did. A caricature is a likeness
which deliberately exaggerates, distorts or oversimplifies certain features
of the complex reality it aims to depict, in order to illuminate an aspect
of its essence.

The concept of "if others do it, it is OK for me" can be a valid implication
of the basic moral rules "do unto others...." and "don't do unto others.." .
Thus, the idea that "if others do it, it is OK for me" can I think be quite
correct in certain contexts, but completely wrong in other contexts.

For example, President Obama has a food taster - certainly, when he is
abroad, an expert food taster tastes his food, before he eats it. When the
food taster signals the food is OK, President Obama proceeds to eat. In this
case, if it is OK for others, it is OK for President Obama.

This is merely to highlight, that moral rules were not invented, simply
because somebody at Pratt University thought that this would be a nice idea,
but rather because, if some norms are not adhered to, you are dead as a
doornail or, at any rate, ill or disabled. In other words, morality evolved
out of the survival needs of human beings (it might not be biological
survival, but just social survival). A Marxian scholar obviously cannot
disconnect the formation of moral character from the fabric of social
relations, ranging from the simplest kinship relations to the most complex
cultural relations.

Right now, I have had another request from an American academic I highly
respect, to vet through a submission for his scholarly journal. Again,
disappointingly, the ms. is a Marxist "discourse" which is crap from a
scholarly point of view, or from Marx's own point of view. I have the
ungrateful task, of sorting through this crap, in order to explain why it is
crap, out of the goodness of my heart, since I don't get paid for it. You
have to forgive me for developing a penchant for a surrealistic lampooning
of Marxism - emotionally, it is a response to being cast in the role of
being an intellectual sewerage inspector.

Let none of this however detain you from a pleasant sailing trip.

Jurriaan

8 oclock get up get outta bed
I feel like a truck ran over my head
Another day of stress and sorrow
Skip breakfast, cause I gotta go
Aint got no time to take it slow
And I will do my hair tomorrow
I cant take it no more
Oh no no no
Is this what I'm living for?
But my uncle John from Jamaica
Keeps on calling every day
Just buy a ticket and take a
Summer holi - holiday

- Vengaboys, Uncle John from Jamaica

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Received on Wed Jun 17 14:17:10 2009