DJP
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All living beings have language.
If you say that, then it seems to me you are using the word “language” in a very loose kind of way.
But yes, of course words are not ‘just sounds’. Sometimes a saying something *is* also a doing something, what we might call a ‘speech act’
A bit of good news here on the freedom to criticise Zionism issue
Not to be confused with another David Miller, from Oxford, who is famous for his writing on ‘market socialism’ and ‘liberal nationalism’. I just had to do a double-take!
Marx was certainly influenced by Hegel his whole life. But I doubt in his mature years he would have liked to be called a ‘Hegelian’. It was an influence he adapted rather than blindly imitated. The Hegelian Marxism stuff is a step backwards, not forwards.
Though remember, in one of the prefaces to Capital he famously says (speaking of Hegel) “I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him.”
FWIW, as I’ve said before, the influence of Stirner on the development of anarchism has been grossly over-inflated. A couple of individualist anarchists mention him as an influence, and Bakunin mentions him in ‘Statism and Anarchy’ but not to claim him as an anarchist or an influence on Anarchism. It’s largely from hostile and inaccurate sources (unfortunately some early articles in the Standard fall into this category) that this link has been popularised.
As a reference see Zoe Baker’s ‘Means and Ends’ which has now been published (I’d say this and ‘Black Flame’ are the best books about Anarchism). Stirner gets a mention on page 42, and that’s it.
“I think you’ve just outed yourself as someone who looks up ‘SPGB’ on YouTube.”
So you don’t think I spend my time looking up K-pop? Surely that’s presuming
Surprisingly, The SPGB have become popular in the world of K-pop. For those that can’t understand the Korean, the lyrics are a perfect word-for-word translation of the DOP.
“Barltrop made the telling point that if it were not for the Bolshevik revolution, today Marx would be as well known as Lassalle or Duhring or Proudhon to name but three. He would be by and large unknown.”
I think this has got to be true. However, the association has been a curse rather than a blessing.
“So my question is what do we do if they vote to ban LGBT in an area that previously had it legalised? How do we react if they do not respect the rights of women or actively roll them back?”
This sounds like a description of what the Christian nationalist far right is trying to do in some US states. Should we therefore assume all Christians or all people from the US want to do the same?
What you are referring to is the “paradox of tolerance”. The question of how far should democracies tolerate intolerant views.
I’ll suggest that creating a permanently excluded underclass of people from certain religious or geographical backgrounds would only compound the problem.
For one thing, a strengnthed right of exit would actually weaken conservative and fundamentalist movements. If those you are trying to repress can easily go somewhere else the amount of power that can be exercised over them is reduced.
Refugees wanting to settle in the UK usually do so because of historic, family, or language ties. That is only a small drop of the world’s refugees.
What you are describing doesn’t sound like a world co-operative commonwealth. Democracy would be something that happens within the workplace as much as in the community. Creating a two tier system where some don’t get a say would not be socialism.
Both reactionary religious beliefs, and biggoted xenophobia of the type above, is something that a socialist movement will have to overcome or you won’t get socialism.
Why think everyone wants to come the British Isles? It’s just some grey and rainy rock on the edge of Europe. Hardly the centre of the universe.
“But there’s no way Trump will win.”
By all accounts, it’s actually 50/50. A Republican win is currently the bookmakers favourite in fact.
There’s this too, which explains why plantation forests are more prone to disease outbreaks.
But seriously, who – apart from someone wanting to attack an aunt-sally – uses “free will” in the way you’ve described it here (as living a life of total caprice)?
Anyway, I’m going to leave this for now.
as opposed to my “free will” cavalierly adopting them free of any motive to do so.
This is a description of caprice, not freedom.
A life where you just acted at random, regardless of your prior values or knowledge, would not be a life of freedom.
Just remembered about this, seems Engels was a ‘compatibilist’ too.
“Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with real knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, with so much the greater necessity is the content of this judgment determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choke among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows by: this precisely that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control, Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch09.htmNothing in here about the requirement of an absence of external (or internal) influences.
Some more on Sam Harris here, from the Ben Burgis who wrote the ‘Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left’ book:
https://benburgis.substack.com/p/sam-harris-has-nothing-useful-to
