I think you've missed the mark there. Natural? Yes. Law? No. It's about human nature, not the nature of the universe. And I'm not ruling out the highly unlikely possibility that human nature can change to such an extent that the selfish aspect disappears. What I'm saying is not at all mystical; it is in fact a common sense observation. — Sapientia

It's mystifying when it serves as a reductionist explanation for something like contemporary practices of tax evasion. Why the practices revealed in the PP are so common-place and widespread among the elites (enjoying a state of exception not afforded others who can't purchase such services) is a historical, economic, and political matter. Greed doesn't need to enter into play anywhere here: you could be the most ethically conflicted and altruistic individual but recognize that it is the most rational decision to make to stay competitive, within the logic of how the modern global capitalist economy is concretely organized. Concretely, that is, as a contingent matter of decisions being made, laws and treaties being written, a state of the political balance between power structures, and so on. It is mystifying when such matters are 'explained away' by some ontological or natural necessity, whether it be the divine right of kings or 'human nature'. As it tells us that, 'well what do we expect, it's just human nature, nothing we can do about it'.

Also, to suggest that this aspect of human nature is transient or has only been present in certain phases throughout history or in certain historical contexts is very misleading. I can assure you, no perfectly altruistic and cooperative utopia can be found in human history. There has always been those who are selfish, and that doesn't seem likely to change anytime soon. You'd have to have your head in the clouds to believe otherwise. — Sapientia

Greed is nothing new, we can find it in the ancient literature. This is not my point. My point is however, that greed takes on a particular precedence and form within whatever historical and social situation you find yourself in. There are no perfectly altruistic and cooperative utopias that we know of in history, but there are endless examples of societies that heavily constricted the socially acceptable ways in which greed could be manifested (if at all). Who cares if there are no examples of perfect anything? It's entirely meaningless when it comes to things like societies, and doesn't add anything here.

I would actually argue that greed isn't natural at all, but is entirely socialized. But I don't really need to say that to argue what I'm arguing. All I really need to say is that whatever 'natural drives' may be there, they're completely transformed and given meaning, value, and normative character when interpreted through language, culture, and ideology. And what's more, there's a reality to the material circumstances that don't give a damn about how virtuous you are, you're forced to do 'greedy' things just to survive.

Revolutionary acts are designed to degrade the effectiveness of the regime by destroying specific parts of the government. Terrorist acts are designed to degrade the life of people in general. — Bitter Crank

To a state, these two are indistinguishable. Their primary concern is any challenge to their monopoly of violence (and ideology), and so their monopoly of sovereignty. To the Syrian government all groups are terrorist (no matter if they're Islamic fascists or pro-Western representative democracy).

'Terrorist' then becomes a political term, in that its use is fraught with the perspective and interests of its speaker.

But in real life, when is political insurgency/revolution acceptable? From an initial observation, it would seem as though it is only acceptable so long as you agree with the insurgency. Of course the American colonists are seen as heroes, because ultimately they won. Had the colonists not won against the British Empire, might we see them as treacherous villains? History is written by the victor, as they say. — darthbarracuda

Revolution is always a historical matter. In non-revolutionary times, there is of course the wide buffet of possible political identifications, but why a sizeable chunk of the population takes on a particular revolutionary view under some organized political form says more about the historical crisis and that social body than anything else. People aren't convinced into revolutions through intellectual moral deliberation, but because the possibility of a revolutionary alternative has been recognized as a necessity. A transition from possibility to necessity, due to the particular intractability of a systemic crisis. Whatever the ruling ideology and infrastructural organization/regulation of social life, what's important is that it's seen to be incapable of solving a systemic issue without undoing its basic logic and assumptions.

People launch attacks at it all the time, but a revolutionary attack is a conscious, politically organized collectivity with revolutionary objectives. 'Revolution', in this sense, would be the overthrow and attempt to engineer or redirect the basic social relations of society. So, I'd say if you're looking for a substantive classification and separation of 'terrorist' and 'revolutionary', it would be along these lines.

True. It's a natural act, and self-interest is present within human nature, so if they can exploit the situation for the sake of themselves - even if it's at the expense of others, then they will do so. — Sapientia

To use something like 'human nature' (qua 'natural law', perhaps biologically coded) to explain the current situation of tax evasion I think is mystifying. That is, mystification in the sense that it confuses something social, transient, and materially/historically contextual for some ontological essential nature of the universe. Thus the mystification happens on the metaphysical level, for even the biological (as Darwin has shown) is always in a state of flux, and transition, adapting dialectically with the environment (as the sum of material, historical circumstances which construct the 'situation').

The speed an ease at which the ruling classes of society can transfer mass sums of accumulated capital across the globe, and the particular mapping of the globe into tiered sectors regulated by international monetary and regional/inter-national governing institutions, the transfer of sovereignty mostly to international institutions, and predominantly to the economic sphere in the hands of a small minority of mostly international capital: all of these things go into why the practices revealed in the PP are common place among the capitalist and political classes.

I think that it's a bit of both. Why else would anyone want to safeguard their wealth to begin with? More for me, less for society. And these aren't small sums of money that we're talking about. Greed is the motive, reason is the method. — Sapientia

Again, we can talk about greed and various motives, only as a description of ideology in reference to the concrete historical situation.

I feel like this question isn't worth answering. I don't need a complete account of fiction to know unborn people aren't fictional characters. To insist otherwise IMO is not to understand what fiction is, not even in a technical sense, but just in a vulgar sense. — The Great Whatever

I'm not insisting otherwise, but just seeing why, in principle, unborn babies couldn't enjoy the kind of existence that some attribute to fictional characters. I'm asking for more nuance and sophistication in our ontology, which I see as opposite of asserting vulgar views.

I mean, I disagree, but then, I think modal realism is fundamentally confused and is not really an account of modality so much as a science fiction story. — The Great Whatever

The view I'm exploring is different from modal realism.

These are not necessary to know unborn people don't exist. If your theory says otherwise, that is evidence agains your theory. — The Great Whatever

They're at least necessary to be clear on our terms and what we mean by being and existence. At the most, they constitute real substantive disagreements on what it is to exist. For example, you could be an eternalist who would say that unborn (presently nonexistent) babies exist. And you can't really appeal to intuition either, because a lot of people have the intuition that they're responsible in some way to their future children and family.

You can't just keep reasserting a premise that's under question. You have to make some argument.

It isn't 'my metaethical view.' Again, what metaethical view you have doesn't really matter. Pain's still going to be bad on its own terms without any care for your philosophy. — The Great Whatever

And yet there are all sorts of people out there that think pain is good, because it teaches them a lesson, helps them grow, or they're just good old-fashioned masochists. If you think they're mistaken somehow, you have to explain why.

No. Unborn people are not fictional characters. — The Great Whatever

Why not? What would qualify an unborn person being a fictional character? Does it have to be in a published novel or short story? What about unpublished narratives? Or narratives that exist in the space of conversation?

Even if one were a modal realist, unborn people would not be actual, and only actual entities can be affected by actions in the actual world. — The Great Whatever

Fair enough, and I'm not arguing that whatever kind of existence unborn/possible babies have is the kind that can be effected by actions in the actual world. I'm not sure I want (or need) to argue that, so maybe what I'm saying has little bearing on the discussion (i.e. moral duties to unborn children). But it does seem like a kind of existence that has effect.

A negative existential is a kind of statement, not a kind of person. If a negative existential is true of an unborn person, this just means, as I've said, they they don't exist. Sapientia has difficulty wrapping his head around this -- he claims to understand it, and then makes posts that are only intelligible if he does not. — The Great Whatever

That's why I said it can be quantified so. But I think first-order predicate logic viewed as operating so here kind of belies a less crudely materialistic view of existence. And then we get into broader questions of ontology, when we ask "what is there?" or what it means to exist. It's only further complicated when we ask "what does it mean for some being to exist such that moral duties could be applied to it?"

My comments were meant to draw attention to how, following this philosophical methodology, disagreements ultimately lead us to questions that go up the ladder of fundamental explanation, i.e. all the way to metaontology. They weren't necessarily meant to argue for a particular position, as much as they were meant to show why someone can have reasonable disagreements about what 'x doesn't exist' means, or entails in the context of the current discussion. Simply stating 'unborn babies don't exist' doesn't solve anything.

What is good or bad does not depend on an impotent 'ethical frame.' It doesn't matter what ethical frame you have, suffering is still bad, precisely because it doesn't care whether anyone 'looks at it' as bad. What you think, or how you look at it, doesn't matter -- suffering is bad on its own terms, and no alternative belief system tat claims it isn't can change this, as if mere belief or framing could stop reality.

Pleasure and pain are intrinsically good and bad, while everything else can only be extrinsically so. — The Great Whatever

You're essentially just saying your metaethical view is true by bare assertion. This is a form of argumentation that has little purchase in my mind.

Unborn people do not exist. — The Great Whatever

They can enjoy a particular kind of existence, as fictional characters. Or barring discussions on the existence of fictional entities, or modal realism, they can still be quantified as negative existentials that are nonetheless causally efficacious.

I'm obviously jumping into this discussion very late, and perhaps someone brought this up before, but why should we look at suffering as something defective with the state of things? There are other ethical frames, such as Nietzsche's, that see suffering as a necessity for any meaningful form of human transcendence. Pleasure or pain might take particular values only in an instrumental sense.

What really surprises me is that one lawfirm had all the data. — ssu

Keep in mind that Mossack Fonseca is the fourth-largest offshoring law firm. The three others are likely to contain a majority of the world's elite. It isn't surprising to me that law firms specializing in shell companies, offshoring, tax evasion, and various forms of subtle (questionably legal according to the state) large-stakes money laundering would be effected by the same rules of the economy that said elites organize, namely monopolization. When it comes to information containment, this is perhaps a weakness of theirs, and we see this weakness playing out on our screens. It also happens to be a structural weakness of the system (as evidenced by 2008 and 'too big to fail').

I get the sense that the NY Times was pissed off that they did not have access to the leaked papers, that they were not part of the consortium of newspapers chosen to investigate the leak. Apparently, these documents were leaked to a German newspaper about a year ago and hundreds of journalists have been working on them for quite a while. — Cavacava

The conspicuous lack of exposure to Americans (high level or otherwise) could be due to a number of different reasons, some of which are relatively innocuous and uninteresting, like most elite Americans might simply employ such financial services with firms within the US (gotta stay competitive in the tax evasion market, after all). But we should consider the importance of what you bring up. The UK is MF's largest country of origin for clients (second to Hong Kong), yet only represents a fraction of the spotlighted figures in the reports. Additionally, there are over 3,000 US companies that are clients for MF. These facts, combined with the observation that these reporters (who are responsible to their funders) poured over these papers for some time now, means that they made a conscious and deliberate effort to censor or withhold information that might be damaging to Americans.

The Guardian (one of the outlets privy to the leaks) launched the story framed primarily as an expose on Putin, despite the fact that Putin himself wasn't even named in the documents.

Out of 11.5 million documents, only 149 were released. There is then, a meta-story here of corruption and intrigue, that is groups with certain ideological agendas releasing attacks veiled as journalism and shocking exposes of the truth (and, how did the Australian government get ahold of these leaks?). I'm not fan of Putin or these (mosty) E.European and Arab oligarchs (Western ones are called 'business tycoons', sounds nicer doesn't it?), and would like to see them go down burning as much as the next guy, but the point is that there seems to be an obvious effort by someone to make the double-edged sword of transparency and information one-edged.

Nobody knows who the leaker was (and MF claims that it wasn't a leak from the inside of their firm, but from an outside attacker who gained access to their systems). Short of conspiratorial conjecture on who he/she/they were, they were at least incredibly stupid (or naive) when it came to choosing their journalists if total transparency and exposure were their aims.

But unless the sources deleted all traces of the information in their possession, there is nothing holding them back from leaking the data to Wikileaks or The Intercept.

TL;DR: Americans aren't law-abiding angels or less corrupt than others, it's just shitty and highly compromised journalism.

I'm picking up what you're putting down.

I'd add though that, while 'ego-enhancement' (and wanting to gain the most social capital or whatever), doesn't need the market to exist (and it existed in pre-modern, pre-capitalist times), such social drives change character and are conditioned by new social relations (basically, reordering the terms on which something counts as ego-enhancing or social capital).

As contemporary subjects of the postmodern capitalist consumer society, we're much more likely to see our commodities, our property, as extensions of not only our ego but of our self-constructed identities. Erik Eriksson of pre-modern agricultural Scandinavia is much less likely to have a crisis of identity (he knew 'his place', he's a farmer, like generations in his family before him, he prays to Odin and the gods, and so on). He gains social capital so long as he best fulfils his part in a larger whole.

With the introduction of the pressure of social mobility as a perquisite for social capital, we see an explosion of an invention called madness (and, I mean literally, mental and psychological disintegration). Identity is destabilized, narrowed from a relatedness to a community to a function of individual taste/belief, self-reliance and capacity to outcompete. It does not arise from the local community but a matter of patchworking and pastiche. We go out into the buffet of signs to incorporate them, to color our feathers and paint ourselves in a certain way. A function of 'the society of the spectacle' is that we're constantly concerned with engineering and patching our projected selves in the eye of the other.

Everyone's an expert on social media.

Of course Erik Eriksson probably wanted more cows than the other, and maybe even a bigger house and to be more respected in his community than others. But hoarding and lording (going outside of 'his place') would invite derision and social isolation.

The market seems to tailor to almost every possible desire and identification. But sometimes I think of how identity creation happens (at least in the US). Which usually happens in high school, and as we know, it is much more of a matter of falling into ready-made forms, premarketed identities with their own lines of consumption and associated commodities (the jocks, the nerds, the goths, the punks, the..well you get the idea). Identity-types that undoubtedly have a life in the popular media which instantiate their status as coherent forms, complete with sets of subculture mores and behaviors, attitudes, and codes of dress and consumption. The basic form persists into adulthood from this education in identity creation, basically the terms of being 'cultured' in America.

I don't know what you mean by "deification of the risk".

And I would agree that wealth and power insulates one from reality, or at least a major aspect of it.

EDIT after your EDIT (or maybe I misread it): I don't deify the rich, but their interests and value systems are organized into super-human structures (that is, mass institutions, governments, corporations). Super-human in the sense that they extend their power and influence in degrees immeasurably more powerful than single individuals (especially compared to members of largely powerless and marginalized groups). This isn't a function of some inborn supernatural qualities of the rich, it's due to their structural location in a nexus of power.

With my ideas, without the level of wealth and material control of elites, I can maybe convince a few people. I can even maybe make a viral post that gets seen by hundreds of thousands before it quickly disappears like a drop in a torrential stream of information and images. But I can't make multi-billion dollar deals with governments and have my ideas instantiated in mass infrastructure that organizes society.

To me, the truth comes from these places of the margins.

Think of it like a giant echo chamber, with the elite having control of the most sophisticated and powerful instruments and sound equipment, and endless funds to hire paid parrots to repeat what they're saying, producing 99% of the noise. They can pick up what other people are saying, but when they incorporate it and rephrase it in a game of telephone, what they say will (rationally) reflect their own interests.

Yes, everyone picks up signs from their environment and echo it, this is vital for ideology and power to function in the first place.

They do listen to what's coming 'from the bottom', only to the degree that it's necessary for mass-marketing. Yet the 'people at the bottom' are also socialized in the same echo chamber, responding to dominant cultural threads.

Occasionally you get art that derives from a counter-culture (some group of people making their own echo chamber), or just frustrated individuals shouting into the void in rebellion. But their lack of resources mean that they are unable to translate these narratives into material infrastructure that can continue to reproduce them. The result is that much of it is 'recuperated' by the elite, or whatever dominant institutions are there to suck it up, chew it, and spit it back out for its own purposes (Che t-shirts, the pacification of MLK featuring him in Apple and McDonalds commercials, etc.). Sometimes contrarian artists are lucky to have their work picked up and praised by institutions, but only when those institutions believe it will be profitable.

Originally subversive signs undergo a process of pacification, institutions stamp them with new mythologies and auras, changing their meaning in the popular imagination to confirm or reinforce whatever processes they need them to.

The problem with a mythical elite pulling all of the stings, and having such a wide influence on the unwashed masses is that these supposed elite didn't grow up on mars, they're just as much products of their cultures and environments, and just as easily manipulated by tall tales, and conditioning. We all condition each other everyday in subtle, and unsubtle ways, and no one is immune. — Wosret

This is a central part of my point and I don't think it contradicts my view of ideology and control. The elite grow up and exist in an idiosyncratic social milieu and moral universe. They select and reproduce these value systems when operating the institutions of cultural diffusion.

In many ways "genuine persuasion" in the sense that you mean it isn't required, even though it happens. With the 'attention economy', the mass of endless proliferation of images and narratives is more compromised by the market and dominated by large-scale corporate structures and state institutions. By dominating the standard for what's acceptable, setting the frame (setting up the audience to view something in a particular way), and ordering things in terms of value and attention, they can set the limits of ideological possibility, order our conception of the world on a cultural scale, and delegitimize and isolate counter-narratives. Many people think of themselves as sophisticated consumers of culture and are incredulous to the mass media, but nobody can escape the influence of one's environment (especially, in my view, if they are philosophically illiterate, but that's another discussion).

It's a difference between Edward Smith the III inheriting his father's media conglomerate, and Joe the construction worker having control over..what, his Facebook posts? One can make raids on the consciousness of a culture, the other can get a few 'likes'.

They'll never have the influence of good author, artist, or musician -- whom are surely corruptible, and even with the best of interests are writing from their own value sets, and dispositions, though in a far less conscious way than such corporate cabals. — Wosret

The artworld itself is not immune to recuperation and compromise but is fully enveloped in this process, not just through commodification and mechanical reproduction, but also as a world largely dominated by a privileged leisure class. Our world is a much different world from, say, the modernists, where many of them were publishing in widely-distributed political and literary magazines (Joyce's Ulysses was first serially published in an anarchist magazine, for example). The author today now must navigate between large corporate publishing companies who produce easily digestible mass-marketed popular novels with editors that assume a large degree of control over content for 'profitability', and potentially not being read and persisting in marginal irrelevance by self-publishing or going with smaller publishers who do not have the organizational and institutional resources for wide distribution to compete on any scale compared to that of the big conglomerates.

I just don't think that I know of any culture that actually upheld cruelty, malicious violence, or unfairness up as ideals. I think that we are all capable of enjoying the misery and harm of people that deserve it, and it requires misinformation, propaganda, and the overshadowing of the visceral force of actions by ideological commitments, and rationalizations. — Wosret

Our culture does it, and pretty much every culture in some form or another and to some degree of severity or another. The point is that in doing so, we're conditioned to not see such ideals as 'cruel, malicious, and unfair.'

Very few people with power (or otherwise) fully believe they're playing the part of the villain. Even Hitler thought he was doing good.

The trouble with the conspiracy theories about the media is that the ruling cliques that supposedly are in charge of the conspiracies would have to be extremely and unbelievably knowledgeable to have enough insight to know how to manipulate 300 million people in the right way (for their advantage). They would have to know how millions and millions of people would react to a given story, and know the upsides and downsides of all their media manipulations. They would have to be unnaturally imaginative, insightful, ingenious, clever, inventive -- all the time, for decades on end. — Bitter Crank

Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, penned the following in his book Propaganda:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind."

Bernays was one of the principle architects of modern advertising, and a conscious switch from war-era models of nation-state propaganda and mass cultural manipulation through totalizing political grand narratives to the commercial 'exploitation' and 'channelling' of crowd libidinal energies by a corporate elite into a consumer culture. He used Freudian psychoanalytic theories to develop advertising for major corporations after working for the Wilson administration, and later working with United Fruit Company and the CIA in overthrowing the democratically elected government in Guatemala in the '54 coup, leading to a series of US-backed right-wing dictatorships that committed forms of genocide.

Many corporations and advertising firms still use psychoanalytic techniques developed by Bernays, in efforts to subliminally influence and seduce consumers, obviously now more modulated by empirical and statistical methodologies, using test-groups and so on.

'Conspiracy' has a tinge of the secret cabal, of a completely organized (and competent) malicious intent at the highest levels. There is a 'conspiracy' in the sense that advertising and what's prioritized in the media, and how narratives are constructed, are done intentionally by "cabals" (boards of directors, corporate PR teams, etc.). But the word 'conspiracy' also betrays the observation that power and its ideologies are reproduced in more autonomous ways, by actors and structures all the way down the pyramid. It may be the case that 'intentions' at the top are 'good', but institutions of information and ideological diffusion are still hierarchical structures, the narratives are controlled (even if in self-selecting mechanisms) by a certain strata who exist in a peculiar social milieu and moral universe. It is in this sense that the 'ruling ideology of a culture is the ideology of the ruling class'. It's not the sexy mythic illuminati with robes committing blood sacrifices to Moloch in secret subterranean Medieval chambers, but corporate suits in skyscrapers answering to their investors. Whether they like cosplay and exclusive clubs with rituals is of little consequence to the truth of the matter.

No one can force you to watch, agree with, or listen to anything. I suggested studies that showed that people's values are not significantly altered by media exposure. For instance, people are not made violent by watching violent movies, or playing violent video games. Studies I saw suggested that exposure to political propaganda increased people's knowledge of issues, and view points on the subject, but didn't really sway their opinions of them. — Wosret

I think when it comes to looking at the broad cultural effects of media, it is a bit wrong-headed to rest our conclusions on being able to demonstrate a direct and (mostly) immediate causal link between the consumption of some media and an individual's actions. It doesn't really work like that, although, it does happen at times. Arthur Bremer was moved to shoot George Wallace after watching "A Clockwork Orange", he published his memoir which provided the inspiration for "Taxi Driver", John Hinckley in turn became obsessed with the film and Jodie Foster, wishing to impress her by attempting to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Although even in these cases, I believe there is something more complex and pernicious going on that gets at the broad ideologies and values of a cultural environment, of which these particular films and individual actions are just symptoms.

There's a difference between saying:

(1) The media directly causes individual acts of 'X'

and

(2) As a culture, we treat acts of X as normal or natural because of a host of different reasons, one of which is X's frequent reproduction in the media in normalizing ways.

The type of evidence you're looking for is more relevant in attempting to prove claims of the sort (1), while we don't necessarily need a wealth of such evidence to prove (2). If we hold (2), we can say that 'the media causes violence' only insofar as it proliferates ideologies and value systems that reproduce inherently violent social relations; on a whole, rape is more likely to happen in a culture that considers it normal and even hides the violence inherent in the act.

Ownership came into being with agriculture, because you have to invest work for future reward. So you need ownership for culture. It is always open to you to be a hunter gatherer or robber pillager. There's nothing tacit about the social contract unless you don't bother to think about it and the alternatives. — unenlightened

'Ownership' is a legal contrivance created to regulate a situation and set of practices that were already at work in society before it was written into law. Much of early (and even Medieval) agriculture was done on "commons". As it happened as a matter of historical material circumstances, land was often taken by force and without the general consent of society and was often met with resistance (see the practices of enclosure in England for example). The 'owners' were only recognized and designated as such later in the law, complete with a host of legal protections, often because they and other more wealthy peasantry used their influence and control over the state to benefit their own interests.

Of course 'ownership' in a broad sense, that is, the effective control of something (and exclusivity to whatever surplus is gained from it), existed in varying forms in pre-modern times. But 'ownership' is a legal concept, and it would do us good not to project our modern sense of the term onto history, or to justify our modern legal conception of it as 'natural' through the use of ahistorical fictions, such as...

I brought up 'state of nature' and I think your strictures are wide of the mark. From Rousseau to Rawls thinkers have addressed these issues by working from these 'fables', because they arguably make good starting-points, they're not cunning devices conjured up by the Koch Brothers so we don't see things clearly — mcdoodle

The 'state of nature' is a fiction, and as such functions as to frame the discussion and our general orientation toward the question. It sets limits and boundaries on what is a possible or acceptable answer. Fictions are useful, but as they are written, they are useful toward certain ends. In Hobbes' case, it was particularly useful to justify a particular nexus of power, to make this particular form of power and hierarchy seem natural in the general course of man's secular rise from a fallen state, and of course the imposition of British settler and colonial states on indigenous populations. Locke's depiction of life in the 'state of nature' is different from Hobbes' 'nasty, brutish, and short' one, yet of course it's interesting that he manages to smuggle modern concepts of property ownership into the 'necessary' development of civilization, which of course proved handy as the British were dispossessing native Americans of their land.

A starting point of a fiction such as the 'state of nature' of course has its particular instrumental and discursive conveniences, especially with a particular philosophical methodology in mind, than the complex, messy, and diachronic one of history. But I think it's more beneficial to approach coercion (and power in general) it at it exists in a continuous historical dialectic, because that is where we must (and any human in any moment in time), must always already find ourselves starting from.

Our approach to the question is then transformed from a largely metaphysical-moral one to a largely historical and political one. There isn't a set of necessary and sufficient conditions as to 'when' coercion is acceptable to be universally applied across disparate concrete historical situations. Yes, rephrasing the question from 'is coercion acceptable' to 'when is it acceptable', as does, is on the right track. But I would go further and say it is a question of, who is using coercion and to what ends? And what particular historical 'problem' are they responding to?

More topical to the OP, since his posting, Bernie has swept Washington, Hawaii, and Alaska. But it is not enough, as it is likely Hillary will sweep New York, and possibly California. And they will continue to represent the preferences of superdelegates as 'earned'..

However, there might be hope of a contested convention, in the event that a portion of superdelegates are all that decide the nomination. I find this situation more hopeful, as it will help generate a narrative and national recognition of the Democratic Party as inherently undemocratic, as it exists in any case. It could help lead to masses of people (finally) breaking away from the Dems and carving out genuine left alternatives, no longer under the same illusions that the party is there to motivate their interests in the halls of power. One can hope. Electing one president won't produce the changes that are needed anyway. There will be no deus ex machina.

Having left the United States myself for some time (albeit nowhere long as your stated 23 years), encountered countless travellers from all across the world (Western and otherwise), I can only conclude that the US doesn't have a monopoly on ignorance. My anecdotal impressions is that Western Europeans have a generally better education, but in the end this just produces a certain population of individuals who know just enough to discuss familiar topics superficially to appear reasoned, cultured, and sophisticated, but cannot carry through with much depth or much else resembling creative risks outside of the dominant ideologies. Western Europe has its fair share of racism and far-right ignorance. Austria's fascist 'Freedom Party' is gaining ground with 20.5% of the national vote in 2013 (more than 30% in Vienna), pulling out ahead in some state elections. A fascist is a fascist, I don't really care if they look like a poor rural American or an 'educated' and cultured city-dwelling European.

In fact, as ideological production centers, the general failure of K-12 schools in the US means that many live outside of the cognitive regulatory reach of the state apparatus. Incredulous to grand narratives, distrusting of representatives of authority. Who cares if you got the badge and blue uniform Mr. Pig Man, who cares if you're legally 'right', that the assertion of your authority through violence in all of its felt, raw irrationality of the immediacy has behind it an abstract apparatus and sign, an endless codex written in non-human language, stored away in digital libraries and off-limits spaces, inflexible to circumstance and the little imperfections of the ebb and flow of bare life. Reference to a by-law does not justify legal authority except through circular reasoning. I am here. I speak myself, I live these streets and know who you really represent. It is the talk and murmur of my fellow prisoners. Your flag is a jolly-roger, gun-slinging pinkertons sanctioned by statesmen who speak between two fasces, of 'law and order', to protect the highest bidder and the general state of things.

Of course it also means a general deterioration of the social body, the capacity to readily identify as a part of a larger whole. Every individual is a private corporation, taking risks and making investments; I have no ethical responsibility in my actions so long as it's legal, it's up to the big other, the government, to step in and regulate it. Responsibility and moral agency deferred, children under the loving and watchful care of big daddy. Literature used to be our great secular transcendence, and the chorus of the rooted community joined in common interest and political song, the totalizing narratives of the early 20th Century (in its wonderful as well as horrific forms). In its place, we turn toward the spectacle, toward the news and its constant mood of some fresh new catastrophe. Political theatre has turned into show business. And Trump knows show business.

All of this is a global process, and I don't see Americans as being uniquely effected by it.

We're obviously working with different definitions. Going by the traditional usage of those terms in the literature, having both 'private property with the common/collective ownership of the means of production' is contradictory by definition.

I suspect by 'private property' you mean something like 'personal property' (along the lines of your shelter, computer, television, and so on)?

No. — Thorongil

Fair enough.

We're all allowed to contradict ourselves.

We all contain multitudes.

private property...
but with common/cooperative ownership of the means of production — Thorongil

Pick one.

Seems like a lot of people's posts are shot-through with an undercurrent of contradiction; that is, between our 'ideal-state' and what we could reasonably expect ('ideal state heavily attenuated by necessity and circumstance'?). Whatever, I'll give you my ideal:

Generalized label: libertarian-communism, left-anarchism (in this historical situation, more broadly speaking I fluctuate between 'Deleuzian 'from the left/minority' and at times a more Badiouian approach of politics as a truth procedure/fidelity to the evental horizon of 'Truth')
Form of government: Libertarian Municipalism
Form of economy: The collective democratic ownership/control of the means of production, greatly aided by some advanced Project Cybersyn-type system, push to fully automate the boring tasks
Abortion: Legal, with comprehensive resources to make it as accessible and healthy as possible along with other forms of contraception and birth control
Gay marriage: Yeah why not?
Death penalty: No, though things become more complicated when it comes to war criminals and tyrants
Euthanasia: Right to assisted suicide
Campaign finance: In this system? Publicly funded campaigns, perhaps only allowing for one-time donations no greater than $50 or some not-so-arbitrary low figure
Surveillance: No mass 'passive dragnet surveillance', targeted probably allowed in certain cases but heavily watched over by some legal/democratic mechanism
Health care: Free universal access, no private hospital/health insurance
Immigration: Mostly free unhindered movement, regulation according to some post-nation-state schema according to need for labour/protection of the environment and so on
Education: See Paulo Freire, plus free access at all stages (K-Doctoral)
Environmental policy: Overcome capitalism, transfer to green energy, research fusion
Gun policy: Legal
Drug policy: Legal, healthcare programs for those that want to overcome addictions
Foreign policy: Internationalism, anti-imperialism, context-dependent (Cuba's intervention in Angola was great, US intervention in Vietnam was horrible).

Of course this is my utopian ideal-type and there's a very low probability it'll actually happen. But not sure what else the OP would be asking for.

In the past the sort of thing that is now on TV for the whole world to watch would have taken place in a private bar room among cigar-smoking political bosses.

Like making sausage and law, some of these things are just not fit to be seen by the public. — Bitter Crank

Why not? Ideally, the spaces where the actual decision-making is happening should be the most public. Although I'm reminded of something that Yanis Veroufakis said about his time in negotiations with EU officials and creditors (I don't remember the particular interview or article where he said it); he said something to the effect that people would be surprised about the demeanour and callous disregard for democratic principles in these behind-the-scenes negotiations, but if it were publicly televised or something, they would just have those same behind-the-scenes discussions before the 'official' televised ones. Maybe we should keep cameras on figures of power throughout their entire day and catalogue all of their communications. If they have nothing to hide, then they have nothing to fear ;) .

I actually don't care for the pretence of 'respectability' and 'civil conduct', I'm more offended by the level of stupidity and debasement of public political discourse.

We could even go back a couple hundred years when US politicians would challenge each other to fight-to-the-death duels. We could even televise it and handout publicly-funded instant popcorn available at any post office or public library.

Id: Trump, Ego: Rubio, Superego: Cruz

This is the very nonsense I've been trying to avoid. Of course anyone can sit around and hypothesize a possible situation where a Marxist government would protect individual rights. That would be a wonderful exercise I suppose. But, to the extent that economic theories can be actually implemented, the question of whether Marxist governments have been protectors of individual rights is an empirical question. It's the same old argument that's been made for decades and decades: Marxism isn't per se bad, it just happens to be every time it's been attempted. — Hanover

Okay, have you conducted an empirical study of 'Marxist governments' and its level of totalitarian power over the individual? What 'Marxist states' do this, have there ever been any that went against the rule, and exactly what features that are 'Marxist' lead, empirically speaking, to such totalitarianism?

The problem is that you think you're being empirical and historical, but you are in fact very ahistorical and ideological. You point at China or Vietnam as evidence, yet these are highly capitalist societies, and you isolate them from the context of oppressive states (arguably more-so) that are nominally capitalist and US allies, i.e. Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Saudia Arabia, and so on and so on. You are unable to demonstrate, historically speaking, why 'Marxism' necessarily involves totalitarianism. On the other hand, I have shown why capitalism as an economic system, to the extent that it is actually implemented and in theory, necessarily involves unequal power relations enforced through coercive apparatuses that thwarts the will of the individual.

We're all slaves under this definition. I have to eat, so I am a slave to food. Equating working at McDonalds to slave working the fields is hyperbole and a bit of an insult to those suffering slavery. We all have to work. Food doesn't fall from the sky. How you choose to work is your choice, but no one is making you work at McDonalds are in any particular job you don't want to. — Hanover

No not really. 'Nature' isn't an authority you can appeal to, it doesn't have any characteristics of agency to subjugate you for its own self-interest. The universal fact that we have to eat to survive is just a brute fact. It's a property of our universal facticity as natural, living, fleshy animals that has no meaning in-itself. It just is. On the other hand, capitalism is a social system. Anyone that tries to argue that a social system 'just is' rooted in the natural and cosmological state of things is spewing ideology (that is, in my view, a primary role of ideology), whether it be 'the divine right of kings', the tripartite estates system, the 'natural harmony' of the Indian caste system, or capitalists justifying inequality on some grounds of 'survival of the fittest'.

We all have to eat and contribute work toward being able to eat, but that doesn't automatically mean it has to happen under hierarchical and coercive contexts. There is no 'outside' of capitalism that someone who wants to opt-out can go to, they're coerced into this social relation of a few owning everything and the rest having nothing but their labour to sell for wages. No where did I 'equate' working at McDonalds to a field-slave, but I did compare them. In my view, to write off the really-existing oppressive conditions that such workers have to endure unless they want to starve and go homeless, and to just pretend like they enjoy all of the freedoms to choose types of work that any middle or upper class person with few or no restrictions can is an insult. And yes, they are being coerced into work at McDonalds or a particular type of work. The fact that you think otherwise tells me you've never experienced being in such a position and you live in your privileged bubble where you think everyone's experience is the same as your own.

Of course it is. Without capitalistic initiatives, Vietnam's economy wouldn't be thriving and it would be a far more miserable place to live. Capitalism is saving Vietnam from its failed communistic system. That is pretty obvious even if it pisses you off. — Hanover

It's not obvious at all. Any country that is embargoed, bombed to the stone age, and invaded/attacked by its neighbors for trying to adopt some system or another is set up to fail. This once again gets to your ahistorical and decontextual narratives. In your ideological universe, you don't have to know any of the historical circumstances why something happens, just a waving-of-the-hand and saying 'because communism' suffices for you.

You don't know anything about contemporary Vietnam, let alone its history, but you still seem confident that you're equipped to opine about broad and complex matters such as political economy. Here's just a few reasons why your narrative turns out to be too simplistic upon closer inspection of the situation: while GDP per capita is increasing, that income generation is intensified into the hands of an elite class, much of the development here is happening with unsustainable levels of debt, they're deteriorating the environment and the mechanisms that would have previously enabled them to control the oncoming sea-water that is rendering much of the agricultural land in the delta useless, public hospitals are deteriorating in favour of expensive private hospitals the vast majority of people cannot afford, malls, and rich condominium developments where nobody lives but their sole purpose is for the rich to buy and sell on the market. Come to Vietnam in 50 years when a majority of their population is expected to be displaced from rising sea-levels due to climate change, another brilliant innovation gifted to us by modern capitalism. The TPP will price a majority of the population out of medicines, and scary 'socialist' programs that are a matter of life and death for many people are deteriorated by 'economic liberalisation' requirements for foreign investment. If it wasn't for the last vestiges of socialist policies, they wouldn't have universal health care and education, something that aids the poor, however low-quality that care is due to the country's lack of resources and wealth, compared to countries of comparable GDP per capita that didn't go through 'evil communism'. I suspect you're not interested in complicating matters for a better picture of reality however, especially when it contradicts your simplistic ideological narratives. I don't purport to have all the answers, and I would disagree with someone that says 20th Century-style socialism is the easy answer, but I at least try to understand the roots of the problem.

I just think you're stuck in trying to evaluate Marxism as an intellectual enterprise as opposed to looking at what has happened when it has been implemented. The proof is in the pudding, not in the recipe. — Hanover

I look at history too, but the problem is you have to actually know what you're talking about. Turns out, proving 'Marxism is a failure' might actually require knowing what Marxism is and getting a more nuanced view of history.

No, there are some governments that hold that certain principles are self evident and that derive from nature and cannot be infringed upon. The government is understood as the protector of those inherent rights, as opposed to the grantor of those rights. — Hanover

You're just spewing ideology but missing the point. Those same governments that place restrictions on government to protect individual rights also have laws that give the state vast powers over individuals, and these powers are enforceable with violence. Some of these powers are biopolitical: the ability to determine matters of life and death and to regulate life. If the state has these powers, somewhere in its legal corpus it is maintaining the state's "supremacy over the individual" in some domain of life or another. Somehow you are under the illusion that this is entirely unique to 'communist governments'.

Your original claim was that communist charters involve setting up a 'supremacy of the state or collective over the individual', and it is this feature that necessarily leads it to totalitarianism. Yet clearly Western capitalist states have this feature. If you hold that a capitalist government can have this feature yet protect individual rights, then mutatis mutandis communist governments can. You haven't established why, in principle, communist forms of government necessarily cannot protect individual rights. I suspect this is because you don't know what you're talking about, and haven't actually read any Marxist political theory.

This characterizes Marxist governments as nothing other than protectors against capitalism, as if they have no proactive goal of their own. — Hanover

Fair enough, and that may be a limitation of my wording. But I figured "Marxists want to create a system" implies some proactive goal. The founders of the U.S. system 'wanted to create a system that protected individuals (actually white, property-owning, men) from the whims of arbitrary aristocratic tyranny'. Even if it sounds like an entirely negative formulation, it implies the creation of new political forms to provide such protections.

It's hard to coherently speak of self-determination when you suggest it doesn't exist. If I voluntarily choose a job that requires behavior that I find oppressive, then one must ask why I chose it unless I find the pros of that job outweigh the cons, which simply means I've made a rational choice. If you're suggesting that I was forced to take that job because I was forced not to have adequate skills to find other employment, then I don't know what you mean by choice or self-determination. That is to say, if you don't like wearing a hair net at McDonalds because it makes you look silly, then don't work there. — Hanover

I'm not sure what you mean at all. How can we not speak coherently of self-determination when it is suppressed?

Well, for the vast majority of McDonalds workers, that isn't a 'free choice', in the sense that a choice is a 'free choice' only if it happens under non-coercive conditions. If they decide they don't like working 60 hours a week at McDonalds and forced to wear stupid attire and flair and quit their job, then they're threatened with the prospect of going homeless, racking up debts and hurting their credit score, and not eating. And if they have children then those things are over their heads too. They are coerced into hierarchical forms of labour. The point is that there is a power relation embedded in the relationship between capital and labour. There are owners that get to decide matters of life and death for the majority of people. By your reasoning, slaves have self-determination and freedom of choice because if they don't like working for their masters then they can just try to run away or just stop working all together. Of course that's absurd, because we know it's not 'free' because such a choice is not happening under non-coercive conditions, i.e. they're likely to get flogged, beaten, or lynched.

And please don't give me the predictable crap about how wage-labour is not the same thing as slavery. Look at the point I'm trying to toy out with the comparison.

Oh, yes, nothing like a single government media outlet to get your news from. Although I understand that you don't really care about the market force of demand, maybe ask yourself why the trail of immigrants moves from Vietnam to the US and not the other way around. — Hanover

Oh the 'market force of demand' is alive and well in Vietnam.

As if the shitty corporate media in the US owned by a handful of conglomerates provides a vibrant democratic interchange of journalistic integrity. Get a grip man. And actually foreign news outlets are readily available just a couple of clicks away with your television remote. I'm not saying totally state-owned news channels is great and fantastic, just these condescending orientalist narratives coming from the West are deeply hypocritical and missing a sense of proportion. Yeah the news outlets are owned by the state, but there also aren't ghettos with an occupying militarized police force shooting blacks and latinos either.

They move to the US because that's where the wealth is. It doesn't matter if it was a vibrant democracy here, many are still poor. And the rich Viets like going to the West so they can buy up property to avoid taxes and launder money, a corruption that the West is more than glad to reinforce and partake in. Also the West is constantly glorified in the media, that is mostly Hollywood movies and such. As per the boat people, enforcing an embargo on a poor country that already endured decades of war certainly didn't help (the US dropped four times as much tonnage in explosives on this region than that used in all of WWII), and it's demonstrable that if they didn't have the subsidy system, a desperate situation would have turned into a humanitarian calamity. It also coincided with the war with the Khmer Rouge and the Chinese invasion. Do people also want to move because of the government and corruption? Yeah sure, but it's really naive and simplistic to pretend like this vast change in society to a capitalist market system has nothing to do with it. You point at governments here and say 'bad!' yet you defend the very systems and structures that make it worse.

And such is my point: trying to declare Marxism a failure simply results in its redefinition where someone cries out "yeah, but that's not really Marxism." The claim "Marxism doesn't work" becomes unfalsifiable, meaning it is a meaningless claim — Hanover

Yet I was implying that 'Marxism doesn't work' is a meaningless claim. You're making it not me. 'Marxism' isn't a definite set of principles or a political and economic system that we can test whether or not it 'works'. It's an intellectual and political tradition. You can argue that that tradition is wrong-headed for certain reasons, or that certain ideas within the tradition were failures, but then you might have to treat them like actual philosophers and read them. Yuck.

Even getting a charitable grasp from exegeses would work.

I know, but you'll keep talking to me about it because you can't help yourself not to. It's just too near and dear to your heart for some reason. — Hanover

Hah, at this point I'm more motivated out of sense of fidelity to philosophy than Marxism. You're intellectual laziness and dogmatism is too much to be left ungauded.

The distinction is that a Marxist government would have to set forth Marxist principles within its constitution and it would necessarily begin with the notion that the state (or community, or whatever you wish to call the collective) maintains some level of supremacy over the individual. It is that notion that leads to the totalitarianism that is characteristic of every state that considers itself Marxist. Such places have never been bastions of individual rights. And so when the proletariat votes, should it vote for anything over the subjugation of the person to the collective, then it has redefined it's god. — Hanover

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. Don't all governments necessarily back up their authority on principles that the state maintains some level of supremacy over the individual? I cannot flaunt laws at my pleasure and refuse to pay taxes lest I meet the coercive violence of the state, i.e. get shot, tased, and/or thrown in jail. How is this unique to nominally communist countries?

And why would a Marxist charter necessarily include such measures? Marxists want to create a system where the state isn't a coercive apparatus for the capitalist class to enforce their unequal power relation with labour and the economically/politically excluded. Large political and economic forces suppress the vast majority of individuals in capitalist societies. Freedom of expression and self-determination suddenly magically disappear when you enter the workplace, where most people spend a majority of their waking life. Owners of firms can make decisions that are life-altering and sometimes matters of life and death for workers without any mechanism for their input or consent, simply when it makes sense to maximize profit for an elite of shareholders. The state is beholden to and almost entirely controlled by the minority of owners of capital. Forms of oppressive power exist which are detrimental to the individual in that it creates layers and forms of alienation. It excludes and represses minority groups and creates racial divisions. The question is, which individuals are you protecting by favouring capitalist social relations and political formations?

You miss my perspective is all. You can read Marx as a philosopher or you can read him as a politician. The former leaves us having all sorts of heady discussions about alternative ways to structure our society, and perhaps we can talk about revolutions and bringing down the oppressive structures so prevalent in our society (despite the fact that the oppressive structures in non-Marxist countries are child's play when compared to those in Marxist countries). The latter leaves us with a very different discussion. We stop caring about theories, hypotheticals, and endless debates in smoke filled rooms. We simply ask: does this work? It seems not to. You've built a hell of a mousetrap, but it just doesn't catch mice.

So, sure, I could go about discussing Marx like many discuss Descartes (for example). Interesting stuff with a massive academic history that really doesn't matter outside of academic settings. That, though, isn't why he's being discussed. You guys are discussing him like he ought to matter outside of academia. — Hanover

So basically you've convinced yourself that by calling Marx a 'politician', you can dismiss an entire body of work and say that it's flawed without ever having to read it or understand it. That's pretty convenient. I should have tried that trick in my philosophy program in college. I can't believe philosophers haven't found out that devastating way of arguing yet.

Evaluating whether 'Marxism works' requires knowing what 'Marxism' is, which is already demanding that we treat his work in philosophical manners in interpretive debate, and then understanding the historical contexts in which actors say they are implementing 'Marxist' theories. We must then be able to argue that certain 'failures' are due to the foundational logic of 'Marxism' and not any other factor (is the failed-state of Somalia 'evidence' of the failure of parliamentary systems? Of capitalism? What counts as 'failing'?). Not saying you can't make the argument, just saying that there isn't even much of an argument here yet. Spoiler alert: 'Marxism' isn't a set of doctrines but a tradition of many different writers disagreeing with each other.

(despite the fact that the oppressive structures in non-Marxist countries are child's play when compared to those in Marxist countries) — Hanover

For what it's worth, I'm an American living in one of those scary supposedly 'Marxist' countries (Vietnam), and I can tell you from first hand experience that a) there is nothing meaningfully Marxist about the organization of society, except for perhaps some terminology and government posters, and b) to say that oppressive structures in the US are "child's play" compared to here is more than simply hyperbole, it's blatantly false and the truth is arguably the opposite in certain aspects. Corruption, undemocratic political form, exploitation, are all interlinked with the overwhelming and extremely fast in-flow of capital and the complete overturning of society by the wholesale integration into global capitalist markets. Why these countries turned out the way they did is a much more complex and complicated affair than just waving one's hand and saying 'because communism'. And for what it's worth, I think the converse is too simplistic also, that is to say that it is only because of outside factors that caused the failure of 20th Century-style socialism and there's nothing wrong with that form of socialism itself.

But I don't see any virtue in further discussing these contexts or arguing why Marx matters outside of academia if you're unashamedly sticking to intellectual laziness and dogmatism.

There would have to be a limitation placed on such a democracy which would require that it adhere to the principle that each must contribute to the best of their ability and each is entitled to his fair share. That is, you can't just assert there will be an open democracy with each voting his individual conscience for whatever he wants, else there most certainly will be some group of people who will vote for privatization and capitalism. which would defeat the whole point of enterprise. In fact, I'd expect that no rule could be passed (even should it emanate from the worker's council) that does not require certain behavior consistent with working for the collective. Those restrictions placed on democracy are what will (and has) led to totalitarianism within communist systems. — Hanover

Of course there are certain restrictions and limitations. I don't think anyone is claiming otherwise. Like I said in the sentence prior to the one you quoted, it would defeat the purpose if any one individual can single-handedly suspend the conditions on which collective democratic control of society rest. This is nothing peculiar to alternative leftist democratic forms. All representative political systems have foundational legal frameworks that organize its form. And it's not exactly a new idea that these restrictions are designed to be in service to democracy by protecting the conditions in which it can meaningfully exist by preventing arbitrary consolidations of power. Think Montesquieu and the separation of powers. Political and human rights do not simply exist as concrete abstract objects somewhere that will flourish when all restrictions are thrown off as fetters, they're written into law. It's a matter of inventing jurisprudences that say this or that is no longer possible. A Marxist would have it that we can easily come up with jurisprudences that are far more democratic than the ones we have now, given that the frameworks we have (the U.S. constitution, the magna carta, etc.) are designed to set up a political system that privileges capital and restricts democracy from the economic sphere of society. By your reasoning, any system with 'restrictions' (i.e. all of them) lead directly to totalitarianism.

You're going to have to do more argumentative work to establish that political systems proposed by Marxists always and necessarily lead to totalitarianism.

Or we can simply finally recognize that Marxism is an unworkable theory in practice and that constant efforts to explain how it might work make it a meaningless tautology where it's just true that if we all live together as one, we'll be happy. — Hanover

A bare assertion does not an argument make.

You purport to have figured out everything wrong with Marx's arguments when you're obviously coming from a place of ignorance. Have you even read Marx, let alone tried to extend the least bit of charitability in trying to understand his arguments? Attacking strawmen gets tiring, and it is quite unfortunate because I'd really like to hear intelligent criticisms of Marx from perspectives that know what he's talking about. I don't believe everything Marx says, but I try to understand what he says before evaluating it.

The Dialogic Imagination - Mikhail Bakhtin

The Ecology of Freedom - Murray Bookchin

Libra - Don DeLillo

I have Transcritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani and Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism by Tran Duc Thao on my immediate list but I'm trying to convince myself to not keep starting books when I'm in the middle of others (already not working as you can see).

If he only thought that people ought to be concerned about the public good, but recognized they wouldn't be, then that would suggest he fully intended communism to be totalitarian, else how else would the people do something they didn't want to do? — Hanover

Actually Marx is occasionally criticized by political theorists within the Marxist tradition for having too overly-emphasized groups of people as self-interested economic actors. Which is why I find criticisms like these slightly humorous when they pop up. After the failures of the revolutions of 1848, he figured that the bourgeoisie couldn't be the source for true revolutionary agency because at a certain point it goes against their interests as a class. According to this view, the character of a political revolution is shaped by the social milieu of its primary actors, establishing ideologies and institutions with the intended effect of ensuring the reproduction of the conditions in which said actors could flourish (hence analyses that show that even the French revolution only took on more radical and less accommodating characteristics when the sans-culottes were agitated and formed the majority of bodies in political actions). He thought that the proletariat had become the true revolutionary class because it is in their self-interest to abolish themselves as a class, i.e. overturn social relations that involve their exploitation as an inherent part of its functioning logic. Whether he was ultimately right about this latter point is another question, but regardless I don't think you could fault him for believing some-such idea about how human nature is selfless or immediately directed to the public good.

He didn't really write much about what communism should or should not be, but forms of more direct democracy argued for by people in the tradition doesn't mean it's completely unorganized. It's not the 'honor system', as that would kind of defeat the purpose if any one individual could single-handedly undermine the conditions of collective ownership and control of the economic and political spheres. The 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is supposed to designate such a system, in which total political power emanates from democratic worker councils and governmental/inter-local institutions are meant largely as coordinating bodies for carrying out decisions coming from them. Of course we can all make criticisms of Marx and update it to more contemporary conditions. But if machines are going to be our betters 'at the top', I hope there are mechanisms in place which puts 'the top' in service to humanity and not the other way around (which isn't to say human masters are any better). The dangers of automation isn't so much a technological issue, but a political one of flow of power and resources. Or better yet, the technological question is always already a political one.

You misunderstand what I mean by form, and characteristics. I don't recall him talking about sensory modalities, chronology, spacial, or physical characteristics. Talking about the form as in what particular symbols, and the forms they take in essence stand for, is talking about the content, and not the form in the sense that I mean in. — Wosret

I don't recall him focusing specifically on spacial or physical characteristics as a part of "form" either. But I suspect Freud would consider those aspects a part of the "manifest content" of the dream. What he considers the form of a dream is its ''dreamwork'', or the particular logic, composition, and ordering of specific images and thoughts. For example, he considers why dreams appear distorted, "condensation", or how seemingly disparate images and thoughts are combined into one, and ''displacement", or how the dream redirects subconscious thoughts or desires into seemingly unrelated contents.

You definitely read too much into my quip about dreams all being about dicks, although I do think that dreams are not nearly as libidinally charged as Freud thought that they were, that his Platonic symbolic essentialism was malarkey, and there is no such thing as the unconscious, preconscious, or any of that. — Wosret

I don't think they are as libidinally charged as he argues either, but that might come down to the particular repressions of an individual and society. Freud's social context was much more prudish. But I don't think you need to be committed to a 'pansexualism' to gather valuable ideas from Freud. Unfortunately, I think references to this are often used in unfair dismissals of Freud.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'Platonic symbolic essentialism'.

"Running through the day's activities" is poor phrasing. It makes it sound like some kind of playback mechanism. So, if that's the way the researchers you've read are putting it, they're putting it badly. I see it more as a processing of excess/latent/repressed emotional energy. The result doesn't have to look like the day's events at all. But it's often easy - for me at least - to link the nature of my dreams to events of emotional salience occurring during the day. There's a kind of symbolic grammar to dreams that's satisfying to untangle. — Baden

Fair enough. I agree that it's poor phrasing, and maybe I'm getting it from pop psych characterizations of the research. I'm by no means well-versed in this type of research, but I wonder how the processing of 'excess/latent/repressed emotional energy' could be formulated in the framework of empirical psychology to be tested.

I pretty much agree with this, but I think there's another way of looking at it. Kant regarded metaphysics as a natural disposition, and if this is the perennial originary seed of philosophy as a "science" (in Kant's terms, meaning a rigorous and productive discipline) it is far from trivial. To say that the ability or inclination to do philosophy--by which you mean to do it right--is something rare, and not characteristic of human beings, is not to deny darth's comment that "philosophy is something that is inherently part of a human being". — jamalrob

This is a fair observation and one that I wouldn't object to. But I think there's something worth pointing out about philosophy as a craft. As per my earlier comments regarding Heidegger's observation that a human being is a kind of being (Dasein) for which its own being is a concern, I don't think this is enough in my eyes when we're talking about philosophy. I would agree with H's observations that it's a fundamental aspect of the kinds of beings we are (qua being-in-the-world) to take issue with, and care and concern, with the world in which we're engaged. So for example, it's an aspect of being human to consider the natural world as 'mine', i.e. make sense of it as an extension of utility or how it relates to humanity, and thereby transform natural resources to shape one's surroundings in a world, this does not necessarily mean that we are all carpenters. The 'natural disposition' is there behind the activity, motivating it and shaping its form, but how this modality is expressed is not guaranteed. We must be embedded in a community of carpenters (a 'world') for the craft to make any sense to us as a craft, with examples of how its done, and we won't really know until we jump in and engage in it.

So philosophy isn't comparable to something so specific as carpentry, you might say, but gets at something more broad and fundamental about being human. I suppose this is right, but I think the metaphor is useful for the sake of toying out the point I'm trying to make. We all have metaphysical systems in some sense that inform us of the coordinates of the world and structure our orientation toward it, and we all yearn to 'ontologize', make sense of, and fit the world into a network of meaning. But to me, doing philosophy (and not just 'doing it well'), involves taking up certain commitments to engage in concept creation, and a development of (self)-understanding, and the systematic incorporation of this cognitive work into one's basic reflexive orientation toward the world and others. It's one thing to yearn for meaning, it's another to take a certain disposition toward this search for meaning that is philosophical.

Sure, most, if not all, human lives are full of imagination and a need for meaning in the form of passive day-dreaming, or passively accepting the concepts and worldviews of others, which need not be acted on. But to do philosophy and to learn to think well involves putting these imaginings and concepts to the test, a transformation of this cognitive activity into reality that isn't passive; putting it on paper or engaging in a dialectic, and to live one's philosophy in the world. There needs to be a free-thinking disposition and the willingness to transcend and challenge immediate experience and accepted ways of thinking/worldviews. None of this is guaranteed by being human. This transformation of the imaginative into reality is the meaning of philosophy as a craft.

It almost looks like a professional philosopher's apologia, the demand that he is taken seriously as a professional alongside scientists, doctors and lawyers ("not just anyone can do this job!"). This idea of philosophy as a job or craft, more than the thought that philosophy is innate, might itself be seen as a trivialization of philosophy. To philosophize is not a success verb, and it can be done well or badly, rigorously or lazily. — jamalrob

Well I don't think this 'artformist view', if we can call it that, of philosophy requires a professionalization. Actually I think more often than not, the pressures and demands of professional institutions get in the way.

Would you agree that philosophy is something that is inherently part of a human being? — darthbarracuda

Absolutely not. In some trivial sense, everyone does philosophy in that they, perhaps sometimes on a lonely night, 'wonder what it's all about', or have disagreements with other people about certain things. But I think that to do philosophy as a craft requires the taking up of certain commitments regarding the long-term refinement of one's own thinking, a willingness to open up all belief and values to revision, as well as a worldly-engagement of praxis in dialectical relation with one's philosophy. All of this is by no means guaranteed, and in fact rare because it's hard work.

Actually I'd even argue that one has to engage with the actual discourse and philosophical texts before one can 'do it', or otherwise a community where you can engage dialectically so that specific discursive features and a shared language are developed that can be recognized as 'philosophical'. I'm not sure if it makes any sense for philosophy to be done by a solitary individual with no context of a community: concepts and language are socialized. It isn't something totally innate and guaranteed...what would we need to refer to to make such an argument?

To think philosophically, to use reason, it is inevitable and unavoidable? — darthbarracuda

There's two questions here (unless you equate thinking philosophically with using reason, which I wouldn't, although they're intimately related). Again, these two things are used in certain manners--everyday practical reason, for example--but how one interprets and thinks of what reasonable or philosophical thinking entails will depend on social, historical, and cultural contexts.

Doing philosophy is an eliminable part of being human; of being, as Heidegger says (roughly), 'a being whose own being is an issue for it'. — John

For Heidegger, Dasein is being whose own being is an issue for it, and it is also related to the fundamental basis of being-in-the-world as conditioned by care or concern [Sorge]. This explains the fundamental comportment, as well as the underlying mood, of a philosopher (or anyone in their particular engagement 'Being-in' a world) to create new concepts in a fidelity to truth as disclosure of new worlds (an aletheic truth). But it is not enough to explain philosophy itself, or even establish the continued existence and health of philosophy. What Heidegger is looking at are much broader existential-phenomenological ('ontological') questions of what it is to be human, and whether they're 'philosophers' is no guarantee simply because their way of being involves care. Of course Heidegger was lead to some anti- or post-philosophical pronouncements in favour of 'thinking', or even later in favour of the poetic as the last hope of the use of language for this aletheiac function.

As for Deleuze, his meta-philosophical thought also informs my own considerations on it. But I wonder if phrased so (i.e. 'concept creation'), we're providing too weak and broad of a definition of philosophy, for Deleuze himself considered certain works of his to be properly 'pure' philosophy (e.g. The Logic of Sense) in contrast with his more well-known works with Guatarri (Capitalism and Schizophrenia).

But is there any point in doing professional philosophy? Is it just intellectual masturbation? — darthbarracuda

Professional philosophy? More often than not.

Okay, I won't be facetious. Your question is about 'philosophy' proper. It will come down to what we think 'philosophy' is, which is itself a meta-philosophical question. All of your questions themselves seem like philosophical questions of a sort, and in their posing already in some sense require philosophy, or express a desire and a need for philosophy. All this inverted-millenarianism of the 'end of philosophy' and the 'end of wahh' I think is bogus. Whatever situation we find ourselves in, there will always be a need to create concepts and debate about the virtues and vices of particular concepts. It is not intellectual masturbation because a real mastery of thought is gained, not just in terms of determining 'bad' or 'good' ways of thinking, but also in being able to be better quipped to orient oneself in the world and toward their projects in meaningful ways that demonstrate careful deliberation, and not just taking the word of others. And even if we take the word of others, wouldn't you want those beliefs to be founded on something more than just mere whim?

Philosophy is, in my mind, one of the most useful things to do. It helps us master whatever craft we're engaging in on a higher level of sophistication, and defeats the ability of others to mystify or dupe us.

Can philosophy ever come to a conclusion? If it can, how does it do so and why hasn't it happened often? If it cannot, then what is the purpose of philosophy? — darthbarracuda

Philosophers come to conclusions all the time. But I suspect you mean an eternally irrefutable conclusion. Why would I want one of those? I can't really do anything with it.

Can pure reason alone bring about true facts? How can we know if we have reached a true conclusion? What even is reason to begin with, and why is it regarded as infallible (from an evolutionary perspective)? Are these questions even worth arguing about if they will never be solved? — darthbarracuda

Again, all of these are philosophical questions, in that answering them requires the practice of philosophy. In my eyes, that good philosophers can reasonably disagree on how to answer them speaks to the strength of philosophy, and its usefulness in any new circumstance. We should worry about the lifespan and usefulness of philosophy if all the answers are agreed upon and over with.

Incidentally I've actually read the interpretation of dreams. It was a funny one. Spoiler alert, everything is really dicks. He doesn't go into the formation or characteristics of dreams themselves, but rather only interprets their contents, as dicks. — Wosret

Huh? That's not right. The 'dicks' is probably tongue-and-cheek (ba dum ch'), but it still reflects a misunderstanding to consider Freud's concern with dreams as only with their contents. While the distinction between the manifest image of the dream and the 'latent dream-thoughts' is important to their interpretation, he makes it clear that he is concerned with their particular form, and the fundamental question as to the essence of dreams is why they take this form and not any other. He is everywhere interested in the particular form of thinking that is involved in dreaming and the unconscious, including analysing why dreams become distorted for example (i.e., that there is a repressing/censoring function that inhibits repressed thoughts and drives from appearing too explicitly in the manifest image). But the main thing that he is concerned with in this regard is 'the dream-work':

many [critics] are guilty of another mistake, to which they adhere just as stubbornly. They look for the essence of the dream in this latent content, and thereby overlook the distinction between latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. The dream is fundamentally nothing more than a special form of our thinking, which is made possible by the conditions of the sleeping state. It is the dream-work which produces this form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming -- the only explanation of its singularity. I say this in order to correct the reader's judgment of the notorious `prospective tendency' of dreams. That the dream should concern itself with efforts to perform the tasks with which our psychic life is confronted is no more remarkable than that our conscious waking life should so concern itself, and I will only add that this work may be done also in the preconscious, a fact already familiar to us.
-The Interpretation of Dreams (bold mine)

The point of the book is to argue the thesis that dreams are interpretable as coded wish-fulfilment, not necessarily exposing a supposed latent sexual content behind all psychical phenomena. After all, many of his case examples do not involve sexual interpretations at all (including the famous 'Irma's injection'). Whatever you're dealing with in real life that is particularly traumatic for you to confront directly, and so repressed, will be expressed in the unconscious and in dreams where it is bound-up in a free-associative manner with other suppressed instincts like sexuality. While he thinks that a majority of dreams of adults deal with sexual latent contents, I don't think he believes that this is because the essence of dreams involves sexuality necessarily, but because the sexual instinct is the most suppressed of instincts (and arguably one of the most powerful at the same time). This leaves powerful unconscious wishes of a sexual nature to be fulfilled in dreams, according to Freud.

Thus, it seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong here, that Freud's emphasis on sexuality is due to the particular contextual nature of the society in which he finds himself, which abjects and represses sexuality, leaving no socially-acceptable public means for its expression. You may disagree with Freud on all of this (and I don't necessarily agree with him on everything), but let's at least get him clear before we shoot the gun.

1) Dreams as changing in form according to sociocultural/historical context.
2) Dreams as a kind of virtual gym. — Baden

While the scientific research on dreams mainly supporting the hypothesis that dreams are 'running through the day's activities' may be getting at a particular feature of dreams, I feel that this is only scratching the surface and belies a more fundamental question as to the phenomenological essence of dreaming, whatever that may be. What I mean by this is that it leaves the analysis of dreams wanting in a similar way that Heidegger finds the ontic questions posed in empirical sciences of anthropology and psychology wanting with regards to an ontological analysis of human (qua Dasein) modality.

What's more, is that my experience of dreams defeats these hypotheses. While obviously dream-contents derive from experience, I almost never dream about 'the day's events', and I rarely dream about some future prospect, say, exercising it as a 'test run' in a virtual gym.

I think that it ultimately depends on worldview. The meaning of particular events emerges when it is fit coherently as a part of a narrative or contextual whole. If 'worldview' is too metaphysical for you, then I think you really only need to invoke 'ideology' for this view to be maintained. Similarly, fidelity to new events that reshape worldviews summons the past up to be recontextualized in the new narrative, such that the present is seen to be in a coherent historical connection with the past. The vitality and importance of the past reasserts itself when it demands proper re-ontologization in light of the throwing off of ideological suppressions and over-emphasis.This, I believe, lends us the importance of visiting Walter Benjamin''s reflections on the topic in "On the Concept of History":

Historicism justifiably culminates in universal history. Nowhere does the materialist writing of history distance itself from it more clearly than in terms of method. The former has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive: it offers a mass of facts, in order to fill up a homogenous and empty time. The materialist writing of history for its part is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts but also their zero-hour [Stillstellung]. Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same, through which it crystallizes as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour [Stillstellung] of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past. He perceives it, in order to explode a specific epoch out of the homogenous course of history; thus exploding a specific life out of the epoch, or a specific work out of the life-work. The net gain of this procedure consists of this: that the life-work is preserved and sublated in the work, the epoch in the life-work, and the entire course of history in the epoch. The nourishing fruit of what is historically conceptualized has time as its core, its precious but flavorless seed.
-XVII

The 'historicism' that Benjamin critiques I take to be the historiographical view of emphasizing the historian's role as 'objective' investigator, moved in his methods only by the rigours of objective empirical science, isolating the historical event from the present. But the point is that this positive science presupposes certain more fundamental interpretative assumptions which cannot be disclosed or discredited by further subsequent collection of empirical 'facts', but are always already there when the empirical data is collected, prioritized, and interpreted. In short, there is no 'objective frame' from which one can approach narrativizing history, but one is always re-appropriating the past along with one's ideological baggage, and the baggage of the present.

I don't necessarily think that the debate should hinge on the particular ontological status of whatever (if at all) a purportedly fictional or nonfictional proposition refers to. In any case, we tell ourselves stories about people fictional or otherwise in order integrate them meaningfully into a symbolic order, and these stories and what they motivate should be the focus of our line of questioning. Artworks, historical narratives, and expectations of the future all feature in the creation and reproduction of fantasies which have political and social import. They frame our conception of what is possible and order our orientation toward the world and others. It is even conceivable that we should care a great deal more for fictional characters, knowing that they will go on to play in the imagination of future generations more than some solitary individual who 'actually' lived--barring rather postmodernist concerns about the distinction in the first place.

As far as I'm concerned, only future intelligence matters. — 180 Proof

Care to elaborate? Are you insinuating that future non-intelligent life doesn't matter, and by extension intelligent life's existence does not depend on its interaction with non-intelligent life?

As far as Derrida goes, he would resist the idea that your experience, your dreams, or some 'inner' unarticulated psychological reality offer some foundation or more 'fundamental' truth beneath language. If an experience is meaningful to you in anyway, it's still going to be mediated by conceptual activity. Articulating this experience in language does not refer to some 'unmediated' or 'fundamental' reality, but only another text, so to speak. You're just mapping one system of differences in relation to another, without any actual reference to something 'outside' the text. And what's more is that the particular 'nodes' in those systems of differences can never be properly represented, stabilized, and 'ontologized' to constitute something like objective knowledge of the world (or of your self). They are shaky at best, and are always already in a state of deferment.

As for me, I often dream in language. Sometimes I may even be dreaming only in language, sometimes continuing a debate in my head between two or more interlocutors, and this often happens when I'm sick oddly enough. But sometimes I dream in impressions, as you say, and what's more is that often I'll think in impressions in my waking states.

Another question would be how we can convey a thought or feeling when we haven't even been able to qualify/quantify them in any meaningful way. — Sentient

I agree that language is a crude tool, but it is a tool nonetheless. And while understanding, and its later articulation in language, is never perfect, I still believe it can be refined and progressed dialectically.

One can observe that nationalism today not only persists but is rearing its ugly head in new movements. Far-right nationalist parties are gaining in popularity in Europe, with right-wing and anti-migrant (so-called 'Euro-skeptical') parties just now winning elections in Poland and Switzerland. The successor to the Nazi party in Austria is polling over 30 percent, and Denmark's right-wing is enjoying popularity. These are all more popular than Golden Dawn in Greece, even though the Greek fascists were treated with more anxious international attention—not so much due to the supposed bleeding-heart concern of liberal Europe as self-interest considering EU fiscal policy was on the line. This is all to just name a few examples, and they are all now riding waves of populist anti-migrant protests in the wake of the influx of refugees.

But I think discoii hits upon a worthwhile point that these nationalisms are reactive in the face of increasing structural importance of inter-state unions that increasingly diminish the sovereignty of individual nation-states. This is in stark contrast to the romantic nationalism of 19th Century popular movements when the particular liberal character of states was at stake in its structural relation to capitalist economic structures and persistent landed aristocratic wealth. The horizons of what the nation-state would be were still open to some degree, and the particular nature of modern capitalist nation-state was to be determined in the field of political struggle. Now nationalist ideologies are retrospective, nostalgic, and fantastical. It can only refer back to an idealized conception of national sovereignty that, according to the ideological mind, if restored in its proper form we could free ourselves from the postmodern discontents surrounding the pressures and demands of increasingly global capitalist economic structures.

I don't think that what is at stake here is the very existence of broad and unifying biopolitical infrastructure, but rather what that infrastructure might be, and in some sense the 'question' of the nature of the state is opening up again to be contested. It's worth noting that many of the 'superhuman' or 'superinstitutional' threats that Mariner brought up that we face today are largely generated, or intensified, by the very institutions that are ostensibly there to protect us. The economic crisis of 2008, as well as the debt crisis in Europe were generated by factors inherent in the basic logic and operation of the system itself. In any case, what is in question in this thread is the particular formulation of the Westphalian system.

The election of left-wing governments in Greece and (now) Portugal seems to demonstrate what has happened to the Westphalian conception of the state. All three traditionally formulated 'principles' of the Westphalian system seem to be a joke (although it could be argued that they never really meaningfully applied). Individual states do not have sovereignty and self-determination, as even electing a political leadership of individuals that are anti-capitalist seems to offer no effect; the state of Greece itself is forced and compelled to act in a certain way due to various institutional and structural constrains of the economic union it is in, and in virtue of it occupying a place in a global capitalist economy. There is no assumed equality of states because the union itself privileges core states, especially Germany, whose finance minister was able to not only force its interests on Greece but to strong arm other 'stronger' European states like France. But most of all it privileges the interests of transnational corporations. And far from non-intervention in internal affairs, the agreement requires the Greeks to allow European technocrats to manage the market liberalization reforms and fire-sale of publicly-owned assets.

I'm not sure how anyone paying attention could take the pluralistic theory of the state seriously. Sovereignty lies with those interests and institutions that reserve the right to a state of exception. Individual state's political institutions don't mean anything if they can be outright suspended by force or coercion by inter-state parties. State power is the instrument of the dominant class and can be reformulated at need, either explicitly with your stamp of approval, or behind closed doors and through 'deep state' mechanisms (this isn't necessarily against a structuralist view, as per Althusser for example, but the trend seems to diminish what relative autonomy the state continues to have). It's interesting that discoii brought up how Chuck Hagel and elements of the American government itself is preparing strategically for this prospect. Probably this is reflected in the TPP and TTIP to begin to reformulate international political and legal infrastructure to reflect the demands of global capital, considering under the agreements transnational corporations can sue local states if it deems legislation (environmental or labor regulation, for example) hurts their profits. But of course the particulars are secret, so I can't be sure, but then again that's a part of the point.