Date: Mon, 10 Nov 1997 12:36:57 +0200 (EET)
Subject: Re: Post-Marxism and Paleo-Marxism


Ok, ok, Justin

I was exaggerating.

" Anyway I reject the purported distinction. Our moral beliefs about
what is politically desirable depend in part on our social theory.
Because I regard Marx's analysis of capitalsim as exploitative as
basically sound, I seek a noncapitalist society taht is not
exploitative and look to ther working class as a central agent for
getting us there because the working class is the main object of
exploitation and has an interest in getting rid of it. This is just an
example. "

Yet I simply don't see any reason to reject the difference between
political and social philosophy as one between 'elaborative' and
'descriptive' theory. The point was not to deny analysis of social
structure and class analysis, but to emphasise the importance of
elaboration and evaluation of political perspectives and strategies
(as I would call it). The latter is more concerned with "political
imagination"; ability to utilize weaknesses in politics of bourgeois
parties, capability of communicating with people with not fixed pol.
stance (sensibility towards others), skills in recognising
possibilities for creating allies. Then again, I haven't even
subscribed the local commie (or leftie, as it's called today)
newspaper for nearly ten years. Perhaps I simply have lost my touch
with pol. realities? I don't think so. One slightly simplified
example:

At least here especially younger (under 30 years old) people think
left to be as only bunch of crooks and criminals who first tried to
sell their "Fatherland" to enemy and are now living mainly in the
past. Politics of "facts only" won't change that because exactly that
is seen as "Neanderthalian": according to them, politics isn't so much
of knowledge than of decisions, will, and pleasure. In universities
that is seen most clearly now when the egalitarian educational
politics has been skipped. In student association elections
twenty-something middle-class kids concentrate on three main groups:
around "Centre" (earlier agrarians, who had close affinities with
"blood-and-soil" imaginary that haven't totally been dismissed even
today), conservatives, and "non-politicals" with heavy neo-racist and
fascistoid sensibilities beneath the official jargon. In some
universities left has lost almost all representatives. This Jyvaskyla
is today among the most esteemed and wanted academic sites in Finland,
after Helsinki, and it shows: students are snobbish, right-minded ones
who pay almost no attention to anything but "survival". And they are
the ones who become (if they aren't already) opinion leaders,
politicians, teachers, public persons in general. Under such
circumstances it doesn't much matter whether what you're saying has
any truth value. They know it already that the truth is what they
believe... What about proletarian kids? As minority, they have to
adjust themselves into crowd. If not, their destiny is far more worse:
they become freaks. Such are the near future perspectives here. What
I've said cannot be generalised to all finns but it shows the
strongest, most powerful tendency (supported by media) at the moment.

Jukka