Zompist Bboard Again

Starbeam wrote: ↑Fri May 02, 2025 9:26 am See, that's the thing. A lot of people I'm complain about say their actions are part of human rights or that oppressor peoples are wholly exempt. I don't know what to call this tendency, but it intermingles in all movements and I'm sick of letting it pass.

Starbeam wrote: ↑Fri May 02, 2025 9:26 am See, that's the thing. A lot of people I'm complain about say their actions are part of human rights or that oppressor peoples are wholly exempt. I don't know what to call this tendency, but it intermingles in all movements and I'm sick of letting it pass.

linguistcat wrote: ↑Fri May 02, 2025 12:05 pm

Starbeam wrote: ↑Fri May 02, 2025 9:26 am See, that's the thing. A lot of people I'm complain about say their actions are part of human rights or that oppressor peoples are wholly exempt. I don't know what to call this tendency, but it intermingles in all movements and I'm sick of letting it pass.

I mean, they're wrong, but that hasn't stopped people from claiming things if those claims made them feel justified.

rotting bones wrote:Note that Marxists traditionally opposed human rights.]

Starbeam wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 8:05 am I'm curious to what the situation here is. Do any current Marxists follow this pattern?

Starbeam wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 8:46 am I meant that if they don't support human rights, what are their beliefs on the subject of undeserved cruelty instead?

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 9:22 am IIRC Marx said something like: wood gatherers could once go into forests to gather firewood.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 9:22 am How would that happen? Don't ask. Be flexible, and respond to the moment. Like I said, crazy.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 11:06 am a societal structure composed of workers' councils or a syndicalist union is effectively a new state of sorts even if it is more democratic than the states that came before it. (This is a large part of why I now consider myself a democratic socialist rather than an anarchist.)

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 9:22 am Marxists think "rights" are post hoc justifications reflecting material power relations in society.

To the extent that rights sometimes protect workers, that's because property owners fear violence if they are not respected. According to Marxist materialism, rights are derived from this fear of violence, and all rights are lumped in with property rights. Like property owners, wood gatherers wouldn't respect property rights either if they didn't fear the gendarme's bayonet. What appears in retrospect as the natural order is a state of sublimated violence: children who grow up under its chilling effect can no longer imagine other possible worlds, making perpetual violence appear as a state of peace. Therefore, the only way to increase the so-called "rights" of the working class is to make property owners fear them.

Given this worldview, no one is coming to save you. The enemy will give you no quarter unless he "respects", i.e, fears, you. The only recourse for people suffering cruelty is to unite with others in a similar predicament and march against their oppressors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xjONUGUnlw

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 11:16 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 11:06 am a societal structure composed of workers' councils or a syndicalist union is effectively a new state of sorts even if it is more democratic than the states that came before it. (This is a large part of why I now consider myself a democratic socialist rather than an anarchist.)

Like I said before, your scheme disenfranchises non-workers. Don't you think non-workers will suffer if they have no representation in government? Possible scenario: Once the initial idealism has faded and society has re-entered its resting state, the needs of non-workers will matter less to the government, lowering effective demand. Then people will have difficulty finding work again. Why not just ask everyone what goods and services they want, and create government jobs to provide them?

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 11:16 am Why not just ask everyone what goods and services they want, and create government jobs to provide them?

Starbeam wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 11:48 am When i said (human) rights, I meant as in "shoulds", ideals on what is the right way to do things; a prescription. I wasn't referring to encoded rights, or "mays", what people are formally allowed to do; a description

I am not wholly against laws and legalism, what i am against is social analyses that are limited by them. It's why i hate statements like "illegal genocide", 1) it implies the law should be the center of ethics (if only it were legal, then genocide would be good somehow *eyeroll*) and 2) implies nothing could happen above it (powerful entities make the law after their actions, for their benefit)

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Starbeam wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 11:48 am Is this that whole "passively benefiting from privilege is violence" horseshit? There is no such thing as an ignorant passive abuser, drives me insane. It is only an excuse to abuse people for things beyond their control. Nothing else. I find these revolts aren't always at who they need to attack, but just whoever's there. Still, i completely understand this happens and not to hold oppressed groups to a higher standard. The problem is when anyone starts justifying it as benign or even necessary, rather than, in broad terms, forgivable

But if the connection is actually something different, let me know

Starbeam wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 11:48 am I cannot watch the video right now, but I want to say at least some of my points while i've got downtime at work before i do. I'll make another post to get back to you

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat May 03, 2025 1:07 pm To get really deep into pedantic philosophical nitpicking, I don't believe in inherent rights. But I do believe in rights where it's generally good if a place is run in such a way that people there can usually rely on having those rights. I'm very fond of my right to take part in a discussion like this one, for instance. But I don't think such rights should include to right to own things, except when it comes to stuff like clothes or furniture.

But it is superfluous to expose these sophistries. Let the spokesman be so good as to tell us himself how worldly-wise people judge humane phrases. He makes the forest owner address the following reply to the farm owner who displays humanity:

"If some ears of corn are pilfered from a landowner, the thief would say: 'I have no bread, so I take a few ears of corn from the large amount you possess', just as the wood thief says: 'I have no firewood, so I steal some wood.' The landowner is protected by Article 444 of the Criminal Code, which punishes the taking of ears of corn with 2-5 years' imprisonment. The forest owner has no such powerful protection!"

This last envious exclamation of the forest owner contains a whole confession of faith. You farm owner, why are you so magnanimous where my interests are concerned? Because your interests are already looked after. So let there be no illusions! Magnanimity either costs nothing or brings something in. Therefore, farm owner, you cannot deceive the forest owner! Therefore, forest owner, do not deceive the burgomaster!

This intermezzo alone would suffice to prove what little meaning "noble deeds" can have in our debate, if the whole debate did not prove that moral and humane reasons occur here merely as phrases. But interest is miserly even with phrases. It invents them only in case of need, when the results are of considerable advantage. Then it becomes eloquent, its blood circulates faster, it is not sparing even with noble deeds that yield it profit at the expense of others, with flattering words and sugary endearments. And all that, all of it, is exploited only in order to convert the infringement of forest regulations into current coin for the forest owner, to make the infringer of forest regulations into a lucrative source of income, to be able to invest the capital more conveniently -- for the wood thief has become a capital for the forest owner. It is not a question of misusing the burgomaster for the benefit of the infringer of forest regulations, but of misusing the burgomaster for the benefit of the forest owner. What a remarkable trick of fate it is, what a remarkable fact, that on the rare occasions when a problematic benefit for the infringer of forest regulations is given a passing mention, the forest owner is guaranteed an unquestionable benefit!

In regard to civil law, the most liberal legislations have been confined to formulating and raising to a universal level those rights which they found already in existence. Where they did not find any such rights, neither did they create any. They abolished particular customs, but in so doing forgot that whereas the wrong of the estates took the form of arbitrary pretensions, the right of those without social estate appeared in the form of accidental concessions. This course of action was correct in regard to those who, besides right, enjoyed custom, but it was incorrect in regard to those who had only customs without rights. Just as these legislations converted arbitrary pretensions into legal claims, insofar as some rational content of right was to be found in those pretensions, they ought also to have converted accidental concessions into necessary ones. We can make this clear by taking the monasteries as an example. The monasteries were abolished, their property was secularised, and it was right to do so. But the accidental support which the poor found in the monasteries was not replaced by any other positive source of income. When the property of the monasteries was converted into private property and the monasteries received some compensation, the poor who lived by the monasteries were not compensated. On the contrary, a new restriction was imposed on them, while they were deprived of an ancient right. This occurred in all transformations of privileges into rights. A positive aspect of these abuses -- which was also an abuse because it turned a right of one side into something accidental -- was abolished not by the accidental being converted into a necessity, but by its being left out of consideration.

These legislations were necessarily one-sided, for all customary rights of the poor were based on the fact that certain forms of property were indeterminate in character, for they were not definitely private property, but neither were they definitely common property, being a mixture of private and public right, such as we find in all the institutions of the Middle Ages. For the purpose of legislation, such ambiguous forms could be grasped only by understanding, and understanding is not only one-sided, but has the essential function of making the world one-sided, a great and remarkable work, for only one-sidedness can extract the particular from the unorganised mass of the whole and give it shape. The character of a thing is a product of understanding. Each thing must isolate itself and become isolated in order to be something. By confining each of the contents of the world in a stable definiteness and as it were solidifying the fluid essence of this content, understanding brings out the manifold diversity of the world, for the world would not be many-sided without the many one-sidednesses.

Understanding therefore abolished the hybrid, indeterminate forms of property by applying to them the existing categories of abstract civil law, the model for which was available in Roman law. The legislative mind considered it was the more justified in abolishing the obligations of this indeterminate property towards the class of the very poor, because it also abolished the state privileges of property. It forgot, however, that even from the standpoint of civil law a twofold private right was present here: a private right of the owner and a private right of the non-owner and this apart from the fact that no legislation abolishes the privileges of property under constitutional law, but merely divests them of their strange character and gives them a civil character. If, however, every medieval form of right, and therefore of property also, was in every respect hybrid, dualistic, split into two, and understanding rightly asserted its principle of unity in respect of this contradictory determination, it nevertheless overlooked the fact that there exist objects of property which, by their very nature, can never acquire the character of predetermined private property, objects which, by their elemental nature and their accidental mode of existence, belong to the sphere of occupation rights, and therefore of the occupation right of that class which precisely because of these occupation rights, is excluded from all other property and which has the same position in civil society as these objects have in nature.

It will be found that the customs which are customs of the entire poor class are based with a sure instinct on the indeterminate aspect of property; it will be found not only that this class feels an urge to satisfy a natural need, but equally that it feels the need to satisfy a rightful urge. Fallen wood provides an example of this. Such wood has as little organic connection with the growing tree as the cast-off skin has with the snake. Nature itself presents as it were a model of the antithesis between poverty and wealth in the shape of the dry, snapped twigs and branches separated from organic life in contrast to the trees and stems which are firmly rooted and full of sap, organically assimilating air, light, water and soil to develop their own proper form and individual life. It is a physical representation of poverty and wealth. Human poverty senses this kinship and deduces its right to property from this feeling of kinship. If, therefore, it claims physical organic wealth for the predetermined property owners, it claims physical poverty for need and its fortuity. In this play of elemental forces, poverty senses a beneficent power more humane than human power. The fortuitous arbitrary action of privileged individuals is replaced by the fortuitous operation of elemental forces, which take away from private property what the latter no longer voluntarily foregoes. Just as it is not fitting for the rich to lay claim to alms distributed in the street, so also in regard to these alms of nature. But it is by its activity, too, that poverty acquires its right. By its act of gathering, the elemental class of human society appoints itself to introduce order among the products of the elemental power of nature. The position is similar in regard to those products which, because of their wild growth, are a wholly accidental appendage of property and, if only because of their unimportance, are not an object for the activity of the actual owner. The same thing holds good also in regard to gleaning after the harvest and similar customary rights.

In these customs of the poor class, therefore, there is an instinctive sense of right; their roots are positive and legitimate, and the form of customary right here conforms all the more to nature because up to now the existence of the poor class itself has been a mere custom of civil society, a custom which has not found an appropriate place in the conscious organisation of the state.