>> Your conclusion is also interesting: "Writings expressing the life of society are by definition anti-philosophic." So, coupled with the sentence previous to this one and the preceding discussion, the real meaning of Cornel West has nothing to do with his writing or its intellectual content, but with his historical role and the forces that sent him in the direction he went. I presume you'll have more to say about this as your narrative unfolds, esp. viz. the meaning of the political conjuncture. But since you judge Cornel a brilliant intellect, at the same time not taking the intellectual content of his writing seriously, I will be interested in seeing where you take your analysis. Because if his writing expresses something other than its manifest content, which I don't doubt it does, what is this other something in your view and is it worthy of respect?<< Reply I tend to stand away from and apart from philosophic discourse for several reasons: first it simply is boring and uninteresting to me. Philosophic discussions are inherently subjective and not provable by definition. Third, what a person writes or say and the ideological framework in which they understand their life activity and events, can and does make interesting and clever conversation, but at the end of the day a man or women is not their utterances or memory but their actions and their role in the on going social process. Cornel is of course brilliant by all standards and measures of philosophic engagement with his peers. More than that he has a political and social basis within the political establishment in America. He also has a role and impact upon the Church, specifically the African American Church is its theological cadre. It was not that long ago that Mr. West put forth the ideological and theoretical basis - in the mid and late 1990s, for the conversation of Al Sharpton from "street corner activist" to "presidential candidate." The point is that the intelligencia of society and their various think tanks do in fact impact the politics and actions of individuals and grouping in our society. According to Mr. West, he has inherited a prophetic view rooted in the lived experience of the Black Church in America. He asserts that his intellectual understanding of his moral and ethical imperatives flow from a vision adjusted by and viewed through the lens of Jesus suffering on the cross. This is not my particular vision, although both of us believe that evil is not an intellectual construct and long ago evolved its intellectual expressions and ideological forms. Thus, the issue for me is not if I respect Cornel West, and I happen to respect him, but on what basis I work with people around specific issues. Communists do in fact and must take part in work within the Church and there is no ifs, ands and buts, about this. Our purpose is not to win people to an ideology, unless we are speaking in a brutal materialist sense, of consolidating the base of ideas that allows one to fight and die in combat with evil. The bourgeois mode of production is evil and emerged from a historically built up evil. The bourgeois mode of production owe its origins to the slave trade and not the harmonious passage from manufacture to heavy manufacture to industry proper. Property, in the Marxist sense and meaning arising as a struggle in the ideological and political sphere and does not magically leap into history as an expression of division of labor. That is why we fight and have fought through out the ages, even when our goals could not be achieved. We dream and will always dream the impossible dream, until its realization is at hand and can become manifest as material. How one describes their vision of a better world may or may not be at variance with their actual life activity, but such is the role and impact of ideology and thinking. The issue is communist work within the Church and in this context Mr. West role in the Church and its attached intellectual theological-cadre. I respected Dr. King - Martin Luther King, Jr., but disagreed seriously with his political doctrine of combat. Then again . . . I did not live in Alabama, but Detroit and many of us in Detroit had and still have a very fucked up attitude about things. More than that, we had the luxury to disagree with the tactics of nonviolence given the massive concentration and density of the Black masses in Detroit and a certain industrial proletarian organizational sense and lived experience. Being a professor and having an exalted position at a major university is a damn job. Jobs is what people do for money. Any black person of my age and generation and especially that of my parents, would hold in contempt their treatment as second class citizens in America. Actually, most American probably hold their employers in contempt . . . more than less. Hey Ralph . . . you catch how I located property fundamentally in the "subjective" arena, rather than something that flows from the material organization of production like a "Jack in the Box.?" Melvin P.
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