On 4/18/07, Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It seems as if you don't know what a coalition is. I'm in one right now. The principles are U.S. out of Iraq. U.S. out of Afghanistan. U.S. stay out of Iran. Various other ones are more or less implicit in our conversations with each other, but would only become explicit when the occasion to act on them arose. Coalitons are based to begin with on shared practice. And there is no way to discuss them in the abstract.
If a coalition is one dedicated to a single prominent issue like ending the US war in Iraq, questions of the sort raised by Ravi rarely arise, but as soon as we go beyond that, such questions may come up. Moreover, eventually we want to go beyond a movement that focuses on a single issue or even a collection of related issues and to change the entire society here from the ground up. Then, an agreement based on not talking about issues on which we know we disagree won't do. While we can't discuss this question as our own practical question today, we can still look at other societies and examine how people handled political, social, and cultural differences in the past and how they are handling them today. On 4/18/07, ravi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 18 Apr, 2007, at 7:13 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > > I think we can draw a meaningful distinction between people who care > about what they eat only to stay slim, live long, etc., i.e., for > individualistic reasons, and people who care about what they eat as > part of "a broader humanist agenda." Yes, I would guess that Doug and Michael Yates would endorse such a distinction. Yet their choice of phrases, to some extent, betrays their methodological commitments.
I think it's not so much "methodological commitments" as structures of feelings, to use Raymond Williams' term. The default structure of feeling on the Left, including the Marxist Left, is probably a populist one that divides society into "an elite who care about lifestyles" and "the people who do not."
In fact, animal welfare is the term I myself would prefer to use, since I do not find meaningful the concept of "rights".
In this respect, I assure you that you have a lot in common with Michael Yates, who are incomparably more conscientious than me about the question of environment, including welfare of living beings beyond human beings. From what I know about Michael, he's the most outdoorsy and nature-loving among all MR people! -- Yoshie
