Can we just all agree that there is no God and no Natural Justice?

Respectfully, I don’t think there is general agreement on either of these separate questions. On the latter, I doubt most people have thought it through enough to ask that question. On the former, one has to have agreement on a definition before the question of is-or-ain’t.

One of the most tediously constructed premises of several libertarian tendencies — the Randians come to mind here — is that nature does implicitly confer rights. In her bible-length opus, Atlas Shrugged, she takes 64 consecutive pages, disguised as a speech by her cardboard-Neitzschean protagonist, to attempt a “proof” of just that.

On your final paragraph, Peggy, I couldn’t agree more.

Can we just all agree that there is no God and no Natural Justice? On this planet, only human beings decide, wisely or not, what is just and what is to be done, who has what rights and who has what responsibilities.

Individuals may enforce their will upon others, for a brief time. But in the long term, only human consensus prevails in the human world. That consensus may be wise or stupid from your or my point of view. You or I may influence the consensus a little bit for a while. You or I might even make a historical difference.

But in the long term, you and I are just butterflies, among billions of butterflies, exercising our butterfly effects, which come to results far beyond our intentions or even our imaginations.

Some of us flap our butterfly wings with all our might and with no thought of responsibility for the outcome. After all, they are just butterflies, and so, who cares?

But I think that even us little ones have responsibilities – to mind what we say, to take care for those close to us, to look out for the greater world and to use our intelligence not to make bad things worse.

Tim Wheeler is the ag econ writer ( and was DC correspondent)

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^^^^^
CB: I know one group on the left ( which will remain nameless) which regularly and routinely championed the small farmer and loss of family farms in their struggle with monopoly agriculture corporations. Tim Whathisname wrote theoretical articles in PA on this often. I wish I could remember the economic demand which was one of the fundamentals we made ( probably still do) Maybe google will find it.

Historically, the Left developed our version of the unity of the sickle (peasants) and hammer in terms of the Minnesota Farm-Labor Party, for example.

^^^
And their social darwinist theory of human nature. Libertarian theory is a species of social darwinism, a main modern bourgeois theoretical error.

On another general issue raised earlier, a riddle for us materialist feminists (“mater” means mother in Latin; we are “mother wit” feminists)is the following: as men visit so much oppression and harm on the bodies of women in the US, how is it that the average life expectancy of US women is longer than that of US men ?

Hypothesis of an answer tomorrow.

To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

-Barbara Kingsolver

A little late to the game here but Stan you’re gonna have to get over the hurdle of your title. A system that is based on and supplied by the vicious Free Marketeers can hardly be monkey-wrenched by supporting the most ardent spokesman for The Free Market.

I know, I know we haven’t yet experienced the “truly free” Free Market.

And then there’s that ugly bit about sealing the border.

There are many many options out there beyond supporting this candidate or that candidate. The fact that considering the support of such a beast is of primal importance to anyone displays an intellectual vaccuum in what passes for the Left in the good ol’ US of A.

In no way am I endorsing libertarianism, but I have to point out here that many on the left have bitten on one ofthe key fallacies of libertarians and, in the process, paradoxically positioned themselves to argue agaisnt libertarians when they are right. Capitalism is not now, nor has it ever been, about “free markets.” The “free market” that libertarians describe is an idealized abstraction with zero historical support. This is what allows the most purist libertarians to accidentally make a correct statememt… what we (the left) are calling capitalism is not “true” capitalism (the idealized premise); the system we have now is one in which massive state intervention is required to keep this “non-capitalist” system as it is.

Capitalism — the real thing — was built on plunder, genocide, slavery, and war. These are “externalities” to the actual M-C-M+ capital accumulation process that Marx described for the creation of surplus value, but then air is an “externality” for the human body, too.

Where we get wrong-footed in our debates with libertarians is precisely when we confuse “free markets” with capitalism… the term being something with limited descriptive value in the real world, and mostly ideological cover for a process that requires incessant expansion of appropriation of land and water and minerals and clean air, et al, armies and armies of cops, and the inevitable development of an ever more bureacratic/technocratic state apparatus to defend the interests of the dominant class, and gender, and nationality… in societies with a strong history of racial caste emerging as internal oppressed nations.

This is where the history — referring back to Joel Salatin’s examples here — has presented the left with a huge contradiction, largely based on a failure to account for the dynamics of industrialism and, I think, also the absence of theories of social scale (Dunbar’s number, eg) integrated with our theories of management and bureaucracy. When small farmers complained that regulaitons were creating an undue burden on them, they were telling the truth. Those regulations received support from the left, in many cases, because the left was responding to the horror stories that emerged from food production… but they didn’t differentiate between small farm production and CAFO, mono-crop industtrial (Green Revolution) food production.

The left ignored small farmers’ complaints, even as they were losing farms like crazy, while libertarian-like forces validated what the small farmers knew… the regulations are making it impossible for small producers to survive economically. In effect, the regulation of industrial monocrop production, to prevent the problems created by industrial monocrop production, ended up creatinig a financial obstacle to competition from below in the putative “free market” that turned agriculture into a corporate country club with a prohibitive membershnip fee… the ability to pay enough to comply with the regs.

Small producers heard these libertarian-like forces validating what they knew was damn well true… the regulations did place an undue burden on their viability. Instead of uniting with small producers on this count, much of the liberal-left did what they always do when confronted with a contradictory situation (that requires re-evaluating one’s premises); they retreated into vapid phrase-mongering about how the small producers were being manipulated into arguing against their own interests.

The Achilles heel of libertarianism is not “free markets,” per se, but abstractionism, their scientifically insupportable account of “human nature,” and ahistoricism… uh, and property.

This is exactly the same logic used by “Pro Choice” people to argue for “reproductive rights.” After all, its the woman’s body, isn’t it? The fetus has no right to impose itself on her body or other people to force her to care for the fetus.

No, actually it’s not, Craig. Fetuses aren’t independent, human beings: they function as de facto organs of a woman’s body. Things don’t “impose themselves upon” people.

In other circumstances, this is even a basic principle of Anglo-American law – you have no duty to rescue someone in a life threating situation or otherwise. I guess no one told you.

Silly me. I thought there was something wrong with the notion of new mothers abandoning their babies, or with parents abandoning their children. How wrong I was! Thanks for setting me straight.

I’m not sure that this sweeping statement stands, in face of the last 30 years of work with e.g. Japanese macaques, who pass on inherited knowledge and skills to offspring (as well as preserving social rank across generations, matrilineally iirc). Primates don’t have the hypertrophied cultural constructs that we recognise — artifacts, costumes, rituals, liturgies, etc. But they definitely learn, and transmit learning to their offspring, and thus propagate a knowledge base that does not have to be reinvented with each generation. That’s a pretty good definition of culture, no?