Mass act of Metaphysics

Metaphysics is total rubbish and don't darken my door with it again.

Cos no one's got a clue what you're talking about? I haven't anyway

I answered it.

The protest for the right to protest, right?

Well, I'm chuffed that the guy the law was designed for, Brian Haw, is exempt from it. That's pretty funny. Nothing to do with this particular action though.

It's a protest to retain a civil liberty - one that's pretty much down to the whim of the state anyway when there's so much public order legislation applicable everywhere anyway - on balance well worth doing for all the effort it will take (hopefully not too much). It's a one-off, it's for a specific purpose, and it has the potential to make a wider point about the way the state uses "security threats" to increase its control over people, it also doesn't require a lot of pissing about organising convergence spaces and other infrastructure. I'd imagine the police will be told not to arrest anyone due to publicity, and if they did, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot.

It's not likely to get the law repealed (the drafting error is more likely to do that), and civil liberties are a political red herring in terms of libertarian communism because the entire concept assumes the state's legitimacy to grant them in the first place. Doesn't mean they shouldn't be defended in the same way that wages should be defended, but the difference between liberty and freedom is an important one, the same as the difference betwen high wages and communism is an important one.

There is nothing at all 'metaphysical' about protesting for the right to protest.

Rather it is elemental.

Aaaand I'm last poster on all hte forums again!

(sad fucker)

Hi

It's a recursive meta concept. Oxygen is elemental. Jack is an elemental.

Love

Chris

There is, however, something metaphysical about the actual right to protest itself. What, after all, is a right?

Be well,

Rob Mills

The opposite of a left.

Hi

Let the market decide.

Love

Chris

Keep left. Sod the market.

Jack is of the matrix.

Hi

It's good healthy fun to say sod to the market. However, it is capable of deciding what is free by right and what requires extra effort on the part of the consumer.

Love

Chris

I doubt if you'll get done for organising marinebroadcast. Filming folk is a scare tactic. i think the reversed spartacus approach usually works, none of us are organisers, cause it confuses them.

I've done stuff around civil liberties issues and its not useless although i agree with Catch its an odd situation to be in politically. still, we have to live in the real world and the rate of attack on civil liberties is increasing. i think the protest the other week was legitimate. people are concerned about the government response to the current political climate and its often useful i reckon to be able to use the issue to widen the subject as well.

don't know anything about metaphysics so i'll shut up now.

Believe me, metaphysics sucks. Ordinary physics is bad enough, with quantum stuff and all that to contend with. e=mc2. What an odd equation...

Yes, human rights are different to civil liberties, but they're still largely determined by international law - and hence similar structures to civil rights. When you said "right of life" - that's more fundamental and less problematic I think. Is it a human right to own private property for example?

Hi

That’s a good question. The short answer, from my point of view, is “no”, but for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, I’m pretty sure that “rights”, in the bourgeois democratic sense of the word, are pretty much fertile soil for dodgy politics based on flawed axioms. They set up an abstract moral code with an uncomfortable biblical flavour.

For instance, the “right to life” assumes that forces would otherwise take my life unless checked by a benign moral code, similar to the religious taboo against “murder”. A right to life only has meaning in a hostile environment. What it really translates to is free protection from malevolence as opposed to protection that must be paid for, in some sense, by the individual.

Secondly, property is such a profound concept that it complicates the notion of rights in itself. Is my life my property?, are my children? Where does my property end and yours begin?

I like to think that there are no hard and fast rules about property. Property is 9/10s of the law for a good reason, you need labyrinthine bourgeois regulations to maintain order and privilege simultaneously. Property should be democratic, in the communist sense of property ultimately vested in the public. But at the same time, for the majority of goods, individuals should enjoy exclusive consumption where society as a whole can afford to allow it. It is folly to believe that the whole of supply and demand can be bureaucratised in the public interest, and so I am an advocate of libertarian socialist markets backed by a universal citizens income. I’ll concede that to many, that constitutes a right in itself.

Sorry for the long post.

Chris

Don't apologise for the long post, especially not to me!

I agree with your analysis of property, although I think "exclusive personal consumption" of goods is something most libertarian communists wouldn't have too much of a problem with - just that communities would have to decide what a "personal good" was. No one wants to share a toothbrush, but I think communalisation of cars or their equivalent would work for example, though not necessarily in a very dispersed community.

This brings up why the idea of human rights is problematic though:

This includes expropriation of land/factories by the people living and working in them.

Well, actually, there is a lot of debated about this. Though there are some Pre-Socratics who have defended something similiar, the first concrete case of human rights normally cited is Locke.

Most people do not realise that in rights theory that human rights have their origin in a religious perspective. For Locke, the origins of these rights (and for a lot of religious human right activists since) comes from God.

The task, for many today, is the creation of a basis for rights in a secular framework. This task is both epistemological and metaphysical. The idea that rights are determined by international probably would not be very popular as it seems to depend on moral relativism, which is itself not at all popular in modern ethics (nor has it ever been, really). However, there may be versions of it that depend on the international community deriving from an objective set of morals, so I could see a possibility for it.

As two side issues, Locke did argue for the right to property and his argument is fairly good, it's in the beginning of his Second Treatise on Government, chapter 2 if I recall. Second side note, this talk of rights really shows that one can't sweep away metaphysics (as some have tried earlier) as even when one denies the existence of a god or the existence of abstract rights then one isn't attacking metaphysics as a whole but just taking a certain stance in it. Atheism, for example, is a metaphysical position as is the denial of, say, unicorns (sorry, I know the anti-metaphysics part of the discussion died a while ago but I had to get that in there).

Be well,

Rob Mills

Hi

You need to understand markets first, metaphysics is much harder and far less practical. Where else are you going to buy cheap potatoes from Cohn-Bendit's farm?

Woof

Chris

The stuff on Wikipedia is good, apparently the central anarchist article was criticised for failing to be objective, but the note about that has been removed recently. From the central anarchist page, it is easy to jump to the pages for the different schools of anarchism and there after to the individuals behind these schools. The anarcho-communism page links to this site as well. I second your comment about the site.

Be well,

Rob Mills

Hi Marine

That wasn't from me, it was Cohn-Bendit as a potato farm owning dog. Sorry for doing cross-thread jokes, I concede that they are in poor taste.

Don’t worry about Clara. You don’t have to be Sherlock to know who she is.

Love

Chris