Needham Freedman Aff
| Tournament | Round | Opponent | Judge | Cites | Round Report | Open Source | Edit/Delete |
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| Yale University Invitational 2021 | 1 | Strake Jesuit NW | Henry Eberhart |
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| Tournament | Round | Report |
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| Yale University Invitational 2021 | 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit NW | Judge: Henry Eberhart AC = cap |
To modify or delete round reports, edit the associated round.
Cites
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Adopting a Marxist perspective helps us resist alienation and solve issues of inequalitiesTournament: Yale University Invitational 2021 | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit NW | Judge: Henry Eberhart We need to try to grasp the complexities of the world that we find ourselves in, in global capitalism today, so that we can then try to find a way to break free from it all, in order to create a better, a kinder and a fairer world. If one took a different position, and argued that global capitalism was a very good system, and that we just need to work through the various issues and dilemmas, one would quickly come up against an insurmountable number of problems (as indeed people do) in regard to issues such as IPRs, moral and humane issues, the public service ethos and the balance in copyright. A Marxist analysis is complex, but it seeks to explain and solve many of these real problems and contradictions, whilst also enabling us to face up to these contradictions. We need a theoretical analysis that helps us to understand and explain the system that we find ourselves in – global capitalism, with all its injustice, inequality, cruelty, suffering and death – and an Open Marxist theoretical analysis provides us with this, in my view. Once we have this understanding, we can then endeavour to create a better, kinder and a fairer social, economic and political system – one that is based on human wants and needs and one that will enable humans to find self- expression and fulfilment, rather than a system that is based on the exploitation, alienation and objectification of labour, value-creation and the never-ending drive to increase profit margins. | 9/18/21 |
Justice is an abstract idea that is solely dependent on the mode of production at a given timeTournament: Yale University Invitational 2021 | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit NW | Judge: Henry Eberhart 2.2 Marx on Morality and Justice Marx holds that not only will legal and political institutions reflect the material life of humans, but so too will beliefs and ideas. If the beliefs of a given society reflect the mode of production, the only way to understand those ideas will be to examine them in relation to their 18 genesis and development. Additionally, it follows that if ideas are tied to a given mode of production, moral ideas too will reflect, in one way or another, a given mode of production. Think, for example, of values associated with different epochs. Marx, in a criticism of historians who detach the ruling ideas of an era from their material basis, points out that ruling ideas change. Thus honor and loyalty were the values of the aristocracy while freedom and equality are the values of bourgeois society. In later years, Engels declared that “we reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as eternal, ultimate and forever immutable ethical law on the pretext that morality has its permanent principles which stand above history” (726). He continues morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or, ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination. (726) Therefore, for Marx and Engels, just as social relations and social institutions are always in flux, the ideas that arise out of material existence are also in flux. Now, how does this affect justice? The answer is that justice is affected in precisely the same way; however, the term justice can be understood in both a legal and a moral sense. Given that, for Marx, “every form of production creates its own legal relations, form of government, etc.,” it follows that justice, the concept typically used to describe legal phenomena, is itself an idea that arises in, and is conditioned by, the existing mode of production (Gr; 226). A given era, according to Marx’s method, will contain a social totality of needs, productive forces, and social, economic, and political relations that determine the overall form of social organization. Part of this overall form is the legal and political apparatus that both grows out of, and helps to develop and fortify, the rules and practices of society. These developments, rules, and regulations determine, in one sense, what is just. Consequently, justice, like morality, can have no transhistorical or 19 transsocietal determinate content — it is determinable at a given moment, but never abstractly determinate. Thus, that it is just to enslave a large number of human beings at one moment and that it is unjust to do so at another lends support to Marx’s view: namely, justice can be determinate and identifiable at any given moment, but it does not retain the same determinacy from era to era, place to place. Appeals to abstract justice, then, are historically-contextualized expressions misrepresented as universal. Allen Wood (1972) is helpful on this point. On Wood’s reading of Marx, ‘just’ actions are those “transactions that fit the prevailing mode of production, they serve a purpose relative to it” (1972, 256). What is just, then, is a matter of what maintains the existence and reproduction of the social totality as a whole. Again, the legitimacy of Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 expressed the idea that society cannot reproduce itself (in its current form) if slave labor is unenforceable. To adopt a juridical view, then, entails that one takes these legal and political determinations as if they do not presuppose a given social totality composed of interrelated and interworking parts. As Wood explains, such a view “is essentially one-sided, and to adopt it as the fundamental standpoint from which to judge all social reality is to adopt a distorted conception of that reality” (1972, 255). Again, the juridical view is a distortion precisely because in taking some particular notion of justice as the primary metric of a given society, one neglects the way in which ideas about justice arise, not to mention the way in which societies function so as to reproduce themselves. The juridical view confuses a context-dependent idea for an abstract one. Furthermore, the juridical view is equally problematic for its neglect of society as a totality that contains needs, production, relations, and ideas which condition and are conditioned 20 by each other. Whatever justice means at a given historical moment must be understood in its broader social and political context. So long as identifying principles of justice is the central concern, developing a proper understanding of how so-called injustices arise, for what reasons, in what way, as a result of what needs, production, and relations of power, etc., will be secondary and potentially, if not often, overlooked. Therefore, because ‘justice-seeking’ and ‘justice adjudicating’ ignore the centrality of civil society and the interdependency of social phenomena within a given mode of production, we can see how nonideal theory adopts a flawed view of society. As Wood explains: Abstracted from a concrete historical context, all formal philosophical principles of justice are empty and useless; when applied to such a context, they are misleading and distorting, since they encourage us to treat the concrete context of an act or institution as accidental, inessential, a mere occasion for the pure rational form to manifest itself. (1972, 257) In other words, to use justice as nonideal theory does — as an abstract, pure, moral, or metaphysical concept — is to misunderstand what justice is. Therefore, the nonideal theorist’s employment of justice, like their ideal theorist counterparts’, is simply confused. Stated differently, abstract justice, from the Marxian understanding of society as a totality of interdependent moments, is a contradiction in terms. | 9/18/21 |
Since justice is historically-contextualized, non-ideal theorys belief that justice is a moral ideal is inherently flawedTournament: Yale University Invitational 2021 | Round: 1 | Opponent: Strake Jesuit NW | Judge: Henry Eberhart | 9/18/21 |
Open Source
| Filename | Date | Uploaded By | Delete |
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9/18/21 | lgfreedman0420@gmailcom |
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