Re: They're not violent enough...

You cannot be argued with; you can only be defeated. This seems to me to be exactly the point Laclau makes in the passage from p83 of "New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time" (1990) I quoted in the post linked below. Maybe the distinction is that Laclau makes a general rule out of it, while you apply it only to Django? That explanation doesn't really work, though. Other right wing voices on the board are only marginally less impervious to argument (as you implicitly acknowledge when you end a thread, as you often do, by stating you refuse to respond further to their nonsense). And you admit, I think, that your principle of rationality cannot yield values anyway. You will say, perhaps, that this is already there in Marx, in the 11th thesis on Feuerbach: that philosophers have "only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." To some extent, Laclau's project is to take Marxism back to Marx. But he finds Marx ambivalent. Marx saw a rational and inevitable progress in history. Laclau doesn't, and furthermore he thinks that aspect of Marx's thought (which I suppose is the part of Hegel Marx doesn't want to let go of) is inimical to human agency and has led the self-described Marxist left into isolation and passivity. The social, Laclau claims, is radically contingent, and isn't heading anywhere in particular on its own. (So, no determination by the economy in the last instance; no base/superstructure distinction; and democracy -- finding ways to make choice possible -- rather than socialism, which sees history as having a teleology and our task merely as realizing something already rationally predetermined.) hugzu ;-p (Boychat.org link) Laclau, New Reflections.... (1990) (Pharmakon post)