Thank you, Squeers, but can you stand back a bit and examine what you have written ? What Marx writes is almost obscene - as I understand your quotes, he is suggesting that a person can't be Jewish or Aboriginal or have any specificity or identity, it's all illusion, that civil society is all illusion, that genuine society, civil society, and human diversity can never be properly achieved until the Day, and even then, I don't know how human diversity is meant to go, perhaps there will be no 'historical' need for diversity, therefore it will be seen as subversive of The Good Society and purged. Hello, gulags.

Of course, it's no longer 1830, or 1848, or 1871. We've learnt a great deal, through a multitude of bitter experiences, since Marx's time. So perhaps Marx's message needs to be paraphrased (or distorted?): that socialism will, if anything, need to supersede democracy, to do better than democracy, that the limits of democracy have to be reached and then transcended, rather than avoided and denigrated. I.e. socialism, to be at all valid, must build on democracy, with all its imperfections and annoying diversity, i.e. built on the fuzzy and imperfect aspirations of the Enlightenment, in spite of all its illusions which only a select few can clearly understand.

A socialism built on, and superior to, the best aspects of democracy - that might get my vote.

Oh I keep forgetting - under genuine socialism, there isn't any need, ever again, for the vote ? Once we have 'chosen' The Good Society and its apparatchiks, we are stuck with it forever. Now, where have we seen a party being elected and then immediately banning future elections ? Or am I being unnecessarily provocative ?

Joe :)

Joe:
<What Marx writes is almost obscene - as I understand your quotes>
well then you don't undestand them--but a charge of obscenity is always a useful rhetorical device when substance is wanting, isn't it?

As I've said, Marx used Jewishness metonymically for civil society under capitalism; we are figuratively all Jews, according to the stereotype. If you read the text closely, he is not denigrating the idea of cultural distinctiveness (quite the opposite!), but asserting that the ideology of political community (including such verities as "cultural diversity" lol) is confounded by the lived-reality of civil society, where each "acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers".

Whether Christian, Jew or Aboriginal, the individual must play the only game in town, and live counter to his professed ideals. This is manifestly so for the bourgeois Christian, who lives utterly counter to the teachings of Jesus and (ab)uses religion as a kind of idealistic counterweight. It's equally true for the Jew, whom, however, Marx puns and tropes with.
How on Earth can the aborigine claim his distinctiveness when he leaves the land and his culture to embark on the same demeaning and futile pursuit as the rest, to live utterly at odds with any notion of indiginous culture. Indeed to compete in a vicious world where his aboriginality is a material disadvantage, since western ideology is not only at odds with civil society, but also with itself! Ergo intolerance.
Assimilating aborigines into the system, while simultaneously patronising them with a trumped-up sense of their cultural-distinctiveness, which is supposed to be a comfort! rather than a reminder of what they've lost, or an identity for which they've endured centuries of humiliation, deprecation and disadvantaged, takes my breath away in its brazenness.
cont..

..cont.
At this stage of late-capitalism you're deluded if you think there's much cultural distinctiveness left. Distinctive cultures are almost extinct, and live-on only as commodities. Anyone can buy a didgeridoo. But you can't live the life any more than you can be a real Christian and live a reality of viciousness.
Marx was trying to make genuine individualism and cultural distinctiveness a civil possibility rather than an ideological contradiction!

Antiseptic,
I would say urban aborigines most certainly do have a relevant difference. It's called skin, and aboriginal skin and features have a history of being the most despised of all. I asked my racist friend in Mt Isa once, six foot six, good looking, white and very successful, if he thought he'd have been as successfull if he'd been born an aboriginal. Still waiting for an answer.
Skin is also the organ of sensitivity, and not just pigment. The skin is a mass of sensitivity and so is the human being. I've often wondered how I'd feel if I was an aborigine to some prominent outward degree, in a white world that mistrusted me at best and loathed and despised me at worst. I think I would be an utterly "dysfunctional" and paranoid individual.
The book to read is Lerissa Behrendt's "Home".

On this subject, I noticed this article recently.

Apparently Aboriginal Australians have been here around 50,000 years and perhaps up to 75,000 years and have had a longer continuous association with the land than any other race of people.

"...the study shows that when ancestral Australians began their journey, the ancestors of Asians and Europeans had not yet differentiated from each other and were still in Africa or the Middle-East."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-23/aboriginal-dna-dates-australian-arrival/2913010

Slightly off track but I thought it was interesting.

Squeers,

Obscene, yes - and with respect, you provide examples of this callousness towards non-majority people, that if they can't forget who they are, then they can bugger off, until the Great Day:

What it is to be Aboriginal is simply, in my view, whatever Aboriginal people are doing, WHILE REMAINING ABORIGINAL. Ask them, when they are working, playing, shopping, enjoying a movie - 'are you still Aboriginal ?' and they will look at you as if you are crazy. Of course they are, they'll respond.

And as such, they are entitled to the full rights of participation in Australian society, Australia's civil society, no matter how flawed and illusory those rights may be.

What's your alternative - that any Aboriginal people who wish to keep asserting their Aboriginality might as well keep out of town - that, if they want to stay Aboriginal, illusory equal rights for them will have to wait until the Day? I thought such Right-wing ideas went out fifty years ago [forty years ago in Queensland].

Colour is not the only criterion - many of my relations-by-marriage are paler than me, but have grown up knowing only Aboriginal relations, day in, day out, mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts dropping in, grannies. No white fellas within cooee. So, pale or dark, and accepted by all of the Aboriginal people around them right through their childhood, and usually slagged by many the non-Aboriginal people around them, it's no mystery if Aboriginal people raised in that way take their Aboriginality for granted, no matter what they are doing, how they are living, who they marry.

And surely it is progressive to recognise their equal rights to participate in society, as 'citoyens', as whatever they damn-well like, or should they wait to be liberated by the revolutionary working-class ? How long might that take ?

To get back to topic .....

[TBC]