"Whatever happened to the idea that the dissident intellectual's role was to inspire the people with a positive vision of what they could achieve if they worked for it? All the time I have been on this list, all I have seen from Wanzala and his comrades by way of a vision of the future is the single simple idea that the worse things get, the better."
This is of course a complete misrepresentation of my view and that of my comrades. The idea is not that the worse things get the better. It is that we have been stripped of so much that the opportunity cost of reclaiming what we have lost and obtaining what we should have is negligible. Things have been getting worse for quite some time, people simply pay more attention when a Bush is at the helm. My posture is no different with respect to Bush, Kerry, or Clinton for that matter. Most of the Kerry boosters admit that he is hardly an improvement on Bush, but that he *might* provide us with some breathing room. I think it is more a matter of liberals/progressives allowing themsleves to take down their guard because the perception of Democrats as more benign than Republicans is more extravagant than the reality. The Kerryistas are fundamentally concerned with the preservation of the system and see Bush as a strange anomaly and Kerry as a corrective, a path to the status quo ante. What I am saying is that we need to think in terms of radically social transformation. They way to achieve that is not through fretting about the next election. It is about cultivating possibilties for the long term, rather than remaining mired in this endless lesser-evilist status-quo, spiral.
Joe W.