[lbo-talk] Cheery thought for the next 300 years

[andie nachgeborenen]

Well, the hope of preserving Scandanavian social
sdmocracy is a bit far from anything on our horizon.
And scaling back our ambitions from struggling for a
society where the workers actually run the economy and
exercise political power to one where "left" seeks to
reduce the rate of increase of the worse
depredatations of an increasingly savage and
unrestrained capitalism may be more realistic, but is
hardly cause for celebration. And if at the end of it,
in 300 years, assuming that we can still drinking the
water and still breathe the air, their radicalized (?)
descendents of our children, in the wreckage of
William Gibson's Sprawl or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner
world, must re-invent the wheel, all continuity with
historical radical and working class movements have
been severed and all memory and tradition of those
class struggles gone, this seems to me to be
unfortunate in the extreme. Though I am not sure I see
an alternative.

--- Luke Weiger <lweiger at umich.edu> wrote:


> Justin wrote:
> 
> > Have had interesting and rather depressing chats
> about socialist politics
> with my teenage kids, one a 16 year
> > old HS junior, another an almost 13-year old
> middle schooler (now reading
> Orwell's 1984) on his own, both
> > very smart and fairly politically aware, quite
> progressive in their
> values -- antiwar, anti-imperialist, antiracist,
> anti-corporate,
> > pro-union, feminist.  But utterly skeptical about
> the possibility or point
> of socialism -- not that they have a sophisticated
> > understanding, though they both have the general
> idea that it involves the
> workers running things. Or that their objections are
> > particularly sophisticated or novel. (Generally
> comes to, A good idea in
> theory but it won't work in practice.) But what's
> > somewhat dispiriting is the lack of hope for a
> future that is better than
> this.
> 
> Is this another way of saying that the smart
> radicals of yesteryear are more
> likely to be smart reformers today?  If so, I'd say
> we don't lack hope--we
> just have different hopes.  And sometimes it's just
> a different vision of
> how those hopes are to be realized.  I think you
> yourself have cited
> examples (e.g. Sweden) where reformers have won so
> convincingly that radical
> change is and (more importantly) _ought to be_ a
> tough sell.
> 
> -- Luke
> 
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