Carrol Cox wrote:
> Yugoslavia is a good litmus test here in the U.S.
> also. It separatedleftists from _liberals-full-of
> shit_ pretending to be leftists.
I think the litmus test on a more general level is one's capacity to have faith in the civilizing potential of capital, and specifically one's own nation-state as the agent of this civilizing process.
Such faith is either naive or cynical. Among educated people, I'd say it tends to be entirely cynical, since anyone familiar with the enclosure of the English countryside, European settling of the North and South American continents, the Middle Passage, colonization of Africa, World Wars, and Auschwitz, does not have the excuse of ignorance when professing the progressive potential of the commodity form.
But then, Walter Benjamin has been reduced to literary theory in the contemporary academy, so perhaps we expect too much.
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