[lbo-talk] the depressing thing that is American politics...

Mike Ballard swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au
Wed Jul 25 16:37:25 PDT 2007


On 24 Jul, 2007, at 19:01 PM, B. wrote:
>
> There are just so many fucking good reasons that
> certain things needs to happen, universal health care
> one of them, an end in Iraq another -- yet, no matter
> the brilliance of the salvos fired, they don't. Even
> when perfectly sound and reasonable reasons are
> elaborated -- it's just, thanks, but no thanks. And
> I'm not even blaming leaders for being obstinate,
> though they're obviously bastards. There is a HUGE
> amount of the US public that is so entrenched in a
> facts-be-damned mindset that I have no idea how to
> even comprehend it, or approach it.
>
**************

The condition our condition is in was pretty well summed up in 1941, IMO:

"..freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an 'individual,' but that at the same time he has become isolated, powerless and an instrument of purposes outside of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual's potentialities, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously."

Eric Fromm Escape from Freedom

The best response to the servility inherent in a more or less stable system of class rule is to be as free as you can yourself and associate organizationally with others of a similar mindset: there's not much more an isolated individual can do. As a benefit, such organization can become a catalyst for critical thinking amongst your fellow workers. As the contradictions of the system become more and more apparent on a material, existentially threatening level e.g. climate change, the movement towards more freedom from the fetters of class rule will grow.

Minor improvements in the standard of living can be legislated : Government funded health care can be won as a concession to working class interests in a bourgeois democracy, if enough people feel the need for it and act together to get it--history shows that. History also shows that if workers do nothing in the way of organizing, they'll get nothing, not even a part of the surplus value, they create above the wages they need to reproduce themselves for the captains of industry and commerce to exploit forever and a day. The trick is to get people out of their resignation, their tendency to retreat into a kind of militant ignorance, their tendency to take the least path of resistance which is to acquiesce to conservative inertia of the times. This face of militan ignorance is sometimes known as "being realistic".

Solidarity, Mike B)

An injury to one is an injury to all http://www.iww.org/

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