Doug Henwood:
> Can you understand why Americans might envy that,
even > if they're wrong on the details?
Certainly. That is why I said that I have complete understanding for whatever someone has to do to ensure their own material survival within capitalism. I am no moralist.
However, ressentiment is a terrible foundation for political agency. Hillary Clinton is offering something not unlike the German system (mandatory insurance), but I do not understand why the radical left should be *satisfied* with that. Of course you take what you can get, but you should not mystify or idealize it.
And the corollary to Dennis and others' mystifications of European social reality is that over here, every demontage of the social insurance system, every NATO or EU war, every introduction of students' fees, every propaganda against trade union strikes, is done with the justification that "at least we don't have American conditions."
It is not coincidence that Schroeder's opposition to the Iraq war was simultaneous to passing the Hartz reforms.
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