[lbo-talk] David Brooks, so worried

Wojtek Sokolowski swsokolowski at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 13 12:08:57 PDT 2008


----- Original Message ---- From: Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> Wojtek, the social state in Germany has been effectively reduced to an American-style "workfare" regime. 

 [WS:] If it has been reduced, then it follows that it was in a much better shape in the past, or so it seems by my logic.  And if it was in a better shape in the past, then someobody must have given it thatshape, no?  That someone can be either the bourgeoisie or the working class.  Quite frankly, I belive that it was the working class - which is onsistent with the point that made earlier, namely that the welfare state was one of the greatest real achievements of the socialist/working class movement.

Granted, that achievement is under attack by global bourgeoisie, but it does not diminish the significance of  initially attaining this achievements.  I argued, in the context of andie's popsting, that this was one of gretest accomplishments of the sociallist/working class movement, which currently is either being taken for granted, or even dimissed by looney left.

Wojtek

--------------------------------------------------------------- "When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken ----------------------------------------------------------------



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list