[lbo-talk] Is Obama Running Interference to ProtectBankers' Pay?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Mar 23 16:20:35 PDT 2009


SA] I hate this kind of argument. I always picture the advocate of this view watching a puppy being tortured and inwardly reproaching himself for his bourgeois sentimental feelings of outrage. Miles, you live under capitalist social relations, yet you don't believe people are poor because they don't have a good work ethic. How'd that happen? If you woke up under a fascist regime, would you support the Fuhrer because, after all, morality is merely a product of power relations? This argument makes no sense at all.

It's not an argument; it's an explanation. There is no reason your or anyone else _should_ join the revolution or become a Trappist monk. That's up to you. It's too bad you hate it though, that could be bad for your blood pressure. If someone _wants_ to join in social struggle, then I think I have useful things to say to him or her, but I'm not going to try to convince anyone that Marxism is "true" or that they _should_ go out and overthrow capitalism. No one _ever_ tried to persuade me of either of those things, they flowed from, were an emergent property of, activities which I first joined mostly as a lark after finishing my dissertation, and a few years later someone was posting very well drawn cartoons of me (with my tongue stickingout) in every men's room in town. Caption: "A year ago I couldn't spell revolutionary and now I am one." (Dennis Rogers, a rather good artist. I don't know what he's doing now.) As we used to say in the '50s, that's the way the cookie crumbles. And watch that blood pressure.

Carrol



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