> but I am quite sympathetic to the virtues of, "personal responsibility, hard
> work, and the ability of the individual to improve his or her own condition
> through their efforts.” I'd rather try to show why these values
> are incompatible with capitalism
shag carpet bomb wrote:
> totally agreed Bhaskar. i think what's often missing, for many who
> lean left (progressives) - katha pollit arguments on this list in the
> past come to mind -- is that, for whatever reason, they _do_ associate
> responsibility, hard work, and self-improvement with capitalism and
> implicitly see socialism/communism as anti-thetical to those values,
> as a priori a system that can never be compatible with those values,
> let alone foster them.
Yeesh! I thought it would be obvious that my phrasing was meant as a provocation, not as a real, literal assertion. I hoped to provoke exactly these kinds of thoughts. *This* is the kind of ideological work that needs to be done. These are the debates that need to be had. These are the kinds of ideas and symbols that people care about. When non-political people get attracted to a political ideology, it's usually because it offers an explanation of how politics connects with such basic thematics of life.
Not to be invidious, but working out "words and theories" on issues like these is a much more pressing task than working out theories on hoary abstractions concerning the nature of capital. Not that I don't enjoy a good argument on that as much as the next email list subscriber.
SA