Doug wrote:
> Really? He said that? Why not taking the controls instead?
You avoid a collision by hitting brakes. You take control after you've wrested them away from the other driver.
Whatever, the point is that I can't stomach anymore this crap about how irrelevant "the" left (always uttered in the singular) is. It's a complete inversion of roles to imagine that the role of communists is to lecture people about how they can't occupy Puerta del Sol until they've committed the Critique of the Gotha Program to memory.
And James's bullshit remark about Joschka Fischer really proves my point; there are indeed individuals of the 1968 generation whose former radical commitments might be a result of pure historical contingency.
Those of us who have those radical commitments now are the least likely to be opportunists of any sort, as Horkheimer said, a "revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, to interesting research and professorial salaries, but rather to misery, shame, ungratefulness, the prison of the unknown, which only a superhuman belief illuminates."
James says Die Linke only has Keynesian crisis management to offer; so why has the entirety of the bourgeois ideological apparatus, from the right-wing Springer press to the "liberal" Spiegel, declared war on this party? Simply because the bourgeoisie as a whole has become so barbarous and irrational?
If so, that's even more of an argument not to wallow in wanky existentialist poses about how benighted the poor masses are who haven't been granted the opportunity to quaff from the fountain of Furedi-thought.