[lbo-talk] Donate to Wall Street Protestors

[James Heartfield]

I have no brief for Ron Paul, but it seems to me that if some – including me – are less critical of the libertarian right, it is because we think that the left got the balance between state and liberty wrong. British Social Democracy, certainly, and Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson ‘big government’ were authoritarian and oppressive regimes. I think the left ought to oppose the bail-outs, because they are all about directing public money to parasitic capitalist concerns, and sweet FA to do with saving jobs. The left should not identify with government (or what in Europe we call ‘the state’) which is for the most part summation of capitalist society (as the German state-derivation theorists explained, cf. the 1978 collection edited by John Holloway, Capitalism and the State).

SA had said: ‘Yup. It's funny how there are certain leftists who'll flirt with that  faction of the right-wing that wants to turn back the clock to 1880 as long as it's against whatever the current war is. They'd never think to  give a pass to some apologist for the wars just because he was a liberal  New Deal-Great Society diehard. It's part of this imperialism-centric  worldview that I assume comes from the New Left generation.’