On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 4:41 AM, James Heartfield < Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.’
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