“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, June 12, 2014

Any Kind of Socialism Will Do?

Amy Goodman and guy from The Nation:

Just because the fantastically named Brat has beaten Cantor, doesn't mean you can see anything in his plan that is good, just because you loathe Cantor.

No, “the left” had better not pay attention to the fact that “Wow, he actually criticized the excesses of Wall St. against Main St.”

There are different ways of doing that you know.

This way, if you'd been paying attention, is extreme libertarianism applied as a global umbrella (the latter obviously doesn't work in an ecological polity as I've been arguing, so good luck with umbrellas).

The big corporations are bad not because they exploit people. Brat is into exploiting people: listen to what he says about the minimum wage only yesterday on MSNBC.

He is a libertarian Platonist: the ideal reality of “the market” has been “distorted” and its purity and clarity need to be restored.

Erm...

Big corporations are bad because they got bankrolled by “government.”

And in turn that is bad because it is akin to “regulation.”

And that is bad because any regulation is a distortion of market reality. 

So the solution is not in any sense about helping Main St. The solution, which will destroy Main St. forever, is to withdraw all boron rods from “the market.”

Happy now that you supported him because he made some noises you identified with?

There is a famous case of another kind of entity calling itself “socialism” and opposing huge corporations, but for the wrong reason. (The ultimate wrong reason.) But for fear of enacting Godwin's law, I shall not name it.

That was one of the most irresponsible pieces on Democracy Now I've ever heard.

1 comment:

Nick Guetti said...

That kind of thing is one of the reasons I haven't watched DN! much lately. Sometimes I almost feel like AG is trying to shame the liberals by going "Look! You see what this radical right Libertarian was able to do by playing cards YOU had in your hand but were afraid to play? Snark snark." It seems pretty characteristic of her: "I know who the Enemy is, even if you don't, and any blow against them is a blow for me!" That kind of thing.