History, Evolution, and the Eonic Effect

by Bob Fitrakis
The Columbus Free Press (February 28 2010)
The American people voted out the policies of George W Bush’s
administration. Voters turned their back on W’s war policies and torture;
repudiated his Orwellian anti-environmentalism and demanded green jobs;
and rejected his bailout of the big investment bankers that destroyed our
economy.
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And interesting older text: Socialism, by Michael Harrington, a book from the seventies that younger readers may not know. (isn’t Amazon great? you can get an old copy for two and half bucks)
Watching the charade of rightwing ideology in action, to the point of accusing Obama (!) of socialism, I am mindful of a lost world of liberal/left culture and thought that is being asphixiated by neoliberal media tactics, devastatingly successful.
I am often stunned by the sheer idiocy of the current generation, even of educated persons. The work of Fox News has been done well: idiots roll off the assembly line
I am a critic of Marx and Engels and have posted frequently on that issue, but the current prejudice against socialism, despite the left’s idiocy on the legacy of Stalinism, is a form of historical ignorance, and often the result of the mindset described in Frank’s What’s The Matter With Kansas: the working class mindset poisoned by overdose watching of Fox News into the rejection of self-interest. Basically the rightist elite understands the low class asshole hooked on Fox News: he is easily turned against himself to be a compliant idiot in the system from which he can receive no profit.

We can see this in clever way propaganda has reversed the idea of revolt in the stupidity of the Tea Party movement. etc, etc….
These phenomena were foretold fairly well by Marx/Engels.
The right wing is trying to destroy American democracy, and in the process have distorted the meaning and usage of the terms ’socialism’ and ‘liberalism’.

Michael Harrington, although his book is out of date, has some nice pieces that endure in this text from the days before even Nixonian conservatism.

He makes the case for the democratic Marx in the wake of 1848, and as a consistent socialist clarifies the way in which Lenin along with the right wing destroyed the socialist idea.
It is not complex: any right thinking citizen-voter untouched by the Fox News poison machine would naturally embrace basic elements of socialism, or, at least, welfare economics and social democratic pseudo-socialism.
One can disagree with these statements, but the idea of socialism should at least be used in a proper usage even by critics.
Harrington would have a hard time in the current scene where unrepentant leftists of crypto-Stalinist persuation have coopted the idea of socialism as badly as those on the right. Harrington was a rare thinker, and insisted on the need for the left to resurrect socialism after and apart from the Bolshevik theft of the idea.
Anyway, his book is a minor classic of reasonable and intelligent socialist discourse.
It might help, even for critics of socialism, to insist at least on the right use of the term, instead of the current systematic mystifications of the increasingly fascist right in the the US.

Everything that Marx predicted is rapidly coming to pass in the US, and the result could be catastrophic very soon.
An archaeological study of the ideas of socialism and the left are essential, but that is very difficult because of the kind of distortions of the record, right and left, that Harrington uncovered with considerable foresight in the seventies.

SOCIALISM HAS KNOWN increments of success, basic failure and
massive betrayal. Yet it is more relevant to the humane con-
struction of the twenty-first century than any other idea.
The American system has struggled and failed for over a century for simple health care, an achievement pulled out of a hat by Bismarck in the nineteenth century (to coopt the left). As that point a grave danger arises, as the ‘enough is enough’ tipping is reached.

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Economists routinely ignore its hidden costs to the environment and the
community
by Herman E Daly
Scientific American (November 1993)
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by Herve Kempf

Le Monde (October 31 2009)

Capitalist ideology – according to which the market can resolve all
problems – has, in these last few days, reached the apex of the
absurd. [click to continue...]

http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

Spot the Difference
12/12/09
A SHORT historical quiz: Which state:
(1) Arose after a holocaust in which a third of its people were destroyed?

(2) Drew from that holocaust the conclusion that only superior military forces could ensure its survival?

(3) Accorded the army a central role in its life, making it “an army that had a state, rather than a state that had an army”?

(4) Began by buying the land it took, and continued to expand by conquest and annexation?

(5) Endeavored by all possible means to attract new immigrants?

(6) Conducted a systematic policy of settlement in the occupied territories?

(7) Strove to push out the national minority by creeping ethnic cleansing?

For anyone who has not yet found the answer: it’s the state of Prussia.

But if some readers were tempted to believe that it all applies to the State of Israel – well, they are right, too. This description fits our state. The similarity between the two states is remarkable. True, the countries are geographically very different, and so are the historical periods, but the points of similarity can hardly be denied.

http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

Volume 56, Number 20 · December 17, 2009
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?
By Tony Judt
The following is adapted from a lecture given at New York University on October 19, 2009.

Americans would like things to be better. According to public opinion surveys in recent years, everyone would like their child to have improved life chances at birth. They would prefer it if their wife or daughter had the same odds of surviving maternity as women in other advanced countries. They would appreciate full medical coverage at lower cost, longer life expectancy, better public services, and less crime.

When told that these things are available in Austria, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, but that they come with higher taxes and an “interventionary” state, many of those same Americans respond: “But that is socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And above all, we do not wish to pay more taxes.”

This curious cognitive dissonance is an old story. A century ago, the German sociologist Werner Sombart famously asked: Why is there no socialism in America? There are many answers to this question. Some have to do with the sheer size of the country: shared purposes are difficult to organize and sustain on an imperial scale. There are also, of course, cultural factors, including the distinctively American suspicion of central government.

And indeed, it is not by chance that social democracy and welfare states have worked best in small, homogeneous countries, where issues of mistrust and mutual suspicion do not arise so acutely. A willingness to pay for other people’s services and benefits rests upon the understanding that they in turn will do likewise for you and your children: because they are like you and see the world as you do.

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Conversely, where immigration and visible minorities have altered the demography of a country, we typically find increased suspicion of others and a loss of enthusiasm for the institutions of the welfare state. Finally, it is incontrovertible that social democracy and the welfare states face serious practical challenges today. Their survival is not in question, but they are no longer as self-confident as they once appeared.

But my concern tonight is the following: Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?

Our shortcoming—forgive the academic jargon—is discursive. We simply do not know how to talk about these things. To understand why this should be the case, some history is in order: as Keynes once observed, “A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.” For the purposes of mental emancipation this evening, I propose that we take a minute to study the history of a prejudice: the universal contemporary resort to “economism,” the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs.

Mad about English: The age-old language struggle
The Lexicographer’s Dilemma
Jack Lynch
Friday, December 4, 2009
THE LEXICOGRAPHER’S DILEMMA
The Evolution of “Proper” English from Shakespeare to “South Park”

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/10-7

Published on Thursday, December 10, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Making an American ‘Impenetrable Underground Wall’ the Laughing Stock of
the World
by Ann Wright
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The potentate of potions

The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy
By Adrienne Mayor
Princeton Univ. 448 pp. $29.95
“The Poison King” is, as its subtitle makes clear, the story of the life of Mithradates, leader of the ancient Black Sea kingdom of Pontus, who, in the 1st century B.C., did everything he could to overthrow the Roman Empire. I read this biography as a layperson, not a scholar, but I can say without reservation that it’s a wonderful reading experience, as bracing as a tonic, the perfect holiday gift for adventure-loving men and women. A finalist for this week’s National Book Award, it’s drenched in imaginative violence and disaster, but it also wears the blameless vestments of culture and antiquity. You can have all the fun of reading about a greedy villain being put to death by being made to “drink” molten gold, but still hide safe behind the excuse that you’re just brushing up on your classics.

Mithradates, as the royal heir of Pontus, was trained in all the manly sports and modeled his life on heroes of yore like Alexander the Great and Hannibal. Perhaps because of his suspicious, murderous mother, he took a lively interest from his earliest years in poisons and their antidotes. Quite a few of his relatives had been or would be poisoned, so this was a sensible precaution.