We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, February 7, 2010

How Not to Create Jobs

by Zoltan Zigedy from Marxism-Leninism Today. A good analysis of why the US administration's jobs program will not work. But the author seems to be willing to settle for an FDR New Deal type program. It is amazing to me to see how tame some Marxists have become. The New Deal programs, IMO, were a temporary measure to stabilize capitalism in the US. In the early 1930s there were virtually no safety nets in place so that people would have starved to death without those programs. Also the ruling class feared the attraction of socialist ideas to working people due to the rapid economic advances at that time made my the Soviet state bureaucratic system that ruled in the name of "socialism".