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

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Golden Dawn and the extremism of the center

Click here to access article by Jerome Roos from Reflections on a Revolution

The author sees through the ruse of a civil war between two extreme factions which ruling capitalist directors would like to use as a cover for a police-military crackdown on all dissent. The quote by Sinclair offers a useful political equation to suggest that capitalism will resort to murder whenever their other strategy doesn't work. Their other strategy is obviously liberalism. Thus, I think it logically follows that capitalism minus murder equals liberalism. In both equations I see capitalism as a constant, while the independent variable is the legitimacy of class rule among the larger population, with fascism and liberalism the dependent variables.

Framing the relationships this way suggests that liberalism is only another facade that hides the exploitative system of capitalism. In university philosophy and history classes liberalism is taken far too seriously as a thing in itself that somehow influenced the rise of capitalism. The agency is the other way around. Liberalism as expounded by Adam Smith, John Locke, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, etc, whether they were consciously advancing property rights--the core concept of capitalism--or not, their ideas were strongly advanced by key capitalists as a major ideological weapon in the struggle against aristocratic rule. Liberalism was used as a cover to justify the elimination of all barriers to capitalist enterprises and the capitalist class's exclusive claims to the wealth derived from these enterprises. Hence, liberalism was, and continues to be, merely political propaganda and a tool to insure the rule of capitalists.