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Originally Posted by roachboy
its easy peasy: if people understand capitalism to be a force of nature, then the states of affairs generated within it are simple effects of inevitable, natural processes. to revolt would then be to like king lear, trying to stop the ocean.
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Yes, even the term "capitalism" is sort of taboo because using it puts you in a conceptual space where alternatives exist.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
personally, i think that this would be a good time for people to begin thinking about what a truly radical oppositional politics might look like, to work out its conceptual premises, to generate positions and float them in the netaether (for example), opening them up to critique, etc. seen from a certain distance, the conditions for a radical change are beginning to emerge from within the exercize in sustained incoherence that is the present american system, but there are very few frameworks that enable people to see what is happening, and almost none that enable folk to imagine other alternatives toward which they might move, so there is no real political action and seemingly little possibility of such political action.
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You're coming at this from theory. I tend to agree that we need new theory more than anything right now, but sometimes i need to remind myself that people can act and even organise themselves without too much theorising. Y'know, like when workers organise the flow of work so that they don't put too much strain on the guy with the bad back. ("That is socialism!" wrote a famous Trinidadian back in the fifties.) Surely there are other examples of the New Society emerging from under our noses. Of course, those examples will need to be sought out and described and presented as The New.
It's interesting to hear my very small-time capitalist relatives call for more money for schools (workers need more/better education just to do their jobs), public transport (urban gentrification means the cheapest-to-hire workers must travel from the hinterlands), and most often, for a Canadian style health care system (They want Walmart to pay their share of social costs). I had thought that it was only the Big Guys, like GM, who wanted a national health plan, since it would spread the cost of their corporate social programmes. So there you go: conservative ideology is not even coherent from the perspective of actually existing capitalists.