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to clarify something, i use ideology in almost exclusively it's marxist sense---it refers to a class-specific set of statements about the world that are presented as if they were general basically, and then to particular political worldviews (to the extent that they're predicated on this same structure, but each differs from others around it...) so i don't mean the same thing by it as you do, ace.
it's doubly confusing because pragmatism can be understood as a tactic rather than an ideology, one that entails cobbling together elements from a range of positions using a criterion of efficacy, say. but this says nothing about the ideological position occupied by the pragmatist---it simply points to tactics.
i was more interested in obama early in his campaign when he was running vaguely left. i understood why he shifted center as the candidacy became more serious--this (illusory at worst, self-confirming at best) notion of "centrists" as holding popular power.
i hope that he is more familiary with social democratic style action than his centrist campaign would have us believe simply because the territory that the us is heading into in order to manage this economic and political meltdown, brought to you by 30 years of degenerate neoliberalism, will be a type of social-democracy. if he knows this area and understand its logic, we'll collectively be in far better shape than would be the case if reality presents him with on the job training.
o and i do not consider myself to be particularly driven by ideology---i simply think that capitalism is a giant farce and expect that sooner or later it will either be taken apart or will implode. given that i have little more than contempt for conservatism in all its forms, i would prefer to see this process sped along by folk who operate from "the left"---whatever that means in 2008. but the particular situation in which we find ourselves does not provide folk like me the luxiry of ready-made belief systems, so i remain a kind of critical observer. just to say this.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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