Oct, 25th Apologies! For some strange reason (sic), I sent out the notice about this post, but forgot to post it!
Corporate newscasters like Dylan are not the only ones who demonstrate a lack of ideological literacy. Their ignorance partly accounts of that of the brave and joyous occupiers of Wall Street, who are sounding more and more like the sixties, having recreated a commune in a New York City park.
An excellent article in the new NYR by Michael Greenberg, makes clear the reason why occupiers insist they’re neither right nor left: it’s because they reject both Democrats and Republicans, for being subservient to the corporatocracy. Notwithstanding this stark reality, in the minds of the protesters, the Dems are in their new iteration are still ‘left’ and the Republicans are ‘right’. Hence to be against both is to be ‘neither left nor right’.
They have yet to realize that the Dems are not ‘left’ according to the definition of left in the rest of the world. If they get access to Ideology 101, they will know the difference between Communism, Socialism and Social Democracy For more than fifty years the latter has brought Europe prosperity and peace - until, with Barack Obama’s election it allowed itself to believe that the Democratic Party was once again a Left party (meaning it would succeed in gradually transforming the corporatocracy that hurts so many citizens, into an American version of social democracy). The commonly held belief by the European and American ‘left’ that the Democratic Party was on its side resulted in the blind faith in the American financial system that led to the massive financial crisis that affected mainly us and them.
The Occupiers need to add to their new form of participatory democracy an on-going sketch of a governing system that will allow us to get from growth at all costs, to sustainable no-growth societies. They could add to their reading ‘Ecologica’ by the French essayist Andre Gorz, information about bitcoin, local currencies and the many experiments in self-governance and survival that are out there.
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