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

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The liberals’ lament: “Why won’t Obama fight?”

by David Walsh from World Socialist Web site. 

This writer provides a lot of valuable insights to understand how US liberals serve to maintain the capitalism system.
They delude themselves and others with the notion that, subjected to the right arguments, the proper amount of pressure, Obama and his administration can emerge as the champion of the people.

That miracle will never happen before the Day of Judgment, and those who perpetuate such illusions play a reactionary role. This sort of complacent petty-bourgeois politics has disastrous consequences for the working class. Insofar as it reinforces the hold of the big business Democrats over workers, it confuses and paralyzes them politically, and makes inevitable the advance of the ultra-right and ever deeper attacks on social conditions, living standards and democratic rights.

Rich, Krugman, Reich and Greider are at one on this: they seek to prevent an understanding of the class character and history of the Democratic Party and of the need for the working population to break with it, once and for all.
Until ordinary working people understand this, they will continue to suffer the "slings and arrows of [capitalist] misfortune".
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