Friday, December 08, 2006

Answering the Social Conservatives

Found this gem in an excellent article entitled populisms left and right Of course I have raised this point about the "revolutionary nature of capitalism" before. Call it exchange value versus family values.

Answering the cultural side of the right-wing populist message is slightly tougher. We need to point out the massive contradiction between the cons’ populist, “family values” rhetoric and their free-market practice. When conservatives talk about how Xtreme and revolutionary the laissez-faire system is, we should agree with them—and then point out what exactly this means: the destruction of the world you grew up in. If left to itself, free-market capitalism would empty our towns and bid our wages down to nothing and drill for oil in the Grand Canyon and hook us all up to non-stop virtual-reality advertising goggles for the rest of our days. It doesn’t give a damn about families or values or very much else. So what are we going to do about free-market forces? This is the question of the time, and as long as our answer to it is to shrug it all off as inevitable, as the dictates of “globalization,” we are going to continue to lose.

Or as Herr Doctor Marx said about Globalization;

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."


See:

Capitalism

Marx

Neo-Cons

Neo-conservative


Conservative




Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment