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Silence8 -> RE: American Ideology (Don't Think! Don't Think Again!) (5/31/2010 10:03:29 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Musicmystery
Back to the OP...
quote:
Well, for the radical imagination to be rekindled and to lead the way out of this desert, what is needed is people who will work to sweep away the mists of carefully contrived illusion, reveal the stark reality, and also to be directly engaged in popular struggles that they sometimes help galvanize.
This concluding point is a nice sentiment, but it reveals the vapidness of the well worded but empty speech. It should have been the introduction, not the conclusion, an introduction to strategies to achieve this fine sounding goal.
Instead, he presents an overview of what is, with no more ideas for solutions than the people he reviews.
The immediately preceding paragraph offers some concrete conclusions:
Well, the radical imagination should suggest an answer. The factory in question, and many others, could be taken over by the workforce with the support of—that would, of course, require the support of the communities that are left desolate, and in fact the rest of us. And they could be converted to production of high-speed rail facilities and other badly needed goods. Now, I said "radical imagination," but the idea is not particularly radical. In the nineteenth century, it was intuitively obvious to New England workers—quoting them, quoting their papers—that “those who work in the mills should own them,” and the idea that wage labor differed from slavery only in that it was temporary was so common that it was even a slogan of Lincoln’s Republican Party. Well, during the recent years of financialization and deindustrialization, there have been repeated efforts to implement worker and community takeover of closing plants. A few have succeeded, but not most. The ideas have immediate moral appeal to the affected workforce and the communities, and they should be quite feasible with sufficient public support. And they would be very far-reaching in their implications.
The most important thing, though, is precisely what Chomsky (and few other people) are doing -- trying to educate people about the dynamics at work. People can't act (and vote, for that matter) rationally if their heads aren't screwed on straight.
I'm not sure frankly it's even possible. But, maybe.
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