This is absolutely the last sociopolitical post. Our new focus will be music!
"It was not Obama who deluded the left; the left deluded itself. His rise to the presidency was the product of a disoriented conception of politics that elevated race and gender into the central and defining issues in American life. Along with this went the repudiation of social class as the essential analytic category. The historic problems of social and economic equality seemed to disappear from liberal discourse. Sadly, liberals did not really care what Obama really thought about the concentration of wealth in the United States. They cared about the fact that he was African-American. But that is only part of the story. The sort of liberal constituency that existed in Roosevelt's time -- which favored a substantial redistribution of wealth in the United States -- is not to be found. In reality, liberals (as that term is used today) are distinguished from conservatives largely by secondary cultural issues. The liberal elite and its affluent constituency have no interest in any significant economic restructuring of American society. They are for "reform" to the extent that it does not affect their stock portfolios and personal wealth.Obama's empty rhetoric -- which consisted of stringing together cliches about change that lacked, upon examination, any significant social content -- appealed to wealthy supporters who enjoyed indulging their self-satisfied illusions in their own "progressive" intentions. The failure of Obama reflects the bankruptcy of the sort of identity-politics liberalism that raised him into the White House." -----somewhere in the NYT
click on the image for more detail...
An excerpt from the Spartacist Manifesto (published in 1918):
The question today is not democracy or dictatorship. The question that history has put on the agenda reads: bourgeois democracy or socialist democracy. For the dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean bombs, putsches, riots and anarchy, as the agents of capitalist profits deliberately and falsely claim. Rather, it means using all instruments of political power to achieve socialism, to expropriate the capitalist class, through and in accordance with the will of the revolutionary majority of the proletariat.
