The three points about the purity fetish are superb. I have your book, and look forward to supplementing/contrasting it with Losurdo's Western Marxism coming out in translation soon.
The US military/police/intelligence budget borders on a trillion dollars. That enemy is an objective obstacle to revolution in the US. You are incontestably right on the objective need for revolution though.
I do not believe the professional managerial class is a coherent class in any useful sense. The conflation of socioeconomic status with "class" ends up formally speaking lumping together say, Jamie Dimon and David North. No one with any sense really does this but why then use a term like PMC which in practice you have to not use when it lapses into blatant absurdity?
I though "demos" was not in ancient Athens etc. precisely the people in general or even the poor people in general, but specifically the people in a deme, a city ward. And this was in distinction to speaking of the people as fellow members of the clan or gens or tribe (or any of the other numerous names for such groupings.) Democracy it seemed to me is not the principle of majority rule, but a principle of class collaboration, that treats "the people" as Us vs. Them, them being foreigners abroad and foreigners at home (non-citizens, whether slaves or metics.)
And the whole point of this state was to defend property. In bourgeois states then formal equality is never meant to imply majority rule, but minority rule in the sense of defending the minority's property against the claims of the poor. And democracy also means conquest, if you can get away with it. I think it is undeniable that such democracy is better than godkings or feudal lords but this kinds of democracy is not the naturally ordained perfect society that can't be replaced in its turn. The thing is, in the US, the Constitution rejects majority rule.
Professor Garrido will speak for himself if he wishes, but I think denying the national past is disorienting. For example, I was watching the streaming series Manhunt on Apple TV+ about the search for John Wilkes Booth. The series in its penultimate episode went to the trouble to show a Black character who helped John Wilkes Booth in his escape and openly attacked Lincoln personally. (This is TV, so personal is all you get, no social or political really.) So far as I can tell, the thrust of the assumption that "we" are enlightened *now* cultivates complacency and confusion. Repudiating Lincoln as a fraud, forgetting that Lincoln was the chief leader in the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution and this was a great thing, tends to make people believe stuff like the Civil War amendments were and are irrelevant, if not outright frauds. Yet for just one example, birthright citizenship (conferred constitutionally by the Fourteenth) is under attack and highly relevant. The belief that even Lincoln was an enemy of Black people (and John Brown was a contemptible fool or maniac) means that Blacks and whites can't truly be allies today. The belief Reconstruction was always a swindle means the real causes of its long defeat (it took decades for "Redemption" to devise Jim Crow) included issues such as hard money, government austerity, opposition to labor as conspiracies in restraint of trade, the role of monopolies like railroads, all played a part in the reconsolidation of Black oppression----and all were perceived to be a part of "freedom" as conceived by the market liberals of the day. That division hasn't even disappeared yet. Again, I think forgetting the past hurts our work in the present.
Hey Rusty, yes, there are people on the U.S. left (usually the ultra-left, some wrongly self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists, some Maoists, some third wordlists and anarchists) who refer to the U.S. as a settler state (and hence, to workers as settlers) that ought to be abolished. Hence, the 'Abolish America' or 'Death to America' sloganeering and the 'Amerikkka' spelling of the country. Critiques of this ultra-left in the U.S. is not new - I recommend reading Michael Parenti's book, Superpatriotism, where he also brings these national nihilists under scrutiny while distinguishing between the superpatriotism of the imperialists and the organic patriotism of the working class (based simply on a love of the people which is only really compatible with socialism).
The three points about the purity fetish are superb. I have your book, and look forward to supplementing/contrasting it with Losurdo's Western Marxism coming out in translation soon.
The US military/police/intelligence budget borders on a trillion dollars. That enemy is an objective obstacle to revolution in the US. You are incontestably right on the objective need for revolution though.
I do not believe the professional managerial class is a coherent class in any useful sense. The conflation of socioeconomic status with "class" ends up formally speaking lumping together say, Jamie Dimon and David North. No one with any sense really does this but why then use a term like PMC which in practice you have to not use when it lapses into blatant absurdity?
I though "demos" was not in ancient Athens etc. precisely the people in general or even the poor people in general, but specifically the people in a deme, a city ward. And this was in distinction to speaking of the people as fellow members of the clan or gens or tribe (or any of the other numerous names for such groupings.) Democracy it seemed to me is not the principle of majority rule, but a principle of class collaboration, that treats "the people" as Us vs. Them, them being foreigners abroad and foreigners at home (non-citizens, whether slaves or metics.)
And the whole point of this state was to defend property. In bourgeois states then formal equality is never meant to imply majority rule, but minority rule in the sense of defending the minority's property against the claims of the poor. And democracy also means conquest, if you can get away with it. I think it is undeniable that such democracy is better than godkings or feudal lords but this kinds of democracy is not the naturally ordained perfect society that can't be replaced in its turn. The thing is, in the US, the Constitution rejects majority rule.
In point 3, are you saying some of the left WANTS the destruction of America through socialism?
Professor Garrido will speak for himself if he wishes, but I think denying the national past is disorienting. For example, I was watching the streaming series Manhunt on Apple TV+ about the search for John Wilkes Booth. The series in its penultimate episode went to the trouble to show a Black character who helped John Wilkes Booth in his escape and openly attacked Lincoln personally. (This is TV, so personal is all you get, no social or political really.) So far as I can tell, the thrust of the assumption that "we" are enlightened *now* cultivates complacency and confusion. Repudiating Lincoln as a fraud, forgetting that Lincoln was the chief leader in the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution and this was a great thing, tends to make people believe stuff like the Civil War amendments were and are irrelevant, if not outright frauds. Yet for just one example, birthright citizenship (conferred constitutionally by the Fourteenth) is under attack and highly relevant. The belief that even Lincoln was an enemy of Black people (and John Brown was a contemptible fool or maniac) means that Blacks and whites can't truly be allies today. The belief Reconstruction was always a swindle means the real causes of its long defeat (it took decades for "Redemption" to devise Jim Crow) included issues such as hard money, government austerity, opposition to labor as conspiracies in restraint of trade, the role of monopolies like railroads, all played a part in the reconsolidation of Black oppression----and all were perceived to be a part of "freedom" as conceived by the market liberals of the day. That division hasn't even disappeared yet. Again, I think forgetting the past hurts our work in the present.
Hey Rusty, yes, there are people on the U.S. left (usually the ultra-left, some wrongly self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninists, some Maoists, some third wordlists and anarchists) who refer to the U.S. as a settler state (and hence, to workers as settlers) that ought to be abolished. Hence, the 'Abolish America' or 'Death to America' sloganeering and the 'Amerikkka' spelling of the country. Critiques of this ultra-left in the U.S. is not new - I recommend reading Michael Parenti's book, Superpatriotism, where he also brings these national nihilists under scrutiny while distinguishing between the superpatriotism of the imperialists and the organic patriotism of the working class (based simply on a love of the people which is only really compatible with socialism).