The State of the Left

A good friend of this blog sends a pair of links to be enjoyed together.

In An Investment in Failure Thomas Sowell points out that, back to Karl Marx, the left has no interest in those rising out of poverty. Once you cease to be an object for their polity, you are -- if I may borrow a word from Senator Clinton -- invisible.

At one point, Marx wrote to his disciples: "The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing."

Think about that. Millions of human beings mattered to him only in so far as they could serve as cannon fodder in his jihad against the existing society.

If they refused to be pawns in his ideological game, then they were "nothing."

No one on the left would say such things so plainly today, even to themselves. But their actions speak louder than words.

Over at The Nation, their words speak pretty loud as well. Barbara Ehrenreich cannot contain her glee that the subprime crisis is Smashing Capitalism but she is mad that it is not self directed. You really have to read this in full (it's blissfully short), but here's a taste:

The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.

First they stopped paying their mortgages, a move in which they were joined by many financially stretched middle class folks, though the poor definitely led the way. All right, these were trick mortgages, many of them designed to be unaffordable within two years of signing the contract.

Like my disappointment at "The Glorious Revolution," however, the serendipity of it annoys her.

Personally, I prefer my revolutions to be a little more pro-active. There should be marches and rallies, banners and sit-ins, possibly a nice color theme like red or orange. Certainly, there should be a vision of what you intend to replace the bad old system with--European-style social democracy, Latin American-style socialism, or how about just American capitalism with some regulation thrown in?

Global capitalism will survive the current credit crisis; already, the government has rushed in to soothe the feverish markets. But in the long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis. Who would have thought that foreclosures in Stockton and Cleveland would roil the markets of London and Shanghai? The poor have risen up and spoken; only it sounds less like a shout of protest than a low, strangled, cry of pain.

Capitalism will survive? Damn.

Politics Posted by jk at August 21, 2007 11:23 AM