Reggae Bangara Vol. 2
In his 2008 parliamentary apology, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd endorsed the estimate by Peter Read, the university historian who first advanced the concept of the Stolen Generations, that 50,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed in the 20th century.
Read had written that governments removed children as young as possible and reared them in institutions isolated from any contact with Aboriginal culture. "Welfare officers, removing children solely because they were Aboriginal," he said, "intended and arranged that they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home."
The majority were allegedly babies and infants. The SBS television series First Australians claimed most of the 50,000 were aged under five. Henry Reynolds explained the rationale: "The younger the child the better, before habits were formed, attachments made, language learned, traditions absorbed."
Rather than acting for racist or genocidal reasons, government officers and missionaries wanted to rescue children and teenagers from welfare settlements and makeshift camps riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence and sexual abuse.
In NSW, WA and the Territory, public servants, doctors, teachers and missionaries were appalled to find Aboriginal girls between five and eight years of age suffering from sexual abuse and venereal disease. On the Kimberley coast from the 1900s to the 1920s they were dismayed to find girls of nine and 10 years old hired out by their own parents as prostitutes to Asian pearling crews. That was why the great majority of children removed by authorities were female ...
Government officials had a duty to rescue children from such settings, as much then as they do now.
It can be stated definitely, that it is and always has been, contrary to policy to force half-caste women to marry anyone. The half-caste must be a perfectly free agent in the matter.
"We have no right to attempt to destroy their national life. Like ourselves, they are entitled to retain their racial entity and racial pride."
Research Turtles-Research Turtles. Classic rock lovers, here's your band. Louisiana's Research Turtles (a literal band of brothers) manage to capture the art of the riff (one track is even titled "The Riff Song") while remaining tuneful enough to appeal to power poppers. Opener "Let's Get Carried Away" is the epitome of this balancing act, mixing heavy guitar riffs with an indelible melody. "Mission" is another winner, a raveup with cojones that has another chorus that'll stick in your head. Elsewhere, "Kiss Her Goodbye" is the kind of power ballad that's de rigeur on albums like this, but it works; the aforementioned "Riff Song" recalls Zeppelin, and "Tomorrow" is another display of their pop smarts. One could call them a Southern-fried Oasis, and like those Brits did in their 90s heyday, they manage to make the old sound new again, and that's no easy feat. 
Research Turtles
Dino-Fool's Gold. Here at Absolute Powerpop, we scour the globe for power pop artists that deserve recognition, and our latest international power popper of mystery is Sweden's Dino. He remains a bit of a real mystery since I can't find a MySpace or a bio, but the album speaks for itself, a mix of ELO with 70s pop sounds not unlike similarly-minded artists like Pop Is Art! and AlternativA. "I Don't Believe in Love Anymore" bears the Jeff Lynne influence (in fact, it reminds me a bit of Kelly Groucutt's solo minor hit "Am I a Dreamer"). "Love is the Drug" is not a Roxy Music cover, but he does borrow from ELO again with the lyrics "do ya, do ya want my love" with another driving pop melody, and "The World Where You Live" (not a Crowded House cover) is another pop gem with bombastic backing. Other highlights include "California Blue Skies", which sounds as ebullient as its title, "Mrs. Frost", which has a bit of Fountains of Wayne about it, and the Lynnesque (or LEO-esque) ballad "Someone by Your Side". With a nondescript moniker like Dino, he's hard to Google, but easy on the ears.Fool`s Gold
Another example of government spin gone tragically wrong is the latest Australia Day Council advertisements, urging us all to barbecue like never before.
The advert, in the style of a 1970s Maoist propaganda poster, features three bronzed Aussies gripping their chops and snags close to their hearts in readiness for the ritual fry-up.
One can only gasp in horror at the meaning this might have for people of the Hindu faith - this is tantamount to saying throw another sacred cow on the barbie, mate.
To an anti-social minority, every display of the flag means a vote in support of violence-based nationalism. We all know who this minority is. They can usually be seen on Australia Day with their shirt off, beer can in hand, often wearing the flag as a cape, and being generally loud ... But they are not solely to blame. All those who choose to publicly exhibit the flag - whether they have pure intentions or not - are inadvertently encouraging these flag-abusers.
It is anyway barely possible to regard Australia Day as an unconditional celebration ... Aboriginal population ... unreflective racism and colonialism ... how difficult it is for first-generation migrants to feel at home ... exacerbated when people look and sound different...
At every level what it means to be an "Australian" is in a state of flux ... It is one of the markers of 21st-century life that populations are on the move ... While this social revolution is unrolling, we can't predict how it will alter our conceptions of nationality and belonging. But we can recognise the inevitability of this change .... A common reaction to such fears [of change] is defensiveness and bigotry.
These are human qualities, not national ones.
I do not agree with the policy and theory of multiculturalism, as it is defined and practised. I believe it is flawed with its narrow focus on diversity and on the other. And sadly its meaning was never elucidated beyond tasting a different cuisine each night.
The commitment is all. The commitment to Australia is the one thing needful to be a true Australian.
An Australian is someone who chooses to live here, obey the law and pays taxes.
According to Hawke, Australians have no distinct ethnic or cultural identity. In fact, they have absolutely nothing to define them as a people - no history, traditions, ancestors, customs or heroes. To be an 'Australian' is not to belong to a distinct national community; it simply means you live here and pay tax.
In short, it seems that Hawke is saying that 'Australians' don't really exist in any meaningful sense.
The Gamilons-Blue Whispers EP. Had it come across my desk upon its fall 2009 release date, this Delaware band's debut EP would have made the year-end EP list. As it stands, better late than never for this Cliff Hillis-produced 3-song gem. Fans of Hillis and his work in Starbelly will be at home here, from the hook-filled Beatlesque opener "Blue Shadows" to the acoustic-based "Whisper in a World" to the sublime and sweet melodies of "Summer Surfer Girl". We always say "bring on the full length" in these instances but I'll gladly settle for an EP with more tracks if they're going to be this good.
The 88-This Must Be Love. LA's The 88 have a higher profile than most acts I review on this site - their songs have been featured in countless TV shows and films (see here), and they had their 2008 album Not Only...But Also released on Island Records with big-name producers Matt Wallace and Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds in charge. This came on the heels of their brilliant self-released album Over and Over (which placed #6 on my 2005 year-end list) and there was quite a bit of expectation associated with the followup. Not Only...But Also turned out to be a decent album, but lacked the sharpness and cohesion of Over and Over, another example of an indie band losing its identity on a major label. So it was a pleasant surprise to see them back, without fanfare and barely a year later, with a self-released digital-only album that doesn't quite match Over and Over's peaks, but sounds like The 88 again.
Scruton, probably the English-speaking world's finest conservative thinker, evokes a conservatism that's founded on an instinctive love of country.
Conservatives are engaged in their country's history, proud of its symbols, concerned for its welfare, attached to its values and vigorous in its defence. The instinct to defer to authority and to respect tradition - the sense that each individual has been shaped by the past and will influence the future, having both ancestors and descendants to keep faith with - is deeply ingrained in human beings, even if it's under-appreciated by intellectuals. A conservative apprehends how so much modern thinking is actually in revolt against human nature.
My instinct is to extend to as many people as possible the freedom and benefits of life in Australia. A larger population will bring that about provided that it’s also a more productive one
Except for the half million or so who identify as Aboriginal, every other Australian is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants since 1788. Unlike any other, we are a nation of relatively recent immigrants ... This means, of course, that the immigrant who feels like a stranger in our midst is really at the heart of the Australian story.
To the extent that it is a celebration of our nation, Australia Day is necessarily a salute to an immigrant culture.
Edmund Burke once defined a political party as people working for the national interest according to a particular principle on which they all agreed ... The essential principle animating the Federation Fathers (whether conservative protectionists or liberal free traders, they mostly ended up in the first version of an Australian liberal party within a decade) was citizens’ greater freedom to pursue their individual destinies within the framework of a new nation.
The dream of greater personal freedom is probably the Liberal Party’s nearest equivalent to a “light on the hill”
In a world where nothing exists in isolation and everything is connected, “liberalism” and “conservatism” turn out to be complementary values. The difference between a “liberal” and a “conservative” is not that one values freedom and the other doesn’t or even that one asserts and the other denies that freedom comes first. The difference between the ways liberals and conservatives value freedom is, perhaps, more the difference between love at first sight and the love which grows over time.
Supporting families shouldn’t mean favouring one family type over others. We have to resist yearning for “ideal” families and “traditional” mothers. Every family is a source of nurturing and security for its members.
An examination of the Howard government's signature policies shows deep concern for personal responsibility, individual choice, reward for effort, the protection of families and respect for traditional institutions and values.
Notwithstanding their frequent inability to articulate them, men and women live by ideals. Shared ideals and enduring values are what turn crowds into communities and peoples into societies and ultimately civilisations. They form the bonds of kinship and common purpose which constitute the social fabric and which allow diverse individuals to find a sense of place and belonging in something which transcends themselves.
Australia makes very few demands of its immigrants. There is no ideal of Australian-ness to which they are expected to conform.
Unlike any other, we are a nation of relatively recent immigrants. New Zealand has a proportionately larger indigenous population and North America has been settled for almost two centuries longer.
Andy Lehman & The Night Moves-Lowcountry. Lehman's 2007 debut Landline was a Butch Walker-styled power pop disc, but on his followup with The Night Moves, he opts for a more atmospheric pop sound that comes down somewhere between Steven Mark and Coldplay. Lowcountry is a loose concept album about a South Carolina boy who falls in love with a girl, can't commit, loses her, stalks her, and then kills her new boyfriend. But despite the Southern Gothic subject matter, the concept is done with a light touch, allowing the songs to stand on their own. Highlights include the midtempo "You Can Leave The Light On", the poppy "Million to One", and the absolutely gorgeous "All Along the Roads We Walked", which takes on added resonance once the album's concept is grasped. A rewarding listen.
Prattle On, Rick-Communion Bread. This amusingly-titled act consists of Nashville singer-songwriter Patrick Rickelton and whoever happens to be backing him at the moment. His debut EP is a folk-pop delight, evoking Elliott Smith and Simon & Garfunkel in equal parts. "My Holiday" is gracefully tuneful, "Lift Up" does just that, and "Lately" sounds like an instant classic. Prattle on all you'd like, Rick.
Produced by C. Hamilton (Soljie)what we all really need now ... is our very own brand of New Feminism ...
A young journalist I used to mentor got married, much to my annoyance, in her mid-20s and decided to go part time. I asked why she had not followed in the previous generation's footsteps and she said: 'God, I wouldn't dream of working as hard as you do. Who would want your life?'
The problem is that my generation of women, the one after the bra-burning trailblazers, moaned too much about how tiring it was 'having it all'.
Even those of us who, like me, chose a career over a family ... and therefore didn't even try to 'juggle' have turned out not to be an inspiration for well-educated girls.
OK, I admit that feminism the first time around made mistakes. It turned us into man haters (I still, to this day, whenever I am told my BMW needs a new tyre, say, yell at the hapless man serving me: 'You wouldn't dare treat me this way if I were a man!'), and set impossible standards.
As Rosie Boycott, founder of Spare Rib magazine, admitted last week on Woman's Hour: 'In the Seventies feminism was too narrow, it bore no relationship to my life: I liked men.'
yesterday, with my niece's smart London wedding only days away, I went on netaporter and ordered an Yves Saint Laurent draped jacket for £1,225 and a hand-painted Vera Wang dress for £2,750 - but it really is gorgeous. Ooh, and a Bottega Veneta clutch for £602 ... I am stroking my Bottega bag now, like a pet.
I think in the Nineties I fell in love with three black men partly because it was fashionable and gave me a veneer of ‘cool’ that, as a boring Essex girl, I didn’t possess.
Our marriage was, on reflection, a very modern one. I am 14 years older than him. When we met I was earning a huge salary ... he was an intern on a local radio station.
He is Indian and moved, aged 26, straight from his mum's house into mine.
At first I believed that love would conquer all, that our bond was so strong that none of these things mattered. He told me he didn't want children ... I hid the fact that I did.
... I told him to give up his job so that he could write a novel: 'Take six years. What's the rush.' I took a job where I worked 75 hours a week to support us both.
New men, metrosexual men, men who are in touch with their feelings, who are willing to take a back seat, supporting and nurturing you, don't exist.
They might pretend to be able to cope with you but they are, instead, storing up anger and will hate you for being fabulous, for being independent, for not needing them in your life but just wanting them to be there.
Just over half of all women under 50 have never been married, double the figure of 30 years ago. Dubbed the 'freemale' in the lifestyle pages of magazines and newspapers, this is a breed of woman who has actively rejected the notion that we are destined to grow up to nurture, to be wives and mums and carers.
And while I would count myself firmly in this camp, having always put my career and my own selfishness first, there are certain things that still trigger a lump of doubt in my throat: James Stewart hugging his brood of children beside a Christmas tree in It's A Wonderful Life, say.
Loneliness is a resilient, persistent little beast. For most of the year, those of us who live alone can rub along pretty well.
We tell ourselves everything is fine, that it's better to live alone than in a loveless relationship, that we enjoy the peace and quiet and the freedom ...
We are beholden to no one. Even that other big examination of whether or not you have passed life's fulfilment test - the summer holiday - can be cleverly crammed for: you can relish the opportunity to choose your destination with supreme selfishness, content in the knowledge you will be able to finish that book on the beach without interruption, or book one of those 'activity' holidays - walking in the Himalayas, learning to cook like a peasant in Puglia - that cleverly masks the solitude.
I moved to the countryside, where I thought there might be more of a community (in London, I never did find out the name of the girl who lived next door).
I was wrong, as it turned out, and have found I can go from one week to the next without speaking to a soul.
I have written my three Christmas cards: to my mum, who lives 200 miles away and has dementia; to John the postman; and to the dustbin men, a lovely trio who often bypass my house because I have so little rubbish.
Penthouse
Digital B
The brother of Papa San, Dirtsman was a similary inclined dancehall DJ until his brutal killing on december 21 1993. He was shot on his veranda by four gunmen, being pronounced dead on arrival at Spanish Town Hospital. His first chart appearance came with 'Thank You' in 1990, preceding 'Borrow Man' on Steely & Clevie's label. Later he teamed up with Philip Smart in New York, wich offered him further success with 'Hot This Year'.
Chris Abad-No Glory. This NYC rocker and ex-member of Dough has given us the first great power pop disc of 2010. Mixing in influences from Elvis Costello to Squeeze to Weezer, Abad has cooked up 8 tracks of power pop goodness from the rocking "All in My Head" to the clean midtempo melodies of "Downer". Others standouts in this lean all-killer/no-filler collection include the title track power ballad, the anthemic "Living Without You" and the irresistible "Trouble", perhaps the disc's best track. Stop what you're doing and give it a listen below.
Anny Celsi-Tangle-Free World. Anny Celsi's new disc may be a "tangle-free world" but it's certainly not a jangle-free one as she evokes a Byrds-by-way-of-Beach-Boys sound here. The LA jangle-pop mafia is out in full force on this, with Nelson Bragg producing and the likes of The Wondermints, Robbie Rist and Adam Marsland contributing. The opening title track captures the sound here, 12-string guitars and sitars galore, with Celsi's voice a perfect match for the proceedings. "Thanksgiving in Hollywood" has just the kind of noir-ish jangle feel that recalls "King of the Hill", Roger McGuinn's team-up with Tom Petty. Bragg steps out from behind the mixing board to contribute vocals to Celsi's tres cool cover of Nancy Sinatra's "One Velvet Morning", making Sweet & Hoffs sound like kids by comparison, and Evie Sands joins for a cover of the 1963 Jaynetts classic "Sally Go Round the Roses" that sounds completely in place here. Retro yet original, this disc is one world in which there's nothing wrong in getting tangled.AC: I think the poem in question is an entirely reasonable and 'human' response to a disaster
Me: No, it's a poem that clearly vilifies whites. Just like many other poems by Maxine Clarke, on many different themes.
AC: No, in reality I challenge you to find a word in there that 'vilifies' anybody, without relying on the tortured logic of somebody with a persecution complex.
Me: AC, you really think that there are no leftists who believe that white guys are bad and cause the suffering of others? Really?
AC: You're straw-manning the argument again. No leftist on earth pushes the line that only 'whites' are capable of evil, whilst everybody else is innocent.
White people can be human sometimes, but only if we turn our backs on being white: We can be human, or we can be white.
White Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt and ethically flawed, because white supremacy has taken a huge toll on white people's capacity to be fully human.
Me: whites are the ones to be categorised as privileged, dominant; non-whites as historically victimised
AC: In what way are whites 'victimised'? I mean, seriously. Is it like jews in the holocaust, kulaks under Stalin, Catholics in Belfast, Aboriginals in the early years of white settlement? ... It's like a kind of victim-envy here.
Wells ... reacted violently, even as a child, against the evangelical faith of his mother. This hostility continued throughout his life and included both Protestant and Catholic Christianity. (p.121).
Wells does not hesitate to picture an ideal society of the future in which the propagation of the Christian faith, if persisted in, would be punishable by death; and he justifies this by analogy with legal requirements for vaccination. (pp.123-124)
The content of the religion which Wells heralded with such confidence and enthusiasm is an amazing concoction of humanism, Christianity, Gnosticism and a kind of Promethean dualism to which Wells later called particular attention as giving him affinity with the Manichaeans. (p.125)
Wells begins by distinguishing the God of his faith from the "Veiled Being" who is behind and in some sense responsible for the universe in which man finds himself ... the Nature for which this being must be held responsible is the real enemy of man, the source of his suffering and the obstacle in the way of his progress.
The God of H.G. Wells was a finite God who had a beginning in time but who was outside space. God was a person who was the Captain of Mankind ... God had come into existence "somewhere in the dawning of mankind" and "as mankind grows he grows".With our eyes he looks out upon the universe he invades; with our hands he lays hands upon it ... He is the undying human memory, the increasing human will.
The enemy ... was Nature ... God stands over against not merely the ultimate being who is referred to as Darkness or the Veiled Being, but also against the Life Force, which is a lesser being coming out of the Veiled Being ...
... for the present God and mankind are in a state of opposition to the universe and to the Life Force within it. God is described as an unfilial, Promethean rebel ...
Wells frankly accepted the dualistic character of his religion and even after the failure to launch a new religion of mankind he referred to his own religious outlook as Promethean, Manichaean, and Persian.
By 1920, The Nation could describe Wells as “the most influential writer in English of our day.” ... For many, noted historian Henry May, Wells was “the most important social prophet.” The social critic Randolph Bourne described Wells’s “religious” impact, his “power of seeming to express for us the ideas and dilemmas which we feel spring out of our modernity”—a power that was nothing less than “magical.”
Orwell nonetheless recognized Wells’s extraordinary impact. “I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much,” Orwell wrote. “The minds of all of us . . . would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”
“Without doubt,” wrote Brooks, “Wells has altered the air we breathe and made a conscious fact in many minds the excellence that resides in certain kinds of men and modes of living and odiousness that resides in others.”
Other major public figures in the U.S. acknowledged Wells’s impact. Margaret Sanger ... believed that the author had “influenced the American intelligentsia more than any other one man.” The naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch, looking back on the 1920s, noted of Wells that “a whole surviving generation might appropriately sing in the words of the popular ballad of their days, ‘You made me what I am today.’ ” To assess Wells and George Bernard Shaw, Krutch asserted, “would come pretty close to assessing the aims, the ideals, the thinking and one might almost say, the wisdom and folly of a half-century.”
Suddenly there came into our minds the magnificent and well-nigh incredible conception of Change. . . . gigantic, miraculous change, an overwhelming of the old in ruin and an emergence of the new. Into our eternal and changeless world came H. G. Wells prophesying its ending, and the Kingdom of Heaven come upon earth; the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll, and all the familiar things of earth pass away utterly—so he seemed to cry out to our astounded ears.
“My hero in the confused drama of human life,” Wells wrote in The Future in America, “is intelligence; intelligence inspired by constructive passion. There is a demi-god imprisoned in mankind.” ... Wells presented TR as the demigod incarnate, the very symbol of “the creative will in man.” Here was the man of the future—“traditions,” noted Wells, “have no hold on him” ... “I know of no other,” said Wells, “a tithe so representative of the creative purpose ...
As some might well know, i am a massive supporter of Uk reggae in all genres. This is one of my favourite albums from the legendary Ariwa studios, produced by a old friend called The Mad Professor. Released in 1990 with the unmistakable sounds of hard bass lines, echoes, reverbs etc etc, Papa Levi chats concious lyrics and topics of that era in a style which i am sure you will like. Uk digi style. Respect every time.
I think destruction comes naturally to us white men. It is almost like a religion to us that we will worship, forever creating new and more devastating ways to blow shit up.
The bonus is, when armagedon comes, it will be us what brings it and we’ll dance and sing and laugh at all the pretty flashing lights caused by the world falling to pieces as lava advances on the homes of those too poor to fly off to the moon where the best seats for the show will be.
That’s very well said Maxine, personally I don’t like to point the finger at God for natural disasters. Maybe because I’m a atheist.
Seems Gaia
That big Momma
that swallows us whole dying
must be a commie / to me
else what the hell she want / taxing
the hell outa
the brave
& the free
the state entity
takes my money in their fist
did it feel as good in
Russia / Germany / or China
what tickles her the best
giant cavernous devouring,
swallowing down the free man
Gaia is a commie / i’m sayin
Gaia is now a commie / to me
Dan Payson-Lewis-Hearts and Minds. Adam Merrin of The 88 brought this SoCal singer-songwriter to my attention and I'm glad he did. He does share a similar pop sensibility to Merrin and his band, and these four songs make quite an auspicious debut. I hear bits of everyone from David Mead to Coldplay in the mix, from the power poppin' opener "It's a Long Way Down" to the lovely title track ballad. It's always a cliche to include the phrase "can't wait for the full length" in an EP review, but it really applies for this one.Hearts And Minds
Michael Gross & The Statuettes-Impulse & Exports. Last summer Gross & his band put out the fine EP Dust & Daylight and together with this new EP, they've released the equivalent of one kick-ass full-length. If you liked Dust & Daylight, you'll love this one and Gross & Co. have further refined their heartland-rock-with-a-touch-of-Americana sound. The noirish "Keep Driving" sets the tone with its late-period Replacements rock style, and the moody yet urgent "On and On" is equally outstanding. And for those familiar with Gross and his earlier solo disc Tales From a Country Home, he offers up a full-band version of that disc's "No Good", and it's anything but. I can wait for a full-length if Gross & Co. are content to crank out a top-notch EP every six months or so.In the passage cited at the beginning of this essay it is clear that by freedom Marx means individual autonomy. This is indeed what most of us mean when we use this word ... in our context, freedom clearly is a category relating ideas about individual choice and self-determination. (p.27)
There are a number of ways the link Marx makes between freedom and capital can plausibly be read. The standard interpretation of his critique is that the depiction of capital as freedom is false. The semblance of free contract between workers and bourgeois conceals that workers have no other choice but sell themselves if they want to survive. The policy implications for Marxists become clear: give workers greater control over the means and distribution of production as the pre-condition for real autonomy. (pp.28-29)
So framed, Liberals and Leftists share a substantive end (individual freedom) while disagreeing about the means for achieving it. The debate then is really a contest between ‘negative (Liberal) freedom’ and ‘positive (Socialist) freedom’ (Berlin 1998) with Leftists arguing that the legal and electoral rights of Liberalism need to be supplemented with a set of resources required for any real autonomy: food, housing, healthcare, education and so forth. (pp.29-30)
The standard Marxist version of the argument is pressed slightly further. Capital is posited as inherently antagonistic to the goal of self-determination since no one can be free if they are required to sell their labor.
Socialism is identified as a society where ‘humanity’ is finally realized: a historically unique animal whose life activities are not pre-determined by innate nature, nor directed towards subsistence, nor coercively to satisfy others, but determined by individuals in ways meaningful for them. (p.30)
The point for Marx is not to move us toward the telos of History, but to get out from under all that so that we may make a beginning—so that history proper, in all their wealth of difference, might get off the ground. This, in the end, would be the only ‘historic’ achievement. And here universality and plurality go hand in hand. For only when the material conditions exist in which all men and women can be freely self-determining can there be any talk of genuine plurality, since they will all naturally live their histories in different ways. (Terry Eagleton, quoted by Bholat, p.25)
let me suggest that today it is possible (even necessary) for Leftists to concede what our opponents have long suspected and declare that we are not really for freedom tout court. So much is evident already in the (justified) limits of Leftist tolerance of misogynists, capitalists, and racists (among others) to self-expression. (p.30)
In sum, conceptualizing a Left agenda around freedom and self-determination today seems part of the problem rather than its remedy. The sage Left strategy of making people aware of their ‘authentic’ (individual/class) interests has proven a dead-end. (p.32)
Contra the principle of identity and interest politics then the progressive gesture is for those living in advanced capitalist states to act against their self-interest and do so aware that this is neither transcendentally required nor necessarily generative of the collective attachments which motivated Romantic communitarians.
... such a progressive gesture means making the struggle of those on the periphery of global capitalism our own ... Within standard theories of just accounting, these people have no legitimate claim to the wealth created by capitalism. And yet only by making common cause with them can the Left have any meaning or chance in the 21st century. (p.33)
an aspiring Left might proudly declare that post-capitalist society is one without ideals. (p.37)
What Marx suggests in Theses on Feuerbach is that the appearance of an ideal realm necessarily signifies an unsatisfactory resolution to contradictions in reality. A parallel can be drawn to the analysis Freud gives of dreams. Dreams come to us in sleep to express what in our waking lives is repressed. The appearance of dreams, like abstract ideals, suggests something is frustrated from achieving empirical actuality. (p.37)
