The mindlessness involved in putting/ commiting to words by Walt K reflects nothing other than hatred, jingoism, an entire bag full of nasty/poisonious contents thrown at -to put matters with modesty- a US citizen, just as Walt K. I presume is also a U S citizen. This abusive string made up of slurs, confected in the  US from late 1940's that was earlier a version of cold war mindset, is still embedded in the strong sense, when I take the complete absence of any shame or guilt while being abusive, rude and barbaric in the use of predicates as deployed while discribing of communists, some 15 years after the demise of what the term `communism etc. says a lot about your average [mostly] white[ and obese in many cases, not the obesity of the inherited type but as produced by consumerist discharge]citizenry in the US. All the pejoratives hurled  together with complete absence of any sense of understaning whether what he says is is some freakish, unique, private belief [which would have been preferable] or a mindset inside which is embedded cold war propaganda against the communists. For this person, anything disagreeable is reduced to comunism, long past that age of abusive language.This is a more serious concern and worrisome to the extreme not because walt k is speaking for himself. The worry is the persistence of attitudes constructed during cold war propaganda with minor modifications in terms of the context,that  is representative of a wide range of public opinion in the US. The material conditions for the production of such `types' lie somewhere in US rural history.

This exhibition of virulance, as representation in the terrain of politics,has to be combated on a permanent time-scale, in true plastic mode of democratic psychology. Only permanent resistence to reaction can work for a modicum of betterment of such average US citizens.

I mean counter-hegemonic projects, which has been in the US for long, having produced figures like Eugene Debs who faught for presidency from a jail, has to converge at some point of history. There are some signs of a renewal of the radical dimension of American politics, which FDR could mobilize, but having relapsed into a big sleep since early 50's, should awake or remain wakefullness that should be a force capable of topping  ounter-hegemonic agenda, through a sign of ressuruction, for a change to the better.

When were homo habilis citizens?

regards

db

Fill us in, either here or in a new blog post!!

Here is an interesting line from the preface to the great British Marxist historian (and longtime CP member) Eric Hobsbawm's autobiography "Interesting Times": "What I have tried to do is put some intellectual distance between the historian and the illusions, delusions, lies, and self-deceptions of the past century. That is easier today for Communists, since their side was plainly defeated and the project of the 1917 Revolution plainly failed, and was probably destined to fail. But on the other side much of the public discourse about the history of the twentieth century is still that of the Cold War phase of the twentieth-century wars of secular religion. This has dangerous implications. Fifty years after the death of Stalin an editorialist for the British Guardian can still compare a classic English socialist novel unfavorably with Thoreau's Walden on the grounds that the Marxist ideas inspiring The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, which has rarely inspired more than the desire to join a union and vote for the Labour Party, have killed millions, unlike those inspired by Thoreau. Are we to remain under the sway of ideas, which imply - against the evidence of social-democratic Europe, the Nehru heritage in India, and the liberation struggle in South Africa - that the aspiration to build a new society leads inevitably toward the gulag and nothing but the gulag?" I have noticed that the right wing commenters to ZNet blogs seem stuck in a Cold War mindset. This is partly the price of their Cold War "victory" over the state-capitalist Red Fascist regimes of the Eastern bloc, which were strongly criticized from the beginning by left anarchist/ libertarian socialist sorts like Rudolph Rocker. It is true that Albert (consistent with the left libertarian tradition that is the most relevant strand at ZNet...and with good reeason)is seeking systemic change more radical than European social democracy, but to go into the whole zero-sum Good v. Evil mindset of the Cold War (as "Walter K" does) is just absurd. One of the prices of winning is that it encourages you NOT to examine your own flaws, illusions, lies, self-deceptions and delusions. The flaws of capitalism are just astonishing to anyone who takes an honest look at the current state of the world starting even in the affluent imperial homeland where nearly 16 million people live at less than half the notoriously inadequate federal poverty level and where democracy is deeply disabled by astonishing and deeply entrenched (an deepening) wealth inequality (inequality that is an inherent tendency of the system). The most intractable problems of all are probably ecological and the notion of solving them through and within the framework of capitalism is totally fanciful --- a complete delusion ---- at this point.

I have read every one of Albert's books. I have never seen him use either of the words "reallocation" or "reeducation."

Parecon is nothing more than communist balderdash.  With all of Albert's talk of "reeducation" or "reallocation" or whatever he calls it, it makes me think of Pol Pot's reeducation camps.  Wait, Mao had those as does Castro.  I think Stalin had those too.  What's next, emptying the cities so the working class can be reallocated to tilling the fields?  I know, I know, there's a difference between Stalinism and the new communism-light that developed after that glorious day in early November 1989 (that's for all you history buffs).  The point is, what do you do when someone doesn't want to be reallocated? 

The great irony of Albert championing the "reallocation" of labor is this of course was tried and failed with Chomsky back in the 1950s.  Chomsky went to a Kibbutz in the great Zionist enemy state of Israel, hoping to live the communist dream.  But when Chomsky was "reallocated" from the classroom to the fields, he said enough and left for graduate school in the good ol' U.S. of A.  So much for balancing job complexes. 

I can't help but wonder if Albert runs the printing press at his little five man corporate operation, or if that is outsources - eliminating any necessity for balanced job complexes.

To answer Albert's question, yes, you've been hoodwinked.

Schweickart will have to if he doesn't want to lose the debate.

Hope that this time he doesn't misrepresent and misinterpret Parecon...