09.24.08
Ultra far left: is the yankee doodle number finished?
To answer the question, I don’t think so. And find Obama inspiring. But I think you ought to be worried, pace Naomi Klein.
Good to consider the boundary between liberalism and the alternatives all sorts of monsters wish to come next, by considering classic, abstract, almost boring ‘socialism’ done right in a Kantian vein, as a failsafe or benchmark against lunacies on their way in the stressing-to-breakdown of current democratic liberalism.
From redfortyeight.com: Van Linden’s Kantian Ethics And Socialism
There has been a lot of talk this week about ‘socialism’, the ‘socialism of the rich’, maybe it’s time to put some money where one’s mouth is by reopening the discussion of socialism as such. The question has been so hopelessly confused by historical calamity, to say nothing of bad ideology, as to have passed beyond public discourse. But the rumors that socialism has been ‘fukuyamated’ are greatly exaggerated, witness the headlines.
The problem is that the ‘left’ has been so confused by the legacy of stale Marxism that it can’t function. In that context, one can recommend a cogent work on the forgotten legacy of the Marburg socialists, in the period of Herman Cohen, nineteenth century. These were the original, and best critics of Marx (I won’t include Bernstein who muddled their legacy), at the point before the crystallization of the left on Marxist theory, and the study of socialism in this vein can be of use in logically deducing the framework of socialism from ethical principles, without the insidious and violent Hegelian logic of dialectic that left Marxism shorn of any ethics at all.
A discussion of this brand of socialism can be useful because it has no revolutionary axe to grind, could lead to a reinvented ‘liberalism’ in the worst case, and doesn’t navigate the Hegel morass, and is free of the reductionist scientism that crippled Marxism. And it can clarify the confusions of the pseudo-left that took over in the wake of Marx/Engels.
The discussion transcends liberalism/postliberalism, and is a neutral referee of leftist ideologies.
This text is available at Google books Kantian Ethics And Socialism
The legacy of Herman Cohen (almost none of the literature has been translated) was wiped out in the Nazi period, and deepsixed by the Marxist left.
warning: the ‘ultra far left’ is left of Karl Marx. (and Nader too).