[Peace-discuss] Blair To Brown - The Killing Will Continue

[John W.]

At 06:31 PM 7/23/2007, C. G. Estabrook wrote:


>Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>
>I'm sending too much it seems, but this piece from Media Lens tells what's 
>up in the UK.
>
>"We speak of national interests, national capital, national spheres of 
>interest, national honour, and national spirit; but we forget that behind 
>all this there are hidden merely the selfish interests of power-loving 
>politicians and money-loving business men for whom the nation is a 
>convenient cover to hide their personal greed and their schemes for 
>political power from the eyes of the world." (Rocker, Culture and 
>Nationalism, Michael E. Coughlan, 1978, p.253)
>
>This comes from 
><http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php>http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php 
>
>
>entitled: From Blair To Brown - The Killing Will Continue
>
><http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php>http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php 
>
>
>**********
>
>It's vital, though, in exposing the fraud of Clinton-Blair "humanitarian war."
>
>The paragraph you quote from anarchist writer Rudolf Rocker --
>
>"We speak of national interests, national capital, national spheres of 
>interest, national honour, and national spirit; but we forget that behind 
>all this there are hidden merely the selfish interests of power-loving 
>politicians and money-loving business men for whom the nation is a 
>convenient cover to hide their personal greed and their schemes for 
>political power from the eyes of the world."
>
>-- incidentally makes clear why libertarians and the anarchist left are 
>opposed to one another.
>
>Anarchism is left-wing socialism (as Rocker says elsewhere, "All 
>anarchists are socialists, but not all socialists are anarchists"), and 
>socialism is that critique of capitalism that demands an economy based on 
>production for use rather than production for profit.  Anarchists add that 
>production must be under democratic control.
>
>Modern American Libertarianism, although it's verbally consistent with 
>Enlightenment Liberalism in asserting the essential need for freedom to 
>human nature ("liber" is Latin for "free"), errs by asserting that that 
>freedom must also belong to "legal persons" -- corporations.  They don't 
>seem to notice that freedom for concentrations of money is precisely what 
>takes away freedom from real persons, who have to sell what makes them 
>human, their work of head and hands, to those concentrations of money in 
>order to eat regularly.
>
>Anarchists, at the other extreme of the political spectrum, want to 
>establish that freedom for real persons, and that means bringing 
>concentrations of money under democratic control. Otherwise the "free 
>economy" merely presents "the selfish interests of power-loving 
>politicians and money-loving business men for whom the nation is a 
>convenient cover to hide their personal greed and their schemes for 
>political power from the eyes of the world."  --CGE


Serious question, Carl:  Why distinguish corporations?  What about 
concentrations of money in the hands of individuals or families?  In other 
words, what about "real persons" exercising their freedom in ways so as to 
accumulate money?  What do anarchists want to do about that?

John Wason

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