[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Reflections (attached) from Paul Street

[Morton K. Brussel]

Below is a report by Paul Street of his recent tour promoting his new book. Some may be interested. Here is an excerpt:

…The demand for radical, deep-rooted, systemic change naturally strikes Obama’s more intellectually inclined liberal and progressive supporters as hopelessly “utopian” and “unrealistic” – as off the charts of serious consideration. The real progressive thing, the properly “practical” and “pragmatic” course, is to carefully and incrementally push for small steps on the long, slow path to a better world. As Obama likes to say, we must not let “the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  But for many of us on the actual historical Left, the honest and truly informed calculation of what is realistic is very different.  Leaving aside the important fact that many of Obama’s “reforms” are simply (far worse then being merely “less than perfect”) “just no damn good” (from even a mildly progressive perspective) [i]even just from a mildly progressive liberal perspective (the perspective of say, a John Conyers), we have a very dissimilar sense of practicality and reality.  As we see it, the currently reigning profits system – every bit as entrenched and intact under the “leftist” Obama and a (corporate-) Democratic congressional majority as it was with Bush and Republicans in the saddle (possibly more entrenched now thanks in part to the superficially left cover provided by “Brand Obama”) – is incompatible with basic human needs and democratic principles. The really fantastic and deadly “utopian” illusion, for us, is to believe that the U.S. and humanity can build a desirably democratic and sustainable future without  implementing an egalitarian alternative to the capitalist order – to the so-called “free market” system to which Obama has repeatedly pledged his allegiance[ii] and on whose financial chieftains he has so strongly relied. To quote the left economists Fred Magdoff and Michael Yates: “Can [democratic, socially egalitarian, and ecologically] goals be achieved inside the present economic system? Perhaps some can in very limited ways, but most of them clearly cannot.  The system simply will not allow it.  Pragmatists say that these things are utopian, that we have to work within the system and achieve what we can, gradually and in a piecemeal fashion.  It seems to us, however, that this ‘pragmatic’ approach is utopian.” [iii] Increasingly grave ecological issues, particularly those connected with the profits-driven problem of global warming, call into question the “pragmatic” wisdom of pursuing nothing more than the “incremental change” that many Obama fans laud the president for embodying.
…
 
[ii] For details and sources, see Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008),. 40-54l Paul Street, “Michael Moore and Barack Obama: A Love Story,” ZNet (October 9, 2009), read at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22823.
 
[iii]  Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates, “What Needs to Be Done: A Socialist View,” Monthly Review (November 2009), 90.

What Street is talking about, is provided in the document below:
> 
>  
> Paul L. Street 
> www.paulstreet.org
>   
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