Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="rickyb" data-source="post: 5135739" data-attributes="member: 56035">[URL unfurl="true"]https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/cornel-west-commodification-spirituality-race-oppression-democratic-socialism[/URL]I come from a black people whose anthem is “lift every voice.” Lift every voice. And when you get the voices of those Sly Stone called Everyday People in all of the decision-making processes and institutions that guide and regulate their lives, they’re not going to choose poverty. They’re not going to choose decrepit schools. They’re not going to choose lack of health care. They’re not going to choose rat-infested housing.Democracy from below takes seriously those voices as they’re wrestling with social misery and suffering, and allows them to shape their destinies in such a way that lo and behold, their children might be able to go to quality schools like the ruling class. That their mothers and fathers might have health care like the power elites. So democracy from below is a threat to any hierarchical power, be it in the political realm or the economic realm.That’s where the rubber hits the road, where Eugene O Neill’s great indictment of American capitalist civilization comes in, the greatest play ever written in the United States, The Iceman Cometh. He was an anarchist like my dear brother Chomsky. But he argued that, like Dostoevsky, that most human beings would choose greed over liberty, that they would choose even the possibility of joining the greedy at the top, rather than risking solidarity with the impoverished, because it looked like it’s too hard. It’s easier to think that somehow you’re going to be the next Gates or Rockefeller.So you dangle that carrot — this has been very much an American project in terms of our distinctive form of individualism. But he and Dostoevsky, of course, have a critique of the species. They believe, in fact, that we human beings would rather choose authority over liberty. We’d rather choose to follow the pied piper rather than organize ourselves and run our workplaces. And part of the radical democratic project is to show that they’re wrong. But it’s a serious battle. There’s no doubt about it.</blockquote>

Verification