BILL MOYERS: You talk about the vocal right. And there's a powerful movement that seems to like the way the country is going. That seems to think this is the way it ought to be and that Occupy Wall Street and Steve Fraser, and others, they just represent the malcontents of a system that is really working for them.STEVE FRASER: Yes. It is the consummate all embracing expression of the triumph of the free market ideology as the synonym for freedom. In other words, it used to be you could talk about freedom and the free market as distinct notions. Now, and for some time, since the age of Reagan began free market capitalism and freedom are conflated. They are completely married to each other. And we have, as a culture, bought into that idea. It's part of what I mean when I say the attenuating of any alternatives.
BILL MOYERS: Is there any vision of an alternative society to the financial capitalism that's driving this?
STEVE FRASER: Very, very little. The labor movement itself offers no such alternative. It is trying to defend its own very precarious existence and defend its shrinking numbers. Making valiant efforts to convince other unorganized working people that it might be to their immediate advantage to join the labor movement. But there's no alternative vision of a different kind of society.
Let me give you a very interesting example, to me anyway. When the Cold War first broke out, and we faced the Soviet Union, we depicted ourselves as the free world, as we all know. And as that, as a slave empire, whatever you want to call it exactly. But actually we talked very little then about capitalism. We talked about freedom and the free world, but not so much about capitalism. Why? Because the country had just emerged out of the Great Depression. Capitalism didn't have a very high reputation in 1945 or 1950. People were still very skeptical about whether it could indeed serve the general welfare. Right?
BILL MOYERS: It had failed. That's what led to--
STEVE FRASER: And it failed in the most traumatic way. It's the second greatest trauma in our country's history next to the Civil War. Horrible. It ruined millions of lives. It is axiomatic in our current political culture that when we say freedom we mean capitalism. And that is an indication of how we have been, you know, there's a philosopher who said that language is the house of being. It's where we live. And if you're living in a language that's been denuded of some of its key furniture like certain concepts like that, you're homeless. You have no way, you have no way to challenge even when you're faced with wholesale larceny. I mean on the part of the major banking institutions. I mean what-- let's call a spade a spade. These were thieves. And yet the we lack the kind of linguistic wherewithal, which is much more, it's spiritual, to confront it.
― ♪♫_\o/_♫♪ (Karl Malone), Monday, 22 December 2014 18:43 (nine years ago) link