[A-List] This Country Needs a Few Good Communists

[c b]

I know Hedges is no Nadja's favorite, but this is not a bad one.

Charles

^^^^


This Country Needs a Few Good Communists

Posted on May 31, 2010

AP / Elizabeth Dalziel

By Chris Hedges
The witch hunts against communists in the United States were used to
silence socialists, anarchists, pacifists and all those who defied the
abuses of capitalism. Those ?anti-Red? actions were devastating blows
to the political health of the country. The communists spoke the
language of class war. They understood that Wall Street, along with
corporations such as British Petroleum, is the enemy. They offered a
broad social vision which allowed even the non-communist left to
employ a vocabulary that made sense of the destructive impulses of
capitalism. But once the Communist Party, along with other radical
movements, was eradicated as a social and political force, once the
liberal class took government-imposed loyalty oaths and collaborated
in the witch hunts for phantom communist agents, we were robbed of the
ability to make sense of our struggle. We became fearful, timid and
ineffectual. We lost our voice and became part of the corporate
structure we should have been dismantling.
Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of
the language of class conflict. It does not mean we have to agree with
Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a
utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working
class, but we have to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have
to grasp, as Marx did, that corporations are not concerned with the
common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie
to make money. They throw poor families out of homes, let the
uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute
the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education,
trash the global economy, loot the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular
movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship
only money and power. And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a
revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human
lives until it finally consumes itself. The nightmare in the Gulf of
Mexico is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state. It is the same
nightmare seen in postindustrial pockets from the old mill towns in
New England to the abandoned steel mills in Ohio. It is a nightmare
that Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans, mourning their dead, live each
day.

full: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/this_country_needs_a_few_good_communists_20100531/