The Only Real Political Choice

Our planet cannot long sustain the momentous worldwide embrace of the manufacture of desires

Above all, though, there is the inescapable dilemma that this planet cannot sustain six-and-a-half billion people living like today's middle-class consumers in its rich north. In just a few decades, we would use up the fossil fuels that took some 400 million years to accrete - and change the earth's climate as a result. Sustainability may be a grey and boring word, but it is the biggest single challenge to global capitalism today. However ingenious modern capitalists are at finding alternative technologies - and they will be very ingenious - somewhere down the line this is going to mean richer consumers settling for less rather than more.
Source: Timothy Garton Ash, Guardian, 22 Feb. 07




The only real political choice
With continued expansion of capitalism, politically, things do appear to be the reverse of what he predicted. Instead of class conflict, liberal subjectivity now transcends any division between capitalist and worker. Rather tan revolutionary consciousness, there is a growing hostility amongst today's broad middle class towards politics altogether.
Now that civilization is a synonym of capitalist democracy, anything critical of the current state of things is branded 'radical' and dismissed as irresponsible romanticism. Since democracy has become the 'political wing' of capitalism, the media, the state, and the general public have become violently intolerant of anything but 'personal opinion'. Because capitalism is the social order, 'anti-capitalism' has become a convenient and cogent means of containing any political critique of capital, or science or democracy. Intimidated by the threat of 'disorder', the working class now accepts anti-capitalism as legitimation for amount of police or military violence.
Since within capitalist society everything appears to be a matter of choice and everyone is supposedly equal in the eyes of the law and have the same economic opportunities, it has become generally accepted that criminals and illegal immigrants are simply greedy and the unemployed, lazy. Furthermore, because people appear to make their own conscious 'life-choices', few question the fact that the most powerful capitalist country houses a quarter of the worlds' prisons inmates, a large percentage of whom are a formally enslaved minority. As the liberalist ideal of the universal 'right' to 'free' choice is the only political position that capitalism and democracy allow, whether white, black, gay or Muslim, one has no alternative but to follow the 'straight and narrow', get a job, get married (outside of Britain..see today's Guardian article), buy a house, get connected and watch television. As the only real political choice of any minority is to 'get a job', virtually every political movement of the past has dissolved into individual 'responsibility'.
All hail the New World Order.
Source:Guardian, CiF,22 Feb




Inspiring
Prince Harry will serve in Iraq, Last year, the prince said: "There's no way I'm going to put myself through Sandhurst and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country."Source: BBC 22 Feb