Capitalism Is a Tumor on the Body Politic: What's the Alternative? Beyond Mid-Election Babble

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Capitalism Is a Tumor on the Body Politic: What's the Alternative? Beyond Mid-Election Babble

Thursday, 06 November 2014 11:03
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | Op-Ed

The biggest challenge facing those who believe in social justice is to provide an alternative discourse, educational apparatuses and vision that can convince US citizens that a real democracy is worth fighting for.

The right-wing Republican sweep of Congress testifies to a massive memory and educational deficit among the US public and a failure among progressives and the left regarding how to think about politics outside of the established boundaries of liberal reform. The educative nature of politics has never been more crucial than it is now and testifies to the need for a new politics in which culture and education are as important as economic forces in shaping individual and social agency, if not resistance itself.

The cultural apparatuses owned by the financial elite are largely responsible for the political and social darkness that engulfs the American public. Americans are shaping a new moment in history in which the symbiosis among cultural institutions, power and everyday life has shaped the very nature of politics and the broader collective public consciousness with an influence unlike anything we have seen in the past. Economics drives politics and its legitimating apparatuses have become the great engines of manufactured ignorance. This suggests the need for the left and their allies to take seriously how identities, desires and modes of agency are produced, struggled over and taken up. The left and other progressives need to rethink Pierre Bourdieu's insistence that the left "has underestimated the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle and have not always forged appropriate weapons to fight on this front" and in doing so have failed in its responsibility to address the educative nature of politics by challenging modes of domination "that lie on the side of the symbolic and pedagogical dimensions of struggle." (1) Couple that understanding with the need for a more comprehensive vision of change and the necessity for broad-based social movements, and it may become possible once again to develop new opportunities for a new political language, forms of collective struggle and a politics for radical change rather than cravenly center-right reforms.

As Hannah Arendt and others told us many years ago, there is no democracy without an informed public. This is a lesson the right wing took very seriously after the democratic uprisings of the 1960s. This is not a matter of blaming the public but of trying to understand the role of culture and power as a vital force in politics and how it is linked to massive inequities in wealth and income. The financial state promotes a form of ideological terrorism and the key issue is how to expose it, and dismantle its cultural apparatuses with the use of the social media, diverse apparatuses of communication, new political formations, and ongoing collective educational and political struggles. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/27273-henry-a-giroux-capitalism-is-a-tumor-on-the-body-politic-what-s-the-alternative

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1. Shameless self-kick

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2. Socialism or Barbarism.