George Monbiot asks the big question…
[Indeed. The biggest. What the “left” in America and the U.K. has really refused to face… which, I think, is why our politics have drifted almost completely to the right… except for the Green Party. -Thomas]
A huge gathering in Paris at the weekend showed the young don’t reject politics, just politicians
George Monbiot
Tuesday November 18, 2003
The Guardian
When a few hundred elderly people converge on a seaside town for the annual conference of the Conservative party, all leave for Britain’s journalists is cancelled. Every stave and quaver of the death rattle of a moribund movement is recorded and drummed into our ears. But when 51,000 mostly young people converge for a conference on the future of politics, they are ignored. The European Social Forum, which ended in Paris on Sunday, generated just one report in the printed editions of the British mainstream press. Doubtless the papers will inform us again this week that young people have lost interest in politics.
[…]
The biggest question of all is the one concerning the c-word. We have little difficulty in dealing, in theory at least, with the medium-sized issues: What should be done about the World Bank? How can the anti-union laws be reversed? But we have scarcely attempted, as a movement, to tackle the big issue: what should be done about capitalism? Whenever anyone in Paris announced that capitalism in all its forms should be overthrown, everyone cheered. But is this really what we want? And, if so, with what do we hope to replace it? And could that other system be established without violent repression?
In Paris, some of us tried to tackle this question in a session called “life after capitalism”. By the end of it, I was as unconvinced by my own answers as I was by everyone else’s. While I was speaking, the words died in my mouth, as it struck me with horrible clarity that as long as incentives to cheat exist (and they always will) none of our alternatives could be applied universally without totalitarianism. […]
It seems to me that the questions we urgently need to ask ourselves are these: is totalitarianism the only means of eliminating capitalism? If so, and if, as almost all of us profess to do, we abhor totalitarianism, can we continue to call ourselves anti-capitalists? If there is no humane and democratic answer to the question of what a world without capitalism would look like, then should we not abandon the pursuit of unicorns, and concentrate on capturing and taming the beast whose den we already inhabit?
[…]
