Reply #49: Like Scott Nearing, I consider myself a radical. [View All]

[govegan]

Or like Cornell West, a radical democrat.

Or like Gandhi, a personal socialist - as opposed to state socialist. As in "be the change you wish to see."

As Scott wrote in "The Making of a Radical," in 1972:

Another consequence of natural and social forces operating through the agency of change is the rat race for wealth, prestige, and power which is the central motive of western civilization. At the individual level the wealth-power rat race is carried on by those who devote their talents and energies to getting ahead and keeping ahead. They are not satisfied merely to survive. They strive for recognition, for prestige. Their declared aim is security. Their real goal is the exercise of power. Hunger for power animates them, corrupts them, and finally consumes them. They lead the rat race, enjoy its honors, grow paunchy with its rewards.

The most successful of the rat race leaders constitute a wealth-prestige-power oligarchy, a self-selected minority which initiates policy and directs the appartus of exploitation. The oligarchs aim to gain and keep a monopoly of wealth, prestige, and power and from this vantage point to get a monopolist's share of available goods and services.

Where possible the oligarchy seeks to perpetuate itself, handing wealth and power from father to son, generation after generation, thus converting a ruling group into a ruling, exploiting class, controlling and operating a state apparatus designed to safeguard and extend its wealth and power. Yesterday the process was a rat race, today it is a class dictatorship. If it survives until tomorrow it will have consolidated its position and have become a caste structure, perpetuationg the privileges and prerogatives of those who enjoy privileges and wield power.

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On a worldwide scale, this seems not far off the mark. The neofascist elite appears to be struggling mightily for something like a worldwide caste structure. As in selling off Iraq in parcels and packets, because the common person of the land is not good enough to enjoy its fruits, or to be a thoughtful steward of them.

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We shall be obliged to import the timber for our liberty pole--as leafless as it is fruitless--or hereafter splice together such sticks as we have, and our ideas of liberty are equally mean with these. -- Thoreau

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So, yes, vote for Kerry/Edwards. And work for a day when the liberty pole is not so barren and fruitless.