I have been turning over in my mind a post drawing on a book
I published just fifty years ago, concerning the reasons why even radicals
should support Blue Dog Democrats in the November election, but the events of
the past twenty-four hours have consumed my attention. I am now clued in on the complex process
required when the FBI seeks a search warrant for a lawyer’s office [something I
had somehow neglected to inform myself of in the preceding eighty-four
years]. I keep checking the TV to find out whether
Trump has done anything precipitous and dangerous. Obviously I am merely a bystander in this
affair, but my sense is that we are rapidly approaching some sort of
crisis. At this point, our best defense appears to be the patriotism and commitment to the rule of law of people I have been
inveighing against my entire adult life.
The irony is not lost on me.
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A Commentary on the Passing Scene by Robert Paul Wolff rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
My Stuff
https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/rwolff_umass_edu/EkxJV79tnlBDol82i7bXs7gBAUHadkylrmLgWbXv2nYq_A?e=UcbbW0
Coming Soon:
The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.
NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."
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About Me
- Robert Paul Wolff
- As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.
2 comments:
You miss the bigger picture, mainly the Trump perspective. Clearly the 2016 election was all about Trump. Namely it was a referendum on who is the greatest human being ever in God's creation- Trump is the condorcet winner over any major figure since Hamurabi. Who cares what happens to America? Trump will come out of this crisis alive and President (of what?) and a very stable genius- they didn't call the twenties through WW 2 the Hitler era. Did they? They didn't name an era after Hillary or Obama or Kennedy or Nixon or even Reagan. In conclusion, no matter what happens next Trump has the biggest ego that ever lived, the hell with America
In times like these, where war makers and profiters gleefully rush to judgement once again and take yet another step toward the abyss, it becomes ever clear to me, as Chomsky has pointed out for quite some time, that we live in a one party state. Ironically, just yesterday I was listening to an interview with Francis Fox Piven whose brilliant analyses of social movements and their impact on policy, she seems to be saying, are effective to the degree that their disruption of business as usual raises the costs of maintaining empire, oligarchy, and disenfranchisement.
Writing in January 2017, Piven wrote: "... what makes movements a force—when they are a force—is the deployment of a distinctive power that arises from the ability of angry and indignant people to at times defy the rules that usually ensure their cooperation and quiescence. Movements can mobilize people to refuse, to disobey, in effect to strike. In other words, people in motion, in movements, can throw sand in the gears of the institutions that depend on their cooperation. It therefore follows that movements need numbers, but they also need a strategy that maps the impact of their defiance and the ensuing disruptions on the authority of decision-makers."
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