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Showing posts with the label "british left"
Provided the economic basis of the social order is not called into question, criticism of it, however sharp, can be very useful to it, since it makes for vigorous but safe controversy and debate, and for the advancement of “solutions” to “problems” which obscure and deflect attention from the greatest of all “problems,” namely that here is a social order governed by the search for private profit. It is in the formulation of a radicalism without teeth and in the articulation of a critique without dangerous consequences, as well as in terms of straightforward apologetics, that many intellectuals have played an exceedingly “functional” role. And the fact that many of them have played that role with the utmost sincerity and without being conscious of its apologetic import has in no way detracted from its usefulness. Ralph Miliband pledged himself to the socialist cause at Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery as a sixteen-year-old, shortly after fleeing the Nazis in Belgium. It led him to s
Britain In December 1989,  Corbyn was one of only four MPs to sign a parliamentary motion  congratulating the “magnificent outburst” by striking workers in Czechoslovakia “against the corruption and mismanagement of the Stalinist bureaucracy”. “Even though Russia is no longer communist, there is still this assumption on many parts of the left that it is anti-imperialist, and they’re willing to turn a blind eye to things Russia does in other countries,” Greenberg said. “There’s a continuity between that part of the left’s attitudes back then to Czechoslovakia and its dissidents and its attitudes now to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its involvement in Syria. Those old attitudes are still there.” "Corbyn, the spy, and the cold war long shadow"