Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.
Talk about corporate greed and everything is really crucially beside the point, in my view, and really should be recognized as a very big regression from what working people, and a lot of others, understood very well a century ago. Talk about corporate greed is nonsense. Corporations are greedy by their nature. They__e nothing else _ they are instruments for interfering with markets to maximize profit, and wealth and market control. You can__ make them more or less greedy; I mean maybe you can sort of force them, but it__ like taking a totalitarian state and saying __e less brutal!_ Well yeah, maybe you can get a totalitarian state to be less brutal, but that__ not the point _ the point is not to get a tyranny to be less brutal, but to get rid of it. Now 150 years ago, that was understood. If you read the labour press _ there was a very lively labour press, right around here [Massachusetts] ; Lowell and Lawrence and places like that, around the mid nineteenth century, run by artisans and what they called factory girls; young women from the farms who were working there _ they weren__ asking the autocracy to be less brutal, they were saying get rid of it. And in fact that makes perfect sense; these are human institutions, there__ nothing graven in stone about them. They [corporations] were created early in this century with their present powers, they come from the same intellectual roots as the other modern forms of totalitarianism _ namely Stalinism and Fascism _ and they have no more legitimacy than they do. I mean yeah, let__ try and make the autocracy less brutal if that__ the short term possibility _ but we should have the sophistication of, say, factory girls in Lowell 150 years ago and recognize that this is just degrading and intolerable and that, as they put it __hose who work in the mills should own them _ And on to everything else, and that__ democracy _ if you don__ have that, you don__ have democracy.
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Talk about corporate greed and everything is really crucially beside the point, in my view, and really should be recognized as a very big regression from what working people, and a lot of others, understood very well a century ago. Talk about corporate greed is nonsense. Corporations are greedy by their nature. They__e nothing else _ they are instruments for interfering with markets to maximize profit, and wealth and market control. You can__ make them more or less greedy; I mean maybe you can sort of force them, but it__ like taking a totalitarian state and saying __e less brutal!_ Well yeah, maybe you can get a totalitarian state to be less brutal, but that__ not the point _ the point is not to get a tyranny to be less brutal, but to get rid of it. Now 150 years ago, that was understood. If you read the labour press _ there was a very lively labour press, right around here [Massachusetts] ; Lowell and Lawrence and places like that, around the mid nineteenth century, run by artisans and what they called factory girls; young women from the farms who were working there _ they weren__ asking the autocracy to be less brutal, they were saying get rid of it. And in fact that makes perfect sense; these are human institutions, there__ nothing graven in stone about them. They [corporations] were created early in this century with their present powers, they come from the same intellectual roots as the other modern forms of totalitarianism _ namely Stalinism and Fascism _ and they have no more legitimacy than they do. I mean yeah, let__ try and make the autocracy less brutal if that__ the short term possibility _ but we should have the sophistication of, say, factory girls in Lowell 150 years ago and recognize that this is just degrading and intolerable and that, as they put it __hose who work in the mills should own them _ And on to everything else, and that__ democracy _ if you don__ have that, you don__ have democracy.
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The proposal to quit voting is basically revolutionary; it amounts to a shifting of power from one group to another, which is the essence of revolution. As soon as the nonvoting movement got up steam, the politicians would most assuredly start a counterrevolution. Measures to enforce voting would be instituted; fines would be imposed for violations, and prison sentences would be meted out to repeaters.
It is probable that the most inhuman monsters, even the Himmlers and the Mengeles, convince themselves that they are engaged in noble and courageous acts.
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