Dan Kervick comments in a Doug Henwood post;
Seems like leftists of various kinds and degrees are always bemoaning the failure of the masses to develop a consciousness of their “true” material interests, and their susceptibility to fake or fraudulent cultural, religious, identity or moral concerns. (What’s the matter with Kansas?)
Is it possible that, after many decades of failure, these kinds of leftists might want to reconsider their own flat, two-inch deep understanding of human nature and what they understand as its “real” material interests.
People actually care about their spiritual lives, their loves and friendships and family lives, their linguistic heritage and the cultural riches embodied in it, and their sense of justice and morality. Leftist philistines who think all of this is fake, false consciousness need to expand their own intellectual and spiritual horizons, and then might understand why they have failed, over and over and over, to gain much of a foothold.
The socialist vision of society is ancient and rich and varied. It is exalted. It has a noble artistic, moral and religious heritage. It didn’t begin in the cold, smoggy and mechanical mid-nineteenth century and isn’t solely the product of the satanic mills and what a handful of modernist urban European thinkers thought about them.
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