Then some positions that may be progressive in 1850 are not progressive in 2009. There's a factor of "historical relativity" in assessing left/right ,progressive/reactionary. Recall that "left/right" originally meant the sides of the French legislature in the early 1800's ( I believe). The left of the French legislature of 1820 might seem fairly right today.
Lincoln and the Republicans were the left, revolutionaries, of 1860 in the US, but some of their ideas would probably be literally reactionary today. Capitalism and the bourgeoisie are progressive in 1600, 1700, even 1850 relative to the feudal order and the slavocratic bourgeoisie, revolutionary even. In 1900 they are left relative to the Czarist regime in Russia. "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. " etc. As to cost/benefit analysis, I think Sean hit upon an important issue: reality is contradictory relative to the "pure" ideas of "typologies" and "spectra". And , again, left/right are pretty simplistic slang words. David's repeated glee at finding cases that are hard to classify as left or right gives too much weight to slang terms as a basis for analyzing the real world. So what if "Liveable Rotterdam" is a mix of "left" and "right". charles On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 10:11 PM, Sean Andrews <[email protected]> wrote: > Agreed: what would you think of a program which advocated the > deportation of all African Americans? It sounds a little racist, eh? > Well that was one of the big abolitionist ideas--free the slaves and > send them back to Africa where they can have their own country > (Liberia). IIRC, it was actually the plan that Harriet Beecher Stowe > puts forward as the supposedly genius conclusion to Uncle Tom's Cabin. > Bad Idea: Good people. No? This is true and we can easily think of many more examples (Chartists in 18'th century Britain who excluded women, healthcare reformists today who exclude immigrants and so on). This is actually why I found David's original question so problematic: is it not possible to make similar apologies for Mussolini and his kind? (Hitler is so much of an sociopath that it'd be hard in his case, but perhaps one could say of Mussolini, sure he was a bloody dictator but he followed highly progressive redistributionist policies etc). Does this all come down to a mere Cost/Benefit analysis? I hope not! -raghu. -- Dyslexics of the world, UNTIE! _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
