.. The idea that ... rights have a deeper moral
underpinning is an illusion. Morality itself is an illusion., just
another weapon of the ruling class. As Gyorgy Lukasc put it, 'Communist
ethics makes it the highest duty to act wickedly ... This is the
greatest sacrifice revolution asks from us.' Human agency is null: we
are mere dupes of 'the system', until we repudiate it outright. What
goes for ethics also goes for history, literature, the rest of the
humanities and the social sciences. The 'late Marxist' sees them all
... not as subjects for disinterested intellectual inquiry but as forms
of social control."
Many in Europe feel that the above paragraph might as well have been
written about Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Reduced to bare-bones
materialism, it is amoral, if not immoral. It upholds natural selection
instead of ethics, prefers money to values, wealth formation to social
solidarity.
Predators everywhere - Russian oligarchs, central European cronies,
Balkan kleptocrats, east European managers - find this gratifying. All
others regard capitalism as yet another rigid and unforgiving creed,
this time imposed from Washington by the IMF and multinationals rather
as communism was enjoined from Moscow by the Kremlin.
With eight of the former communist countries about to become members of
the European Union - albeit second rate ones - transition is entering
is most fascinating phase.
Pages:
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77