Views in brief
The response to a bigoted assault
IN RESPONSE to "The bigotry behind a terrible assault": While many sites are reporting the assault on Chrissy Polis, you did so with compassion and care for the victim and transgender people as a group. Beyond the mainstream coverage, you examined the roots of anti-transgender bigotry and violence, and the need for education.
We are not a freakshow or less than anybody and when all human rights and social action groups are transgender inclusive, it will make us all stronger. Thank you!
Liz LaVenture, St. Louis
A vision of a classless society
IN RESPONSE to "Marx meets the working class": I'm in agreement with this treatment of Marx and his awakening to the revolutionary character of the proletariat, the working class.
I'm especially in agreement with the passage where Marx describes the "radical chains" of the proletariat, one that's often overlooked or misunderstood. It implies that the emancipation of the working class lies not only in getting rid of the capitalist class, but also getting rid of the working class as well.
Naturally, it doesn't all happen overnight. It requires a radical development of the productive forces so that the length of the working day approaches zero and the amount of living labor in any given commodity approaches zero, i.e., and fully cybernated, automated and ecologically sound system of production on a global scale.
While capitalism will create some of the conditions, it's not going to get us there. We'll need socialism and its path to break the fetters of capital. But even socialism is a transitional class society, a way station in the process of breaking and dissolving radical chains altogether. The classless society is the final aim.
It's this vision on Marx's that won me over when I first studied his critique of Hegel in my early 20s. It taught that the working class was revolutionary because OF WHAT IT IS, not what it might think of itself at any given time. It sticks with me today.
Carl Davidson, Aliquippa, Pa.
A decayed institution
IN RESPONSE to "Britain's royal parasites": Sherry Wolf's analysis of the British royal hullabaloo is both hysterically funny and frighteningly real. Worse still is all the American media hype about the wedding dress and the minute-by-minute details of the procession and the couple's whereabouts.
In a world plagued by so many difficult circumstances, and with so much doubt and uncertainty for most working people living on the planet, isn't royalty, British or otherwise, a worn-out institution that needs to disappear forever?
Let them go out and struggle to find jobs like the rest of us. I'd start by cutting Liz's pension and social security. Let her tough it out like everyone else. Or she can take out a reverse mortgage on Balmoral castle!
M.B.H., Chicago
Liars of the first order
IN JUNE 2008, Republican Presidential hopefuls began talking about the existence of a videotape in which Michelle Obama gave a racial inflammatory speech, railing against "Whitey." Republican bloggers and commentators would confidently promise to release the tape in a day or two, and told the media to sit tight.
Of course, the tape never appeared--it never existed. But to this day, if you type "Michelle Obama whitey tape" into any search engine, you'll find the same crowd talking of the tape as if it were undisputed fact.
Today, pundits assure us that, since Obama has released his long-form birth certificate, the so-called "birther controversy" can now be laid to rest.
I disagree. Such a claim assumes that Republican presidential candidates are interested in facts. That's a huge assumption. Just ask John McCain, who lost a crucial presidential primary in the year 2000, in part because the Bush people spread rumors that McCain's adopted daughter was really the product of a tryst between McCain and an Indonesian woman.
John McCain learned the hard way that Republican national campaigns are dominated by liars of the first order. That being the case, you can expect the baseless "birther" controversy to be in the news for a long time.
Craig Waits, from the Internet
Obama's "liberalism"
IN RESPONSE to "Assassination nation": This is a good, timely and comprehensive story, but I have to take exception to the assertion that Obama is a liberal Democrat. He isn't; he's an economic neoliberal who tacitly adopted the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war as early as mid-2007 in an essay published in Foreign Affairs magazine, the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations.
On social issues, as every writer published in SocialistWorker.org well knows, he is (sort of, within limits) what Bush was marketed as: a compassionate conservative. And he used the occasion of his Nobel Prize lecture to deliver a stirring defense of war while maligning Ghandi and Martin Luther King as naïve strivers.
I'm 60 years old. I never dreamed that Lyndon Johnson, of all people, would prove to be the last great socially liberal Democratic president. Oh well; one lives and learns.
Weldon Berger, San Diego
