This wasn't a flame, so I couldn't resist taking time out from lesson planning to respond:: This is , by the way, why I disagree with Fassbinder. You can not expect the workers to fight for their rights on the basis of abstract and far fetched "lennonian" notions. We need education and a programme of action to understand capitalism and look for alternatives.
Sure. But how do you know "lennonian" notions are far-fetched until you have education, a programme of action etc. in place? Discarding such notions and adopting some sort of fashionably-cynical "realism" in their place would be a strategy just as infected by idealist metaphysics, and not as effective in stirring hearts and minds to hope. The point I wanted to make is that various modes of civic idealism have been progressively discredited in the US and in other countries since the 1960s ended, not because of any scientific proof of the impossibility of global community or anything of that sort, but because of certain specific social and economic trends, some of which are traceable to elite forms of agency.
So now you have a bunch of people wandering around thinking "there are jerks everywhere you go," which gives them an alibi for themselves whenever they catch themselves acting like jerks, and you have a bunch of people who think of themselves as "hardened realists" who in fact believe in the shoddiest idealisms such as this "greed is good" idea. So how is the world to discredit the fashionable cynicism it has today adopted, and switch to something better?
