Rights, not righteousness

by Meredith Tax
guardian.co.uk,
20 December 2010

"Until the larger progressive movement either stops being afraid of the word or comes up with an alternative way of naming long-term social transformation, it will not be able to challenge the overwhelming dominance of capital in politics, business, the educational system and the culture as a whole.

Until then, there will be plenty of calls to build a new people's movement, but no ideological foundation on which to base one. This is because radical movements are not built on the basis of policy prescriptions. They are built on a transformational vision, like that of the Communist Manifesto. The reason the Manifesto was a call to action that lasted over 150 years was that it coupled an analysis of what was wrong with a vision of how things could be different. It even laid out a rudimentary pathway from one to the other. It spoke in the voice of prophecy. We need to be able to speak this way again."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/20/us-politics-gender