| Display Name |
Eric Patton |
| About Me |
I live in Cincinnati , Ohio. I have lived in Ohio for most of my life. I run a D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) game, write and record music, read incessantly, keep in shape, eat Italian food, follow sports (especially the NFL and Ohio State football), and hate liberals.I’m not interested in FDL friends. If you want to get to know me better, you’re better off looking for Facebook [facebook.com/ebpatton]. |
| Issues I care about |
I am an anti-capitalist , pro-pareconist (parecon is short for participatory economics). I subscribe to a three-class view of the economy, not a two-class one.Put another way, Marx (who was a genius and got a lot of stuff right) was wrong about the only classes in the economy being owners and workers. There are also coordinators — people like doctors, lawyers, managers, engineers, professors — people who do not own the means of production, but who run the means of production on behalf of the owners. The U.S. left is not a working-class left — it’s a coordinator-class one. But, just as whites do not (generally) wish to see their racial privileges and men do not (generally) wish to see their gender privileges, so too do coordinators not wish to see their class privileges. The biggest challenge facing the left is how to get it to see this third class. To use a (chattel) slavery analogy, the coordinator-class left is the overseers. It wants to get its working-class slaves to help it overthrow the plantation owner so that it can move into the plantation house and take over the cotton-growing operations for itself, while retaining its working-class slaves in the fields to do the actual work. The left is not seeking working-class liberation — it is seeking coordinator-class liberation. The actual picture is a little more complicated, but this essentially is why working people are nowhere to be found (certainly not in more than the occasional dribs and drabs) on the left. If the left wants to change this — which, really it doesn’t (it doesn’t really want working people to be part of its reindeer games, except as order takers and foot soldiers) — it is going to have to get serious about addressing its coordinator-class privileges. The left cares more about maintaining these class privileges than it does anything else. It talks a good game about, say, global warming. And it would like to deal with the problem. But not at the expense of its division-of-labor privileges within the economy. Like the alcoholic, the first step is always to admit one has a problem. If the left is seriously going to address the issues it claims to care about it, it’s going to have to start being honest with itself regarding its class privileges. |
| Political Views |
Radical left. I am a revolutionary, although the word has been stripped of meaning. |
| My Website |
