This evening I took part in a lively Braver Angels Film Club discussion of the film American Creed. I made several interventions in the chat, of which I consider the first the most important. In this, I took off from the words of one schoolchild in the film who said he thinks freedom means "no one can boss you around," observing that today most Americans don't enjoy freedom in this sense. I used this point to relate the Declaration of Independence's twin themes of individual self-determination -- "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" -- and collective self-determination -- "the right of the people to alter or to abolish" their form of government "whenever it becomes destructive of these ends" -- to Platypus's analysis of capitalism as a contradiction of bourgeois society that negates the emancipatory values of the bourgeois revolution, pointing beyond itself toward the revival of those values through socialist revolution.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment