The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues (City Lights Open Media) by Davis Angela Y

Author:Davis, Angela Y. [Davis, Angela Y.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780872865860
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2012-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

Even in the descriptions of tortures inflicted on Iraqi prisoners, there are noxious strains of racism, some of which are not so easily recognizable because they rely on generally accepted commonsense ideas. These include the trivialization of Islamic cultural leaders and the wielding of cultural misunderstandings as political weapons. The promulgation of Samuel P. Huntington’s notion of a clash of civilizations relies on racist justifications for wars for global dominance masquerading as a war on terror. Civilizational thinking creates cultural hierarchies and the inevitable quest for superiority.

The global reputation of U.S. democracy has declined precisely in proportion to the extent to which the language of democracy is deployed as a rhetorical weapon in the quest for empire. What is most distressing to those of us who believe in a democratic future is the tendency to equate democracy with capitalism. Capitalist democracy should be recognized as the oxymoron that it is. The two orders are fundamentally incompatible, especially considering the contemporary transformations of capitalism under the impact of globalization. But there are those who cannot tell the difference between the two. The model of democracy associated with capitalism is free enterprise, although free enterprise does not capture the state of capitalism today. Moreover, in no historical era can the freedom of the market serve as an acceptable model of democracy for those who do not possess the means—the capital—to take advantage of the freedom of the market. Karl Marx revealed the manipulations underlying the equation of capitalism and democracy in chapter 6 of Volume I of Capital.

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