jueves, 4 de octubre de 2012

No one changes the world without a fight


"In any use of politics to change society, there is the moment to unite and the moment to divide. What usually happens is that instead of the marriage of institutional imagination with a willingness to fight, we get lack of imagination providing an alibi for surrender, disguised as realism. The impersonal friendliness, the aloofness, the estrangement from the urgency of the moment, the craving for prompt and universal approval -- all these psychological characteristics, common among the professional politicians, provide cover for something much worse.

In this absence of structural vision and structural alternatives, in this abdication of the progressives, lies the tragedy of contemporary politics. The program of the would-be progressives has become to put a human face on the program of their conservative adversaries. Everything else is derided as radical fantasy. 

Politics is ultimately religious as well as practical. Without prophetic vision, assisted by courage, the enabling virtue, political activity remains impotent to change anything."
Roberto Mangabeira Unger