This is worth listening to on the subject if you have the bandwidth. An amusing but thoughtful take on the modern liberal:

http://www.heritage.org/Press/Events/ev030507a.cfm

Alas, although I can understand this part more easily than the first, it doesn't add much to the sum of human knowledge. I think that the authors need to read up on the history of the ALP (and indeed of other social democratic parties in the developed world). Marxism has only ever been one strand. Methodism and catholicism were others, as was a humanist, non-religious perspective.

Another respondent thinks that those of us who feel we don't understand these pieces should not parade our ignorance. I'd put it another way. To communicate requires that we try to do the best we can to make what we are saying sensible to our audience/reader. As I said before, here there are too many words, and too much denunciation. Simplify, reduce the number and size of the words, try to persuade rather than to hector, and see if that helps.

What a hoot the Heritage Foundation is THE MODERNIST insitution par excellence--rigid, patriarchal, full of lies, and utterly devoted to the one dimensional "reason" and the "culture" of scientific materialism---despite the phoney religiosity.

It combines the "moral" (even fascist) "certainty" of the patriarchal war god and is at the same time THE leading propaganda outfit for Eisenhower's (equally fascist) Military-Industrial Complex --better known as the Pentagon Death Machine---the Pentagon being THE most influential institution in the USA and by extension the rest of the world. The "culture" of fear and death made very concrete in no uncertain terms.

"Today’s Labor is haunted by the spectre of Marx" Says who?

Marx clearly attributes the productive forces and their development to the actions of human beings, but emphasises the social nature of this development, based on necessity, the need to maintain their existence, which thus develops "independent of their will", as individuals, and thus impacts back on the individual in ways which reflect the given social conditions.

Given our current social conditions, it should be the conservatives who are haunted by the spectre of Marx.

Glen, yr right. The Deleuze quote was from Understanding Structuralism (I'd have to check my notes for the page) and it was cited again in Francis Wheen's 'How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World', Harper, p87.

As progressives we stand for fairness, empathy, freedom, justice, human dignity, the common good, and equality.

Our values are key to our identities, and any new policies/directions need to come from these values.

George Lakoff discusses it well.

http://connectthroughvalues.com