Italy by Perry Anderson

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

a quite brilliant long essay in the LRB on the democratic deficit in the EU and Italy in particular

[Serial_Apologist]

Bloody hell - half an hour in you realise you're reading a book! <yikes>

Seriously though, Perry Anderson is always a good read, and especially so here, I think. (I just wish I could speed-read though!)

I hope ahinton gets to read this; it might knock a few stars off the diminishingly justifiable claims he repeatedly makes for a redeemable capitalism, without offering evidence of such.

[ahinton]

I hope ahinton gets to read this; it might knock a few stars off the diminishingly justifiable claims he repeatedly makes for a redeemable capitalism, without offering evidence of such.

The evidence I offered is the positive things that have occurred under and due to capitalism in the past, to which you and others have testified; I make no excuses for the other kind or for the manifold ways in which it has been ciorrupted, perverted, misappropriated and the rest, of all of which I am all too painfully well aware. For the record, I do not claim that capitalism will be "redeemed"; I merely suggest that it could be so, given the will - the kind of will, incidentally, that would likewise be necessary for any alternative system to be created, established and implemented.