Query: Suppose the great mother of all stock crashes occurs - here, Asia, Russia, Everywhere. The ruling class would still own all the means of production, still control the state? Why should they be nervous?
An answer to this should not, of course, have recourse to the Godena-Adolfo thesis that only absolute misery generates resistance.
On my very first reading of Vol. 1 of *Capital* (several years before I became politically involved) I have always remember with something of a shock a passage in the chapter on "The Working Day," Section 6, "The Struggle for the Normal Working day...":
As soon as the working class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production, recovered, in some measure, its senses, its resistance began, and first in the native land of machinism, in England.
(Progress Pub., p. 264)
Would not a "collapse" of the nature Lou wonders about, at least *at first*, merely strengthen rather than weaken the power of capital over labor? The civil rights movment and the movement for black liberation began and flourished during a period of *rising expectation* rather than of deepest misery and collapsing hope.
The Depression, after all, brought Hitler and and the New Deal, both of which served (when the dust settled, as it were, in 1950) to strengthen capital rather than weaken it, to crush or coopt the labor movement rather than to empower it.
Carrol