>You cannot persuade people to attend to the real barrier that capitalism
>places before human development by telling lies about how dreadful their
>lives are. If what Marxism has to say has no resonance in the lives of
>ordinary people, then it won't gain a hearing.
By ordinary people here you mean the already or to be professional salaried people who are stoked by the Tony Robbins pep talk stuff in which LM excels, right?
>In the 1950s the Communist Parties were committed to a vulgar theory of
>the absolute immiseration of the working class. That theory proved to be
>false, and those comrades were made a laughing stock. Histrionic
>caricatures of what is taking place do not win radical politics any
>support.
However, Mattick predicted an upturn following the war on the basis of the possibilities opened up by the massive destruction of capital. He also deomonstrated that Keynesian techniques could be successful in stabilizing the economy before the limits of the mixed economy would be reached.
>Marx never put forward a theory of catastrophism or of absolute
>immiseration.
Actually following Wm J Blake, I think Grossmann's magnum opus should be trans as The Law of Accumulation and the the Catastrophe of the Capitalist System; please also note the nuanced theory of absolute immiseration defended by Grossmann. I thought you considered yourself his disciple? And what of Rosa's stark choice between socialism or barbarism.
>Instead Marx showed that destructive and creative aspects of capital
>were always combined, with the one laying the basis for the other.
This is just phrase mongering so favored by Bukharin and pilloried by Grossmann, our mutual hero.
Dealt already with the fall and stagnation in real wages. Even if this has been reversed in the last two years, the intervening 25 have to be explained, not denied.
>> the having to run
>>harder on the treadmill to stay in place,
>
>I have to say, that would have been true in the early 90s, but for about
>five years now the British economy has been on a qualified upturn.
What I meant here is the speed up of the labor process studied by Slaughter and Parker. Is this no longer true--the kind of reduction in downtime to say 14 sec per min to 4 sec.
I meant Continental Europe for intractable unemployment.
>
>'Long' stagnation? Not all that long, and following several decades of
>strong growth.
John Galbraith goes so far as to say Japan has been suffering a silent depression since the crash of the Nikkei and real estate market. Of course stagnation, depression and eventually catastrophe are followed by several decades of growth. What is your point? Anyways, I don't have time series for Japan's economic performance with me. One thing to add here is that relative stagnation in Japan can mean runaway immiseration for some of the economies tied to its market.
>>To all this you say that life expectancy is improving, yet this is an
>>average
>
>Yes, indeed it is an average, 17 per cent increase in life expectancy
>worldwide between 1950 and 1990. In the poorer countries of Asia the
>increase is 20 per cent (UN World Population Prospects, 1990). Infant
>mortality, too has improved, most pointedly in Africa. Of course it can
>be said that starting from a lower level, small investments create
>considerable improvements. But I don't think that you can just sweep
>these facts under the carpet.
Again these numbers are near meaningless as a response to my request that we consider inequality. Say we start out from average lif exp of 55. Then top 20% of the pop lives to 85. So mean life expectancy now increases 11% while there is stagnation for 80% of the pop. Plus, I am not interested in forty year comparisons but broad based progress since the world economy entered structural instability in the mid 70s. Unfortunately I can't access the web here for hard data.
>No doubt, but they also include higher yield grains, a
>telecommunications revolution, family cars, package holidays, and all
>those other mundane improvements in ordinary people's lives that
>intellectuals look down upon.
And I would agree with the general point. My point however is that in counterposing the creative to the destructive in capitalism, one should not imagine that the creative is always useful.
As for that hocus pocus of ecological biology, on what specific critiques of the work of which specific ecological biologists are you relying to justify the sweeping claim that it is all hocus pocus?
Yours, Rakesh