Bears & Crashes

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Apr 4 13:25:59 PDT 2000


Doug is always too tentative. Be bold. People forget false predictions and remember the bold valid ones. Leave out the maybe. My guess is that almost all of the radical upsurges of the last 200 years have come in priods when conditions were improving. I think a month by month or at least year by tear tracing of economic movement and political radicalism in the 1930s would show this to be true even then.

One could make a good argument that the movement of the '60s died with the economic slump of 1974-75. And that the stagnation or continued deterioration of wages during the following two decades was a major cause of the steady decline of the left during that period. It is quite possible that during a real boom Reagan could never have broken PATCO -- and the "New Communist" organizations of the early '70s would have grown and become more flexible rather than shrunk and become ever more sectarian.

Carrol

Doug Henwood wrote:


> We've had an upsurge in radical political
> activity in the U.S. over the last several years along with - and
> maybe because of - the boom.



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