Bears & Crashes

[Carrol Cox]

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.