W speaks

Peter K. peterk at enteract.com
Mon Aug 21 23:06:27 PDT 2000



>I notice a catastrophism slipping into a lot of left discourse. Gore
>Vidal, Alex Cockburn, John Gulick talking of the depression awaiting
>Clinton's successor. Katha Pollitt told me she doesn't see a left
>revival without a depression. What's that all about? People seem to
>be almost rooting for throwing 30 million out of work. Tight labor
>markets are good.
>
>Doug

I agree tight markets are good. In the U.S. (sorry Rob S.) there was a fair amount of decent reforms in the 50s and 60s, but wasn't this also true of the 30s?

I just skimmed last Saturday's (8.19) New York Times and thought it was odd that Robert Brenner and Giovanni Arrighi were mentioned in one article in the Arts and Ideas section, and "Frederic[sic] Jameson" was quoted in another. From the first article, which was on the 95th annual meeting of the American Sociologcial Association: "... Mr. Brenner was spurred into uttering a few kind words for the Seattle protesters, but Mr. Arrighi refused any crowd-pleasing. He expressed skepticism at the thinking behind the antiglobal eruptions and went so far as to dismiss Marxist theory as a muddle that was failing to catch up to the continuing transformation of capitalism..."

Peter



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list