Doug Henwood wrote:
> [Gosh, Virginia Postrel sorta agrees with me. Scary.]
>
> New York Times - September 7, 2000
>
> ECONOMIC SCENE
> Good Times, Not Bad, Nurture Enemies of Free Market
Actually, I got this idea from some conservative text or other I read years before I ever dreamt of being a marxist or even a political activist of any sort. The writer was bellyaching about how unfair it was that both the French Revolution and the February and October Revolutions occurred just when things (economic) had been in a process of improving. It made sort of immediate intuitive sense to me that such should be the case. And those whose memories go back far enough may remember the bandying about of the phrase "Revolution of Rising Expectations" in the early '60s. I believe that was the explanation the Pundits gave for the early stages of the civil rights movement -- and I think they were mostly
right.
Moreover, I don't think the 1930s are an exception at all. As someone once mentioned, there's a social and historical element goes into the establishment of the value of labor power. Rising expectations may be based on very flimsy grounds. What looks like real misery from a distance might very well, everything taken into account, have looked like exploding good times to those caught up in it. I think that from 1933 to the recession of (1938 was it?) there was a *perception* of improvement or impending improvement. "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" FDR famously intoned, and I suspect among those who took him seriously and acted on the feeling of opening opportunity it helped generate were those women who at the time of the Fisher Body sit downs in Flint changed their name several times in one week, from something like "Ladies Auxilliary" to "Red Berets."
According to one account I read of the Vietnam struggle, the very very slight easing in repression that the Blum government brought about in French Indochina was the seedbed for the growth of Ho's Vietnamese Workers' Party.
Carrol