[lbo-talk] Krugman

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Fri Jun 6 08:45:47 PDT 2003


From: Doug Henwood

Chuck Grimes wrote:


>The crude choice dynamics emerges between an apparently positive,
>smooth, orderly, and established system of assurances and
>consistencies perpetrated by the Right, as opposed to an
>argumentative, messy, contentious, disorderly and negative Left.

The left isn't immune to the easy consistency, even at the high end. Some Marxisms purport to explain everything as emerging from the laws of motion of capital; "it is no accident that...," as the vulgar Marxists used to say (to steal a phrase from John Leonard). Your average Pacifica listener believes all kinds of conspiracy theories - Bush planned 9/11, Unocal the Afghanistan war, etc. There's no room for the messy or accidental in that sort of worldview.

Doug

^^^^^^^ CB: On the real "high end", Engels said that scientific laws assert themselves in the form of a welter of accidents, or words to that effect. That was not meant as a denial of the existence of accidents, but a unity and struggle of accidents with their opposite. That is "everything" is not consistent, but rather contradictory. We have Barkley here again to help explain this (smile). Of course, 9/11 was a conspiracy - by Al Q. . Is that messier or neater ? I guess the easy, left consistency in this might be that the terrorists were ultimately a reflection of colonials' anger at U.S. imperialism. Anyway, perhaps in the overall context of Chuck's comments, the point is that even the Left's easy consistencies are _agitational_ messages

"something is really fucked up about all this; in fact, lots of things are really f'ed up about all this") , disruptive of a mass consciousness that seeks to be comfortable with things, and therefore not obligated to go through the difficult , long, arduous tasks of changing the "system".



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