Patrick Bond wrote:
> MG: > In an otherwise useful summary of Marxist crisis theory, this is a
> statement only a comfortable academic could make.
>
> PB: Marvin, true, I'm a petit bourgeois academic. But are you *that* out
of
> touch with the majority of politically progressive people in the world,
not
> to sense how much satisfaction there would be if the US lost economic
power
> in a dramatic manner? Schadenfreud is not good politics, but you have to
> grant *some* sort of validity to the view that's what is bad for the US
> *might* be good for everyone else? (And then help with that weakening
> process?!)
--------------------------------
I should have specified you are not a p.b., Patrick, but rather a
"privileged intellectual worker" :)
On a more serious note, I can't presuppose that what's bad for the US and capitalism is by definition good for everyone else. If that were so, we wouldn't have known fascism and world war. Economic crises strengthen the right as well as the left, and, unlike the 30s, we would enter a crisis with the former rather than the latter in the ascendent.
Nevertheless, I don't doubt there will be a great deal of satisfaction among many politically progressive people if there is a crash for the reasons you mention. But some and maybe many of my largely apolitical or mildly progressive friends and neighbours and those closest to me will lose their jobs and homes - and in some cases their zest for life - and I can't take any satisfaction in that.
That doesn't mean I would bemoan the advent of such a crisis, anymore than I would cheer it. I expect I'd simply join those around me in doing what seems at the time to be necessary to resolving it. Probably the first impulse of people will be to try to reform the system as they tried to do under the New Deal. I'll be with them in that, because I won't want to isolate myself from them, and because I can't tell them for certain that they won't be successful and are wasting their time. If reform efforts do prove impossible given the depth of the crisis, I expect they will turn by default to public ownership to restore production, and I expect I'd be part of that process too, if it should come to that.
But I'll wait for it to come to that. I'm not sure what you mean by joining you in a "weakening process" in the meantime. Does it involve more than observing, reading, writing, and discussing in this period, and participating in reform and solidarity activities? I still do that, not as much as I used to, but am under no illusions this weakens the system, or can do so for so long as capitalism continues to provide people with a tolerable level of jobs and income, whatever its inequalities and other abuses. There is a powerful argument to be made, in fact, that such things as the fight for labour, gay, women's and minority rights, for a revamping of global finance and trade relationships, for an end to the war in Iraq, and other necessary democratic reforms strengthen the system more than they weaken it - which of course doesn't mean these are not still fully deserving of our support.
MG