> Comrade Travis, my old drinking buddy, hits on the crux of the matter:
> PB: Then come home, Travis, and see the promise smashed every day in the
> surf of bad capitalism. A national public sector strike was announced
> yesterday, and check the adverts on today's protest marches:
TF: You mistook yourself for my target and point. A crisis of the economic base is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce the revolutionary subject. The revolutionary subject is always with us: we do not need a crisis to create the revolutionary subject.
Let my old mentor speak for me:
"Thus, the struggles of workers to satisfy their many-sided needs-- whether they are struggles, for example, to develop that which is needed for the common satisfaction of needs, such as schools, health services, etc.' or to preserve Nature as a source of their wealth or to secure use-values in a commodity-form-- are struggles against capital as mediator. They are class struggles--struggles of those who are compelled to sell their labour- power to satisfy needs; and, they are struggles against the results of capital's ownership of the products of their labour..." p.186 Michael A. Lebowitz "Beyond Capital" (2003) Palgrave.
Hence, even in the surf of "good" capitalism the revolutionary subject exists. The revolutionary subject is not the product, that is, it is not created nor is it destroyed by the machinations of the economic base. Good times are as likely to make us act on our revolutionary subjectivity as bad times: whether or not these struggles manifest into The Revolution or not is a matter of contingency and purposeful human action (politics as Doug Henwood might say).
The snare that Heartfield lays, and the one to which you seem to be willing prey, is that which posits the revolutionary subject as a character that enters stage left and departs stage right depending on the inducements of their belly. This whole mechanical apparatus needs to be jettisoned! It is bad socio-political theory and history. Heartfield's snare is just that: we would do better to forgo his offer of tainted meat and thereby forgo the spectacle of eating our off our own limbs to get out of this fictitious snare.
As satiated as I may be on wine, I am not a member of the living dead -- a Zombie-- I may express myself in an awkward, and at times, foreign tongue, that is, I may be a barbarian but that does not make me, or you, or the white-collar freaks on the streets of New York "Zombies". It makes us living human beings groping in the dark to communicate our dissatisfaction (which is a revolutionary act) with the present order of things. The Liberal Idiom is a straight-jacket and a mind fk:, it has not the words nor the concepts to express dissatisfaction with itself. If such attempts to get outside of the discursive liberal prison-house make Heartfield feel embarrassed that is, as they say, his own shit.
PS. Comrade, I would go home, but I have none. If you can find me a place in Jo-Burg let me know my bags are packed I can be there in a fortnight!