[lbo-talk] Gloom amd Doom and . . . .?

Marvin Gandall marvgandall at rogers.com
Tue May 24 08:37:00 PDT 2005


Wojtek on the prospects for progressive social change in the US:


> But it simply will not happen here - at least not in our life time.
----------------------- But how can you be so certain? Your regular sweeping pronouncements about the inherently reactionary political character of the American population and the impossibiity of change reminds me of nothing so much as their mirror opposite: the equally bold pronouncements about the revolutionary potential of the masses and the certainty of radical change in our lifetime which used to be so common on the left.

There are no fixed political characteristics. No individual or collectivity is inherently reactionary or progressive. Yesterday's stolid masses can be tomorrow's insurgents; you would have been saying the same thing about the Russian and Chinese peasantry on the eve of their revolutions and US factory workers before the depression.

That's not a counter-prediction of my own. We can't know in advance whether and when change will occur. That will depend on social conditions, which can alter the collective political psychology which you seem to regard as immutable very abruptly and dramatically. Otherwise history would be static. Or is your position more nuanced than this, and I'm simply missing it?

MG



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