[lbo-talk] Barbara Ehrenreich Loses Her Mind

[Jeffrey Fisher]

On 8/23/07, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
> Dmytri Kleiner wrote:
> >
> > Um, she is joking. The article ends with:
> >
> > --- start quote ---
> >
> > Global capitalism will survive the current credit crisis; already, the
> > government has rushed in to soothe the feverish markets. But in the
> > long term, a system that depends on extracting every last cent from the
> > poor cannot hope for a healthy prognosis. Who would have thought that
> > foreclosures in Stockton and Cleveland would roil the markets of London
> and
> > Shanghai? The poor have risen up and spoken; only it sounds less like a
> > shout of protest than a low, strangled, cry of pain.
>
> I suspected that might be the case, but still didn't bother to continue.
> And note her "in the long term...." That is almost as silly as her joke.
> Class society has flourished for about 5000 years, and to say it cannot
> hope for a healthy prognosis is mere wishful-thinking. If you don't hit
> it, it won't fall -- and only at rare intervals does it, for a very
> brief period, become vulnerable to being hit. Those periods are
> unpredictable, and cannot be willed into existence. Mere moral outrage
> of a few, or even quite a few, won't do it.
>
> Carrol

i don't know. maybe there's too much here i don't understand, but i thought
all in all her analysis--emphasizing paying less with one hand and lending
more with the other--was pretty good. i'm happy to be disabused of my
mistaken assessment, as i would rather understand rightly than wrongly, but
i would want it to be about more than the admittedly rosy-eyed aspect of
hoping a little too much that this crisis would lead to some sort of
revolutionary change.

j