Subprime crisis - overaccumulation?
> Both Charles and Woj, in arguing for the subjective factor,
acknowledge that
> you need "objective conditions including increased immiseration" and
> "historical conditions"
My own sense is that "what you need" is the opposite of "immiseration," which merely individualizes (fragmens) the working class in the scurry for survival. What you need is a "revolution of rising expectations," which, of course, can occur within considerably misery.It was only in the '50s or '60s that the phrase was coined, but I believe it also applies to the French and Russian Revolutions as well as the CIO upsurge of the '30s (which occurred after FDR had provided some hope though only small material gains).
We just don't know what kind of a party we need, and as you say it's pretty trivial merely to recite the fact that we do need a party.
Carrol
^^^ CB: I agree with Carrol on the paradox that the immediate situation before an "uprising" may very well be relatively better conditions causing rising expectations. I do not subscribe to "the worse the better "
I think it is obvious that if in the larger historical context capitalism is not causing mass immiseration it wouldn't make any sense to overthrow it. Those are the objective conditions of immiseration I refer to.
By the way, in the US , the exploding prison population is one of the main locuses of increasing immiseration. Everybody in prison is immiserated. It is not just the poor outside of prison who are immiserated. The victims of crime are immiserated too. Mass crime and imprisonment in the US is mass immiseration, along with basic mass poverty and victims of war, thereby empirically fullfilling Marx's absolute general law of capitalist accumulation in the US today.