I admired Sweezy & Magdoff a great deal, but just how did they do this well? How many Reviews of the Month did they write about "stagnation and the financial explosion" that always forecast a doom that never came to pass? And just how did those bad prophecies translate into radical political discourse? I know it influenced me when I first started reading MR in the early 1980s, so when I started
writing about this stuff a few years later, I was caught up in the Armageddon syndrome myself. But after the 1987 stock market crash and
1989-91 leveraging/deleveraging experience didn't produce the forecast result, I decided it was time for a rethink. If you keep predicting disasters that never happen - and, worse, find yourself wishing for them, despite all the massive human damage they would cause - then you look like a callous fool.
Financial volatility is often just that - financial volatility. Markets overreact. I don't know how a coefficient of variation translates into revolutionary politics though.
As I've said a hundred times, I'd never predict that capitalism is rock solid and immune to serious crisis. But should admit the presumption is that it will carry on. So if you don't like it, you have to resort to organizing and persuasion and stop wishing for a crash. How many friends would you win among the working class by celebrating the positive aspects of a 27% decline in GDP and a rise in the unemployment rate to 25% (which is what happened between 1929 and 1933 in the US)? And what do you think that kind of collapse would do to Latin America and Asia?
Doug
^^^^ CB: It's true. I'm a little concerned about backing into an apologia for the system. Isn't there mass immiseration caused by the system even when in the middle of a boom ? The massive prison pop. in the US represents mass immiseration, for example. If we are not going to holler about recessions, we have to holler about the continous immiseration, no ?
Also, don't we have to organize through activism during the non-depression times in order to be prepared to move masses to make fundamental system changes when a depression does come (God forbid) ?