[lbo-talk] URPE Summer Conference -- Aug 15-18 -- REGISTER NOW! ORGANIZE A PANEL!

Julio Huato juliohuato at gmail.com
Mon Jul 14 09:53:44 PDT 2008


To follow up on my reply to Doug:

In my view, the need for left-wing, radical, Marxist economists (or whichever way you wish you call them) in the U.S. is immense. What is sorely needed is the subjective condition for that: the active subject. Obviously, that cannot develop overnight.

Basically, we have to encourage young people to take that task up and cross the many bridges when/if they come to them.

Ultimately, as Marx and Engels suggested somewhere, the ultimate basis for any rebellion against the status quo is the oversupply of free disposable time, time beyond the "realm of necessity," time that people can use to develop themselves universally, time to evolve higher capacities and needs, and -- as obstacles to meet those needs pop up -- time that people can use to come up with collective solutions, time to create new, liberating conditions.

At a superficial political level, the push to social change comes from oppressive social conditions weighing on people. But at a meta-political level, the source of any organized, enlightened opposition is always a large, redundant, overflowing intellectual work force, way beyond the immediate needs of the status quo, even way beyond the immediate political needs of elementary resistance to the status quo. That's why we need more people getting schooled at the highest levels, preferably at the public expense.

(By the way, this is a very basic reason why we should oppose the postponement of the retirement age under the guise of the so-called financial crisis in Social Security. That argument may hold in Cuba, but not in any rich country. Greg Mankiw just repeated the reactionary shibboleth in his recent NYT's article. A large group of mature, healthy thinking people with disposable time in their hands in a society as full of shit as ours is, potentially, very explosive stuff. Another force converging is the questioning of the existing structure of social and individual needs in our society, a trend that perhaps a bit too dogmatically environmentalists espouse. Paradoxically, a sliver of our commercial culture is starting to get on board -- witness Wall-E, which still relies heavily on individual heroes: the captain, the rogue robots, etc. But I digress.)



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