I've said this many times, but that's never stopped me from saying it
again. If the left project is so dependent on crisis to do our polemical work for us, then we're doomed. If we can't convince people
that the normal operation of capitalism is unjust, violent, alienating, polarizing, etc., then we might as well give up. Because crises do resolve themselves, but the rest goes on. The "normal" should be the issue, not the extraordinary.
Doug
^^^^^ CB: Yes, the secular capitalist trends , not so much the cyclical trends. That's why I emphasize that Marxists should take their theoretical lead from Marx's discussion of the Absolute General Law of Capitalist Accumulation , which claims there is a secular, not just cyclical, trend in capitalism pauperise and immiserate masses. So, for example, we should constantly essay the gigantic prison population in the U.S., a "lazurus layer" of the relative surplus population, if there ever was one. We shouldn't spend so much time pointing to the downturn of the business cycle. Rather we should describe in detail the continous processes by which people are pauperized, pushed into crime, immiserated, driven crazy _in the boom phase of the business cycle_
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S4
"
Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that of the relative surplus-population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus-population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these. for the most part, from its own shoulders on to those of the working-class and the lower middle class.
The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here."
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