>Okay, but when very unabstract things like university occupations, factory occupations, street rioting, strikes, etc. happen, much of the left largely ignores them or belittles them or, at best, immediately despairs that there aren't more of them. When I hear the word organization, I hear a lament, not an acknowledgment of opportunity. What I hear is, I wish there *already existed* an organization that could use this opening to institute a politics at the macro level. In other words, there is no possibility that politics is created in the course of action; politics has already happened and just has to be administered. What I like about Carrol's views on political change--despite the by turns evangelical and vanguardist character of them--is that they don't see politics as preexisting political action but as something created in the course of struggle [...]
It's a bit of both, don't you think? You have to analyze your experience of struggle--along with conditions and changes in conditions--as you go along. Plenty of organizations don't do that.
>I took Eubulides to be ironic, but given that the whole point of this list over the last few weeks and months has been to give advice to capital and to pray for it to reconstitute itself on some more humane, socialistic level, I don't know what to think anymore. People on lbo-talk may scoff at the conservative idea that nationalization = socialism, but as far as I can tell that's exactly the politics that dominate here.
I'm for reform and revolution. The question at issue at this moment in the US is how much will the cataclysm be solved by slashing living standards. While you may see talking about this as 'advice to capital,' I see it as a part of the struggle against its greater depredations. It's just that type of struggle, if carefully analyzed, that teaches in the way you describe above. You don't gain anything by giving it a pass because it's not 'radical' enough. A year from now conditions and the struggle will be very different, but what direction they've gone will depend on the current fight around the stimulus plan, the banks, unemployment, Employee Free Choice Act, health care, evictions and so on. Check out Haley Barbour in Mississippi and Bobby Jindal in Louisiana saying they're going to refuse federal money for unemployment benefits because it would require covering some laid-off part-time workers. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/21/us/21govs.html?ref=business Just because unemployment insurance isn't socialism doesn't mean it's not an arena of class war, as these southern governors are reminding us.
>Speaking of, I've finally read the Harvey article, and even though DeLong is a complete ass, I feel no need to defend Harvey and his highly conservative analyses and prescriptions: financialization as decadence and sign of the end, the rearrangement of something called hegemony, and the desire "to rescue capitalism from the capitalists and their false neoliberal ideology" all point to a Keynesian in Marxist dress. Why does Harvey think that Keynesianism is the only solution to the current crises? Someone might want to remind him that it didn't actually exist before the last big crisis and that capital has shown itself to be just a little bit supple. I'm sure it can come up with its own solutions without advice from dissenting intellectuals.
Yes, it can, and I believe the current plan involves a lot of layoffs, evictions, and starvation.
Jenny Brown