[lbo-talk] Surrender!

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Sep 27 13:53:40 PDT 2009


Marv Gandall writes:

"It's hard to come to any conclusion other than that this global downturn will have to deepen and cause significantly more hardship for working class families before they join these demos in large numbers."

This too is wrong. It is not worse conditions but improving conditions (or the illusion of such) that drives significant resistance. There has been a consistent tendency on this and other lists to reduce the '60s to a few cliches, to focus on the alleged mistakes of that period, to dream of a day that never was. The future will be different from anything we can imagine today, but a future uprising will resemble the '60s more closely than any other image in your mind.

The last workers to give up in France '68 were the skilled workers of the TV stations, not blue-collar workers of Marv's romantic memory.

"I'm surprised we've seen so little protest on a world scale to date, but maybe the initial shock and fear will have to begin dissipating "

Exactly. See the paragraph in Capital in which Marx introduces his discussion of the fight for the 10-hour day. I think he may use Marv's identical words, "the shock" must wear off. Bad times do not trigger reistance. They trigger a flight to individualist survival, and the early resistance in such periods is defeated time after time after time before (again under unpredictable conditions) grows into something larger.

Carrol



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list