> On Apr 21, 2010, at 11:08 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>> The Great Depression lasted long enough, continuously, that
>> slight improvements in conditions could generate the hope and the rising
>> expectations that are so vital to left movements .
>
> The recovery from 1933 to 1937 was very powerful. The unemployment
> rate fell from over 25% to around 11%, and GDP rose by 43% (or over 9%
> a year), surpassing the 1929 peak in 1936. And, as Bhaskar just
> pointed out, the politically interesting stuff didn't really start
> until 1934. That was the year of the Minneapolis general strike. A
> year later, the UAW was formed in 1935, and the Flint strike was
> 1936-37. Rising expectations are very dangerous from a bourgeois
> perspective. Best to keep the working class always a little off guard.
There's something about this argument that always strikes me as off. It's true that people will never rebel if they're terrified and at the edge of the abyss. They're more likely to rebel if they feel some sense of hope. But that doesn't tell you *anything* about whether people will rebel against *capitalism* specifically (or against "actually existing capitalism," or whatever).
The assumption seems to be that once people feel secure enough to rebel, they'll naturally rebel against capitalism. But if everything around them is telling them that capitalism works great, that it's a brilliant system, that no alternative could possibly stack up, then they will have no reason to conclude that whatever's pissing them off should be combated specifically by anti-capitalist politics. They'll come up with some other kind of politics. Those other politics may be good or bad, they may be worthwhile or not, but they won't be anti-capitalist politics.
If you're a Flint autoworker in 1936, you may well be feeling emboldened by the fact that things are starting to look less dark for you personally. But you also can't help but note that capitalism is discredited, the economy is in shambles, and the whole worldview that your boss and the Protestant ministers on the radio used to force-feed you, to explain why you should just accept things the way they are (that "the American system" is the best system, it maximizes the well-being of all, etc.) looks utterly ridiculous.
In the 30's, the worse the economy got, the more discredited pure capitalism became. In the 70's, the worse the economy got the more pure capitalism grew in prestige. In the late 90's, the better the economy got the more prestigious neoliberalism grew - for rich countries. (It was easy for Seattle protesters to conclude that the system wasn't working for developing countries - especially after an endless series of economic crises and depressions - Mexico, Thailand, Korea, Russia, etc.)
To the extent that economic crises spur rebellion, it's certainly not because people get more miserable and therefore rebel. It's because people become more contemptuous of the ideology they had been fed for so long.
SA