SA wrote:
. 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.
Part of the error here reflects the general tendency of leftists today to grossly underestimate the strength of that Movement of Movements referred to as the '60s -- jus as those of us who participated in it _also_ consistently under-estimated what was happening. And an essential source of energy during that period was precisely the factors SA describes as discouraging. (Except for a minor confusion over TINA, which was a slogan of the '80s, not the '50s and '60s, he describes pretty accurately what it felt like to live through those two decades. The System Works! was broadcast everywhere; it delivers! And the better things got, the more hopeful theworld looked, the more pissed off with it a growing minority of the population felt. And as I and Miles, among othrs, have been insisting for years: Left Movements are always movements of a fairly small proportion of the population. (Of course to grasp this you have to escape the hypnotic state engenderd by electoral politics.) Capitalism at its very best, its all-time glory days, revealed itself glaringly as the horror whicch it w as and is.
But the slump (every serious slump) exhbits itself NOT as a failure of the "system," of capitalism, but almost as force of nature, The Way Things ARe, There is No alternative.
Carrol