On 12/29/2010 1:52 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> What if it isn't a slump or crash or depression but merely (!) a permanent
> readjustment in global capitalism. There will continue to be the usual dips
> and recoveries, but nothing like the recovery of the 1950s with the
> resulting "rising expectations" which fueled the Movement of Movements which
> overturned the White Male Republic established in a1870, in addition to
> bringing most of the world's population into the abstract equality
> ("citizenship") rather than caste or estate or "identities" and made a
> present reality of Marx's prophetic remark in the Grundrisse of the
> "dot-like existence of the mere free worker" of bourgeois society. Zoning
> laws (with the disastrous results described by Jacobs) and suburbanization
> (with homes without porches and "neighborhoods" without bars& drug stores,
> etcd, and nearby places of employment) created the physical environment
> suitable to the invisible storage of these nomads. This ultimate
> individualization of the populace makes the elimination of rising
> expectations and the permanent reduction in standards of living (resulting
> in a radical reduction of "free time") ends, perhaps more or less
> permanently the material basis for collective action (either for radical
> reform or for revolution. This isolation is, however, the proper basis for a
> great intensification of the fear which accepts the various "Wars" (on
> crime, on drugs, on cancer, on terrorism, on others to be invented),
> creating a self-fueled process of ever greater isolation. The permanently
> 'depressed' economies of both core and 'periphery'* should both provide
> support for the needed disciplinary wars and the soldiers to fight those
> wars. Electoral politics will enter a new "Era of Good Feeling" (in which
> politics becomes bitterly personal and grounded in slander, since there are
> no longer issues around which partisan differences arise). This 'harmony' of
> principle and extreme bitterness of partisan conflict is of course already
> present: the attacks on Bush's intelligence, the myth of Obama's Islamic
> relition, are exactly the sort of personal differences that fuel conflict
> when there is substantial agreement on issues.
Well put...
SA