SA wrote:
>
> Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > Industrial capitalism and the oppositio to it are both a bit over 200
> > years old. Probably there haven't been more than 15 total years during
> > that period when there was significant political and/or cultural
> > resistancee. We are living in a very typical period. Run-of-the-mill.
> > Nothing especially bad. Nothing especiallay good.
>
> I disagree. A lot of periods may have lacked much objective resistance,
> but the current period is unusual for how weak even subjective
> opposition is. There's an unusual level of active identification with
> the system.
Let's assume that last statement: "There's an unusual level of active identification with the system."
"Active identification," when you roll it over in your mind, is sort of a curious state of affairs. From 1942 when I first begin to respond to and remember political events to the early '60s I was, really, utterly unconsicous of (a) any real opposition to the system and (b) any identification, active or otherwise, with the system. (I don't even remember those words, "the system<" being used muc.) For me and my friends at Western Michigan the Wallace campaign in 1948 was an amusing joke. I seldom went to football games, but I remember the halftime at one game that year: the band played a song for each of the four candidates: the one for Wallace was Red Sails in the Sunselt. "The System" was perfectly safe, resistance to it invisible. But no _active_ identification with it either: merely automatic acceptance that that was the way things were.
Perhaps this is trivial, perhaps not. I just want to see examined a bit more deeply what "active identification" _means_; why it should be especially strong now -- and even whether that is necessarily a sign of political strength of capitalism, depending on whipping up active identification?????
My other point in a separate post, that everything and there fore nothing in capitalism is "unprecedented," I would like to insist on.
Carrol