True, hoping for a magic bullet such as a recession to act as a catalyst is foolish. However, apparently things getting pretty bad is a prerequisite for radicalization (in the countries where there is serious class struggle such as Bolivia people are among the worst off)--people hardly become revolutionaries in times of plenty.
By the way, for my part, I think that if the millennium comes in the good old US of A it will have little to with people who see themselves as "leftists". Western leftists are generally smug intellectuals fixated mostly on academic irrelevancies, almost completely oblivious to what's happening in the present and absolutely oblivious to the struggles and popular desires of their less fortunate compatriots, folk they routinely ridicule in manifold, subtly disguised ways. There are honorable exceptions, of course; but not many. My point is, our revolution, if it comes, will probably not be predicted by those who wear the (superficial) trappings of (historic) class struggle on their sleeves--it will probably employ the jargon of capitalism rather than Marxism and will probably be Christian rather than (nominally) atheist. This is not to say I see a revolution in the Tea Party or any other present developments, merely to point out that worshipers of 19th and 20th century Socialism are probably too fettered by an extremely narrow view of class struggle to make good judges of what's happening today.
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> For a long time, I’ve been critical of the left-wing penchant for
> economic crisis. Many radicals have fantasized that a serious recession
> —or depression—would lead to mass radicalization, as scales
> simultaneously fell from millions of pairs of eyes and the imperative
> of transcending capitalism became self-evidently obvious. I’ve long
> thought that was nonsense, and now there’s empirical support for my
> position....
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