On May 17, 2010, at 11:38 PM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> Hang on, Doug, I'm not quite ready to 'put this one away'. A little
> unpacking would be good here.
>
> * Are you against the hope that with crisis, hegemonic power
> declines and financial circuits of capital wane? That, to me, is the
> merit of capitalist crisis joined by progressive reregulation, e.g.
> the demise of the Gold Standard, Glass-Steagall, the New Deal.
Like I said: "A major exception, of course, was the U.S. in the 1930s, but that one took the unemployment rate up to 25%. And that Great Depression didn’t do much for the left in Europe."
> (Right now it looks like we're getting the former - US empire
> shrinkage - and bankster re-empowerment due to the lack of strong US
> grassroots resistance, aside from Public Citizen.)
U.S. hegemony is getting a new lease on life from the euro crisis.
> * Are you against the role that regular, repeated, system-
> threatening capitalist crisis plays in left critiques of capitalism?
> Whyever so (aside from your own incompetence in not foreseeing the
> 2008 burst)?
Yes, I'm against that role of crisis. Most of the time, capitalism is not in serious crisis - and I'd say it's not in one even now, in the sense of difficulties that threaten the system's fundamental reproduction - so you have to come up with a critique that's credible in "normal" times.
There are varieties of incompetence. I'd say that forecasting a crisis every month for the roughly 240 months I've known you is also a kind of incompetence.
> * Are you of the mistaken impression that 'voting communist'
> represents any sort of marker of anything? Would you share the
> updated paper so we can figure out what you and the author mean by
> 'far left parties'? Why would anyone imagine that 'far left parties'
> adding 1 or 3 or 5% of the vote (e.g. as Die Linke have) make any
> sort of difference?
It could make a little difference, but gains in the nonelectoral realm have been equally marginal.
> Do you not want to ask whether a new zeitgeist - e.g. the Global
> Justice movement's rise in places like Seattle, Asia, South Africa
> and Latin America following the 1998 meltdown - might be worthy of
> consideration? (Ok, hard to add subjectivities into a regression, so
> maybe just forget it then.)
It wasn't the 1998 meltdown that gave rise to the global justice movement - I'd say on the contrary that the deficiencies of the 1990s boom contributed to that. The recession of 2001 and 9/11 knocked it for a loop from which it's never really recovered.
Doug