I doubt that! The competitor to bring down the US isn't Europe.
>> * 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.
Crisis isn't best defined as 'threatening the system's fundamental reproduction'... but rather, in the spirit of Robert Cox, as a time when the reproduction of a system cannot occur through its own internal logic, and requires therefore an intervention that is *outside* that logic. So to resume the earlier rates of growth, the overaccumulated real economy and financial system need a round of creative destruction, of devalorisation. A critique of the bursts of value generation (capital accumulation) and then destruction of overaccumulated capital - instead of a rational, eco-sensitive, and ultimately planned approach to economic development - is a crucial part of the narrative the Left has always had when railing against capitalism. Why depart from that line, now, of all times? And sure, 'most of the time capitalism is not in serious crisis', so we have to understand the crisis displacement techniques (which I term shifting, stalling and stealing) - and not deny them.
> 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.
See, your numbers are way off again. I gave you your first radio interview in June 1988.
> ... gains in the nonelectoral realm have been equally marginal.
Well, I keep coming back to the defeat of apartheid or the acquisition of antiretroviral medicines for HIV-positive Africans (two of the greatest social advances in the past few decades). Those sure weren't done in the ballot box.
> 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.
It was the exhaustion of IMF Rioting in Latin America that gave us the main social movements there, I am led to understand, and what would Global Justice be without that inspiration. These have mainly been anti-neoliberal movements, and they made their most sophisticated moves - Zapatismo's hearts and minds after Mexico's early 1995 meltdown, Brazil's Workers Party win after the 1999 crash, the Argentine picas and factory occupations in 2002, the Morales and Correa victories in Bolivia and Ecuador - in the immediate wake of acute capitalist crises. South Africa's strongest push against apartheid came in 1989-93, during the country's longest-ever depression, and in the wake of the 2008 crash here, the upsurge of 'service delivery protests' - many thousands last year - is exceptional evidence. Asia after 1997-98 became much stronger as a site for radical social change advocacy and environmentalism, in many ways directly because of the crisis.
You're stuck in the US too much, you've got to get out and check the rest of the world. Far lower levels of consumption-induced mass inculcation mean that people can connect the dots rather more quickly, I find.
> The recession of 2001 and 9/11 knocked it for a loop from which it's
> never really recovered.
All movements ebb and flow. This has much more room to grow, especially as Climate Justice spreads.