[lbo-talk] Austerity In The Face Of Weakness

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Sep 3 06:55:40 PDT 2010


On Sep 3, 2010, at 9:46 AM, Marv Gandall wrote:


> On 2010-09-03, at 2:32 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
>
>> You may say this is trivial, but surely one part of the challenge of
>> generating an anti-capitalist narrative, is to alert people that crises
>> are part and parcel of capitalism's laws of motion. So the LBO (and to
>> some extent SR) arguments to the contrary have done some damage.
> =====================================
> You anticipate correctly - this is trival.

And, as I've been saying to Patrick for many years, what he calls "crisis" is often what I call capitalism's standard operating procedure: creating poverty alongside wealth, instability, anxiety, ill-health, alienation, etc. To call them "crises" is to misname them, in fact - the word should be reserved for exceptional states, not an awful daily reality. If we can't tune our critique to the "normal," then why should anyone listen to us? Instead, they'll just long for a return to the normal, instead of getting off the whole goddamned merry-go-round.

Doug



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