> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 3:37 PM, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > [I actually think the "paradox" he cites at the end is no paradox at
> all.]
>
> I agree, and it's why, though I'm sympathetic their anticatastrophism,
> I can't sign on to Doug's and Carrol's mechanistic, deterministic
> views on crisis, communism, and social change.
>
> Huh.
1) I didn't think either of them had mechanistic or deterministic views on
such things - it seems to me that Doug's criticisms of many generally lie
in
the realm of "crises don't mechanistically produce a left" and Carrol's
position
is primarily that well-organized and committed local groups, increasingly
coordinated with others, are the only way to build a left.
2) I think that last paragraph is bizarre:
It appears that much of the European left does not understand the right-wing nature of the institutions, authorities, and especially macroeconomic policies that they are facing in the Eurozone.
"Much of the European left" is pretty vague, and focusing on the issue of understanding is a great, idealist way of bracketing the ways the structuring of the Eurozone and Euro-institutions was a) constructed to disempower the left and b) was resisted but not successfully by lefts that knew well the right- wing nature of the institutions.
This is part of a more general problem with the public misunderstanding
of macroeconomic policy worldwide, which has allowed right-wing central banks to implement destructive policies, sometimes even under left governments.
Again with the lame focus on understanding... but with a shift from "the left" in Europe to "the public" worldwide. The problem is not understanding, though macroeconomic understanding is surely weak. The problem is the ways in which social and liberal democracy simultaneously bought off, disempowered and savagely crushed lefts while carefully producing not only the ignorance about economics in the public but extending and intensifying anti-left sentiments in any number of ways (often with weak responses from the left).
These misunderstandings, along with the lack of democratic input, might help explain the paradox that Europe currently has more right-wing macroeconomic policies than the United States, despite having much stronger labor unions and other institutional bases for more progressive economic policy.
But this sentence treats the "lack of democratic input" as if it were a fact in need of no institutional explanation. Secondly, comparing the US and EU is kinda problematic given that the institutional structure of the latter was set up in the late neoliberal 20th C while the former was designed in the pre-industrial 19th, despite all the subsequent updates. It also brackets, on the one hand, the difference between our regional trade agreements and the integration of the EU and, on the other hand, pretending that the US and Europe don't collaborate in the running of the IMF, World Bank and WTO in a manner which rather powerfully weakens the meaning of the comparison in the last two lines.