[lbo-talk] Weisbrot: Why the Euro is Not Worth Saving

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Tue Jul 12 08:20:34 PDT 2011


On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 7:56 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 12, 2011, at 1:24 AM, Eric Beck wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Yeah. See kids, this is what happens when you post while going through insomnia.

Maybe it's the unsubtlety of email, but I read statements such as "crises are not good for the left, since they make people more defensive, insular, competitive, and focused on survival" as fairly mechanistic in that they seem to treat all crises the same and don't seem to allow for any possible escape from the crises' effects. Don't get me wrong: Empirically speaking, I mostly agree with you that crises are bad for everyone except capitalists, and I certainly loathe "accelerationism" (to borrow a term some have used lately), but I think it gives Them too much credit and Us not enough to declare ahead of time that crises are bad. It certainly seems to rule out the possibility of political action that eludes or uses the crisis. And maybe you are right, but I don't really see what good can come of foreclosing possibility.

Drawing lessons from events when n=a pretty small number is dangerous, I know, but I think in order for your thesis to have more weight it'd have to begin to account for the 1930s.



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