> Wojtek wrote: I really do not understand the tendency on the left to hope
> that an economic crisis will bring capitalism down and start a revo...
I guess W is illiterate, and my previous post correcting him will be recast into his internal fantasies. Alan's post won't get thorugh either. Anyone who can say that has never bothered to read any of the posts on lbo and probably never will.
An economic crash will frighten most people into scrambling for personal survival. It will trigger _some_ resistance_ from a small minority. Under _some_ (unpredictable) conditions that minority in action will attract a slightly larger minority around it. We can say this because it has happened so many times. A really protracted deep depression can, given that active minority, generate a movement of some serious threat. Or, if after a serious economic crash had generated such an activie minority there were a really substantial and sustained growth of prosperity and increased leisure, then capitalism Carrol might be in serious trouble.
One can find Marxists (not usually those engaged in active building of mass movements but those on the sidelines) who will continually point out this and the other economic trouble. It's as though they didn't really believe the Marxist analysis of capital (or didn't understand it) and therefore always had to be reassuring themselves by piling up more and more empirical 'evidence.') And there are a number of people on this list who continually irritate me personally anyhow by posting news (or often only a link) of some new horror which is just terrible. I find that a bore. But opinions among leftists are so varied that anyone who starts off a proposition with "The left" or "Lots of Leftists" marks him/herself as an ignoramus.
Carrol