[lbo-talk] flush *that* social movement thesis?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Oct 3 08:56:00 PDT 2011


Rising expectations frustrated is not the same as being beaten down by a serious austerity prgram. But the question still is a bit sticky. And it's one that can be speculated on but not resolved by argument or theoretically. The resolution in practice, however, is simple. One has to keep beating on the damn door whenever one can get 4 or 5 people to join in the action. If instead of dying away (or at lest not getting any traction), as is usally the case (and has been for the most part since 1970 -- if instead more people flock in, THEN one can push further -- and so forth. It's not predictable -- i.e., not theorizable. A subject line on a recent post onthe Solidarity list was "We have a movement." Well, maybe. But also maybe we have something better: We have a hell of a lot of people lookigng real hard for a Movement. We will see.

Carrol

On 10/3/2011 10:22 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
> Ok, so the social movement thesis bandied about here has been that
> people are move apt to get pissed off and demonstrate about their
> anger during economically good times.
>
> Does OWS contradict this?
>
> Or do we go with McAdam's thesis in Freedom Summer? That people get
> pissed off when their expectations have been raised and then the
> politicians who've been elected to meet those expectations fail
> miserably at doing so.
>
> shag
>



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