On 2012-02-16, at 8:57 AM, Wojtek S wrote:
> The only thing beside the relationship with my wife that
> keeps me from total despair is anecdote of a certain Jew who after the
> Nazi invasion of Poland went into hiding. The only contact with the
> outside world was the radio that he kept so he listened to the BBC for
> the news from the front. By 1942, these news were overwhelmingly bad.
> The Nazi conquered Western Europe and were rapidly advancing toward
> Moscow. So the guy decided that there was no way out and hanged
> himself in despair, shortly before the news of Stalingrad broke out.
Grim anecdote, but history provides more reassurance that change will come since no system is permanent. But that's still not saying much, since our dilemma is that we can't know when conditions will change, and in the long run we're all dead. So for most people the illusion of permanence becomes deeply embedded and fosters conservatism, including a hopeful faith in the inevitability of relief which is the basis of all religions, secular and otherworldly.
When change does come, it is typically unexpected and swift. The most spectacular example in our lifetime was the rather abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism in the fSU and China and the other states (barring Cuba, for now) where the capitalists had previously been expropriated. In retrospect, you can trace the subterranean roots of these developments, but no serious analyst without an ideological axe to grind anticipated these changes before they appeared during the 80's. Even those on the left who forecast that these "state capitalist" or "deformed workers' states" would undergo revolutions resulting in workers' democratic control of the political system never expected their social foundations to be overturned, and certainly not with the tacit consent of their working classes.
Because Western capitalism has been so resilient as to make a mockery of the expectations of early Marxists - expectations which were reasonable at the time given the growing militancy of the working class, the spread of socialist ideas, and the doubts of the system's own apologists - I don't think I'm alone in having become conditioned to anticipating its recovery from recurrent crises. But I've never experienced a financial and economic crisis as deep and threatening as this one, and, more tellingly, one which is widely perceived that way by other than the usual suspects on the left, so I will not be wholly taken aback if this time does prove to be different. Already, there is more off-campus talk of "collapse" and "revolution" in the air in both Europe and the US than I can recall in my lifetime.