[lbo-talk] PBS documentary: "Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream"

Julio Huato juliohuato at gmail.com
Mon Nov 19 08:38:21 PST 2012


Marv wrote:


> Watched it last night. It's an excellent complement to Inside Job. My only
> criticism is that it shares the widespread liberal (in some cases, leftist)
> misconception that the extremes of wealth and poverty and the arrogant greed
> and insensitivity of the rich and powerful are a fairly recent phenomenon
> resulting from stepped-up capitalist organization and lobbying and the wave of
> financial deregulation at the end of the century.

Right. But there's what I call the "\sum_i x_i = Y rule", which says that one can suffer death by a thousand cuts just as death by a massive stroke. E.g., disproportions in many unimportant branches of the economy can disrupt the whole economy just as much as an imbalance in a key sector. But the rule cuts both ways!

Thus, one liberal (e.g. Paul Krugman) can have as large a concrete, favorable effect on the class struggle as the total sum of n Marxists out there (me included), where n can be a very large number. Ideally, we would want to have n radical Marxists each with as much influence as a Paul Krugman, but we don't have them -- yet. So, for the time being, I'll take one Paul Krugman any day over less than n Marxists (again, me included).

Many lower-quality radical documentaries would perhaps have a similar effect than a high-quality liberal one, but I haven't seen them -- yet.



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