On 2013-08-14, at 10:10 AM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
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> During real economic booms labor markets become very tight thereby placing workers in a very strong bargaining position in relation to capital. Hence, as Carrol says, it's precisely during such times that labor militancy increases because unions are now better situated to win their demands through use of the means available to them like strike actions.
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> Under such conditions, it's rather unlikely that a president like Ronald Reagan would have attempted to bust a union like PATCO. This also gets at what is almost surely one of the chief functions of recessions in capitalist economies which is to discipline the working class.
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> And concerning political instability and outbreaks of revolutionary unrest, it was Alexis de Tocqueville's view,that revolutions usually occurred when a long period of improving conditions was suddenly broken either by an economic crisis (or as in the case of Russia) by military defeat. The experience of improving conditions having had the effect of strengthening the masses' confidence that their lot in could be improved and hence was not something to be passively accepted as preordained by God or nature. While on the other hand the experience of a sudden reversal of these gains by economic crisis or war convincing the masses that hope for restoration of their past gains could only come through the overthrow of the status quo.
Yes, I fully agree about labour market conditions, which I've commented on before and will be evident from my own reply to Carrol.
De Toqueville's thesis explains the Russian Revolution nearly a century ago and the earlier mass outbreaks of the 19th century.
But there hasn't been a revolution in any advanced capitalist society since then, where socialist revolutions were expected to occur.
I think the explanation here is twofold: (1) the as yet uninterrupted ability of the capitalist countries to repeatedly recover from crises and restore relatively high levels of employment and (2) the extension of the universal franchise which allowed workers to vote for their own parties or bourgeois ones prepared to make concessions to them, which conferred legitimacy on the system and channeled energies which had previously been expressed in illegal strikes, demonstrations, and riots into the more stable and orderly arenas of electoral politics and institutionalized collective bargaining and protest.
Neither de Toqueville or the early Marxists anticipated or had to incorporate these events into their analyses.