On May 24, 2013, at 5:50 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Below is a rather overwrought illustration in today's Counterpunch of the idealist pessimism of the US left which I alluded to in my previous post. The cry of despair by the magazine's editor, Jeffrey St. Clair attributes the "somnambulism" of the masses to their "betrayal" by cowardly and wrongheaded liberals and DP-oriented leftists - a favourite theme of Carrol's and others on this and related lists. Liberal ideological hegemony is treated as the cause rather than the consequence of the decline of the organized industrial working class and of the mass international socialist movement which developed within it. There is no reference to the underlying material conditions which have ultimately been responsible for the decline, in particular the technological advances and global spread of capitalism which gave the system a new lease on life in the latter half of the twentieth century. Capitalism's unexpected resilience is in conflict with Marxist orthodoxy, which had been forecasting the system's imminent demise for more than 150 years. But since it is perceptibly easier to change ideas than material conditions, and ideas are the stock in trade of today's campus-based left, the development of a strong idealist streak in contemporary Marxism is not surprising.
JSC is no Marxist, if that's what you're implying. He's some sort of Edward Abbeyist or something.
This despair is too thick. The kids are great. Krugman is quoting Kalecki.