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OK, let me take a swing at this. Perhaps I am a bit more optimistic, because the old adage "politics makes strange bedfellows" IS true, as in that the twists and turns of "crisis" and its resolution are more convoluted that we ever think. I think what is described below is a crisis of the working class, its organization, "consciousness" etc. That's old news, and well predates the present _capitalist crisis_ (reworded to avoid the semantical confusion). As one historical example - and warning, it is ONLY by way of example, the intent is not to delve into a period-specific discussion cast in terms of dead terminology from a now-dead era: At the time of the first WW, the large majority of workers of Europe and the U.S. believed in fighting and dying for "their own imperialism", because they believed that "the crisis" was the encroachment of the others on "their own turf". Very very few listened to the Zimmerwald Left. They listened to the Dobbs/Limbaugh/Beck's of their time. Yet this did not prevent the Russian Revolution from opening up a whole era of revolutions of all sorts, an era that lasted until the 1980's. So go figure. It is impossible to project the dull sameness of yesterday and today in the face of a potentially deep crisis of what is after all the dominant system. And I listen to Dobbs/Beck (not Limbaugh, what a Repug hack bore); my fav is Michael Wiener, or Winer, or whatever, aka "Savage", based right here in SF. And I read Capital, and maybe so does Wiener for all I know. Hey, whatever happened to him, he's been off the air for some time? BTW, you forget that types like Dobbs also piss off a lot of Latinos, and politically speaking I'm a lot more interested in this sector of the U.S. working class, especially in connection with the immigration question. It is almost analogous to the "Slave Question" before the Civil War, because it involves a "racially despised" super-exploited population stripped of civil rights, in connection with a supposedly "hard and fast" territorial question, Mexico and the border. (in fact it was the original war with Mexico that created the present situation, that also lit the fuse for the actual Civil War, when it came time to consider the status of the California territory as either free or slave) When, like the Zimmerwald Left, I'm looking for cracks of light in the dull pall of unconsciousness that is a lot of the U.S. working class, I look there. -Matt Date: Sat, 28 Nov 2009 21:19:29 -0800 From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhand...@berkeley.edu> Subject: Re: [Marxism] theses on the economic crisis Cc: marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Message-ID: <4b120461.7030...@berkeley.edu > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed At this point, I would say that those who say that this is a crisis of the deregulation of the banking sector alone clearly outnumber who think that this crisis is also rooted in the structures of capitalism itself. I would also say that those who say this crisis stems from overly loose monetary policy or the Greenspan put, plus the GSE's pushing loans to underqualified minorities in an attempt to realize Clinton/Bush's ownership outnumber those who think this crisis has something to do with capitalism itself by a number also of 90 to 10. In other words, there are a lot more people listening to Dobbs/Limbaugh/Beck than reading Marx. Americans don't read anyway. And those who think the financial crisis originates in China's anti capitalist mercantilist policy of oversaving clearly outnumber the critics of capitalism who would argue the increasingly unequal distribution of income brought about by capitalist competition is the root cause of the crisis (oversaving by the rich that did not make sense to invest given stagnant workers' income and was thrown into a global casino). > ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
