On 2/5/07, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I get really tired of leftists going on about the next crisis that never arrives, or talking like an ordinary recession represents some great political watershed. ...
so it's mutual. I'm tired of you attributing such opinions to others willy-nilly -- to undefined and unquoted "leftists" or worse, "the [nonexistent] PEN-L orthodoxy." recessions are not political watersheds. Rather, they are part of the automatic adjustment mechanism that keeps capitalism on a relatively stable growth-path. They are part of the body economic's immune system. Sometimes -- but not often -- the automatic adjustment mechanism goes too far and acts like an AIDS patient's immune system (absent medication), actually hurting the patient -- as in the Great Depression of the 1930s. This might be a "political watershed" that wakes people up the injustice of capitalism, etc., as in the US during the 1930s (más o menos). But it might also might unleash the force of Charles Brown's favorite f-word, as in Germany in the 1930s. A Depression is not any kind of guaranteed solution to the lefts' current political marginalization and powerlessness. I know that given the current demobilization of US the labor, women's, environmentalist, etc. movements and their resulting embrace of the DP, many leftists hope for manna from heaven coming from a recession automatically sparking a spontaneous uprising of the masses upon which the lefts can ride. But he world doesn't work that way. -- Jim Devine / "The truth is more important than the facts." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
