On 3/9/07, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
a) "riding the wave of economic crisis" is crap. M&E and many other
old socialists only saw crises as a small part of the process, helping
to raise consciousness (as it were). The important part was the
development of the self-organized & class-conscious working class.
b) the idea that the states in the rich countries have managed the
crisis is naive. Rather, it's a matter of unplanned effects of
military Keynesianism and (to a lesser extent), the welfare state.
Almost all active policy involves muddling through in the dark. In
addition, it's not that crises were minimized as much as their worst
impacts were shifted to the poorer countries in the world.
The welfare state, military Keynesianism, shifting to the poorer
countries, etc. all have had the same effect in the sense that crises
like the Great Depression have not happened in the West and may not
happen again here.
M&E consciously rejected the path of utopian socialism and coming up
with a blueprint for new socialist society. But M&E didn't have much
to say about (A) how the self-organized & class-conscious working
class could develop and (B) how that development might lead into
transition to socialism either, in contrast to far more intellectual
energy expended on explaining commodity fetishism, the mechanism of
surplus value extraction, contradictions of capitalism, why crises are
inherent in capitalism, etc.
We can infer some of their political thinking from their historical
analyses, journalism on contemporary affairs, programs they wrote or
helped devise or criticized, etc., but really not much is there.
About (A), though, Gramsci has had a lot to say. It's hard to apply
his thinking in the USA, however, since it's basically centered on the
idea of the Communist Party -- the Prince -- being an all-encompassing
organizer.
> So, if today's socialists in the
> West still contemplate transition to socialism ...,
> we have to think about ways of getting there without
> going through anything like the Great Depression.
good idea. How are you going to do it?
I'm proposing it as a topic of discussion, rather than claiming that I
have an answer.
> In the South, quite severe economic crises are not uncommon. One
> recent one did break the old ruling class choke hold on power and
> created an opening for a new approach to socialism (or perhaps just
> social democracy, in some people's opinions): Venezuela.
was Chavez's rise to power the result of an economic crisis?
In part, indirectly. Before the rise of Chavez and his comrades'
movement, the two main bourgeois parties, AD and COPEI, had already
lost a great deal of legitimacy in people's eyes. Venezuela's
economic crisis since the early 1980s, the IMF's program imposed by
President Carlos Andrés Pérez, the protests against it and repression
of the protests, called Caracazo, in 1989 -- all these events helped
discredit politics as usual. Without that process, neither Chavez's
failed coup of 1992 nor the populace's favorable response to him
despite his failure can be explained.
since when are we forced to _choose_ between crisis theory and
political theory? That's falling into the standard bourgeois-academic
habit of over-specialization of thinking.
<snip>
Yoshie, now:
> That's in part because of environmental consciousness, not the POT per
> se: an objective difficulty of reconciling the idea of conquering a
> rich world and the kind of systemic change that may be required by a
> rational response to climate change. If climate change goes unabated,
> there is a real possibility that our descendants (whether or not they
> are socialists) will be inheriting squalor in many parts of the world.
I agree with this environmentalist problem (and the difficulties it
creates for Marx's original vision) but we were talking about POT.
Does its popularity arise from the "exhaustion of crisis theory" as
Yoshie suggested in before? whose "crisis theory"? which "crisis
theory"?
I'm thinking of debates over underconsumption vs. overproduction and
things like those. Some of the crisis theory debates in the past
originally had some political implications, with regard to what to
think of Keynesian economics, how to explain imperialism, and so on.
But it seems like debate on Keynesian vs. Marxist economics has become
virtually moot as just about everyone in the West has become basically
social democratic in practice (and if that's the political
destination, Keynes makes a lot of sense), and attempts to get a
theory of imperialism out of the laws of motion of capitalism seem to
have petered out. Hence my claim that crisis theory has exhausted
itself.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
