Greetings Economists, On Nov 18, 2007, at 6:25 AM, Charles Brown wrote:
In fact, where has there been a recession anywhere in the world lately ? Is the business cycle obsolete ?
Doyle, Iraq. Like you wrote before there are spots. The question before us is systemic recession. As Roubini points out, the likelihood of a U.S. recession is near certain now, the debate is about depth. I want to go back a way to 1973. That recession formed the political background to my adult life. The left motion I knew resisted what happened into the early eighties. And then resistance faded away. I think the fade away has to do with the general decline of catastrophism that guided people from 1917 onward. The rootedness in struggle that taught people how to organize, I mean how tens of millions schooled in war thought about organization couldn't work in 1973 to about 1984. Suppose we have a significant deep recession now? More so than 1973? Where all the wealth accumulated in the safety net has been spent for profits? Where people don't trust each other enough to unite in the face of survival against loss? We will not turn to what war teaches working people. A generalized war would be a high tech war in which cities would be military targets. How then could people unite? Does a severe recession teach us lessons we can use that lack a generalized war to teach struggle to people on a mass scale? Surely hungry desperate people die. Homeless people suffer. But they face an enormous state. Walled cities with gates are everywhere. Gangsters control the streets where police don't go. That sounds like China in the 1920s to me, but the same sorts of institutions are paramount now in the U.S. long before Roubini's catastrophe strikes. Argentina teaches us that the neo- liberals collapse politically like a house of cards, but our ability to unite into powerful groups to seize power is lacking. No Lenin emerged in Argentina, nor Turkey. We watch Islam provide social programs in Lebanon and their ability to fight off the modern war machine of Israel. That warfare teaches them how to cope with catastrophe, but a collapse in the U.S. has no war machine to correct the failure. The war machine can't correct Iraq. The schooling of war that Lebanon provides does nothing much to unite us against a collapse. What then? If one goes back further, to Paris up to the revolution, they had no great war to school them. No Lenin, and they faced a state on a scale in that time equal to Britain. Truly they lack scientific knowledge that came after the French Revolution, but that state was a police state that had no trouble with massacre to control things. The mob, chaotic disordered groups grew. Then order came from the civil structures, and the mob merged into the nation state. So it is now, the police state Bush created can massacre quite a few people, but collapse economically strips neo-liberals of power without a shot being fired. So the schooling of crisis, and struggle is not about firing weapons, but like France chaos pushing masses into groups, and groups flailing toward social organization. And existing social international structures merging with the mob into global institutions that the neo-liberals lost control of. Argentina on the big scale as it were. A place where crisis certainly rules but the schooling of war cannot cope with the mob like disorder and chaos. The states as it were are the civil structures to which we turn, but in uniting across states, since the U.S. cannot provide global power. Then the mob seizes that international nascent global system. Surely the U.S. can't stop that, because the collapse of neo- liberalism in the heartland leaves the U.S. with no alternative. Global crisis begats global solutions. thanks, Doyle Saylor
