Jim Devine wrote:
>
>
> > Or is there really a lot of forest fire fuel piling up somewhere so
> > that there will be a really big one ?
>
> it's mostly in the form of excessive and shaky consumer debt and bank
> assets that turn out (or will turn out) to be bad.
"Ordinary" recessions do not, I think, have any particular significance
for left politics. (For this post I'm defining "left politics" as
building mass extra-parliamentary movements for major change.) Their
initial impact is to drive working people to scurry for individual
safety. It is also usually evident that rallying to a mass movement is
not going to change immediate conditions; any succor that does come is
going to be from politicians & bureaucrats for their own reasons.
Efforts to build such movements must continue, in any case, at all
times, bad or good, to maintain a 'cadre' of activists to react to a
real crisis. Hence left politics just goes trudging on its eay.
Now, predicting terrible things every time the unemployment rate moves
one percent has never been very useful & makes leftists look silly. (The
latter doesn't worry me too much, for various reasons, but that's
another topic.) But if at some point it _were_ possible to forsee the
substantial possibility/probability of a major crisis ("major crisis" is
perhaps redundant), that would make some difference in our thinking,
preparations, and public agitation.
Let's hypothesize that a Depression were reasonably probable in, say,
2010. How would it affect organizing activity? What sort of skills
should local groups try to develop? What sort of speculations ought left
economists and sociologists engage in? Should we start incorporating
such a prediction in whatever agitational work we can do under current
conditions? And so forth.
Is another Depression inevitable at _sonme_ point within the next half
century? Does the answer to that question make any difference to current
thinking or practice.
Carrol
