Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> >As capitalism crashes,
> >people are bound to enter struggle. They may have illusions to begin with
> >but those will change under the rod of reality
>
> Right.
>
If it doesn't crash (which seems to be your premise) then, yes, people won't
struggle.
If it DOES crash, they may still not struggle much, enough, or for the right
reasons or the most rational (however defined) goals. So we shall get
fascism and barbarism or worse - not socialism.
I think we shall not succeed and so I'm pessimistic, increasingly so what's
more. So we agree! A Crash may produce nothing good. I do not yearn for it,
but I do think that it is inevitable and it doesn't matter what any of us
says or doesn't say for or against it. We're just bystanders. So my
pessimism and your seeming optimism add up to the same thing.
But there is no meeting of minds and no dialogue. When we speak of the Crash
we mean different things. I mean the loss of biodiversity, ecocide, and the
terrible dangers posed by global warming. You mean, the fate of the Dow.
Continued "prosperity" and "bountifulness" as it is now often and inanely
described, make *my* kind of Crash *more* not *less* likely. The higher the
Dow goes, the more fossil is burnt, and the more crazed are the dances of
the sacristans of Mammon around the flickering pyres heaped with other
species and biomes, with rainforests and ocean ecosystems. Economic "bounty"
= disaster. This is the ecolate view.
The other day I posted to the Crashlist the recent Senate testimony of
leading American petrogeologist, "Skip" Hobbs. This articulate maniac
enthused to a hushed audience about the limitless supplies of natural gas
locked up in subsea methane hydrates. He told the Senators: "As the
spokesman for the geologists who assess the nation's fossil fuel resources,
I can unequivocally answer in the affirmative. Yes, the United States has
abundant natural gas resources to fuel the country well into the 21st
Century."
You bet it has.
In old English, "Hobbs" is another name for Satan ("Old Nick"). Perhaps
"Skip" Hobbs really is Old Nick come a-visiting. Many people think that
attempts to extract gas from hydrates will result in runaway warming, ie the
planetary atmosphere will quite literally catch fire. I have posted chapter
and verse on the science about this, and will do again if even fleetingly
encouraged. There is *as yet* no known technology for extracting gas from
hydrates, but don't let that fool anyone, because when you see the gleam in
the eye of "Skip" Hobbs you realise with sickening certainty that nothing
can stop these guys. No power is bigger than this kind of greed.
It therefore does not console me much that perhaps you are right and there
may indeed be a huge new economic upwave a la Anwar Shaikh. Perhaps, indeed,
there is a great deal more fossil hydrocarbon left to extract and burn.
Frankly it intrigues me that this dreadful possibility *does* seem to be a
source of reassurance and comfort for the panglossians, whose remorseless
optimism is to many of us, self-evidently suicidal. They exult, they are
gleeful, they have found not one but six bullets to play Russian roulette
with! Bountiful US economy!
I know now that I am too poor a student of human nature to understand how
such strange things can be. So I don't worry about it any more. Either you
are right, Mr Henwood, and capitalism will power on from strength to
strength, in which case the ultimate Crash (it's already happening,
actually) will just be so much the more devastating and final, and will
likely result in runaway warming, but will certainly result in a mass
extinction of mammalian species and much more besides. Or *I* am right, and
the capitalist system will implode, in which case we shall endure a collapse
of civilisation (a hiatus, disjuncture) and human megadeaths but at least
the biosphere may possibly be saved, in part anyway. I still think that on
balance you will be shown to be wrong about the economics and that my
longstanding argument that the system will implode primarily because of the
socioeconomic effects of resource and energy constraints (there is no
shortage of energy, but there is agrowing shortage of realisable, utilisable
energy) -- this argument will be shown to be correct. I think there is a
little *too* much desperation about the techno-optimism of people like Mr
Skip Hobbs.
At the time of the Asian meltdown I thought that the knock-on effects would
drag down Wall St too, and burst the bubble. It did not happen, and the Dow
has moved sideways for some time. But I also argued that the unexpected
Asian debacle might produce a short-term oil glut which might help keep the
show on the road until demand picked up again. We've all of us got familiar
with the ways in which the West benefited from the Asian collapse, and one
of the most important ways was in reducing demand for oil.
I argued this in August 1998. I was wrong about the Dow, but I think I'm
doing much better in my central prediction about the Fourth and Final Oil
Shock, don't you? Of course, you think it's just short-term. But it isn't.
best wishes
Mark
> Doug
>
> ----
>
> New York Press - September 6, 2000
>
> Connoisseurs of Catastrophe
> By Doug Henwood
>
> The other week in this paper, Peter Eavis wrote about James Grant,
> proprietor of an eponymous newsletter covering the credit markets.
> Grant, one of the few remaining bears in these bullish times, is
> tireless in uncovering reasons to be gloomy. Back in 1994, he even
> invited me to speak at one of his semiannual conferences to terrify
> attendees with tales of an imminent anticapitalist revolution.
>
> Anyone who's stuck with a bearish strategy since the bull market's
> birth*1981 for bonds, 1982 for stocks*would be lucky to be solvent
> today. (Grant acknowledges this with characteristic humor; the badge
> given to conference attendees was decorated with a picture of a bear
> wearing a barrel.) But he survives because he's a smart guy and a
> stylish, witty writer, and there's always a reliably populated bears'
> den on Wall Street. Why any Wall Streeter should be bearish in an era
> when pretty much the entire world has been transformed into a
> free-fire zone for capital is a mystery I'll return to in a bit.
> First I'd like to take a look at why so many people on my end of the
> spectrum are expecting, even rooting for, doom.
>
> In his Aug. 16 "Wild Justice" column in this paper, Alexander
> Cockburn speculated that Bill Clinton was looking forward to "four
> years of economic depression under the supervision of George W.
> Bush." Not long ago, Cockburn's Nation sparring partner Katha Pollitt
> told me that she thought there could be no revival of the American
> left without a depression. In a mid-August interview with Salon, Gore
> Vidal said: "I've spent my life studying American history and
> politics. I know how the country's run. There will be an opportunity
> to get rid of this system. And the opportunity will come from the
> total collapse of the economy, which I think is on the horizon. The
> Dow Jones, the Nasdaq, will collapse and the people will be very
> angry. At that moment you can make big changes."
>
> What is it with this leftie lust for disaster, this embarrassing
> habit of predicting disasters that never quite arrive? Now I'd be the
> last to argue that some kind of neo-depression is impossible.
> Throughout its long and charming history, capitalism has been through
> many crackups. Much of the Third World has been in some kind of
> depression for 20 years. But it seems highly unlikely that a First
> World economy could experience a rerun of 1929-'33, when real GDP
> fell by 27 percent, and the unemployment rate soared from 3 percent
> to 25 percent. Look at Japan, where the consequences of their
> bubble-pricking has been a decade of near-zero growth, but no
> outright collapse.
>
> But since many of these predictions of collapse include no small
> amount of wish-fulfillment, I've got to ask: What friend of the
> working class would long for 30 million layoffs (today's equivalent
> of a 30s-style collapse)? Tight labor markets are good. The best
> thing that Alan Greenspan has done in his vastly overpraised reign*a
> period that includes the 1987 stock market crash, the S&L debacle,
> the leveraging mania, the credit crunch of the early 1990s and the
> Mexican and Asian crises*has been to let the unemployment rate fall
> to 4 percent and stay there. The lowest jobless rate in 30 years has
> helped bring about the lowest black poverty rate ever, the lowest
> level of violent crime in the history of the government's
> victimization survey, and real wage gains across the entire
> distribution. It's also contributed to a new and imaginative protest
> movement and signs of imagination and militancy among American
> unions*with students and labor working together, in contrast with the
> fabled 1960s. These are all excellent things.
>
> When people think it's relatively easy to find or keep a job, they're
> more likely to kick up a fuss. Yes, it's true there was all kinds of
> political ferment in the 1930s*though in places like Germany and
> Italy it took a rather uncongenial form. More likely than that kind
> of depression is something like the 1970s and 1980s, when
> unemployment was high enough to make people nervous, but not high
> enough to make them think about plant occupations*or some place like
> Japan today, which is hardly a crucible of interesting political
> ferment.
>
> The major reason a rerun of the 1930s is so unlikely is that state
> bailout managers have learned how to contain a financial panic and
> keep it from turning into a deflationary collapse. Which brings me
> back to the Wall Street bears. Lefties who imagine, or even long for,
> disaster often do so because they find capitalism a repellent system
> and hope that some break might bring about its end, or at least its
> reform. Hoping for collapse is a lot easier than organizing and
> persuading the masses.
>
> But you have to wonder why Wall Streeters, who have been raking it in
> like never before for nearly two decades, would be so itchy for a
> collapse. I think there's a kind of perverse wish-fulfillment working
> there too. The Street's permabears are mostly libertarians who find
> the whole apparatus of modern capitalism, with its developed and
> indulgent state underpinning, to be theoretically offensive. They
> often overlook the degree to which they depend on that indulgence.
> Like Western libertarians who denounce the gummint, forgetting that
> their region would be barely habitable without massive federal water
> projects, and cyberlibertarians who excoriate Washington, forgetting
> that their computers and Internet wouldn't exist without decades of
> federal subsidy, Wall Street libertarians kvetch about state
> intervention, forgetting that capitalism would have collapsed long
> ago without lenders of last resort and big spending programs. The
> permabears, Hayek in hand*or a few thirdhand snippets from The Master
> in their heads*just know that state intervention sullies the market's
> perfect beauties, and can't work over the long term. So the collapse
> has to come. And if it doesn't come tomorrow, then we're just
> postponing the inevitable, and so it will come, worser than ever, the
> day after tomorrow.
>
> But of course, I find myself occasionally wishing for a killer bear
> market to drive all the assholes out of town.
>
> [Doug Henwood edits Left Business Observer. His book, A New Economy?,
> will appear late this year from Verso.]
>
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