Carrol wrote: > The most visible feature of such periods is that nothing that leftists do can or will have an impact on current affairs. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No offence, Carrol, but I completely disagree with this statement. The idea that leftists and workers have no impact on current affairs is to fundamentally give up on the whole project. It is to say that workers have no power, no agency, when in fact they have all of the power, all of the agency they just don't always know it. The resistance in Greece reveals the power of workers to alter the nature of the development of capitalism. Your argument that this impact will only lead to increased misery as the economic crisis it brings forth comes to bare, means that you think it better for workers to just roll over and take the disciplining of the crisis (as US labor has with the biggest increase in productivity last month since the 1970s). As if this will not create its own, and possibly worse, misery. There are two ways out of crisis, one helps capital the other workers. They are not and cannot be aligned. When workers roll over and accept the burden for reconstituting economic health it creates more suffering than when they struggle against this and make capital carry a heavier portion of the burden. That is what the brave folks in Greece are doing, refusing to carry the lions share of the costs necessary for the recovery of capitalism's health. Capital will attempt to shift this burden onto other, less resistant, workers if the Greeks can sustain their resistance, which is where international solidarity comes into it. It directly poses a threat to the 'system' only if all workers everywhere refuse to take on the responsibility of saving capitalism from itself.
Brad _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
