Sandwichman wrote:
Felice Pace asked, "How much abuse will Americans take?"
To paraphrase Johnny (Brando) in The Wild One "How much have you got?"
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I suspect 'they' want even more than we have. Almost daily on lbo-talk
I refer to the last chapter of Wages, Price and Profit. No one has
commented on that yet, but I think I'll keep up the repetition. It seems
to me that that chapter is the best commentary available on the United
States from 1975 to the present and on into the future. "They" (I return
to this below) will never stop demanding more, and Americans will never
stop accepting that demand until a major militant movement OUTSIDE and
independent of electoral politics emerges to force "them" to cease and
desist. No administration, no Congress (DP or RP) will implement our
demand unless the alternative is rising and uncontrollable disorder in
most u.s. towns and cities.
Now - Who is "they"? ("We" is, broadly, the U.S. Working Class.) The
assault on the working-class beginning in the mid-70s has, in many ways,
been so seemingly systematic, so coherent, that it tempts to
personification of "the capitalists" as though they constituted a single
agent who could launch the assault. This is obvious nonsense, but I have
noted on thse lists that many write as though they believed this. If
that is the case, if we have a roughly systematic assault stretching
nearly 40 years on the conditons of life of nearly 90% of the
population, but if that cannot be ascribed to some fantasized "Central
Committee of the Ruling Class," if in fact what seems planned is not and
could not have been planned - if this is the case, then we need an
explanation of what were/are the forces instigating such action over a
lengthy period. How does the "they" of my first paragraph come into
existence, and what are the historical conditions, relations, etc.
driving their action. No one decide one day, "Let's go out and be mean
to the American people." This cannot be driven simply by ideas that pop
up from nowhere, though a thread on Obama over on lbo-talk is proceeding
as if ideas had a historyof their own and current politics are the pure
expression of pure thought.
Can't the economists on this list begin to explore (after first making
more precise) these questions?
And remember: ideas merely as ideas have no impact. No matter how
brilliant and accurate your ideas of what should be done (by whom?)
are, it will make no difference until those ideas exist ina form that
can be adopted by masses of people: it is only when ideas seize the
masses that they become a material force.
Carrol
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