On 2012-11-19, at 10:11 AM, Julio Huato wrote: > Marv wrote: > >> Watched it last night. It's an excellent complement to Inside Job. My only >> criticism is that it shares the widespread liberal (in some cases, leftist) >> misconception that the extremes of wealth and poverty and the arrogant greed >> and insensitivity of the rich and powerful are a fairly recent phenomenon >> resulting from stepped-up capitalist organization and lobbying and the wave >> of >> financial deregulation at the end of the century. > > ...one liberal (e.g. Paul Krugman) can have as large a concrete, > favorable effect on the class struggle as the total sum of n Marxists > out there (me included), where n can be a very large number. Ideally, > we would want to have n radical Marxists each with as much influence > as a Paul Krugman, but we don't have them -- yet. So, for the time > being, I'll take one Paul Krugman any day over less than n Marxists > (again, me included). > > Many lower-quality radical documentaries would perhaps have a similar > effect than a high-quality liberal one, but I haven't seen them -- > yet.
For sure, I agree. At one time, the best cultural production was coming out of the socialist movement, but that movement unfortunately no longer exists. Its progressive working class constituency is now influenced by liberal public intellectuals who now mainly aim their fire at conservatives to their right rather than Marxists to their left. My sense is that Krugman, Reich, Galbraith, Susan Webber of Naked Capitalism, and others have moved to the left (obviously not the far left) under the impact of the financial crisis and the imperialist and cultural excesses of the Bush administration before that. Their criticisms of the status quo are very useful, especially the stronger populist documentaries like Inside Job and Park Avenue. Also Michael Moore's stuff. Their ideological idiosyncrasies are insignificant and of interest mostly to people like us. Any "illusions" they might foster about capitalism are far outweighed by the more profound illusions they dispel about the syste! m, given the current level of popular consciousness. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
