Re: [Marxism] How today's working-class would confront a Great Depression

[Aaron Aarons <aaron@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:48:04 -0400
>From: "Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
>In his latest encyclical, Aaron writes:
>"What's not funny is that a few billion people in the world have been forced 
>to skimp on necessities (like food) so that a few hundred million could and 
>still can spend on luxuries....
>"Puritans condemn sexually active people. It's not puritanical to condemn 
>rapists."
>
>
>Fred responds:
>Aaron is historically and practically wrong to aver that Puritanism is 
>exclusively a condemnation of "sexually active people" (actually, Puritanism 
>does not condemn ALL sexually active people anyway).

AA: Sorry I forgot to renew my poetic license. I was talking about "puritanism" 
in the sense the word is used in contemporary discourse.

>[Fred:] And I think it is possible that the next bunch of years will 
>demonstrate that impoverishing the working and oppressed people in the United 
>States far from automatically enriches the lives of billions of other 
>oppressed and working people. Quite the contrary, I am afraid. It will not be 
>an affirmative action measure.

AA: I never advocated impoverishing anybody. Even ex-capitalists should be 
allowed to grow healthy food for themselves and build themselves adequate 
housing in their rehabilitation camps. (I'm referring to those ex-capitalists 
who can't immediately be safely integrated into society.)

What I do advocate is reducing individual resource consumption in the U.S. to a 
level that the planet can support. That means a very sharp cut in such 
consumption for the upper classes in the U.S. and qualitative change, but no 
cut and perhaps an increase, in the consumption of the poorest 10 - 20 % of the 
U.S. population.

Unfortunately, while the people of the oppressed nations have the potential 
ability to cut off the flow of resources, including their labor embodied in 
goods and services, to the U.S., they don't have the power to end the skewed 
distribution of whatever resources are IN the U.S.. That will be the job of the 
proletarianized U.S. workers.

>[Fred:] Of course, if this has the consequence of increasing and intensifying 
>the struggles and solidarity of the oppressed and exploited worldwide, this 
>will be a progressive consequence of what shows strong signs of being a 
>developing WORLD catastrophe.

AA: The world catastrophe has been happening for a long time, but at an 
accelerating rate. The crisis of capital is an opportunity to overcome capital 
and save the planet, its peoples and its other life forms.

>[Fred:] It is Puritanism of a most shallow and sanctimonious kind to assume 
>that comrades who find something amusing in this cartoon, from various angles, 
>are simply dismissing, ignoring, or rejecting doing what is within their power 
>to oppose oppression, hunger, and misery in the rest of the world.

AA: Huh? What might this be a response to?

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