[Marxism] Doug Henwood on gloom

["Charles Brown" <charlesb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect 

[from LBO #119, just posted to web]

Gloomy, w/ a 15% chance of depression

LBO has often described the U.S. economy by invoking the old Timex
watch 
slogan from the 1950s, âTakes a licking and keeps on ticking.â
Crash 
follows upon panic follows upon bust, and yet the thing keeps getting
up 
again to binge some more. These remarkable feats of renewal, though, 
have always come with big help from the U.S. government, either 
multibillion dollar bailouts or long rounds of indulgent monetary
policy 
from the Federal Reserve. But revive it always has, despite the 
forecasts from the hard left and the hard right that this time it was 
different and the medicine just wonât work.

^^^
CB: Of course, before the
1930's, before the govt.
started giving said Keynesian
medicine
the capitalist economy always
came back after panics
and depressions  , too.

Also, now Doug says
the US has been in
recession since last January, 
but he didn't say that last
January.  Otherwise, we
would have been in a "gloomy" 
state of mind
a lot longer, and there
would have been a different
impact on the mass consciousness
concerning the "system"
  if they were aware that we
were in recession as we were
in it all those months. So, delayed
announcement of "gloom" has
 a pro capitalist propaganda effect.
The timing of announcements of 
"gloom" is highly political and
 ideological, and the crack on the
 "hard left" above is not a left 
consciousness
 but a covert pro-capitalist 
consciousness. Working class
partisans want "gloom" announced
continuously. Even when we are in
the up part of the cycle, the boom
phase, there is continous immiseration
under capitalism. There is plenty of
gloom, poverty, crime, imprisonment
disease, that constitute mass 
immiseration that working class
 partisans , the "hard left", want
 to be announced to the world, 
broadcast. Discouraging discussion
 of gloom is not "correct" left.




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