[PEN-L:28126] do recessions have a good side?

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: do recessions have a good side?

[was: RE: [PEN-L:28123] Re: Re: Re: Re: Mental sounds remain fund!]

If I remember Marx's attitude, he saw crises as potentially a good thing because (1) they revealed the until-then latent socialization of production; and (2) represented a failure of capitalism. Both could strengthen the working-class movement.

150 years of history suggests he was wrong. Not only are recessions nasty (as he recognized) to the working class, but they don't automatically have the good effects listed. Among other things, there are always non-capitalist scape-goats at hand.

Marx was not a student of social psychology, so it's no surprise that he didn't settle the issue of what boosts class consciousness (or how to promote it beyond doing a whole lot of hard and thankless work). I don't know of anyone who has.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Hoover [mailto:hooverm@xxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2002 11:20 AM
> To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [PEN-L:28123] Re: Re: Re: Re: Mental sounds remain fund!
>
> Ah, we're back on Depression Watch, aren't we? Hope you all
> have good plan
> for taking advantage of the blood that will soon be flowing in the
> streets. And a good explanation to offer the working class
> for why you're
> all ghoulishly cheering on disaster.
> Doug
> <<<>>>
>
> above is inevitability's dialectical
> twin (call it impossibility, nay, make
> it joycean un-inevitability)...
>
> skepticism is healthy, cynicism is, well,
> cynical and political disabling...
>
> i like sam gindin's point that folks
> know something is wrong but lack
> confidence to do something about it,
> to understand what doing something
> entails, to develop commitment &
> organization to - in nike parlance -
> "just do it"... 
>
> on other hand, surely history confirms
> absolute truth of comrade _____ (fill
> in blank) that capitalism will collapse
> solely from internal contradictions...  
> michael hoover
>
> 
>