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host: american style capitalism has never really worked.
not the way its defenders claim it has.
and most of these claims are incoherent at best. and even at their best, they have this tiresome quality of any phrase that is recycled endlessly, repeated regardless of whether there is or is not any correlation between the mode of production and its outcomes and what these folk say is the case.
that said, i dont agree with your apparent assumption that people will suddenly wake up politically in the context of an economic crisis. rather, i think that a population which is ideologicall incoherent, which accepts a wordview predicated on avoidance of what which is difficult, of that which is problematic, will continue to avoid that which is difficult and that which is problematic and so will stay incoherent even as their material lives begin to some unravelled. i do not buy it---it seems to me a version of diamat from the old days, the kind of thing that lukacs relied on when he described class consciousness on the part of the proletariat as emerging when the proletariat "does what is objectiely necessary."
well what the hell is objective? and who decides what is necessary?
even within that context, lukacs's positions were easily juxtaposed with lenin's, who assumed that, left to themselves, the working class could only aspire to "trade-union consciousness"--that they were "reactive" and therefore would fall into "tailism" unless there was a cadre of professional revolutionaries who knew--somehow--what was objective and what was necessary and told them what to do based on that.
what is possible politically seems to me a function of how the present system is politically enframed.
this lay behind the whole of my previous post, and that is why i dont buy the relation economic crisis/political awakening. i just dont.
as for what gets called "radical": i really dont care about that.
in the present degenerate political context, it is not important.
anything and everything can be called radical.
it means as much as the status of the talking heads or writers who have access to an apparatus that allows their actions to have social meaning allows these names to mean.
so it means nothing.
so you're right, of course...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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