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probably not.
diamat isn't terribly helpful in sussing out what's happening in real time---the correlate of the schema is that at a certain point the proletariat will recognize it's objective interests and will act as a class to push this cycle of crisis in a revolutionary direction---but that cannot account for the transformation in both material and political conditions of working folk. i could go on and on...
what i think we're moving through is a significant rearrangement of the capitalist game though. it seems like most folk who a year ago were neoliberals are now more or less talking a social-democrat game, with varying degrees of coherence--with the americans bouncing along at the rear of the coherence train. the leading symptom of that is the fracturing of the hegemony of neoliberal discourse as the lingua franca of the dominant media's collective way of talking about the world. it hasn't disappeared, but it's self-evidently irrelevant. it's generating a cognitive dissonance amongst conservatives that you can almost hear buzzing in their skulls when you pass them on the street. but the immediate future is, as it always is really, open-ended.
what i think is going to happen is a political reconfiguration of the existing transnational order. while i think the principal loser in it will be the united states, it isn't obvious yet what shape that'll take or, by extension, what it will mean. in terms of the domestic ideological situation in the states, so far as i can talk about something that big, i think we are in stasis, in a strange interzone, adrift and waiting for the bush people to fuck off into a richly deserved oblivion (if there were any sense of justice in the world, their pathway to oblivion would be tracked by trials for war crimes)---but this is obviously not an unambiguous situation. look at gaza if you doubt this--look at what the americans are and (mostly) are not doing. it's obscene. the interzone is one of waiting for obama, and the reasons the dominant ideological apparatus if focused that way is that it maintains a veneer of legitimacy for the existing order.
my more revolution-oriented side sees possibilities in the next phase of things--if for example the lingua franca of the dominant ideology shifts toward a more social-democratic frame, that opens space to it's left that has been entirely foreclosed as the us has passed through the past 7 year of fascism-lite. and historically, it is the periods after the crises of capitalism that are the most volatile from a revolutionary viewpoint, particularly if the crisis unfolds across a phase of weakness for the left--and this is beyond weakness---this is atomization.
what cannot happen is a simple reversion to either the theoretical frameworks of modes of thinking political action from the old left tradition. i'd be happy to talk about this, but won't get started on it now. let's see how the thread unfolds.
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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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