-----Original Message-----
From: M.A.&N.G. Jones <Jones_M@netcomuk.co.uk>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Date: Thursday, February 26, 1998 8:12 PM
Subject: Re: Immanuel Wallerstein's "Ecology and Capitalist Costs of
Production: No Exit"
>What I think will happen is that there will be catastrophes and they will
take a
>political form, ie, their 'substantive' content will be veiled; and the
>political form will exactly be a demand, more or less politely expressed,
by
>those same 3 or 4 billion unwashed denizens of the barrios, for a SHARE;
and I
>look forward to seeing the expressions on our faces when that day comes. I
hope
>said proles remember that 'as someone said' (as IW likes to say, when he
>actually means Karl Marx), 'political power grows out of the barrel of a
gun'.
The quote, btw, is from Mao. Marx lacked the practical revolutionary
experience needed to make such an observation.
In part, I still see the potential for a classic crisis of overproduction
but I also believe that potential is diminishing.
Wait, I thought you didn't subscribe to catastrophe theories but a
revolution of 3 or 4 billion of the great unwashed certainly sounds like
one. This prediction has been around almost as long as Marx's prediction of
the final crisis of overproduction but unlike Marx's prediction, where we
have seen smaller versions of this crisis, I am hard pressed to see an
example of the world poor advancing some COLLECTIVE CLAIM to a greater share
of global resources.
Carl Dassbach