>I have been reading John Strachey's The Nature of Capitalist Crisis >(Corvici, Friede, Inc., 1935). I would appreciate any comments or >criticisms of Strachey's work. His criticisms of GDH Cole are quite >provocative. >All the best, Rakesh Strachey's critique of social democracy interests me. I think it is widely believed by the US populist left (by which I mean the readers of the Nation magazine or members of Green like parties) that capitalism could be stabilized on a high growth trajectory if wages were made higher through union pressure, progressive taxation, immigration restriction and protectionism against low wage imports. For Strachey such conclusions in regards to the high wage path result from theoretical confusion, and strengthen support in the working class for demagogic, nationalist and authoritarian political movements which after all have a better chance of coming to power than leftists whose moral objections can only seem weak given all that they have themselves theoretically conceded in terms of the crisis-attenuating powers of an authoritarian state; moreover, since the basic abstractions of their Keynes-Marx synthesis such as the propensities to consume and invest are neutral in regards to leftist or rightist appropriation, they have left themsevles in a vulnerable position (still worth consulting is Erich Roll's piece on the eclipse of liberal economics in the first Modern Quarterly). In the US Marxists themselves feed the illusions of the high wage path, publish and cite favorably authoritarian populists like Michael Lind, remained relatively silent about the unions' anti China bashing, allowed the illusion that third world exports are the main drag on US wages to fester, and left largely unexplored the economic bases of the imperialist power politics of their bourgeoisie in the Arab world (the word "oil" is invoked to explain all). The US working class seems ripe for the picking by authoritarian, demagogic and nationalist statists, and I think US leftist intellectuals have done little--if not actually contributed--to this dire situation. Rakesh
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