[Marxism] Fwd: Elephant Blues | The Brooklyn Rail

[Louis Proyect]

We live in strange times. The hope and enthusiasm that the post-2008 
landscape produced for a resurgence of an emancipatory class antagonism 
at a global level seems today even further away than it did before the 
crisis. The only thing that even appears to express a certain threat to 
the continuation of “business as usual” carries a nationalist banner and 
glorifies ruthless state mechanisms. The uncertainty generated by the 
global economic slowdown has reshuffled the cards, but the apparent 
“loss of the sense of totality” by the ruling class did not result in a 
new grasp of the whole by those who have no material reasons to continue 
this disaster called capitalism. In any case, the question is not 
whether capital’s representatives have a strategy or not. There are 
reasons to think that they do and plenty of evidence that they do not. 
The issue is that the absence of a revolutionary social movement means 
that whatever outcome prevails will by definition be detrimental to 
emancipation. The abolition of the material conditions that lock us into 
a downward spiral is not going to happen by accident or by default.

full: http://brooklynrail.org/2017/02/field-notes/Elephant-Blues