Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Going Underwater in the Long Recession

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Going Underwater in the Long Recession

Click here to access article by Barbara Garson from TomDispatch. (Note: If you wish skip Engelhardt's introduction, you will need to scroll down to the article.)

The author found herself inadvertently following the life of a Vietnam veteran whose work history illustrates some very significant truths about American worker lives and the capitalist economy since the early 1970s. It is a tale of alienated work, adapting to technological changes, increasing productivity with only a slight increase in wages, financing of consumption, all leading to the economic collapse of 2008.

In the 1960s, I met a young man about to be discharged from the Army and then, by happenstance, caught up with him again in each of the next two decades. Though he died two months before the Lehman Brothers collapse, those brief encounters taught me how the Long Recession led directly to our Great Recession.