Just to fill in those revolutionaries who have been living under a rock for the last year, there is currently an historic housing crisis in the USA (increasingly worldwide), as the subprime mortgage market has tanked following record defaults. We should care because most of these early defaulters, and we're talking millions of people, are poor, working class, and middle class families that have been fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have the opportunity to buy into the "American Dream" by owning their own home, only to have them repossessed after they fail to make the exorbitant interest payments that kick in after a few years.

Spend a few moments reading THIS BLOG and you'll see the crisis as its unfolding.

What comes to mind is a conversation I once had with a old school Marxist about Capital, and its "applicability", or its accessibility, to the average jane and joe. She claimed that Capital is readily assessable, I claimed it was a text hardly approaching contemporary understanding without a bit of background, definitions, and maybe several years of study.

Of course that's nothing compared to what flies for "theoretical discourse" these days, from various Marxist circles, primarily. Note this passage:

One should bear in mind here the fundamental lesson of the Hegelian "concrete universality": the universal necessity is not a teleological force which, operative from the outset, pulls the strings and runs the process, guaranteeing its happy outcome; on the contrary, this universal necessity is always retroactive, it emerges out of the radical contingency of the process and signal the moment of the contingency's self-Aufhebung.

Jan 9th, 2007

Last night a group of NYMAA members went out for drinks after the Open City / NEFAC panel on Anarchist - Communism, an event rather well attended and overall informative and lively.

So we manage to find ourselves boozing into the wee hours with a member- actually one of only TWO members, of the NYC branch of the International Bolshevik Tendency , who had stood up at the panel to give the usual wingnut diatribe about Lenin and the efficacy of the Bolshevik party organization, blah blah blah.

Nice guy. Seriously, though, we tend to write off these small political sect members as if they're all just mindless dredgers of doctrine (which of course they usually appear to be) formulated some 80 years ago by some "ye ole koot" who no one cares to remember anyhow (and not to downplay the danger of suffering from such nonsence ourselves).