Worth a re-post

Marx said "Philosophers have only tried to understand the world. The point is to change it." The IWW wrote "Don't moan, Organise!"

"For years, decades, I've had to listen to self-proclaimed "marxists" (usually trotsksyists) fetishise the word "crisis", and describe every economic downturn and political turn of events as the "crisis of capitalism" or even prophesising the "inevitable" end of capitalism. This over optimistic wish fulfilment mixed with crude determinism does no justice to Marx.
The liberation of our class will only come about we, the class ourselves for ourselves, pull our finger out and do the hard work of organising, which needs we class conscious workers doing the equally hard work of convincing our sisters and brothers.
There are three things wrong with seeing each downturn as the end of capitalism: 1. Getting pleasure out of or excited over other people's misfortune (workers losing their jobs, benefits and public services cut) is sick. 2. It isn't and deflects/distracts from the real solution - self-organisation. 3. While you can argue that downturns make people angry and more susceptible to revolutionary ideas, the opposite may be true. It may be downturns just lead to despair, fatalism, acceptance of misery and cynicism to things getting better (by any means) as utopian. The flipside being that upturns make revolution more likely because it is the human condition never to be satisfied and when you've got the job, house, wages, car and all the mod cons then you want more - security, control over your own life which can only be got by workers ownership and control of our own work, residents ownership of their own homes and individuals control over our lives, all of which can only be got by anarchist communism (or whatever you wanna call it) by way of social revolution.
Joey OD
http://libcom.org/forums/news/economic-crisis-18122007?page=45