Last night I went to see Clifford Odet's play "Awake and Sing". Odet was a twentieth century American playwright, born in the early 1900s and died of cancer in 1963. He was a socialist and at one time a card carrying communist, which resulted in him being hauled before McCarthy's UnAmerican Activities Commiittee. As a member of the pioneering theatre collective known as "The Group" he developed his writing talent and scripted other memorable plays such as "Waiting for Lefty."
Set in the 1930s Depression the play is both humourous yet deeply moving, telling the story of a working class Jewish family struggling to survive the grinding poverty and insecurity inflicted on them. We witness the strain placed upon their relationships by their plight but also their enduring humanity, self sacrifice and determination to win through.
The irony of watching a play set in the Depression was not lost on many in the audience on the day queues were forming outside Northern Rock offices as investors feared for their savings. The play is at the Almeida theatre in Islington, not far from Karl Marx's old drinking haunts. Alive today, Engels woould have been buying his mate Karl a few pints of porter to celebrate his theory of the inherent instability of capitalism being proved accurate once again.
The significance of staging Odet's play now is not just the timeliness of its subject. Odet was writing at a time of immense upheaval and change in the world, when new social forces were coming onto the scene. He was one of a wave of artists, writers, economists, social theorists and political activists who played a critical role in not only describing the new world they were experiencing but also explaining it and above all else motivating people, giving them confidence, to change it.
Odet and many of his progressive contemporaries gave people the belief that by reaching into their shared humanity they could not only cope with what the world threw at them but could change the world itself. They could do so by solidarity. A simple message that we can deal with this together.
The advent of globalisation over the last 30 years means that we are in a similar period of immense and dramatic change. Just as the artists, writers, theorists and activists emerged in the 1930s to describe and explain this change so today we are witnessing the beginnings of this reinterpretation of the world and the blossoming of campaigns, social movements and artistic initiatives to give people hope.
15 Comments:
The Great Depression...
http://www.isop.ucla.edu/profmex/volume1/4fall96/Art3/Great.html
"The World in Depression, 1929-39"
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/depress.htm
THE RECESSION IS HERE
by Richard Benson
Benson's Economic & Market Trends
September 14, 2007...
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/benson/2007/0914.html
The cause of it all...Thatcher (with help from New Labour)...
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/09/381020.html
The media are not making more of the fact that many banks are having to be bailed out by their respective governments all over the world at a cost of many hundreds off billions of pounds in the last few months,there comes a point where the money will run out and bailouts stop, and then? everything will come down like a pack of cards?.
20 August 2007...
On Friday it was announced that SachsenLB, a bank owned by the German state of Saxony, had to be bailed out to the tune of 17.3 billion euros
($23.3 billion).
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/aug2007/bank-a20.shtml
"The danger, which many commentators are pointing to, is that the Fed will ignite a hyperinflation, which may be what is happening and may actually be intentional because it devalues debt. It’s what happens when debt is used to pay off debt and is in fact an invisible tax. Such inflation is difficult to discern, again because of the government’s rigged statistics. The most important indicator to watch is the price of oil, which doesn’t show up in “core inflation.”...
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6575
An attack on Iran may spark hyperinflation?.
Your right there John,
Apparently it was Engels doing all the buying!! Karl was renowned for not having enough money for buying a round or when he did would keep his money well and truly in his pockets!!
Still, suppose if you write one of the most influential analysis of the last 200 years you can't be expected to be all good!!!
"Wall Street hides impact of subprime mortgage meltdown"...
http://tinyurl.com/2j7ay7
�With these advances in technology, lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. The widespread adoption of these models has reduced the costs of evaluating the creditworthiness of borrowers, and in competitive markets, cost reductions tend to be passed through to borrowers. Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending; indeed, today subprime mortgages account for roughly 10 percent of the number of all mortgages outstanding, up from just 1 or 2 percent in the early 1990s."
Chairman Greenspan Federal Reserve System�s Fourth Annual Community Affairs Research Conference, Washington, D.C. April 8, 2005
http://postmanpatel.blogspot.com/search?q=UNum+Provident
"The former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has said President George W Bush pays too little attention to financial discipline."
"In a book to be published next week, Mr Greenspan says Mr Bush ignored his advice to veto "out-of-control" bills that sent the US deeper into deficit."
"And Mr Bush's Republicans deserved to lose control of Congress in last year's elections, he charges."
See post above.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6996713.stm
FROM PRIME TO SUBPRIME, AMERICA'S HOME-MORTGAGE MELTDOWN HAS JUST BEGUN
http://tinyurl.com/2yzaeh
The Hyperinflation Survival Guide: Strategies for American Businesses...
http://tinyurl.com/2jccju
"The inherent instability of capitalism" - and your point is?
Capitalism is a disequilibrium system that Marx was the first to brilliantly analyse. However he made the apocalyptic assumption that these crises would lead to a final one, when a much better analysis of capitalism is to consider it as an evolutionary system with a wide range of extinction events operating to a power law.
The problem for the socialist project is the attempt to propose an equilibrium alternative, which is likely to lead a rather boring sort of society. It is noticeable that all the synthetic worlds created on the web have been disequilibrium ones with market systems (no Parecon has been used anywhere) and no one has actually suggested "lets create a classical socialist Second Life?". For example the only time my body will be in equilibrium will be when I am dead.
One only has to look at the satellite photos of the Korean peninsular at night to see the difference between disequilibrium and attempted equilibrium economies.
Thus the challenge for socialists is to develop a system as dynamic as capitalist disequilibrium. This will inevitably have to compete against capitalism before it supercedes it. One assumes we are all nowadays past the substantial curtailment of citizen rights required to impose such an alternative on the assumption that spontaneous harmony is not going to break out on just the suggestion of such an alternative.
All you need to know about Greenspan...
http://tinyurl.com/yt4udk
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