Athens on fire

[ritaxis]

My kid says: "You have to admit that the police running out of supplies to combat protests against government cutbacks is the most ironic thing in the last several years."

I said I also had to wonder why the capitalist overclass is so intent on destroying capitalism.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Amazingly little news coverage. But perhaps riots in Greece have become routine.

I love phrases like "45 buildings damaged or destroyed". That doesn't seem to distinguish between "total loss" and "smoke stains on the exterior paint". Which represent rather different levels of loss.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I think "damaged" means "enough to be unusable for at least a day or several."

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I agree they probably don't mean my minimal level example, anyway.

I guess it's a measure of how widespread fire was, rather than of the economic loss.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Snicker.

The capitalist overclass did not invent capitalism. It's not their world, they only stole it.

It seems to me that US Marxists tend to imagine more organization in "the capitalist class" than there actually is. It is not like a 19th-century European aristocracy, where everyone knows their place, though they may be jostling to raise it. Early 21st-century world capitalism is a muddle of factions and they are all pulling in different directions. George Soros, Bill Gates, and the Koch brothers are all members, and it is hard to imagine more different people or more different politics.

The capitalists don't know their own interests. In the 1930s, they had to be saved by Keynes, who was scarcely one of their own. Now, they won't listen to Keynes's heirs. So who knows what will happen? There is a quiet global revolution going on, which no-one else seems to have remarked on yet. We hope. But for what?