Dégringolade

   First Published : Jean-Paul Sartre, «Élections, piège à cons»,   Les temps modernes , n° 318, janvier 1973; Source :  Good Morning, Revolution HTML Markup : for marxists.org by  Zdravko Saveski , 2021. In 1789 the vote was given to landowners. What this meant was that the vote had been given not to men but to their  real  estate, to bourgeois property, which could only vote for itself. Although the system was profoundly unfair, since it excluded the greater part of the French population, it was not absurd. The voters, of course, voted individually and in secret. This was in order to separate them from one another and allow only incidental connections between their votes. But all the voters were property owners and thus already isolated by their land, which closed around them and with its physical impenetrability kept out everything, including people. The ballots were discrete quantities that reflected only the separation of the voters. It was hoped that when the votes are counted, t

  source:  Nonsite.org BY   SAM GINDIN OCTOBER 20, 2023 There’s something happening here / But what it is ain’t exactly clear. —  “For What It’s Worth,” Buffalo Springfield The other crisis The go-to crises of the socialist left have been “American declinism” and “inter-imperial rivalry.” These crises have not only been predicted by the left but often  wished for , the left seeing them as doing much of the heavy lifting it cannot do on its own. This is both bad analysis and worse politics. It overstates declinism, wrongly projects the (very real) tensions between the U.S. and China into a contest over who will lead global capitalism, and assumes that things getting worse inherently advances progressive politics. The U.S. is not—apart from China—facing any definitive decline relative to its main economic competitors. Nor is it facing a profit squeeze; corporate profits have been running at their  highest ever share of GDP  (see chart below), and non-financial profits per unit of real ou