Re: [A-List] Populism or Neoliberalism?

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7/24/07, Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > In today's global capitalism, the range of economic choices (available
> > outside the richest capitalist countries) that people have accepted
> > seems to be between a populist economy like Iran's and Venezuela's and
> > a neoliberal one like Brazil's and Turkey's* (Russia's falls into the
> > middle between them), unless the country has a special relation with
> > the USA of the sort that East Asian countries such as China have
> > (export to the USA, profit, save, and lend a lot of saving to the USA
> > so the cycle can continue, while undervaluing the currency).
>
> TINA.
>
> > Expropriating all the expropriators is not on the agenda even in the
> > land of Socialism of the 21st Century, and the way it's going, the
> > Bolivarian Revolution won't nationalize the means of production as
> > much as Iran's Islamic Revolution did.
>
> Thanks for the more precise terminology. Nationalizing the means of
> production does not have much to do with socializing them.
>
> With respect to whether expropriating the expropriators is "on the
> agenda" or not, neither was the abolition of slavery in the 1830s. Why
> Yoshie would want the left to retreat to timid genuflection before the
> status quo is a mystery to me. Even if Wendell Phillips or Frederick
> Douglass were the only abolitionists around in 1840 or so, there was no
> reason for them to tailor their ideas to what American would accept.

The term socialization has been used variously in the Marxist
tradition, including the sense in which capital itself socializes
production.

On one hand, while the means of production remain in private hands,
it's not possible for people to control them; on the other hand,
people have a much better chance of controlling what is in the hands
of the state.  For the market depoliticizes, and the state
politicizes, who gets what.

What is to be done today, given the choices that people are making?
IMHO, it would make sense for leftists, especially those who are
economists, to figure out how to run a populist mixed economy in the
interest of people as much as possible, until such time as people put
socialism on the agenda, while always reminding people that there
exists essential contradiction in a populist economy (as in any
capitalist economy) that creates certain inevitable problems (that are
specific to a populist economy, unlike the problems of a liberal
economy and a socialist economy).
--
Yoshie