RE: Re: Re: RE: Re: The Vulnerable Planet (was Re: suburbia)

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stephen E Philion
>
> Perhaps it would be better if Mark told us where he gets the idea that
> Doug embraces such ideology? Or is it imagined that Doug does so?
> Steve
> > On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > Mark Jones wrote:
> >
> > >  >The USA is
> > >>  inefficient.
> > >
> > >That's not what Doug Henwood thinks, is it? Or is the
> productivity miracle a
> > >myth just like the New Economy turned out to be?
> >
> > I suppose my ego should take some cheer from the fact that you've
> > achieved a certain otherwise gratifying fame when people make shit up
> > about you, but it's still irritating. I don't believe that at all,
> > and I have no idea where you got this from.
> >
> > I think it's probably best that I ignore you from here on out, along
> > with your partner in ur-nostalgia.
> >
> > Doug
> >
> >

Probably things like this make me suspect that Doug is a closet fan of
capitalism:

>>You can hardly open a newspaper or turn on the TV (well, at least
tuned to certain channels) without hearing about a wondrous New
Economy. (Though it's sobering to learn that, according to a Scudder
Kemper Investments poll, over 80% of Americans have neither heard nor
read of a New Economy.) The canonical version is relentlessly, almost
deliriously optimistic. It goes something like this. Finally, after a
long wait, the computer revolution is paying off economically. It
used to be, as the economist Robert Solow famously put it, that that
revolution was visible everywhere but in the statistics. Now, with
U.S. productivity stats surging forward, Solow's quip has to be
retired. It took some time for people and organizations to learn how
to use computers (broadly defined, of course, to include all kinds of
high-tech electronic gadgetry), but now they've finally learned. All
that hardware, now linked from local area networks to the global
Internet, along with a political regime of smaller government and
lighter regulation, has unleashed forces of innovation and wealth
creation like the world has never known before. Flatter hierarchies
and more interesting work are the social payoffs; rising incomes and
an end to slumps the economic payoffs. Quality replaces quantity,
knowledge replaces physical capital, and networks replace hierarchies.
The portion of the New Economy discourse that's relevant to Marxism,
and specifically to this panel, is that it's appropriated a lot of
rhetoric about revolution, about the overturning of hierarchies, and
about the democratization of ownership and the workplace that used to
be staples of radical politics. At the same time, though, New Economy
rhetoric also rejects a lot of the old Marxian catechism: we're now
post-material; scarcity is waning as a social force; in an age of
endlessly and almost costlessly reproducible goods like software and
movies, ownership too is waning as a social force; physical capital
doesn't matter anymore, because knowledge, as everyone from George
Gilder to Manuel Castells could tell you, is what matters, not
things; and place doesn't matter much anymore, as long as you have a
cell phone and a net connection.<< [lbo-talk Sep 25 2000 - 11:31:51 EDT ]

True, Doug's qualifies his  to American efficiency with what is his habitual
reservation:

>> Obviously I am extremely skeptical
about almost all these claims, or I wouldn't have a book to write. <<

But scepticism like his is a stock-in-trade which allows you to have your
cake and eat it. Doug is always sceptical, but it is only a cadenza to the
main theme: the great civilisational benefits of American capitalism. For
every expression of Doug's doubts about these benefits you can find many
more rants like the above, where the exuberance of what Keynes called  the
'animal spirits' of the business class, simply leaps off the page at you. At
heart, Doug is a great celebrator of the American Dream.

One of his intellectual mentors is Anwar Shaikh, who is a also great
believer in the future of capitalism:

> If you argue, as Shaikh does, that the solution to the crisis of the last
> 24 years has been a relentless attack on the living standards of the
> working class, then all the noxious symptoms you list are part of the
> side-effects of the "cure." If there is an upswing, these pressures will
> ease, and real gains for the working class - and a reduction of these
> hideous tensions - may be possible.
 [--- from list marxism-international@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
 15.11.97]

You get the picture? Capitalism is bad but, hey, things are getting better!
Even in the colonies:

>>My point was this: life on the capitalist periphery is not some
simple narrative of relentless decline. There has been real progress
in a lot of places and in a lot of ways. << [pen-l 02 May 2001 18:18 UTC ]

Doug even thinks that altho neoliberalism is 'a crime against humanity', it
too can be a good thing:

>>I cite this stuff not to say that neoliberalism is wonderful or that
Argentina is paradise. Neoliberalism is a crime against humanity, and
Argentina could do a lot better under a more humane regime. But it's
just wrong to say that it's all a story of going uninterrupedly
downhill.<< [pen-l 01 May 2001 20:12 UTC ]

This idea that a crime against humanity can lead to a betterment of the
human condition is an odd one, but it is one Doug has expressed repeatedly
in one form or another. Thus, the maquiladoras represent liberation (of a
kind) for Mexican women, and so on.

Only the other day, Doug repeated the same thought of Shaikh's about
capitalism being bad but somehow also, rather good:

>If you believe Anwar Shaikh - and he's very persuasive on
> this - currency values are determined over the long term by relative
> productivity performance. If the U.S. productivity "revival" is real
> - I'm skeptical, but I think we have to get through this slowdown to
> know for sure - then the strong dollar is warranted by the
> fundamentals. [PEN-L:13180]

See what I mean?

Mark Jones





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