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

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Jones <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> > >
> > >Comments after passages:
>
> 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. <<

COMMENT: After reading this I just wonder if I can trust anything you say.
The paean? to American efficiency you attribute to Doug is not his at all It
is Doug's description of the New Economy rhetoric in mainstream business
media. You represent them as HIS description with a habitual reservation.
But his reservation is that he doubts almost all the claims of the rhetoric.
You seem to read whatever you please into
what Doug says.
>
> 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.

COMMENT: Oh by the way you didnt notice the above was not Doug's rant.
>
> 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:

COMMENT: Well you dont give us direct quotes form Shaikh. But what is
strange for a Marxist to claim that
crises are solved by attacks on the living standard of the working class, or
that during upswings there may be  gains for (some) of the working class?
You turn this standard Marxist analysis into some sort of defence of
capitalism.


>
> >>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.

COMMENT: You are absolutely perverse. Doug is arguing against those who
think that neoliberalism has absolutely no positive aspects.
He is not saying it is a good thing overall. Responding to the view that
neo-liberalism is wholly negative in its results he points out surely quite
rightly that this is incorrect. But you have him saying that although
neoliberalism is terribly evil is produces a  net balance of good.
:
>

>
> See what I mean?
>
COMMENT: No. I dont see what you mean. But see your mean antics,
misconstruing the obvious.


> Mark Jones
>
>
>
>
>
> >
> >
>