[PEN-L:30661] War, Deflation, and the Three Bears

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

At 9:33 PM -0700 9/27/02, Dennis Robert Redmond wrote:
>  > Dennis, you're a big fan of both Adorno and East Asian state-led
> >  development. Wouldn't Teddy regard them as administered societies of
> >  the most conformist and instrumental sort?
>
> Yes. But he'd also say that this instrumentalism harbors a tremendous
> utopian potential. Capital civilizes: an industrial base, modern cities,
> literacy, healthcare etc. are qualitatively better than preindustrial
> village society. Administration per se is as neutral as technology -- it
> can bring good or ill. That's why unions fight like hell for contracts,
> mobilize to build welfare states, etc.

Capital has civilized North America, Western Europe, and East Asia.
That's a small patch of the earth, though, within which much of
capital circulates.  This fact is often held up by proponents of
economism as "evidence" of obsolescence of imperialism.  One might as
well say, however, that capital's inability to civilize the rest of
the world is the sign of its limit: "The monopoly of capital becomes
a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and
flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of
production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where
they become incompatible with their capitalist integument"
(<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm>).
Overcapacity and worldwide waves of deflation are finally threatening
to capsize the USA, the consumer of last resort already laden with
debt (Cf. Brad De Long, "America's Date with Deflation?" _Financial
Times_ 21 August 2002,
<http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000533.html>;
James Devine on "the Three Bears,"
<http://clawww.lmu.edu/faculty/jdevine/talks/Goldilocks.html>).  We
need to analyze the current and future effects of Bush's endless war
on the USA and the rest of the world in this context, while trying to
build our own capacity to rise up to the challenge.

socialism or barbarism,
--
Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus:
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>