Never Date Yourself (was Were the Nazis radical environmentalists?)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed May 13 13:43:58 PDT 1998


Doug comments on Mark:
>>But capital is just a passing dream.
>
>Mark, I love you for your optimism. But really, the dream has been going on
>for, what, seven centuries or so. Are you putting all your chips on oil now
>to bring about the revolution, or at least the wrenching quasi-terminal
>crisis of capitalism? What if the oil doesn't run out? What if eco-crisis
>is just the latest refuge of frustrated crisis theorists?

I don't think it's wrong to see capitalism from the point of view located byond it. A necessary futurism, I say, without which "what is" becomes the limits of one's thought.

What's wrong is to _date_ the end of capitalism, because by doing so, one almost always dates oneself (and the tradition from which one draws one's theory). Even the word 'future' has come to sound so retro, after so many failed predictions, and we can't afford to diminish its significance further. The openness of the social resists large-scale predictions of most kinds, and any good scientist knows the difference between open and closed systems.

Also, never bet on one cause of a terminal crisis, be it oil or anything else. A crisis of capitalism that begins its end, if it comes, will be a multi-causal affair.

Yoshie



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