I just wanted to weigh in a bit on the Posner discussion with a couple of points.
One concerns the issue of slavery and the free market. As I understand some of the previous posts on this subject, abolition has been described as an example of government intervention that all right-thinking people should applaud. This is certainly true, but at the same time it was a good deal more -- an example, in a Polanyi-esque sense, of how quasi-revolutionary political action had to be taken in order to create a free market in the first place. Today, we regard a free labor market as natural, yet we forget how bullets and bayonets had to be brought to bear before it could take the place of neo-feudal system in which labor was not free to sell itself, but which was bought and sold against its will. An entire class had to be forcefully repressed -- indeed, liquidated -- before a free market could take shape.
Am I restating the obvious here? Or is this point sometimes overlooked?
The second issue concerns the concept of efficiency. In attacking Posner, it is wrong to attack efficiency per se. Any such attempt strikes me as moralistic and reactionary. Rather, what we should be attacking is P's impoverished concept of efficiency -- impoverished because he defines it exclusively in term of capitalist outcomes. Whatever promotes the rule of capital, social atomization, the destruction of democratic politics, etc. is, from his point of view, efficient. Whatever does not, is not. Socialist goals, needless to say, are very different. Rather than social atomization, we wish to promote social solidarity. Rather than consumer consciousness, we wish to promote political class consciousness. Etc., etc. From a socialist perspective, thrfr, economic activity that strengthens society and democracy is efficient, while economic activity that undermines them is not.
Re Frances's angry retort to Lehman:
>
Middle aged version of Monica Lewinsky? Jesus fucking christ. After reading
your stuff for so long, I can't tell if this is one of your frequent
anti-woman comments, or one of your frequent anti-semitic comments. Or both.
>
It would be contrary to this list's rule against personal attacks to say that you're fucking nuts. So let me just say that incendiary, over-the-hill comments of this sort are fucking nuts. One should always be careful to distinguish the sin from the sinner, shouldn't one?
Dan Lazare.
>>