> Is your thesis that Keynes and all Keynesians are national socialists
> and therefore racists?
> Yoshie
if you'd read the post before you asked this question, you would not be asking this particular question. the short answer: the question of whether anyone is personally racist is redundant -- or should be. it's a game for the easily-impressed, for those who think the stakes and aim are personal distinction. whether as denial (which is what this particular post was referring to) or as insult (to which i've referred to before) it works to trivialise the whole discussion and debate. hence, any discussion on whether or not certain economic policies and presumptions -- and whether it's keynsianism or liberalism or socialism, the query still stands and should -- rely on or imply racism for their effectivity, apparent self-evidence and favour gets transformed into a debate over whether or not someone is personally racist or not.
below is the whole post, in case you need reminding of the bits -- the "critical assumption" bits -- that you edited out.
in any case, economic nationalism can take its rhetorics and/or presumptions from many things -- keynsianism, marxism, socialism, liberalism ... --, so it's not quite honest to assert that only one of those implies a racist economics. i think i've consistently bothered about all of those for that to already be quite clear.
Angela _________
jim wrote:
> Then again I don't recall ever seeing anything to indicate
> that Henry has any sympthies with Naziism as such either.
his question, put a number of times, was 'why was germany in the 1930s such an economic success?' leaving aside the criterion of "success" (which remains the task of endless citations of kalecki it seems to even begin to unsettle), he continued to insist that the racism of germany in the 1940s was epiphenomenl (his word for this was 'ideological') and separable from the assumptions and programme of national socialist economic policies. in short, that the attainment of full employment had nothing to do with -- and was not premised on -- the concentration camps, the destruction of the workers' councils. he was trying to find a way -- as are others here -- of asserting a racist economics stripped of its 'ideological' (or historical) 'baggage'. to find a way of saying 'I want to have the economy of nazi germany, but I'm not a racist.' (i'd go further than doug and say that the distinction HKL was looking for was not really between economics and politics, but rather that between the stats on employment and production levels, ot1h, and otoh, the economic *and* political processes that made such stats possible.)
the critical assumption being, of course, that the national socialist bureaucracy spoke in overt (or sufficiently overt that even most listers on a left list would comprehend it) racist language, which they did not. (how easy it is not to notice even what i would have thought were the most obviously racist arguments; and how much easier it is to leap to the defense of those doing the arguing with the 'but they're not personally racists'.) they were bureaucrats pursuing a set of apparently technical economic assumptions to their conclusions.
i've said it innumerable times: using racism in this sense -- as a personal expression of prejudice -- is not only absurd, but downright obfuscatory. it's the tabloid version of history, where hitler and co were so hate-filled and pathological, the masses so prone to temptation and demagogery, that germany perfected the industrialisation of death. in that scenario, all that's left is to wonder about the extent of *personal* complicity, and to remain bewildered at the fact that so many went along with such a murderous regime. with such a version of events, the path to the camps remains ineffable, or at best, explicable only according to a conspiratorial pop-psychology applied to nations seen as exhibiting a defective 'character'.
well, there is so little in german history to bear this out that, at most, all that can be said is that it constitutes a fantasy worked over by those who want to claim some special -- and in fact, personal -- distance from the possibility of those events. as in: "I'm looking for a way to repeat the successes of the german economy, but I'm not a racist."
Angela _________