From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> Doug Henwood wrote in _Wall Street_: " . . . To be meaningful, any attack on the money system is an attack on the prerogatives of ownership and class power.
Right.
"Instead of socializing capital through taxation or some other form of expropriation, loose-money dogma simply reduces to a desire for loans on easy terms. . . .
Right again. In other words, "loose-money" is a more practical form of struggle than all-or-nothing expropriation. Incidentally, the old movement foresaw a good bit of socialized property, so the depiction of it as focused entirely on finance and dependent on private ownership is just inaccurate.
"The notion of _crédit gratuit_, incidentally, is only a hypocritical, philistine and anxiety-ridden form of the saying: property is theft. Instead of the workers _taking_ the
Why the jaundiced modifiers? This is just anti-incrementalist or anti-reformist argument, like Carroll saying we should be looking forward to a blacks & women revolution in about 150 years and not divert ourselves with politics.
The Hitler/Ezra Pound crap is precisely what financiers and their literary camp followers use against their critics. Vintage New Republic stuff.
" . . .And have we not learned anything from the 70s and the exhaustion of Keynesianism (not to mention the more recent Asian crisis)? . . . "
More conservative dogma, this time on economics.
". . . But of course interest rates can't be forced to zero . . . "
How about 1.02? What about periods when interest rates were negative? Why all or nothing, endlessly repeated?
BTW, I'm not impaled on Keynes, so I don't have to defend every damn thing he said.
(214-7) ***** " . . . At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production...".
Just keep on waiting for that great dissolution. And waiting. . . .
Rather than reckless paraphrases, I'll leave you with my own quick restatement of the pop program:
* Democratic money boils down to two things: a monetary policy
dedicated to tight, near-inflationary labor markets; and the
regulation of credit allocation to prevent discrimination, and
to promote investment in under-served areas and to under-
financed populations.
* The critique of free trade leads to international labor solidarity
on behalf of green & labor standards and national governments'
commitment to defend sectors with higher labor standards within
their jurisdictions against scab import policies.
There are other pop program features that overlap more with standard social democratic program (i.e., social insurance, full employment), but the two items above reflect populism's radical, comparative advantage over more pedestrian forms of socialism or liberalism.
All the impossibilist rhetoric, whether from Henwood or Marx, is a statement of political bewilderment, since if things are impossible then revolution is the only solution. But unlike aspirin, you can't take a bottle of revolution out of the medicine cabinet when your belly aches. So it is no solution at all. It is something that may happen and, by one means or another, accomplish some good or some evil. But you can't look forward to it the way you can to a good harvest, a lottery drawing, or Monday night football.
Finally, the good stuff. The sex.
Y: "Pace Nader, it is in fact populists who have traditionally engaged in
the "gonadal" politics: for the populist imagination, private property is as
good and natural as heterosex -- it is only 'finance' that is queer and
CONTRA NATURAM. I wish Max had a kinkier taste than Pound.
>>>>>>>>
I'd taste whatever you'd care to offer. As long as it was sincere.
mbs