Tom Lehman
Doug Henwood wrote:
> Max Sawicky wrote:
>
> >The liberal elite criticism has been to equate
> >criticism of the banking industry and specific bankers
> >anti-semitism and conspiracism; to equate criticism of
> >monetary policy with quackery; and to equate protectionism
> >and/or economic nationalism with xenophobia and nativism.
>
> The associations show up so often you have to wonder why.
>
> The other week I heard Steve Bronner give a talk about the Protocols
> of the Elders of Zion
> <http://home.earthlink.net/~centurion88/jewish_question/protocols_of_z
> ion/>. I was struck by how easy it would be to substitute
> "financiers" and "globalizers" for "Jews," yielding a text rather
> consonant with stuff circulating on the left today. Is this because
> "Jews" is a debased and hateful shorthand for "financiers" and
> "globalizers," or is there something debased and hateful about the
> style of critique itself? In both critiques, tradition and the local
> are threatened by cold-blooded, destabilizing, cosmopolitan, and
> conspiratorial forces.
>
> >Another axe is that of the anti-populist marxist.
> >Criticism of banks or even monopoly in general is held to
> >be incorrect doctrine.
>
> I'm very wary of any critique of "banks" that isn't part of a
> critique of capitalism, since it focuses on only the M-M' part of the
> M-C-M' formula, forgetting that the whole point of commodity
> production under capitalism is the prodcution of profits in monetary
> form. Keynes realized this, though he shied away from drawing the
> appropriate political conclusions.
>
> And what about "monopoly"? Is the implied good opposed to this bad
> "competition"? Isn't competition a socially corrosive force? Doesn't
> it force wages downward and further the cause of the war of each
> against all?
>
> Doug