>Does this mean that if the Capitalist class
>>in the 19th century US had read Becker they wouldn't have owned slaves or
>>slaughtered the Indians?
>
>Only if they became convinced that slavery and genocide were inefficient.
>"It's OK with my political economic ethics. Whether it's right or wrong,
>you'll have to ask brother religion or philosophy"--I paraphrase the young
>KM, discussing whether there is anything wrong with selling my friend to the
>Moroccans. --jks
EP Thompson makes the same point about Francis Place, the political economist who convinced the British PM to submit to restoring some of the artisan class's former rights (eg to 'combine') in 1824. The Government had been hanging, shooting and otherwise censoring the impoverished and socially emasculated Luddite and Painite malcontents for quarter of a century (since the Combinations Act of 1799), as the social contradictions of factory capitalism transformed life in the north and midlands. Place stressed he was merely advising on grounds of good political economy. Lesson, if, and only if, a given class were to make an expensive enough pain of itself, capitalism could be made to ameliorate the social trauma that attends its process.
'Trouble is, in Place's day, government had the degree of independence from external price makers and political interests it needed to choose just how rapacious it would allow its domestic bourgeoisie to be. I doubt the Francis Place of today (Edward Luttwak? Paul Krugman? Joe Stiglitz?) need merely to tell a president or prime minister to rein in the boojies a little to ensure a few decades of relatively peaceful social transformation. Prime ministers and presidents don't have that kind of primacy any more - the essential contradiction between constitutional democracy and private property having had another 180 years to do its thing (ie merge under the identity of the latter).
So Political Economic Ethics have always been decisive; it's just that, having devoured its brothers, it must now go mad in its loneliness, there being no 'moral economy' but accumulation, no god but mammon, and no philosopher but Milton Friedman.
Cheers, Rob.