everything's really ok

[Peter van Heusden]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Patrick Bond wrote:
> 
> Recall Keynes at precisely that time (in the famous 1933 Yale 
> Review article), getting normative in the same kind of way that our 
> leading internationalist thinkers are, right now:
> 
>      "I sympathise with those who would minimise,
>      rather than with those who would maximise,
>      economic entanglement among nations. Ideas,
>      knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--
>      these are the things which should of their
>      nature be international. But let goods be
>      homespun whenever it is reasonably and
>      conveniently possible and, above all, let
>      finance be primarily national."
> 
> This line will become, I'll predict now, the watchword for the NGOs, 
> church leaders, social movements, environmentalists and labour 
> comrades who gather next week in Montreal at the parallel sessions of 
> the Financial Stability Forum...

I hope not, but I fear you're right. Luckily, there are forces beyond
NGOs, church leaders, etc. in the current mix of international protest -
because any attempt to follow the Keynesian model of national capital *as
a solution* would merely reinforce the role of the NGOs, etc. as the moral
guardians of capitalism.

The implications of a programme to develop a 'national finance' are
monstrous - this would mean, rather than a critique of free-floating
capital, merely capital under the notional control of policy wonks, acting
in the 'national interest'. Autonomy from the demands of capital, which
sucks up ever more living labour to add to its dead hoard, has no place in
this Keynesian vision.

Peter
--
Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com>
NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics
"Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man 
shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain 
and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844