> http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/giddens/giddens_p2.html
Apologies in advance for this superlong post, but Giddens spouts some really toxic, deeply devious stuff, so I had to power up the gluon gun (let the hosing commence!). Giddens says:
"For about 30 years after the Second World War the dominant view on the whole, which was institutionalized in many countries, was of a beneficent state guided by some kind of view of the idea of managing a capitalist economy more effectively than it could manage itself by market forces. And that essentially failed, at least it failed in its more extreme versions, the Soviet Union obviously being that version."
Three points: the Soviet model delivered low growth towards the end of its life, but had world-class science and tech and preserved basic safety nets for all; not a word is said about how deregulated, wildcat free market capitalism delivered a 65% collapse of Russian GDP in five years. Second: the demise of the state would be news to the entire state-managed, state-directed, state-engineered East Asian economy. Third: the EU states intermediate 49% of the EU economy, and are global creditors with massive reserves; the neolib, market-driven US is the world's biggest debtor which underinvests in its schools, people and industrial base. Globally speaking, welfare states and egalitarian distributions of wealth correlate quite well with economic efficiency. More Giddens:
"Then you had a period of reverse dominance of the idea that we can leave all that to markets; if the state can't solve our problems, markets can. That's also failed, electorally, and it failed structurally because you can't just leave the world to be run by the vagaries of market-based decisions."
And markets consist of what, precisely? Economic forces, right? So why not say so? Earlier, he says, bizarrely, globalization is not about economics, it's about high-tech messaging toys ("Globalization is not primarily economic. It's not solely driven by the global marketplace. It's actually about what we're doing now. The driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution.") No mention of just-in-time production, global production networks, global credit flows, or multinational corporations. A fine example of what Bourdieu described as the ideology of symbolic capital, which fools its recipients into thinking they control the entire economic field. Later, the interviewer brings up China, which seems to embarrass Giddens:
"Yes, but there are a lot of questions involved there. As far as China is concerned, you have to first start from the obvious. China's had a period of very intensive and successful economic growth, bred not by traditional mechanisms of Communist control of the economy but, on the contrary, by a kind of embrace of some aspects of a market economy. And that's crucial to recent Chinese history, so China is not outside the whole world which is developing here, and the issue of including China formally on the inside, with the WTO, hopefully shortly, will be further bolstered by the U.S. Congress."
China grew fast but was derailed from 1966-76 by Mao's insane Cultural Revolution, which rendered the Party bureaucracy completely inoperative, not because of traditional stodgy Sovietism. But since then China has boomed while countries with weak states beholden to domestic comprador capitalists - Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines - have been bushwhacked by the onslaught of the marketplace. But who needs concrete solidarity with Chinese workers, technicians, scientists and teachers or a greatly expanded, multinational welfare state, when we can offer them membership in an unelected, unaccountable, lobbyist-infested and corporate-run WTO! Onwards to exponentially increasing Vodaphone stock punts!
-- Dennis