>Laissez-faire never existed. It is a legal impossibility.
>
>Ian
True. Anarcho-capitalists are utopian. The state (with its police,
army, regulatory apparatus, etc.) is _absolutely necessary_ for the
expanded reproduction of capitalism _at any stage_. That said, there
is an important difference of degrees, not of kinds. "Mercantilism"
-- "laissez faire" -- "monopoly" -- "neoliberalism." As Lenin says,
we shouldn't forget "the conditional and relative value of all
definitions in general, which can never embrace all the
concatenations of a phenomenon in its complete development" (Lenin,
"Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism," _Marxism: Essential
Writings_, ed. David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988, p. 154).
Each term merely captures the dominant tendency, salient feature,
and/or "cutting edge" of new development. Unless you keep this fact
in mind, all theoretical terms become useless.
Yoshie *************
Well I think that, except for neoliberalism -which seems to be a term borrowed from International Relations discourse [Robert Keohane], those terms aren't really that useful any more. Even neoliberalism is problematic. Neoliberalism is about strategic oligopoly as the dominant economic reality within capitalism and the mandarins cranked out by universities accomodating that fact. In Lenin's time strategic oligopoly was the "cutting edge" as well. We need a much more multidimensional model of competition and stability/instability for various sectors of the world market; that would entail much conceptual innovation on our part. Doug called for something akin to that in Wall Street, but I haven't seen anything from the left that apporporiates chaos, fractals etc. for our own purposes. Farjoun and Machover did a book called "The Laws of Chaos: A Problematical Approach to Political Economy" for Verso in 1983, but I haven't tracked a copy down yet and J.B. Rosser Jr's books are toooo damn expensive.
Mercantilism was very imperialistic and, in actuality, a sophisticated form of thuggery.
I'd love to see a model of the "American Revolution" that made good use of Tilly's approach to early states as organized crime and protection rackets. One could then go on to launch bigger attacks on "corporate welfare" and the rebulicrats as protection rackets. In fact, reading Tilly alongside Thomas Ferguson's "The Golden Rule" and then writing up an essay for user friendly purposes would pack a mighty wallup; anarchists would have a field day :-)
Ian