> 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.
As you can see, I ordered the terms above ("Mercantilism" -- "laissez faire" -- "monopoly" -- "neoliberalism") chronologically, which means that neoliberalism best captures the current conjuncture. Neoliberalism = the post-Socialist & post-Social Democratic era = roughly from the mid-70s to the present.
>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.
Write about the Farjoun and Machover book when you get around to it. I haven't read J. Barkley Rosser, Jr.'s books, but based upon his PEN-l & other posts, I don't set much store by chaos theory. :) However, I'm not about to discourage anyone from reading Barkley Rosser, and here's the URL for his home page where lots of his papers are available, free of charge: <http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb/>.
>Mercantilism was very imperialistic and, in actuality, a sophisticated form of
>thuggery.
Sure enough, but in the era of mercantilism, the world had yet to be fully conquered for capitalism, as it is now.
>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 :-)
It would be a sensational potboiler, a la Mike Davis' _City of Quartz_ & _Ecology of Fear_, and I'd welcome such an effort, if anyone wished to undertake it. The main emphasis of Marxist rhetoric should be, however, upon how _even at its very best & cleanest_ capitalism is just M-C-M' & how violence & reaction, domestic or imperialist, are _necessary corollaries_ of M-C-M'.
Yoshie