dd: You are Jan Carowan and I claim my five pounds.
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No, I am not Jan Carowan, but I'd like to shed 5 pounds, my bathroom scales would thank you.
Doug: In standard ideology, capitalism's deaths are aberrations or excesses, departures from the liberal ideal, while Communism's deaths emerge right from the pages of the Manifesto.
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I would agree. Capitalism views the teeming masses as a dairy cow to be milked, not a beef cow to be slaughtered.
Rob Schaap: The name of that region with over 800 years of documentable war is Europe (not just the Sarajevo bit, but all of it - always wars - and, after the fourteenth century, ever bigger wars). Oh, and Europe is the birthplace of capitalism - whose history rather seems to match this escalation.
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Europe is the birthplace of other things as well. I find the blanket attributions of bad things to capitalism, with scant or absent address on other causal factors, intellectually lazy, if not dishonest.
Doug: It's funny enough that the NYTBR should be the set up as the arbiter, but it's even funnier that you should say this the day after their quite positive review - by no less than Amartya Sen - appeared (which was posted here yesterday).
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I ran a search of their website for author's name and book title last night, I was not subscribed all day, yesterday. The url does provide some tasty quotes though, such as:
In developing this dual account -- what Davis calls ''political
ecology'' (citing Michael Watts's important 1983 book, ''Silent
Violence'') -- he shows how the policies adopted by the authoritarian
governments in the heyday of imperialism exacerbated the famines and
made their impacts more severe.
Davis claims the impact was made more severe by authoritarian governments? Ok, I object to classifying all authoritarian governments as capitalist, as was done on this list. Non-capitalist forms of imperialism exist, Davis' claim of fault within authoritarian imperialism is not the indictment of capitalism some here present it as, it is an indictment of authoritarian disregard for the proletariat. The easy jump from this, to the castigations of capitalism, is as much Davis' fault for not addressing this in greater clarity, as it is poor reading habits of those to read his book (whether they be reviewers or list members here).
Rob Shaap: Yeah, but what exactly do you find wrong with Davis?
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I suppose, if I saw Los Angeles (and the world), as Davis does, through Marx-colored glasses, I would not object to the mischaracterizations and near-sophistry (and resultant abuses) his work lends itself to. As it is, I'm rather disgusted with it all.
George Thomas
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