Isms and other matters

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>I listed several rather important changes between the capitalism of 
>the mid-19th cenutry and the early 21st - a rather long period of 
>time, and some rather profound changes. And i said there are great 
>structural continuities, too. I wondered, though, how much 
>analytical and political usefulness there was in pointing out the 
>eternal verities. After reading your & Yoshie's responses, I wonder 
>even more.
>
>Doug

You can't look at ceaselessly changing phenomena -- capitalism can't 
exist without changes -- and identify which are "great structural 
continuities" and which are "rather profound changes" unless your 
_theory_ is sparse and constant.  There would be no identifiable 
structural continuity if you kept changing theory every time you 
encounter a new phenomenon.

Here's an example of conjunctural analysis:

*****   The Political Economy of Intellectual Property
by Michael Perelman

The dramatic expansion of intellectual property rights represents a 
new stage in commodification that threatens to make virtually 
everything bad about capitalism even worse. Stronger intellectual 
property rights will reinforce class differences, undermine science 
and technology, speed up the corporatization of the university, 
inundate society in legal disputes, and reduce personal freedoms.

We have no precise measure of the extent of intellectual property, 
but a rough calculation by Marjorie Kelly suggests the magnitude of 
intellectual property rights. At the end of 1995, the book value of 
the Standard and Poor (S&P) index of 500 companies accounted for only 
26 percent of market value. Intangible assets were worth three times 
the value of tangible assets.1 Of course, not all intangible assets 
are intellectual property rights, but a substantial proportion 
certainly is....

<http://www.monthlyreview.org/0103perelman.htm>   *****

Some profound changes indeed, but do we need to change theory to make 
sense of them?

Yoshie