----- Original Message ----- From: "Brad Mayer" <bradley.mayer at sun.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, February 24, 2003 10:58 AM Subject: Re: It's Colonialism, Stupid
> Uh, "LOL" indicates laughter, not anger, Ian.
>
> Pity you have little to say about the remainder of the post.
>
> But the obssesive-compulsive "Lenin-hating" is perhaps of concern...I'm
> sure the authors of 'Empire' would find it an embarrassment.
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What, parodying militant anti-anti-Leninism is verboten? :-)
> Meanwhile, I'm back to reading "real theory", Nitzan & Bichler, who at
> least have something to say about the "premodern", that is,
> colonialism.
=======================
A fine book, worth reading simply for their barbecueing of Stanley Fisher. And why do you think I've been a cheesy marketing hack for Nicos Poulantzas lately? :-)
Just for the sake of amusement, compare and contrast:
[N&B]
"[W]e could argue that the increasing normality of profit reflects the progressive universalization and standardisation of power under capitalism. Te *expect* profit to grow at some normal rate is therefore to *expect* the underlying power institutions to remain stable; the more stable these institutions, the more normal the rate of return, and vice versa." [emphases mine, page 13]
[H&N]
"Today, however, the situation is different: those *expectations* that must be based on entrepreneurial confidence if they are to produce positive values have now been knocked off balance by a whole gamut of uncontrollable risks- and this at a time when the high organic composition of capital permits even less tolerance of large areas of uncertainty. The crisis has destroyed confidence and certainty in the future, has destroyed capital's fundamental convention that results and consequences must match up to *expectations*. So Keynes first imperative is to remove fear of the future. The future must be fixed as present. The convention must be guaranteed...Investment risks must be eliminated. or reduced to the convention, and the State must take on the function of guaranteeing this basic convention of ecnomics. The State has to protect the present from the future. If the only way to do this is to project the future from the present, to plan the future according to *expectations*, then the State must extend its intervention to take up the role of planner, and the economic thus becomes incorporated in the juridical." ["Labor and Dionysus", p.40]
Marxism obliquely meets up with the US school of Legal Realism.
> What do N & H have to say about this retrogression? Not
> much, they (notoriously for me) didn't get the legacy of American
> constitutionalism right.
====================
Well we can always critique books and essays for what they leave out. Doug's "Wall Street" doesn't talk about environmental property rights and global warming and the need for financial instrument that can deal with the issue, is that fatal to his project of frying the financiers and rentiers who are making a mess of our technological "trajectories"?
N. definitely romanticizes US constitional law. He should read Robert Hale, Morton Horwitz and Albert Alschuler's unflattering biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes to correct such fantasies.
>But their very source for this, Pocock, got it
> right in his Preface to "The Machievellian Moment", where he described
> this tradition as to some degree _anticapitalist_, that is to say, a
> tradition firmly lodged in the pre- or proto-modern epoch. That's a
> partial clue that could help to explain the terrible result we now have
> in the form of the Bush gang.
===================
Well, Locke and Blackstone are far better guides to understanding how US imperialism, starting with expansion over the Alleghany mountains, got rolling. Alexander Hamilton was the consummate State Capitalism proponent. All of it is laid out very well in William Appleman Williams "Contours of American History."
Dubya's warlord capitalism [and here N&B's work links up with William Reno's, Israel is a form of a warlord capitalist state] has many debts to the Right wing aristocratic pessimism applied to foreign policy. Mearsheimer's work, is thinly disguised Oswald Spengler......
>
> The "stupid" was not meant personally. It was perhaps a tiresome
> reference to the famous early Ninties Clintonism.
>
> -Brad Mayer
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No problem.
Ian