[lbo-talk] pain & development

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Fri Oct 31 18:41:19 PST 2003


On Wednesday, October 22, 2003, at 09:37 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:


> Grant Lee wrote:
>
>> The history of developing nations over the last 50 years
>> present abject lessons for those Keynesians, Fabians and self-styled
>> Marxists who still think that there are pain-free development schemes.
>
> What painful development scheme(s) do you recommend? (That's a
> serious, not a wiseguy, question.)

In most messianic-apocalyptic visions the the coming of the messiah is necessarily preceded by mass suffering as in the idea that the building of the New Jerusalem must be preceded by mass absolute immiserization. This has an uncanny likeness to sadomonetarism: short run pain for long run gain; if it isn't hurting, it isn't working; etc. etc. In was partly in response to this kind of "purposiveness" that Keynes made the quip: "_In the long run_, we are all dead!"

Ted



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