[lbo-talk] War and Peace

Dennis Redmond dredmond at efn.org
Sun Apr 25 22:35:59 PDT 2004



> John Maynard Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, pp. 11-12:
>
> The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his
> morning tea in bed

How many people had phones during Keynes' day? Relatively few.


> delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the
> same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new
> enterprises of any quarter of the world,

How many Londoners owned bonds? Fewer still.


> [He] could
> despatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such
> supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient

Servants, indeed. Keynes is talking about a tiny sinecured elite, not the average Londoner.

My point is that multinational capitalism is inconceivably more ubiquitous and totalizing than its monopoly-era predecessor. The mass media, tourism, textiles and financial flows -- the damn thing is everywhere. There's a saturation of social space nowadays, which goes far beyond the observation that the urban workingclass communities of Keynes' day just don't exist in that fashion anymore. There's a sort of convergence of geopolitics and micropolitics happening, which in many ways is a good thing (Hardt & Negri's insight, not mine).

-- DRR



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