war, devastation, reconstruction," etc, or that a more humane and rational capitalism is the best one can hope for, or is even possible. But surely there are more and less crass, thuggish, mendacious, and hypocritical capitalists and politicians. I was merely suggesting that the apparent inability of the American electorate to tell the difference between them might be a bit of relevant evidence in the disagreement between Jerry and Wojtec about why things seem so hopeless at the moment.
At 09:48 PM 7/20/2006, you wrote:
>George Scialabba says
>
>"Yes, of course, nearly all Americans, including Democrats and even some
>intelligent people, like The Market. But the hallmarks of contemporary
>Republicanism -- corruption, cronyism, voting fraud, punitive reductions in
>social spending, extremely regressive tax policy, fantastically bloated
>defense budget, environmental irresponsibility, gutting of regulatory
>agencies, etc, -- don't follow from a commitment to the market. Of course,
>Republican propaganda pretends that they do, but how much intelligence does
>it take to see through that?"
>
>Of course all this derives from a commitment to the free enterprise
>market. One cannot abstract from the history of capitalism its corruption,
>constant wars, either at home or in the colonies, its armaments, its large
>military establishments, its struggles for plunders, its terrible human and
>material costs, and then assert that such things, enormous as they
>are, are excrescencies. The idea of abstraction is dear to these
>economists, but it is not an act of legitimate abstraction. They
>choose to assume that an ideal system of production and exchange goes on:
>that this system operates without political consequences, that it can thus
>be viewed as having a normal existence independent of its action in most
>countries, in a large part of the course of economic history. Now,
>abstraction is legitimate as a weapon of exploration. One can go beneath
>the great indicative appearance of capitalism and seek to isolate its law
>of wages, prices, interest, rent, profit,
>etc. But from that to refusing to consider the costs of its actual
>working out, when making a specific analysis, there is no relationship at
>all. The persistent tendencies of any system
> culminate in its political manifestations, and wars and destruction
> are no more to be reckoned out of the costs of capitalism than its
> payments for machinery. The system of supply and demand does not
> achieve economic harmony such that it avoids crises and wars. These
> inflect its course. It is a masquerade of inflation, bankruptcy,
> boom and bust, fraud, unemployment, race hatred, colonial oppression,
> war, devastation, reconstruction. This Satanic medley is what it is:
> there is no pure system operating outside of all these
> consequences and which would prevail, a Platonic ideal, were it not
> disturbed by these recurrent miseries and shame, apparently arising
> out of another world?"
>
>AH
>
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