[lbo-talk] Keynes: Marx and the Koran

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sat Sep 22 12:15:29 PDT 2007


On 9/22/07, dredmond at efn.org <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> On Sat, September 22, 2007 10:07 am, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > We live in the post-Marxist age.
>
> Not at all. We live in the age of developmental states, which are slugging
> it out with the robot legions of multinational capitalism, sort of like
> the human-Godzilla alliance against neocolonial space aliens in "Godzilla:
> Final Wars". These are exciting times!

If any people want to try a "developmental state" in their nation, it's up to them. I'm not one of those Western Marxists who act as if the Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. had personally betrayed them by changing the course. I for one, however, am not sold on "developmental states," having grown up under one at its highest stage. A developmental state can develop economy, if it integrates itself into global capitalism, especially the US market, in a way that Michael Dooley, et al. describe, but it does so at the cost of underdeveloping, sometimes withering away, politics. Japan, which is decidedly less democratic than Iran, is the best example of that political underdevelopment. And Bretton Woods II may not last as long as it takes for China, etc. to proletarianize and urbanize most of its remaining farmers and other rural people (to be sure nothing else lasts forever either). -- Yoshie



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list