On Apr 28, 2008, at 1:13 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
> Hey, you have some good points, but isn't this review a bit over
> the top
> and often a caricature, Doug?
Well, no. I thought my critique was fairly detailed, or as detailed as you can get in 2700 words.
> * Doug, there are increasing reports, e.g. by David Harvey (whom you
> hailed at his booklaunch a few years ago), that extraeconomic
> coercion -
> accumulation by dispossession - is central to contemporary political
> economy.
I thought David Harvey's book on neoliberalism was very good. But I did take a few exceptions to his argument, e.g.:
> First exception: a word in the title itself, a word that is in wide
> usage everywhere but in the U.S., neoliberalism. On one hand, it’s
> a useful way to describe the shift in capitalism that began around
> 1979 (the election of Thatcher, the ascension of Volcker) or 1980
> (the election of Reagan). But there’s a danger in the word, much
> like the danger that inheres in its frequent companion,
> “globalization”: exaggerating the break and obscuring the
> continuties with what went before. All too frequently, both words
> serve as euphemisms for capitalism and imperialism, beasts that
> have been around for several hundred years, and are likely to be
> around for several hundred more unless we do something about it.
and
> But the principles of profit maximization, of border crossing, and
> of the private appropriation of common property have been with us
> for a very long time.
So, I don't really buy David's argument that "accumulation by dispossession" - which is a catchy phrase, for sure - is any more central to contemporary PE than it's been at many other points in history. The history of the USA is practically synonymous with dispossession - slavery and the effacement of the Indians are our foundational events. We stole land from Mexico. We've stolen all kind of things from the rest of Latin America. Why use a phrase that makes it easier to forget all that?
> * Doug, a "theory" in an academic sense - let's say Marx's approach in
> Das Kapital - has to explain the laws of motion of a system's
> reproduction. This is done at great length, with proofs, and with
> jargon. In contrast, a theory expressed through popular, journalistic
> investigative - and non-academic - writing whose objective is partly
> raising the outrage level, has very different standards.
I just don't accept that journalism means intellectual flabbiness, and that the excitement of outrage should take precedence over truth.
> I think you
> write well inbetween, judging by Wall Street,
Well, yes. I think trying to bridge the world of theory and practice, of the arcane and the popular, is an important pursuit. Liza, Christian, and I wrote our Activistism piece because we were tired of a left that couldn't think seriously, that found action more important than analysis, and commitment more important than thought. We're lost. We don't have a persuasive story to tell people about the world, in part because many of us aren't making a real effort to understand it.
> Neither her "outnegotiated" nor your "ANC never
> revolutionary" captures the dynamics perfectly (since we definitely
> had
> a much more radical campaign program - the RDP - than was
> implemented by
> Mandela's government).
But your RDP was junked. Why? Because the leadership of the ANC wanted a piece of the global capitalist action, not to build a revolutionary enclave.
> Your old friend Alexander Cockburn
> complained about Naomi, in much the same spirit, that India is an
> exemplar of neoliberalism and didn't have a traumatic shock;
> actually it
> did, if you look at the way farm suicides reflect the oppression and
> pacification of rural people.
Those suicides are a reaction to neoliberalism. But Indians have repeatedly voted in governments that pursued these policies? Why? There were no torture cells as far as I know. No death squads. From what I've seen, India has a very vigorous political culture. Part of the reason I find Naomi's magnification of "shock" into some sort of prime mover is that it evades the really difficult question of how ruling classes around the world have managed to win popular consent for the intensification of capitalism that's characterized the last 25-30 years.
> "there’s one prominent missing case: Lyndon Johnson, who engineered
> the
> killing of something like a million Indochinese."
>
> * Doug, when you cite Clinton and LBJ - "Democrats even" - you make it
> sound like Naomi joins a conspiracy of silence in not attacking the
> center. As far as I know her work, you are guilty of bizarre
> distortion.
There is almost nothing about Democrats in the U.S. or social democrats abroad in this book. Like I said, you will find next to nothing about Clinton and Blair, and absolutely nothing about Douglas or Keating. I could have mentioned Gonzalez too. The book reads very much like a product of the immediate post-9/11 world, when terror was the master narrative. That hasn't aged well.
> As for LBJ, the book is meant to cover the neoliberal era (roughly
> 1973-present); so you could add, in the same way, what about JFK who
> catalysed the killing of even more Indochinese, or Eisenhower who
> built
> up the military-industrial complex to do so, or Truman who dropped the
> A-bomb unnecessarily so as to shock the Soviet Union, or Roosevelt who
> authorised building the A-bomb, or etc etc etc. But the book's already
> too long, and most of her readers are probably born after 1973, and
> from
> around then there was indeed a substantial sea-change.
Yes and no, which is exactly my point. There's also a tremendous continuity. It does no one any favors to erase the history of U.S. imperialism. In fact, it leads to a dangerous politics of nostalgia - if only we could get back to those innocent old days before the usurpers took over. Isn't it important, and relevant, that LBJ virtually created Brown & Root, and vice versa, and that B&R did things in Vietnam that are very similar to what KBR did in Iraq? Or is history bunk?
> "Neoliberalism, a word that Klein uses a lot, has consistently gained
> electoral victories in the U.S., Britain, Australia, New Zealand,
> India."
>
> * This is banal, Doug. We can just as easily accuse you: the word
> "crisis" was not used by Doug Henwood nor enough others in the US, UK,
> Oz, NZ, India, or South Africa to project the logical trajectory of
> the
> economy, and hence the current mess is all a great surprise to those
> who, believing neoliberalism might deliver the goods, voted for neolib
> or neocon parties.
Eh? I've known you for about 20 years now, and we've been through several business cycles and several more financial crises. You've been eager during every one to read it as the death agony of capitalism. None of those diagnoses have panned out. It might this time - I always say that in the middle of every financial crisis or economic downturn. I would never say it's impossible. But you're assuming that this financial crisis is going to turn out very badly. It might. But then again, it might not. Who knows?
And the "crisis" so far is mostly confined to the U.S. It's having little or no effect on the rest of the world. So far. Things could always change. But not so far.
> The review, Doug, is foul-moody. Where's your solidarity?
Solidarity? One is not suppose to criticize people on our team?
Naomi has said: "We did not lose the battles of ideas. We were not outsmarted and wewere not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes wewere crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by thinktanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think bythe makers of tanks." I think this is somewhere between misleading and wrong.
While I was looking for links for Roger Douglas yesterday, I came across this very interesting tribute to Bruce Jesson, a New Zealand Marxist who died in 1999, and whom I met when he visited New York a few years before his death. What he says about NZ in this passage applies more broadly to the left in a lot of countries. Blaming "extraeconomic coercion" for the course of politics over the last few decades misses all this. We don't need more "left apologists," as the author, Bryce Edwards, puts it at the end of this excerpt.
<http://liberation.typepad.com/liberation/2008/01/nz-intellectu-3.html>
> The leftwing intellectual crisis
>
> Again and again Bruce Jesson expressed his frustration about the
> 'mindless activism' of the left in NZ. By this he meant that the
> left acted too much like headless chickens. In 1997, when looking
> back on the history of the left, he commented that, 'Only a handful
> of people were interested in political analysis and discussion.
> Most leftwingers were more interested in the kneejerk politics of
> moral outrage and misery-mongering' (Jesson, October 1997: p.27).
> Sharp summarises Jesson's belief that 'The antidote to anti-
> intellectualism and its consequence in self-centeredly pragmatic or
> romantic politics was, he continually insisted, "theory"' (Sharp,
> 2007: p.78). In this regard, Jesson was constantly more impressed
> during the 1980s and 1990s with the operations of the New Right:
>
> "the fault everywhere [on the left] is the same. Intellectual mush.
> In this respect, the contrast between the Left and the New Right is
> a telling one. The New Right sees itself as an intellectual-
> political force and puts quite a lot of energy and resources into
> thought and discussion (which is not to say it does it well). The
> characteristic New Right organization is the think tank, which is a
> role the Roundtable has assumed. The Left in New Zealand puts its
> energy and resources into activism and electoral campaigns. The
> characteristic leftwing structure is a committee" (Jesson, October
> 1997: p.32).
>
> The near-total investment of the left in the parliamentary
> political parties was a particular concern, which Jesson felt
> needed to be counterbalanced by leftwing think tanks of some kind:
>
> "Essentially, all of the resources of the Left still go into
> mindless activism. In recent years, a large proportion of the
> energy of the Left has gone into the electoral and organizational
> work of the Alliance. Virtually nothing has gone – in any organized
> way – into the sort of intellectual-political role that the
> Roundtable fills. Yet that is the area of greatest need, given the
> total confusion on the Left as to what its role is. What is badly
> needed is a policy-research-proselytising institute rather like the
> New Right think tanks" (Jesson, October 1997: p.33).
>
> Jesson clearly believed in the need for a programmatic approach to
> social change involving theory, activism, and a well-organised
> political vehicle. According to Sharp:
>
> "the point was to understand the situation before leaping into
> action. And it was because he was seduced by theory that he
> gradually came to eschew the activism of demonstration for that of
> party political activity, and much more than that, writing. Only
> those who could see their actions in the light of the knowledge
> that theory generated and organized were capable of effective
> action" (Sharp, 2007: pp.78-79).
>
> In particular, NZ's anti-intellectualism led to a failure to take
> economics seriously. Sharp says that Jesson was condemning of all
> parties for this,
>
> "including the New Labour Party and the Alliance, in whose policy-
> making circles he moved for a time, for not taking economics
> seriously: for leaving it to the professionals. This, too, was the
> fundamental flaw he saw in the intellectual classes of New Zealand.
> The politically committed knew and cared little about the alien
> forces that were controlling them" (Sharp, 2007: p.82).
>
> While in the midst of Labour's Rogernomics revolution, Jesson
> complained about this anti-intellectual trend: 'Even now in most
> left-wing meetings if someone tries to put forward a reasoned
> intellectual argument there will always be someone who'll get up
> and say "all this mind-bending stuff is no good, let's get down to
> practicalities"' (Jesson ,1988: p.1).
>
> The complaint that the NZ left was in an intellectual crisis was
> not merely an abstract or elitist complaint. Jesson's concern was
> that the mindless activism combined with the anti-intellectualism
> produced a weakened left that would severely reduce its ability to
> make progress on, or defend, its political programme:
>
> "Intellectually, the Left was too soft to resist the New Right coup
> of 1984. It was obsessed by social issues and by foreign affairs,
> and couldn't debate economic issues. In the early stages of
> Rogernomics, it tended to concede the big issues of economic policy
> in return for some concessions on foreign policy and social
> matters" (Jesson, April 1997: p.113).
>
> A major strength of Bruce Jesson's writings was the fact that he
> was a left dissident and not a left apologist...