What you are citing below is not a "goal" in my reading; no, it's a statement reflecting strategic rhetorical retreat in the face of our collective failure to shift conventional wisdom even a fraction backwards to a more civilised 1971 when Nixon remarked "We're all Keynesians now". So what if she tries to find that old-fashioned space between Marx and Keynes that typified Cambridge, Mass and Monthly Review. If I have to speak on any kind of big public platform in SA, that's what I'd do too. Doug if you have to write ideas about policy for The Nation, you aren't going to be upfront about your Marxism, are you?
If you want a "goal" try "democratic socialism", as Naomi described it in a British SWP magazine last year.
If you want to get a hearing from the masses, then you take one step backward on rhetoric so you can take two forward with evidence and social struggle, and get a hearing you and I will never have. So Doug, old friend, make an alliance here, not purist posturing.
Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Apr 30, 2008, at 5:29 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
>
>> 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> As for her goal of a kinder, gentler capitalism....what can I say?
>>>
>>>
>> * Which Naomi Klein is that?!
>>
>
> The Shock Doctrine, p. 20:
>
> "I am not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently
> violent. It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that
> requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A
> free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health
> care.... It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent
> wages, to respect the rights of workers to form unions, and for
> governments to tax and redistribute wealth.... Markets need not be
> fundamentalist.
> Keynes proposed exactly that kind of mixed, regulated economy...,
> a revolution in public policy that created the New Deal.... It was
> exactly that system of compromises, checks and balances that
> Friedman's counterrevolution was launched to methodically dismantle
> [sic].... Seen in that light, the Chicago School strain of capitalism
> does indeed have something in common with other dangerous ideologies:
> the signature desire for unattainable purity, for a clean slate on
> which to build a reengineered model society."
>
> p. 53
>
> "...Chicagoans did not see Marxism as their true enemy. The real
> source of the trouble was to be found in the ideas of the Keynesians
> in the United States, the social democrats in Europe and the
> developmentalists in what was then called the Third World. These were
> believers not in a utopia but in a mixed economy, to Chicago eyes an
> ugly hodgepodge...."
>
> As I said in my review:
>
> "Using words like 'Friedmanite' and 'neoliberalism' is a way to avoid
> talking about capitalism in any systemic fashion. When Klein does
> address systemic issues, she professes that she’s not anticapitalist,
> but prefers a form of managed or welfare capitalism. It would be
> sectarian to say that managed or welfare capitalism isn’t better than
> what we’ve got now; it most certainly would be, especially in the
> U.S., where a single-payer healthcare system seems almost like a
> revolutionary impossibility. But it would be naive to think that we
> could get there without a political upsurge demanding an even more
> radical renovation, and evasive to deny that exploitation wouldn’t
> still exist under a regulated capitalism."
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>