----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
" What I'm trying somewhat sloppily to get at is that current capitalism is capable as it were of seriously confusing (stulitfying) even the "more fortunate" demographic sectors. As Jim Devine once suggested I believe, Economics Departments are organized crime -- but I also suspect that the bulk of economists 'outside' the prestige departments sincerely believe the nonsense they've imbibed in grad school. And the generating 'mechanisms' of that stultifying effect are (a) the radical individuating features of a fully developed capitalist 'economy,' which extend throughout the whole of capitalist society, and (2) the nearly complete divorce of act and motive. The isolated individual, then, having _no_ direct experience (which is impossible) of the social relations generated by the capitalist economy and little or no training in abstraction (or in recognizing the difference between an abstraction and a mere empirical generalization, is nearly helpless to resist nonsense explanations of what is happening."
I have a friend who is a senior scientist at Cal Berkeley. An absolute luminary in Physics, IQ of 170++, degrees in Physics and Chemistry with a minor in Economics.
He patiently explained to me one day that this is no longer a class society because everybody owns a little piece of the pie (through 401Ks) and that, in fact, we live in a meritocracy.
The only thing that exceeds his ignorance is his self satisfaction. It's hard to explain. He thinks of workers as losers despite the fact that his (very loving and decent parents) were themselves workers: his dad was a truck driver and his mom a physical therapist. Really weird and almost nauseating.
So, yeah, Carrol is right.
Joanna