[lbo-talk] Manufacturing Discontent

[Alan Rudy]

Raised on your stuff by Friedland and O'Connor, this commentary is one I
appreciate very much.
In Jim's terms, kinda, within mid-20th C capitalism Progressive reformers
and liberal social movements had established a temporarily stable political
economic terrain where the costs of maintaining, reproducing and
rehabilitating (the naturalized) ecological, personal and communal
conditions of capitalist production (the conditions of life for the rest of
us) had been successfully socialized into the state, an apparatus which
simultaneously - in Habermasian terms - fostered capital accumulation and
legitimated its privatization of profits.
In the process, however, citizen-producers were ideologically transformed
into consumer-citizens as the commodification of needs expanded into ever
wider and deeper realms of ecological, personal and communal reproduction...
primitive accumulation of a sort.  On the one hand, consumer citizens
embraced that role because the socialization of maintaining, reproducing and
rehabilitating their conditions of life appeared to made reliable by the
state (whether or not it actually was).  On the other hand, consumer
citizens generated liberal movements to incrementally extend the state's
maintenance, reproduction and rehabilitation of conditions of production and
life.
In the early 1970s, this system began to implode for a whole host of
reasons... perhaps it reached its limit in the context of national
development (the closing of the American frontier redux), perhaps the
social, poltical and cultural movements of the 1960s did it in, perhaps the
Viet Nam war did it in, perhaps the oil shock did it in, perhaps the
incompetence of American industrial strategy did it in, perhaps its all of
this and moer but the result was stagflation and steering, legitimation,
motivation, and fiscal crisis.
At this point, I think you are saying, the neoliberal/neoconservative
coalition solidified in the name of ideologically and materially
de-socializing (re-naturalizing, re-personalizing, and re-communalizing) the
maintenance, reproduction and rehabilitation of the conditions of
life/production.  You argue that this isn't primitive accumulation, really,
but that it might could be seen as a kind of modern variant.  Of course,
desocializing nature means recommiting to private property (and
deregulation), desocializing people means an ideology of personal
responsibility (and social irresponsibility) and desocializing communities
means enclosiung public space and reducing the corporate, property and
personal tax "burden" necessary to maintain the bureaucracies that regulated
private and personal access to natures, bodies and communities.

yeah, its formulaic... yeah, its too sweeping and insufficiently
empirical... but, yeah, I like what you say and hope I've translated it
correctly.

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:04 PM, michael perelman <
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> wrote:


> I was asked to write something up about my book, Manufacturing Discontent.
>  I thought that I would share it with you.  Any comments would be be
> appreciated.  I was asked to wrtie something up about my book, Manufacturing
> Discontent.  I thought that I would share it with you.  Any comments would
> be be appreciated.
>
> Of all my books, Manufacturing Discontent may seem to have the least links
> with Marxism.  After I published The Invention of Capitalism: Classical
> Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation, some
> people argued that the subject was purely historical and had no contemporary
> relevance.  Of course, the seizure of property continues throughout the
> world, even in the United States, where government can take property through
> the law of eminent domain and then turn it over to private interests.
> Read the entire commentary at:
>
> http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/manufacturing-discontent/
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA
> 95929
>
> 530 898 5321
> fax 530 898 5901
> http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319