[lbo-talk] Manufacturing Discontent

michael perelman michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Wed Mar 17 17:24:39 PDT 2010


You asked if you got it correctly. Yes, indeed you did.

Alan Rudy wrote:
> 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.
>

-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929

530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com



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