What I've noticed is that you've yet to claim that the Forest Service in the US is qualitatively different - with the emphasis on qualitative - from its parallel institution in Sweden, much less from state level human services bureaucracies... THIS is Wojtek's claim and I couldn't get him to provide an empirical counterpoint. If you accept it and I reject it, we disagree. I never said Darwin's finches weren't significantly different, I said their similarities were stronger than those differences, why is this hard to accept? It is true that social democratic bureaucracies under parliamentary systems in European nations have had somewhat different imperatives and constituencies primarily as a result of the different structure of electoral politics than here in the winner-take-all two party representative republic we have in the US. But they still work in staggeringly rationalized/bureaucratic/Weberian ways, on the one hand, and in remarkabley "captured" fashions on the other... hell, just watch European cinema.
Both Wojtek and I are engaged in a discussion at a radically different level of analysis than your last post... neither one of us was talking about the end of regulation, we were disagreeing about whether the _cultures_ within organizations in advanced industrial capitalist societies were more different than similar, where that Gilded Age vs Social Democracy vs Neoliberalism vs, NICs stuff came from I don't know but its on you not me.
On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 3:35 PM, Somebody Somebody <philos_case at yahoo.com>wrote:
> Alan: To my mind, arguing otherwise when it comes to the cultures of
> different corporations, government bureaucracies, consumer identities
> (broadly defined to include most all politicized consumption) and local
> communities in the advanced industrial west all-but completely rejects
> Marxist analysis of the homogenizing tendencies of capitalism
>
>
>
> Somebody: It troubles me that the major issue you have with Wojtek's
> argument is the extent it indicates a rejection of Marxist orthodoxy. This
> sounds like a theological argument to me. Trotsky had the courage to say
> that he'd change his mind if the revolution didn't come with the end of the
> Second World War. I wonder how many socialists today are that open-minded.
>
>
>
> I agree that capitalism is homogenizing, as indeed is socialism for that
> matter, but this is only a grand secular trend, and the fact remains that
> *today* there are still significant differences between capitalist
> societies. Moreover, I think the left should consider the possibility, even
> the probability, that even if the neo-liberal onslaught were to continue for
> generations, it might *never* take us back to the Gilded Age of unregulated
> capitalism. It's been quite some time now since the collapse of the Bretton
> Woods system, since Thatcher and Reagan, and the safety net in the Western
> World has been diminished, but is still with us, in some countries much more
> than others - despite a massive decline in working class resistance. You
> keep saying capitalism isn't sustainable, but the fact of the matter is,
> social democracy has lasted much longer that Stalinist-style state
> socialism.
>
>
>
> Not only that, but there are indications that the newly industrializing
> East Asian countries are in the early stages of instituting the building
> blocks of the welfare state in their own countries. As I've noted before,
> Taiwan and South Korea created universal health care in the last generation
> right under the nose of the Washington Consensus, and Thailand has recently
> done the same. China's government has set a timeline for developing a safety
> net as the country develops as well.
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> 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