[lbo-talk] Tea Party Numbers (and Chomsky's citation of polls)

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Fri Sep 3 14:47:05 PDT 2010


Doug: 'Ours [capitalists of the 1960s] tolerated such them [Keynesian arrangements] because they thought they had no choice. By the 1970s, they'd reached the breaking point, and launched a war.'

It's a question of interpretation, I guess.

For some, no doubt, the whole 'statist' interlude was an insult to be suffered - rather like the Evelyn Waugh character who wondered, after the end of the Second World War, why it was still necessary for anyone to work for the government. But I think there were others who embraced the argument that the mixed economy had rendered the distinction between capitalism and socialism obsolete, both being instances of 'industrial society', that shared the same goal of 'growth'. That was true in England, with ex-Marxists like John Strachey, but also, I think in America, with people like WW Rostow or Simon Kuznets or Robert McNamara.

The revolution against Keynesianism in the 1980s was not just against the working class, but a reorganisation of the ruling class, too: a shift from one way of doing things to another (and that is the small rational kernel in the over-wrought theorisation of 'regimes of accumulation'). Corporatism was a real ruling class ideology - you know, organisation man, and all that. That's what Castoriadis was writing about when he compared the bureaucratisation of the business class in America with the nomenklatura in the USSR. That's how it seems to me, anyway.



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