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

[Ricky Page]

What we forget is that this statist period was itself a response to the global 
class war against communism- which was in fact total war. This is why capital 
allowed certain reforms to be established- with the end of the "Cold" War there 
was no longer a need to dull the edge of Capitalism and thus we've had the 
massive attacks on the welfare state, that represents the hardness of the 
neo-liberal agenda 

________________________________
From: James Heartfield <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Fri, September 3, 2010 5:47:05 PM
Subject: [lbo-talk] Tea Party Numbers (and Chomsky's citation of polls)

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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