On Aug 18, 2014, at 11:52 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> 1. U.S. deep in debt
>
> 2. the worst economic crisis in 80 years
>
> 3. limits of U.S. military power ("the world" is too vague to count its
> ideas as relevant here)
>
> 4. Iraq far worse than the would have been without his war
>
> ------
>
> (It would be perfectly satisfactory to respond to all this with a So? And I
> may return to that.)
>
> The first two points may be flatly rejected: The debt was and is an
> absolutely necessary foundation to legitimize austerity, and of course any
> major shift within capitalism involves a crisis of some sort. Sow what!
>
> Of course there are limits to military power, but there is no indication
> that the limits referred to here are at all dangerous to capital: The new
> era is an era of Endless War, and the limits revealed are an illusion
> generated by false assumptions (illusions) as to what marks a 'successful'
> Military operation. What Doug's fourth point is in fact evidence of the
> _success_ not the failure of Bush's policy. Iraq is no longer an
> independent state (as it threatened to be under Saddam Hussein). All is
> well. What global capitalism cannot tolerate is the existence of stable
> independent regimes, whether "left"(Honduras) or (as Saddam's) "right."
>
> Peace and prosperity are not at all essential to capitalism; too much of
> either would be a threat.
>
> Carrol
>
=========
Naive functionalism to the rescue!