>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 07/20/00 02:24PM >>>
G'day Charles,
>Y'all should get another name other than "market". That term has a very
specific history synonymous with "capitalism". Call it the Marxit instead
of the market, or the "Exchange Network" or something.
I admit people use the term today because they don't want to say
'capitalism' (for fear of reawakening old grievances and malcontents), but
we'd be wise to remember markets have existed ever since ancient times - and
to claim it was capitalism all along rather buggers our historical analysis,
no?
________
CB: Yea, capitalism is when the market becomes the prevailing or dominant form of the
economy. A "market economy" is usually used to refer to an economy in which the
market is the dominant form.
_______
Talking of history, I wonder what this list would be talking about if we
lived in a time of, say, crippling poverty for more than half the world's
people, half a billion people going to waste on the world's unemployment
slagheap, a rapid degradation of the environment as a whole, violent social
fragmentation (already manifest in Africa, Eurasia from the Balkans to the
Caucuses, parts of Southern Asia, and half the Pacific - with Burma,
Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, most of Latin America and maybe China all on the
precipice), and mebbe a hundred million people with AIDS.
I doubt whether we'd have the wherewithal to put a hole in such a wall of
misery - seems to me we'd need not just debt cancellations but planned
investment *on a world scale* (Ted Trainor reckons one-fifth of the world's
people receive 86% of all income while one-fifth receive only 1.5%), a
global employment policy, and flattened cycles (so we don't regularly chuck,
say, 200 million SE Asian families on the slagheap, as happened in '98). As
that little lot would probably require a global currency, and either a very
powerful world-government or a sort of GlobeCom gigamonopoly - a sorta
Keynesian welfare-globe or Schumpetarian corporate-socialist-globe - well,
we might as well argue about what we'd do after a socialist revolution
that's at least no less likely to happen in the foreseeable future than that
little list is, eh?
Yours morosely,
Rob.
