Jim Devine wrote, quoting the one true bearer of the Leninist flame:
>>It is at odds with a Marxist understanding of how capitalism
>>operates in places like
>>Argentina, South Korea, etc. I can understand why Brad would argue along
>>these lines. He is an outspoken neoliberal. Why Doug argues along the same
>>lines (while holding out for some vague classless "humane regime") is
>>another story altogether and a depressing one at that.
>
>This is an inaccurate representation of Doug's viewpoint, though I
>really should let him defend himself.
I hadn't seen that the first time around, because I ignored Lou's
response in an effort to keep the peace on PEN-L.
I wrote this in the heat of the Asian crisis in 1998:
>Now, as a condition of its bailout, Korea is expected to dismantle
>most of the state, financial, and corporate structures that were
>responsible for rapid growth. It will open its financial markets to
>foreign owners and its product markets to foreign manufacturers
>almost overnight. The foreign buyers will scoop up the sweetest
>assets and the rest will be left to struggle. Korea may grow
>strongly again, but it will probably be growth of a more subordinate
>kind. Its ambitions to join the First World seem dashed for a long
>while. If Korea can't make it into the imperial inner circle then it
>seems no one else can. The hierarchies mapped on p. 3 [income
>disparities over the long term] seem as good as fixed unless things
>change radically.
I still think that. I'm quite aware of the limits of the present
world system, and I don't need patronizing lectures from someone who
constantly cites his cred-building trips to Nicaragua in the 1980s to
inform me of them. I spend a lot of time scrutinizing social
statistics, and I also don't need similarly patronizing lectures to
remind me of their limitations. I also really wonder why the
Patronizing Lecturer pays so much attention to people far from him,
while never saying a word about the rather impoverished people who
live 20 blocks north of him.
My point was this: life on the capitalist periphery is not some
simple narrative of relentless decline. There has been real progress
in a lot of places and in a lot of ways. It seems pretty
incontrovertible that in most places people are living longer and
more kids are reaching their 5th birthdays than 20 or 40 years ago.
There are still enormous gaps between what is and what could be under
a more "humane" regime. I was deliberately vague about that because I
think honestly reformist/social democratic (but still bourgeois)
regimes could make lives a lot healthier and richer than what
prevails today, well short of total revoluiton. I know that authentic
revolutionaries like the incomparably authentic Mine Aysen Doryan
think it's outrageously reactionary of me to suggest this, but a
world run by people like Joseph Stiglitz - or even, heaven forfend,
Brad DeLong - would be a lot better place than the one we live in
now. I'm quite aware of the constraints on people like that; Stiglitz
got fired and the DLCers who ran the Clinton administration would
have none of even Brad's mild redistributionism. But it's an
infantile leftism that can't make any distinctions among Stiglitz,
DeLong, and Dick Cheney.
Doug
