>>From: "Forstater, Mathew" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>Subject: [PEN-L:21408] RE: RE: Re: RE: Re: crisis causes the end of >>capitalism? >>Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2002 13:56:55 -0600 >> >>I don't know if anyone is familiar with Darity's thesis about managerial >>society or the managerial mode of production, which he believes has >>developed out of capitalism. I am not sure if I agree that managerial >>society is a distinct mode of production that had superceded capitalism, >>but I think the thesis that managerial capitalism is another stage of >>capitalism has something to it. In the managerial society, "experts" run >>things and the system is based on credentialism. I can find the cites if >>anyone';s interested. mat > >Mathew, I am not familiar with this thesis (though I recall you >bringing it up on this list earlier) but I am very interested in it. >The thesis appears to have some surface cogency, especially with >regards to credentialism, the explosion in jail population in the >U.S., populist authoritarianism in politics on the rise since 1980, >etc. >I would appreciate those citations. > >-Frank G. > Wm Darity:
"Marx's fundamental law of motion for bourgeois society--the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall--led to his famous conclusion that capitalism would come to an end under the weight of its contradictions. This conclusion has been deemed false even by Marx's leftist sympathizers who see the power of corporate capital in every facet of their lives, often failing to investigate within the social matrix. Unquestionably, the working class has not attained power in the US, nor arguably anywhere else for that matter. But the end of capitalism need not usher in the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' "Instead the winding down of capitalism and the winding down of managerial society ushers in a 'dictatorship of the intellectuals and the intelligentsia'... "th emost thoroughly excluded members of the 'outcast' group, say the for example the black underclass, may find other policies besides spatial isolation and deprivation of adequate welfare support...While capitalism in its laissez faire mode necessarily posseses an ambivalence on the population question, the social managers possess a growing inclination to view population as something to be controlled and reduced... "In an earlier paper where I explored the implications for surplus population of the rise of managerial society, I suggested that the law of population in the new age would be 'the Law of the Progressive Elimination.' Under capitalism the surplus population, and any segments of its that are undesirable, must be identified relative to capital's valorization requirements. But under managerialism, the existence of a surplus population is a holdover from the ancien regime, and the undesirables are identified according to the tastes and preferences of the managerial class. "It could be a matter of whim, or it could be a matter of crude calcuation. If it is the latter, the managerial class will ask: Are they too expensive and too dangerous to take care of indefinitely? And if the answer is in the affirmative... "...the underclass need not be a permanent fixture in the social order, but its disappearance will not be due to actions to uplift the working class. Rather it will be due to what amounts to a genocidal strategy... From An American Dilemma Revisted, ed. Obie Clayton, Jr Russel Sage, 1996. On the question of population control there are important books by Mary Quine, Marc Linder, Winter and Teitelbaum, Diane Paul, Nancy Leys Stepans (latin american eugenics), Troy Duster, Richard Lerner, Soloway (victorian england), Weindling (nazi germany).Read em all or at least big chunks of them all if anyone is interested in this dreary, nightmarish topic. As for the consolidation of an intellectual dictatorship, one is reminded of the Polish revolutionary Jan Machajski who criticized the pernicious influence of the new intellecual workers who had hegemonized European social democracy. Machajski is discussed very briefly by Russel Jacoby, Dialectic of defeat, p. 122. Michael Pugliese will probably know tons more about this. RB
