At 7:39 AM 4/20/96, Doug Henwood wrote: [long interesting quote from Negri deleted...] >Once the fear of revolution subsided, and the working class was >domesticated, the concessions of the Keynesian order could be revoked - and >with the collapse of the USSR, the demand for givebacks has intensified. I >think that it's only in this highly politicized sense that Keynesian >uncertainty can be seriously relevant; in "normal" times, convention needs >no great external assistance. Doug: not to disagree with you, but to suggest another angle that may add to the discussion, taking your point in a new direction: I wonder, in this era of what Martin O'Connor calls the "ecological phase of capital," and in the spirit of Jim O'Connor's "second contradiction of capital," whether we are not again in non-normal times. Here is a quote from my dissertation that I think makes the point: "An interesting and clear example of just what "taming" nature means appears in an article on allocating the costs of global warming (Chichilnisky and Heal, 1993). Reducing the "risk" of global climate change apparently has to do not with taking action to minimize global climate change, but rather with correctly allocating among different human groups (North/South; rich/poor, etc.) the costs of whatever global climate change occurs through appropriate use of market mechanisms." It seems to me that what is happening here is neoclassical economists are attempting to deal with the radically uncertain consequences of global climate change and other ecological disturbances as if it were something that could be addressed probabilistically as risk. Radical subversion of the "pure" logic of capitalist dynamics enters the economy through myriad sutured sites. Negri, Jim O'Connor and the autonomistas like to refer to labor as the "unplannable" fly in the capitalist ointment, but the point of the theory of the "second contradiction" is that labor is not the only such fundamentally unplannable element. Just as the capitalist crisis of Keynes' time engendered the political struggle around the "welfare state" (the New Deal), so the current crisis has engendered a struggle around global corporate governance in large measure focused on ecological issues (though naturally these feed and are in turn fed by other social issues) -- global eco-geopoltics. See, for instance, Athanasiou's book DIVIDED PLANET: THE ECOLOGY OF RICH AND POOR, Little Brown, 1996. I'm interested in your thoughts on this. Blair Sandler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
