Comrade Jim D, it's not that Roemer retreats from descriptive or policy poli-econ, but that when he comes into it the traces of his neverland distract us from actually existing K. I think I mentioned on PEN-L that he paid a vist to Jo'burg about eight months ago and confounded worker audiences with the argument that they should punt "coupon socialism" via the super-speculative (and thoroughly decadent) Johannesburg Stock Exchange. He even went into the op-ed pages of SA's WSJ to make the case (attracting a neo-classical rebuttal). This would be harmless enough, but it served to give a bit of an intellectual foundation to some charlatan ex-leftists in the union movement here who subsequently have gone off into a weird investment banking mode with union funds. Buying dear, borrowing massively (at the highest i in SA history), investing in parasatical holding companies, confusing workers about the character of the financial markets, etc etc. Not that Roemer would endorse this, nor that his visit was crucial to the trajectory. But readers of the SA Labour Bulletin (as well as our new left journal, Debate) will see that the coverage and interest in fanciful theories of getting to socialism via the stock market have quite a dispiriting effect upon strategy, and upon radical politics...
