Doug wrote: >Oh, but the protectorate would be in the name of "civilized Western >values," because as everyone knows the people of the Balkans are only >marginally white. And structural adjustment too is imposed in the name of >progress. The bourgeoisie has been quite adept in rebranding 19th century >economic and social policy as forward looking, and welfare state and >developmentalist interventions as backward-looking. They may want to sell it, but marketing efforts seem sporadic + half-hearted (probably because they don't believe it either). Besides, do people buy it? What I see in American people's responses to the Clinton Administration's Kosovo policy, for instance, is mainly indifference or acquiescence, along with smaller currents of distrust, anger, and hostility. As far as I know, only cruise-missile liberals + social democrats (_very few_ in number) who belong to the _opinion-making professions_ talk and act like as if they bought it. It's hard to sell MacJobs, sweatshops, deindustrialization, pauperization, debt peonage, & colonialism as the way forward in 1999. People aren't as naive as Susan Sontag. The way I see it, neither the ruling class nor the working class believe in the rhetoric of 'progress' any longer. The working class seem committed to a Machiavellian relativism as much as the ruling class are; it's just that the working class version is a releativism of the powerless while the ruling class and the governing elite go about their business without even promising capitalist 'progress' in terms of fatter paychecks. 'Progress' is dead under capitalism. In this sense, I think that postmodernists have proven to be better at reading the rhetoric and structure of feelings of the fin-de-siecle capitalism than most non-pomo/anti-pomo leftists are. Yoshie
