At 10:42 AM 5/5/99 -0700, you wrote: >One question. If the battle between capitals is so fierce how is capital as a >whole able to maintain hegemony and how is the capitalist class able to unite >to act in its long term self-interest (assuming it does) when the competitive >short-term and hence destructive behaviour between individual capitals is so >strong? Seems to me the state is one of the actors that helps capital overcome >short-term myopia in favor of long term stability. you're right. The nation-state has been a major institution stabilizing capital in each country. I think about industry self-regulation (ISR), an institution that is extremely common in the US (and my father was part of it, working for the Audit Bureau of Circulations), even though economics textbooks never mention it. ISR keeps competition from being destructive to the industry. The state's role is as a centralized form of ISR, regulating all of the decentralized versions. In the US, it has traditionally kept ISR from being cartels -- though in many cases, it created cartels (the CAB, the ICC). The problem is that there is no equivalent -- or a weak equivalent -- on the global level. Bukharin, Lenin, and others pointed to the way in which managed domestic competition implied more rabid international competition, encouraging the first World War. I extend that to see international comp. as encouraging the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. In the post-WW2 era, the US has played the role of hegemon (standing behind the IMF, WB, and GATT/WTO), sometimes moderating the downside of international competition (from the capitalist point of view). But sometimes the US acted as a competitor (as with the famous "Nixon shocks" or the vetoing of international agreements that didn't serve US interests, such as the Law of the Sea and the anti-global warming initiatives). Of course, the little ISR that existed didn't help the third world, workers, oppressed minorities, etc. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!
