Hi Doug, >Hasn't it always been, or at least for a very long time? Certainly >financiers drove the U.S. merger boom at the turn of the last >century, and financial operators were in the driver's seat until the >'29 crash. Er, that's what I was trying to say; that it took forty years for us to get back to high capitalism's default setting: one of finance priorities trumping all others, to the medium-to-long term disadvantage of all. The producers of 1893 and 1929 bring us 2001, sorta thing. And that's not a million miles from what I thought Chris was saying. >But in the early years after WW II, everything went pretty >swimmingly, so there was no need for the financiers to intervene. >Profits were high, class relations were relatively peaceful, and the >stock market rose nicely. Come the 1970s, though, and the U.S. lost a >war (or seemed to - hard to describe Vietnam as the winner of much of >anything today), there were folks in the streets, wildcat strikes and >industrial sabotage were rampant, profitability was in the tank, and >inflation was high. That's when the financiers asserted themselves - >because they weren't raking it in like they were, and the world >needed some disciplining. Again, that was what I hoped I was saying. This bodes ill, no? If capitalism is to prevent a whopper of a crisis, must we not return to an institutional setting whereby more medium-to-long-term strategies are encouraged, or at least tolerated? I tend to read most of the anti-WTO feeling as just this sort of sensibility - there being nothing in the WTO prescriptions to prevent the rule of finance capital - not just to ecological and social disadvantage - but to inevitable economic disadvantage in the very terms of economists themselves (there being no such thing as efficient markets; there being too great a [credit-conjuring but allocation-distorting] stress on the short-term welfare of shareholders; there being too great an entrenched agglomeration of the information advantage [high-value-yielding enterprise in the core of the core driving everyone else backwards]; and too many things getting counted in dollars when that just ain't the best way to evaluate their significance [eg. oil may be a smaller proportion of 'northern' GDP than it used to be, but that only hides the fact that the economies depend as much on ever more of the stuff as they ever did].) I don't always find myself in agreement with Mark, but I think he was wrong for the right reasons on Wall Street's fortunes, and may well be right for the right reasons on environmental concerns (water problems, establishment clues as to serious problems with oil, wide-spread weather phenomena consistent with the global-warming thesis, and ozone holes giving me a skin cancer on my bald spot - all smell suddenly urgent to me - and, as The Club of Rome [who may themselves have been wrong for the right reasons] pointed out thirty years back, the system can feel fine even though we've already poured enough shit into it to destroy it - it just takes a couple of decades to manifest, is all]). And, anyway, there's so much pride about, there just has to be a fall! These WEF types just KNEW anyone who'd pose such questions was an ill-informed thug - and said so a thousand times. There is NO critical thinking happening in the mahogany halls, mate - decades of hegemonic divinity and privilege, combined with the reassuring aphorisms of a thirty-year-old theory of finance has fenced off their intellectual paddock, and they're idly flinging quoits on the Titanic. So, yeah, if nail my colours I must, I too feel obliged to nail 'em to the 'millenarian' mast. We got trouble. Cheers, Rob. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
