Thanks Keith,

I really appreciate you taking the time squat with me at the old
nettime pidgin bar: posting your work, and entering into discussion.
I love your mention of the "ringing true" of the sovereign.
There is a kind of ringing true of discourse that is able to reflect
on how the memory bank of money and language are of a piece.

Your post on African urban development was as example of something
that rings true because it asks the right questions.

> Transparency as a political and economic virtue still has something to be
> said for it, but the concept itself, like much else from the liberal
> revolution, has been corrupted by its contemporary use for purposes opposite
> to those originally intended.
> 
> Surely, what is new about neoliberalism is the perverted use of liberal
> ideas to mystify the reversion of capitalism to its feudal origins. Marx
> understood that capitalism was feudalism in drag: that's why he coined the
> expression surplus value. But, in his anxiety to rush to the next stage, he
> also subscribed to the notion that capiralism had replaced
> feudalism. 

I like this funny slip. It does look like crapilism at times or
katzenjammer-ism.

> Bush capitalism is literally the Old Regime: autocratic rule, unhindered
> looting by the big corporations, colonial war, torture, abuse of civil
> rights -- the whole package, George III and the East India Company all over
> again.
> 
> My mentor, CLR James, used to say in the 70s that there were only two world
> revolutions left: the second Russian revolution and the second American
> revolution. The fall of the Berlin Wall certainly felt like the former at
> the time. It might be farfetched to think of the present political and
> economic crisis as the latter or its antecedent. To endorse such a view
> would be to imply that the American people still have the dynamism that
> Tocqueville found in them. I think they do, but that makes me pretty unique
> in my circle and probably on this list.

Boosh is fronting for a kind of imperialist fundamentalism that like
the religous fundamentalisms is a very contemporary phenom, no matter
what atavisms of fear and fetish, of rattle-shaking and obscurantism
it musters. It looks more and more hollow every day, and seems to be
losing traction with the populace as McCain's rhetoric is falling
flatter and flatter.


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