Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> [was: Re: [PEN-L:16340] RE: Re: RE: Re: Jane D'Arista on Doug Henwood's Show]
>
> Mat wrote:
> >When will the [US Democratic Party] left wake up to the mistake
> >and reverse their positions, so that this opening for increasing
> >spending, cutting taxes or whatever can be done in a more progressive
> >way? Will spending be military or penal Keynesianism or will it be on
> >much needed social programs, spending that will improve lives of working
> >people?
>
> when will they wake up? only when there are obvious signs of popular
> discontent (just as the events in Seattle, etc. have pushed the powers that
> be on a little toward more reasonable positions on trade issues).
ah what's a reasonable position for a left keynesian on trade? let's say the
tax cut suffers leakage and bush and greenspan and the fucking bond traders (as
clinton described them) are not willing to allow deficits the size of reagan's.
consumers are also maxed out, and interest rate reductions are now ineffective.
now the keynesian is left with the mercantilists whom keynes so admired.
That is, for the keynesian the most reasonable thing "left" to do is the
stimulation of net exports through some combination of wage repression,
currency devaluation and restrictive trade policy.
so keynesianism will prove in practice to be the ideology of big nation
chauvinism (which now goes under the name of Seattle and anti corporate
globalization and paternalistic anti sweatshop movements) just as keynesianism
has already proven in practice to be none other than the ideology of rearmament
since unlike other investments arms do not adversely affect the values of
existing capital assets.
And when confronted with the fact that his theory was being implemented through
hiterlite militarism rather than treasury bill burying and pyramid building,
keynes in effect could only say "but still", but still it is better than the
classical teaching! What an ethical hole in the center of the positivist
keynesian system.
add to this the duplicitous manner in which keynes attempted to reduce real
wages--no wonder he was rushed into translation by the publishing houses owned
by the big german industrialists!
devoted to full employment on a national scale above all else, the keynesian
framework does in fact go beyond the classical teaching but it points not to a
better but to a more gloomy future--militarism, big nation chauvinism and wage
repression. This is the price of attempting to mediate the contradictions of
capitalism through reliance on the state, the capitalist state.
of course while entangling the working class in nationalist mythology through
their partipation in rituals against world trading bodies (even those which do
not have a weighted voting formula) and free trade agreements unless loaded
with protectionist measures such as the deals with Africa, Cambodia and Jordan,
the push for net exports will not in itself prove sufficient for full
employment... leaving the state to deal with unemployment equilibrium with
incarceration and restrictive immigration policy.
Rosa Luxemburg was right about the basic choice which this social system
presents to the working class.
Rakesh
