Doug Henwood writes,
>Ok, we're on the PEN-L bear watch again. What do you think we should
>do if the market keeps falling? Just what does it mean that it does?
>If it means a very bad economy ahead, what does that mean? Right now
>you're sounding like the color guy in the ICU, and not much else.
Please don't morph into a pundit, Doug.
These financial wizards have been pissing into the wind for a half-dozen
years and a lot of us have been getting soaked. The protests against
neo-liberalism, MAI, WTO, IMF, and the WB didn't spring up out of a material
vacuum, you know. So now they are getting soaked and their instinct is to
call for another round of their favorite brew. I'd hardly call pointing out
the folly, "gloating".
What to do if the market keeps falling? FUCK the market. The market
orthodoxy has been "take care of the market and the market will take care of
us." Or, to put it slightly more technically, "promote the accumulation of
exchange values and the production and distribution of use values will take
care of itself." Well, the market *hasn't* been taking care of all of us. My
policy proposals (I'm a policy researcher, remember) deal with concrete ways
to directly deal with production and distribution to provide for people's
needs.
As someone who used to do policy consulting to government I have watched the
evolution of the markets-R-us dogma within government. It used to be that
the bureaucrats didn't want to actually do anything noncapitalist but they
at least wanted to know what the options were. That was before the Berlin
Wall came down. About six years ago they came to the smug conclusion that
they didn't even what to HEAR about what the alternatives might be. The
business prescription of low inflation, privatization, regressive taxation,
free-trade, investor confidence and the occasional bail-out was the panacea.
The other side of the business dogma, the part where the rubber hits the
road, is "flexibilization of labour". In plain terms, that is a social
accounting swindle that allows the accumulators of exchange value to shift
the costs and risks of the production process onto the workers. This swindle
makes balance sheets look impressive. That's all. It's primitive accumulation.
Meanwhile, I have developed and presented to governments concrete proposals
designed to AVOID an economic catastrophe. Of course, I didn't *say* that
was what they were designed to do. My proposals for reduced work time were
not panaceas but focused on a specific aspect of material production. Lots
of people on this list conduct analyses and develop proposals targeted at
other specific aspects of the real -- not the financial -- economy. What
distinguishes these proposals is that they focus on production of use
values, not the accumulation of exchange values.
As for the metaphor of sounding like the colour guy in the ICU, let's
develop it a bit. Let's say someone has devoted a major part of his or her
time and energy over the past decade or two to talking about traffic safety
enforcement. What's wrong with that person going to the ICU after a major,
avoidable freeway crash and saying "this didn't have to happen." Do you have
to call that gloating?
Tom Walker
Bowen Island, BC
604 947 2213
