On Aug 15, 2008, at 10:50 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
o much so that when I read Paul Krugman’s August 15, 2008 N.Y. Times
op-ed piece “The Great Illusion“, I wondered if he had been dipping
into Lenin himself :
"So far, the international economic consequences of the war in the
Caucasus have been fairly minor, despite Georgia’s role as a major
corridor for oil shipments. But as I was reading the latest bad
news, I found myself wondering whether this war is an omen - a sign
that the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the
first.
"If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, here’s what you need to
know: our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient,
inward-looking national economies - but our great-great grandfathers
lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and
investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.
"Writing in 1919, the great British economist John Maynard Keynes
described the world economy as it was on the eve of World War I.
“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his
morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth … he
could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth
in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the
world.”
"And Keynes’s Londoner 'regarded this state of affairs as normal,
certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further
improvement … The projects and politics of militarism and
imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies,
restrictions, and exclusion … appeared to exercise almost no
influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life,
the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.'
Dunno if PK's been dipping into Lenin. But I quoted that passage from
JMK in Wall Street, and commented:
"This attitude of entitlement and permanence equally characterizes
capital's sense of itself today. Aside from the occasional trade
skirmish, often whipped up by politicians eager to excite domestic
audiences, further glo- bal economic integration, of which free
capital flows are the avant garde, is thought to be inevitable. We'll
see if it is."
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