On 12/12/06, John Gulick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Jim Devine posted:
>Sunday, December 10, 2006
>Not Dead Enough. posted by lenin
>http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/12/not-dead-enough.html
>Pinochet is dead, but not dead enough. To see him as simply another
>vile bastard dictator who has snuffed it is to miss the point. He was
>crucial, inasmuch as he provided the opportunity for advanced
>capitalist states to test in the periphery a doctrine that lurked in
>the margins of political discourse back home.
Big fat yawn... I've read this before. That's b/c these are crib notes of
David Harvey's _A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism_. How pretentious... using
Pinochet's death as an excuse to pontificate about the archeology of
neo-liberalism, with nary an original thought. It's not like he/she HAD to
do this, like some of us phone in the work effort when the mandates of paid
academic labor call. This is a VOLUNTEER job. At the very least he/she could
plagiarize an innovative analysis of an understudied phenomenon. But which
self-identified neo-Marxist doesn't have his/her diagnosis of the 1970's
crisis
(most of which are numbingly familiar)? At least Harvey livened up his tale
of the Labor Party's unsuccessful reign with anecdotes of the gravediggers'
strike... unburied corpses piling up in the morgues and all that. This
Leninology posturing is paint-by-numbers.
JG
Things were beginning to go downhill in the then-existing socialist
bloc just about the same time, but I have yet to read a really
interesting narrative of economic history that takes a truly global
view of the seventies.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
