--- On Mon, 22/6/09, Venkat Inumella <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Venkat Inumella <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [silk] BJP pulling wool over our eyes?
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Monday, 22 June, 2009, 11:34 PM
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 9:38 PM,
> Indrajit Gupta <[email protected]>wrote:
>
> > Frankly, no, these are perfectly viable in
> combination, unless one is a
> > Marxist and believes that culture is part of the
> superstructure of a
> > particular state of development of society, hence is
> determined - and shaped
> > - largely by control of the means of production, hence
> any cultural impulses
> > during a period of capitalism (I leave out the 'free
> market' bit for
> > separate comment some other time) are likely to have
> been formed by the
> > underlying class character of society as typical of a
> capitalist phase.
> >
> >
> So, given that there doesn't seem to be any fundamental
> conflict between the
> two, why is it that the combination doesn't seem to be very
> prevalent (and
> hence feasible?) politically? Or is there an obvious
> example that I'm
> missing? I find the culturally liberal Scandinavian systems
> to be too
> socialistic with their high taxes and elaborate social
> security nets, and I
> find the anti-gay, anti-abortion but pro-business brand of
> Republican
> right-wingism(never mind their ineptitude) to be too
> culturally regressive.
> The lines are perhaps a little more blurred in the Indian
> context, but on
> the (thin) evidence of what happened to telecom(or power or
> aviation) during
> the BJP's one term in power, accompanied by a simultaneous
> absence of any
> large-scale socialist policies such as the NREGS, I'd
> venture that the BJP
> is more pro-business and less socialist than the Congress,
> only buttressing
> this (to me) baffling trend.
>
> Venkat Inumella
I would have that by today, nobody remains to subscribe to completely
untrammeled Anglo-American capitalism. It exists in that disastrous form only
in a handful of countries. In those, it has been an unmitigated disaster.
Why do you object to controlled capitalism, Scandinavian capitalism? It's
successful, isn't it?
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