In other words, the Beckert recipe is: start with Marx and “primitive accumulation“, both domestic and international. Marx had gleefully welcomed the imperialists’ destruction of the “semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities [of Bengal], by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the…
“@ViscidKonrad Man, if this doesn’t impress you, you’re *choosing* not to be impressed.” From: Noah Smith on Twitter: “@ViscidKonrad Man, if this doesn’t impress you, you’re *choosing* not to be impressed. https://t.co/RHqXRjU4WI”
Though Robin sometimes seems to intend to incriminate Hayek and others by association, as with the likes of Pinochet, perhaps as a way to emphasize his continued membership in good standing on the political Left, there is nothing in the core of his argument, as opposed to its trivial polemical decorations, that a Hayekian ought to find embarrassing. To the contrary, Robin attributes “profundity and daring” to Hayek and his marginal siblings. Thought through, Robin’s arguments may present at least as many difficulties to a leftist, including one operating from Robin’s own presumptions, as to a conservative or to a libertarian.
The two main alternatives that are put forward and passionately defended by partisans are utopian, not because they are particularly imaginative, but merely because they cannot be implemented. They cannot be implemented, or no one can quite be bothered to implement them, in part because we seem to be heading to where they lead, or to where they fail to lead, to nowhere, anyway.
“A Clash of Models” by James K – latest posting in the League of Ordinary Gentlemen’s virtual symposium under the question “What, if anything, is wrong with inequality?” – resembles previous submissions in that it seems to assume that something called “productivity” is virtually synonymous with “the good,” and furthermore is susceptible to simple quantitative amplification or augmentation – i.e., the more of it the better.
The argument wins out, on the basis of something like the Rawlsean compromise, but remains sustainable only within artificially defined borders without which its appeal to the pure selfishness of an utterly empty self would be exposed not just in its self-insignificance, but in relation to what must be destroyed to keep it materially if not morally alive – at least until the day that the absurdity by whatever unthinkable and therefore totally unexpected way impinges on it as though from the outside, the externality revealing itself as always having been internal after all.
If the system cannot enact what the system must enact, then the system must be replaced.
I’d meant to cut this one down, and save it for future reference and re-editing, but instead accidentally published the whole thing at Jonathan Bernstein’s (great) “plain blog about politics.” It’s kind of embarrassing to be caught depositing long, pretentious…
Owen Gray at Northern Reflections and The Moderate Voice takes a cue from Paul Krugman, whom, Gray concludes, “has a right to be pessimistic.” The powerful elites on both sides of the Atlantic suffer from group think. And, instead of…
Am about to disappear into Lakerdom – either a further descent into tedious misery, a temporary revival on the way to even deeper misery, or the Turning Point we’ve been waiting for and falsely identifying this whole desperately non-compelling season…
