Date: Mon, 30 Dec 1996 17:43:19 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: M-I: Re: This Troyka nonsense


[Bob M. puts the slipper into Joao and his alleged respect for Keynes thus:]

> And the unprecedented defense of Keynes! Well,
> what is happening to all those great reforms by the Social Democrats who got
> their second chance thanks to Stalin and the Imperialists now! The great
> Keynes rescue was in fact dip shit! What is happening today is that all that
> stuff is being quickly taken back as the bougeoisie now declares war on its
> own working classes. Why?  Is it because Keynes worked? What a joke.

[Joao responds with:]  'Keynesianism (the economic doctrine that those
politics represented) was an unprecedented mega-hit for capitalism. I hope
you're not insinuating I'm a converted myself.'

[Just as the British state revived paternalism to emasculate the workers'
movements and thus stabilise industrial capitalism in 1824 so were elements
of Keynes's General Theory appropriable by the state in the 1930s. Francis
Place's 'sound' political economy' worked (although he never saw the
underlying structural flaw posed by the factory system) because the state
was up to the task (it could enforce 'Factory Acts', inhibit technology
diffusion and maintain apprenticeship standards).  The 'Keynesian'
manipulation (apostraphes because Keynes had many reservations concerning
the mode of adoption of his theories) of demand by state priming 'worked'
for forty years because the state was up to the task.  I suspect that
neither the material nor the discursive conditions of today would allow
such discretion by the state.

I think that this suspicion forms the basis of my disagreement with Lou
Godena's conception of the near-to-mid-future.  The western working class
is in for some real attacks on their variable notions of 'moral economy',
on their sense of agency, on their sense of security, and on their
disposable incomes.  

While I see much sense in Lou G.'s notion of '3rd World' resistance as a
central world dynamic (and even there useful mass indignation often comes
about only after the culture that had once proffered food, shelter, status
and order has already been undermined beyond redemption - I think Ghana and
much of India provide good examples), I see also the possibility of a
dawning class consciousness in the west - I say 'possible' because of my
unforgivable Kautskyist tendencies and my fears that we lefties may be too
busy shrieking at each other to converse with our bemused potential
comrades.

The western working class must develop as 'third world' agitation develops
- otherwise it could easily become, as it has before, the blunt instrument
of corporate capital's reprisals against the recalcitrant 'south'.  Waddya
reckon?

Rob.]






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