Date: Mon, 11 Aug 1997 07:09:30 +0100 From: Chris Burford <cburford-AT-gn.apc.org> Subject: M-I: Adam Smith Institute goes socialist This morning the British government announced that it will be keeping a national register of paedophiles and rapists and allowing the police limited powers to disclose the names. At the same time the Adam Smith Institute is proposing a log-book for houses to aid house-purchasing. The Adam Smith Institute is the think tank much loved by Margaret Thatcher which has spearheaded the idea that everything works out for the best through the market as with an invisible hand, and regulations should be a minimum. This is a distortion of Adam Smith who in fact assumed the existence of civil society for the supposed free-flow of commodity exchange. What I am catching trying to catch however, by my of course deliberately provocative title, is that this proposal, even if it only turns out to be a discussion paper, is symptomatic that there are two countervailing tendencies going on. On the one hand the deepening and intensification of the transformation of every human activity into commodities and the increasing speed with which these are exchanged, and on the other, the technology and methods of work of the information age is expanding as fast and can coordinate, regulate and adjust this process. Such a log book for house purchases is eminently rational and will be seen as such by the privileged middle strata of modern capitalist society, who are lucky enough to have houses. For them buying and selling a house is one of the most stressful life events and they might well welcome this. So no votes would be lost. This Adam Smith paper is also almost certainly a response to the new Labour Government calling for ideas about how to make the process of buying and selling houses easier. It therefore illustrates the success of the government in managing the processes of debate in civil society (which also preceded the announcement about sex-offenders). The Adam Smith Institute would therefore appear to have just made a socialistic type of proposal: for the regulation of the exchanage of the important private acommodation market. The new government will carefully not accuse them of going socialist but may well look at their ideas. But I think this is inherently a socialist move, and over a period of decades has other possibilities as well. It is a straw in the wind. Comments? Chris Burford London. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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