File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9708, message 124


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.



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