File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9711, message 13


Date: 	Sat, 1 Nov 1997 13:33:45 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-phoenix.princeton.edu (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-I: David Harvey on the Communist Manifesto


Louis P, you have to put James H's paeans to bourgeois industrial growth in
perspective. He is from a country that lost industrial leadership a century
ago. And in its place the mighty Brits now live off City transactions,
North sea oil exports, and illegal arms sales befitting a rogue nation. It
is in this context that James' promulgation of large-scale industrial
technical projects can seem progressive. Of course what is really bothering
the Brits is that their industrial production has been so stagnant that
dynamic East Asian firms have exported industrial capital in order to take
advantage of the low wages for a massive industrial reserve army of labor.
You have to understand how much that hurts. In the face of such
humiliation, you can't expect someone to think of the global ecological
consequences of global industrial growth; all he will want is some more of
it. There is another interesting aspect to it. Just like it fell to the
German idealists to theorize the French Revolution because they weren't
really making one, it is interesting today that the economic theory which
is most brilliantly attentive to technological change as the pulse of
economic growth is produced by economists from the nation which has had the
least of it--I am referring here to Chris Freeman, The Economics of
Industrial Innovation.

All the best,
Rakesh




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