File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9706, message 15


Date: Sun, 1 Jun 1997 15:32:29 -0800
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-TH: The Illusion of State Socialism



>No no no, Rakesh, you're always attributing things wrongly to me. There was
>nothing hot in Clinton's 1992 campaign program.

But  you did write: "All that's left of his original 1992 campaign program
are tiny,mainly gestural, education tax credits." It seems to me that there
was something in his 1992 campaign program on which he reneged that is
bothering you--I just want to know what it is.

Now in regards to the original program, you say: "It was very small beer."
Well, that is what you are saying about what he did achieve--"gestural,
education tax credits." So what was more than gestural in the original
progam?

>The point is that its political message was the opposite of the austere turn
>Clinton eventually took. His 1992 platform said little about deficit
>reduction and deployed none of the hair shirt rhetoric that Mondale and
>Dukakis did earlier.

Are you surprised that Clinton has cut the budget in a regressive way?

>> If certain microeconomic policies are successful in sustaining a boom in
>>certain "core industries", at whose expense will this supply of credit be
>>achieved; how great the potential boom in the face of a global depression;
>>what will be environmental cost of such a boom, etc.?

>What microeconomic policies? What global depression? What boom?

>From my very rough understanding, industrial policy is based on this  idea
that certain industries represent core technologies (Thurow calls them
brainpower industries); that because of high capital and R and D costs, the
market can only withstand a few competitors in these advanced means of
production which thus tend to get higher ("disequilibrium") profit rates;
the government should help ensure national monopolization of these
industries through "microeconomic interventions" such as supply of credit,
procurement, R&D and tax policies ("picking winners"); that given such
government protection and higher profit rates, idle savings will flow into
these industries, stimulating a boom and, so the argument goes, higher
wages, and in turn stimulate consumer goods production and higher wages
there as well.

This is my sense of the basic idea of industrial policy, which may be
marginal today; however, since budget deficit reduction may not in itself
free savings for an investment-led boom, it seems possible that
interventionism of one sort or another will be called for.

Marxists should not become so obsessed with critiquing the ideology of free
markets that they fall in step with the new forms of interventionism which
may become necessary to restore capital accumulation, including--and
probably most importantly-- the organization of workers into unions by
which they will be controlled and regulated by the state in accordance with
the requirements of capital (I have friends who organize for the AFL-CIO
who after a few beers worry that this is what the new organizing drives may
amount to).

You also note that: "Thurow, Reich, and Tyson have next to no influence in
the higher Democratic circles. Nor with me either, in case you feel the
urge to attribute."

Well, first as Spulber notes, Thurow provided reasons why the Democrats
should not, as they did not, attempt demand side policies to compensate for
growing inequality and poverty (in this regard, he openly broke with the
illusion of state socialism). Here Thurow was not ignored.  From what I
understand Thurow makes close to $500,000/yr talking to businessmen, while
not serving as the lord of the MIT business department.  I am not so sure
how out of the mainstream his ideas really are.

Rakesh






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