Hey David, there's more! I just added new comments from John and Bruce, and my responses, also a comment from Tim Dunlop, who writes the Substack "The Future of Everything."
So, when Nancy Pelosi says, “We’re capitalists and that’s just the way it is,” what does she mean? What version of capitalism is she invoking? (Great piece, btw)
Hey Tim, thanks--that is the question, ain't it? I think when Pelosi or your typical pol says such a thing, she means "We believe in markets as the groundwork of democracy, but we also know that self-regulating markets destroy everything--including themselves--once set free As Alan Greenspan says, market are social constructions with social purposes, and must be treated as such, as subject to democratic control." For the rest of us, we know that capitalism has an internal history. Its stages are (1) simple market or bourgeois society, (2) proprietary capitalism [on which see Phil Scranton's endless stream of books], (3) corporate capitalism, but there's no guarantee that the transition from one to the other will happen: some societies get to (1), but not to (2), and these are concentrated in what we used to call the Third World. The anti-corporate agenda of Vance, Hawley, et al., is actually an attack on "finance capital," which is why it fits so well with the (racist) rhetoric of anti-immigration, fear of the foreigner, etc.
Thanks for sharing this exchange.
Hey David, there's more! I just added new comments from John and Bruce, and my responses, also a comment from Tim Dunlop, who writes the Substack "The Future of Everything."
So, when Nancy Pelosi says, “We’re capitalists and that’s just the way it is,” what does she mean? What version of capitalism is she invoking? (Great piece, btw)
Hey Tim, thanks--that is the question, ain't it? I think when Pelosi or your typical pol says such a thing, she means "We believe in markets as the groundwork of democracy, but we also know that self-regulating markets destroy everything--including themselves--once set free As Alan Greenspan says, market are social constructions with social purposes, and must be treated as such, as subject to democratic control." For the rest of us, we know that capitalism has an internal history. Its stages are (1) simple market or bourgeois society, (2) proprietary capitalism [on which see Phil Scranton's endless stream of books], (3) corporate capitalism, but there's no guarantee that the transition from one to the other will happen: some societies get to (1), but not to (2), and these are concentrated in what we used to call the Third World. The anti-corporate agenda of Vance, Hawley, et al., is actually an attack on "finance capital," which is why it fits so well with the (racist) rhetoric of anti-immigration, fear of the foreigner, etc.