Craner Explains Hayek to Padraig

Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Thankfully that doesn't concern me too greatly, i.e. exposure of the discourse. Obviously I'd be thrilled to have it be read, but mainly the utility of it all is 1) a forcing function for me to better understand the subject matter, and 2) public evidence of the measure of thought I've put into said subject matter, i.e. something I can just point to as an established track record.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Wonder if anyone here would take issue with this?

As regards the maturation of the neoliberal era, I will now highlight the emergence of certain corollary trends which are criticized from those perspectives, such as progressivism, concerned with collective welfare. Here again I will reiterate that the term ‘progressivism’ is here taken to mean a system of social, economic, and political values oriented around the general improvement of human welfare, and which frequently but not necessarily involves governmental programs which actively intervene in the economy on behalf of such welfare. Liberalism and in turn neoliberalism, on the other hand, are theoretically oriented around individual economic liberty and minimizing the role the government plays in shaping economies. Again, the key thing to understand about the development of the neoliberal era is how the reality of this era has become increasingly detached from what could be justified as its theoretical basis. Nonetheless, one can see how even the theoretical basis of liberalism and neoliberalism can appear antithetical to the values of progressivism, insofar as liberalism is not fundamentally concerned with collective welfare, but is rather concerned with individual economic liberty, with the assumption that such liberty will, in turn, result in the general prosperity and welfare of the public. The reality of neoliberalism demonstrates that liberalism, when it develops too far in the direction of laissez-faire and market fundamentalism, does not actually promote general prosperity and welfare, but instead, by virtue of the absence of democratic institutions capable of protecting free markets and actively ensuring welfare in manners compatible with free markets, merely promotes the private accumulation of wealth and power, often at the unjust expense of general welfare.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
dilbert1 said:
@Clinamenic I wonder what you’d make of the Cutrone review I posted above. This is a transcript of a short talk on Hayek and Friedman he gave in response to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. If you find it interesting (you seem to be economics-minded) you might then check out his review of Burns’s Friedman book.
Click to expand...
Yeah I only just now noticed that! Will check it out.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Craner may well go on to have made a sizable, if indirect, impact in the realm of peer-to-peer economics, by encouraging me to read this book.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
dilbert1 said:
@Clinamenic I wonder what you’d make of the Cutrone review I posted above. This is a transcript of a short talk on Hayek and Friedman he gave in response to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. If you find it interesting (you seem to be economics-minded) you might then check out his review of Burns’s Friedman book.
Click to expand...
This bit is interesting, not sure what to make of it though:

"Hayek and Keynes should not be opposed, but rather Hayek, as a classical liberal, was opposed to and warned of the dangers of the Fordist-national dimension of the emergent Keynesian-Fordist synthesis of social-politics and economics in the mid-20th Century."
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
This bit is also interesting, essentially calling for a marxian perspective against the statist approaches conventionally associated with marxism? Although I think I'd argue that Hayek's critique is more against statist approaches to organizing society, regardless of how nationalistic they were.

"Hayek’s critique of the “road to serfdom” and the potential unfreedom in early-20th Century “socialism” was specifically in its nationalist character, to which he opposed the freedom of earlier liberal and cosmopolitan capitalism. Hayek’s critique of the inherent affinity of fascism and Nazism with Stalinist national socialism and their shared roots inproblems of the character of pre-WWI ostensibly “Marxist” social democracy is profoundly insightful, and cannot be ignored by any purported Left that is concerned with the problem of freedom. A Marxian critique of such “Marxism,” that could satisfy these issues raised by Hayek and other classical liberals, was— and remains— necessary."
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
This bit is interesting too, about Friedman and Pinochet:


"But it is wrong, or at the very least not very useful, to try to prosecute Friedman by reference, for instance, to Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. For it was not the case that Pinochet was Friedman’s creature but rather the opposite: Friedman allowed his critique of the Keynesian-Fordist synthesis to be abused politically by the Right, and thus served ends other than freedom. Any “Left” opposition to Friedman would position itself not against his critique of Keynesian Fordism per se (however partial and one-sided it was in its wholesale advocacy of “capitalism,” and tendency, as previously indicated, to collapse the distinction between Keynesian economics and the Fordist state) but rather against the degree to which Friedman in his political thought and action became a figure of the Right. The Fordist state was not “anti-capitalist” but was an expression of inherent problems in the history of capital that drop out of Friedman’s account."
 
dilbert1

dilbert1

Well-known member
Clinamenic said:
essentially calling for a marxian perspective against the statist approaches conventionally erroneously associated with marxism
Click to expand...

Don’t let Jacobin magazine have the last word about Karl! By-the-book Marxists worthy of the name absolutely want to do away with the state. Until that goal can be realized, the Marxist perspective on the state is more or less that of classical liberalism: the state ought to be an instrument serving and presided over by civil society. Invert that relationship and you have the post-1851 Bonapartist state, which as increasingly more bloated, autocratic and repressive, is a much graver threat to the kind of free and open society wherein organization of the working class can take place most effectively, and which arose specifically in direct response to the first real historic wave of attempts at mass proletarian socialist revolution in Europe.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
dilbert1 said:
Don’t let Jacobin magazine have the last word about Karl! By-the-book Marxists worthy of the name absolutely want to do away with the state. Until that goal can be realized, the Marxist perspective on the state is more or less that of classical liberalism: the state ought to be an instrument serving and presided over by civil society. Invert that relationship and you have the post-1851 Bonapartist state, which as increasingly more bloated, autocratic and repressive, is a much graver threat to the kind of free and open society wherein organization of the working class can take place most effectively, and which arose specifically in direct response to the first real historic wave of attempts at mass proletarian socialist revolution in Europe.
Click to expand...
Yeah as I understand, "classical" marxism (if that tracks haha) involves a statist approach insofar as the means of production need to be seized and "self-abolished" a la communization - although I think the concept of self-abolition is too recent perhaps to be called classical?

In any case, yeah I agree, as far as I understand, that marxism doesn't involve a state in its utopian end.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top