As communists once did, today's capitalists blame any
failures on their system being 'impurely' applied
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/17/free-market-fundamentalists-think-2013-best
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That's the problem with development and progress: they are
always uneven, they give birth to new instabilities and antagonisms, they
generate new expectations that cannot be met. In Egypt just prior to the Arab
spring, the majority lived a little better than before, but the standards by
which they measured their (dis)satisfaction were much higher.
In order not to miss this link between progress and
instability, one should always focus on how what first appears as an incomplete
realisation of a social project signals its immanent limitation. There is a
story (apocryphal, maybe) about the left-Keynesian economist John Galbraith: before a trip to the USSR in the late 1950s, he
wrote to his anti-communist friend Sidney Hook: "Don't worry, I will not
be seduced by the Soviets and return home claiming they have socialism!"
Hook answered him promptly: "But that's what worries me – that you will
return claiming USSR is not socialist!" What Hook feared was the
naive defence of the purity of the concept: if things go wrong with building a
socialist society, this does not invalidate the idea itself, it simply means we
didn't implement it properly. Do we not detect the same naivety in today's
market fundamentalists?
When, during a recent TV debate in France, the French
philosopher and economist Guy Sorman claimed democracy and capitalism
necessarily go together, I couldn't resist asking him the obvious question:
"But what about China?" He snapped back: "In China there is no
capitalism!" For the fanatically pro-capitalist Sorman, if a country is
non-democratic, it is not truly capitalist, in exactly the same way that for a
democratic communist, Stalinism was simply not an authentic form of communism.
This is how today's apologists for the market, in an
unheard-of ideological kidnapping, explain the crisis of 2008: it was not the
failure of the free market that caused it, but the excessive state regulation;
the fact that our market economy was not a true one, but was instead in the
clutches of the welfare state. When we dismiss the failures of market
capitalism as accidental mishaps, we end up in a naive "progress-ism"
that sees the solution as a more "authentic" and pure application of
a notion, and thus tries to put out the fire by pouring oil on it.
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