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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: frankw1900 who wrote (60781)	12/9/2002 7:47:23 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Well, I appreciate the post, Frank, but I'm not at all certain just where to grab a piece of it for conversation. Let me simply go back to my point. There is a view of the late 19th century and early 20th century British and US history that emphasizes either a dynamics within capitalism that improves the lot of workers or a kind of "natural" evolution. Perhaps you favor that latter. The name I associate with it is the grand old man of British sociology, T. H. Marshall. I think both views are wrong. Rather, if we were to dig around in this issue for a while, and I'm definitely not suggesting we do for fear of boring everyone else on the thread, if we were to dig around in that history, we would run across a violent history of union clashes with companies, states, and, in some cases, the federal governments. Two of the outcomes of those struggles were an expanded franchise and union organizing rights. They were not products of benevolent business practices or benevolent governments. I think Marx missed that possibility. But I don't think it was possible for him to see it given the structural power configurations of mid 19th century England. For my money, those changes were the changes that made the difference.

To: frankw1900 who wrote (60781)	12/9/2002 8:23:34 PM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Respond to of 281500

What concerns Harris is the apparently widespread belief the US is getting rich from the impoverishment of 3rd world people. It's not even apparently.... this is incontestably the going dogma, what the French refer to as la pensée unique. But I would agree with Harris that this just doesn't follow from any objective analysis of world events. Just look at Africa which is currently the poster boy for dysfunctional governments and economic woes and humanitarian disasters of all sorts.. How much of this is due the ever evil USA ? Is the US somehow to blame for the endless interethnic genocides that are the lot of Africans ? For the kleptocracies lead by dictators who pocket monies loaded by the FMI ? The USA has not even been mixed up in colonization, that was Europe's affair. To a degree this is right because the US is the largest exemplar of status quo but it's not the be-all and end-all of what's problematical. This just isn't true, at least in any meaningful time frame (ie, a little longer than one presidential mandate.) Just think of the social changes that have taken place here in the lifetimes of people like myself who were in college during the Vietnam war. The real reason for the United State's ascendancy to global status is our adaptability and value for the individual and his initiative. Not global pillaging as a "certain left" would have one believe. And people always overestimate what can be accomplished in a year and underestimate what will happen in a decade. I'm not very au courant with the more academic discourse on Marx (who has struck me as kind of a muddle headed thinker when I tried to look through Das Capital ages ago), but the basic thesis that everything has to be analyzed in terms of some mythical class struggle just doesn't stand up. This lack of clarity of Marx's work is one reason it was so easy for one murderous totalitarian 20th century regime after another to be based on "Marxist/Lennist Communism". It's not so easy to build big lies on clear and unambiguous statements about government and individual liberties. I see there are a google of unread messages and I haven't followed this whole topic thread back yet......