“Saving Capitalism demands a third way –not rigid Republican conservatism or blind Democratic state interventionism, but a new politics in which the state focuses, laser-like, on advanced capitalism’s unique threats to private life, while leaving much of the free market intact.” –from the summary of Ronald Dworkin’s How Karl Marx Can Save American Capitalism on the back of the book….
I would also extract a quote from one of my earlier posts on this:
“The problem for me, as concerns Dworkin, is that he is using this issue to present the same old nonsense that other neo-liberals and FreeMarketFundamentalists have: that Adam Smith pastoral vision of everyone pursuing their interests and exchanging their goods –something that might have worked when everything was artisans, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and family farms, but could hardly work with the population dynamics we are dealing with now. This is why he keeps trying to make the distinction between “crony Capitalism” and “advanced Capitalism”.
This becomes apparent to me in Dworkin’s hard-on with guilds –think unions here (his understanding of “crony Capitalism” (who shut down outsider approaches to a given market. And this is right out of the Libertarian playbook as described by Andre Marrou in the 1992 independent debate with Lenora Fulani of the New Alliance party. Marrou turned to the sentimentality of a woman in the ghetto who could turn her living room into a hair salon. But as nice as that sounds (and it is worth considering as concerns policy), it’s little more than a diversion from our obligation to take care of the less fortunate among us –that is since anyone of us could end up in a less fortunate situation.
What he is feeling like to me is a FreeMarketFudamentalist who is turning to the novelty of being one who can talk about Marx without expecting psycho shrieks.”
And I think the former quote clearly gets at my concern. I mean you have to ask how “the state” solves any problem that Capitalism presents without “intervention”. And, unfortunately, the conclusion of the book (as of this reading (does not offer any concrete solutions to the problems he is pointing out –that is outside of a section, “The Future of American Conservatism”, in which he seems to be suggesting that conservatism return to its old role as check and balance to progressive excesses while recognizing the very real consequences for individuals: the molecular as compared the molar. As the summary also says earlier:
“In the past, capitalism’s weak spots were obvious: sweatshops, workhouses, and hunger. The twentieth century welfare state saved capitalism by fixing them. Today’s weak spots are less obvious; they don’t even seem related –mass loneliness, a declining birth rate, young people postponing adulthood, and workers using sleep aids to function on the job.”
And I get this -that is in the same postmodern sense that Dworkin seems to be broaching. But Dworkin seems to be dismissing the postmodern approach by failing to recognize the cultural shift from the Marxist emphasis on exploitation through production to the postmodern emphasis on exploitation through consumption. And it seems to me that any attempt to check the latter exploitation will, by its inherent nature, require state intervention via regulation and expansion of the public economy.