Re: Thinking out loud

THE VIEWS IN THIS MESSAGE ARE MY OWN AND NOT THOSE OF MY EMPLOYERS

Richard (and Louis)

Thinking out Aloud: I, too, don't think that there was a Reagan/Thatcher
revolution. In my understanding they represented a stage in the development of
capitalism over centuries; this stage was merely the increased vertical
expansion of capitalism with the end of the cold war, in one way, representing
the horizontal expansion of capitalism. (this is the essence of a lecture I gave
in Pittsburgh on 8 November)

On your suggestion that Marxism is out of touch with reality: It is about as out
of touch as Adam Smith, or David Ricardo was/is/can be said to be.

For example: I have studied (as a journalist, at the LSE, and now at the World
Bank) Globalisation quite intensively for the past 10 years and the best single
philosophical/theoretic explanation of this phenomenon, is in the Communist
Manifesto.

STARTS: "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a
cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the
great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the
national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have
been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new
industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all
civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material,
but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are
consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the
old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants,
requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In
place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have
intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in
material, so also i
n intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations
become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more
and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there
arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by
the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most
barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the
heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred
of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to
adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it
calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In
one word, it creates a world after its own image. " ENDS


Ismail




Ismail Lagardien
World Bank Institute
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