On Fri, 27 Feb 1998, Richard K. Moore wrote:
>
> My counter-scenario is based, once again, on the petroleum industry
> microcosm. Here you have the first fully globalized markets, run by the
> first fully globalized corporations, and you can see what the capitalist
> endgame has been in this case.
>
> There is still competition, but it is entirely sisterly - they aren't
> trying to drive one another out of business. They collaborate in the
> global management of production, distribution, and pricing. After the
> first century or so of rapidly growing markets, expanding territories, and
> shakeout battles, the industry now operates by a "cash cow" ethos instead
> of a "growth" ethos. That is more like feudalism than capitalism. Each
> "sister" has its traditional sources and markets, just like lords had their
> own estates.
>
> The adjustment to a limited-growth environment did not involve collapse,
> and it has not led to a diminshment of corporate/elite ownership, control,
> or power.
>
> My claim then, is that we must seriously consider the possibility that
> coporate neo-feudalism, rather than socialism, may be the dialectic
> successor to capitalism, and that the transtion may not involve revolution.
> (Other than the revolution of globlization.) I believe, in fact, that
> the empirical evidence favors the neo-feudalist outcome.
>
I wonder why you find it necessary to cast "elite" motives in solely
material, profit-oriented terms. I hardly deny that economic factors are
of substantial importance in globalisation, but it seems that there is a
more fundamental ideational and sociocultural bedrock here as well.
Profit is an object of elite addiction only because it concretely
manifests and mediates certain moral sensibilities and virtues, which are
enshrined in the "thick" value system of the transnational elite and the
upper-middle 15% or so that constitutes its breeding ground. What of
self-absorbed moral relativism, a desire to eviscerate the public sphere,
and the centrality of competitive meritocracy in the self-conception of
these strata? You forget, in your enthusiasm for "fat-cat" rhetoric, that
the principal managers, apologists, policymakers, etc. of the NWO/McWorld
are, by and large, not of megacapitalist personal background. Rather they
have risen in an educational system ever more devoid of moral content,
imbibing its conventional wisdoms, and lack any sense of self-worth beyond
the cutthroat competition that they so desperately wish to see writ large
throughout society as a macrocosmic validation of their own perversities.
Maybe it discourages some of us to appreciate that the "enemy" is larger
than just a handful of "fat cats," and maybe it opens up a discomforting
can of worms when I suggest that we delve into the deeply rooted
psychology of 90% of the world's educated upper-middle strata. But by
failing to confront the real underlying issues head-on we are at risk of
misunderstanding 1) the world's most profound cleavages, 2) the potential
for historical critique and revolutionary appeals based on those
cleavages, and 3) the need to avert system-refining adjustment by an elite
that, based on this interpretation of its fundamental identity,
conceivably could make major structural concessions while preserving the
present ideational framework.
Regards,
--AKW
===============================================================================
Adam K. Webb
Department of Politics
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544 USA
609-258-9028
http://www.princeton.edu/~akwebb