Doug Henwood's Blog, page 63

Fresh audio product

Just uploaded to my radio archives:

March 27, 2014 Philip Shelley on firing tenured faculty in Maine (for more search this Twitter hashtag) • César Ayala (UCLA) and Rafael Bernabe (University of Puerto Rico), authors of Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898, on the Puerto Rican economic mess

Who will defend The Market?

Speaking of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Ryan Cooper points to anxiety on the right about its considerable splash, and its rigorous argument for the tendency of wealth to concentrate over time. He quotes James Pethokoukis of National Review, who worries that a New Marxism is afoot:

John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek famously squared off in the 1930s, Left versus Right. But when Keynes published his revolutionary General Theory in 1936, Hayek went silent. It was a de facto retreat that helped give free rein to anti-market forces — even if that was not what Keynes intended — for decades until Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote A Monetary History of the United States in 1963 and energized the intellectual fight against statism. Who will make the intellectual case for economic freedom today?

Pethokoukis, conceding that Piketty’s case is “well argued, [but] far from airtight,” doesn’t try the heavy lifting himself, though he does seem to be overdoing the threat to capitalism’s hegemony. Still, his anxiety is worth savoring.

The right-wing classics of the 1960s and 1970s—I remember them well, I was a follower for a bit—were published when their ideas were fresh arguments against a Keynesian orthodoxy. Fifty years later, with neoliberalism ideologically triumphant but presiding over vast social and ecological wreckage, it’s hard to imagine anything with the verve or persuasiveness of Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom being written (or tweeted) today.

Pethokoukis should also reflect on the remarkable things that Corey Robin got NR’s founder to say in Lingua Franca back in 2001:

William F. Buckley Jr. says, “The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.”

Sex is actually much better than the market, but let’s bracket that and consider as well what Corey got Irving Kristol to say:

“American conservatism lacks for political imagination. It’s so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left. If you read Marx, you’d learn what a political imagination could do.”

And, Buckley again:

At the end of our interview, I ask Buckley to imagine a younger version of himself, an aspiring political enfant terrible graduating from college in 2000, bringing to today’s political world the same insurgent spirit that Buckley brought to his. What kind of politics would this youthful Buckley embrace? “I’d be a socialist,” he replies. “A Mike Harrington socialist.” He pauses. “I’d even say a communist.”

The challenge, though, Buckley disclosed, was “conjoining all of that into an arresting afflatus.” But it’s not clear that the right has one of those at the ready either.

I review Piketty

Bookforum has unleashed my review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. The opening:

The core message of this enormous and enormously important book can be delivered in a few lines: Left to its own devices, wealth inevitably tends to concentrate in capitalist economies. There is no “natural” mechanism inherent in the structure of such economies for inhibiting, much less reversing, that tendency. Only crises like war and depression, or political interventions like taxation (which, to the upper classes, would be a crisis), can do the trick. And Thomas Piketty has two centuries of data to prove his point.

 

 

Fresh audio product

Just posted to my radio archives:

March 20, 2014 Anatol Lieven on Ukraine • Micah Uetricht, author of Strike for America, on the Chicago Teachers Union

Fresh audio product

Just added to my radio archives:

March 13, 2014 Andrew Ross, author of Creditocracy, on debt and resistance • Evelyn McDonnell, author of Queens of Noise, on The Runaways

March 6, 2014 Greg Grandin, author of Empire of Necessity, on the real history behind Melville’s Benito Cereno • Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore, on sex work as work

Fresh audio content

Just added to my radio archives:

February 27, 2014 George Ciccariello-Maher, author of We Created Chavez, on the unrest in Venezuela • Adolph Reed, author of this article, on the long, sad decline of the American left

Fresh audio product

Just added to my radio archives:

February 20, 2014 Richard Walker, co-author with Suresh Lodha of The Atlas of California, on the Golden State’s physical and social geography, history, economy, ecology

Fresh audio product

Sorry for the delay, but three shows freshly posted to my radio archives:

January 30, 2014 Laura Newland, author of Chasing Zeroes, on how Wall Street is messing up college life • excerpts from Kshama Sawant’s response to the State of the Union • Tom Philpott on GMOs and ag tech

January 23, 2014 Christian Parenti on nature, capital, and the state • Anne Elizabeth Moore on political unrest in Cambodia

January 16, 2014 Stephanie Coontz on why men need feminism • Branko Milanovic on the world income distribution (paper here)

Oops…

I forgot to change the year directory on the radio archive to /2014/, so the links I initially posted didn’t work. Now they do:

January 9, 2014 (back after holiday reruns) two interviews recorded on a visit to Lisbon: economist Ricardo Paes Mamede and labor historian Raquel Varela on Portugal and the eurocrisis

Fresh audio product

I visited Lisbon the week after Christmas and two of my souvenirs are the interviews that make up this show, freshly posted to my radio archives:

January 9, 2014 (back after holiday reruns) two interviews recorded on a visit to Lisbon: economist Ricardo Paes Mamede and labor historian Raquel Varela on Portugal and the eurocrisis