<nettime> Social democrats to the rescue!!! --- yeah, right.

[Phil Graham <phil.graham@mailbox.uq.edu.au>]

At 02:19 AM 25/02/01 -0500, McKenzie Wark wrote:
>As a card carrying social democrat, that seems to me to be all that 
>politics is good for.
>And i am happy to spend my time among the grey and unfashionable
>types in the social democratic movement who try to do something
>to achieve it.

What is it that you're doing, then? Would you be a bit more precise? 
Everyone else seems to be a waste of time or completely wrong other than 
the social democrats. I'm also interested to know which card it is you're 
carrying. I thought you were a labour party member.

All I see in the "social democrats movement" is a pack of fashion-plates 
entirely lacking in ideas,  but overflowing in an insipid, spin-doctored, 
ahistorical, socially irresponsible "centrist" rhetoric designed to get 
POWER and nothing else. Nothing grey about that, really. I thought you were 
a Third Way fan, or is that the same as a social democrat?

Please explain.

Grab the tools from every political economist throughout history --- right, 
okay, BUT TO WHAT END? Does that include Schact? Because the modern finance 
system was designed by him for a specific purpose (WAR--POWER). The current 
system could have been (in fact was) designed by Hitler's finance minister.

If you want to find a thread that runs through all of political economy, 
whether Marx, Hayek, Keynes, Smith, Schumpeter, or any of the Austrians or 
the Chicago school or whatever (you seem to make no distinction between 
"economics" and "political economy"),  you will come up with Aristotle. 
That's why whenever any "economic system" is rigidified, abstracted from 
reality, (mathematically) cleansed of internal contradictions, and pushed 
to its limits, it collapses.

Just like this one is.

Phil

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