<nettime> redirecting the capitalist thread

[Pit Schultz <pit@contrib.de>]

dear nettimers, 

thanks for your overwhelming response. we were expecting the most of
you in offline land, far away from the consoles. it becomes obvious
besides the fact that the Soros-connex contains all the elements of
'real fiction' that we should switch now with meta- and micro-commentary
to the newsgroup of Workspace which is currently hosted by V2east-syndicate:

  with a newsreader: news://www.icf.de/workspace.deep_europe 
  posting via e-mail: deep_europe@workspace.icf.de
  through the web-gate:  http://www.documenta.de/workspace   

the workspace interface is still a prototype but it should
work as a next step into the direction of a more open and distributed
info architecture allowing different styles of discourse/dialogue
within the nettime enviroment. we propose that longer contributions, 
articles, still go trough the list, while annotations, comments, 
talk, controversy should expand in new experimental zones to give
the often needed context for all that content..

                                                         Pit & Geert


ps+btw, the ongoing shift of media attention to Asia can have a healthy
effect on a certain euro-centrism and euro-culturalism, but besides 
the fascination with extreme growth, the 'tiger states' didn't
develope any answers yet on how to deal with 'delirous capitalism'.

"Although I made a fortune in the financial markets, I now fear that
the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the
spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open
and democratic society.  The main enemy of the open society, I
believe, is no longer the communist threat but the capitalist threat."
(Quote from Soros February 1997 Atlantic Monthly) 

here is a forward from soc.culture.vietnamese (check http://www.dejanews.com)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: [INTRO] Critics on George Soros' "The Capitalist Threat".
>From           "Thuyen Nguyen" <thuyen@spacelab.net>
Date           Mon, 28 Jul 1997 15:45:19 -0400
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 Hi Tan Trung,

Haven't heard from you for a while.

>One of those Thuyen Nguyen refered to was George Soros' article "The
>Capitalist Threat"
><http://www.theatlantic.com/atlantic/issues/97feb/capital/capital.htm>.

Beside George Soros, I recommended that readers who wanted to learn about
problems with neo-liberalism and global capitalism should read Bill
Greider's book "One World: Ready or Not".  There are numerous articles on
the problems with neo-liberalism from International Economic Policy
Institute.  In a theoretical level, I recommended John Rawls's "Political
Liberalism" which dealt with great excrutiation detail on the "just and
open society".

To continue the dialogue we started a few months ago, I thought Reisman's
criticism is beside the point. 
<http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jefferson_school/SOROSANX.HTM>.
Soros's point was that one cannot be doctrinaire especially with economic
doctrine because no one has complete knowledge about economic and social
dimensions of human society.  To this I must agree.  This whole
neo-liberalism economic policy has been taken too far. 
It has been turned into an economic religion in which no govt. should
ever do anything that would interfere with the market.  But the problems
that no one have yet addressed: 1) how long do we wait until the market
adjust?  2) Does the global  market ever adjust at all when women are being
beat up, sexually harassed and exploited economically at low-wage
manufacturing jobs?  3)  How do we reconcile the problem that global capital
is free but labor is restrained in the current neo-liberalism world?
Basically, the answer is to wait and doing nothing is better than doing
something.  This is not much of answer at all.  It is a convenient answer
for those with the capital and an inhumane response to those sufferings
under the weight of this economic religion.

Answers to neo-liberalism is being formed.  Alternate schools of thought are
coming out with a better economic theory one that balance economic freedom
with human dignity i.e. Jorge Castaneda, Bill Greider, Lester Thurow.   For
me, the dialetical conflict between capitalism and communism is over, and
we're coming into the next dialetical conflict between neo-liberalism and
liberalism and the synthesis of this conflict will hopefully be coming soon.

Regards, Thuyen Nguyen

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