Profit and loss

[jbor]

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>From: Mike Weaver <mikeweaver at gn.apc.org>

> 
> Anti-capitalism isn't an ideology which can be logically reduced to false
> perceptions, but a dialectical reaction continually developing within
> capitalism's workings. The first wave of anticapitalism may have failed,
> but the next one's already agrowing.

I can see where Mike Weaver is coming from, and how he wants to sound all
resolute and last laughing like Marx of the _Eighteenth Brumaire_ after the
failure of 1848 (unfortunately, however, he's sounding to me more and more
like Lex Luthor), but it still takes an incredibly *selective* reading of
the novels and non-fiction to yoke Pynchon to the political mill of the
_Communist Manifesto_, or even _Das Kapital_ -- to *any* political mill in
fact -- because such undivided political commitment is (imo purposely) never
evident in the texts, sympathies for one or another character or movement or
system are almost always immediately undercut. (This would be the essence of
a true dialectic btw.)

"An Army of Lovers can be Beaten." The Counterforce, like the Trystero or
the 60s counter-culture, was and is a dud. Blicero and even Foppl are not
condemned outright. And so on.

And it would be easy to bring up Marx's essay 'On the Jewish Question' (and
Pynchon's comments about Marx as a "sly old racist" in _GR_), or to note
that the Nazis proclaimed themselves as National *Socialists*, and so
propagandise against Leftist ideology in the way that Bentham has been
bowdlerised here or the surreptitious insinuation that globalisation equals
totalitarianism ... but all of that is just so much cheap rhetoric.

Irrespective of whether Pynchon does actually wear tie-dye and advocate the
dismantling of the projected *global* economy which the anti-globalisation
protesters are calling for, there is near enough to unanimity amongst
*academic* economists that economic *growth* (as opposed to a redistribution
of existing *wealth*) is potentially infinite, and that thus the cutting of
local trade tariffs across the board will result in long-term *sustainable*
benefits for developed and developing nations alike, whatever the short term
negative effect in terms of the redirection of domestic labour resources.
Indeed, it is certainly no accident that the current levels of trade
protectionism have given the advantage to the "massively-monied" developed
nations and international cartels: Japan, the EU, and the US; and that
*this* approach to global economics has to a large extent *caused* the
tragedies of poverty, famine and civil war in the developing nations of the
Third World in the last 50 years or so.

Putting aside ignorance, personal profit and nationalism, and the idea that
there are "sides", for a moment, and taking into account the current state
of the global economy and international balance of power, what *positive*,
*practical* alternatives are being proposed by the anti-globalisation lobby?
Instead of sabotage and destruction why don't they offer something
constructive and conciliatory which the powers that be (corporate, national
governments, and international organisations and agencies such as the UN and
the WTO) might actually be disposed and able to work with.

I rather suspect that Pynchon's political sympathy, on a global and human
level, lies with preterite races and nations -- with the Third World and the
suppressed indigenous and minority underclasses in the First and Second
Worlds -- rather than with those members of the petit bourgeoisie in the
West whose motivations often appear to be little more than financial
self-interest.

best


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                Unless we convince developing
    countries that globalisation really does benefit them,
      the backlash against it will become irresistible.
      That would be a tragedy for the developing world,
            and indeed for the world as a whole.
                                Kofi Annan, Seattle

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