(OPE-L) From William J Blake

From: Rakesh Bhandari (rakeshb@STANFORD.EDU)
Date: Tue Dec 09 2003 - 11:55:49 EST

One cannot abstract from the history of capitalism its constant wars,
either at home or in the colonies, its armaments, its large military
establishments, its struggles for plunders, its terrible human and
material costs, and then assert that such things, enormous as they
are, are excrescencies.  The idea of abstraction is dear to these
economists, but it is not an act of legitimate abstraction.  They
choose to assume that an ideal system of production and exchange goes
on: that this system operates without political consequences, that it
can thus be viewed as having a normal existence independent of its
action in most countries, in a large part of the course of economic
history.  Now, abstraction is legitimate as a weapon of exploration.
One can go beneath the great indicative appearance of capitalism and
seek to isolate its law of wages, prices, interest, rent, profit,
etc.  But from that to refusing to consider the costs of its actual
working out, when making a specific analysis, there is no
relationship at all.  The persistent tendencies of any system
culminate in its political manifestations, and wars and destruction
are no more to be reckoned out of the costs of capitalism than its
payments for machinery. The system of supply and demand does not
achieve economic harmony such that it avoids crises and wars. These
inflect its course.  It is a masquerade of inflation, bankruptcy,
boom and bust, fraud, unemployment, race hatred, colonial oppression,
war, devastation, reconstruction. This Satanic medley is what it is:
there is no pure system operating outside of all these
consequences and which would prevail, a Platonic ideal, were it not
disturbed by these recurrent miseries and shame, apparently arising
out of another world?"

 From William J. Blake in an unpublished mss Imperialism from 1948.

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