In the fall of 1966, before anyone set foot on the moon, let alone Mars or Venus, a big comfortable vessel crossed our TV screens “to seek out new life and new civilizations.” Yet, even as it cruised by some colorful planet or whizzed through the cosmos, the Starship Enterprise, its cheery crew, casually clothed …
Continue reading 1966 and All That: Utopia, There and Back Again
Moishe Postone may have given us the most sophisticated philosophy of history (he would modestly insist on “critical theory”) for our era in his masterpiece Time, Labor, and Social Domination. He manages to re-conceptualize the strangely symbiotic histories of capitalism and socialism through a close and critical rereading of Marx’s Grundrisse and Capital. He uses …
Continue reading RUTGER BREGMAN’S “UTOPIA FOR REALISTS”: POSTONE MADE [TOO?] SIMPLE
Let's take a break from the Olympian perspective on policy with a left technocrat take on the developing scrum of Democratic presidential politics! David Leonhardt in this Sunday's New York Times does an excellent job on the policy side of that struggle with a highly perceptive article on Elizabeth Warren's agenda. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/opinion/sunday/elizabeth-warren-president-2020.html He starts with …
Our fearless (or fearful) forum moderator asked me to move the discussion of my previous blog post toward the realm of concrete policy and our current political situation. Rightly requested, but a slower process to respond to. Here is a start. First, my diagnosis of the problem of our economic regime was intended to address …
Walter Hook is right to say we don’t want a world of austerity, even if a righteous one. Thus, we support “growth,” but what kind of growth? We need to dig down below this simple positive term and look at how it is understood and where that understanding may be leading us. We have been …
Continue reading Growth vs. Anti-Growth: False Alternatives?
In today's NYT, Michael Tomasky posits inflation as the central cause of the turn away from New Deal Keynsianism. He certainly makes a good case that it was a prime propaganda tool fueling the Thatcher/Reagan, et al "revolution." But could it also have been a sign of a deeper limit to capitalist progress, one at …
Continue reading Inflation in the ’70s: the Limits of Shared Prosperity?
Honored . . . no, HAPPY to be invited to join the Left Technocrat Discussion Forum. "How can that be, Harris, you a hardcore Luddite?" "That's 'Luddite Hardcore'," I reply, "my musical genre (see the music festival I work on at HONKfest.org)." A LEFT technocrat critiques the technocracy in order to bend it to human …
Left Technocrat Discussion Forum 