Re: IMF & Relative Autonomy
On Apr 13, 2007, at 2:42 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:
de Rato/Wolfowitz fuse neocon backgrounds/interests with BWI
neoliberalism
How? They don’t seem terribly active or coherent, compared to the
Clinton years. Neocons have historically not shown much interest in
economics - and I mean that going back to the 70s, when Irving
Kristol et al were inventing neoliberalism, not just in the more
recent, PNAC sense. I’m reading Sidney Blumenthal’s excellent book,
The Rise of the Counter-Establishment - just read the Kristol section
last night, in fact. Kristol says the problem with businessmen (his
gendering, not mine) was that they thought economically, not
politically - the mission of the new right was to recruit big biz to
its cause, and Kristol was in the lead. Blumenthal attributed that
insight to Kristol’s old Trot days, citing Lenin on trade-union
consciousness. (Blumenthal reads like someone who spent some time on
the left.) The promotion of the political over the economic still
seems characteristic of neocon thought. So what’s neocon about the
BWIs today? And de Rato is Spanish - they don’t have Kristols in
Spain, do they?
Doug