Too Many Kinds

I just heard Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel parrot the line "There are many different kinds of capitalism." A vast array of both liberal and conservative defenders of the profit system are using this tack and so I started compiling a (partial) list of the various "kinds". Here we go:
Anglo-Saxon, Mercantile, Industrial, financial, State Welfare, state guided, family,entrepreneurial,oligarchic,managerial/big firm, regional/national such as Chinese, Nordic, South Asian etc.., crony, vulture, hyper, mutated, raw, pure, corporate, neoliberal, new, conscious, natural, rogue, late. Whew.

The problem with these types of categories is taxonomic. There are not enough quantitative differences to become qualitative. Each "kind" bleeds into the other and as you add and add the difference goes from negligible to incoherent. Add a little state, subtract a little individualism, throw in a dash of democracy or corruption, stir. Still capitalism. They all breed with each other so they are all the same species and it is far more useful to talk about the traits they have in common than their comparatively petty differences. Unless you are just trying to muddy the water.

Speaking of muddy, Barry Lynn's piece Killing the Competition in the Feb. Harpers is an opaque paean to those "real", "open", markets you hear so much about but never actually see. "REAL MARKETS have equality between buyer and seller, perfect transparency and", I love this, " a tendency to deliver egalitarian outcomes."

Barry locates the Open Markets for us: "The revolutionary achievement of the American people two centuries ago was not merely to establish an independent republic. It was to prove that every citizen in that republic could be independent , economically as well as politically." Uh huh. Every "citizen". The "open markets proved to be as fundamental to our democracy as the ballot box." It's like being back in sixth grade.

Of course, "right from the beginning these markets proved hard to keep." You had the "lords of industry and the prophets of socialism joining hands to defend the "scientific" rationalization" but the people and Wilson fought them off and began "restoring some of the open markets we had lost". Unfortunately, "by the 1970's our open markets were once again under siege."

Even if you can get past the revisionism, the thing that jumps out is his lack of curiosity. He never asks WHY. How do you sell such complete bullshit to Harpers?