From: Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Date: Fri Feb 28 2003 - 23:47:21 MST
Via lewrockwell.com
<<One of the best treatments of this subject I’ve recently encountered
is by a French scholar who teaches at the London School of Economics,
Nicholas Guilhot; he delivered the study at the most recent plenary
gathering of the French Political Science Association in Lille. What
makes this paper, which a former student of mine sent from France,
especially intriguing is that Guilhot is clearly on the Marxist Left
and, moreover, apparently unfamiliar with my writings. Nonetheless, he
arrives at identical conclusions about "la matrice trotskiste" that
nurtured the neoconservative view of the American managerial state as an
instrument of world revolution.
...
The notion of "permanent revolution" drawn from Trotskyist ideology is
given a new meaning by being linked to an expansive American public
administration that tries to replicate itself throughout the world. And
though neocons in the seventies and eighties turn fanatically
anti-Communist, Guilhot recognizes that his subjects are "anti-radical
radicals," opposing the Communists for betraying the revolutionary vision.
Alan Wald makes the observation that "the anti-Stalinist Left moves to
the right for social and not ideological reasons." What may be more
accurate to say is that they appear to move to the right in response to
improved social positions, especially after taking over policy positions
in the Reagan administration from a WASP establishment gone bad in the
teeth. But this ascent to power does not really signify that those who
are ascending are on the right. It merely enables the ascending group to
pull toward the managerial Left the American Right and Right Center,
while concluding a compromise with corporate capitalists.
In return for the support of an expanding welfare state, neocons would
deal Big Business in, exactly the way the Fascists did with European
capitalists, that is, conditionally. Thus neocons would defend
"democratic capitalism" or a mixed economy, together with global
democratic military crusades and the opening up of foreign markets as a
method of global transformation. Guilhot notes that the neocon usage of
"modernization," since the popularization of the term by Lipset in the
fifties, has meant positive revolutionary change. It is a bootlegged
Marxist value judgment pretending to be a neutral descriptive term.>>
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried45.html
-Mike
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