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otto---interesting.
i wasn't arguing that capitalism is over with. it's mutated again, this time i think beyond the nation-state so quite beyond the whole range of political and legal institutions that arose by degrees across the "long 19th century"
(so from say the french revolution through the early 1920s, the modern state trending toward the nation-state, which was dominant after world war 1 as the political form symmetrical with captialism as a mode of production, so as more than a system of ownership and way of organizing how stuff gets made)...
the american empire rested on the lattice of transnational structures set up after world war 2 in order to stabilize states at the level of currency and military action. the process of leaving nation-states behind didn't really get started until the 1970s though, and unfolded like most such processes do incrementally, incoherently, in fits and starts with things like the internet playing a considerable role.
this outstripping of nation-states poses some very basic political questions most of which are not easy and most of which will probably have to be addressed sooner or later (what legal framework can regulate capital flows that move across national boundaries in an instant, for example....what legal structures can regulate TNCs? on and on....how are these structures to be made politically responsive to people? what would it mean for them not to be responsive? these are pretty basic questions, dont you think?)
but right now, they're not being touched. better to pretend nation-states still matter and that market capitalism is still a useful metaphor for thinking about the complex socio-economic system of systems that we live under.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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