Saturday, December 25, 2010

Holiday Reading, Part 2

Presents unwrapped, getting prepared for dinner, and I'm still chuckling to myself about a passage that I read yesterday from David Harvey's The New Imperialism. Discussing the rise of the 'Washington Consensus' and the rapid dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, he writes:
to top it all, the end of the Cold War suddenly removed a long-standing threat to the terrain of global capital accumulation. The collective bourgeoisie had indeed inherited the earth. Fukuyama prophesied that the end of history was at hand. It seemed, for a brief moment that Lenin was wrong and that Kautsky might be right-- an ultra-imperialism based on a 'peaceful' collaboration between all major capitalist powers (now symbolized by the grouping known as the G7, expanded to the G8 to incorporate Russia, albeit under the hegemony of US leadership) was possible...
We all know how well that peace turned out.

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