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Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 04:23:07
From: "Carl Remick" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Gray Reddens

[From Lingua Franca's "The Ex-Cons: Right-Wing Thinkers Go Left!"]

But there is a deeper reason for [former British New Right political
philosopher John] Gray's [leftward] turn: By itself, the market could not
sustain his affections. Without the Soviet Union and the welfare state as
diverting symbols of Enlightenment rationalism, Gray could no longer believe
in the market as he once had. The market, he now had to admit, sponsors a
"cult of reason and efficiency." It "snaps the threads of memory and
scatters local knowledge." He used to think that the free market arose
spontaneously and that state control of the economy was unnatural. But
watching Jeffrey Sachs and the International Monetary Fund in Russia, he
could not help but see the free market as "a product of artifice, design and
political coercion." It had to be created, often with the aid of ruthless
state power. Today, he argues that Thatcher built the free market by
crushing trade unions, hollowing out the Conservative Party, and disabling
Parliament. She "set British society on a forced march into late modernity."
Gray believes that "Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism
have much in common." Both, he writes, "exhibit scant sympathy for the
casualties of economic progress." There is only one difference: Communism is
dead.

[Full text:  http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0101/cover_cons.html]

Carl