Greed, Revolution, and Governance « naked capitalism

I’m generally very taken with Ian Welsh’s work, particularly two recent posts, A New Ideology and How to Create a Viable Ideology. He then continued with 44 Explicit Points on Creating a Better World. And I hate to say it, but the last piece was no where near as well thought out as the preceding pieces.

 

It can be extremely useful to throw out a bunch of ideas as a forcing device: you offer up best guesses and are explicit about that. The purpose is not to create agreement on them, but simply to advance thinking, perhaps get a closer approximation of where answers might lie, and also expose area where further investigation and thinking is needed.

 

But that isn’t what Welsh seemed to be doing. What troubled me about his latest piece was its combination of confidence (as opposed to modesty and soliciting reactions and input) in combination with it having internal contractions and a lack of precision of language. But perhaps the biggest shortcoming was trying to finesse the question of governance.

 

I’m not saying I have any answers to the Big Hard Problems of the day. But I think it’s important for us to keep trying to ask the right questions. That’s a necessary, though far from sufficient, condition for us to have any hope of pulling out of our collective nosedive we are in. (More)