| This is certainly not a comprehensive look at who has been cast aside. Luck of the draw as far as recent articles readily available to me; but even in such a brief scan you start to identify elements of a "common thread".
Who are some of our fellow inhabitants in "Those Who Have Been Shunned Land"?
Well, economists who fail to act as "High Priests of Progress", for one group. And, past communist and socialist elements within the Democratic Party.
Let's look first at a couple of recent articles by Dave Cohen of the "Decline of the Empire" blog. One was posted recently at "EnergyBulletin", and was entitled "Economists - The High Priests of Progress".
It's link is here:
http://www.energybulletin.net/...
You will note that within that article, there is an embedded link to another article back at the "Decline of Empire" site entitled "The Law of Civilization and Decay".
To see where the following excerpts are coming from, you can refer to those sources.
Excerpts - from "High Priests of Progress"
Rather, we must understand that the mission of economists, regardless of their theoretical persuasion, is to define those policies that best implement the unquestioned assumption of Progress, which has come to mean in our time the endless expansion of abundance of all resources and ever-wider consumption of those resources. The result of all this, if the Progress program were successfully carried out to its logical end, would mean that all people on Earth would have a well-off American's standard of living-or better.
However, if Progress is an illusion, and America has been in decline for decades according to the Law of Civilization And Decay, as I believe, and the proximate causes of our decline (e.g. the inordinate power of Wall Street) follow from that natural decay, then there is nothing to explain regarding the failure of economists to apprehend what was going on. All policies, in the context of the Empire's Decline, were bound to fail eventually. And are bound to fail. Economists could always be found who would endorse whatever policy was on the table. That is no less true today, after the crisis.
Morowski draws lessons from the manifest failure of economists to get it right. The first one, and the one most important for us, is This Is What Happens When You Banish History and Philosophy.
It was perhaps no coincidence that history and philosophy were the areas where one found the greatest concentrations of skeptics concerning the shape and substance of the postwar American economic orthodoxy. High-ranking journals, such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Political Economy, declared they would cease publication of any articles whatsoever in these areas, after a long history of acceptance. Once this policy was put in place, then journal rankings were used to deny hiring and promotion at the commanding heights of economics to those with methodological leanings. Consequently, the greybeards summarily expelled both philosophy and history from the graduate economics curriculum, and then they chased it out of the undergraduate curriculum as well.
In other words, economics became ahistorical. The triumph of Progress was so all-encompassing that there was no longer any need to study past financial crises or past anything else, including the rise & fall of civilizations. The Tech & Housing bubbles best illustrate this blindness. Economists were so sure that nothing could go wrong that they not only ignored the historical lessons of past financial crises that John Kenneth Galbraith laid out in A Short History Of Financial Euphoria, but they also denied that the bubbles were happening, period. Our High Priests would wonder aloud if it was even possible to identify bubbles, or simply praised the apparent "growth" you get as bubbles inflate.
Excerpts from "The Law of Civilization and Decay"
But "those who would predict tomorrow's economic states from a study of the economic states of Rome or Venice" overlooked the unprecedented abundance made possible by the productive system, which placed civilization on a new basis. Their apprehensions belonged to a "vanishing age of deficit" ... On the contrary, man's dominion over nature put an end to the "reign of want." according to Patten. "The social surplus is the superlative machine brought forth in the machine age for the quickening of progress."
Patten's optimism required the corollary assumption, directly opposed to the linkage of poverty and progress made by Henry George and Brooks Adams, that the growth of inequality could be reversed...
You can easily recognize the consumer society we live in today in Patten's views. The available "abundance" and our ability to consume are assumed to grow forever. Indeed, this is what Progress came to mean in the 20th century. Nothing has changed in this regard in 2010. That the available abundance might cease to grow or diminish in a new "age of deficit" is antithetical to our faith that Progress is inevitable & enduring.
The belief in this doctrine is nearly universal in our times. To dissent to the Progress paradigm in this day & age is to be cast as some kind of dystopian wacko. That there were other views of how the world works have long ago faded from memory. Simon Patten was responding to people like Henry George, who believed that the law of civilization and decay described below contradicted the notion of continuous improvement. Here is Lasch again, quoting from George's Progress And Poverty (1920)-
George's offense ... lay in his insistence that the theory of continuous progress-the "hopeful fatalism" that "now dominates the world of thought"-was contradicted by the "rise and fall of nations", the "growth and decay of civilizations." George did not deny that "we of modern civilization" stood "far above those who proceeded us." What he denied was that the achievements of modern civilization could be attributed to improvements now "permanently fixed in mental organization."
OK. It would seem that to be entrusted with true power today, you not only have to believe that 'Progress is inevitable and enduring', but that we have also mastered Nature in some kind of "Westworld" where nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong...
And if you don't believe that, then you have encountered one the classes of our shipmates here in "The Land of the Shunned" - those economists who are not 'High priests of Progress', and those historians and philosophers who think the 'social surplus machine' might break down.
Who else? Weren't communist and socialist elements once more prominent in the Democratic Party? What happened to them? Not that this next reference is any comprehensive answer, but it seems to give a look at part of the story.
Here is an article that reviews a 2008 book entitled "Hollywood's Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History", and comments on those times:
Article link is here:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2...
Excerpts from "The Anti-Communist Purge of the American film industry":
For opponents of the political and economic status quo, the events of the 1940s and 1950s in Hollywood raise a host of complex issues bound up with the Second World War, postwar society in the US, American liberalism, the film industry, the Communist Party and the general problems of the American left. Humphries approaches certain of these questions, and leaves some of the others aside.
Humphries broadly presents the anti-communist reaction of the postwar years as an effort by figures such as Hoover to defend the existing social order against the radicalism that had emerged in the working class and other social layers during the Great Depression. These oppositional elements had "joined forces in ways that threatened simultaneously the status quo, the supposedly classless nature of American society and the relations between groups and classes based on power structures so long in place that they were taken for granted."...
Screenwriters and actors began their union organizing efforts in the midst of the Depression. One of the catalysts was the attempt by the studios to cut wages by 50 percent in March 1933, the week of Roosevelt's inauguration. Meanwhile executives lived high off the hog; Samuel Goldywn was reputed to have bet $50,000 on a single card.
Screenwriters were the most consistently left-wing element in Hollywood, and a continual thorn in the side of the studios. The Screen Writers Guild was first established in 1933, with a number of present or future Communist Party members among its founders. Obstructions placed in its path by the employers, including the blacklisting of SWG members and the setting up of a rival, right-wing group, prevented the guild's full recognition until 1941.
... the labor struggles in Hollywood always had strong political overtones. As much as the studios prized their profits, powerful elements in the state and intelligence apparatus never lost sight of the ideological issues at stake. Having smashed radical unionism in the film industry, these reactionary elements, whose anti-communism "was soon to be made official policy" (p.71), turned their attention to purging left-wing writers, actors and directors.
The anti-communist purges should be placed in their broad historical setting, the condition of American capitalism at the end of the war as it pursued its geopolitical interests at home and abroad. US imperialism emerged from the war as the dominant world power. As it launched the attempt to "contain" communism internationally, it needed as well to decapitate workers politically at home and make certain that they would not threaten its global designs.
Unable to drive the working population, with its newfound confidence, back to Depression conditions, the ruling elite did the next best thing: it reinforced the grip of the anti-communist AFL-CIO union bureaucracies and helped keep the labor movement subordinate to the Democratic Party and bourgeois politics generally.
Establishment liberals, like the members of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), solidarized themselves with the witch-hunt, only requesting that it be done somewhat less heavy-handedly. An open letter from the ADA to HUAC's Thomas in October 1947, for example, argued, "Reckless attacks on liberals committed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the past have repeatedly strengthened the hand of communist agents." (pp. 98-99)
The various unions in Hollywood, once they were rid of left-wingers, fell in line with the anti-communist offensive, including, shamefully, the Screen Writers Guild. One Hollywood newspaper reported on December 24, 1947: "Full support and cooperation in meeting and solving the communist menace in movie studios has been pledged a producers' committee by AFL [American Federation of Labor] studio unions."
So, another group that was denounced and purged historically were the left wing writers of the Screen Writers Guild.
What happened this week with Gibbs and the Administration has happened before. Some scruffy populist or progressive groups ally themselves with the Democratic Party for some reason; the Republicans begin a campaign to say "look at those scruffy people you run with; denounce them" - and the "Liberal" establishment denounces them, with sincere apologies all around.
Ain't nothing new. So, we have been purged from the ranks of those who fail to properly honor the infallible social surplus machine. Are you ashamed of that?
Or kind of proud of the company you keep?
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