Devil Red

許勒及佛格森對於全球化(理論)的批判
http://www.benla.mymailer.com.tw/study/study-4.htm
劉世鼎
史勒與佛格森，兩位曾活躍於英語知識界的馬派傳播史學家，對全球化問題均有其定見。許勒(1991)認為，主流的全球化理論過於樂觀，「後」帝國主義時代尚未到來，要談解放仍言之過早。佛格森(1992)則批評，全球化根本是一套國際強權與跨國企業所形構出來的神話。以下將概述兩人對於全球化問題的看法。
史勒：全球化與帝國主義掛勾

Society as a Civil Association or an Enterprise Association
What, then, does Oakshott have to say about the character of moral and political life in the modern world? Oakshott's third major statement, his book On Human Conduct, seeks to delineate positively the forms of moral and political practice that distinguish the modern European state. Oakeshott begins by characterizing morality - at least in the terms in which we know it--as a noninstrumental practice. This is to say that moral life has no end, goal or telos outside itself, and it does not stand in need of any external justification. Further, Oakeshott avers, there is not a single or ideal form of ethical life of which the variety of forms of life of which the variety of forms of life that we find among us are approximations. Rather, moralities are akin to vernacular languages, in that it is the nature of them to be several and divers. If moral life is in this way non instrumental, and so in one sense purposeless, so also are law and the form of civil association that is created by the union of law with morality independent of any specific purpose.
We come here to one of the key concepts in Oakeshott's later work - the conception, which he finds prefigured in the thought of Hobbes and Hegel, of society as a civil association - an association of persons who having no ends or purposes held necessarily in common, nevertheless coexist in peace under the rule of law. On this account, the office of law is not typically to impose any particular duty or goal on men, but instead it seeks simply to facilitate their dealings with one another. Oakeshott goes so far as to claim that law does not restrict freedom at all, since it merely stipulates conditions and actions but does not enjoin or prohibit them. We need not endorse this perhaps exaggerated claim to find an important insight in Oakeshott's argument that the rule of law in a civil society is not that of promoting general welfare or any other similar abstraction, but rather of securing the conditions in which persons may contract mutually chosen activities. Thus, law seeks not to impose on society any preferred pattern of ends, but simply to facilitate individuals in their pursuit of their own ends. Law itself has, for this reason, no purpose.
In modern societies, a powerful rival has emerged to this conception of civil associations as association under independent general rules--the conception of society as an enterprise association. In this latter conception, which is perhaps coeval with that of civil association, the state is understood as an organization for the attainment of a definite end, or hierarchy of ends. It is so understood by Bacon (who saw the end of government in the exploitation of the earth's resources), by the mercantilists (who affirmed it to be the increase of national wealth), and by sundry positivists and their disciples such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb. This collectivist conception of society and government, while it has never completely extirpated the inheritance of civil association, has been dominant in our times - most clearly and widely in Soviet communism and National Socialism, but also in the New Deal, the mixed or managed economy, corporatism, and "welfare capitalism." The idea of the state as an enterprise association, whether it be the idea of the Fabians or of Mussolini, of Bacon or of Auguste Comte, is an idea inimical to any notion of a civil association among persons linked only by their common subscription to a noninstrumental rule of law. The idea of the state as an enterprise association is therefore inimical to the European achievement of individuality, whose political embodiment is in civil association.
The idea of enterprise association has been given practical reinforcement, according to Oakeshott, by a widespread revulsion from the ordeal of individuality that has accompanied civil association almost form its inception. This revulsion is expressed in the character Oakeshott calls the anti individual or individual manqué, who (unwilling or unable to shoulder the burden of freedom, still less to celebrate it) aims to create a compulsory community of others like himself in which the voice of individuality has been silenced. As Oakeshott has said, " The circumstances of early modern Europe bred, not a single character, but tow obliquely opposed characters, that of the individual and that of the individual manqué: and in one idiom or other they have been with us ever since those times." For Oakshott, the individual manqué of early modern Europe was the prelude to the modern anti-individual.

Michael Oakeshott and the Political Economy of Freedom
BY JOHN GRAY
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John Gray is a Fellow of Jesus college, Oxford University, Research for this article was undertaken during a period of residence as Distinguished Research Fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
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http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/fs.htm
The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995).
Moving from Nazi Germany to the United States, the Frankfurt School experienced at first hand the rise of a media culture involving film, popular music, radio, television, and other forms of mass culture (Wiggershaus 1994). In the United States, where they found themselves in exile, media production was by and large a form of commercial entertainment controlled by big corporations. Two of its key theorists Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno developed an account of the "culture industry" to call attention to the industrialization and commercialization of culture under capitalist relations of production (1972). This situation was most marked in the United States that had little state support of film or television industries, and where a highly commercial mass culture emerged that came to be a distinctive feature of capitalist societies and a focus of critical cultural studies.
During the 1930s, the Frankfurt school developed a critical and transdisciplinary approach to cultural and communications studies, combining political economy, textual analysis, and analysis of social and ideological effects of. They coined the term "culture industry" to signify the process of the industrialization of mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives that drove the system. The critical theorists analyzed all mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the context of industrial production, in which the commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification. The culture industries had the specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into its way of life.

http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/

http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html
Todd Kappelman
The High Priest of Pop-Culture
In this article we will begin an examination of someone who most people do not know, but who is considered by many to be the first father and leading prophet of the electronic age, Marshall McLuhan. A Canadian born in 1911, McLuhan became a Christian through the influence of G.K. Chesterton in 1937. He wrote his monumental work, one of twelve books and hundreds of articles, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in 1964. The subject that would occupy most of McLuhan's career was the task of understanding the effects of technology as it related to popular culture, and how this in turn affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities. Because he was one of the first to sound the alarm, McLuhan has gained the status of a cult hero and "high priest of pop-culture".{1} This status is not undeserved, and McLuhan said many things that are still pertinent today.
His thought, though voluminous, is frequently reduced to one-liners, and small sound bites, which sum up the more complicated content of his probing and rigorous examination of the media, a word that he coined. Concerning the new status of man in technological, and media-dominated society, he said:

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1663
January 31, 2006
Robert Higgs
The Freeman
Full-fledged corporatism, as a system for organizing the formulation and implementation of economic policies, requires the replacement of political representation according to area of residence by political representation according to position in the socioeconomic division of labor. The citizen of a corporate state has a political identity not as a resident of a particular geographical district but as a member of a certain occupation, profession, or other economic community. He will probably be distinguished according to whether he is an employer, an employee, or self-employed.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=3054
By Robert Locke
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 13, 2002
We are probably heading into some economic heavy weather which will spur needed debate on what's right and wrong with our economy. This will require our being clear about what kind of economy we really have. I have mentioned before that we increasingly live not in a capitalist society but in a corporatist one, and I would like to flesh out this notion.
What is corporatism? In a (somewhat inaccurate) phrase, socialism for the bourgeois. It has the outward form of capitalism in that it preserves private ownership and private management, but with a crucial difference: as under socialism, government guarantees the flow of material goods, which under true capitalism it does not. In classical capitalism, what has been called the "night-watchman" state, government's role in the economy is simply to prevent force or fraud from disrupting the autonomous operation of the free market. The market is trusted to provide. Under corporatism, it is not, instead being systematically manipulated to deliver goods to political constituencies. This now includes basically everyone from the economic elite to ordinary consumers.

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0411e.asp
by Anthony Gregory, Posted February 23, 2005
Principled advocacy of the free market requires an understanding of the differences between genuine free enterprise and “state capitalism.” Although the Left frequently exaggerates and overemphasizes the evils of corporate America, proponents of the free market often find themselves in the awkward position of defending the status quo of state capitalism, which is in fact a common adversary of the free marketer and the anti-corporate leftist, even if the latter misdiagnoses the problem and proposes the wrong solutions.
Indeed, corporatism, implemented by the state — whether through direct handouts, corporate bailouts, eminent domain, licensing laws, antitrust regulations, or environmental edicts — inflicts great harm on the modern American economy. Although leftists often misunderstand the fundamental problem plaguing the economy, they at least recognize its symptoms.
Conservatives and many libertarians, on the other hand, frequently dismiss many ills such as poverty as fabricated by the left-liberal imagination, when in fact it does a disservice to the cause of liberty and free markets to defend the current system and ignore very real and serious problems, which are often caused by government intervention in the economy. We should recognize that state corporatism is a form of socialism, and it is nearly inevitable in a mixed economy that the introduction of more socialism will cartelize industry and consolidate wealth in the hands of the few.

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/corporatism.htm
Corporatism
In the last half of the 19th century people of the working class in Europe were beginning to show interest in the ideas of socialism and syndicalism. Some members of the intelligentsia, particularly the Catholic intelligentsia, decided to formulate an alternative to socialism which would emphasize social justice without the radical solution of the abolition of private property. The result was called Corporatism. The name had nothing to do with the notion of a business corporation except that both words are derived from the Latin word for body, corpus.
The basic idea of corporatism is that the society and economy of a country should be organized into major interest groups (sometimes called corporations) and representatives of those interest groups settle any problems through negotiation and joint agreement. In contrast to a market economy which operates through competition a corporate economic works through collective bargaining. The American president Lyndon Johnson had a favorite phrase that reflected the spirit of corporatism. He would gather the parties to some dispute and say, "Let us reason together."
Under corporatism the labor force and management in an industry belong to an industrial organization. The representatives of labor and management settle wage issues through collective negotiation. While this was the theory in practice the corporatist states were largely ruled according to the dictates of the supreme leader.