Suppression of Alternatives

An interesting post over at Flagrancy to Reason. It's too complex to summarize adequately without, for all intents and purposes, pasting in the whole thing. So just go read it.

By way of inadequate summary, though, Buermann riffs off of Gabriel Kolko's remarks in The Triumph of Conservatism on the neglect of alternative models of economic organization. Because of the two parties' attachment to slightly different versions of the same centralized corporate-state system, and the mainstream socialists' technocratic assumption (shared by thinkers as diverse as Engels and DeLeon) that centralization was inherent in the nature of industrial production, decentralized and democratic alternatives were completely marginalized. Buermann draws a parallel to the active suppression of such alternatives in the Third World today, with the connivance of neoliberal economists like Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Krugman.