Saturday, May 01, 2004
Web Kamm: the Sequel. posted by Richard Seymour
Regular readers will be aware that Oliver Kamm has been leaking heartily into my comments boxes with corrections, accusations, slanders etc. He made great fist out of the mis-naming of Professor Alan Budd, and what he alleged to be the mangling of a quote of his.A reader of my blog has sent me the relevant information and a couple of URLs.
Here is what Professor Budd told the BBC's Pandora's Box documentary programme in June 1991:
The nightmare I sometimes have about this whole experience runs as follows: I was involved in making a number of proposals which were partly at least adopted by the government and put in play by the government. My worry is as follows; that there may have been people making the actual policy decisions, or people behind them, or people behind them, who never believed for a moment that this was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did however see that this would be a very good way to raise unemployment. And raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes; if you like, that what was engineered there - in Marxist terms - was a crisis of capitalism which recreated the reserve army of labour and has allowed the Capitalist to make high profits ever since.
He then, apparently, appended the following observation :
Now... I'm not saying I believe that story but [that]... I worry whether that was... really what was going on.
There's nothing about this on the Beeb's own website, so I have no way of checking whether or not that exhausts the quotation. Perhaps he then went on to say: "And that's exactly the sort of thing the anti-semitic and totalitarian Socialist Worker would have you believe! Now let me tell you the real story..." I am inclined to doubt it.
Interestingly enough, while Budd washes his own hands of such sordid exercises, he does offer the tantalising possibility that this is what was happening. We know at any rate that the Thatcher government was intent on breaking the power of the organised working class, a plan formulated in broad-brush terms in the Ridley Report .
Since Kamm has proven himself to be little more than a troll, and since he is obliged to pad out his rather thin and empty critiques with personal insults, smears and irrelevancies, I shall have nothing more to say about him here. Let's get back to some real issues.