Newt the Historian, Mitt the Capitalist

Newt the Historian, Mitt the Capitalist

Newt the Historian, Mitt the Capitalist

After many months of debating and politicking, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have moved to the head of the Republican presidential pack. Here, we call the reader?s attention to two Dissent articles from the archives that might help us better understand Newt?s big ideas and Mitt?s big bucks.

First, Paul Ocobock offers a reading of Gingrich?s dissertation from Tulane University, on Belgian education policy in the Congo.

It is not too hard to reconcile PhD Gingrich of 1971 and Politico Gingrich of 2010. His younger self was aware of the limitations and failures of colonialism but was enamored of its possibilities?if only the Belgian colonial government had done more, if only it had developed more advanced educational facilities, if only they had more time. Of course, the clock ran out on colonialism because Africans fought for freedom. Maybe Politico Gingrich has his dissertation in mind when he chastises President Obama for being anticolonial. Perhaps he fears Obama might try to heal the legacies of colonial rule, address global inequalities, or worse, rethink the white man?s modernizing burden. At the very least, the dissertation shows that while we have no proof of Obama?s Kenyan, anticolonialist mindset, there is in fact evidence of Gingrich?s rather Belgian, colonialist worldview.

Second, Stephen F. Diamond unpacks the ?financialization? of the economy and asks whether private equity-held firms are so much worse than the publicly traded companies that preceded them.

Private-equity-led buyouts represent an evolution in the effort by a significant fraction of sophisticated players in the economy to forge new methods of managing and controlling the process of creating and appropriating value from the labor force on behalf of investors. It is possible that the concentration of expertise in finance with operational know-how may enhance the ability of capital to engineer greater returns. To recognize the magnitude of the accomplishment of PE funds is not to support the result. Instead, it helps to highlight the challenge for labor and the left. Private equity funds are doing what capital has always done and will continue to do unless an alternative form of organizing economic activity is established. A misguided fear of ?financialization? does not bring us any closer to exploring that alternative.

Photos by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons, 2011