This only works if you erase the distinction between economic
competition (participation in a game where the co-ordination language
is material exchange) and manichean conflict.
The characters on Potter's side of the struggle between Good and Evil
tend to hang together; they engage in some healthy academic competion
with each other (Hermione, for example, tends to keep her homework to
herself), but it is not "cut-throat" competition: it is generally
characterised by reciprocal altruism. Gryffindors routinely share
valuable information, and try to find ways to protect each other and
to make sure that everyone gets on OK, whereas Slytherins are bound
together by fear and ambition and will likely or not betray one
another when advantage beckons. Voldemort's followers are not
interested in *playing* the economic game: they're more about
eliminating the competition.
So the conflict in the Potter books is between "soft" capitalism
(based on a hackerish sort of ethic, which can perfectly well
accommodate co-operation, mutual respect and solidarity in the face of
a common enemy) and "hard" capitalism (which lacks the social graces
needed to constrain its destructive tendencies, and must perpetually
stave off its own crisis through externally-directed belligerence and
vampirism).
It may be that the books are promoting a form of liberal delusion -
just Be Excellent To One Another, and somehow the contradictions
inherent in the system will refrain from pushing it inexorably towards
violent breakdown - and of course they're terribly cosy with the idea
that some people are just inherently more *magic* than others (the
only thing that distinguishes the Good Guys from the Bad Guys on this
is that the Bad Guys care about purity of magical lineage, whereas the
Good Guys are exemplary meritocrats who will accept anyone of
demonstrable wizarding abillity irrespective of their parental
background). But I wouldn't say they were impeccably neo-liberal. The
strength of the Gryffindors still ultimately derives from their social
bonds - they're not all Randian individualists, heroically building
private monuments to their Creative Will.
Dominic
--
Perhaps (but not likely) I may be still
a whizz at ordinary language and you
mishear things.
-- Geoffrey Hill,
Discourse: For Stanley Rosen
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