Re: [Marxism] [pen-l] Fwd: Debates within ecosocialism: John Bellamy Foster, Jason Moore and CNS | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Foster is not being "denigrated" for his principal contribution to ecosocialism - upholding and elaborating of Marx's notion of "metabolic rift". Rather, what is objectionable is Foster's sectarian misrepresentation of other valuable contributions by Jason W. Moore. See the Angus/Foster interview and my Comment at http://climateandcapitalism.com/2016/06/06/in-defense-of-ecological-marxism-john-bellamy-foster-responds-to-a-critic/ On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 3:48 AM, Ratbag Media via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > POSTING RULES & NOTES > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > * > > I don't know about all this... > > I think 'metabolic rift' is EXTREMELY useful as a means to continue > the dialectical materialism of of Stephen Jay Gould and the > Dialectical Biologists. > Indeed I think it grounds all the business about historical > materialism which so often is ruled by supposition and second > guessing...and so often arrogantly schematic by Marxian wannabees. > Ecological and other sciences in the Soviet Union did outlast --for a > time -- the Stalinist purges/censoring --as exemplified by the > perspective of the historical psychology of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander > Luria and the Soviet's advances in physics...and ecology. > > Indeed, getting back to Foster, the whole metabolic rift argument > merges with the current dynamic of not only the green movement but > climate science. While Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis is rooted in a lot > of idealism, if the Marxist movement had been more attuned to ecology > back when it was first proposed, we could have negotiated a sharper > ecosocialist shift than what we have been treated from within the > green movement. > > Indeed Barry Commoner is way outside the Marxist lazy bones on this > issue... 'We' missed the boat. > > To now denigate Foster seems petty as he makes very clear that the > tradition he embraces is rooted in biology and paleontology and > ecology...and not Marxmail. > > 'Metabolic Rift' is a great way to comprehend the fossil fueling and > organic thieving of capitalism -- especially when so many seek to > divert attention to ethicism. I don't think it is an argument > promoting 'balance' -- a boutique greenoid buzz term -- so much as a > process ruled by the give and take of exploitation and the necessity > of organic return. > > It is the same dynamic that drives Engel's 'Dialectics of Nature' . > > Whatever may be Foster's other positions being here ruled on -- > personal depreciation is hardly an argument re the main game. > > dave riley > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/fred.r.murphy%40gmail.com > -- Fred Murphy | 12 Dongan Place #206 | New York, NY | 212-304-9106 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Notes on the demise of the Kasama Project | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * My mistake, I was referring to the problems alleged against the Kasama Project (keeping contradictions secret, etc). Never mind! On Sunday, June 19, 2016, Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > POSTING RULES & NOTES > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > * > > > > > https://louisproyect.org/2016/06/19/notes-on-the-demise-of-the-kasama-project/ > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/amithrgupta%40gmail.com > -- - Amith _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Notes on the demise of the Kasama Project | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On 6/19/16 3:37 PM, A.R. G wrote: Why specifically do you see hope in this conference in Philly? Is it because they are trying to pull in the Sanders people? No. It is because their praxis in Philadelphia is admirable. One might hope that other people will be inspired to follow their example. I'd say it is unfortunate that this Kasama Project fell into disarray, but from my own experience many of the problems they pointed out were very real. What problems? _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Notes on the demise of the Kasama Project | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Why specifically do you see hope in this conference in Philly? Is it because they are trying to pull in the Sanders people? I'd say it is unfortunate that this Kasama Project fell into disarray, but from my own experience many of the problems they pointed out were very real. -- - Amith _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Notes on the demise of the Kasama Project | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * https://louisproyect.org/2016/06/19/notes-on-the-demise-of-the-kasama-project/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * NY Times Sunday Book Review, June 19 2016 ‘The Money Cult,’ by Chris Lehmann By JAMES LIVINGSTON THE MONEY CULT Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream By Chris Lehmann 403 pp. Melville House. $28.95. How can the most hedonistic consumer culture on the planet also be host to some of the most religious people in the world? Why hasn’t the bureaucratic rationality of corporate capitalism erased the last vestiges of faith in God, especially in the United States, still the farthest outpost of modern-industrial society? Chris Lehmann, a co-editor of Bookforum, has the answers in “The Money Cult.” He’s up against Max Weber, who also had North America in mind when he wrote “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” Weber argued that pious Puritans somehow became secular Yankees, who learned to lock themselves into an iron cage of a disenchanted world: “In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.” Lehmann demonstrates, contra Weber, that Protestantism at its extreme, out there on the European frontier called America, was a way of re-enchanting the world, not draining it of transcendent meanings — and it still is, in the evangelical or Pentecostal forms of contemporary megachurches, where Joel Osteen, the “prophet of the new millennial prosperity gospel,” presides over an empire of God-blessed striving and self-help. Lehmann’s point is not that the ruthless rationality of the market never quite overruled magical thinking. It’s that the mysteries of the market itself have always solicited such thinking, and always will. This is not exactly a new finding. Donald Meyer, Christopher Lasch, Jackson Lears and Thomas Frank have all reached similar conclusions. But the key insight of Lehmann’s book is that the Puritans and their theological heirs (including the Mormons) completed the logic of the New Testament by treating God as a man — by honoring the worldly economic activities of men on earth, in this life, not hoping for the exemptions from work that would come later, in the next life. Lehmann shows that a specifically Protestant, vaguely gnostic materialism has always animated American life, saturating the lowly world of objects with the sanctity of higher, heavenly purpose, even unto our time. His book is a tour de force that illustrates the continuities of American cultural and economic history. Still, I think he makes two mistakes that drive us back toward Weber. On the one hand, Lehmann claims that the Puritans sanctified the market as such. They didn’t. Instead, they feared it, and went to great lengths to contain it. In their view, money, property and wealth were the means to the end of a self-determining personality who could choose God’s path of his own free will — they weren’t ends in themselves. The inversion of these means and ends, what we now call the market revolution, terrified the Puritans. They were the first articulate anticapitalists. On the other hand, Lehmann suggests, as Weber did, that the Puritans were the prophets of the self-made man, the tricky Yankee trader unbound by custom, family, tradition or community. They weren’t. John Winthrop, among others, preached a “yoak of government, both sacred and civil” to contain the “wild beast” that would be loosed by the embrace of every individual’s “natural liberty.” Like Shakespeare and Hobbes, he didn’t see how this animal could be tamed outside the iron cage of religious and political hierarchy. Sometimes “The Money Cult” reads like something straight out of the 1920s, when the Young Intellectuals who invented an American literary canon (Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, et al.) made Puritanism a metaphor for everything distasteful about American culture. More often, it sounds refreshingly new. For Chris Lehmann has shown us why religious history is the mainstream of American history — and how Protestant theologians became the court poets of capitalism. James Livingston, who teaches history at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, is the author of the forthcoming “No More Work.” _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] One Economic Sickness, Five Diagnoses
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * (The most interesting thing about this article is that its author--a high profile bourgeois economist--confesses to having no idea how American can "be great" again to use Trump's slogan.) NY Times, June 19 2016 One Economic Sickness, Five Diagnoses Economic View By N. GREGORY MANKIW Economists, like physicians, sometimes confront a patient with an obvious problem but no obvious diagnosis. That is precisely the situation we face right now. Let’s start with the problem. There is no simple way to gauge an economy’s health. But if you had to choose just one statistic, it would be gross domestic product. Real G.D.P. measures the total income produced within an economy, adjusted for the overall level of prices. Here is the sad fact: Over the last decade, the growth rate of real G.D.P. per person has averaged just 0.44 percent per year, compared with the historical norm of 2.0 percent. At a rate of 2.0 percent, incomes double every 35 years. At a rate of 0.44 percent, it takes about 160 years to double. It may be tempting to blame the Great Recession of 2008-9 for the paltry 10-year growth rate. Indeed, this recession was a deep one. Yet the explanation for the poor long-run performance is not that simple. The recession of 1982 was also a deep one. The unemployment rate peaked at 10.8 percent in 1982, compared with a peak of 10 percent in 2009. But by the first quarter of 1989, as Ronald Reagan was leaving the White House, the 10-year growth rate was up to 2.1 percent. The difference: The 1982 recession was followed by a robust recovery, whereas the recession of 2008-9 has been followed by a meager one. So what’s wrong with the economy? No one knows for sure. But numerous theories are being bandied about. Here are five of them: A statistical mirage Some Silicon Valley economists suggest that there really isn’t a problem. When quality improvements and new products are pervasive and so different from what came before, the national income accountants who construct gross domestic product might underestimate how much life is getting better. Think of how your smartphone now replaces your camera, GPS, music system and various other previously stand-alone devices. According to this theory, the problem is not in the economy but in the statistics. There is, however, reason to doubt that this is the whole story. Polls indicate that most Americans think the country is on the wrong track, and that the economy is their top concern. This dissatisfaction comes not from studying the national income statistics but from their day-to-day experiences, which are not living up to their aspirations. A hangover from the crisis The recession of 2008-9 was caused by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Maybe something about financial crises makes recovery from a downturn all the more difficult. During the recent crisis, many feared another Great Depression would follow. We averted that catastrophe, but the anxiety may linger, causing businesses to be reluctant to borrow to finance risky investments and banks reluctant to finance them. The good news is that hangovers eventually dissipate, but patience is required. Secular stagnation Lawrence H. Summers, former economic adviser to President Obama, has suggested that the problem predates the recent financial crisis. He points to the long-term decline in inflation-adjusted interest rates as evidence of reduced demand for capital to fund investment projects. He cites several reasons for the change, including lower population growth, lower prices for capital goods and the nature of recent innovations, like the replacement of brick-and-mortar stores with retail websites. The result, he says, is secular stagnation — a persistent inability of the economy to generate sufficient demand to maintain full employment. His solution? More government spending on infrastructure, like roads, bridges and airports. If the government takes advantage of lower interest rates to make the right investments in public capital — admittedly a big if — the policy would promote employment in the short run as projects are being built and make the economy more productive when they are put into use. Slower innovation Robert Gordon, author of “The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War,” believes the pace of innovative activity has declined. Previous generations introduced electricity, indoor plumbing and the internal combustion engine. This generation’s innovations, like the smartphone and social media, are just not as life-changing. This theory is
[Marxism] An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * (When Shakespeare wrote, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers", he had no idea that capitalism would be taking care of business for him.) NY Times, June 19 2016 An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It By NOAM SCHEIBER VALPARAISO, Ind. — By most measures, John Acosta is a law school success story. He graduated from Valparaiso University Law School — a well-established regional school here in northwestern Indiana — in the top third of his class this past December, a semester ahead of schedule. He passed the bar exam on his first try in February. Mr. Acosta, 39, is also a scrupulous networker who persuaded a former longtime prosecutor to join him in starting a defense and family law firm. A police officer for 11 years in Georgia, Mr. Acosta has a rare ability to get inside the head of a cop that should be of more than passing interest to would-be clients. “I think John’s going to do fine,” said Andrew Lucas, a partner at the firm where Mr. Acosta rents office space. “He’s got other life skills that are attractive to people running into problems.” Yet in financial terms, there is almost no way for Mr. Acosta to climb out of the crater he dug for himself in law school, when he borrowed over $200,000. The government will eventually forgive the loan — in 25 years — if he’s unable to repay it, as is likely on his small-town lawyer’s salary. But the Internal Revenue Service will probably treat the forgiven amount as income, leaving him what could easily be a $70,000 tax bill on the eve of retirement, and possibly much higher. Mr. Acosta is just one of tens of thousands of recent law school graduates caught up in a broad transformation of the legal profession. While demand for other white-collar jobs has grown substantially since the start of the recession, law firms and corporations are finding they can make do with far fewer in-house lawyers than before, squeezing those just starting their careers. Nationally, the proportion of recent graduates who find work as a lawyer is down 10 percentage points since its peak of the last decade, according to the most recent data. And though the upper end of the profession finally shows some signs of recovering, the middle and lower ranks remain depressed, especially in slower-growth regions like the Rust Belt. As of this April, fewer than 70 percent of Valparaiso law school graduates from the previous spring were employed and fewer than half were in jobs that required a law license. Only three out of 131 graduates worked in large firms, which tend to pay more generous salaries. “People are not being helped by going to these schools,” Kyle McEntee, executive director of the advocacy group Law School Transparency, said of Valparaiso and other low-tier law schools. “The debt is really high, bar passage rates are horrendous, employment is horrendous.” Even as employment prospects have dimmed, however, law school student debt has ballooned, rising from about $95,000 among borrowers at the average school in 2010 to about $112,000 in 2014, according to Mr. McEntee’s group. Such is the atavistic rage among those who went to law school seeking the upper-middle-class status and security often enjoyed by earlier generations, only to find themselves on a financial treadmill and convinced their schools misled them, that there is now a whole genre of online writing devoted specifically to channeling it: “scamblogging.” Belatedly, many schools are starting to respond to this brutal reality, or at least the collapse in applications it has set off. In February, Valparaiso announced it was offering buyouts to tenured professors. As of May, 14 of 36 full-time faculty members had either accepted the package or retired. The law school plans to reduce its student body by roughly one-third over the next few years, from about 450 today. To the faculty at Valparaiso and the roughly 20 percent of the 200 or so American Bar Association-accredited law schools that have cut back aggressively in recent years, these moves can feel shockingly harsh. “Maybe I was naïve, but I didn’t think it would be as stark,” said Rosalie Levinson, a longtime constitutional law professor at Valparaiso who recently headed a committee on restructuring the school. “The number of tenured faculty that would be leaving — not gradually but immediately — just personally, that was difficult.” But from the perspective of the students caught up in the explosion of unrepayable law school debt, the shake-up at the school, and others like it, look rather pedestrian. Given the tectonic shifts in the legal landscape,
[Marxism] Response to homophobic protest in Orlando
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I love the creativity. ken h 'Angels' to block Westboro Baptist Church's protest at Orlando memorial http://m.sfgate.com/news/article/Angels-to-block-Westboro-Baptist-Church-s-8303872.php#photo-10404027 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Obama orchestrated a massive transfer of wealth to the 1 percent | New York Post
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * From the arch-reactionary NY Post no less. http://nypost.com/2016/01/17/occupy-obama-he-orchestrated-a-massive-transfer-of-wealth-to-the-1-percent/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] [pen-l] Fwd: Debates within ecosocialism: John Bellamy Foster, Jason Moore and CNS | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * I don't know about all this... I think 'metabolic rift' is EXTREMELY useful as a means to continue the dialectical materialism of of Stephen Jay Gould and the Dialectical Biologists. Indeed I think it grounds all the business about historical materialism which so often is ruled by supposition and second guessing...and so often arrogantly schematic by Marxian wannabees. Ecological and other sciences in the Soviet Union did outlast --for a time -- the Stalinist purges/censoring --as exemplified by the perspective of the historical psychology of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria and the Soviet's advances in physics...and ecology. Indeed, getting back to Foster, the whole metabolic rift argument merges with the current dynamic of not only the green movement but climate science. While Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis is rooted in a lot of idealism, if the Marxist movement had been more attuned to ecology back when it was first proposed, we could have negotiated a sharper ecosocialist shift than what we have been treated from within the green movement. Indeed Barry Commoner is way outside the Marxist lazy bones on this issue... 'We' missed the boat. To now denigate Foster seems petty as he makes very clear that the tradition he embraces is rooted in biology and paleontology and ecology...and not Marxmail. 'Metabolic Rift' is a great way to comprehend the fossil fueling and organic thieving of capitalism -- especially when so many seek to divert attention to ethicism. I don't think it is an argument promoting 'balance' -- a boutique greenoid buzz term -- so much as a process ruled by the give and take of exploitation and the necessity of organic return. It is the same dynamic that drives Engel's 'Dialectics of Nature' . Whatever may be Foster's other positions being here ruled on -- personal depreciation is hardly an argument re the main game. dave riley _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
