[Marxism-Thaxis] Economic Crisis and Ireland
The world capitalist economy has plunged into a sustained economic depression. The signs are that this depression shall be deep and prolonged. The principal way by which capitalism can come out of the depression is by reducing both the living standards and employment conditions of the working class. The only other solution is social revolution involving the seizure of power by the working class from the capitalist class necessitating the establishment of a world communist federation. Because of the peculiarities of the Irish situation: booms powered by bubbles and a Fianna Fail dominated government that instead of storing up its surplus revenue, in anticipation of future contingencies, largely squandered it. These funds were largely used to bribe the electorate into voting the Fianna Fail party back into power. It was also used to support its capitalist friends such as Irish property developers and bankers. Since the outset of the depression the same Irish government has been engaged in a sustained attack on the working class. It endeavours to achieve this by splitting the working class --pitting worker against worker. By maximising the fragmentation of the working class it is rendered more vulnerable to crushing defeat. Immigrant workers are split from indigenous workers; public workers from private workers; female workers from male workers; unskilled workers from skilled workers etc. In its current attack the government has singled out the public sector workers. To achieve a cut back in the income of these workers it has actively led a sustained campaign against them entailing the polarisation of pubic and private worker. This is the basis from which it has imposed substantial pension levy on the public worker. Success here will render it easier for the state to reinforce this cutback with ensuing cutbacks in the incomes of the entire working class. Its declared intention of widening and further increasing income tax within the next month is irrefutable evidence of this. The government also hopes to continue the reorganisation of the public sector work force. An Bord Snip with its mandate to focus on slashing employee numbers and spending within the public service forms part of this plan. The consequent reorganisation and diminution of the public service will lead to a weaker and harder pressed workforce. It is hoped to ultimately reduce the public service worker more or less to the same condition as that of the average factory or shop worker. Then capitalism will have a cheaper and more docile workforce. The European bourgeoisie is watching this conflict with keen interest. Cowan will be Europe's new hero should he succeed in defeating the public sector workers and indeed the working class in Ireland as a whole. His success may provide them with encouragement to attempt to impose similar conditions on their own public sector. The present struggle in Ireland is not just a local matter. It also has a European dimension that may influence events in the European Union. In view of this it is imperative that the working class meet this capitalist onslaught, led by its state, with stiff resistance and the correct politics. Working class action must involve strikes culminating in the general strike together with the setting up of workers' councils for the organisation and administration of economic, social and political life. In the struggle the conservative unions must be replaced by communist unions. In connection with this communists must struggle to set up workplace committees as a means of organising against the bosses and the leadership of the conservative trade unions. In solidarity with the working class in Ireland the European working class must strenuously resist their own ruling class too in the struggle for power. The government has been actively encouraging the mass immigration of workers into the Irish Republic on an unprecedented scale. This is but a further way of promoting more division within the working class. Immigration is a social engineering device intended to drive down the price of labour power through competition. It is also intended to hinder the prospects of the working class in Ireland evolving into a unified revolutionary class force. The working class based in Ireland must overcome this division by endeavouring to create unity among migrant and indigenous sections of the working class in Ireland on a principled revolutionary basis. None of the political elements represented in the Oireachtas can offer a solution other than essentially the same solution as that of the Fianna Fail Party. They are all bourgeois in character including the Labour Party, the Green Party and Sinn Fein. They simply attempt to dress the same solution up in different clothes. They all actively support a solution to the capitalist crisis at the expense of the working class. The leader of the Labour Party, Eamon Gilmore, has expressed his opposition to strike action and does not reject a pension levy in
[Marxism-Thaxis] Human language gene's origin not as recent as thought
This implies that language originated earlier in human evolution than thought. CB http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_dawn/ The Neanderthal genome includes the human version of the FOXP2 gene. In my most recent post on that finding (see: Narrowing Down the Suspects) I said: The original dating of the appearance of the FOXP2 gene in its human form put it between 200 and 100 thousand years ago. Many arguments about the recency of language have claimed authority based on that date, and now find their cards are very weak. ... In November 2006 this blog reported on a paper presented at a conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa claiming that the original dating effort on FOXP2 had been grossly in error and the true date of the human version of the gene was 1.8 to 1.9 million years ago. ... I have emailed the paper’s main author, Karl Diller, to ask for an update on his work, but have not yet had a response. Now I have gotten a response. In a nutshell, he is sticking by his earlier findings: It is true that the [original] date for FOXP2 was widely cited before the Neanderthal results, but I would say that hardly anyone believes anymore that the FOXP2 mutations were recent. The accepted date for the common ancestor with Neanderthals is ~660,000 years ago. We stand by the genomic evidence and our date of 1.8 or 1.9 million years ago for the FOXP2 mutations. More Carl Zimmer reminds me of a letter Molecular Biology and Evolution (here) arguing that the Neanderthal gene is a contaminant from inbreeding with Homo sapiens. These things will be argued for some time, and as I said in my Narrowing Down the Suspects post: ... all dates on this gene are likely to be taken with several grains of salt without multiple, independent confirmations. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] FOXP2 and the Evolution of Language
FOXP2 and the Evolution of Language Alec MacAndrew Introduction This article addresses the history and the significance of the discovery of the relevance of FOXP2 in the development of speech. It is a remarkable scientific detective story that has been in the making for some time. In its earlier stages, there was serious disagreement within the scientific community about how the scientific findings should be interpreted, and this was set against a background of sensationalist reporting by the popular press. Background Background The story goes like this: The KE family were brought to the attention of the scientific community in about 1990. Over three generations of this family, about half the family members suffer from a number of problems, the most obvious of which is severe difficulty in speaking, to such an extent that the speech of the affected people is largely unintelligible, and they are taught signs as a supplement to speech as children. It is a complicated condition including elements of impairment in speech articulation and other linguistic skills, and broader intellectual and physical problems. From the outset it seemed quite likely, from the pattern of inheritance, that the disorder is associated with a mutation in a single autosomal-dominant gene. It is rather surprising that such a diffuse condition should be linked to a single genetic defect, but it turned out to be so for reasons that we shall see later. From the beginning, there has been a range of views in the professional scientific community with regard to whether the gene in question is a `language' or a `grammar' specific gene. Those disagreements continue in a somewhat abated form today. http://www.evolutionpages.com/FOXP2_language.htm ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Capitalism, Socialism and Crisis
A Non-Orthodox View by Walden Bello ZNet (February 22 2009) This is the longer version of an essay by the author released by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on February 06 2009. Week after week, we see the global economy contracting at a pace worse than predicted by the gloomiest analysts. We are now, it is clear, in no ordinary recession but are headed for a global depression that could last for many years. The Fundamental Crisis: Overaccumulation Orthodox economics has long ceased to be of any help in understanding the crisis. Non-orthodox economics, on the other hand, provides extraordinarily powerful insights into the causes and dynamics of the current crisis. From the progressive perspective, what we are seeing is the intensification of one of the central crises or contradictions of global capitalism: the crisis of overproduction, also known as overaccumulation or overcapacity. This is the tendency for capitalism to build up, in the context of heightened inter-capitalist competition, tremendous productive capacity that outruns the population's capacity to consume owing to income inequalities that limit popular purchasing power. The result is an erosion of profitability, leading to an economic downspin. To understand the current collapse, we must go back in time to the so-called Golden Age of Contemporary Capitalism, the period from 1945 to 1975. This was a period of rapid growth both in the center economies and in the underdeveloped economies - one that was partly triggered by the massive reconstruction of Europe and East Asia after the devastation of the Second World War, and partly by the new socioeconomic arrangements and instruments based on a historic class compromise between Capital and Labor that were institutionalized under the new Keynesian state. But this period of high growth came to an end in the mid-1970s, when the center economies were seized by stagflation, meaning the coexistence of low growth with high inflation, which was not supposed to happen under neoclassical economics. Stagflation, however, was but a symptom of a deeper cause: the reconstruction of Germany and Japan and the rapid growth of industrializing economies like Brazil, Taiwan, and South Korea added tremendous new productive capacity and increased global competition, while income inequality within countries and between countries limited the growth of purchasing power and demand, thus eroding profitability. This was aggravated by the massive oil price rises of the seventies. The most painful expression of the crisis of overproduction was global recession of the early 1980s, which was the most serious to overtake the international economy since the Great Depression, that is, before the current crisis. Capitalism tried three escape routes from the conundrum of overproduction: neoliberal restructuring, globalization, and financialization Escape Route #1: Neoliberal Restructuring Neoliberal restructuring took the form of Reaganism and Thatcherism in the North and Structural Adjustment in the South. The aim was to invigorate capital accumulation, and this was to be done by (1) removing state constraints on the growth, use, and flow of capital and wealth; and (2) redistributing income from the poor and middle classes to the rich on the theory that the rich would then be motivated to invest and reignite economic growth. The problem with this formula was that in redistributing income to the rich, you were gutting the incomes of the poor and middle classes, thus restricting demand, while not necessarily inducing the rich to invest more in production. In fact, it could be more profitable to invest in speculation. In fact, neoliberal restructuring, which was generalized in the North and south during the eighties and nineties, had a poor record in terms of growth: Global growth averaged 1.1 percent in the 1990s and 1.4 percent in the 1980s, compared with 3.5 percent in the 1960s and 2.4 percent in the 1970s, when state interventionist policies were dominant. Neoliberal restructuring could not shake off stagnation. Escape Route #2: Globalization The second escape route global capital took to counter stagnation was extensive accumulation or globalization, or the rapid integration of semi-capitalist, non-capitalist, or pre-capitalist areas into the global market economy. Rosa Luxemburg, the famous German radical economist, saw this long ago in her classic The Accumulation of Capital (1913) as necessary to shore up the rate of profit in the metropolitan economies. How? By gaining access to cheap labor, by gaining new, albeit limited, markets, by gaining new sources of cheap agricultural and raw material products, and by bringing into being new areas for investment in infrastructure. Integration is accomplished via trade liberalization,
[Marxism-Thaxis] Wither the car?
_http://www.truthout.org/030509G#1_ (http://www.truthout.org/030509G#1) The causes of the euphemization of the automobile industry's social movement are various. The first lies in the significant reduction of the number of employees, and, in particular, of workers on production sites over the last thirty years: Renault-Flins, which produces the Clio, went from 23,000 employees in the 1960s to 3,500. At Peugeot-Sochaux, manpower has fallen from 42,000 employees in 1978 to a little less than 18,000 today. These reductions are not only the result of technical progress that substituted robots or automation for people; these drops in manpower come both from outsourcing to regions with lower manpower costs and sub-contracting (manufacturers no longer produce more than 30 percent of value-added internally, versus 70 to 75 percent during the 1970s). At most sub-contractors, and especially at second and third-tier subcontractors, there are no unions, but very high levels of part-time workers hired and fired at the complete pleasure of management. Salaries may be 30-50 percent lower than those obtained at the manufacturers. To summarize, the globalization of the automobile industry's markets and of the capital likely to invest in it tend to align the work conditions and salaries of industrialized countries with those of lowest-bidder countries. And that alignment began at the same time as the explosion of that organizational revolution which occurred almost unnoticed in France, that is, the Japanization of production with the generalization of the principle of just-in-time inventory management. That principle rests on the disappearance of work-in-progress and buffer stocks that would allow workers to breathe on the production line. The end of work-in-progress means that if a single link out of 100 to 200 (men or work stations) fails, the whole line stops, entailing significant cost-overruns. This increased fragility of the production process is purposeful and constitutes a vicious cycle constructed by company management to mobilize its personnel; moreover, this organizational model involves a drastic reduction of manpower. This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from _http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm_ (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) **Need a job? Find employment help in your area. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agenciesncid=emlcntusyelp0005) ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Capitalism, Socialism and Crisis
Capitalism, Socialism and Crisis By Prabhat Patnaik _http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/8201/_ (http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/8201/) Original source: People's Democracy (India) Comment Having read this article several times and gone to its location source above, I could find nothing that indicates that this article purports to be a Marxist analysis. My initial response was based on a false premise. Critiquing an article for failing to be Marxists, when nothing states that the article is submitted as a Marxist analysis, is wrong. Sorry for my misunderstanding. WL. **Need a job? Find employment help in your area. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=employment_agenciesncid=emlcntusyelp0005) ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Capitalism, Socialism and Crisis
CB: This is one of the worst unsupported, conclusory assertions I've seen since Ralph's embarrassing posts a couple of days ago. An empty outburst, with no thought in it whatsoever. Who cares what you think without any argumentation ? I thought it was a fairly good piece (assertion for now unsupported), but I'd be curious as to why WL thought it was so bad it was beneath at least some sort of explanatory comment. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
