[PEN-L:2700] DISTRICT 11'S COKE PROBLEM (fwd)
Forwarded message: Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 11:05:58 -0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Sid Shniad [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: DISTRICT 11'S COKE PROBLEM X-UID: 6381 Harper's Magazine February 1999 [Memo] DISTRICT 11'S COKE PROBLEM From a September 23, 1998, letter sent to the principals of School District 11 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, by John Bushey, the district's executive director of "school leadership." In September 1997, the district signed an $8 million exclusive vending contract with Coca-Cola. Dear Principal: Here we are in year two of the great Coke, contract. I hope your first weeks were successful and that pretty much everything is in place (except staffing, technology, planning time, and telephones). First, the good news: This year's installment from Coke is "in the house," and checks will be cut for you to pick up in my office this week. Your share will be the same as last year. Elementary school $3,000 Middle School $15,000 High School $25,000 Now the not-so-good news: we must sell 70,000 cases of product (including juices, sodas, waters, etc.) at least once during the first three years of the contract. If we reach this goal, your school allotments will be guaranteed for the next seven years. The math on how to achieve this is really quite simple. Last year we had 32,439 students, 3,000 employees, and 176 days in the school year. If 35,439 staff and students buy one Coke product every other day for a school year, we will double the required quota. Here is how we can do it: 1. Allow students to purchase and consume vended products throughout the day. If sodas are not allowed in classes, consider allowing juices, teas, and waters. 2. Locate machines where they are accessible to the students all day. Research shows that vender purchases are closely linked to availability. Location, location, location is the key. You may have as many machines as you can handle. Pueblo Central High tripled its volume of sales by placing vending machines on all three levels of the school. The Coke people surveyed the middle and high schools this summer and have suggestions on where to place additional machines. 3. A list of Coke products is enclosed to allow you to select from the entire menu of beverages. Let me know which products you want, and we will get them in. Please let me know if you need electrical outlets. 4. A calendar of promotional events is enclosed to help you advertise Coke products. I know this is "just one more thing from downtown," but the long-term benefits are worth it. Thanks for all your help, John Bushey The Coke Dude -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2699] Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: Shleifer and Incentives]
(The spell-checker translated Shliefer as "Slicer" and "Shifter" and "neo-liberalism" as "neocolonialism." From the mouths of machines! Of course, Peter was Doorman.) Beware. The spell-checker translates the name of Shleifer's frequent co-author Robert Vishny as "Vishnu." OM MANI PADME HUM...
[PEN-L:2698] Re: Duke University's literature department
By the way is David Yaffe, the same fellow that wrote marxists stuff a few decades ago? -- No, that David Yaffe is a different David Yaffe. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:2697] What would happen if . . .
.. . . we had a four-day work week? The NEXT CITY asked Tom Walker, a social policy analyst with TimeWork Web, and Jock Finlayson, vice-president of policy and analysis for the Business Council of British Columbia, to comment. go to: http://www.nextcity.com/whatif/whatif14.htm Who makes more sense to you? Select your choice and then press below to register your vote. Tom Walker Jock Finlayson http://www.nextcity.com/WhatIf/whatif14.htm#vote Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
[PEN-L:2696] Re: Re: Duke University's literature department
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: 1) Bourdieu was the first to coin the term "social capital." According to Senior, England was successful because "the intellectual and moral capital of Great Britain far exceeds all the material capital, not only in importance, but in productiveness" (Senior 1836, p. 134). By the way is David Yaffe, the same fellow that wrote marxists stuff a few decades ago? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
[PEN-L:2695] Re: Re: Re. euro-query
Trevor, You are right about how the nineteenth century US case differs from the euro case. But, how do you answer my arguments about a possible black market in cash, with my potential Dutch drug dealers as a possibility. Answering that Moroccan hashish dealers don't prefer marks or something like that is not an answer. We are dealing with a _potential_ problem. You have ruled it out "by definition" because "there are no national currencies." I contend that there still are. They are just very strongly fixed in rates with each other through the euro, almost as strongly as dollars printed by the Richmond Fed are to those printed by the New York Fed, but not quite as strongly. Again, a currency can trade against itself in the real world at varying rates under weird conditions, e.g. my rubles for kopecks example that really happened in August 1992 in Moscow. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 28 Jan 1999 17:40:26 -0500 Trevor Evans [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think that Barkley's examples differ from the situation regarding the euro. Notes issued by US banks in the nineteenth century exchanged at varying discounts because there was no central bank that integrated the monetary system. In the case of the euro, the European System of Central Banks stands ready to convert all currency issued by member states at the official rate. Before answering Jim Devine's important question about thinking the impossible - what could lead to the break up of the european monetary system - I wanted to consult with some comrades here who I meet with in a discussion group every couple of weeks. The first response was to ask, what could lead to the collapse of the US monetary system. The next suggestion was a revolution in France. Unfortunately this doesn't look very likely in the near future. A last response was that, if the European Central Bank pursued a highly restrictive monetary policy, some countries might chose to opt out of the system - something for which there is no provision, but would be difficult to prevent if a government was really determined. But even then, unless it were Germany or France, its not clear that this would threaten the euro; and its also very difficult to envisage realistic conditions under which a member country would wish to do so, given the increasing degree of integration of the economies, and also that the euro is an attempt to reduce countries vulnerability to external financial crisis. As I have already said, in my opion, the time when the system of exchage rates was potentially at risk was between last summer, when the decision was taken to adopt the central EMS rates as the basis for the euro conversion rates, and the end of the year, when the rates were fixed irrevocably. Now that the rates are fixed, euro-zone countries have ensured themselves against exchange-rate instability within the zone. Trevor Evans Paul Lincke Ufer 44 10999 Berlin Tel. fax: +49 30 612 3951 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2694] Re: Re: Re. euro-query
I think that Barkley's examples differ from the situation regarding the euro. Notes issued by US banks in the nineteenth century exchanged at varying discounts because there was no central bank that integrated the monetary system. In the case of the euro, the European System of Central Banks stands ready to convert all currency issued by member states at the official rate. Before answering Jim Devine's important question about thinking the impossible - what could lead to the break up of the european monetary system - I wanted to consult with some comrades here who I meet with in a discussion group every couple of weeks. The first response was to ask, what could lead to the collapse of the US monetary system. The next suggestion was a revolution in France. Unfortunately this doesn't look very likely in the near future. A last response was that, if the European Central Bank pursued a highly restrictive monetary policy, some countries might chose to opt out of the system - something for which there is no provision, but would be difficult to prevent if a government was really determined. But even then, unless it were Germany or France, its not clear that this would threaten the euro; and its also very difficult to envisage realistic conditions under which a member country would wish to do so, given the increasing degree of integration of the economies, and also that the euro is an attempt to reduce countries vulnerability to external financial crisis. As I have already said, in my opion, the time when the system of exchage rates was potentially at risk was between last summer, when the decision was taken to adopt the central EMS rates as the basis for the euro conversion rates, and the end of the year, when the rates were fixed irrevocably. Now that the rates are fixed, euro-zone countries have ensured themselves against exchange-rate instability within the zone. Trevor Evans Paul Lincke Ufer 44 10999 Berlin Tel. fax: +49 30 612 3951 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2693] Re: [Fwd: Re: Shleifer and Incentives]
Peter Dorman writes: Shliefer's theory of soft incentives goes like this: We know that private, profit-seeking firms minimize costs. I know that Peter knows this, but profit-seeking firms do not minimize costs _in general_, but only their own (private) costs. As E.K. Hunt pointed out years ago, this means that they actively seek out ways to externalize internal costs (in prose, to pollute) and to internalize external benefits (to engulf and devour). We can see this happening in the Amazon right now. One scandal among economists is the common statement by economists that capitalist firms are "efficient" because they minimize costs. But that's only private costs that are minimized. Given the ubiquity of external costs and benefits, the only real solution is some sort of government rule of the economy. Given the way in which laws don't work well unless their purpose has been accepted and internalized by people, we need "enterprises" run by publicly-minded people. The only way to make sure that the laws and the public mindedness don't conflict is to intensify democratic control over the state. All of this goes against Shliefer's neo-liberalism, which emphasizes narrow greed over public mindedness (as extrinsic motivations crowd out intrinsic motivation) and the technocratic state over democracy. (The spell-checker translated Shliefer as "Slicer" and "Shifter" and "neo-liberalism" as "neocolonialism." From the mouths of machines! Of course, Peter was Doorman.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
[PEN-L:2692] RE: Re: Long Term Capital
Yeah, I thought it was very disappointing article; Lewis has never written anything even half as good as Liar's Poker. It was also very Trail Fever was pretty good, I thought, though you have to be struck by Lewis' predilection for agreeing w/either Morrie Taylor or Alan Keyes, depending on whom he spoke with last, notwithstanding his own vote for Ralph Nader. mbs
[PEN-L:2691] Re: Long Term Capital
Peter Dorman wrote: I wonder if we could provoke Doug Henwood's reaction to the article on LTCM in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It struck me as an apologetic: Michael Lewis went to Greenwich, listened to LTCM's side of the story, and wrote it up. The only thing wrong with their models, they say, is that they didn't take account of the nasty, predatory behavior of their competitors. Yeah, I thought it was very disappointing article; Lewis has never written anything even half as good as Liar's Poker. It was also very un-Timesian to report something as one-sided as Meriwether's claim that AIG was out to destroy them without offering any outside confirmation. Not that it's implausible; if you're a trader, and see someone you could get rich by ruining, the temptation would almost be impossible to resist. What good are their models if they don't take account of the predatory habits of their competitors? It's like having developed a shark-resistant diving suit that only works when the sharks don't bite. Doug
[PEN-L:2690] Re: Re: Re: LBO intern needed
Josh Mason wrote: Gerald Levy wrote: Doug writes: H-lp! LBO badly needs an intern snip What did you say you were offering prospective candidates in terms of an hourly wage and benefits? $50/week for 5-10 hours of work. No benefits, sorry. Except an education money can't buy. The education works both ways, Josh. Doug
[PEN-L:2689] Long Term Capital
I wonder if we could provoke Doug Henwood's reaction to the article on LTCM in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It struck me as an apologetic: Michael Lewis went to Greenwich, listened to LTCM's side of the story, and wrote it up. The only thing wrong with their models, they say, is that they didn't take account of the nasty, predatory behavior of their competitors. Peter Dorman
[PEN-L:2688] Re: Re: Re: LBO intern needed
I'm with Gery on this one Doug, you evil, bloodthirsty, imperialist, exploiter Steve On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, Doug Henwood wrote: Gerald Levy wrote: Doug writes: H-lp! LBO badly needs an intern snip What did you say you were offering prospective candidates in terms of an hourly wage and benefits? $50/week for 5-10 hours of work. No benefits, sorry. The Village Voice pays $0/week for full-time interns, and The Nation, $125/week, also full-time. Doug
[PEN-L:2686] [Fwd: Re: Shleifer and Incentives]boundary=------------C1476A6CA1A75A6E2C650234
This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --C1476A6CA1A75A6E2C650234 Oops--sent this to the wrong pen-l address. Must get this straight --C1476A6CA1A75A6E2C650234 Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 17:27:21 -0800 From: Peter Dorman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: The Evergreen State College To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L:2284] Re: Shleifer and Incentives apologize for the lateness of this reply, but I've had a heavy bout of teaching and have not had time to take a second look at Shleifer until today. To refresh memories: I had made the criticism that Andrei Shleifer, in his piece in the fall 1998 JEP, assumes away the existence of public service as a motive and then "proves" that nearly all services should be provided privately. I reread Shleifer (although admittedly not the more elaborate work on which his article is based) and see no reason to change my mind. Shliefer's theory of soft incentives goes like this: We know that private, profit-seeking firms minimize costs. Nevertheless, there may be instances in which cost minimization would lead to shortcuts the public would oppose. Thus an argument could be made for public provision precisely because cost minimization would be avoided through soft public incentives. Says Shliefer, this doctrine has limited applicability due to the great dynamic advantages of private, for-profit production (innovation), opportunities for members of the public to choose between providers (so they can punish shortcuts), and the possibility of using private, non-profit providers in certain cases. So, does Shliefer assume away public service motives? Of course. He assumes them away first by positing that private, competitive production achieves cost minimization more readily than public production. But an important aspect of public service is the willingness of workers to go "beyond the call of duty" (job description, what they are paid for), and this can have tremendous cost-reducing consequences. Many public health services, for instance, are provided more cheaply than their private counterparts, because of the extra work health professionals will perform if they serve the public directly, even though they are typically paid less. His second assumption is even more outlandish, because it contradicts the logic behind "soft incentives". Why should highly motivated public servants produce less innovation than private sector workers? If someone has an idealistic commitment to the provision of a service or achievement of a goal, this should be reflected equally in static and dynamic choices. The best example of this is the work we all do: academic research. Relatively few researchers are employed by for-profit institutions; many are employed by government. Their primary motive, we hope, is the advancement of knowledge, a form of public service. (Even many private companies that maintain large RD shops have found it useful to replicate internally the atmosphere of a college campus, with substantial worker autonomy in setting the goals and pace of research.) It should also be added that Shliefer fails to recognize that a primary basis for public provision is the belief that particular qualities of the good or service in question have a value from a public perspective that differs from the sum of the private valuations that a market would perform. This is obviously true of schools, parks, social welfare and public health services, etc. A rousing case for this is made by Mark Sagoff in his still-relevant book "Economy of the Earth" (Cambridge, 1987). I get the sense that Shliefer can't even begin to conceptualize a difference between aggregate consumer willingness to pay and public value. (This does not mean that notions of public value, like Sagoff's, are unproblematic, just that they are indispensable and play a large role in real-world political debate.) So in the end I would say that Shliefer's piece remains a rant. He assumes away the basis for all counterargument and then announces that those who disagree with him have no arguments. (You know how these mushy-headed types are, they haven't studied serious economics and don't realize their positions have no foundation.) I thank the people who have posted more information on the Russian "aid" follies, although I don't know enough to pass judgment on Shliefer's personal role. Nevertheless, I am not surprised that someone whose moral universe is so bereft of public, as against private, values has got caught up in this mess. Peter Dorman Brad De Long wrote: Peter Dorman wrote: Subject: Shleifer and incentives Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1999 13:12:03 -0800 From: Peter Dorman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] References: 001501be3fd1$f6c56940$[EMAIL PROTECTED] I finally got around to reading Andrei Shleifer's rant against the public sector in the Fall 98 J of Econ
[PEN-L:2685] Re: Duke University's literature department
Interesting post, Lou. Several observations.
1) Bourdieu was the first to coin the term "social
capital." This has become a hot topic among
"communitarians," most notably with Harvard's Robert Putnam
and his "bowling alone" stuff. He derives the concept from
James Coleman and Glenn Loury (who used it to blame blacks
for their own problems, not enough "social capital"), but
Bourdieu beat them to the punch, although he had a slightly
different meaning for it. The original context for him was
in reciprocal social activities in less developed
societies. I gain social capital by giving you gifts.
Northwest American Indians gained social capital by having
large potlatches, and so forth.
2) I'm not sure I would identify the "material base
of pomo" with the 1980s boom. After all, the 1990s have
been boomier than the 1980s, except for at the front end in
some parts of the world right now. But the US is boomier
than ever, at least on the surface. Don't know what its
material base is, if any.
3) On another list Doug H. took me to task for
telling "wee-wee jokes" about Judith Butler. Actually I
think Dennis Redmond is on the money: she is the Foucault
of lesbianism. I buy that, but what has she said that he
didn't? "Transferable phantasm" may be neat, but we've
been there before with the analysis of "the Other" and how
especially oppressed others may pick up characteristics of
the oppressor, as with blacks conking their hair once upon
a time. A lot of writing on black power taught us that
one. Otherwise, about all I see in Butler is the adoption
of a lot of peculiarly ingrown academic rhetoric to such
discussions. That is why the more substantive part of my
mock was not about the performativity of the phallus, but
about her incessant invocation of "citations." How
ludicrously and introvertedly academic can one get?
Barkley Rosser
On Thu, 28 Jan 1999 11:39:37 -0500 Louis Proyect
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Last night I read the Lingua Franca article on the decline and fall of the
Duke Literature department with morbid fascination. ("The Department that
Fell to Earth," David Yaffe, Feb. 99) While not quite as scandalous as the
discovery that Paul De Man, Yale's post-structuralism guru, had been a
pro-Nazi journalist during WWII, the collapse at Duke should remind us how
tenuous the whole postmodernist/poststructuralist enterprise is
intellectually. Now that the material base for these trends is dying
down--namely, the economic expansion of the 1980s-- it should be apparent
that much of the intellectual energy will begun to dissipate. That is the
real story behind Duke's debacle.
What you might also find interesting is that the Marxism list at Panix is
actually the spawn of a mailing-list that a Duke literature major started
over five years ago. There is a core of people, including me, who met each
other on that list and who have stayed together in one permutation or
another for around a half-decade.
Jon Beasley-Murray was a member of the Spoons Collective, a group of
students and non-academic intellectuals who shared an interest in cultural
studies. They already had begun lists on Deleuze-Guattari, Bataille,
Lyotard, etc, when they decided it would be useful to have one on Marx as
well. They saw Marx not as a proletarian revolutionary, but as an
intellectual forerunner to Frederic Jameson! Jameson was Beasley-Murray's
professor at Duke and I would be the first to admit that Jon was closer to
Marxism politically than the rest of the Spoons Collective put together. He
was strongly influenced by Jameson, Deleuze-Guattari and Bourdieu. His
papers are online at:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/marxism/marxpapers.html
Mostly what Jon was interested in was escalating the importance of culture,
as opposed to underlying class relations that supposedly typified classical
Marxism. This paragraph from his paper on "Value and Capital in Bourdieu
and Marx" should give you an idea where he is coming from:
"Traditionally, only the exchange at the cash register concerns economics.
In Marxist terms, the price paid is related to the book's value which is a
combination of: the value of its means of production; the value of the
variable capital (wages) required for the reproduction of the socially
necessary labor time; and the value of the surplus, which is more or less
equal to profit. Everything else concerns use value. On the other hand, for
Bourdieu this is only the beginning of the story: selecting and then
reading the book require a certain amount of cultural (particularly
linguistic) capital, and the benefits of such investment yield an amount of
cultural capital which may acquire a new form of exchangeable value at an
academic dinner party or job interview, or with the granting of an
educational diploma. Thus while for an orthodox economist the choice of
Great Expectations over Neuromancer (say) is of
[PEN-L:2684] A correction from Jon
Greetings from Scotland, and thanks to Lou for his comments and analysis, which seldom fail to be interesting and are usually pertinent, if not always 100% accurate. On accuracy, I'll just mention that the department at Duke that has "imploded" is not the Literature Program (at which I did, and continue to do, my PhD), but the English Department. And while the press may consistently confuse various theoretical and political tendencies--tarring them all with the same brush--it would be unwise to repeat this move if one wants an effective analysis. Thus beware: not all poststructuralisms, postmodernisms or postmarxisms are alike. Specifically, in this case, Stanley Fish (former chair of the English department) is an avowed conservative--if one worth listening to--while Fred Jameson (chair of the Literature Program) is more Marxist--of a Hegelian or Lukacsian variety--than postmarxist. But the fact that the Literature Program (whose program is generally much more recognizeably leftist) remains sturdy while serious problems have been revealed in the (generally more conservative) English Department is less, I think, a result of its political or theoretical orientation than of rather different hiring strategies, relations among the faculty, and the fact that it has always had fewer significant internal divisions. Not such an interesting story, but perhaps a more complicated one concerning academic labor practices and corporate organization. Meanwhile, rather than search for the apocryphal article that might reflect how much I was shaken by the Sokal affair (and rather than take the ironic reference to this affair at face value), perhaps better to look at my article "Peronism and the Secret History of Cultural Studies: Populism and the Substitution of Culture for State," in _Cultural Critique_ 39 (Spring 1998): 189-217. This might also clarify, a little better than can Lou, my position on the role of culture in politics. And education is bad for you whether you are at Duke, Aberdeen, or anywhere else. I know many said this on the old marxism list (Lou first among them), but they sometimes forgot that you don't have to be outside of academia to say it. Indeed, some of us hope that we may be heard saying it within academia. Take care and regards to all, especially to Lou Jon Jon Beasley-Murray Hispanic Studies University of Aberdeen [EMAIL PROTECTED] Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:2683] Chicago Tribune Traditional Version - Nation/World
This is a multi-part message in MIME format.
Dear Pen-L,
This sounds pretty good to me. Anyone want to go into the radio
business?
Your email pal,
Tom L.
http://chicagotribune.com/version1/article/0,1575,SAV-9901280202,00.html
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[PEN-L:2682] Re: Duke University's literature department
It's funny, really, that such certifiably educated folks would confound self and subjectivity. That's the root form of *essentialism* that has been known to philosophy for ages as solipsism. Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
[PEN-L:2681] An article responding to MR's critique of post-Marxism
Hi Lou, Long time no converse. I have attached a reply I wrote to an article that you posted from MR last year, Christopher Rudes review of _Globalization and Its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms_ by Roger Burbach, Orlando Nunez, and Boris Kagarlitsky. My reply focuses on the author's attitude towards Marxism, not on the substance of his critique of Burbach et. al. I just received a letter from MR this morning rejecting the piece on grounds of lack of space, despite the fact they found it 'acceptable'. I have no desire at the present time to delurk on your list, so I didn't want to post it directly. However, since I first read the article on your list and you seemed to approve of Rude's article when you posted it, I wanted to let you see my response. Feel free to use it in any way you wish. Best wishes, Howie Chodos - 'Unreconstructed' Marxism: A Critique Howard Chodos Postdoctoral Fellow School of Public Administration Carleton University I would like to offer some comments on Christopher Rude's review of Globalization and Its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms by Roger Burbach, Orlando Nunez, and Boris Kagarlitsky that appeared in your November issue. Unusually, I am doing this despite not having read the work that was under review. Thus, the issue I want to raise is not whether Burbach et. al., or Rude, or some other commentator, is right with regard to particular substantive claims about the state of international capitalism and the class struggle. What does concern me, however, is the tone, spirit and attitude towards Marxism that the review displayed. I wish therefore to speak to two interrelated points. First, there is the question of the standard of argumentation that is required to foster a vibrant interchange, and second, there is the matter of the attitude to be adopted to what we can call, for want of a better term, the crisis of Marxism. In general, Rude's review struck me as being casually dismissive of the authors' views without offering anything other than a rather dogmatic reliance on certain key traditional Marxist precepts as an alternative. From the outset, Rude establishes his general opinion, not only of the authors in question, but of all those who think that Marxism has become outdated. In his view, they are all succumbing to intellectual faddism. He objects to the authors' characterization of Marxism as being in complete disarray and their endorsement of the death certificate for the project for revolution launched by the Communist Manifesto (p. 52). Rude is right that, formulated in this fashion, these positions seriously overstate the overall case against Marxism. However, there are important issues at stake here that must not be ignored in a rush to defend the tradition's honor. Let me begin with the key question of class. Central to Rude's complaint against the authors is their contention that globalization has "brought about a cessation of class conflict throughout the world." (p. 53) In Rude's view, not only is this a patently inaccurate assessment of the current situation, but it also leads to privileging movements and struggles that do not have the potential to radically transform capitalism, namely the so-called new social movements (i.e. "women's, ethnic rights, gay and lesbian, disabled, Indians, environmentalists"). Rude raises a number of reasons as to why these forces are fundamentally different to the working class, two of which I wish to highlight. The first is on p. 53, where he affirms that: "With a class-based opposition to world capitalism no longer viable, presumably opposition cannot come from within the system but only from without, and non-economic, cultural issues are pushed to the forefront." My question here is a simple one. What warrants the assertion that all these other movements are somehow located "outside" the system? Now, later on Rude himself acknowledges that: The women's, gay, lesbian, and ethnic rights movements have indeed acted as the "major ideological protagonists" of social change in recent years. By showing just how varied and subtle oppression can be, these social movements have both broadened the left's political agenda and, by exposing many blind spots, transformed the left's total world view. (p. 55) Shouldn't this later admission qualify his earlier dismissal of the non-economic movements located outside the system (wherever that may be)? Not only does Rude not do that, he goes on to argue that by embracing non-class forces the authors "appear to have lost a concern for universal principles altogether." Class would thus seem for Rude to be the only possible source of universal values, or anti-systemic struggles. He then points to the fact that "as recent events in Bosnia and Rwanda show, movements based on race and ethnicity can just as easily produce genocide as liberation." (p. 56) The problem with this argument, and it is a decisive one in my view, is that it can just as easily be
[PEN-L:2680] Duke University's literature department
Last night I read the Lingua Franca article on the decline and fall of the
Duke Literature department with morbid fascination. ("The Department that
Fell to Earth," David Yaffe, Feb. 99) While not quite as scandalous as the
discovery that Paul De Man, Yale's post-structuralism guru, had been a
pro-Nazi journalist during WWII, the collapse at Duke should remind us how
tenuous the whole postmodernist/poststructuralist enterprise is
intellectually. Now that the material base for these trends is dying
down--namely, the economic expansion of the 1980s-- it should be apparent
that much of the intellectual energy will begun to dissipate. That is the
real story behind Duke's debacle.
What you might also find interesting is that the Marxism list at Panix is
actually the spawn of a mailing-list that a Duke literature major started
over five years ago. There is a core of people, including me, who met each
other on that list and who have stayed together in one permutation or
another for around a half-decade.
Jon Beasley-Murray was a member of the Spoons Collective, a group of
students and non-academic intellectuals who shared an interest in cultural
studies. They already had begun lists on Deleuze-Guattari, Bataille,
Lyotard, etc, when they decided it would be useful to have one on Marx as
well. They saw Marx not as a proletarian revolutionary, but as an
intellectual forerunner to Frederic Jameson! Jameson was Beasley-Murray's
professor at Duke and I would be the first to admit that Jon was closer to
Marxism politically than the rest of the Spoons Collective put together. He
was strongly influenced by Jameson, Deleuze-Guattari and Bourdieu. His
papers are online at:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/marxism/marxpapers.html
Mostly what Jon was interested in was escalating the importance of culture,
as opposed to underlying class relations that supposedly typified classical
Marxism. This paragraph from his paper on "Value and Capital in Bourdieu
and Marx" should give you an idea where he is coming from:
"Traditionally, only the exchange at the cash register concerns economics.
In Marxist terms, the price paid is related to the book's value which is a
combination of: the value of its means of production; the value of the
variable capital (wages) required for the reproduction of the socially
necessary labor time; and the value of the surplus, which is more or less
equal to profit. Everything else concerns use value. On the other hand, for
Bourdieu this is only the beginning of the story: selecting and then
reading the book require a certain amount of cultural (particularly
linguistic) capital, and the benefits of such investment yield an amount of
cultural capital which may acquire a new form of exchangeable value at an
academic dinner party or job interview, or with the granting of an
educational diploma. Thus while for an orthodox economist the choice of
Great Expectations over Neuromancer (say) is of no concern, for the
economist of cultural capital such distinctions are the essential points of
analysis. Indeed, Bourdieu appears to overturn the common economistic
conception that use is the immediate and uncomplex satisfaction of need.
Rather, he demonstrates the way in which use value is transformed into a
new form of value, and thus produces cultural capital, at a scene removed
from the initial, economic exchange. The question now is that of the
relation between these two moments of exchange."
The Spoons Marxism list was characterized by internal contradictions from
the very beginning. The post-Marxists like Beasley-Murray were frustrated
by the direction the list took, when activists and classical Marxist
academics signed up. By the same token, this camp found itself at war with
sectarians from across the political spectrum who thought that they were in
the Russian Duma of 1911 rather than a mailing-list. Jon, in keeping with
the free speech metaphysic that had been institutionalized by Duke
department head Stanley Fish, insisted that the list remain unmoderated. It
was only during the course of a particularly bitter flame war with
supporters of Peru's Shining Path that a decision was made to moderate the
list. Unfortunately, one of the moderators turned out to be not only
incurably sectarian, but certifiably insane, so we were forced to look
elsewhere. Doug's LBO-Talk list and the Marxism list at Panix are the
grandchildren of Jon Beasley-Murray's original list.
I suspect that the internal crisis at Duke and other shake-ups in the world
of postmodernism have taken their toll on Jon. He was profoundly shaken by
the Sokal affair and wrote a short article on how this had made him
reconsider many of his theoretical assumptions. Unfortunately, his web page
no longer has the piece otherwise I would have included it.
The most interesting observation in the Lingua Franca article is that
nearly all of the Duke literature professors had gone off on a
memoir-writing jag. Postmodernism, with its obsession with
[PEN-L:2678] BLS Daily Report
This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. --_=_NextPart_000_01BE4ACC.92C65E30 BLS DAILY REPORT, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 27, 1999 Adding to a series of Internet-related calamities at BLS, the agency's Web site fell prey to a hacking prank, says an article in the Wall Street Journal (page A2). A computer hacker defaced the bureau's introductory Web page Friday afternoon, adding several juvenile messages, including the boast, "You've been hacked." Labor Department technicians discovered the digital graffiti less than 15 minutes after they had been written and ripped the page from the Web. Carl Lowe, the department's associate commissioner for technology, said no sensitive date were compromised. "I would classify this as minor hacking," he said, adding that some of the messages indicated it was the work of teenagers, according to the article. The incident was the third Internet mishap at the department in as many months. In November, BLS mistakenly posted portions of a monthly employment report a full day ahead of schedule. The leak moved financial markets and caused Labor officials to rethink the department's procedures for releasing information on the Web. In a similar incident earlier this month, the BLS inadvertently released the monthly Producer Price Index, another report that affected the day's financial markets. ... Increasingly, hackers use password programs that generate frequently used passwords in a matter of minutes, helping them to gain quick access to computer servers. The Labor Department won't say how the hacker entered the Web site. Mr. Lowe, however, said technicians "have removed the vulnerability." Consumer confidence edged up in January, indicating continued economic expansion in the coming months, the Conference Board reports. The organization's consumer confidence index advanced 1 percentage point to 127.6 percent of its 1985 base. ... Nearly 46 percent say jobs are plentiful, up from nearly 43 percent last month. The proportion of respondents who feel jobs are 'hard to get' declined from 14.6 percent to 13.3 percent. ... (Daily Labor Report, page A-2)_Americans are slightly less confident about the outlook for the next six months than for the month ahead. ... (Washington Post, page E4)_The rebound on Wall Street during January helped restore consumer confidence in the economy, but Americans still have concerns about their own finances in the months ahead. The number of people who said they expected their incomes to increase over the next six months dropped 5.3 percentage points. ... (New York Times, page C8)_Low unemployment and a steady stream of new jobs are keeping consumer confidence at high levels. ... (Wall Street Journal, page A2). Led by booming information technology businesses, more than 80 percent of manufacturing industries and all the major service sectors are expected to grow through 1999, according to a trade and industry report by the Commerce Department and McGraw-Hill. ... The report, "U.S. Industry Trade Outlook '99," forecasts broad-based growth, with gains in the consumer goods, machinery investment, construction, and high-tech sectors. The outlook predicts that economic growth will be between 2 and 2.5 percent in 1999, lower and more sustainable than the 3 percent growth seen in 1998, the report said. ... "The big winners are clearly information technology sectors which continue to plow on, regardless of what happens in the world," says the director of the Office of Trade and Economic Analysis in the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration. The information technology sector is projected to grow 8 percent in 1999, according to the report. ... The report predicts that economic growth abroad will be relatively weak in 1999. The report cites chemicals and machinery as examples of export-reliant industries that are expected to be dampened by weak export markets. ... (Daily Labor Report, page D-1). The White House said the administration was considering plans to produce two sets of official census data in 2001. One would be based on a traditional head count to be used for apportioning Congressional seats, and another adjusted by sampling that states could use to draw lines for federal, state, and local political districts. The Supreme Court ruled that sampling, a statistical technique, could not be used to adjust the 2000 census for the purposes of apportioning seats in the House. But the court left the door open to using sampling for other purposes, including possibly redistricting and allocating Federal money. ... (New York Times, page A13; Washington Post, page A2). DUE OUT TOMORROW: Employment Cost Index -- December 1998 --_=_NextPart_000_01BE4ACC.92C65E30 b3NvZnQgTWFpbC5Ob3RlADEIAQWAAwAOzwcBABwACQArACsABABWAQEggAMADgAAAM8HAQAc
[PEN-L:2677] Re: Re: LBO intern needed
Gerald Levy wrote: Doug writes: H-lp! LBO badly needs an intern snip What did you say you were offering prospective candidates in terms of an hourly wage and benefits? $50/week for 5-10 hours of work. No benefits, sorry. The Village Voice pays $0/week for full-time interns, and The Nation, $125/week, also full-time. Doug
[PEN-L:2676] Re: LBO intern needed
Doug writes: H-lp! LBO badly needs an intern snip What did you say you were offering prospective candidates in terms of an hourly wage and benefits? Jerry
[PEN-L:2675] Re: The lump-of-opera fallacy
Ray E. Harrell wrote,
Ed,
Let us talk about artists. Truth and Beauty. A mirror and an ideal.
At Kyoto it is a mirror and a stone which seems a parallel but the
Japanese will have to tell us about that. In America it was a dark
mirror and a clear mirror with a hole in it that spoke of the reality of
human existence in artistic terms. Reality cannot be directly
expressed. It can only be hinted at in metaphors of words, paint,
sound, movement and drama. Our art is a mirror of who we are in the
world and can be read like the book of our souls. At the same time that
reading creates the next generation. But let us talk of the evil when
art is abused and ignored.
Hitlers and Stalins are easy targets. They "prove," as sacrifices in
singular ways, that no matter how prejudiced, bigoted or provincial we
are, we are not responsible for the deaths of millions, and we are
certainly not like or responsible for the tyrants, or are we?
Is it not often the little bigots, the provincial, those who create and
denigrate the "other" group or the objectification of the "opposite"
philosophy, religion, company or cultural group, that creates the "foot
soldiers" for the war that murders millions of people? (War has
practically been constant in Europe for the last five hundred years. In
this country it was not just the physical war but all of the aspects of
colonialism that murdered 92 out of every 100 aboriginal citizens of
this hemisphere not counting the diminished birth rate.)
In this provincial context placing blame is like shooting fish. It is
easier to blame the leaders we call up than to blame Mark Twain or L.
Frank ("beloved writer of Wizard of Oz") Baum whose writings reinforced
the prejudices of the pioneers who called out the army to murder women
and children. Baum editorialized in his newspaper the day after the
Wounded Knee Massacre:
"that our only safety
depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians.
Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in
order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more
wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures
from the face of the the earth.
Baum opened this up for us so let us examine his "artistic truth" a
little more closely. He wrote all of this when the "Indians" had
formed governments, had legal systems, mansions and worst of all,
prosperity in Oklahoma. In South Dakota, it was the greed of the local
pioneers and the collaboration of the local taxpayers "Indian Agent"
who shipped rotten beef and "untaught" a people, that knew plenty about
agriculture, how to do it the approved wrong way. (Read the great
Peace Priest Frank Fools Crow's story of this time told to Thomas
Mails) Who caused this? The government? The government's response
was from the bigotry and voting power of their male taxpayers. The
females traded with the Indian women for cures for their children and
for clothing and how to collect food from the wild prairie. ("Women and
indians on the Frontier, 1825-1915" by Glenda Riley)
After the massacre the American people used it as an excuse to disband
all of the Indian nations and homestead the rest of the land. It was so
illegal that much of it is still in the courts 100 years later.
Artists collaborated in building these stereotypes but was it everyone?
Some of the artists like Payne and Emerson wrote of the lies and
injustice but most artists played up the terrible danger and the wild
countryside made unsafe for the "poor" farmers by the "terrible"
Indians. Contrast the wild countryside peopled by dangerous tribes
with the Thomas Orchestra from NYCity making so many tours in the 1880s
across the U.S. that the road to the West Coast became known as the
Thomas Orchestral highway. The Wounded Knee Massacre was in 1880.
There were thousands of opera houses across the country with 1,300 in
the "wild" state of Iowa. Meanwhile in Oklahoma the government Dawes
report said (as I have printed here earlier):
"The head chief told us that there was not a
family in that whole nation that had not a home of its own.
There was not a pauper in that nation, and the
nation did not owe a dollar. It built its own capitol, in
which we had this examination, and it built its
schools and its hospitals. Yet the defect of the system
was apparent. They have got as far as they can go,
because they own their land in common. It is
Henry George's system, and under that there is
not enterprise to make your home any better than that
of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is
at the bottom of civilization. Till this people will
consent to give up their lands, and divide them
among their citizens so that each can own the land he
cultivates, they will not make much more progress."
How is it that those Indians loved opera and ballet and that in a short
time the first five prima ballerinas in America's modern companies were
American Indians? Something wrong here? An Osage Prima Donna in the
Metropolitan
[PEN-L:2674] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: intern needed
-- On Wed, 27 Jan 1999 11:03:32 Jim Devine wrote: In response to Doug's effort to hire an intern, Tom Walker wrote: Would that be LBO as in LiBidO? Doug responded: I'm too old for one of those. easy: body, soul and spirit in tandem (or is it traend'em now? that fool freud who was raised by a maid and fancied his mamma (as a consequence; incest ain't natural past a certain stage of complexity...ooohohoahahaha..profound, well tis still early and I 'm sharper now than at night ) Wojtek responds: It is not age, Doug. It is power, the ultimate aphrodisiac as our fearless leader can attest. I wonder: if knowledge is power, and power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, why didn't _my_ Ph.D. pay off? and if knowledge is power and power corrupts, does that mean that knowledge corrupts? and that absolute knowledge corrupts absolutely? Just as Heidegger's stuff is as 'abgehoben' as Butler's and mere mirror images of molecular mechanics, never getting from Sein to Stein; so power can't seem to find the will to powder or maybe I really am ignorant. "all I know is that I know nothing." -- Socrates. Confucius was praised for his intelli-prowess but said: "I only know one thing well but it permeats all things" quoted in Leopold Kohr's "the overdeveloped nations" His ears were as big as mine but he was pretty deaf towards the end of his life pioneering the small is beautiful body of thought. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html HotBot - Search smarter. http://www.hotbot.com
[PEN-L:2673] Re: Re: intern needed
what's that work like then tom? Growing a site? Does it come with seedsaver samples produce subscriptions or acreage or anything like that? HotBot - Search smarter. http://www.hotbot.com
[PEN-L:2672] Capital
So Amazon delivered to me vols 1 2 of Capital and the Grundrisse today, and vol 3 is on the way. So they're not out of print yet. Doug
[PEN-L:2687] Re: Re: LBO intern needed
Gerald Levy wrote: Doug writes: H-lp! LBO badly needs an intern snip What did you say you were offering prospective candidates in terms of an hourly wage and benefits? $50/week for 5-10 hours of work. No benefits, sorry. Except an education money can't buy. And the doors Doug's name opens (of which there are more than you might think.) Josh (former LBO intern)
