Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[ken hanly]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:30061] Re: RE: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]



Not only that but Husky chain saws are among the 
best. There is even an ad for a husky grass whipper that shows someone trimming 
the grass around a telephone pole and as the person moves to the next one the 
pole falls down. So as usual Louis is wrong, Shiva would not survive. She and 
her arguments would be cut to pieces. (Of course much that Shiva has to say is 
correct but has already been said by countless other less adorable 
people)

Cheers, Ken Hanly

  - Original Message - 
  From: 
  Devine, James 

  To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' 
  
  Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 2:47 
  PM
  Subject: [PEN-L:30062] RE: Re: RE: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  
  There is a graduate student in Sweden named Bo 
  Husqvarnaquistholm who is closely aligned with Bjorn Lomborg, the 
  self-described skeptical environmentalist who favors 
  global warming 
  heck, if I lived in Sweden, maybe I'd favor global warming 
  too. 
   Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine 
   -Original Message-  
  From: Louis Proyect [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]  Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 2:40 PM  To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]  
  Subject: [PEN-L:30061] Re: RE: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Devine, 
  James wrote:
  Mark Jones writes:Those who want to silence such  authentic voices of   the 
  oppressed women of the South as Vandana Shiva are its servants. 
  could you name 
  someone who wants to _silence_ Shiva? as opposed to   simply disagreeing with her opinions and thus being willing 
  to   criticize them? (BTW, is it some government 
  that wants to silence her?  people on the 
left don't have the power to do so.) 
  I think I know whom Mark is referring to. There is a graduate 
   student in  Sweden 
  named Bo Husqvarnaquistholm who is closely aligned with Bjorn  Lomborg, the self-described skeptical environmentalist who 
  favors  global warming, genetically modified food 
  and keeping the beef fat on  Mcdonald's french 
  fries. Husqvarnaquistholm is working on a  
  dissertation  as I understand it which implicitly 
  defends the need to  reintroduce DDT. 
   He argues that if Great Britain survived without 
  condors, so can the  rest of the world. 
  Husqvarnaquistholm is not only completely  wrapped 
  up  in this ideology, he is also a bit manic it 
  seems. Well, when Shiva  showed up at his college 
  last year to speak on GM crops, he  attacked her 
   with a chainsaw. As I understand it, she survived 
  with minor cuts and  scratches.   --  
   Louis Proyect  
  www.marxmail.org   
  

Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Patrick Bond]

After noting on Mark's A-list that I got Robert's excellent book for $15
equivalent in South Africa a year or so ago, I went over to the Johannesburg
Workers Library bookshop and found many many other recent Zeds for $6.
Farouk, great cross-subsidisation (for us who are in the US$1,000/month
range and below), many thanks!

Patrick

- Original Message -
From: Farouk Sohawon [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: Mark Jones [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
[EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
[EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
#[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 12:28 PM
Subject: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]


 Dear Mark Jones,

 Thanks to you and Lou giving a good account of Robert Biel's book and its
 weaknesses.

 Speaking on Zed's behalf concerning the size and price, 370 pages in Royal
format is not a slim volume
 and US$25.00  is not an exorbitant price for a book of this size, and this
is the
 highest price Zed would charge in the North.  I can point out to you that
we have a
 two-track policy in terms of prices.  In the North we charge a realistic
price, or what
 we consider to be realistic, but this goes a long way to subsidise the
price in the
 South.  You may or may not know that books published by Zed are available
in
 many countries in the South at an accessible price to the local
population.

 Again you may not know that Zed is a workers' cooperative and most of us
working
 here are politically motivated, but as we do not have any sugar daddies,
we need to
 get the political and the economic right.

 I hope this addresses your concerns.  If you need further elaborations,
please get in
 touch.

 In solidarity.

 Farouk Sohawon

Re: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[ravi]

Doug Henwood wrote:
 ravi wrote:
 Doug Henwood wrote:

 Shiva's biggest fans are among Western NGOs. She has almost no 
 followers in India.

 can you back up this statement?
 
 I've heard it from people in the antiglobo movement, and from Ulhas 
 Joglekar on either this list or lbo-talk.
 

but doug, does the antiglobo movement represent indians? how many
indian farmers (or the starving masses) consider anti-globalization
an issue?

so far, all i have heard in the criticism of shiva (in general, not
from you particularly), apart from lewontin's review of her book
which i forwarded to the list, is a form of intellectual
snobbishness - kind of the anti-primitivism, or pro-enlightenment,
or anti-liberal-bourgeosie, and other varying attitudes, seen here.

perhaps i am just reacting to a recent argument (not on this list)
with a marxist who felt that my concern for animal rights is
bourgeosie and silly. he may well be right, but what is constant in
this sort of argumentation is the obsession with the person rather
than the idea. it seems there are some preferred notions (in some
circles its 'marxism'), - perhaps i have missed the concrete
demonstration of its overriding superiority - and the arguments in
favour of that notion, over opposing ones, often seem to beg the
question (such as arguments of creationists: the bible says so).

if indeed shiva's thought is misguided (as lewontin argues) and she
is a crank with no following, then i would like to see the evidence
so we can move past her. lewontin makes a good case for the former,
though not to the point of dismissing all that she has to say. on
the other hand, sitting a few thousand miles away, all i can see in
shiva's work is honest effort such as mentioned in patrick bond's
response in this thread.

btw, i agree with the carrol's response to my post.

--ravi

RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Devine, James]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:30058] Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 





Mark Jones writes:Those who want to silence such authentic voices of the oppressed women of the South as Vandana Shiva are its servants.

could you name someone who wants to _silence_ Shiva? as opposed to simply disagreeing with her opinions and thus being willing to criticize them? 

(BTW, is it some government that wants to silence her? people on the left don't have the power to do so.)



Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine




 -Original Message-
 From: Mark Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
 Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 1:58 PM
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: [PEN-L:30058] Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
 
 
 At 05/09/2002 19:29, Louis Proyect wrote:
 Robert Biel's The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in 
 North/South Relations (Zed Books, 2000) is everything that 
 Hardt-Negri's 
 Empire is not.
 
 This is a wonderful book by Biel and, prompted by my mentor 
 Lou Proyect, I 
 just spent a day at the British Library going thru it. Great, 
 especially, 
 on the importance to capitalist accumulation and to the 
 wealth enjoyed by 
 the big swinging dicks of Wall St and their 
 fashionable-parlor-socialist 
 acolytes and alleged critics, is the unsung and unpaid 
 domestic drudgery of 
 Third World Women. As Biel points out, the same people who 
 argue in favour 
 of the maquiladoras and the entrenchment of wage-slavery in the 
 peripheries, as somehow enlightening alternatives to such domestic 
 drudgery, are in their own persons and in their engrossment 
 of the labour 
 of others, beneficiaries of that domestic drudgery, for without the 
 immiseration and cruel exploitation of unseen masses of women, 
 part-peasant, part-proletarian, hag-ridden by patriarchy and 
 ultimately at 
 the service of Wall St and its mouthpieces, imperialism could 
 not continue 
 to exploit the South at all. These silent, invisible women, 
 hundreds of 
 millions of them, are a condition of existence of late 
 capitalism, of US 
 imperialism in its exterminist phase of final decay. Those 
 who want to 
 silence such authentic voices of the oppressed women of the South as 
 Vandana Shiva are its servants. Biel provides a rebuttal to 
 their craven 
 politics in terms which even economists can understand.
 
 However despite its strong points, so well summarised by Lou 
 that you don't 
 need to buy the it, there are one or two, no, make that four, 
 thing wrong 
 with Biel's book.
 
 First, his approach to the USSR (his Maoist inflection 
 doesn't permit him 
 to comprehend either the scale of the human catastrophe 
 ongoing in eastern 
 Europe, or the implications, positive and negative, of the 
 disappearance of 
 the USSR for global relations of production and for US hegemony).
 
 2nd his approach to the nature of contemporary imperialism (he's a 
 semi-kautskyite who believes in ultra-imperialism. Now. while 
 it is true 
 that there exists a baleful solidarity of the thieving North 
 against the 
 abused South, the idea that the USA is merely one imperial 
 power among 
 others, a primum inter pares, is absurd. The US is the heart 
 of the global 
 cancer of capitalism, the primary tumour).
 
 3rd Biel's approach to the ongoing and apocalyptic eco-crisis, which 
 combines man-made climate change, mass extinction and 
 poisoning of the 
 ecosphere is far too weak (He kind of mentions it, but it is 
 hardly central 
 to his thinking; but, to paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be 
 interested in 
 eco-catastrophe, but eco-catastrophe is sure interested in you).
 
 4th Biel's political conclusions are tepid, insipid and 
 utopian; and here I 
 diosagree with Lou's more upbeat judgment.
 
 I'm glad of Lou's review and despite my overall negativity, 
 this is a good 
 book. Especially good factually (but an archive search of 
 marxmail or the 
 A-List will bring up a lot better and more recent stuff, for 
 free. Where do 
 Zed get off charging $25 for a slim paperback?)
 
 Mark Jones
 

RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Devine, James]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:30058] Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 





Mark Jones writes:These silent, invisible women, hundreds of millions of them, are a condition of existence of late capitalism, of US imperialism in its exterminist phase of final decay.

what makes you think that US imperialism is in its phase of final decay? It's horrible -- maybe even exterminist -- and having some severe economic problems, but it's not going to go away until there's some sort of powerful movement aiming to replace it. 

BTW, EP Thompson used the word exterminist to refer to the vicious circle of the Cold War rivalry between US and Soviet imperialisms (though I don't think he described the USSR as imperialist). You must be describing a different type of exterminism. Very destructive military adventures by imperialist powers against smaller countries (here, Iraq) have happened before. What makes the current one exterminist? 


Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine




 -Original Message-
 From: Mark Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
 Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 1:58 PM
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: [PEN-L:30058] Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
 
 
 At 05/09/2002 19:29, Louis Proyect wrote:
 Robert Biel's The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in 
 North/South Relations (Zed Books, 2000) is everything that 
 Hardt-Negri's 
 Empire is not.
 
 This is a wonderful book by Biel and, prompted by my mentor 
 Lou Proyect, I 
 just spent a day at the British Library going thru it. Great, 
 especially, 
 on the importance to capitalist accumulation and to the 
 wealth enjoyed by 
 the big swinging dicks of Wall St and their 
 fashionable-parlor-socialist 
 acolytes and alleged critics, is the unsung and unpaid 
 domestic drudgery of 
 Third World Women. As Biel points out, the same people who 
 argue in favour 
 of the maquiladoras and the entrenchment of wage-slavery in the 
 peripheries, as somehow enlightening alternatives to such domestic 
 drudgery, are in their own persons and in their engrossment 
 of the labour 
 of others, beneficiaries of that domestic drudgery, for without the 
 immiseration and cruel exploitation of unseen masses of women, 
 part-peasant, part-proletarian, hag-ridden by patriarchy and 
 ultimately at 
 the service of Wall St and its mouthpieces, imperialism could 
 not continue 
 to exploit the South at all. These silent, invisible women, 
 hundreds of 
 millions of them, are a condition of existence of late 
 capitalism, of US 
 imperialism in its exterminist phase of final decay. Those 
 who want to 
 silence such authentic voices of the oppressed women of the South as 
 Vandana Shiva are its servants. Biel provides a rebuttal to 
 their craven 
 politics in terms which even economists can understand.
 
 However despite its strong points, so well summarised by Lou 
 that you don't 
 need to buy the it, there are one or two, no, make that four, 
 thing wrong 
 with Biel's book.
 
 First, his approach to the USSR (his Maoist inflection 
 doesn't permit him 
 to comprehend either the scale of the human catastrophe 
 ongoing in eastern 
 Europe, or the implications, positive and negative, of the 
 disappearance of 
 the USSR for global relations of production and for US hegemony).
 
 2nd his approach to the nature of contemporary imperialism (he's a 
 semi-kautskyite who believes in ultra-imperialism. Now. while 
 it is true 
 that there exists a baleful solidarity of the thieving North 
 against the 
 abused South, the idea that the USA is merely one imperial 
 power among 
 others, a primum inter pares, is absurd. The US is the heart 
 of the global 
 cancer of capitalism, the primary tumour).
 
 3rd Biel's approach to the ongoing and apocalyptic eco-crisis, which 
 combines man-made climate change, mass extinction and 
 poisoning of the 
 ecosphere is far too weak (He kind of mentions it, but it is 
 hardly central 
 to his thinking; but, to paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be 
 interested in 
 eco-catastrophe, but eco-catastrophe is sure interested in you).
 
 4th Biel's political conclusions are tepid, insipid and 
 utopian; and here I 
 diosagree with Lou's more upbeat judgment.
 
 I'm glad of Lou's review and despite my overall negativity, 
 this is a good 
 book. Especially good factually (but an archive search of 
 marxmail or the 
 A-List will bring up a lot better and more recent stuff, for 
 free. Where do 
 Zed get off charging $25 for a slim paperback?)
 
 Mark Jones
 

Re: RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Louis Proyect]

Devine, James wrote:

 Mark Jones writes:Those  who want to silence such authentic voices of 
 the oppressed women of the South as Vandana Shiva are its servants.

 could you name someone who wants to _silence_ Shiva? as opposed to 
 simply disagreeing with her opinions and thus being willing to 
 criticize them?

 (BTW, is it some government that wants to silence her? people on the 
 left don't have the power to do so.)


I think I know whom Mark is referring to. There is a graduate student in 
Sweden named Bo Husqvarnaquistholm who is closely aligned with Bjorn 
 Lomborg, the self-described skeptical environmentalist who favors 
global warming, genetically modified food and keeping the beef fat on 
Mcdonald's french fries. Husqvarnaquistholm is working on a dissertation 
as I understand it which implicitly defends the need to reintroduce DDT. 
He argues that if Great Britain survived without condors, so can the 
rest of the world. Husqvarnaquistholm is not only completely wrapped up 
in this ideology, he is also a bit manic it seems. Well, when Shiva 
showed up at his college last year to speak on GM crops, he attacked her 
with a chainsaw. As I understand it, she survived with minor cuts and 
scratches.

-- 

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org

RE: Re: RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Devine, James]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:30061] Re: RE: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]





There is a graduate student in Sweden named Bo Husqvarnaquistholm who is closely aligned with Bjorn Lomborg, the self-described skeptical environmentalist who favors 

global warming


heck, if I lived in Sweden, maybe I'd favor global warming too.



Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine




 -Original Message-
 From: Louis Proyect [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
 Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 2:40 PM
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: [PEN-L:30061] Re: RE: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 
 
 Devine, James wrote:
 
  Mark Jones writes:Those who want to silence such 
 authentic voices of 
  the oppressed women of the South as Vandana Shiva are its servants.
 
  could you name someone who wants to _silence_ Shiva? as opposed to 
  simply disagreeing with her opinions and thus being willing to 
  criticize them?
 
  (BTW, is it some government that wants to silence her? 
 people on the 
  left don't have the power to do so.)
 
 
 I think I know whom Mark is referring to. There is a graduate 
 student in 
 Sweden named Bo Husqvarnaquistholm who is closely aligned with Bjorn 
 Lomborg, the self-described skeptical environmentalist who favors 
 global warming, genetically modified food and keeping the beef fat on 
 Mcdonald's french fries. Husqvarnaquistholm is working on a 
 dissertation 
 as I understand it which implicitly defends the need to 
 reintroduce DDT. 
 He argues that if Great Britain survived without condors, so can the 
 rest of the world. Husqvarnaquistholm is not only completely 
 wrapped up 
 in this ideology, he is also a bit manic it seems. Well, when Shiva 
 showed up at his college last year to speak on GM crops, he 
 attacked her 
 with a chainsaw. As I understand it, she survived with minor cuts and 
 scratches.
 
 -- 
 
 Louis Proyect
 www.marxmail.org
 
 

Re: RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Doug Henwood]

Devine, James wrote:

Mark Jones writes:Those  who want to silence such authentic voices 
of the oppressed women of the South as Vandana Shiva are its 
servants.

could you name someone who wants to _silence_ Shiva? as opposed to 
simply disagreeing with her opinions and thus being willing to 
criticize them?

Shiva's biggest fans are among Western NGOs. She has almost no 
followers in India. How does someone get nominated as the authentic 
voice of the oppressed anyway?

Doug

Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Tom Walker]

This Husqvarnaquistholm sounds like a dangerous fellow. I understand he's
also for clear-cutting old growth forests. Just one point of clarification,
though. Did he actually say condors or condoms? If it was condoms, did he
mean Ireland, not Great Britain?

 He argues that if Great Britain survived without condors, so can the
 rest of the world.

RE: Re: RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Devine, James]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:30064] Re: RE: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]





Mark Jones wrote:Those who want to silence such authentic voices 
 of the oppressed women of the South as Vandana Shiva are its 
 servants.


me:
 could you name someone who wants to _silence_ Shiva? as opposed to 
 simply disagreeing with her opinions and thus being willing to 
 criticize them?


Doug: 
 Shiva's biggest fans are among Western NGOs. She has almost no 
 followers in India. How does someone get nominated as the authentic 
 voice of the oppressed anyway?


don't they have a ceremony every year in Hollywood, where they decide who's the best voice of the third world and stuff like that? didn't Shiva get yanked from the stage because her acceptance speech was too long? something about thanking each woman in India by name? 


Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Devine, James]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:30065] Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 





didn't St. Pat chase the condoms out of Ireland?



Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine




 -Original Message-
 From: Tom Walker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
 Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 3:31 PM
 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Subject: [PEN-L:30065] Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
 
 
 This Husqvarnaquistholm sounds like a dangerous fellow. I 
 understand he's
 also for clear-cutting old growth forests. Just one point of 
 clarification,
 though. Did he actually say condors or condoms? If it was 
 condoms, did he
 mean Ireland, not Great Britain?
 
  He argues that if Great Britain survived without condors, so can the
  rest of the world.
 
 

Re: Re: RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[ravi]

Doug Henwood wrote:
 
 Shiva's biggest fans are among Western NGOs. She has almost no followers 
 in India.
 

can you back up this statement? perhaps starting with a more quanititative
description of what you mean by almost no. what counts as almost no?
is it 0?  10?  100?  1% of the indian population? say it is  1% of
the indian population. could you provide some sources for such a number?
could you also provide a hint on what number would constitute significant
followers in india?

--ravi

r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Louis Proyect]

Robert Biel's The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in 
North/South Relations (Zed Books, 2000) is everything that Hardt-Negri's 
Empire is not. Starting with the premise that there *is* such a thing as 
imperialism--as opposed to some nebulous concept of Empire--Biel supplies 
the kind of data to support his argument that is ostentatiously missing 
from Hardt-Negri. And he ends with an embrace of local, precapitalist 
initiatives that are disdained by Hardt-Negri, who favor a kind of 
homogenizing and benign globalization that appears to critics as a leftwing 
version of Thomas Friedman's Lexus and the Olive Tree.

For those Marxists rooted in grass-roots activism, it might come as a 
surprise that some of their academic brethren either deny the phenomenon of 
imperialism or--worse--welcome its existence through a kind of 
neo-Kautskyist self-deception. The late Bill Warren was the most notable 
example. Starting out with an undialectical appreciation of the Communist 
Manifesto, they assume that because Marx wrote, The bourgeoisie cannot 
exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and 
thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of 
society, it is necessary to stand with the bourgeoisie against every local 
initiative that would impede this process. Between the multinational 
corporation seeking to modernize agriculture in Mexico in order to step 
up the export of flowers or lettuce, for example, and the Mayan peasant 
seeking to preserve traditional corn-based subsistence farming, they might 
choose the former.

Although widely regarded nowadays as being overstated, Warren's ideas still 
reverberate in the academy. As late as 1995, you can still read such 
nonsense in the Fall 1995 Science and Society special issue on Lenin as 
John Willoughby's Evaluating the Leninist theory of imperialism. From 
this we discover that the third world suffers not from capitalist 
penetration, but just the opposite:

Lenin's original argument appeared to link exploitation to stagnation--the 
implication being that a country could only develop by breaking out 
completely of capital accumulation circuits. Samir Amin has drawn precisely 
this conclusion, but an examination of the data suggest that those 'Third 
World' countries most enmeshed in capital circuits are also the most 
dynamic. It is a common joke in development circles that most poor nations 
would love to be exploited by an infusion of capital from the North. More 
seriously, most of those countries that have either purposefully isolated 
themselves from the world economy or been isolated by imperial action have 
suffered disastrously.

Space does not permit an elaboration of this point. Nevertheless, radical 
economists are increasingly realizing that it is not true that global 
capital accumulation must coerce the Third World into a position of 
permanent economic backwardness. On the level of the abstract theory of 
capital expansion and exploitation, it is not possible to argue for the 
inevitable necessity of the North-South divide.

(Jim Blaut had a reply to Willoughby in the 1997 SS that can be read at: 
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/imperialism.htm)

With little apparent interest in staying current with academic fashion, 
Robert Biel openly describes himself as in the dependency theory tradition. 
This school emerged in the 1950s as a result of trying to apply Baran and 
Sweezy's views on monopoly capital to the 3rd world. Andre Gunder Frank's 
phrase the development of underdevelopment captured this approach 
succinctly. Most of the dependency theorists, including Frank, have long 
since mutated into world systems theorists. This is a very high level, 
almost Olympian, understanding of world history that posits rise and falls 
of hegemonic powers in almost a Viconian sense. Attempts to get off the 
merry-go-round of history, such as the Cuban revolution, are derided as 
exercises in futility.

For Biel, world capitalism can only have one set of winners:

The conditions for the form of development which entrenches poverty are 
international. The dependency perspective (which is a radical critique of 
mainstream development theory) highlights these conditions by introducing a 
dangerous idea: it is not just that there is one group of countries in the 
world which happens to be poor. The two are organically linked; that is to 
say, one part is poor *because* the other is rich. The relationship is 
partly historical--for colonialism and the slave trade helped to build up 
capitalism, and this provided the conditions for later forms of 
dependency--but the link between development and underdevelopment is also a 
process that continues today. As Amin pointed out, in what is perhaps the 
most single idea of dependency theory, the tendency to pauperization--the 
acute poverty that is both the basis and product of capital accumulation, 
and thus of 'growth'--was transplanted to the 

Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Mark Jones]

At 05/09/2002 19:29, Louis Proyect wrote:
Robert Biel's The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in 
North/South Relations (Zed Books, 2000) is everything that Hardt-Negri's 
Empire is not.

This is a wonderful book by Biel and, prompted by my mentor Lou Proyect, I 
just spent a day at the British Library going thru it. Great, especially, 
on the importance to capitalist accumulation and to the wealth enjoyed by 
the big swinging dicks of Wall St and their fashionable-parlor-socialist 
acolytes and alleged critics, is the unsung and unpaid domestic drudgery of 
Third World Women. As Biel points out, the same people who argue in favour 
of the maquiladoras and the entrenchment of wage-slavery in the 
peripheries, as somehow enlightening alternatives to such domestic 
drudgery, are in  their own persons and in their engrossment of the labour 
of others, beneficiaries of that domestic drudgery, for without the 
immiseration and cruel exploitation of unseen masses of women, 
part-peasant, part-proletarian, hag-ridden by patriarchy and ultimately at 
the service of Wall St and its mouthpieces, imperialism could not continue 
to exploit the South at all. These silent, invisible women, hundreds of 
millions of them, are a condition of existence of late capitalism, of US 
imperialism in  its exterminist phase of final decay. Those  who want to 
silence such authentic voices of the oppressed women of the South as 
Vandana Shiva are its servants. Biel provides a rebuttal to their craven 
politics in terms which even economists can understand.

However despite its strong points, so well summarised by Lou that you don't 
need to buy the it, there are one or two, no, make that four, thing wrong 
with Biel's book.

First, his approach to the USSR (his Maoist inflection doesn't permit him 
to comprehend either the scale of the human catastrophe ongoing in eastern 
Europe, or the implications, positive and negative, of the disappearance of 
the USSR for global relations of production and for US hegemony).

2nd his approach to the nature of contemporary imperialism (he's a 
semi-kautskyite who believes in ultra-imperialism. Now. while it is true 
that there exists a baleful solidarity of the thieving North against the 
abused South, the idea that the USA is merely one imperial power among 
others, a primum inter pares, is absurd. The US is the heart of the global 
cancer of capitalism, the primary tumour).

3rd Biel's approach to the ongoing and apocalyptic eco-crisis, which 
combines man-made climate change, mass extinction and poisoning of the 
ecosphere is far too weak (He kind of mentions it, but it is hardly central 
to his thinking; but, to paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in 
eco-catastrophe, but eco-catastrophe is sure interested in you).

4th Biel's political conclusions are tepid, insipid and utopian; and here I 
diosagree with Lou's more upbeat judgment.

I'm glad of Lou's review and despite my overall negativity, this is a good 
book. Especially good factually (but an archive search of marxmail or the 
A-List will bring up a lot better and more recent stuff, for free. Where do 
Zed get off charging $25 for a slim paperback?)

Mark Jones

Re: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Eugene Coyle]

It is and has been perfectly legal and accepted, for a long time, to use
condoms in Ireland.

You just have to chainsaw the tip off before donning.


Tom Walker wrote:

 This Husqvarnaquistholm sounds like a dangerous fellow. I understand he's
 also for clear-cutting old growth forests. Just one point of clarification,
 though. Did he actually say condors or condoms? If it was condoms, did he
 mean Ireland, not Great Britain?

  He argues that if Great Britain survived without condors, so can the
  rest of the world.

Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Carrol Cox]

ravi wrote:
 
 Doug Henwood wrote:
 
  Shiva's biggest fans are among Western NGOs. She has almost no followers
  in India.
 
 
 can you back up this statement? perhaps starting with a more quanititative
 description of what you mean by almost no. what counts as almost no?
 is it 0?  10?  100?  1% of the indian population? say it is  1% of
 the indian population. could you provide some sources for such a number?
 could you also provide a hint on what number would constitute significant
 followers in india?

It seems to me that westerners arguing either way as to whether X
represents or does not represent India rather resembles Trotsky trying
to run the Spanish Civil War from Mexico.

The Indian people are going to work it out for themselves -- it seems to
me what marxists in the west have to do is work at building an
anti-imperialist movement here. Taking sides on Shiva hardly seems to
contribute very usefully to that task. It may even be negative. I wonder
if Support Shiva makes a good slogan for mobilizing yankees against
the Iraq invasion.

Carrol

Re: tip (was Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk)

[Tom Walker]

Eugene Coyle wrote,

 It is and has been perfectly legal and accepted, for a long time, to use
 condoms in Ireland.

 You just have to chainsaw the tip off before donning.

Jaysus friggin' Christ, Gene, you wouldn't be needing a condom if you did
that! Unless it was for a tourniquet.

Tom Walker
604 255 4812

RE: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Devine, James]

Title: RE: [PEN-L:30071] Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: [EMAIL PROTECTED]





 I wonder if Support Shiva makes a good slogan for mobilizing yankees against the Iraq invasion. 


how about Support Vishnu?
JD

Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Sabri Oncu]

 how about Support Vishnu?
 JD

Nah! Not good. Support Vishne is much better. Vishne means sour
cherry in my language. Therefore, Support Vishne is
ecologically more correct. Moreover, Coca Cola's attempts to take
over the vishne juice business back home is a serious problem for
my poor vishne juice producers.

To hell with Coke, long live independent Vishne!

Sabri

Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Doug Henwood]

ravi wrote:

Doug Henwood wrote:

Shiva's biggest fans are among Western NGOs. She has almost no 
followers in India.


can you back up this statement?

I've heard it from people in the antiglobo movement, and from Ulhas 
Joglekar on either this list or lbo-talk.

Doug

Re: Re: RE: Re: r.biel@ucl.ac.uk

[Patrick Bond]

- Original Message -
From: Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 Shiva's biggest fans are among Western NGOs. She has almost no
 followers in India. How does someone get nominated as the authentic
 voice of the oppressed anyway?

Hey comrades, she has lots of grassroots South Africa fans after excellent
hits on big water, food and energy companies over the past couple of weeks.
She pummelled the World Bank Africa water master on a tv chat show Ben
Cashdan ran, which aired yesterday. And she was front-line in the march on
24 August when the police lobbed 8 stun grenades at us, badly injuring one
internationalist.