Re: Economics and law
Justin (converted to plain text from html code): Lenin expressly holds up Taylorism as an ideal for Soviet industry at a couple of points. I could find the references if you wanted. But I think the Bolshies were more impressed with German war planning planning, which was more familiar to them. Gramsci conceived of Fordism not only asa tool of analysis but as containing elements of a Communist society. - These passages are commonly cited to show how Lenin was a spawn of the devil. But they probably should be collated with his (half serious) comment that communism was soviets + electricity, and glossed with Tom Walker's signature line, Wealth is liberty... it is disposable time and nothing more. (I don't know who he was quoting), _and_ with ME's argument in GI that communism would involve the dissolution of the division of labor. If necessary labor (in Hannah Arendt's sense of _merely_ necessary labor in contrast to work or action) is to be reduced to the absolute minimum, and men/women are to be fishers in the morning and critics in the afternoon, that necessary labor needs to be rationalized and divided into such minute parts that it becomes a trivial part (in terms of time skill) of human activity, which then can become fully human (work action in contrast to labor). One of Engels's footnotes in Capital I is also a useful gloss: The English language has the advantage of possessing different words for the two aspects of labour here considered. The labour which creates Use-Value, and counts qualitatively, is Work, as distinguished from Labour, that which creates Value and counts quantitatively, is Labour as distinguished from Work. The ultimate goal of socialism is to eliminate Labor and replace it with Work -- electricity and taylorism are means to that end. In this light, Lenin's perspective on taylorism might also evoke that passage in _Capital_ where Marx compares the ancient and modern perspective on labor-saving technology, quoting an ancient poet on how the water-wheel could reduce the labor of the servant and contrasting it with the capitalist use of machinery to extend the working day. Carrol
Re: Najaf
Marvin Gandall wrote: A spokesman for Al Sadr meanwhile told Agence France Presse early today that UN troops should be brought into Iraq to replace US forces, an unrealizable demand indicating the Mehdi Army is anticipating a fight. Debate on demands of the anti-war movement has been frequently disrupted by the inability of too many leftists to acknowledge that UN involvement is an _unrealizable_ demand. The _only_ rational demand is immediate US withdrawal without conditions. Al Sadr has, I believe, made this suggestion before, but it has always been obvious that it could not be a serious proposal. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the only military strategy which could maintain the U.S. in Iraq is that of We had to destroy the [village/city/nation] to save it. And as the account Marvin attaches note, that is not a politically possible strategy in Iraq. Leftists who look for complicated solutions to propose will look increasingly foolish over the next several years. Bring the troops home now! Demand that now, and then we can boast in a few years of how prescient we were, after all the complicated solutions turn out to be only face-saving methods of disguising a u.s. retreat in disgrace. Carrol
Re: Economics and law
Charles Brown wrote: CB: Why was there a need to develop the agrarian country ? People had been surviving in agrarian societies for millenia. For one thing, the USSR existed in a capitalist sea, as Stalin said in 1930, they had 10 years to catch up with the west industrially, culturally, etc or they would be overrun. (This speech by Stalin was quoted by Carl Oglesby in a book the title of which I now forget, and I have never been able to run down the text in any of Stalin's works that I possess.) Secondly, the primary Marxist point about capitalism was that, destructive of human life as capitalism had been from its very beginning (the advances for the few from the beginning disguising the greater horror for the many), it _had_ opened up the possibility of _real_ improvement of human life, a possibility that did not exist within agrarian society (as superior as such societies had been for the the vast majority in comparison with capitalism). Carrol
Re: economics, law and the old soviet economy
Charles Brown wrote: CB: If they hadn't been doing something that was building socialism some kind of threat to capitalism , they wouldn't have been in such imminent danger of being defeated again. The reason imperialism was especially focussed on invading and conquering the SU is that they were building socialism, however flawed. Agreed, but that wasn't what Stalin said. (I'm going by memory here: I hope someone can find the exact quotation.) He talked about how the West had beaten us repeatedly through Russian history: i.e., the whole was in nationalist, not socialist, terms. The earlier defeats (and he names several) were not of socialist regimes but of Czarist regimes. And he speaks of _Russia_ being behind militarily, culturally, economically, and several other adverbs. He undoubtedly _could_ have written what Charles writes above, but he didn't. Carrol
Re: Tariq Ali on the US election
Marvin Gandall wrote: (The following is from Doug Henwood's LBO-list. I may have missed Doug also posting it here. If so, my apologies for duplicating it. But a case can be made for reading Tariq Ali's comments twice. Ali, the radical British political commentator and playwright, has IMO succinctly grasped what is essential from the POV of the left in this particular US election -- what the so-called Anybody but Bush sentiment represents in the popular consciousness. Ali describes it as positive -- a point of some contention on this and other left lists -- and that it offers the potential for further advance if it is embraced. Note too his understanding that despite Kerry's electoral opportunism on Iraq, a Democratic administration would not have invaded Iraq. TA was interviewed on Doug's radio show.) First, I agree with Michael Perelman. I think the ABB people are terribly wrong, but I also think that most of them will be with us in the long-run struggle against US intervention around the world. Earlier I came to detest John Lacny for his letter to Counterpunch in which he termed those who rejected ABB traitors. (A letter to Counterpunch is public domain as it were and disqualifies him for even the minimal courtesy one might extend to a poster on a maillist.) Michael Perelman wrote: I don't see any more reason to demonize ABB people than to demonize Nader people. Both sides see themselves as promoting the left albeit by different routes. I have already posted briefly in response to Tariq on lbo-talk: Dwayne Monroe wrote: Doug (quoting Tariq Aziz): A defeat for Bush would create a different atmosphere in American political culture, to show it can be done. It will make people much more critical. I hope (assuming Kerry wins) that Tariq is correct. I don't think he is. Lincoln's election created a different atmosphere. I don't know of any other presidential election that has. We shall see. Carrol Marvin's final point: Note too his understanding that despite Kerry's electoral opportunism on Iraq, a Democratic administration would not have invaded Iraq. That is disingenuous. A Democratic Administration (Clinton's) had _already_ invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. And without that assault underway Bush's invasion would not have been likely. Leftists have not in 68 years gained by tying themselves to the DP. That tie must be broken, unambiguously. Carrol
Re: The rise of an emotion based left was Bush using drugs
Brian McKenna wrote: Hi all, I disagree strongly with this view. . . The rest of this post is so incoherent that I am baffled by how to respond to its actual arguments (since every argument the post advances it also attacks as far as I can see: hence it refutes itself pretty conclusively). But the rationale of the argument aside, I take any attack on anyone on the basis of mental illness as a personal attack. I.e., as far as I am concerned Brian's post boils down to the proposition that Cox is a shithead. Same to you Brian. Carrol
Re: Liberal yuppies go ballistic over Nader petition
Devine, James wrote: Todd Chretien writes: The Democrats do nothing to challenge the indifference of the poorest people and youth in the United States to the outcomes of elections, because they benefit from it. The biggest threat to the Democratic Party's status as an alternating ruling party is an active, confident and organized working class. The submission of most of the left in the United States to the mantra of Anybody But Bush is of enormous importance to maintaining this subjegation. Though this is accurate (as is the critique of the DP's anti-democratic ways), it misses an important dimension of the middle-class white ABB movement, i.e., the culture war stuff. Though it's very true that the DP doesn't want organized and class-conscious workers, there's a big component of the working class that doesn't want abortion rights, gay marriage, etc. The yuppies that Chretien discusses are typically more in favor of those, and are deeply worried about who Bush will appoint to the Supreme Court (someone _worse_ than Clarence Thomas?) I would prefer to speak of different sectors of one working class in formation, since most of those yuppies would be -- or since the 2000 crash are already -- in great trouble if their paychecks cease for a few months. And those culture wars need, eventually, to be won _inside_ the working class. AND that will be rather difficult to do so long as a large number of leftists remain tied to the DP. Carrol P.S. Many ABBs affirm that they have no allegiance to the DP but believe that 2004 represents a special case; that one can work for Kerry now but return to the struggle against the DP after the election. For some no doubt this is true. But it seems to me at least that as the months have passed those ABBs have increasingly used arguments that simply do not differentiate between now and any other election past or future -- i.e. are arguments which will equally apply when a run-of-the-mill DP reactionary is running against a run-of-the-mill RP reactionary in future elections. ABB is turning into The DP Now and Forever. And that brings us back to Chretien's point, that the DP is essentially anti-democratic, and any movement for democracy in the U.S. must see the DP as its chief enemy. Hence my increasing irritation with (most) ABBs. P.S. 2 This irritation does not extend to the 20 to 30 rabid Kerry supporters in the local anti-war group: they are just getting started in non-electoral political activity and take supporting the DP for granted. They will learn. But the ABBs who publish in various left journals and on maillists are a different matter -- they are (supposedly) not political amateurs or new to left activity.
Re: Liberal yuppies go ballistic over Nader petition
Devine, James wrote: This suggests that, for clarity's sake, future discussions of the DP and ABB should make it clear whether we're talking about (1) working within the DP; or (2) voting for Kerry. as for me, I agree that working within the DP is absolutely the wrong way to go. What we need is an anti-war movement and other anti-establishmentarian movements. As for issue #2, voting is a very personal decision -- and very powerless. I would agree. And indeed, though I have sometimes been careless in making the distinction, it is _political activity_, not voting, that is of interest to me. Voting seems more or less a symbolic activity in the dark appreciated only by the voter him/herself. I couldn't care less what private symbols voters send to themselves. Carrol
Re: What is the total wealth ?
ken hanly wrote: The BSers of the world have united. The revolutionary result is mainstream economics.. For many years I taught a course in ancient (greek) literature in translation -- including the Odyssey and the Oresteia. One of the problems was convincing the students that, yes, Homer (the Odyssey poet that we call Homer for lack of an actual name) and Aeschylus really did believe in the existence of Zeus, Athena, et al. In the future (if we have a future) I suspect teachers of twenty-first century history will have an even more difficult time convincing their students that anyone ever really believed mainstream economics! One of the gimmicks I used a few times in the class was to paraphrase a few premises of mainstream economics and point out that the Greeks really had better reason to believe in Zeus and Athena. Carrol
Re: Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior
Robert Naiman wrote: From Capitol Hill Blue Bush Leagues Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior By TERESA HAMPTON Editor, Capitol Hill Blue Jul 28, 2004, 08:09 http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_4921.shtml President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned. This sort of thing should be discouraged. Powerful would simply not not appear in an honest account as a modifier of anti-depressant drugs. I've _never_ seen that adjective in straightforward discussion of anti-depressants, and the only excuse for it hear is that the writer is trying to put across bullshit. What in the hell would a weak anti-depressant drug be? Carrol
Re: Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior
ken hanly wrote: Joyful gospel songs? :-) Now that is really depressing. As a friend of mine in the local Depressive Support Group once observed, Just because you're crazy doesn't mean you're not also a jerk! There is no difficulty in demonstrating that Bush and his friends are one large bunch of thugs war criminals. There is no need for Capital Blue's baiting of the mentally ill! Carrol
Re: No Bounce for Kerry
Michael Perelman wrote: Also, I have never heard of any competitive contest where you aim to just get over the hump. Sounds like a stupid strategy. The alternative strategy would be to arouse public passion (and participation!). It has long been my own theory that the DP leadership would always choose losing rather than risk such arousal. The Public is a great Beast, and dangerous when aroused. (I think Zinn argues this someplace, but I'm not sure of my memory on this.) Carrol
Re: No Bounce for Kerry
ken hanly wrote: Well I think that Plato argued it a bit earlier..in The Republic.. :-) Yup. My post was a bit ambiguous -- pronoun reference not clear. I was thinking primarily of the DP rather than the general principle re a great Beast. Whether the DP leadership reads Plato or not I do not know, but I suspect they remember the '30s and '60s well enough not to need specific guidance from him. I think Zinn argues specifically that the DP has existed above all to keep the Beast down, but I'm not sure. Carrol ken hanly wrote: Carrol wrote: The alternative strategy would be to arouse public passion (and participation!). It has long been my own theory that the DP leadership would always choose losing rather than risk such arousal. The Public is a great Beast, and dangerous when aroused. (I think Zinn argues this someplace, but I'm not sure of my memory on this.) Carrol
Re: No Bounce for Kerry
Robert Naiman wrote: What moved them was the electability issue. They wanted to back a winner. This is the popular attitude that disturbs me most, for more than any other attitude it represents despair at the possibility of people affecting national policy. Carrol
Re: No Bounce for Kerry
Devine, James wrote: alas I missed his speech. I had to work last night. (I like to watch the candidates' convention speeches for the same reason I saw Terminator I and II, i.e., to keep up with popular culture.) That seems a better motive than most have. :-) Maillists tend to tell you everything you need to know (and sometimes a lot more than you want to know) about popular culture. The main problem is that no one seems to be able to describe what they mean by popular culture. That was partly behind the long list of questions I posted not long ago. (How many watch Fox News, watch CBS, don't watch any, etc.) For example, in addition to the high-rated TV shows there are in fact hundreds of TV shows, presumably watched by _some_ people (who also presumably make up part of popular culture). What percentage of the adult population regularly watches at least one of the top three TV shows in a given year? What do we have to say about those (number unknown to me) who do not watch any of the top three TV shows? What percentage of the population does NOT see at least seven of the 10 most popular movies? What information about popular culture is given us by the existence of the Western Channel on cable tv. What is the cultural status (popular or freakish) of those who watch reruns of Gunsmoke or old Autry movies? How many do watch the reruns of Gunsmoke? Carrol P.S. The last president and/or presidential candidate that I heard deliver more than two consecutive sentences by (the time it takes to reach the radio dial) was LBJ in 1964. But I've never had any trouble understanding anything anyone said to me about the current president and/or candidate.
Re: What is the total wealth ?
Charles Brown wrote: Ok I said it dumbly, but I'm trying to start a holistic thought like Levins and Lewontin might advise. Is there enough wealth in the whole world to give everybody a decent minimum ? Could we have a world minimum income/networth ? I don't think estimates of total wealth tell one much. What counts for your purposes is the flow of material goods and services available at any given moment. Or perhaps the productive capacity if everyone were employed, but I doubt anyone could make even a wild estimate of that. Carrol
Re: The NY Times, the Democratic Party and Italian fascism
Devine, James wrote: [how does this look?] Alan A. Block, Space, Time Organized Crime: As a way of initially placing the fascist presence in America, consider Mussolini's reception in the United States. One of those random things one remembers from early youth (8 or 9 at most). A cartoon in the Sunday Chicago Herald-American (a Hearst paper). It was a double panel. One showed Stalin in an armored railroad car surrounded by armed guards. The other showed Mussolini driving a tractor pulling a combine or something, with scores of happy peasants working in the fields around him. No guards. (I'm probably making some of the details up, but the basic contrast was there.) Carrol
Re: The Soviet empire was a drain on Moscow
Devine, James wrote: The Soviet empire was not extortionary, in the sense of providing a bounty of riches to the imperial center, as India and other colonial holdings had done for Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries; instead, it was a drain on Moscow. Without oil, the heirs of Lenin would have had great difficulty subsidizing their needy allies, their globe-spanning navy, their 45,000 nuclear weapons, their four-million-man army, their record-setting Olympians and their space stations. Oil was, in many ways, more crucial to the Kremlin than ideology. Some scholars (sorry, I don't have the reference here) argue that even the British empire wasn't profitable for Britain as a whole. But it clearly benefited the upper classes, who were more important in decision-making. If you consider the conditions of English workers in the 1840s 1850s as described by Marx Engels, and if in addition you consider the _change_ for the worse of that condition between (say) 1750 and 1840, also as described by Marx Engels, and if, finally, you consider that the engine of that change had been the textile industry (fueled by exploitation of the u.s. south, India, China), then it becomes fairly obvious that the Empire was an utter disaster for English workers. In fact, the Empire could be regarded as a huge, terroristic machine designed primarily to pump surplus labor out of English workers. Carrol Jim Devine
Re: The Soviet empire was a drain on Moscow
Devine, James wrote: it's clear that the USSR subsidized its satellites, but that doesn't make it any less of an empire, since the USSR didn't grant its allies independence until the USSR itself was falling apart. I'm not sure what to call the USSR dominance of its allies, but I think it is misleading to call it an empire. As we ordinarily use the word (leaving aside the oddity of the Hardt/Negri empire), whether in reference to the present or even the distant past, the word carries a more complex intension than just dominance, and part of that intension is, precisely, exploitation. We speak of the ancient Athenian Empire not merely (or at all) just because it dominated its allies, but because it compelled those allies to contribute to the treasury of the alliance, and used that treasury for its own purposes, domestic and foreign. I think calling the USSR an empire interferes with understanding the actual material relations of the alliance, and even points away from a full understanding of what was wrong with it. Put another way, to label the U.S. and the USSR with the same label, empire -- and hence to suggest that there is some analogy between the relationship USSR/Cuba and US/Puerto Rico -- is just too violent an abstraction, it leaves too little material content to what we mean when we speak of empire. Carrol
Re: A Question for the Moderator
Ulhas Joglekar wrote: Michael Perelman, Some posters on this list have expressed their support for the breakup of Russia, India, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. I would like know what is your personal opinion in this matter. It is a (sort of) interesting _academic_ pursuit for leftists in the comre imperial nations (Western Europe, UK, US, Japan) to discuss what sort of precise policy should be (were we able to dictate implementation as well as general principle) followed by our governments. It is even of similar interest for us to discuss what policies should be followed by other governments or by resistance movements in other nations. Such discussion and/or explorations can (perhaps) expand our understanding of the overall social reality of the world today. BUT we should understand that our opinions on such detailed questions are toothless, that the discussion can NOT be directly (or even indirectly) relevant to our theory and practice as leftists in a given nation (the U.S. say). Our aims, of course, are to affect U.S. actions and policy. But we have to understand what the scope and limits of the change which popular pressure can bring to bear on government. (I will eventually get back to the particular question posed by Ulhas, but I want to first establish what I think is a reasonable context in which to answer it and many similar questions.) Let's take a particular instance. Many leftists since the criminal u.s. assault on the people of Iraq have suggested that we (and the content of we is always ambiguous) should support a UN replacement of the U.S. in Iraq. Such a proposal is (to be kind) an alice-in-wonderland proposal. Even if it were possible to marshall significant public pressure behind such a policy, the best (and this is nearly hallucinatory) that could be accomplished would be for the u.s. government to declare such as its official position. But here _everything_ that counts lies in the day-to-day particularities of implementation. As an academic proposal, there is no doubt but what the best thing for Iraq would be for a true UN (independent of the U.S.) to administer Iraq for a brief period before giving power to a provisional government backed by public opinion in Iraq. But anyone who proposes this as a popular demand just simply isn't living in the real world. (I think journalists are rather more apt to make this academic mistake than are academics themselves. Academics after all have to deal with _real_ audiences -- their students -- continuously, and hence can at least develop a realistic understanding of what does and what does not influence the opinions of actual people. Journalists can live in a dreamworld forever -- though that dream world can be lethal, as in the case of Bernard Fall in Vietnam. He was a marvellous journalist, perhaps one of the 20th century's best, and his reports from Vietnam were quite splendid. But when he occasionally allowed himself to speculate on what should be done, he was no better than any Harvard professor.) What popular movements _can_ do is create tremendous pressure on government to relieve the pressure by doing _something_ that will remove or soften whatever it is in the world that generates the pressure. (Had the UAW supported the organizing efforts of foremen back in the late '40s -- to the point of a new round of sitdown strikes and illegal secondary boycotts -- that would have very possibly brought about the repeal of the Taft-Hartley law (without any lobbying or wanking or complex argufying at all on the need for its repeal). When there is enough pressure on the U.S. government (in the form of growing militancy behind the Demand of Out Now, no Conditions), it may well be that the U.S. government _will_ use a U.N. presence as a face-saving measure behind u.s. retreating (the U.N. being good camouflage for the tail between the legs). There are some interesting complexities here in respect to the various simultaneous routes to mobilizing the needed pressure, but those can only be worked out in day-to-day discussion and wrangle within the 1001 different local/regional/national coalitions against the war. The success of William and Hillary in crushing the nascent movement for national healthcare by diverting it into endless wankery and journalistic navel-gazing is characteristic of what happens to mass movements when they are diverted into debates over detailed policy. Now to come back to the question posed by Ulhas: Some posters on this list have expressed their support for the breakup of Russia, India, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Is that a good idea. Personally (merely personally) I hate to see breakups anyplace outside the U.S.; they expose the areas concerned to more manipulation and control from imperialist powers. So to that extent I agree with Michael's own answer, and of course I agree that it would be nice to have a socialist world. But in respect to opinions in the U.S. which might make a difference in all these areas, I
Set sail Irish; Land White Re: ethnic divisions
Michael Perelman wrote: The Irish were regarded almost identically to the Blacks in the US. I gave some sources on this a few days ago, I believe. Yet, there is not a high level of anti-Irish feeling in the US. All _european_ ethnic groups that have migrated to the u.s. have come to begin with as micks, wops, hunkies, etc., which _at the time_ were very close synonyms for nr. But as their position (economic and/or political power) increased, they ceased (except for purely ceremonial occasions) to be Irish, Italian, etc. and became generic whites. There was a large Irish migration apparently to the Boston area in the 1980s, at the same time there was also a large Haitian migration. The Irish migrants _could_ have kept their position as migrants and joined with the Haitians in a joint struggle for migrant rights. Manning Marable in a speech in Chicago a few years ago summed it up in the phrase, They got on the boat Irish, they got off whites. If my suspicion is correct, are there any models for people confronting those who try to whip up divisions? See Foner's history of labor, particularly his report on a lumbermen's strike in Louisiana (or Mississippi) around the beginning of the 20th century. When _all_ the divisions broke down, the governor called out the National Guard and crushed the strike. I believe Foner also reports on both occasions of unity and of division between white miners and black convict labor in the mines. It's been quite a while since I read it. Carrol -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Re: Israel pushing for Kurdish state?
Charles Brown wrote: by Devine, James . The terrorist theory is that by blowing things up, the powers that be will crack down and alienate the population, so that the population will join the insurgent movement. Specifically in Iraq, it's supposed to show that the US hasn't brought order to the country. The hope is that the people will blame the US for the killings. ^^ CB: Are none of these killings done by agent provacateurs undercover for the U.S. ? There would be no reason for this. The U.S. authorities know as well as the patriotic Resistance that in this case terror will be blamed on the U.S. As it should be. Given so outrageous a flouting of all human dececency and international law as the Occupation is (_The Occupation_, not just the invasion), everything that happens in Iraq at the present time is a U.S. crime, and only a u.s. crime. This is the same principle as most laws on murder in the u.s. recognize: any death during a felony (even if not commited by the felons) is first degree murder. There are and there should be no restraints on the Resistance, any more than there were on the French Resistance during the German Occupation. If I remember correctly, the French Resistance killed 5 or 6 French for every German they killed. Quite reasonable under such circumstances. No one has the _political_ right to condemn anything the Iraq resistance does. (I'm not interested in personal morality.) Carrol
Re: Kerry's a better choice for some conservatives
Dan Scanlan wrote: The Right Wing's Deep, Dark Secret Some hope for a Bush loss, and here's why By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge And that is the fifth reason why a few conservatives might welcome a November Bush-bashing: the certain belief that they will be back, better than ever, in 2008. The conservative movement has an impressive record of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Ford's demise indeed helped to power the Reagan landslide; Poppy Bush's defeat set up the Gingrich revolution. In four years, many conservatives believe, President Kerry could limp to destruction at the hands of somebody like Colorado Gov. Bill Owens. I don't know about the other reasons given, but I think this one holds water. There is simply no way the DP can _hold on_ to power, certainly not more than 8 years and probably (given the morass of Iraq) not more than 4 years, and then a Republican as reactionary as Bush but more competent and more sinister [pun?] will be elected. We (people, leftists, left liberals) made significant gains under Nixon (despite his intentions) because we had behind us the threatening mass movements of the '60s. The only chance to control (or at least moderate) a really frightful lunge to the right in 2008 or 2112 is the appearance of a mass anti-Occupation _and_ anti-Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act movement capable of creating serious social unrest unless it is at least partially pacified through concessions. (The Patriot Act is mere frosting on the earlier act; and of course the act which outlawed the CPUSA at one time was sponsored by that great liberal, Hubert Humphrey.) E.g., we can't pull it off now, but some really large demonstrations for Lynne Stewart would put a far greater dent in the Patriot Act than will the election, close or a landslide, of Kerry. The ABBs of this election, if they get their way, will have prepared frightful events for us in 2008 or 2112. Leftists _must_ break, permanently and unambiguously, all ties to the DP -- and this includes the leftists of the DP (Wellstone, Obama, Hightower), who achieve nothing for us except symbolic gestures but provide cover for the party's left flank. Carrol
Diminishing Expectations
Michael Hoover wrote: but conversations here indicate that we sure do live in the age of diminishing expectations, which in itself gives people fewer reasons to spend time on political activism. That's interesting (as well as depressing). A speculation: Assuming the truth of this, the driving force behind that trend is a longer work day (not only at work but getting to and from work). It leaves people short of breath. There is one sentence in _Capital_ that has always haunted me: As soon as the working-class, stunned at first by the noise and turmoil of the new system of production, recovered, in some measure, its sense. . . . Stunned at first. . . .I think the the reduction in free time (by which I mean time in which one is neither burdened with the tasks of reproducing oneself nor with simple fatigue and tension) over the last 30 some years is perhaps the strongest argument against Chomsky's claim that the u.s. is incomparably more civilized today than 40 years ago. Civlization (in any of its positive sense) can only mean more spare time for sheer loafing. Carrol
How Mass is Mass Media?
What percentage of the adult population watches Fox News? What percentage of the adult population watches ABC and/or CBS and/or NBC but _not_ Fox? What percentage of the adult population watches Local News but no network news? What percentage of the adult population watches watches local news _and_ network news? What percentage of the adult population watches no or little news? What percentage of the adult population reads a local newspaper but no metropolitan newspaper? What percentage of the adult population reads a metropolitan newspaper? What percentage of the adult population listens to radio news? (How distributed among different sources of radio news?) What percentage of the adult population has watched and/or listened to more than one presidential address? What percentage of newspaper readers read the news section. What percentage of newspaper readers read the letters to the editor? What percentage of the adult population gets their news from conversation with friends, coworkers, or relatives? What percentage of the adult population do _not_ watch any of the top 10 tv programs? What percentage of the adult population reads political columns in the daily or sunday paper? What percentage of the adult population knows who O'Reilly is? What percentage of the adult population knows who Edwards is? What percentage of the adult population knows that H.Clinton ever had anything to do with health issues? What percentage of the DP voters know where Kosovo is? What percentage of the adult population watch 4 or more hours a week of tv programs _not_ in the top 50 programs? What percentage of the adult population watches Nick at Night? What percentage of the adult population have cable tv? Is there _any_ one event (program, speech, movie, headline) experienced by 70% or more of the population in a given six month period? Under what conditions would large numbers of non-voters vote? Would conditions that would (might) cause non-voters to vote leave their opinions the same as they are now? Is patriotism (in the u.s.) a positive attitude or an attitude towards those who ae (are thought to be) non-patriotic?* Carrol *Kenneth Burke repeats a conversation in which one party says, I'm a Christian, and the other party replies, Yes, but who are you a Christian AGAINST? P.S. This post was originally written in response to certain threads on lbo-talk, but then it occurred to me that some of the questions could best be answered by professional social-scientists. (Should I put a :-) after professional social scientists?)
Re: Owning Up to Abortion
The Pro-Choice movement made a fundamental mistake from the beginning -- by calling themselves pro-choice instead of pro-abortion. You can't win major political and cultural battles by being shame-faced, which is what the pro-choice label is. Some on this list will remember the late Lisa Rogers, whose political slogan on this issue was (if I remember correctly, in all-caps): IN A JAR, DADDIO, IN A JAR. Abortion is merely a method birth control, not a moral issue. When the pro-choice movement gets pushed to the wall and elements of it decide to fight back, their fundamental assumptions will be (a) abortion is a technical matter, not a moral choice and (b) the way to achieve abortion rights is to create so much social disruption that the only way to settle things down will be to make the pro-life movement an object of universal contempt. Carrol
Re: Hassett
Michael Perelman wrote: Hassett of Dow -- not NASDAQ as I carelessly wrote earlier -- 36,000 fame also has an outrageous column in the WSJ describing Kerry's wild eyed fiscal spending plans. Aww, come on Michael. To be outrageous by WSJ op-ed standards it would have to Be Hermann Goering high on speed! Carrol
Re: HDI, GNP and the PPP factor
Ulhas Joglekar wrote: I was making a simple point that the debate on economic policy in India has little to do the utility of PPP numbers. But apparently _our_ understanding of that growth has much to do with those PPP numbers. Your post on growth in India incorporated those numbers, and we in the U.S. might not understand your post without Paul's explanation of what those numbers meant. Paul was trying to show how PPP numbers overstate the economic growth in the developing countries. I am not sure I understand how he has reached that conclusion. Paul suggests (or this is what I get from his posts) that the proper way to estimate a nation's economic growth is to measure the well-being of (say) the worst-off 20% of its population. How does the infant mortality rate of that part of the Indian population compare to the infant mortality rate of that part of the French or German or U.S. populations? Without such comparisons, not of statistical creations but of actual lives, we can't judge _real_ economic growth, which in material terms can only mean the economic improvement of those who are worst off. There are some passages in Charles Dickens's novel, _Hard Times_, which bring this out very dramatically. Similarly, in measuring the present economy in the U.S., we should not look at the unemployment rates or the average GNP per capita but examine the life conditions of the worst-off 20% of the u.s. population. And as I drive through the west side of Bloomington Illinois on a summer day, the quality of life of that segment of the population does not look very good. Is that (lower 20%) of the population of India (measured by infant mortality, available medical care, etc.) worse or better off than those neighborhoods in west Bloomington? Carrol Ulhas Yahoo! India Careers: Over 65,000 jobs online Go to: http://yahoo.naukri.com/
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
Justin wrote: [clip] So, we're fucked, right, Carrol? Not completely so anyhow when I can have that much fun writing a post off the top of my head. :-) A whole series of 19th c. poems (beginning with Keats's Nightingale Ode) may be crudely paraphrased thusly: The world is all fucked up. But look, that I (the poet) can dramatize what a fucked up world looks like means that I have created in my imagination what an unfucked up world would look like. And a world that contains that triumph of the imagination is not wholly fucked up. ** Yeats didn't think that was good enough: Once out of Nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing [i.e., not from Keats's bird] / But such a form as grecian goldsmiths make [i.e., dead, frozen, out of time]. . . .to sing / Of what is past, or passing, or to come. But Pound came close to returning to Keats at the end of his life: I have brought the great ball of crystal; who can lift it? Can you enter the great acorn of light? But the beauty is not in the madness Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me. And I am not a demigod, I cannot make it cohere. . . . . . . . . . . to see again,* the verb is see, not walk on i.e. it coheres all right even if my notes do not cohere. (Canto CXVI) (*The roads of France, wish expressed in an earlier Canto.) But Pound's Make It New was Platonic: the same forms endlessly recur, and must on each occurrence be made new. History is not Platonic; it has surprises for us. Perhaps that is what at one time some marxists I believe called attentisme. Carrol
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
Devine, James wrote: CC writes: it would be more interesting and more relevant to the future to explore the forms of commodity fetishism int he 21st century. maybe, given the way that the presidential and other electoral contests have turned into duopolistic or monopolistic marketing events, this is quite relevant. The posts I wrote yesterday were in part just celebrations of being out of the hospital after three very unpleasant days, but also I have been mulling over for several weeks what I think may be the wrong handle people bring to discussing the topics raised in vols. 2 3 of Capital. The approach is always in economic terms (in ref., e.g., to productive/unproductive labor) rather in terms of a critique of political economy. Marx is partly responsible for this himself, with all the arithmetical rambling in those two volumes and in the Theories of Surplus value. But those are all unfinished mss., and in Vol. 1 of Capital the arithmetic clearly constitutes poetic images rather than economic analysis. Not an economics text; not a criticism or analysis of economics; not a political-economy text; not a criticism of particular theories of political economy, but a CRITIQUE (and overthrow from within) of Political Economy, hence necessarily (even in the supposedly more specific vol. 3) a gaining, from within, of a perspective from OUTSIDE political economy, where the numbers become illustrations not arguments, and illustrations of social relations; hence the focus must be on the relations, not on the empirical accuracy or inaccuracy of the illustrations. We live in a historical period when an immense amount of our human activity consists in distributing paper claims to surplus. I buy hearing-aid batteries at Walgreens. (I'm making the example false enough so there will be no temptation to translate into real dollars cents.) Supply of the size I need has been exhausted in the display case, so the clerk brings new supply from the store room. Obviously (in vulgar materialist terms, such as would fit even a hunter-gatherer culture) she has made the hearing aids of worth to me (since I can't wear them if they are stacked up in the storeroom any more than I can eat fish that are still in the ocean or cut my potato with iron ore that is still in the ground. But then the clerk spends a number of minutes explaining to me that if I were to take out a Walgreens credit card instead of charging on my mastercard I would get 10% off on the batteries. Clearly this human activity is profoundly different from the human activity of physically bringing to me the batteries I need. Different _as human activity_ whether it shows up in the national accounts or not. So even if the distinction makes no economic sense at all, nevertheless Marx's distinction between productive and unproductive labor is a profound truth of history, of human culture. Now I leaped a few stages there, and left productive and unproductive undefined. Those steps ought to be filled in -- BUT NOT BY TRYING TO MAKE _ECONOMIC_ SENSE. As soon as you try to prove or disprove this as a statement about technical economics you will lose completely the profound historical (cultural) importance of the distinction. Or to put it another way, to reject Marx's distinction between productive and unproducive labor (by placing on it the burden of practical economics or political economy) you will completely lose the main point of Marx's whole life's labor, that capitalism is a _historical_ phenomenon. That it is _different_. And it is different (among other reasons) because of the difference between the two types of human activity which our Walgreens' clerk has exhibited for us. That distinction could not have arisen except in a capitalist economy. And it probably can't be translated into empirically confirmable/disconfirmable statements about the actual economy -- but one cannot let that interfere with developing one's historical and cultural understanding of the distinctions in living human activity involved. Carrol jd
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
Marvin Gandall wrote: Finally, it seems Carrol has gone anarchist on us: :-) Anarchism is so completely dead that one really need not try particularly hard to distinguish oneself from it. In 1875 after the defeat of the Paris Commune it would not have been possible to predict the political forms of the revolutions in Russia and China, nor would it have been possible to predict (I think) the treason of the leadership in 1914. And the new forms did not drop from the sky or come from revolutionary theorists sitting around and (Gary Hart fashion) dreaming up new ideas. Probably new ideas emerge from within old practices, but only if the old practices are pushed hard, as Yoshie is doing and urging others to do. When I say she is a bit too much wrapped up in the Greens, I refer primarily to further theorizing of and polemics for her position on the lbo and pen-l maillists; Ohio is one of the states where left activity might seriously hurt the DP, so clearly in her local situation it is impossible to be too wrapped up in the Green campaign. For 75 years or so the DP has successfully muffled most forms of mass struggle most of the time. The CPUSA seemed anxious to meet that fate, becoming a mere appendage at times to the DP. (During the Truman Era -- miscalled McCarthy Era -- DP politicians and their lackeys in the labor movement exercised direct repression. Humphrey destroyed the left forces in the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party. Under Reuther Meany the CIO, AFL, AFL-CIO never even really pressured the DP to push for the repeal of Taft-Hartley.) The McGovern campaign absorbed the energies of the anti-war movement and the militancy of the women's movement was absorbed into the polite lobbying through which ERA ratification was sought. Had Roosevelt had his way with Governor Murphy of Michigan the sit-down strikes might well have been militarily crushed. There will never be a good time for leftists to break away from subordination to this enemy; 2004 is perhaps a better time than most. Particularly telling is that the closer we get to the election the more most ABBs, instead of emphasizing that this election is (allegedly) _different_, increasingly spout the same rhetoric that we have been hearing for 30 years, and which will _always_ apply: NLRB; judicial appointments, abortion, etc. This is not ABB; it is Remain with the DP forever. Any argument in 2004 that would have been at all relevant in 2000 is an implicit admission (regardless of how much verbal criticism of the DP accompanies it) that this election is not special but just one more occasion on which to remain tied to the tail of the DP. But these arguments merely heave tofro on these lists, which brings me back to my suggestion to Yoshie: I agree with her arguments but believe that the topic has been exhausted as far as pen-l and lbo are concerned. They may well become relevant again _after the election_ but for now, as I suggested, forms of commodity fetishism, among other topics, might be more fruitful at the present time. Concern with November 2004 here on pen-l and lbo is more like scratching an itch than discussing topics of concern. Carrol I think Yoshie has gotten a bit too wrapped up in the Greens (in the 2004 election). We cannot know the form that socialist activity will take in the future, but we can be fairly certain that it will not be electoral and will involve mass resistance to imperialist policies. Arguments against the Greens are equally arguments against paying any attention at all to elections at any level. Marv Gandall
Re: Query: Ford/General Motors
Charles Brown wrote: what is progressive economist take on ford and general motors releasng info the other day indicating that each only made profits from credit/lending operations... michael hoover ^ You must be reading Detroit newspapers in Ann Arbor, Michael. It made the Chicago papers too; I can't remember now, but I think there was a brief story on it in the Bloomington Pantagraph. GM Ford are big news reverberate outside the City of Eddie Guest. :-) Carrol
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Even if the Green Party were to succeed in electing Green mayors in all cities in the United States, for instance, an impact of such a dramatic change in local politics on US foreign policy won't be even minimalist -- it will be practically zero. Not necessarily. One can't judge that _If_ as though in a laboratory where one element changes while all other elements remain constant. The conditions under which the GP could elect mayors in several hundred substantial (150k+ population) cities around the u.s. would be conditions which could not occur without profound reverberations elsewhere from the activities which brought about the electoral victories. You and I have both complained about those comments on revolution which presuppose that revolutionary action would occur with all other conditions (as now experienced) remaining constant. (E.g. someone once asked the silly question of how we could ask the working class to risk everything for overthrow of capitalism, when of course we would never ask that but conditions, now unpredictable and undescribable -- perhaps of rising expectations, perhaps of utter chaos, perhaps of something we cannot describe now--would do the asking.) I tend to agree that the local politics route to national power is illusional, but in considering it we can't consider it in a vacuum. The mass assault on u.s. foreign policy which is needed can't demonstrate in D.C. every week (this is a caricature but take it as a gesture towards a more complex reality), and the energies recruited and ultimately aimed towards national impact could well be (partly) nourished and enhanced through local political initiatives, including perhaps the election of mayors or (perhaps though I doubt it) even through contesting for power in local DP organizations. Carrol
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
Marvin Gandall wrote: Don't you think it will be necessary for the Greens to win a number of congressional seats before they can be seen as a potential alternative to the Democrats by the unions and social movements, and a durable third party in the country as a whole? You are assuming business as usual in u.s. politics. There is another factor in all the discussions of the elections -- the failure of so many to see that social democracy is as dead as stalinism. Both were equally discredited by the events of the twentieth century. Justin argues that there will never again be mass Marxist parties. Could be. But the same argument suggests that there will never again be mass social democratic parties. And if there can be no more social democratic parties (and classical liberalism is one would think equally dead) all the jargon and pieties of social democracy (lesser evils, small gains, progressive wing of bourgeosie) are as dead as the slogans of Stalin's _Foundations of Leninism_. Those leftists appealing to the social democratic tradition (e.g., cooperation with progressive or less reactionary bourgeois politicians) are as trapped in dead pieties as are the Sparticists. ABBs and Sparticists unite in the Graveyard. I think Yoshie has gotten a bit too wrapped up in the Greens (in the 2004 election). We cannot know the form that socialist activity will take in the future, but we can be fairly certain that it will not be electoral and will involve mass resistance to imperialist policies. Arguments against the Greens are equally arguments against paying any attention at all to elections at any level. I think that until the electoral hysteria has ebbed it would be more interesting and more relevant to the future to explore the forms of commodity fetishism int he 21st century. Carrol
Re: [Fwd: Swans' Release: July 19, 2004]
sartesian wrote: I've stay out of this discussion, to everybody's relief (and my own), but is it possible that anyone can really endorse voting for a national Democratic candidate as progressive, or even the lesser evil? I guess so, but it takes a complete disavowal of history to do so. It takes a deliberate denial of reality. Ask a simple question: Are the Democratic Party and its national candidates calling for immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Iraq? I couldn't conceive of myself as voting for a DP candidate (even for a Wellstone or an Obama or a Hightower), because I cannot conceive of any future for the left in the u.s. until the break with DP is final and uncompromising. But I know many people who are committed to the struggle for unconditional withdrawal from Iraq and _also_ immovably attached, _for the present_, to supporting the DP. I make my personal position known to these people. (I'm referring to the local anti-war group.) I don't think it would be useful to future relations to make a big fuss about it. There is also a handful of people on these lists (including the marxism list) who are equally committed to struggle against the Occupation but in whose judgment it is proper to work to defeat Bush this fall. I think they are wrong, but I don't think it is correct to accuse them of a deliberate denial of reality. If Kerry wins, he will make Nader supporters and other leftists look like prophets. If Bush wins, the Democrats in Congress will continue to support his policies, and we'll still look like prophets. Carrol
Off List Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
Hi Michael, Funny, though I only lived in Ann Arbor 1955-59, it is still the only spot on the map reference to which gives me a slight jab of something like homesickness! I haven't been back there since the New University Conference there in the summer of 1970. (And already it had changed almost beyond recognition from the Ann Arbor of the early 1960s.) Carrol
OOOPS! Re: Off List Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
Sorry, that last post was intended to be off-list to Michael. Carrol
Re: a third force in Iraq?
Devine, James wrote: The Iraqi leader seeking a peaceful path to liberation A new party unites Shias, Sunnis, Kurds and Christians Jonathan Steele in Baghdad Friday July 16, 2004/The Guardian [U.K.] Iraqis are looking for security, and can be seduced by hope. Extreme dictatorships are always formed in a context when nations seek stability. It happened when the shah took power in Iran, with Ataturk in Turkey, and Saddam Hussein here, Sheikh Khalisi said. I don't know the the conditions under which Ataturk seized power, but Sheikh Khalisi is clearly fudging here in respect to the shah and Saddam, since the operative factor there was u.s. interference, which in the case of the overthrow of Mossedegh included creating the chaos from which people sought escape. Does anyone know of even _one_ case (WW 2 doesn't count) of u.s. intervention leading to a democratic state? Carrol
Re: A Cronkite moment?
In a few years will the Times be admitting that its their own pro-withdrawal arguments should have come earlier and faster? Perhaps after 5000+ u.s. deaths and about 1 million Iraqi deaths it will become apparent that no stability can be achieved in Iraq until after the unconditional withdrawal of all foreign forces.** Carrol
Re: Hegel Marx
Louis Proyect wrote: En lucha Jim Blaut This reminds me of an argument I was never able to have with Jim. In the context of a different discussion he remarked in a post on the marxism list that if one knew all the facts involved one would not have to study the relations among them. As I say, it was a parenthetical remark and it was not until almost a year later in wandering through some old posts that I came across it. Hence the lack of any discussion with him on the point. (I have a hard copy of the post someplace but currently all my printouts are in one chaotic pile and I wouldn't be able to put my hands on it. Until I do regard this as a remembered paraphrase, not as Jim's precise words.) But he was profoundly wrong on that, though how much it influenced his thought and practice in general I do not know. Carrol
Re: absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
Devine, James wrote: I don't reject dialectical thinking. I just don't like Hegelian jargon. I think that all of CAPITAL could be translated in relatively simple language without dropping Marx's dialectical method, mode of presentation, or understanding of the world. In _Alienation_ Ollman both makes that criticism and (partly) answers it. I tend to agree that paraphrase is always (or nearly always) possible without changing the meaning of a text, so I would also have to agree that the translation of _Capital_ you claim possible is (probably) possible. The catch, perhaps, is in your adverb, relatively. It is also at least possible that while whole texts can be paraphrased (translated), there do exist particular meanings (references) which are tied to particular expressions. Much of the complexity of _Capital_ comes from using the same word with different meanings at different times. It is at least possible that eliminating _that_ obscurity would only create other obscurities. Carrol jim
Re: Stephen Gowans on Fahrenheit 9/11 and Robert Jensen
A movie is not a political analysis, nor does it present an argument. It presents a concatenation of images (verbal and non-verbal) which each viewer will 'fit' into his/her own frame of reference. Hence the relevant questions about Fahrenheit 9/11 are not so much what it, by itself, _means_ as what the reactions of the large audiences it is attracting will be. Any one person's interpretation is merely that person's, and by itself establishes nothing about the political impact of the film. The immediate impact of the film in Bloomington/Normal has been to bring the local anti-war group (and myself) into an ongoing relationship with a minimum of five new people, plus the reenergizing of a number of people in the group. _That_ is what Moore's film means here. If our leaflets attract more to our August meeting, that will add to the meaning of the film. I hope local groups elsewhere are making similar use of it. And given that the meaning of films depends on their reception, whether Michael Hoover's or Jensen's interpretation is the real meaning is almost irrelevant. That Michael _did_ interpret it in that way meanst it _can_ be so interpreted. And for non-DP leftists (such as myself), it seems to me that the campaign is no longer worth discussing. What Lou or Gowan or I say about the campaign at this point is, for the present, simply kicking a dead horse. The debate over the DP will become relevant again next January (regardless of who wins in November). Between now and then we have better things to do with our time and energy. All the people I am working with locally are committed to electing Kerry; they also all know (and it has raised no resentment) that I will have nothing to do with the DP or Kerry. But Jan and I have been wholly successful in persuading the active members of the group that we must be prepared to fight against the occupation of Iraq: that is, few if any of them are accepting Kerry's international politics. For us to engage in a hassle with them now over their support of Kerry would be utterly goofy. Carrol
Re: Enron
Devine, James wrote: you don't understand Locke. He didn't think of his servant as a human being, so that the servant's labor didn't produce property for her (according to Locke's labor theory of property). Instead, she was like Locke's horse. This is misleading. Until the millenia-old sense of human society as naturally hierarchical began to dissolve in the late 18th century it was not necessary (nor even desirable) to see the lower orders as non-human or less than human. They were fully human, and in the sight of God even fully equal, but god or nature had created a world in which subordination was the principle of unity and order. This is clear enough in Shakespeare; many (most / all) of his characters from the lower orders are seen as quite richly human and worthwhile, but this does not interfere in the least with an assumption that they filled their appropriate rungs of the great chain of being. It was the crumbling of this hierarchical sense of divine ordained order that generated the ideological necessity for scientific racism and scientific male supremacy in the early 19th century. Discussion of this change can be found in Stephanie Coontz, _The Social Origins of Private Life_, in Thomas Laqueur, _Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud_, Volume I of Martin Bernal's _Black Athena_, Stephen J. Gould's review of Laqueur in the NYRB, and Barbara Fields, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America. Stephanie Coontz quotes from a letter from a 17th c. gentleman to his daughter, in which he says that were it not for the natural subordination of women, she would be a better writer than he. In the same spirit it would have been quite possible (whether it ever happened or not I do not know, but it would not have been a contradiction) for Locke to see that servant as a better human being than Locke himself, and yet without a quiver exploit the hell out of that servant. It was only with the Declaration of Independence and its assertion of human equality that there developed a serious need to justify such subordination by asserting biological inferiority. Carrol
Re: Enron
ravi wrote: can we define such a thing as public property? i.e., something that belongs (i would prefer 'open' or 'available' to 'belong') to everyone (all species)? if so, anyone appropriating such property for personal use, excluding access to othres, could be said to be committing 'theft', no? They hang the man and flog the woman That steal the goose from off the common, But let the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose. Carrol
Re: Sowell
Kenneth Campbell wrote: The Marxist perspective might be that this is a false consciousness and wishing for the days of old ideologies (Santa Claus etc)... and people pay money for it because it eases their feelings of being less than they had thought they were (socially speaking). ? Ya think? Once in a while the obvious needs to be restated. Marxism is not a TOE (Theory of Everything)nor did any serious Marxist ever pretend that it was. Engels goes out of his way several times to deny it. In particular he denies interest in explaining cultural minutiae. _The_ Marxist perspective obscures the multiplicity of marxist views even on those topics which marxists _do_ claim to be able to explain. Carrol
Re: Interim Results Are In
sartesian wrote: I am not so foolish to think that those arguing for stabilization under US occupation will, having read this report, change their view, but I think it would be nice for them to explain the dismal reality in light of their previous arguments. I've just taken to ignoring leftists who quibble with the Out Now slogan on which all real opposition to U.S. aggression has to be based. Most of them will come back to their senses as the chaos in Iraq grows worse and worse and as the anti-war movement grows. It's pointless to argue with them now. Carrol
Re: Thomas Sowell
Laurence Shute wrote: It looks like he made his right turn around then. An interesting ambiguity. Right turn means turn to the right or the right turn to make. :-) Carrol
Re: Bush's rapid shifting of position
Perelman, Michael wrote: I cannot remember a time with so many left documentaries getting screen time -- even ignoring Michael Moore. Supersize this, control room, the corporation Maybe our time is coming. And then, maybe not. Several points. 1. Influencing people (which is what films, tv shows, newspapers, leaflets, whatever) do is _not_ the same (and not even necessarily related to organizing people. 2. The right only wants people's passive acquiescence and/or their vote. 3. Passive acquiescence (or passive agreement) and to a great extent even votes are of no use to the left. 4. Propaganda separated from any visible practice is of great use to the right. It is of no particular use (except occasionally by accident) to the left. 5. Moore's film will be of great importance to the left in those localities _and only in those localities_ where local left organizations leaflet departing audiences, calling their attention to the existence of the organizations and indicating how people can relate to those organizations. Carrol
Re: Print versus web publishing
Louis Proyect wrote: One form of communication has enormously democratic implications while the other serves as an elitist club open only to those who have been accepted into the priesthood. In Gutenberg's day, it was the Catholic church. Today it is tenured academia.) --- NY Times, June 26, 2004 The journal Dr. Nicolelis chose PLoS Biology, a publication of the Public Library of Science aims to do just that by putting peer-reviewed scientific papers online free, at the Web site www.plosbiology.org. Still PEER-reviewed. That is, still dominated by tenured faculty. The internet is having a great impact, but what Lou describes here is something happening within tenured academia. Tenure (unless something else than the internet impacts it) will continue to be based on _peer-reviewed_ publication. What is different is that the publications of tenured faculty will have a (potentially) widened circulation. There is one possibility I see in the social sciences and humanities. There are too damn many scholarly books being published. Web publication would put the emphasis where it ought to be, on articles. In the physical and biological sciences the emphasis always has been on articles rather than books, so I don't see web publication making any great difference there in the structure of academia. Carrol
Chat about Financial Advice, was Re: Marxist Financial Advice
Sabri Oncu wrote: This is not diversification at all. It is a single bet, a bet on the US dollar hegemony, whose future is more uncertain than ever. Let's remember that very few if any of the subscribers to this list have much in the way of discretionary investment. So the question (which probably ought not to have Marx's name tagged to it) simply concerns a chat among fellow leftists about how people in their situation can have a trifle better chance of surviving at least until dementia sets in and medicaid takes over. And the first question emphasized the ethics of the topic. I argued at the time that there was no ethics to it. That is, that (leaving aside organized boycotts) progressive politics placed no constraints on how one spent or saved one's money. There would be no _political_ or _ethical_ constraint in investing in Shell, in investing in a napalm manufacturer, in shopping at Wal-Mart or Naiman-Marcus, etc etc. (Assuming no organized boycotts, which one honors.) Carrol Sabri
Mausoleums for Reds -- Ugh
Devine, James wrote: I wish they would follow his wishes. he wanted to be buried or cremated, I forget which. I doubt that anyone wants to be put on permanent display... jd Agreed. Chou en Lai (at his standing request) was cremated and his ashes spread from an airplane over the land. At the time it was official CPC policy that party members be cremated. The sad decision to put Mao on display was an early indication that things were iffy in China. Carrol
Re: Marxist Fianancial Advice
sartesian wrote: Keerist, can't we at least spell financial correctly? And then terminate this thread? Oh come off it. True the initial question, as phrased, was perhaps not very interesting, but a lot of different topics came up under the heading. And ultimately, maillists are conversation, not the formal meeting of the Political Committee of the Central Committee of The Sixth International. And a serious point, that's been bugging me for 35 years. The most chaotic parts of various regional and national conferences back during the '60s and early '70s were when someone started talking about what we should be talking about. It only led to talking about talking about what we should be talking about, which only led to talking about . . . . Carrol
Re: Marxist Fianancial Advice
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: To get those things will require a mass (non-electoral) movement equal to the (CIO + Civil Rights Movement + Anti (Vietnam) War Movement)*3. Carrol Though if we keep getting Geroge W. Bush's for president, we don't even get the first step do we? Joel The anti-war/anti-occupation movement has been far bigger -- perhaps the biggest in history, counting participants worldwide -- under Bush than it was under Clinton. Joel has causal lines reversed. We will keep on getting Bush's for president (sometimes DP Bush's, sometimes RP Bush's) until we have a mass movement. The first steps in getting a non-Bush president in 2112 or so is to run a Nader campaign that seriously damages Kerry, at the same time building the foundations for a larger anti-war movement in 2005 -- since it's fairly obvious that in international affairs Kerry is the greater evil. Carrol
Re: Marxist Fianancial Advice
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: The anti-war/anti-occupation movement has been far bigger -- perhaps the biggest in history, counting participants worldwide -- under Bush than it was under Clinton. That's because the wars and threat of future wars were bigger. If Bush decided to invade Iran, the antiwar movement would probably grow further - is that what you're hoping for? Doug Far from making more wars on its own, Washington is now re-mapping and down-sizing the empire, in Korea and Germany. Smaller and manageable interventions concurrent with the occupation of Iraq -- e.g., Haiti -- have come with European support. Washington will not invade Iran or Syria -- unless Israeli freelancing creates an incident that really goes out of control. -- Kerry has really put himself out on a limb, virtually promising to widen the war without limit in order to stay the course. I don't think the present administration has the nerve or the political muscle to do that. A DP president might. Emphasize _might_; in general I think leftists should simply ignore the presidency and go about our proper business of doing out best to build mass movements on whatever terrain the enemy creates for us. That is, the presidency, like the Rockies for Lewis and Clark, are just part of the terrain we have to deal with. Carrol
Re: presidential election
Devine, James wrote: [clip] Is the Nader campaign the best way to build the mass movements we need? especially considering the fact that Nader is going to run it? Might it make more sense to simply ignore the presidential election (as Carrol's first comment above suggests), leaving the issue of actual voting to each individual's conscience (since it won't have much effect anyway)? Probably Jim is correct here. I'm partly working out arguments for Nader to see what they look like, and in irritation at some anti-Nader material. Over on LBO I wrote an even post even more strongly in support of Nader, again mostly in response to Nader-hating. Incidentally, the Boondocks comic strip was delightful on that today. Those who don't get it with their paper should look it up on the web. One's relation to the campaign probably depends on local circumstances. As I mentioned in the earlier post, I know of a couple instances where people who share my view of the DP are nevertheless making serious political use of (sort of) supporting Kerry: mostly by voter registration and get-out-the-vote work. The same could be true of Nader support in some localities, and where that is the case I think the campaign can contribute to the core goal of mass-movement building. My own bedrock feeling remains pretty close to Jim's, however. I know that even if I end up voting for Kerry (it depends on how the anti-depressants are working), Which side is the Lexipro vote on these days? I sort of vaguely seeing a sample Michigan ballot from 1936. There were about 6 partly lines on it. (Greenback, Prohibitionist, Communist, Socialist, perhaps one or two others.) Those were the good old days. :-) Carrol
Re: Marxist Fianancial Advice
Devine, James wrote: Yoshie writes: If the next POTUS is going to expand the war, though, won't he deploy US troops in Saudi Arabia, given the spate of terrorist attacks there which may very well escalate? As for Iran, if the next POTUS is Kerry, won't he more likely try in Iran what worked in Yugoslavia? I doubt that the US armed forces have the ability to expand their role -- unless there's a draft. With declining support for the current war, would President Kerry be able to pull that off? I don't think _any_ president can pull it off, for the reasons you give, and even with a draft it would be rather iffy: citizen soldiers do not do well as an army of occupation of a hostile citizenry. But someone with ties to the more traditional u.s. imperialist interests and with an electoral victory over bush in hand would have a much better chance of doing it. I don't think there is _any_ chance of the present administration risking any further expansion. But I didn't think the first Bush would actually go to war either! Carrol jd
Re: Marxist Fianancial Advice
Funke Jayson J wrote: how do you handle planning for your financial future while reconciling those actions with your personal convictions? I can't give financial advice, but I have a perspective here. I don't cooperate with cops or any equivalent. I don't violate organized boycotts or cross picket lines. I growl when I encounter instances of sexism, racism, etc. I may have left something out, but I think that is close to the complete list of political constraints on personal life. Carrol
Re: Marxist Fianancial Advice
Joel Wendland wrote: When I retire in 30 years or so, I plan to be living off a fully state-funded retirement system, with comprehensive socialized medicine, at a collective retirement farm somewhere in Idaho or North Carolina, growing potatoes or cabbage and deleting all of the cranky messages I get on the list-servs I read. With some differences, this resembles what I told an insurance salesman back in the summer of 1955, during my first year in grad school just after my daughter had been born. Hah! To get those things will require a mass (non-electoral) movement equal to the (CIO + Civil Rights Movement + Anti (Vietnam) War Movement)*3. Carrol
Re: Sinclair Lewis quote
:-) Has someone already noted that Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis are not the same person? Sinclair wrote a whole mass of pamphlets besides his novels. This could come from almost anyplace. Carrol Michael Perelman wrote: Michael, I would be that C. Cox would know, but it sounds like it belongs in the Brass Check. On Mon, Jun 14, 2004 at 04:11:17AM -0400, Michael Pollak wrote: [Got it from A.W.A.D, so don't know the exact source] It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Upton Sinclair, novelist and reformer (1878-1968) Michael -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Re: Further confirmation of Mark Jones
Michael Perelman wrote: Proven reserves are very unreliable. That point seems to be key to the new Out of Gas book. He asserts that the production curve is a lagged reserves curve. Just as we cannot predict the future based on a couple of data points of GDP or unemployment, the NYT article is only a suggestion of a problem, not confirmation of anything. The material facts regarding oil depletion, global warming, mercury poisoning of the seas, have _never_ been a central issue except in the thought of those who cannot or who refuse to think politically. And thinking politically involves NOT What should the government(s) do? But How can those who recognize the 'facts' achieve political power to do something about it? How can 'we' achieve political power? Then the question becomes: In what way does knowledge of the future of oil contribute to achieving political power? And my answer to that question is, it does _not_. At a certain point environmentalist politics (or what one might call 'futurist' or 'predictive' politics) hit a wall, in the sense of being unable to achieve additional mass support. And that support by itself is not sufficient, or even close to sufficient, either to have the needed impact on capitalist states or to overthrow those states. In this key political sense, environmentalist (or what I am here calling 'predictive') politics resemble conspiracism: they have no 'bite' outside some theoretical courtroom where all the facts can be presented to a fixed judge and jury. One could compare also the bizarre debate among 'soft' leftists about the desirability or undesirability of an immediate u.s. withdrawal from Iraq. Their various suggestions (U.N. replacement of U.S. troops, etc.) have as much political bite as predictions of global warming or of economic collapse from oil depletion. The discussion of whether Mark Jones was correct or not in his analysis of oil is, then, a purely academic discussion. Carrol
Re: Further confirmation of Mark Jones
Michael Perelman wrote: I have to disagree. Such knowledge is not sufficient. It may not be necessary, but understanding how material conditions evolve will certainly give activists a valuable edge. It already has given activists an edge -- my point was that nothing could be added to that edge. It is fairly self-evident that capitalist progress is destroying the human species. That needs to be incorporated into all left programs and struggles. But the amount of time, energy, and space being devoted to specific aspects of it (like the coming oil crisis) is out of all proportion to any further gain that can be made. Everyone who can be influenced by the news has already been influenced. And the sad fact is that _most_ of those so influenced have _not_ moved on to anti-capitalist struggle. In other words, our time and energy needs to be spent in turning greens red, not in the hopeless task of bringing more people into the general movement through green agitation. The knowledge we had by 1980 of the ongoing damage to our living space by capitalist progress was sufficient to produce a sizeable green movement, and the added knowledge of the last 25 years has been of no added political impact. Or perhaps it even has had a negative impact, by adding weight to the lesser evil strategies that keep so many leftists tied to the tail of the DP. Carrol
Re: wikipedia?
Calvin Ostrum wrote: Devine, James wrote: what ever happened to the idea of producing a wikipedia of leftist political economy? I proposed it and someone said he'd look into it... and then I heard nothing. Why not just produce a wikipedia of objective political economy? If that turns out to be leftist, so be it. A political economy either takes the perspective of those who must sell their labor power or the perspective of those who purchase that labor power. All political economys will make this choice willy-nilly. The phrase Objective political economy is incoherent. Carrol
Re: Reagan dead
Mark Laffey wrote: Did anyone else see the CNN hagiography? He was 93 - how many people died as a result of his policies? Mark Most or all of the Reagan policies that led to so many deaths were policies initiated during the Carter administration. I think it especially important to recall this in the midst of the current ABB hysteria. It was Carter above all who sponsored the slaughter in East Timor. It was Carter who in effect approved in advance of the murder of Bishop Romero and of the ongoing massacres in Central America. It was Carter who began the war in Afghanistan that led directly to the present horrors. It was Carter who began the military build-up that Reagan merely continued. It was Carter who began the deregulation process that Reagan merely continued. Carrol
Re: sudden loss of spam
A few months ago ISU introduced a filter of some kind that reduced spam flow radically. It's been creeping up since but hasn't yet reached the earlier level. Carrol
Re: Hubbert's peak
sartesian wrote: It is possible to twist and turn and refer to statistical relativism and do all sorts of things to make Hubbert appear less Hubbertist than he was and his predictions appear more accurate than they are, but doing that obscures the kernel of the Hubbertist message-- and that message is not one of conservation, price increases, tax, etc... It is quite clearly a message of approaching apocalypse, an absolute, irreversible, depletion of hydrocarbon fuels. You seem obsessed with a particular person, Hubbert, rather than really interested in the topic. Clearly many people have taken some things from Hubbert but have formed their own perspective around what they take from him. Your post resembles someone attacking Einstein because he took Newton seriously. What needs to be debated is the views of those involved in the debate, not an antiquarian issue about some particular person not involved in the debate. Carrol
Re: the new number one reason to vote Nader
Devine, James wrote: In my much more humble opinion, I agree with Michael: it doesn't make sense to me that non-voters and voters would vote in a similar way, since the former are poorer, more minority, and less educated than the latter, and many votes correlate highly with income, ethnicity, and education. Jim D. Another thing left out. If Non-Voters were to vote it would be because something had happened -- but no conceivable question that can be asked a _present_ non-voter can throw light on those (hypothetical future) events which would have changed the non-voter to the voter. This error seems to me rather fundamental in bourgeois ideology. Consider a recent post on the Milton-L list: If John Milton could observe the world of today (I mean the Milton we know from his writings, not Milton as he might have turned out had he lived today) would he take sides in the 'War on Terror?' If so, who would he support and why? Or would he call down a plague on both their houses? I replied to this question as follows: - I don't believe your specification -- (I mean the Milton we know from his writings, not Milton as he might have turned out had he lived today) -- is tenable. The Milton we know from his writings (and the writings themselves to a great extent) simply could not exist abstracted from the ensemble of social relations which in a very real way constituted that Milton. And whatever principles we ourselves can abstract from those writings almost certainly could (and will be) used to ground all possible positions on the War on Terror. The difficulty in answering your question, then, is that the question is incoherent. I would even argue that prior to the last 50 years the verbal construct, War on follwed by an abstract noun, would not make sense. War on Poverty. War on Drugs. War on Crime. War on Terror. All these expressions are essentially incoherent. Your subject line, USA v.Al-Quaeda, is a tacit recognition of the incoherence of War on Terror. Al-Quaeda consists of a specific group of persons, organized around identifiable principles, and it was possible to imagine a _that _ war. (Cf. a War on the Mafia vs a War on Crime.) But that (possible) war became impossible when the Bush administration, instead of launching a standard sort of criminal investigation, used 9/11 as an excuse for what is developing into a War against Everyone. That war the U.S. will inevitably lose, though one may fear that in the process the whole human species may well be irreparably damaged. Carrol --- A non-voter who voted would no longer be a non-voter; she would be the person who had undergone certain experiences that as a non-voter she would not have undergone. Hence her opinion in the present, in which she is a non-voter, throws no light on her opinion in a world in which she is a voter. Consider, similarly, the idiotic question often asked, What would a revolutionary regime in the U.S. do about X? -- X being a condition that exists now. All one need do to see the idiocy involved is to imagine the unimaginable changes which would have to have occurred in present conditions before a revolutionary regime could be even a remote possibility. It would be as though someone in 1787 had asked, How can we get the votes in Oregon reported in time for the electors to vote in December when it takes a whole year to travel from Oregon to Philadepphia? Try it another way. A world in which 20% of current non-voters voted would be a world radically different from the world in which public-opinion pundits arrive at their current conclusions. We simply can't even make rough guesses at how _anyone_ would vote in such a world without first making an accurate assessment (impossible I think) of what public events could bring about such a change in voting habits. Those events would of course have a profound effect also on those who are presently voting, so _their_ present voting habits give us no clue as to how they would vote under the (now unknowable) changed conditions. Predictions on how non-voters would vote if they did vote are grounded in the assumption that there has been history but no longer is any. Carrol
Re: Kerryisms
Frank, Ellen wrote: Or, as John Stewart put it, why does Kerry sound more dickish when he's telling the truth than Bush sounds when he's lying? I hope he's lying about what he plans for Iraq. But as it now stands, a vote for Kerry is a vote for expanding the war in Iraq. I don't see how any progressive can do that. Carrol
Query on Marxian Anecdote
I wonder if anyone can (a) confirm/correct the following anecdote and (b) identify a source for it. I read it someplace long ago but no longer remember where. Shortly after one of Marx's vacations in Germany in which he had been luxuriously entertained by some of his aristocratic friends, someone in London noted that such pleasures would not be available in the socialist future, and asked whether Marx would enjoy living in that future. Marx's reply was that he would be dead by then. Carrol
Re: Hate radio
The headline for today's column by Cal Thomas (I didn't read the column itself) blames the problems in Iraq on Coed Basic Training. :-) The Army has become increasingly dependent on women in its ranks; that could conceivably cause them as much trouble as racism caused in the '60s. Carrol Michael Hoover wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 5/19/2004 9:05:42 AM When the torture story first broke, Rush Limbaugh made a number of outrageous remarks about the revelations, including calling the abuses by U.S. soldiers pretty thoughtful and a brilliant maneuver. was radio channel surfing the other day and heard limbaugh comparing prisoner abuse photos to robert mapplethorpe's work, he suggested that people who are criticizing sexual humiliation/degradation/torture of iragis are same folks who have promoted porno agenda and celebrated likes of mapplethorpe, guess one's inability to choose to be a subject in such matters is irrelevant... michael hoover
Re: How many history books cite Winnie as War Criminal?
Devine, James wrote: Of course, Churchill isn't cited as the war criminal and racist that he was because (1) his last stint as PM involved a war against a generally-accepted bad guy; and (2) he won. Blair Bush may not win, while it's possible that they could become generally accepted as bad guys. -- Jimmy D. And since Bush Blair's crimes so vividly echo the particular ones of Churchill, the net result may be that Churchill's fame takes a turn for the worse also. He may yet be remembered more for his use of poison gas in Iraq than from his role in the Great Patriotic War. Carrol
[Fwd: [SIXTIES-L] Flawed Classic Displays Mumias PantherPassion]
Original Message Subject: [SIXTIES-L] Flawed Classic Displays Mumia's PantherPassion Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 13:52:00 -0700 From: the moderator [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Recipient list suppressed Flawed Classic Displays Mumia's Panther Passion http://www.tbwt.org/home/content/view/214/40/ 10 May 2004 Written by Todd Burroughs and Ollie Johnson Book Review: We Want Freedom: A Life In The Black Panther Party. By Mumia Abu-Jamal, South End Press, 267 pages. $18.00 paperback; $40 cloth ISBN: 0-89608-718-2 (paperback); 0-89608-719-0 (cloth) Mumia Abu-Jamal invites conflict. So does the Black Panther Party. Both inspire virulent, even violent, debate about race and resistance in America. It's no wonder that Abu-Jamal's We Want Freedom is a powerful literary and political event. As a teenager, Abu-Jamal was a member of the Black Panther's Philadelphia branch from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. His new book, released on April 24, his 50th birthday, provides an artful synthesis of scholarship and personal observations. Abu-Jamal is an internationally known radio commentator, newspaper columnist, and author of four books. Convicted of the first-degree murder of a white Philadelphia police officer more than 20 years ago, he wrote We Want Freedom from death row. He began his journalistic career at The Black Panther, the Party's national newspaper. He explains in dramatic, precise and often poetic prose how Blacks have confronted white supremacy directly throughout American history. He writes that the Party was founded during a time when many American Blacks saw themselves in the villages of resistance and saw their ghettoes as little more than internal colonies similar to those discussed in Frantz Fanon's analysis [in his classic book, The Wretched Of The Earth]. Abu-Jamal is clear on the Party's lure during a time of great youth-led social change: It meant being part of a worldwide movement against U.S. imperialism, white supremacy, colonialism, and corrupting capitalism. We felt as if we were part of the peasant armies of Vietnam, the degraded Black miners of South Africa, the fedayeen in Palestine, the students storming in the streets of Paris, and the dispossessed of Latin America. Abu-Jamal gives a valuable social history of Philadelphia to show why the Party could, and would, take hold there. He takes nearly one-third of the book to make clear the idea that African Americans had fought-and not always nonviolently-for their freedom. Abu-Jamal points out that such battles spanned from the beginning of the African slave trade to the self-defense organizing of the Louisiana-based Deacons For Defense and the Watts rebellion of 1965. The Black Panther Party formed shortly after that event. Abu-Jamal argues the Party was popular in Philadelphia because Black residents there came of age with the deeply felt knowledge that they could be beaten, wounded, or killed by cops with virtual impunity. Abu-Jamal describes the rally where the Philadelphia Panthers first appeared publicly: [B]etween fifteen and twenty of us are in the full uniform of black berets, black jackets of smooth leather, and black trousers We thought, in the amorphous realm of hope, youth and boundless optimism, that revolution was virtually a heartbeat away. It was four years since Malcolm's assassination and just over a year since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The Vietnam War was flaring up under Nixon's Vietnamization program, and the rising columns of smoke from Black rebellions in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and North Philly could still be sensed, their ashen smoldering still tasted in the air. Abu-Jamal tells familiar stories with great skill-the naiveté of Panther leaders, the state-sanctioned murders of Chicago Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969, the FBI's role in the Party's split between supporters of co-founder Huey P. Newton and Minister of Information Eldridge Cleaver. He is unapologetically critical of the FBI's snitches (Earl Anthony, George Sams, Louis Tackwood, William O'Neal, et. al.) sent into the Party to disrupt and destroy it. His history of the FBI clearly shows how decades of practice infiltrating progressive movements served the Bureau well when Black leftists donned black berets and black jackets and began to act in ways they thought would make the late Malcolm X, their new Black nationalist martyr, proud. In addition to extended personal recollections, another of the book's highlights is Abu-Jamal's commendable voicing of Panther women's experiences. One of the women recording her Party experiences to Abu-Jamal is Naima Major, who recalled how, at 17-years-old, she sought out the Party to escape what she called petit bourgeois mediocrity: I went to a 'Free Huey' rally at the federal building in SF [San Francisco], and met many brave Panthers. Went on a mission with Kathleen Cleaver in Hunter's Point because my
Re: Another reason to hate dittoheads
The following post on lbo-talk seems relevant to the current discussion on pen-l. John Gulick wrote: Is any self-respecting US leftist truly _shocked and dismayed_ by the casual violence visited upon Iraqi prisoners ? Inquiring minds want to know. Just asking. Isn't it entirely predictable that a racist and imperialist occupation writ large will lead to a million acts of smug brutality writ small ? IMO undue attention to the deeply disturbing prison atrocities (which are indeed deeply disturbing, but far less heinous than imposing a dysfunctional neo-colonial client state) feeds the following sentiment which the US left should obviously vigilantly oppose: that the occupation is a mere policy mistake, horribly bungled by Bush and company. The Abu Ghraib revelations are in fact heaven-sent for the liberal clowns at moveon.org (who are annoyingly pelting my e-mailbox with overwrought appeals to dump Rumsfeld), who can now safely couch their tepid anti-occupation stance in the premise that Bush and company are congenitally incapable of bringing freedom to the Iraqi people. Said revelations are even more heaven-sent for that weak-kneed segment of the US political class that is now recognizing the inevitability of defeat in Iraq, but can conveniently blame the illegitimacy wrought by a few dozen torturers, rather than the tenacious resistance of the denizens of Fallujah, Najaf, Sadr City, and elsewhere. Or perhaps I'm just preaching to the choir ... I wish John was preaching to the choir -- but my feeling is that close to a consensus among lbo and pen-l posters holds that the u.s. must not leave Iraq until it has made up for the damage it has done. It would be, the argument goes, irresponsible to leave the Iraqi people to their own devices. Carrol John Gulick Knoxville, TN John Gulick Knoxville, TN
[Fwd: Fw: Why the torture at Abu Ghraib should be no surprise]
I wish some of those who argue that Out Now! is too simplistic could give some reason to believe that there is any possibility whatever of the U.S. occupation remedying _any_ of the evil it has created; how any other policy than simple withdrawal (any policy, that is, that we could reasonably expect the U.S., under either Kerry or Bush to follow) could in practice leave Iraq any better than an immediate withdrawal could. It's easy to dream up scenarios in one's head. But no u.s. government is going to follow any such scenario; nor is a sizeable section of the Iraqi people (ranging from 15% to 30%) going to cooperate with anything except immediate withdrawal. And as long as that resistance remains, the occupation will become more and more ruthless, leaving a more and more damaged Iraqi polity behind it when it does end. Those who argue for a complex response do so, mostly, by setting up illusory arguments to attack. They fail utterly to compare their suggestions with the actual facts on the ground but compare them only with some ideal u.s. policy which would be followed only if we were living on the other side of the looking glass. Carrol Original Message Subject: Fw: Why the torture at Abu Ghraib should be no surprise Date: Fri, 07 May 2004 07:28:51 +0100 From: joseph schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Science for the People Discussion List[EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Here is my brother's analysis of the torture in Iraq. I think this must be the case - torture by the occupying, unpopular power is inevitable - Original Message - From: Michael Schwartz To: Undisclosed-Recipient:; Sent: Wednesday, May 05, 2004 3:09 AM Subject: Why the torture at Abu Ghraib should be no surprise Here is my take on the torture at Abu Ghraib (also attached) The fundamental verity of the Abu Ghraib scandal is this: occupying powers fighting an insurgency that has the tacit or active support of the local population will inevitably resort to torture. The causal factors are sadly straightforward. In guerilla war, the insurgents fight a battle and then melt into the population. The occupying power therefore cannot identify them by their positions behind barricades, by their uniforms, or because they are carrying guns.Only their friends and neighbors know who the insurgents are; very often even other units of the guerilla army do not know the identity of their comrades who live in other neighborhoods.If a substantial portion of the local population dislikes the guerillas, then they will quietly inform on them, allowing their arrest or permitting the occupiers to attack their strongholds in a targeted way.But often the local population is willing to protect the guerillas, because the communities in which they live contain a critical mass of friends and supporters (and those who might be willing to inform are therefore afraid of being discovered). In this circumstance, which is the reality in most parts of Iraq, the occupying army has the choice of attacking whole neighborhoods more or less indiscriminately (as they started to do in Falluja), or to find a way to force people to inform on the insurgents. Right now, the option of indiscriminately attacking neighborhoods is not viable. It is this situation that leads to torture.The Coalition knows that is has to force people to tell them who the insurgents are and where they are hiding.Once an insurgent or suspected insurgent (or a friend or relative of a suspected insurgent) is caught, time is of the essence.If the captive can quickly be made to reveal the whereabouts and identity of other guerillas, then an attack can be mounted before the insurgents find new hiding places.But this requires quickly applied coercion-and this mean torture.There is no other way. However morally opposed the invading army is to the use of torture, some individuals will be willing to do horrible things based on the logic of war:if the captive can be forced to talk, then more of the enemy is captured or killed while fewer of our side are killed or wounded.Even if this involves incredible brutality or heinous torture, this logic says that it is better for the enemy to suffer than for our side to suffer.So if torture works-even once in a while-it will be worth it because it saves [the] lives [of our side].Even if some or many innocent people are tortured, that is a small price [for the invaders] to pay if they hit the occasional jackpot. So if those in charge of getting information out of prisoners are placed under pressure to get valuable information before it is useless, they will discover torture, even if they are not told to use it.The question becomes whether their superior officers will tell them that it is not worth it.And this is unlikely, because the superior officers are there to win the war, and this is a crucial-often essential-tool when fighting a guerilla army that is protected by the local population. We should therefore
Re: Iraq Communist Party statement on Atrocities at Abu Ghraib
Sabri Oncu wrote: Joel: I just refuse to accept the the worse a situation is, the better it is argument that too many people on the left hold. I find it notable that those who spin this ridiculous canard _never_ quote particular leftists -- it is an urban legend, and passing it on without documentation is pure obscurantism. The point is an empirical one: The situation is in fact going to get worse the longer the u.s. invaders stay there. This is simply a fact, left planning that does not recognize it belongs in the pages of _Alice in Wonderland_. Recognizing the fact has no relationship to the urban legend of leftists saying the worse the better. Joel is confusing the message with the messenger, and whining that the messenger is not bringing better news, when there is no better news to bring. Carrol
Re: Iraq Communist Party statement on Atrocities at Abu Ghraib
michael perelman wrote: It is probably silly plotting the future of Iraq from a keyboard, but I think that talk of supporting a democratic force at this time is pretty far-fetched. The US has created such turmoil that democracy at this time is probably impossible. From what I understand -- and my understanding is limited -- a democratic outcome at this time might be a Shi'ite theocracy. Another strongman might be able to institute some stability, but a bloodless exit seems impossible at this time. Of course, an exit is inevitable and the longer it is delayed the more blood will be shed. No simplistic easy answers exist. Getting out is urgent. Look. The only questions we can legitimately ask and attempt to answer are questions as to the policy of the (still very small) anti-war movement. Any attempt by anyone on this list (or in any other left forum) to detail what the U.S. government should do (either now or next January 20) is, I think, in bad faith, though probably not consciously so. It is in bad faith because it implies that _our_ (leftists) opinion will have an immediate (i.e. in the next 12 months) effect on u.s. action. It won't. In that context, the question of what should be done can only refer to what the movement should do. And the answer to that question is simple: any claim that it is complex is avoiding the real issues. The answer is: U.S. Out of Iraq. Now. No Conditions. Any other demand is academic in the sense of _merely_ academic, having no linkage to human activity, and belongs in the pages of Alice in Wonderland. Carrol
Re: Iraq Communist Party statement on Atrocities at Abu Ghraib
Doug Henwood wrote: Joel Wendland wrote: Carrol said: The situation is in fact going to get worse the longer the u.s. invaders stay there. Have I disagreed with this statement? Somewhere along the way, Carrol has come to think that I support the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq. You'll have to check the archives and find a quote. It's hopeless; forget it. No matter how many times you say you're against the U.S. occupation but think some sort of international presence excluding the U.S. might be warranted, he'll quote Kipling's What I'm claiming is (a) that all those nuances you and Joel talk about won't affect the world, because the only way we can affect the world is through mass action, and the only slogan for that mass action is U.S. Out Now. No Conditions. (b) that the U.S. government will _never_, in fact, carry out the kind of program you and Joel support. Hence you might as well be opposing troop withdrawal. And finally, emulating your habit of looking for the unconscious motives of anyone you disagree with, if I were to do that I would arrive at the conclusion that, without realizing it, you and Joel _are_ being affected by the ideology of the white man's burden. You really, again without quite realizing it, believe that Arabs can't work out their own fate without guidance from the u.s. Carrol
Grounds of Misunderstanding? was Re: Iraq Communist Party ...
I mention this as a possibility, that would explain a good deal of the clashes between me and some others over the last several years. I have never _once_ written about what I think the u.s. should do. I don't think what I think about that is going to butter any parsnips. My focus has _always_ been on what an organized _movement_ should do to organize itself and grow. I don't know whether this clarifies anything or not. It is a harmless academic pastime to muse over what it would be nice for the u.s. to do, but it doesn't get us anywhere. Carrol
Imperialism, was Re: imperalist booty
(I changed the subject line because I think the question of imperialist booty interferes with the analysis of imperialism. It creates the illusion that the leopard could change its spots.) Devine, James wrote: I think Lennon (or what it Lenin?) had something to say here. You're talking about _imperialist policy_, which may or may not have a direct economic motivation. (My feeling is that most policies reflect the combined interests of coalitions of powerful blocs, some of which typically are crudely economic. But not always.) On the other hand, sophisticated opponents of imperialism see it not as a policy but as a social organization or institution that developed historically and characterizes world capitalism (and changes over time, so there are stages of imperialism). Imperialist policy -- such as the fear of a good example that Chomsky points to -- is generated within the framework of imperialism as a social system. It's the system that helps determine which groups have the power to form coalitions to determine policy, among other things. This is my interest. I really don't understand why some marxists are so anxious to prove that capitalists or capitalism _need_ imperialism or that imperialism is nasty. We do have a fact of some 400 years duration that core capitalist states have been invariably imperialist, and continue to be so. If, as Jim puts it here, imperialism is a social system (my wording has usually been that it is the mode of existence of capitalism), then arguments that capitalism needs imperialist profits (or needs imperialism) are as beside the point as it would be to argue that an organism needs carbon! Capitalism and imperialism are inseparable, and would be _even if_ imperialism hurt rather than aided profits. The whole attempt to prove that imperialism is bad seems to me to undercut marxism. (I say in this in abstraction from the argument over whether Marx's disapproval of capitalism was a moral judgment or not. He certainly wanted to destroy it.) What we need to do at a level of theory is _understand_ or _explain_ imperialism, not endlessly argue how bad it is. At the level of practice what we need to do is build opposition to specific imperialist policies, such as, for example, the current u.s. occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of the former Yugoslavia, etc. U.S. troops out of everywhere. Carrol
Re: Iraq Communist Party statement on Atrocities at Abu Ghraib
Michael Perelman wrote: I cannot understand what kind of communist party would join with the US, or why we should take such a party seriously. Maybe I am missing something in my ignorance. No, you are not missing anything. The kind of communist party that would join with the u.s. is a party of careerists and (as Lou says) Quislings whose only relationship to the communist tradition is to spit on it. One of the things many of us in the movement against the first Gulf War argued even at that time was that the U.S. aggression against Iraq meant that there were only two futures for Iraq: A government opposed to u.s. interests or a government supported by permnanent u.s. occupation. We were only partly right. We underestimated the heroism and determination of the Iraqi people. There is only one possible future for Iraq. Carrol
Re: Iraq Communist Party statement on Atrocities at Abu Ghraib
Devine, James wrote: and verbal snobbery (the presumption that one knows better than people on the ground, which is stated in words). Equating these two types of imperialism is nothing but obfuscation, either an effort to cover up the real imperialist policy or to use fallacious reasoning to win an argument or both. In any case, just as the people of Iraq have to act (will act and are acting)for themselves, so we in the imperialist homeland must act for ourselves in response to the actions of our government. And that action has to be organized around the slogan of U.S. Out Now, No Conditions. I don't see how this constitutes even verbal snobbery: we aren't telling the Iraqis what they must do; we are doing what we must do. Carrol
Re: The new Iraqi Flag
Charles Brown wrote: CB: Ok , how about just profits ? Why would U.S. imperialism and U.S. based transnationals go through so much, invest so much in creating and protecting capitalist relations of production outside of U.S. territory if profits were not made there ? Profits are the _ultimate_ goal but never necessarily the immediate goal of capitalist action (particularly of the capitalist state, which among other things is the domain of intra-capitalist struggle). In any case, I can't answer your question with any certainty, but there are several obvious possible motives, none of which directly concern profits: 1. Insure against the rise of serious capitalist enemies. 2. Maintain control of natural resources. 3. Provide investment opportunity (even if at close to zero profits) for capital that can not other wise be invested at all. And so forth. But I think both you and Lou are too focused on demonstrating that capitalists are bad. That goes without saying. What needs to be demonstrated, always, is that capital cannot NOT do as it does. That was Lenin's point, against Kautsky who saw imperialism as an optional policy. And profits in any given context are an option, not a necessity. And if you review the various debates on lbo, marxism, pen-l over the years you will also see that whenever a debate was grounded in merely empirical claims (a poll was or wasn't accurate, an economic statistic was or wasn't accurate, etc) the debate has simply gone nowhere. Carrol
Re: Iraq Communist Party statement on Atrocities at Abu Ghraib
Joel Wendland wrote: Carrol Cox said: No, you are not missing anything. The kind of communist party that would join with the u.s. is a party of careerists and (as Lou says) Quislings whose only relationship to the communist tradition is to spit on it. This observation about careerist is a bit ironic, given the demgoraphic of the people who post to this list, don't you think? Sorry, I used the term in a limited sense -- meaning those who attempt to make a career through (and usually within) leftist organizations, not those trying individually to build ordinary careers. Everyone has to get a salary to live. Those who back in the '70s were called Poverty Pimps are a recent u.s. example. Carrol Here is the OED entry on careerist: A person (esp. a holder of a public or responsible position) who is mainly intent on the furtherance of his career, often in an unscrupulous manner. Also attrib. or as adj. [1910 H. G. WELLS Mr. Polly vii. 225 He called him the chequered Careerist.] 1917 Times 5 June 7/2 Half the present unpopularity of the lawyer-politician..is due to the fact that he is too often a carpet-bagger and a careerist. 1926 S. JAMESON Three Kingdoms v. 153 I'm one of those damned careerist women. 1929 G. B. SHAW in Times 6 Aug., There were already..members of it [sc. the Labour party] who were careeristsmen who wanted to have a political career and joined the party they thought would give them the best prospects. 1934 Punch 21 Mar. 336/2 He states plainly that he was a careerist, power and money were in his hands and it is no wonder that he was dazzled by them. 1940 G. BARKER Lament Triumph 15 The careerist politician and the vague thinker. 1969 Daily Tel. 4 Jan. 23/2 Accused..of being a double-dealer and political careerist. Walter Reuther, for example, in the mid 1930s held membership cards simultaneously in the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the Democratic Party. (Attested to by a Wayne State University professor who had come across them in a bundle of miscellaneous papers turned over to the Wayne State Library.
Re: The new Iraqi Flag
Charles Brown wrote: I know Doug has presented strong arguments against superprofits being used to buy off some of the U.S. working class, but is there none of that at all ? Why is the mass standard of living in the U.S. higher than most other places ? Is it just higher U.S. productivity ? With respect to England at that time, Marx and Engels lamented bourgeoisified workers. One can say that (part of) the U.S. working class is bourgeoisified, and one can claim that there is a relationship between the u.s. standard of living and imperialism, and betweenthe working-class support for imperialism and that standard of living, _without_ appealing to the (I think fallacious) concept of superprofits. U.S. workers _are_ exploited -- that is, they do _not_ (a) retain their own surplus labor and (b) receive _in addition_ part of the surplus labor produced by workers in China, India, etc. In fact that concept is a barrier to achieving an understanding of the mode of existence of modern capitalism (i.e., imperialism). Lenin Luxemburg were correct in seeing the inseparability of capitalism and imperialism, but the nature of that relationship needs further explication. Carrol
Re: The Empire Falls Back - Niall Ferguson
k hanly wrote: Come on..the post says EVEN North Korea. As a bully the US has the power to inflict appalling destruction while sustaining only minimal damage to itself because bullied countries do not have the power to respond. Russia and China are not included in the circle of those to be bullied at least not by inflicting appalling destruction. But one might argue that Iraq and Vietnam show that the political and economic damage caused by playing the bully may be too high eventually. Iraq is different from Vietnam in that wholesale slaughter cannot be carried out retail as it was in Vietnam, where it was possible to kill several million while not killing more than a few score in any one spot. They will never destroy Fallujah or Baghdad as completely as they destroyed hundreds or thousands of Vietnam villages. And the mass slaughter by bombing in North Vietnam was completely hidden. (B-52 pilots should be put in the same category as officers at in the German death camps.) Because of these fetters on u.s. military in Iraq it is actually becoming a possibility that the Iraqi people will militarily defeat the U.S. Army. Carrol
Re: The new Iraqi Flag
joanna bujes wrote: Possibly (and very funny), but the thing is, the profits still go to the US. This is a common shorthand, but it is probably best to avoid it. The US is not a profit center, and hence no profits go to the US as such, any more than the riches of India went to England as such. If England included those men, women, children whose lives are summarized in the chapter on the working day in _Capital_, then there is a certain indifference to human suffering in referring to the profit England gained from the Indian empire. The same applies to the US today. I believe that it is worth some clumsiness of language or added verbosity to avoid bunching Walmart employees, the mentally ill living on on disability, and the actual recipients of those profits all under the same label, The US. Carrol
Re: The Jesus Factor
Doesn't Augustine say somewhere something like, Oh Lord, make me chaste, but not too soon? Carrol
Re: The Jesus Factor
Michael Perelman wrote: Do people really believe the story about the devout Bush? Some of the incidents reported coincide with his wild days. It sounded like a puff job to me. I haven't followed the details, but there is nothing inherently contradictory between born-again xtianity and wild doings. Have you ever heard Molly Jackson's recording, Just a little bit of Jesus makes it right, all right? Carrol
Re: Why did the USSR fall?
Devine, James wrote: It's very rare for a dependent mono-export country to use its bonanzas to develop economically. It's only when left-wing nationalists such as Peron or Venezuela's Chavez decide to shake things up (under the pressure from the workers and peasants) that we see any move in that direction. And often opportunites are wasted. One hopes it will change, some day, but currently the likes of Peron (or even Khomeini or Ghadafi) seem to be the best hope of the peoples of the non-core nations. Only an authoritarian state can subordinate the interests of the U.S. to the interests of its own people. I would assume that Chavez will eventually either establish such a state in Venezuela or he, like other patriotic Latin American leaders of the last century, will end up dead or in exile. I believe that is why columnists and editorial writers can so confidently label Venzuela under Chavez a dictatorship. They know it will become one or be destroyed. Carrol
Re: Bush, the lesser evil?
Joel Wendland wrote: C The mistaken notion that an abandonment of Iraq after 13 years of war and sanctions will better the lives of anyone anywhere is completely mistaken. So let's assume that we do not favor abandoning the people of Iraq. What is the sensible and meaningful (i.e. has to be something that can be practically achievable as things are now) way forward? I suppose you also want rape-crisis centers to be 'manned' by rapists? This line of argument will justify eternal war. All the U.S. has to do is bomb the hell out of some country, send in some troops to do more damage and to kill a few thousand random civilians, and all the leftist of your sort will turn into rabid defenders of _this_ particular crime, because the criminal must stay to make up for the crime. Disgusting. Carrol
Why did the USSR NOT Fall? was Re: capitalism = progressive?
Why did it NOT fall in 1918? Why did it NOT fall in 1921? Why did it NOT fall in 1925? Why did it NOT fall in 1931? Why did it NOT fall in 1937? Why did it NOT fall in 1942? Why did it NOT fall in 1949? Why did it NOT fall in 1953? But you get the idea. This thread has been asking the wrong question. Of course the USSR failed, fell, whatever. That calls for no particular explanation. What needs explanation is why it took so long? What was the element of toughness that let it endure so many decades of external and internal pressures? The reasons for its fall are anitquarian curiosities. The reasons for its tremendous success we may need to know. Carrol Devine, James wrote: BTW, here's another addition to the list of why the old USSR fell: Chernoble. JD I've only followed this thread casualty
Re: FW: [PEN-L] New Business Model
Hasn't IBM for some time been putting multi-page ads in the WSJ proposing that data management be regarded as a fifth utility? I think that started over a year ago. Sun's program as Joanna describes it would seem to be the same sort of thing. Carrol
Re: capitalism = progressive?
Devine, James wrote: Chris wrote: Russian peasants in the quasi-feudal tsarist era would work intensively for the three months or so of the year when the ground was usuable for agriculture, and then sit around on their asses the rest of the year, in any case. I bet that during the 9 months off they spent a lot fo their time fixing equipment, making clothes, salting food, etc. Of course, it was at a much more leisurely pace than during the 3 months on. Jim D. It's possible that men sat around on their asses while women collected water, prepared food, tended to their little ones all day. :-) -- Yoshie it's more than possible. It's likely. Jim D. Medieval churchyards parish records show a very high death rate between the ages of 2 4 -- the hypothesis is that children under two were watched carefully, while those 4 over were reasonably able to get through the day unscathed. So apparently medieval peasant women were too busy much of the time to be able to watch those over two. In most 'feudal' systems peasants are expected to do a large amount of household labor for their lords. Prior to the last century it wasn't much use being wealthy if one did not have available a large pool of household labor for cooking, laundry, weaving, mending, etc etc etc. There were no convenient neighborhood shops. Carrol
Re: At a Loss
Funke Jayson J wrote: I have been having what is probably a pointless and circular debate with a friend that has left me hanging for an appropriate response. I dont know how to answer someone who defends capitalism BECAUSE it is a brutal system, and that they are fine with that system. I dont know where to go. There are, what, 300 million people in the U.S. There must be 10s of millions who could be reached by left agitation if we found a way to attract their attention. So why are you wasting your time trying to argue with someone who simply is not one of those 10s of millions? If he's your friend, talk about something else than politics with him. Carrol
Re: Will more violence provoke an extension of the US occupation?
Joel Wendland wrote: I too am safely tucked away here in the U.S. I made no claim to be anywhere else. But I think my point that brave intellectuals in the west who seem to support anything and everything that seems anti-imperalist because it is violent has been made. The content of support is a bit vague here. As far as I can tell all it means is sit in one's chair earnestly wishing that such and such will be the case in Iraq. There _is_ violence in Iraq. There will continue to be violence, ebbing and flowing but tending towards ever more violence, until all foreign troops are withdrawn unconditionally. There will very possibly be violence, a great deal of violence, after the troops withdraw. The longer troops remain, the more likely of great violence after they do withdraw. This is a statement of empirical fact, and nothing progressive forces in the west can do will change that fact. There is only one honorable course for intellectuals (or anyone else) in the west to follow: do all we can to force the withdrawal of foreign troops. U.S. out of Everywhere! Carrol
Re: Happy Easter!
Devine, James wrote: notes from life in Southern California: I remember from the '30s a sign in a yard in the village of Millburg, Michigan: Repent ye and therefore be saved Electrical Repairing Did Carrol
Re: one up to al-Sadri
dmschanoes wrote: Seems that this is the opening moment in a period of great potential for a real social revolutionary movement-- if it can articulate a program [CLIP]- and a moment of great danger if [CLIP Whichever if eventuates is beyond the reach of world progressives to affect. With luck and hard work we can maintain pressure on the U.S. to withdraw its forces. U.S. Out of Everywhere! Carrol
Re: Decisive showdown
Marvin Gandall wrote: Carrol Cox wrote: I still think that it is really not possible to both support Kerry and continue to build the anti-war movement. It is essential that we keep front and center that Kerry will be a more dangerous imperial warrior than Bush. --- Isn't this like saying a Republican victory in 1936 would have been preferable to the relection of FDR and the Democrats because the latter, by promoting social reform and collective bargaining rights, had a more sophisticated understanding of how to save capitalism? Or the same as the German KPD worrying that a more dangerous social democratic victory would postpone the German revolution, which Nazi repression would hasten? Those two elections were very different. Neither Landon nor Bush bears comparison to Hitler. I am coming to object rather violently to the comparison. The 1932 situation in Germany (in hindsight, and presumably to many at the time) fulfilled the conditions classically named in the Declaration of Independence -- political changes which threatened to be irrevocable. No such situation exists now, nor did it exist in 1936. The decision of the CPUSA to support Roosevelt, in fact, was as disastrous as the failure of the KPD to oppose Hitler. Seventy years later, as the flourishing of ABBs shows, leftists in this country are still cursed by the disaster of '36, which served to tie the left in the u.s. permanently to the DP. Until that link is broken The U.S. Left should never be mentioned without scare quotes. (And incidentally, it is not at all self-evident that Landon would have been all that much more conservative than FDR, whose main accomplishment during his second term was quietly to destroy the most radical 'achievement' of the New Deal, the WPA.) The ABB case stands or falls on the assumption that Bush represents not just ordinary evil but a qualitatively distinct element in u.s. politics, threatening irreversible damage. That is nonsense. Any other argument for supporting Kerry will apply as well to all future elections. I think a failure of nerve has occurred. For defense of Social Security and Medicare, as well as a pullout from Iraq, I would prefer to proceed on Mao's slogan of Trust the People. In July of 2002 Doug posted on LBO: *** New Dealers Redux? Thu, 25 Jul 2002 11:29:54 Archer.Todd wrote: What do you think about Kuttner's analysis of the '29 Crash? Doug? Michael? Brad? http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6057 Kuttner overlooks one political inspiration for the New Deal - fear of communism. With no domestic CP and no USSR to worry about, there's a lot less pressure for New Deal-style reforms.- Doug ** Our business is to rebuild a movement which will will recreate that fear (whether of communism or a left movement under some other name). We simply cannot do our proper work while possessed by the panic which fuels ABB. Carrol
Re: Decisive showdown
k hanly wrote: Kerry opposes the NMD system and that at least is a big plus compared to Bush. There will _always_, in every election as far as the eye can see, be a big plus (or several) for the DP candidate. So arguing on this basis for Bush is _also_ arguing for an endless subordination of 'the left' to the DP. I would support Kerry Only if it could be demonstrated with some confidence that the election of Bush would lead to the cancellation of elections thereafter. Carrol
Re: Decisive showdown
Devine, James wrote: I've spent a decade or three pooh-poothing orthodox Leninist-Marxist visions of military-style inter-imperialist rivalry, i.e., a replay of WWI. Now, it's becoming possible that Iraq could do to the US what Afghanistan did to the USSR... so it might just happen some day soon. Of course, there are are other alternative futures... Jim Devine There are a few missing steps between the situation in Iraq (no matter how disastrous for the U.S.) and any replay of WW1 -- namely the development of an imperialist power prepared (and _driven_) to confront the u.s. militarily. That _could_, I believe, happen, but the EU, Russia, China, China/Japan, all have quite a way to go before they could mount such a challenge believably. But with the U.S. riding a tiger in the mideast, which I would anticipate would stretch its military capacity to the limit and force retreat elsewhere, anything could happen (that is, anything bad: nothing good can come of the u.s. occupation of Iraq, whether it ends soon or later). Incidentally, the current new uprising shows once more that passive public opinion (as measured in polls, elections, etc.) is NOT the relevant opinion. The relevant opinion is that of the minority prepared to act. I've always estimated that at about 10-15 percent of the population -- and I think even the u.s. controlled polls in Iraq indicate that that number has always existed. In a few years, even those Iraqi who actively friendly to the u.s. and concerned above all with order will see that that cannot be achieved until after the unconditional withdrawal of the U.S. That will neutralize that sector of the population politically, and the internal struggle will be between different anti-u.s. factions. Currently, the best analogy perhaps to the U.S. occupation is the Japanese invasion of China. Carrol
Re: Decisive showdown
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Currently, the best analogy perhaps to the U.S. occupation is the Japanese invasion of China. Carrol What's missing, alas, is a strong force of secular leftists against the Empire: Indeed. In any case, all friends of the Iraqi people elsewhere can do is exert as much pressure as possible for the unconditional withdrawal of u.s. forces, since the longer the forces are there, the greater will be the chaos and bloodshed after their withdrawal. And incidentally, I still think that it is really not possible to _both_ support Kerry _and_ continue to build the anti-war movement. It is essential that we keep front and center that Kerry will be a more dangerous imperial warrior than Bush. We will have our work cut out for us next January regardless of who wins in the election, and I think that work should absorb _all_ of our energy, none left over for 'supporting' (however critically) the likes of Kerry. Carrol
