Peter Phillips: >Dear friends, > After Louis' last piece of venom that attacked, not only me, but >my acquaitances that may (or may not) agree with me, but who have >never heard of Louis Proyet, I must withdraw from further discussion >on pen-l. Louis: Oh for christ's sake, mellow out. When somebody like yourself talks about how some member of the ruling party in Macedonia whispered in your ear that everything is on the upswing there, what else do you expect except ridicule. Well, I take that back. I suppose this may be just the sort of thing that carries weight over on PEN-L. I personally think it is elitist. When you make constant references to books you've written, to 7 year old articles, to government officials who you have the inside track to, but don't "have the time" to develop your ideas here on a public forum like PEN-L, this is a slap in the face to people who lack such venues or such inside information. Some day there may not be academic publishing houses and all discourse of this type will be on the Internet where the untutored mob will be able to critique it openly. Why not get used to it now. I think what is really bugging you is that you have no answer to the basic charge: Slovenia represents "white flight" from Yugoslavia. Some socialist ideal. The Slovenians you identify with wanted to be integrated into "civilized" Europe and leave the dirty, lazy, uneducated and unproductive Eastern Europeans behind like a bad memory. People like Schweickart who bought into the myth of Yugoslavia have done a remarkably poor job of explaining why such a positive role model turned into a living hell. I may take the trouble to track down Paul Phillips' article, but since he has locked himself in his bedroom and refuses to talk to me, I'm not sure I will bother. The only members of the Yugoslavia-Slovenia fan club that I have met on the Internet are Justin Schwartz and Barkley Rosser. They also love to tell you about those rising GDP figures, but also have temporary black-outs when it comes to the subject of the Balkan killing fields. I always thought there was a connection between economics and politics--especially the politics of war--, but this connection gets suspended whenever the topic of Slovenia comes up. For people to talk about the wonderful Yugoslavian model is so bizarre that it can only have life in the cloistered world of left economists. Yugoslavia should be mentioned in the same breath as Cambodia. Would you tell working people in Canada that Cambodia, with its mountains of skulls, was a socialist model? Why is Yugoslavia any different? It represents a perversion of the socialist idea. "Self-interest" was one of the guiding principles of the original project, a dubious one in light of the original Marxist vision of "from each according to their needs, to each according to their ability." When things started to turn sour on the economic front for reasons that had nothing to do with conditions *inside* Yugoslavia, the prosperous republics jumped ship and Bosnia got caught in the middle. You have nothing to say about this bleeding wound but talk about the GDP statistics of Slovenia. No wonder you want to evade an open discussion. ****************************** A final word to Peter Bohmer: My purpose on PEN-L is the same as always has been. To speak to the graduate students and working people who have no particular vested interest in doctrines such as market socialism. The mail I received yesterday from one such person is just what I need to keep me going: --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Louis, it's xxx, the grad student in xxx at xxx who presented a paper on the xxx at the xxx symposium. Sharryn Kasmir also presented at the symposium. Her talk focused on the role of Basque nationalism both as the impetus for and changes within Mondragon. The genesis of Mondragon played up the national tradition of Basques which was largely absent landless labor. So from the beginning Mondragon has had a Petit-B orientation - this demonstrates for me the complexity of class and national relations, which I don't have any pat answers to. Kasmir struck me as bright and focused on the right kinds of questions. She and Ian Skoggard, an anthropologist at Yale, are editing a new book on changing property structures as capital advances. Your comment about Slovenia bailing on Yugo when the going got tough was spot on. Market socialism structurally encourages organizational practices which are antithetical to societal well being (in econ talk, markets impose the drive to externalize). What the MSers totally fail to grasp is that socialism isn't just a groovey restuarant in Athens Ohio, but will have to be global in scope. As such MS is just a quick road back to where we are today. Also, the MSer's totally fail on the environmental question. Resource finitude will compel planning and even undemocratic planning in certain circumstances. Example: most Americans would vote for a car based transportation system and yet the automobile is a complete waste of energy and materials. Centralized planning doesn't make for the fuzzy idyllic garden I imagined in my anarchist youth, but it can provide a baseline of ecologically sustainable economic and political equality - the prerequisites for freedom with real content. My last semester of classes and preparing for comps has been kicking my ass lately, I wanted to jump in the analytic marxism debate, but didn't. Justin and others always argue that AM (rational choice theory, methodological individualism, obsessive quant jock stuff etc.) is rigorous social science. From sociology this is just bullshit, any intro to soc. text demolishes the idea that actors are rational and individualistic (even under capitalism all kinds of other cultural, filial, affectivce factors intervene in the rationality of the optimizing individuals). AM's claim to be good bourgeois social science is nonsense. Many banal mainstream psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, geographers etc. are extremely critical of RCT and methodological individalism on purely methodological and scientific grounds. i've rambled long enough. Keep up the good posts, there's nothing like a good spirited debate to clarify class positions.
