Hello Economists,
Where Yoshie writes,
Yoshie,
The main reason why discussion on PEN-l has often no immediate
implication -- for better or worse -- for people in Bolivia (to take
just one example) is that struggles here & struggles there have no
explicit political link. There was once such a political link. The
Communist International, along with various fellow travellers & left
oppositions to it, was the link. That disappeared from the stage of
world history. There is now no shared coherent political program to
link various local & national struggles, perhaps excepting the
opposition to the IMF & the WB.
Doyle
I would make the point that the use of elists is not being thought of
properly. First of all elists could easily be thought of as having a direct
connection to struggle. That is that portable email sending devices such as
"Blackberry" could bring people into the thick of a social action where
archiving and wide scale networks of activists supporting something local
could profoundly change the nature of social organizing. In all kinds of
ways. Secondly Xml forces community connection upon communication
exchanges. I mean by that that data is retrievable to the source of the
data. Therefore the community connectivity that favors the working class is
explicit. Thirdly, as the controversy about "LBO talk" shows the email list
system forces upon people the necessity to understand what is a productive
way of communicating in the community. To answer in relation to real
productivity issues what is the role of a moderator in effecting both
productivity and quality of product in an email list.
Louis Proyect is wrong in his criticisms he is raising of Pen-L. Michael
Perelman is much closer to the necessary role of the moderator. The science
behind that and the engineering of automated systems that do the same thing
will prove the validity of my claim here. The claim to be explicit is that
a moderators role is to enhance the productivity of the group. That role is
about a certain degree of understanding what makes people able to continue
to produce data in greater quantity and to also be qualitatively productive
also. Where Louis writes,
Louis,
If
it is out of bounds to make such points on PEN-L, I will unsub right now.
Frankly, I was happy to be off PEN-L and concentrate on my own list which
gets 7,000 visits a week, more readers I suspect than all of those print
journals put together. I only resubbed because Michael Perelman said that
some people complained that I had left. We all know that anybody with my
kind of politics is always getting into clashes on PEN-L, from Henry Liu to
Jim Craven to Michael Yates to Mine Doyran. I only post here because I feel
obligated to defend a kind of Marxism that will get you an FBI file and not
invitations to speak at an academic plenary.
Doyle
Here Louis is theorizing that first of all Jim Craven, Henry Liu, Michael
Yates and Mine Doyran are something unified and more productive of a kind of
position than what we find on Pen-L. I don't think so. I think the level
of discussion is higher on Pen-L. I furthermore think that the
productivity claims of Louis Proyect are not geared to an understanding of
what makes qualitative performance in human cognition production on e-lists.
Far from being unified, Louis Proyect's list is not more unified than is
this list. Who knows what a claim to have a FBI dossier is supposed to
mean. I am not an academic, but I think I prefer (as a human being
relishing calmness over intensity) in general the approach that Michael
Perelman embodies in moderating. And that Michael Perelman's overall method
is key to the development of the tools of information technology for the
broad range of human beings to be a part of the social fabric in a vast
system of networked electronic communications.
I think as a means of organizing working class people we need to clarify
this issue and make decisions about what works and what doesn't in this much
beyond this level of debate. I'm not talking directly here about the
organizing qualities of this list, I am talking about the method of
production in an e-list and what it does whether in an academic setting, or
a street organizing setting. The methods about thinking processes and
theories of Louis Proyect are not adequate to the needs of list production.
Nor for that matter is his list less inclined to the kind of food fights
that he reproaches Michael Perelman for.
Louis,
The same
people antagonizing each other and the same dialog of the deaf and the
dumb.
Doyle
In the disabled rights community where I organize this statement is a
representation of creating an otherness of disabled cognition. This is good
example of how Louis Proyect does not adequately theorize what cognitive
productivity is about. In this case Louis is saying that the deaf and the
blind people cannot communicate to each other which is a slander to these
groups of disabled people. It is on the same level as saying that an ethnic
group is naturally inferior in intelligence. My wife is blind, my wife
communicates just fine with deaf people using information technology which
is directed by the law (whether or not in reality that happens) of the land
to be both accessible to blind people and to the deaf. This is fundamental
to the development of information technology that disabled people have
rights and that Mr. Proyect intellectually fails to grasp. It is not right
to grasp at an anti-disabled stereotype to characterize this list.
thank you,
Doyle Saylor
