Re: North on ideology
--- Kevin Carson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: One neocon recently argued that anyone who does not support Isreael is, by definition, an antisemite, because Israel is the Jewish national homeland. Which is ironic in that Arabs are Semitic as well. Picking sides in the conflict is not anti- or pro-Semitic, any more than hating the Scots and loving the Welsh is anti-British. Go figure. -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
Re: North on ideology
And free market anarchists like Tucker, who also identified themselves as libertarian socialists, saw the state as the central, defining characteristic of capitalist exploitation (and all other forms of exploitation). Exploitation, defined as the use of force to enable one person to live off another's labor, was the central function of the state, and was impossible without it. For Tucker, free market capitalism was an oxymoron. It's interesting you refer to Leninism, Social Democracy, and Fabianism as allied phenomena--because in fact, they all reflect the rise of the New Class of professionals and planners, who began to take over the labor and socialist movement in the late nineteenth century. In fact, Nazism itself was prefigured in many ways (including extreme antisemitism, eugenics, etc.) in Fabian thought. Socialism in the U.S. persisted, though, as a largely self-organized, working class movement until WWI. It was at that point that the progressives and Crolyites in the Wilson administration, under the pretext of war hysteria and the Red Scare, liquidated most of the genuine working class left. Before WWI, the main electoral support for the Socialist Party was among Oklahoma oil workers, Montana miners, Milwaukee brewery workers, etc. After WWI, socialism's main demographic base was either academia or yuppie hog heavens like Burlington, Vt. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I suspect that Von Mises' insight refer more to the brands of socialism popular in his era, such as communism, social democracy (Austria, France, Germany), Labour Party socialism (Britain), and of course Nazism, rather than to all socialisms throughout modern history. As Elizabeth Tamedly points out in _Socialism and International Trade_, most forms of socialism historically have not advocated an abolition of private property. Most have advocated some mixture of private property and government control. If you want to argue that the more the government control, the less the substance of private property ownership, I'd certainly agree, noting that there's something of a spectrum of government control, with communism on one extreme. Not all government control is created equal (thankfully). David Levenstam _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
Re: North on ideology
I don't know what the term neoconservative means This one is easy. Irving Kristol defined a neo-conservative as a liberal who had been mugged. Bill Sjostrom
RE: North on ideology -- Free Markets, Marketeers -- tunneling
Interesting. Your remarks on tunnelling dovetail nicely with an excellent article by Sean Corrigan at LewRockwell.com: http://www.lewrockwell.com/corrigan/corrigan13.html Corrigan refers to privatization, as part of IMF-imposed structural adjustments, as a carpet-bagger strategy for enabling international financial classes to buy up taxpayer-funded assets for pennies on the dollar. This discussion reminds me of something I heard second-hand about the Austrian economist and anarcho-capitalist Hans Hermann Hoppe. I've yet to read it myself, so take it for what it's worth. Anyway, he argued that the ex-Communist states were the one proper area for implementing syndicalist control of industry, since the original ownership was hopelessly muddled or moot, and the state industry thus qualified as unowned property in the Lockean sense. It was therefore quite logical to treat the workforce as occupiers or homesteaders, and place it under their collective ownership. Anyway, it sounds to me a lot better than turning the product of seventy years stolen labor of the Russian people over to domestic and international elites at fire sale prices, and then turning the country into a big sweatshop. On a related note, in the Tranquil Statement of the YAF's Radical Libertarian Caucus, Karl Hess argued that radical student occupations of even private universities wasn't a violation of any valid private property right, because such nominally private institutions were almost entirely dependant on the state's subsidies. Therefore, they should be treated as unowned, and homesteaded by students or faculty--in many ways a return to the original medieval idea of the university. I've also been told that Rothbard, at one point, (in the late 60s, I think, at the height of his affinity for the New Left) called for the expropriation of any corporation that got more than half its profits from state capitalist intervention, and its being placed under workers' control instead. The agorist Samuel Edward Konkin, another Austrian radical, speaks of a period of restitution in which the property of statists will be seized to pay back what they consumed through robbery of the producing classes. For privatization in this country, there's a lot to be said for what Larry Gambone calls mutualizing state property as an alternative both to corporate capitalist privatization and to state ownership. It entails devolving social services, police, schools, etc., to the local level, and then placing them under the direct democratic control of their clientele--sort of like transforming them into consumer co-ops. The ultimate goal, of course, is to fund them on a user-fee basis and make consumption voluntary. It's quite a bit like what Proudhon called (in *General Idea of the Revolution*) dissolving the state within the social body. From: Grey Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: North on ideology -- Free Markets, Marketeers -- tunneling Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 11:22:22 +0200 quoth Tom Grey: . . . For instance, the need for government to prevent tunneling of newly privatized companies by the managers. . . . Define please? It's basically asset stripping, in any of sundry ways. Asset stripping has occurred in almost all newly privatized Slovak firms. A few ways I know of: 1) The new manager, often part owner, creates a new brand name for the product the newly privatized company is making. This brand name is owned by a little company wholly owned by the manager. The production company pays millions for the brand name. -- production company has losses, the little company is quite profitable, but prolly off shore and untaxed. 2) The new owner's wife or son writes up a strategic or marketing plan, some 5-20 pages of BS to lay a shelf; to get millions in fees. 3) Older but working, high-market value production equipment is sold at almost zero book value (near end of depreciated life). 4) The production company builds a mansion, pays millions; sells it to the owner's little company at a huge loss. Similarly with luxury cars. Here in Slovakia, accounting form requirements are rather strict; but the first three above are entirely legal. I'm not sure on the details of (4) in order to make it legal, but I strongly suspect certain perpetrators have legal opinions on how to do it legally -- in accordance with required form based reporting. The failure of the Klaus voucher privatization plan was that the mostly minority owners had no real way of stopping the top managers from asset stripping. Ownership got dispersed, but it became ownership of debts without assets; select (mostly ex-commie) managers ended up with most of the assets. That's one of the main reasons so many ex-commie countries have voters unhappy with the free markets. ... and then they vote tough ex-commies into office :( (The problem with democracy? People
Re: North on ideology -- Free Markets, Marketeers -- tunneling
Hummbut I still wonder if North was rights. Maybe we are not sharing mental models...:-) - Original Message - From: Kevin Carson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 12, 2002 8:20 AM Subject: RE: North on ideology -- Free Markets, Marketeers -- tunneling Interesting. Your remarks on tunnelling dovetail nicely with an excellent article by Sean Corrigan at LewRockwell.com: http://www.lewrockwell.com/corrigan/corrigan13.html Corrigan refers to privatization, as part of IMF-imposed structural adjustments, as a carpet-bagger strategy for enabling international financial classes to buy up taxpayer-funded assets for pennies on the dollar. This discussion reminds me of something I heard second-hand about the Austrian economist and anarcho-capitalist Hans Hermann Hoppe. I've yet to read it myself, so take it for what it's worth. Anyway, he argued that the ex-Communist states were the one proper area for implementing syndicalist control of industry, since the original ownership was hopelessly muddled or moot, and the state industry thus qualified as unowned property in the Lockean sense. It was therefore quite logical to treat the workforce as occupiers or homesteaders, and place it under their collective ownership. Anyway, it sounds to me a lot better than turning the product of seventy years stolen labor of the Russian people over to domestic and international elites at fire sale prices, and then turning the country into a big sweatshop. On a related note, in the Tranquil Statement of the YAF's Radical Libertarian Caucus, Karl Hess argued that radical student occupations of even private universities wasn't a violation of any valid private property right, because such nominally private institutions were almost entirely dependant on the state's subsidies. Therefore, they should be treated as unowned, and homesteaded by students or faculty--in many ways a return to the original medieval idea of the university. I've also been told that Rothbard, at one point, (in the late 60s, I think, at the height of his affinity for the New Left) called for the expropriation of any corporation that got more than half its profits from state capitalist intervention, and its being placed under workers' control instead. The agorist Samuel Edward Konkin, another Austrian radical, speaks of a period of restitution in which the property of statists will be seized to pay back what they consumed through robbery of the producing classes. For privatization in this country, there's a lot to be said for what Larry Gambone calls mutualizing state property as an alternative both to corporate capitalist privatization and to state ownership. It entails devolving social services, police, schools, etc., to the local level, and then placing them under the direct democratic control of their clientele--sort of like transforming them into consumer co-ops. The ultimate goal, of course, is to fund them on a user-fee basis and make consumption voluntary. It's quite a bit like what Proudhon called (in *General Idea of the Revolution*) dissolving the state within the social body. From: Grey Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: North on ideology -- Free Markets, Marketeers -- tunneling Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 11:22:22 +0200 quoth Tom Grey: . . . For instance, the need for government to prevent tunneling of newly privatized companies by the managers. . . . Define please? It's basically asset stripping, in any of sundry ways. Asset stripping has occurred in almost all newly privatized Slovak firms. A few ways I know of: 1) The new manager, often part owner, creates a new brand name for the product the newly privatized company is making. This brand name is owned by a little company wholly owned by the manager. The production company pays millions for the brand name. -- production company has losses, the little company is quite profitable, but prolly off shore and untaxed. 2) The new owner's wife or son writes up a strategic or marketing plan, some 5-20 pages of BS to lay a shelf; to get millions in fees. 3) Older but working, high-market value production equipment is sold at almost zero book value (near end of depreciated life). 4) The production company builds a mansion, pays millions; sells it to the owner's little company at a huge loss. Similarly with luxury cars. Here in Slovakia, accounting form requirements are rather strict; but the first three above are entirely legal. I'm not sure on the details of (4) in order to make it legal, but I strongly suspect certain perpetrators have legal opinions on how to do it legally -- in accordance with required form based reporting. The failure of the Klaus voucher privatization plan was that the mostly minority owners had no real way of stopping the top managers from asset stripping
RE: North on ideology
Kevin Carson wrote: I haven't read the Pipes book. He's a neoconservative, isn't he? I don't know what the term neoconservative means, nor do I understand why that particular label is relevant to this discussion. I've read Bethell's book in parts, and skimmed through most of it. It strikes me as a very ahistoric view of property: taking the contemporary, Lockean/capitalist model of private property as some kind of Platonic ideal, and then judging history as it progressively approximated that ideal over time. If you had actually read the book carefully, you would realize that your assessment couldn't be more incorrect. Alex
RE: North on ideology
Kevin Carson wrote: As for socialism, its defining characteristic is not necessarily the absence of private property rights. Tucker simply defined socialism by two criteria: the beliefs that 1) all value was created by labor; and 2) that labor should get 100% of its product. In his view, exploitation was possible only through the state's coercion, by which it enabled legally privileged classes to extract a premium in unpaid labor. If such privilege were eliminated, the free market would cause wages to rise to 100% of value-added. I haven't read Tucker, but I've always thought that Von Mises is correct when he says that the essential mark of socialism is that one will alone, acts, irrespective of whose will it is (Human Action, p 695.) To me, this essential mark implies an absence of private property rights. Alex Robson
Re: North on ideology
In a message dated 8/12/02 8:48:56 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I don't know what the term neoconservative means, nor do I understand why that particular label is relevant to this discussion. I'm not sure that anyone knows what it means or rather, that there's any common agreement on what it means. It seems to have started out referring to a group of Sixties liberals in America who decided that Big Government wasn't an effective way of pursuing the goals of reducing poverty et al, and thus became conservatives by the late 1970s. Many prominent ones like Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb (husband and wife, columnist and historian) and their son Bill Kristol (former chief of staff of veep Dan Quayle and now editor[?] of The Weekly Standard) are Jews, and Patrick Buchanan began to use the term neoconservative as a term of derision in order to covertly signal to the anti-Semitic right that he was one of them (although according to personal accounts supposedly he's not) without alerting good conservative Christians to his Jew-baiting (it actually plays quite poorly in Iowa). I briefly joined an email list years ago on which one fellow who seemed to like Buchanan (again Pat, not James) charged neoconservatives with wanting to have some sort of watered down civic religion instead of good old whatever the fellow practiced. Supposedly in orgin the term neoconservative distinguished between the newcomer refugees from liberalism and the old-time conservatives who had always had the faith, although considering that Buchanan supported the statist-liberal Big Government policy of wage and price controls imposed by the Nixon administration (in which he served as an ardent statist) it seems a poorly descriptive term at best. David
Re: North on ideology
In a message dated 8/12/02 8:49:19 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I haven't read Tucker, but I've always thought that Von Mises is correct when he says that the essential mark of socialism is that one will alone, acts, irrespective of whose will it is (Human Action, p 695.) To me, this essential mark implies an absence of private property rights. Alex Robson I suspect that Von Mises' insight refer more to the brands of socialism popular in his era, such as communism, social democracy (Austria, France, Germany), Labour Party socialism (Britain), and of course Nazism, rather than to all socialisms throughout modern history. As Elizabeth Tamedly points out in _Socialism and International Trade_, most forms of socialism historically have not advocated an abolition of private property. Most have advocated some mixture of private property and government control. If you want to argue that the more the government control, the less the substance of private property ownership, I'd certainly agree, noting that there's something of a spectrum of government control, with communism on one extreme. Not all government control is created equal (thankfully). David Levenstam
