Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The centrally planned economy, Hayek, and the red s pot of Jupiter. Cold and dark stars

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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Over on my FB wall, concerning Hayek,  someone once remarked:

"I made it halfway through The Road to Serfdom (unabridged, with all the barbs 
directed at now forgotten supporters of social welfare in the UK left in to 
show it's a much more focused polemical work) before tossing it across the 
room. The straw that broke the camel's back was his contention that firms 
*internally* work like markets. I'm like, OK, he's never had to work for the 
private sector, and said fuck him."

I remarked that Hayek should have read some Ronald Coase. 
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~lebelp/CoaseNatFirmEc1937.pdf

As Coase pointed out, firms internally DO NOT work like markets and Coase makes 
the argument why that should be rational behavior on their part, and more 
importantly, why firms should exist in the first place within a market economy.

Also, it should be pointed out that when he wrote that, Coase was a socialist 
(he would later become a conservative). He was a close friend of Abba Lerner, 
and like Lerner, was at that time very much interested in the "socialist 
calculation" debate.

One of his concerns at that time was to show how to reconcile the apparent 
economic success of the Soviet Union with the neoclassical economics that he 
was committed to. His paper, "The Nature of the Firm" sketches out the kind of 
economic reasoning which could reconcile support for socialist economic 
planning with a commitment to neoclassical economic theory. For Coase, the key 
concept here was that of "transaction costs", which denoted the costs incurred 
by relying on the market and price system for organizing economic activity. 
It's precisely because transaction costs are often of significant size that 
people turn away from direct reliance upon the market and price system. Coase 
also used the concept of transaction costs in his famous 1960 paper, "The 
Problem of Social Cost", where he presented what has come to be known as 
"Coase's Theorem."
http://bev.berkeley.edu/ipe/readings/The%20Problem%20of%20Social%20Cost.pdf

 Coase's Theorem has often been taken as constituting some sort of refutation 
of A. C. Pigou's analysis of externalities. But Coase himself insisted that in 
most cases involving environmental pollution and probably for most other kinds 
of externalities, the relevant transaction costs are of significant size, in 
which case, Pigou comes back into his own again. It is interesting to note that 
both Oskar Lange and Maurice Dobb used Pigou's analysis of externalities to 
make their cases for socialist economic planning. And the young Ronald Coase 
himself had been supportive of socialist economic planning precisely because he 
believed in the existence of high transaction costs.

 And in his Nobel Lecture, Coase admitted as much concerning his own history:

"The view of the pricing system as a co-ordinating mechanism was clearly right 
but there were aspects of the argument which troubled me. Plant was opposed to 
all schemes, then very fashionable during the Great Depression, for the 
co-ordination of industrial production by some form of planning. Competition, 
according to Plant, acting through a system of prices, would do all the 
co-ordination necessary. And yet we had a factor of production, management, 
whose function was to co-ordinate. Why was it needed if the pricing system 
provided all the co-ordination necessary? The same problem presented itself to 
me at that time in another guise. The Russian Revolution had taken place only 
fourteen years earlier. We knew then very little about how planning would 
actually be carried out in a communist system. Lenin had said that the economic 
system in Russia would be run as one big factory. However, many economists in 
the West maintained that this was an impossibility. And yet there were factori
 es in the West and some of them were extremely large. How did one reconcile 
the views expressed by economists on the role of the pricing system and the 
impossibility of successful central economic planning with the existence of 
management and of these apparently planned societies, firms, operating within 
our own economy?"
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1991/coase-lecture.html

BTW I should point out that the young Ronald Coase had studied economics at the 
London School of Economics where he attended the famous lecture course that was 
taught jointly by Lionel Robbins and Friedrich Hayek, so he had absorbed many 
of Hayek's thought concerning how the price system works but which he had used 
to reach conclusions at variance with Hayek.


Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant

Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The centrally planned economy, Hayek, and the red spot of Jupiter. – Cold and dark stars

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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great stuff. Who is colddarkstars?


>
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[Marxism] Spanish state to Catalonia: surrender or you’re taken over

[Stuart Munckton via Marxism]

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Dick Nichols writes, as Madrid threatens to to abolish Catalan government
and rights: "Catalonia’s mass independence movement has been emboldened by
its extraordinary success in carrying out the October 1 independence
referendum in the face of huge police repression. It has also broadened
into a movement defending Catalan sovereignty and institutions, reflecting
the 80% of the population who support Catalonia’s right to decide its
relation to the Spanish state."

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/spanish-state-catalonia-surrender-or-you-are-taken-over



-- 

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[Marxism] Turkish troops enter Idlib - escorted by Nusra

[Chris Slee via Marxism]

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The Turkish intervention in Syria's Idlib province is directed against the 
Syrian Democratic Forces, not against Jabhat al-Nusra/HTS.

BBC report:

www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41607822

The BBC report includes the following:  "However, the UK-based Syrian 
Observatory for Human Rights reported that HTS fighters had escorted the 
Turkish troops towards a western area adjoining Afrin".


ANF comment:

http://anfenglish.com/news/murderous-army-of-al-nusra-s-turkey-confession-we-won-t-resist

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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The centrally planned economy, Hayek, and the red s pot of Jupiter. � Cold and dark stars

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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I  am a co-author of an article on Hayek, which includes an appendix on the 
socialist calculation debates, including both the well known debate  between 
Friedrich Hayek and Oskar Lange, as well as the less well known debate between 
Hayek and Otto Neurath. BTW the whole debate was triggered in the first place 
when Hayek's teacher and mentor, Ludwig von Mises, wrote his essay, 
"Calculation in the socialist commonwealth" in response to Neurath's writings 
in defense of socialist economic planning.
https://www.academia.edu/3291616/The_Strange_Case_of_Dr._Hayek_and_Mr._Hayek

Also, see this past post in Marxmail.
http://marxism.csbs.utah.narkive.com/foQvPPVj/hayek-and-trotsky




Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
http://www.foxymath.com 
Learn or Review Basic Math


-- Original Message --
From: Louis Proyect via Marxism 
Subject: [Marxism] Fwd: The centrally planned economy, Hayek, and the red spot 
of Jupiter. – Cold and dark stars
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2017 15:23:52 -0400

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https://colddarkstars.wordpress.com/2017/10/13/the-centrally-planned-economy-hayek-and-the-red-spot-of-jupiter/
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We Say GoodBye To Sally Fields
iflperfecttouch.com
http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/59e11b7867bdd1b787a46st01vuc

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[Marxism] Fwd: Catalonia: Past and Future

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://jacobinmag.com/2017/10/catalonia-independence-franco-spain-nationalism
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[Marxism] MORE EVIDENCE THAT EXTREME WEALTH IS TOTALLY INDEFENSIBLE

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/more-evidence-that-extreme-wealth-is-totally-indefensible
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[Marxism] Fwd: The centrally planned economy, Hayek, and the red spot of Jupiter. – Cold and dark stars

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://colddarkstars.wordpress.com/2017/10/13/the-centrally-planned-economy-hayek-and-the-red-spot-of-jupiter/
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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Finding Water in Puerto Rico: An Endless Game of Cat and Mouse

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Oct. 13 2017
Finding Water in Puerto Rico: An Endless Game of Cat and Mouse
By CAITLIN DICKERSON

SAN JUAN, P.R. — After a day spent working in an office in the dark, 
without air-conditioning, Iris Díaz arrived at her neighborhood CVS 
drugstore desperate for what has quickly become one of the most 
sought-after items in Puerto Rico: bottled water.


A sales clerk standing behind the checkout counter explained that the 
store had been out of stock for three days.


“Ni una sola botellita?” Ms. Díaz pleaded in Spanish. “Not even one 
little bottle?”


The employee shook her head and apologized.

Three weeks after Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico, the 
challenge of finding enough water to drink and cook with remains 
enormous across the island, even in its largest city. People here engage 
in a perpetual game of cat and mouse, scouring the city for any hints of 
places with water to sell.


People are so desperate that on Wednesday the Environmental Protection 
Agency cited reports of residents trying to obtain drinking water from 
wells at hazardous Superfund sites. “E.P.A. advises against tampering 
with sealed and locked wells or drinking from these wells, as it may be 
dangerous to people’s health,’’ the agency said.


The demand has skyrocketed, according to grocery store managers, 
distributors and supply companies, because safe, drinkable tap water is 
still largely unavailable, and deliveries of water from the outside have 
not kept up with demand. Even Puerto Ricans who have been told that 
their local water is safe to drink are avoiding it because of reports 
that infectious diseases are spreading on the island.


The sight of water delivery trucks outside stores is prompting long 
lines to form. Crushes of customers snatch up new shipments even before 
store employees can restock empty shelves. Of 10 stores in San Juan that 
were visited on Tuesday and Wednesday, only one had bottled water: a 
Walmart store where two brawny men were loading cases of water directly 
off a shipping pallet into the shopping carts of people who had lined up 
in the back of the store. Signs posted on the walls declared a limit of 
one case per group.


Phillip Keene, director of corporate communications for Walmart, said 
that during the storm, the company had safeguarded pallets of water on 
cargo ships that were sent out to sea and away from Maria’s path. Since 
then, the company has been delivering about six million bottles of water 
a week to Puerto Rico from the continental United States, and it is 
making plans to double the supply as soon as possible. Mr. Keene added 
that before the storm, Walmart stores in Puerto Rico generally sold 
about 300,000 cases of water a week, almost all of it bottled from 
sources on the island.


“It’s pretty amazing,” he said. “There’s a real sense of urgency.”

Some Puerto Ricans, particularly those in rural areas, are relying 
entirely on water provided as emergency aid by the Federal Emergency 
Management Agency. The water is sent to local distribution centers, and 
then delivered door to door by local governments.


Federal officials said that as of Wednesday, more than six million 
liters of water had arrived on the island, but that damaged ports, roads 
and bridges had slowed the deliveries, especially to the interior of the 
commonwealth. Officials say 75 percent of the island’s ports are open, 
and they are receiving about 1,100 containers of supplies a day, close 
to the 1,400 that came in daily before the storm.


The lack of water is far worse than anything experienced in Florida and 
Texas after Hurricanes Irma and Harvey. Relief experts say that because 
of the extent of damage to Puerto Rico’s water systems, the scale of the 
overall destruction and the difficulty of delivering aid to an island 
rather than on the mainland, it did not make sense to compare the 
response in Puerto Rico with Florida or Texas in terms of efficiency or 
focus.


“What happened in Texas and Florida were disasters,” said W. Craig 
Fugate, who was FEMA administrator under President Barack Obama. “What 
happened in Puerto Rico was a catastrophe.”


Before Maria hit, most of the bottled water consumed in Puerto Rico was 
produced in factories on the island, according to Manuel Reyes Alfonso, 
executive vice president of the Puerto Rico Chamber for the Marketing 
and Distribution of the Food Industry, a trade association of grocery 
manufacturers, distributors and store owners. Most of those facilities 
lost power during the storm and are now operating on generators, which 
allow them to produce only a small fraction of their normal output.


The island was 

[Marxism] IMF leader calls for symbolic wealth redistribution!

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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Class inequality so bad and causing so much political polarization that
even the commander of the global loan shark calls for some symbolic
redistribution of wealth. Capitalism is the disaster.
https://wtop.com/business-finance/2017/10/imfs-lagarde-urges-leaders-to-find-ways-to-spread-wealth/
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The Chimes at Midnight: Trotskyism in the USSR 1926-1938 | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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This is huge. Will it come out as a book?

Regardless, IMO it should be recommended to anyone looking for a detailed
understanding of the debates and their context.

(As complementary reading I would recommend Thomas Twiss's book:
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/703-trotsky-and-the-problem-of-soviet-bureaucracy
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[Marxism] Interesting statistic

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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HARPER’S INDEX — From the September 2017 issue

--Ratio of the revenue of Detroit’s three largest carmakers in 1990 to 
that of Apple, Google, and Facebook in 2014 : 1:1


--Ratio of the number of people they employed : 9:1
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Chimes at Midnight: Trotskyism in the USSR 1926-1938 | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://links.org.au/chimes-at-midnight-trotskyism-ussr-1926-1938
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[Marxism] Fwd: Bringing Down the Cali Cartel: “Narcos” Season 3 | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://louisproyect.org/2017/10/13/bringing-down-the-cali-cartel-narcos-season-3/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Chargers’ Okung Issues Call to Action for N.F.L. Players - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/13/sports/russell-okung-nfl-anthem-protests-trump.html
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[Marxism] Fwd: Kathryn Bigelow’s Moral Parable

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Critique of "Detroit".

https://jacobinmag.com/2017/10/kathryn-bigelow-detroit-unions-racism-riots
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[Marxism] George Ciccariello-Maher put on administrative leave for Tweet

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(When will people like George C-M learn that every tweet they make is 
being put under a microscope by people trying to get them fired? 
Frankly, he would have been better off writing a 2000 word analysis but 
he seems intent on being an anarchist shock-jock on Twitter instead.)



Chronicle for Higher Education, Oct. 12 2017
A Professor Is Placed on Leave After an Internet Furor and Threats. What 
Happens to the Students?

By Chris Quintana

Many of the students who take George Ciccariello-Maher’s classes don’t 
care what he posts on social media, though many people on the internet 
do. Those outsiders are so passionate that they have threatened to 
attack the associate professor of politics at Drexel University over his 
comments about race and the mass shooting in Las Vegas.


The specter of possible violence fueled the university’s decision to 
place Mr. Ciccariello-Maher on administrative leave. And that is what 
the students do care about.


"It feels like a breach of our academic rights because not only do we 
want the class, we have paid for the class and feel as though learning 
is taking on challenging concepts," said Dakota Peterson, a senior.


It’s become increasingly common for professors to face threats over 
their remarks on social media, and the Drexel political theorist is no 
stranger to controversy. It’s also common for administrators to face 
accusations of trying to censor an outspoken professor, like the ones 
levied at the university in Mr. Ciccariello-Maher’s case.


Less common, though, is an acknowledgment of the students whose lives 
are disrupted by the sudden disappearance of their professor. What 
happens to them when the instructor is placed on leave?


Mr. Ciccariello-Maher had two classes this semester and about 40 
students. This month, he posted an argument on Twitter in which he 
stated that the mass shooting in Las Vegas, which left 59 people dead 
and hundreds of others injured, was the product of a system that favors 
white men.


"It’s the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid," he tweeted. Later, in a 
column for The Washington Post, he wrote that his subsequent tweets had 
diagnosed "a sense of double entitlement — as white people and as men — 
that, when frustrated, can occasionally lead to violent consequences."


“The fact that a course on race and politics would be canceled in 
response to white-supremacist threats is astounding.” The threats and 
hate mail for those remarks quickly followed after the tweets were 
featured on the conservative news site The Daily Caller. Mr. 
Ciccariello-Maher has captured the internet’s ire in the past, but the 
university’s response was different this time. While Drexel condemned 
his earlier remarks, this time administrators placed him on leave for 
this month, calling it the best course of action for the university and 
the professor, given the threats.


"The fact that a course on race and politics would be canceled in 
response to white-supremacist threats is astounding," Mr. 
Ciccariello-Maher wrote in an email to The Chronicle.


The university's decision has been questioned by the American 
Association of University Professors, a watchdog group that noted its 
concern over Mr. Ciccariello-Maher’s academic freedom and tenure status 
in a letter to the university on Thursday,


Niki Gianakaris, a university spokeswoman, said Drexel recognizes and 
encourages its faculty members’ rights to academic freedom. "However, 
Professor Ciccariello-Maher’s comments have led to a growing number of 
threats against both him and the campus, and we made a necessary step to 
ensure the safety of the Drexel community," she wrote in an email to The 
Chronicle. "The university is working on solidifying arrangements for 
Professor Ciccariello-Maher’s classes."


In an email obtained by The Chronicle, Drexel’s provost, M. Brian Blake, 
told the students that he had sent police officers to the professor’s 
home and upped the number of security personnel on campus. Mr. Blake 
also apologized to the students for the inconvenience, and promised to 
"make arrangements" for the class.


He also challenged the notion that the decision was an attempt to mute 
Mr. Ciccariello-Maher.


"As provost, I am perhaps the most present advocate for academic 
freedom," he wrote. "In my role, I defend George’s academic freedom on a 
daily basis. As such, our latest action had absolutely nothing to do 
with the content of his extramural speech."


Whatever the reason for placing Mr. Ciccariello-Maher on leave, some of 
his students viewed the decision as an unfair to their academic rights. 
Mr. Peterson, who is studying political science, had 

[Marxism] Fwd: Russia Before 1917: Imperial Schemes, Doomed Royals and Young Marxists

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Excerpt from China Mieville book.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42240-russia-before-1917-imperial-schemes-doomed-royals-and-young-marxists
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