Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] (no subject)
In a message dated 7/27/2010 5:26:49 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, erca...@yahoo.com writes: ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: _http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis_ (http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis) Welcome WL. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Labor aristocracy
In a message dated 7/22/2010 8:49:59 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, _cb31...@gmail.com_ (mailto:cb31...@gmail.com) : In Marxist theory, those workers (proletarians) in developed countries who benefit from the superprofits extracted from the impoverished workers of underdeveloped countries form an aristocracy of labor. Comment A careful reading of Lenin reveals he makes distinction between the labor aristocracy and labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. Lenin refers to the latter as the upper strata of the labor aristocracy. There is the labor aristocracy and also labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. The first refers to a historically evolved privileged status of the peoples - all classes, in the imperial centers in relationship to the colonials or rather former colonial world. When these oppressed peoples venture into the imperial centers they are confronted with a social system that trapped them into a political status of second class citizens. The plight of the Korean in Japan, the Irish in England, the Algerian in France, Eastern versus Western Europe and of course the actual history of blacks, browns and Indians in America. There has always been a persistent anti-Chinese political and social policy in America that expresses the evolution of the color factor during the era of bourgeois rule. Two political categories describe the historical evolution of imperial privilege as a lived experience of the colonials and former colonials. Those colonials venturing to the imperial center that is their colonizer are dubbed national minorities. The Algerian in France is a national minority. In England he is a minority. The Irish in England is a national minority and in America a minority. The Korean in Japan is a national minority and in America a minority. It is the status of the majority of citizens of the earth in the imperial centers that prove imperial bribery and privilege. II. The evolution of the old great industrial middle class in America, formed on the basis of automotive production is a thing of our past. This great industrial middle class was not formed on the basis of colonial subjugation. This middle class was formed based on the advance of the technological revolution in the imperial centers under the domination of the capital relation. The imperial centers were historically formed based on conquest, wars of genocide, colonial exploitation and slavery. Like most inquiry, the more one studies the issue the more complex it becomes. What is incontestable is historic privilege and the second class citizenship status of the former colonials in the imperial centers. If one view capital as a world wide unified system of accumulation it is fairly obvious that the proletarian masses in the former colonies and dependent countries receive a much smaller wage for similar and identical work as compared with the workers in the imperial centers. The issue is a systemic relations rather than isolating one part of the workers wage in the imperial centers are a direct result of colonial plunder. II. Jesse Jackson Sr. is a labor lieutenants of the capitalist class. In Europe these labor lieutenants of the capitalist class arose and consolidated based on the social democratic movement. In America there never was a movement of social democracy whose origins are in the overthrow of the feudal order. WL. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Labor's Role in the Obama Era: A Troublesome and Unreliable Ally ?
Labor's Role in the Obama Era: A Troublesome and Unreliable Ally? Nelson Lichtenstein Dissent UpFront DissentMagazine.org - June 7, 2010 http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=360 With a perilous set of midterm elections on the horizon, it would be understandable if labor and its liberal allies just closed ranks with President Obama and the Democrats, downplayed any disappointment they might feel, and muted their critique of his often lukewarm liberalism. After all, if the Republicans take one or both houses of Congress, then the whole Obama presidency will be in danger. As every good unionist knows, solidarity is a great thing, but in this case it is the wrong prescription for the American labor movement. Instead, the unions and other labor partisans should be difficult and demanding allies of our president. History shows that such a posture would generate the greatest political and organizational dividend, for labor as well as any insurgent group that seeks to transform American politics and policy. To show what I mean, let's take a look at two eras of labor and social movement success-the 1930s and the 1960s-in order to win a few insights that might be useful for our own times. As Mark Twain once wrote, History never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes. There are three points to be made about such times past. First, conservative movements and right-wing ideas actually grow more extreme in eras of liberal and labor reform. We know that is true today, but it was also true at other moments of change or potential change in twentieth-century U.S. history. Second, when a Democratic administration is in power, the most potent and efficacious strategy for labor and its leadership is to be-and be seen as-a troublesome, even unreliable ally. And third, the labor movement needs to be, and be seen as, a social movement. This does not come without organizational costs. It is a dangerous strategy, but such a transformation is essential if anything resembling an organized labor movement is to survive. We sometimes look at past moments of victory through rose-colored glasses, but neither the era of the New Deal nor that of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s were times of uncontested liberalism. They were also times of mobilization, a renewal of ideas, and activism on the Right. The opponents of reform were not always out-of-touch reactionaries. They were often innovative and aggressive men and women who would later achieve power and position when the political winds tilted in their direction. The Right grew in these eras not because of too much radicalism on the part of labor and civil rights activists, but because any great reform, no matter how carefully put forward, polarizes a society. The rise of labor in the 1930s created a kind of civil war even within the working class. It was mainly nonviolent, and it would later subside, but such polarities can be expected whenever many Americans, even some that one might expect to be allies, see change as a subversion of their religious or ideological worldview. In the 1930s that social and ideological civil war divided not just American parties, but also churches, factories, and many communities. Anti-labor and anti-FDR rhetoric was pervasive in the years of the Great Depression, even as the unions triumphed at Flint and Pittsburgh and in the mines and mills of countless smaller towns. One of the great right-wing demagogues of that time was Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest from Royal Oak, Michigan who pioneered the use of radio for sermons and political talk. He was a brilliant speaker whose audience far exceeded, in comparative terms, the reach of Fox News and its most flamboyant pundits. Coughlin had been a supporter of FDR and labor in 1933 and 1934 because he hated the big banks, the big corporations, and the Depression itself. Roosevelt or Ruin was the slogan he deployed when FDR ran for president in 1932. Indeed, Coughlin thought that Wall Street and the Communists were the twin evils of a secular Satanism subverting the virtuous citizens of the United States. And as Elizabeth Warren has reminded us in such compelling fashion, Americans really do mistrust the bankers and the speculators of that New York street, today as much as eighty years ago. Father Coughlin broke with FDR when he realized that the New Deal would regulate Wall Street, not abolish it; and because Coughlin and some other conservative Catholics believed that the new, militant industrial unions, who deployed as organizers lots of socialists and Communists and other kinds of secularists, were stealing the loyalty of their own parishioners right out from under them. Indeed, it was the success of the UAW-CIO right in Coughlin's own Detroit that sent him into a frenzy of anti-labor, anti-Semitic, and anti-FDR invective. To Coughlin, the New Deal was a Jewish plot and the UAW a red front. Sinclair Lewis was thinking of people like Father Coughlin, as well
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits from Jobs
The Great Decoupling of Corporate Profits from Jobs By Robert Reich July 27, 2010, robertreich.org http://robertreich.org/ Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they're making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] More Optimistic Today Than Ever: A Talk with Pete Seeger
More Optimistic Today Than Ever: A Talk with Pete Seeger David Kupfer in conversation with Pete Seeger July 23, 2010, Reality Sandwich http://www.realitysandwich.com/conversation_pete_seeger There is hardly anything bad in the world that doesn't have something good connected to it. Pete Seeger is one of the world's quintessential activists, having played such an important role in singing the songs and engaging in the struggles of the civil rights, free speech, human rights, anti-Vietnam War, environmental, peace, anti- nuclear, and social justice movements. He spans musical eras, from those who inspired him, Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, to those he inspired, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bruce Springsteen, Dave Mathews, and Ani DiFranco. Seeger has had an epic life, full of amazing contributions to our culture and politics. In person, he conveys a comfortable, homespun way about himself that puts you at ease. He is a modest soul, and in conversation is slow to credit himself on his lifework's impact, but it can be safely said that in the 20th century there is no other individual who has so successfully combined folk music and progressive politics. In the late 1960s, Seeger shifted away from typical American folk music, embracing African music, Latin-American folk songs and other forms of world music. At this time Pete became active in the nascent environmental movement, drawing attention to pollution of the Hudson River with the activist group Clearwater, which teaches schoolchildren about water pollution. He and friends built the Clearwater Sloop, a reproduction of a 19th Century cargo sloop, and sailed it up and down the river, spreading the word about pollution and raising public support to clean up the river. Because of these and other's efforts, the Hudson is now open for swimming in many places. One thing that's endeared him to audiences all over the world is that he always gets people to join in. It's almost a religion with him. The world will be saved when people realize we all have to pitch in. You can't just pay your money and hope that someone else will do the job right. He continued performing into the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, most often at charity shows and benefits. Seeger embodies the spirit of this nation more than anyone I have met. At 90, he is humble, straight-backed, clear-eyed, and as straightforward, sincere, and real as any living folk music icon could be. He remains opinionated, articulate, and keenly aware of his place in history and, thankfully, has maintained his inimitable sense of hope and optimism. Pete once confided to me that he can go on and on (talking), and frequently I do. I have found my favorite talkaholic can always be counted on for bold, provocative, and poignant observations. I visited him just before his 90th birthday in the spring of 2009 on a warm afternoon. The home he shares with his wife, Toshi, overlooks the Hudson River and Denny's Point near Beacon. I helped him bring out an umbrella from the barn that we set up in the picnic table on the porch next to the log cabin he hand built some 50 years ago. He began discussing the local history of the region. Pete is an excellent historian and a wonderful storyteller. During the course of our interview, Toshi brought us out a pitcher of water and contributed to the conversation. ** David Kupfer: What is it about the power of a sing along song? Pete Seeger: There is something about participating. It is almost my religion. If the world is still here in 100 years, people will know the importance of participating, not just being spectators. That's what this book, Blessed Unrest, by Paul Hawken is about. Millions of small groups around the world, that don't necessarily all agree with one another, but they are made up of people who are not just sitting back waiting for someone to do things for them. No one can prove anything, but of course if I didn't believe it had some kind of power, I wouldn't be trying to do it. Curiously enough, the people who are suspicious of songs have put their words down, so they also think there is something to the power of song. Plato is supposed to have said it is very dangerous to allow the wrong kind of music in the Republic. There is an old Arab story, when the king put the poet on his payroll; he cuts off the tongue of the poet. I know very well that the powers that be would like to control the music that the people listen to. Herbert Hoover said to Rudy Vallee, who was a top singer in 1929: Mr. Vallee, if you can sing a song that will make the American people forget the depression, I will give you a medal. A lot of musicians would like to get that kind of medal. Bing Crosby had a hit record, Wrap your troubles in dreams, and dream your troubles away. That was how we were going to solve the depression in 1932. DK: I never thought of those singers as propagandists. PS: The exception proves the rule. A lefty named Yip Harburg got a musician named Jay Gorny
[Marxism-Thaxis] Review: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
http://21stcenturysocialism.com/article/review_red_plenty_by_francis_spufford_01992.html Tuesday, 27th July 2010 by Paul Cockshott / May 23rd 2010 Review: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford This is a marvelous and unusual book. It sits in a remarkable way in between science popularisation, social history and fiction. The author describes it variously as a novel whose hero is an idea and a fairytale. The hero idea is that of optimal planning. The idea of running a planned economy in just such a way as to ensure that resources are optimally used in order to deliver the ?red plenty? of the title. Combining real and imagined characters, politicians like Khrushchev, mathematicians and economists like Kantorovich and Nemchinov with fictionalised minor characters, it gives a gripping and apparently realistic picture of life in the USSR during the 50s and 60s. It is not a single narrative as one expects from historical fiction. Instead it gives us a series of snapshots from the lives of individuals, separated by years. The common link is the project of the Cybernetic economic reformers, and the ambitions of Khrushchev to attain communist plenty. The author shows real skill as a science populariser, explaining such diverse topics as how the Pentode valve logic of the early BESM computers worked, to the molecular mechanics of the carcinogenesis mechanism that eventually killed its designer. He vividly portrays the enthusiasm and self confidence of the USSR in the late 50s when Khrushchev?s boasts that they would overtake the USA by 1980 and achieve communism seemed plausible. He gives a good didactic account both of the basic mechanisms of the Soviet Economy, and, through the lives of incidental characters paints a picture of its real operation that is more detailed and convincing than any academic history. He traces the idea of cybernetic economic management from the hope of the 50s and early 60s to its sidelining under Kosygin, and the eventual relegation of Kantorovich to the less ambitious task of optimisating steel tube output for the oil and natural gas industry. Ironically, says Spufford, as growth rates slipped in the 70s, it was only the exploitation of petroleum for export that allowed Soviet living standards to rise. This is a book that should be read by anyone who is seriously interested in the possibility of a different sort of economy from the one we now have. It shows both the strengths, and the hidden weaknesses of the most serious attempt so far to construct an alternative to capitalism, an attempt that was born when the idea of a communist future was taken very seriously by a whole society. To read it is to be convinced that whatever the truth of standard leftist criticism of the USSR as being undemocratic and bureacratic, there was much more than that at issue in this tragedy. It raises real political and philosophical issues that would have to be faced by any future socialist project, and draws attention to a forgotten history that today?s socialists ignore at their peril. The bulk of what we read and hear about the USSR focuses on the 20s and 30s. The remaining 50 years of its history fade before the glamour, grandeur and horror of the early years. But the early 1960s, when Russia was already an industrial country, with many areas of internationally competitive technology in aviation, space, computing holds more relevant lessons for the European left than its early years. It is clear what lesson orthodox economists will draw: It?s a timely exploration, now so many people have gone off the idea of markets, of why the alternative is worse. But such conclusions betray an unjustified and callous smugness. It is a smugness not justified by the elegaic last paragraph of the book. The restoration of the market mechanism in Russia was a vast controlled experiment. Nation, national character and culture, natural resources and productive potential remained the same, only the economic mechanism changed. If Western economists were right, then we should have expected economic growth and living standards to have leapt forward after the Yeltsin shock therapy. Instead the country became an economic basket-case. Industrial production collapsed, technically advanced industries atrophied, and living standards fell so much that the death rate shot up by over a third leading to some 7.7 million extra deaths. If you were old, if you were farmer, if you were a manual worker, the market was a great deal worse than even the relatively stagnant Soviet economy of Brezhnev. The recovery under Putin, such as it was, came almost entirely as a side effect of rising world oil prices, the very process that had operated under Brezhnev. But this does not excuse us from seriously considering the problems so vividly raised in the book. Spufford recounts how the attempt to follow the reformers' recomendations and raise the price of food to provide more income for farmers provoked strikes by industrial workers, which
[Marxism-Thaxis] Making it plain
http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/07/what-is-it.html What Is It? By James Howard Kunstler on July 26, 2010 9:26 AM The New York Times ran a story of curious import this morning: Mel Gibson Loses Support Abroad. Well, gosh, that's disappointing. And just when we needed him, too. Concern over this pressing matter probably reflects the general mood of the nation these dog days of summer - and these soggy days, indeed, are like living in a dog's mouth - so no wonder the USA has lost its mind, as evidenced by the fact that so many people who ought to know better, in the immortal words of Jim Cramer, don't know anything. Case in point: I visited the Slate Political Gabfest podcast yesterday. These otherwise excellent, entertaining, highly educated folk (David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and Daniel Gross, in for vacationing John Dickerson) were discussing the ramifications of the economic situation on the upcoming elections. They were quite clear about not being able to articulate the nature of this economic situation, ...this recession, or whatever you want to call it... in Ms. Bazelon's words. What's the point of sending these people to Ivy League colleges if they can't make sense of their world. Let's call this whatever-you-want-to-call-it a compressive deflationary contraction, because that's exactly what it is, an accelerating systemic collapse of activity due to over-investments in hyper-complexity (thank you Joseph Tainter). A number of things are going on in our society that can be described with precision. We've generated too many future claims on wealth that does not exist and has poor prospects of ever being generated. That's what unpayable debt is. We have such a mighty mountain of it that the Federal Reserve can create new digital dollars until the cows come home (and learn how to play chamber music), but they will never create enough new money to outpace the disappearance of existing notional money in the form of welshed-on loans. Hence, money will continue to disappear out of the economic system indefinitely, citizens will grow poorer steadily, companies will go out of business, and governments at all levels will not have money to do what they have been organized to do. This compressive deflationary collapse is not the kind of cyclical downturn that we are familiar with during the two-hundred-year-long adventure with industrial expansion - that is, the kind of cyclical downturn caused by the usual exhalations of markets attempting to adjust the flows of supply and demand. This is a structural implosion of markets that have been functionally destroyed by pervasive fraud and swindling in the absence of real productive activity. The loss of productive activity preceded the fraud and swindling beginning in the 1960s when other nations recovered from the traumas of the world wars and started to out-compete the USA in the production of goods. Personally, I doubt this was the result of any kind of conspiracy, but rather a comprehensible historical narrative that worked to America's disadvantage. Tough noogies for us. The fatal trouble began when we attempted to compensate for this loss of value-creation by ramping up the financial sector to a credit orgy so that every individual and every enterprise and every government could enjoy ever-increasing levels of wealth in a system that no longer really produced wealth. This was accomplished in the financial sector by innovating new tradable securities based on getting something for nothing. That is what the aggregate mischief on Wall Street and its vassal operations was all about. The essence of the fraud was the securitization of debt, because the collateral was either inadequate or altogether missing. That's how you get something for nothing. The swindling came in when these worthless certificates were pawned off on credulous marks such as pension funds and other assorted investors. Tragically, everybody in a position to object to these shenanigans failed to issue any warnings or ring the alarm bells - and this includes the entire matrix of adult authority in banking, government (including the law), academia, and a hapless news media. Everyone pretended that the orgy of mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt and loan obligations, structured investment vehicles, credit default swaps, and other chimeras of capital amounted to things of real value. Certainly the editors and pundits in the media simply didn't understand the rackets they undertook to report. You can bet that the players on Wall Street made every effort to mystify the media with arcane language, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. (Making multiple billions of dollars by trading worthless certificates based on getting something for nothing must be the ultimate definition of succeeding beyond one's wildest dreams.) It's harder to account for the dimness of the news media. I doubt they were in on the caper. More likely there is a correlation between their low pay and their low
[Marxism-Thaxis] Jobless Workers Look to Shift Elections
Jobless Workers Look to Shift Elections http://washingtonindependent.com/92821/the-unemployed-organized-online-look-to-the-midterms The Unemployed, Organized Online, Look to the Midterms Jobless Workers Look to Shift Elections By Annie Lowrey 7/28/10 6:15 AM Workers march to protest for jobs legislation. (Rasdourian/Flickr) Sometime this spring, Republicans turned against unemployment. In Nevada, Sharron Angle (R), the candidate facing incumbent Sen. Harry Reid (D), told local reporters, “You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job.” (Untrue.) Angle also called the unemployed “spoiled.” Rand Paul, a candidate for a Kentucky Senate seat, made similar statements, and politicians in Washington followed suit. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said on C-SPAN that extending unemployment would discourage “individuals that are out there to actually go out and go through the interviews.” But unlike most comments from politicians, these criticisms did not diffuse into the generic noise of political chatter. They began reverberating in what might be termed the unemployed netroots — a system of highly trafficked, influential blogs and sites connecting the jobless and updating them, often in minute detail, about ins and outs of Congress’ work on unemployment issues. When Jordan, a former programmer living in Nevada, lost his position with a local university, he began sending out resumes, but he also found himself following the eight-month battle for an unemployment extension closely — each failed Senate vote, each new House proposal. (He requested I withhold his last name to avoid impeding his job search.) Online, he started surfing list-servs, posting on message boards and using resources from the unemployed. A few times, he has worked up the courage to call his legislators’ offices. Jordan has searched hard for a job and is now considering moving away from his family for a few months, if it means he can send home a paycheck. “I have voted Republican my entire life,” he says. “I don’t want to vote for Harry Reid. But I don’t want to be told I’m lazy, and I’m dumb, and I’m living high on the hog, collecting [unemployment insurance] because I want to.” There are more than 30 million people left without work at some point during the course of the recession; 14.6 million are currently unemployed. As many as 4 million people have exhausted the maximum weeks of federal and state unemployment benefits. In each case, Jordan is among these millions, and for an uncountable number of people like him, the experience with income insecurity has led to a political awakening. Among the biggest sites in the unemployment netroots is LayoffList, managed by Michael Thornton, a native of Rochester, N.Y. Thornton stared LayoffList in 2008; five months ago, he began writing articles and posting legislators’ information. He now receives hundreds of emails and has logged more than a million hits. Thornton is finding that, rather than losing interest in politics since the end of the fight for extended benefits, the unemployed are “energized and motivated” and have started looking forward to the fall. “Even Republicans say they aren’t voting Republican anymore,” the soft-spoken former technical writer says. “You have millions of unemployed people out there. If even half of them voted, they could swing a nationwide election.” Paladinette — the online “zealot for the unemployed” also known as LaDona King — has taken the battle over the unemployment extension as more of a call to arms. She routinely publishes phone numbers, fax numbers and email addresses of lawmakers to target, rallying her thousands of online supporters to the cause. King personally calls 25 or 30 legislators’ offices a day. Sometimes, when she posts lawmakers’ numbers or picks out a particularly egregious example of a legislator blocking a vote or putting down the unemployed, her followers flood a Senate or House office with phone calls. The same goes for LayoffList. At one point, Thornton published the name and number of a House staffer working on unemployment legislation. Soon after, the staffer called and begged him to take it down, he says. “They’re all concerned about their re-election,” King says. “We’re making sure the Republicans get blasted for their obstructionist behavior. … We have tons of people calling, faxing, emailing.” “We’re lobbyists in training,” she laughs. “Without all that money!” During the eight month battle to extend unemployment insurance, with the unemployment rate peaking over 10 percent, huge online networks of the unemployed came into fruition. Now, coming into the fall and the midterms, King and other grassroots organizers for the unemployed are hooking up with formal organizing groups to add institutional oomph to the effort. They say they do not want to let the long battle for simple
