Re: Cornelius Castoriadis dead at 75
On Wed, December 31, 1997 at 15:12:12 (-0800) Dennis R Redmond writes: >On Wed, 31 Dec 1997, William S. Lear wrote: > >> I'm tempted to say that the one thing that postmodernism and Marxism >> can't offer to people, just ordinary people, is insight into how to >> think. Postmodernists might be able to tell Marxists a thing or two, >> and vice-versa. Perhaps postmodernism is just the sort of solvent >> that Marxism needs to break out of its self-imposed boundaries. But >> outside the halls of academe this stuff really is meaningless. The >> one thing the left does not need is more obscure prose describing >> society; clarity and simplicity should be sought, and the sooner the >> better. > >If only. There's nothing simple about global capitalism. Even the simplest >things in the world-economy today -- the bills in your pocket, the >commodities in the drugstore, the coffee-maker we turn on in the morning >-- are incredibly complicated commodities in a vast and largely >unanalyzed system of global exchange. Playing off the academic >pointy-heads against an allegedly sound, humane >common-sense makes for great populism, but lousy politics; there's a >difference between delving into the silicon innards of global capitalism, >using whatever models we have (for us literary theorists, this means >analyzing our media culture; for economists, it means sniping at the IMF; >for land reformers in Kerala, India, it'll mean something else entirely) >and delivering a ready-made, instantly-applicable formula which will solve >our problems for us. Wasn't it Marx, not the pomos, who mentioned the dizzying complexity of commodities? If you, or anyone, would enlighten me as to just what insights postmodernism gives us that we haven't had before and that can't for some reason be stated in plain English, I would be happy to listen (of course, you'll have to translate for me). I'm very serious about this --- I would love to be tutored about the complexities of coffee machines and how postmodernism can offer me something new and better than the sort of thinking I normally do. I must say that you neatly conflate my critique of postmodernism with anti-intellectualism, which of course was far from what I was saying. I appreciate hard thinking, and I gave two concrete examples of people who post to this list who do what I consider to be excellent work. And your straw-man dichotomy of intellectual work and ready-made solutions goes way beyond anything I was addressing. If it takes hard thinking about the world, fine. If it takes lots of jargon, fine, I can learn it, as I've learned that of computers, mathematics, and physics. But if it is a lot of jargon piled on for show, then I'll get annoyed. > let me just say that the >whole point of thinking dialectically is to think through contradictions, >indeed to learn to think for oneself on a whole new level (check out >Theodor Adorno's stuff if you don't believe me). I needed the word "dialectical" slapped on something I've done on my own for years? The whole point of thinking, period, is to learn to think through contradictions, and a whole host of other things besides (rhizomes, anyone?). It was Adorno who said in *Minima Moralia*: What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. This is indeed not terrible. It is actually comprehensible, and even, I might say, well written. I like the idea of objective power as being an estranged form of life, something that has turned on life, and has distorted it, converted real human relations into something secondary, something empty and subsidiary to the production of material wants. But then, I don't see this as saying anything new. But then, I read Chomsky long before Adorno, and cutting beneath the lies to examine objective power that distorts and shapes our lives is something not terribly novel to me. He says it well, and I do appreciate the hard work it took him to come up with this, but I guess I enjoy it more as a sort of poetry. > The notion that Marx was >some scheming Stalinoid hack or that the Soviet Union was a Marxist state >is the most ludicrous sort of Cold War propaganda, and about on the same >level as the Soviet apparat's defamation of Rousseau, Thoreau and Kant as >scum-sucking petit bourgeoisie. Where in the world did I say anything like this? Well, if I'm a bit querulous, I do wish it to be known that I will be willing to sing the praises of pomo should someone be kind enough to point me to an idiot's guide.
Re: Deleuze and Guattari experiment
Dennis R Redmond wrote: >The quite flexible Marxist Fredric Jameson famously described >postmodernism as the cultural expression of late capitalism, i.e. the >symbolic infrastructure of its marketing, media and financial (we'll call >it MMF for short) sector. Ok, so Robert A.M. Stern doesn't merely articulate the MMF, he *is* the MMF. But Foucault? Is he part of the MMF too? Just what do we mean by "pomo" here? Doug
Re: vanguards & substitutionism
Jim Devine: >Early on (1905?), old Leon T. launched a critique of Lenin for being >"substitutionist." (See, e.g., Deutscher, THE PROPHET ARMED.) The critique >was very abstract (and self-described Trotskyists have ignored it), but it's >relevant. The problem of a vanguard arises when it starts substituting >itself for the class it's supposed to lead. There is only one place in Lenin's writings where he specifically describes what a "vanguard" means. It is the section "The Working Class as Vanguard Fighter for Democracy" in "What is To Be Done". The notion of a vanguard emerges out of Lenin's struggle with the "Economists", *not* the "Mensheviks". This is often neglected by those "Marxist-Leninists" who use the pamphlet as some kind of organizing handbook. As opposed to Martynov the Economist who expects the class political consciousness of workers to develop from within their economic struggle, Lenin argues that "class political consciousness can only be brought to the workers from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers." The Social Democrat should not aspire to be a trade union secretary, but instead the "tribune of the people." This tribune will "react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum of people it affects; who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat." The best example of such a tribune is the German Social Democratic leader Karl Liebnecht. The German Social Democracy was Lenin's *model* for what was needed in Russia. This type of party did not exist in Russia and it was his goal to build one, not a "Marxist-Leninist" party. Social Democracy would fulfill the role of vanguard insofar as it was able to act as such a tribune and develop class political consciousness among the proletariat. Rather than relying spontaneous struggles at the plant gate over economic issues to generate such consciousness, the Social Democracy would import these political lessons into the class struggle from the *outside*. The clearest statement Lenin makes on behalf of this approach is the following: "Why is there not a single political event in Germany that does not add to the authority and prestige of the Social-Democracy? Because Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of all the others in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given event and in championing every protest against tyranny...It intervenes in every sphere and in every question of social and political life; in the matter of Wilhelm's refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressive as city mayor (our Economists have not managed to educate the Germans to the understanding that such an act is, in fact, a compromise with liberalism!); in the matter of the law against 'obscene' publications and pictures; in the matter of governmental influence on the election of professors, etc., etc." So the vanguard in Lenin's view would embrace bourgeois progressives in a fight with a royalist, the rights of artists to publish smut and the power of the academy to choose its own academicians. What this sounds like to me is a prescription for a militant Socialist Party that fights on all fronts in the most uncompromising and non-sectarian manner. I agree with this concept of a vanguard and--what's more--believe that we'd be much better off with one in the USA and everywhere else. Louis Proyect
Drug-dealing minister's son
Can anyone help name the British Cabinet minister whose son who was arrested for dealing cannabis over Christmas? Press restrictions here have prevented the son of a member of Blair's cabinet from being named after he was interviewed by police regarding a cannabis deal. Overseas press are presumably not subject tot he same restrictions. Has anyone seen any reliable reports identifying the minister in question? Fraternally -- James Heartfield
Re: Trotskyism & Cuban Revolution
Larry Shute: >I honestly don't have time to follow this up, but I hate to see history >turned like this. I was a member of the SWP at this time (late 1950s), and >an original member of the Sparticist League under the name of "Ireland." >The Cuban Revolution electrified all of us -- it was a heady atmosphere in >those days. I am sorry to gore Larry's ox, but the Cuban Revolution did not "electrify" the Sparts. Jim Robertson, who went on to found this group, regarded Castro in 1961 as a combination of petty-bourgeois (god, what an atrocious epithet) nationalist and Stalinist. Meanwhile, his factional co-leader Tim Wolforth eventually came to agree with Gerry Healy, the English Trotskyist leader and pederast, that no revolution had taken place there at all. Cuba remained capitalist under Castro, according to these Marxist geniuses. Bay of Pigs? Just rivalry between two capitalist nations. Yes, I know this will all sound batty to normal people, but we are talking about a section of the radical movement that has always been a little drunk on "theory" to start with. Louis Proyect
Re: Trot'ism
Robin Hahnel: > Define political vanguardism however you want, >postulate a perfect practice of your own definition of political >vanguardism, and then tell me if you think that there is any useful role >for this kind of political activism in progressive political activity in >the twenty-first century -- yes, we are getting very close. Of course a vanguard is needed. The ruling class of the United States already employs its own vanguard. It is the think-tanks, CIA, college professors, newspapers, etc. who operate in and out of the two factions of their Democratic-Republican party. We need a party that can represent the class interests of working people and their allies. It has to avoid the accomodationism of the DSA and the sectarianism of the "Marxist-Leninist" groups. The closest that we have seen to this in recent decades have been the Brazilian Workers Party, the FSLN and FMLN and the Cuban Communist Party. Here is a defense of that type of vanguard. It appeared, with the article on Trotskyism, as part of series on Spoons called "Leninism in Context." (Jim Devine is right; I did mean Hal Draper.) My ideas on this subject have been strongly influenced, by the way, by Roger Burbach and Orlando Nunez's "Fire in the Americas" as well as my own re-reading of Lenin. LEARNING FROM THE CUBAN REVOLUTION For those who are willing to learn, the Cuban Revolution can teach a great deal about building a revolutionary party. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were not members of old-style Trotskyist or pro-Moscow formations. Despite this--or possibly because of this--they managed to reach the masses and lead them to a socialist victory. The July 26th Movement had more in common with Lenin's Bolshevik Party than those parties attached to the official iconography of the Russian Revolution. Castro and Guevara never spent much time investigating organizational questions the way Lenin did in "What is to be Done". Their speeches and writings dealt with broader anti-imperialist themes, and issues directly related to the problems of building socialism in Cuba. Regis Debray made a stab at devising a revolutionary strategy based on the July 26th Movement when he wrote "Revolution in the Revolution". This pamphlet defended "foquismo". "Focos", Spanish for columns, were to be rural guerrilla warfare formations that combined military and political tasks. Debray only understood superficial manifestations of the Cuban Revolution when he produced this work. To an extent, this reflected the inexact theoretical stance of the Cuban leadership itself. Che Guevara tried to implement a strategy of "foquismo" in Bolivia and it failed. Most Latin American revolutionaries abandoned the cruder aspects of "foquismo" as the years advanced. Of much more interest are Castro and Guevara's incidental remarks on the character of the Cuban revolutionary movement. They both realized that they had stumbled upon something different from the traditional "Marxism-Leninism" of the Trotskyist or pro-Moscow CP's. "Anyone can give themselves the name of 'eagle' without having a single feather on their back. In the same way, there are people who call themselves communists without having a single communist hair on their heads. The international communist movement, to our way of thinking, is not a church. It is not a religious sect or a Masonic lodge that obliges us to hallow any weakness, any deviation; that obliges us to follow a policy of a mutual admiration with all kinds of reformists and pseudo-revolutionaries." These words are from the speech Castro delivered to the University of Havana in March 13, 1967. This was around the time that the Cubans began orienting toward the guerrilla movements in Latin America and away from the pro-Moscow CP's. They had arrived at the understanding that it is deeds and not dogma or party labels that determine true revolutionaries. The Cubans organized conferences of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) during this period. They sought to coordinate struggles by guerrilla groups across national boundaries. This was the first attempt at genuine internationalism since the early days of the Comintern. In a speech delivered to the first OLAS conference on August 10, 1967, Castro denounced dogmatism: "This does not mean that it is enough to have a correct position and that is all. No, even among those who really want to make revolution many mistakes are made; there are still many weaknesses, that is true. But logically we will never have deep contradictions with anybody--no matter their mistakes--who honestly has a revolutionary position. It is our understanding that we must leave behind old vices, sectarian positions of all kinds and the positions of those who believe they have a monopoly on the revolution or on revolutionary theory. And poor theory, how it has had to suffer in these processes; poor theory, how it has been abused, and how it is still being abused! And all these years have taught us to medit
vanguards & substitutionism
I think that the whole issue of whether or not we need vanguards boils down to how those vanguards act. Early on (1905?), old Leon T. launched a critique of Lenin for being "substitutionist." (See, e.g., Deutscher, THE PROPHET ARMED.) The critique was very abstract (and self-described Trotskyists have ignored it), but it's relevant. The problem of a vanguard arises when it starts substituting itself for the class it's supposed to lead. Rather than combining teaching workers with learning from them, a substitutionist organization tries to ram its "correct" line or program down workers' throats. It claims to speak in the name of the workers -- or even worse, claims to act in the name of the workers -- without being held responsible to that class. If such an organization takes state power, the "dictatorship of the proletariat" can become the dictatorship in the name of the proletariat or (worse) the dictatorship over the proletariat. In such a situation, the central committee is likely to substitute itself for the party rank and file, while eventually the Leader subsitutes him or herself for the central committee. Note that an organization doesn't have to be "Leninist" or communist to be substitutionist. A social democratic party typically substitutes the parliamentary representatives and the party bureaucracy for the rank and file. The careers of the leaders dominate the wishes of the members. I am sure that a lot of pen-l people have been members of organizations where the "national office" staff end up dominating the organization. Many organizations -- like the old (US) RCP -- start substitutionist and stay that way. But substitutionism can be thrust upon an organization. For example, after the relatively popular October Revolution (during which the Bolsheviks became much more of a grass-roots organization), the Bolsheviks found that their popular support was wiped out by civil war, imperialist invasion, famine, etc. The need to cling to state power imposed substitutionism on them. Of course, those Bolsheviks who were more substitutionist in orientation (Stalin, etc.) rose to the top. Jim Devine Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html Academic version of a Bette Midler song: "you are the hot air beneath my wings."
Re: Deleuze and Guattari experiment
On Wed, 31 Dec 1997, William S. Lear wrote: > One central question I have yet to have answered is *who* is > postmodernism useful for? It certainly isn't useful to even > relatively well-educated people, and I'd get laughed out of the house > if I read pomo passages to my in-laws in Woodville, Texas. If this is > only useful as a therapy to hardened Marxists, and others who have > clung too dearly to rigid categories, it should be labeled as such. The quite flexible Marxist Fredric Jameson famously described postmodernism as the cultural expression of late capitalism, i.e. the symbolic infrastructure of its marketing, media and financial (we'll call it MMF for short) sector. Criticizing pomo means criticizing the MMF, which means taking its abstractions dead seriously, just like PEN-Lers take those abstractions called financial markets, loans and the banking sector dead seriously. Pomo is the neoliberalism of the global culture-industry, and as such it can't be simply condemned or spat upon. You have to deal with the thing itself, in all its unpleasantness, i.e. decode its messages, look beyond the pomo wrappings of the latest Nike TV ad and drudge in the much and mire of an Indonesian shoe factory, all the way to the (potential) rebellion of those Indonesian workers, who can't buy the products they themselves make, and ultimately the ironically utopian role of an imported American consumerism they can only dream about, which is beginning to ignite that most dangerously utopian of all dreams, the notion of the Good Life at one's fingertips. -- Dennis
Re: Cornelius Castoriadis dead at 75
On Wed, 31 Dec 1997, William S. Lear wrote: > I'm tempted to say that the one thing that postmodernism and Marxism > can't offer to people, just ordinary people, is insight into how to > think. Postmodernists might be able to tell Marxists a thing or two, > and vice-versa. Perhaps postmodernism is just the sort of solvent > that Marxism needs to break out of its self-imposed boundaries. But > outside the halls of academe this stuff really is meaningless. The > one thing the left does not need is more obscure prose describing > society; clarity and simplicity should be sought, and the sooner the > better. If only. There's nothing simple about global capitalism. Even the simplest things in the world-economy today -- the bills in your pocket, the commodities in the drugstore, the coffee-maker we turn on in the morning -- are incredibly complicated commodities in a vast and largely unanalyzed system of global exchange. Playing off the academic pointy-heads against an allegedly sound, humane common-sense makes for great populism, but lousy politics; there's a difference between delving into the silicon innards of global capitalism, using whatever models we have (for us literary theorists, this means analyzing our media culture; for economists, it means sniping at the IMF; for land reformers in Kerala, India, it'll mean something else entirely) and delivering a ready-made, instantly-applicable formula which will solve our problems for us. Thinking is not just a privilege; it's damnably hard, often frustrating labor, and ought to be respected just as much as someone digging ditches somewhere. As for the whole Marxism thing, well, this is really the wrong list to engage in a debate about Western Marxism; let me just say that the whole point of thinking dialectically is to think through contradictions, indeed to learn to think for oneself on a whole new level (check out Theodor Adorno's stuff if you don't believe me). The notion that Marx was some scheming Stalinoid hack or that the Soviet Union was a Marxist state is the most ludicrous sort of Cold War propaganda, and about on the same level as the Soviet apparat's defamation of Rousseau, Thoreau and Kant as scum-sucking petit bourgeoisie. -- Dennis
Re: Trot'ism
> >I'll take your word on this, Lou - and Trotsky himself was no fool, for > >sure. But what happened? Why did Trotskyist groups - all Marxist groups > >did, but it seems to be most extreme among Trot formations - show such a > >prediliction for rigidity, cultishness, and schism? Why have they been > >reduced to citing formulas and refighting the same ancient battles for the > >last 30 to 60 years? > > >Doug To which Louis provided a long answer about the history of American Trotskism in particular. I already knew some of that history, did not know some of it, and am not sure I do not dispute some parts of what were related. But, all that interests me very little anymore. I am more interested in whether people in the here and now still agree or disagree with the strategy of political vanguardism. Define political vanguardism however you want, postulate a perfect practice of your own definition of political vanguardism, and then tell me if you think that there is any useful role for this kind of political activism in progressive political activity in the twenty-first century -- yes, we are getting very close. > Louis Proyect
Re: Trotskyism & Cuban Revolution
I honestly don't have time to follow this up, but I hate to see history turned like this. I was a member of the SWP at this time (late 1950s), and an original member of the Sparticist League under the name of "Ireland." The Cuban Revolution electrified all of us -- it was a heady atmosphere in those days. I was among those on 125th Street in Harlem outside the Hotel Theresa shouting "Fidel, Fidel, etc." when Castro chose to stay there when he came to the UN. There was no traffic as the streets were filled with people. (For non-New-Yorkers, 125th Street is the "Broadway" of Harlem.) No-one "sneered" at the Cuban leadership; the issue was not anti-Castro as it was trying to maintain a strong position in the advanced industrial countries, the U.S. In an effort to turn the SWP back from its rightward march, we were expelled, after a trial out of the movies. We were the first group to be expelled from the SWP who did not want to go. Later, of course, we discovered that the SWP was crawling with FBI agents, though I don't know the percentages. I'm definitely not defending any "sectarianism" though. Incidentally, Wolforth and Robertson split very quickly after the expulsion from the SWP. In the SWP, we were known as the "Revolutionary Tendency;" after the split with Wolforth, the Sparticist League was formed. Perhaps others on line who were around in those days could pick this up and fill in more details. I certainly understand anyone's efforts to take new positions, but re-writing history shouldn't be the basis of it. Larry Shute Thanks for your message at 04:26 PM 12/31/97 -0500, Louis Proyect. Your message was: >Some Trotskyists would not even give the Cubans this much of the benefit of >a doubt. A minority in the SWP led by James Robertson and Tim Wolforth >sneered at the Cuban leadership. Tim Wolforth, who had come to Trotskyism >from social democracy, faulted Castro for not upholding institutions of >worker's democracy. He instructed Castro to emulate Lenin, the architect of >Soviet democracy. Tim Wolforth has returned to the social democracy fold. >(Now he calls it by the less compromised term "democratic socialism.") Tim >Wolforth still declares that Cuba lacks democracy, but blames it now on >Cuba's stubborn adherence to Leninist norms. Tim Wolforth is hard to >please. He spent most of the 60's and 70's as leader of the miniscule >Trotskyist sect called the Worker's League. While others were organizing >demonstrations against the Vietnam War, Wolforth and his followers were >organizing meetings on "dialectics", an issue they believed that >transcended everything. Robertson has also been consistent. He formed a new >group called the Spartacist League in the early 60's that gave his >sectarianism an even more virulent aspect. The cult remains faithful to the >leader's religious beliefs to the present day.
Re: Deleuze and Guattari experiment
I agree mostly with Jim and my arguments below are more rhetorical than directed at his comments. James Devine writes: >... >I agree with Doug. I think abstract writing, jargon, and math can contribute >a lot. Just because most people can't read (say) the 1844 MANUSCRIPTS >doesn't mean that they're full of BS. AWJ&M can contribute in the proper place and in proper measure. I just think that there is way too much of it in the social and political sciences. Paul Krugman's work is littered with inflated mathematics and facile conclusions about the wonders of the free market. He uses it to cover himself, and I feel that math is often used to cover up in the same way as fancy prose is used to hide the vast emptiness (as I see it) of postmodern thought. > As Marx pointed out, in social >science, we can't use chemical reagents so we have to use the power of >abstraction. To a certain degree, this is true, but that doesn't mean that a book chock full of abstraction and tedious verbiage shouldn't be slammed for it. I think Marx was justifying his own work, the insights of which would be better with less of the verbiage. > We can't talk about the financial crisis in Korea without using >financial jargon. It's hard to seriously describe the endogenous >acceleration of inflation or the behavior of mesons without some math. Etc. I'm not so sure I agree with this entirely. You can talk about these things using lots of math if you like, but describing it in plain English is also possible. And at a time like this do we really need this pomo garbage to tell us about capitalism? I just fail to see it. Doug's writings, Michael Perelman's stuff, and many other lucid writers get by perfectly well without trotting out a wheelbarrow full of pretentious abstractions. They get at the meat of the problems in our society without resorting to Feynman diagrams in prose form. And actually, you really can go a very long way toward describing the behavior of mesons without a lot of math --- I know, I did so in a long paper in high school and my physics teacher loved it. Don't get me wrong, I find Marx very insightful. But, the excavation necessary to dig out the nuggets is often not easy, and my point is, even though I place Marx a definite notch above the pomos, why bother covering the thing up with a mound of tangled braindumpings when you could have just as easily left it out in the open? What's past is past, and if there are nuggets there to be had, then we'll have to dig them out, but there's no reason to create fresh mounds of homage to the writer's cleverness. >The problem is that much of the stuff that involves abstract writing, >jargon, and math doesn't really have anything to contribute. The costs of >the AW, J, & M often exceed their benefits (and there are examples of this >with all types of thinking, not just postmodernism). > >To test for this, we have to examine the abstract writing seriously, not via >experiments of Bill's sort. Does the work say anything useful or serious >about the world? does it reveal something about our emotional connection >with the world (as poetry does)? etc. My real question is, does it say anything useful or serious that hasn't been said before, or that can't be said much more simply? I fail to see the use of much of postmodernism, at least what I've read so far. The Deleuze and Guattari essay was full of self-important fluff that really didn't say anything that I didn't really know by the time I was 16 (ok, 20). Sure, to a hard-core, close-minded fanatical Marxist, who believes the world operates by rigid dialectical logic, it might be provocative and challenging, but to the other 99% of the world, it's self-indulgent and a waste of time. One central question I have yet to have answered is *who* is postmodernism useful for? It certainly isn't useful to even relatively well-educated people, and I'd get laughed out of the house if I read pomo passages to my in-laws in Woodville, Texas. If this is only useful as a therapy to hardened Marxists, and others who have clung too dearly to rigid categories, it should be labeled as such. Again, much of what I have just said isn't really arguing with Jim, just tossing out yet more snappy answers in the form of questions... Bill
Vanguard of the vanguard, 1998
The thing that interests me about the idea of a revolutionary vanguard is its shameless romanticism. Whatever else Leon Trotsky was, he cut a strikingly romantic figure -- poet, prophet, soldier, exile, martyr. Think of a transcendent persona and it was all in day's work for old Leon. I also can't help but note the homonymy of political vanguard and artistic avant garde and the way that both terms fuse irreconcilable longings for individuation and belonging. Isn't it all still about love and pain and about how going out into the impersonal world of commerce and hierarchy forces us to suppress our "inner soul"? I use romanticism as a descriptive term, not a derogatory term. For cynics, it's a derogatory term, only because cynics are inverted romantics. The first cynics any of us ever meet are four year olds who pretend to know more than we know because they know _something_ we don't know. My New Years' wish to all: may spring follow winter. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ Know Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: Trot'ism
>I'll take your word on this, Lou - and Trotsky himself was no fool, for
>sure. But what happened? Why did Trotskyist groups - all Marxist groups
>did, but it seems to be most extreme among Trot formations - show such a
>prediliction for rigidity, cultishness, and schism? Why have they been
>reduced to citing formulas and refighting the same ancient battles for the
>last 30 to 60 years?
>
>Doug
TROTSKYISM
In the aftermath of the 1928 world congress of the Comintern, Bukharin lost
power to Stalin. Stalin then unseated Jay Lovestone, Bukharin's supporter
and leader of the American Communist Party, and turned over party
leadership to William Z. Foster, a Stalin loyalist.
There was another American Communist leader by the name of James P. Cannon
who went his own way and aligned himself with the Trotskyist Left Opposition.
Cannon was born in Rosedale, Kansas in 1890 and joined the Socialist Party
in 1908. He then also joined the anarcho-syndicalist IWW three years later.
In the IWW Cannon worked with Vincent St. John, "Big Bill" Haywood and
Frank Little as a strike organizer and journalist. He switched allegiance
to the newly formed Communist Party in September 1919 and won an election
to the Central Committee in 1920. He served on the Communist International
Presidium from 1922 to 1923. Next he headed the International Labor Defense
from 1925 to 1928.
After he declared for Trotskyism, the CP expelled him. Along with Max
Shachtman and Martin Abern, he went on to form the Communist League of
America, the first American Trotskyist group. This group eventually
developed into the contemporary Socialist Workers Party, a tiny group that
has disavowed any connection with Trotskyism.
Cannon set the sectarian tone of American Trotskyism at its infancy. In a
speech to the New York branch of his movement, on December 23, 1930, Cannon
defined the relation of the opposition to "class" and "vanguard".
1. The Communist Party was still the vanguard, but the Trotskyist
opposition was the "vanguard of this vanguard."
2. The task of the opposition was to make the "opposition line the line of
the proletarian vanguard."
Cannon invoked Trotsky's words to support his approach. "The revolutionary
Marxists are now again reduced (not for the first time and probably not for
the last) to being an international propaganda societyIt seems that the
fact that we are very few frightens you. Of course, it is unpleasant.
Naturally, it would be better to have behind us organizations numbering
millions. But how are we, the vanguard of the vanguard, to have such
organizations the day after the world revolution has suffered catastrophic
defeats brought on by the Menshevik leadership hiding under the false mask
of Bolshevism? Yes, how?" ("The Militant", 1929)
Has there ever been an "ideological" vanguard, Trotskyist or otherwise? The
answer is no. This is an idealistic conception of politics that has been
disastrous for Trotskyism throughout its entire existence. A vanguard is a
goal, not a set of ideas. The goal of the vanguard is to coordinate the
revolutionary conquest of power by the workers and their allies. Building a
true vanguard will require correct ideas but these ideas can only emerge
out of dialectical relationship with mass struggles. To artificially
separate a revolutionary program from the mass movement is a guarantee that
you will turn into a sectarian.
As I have stated, Lenin had a totally different concept of a vanguard, but
his idea was nothing new. It merely represented mainstream thinking in
Russian and European Social Democracy. George Plekhanov, eighteen years
before the publication of "What is to be Done?" stated that "the socialist
intelligentsia...must become the leader of the working class in the
impending emancipation movement, explain to it its political and economic
interests and also the interdependence of those interests and must prepare
them to play an independent role in the social life of Russia." In 1898,
Pavel Axelrod wrote that "the proletariat, according to the consciousness
of the Social Democrats, does not possess a ready-made, historically
elaborated social ideal," and "it goes without saying that these
conditions, without the energetic participation of the Social Democrats,
may cause our proletariat to remain in its condition as a listless and
somnolent force in respect of its political development." The Austrian
Hainfeld program of the Social Democrats said that "Socialist consciousness
is something that is brought into the proletarian class struggle from the
outside, not something that organically develops out of the class
struggle." Kautsky, the world's leading Marxist during this period, stated
that "socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out
of the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist
consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge."
However, a vanguard in Lenin's view is not something that a cadre declares
at
Re: Drug-dealing minister's son
Canada's Southam newspaper chain ran a story that identified the minister as Home Secretary Jack Straw. Sid Shniad > > Can anyone help name the British Cabinet minister whose son who was > arrested for dealing cannabis over Christmas? > > Press restrictions here have prevented the son of a member of Blair's > cabinet from being named after he was interviewed by police regarding a > cannabis deal. Overseas press are presumably not subject tot he same > restrictions. Has anyone seen any reliable reports identifying the > minister in question? > > Fraternally > -- > James Heartfield >
MacWelfare (fwd)
> Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 23:18:57 -0500 > From: Sherrie Tingley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Future of Welfare? > > CHICAGO-- http://www.theonion.com > > For the past four years, the first of the month meant one thing to > Chicago single mother LaTonya Mitchell: It was the day she could cash > her monthly welfare check for $618--barely enough to cover her own > expenses, much less purchase clothes school supplies and double > cheeseburgers for her five children. > > But all that changed on Oct. 20, 1997. In a welfare-privatization > experiment closely watched across the U.S., the Illinois legislature > approved a bill to radically revamp the state's AFDC system and > transfer welfare control to the McDonald's Corporation, giving > Mitchell and 712,000 other Illinois residents living below the > poverty line "a well-deserved break today." > > According to Illinois governor Jim Edgar, the partnership > between fast food and public assistance makes solid sense. "As hard > as the government has tried, the reality is, McDonald's better > understands and is better equipped to meet the needs of America 's > poor than the outdated federal welfare bureaucracy is," Edgar said. > "McDonald's deals with millions of unskilled, destitute people every > day--it feeds them, employs them, clothes them, and gives them > shelter in its spacious, sanitary seating areas." > > Edgar said McDonald's will provide those living below the > poverty line with a number of benefits each month, including a cash > stipend; a book of 25 McFood Stamps redeemable for Big Macs and other > sandwich items; immunization for children; and, for pregnant mothers, > collectible Flubber cups. > > Felix Melanson, McDonaldland Secretary of Health and Human > Services, said those with dependents will also receive special > scratch-and-win welfare game pieces. > > "Here at McDonald's, we strongly believe that poor people > deserve a chance," Melanson said. "And we give them just that--a > one-in-three chance to win great prizes like soft drinks, official > NBA game gear, trips to Disney World, and a grand prize of a free > McMedicard, good for an entire year's worth of subsidized, low-cost > health care." > > McDonaldAid recipients will also be provided with on-site day > care for their children. By March 1998, Melanson said, every location > will be equipped with a McDonald's Playland, enabling single mothers > like Mitchell to look for a job while their child n are looked after > in a safe, cashier-supervised play area. > > "Welfare recipients deserve the same secure, reliable day care > for their children that other parents enjoy," Melanson said. "That's > why we've made sure that all Playlands are situated in full view of > the registers." > > According to Melanson, what makes the new, privatized system > different is its emphasis on "personal responsibility and self-help." > Recipients, he said, "will be required to work up to five hours a > week and attend job-training instructional-video presentations in > order to remain eligible for McDonaldAid." > > Welfare recipients' duties at McDonald's will include light > lifting, cup and straw restock, and mopping. Further, all recipients > who use the bathroom will be required to wash their hands thoroughly > before returning to work. > > "The idea here is independence, not dependence," Melanson said. > "This is not a handout: These people will be responsible for > everything from refilling ketchup dispensers to busing their own > tables when they're done eating. They are also responsible for > keeping their own uniforms clean and presentable." > > While the Illinois privatization plan has been widely praised > by many welfare-reform advocates, it does have its detractors. > According to state Sen. James Ory (R-Carbondale), the delicious taste > of McDonald's food will encourage many people to remain on McDonaldAid > rather than look for jobs. > > "We need to provide incentives for people to get off welfare. > This food does just the opposite," said Ory, co-sponsor of a bill > setting a six-piece cap on McNuggets orders for welfare recipients > and limiting them to sweet-and-sour sauce only. "Those who are not > interested in finding work will take advantage, feeding off the > system and its tasty cheeseburgers and fries." > >Responding to Ory, McDonald's officials said that a number of > deterrents have been built into the new system to prevent people from > abusing it. > >"We want to help people, but we don't want it to become a > lifestyle," said Justin N. King, McDonaldland Secretary of Urban > Affairs. "That's why one key feature of McDonaldAid is a strict > 30-minute time limit on loitering in the seating area. While eating > at McDonald's restaurants, welfare recipients will be expected to > make an earnest effort to chew and swallow at all times. If they > cease eating at any point during their stay in the r
Forwarded mail...
> JOIN US FOR THE NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION; > - JANUARY 2, 1998 AT 12 NOON IN FRONT OF EVERY MEXICAN CONSULATE IN THE NATION > REQUEST A MEETING WITH THE CONSUL TO PRESENT: > ...AS MANY EXPRESSIONS OF REPUDIATION TO THE MASSACRE OF ATEAL CHIAPAS AS > POSSIBLE > Ask for: > 1. Full disclosure of all the paramilitary groups involved in the massacre. > Stop all state and federal funding, training and equipping of paramilitary > groups. An end to their impunity. > 2. Complete demilitarization of all indigenous communities in Mexico > 3. An independent international investigation of the massacre > All Mexican consuls will be participating in a national meeting in Mexico > City on January 6th. We want to send them with as many expressions of > protest against the massacre as possible. > For more information contact; > The National Center for Democracy, Liberty and Justice > 1-800-405-7770 > 1-213-254-9550 > > THE BLOOD OF THE CHILDREN > by Cecilia Rodriguez > > "To National and International Civil Society > Brothers and sisters; > Why? > How Many More? > Until When? > >From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast > Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos" > FROM COMMUNIQUE OF > ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION > REGARDING MASSACRE IN ATEAL > MEXICO, DECEMBER 22, 1997 > > In the wake of the massacre of 45 Indian men, women and children in the > little village of Ateal, Chiapas, those of us who have worked for three > years attempting to prevent just such an atrocity have been overwhelmed. We > are overwhelmed by pain and sorrow at what most of us knew was coming. > We knew it was coming because of the profile of low-intensity wars in > general. Everyone remembers the sense of helplessness and outrage as the > wars against the people of Central America strangled their hopes . Aware of > the virulent discrimination against Indian people in Mexico we also knew > that a profound transformation of Mexico's political system had to occur if > indigenous communities were ever to achieve the goals of the rebellion. We > worked against a tide of indifference, cynicism and alienation. Reports > came out of Mexico at least once a week about disappearances, deaths, > beatings. The blood trickled at the rate of 15 deaths per week. Death came > so suddenly and quietly, that its trickle brought a complacency with it. > People were under the impression that the conflict had been settled. The > media hammered away at the significance of the rebellion calling it > "marginal" and "inconsequential", refusing coverage because, as they stated > "no one is shooting...nothing is happening...". Columnists and > intelligentsia picked the rebellion apart. They said it was heaving "its > last breath". Others were frustrated because traditional forms of > international pressure seemed to shrink in comparison to the juggernaut. > Still others were bored and disillusioned that the Zapatistas were not more > "radical". Burn-out befell many. The Zapatista rebellion had lost its > newness, and with it grew the boldness of the activities of the military and > the paramilitary groups. The concrete demands of the indigenous communities > which continued to organize themselves into autonomous zones were buried > under a tide of indifference. > Some of us are now overwhelmed by rage. Rage at the mass media which > suddenly returns calls, appears at press conferences, and demonstrates > interest. Rage at some members of the activist community who suddenly > reappear. Rage at the monstrous brutality of the paramilitary groups who > hacked children out of their mothers' wombs with machetes, and chased them > like game in order to shoot them in the back. Rage at the fact that these > deaths could have easily been prevented. > Why was it necessary for those men, women and children to be slaughtered? > How many more must die in order to burn away our passivity? What is it > these communities must do in order to elicit a sustained human gesture from us? > We ride the tide of emotion. We ride it and keep our fingers crossed that > in our dialogue we find the words to convince people that changing a society > is not a product of a single dramatic action, or individual, much less a > single organization. It is rather the product of a single collective will. > This collective will retains a hundred different political tendencies, > styles of work, and ideologies. But it is a product of tactical wisdom. It > nurtures the capacity to stand together against these monstrous forces. > Changing a society is the product of lifelong actions-and the size of the > action never lessens its importance. It achieves larger dimensions when it > is combined with others and when they are consistent. Then it becomes a wave > of resistance. > The Zapatistas carried out such a strategy for 11 years in clandestinity. > They nurtured small actions, agreed to disagree, and accepted the laborious > process of organization which is far f
Re: Holiday Blues
> > But Michael, isn't it important to acknowledge that Actually Existing > > Socialism was notorious for its inability to produce decent consumer > > goods, including clothes? > > > It was a matter of priorities. I remember asking Cubans why they would > accept a Soviet nuke plant if they hated Soviet consumer products. They > argued that the Soviets produced poor products because they put their > emphasis on military and nukes. I don't much care for this line of argument, Michael. The same could be turned on you: why do you accept IBM computers if you hate capitalism? > I don't see any reason why socialism cannot produce better products than > we have today. I'm not arguing this from principle. I'm placing before you the fact that AES was notorious for producing shitty consumer goods. In some minds, this was one of the system's weaknesses which made it susceptible to outright capitalist counter revolution. Given the pervasiveness of this problem throughout AES and its powerful potential to generate social opposition within AES, I don't think it's enough to say that AES should, in principle, have been able to do better. What were the barriers that prevented it from doing so? Sid
Trot'ism
Louis N Proyect wrote: >There is no question that one of the reasons that Judith Butler and >Foucalt seem like a necessary "corrective" to you is that you view the >Spartacist League as bonafide Trotskyism. Nothing can be further from the >truth. I'll take your word on this, Lou - and Trotsky himself was no fool, for sure. But what happened? Why did Trotskyist groups - all Marxist groups did, but it seems to be most extreme among Trot formations - show such a prediliction for rigidity, cultishness, and schism? Why have they been reduced to citing formulas and refighting the same ancient battles for the last 30 to 60 years? Doug
Cornelius Castoriadis
I am very sorry to hear of Castoriadis' death. I did not follow his work in psychoanalysis, and did not particularly agree with some of his writings in Telos during the 80s -- particularly his identification of the Soviet Union as a more dangerous threat to human liberation than the threat posed by modern capitalism in the US and Europe. I thought he went overboard there as many Maoists did at one point, and somehow lost sight of the evils and power in western capitalism that his earlier writings had helped me understand. But I would like to say he had a significant influence on my own political and economic thinking during the 70s. I am staring right now at a copy of "Workers' Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society" that was first published under the name of Paul Cardan by London Solidarity in 1972, and reprinted in the US by Philadelphia Solidarity in 1974. Perhaps because I had not read Edward Bellamy or William Morris' utopian novels, or Kropotkin or Pannecock, prior to thinking out the first version of what Mike Albert and I first called "decentralized socialist planning" back in the mid 70s I was powerfully influenced by Castoriadis' pamphlet. I considered it at that time the best thought out version of workers' self management through planning that I had ever seen. Although I think it had some critical flaws, I still think it is a remarkable intellectual tour de force -- published as a pamphlet for activists with terrific cartoons interspersed. I still consider it much more ingenious than many of Castoriadis' articles in Telos that were adorned with more elaborate academic and intellectual sophistication. In any case, I wanted to express my gratitude for the genius and courage that marked Castoriadis' life. I think there were times when he was right on the money with insights that were unpopular with most progressives at the time. He had the genius to see some things clearly long before others could, and the courage to shout his insights from the roof tops. I don't think he was always right. I do think his initial critiques of the Soviet System, his belief in and dedication to the goal of true workers' self-management, and his contributions regarding how councils of workers could coordinate and plan their inter related activities without resort to markets were truly ingenius and will withstand the only test that matters -- the test of time.
Re: Deleuze and Guattari experiment
William S. Lear wrote: >As promised, I'm posting the (somewhat long) results of my experiment >with the Deleuze and Guattari essay, "Rhizome". This informal >experiment consisted of making copies of the essay and giving it to 5 >of my coworkers to read. I asked them to read through it and to >respond to the following four items: I wonder what the reaction would be if you tried an excerpt from The Grundrisse or an Emily Dickinson lyric on the same audience. Doug
Socialism and quality of consumer goods
At 04:43 PM 12/30/97 -0800, Michael Perelman wrote: >> >> But Michael, isn't it important to acknowledge that Actually Existing >> Socialism was notorious for its inability to produce decent consumer >> goods, including clothes? >> >It was a matter of priorities. I remember asking Cubans why they would >accept a Soviet nuke plant if they hated Soviet consumer products. They >argued that the Soviets produced poor products because they put their >emphasis on military and nukes. > >I don't see any reason why socialism cannot produce better products than >we have today. I agree with the priority part, but I think the nukes part is a bit too simplistic. The centrally planned economies were rapidly developing and that created a host of contingencies that the planning authorities had to cope with to keep the industry going (like shortages of energy or steel) -- so the consumer goods had really low priority. But they did produce some consumer goods, and the question is why these goods were of such shoddy quality? To answer that we must first realize that 'state socialism" was in fact, a gigantic austerity program designed to keep consupmtion at the necessary minimum (there were some good reasons for that) while boosting the investment. One way of accomplishing that was the so-called 'law of socialist development' which simply called for keeping the wage increases below the level of productivity increases. That, however, was easier said than done and wages or rather disposable income increased faster than planned (due to gray economy, and government efforts to appease the toiling massess by various financial incentives). Under ordinary circumstances that would create a strong inflationary pressure, but since the prices were administratively controlled (again, there was a good reason for that), there was excess demand that could not be matched by the productive potential of the economy (remember the priorities!). The periodical attempts to reduce that excess in the form of price hikes led to popular resistance and riots (cf. Poland 1970 or 1976). Consequently, the excess demand persisted, and that created the supplier market for most consumer (and not only) goods, or the emergence of the so-called 'dictatorial supplier.' That, BTW, explains the extraordinarily high prices of alcohol -- in Poland the cost of a pint (1/2 l) of cheap vodka was equal to a more-or-less daily wage. In other words, 'dictatorial suppliers' could sell anything without worrying about quality, especially that technologies to make some high quality goods (esp. automobiles, or electronics) were either not available or very expensive -- so they did not worry about quality. So the bottom line is that the poor quality of consumer goods were a result of the combination of two factors: priorities stemming from austerity measures, and structural bottlenecks created by a combination of economic (rapidly growing economy) and social (resistance to gov't economic policies) factors. That is, poor quality of consumer goods had little to do with socialism -- they were caused by the process of economic development itself (cf. the poor quality of merchandise produced in developing Asian economies). Happy New Year. wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233
Re: Cornelius Castoriadis dead at 75
On Wed, 31 Dec 1997, Doug Henwood wrote: > productive/unproductive sort - the "fake" Trotskyists denounced by the > Sparts (who are the authentic Trots, it goes without saying), or the Doug, one of the great misfortunes of the American left was the decline and fall of the SWP, Trotsky's favorite group. You are too young to remember the activity or the ideas of the SWP from the mid to late 1960s. (Doug just turned 45, wish him a happy birthday.) There were literally dozens of people who could think and write circles around somebody like Jan Norden, the Spartacist League leader who was expelled recently and who you admire. The European Trotskyist movement also included some extremely brilliant people besides Mandel. I include Michael Lowy first and foremost. There are also figures like Theodore Draper and CLR James who came out of the Trotskyist movement in the 1930s but who evolved in a 3rd camp direction like Castoriadis. There is no question that one of the reasons that Judith Butler and Foucalt seem like a necessary "corrective" to you is that you view the Spartacist League as bonafide Trotskyism. Nothing can be further from the truth. Louis Proyect
Re: Socialism and quality of consumer goods
I had written: > >> > >It was a matter of priorities. I remember asking Cubans why they would > >accept a Soviet nuke plant if they hated Soviet consumer products. They > >argued that the Soviets produced poor products because they put their > >emphasis on military and nukes. > > Wojtek took me to task. Maybe I should use smileys. I undestand that some of the Soviet military goods were of high quality, but their nukes .? I did appreciate Wojtek's description of the austerity program. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Cornelius Castoriadis dead at 75
William S. Lear wrote: >I presume the preceding prodded you to write the following because you >feel Marxists should open up a bit and acknowledge some of the >insights postmodernism offers us? [...] >So, this points out that rigid dialectics is, well, rigid and >something even a child sees beyond. We should see spectrums, rather >than a Manichean thesis/antithesis. Do not limit yourself to rigid >definitions, let them be a bit more mobile... > >I don't see that this is all that earthshatteringly interesting. >Nicely written, but do we really need this drapery to tell us to be >open-minded? Well, one of the denizens of the Spoons Marxism space responded to this quote by saying "I think the notion of the either/or is crucial to moral thought AND psychology." So what seems obvious to you doesn't seem obvious to everyone. It's not just a matter of being open-minded (a notion that depends on its opposite, closed-mindedness, of course). Marxist thought, like many others, has tended all too often towards rigidity and abstraction. Rigidity in the form of just that sort of either/or, yes/no, friend/enemy, productive/unproductive sort - the "fake" Trotskyists denounced by the Sparts (who are the authentic Trots, it goes without saying), or the "bourgeois" feminists and greens denounced by orthodox Marxists (because they can't imagine any other kind of feminist or green), etc. And abstraction in the form of throwing about concepts like "capital" and "labor" without doing any of the work necessary to flesh out these terms, of naming and describing the real institutions and practices for which the two words are shorthand. I think these twin tendencies lead to intellectual sterility and political bankruptcy, and for those of us who'd like to see Marxism revived as an intellectual and political force, we badly need flesh & movement. >But >outside the halls of academe this stuff really is meaningless. The >one thing the left does not need is more obscure prose describing >society; clarity and simplicity should be sought, and the sooner the >better. Yes and no (talk about the interpenetration of opposites). The excerpt I posted was maybe a bit obscurely written, but on the other hand, the Grundrisse hardly qualifies as simple. But I don't think the tendencies towards rigidity and abstraction are of purely academic interest; the leftist-Marxist tendency to be more on the lookout for heretics than potential friends has been politically suicidal. Doug
Re: Deleuze and Guattari experiment
Bill Lear wrote: >>As promised, I'm posting the (somewhat long) results of my experiment with the Deleuze and Guattari essay, "Rhizome". This informal experiment consisted of making copies of the essay and giving it to 5 of my coworkers to read. I asked them to read through it and to respond to the following four items:<< Birthday-boy Doug answers: >I wonder what the reaction would be if you tried an excerpt from The Grundrisse or an Emily Dickinson lyric on the same audience.< I agree with Doug. I think abstract writing, jargon, and math can contribute a lot. Just because most people can't read (say) the 1844 MANUSCRIPTS doesn't mean that they're full of BS. As Marx pointed out, in social science, we can't use chemical reagents so we have to use the power of abstraction. We can't talk about the financial crisis in Korea without using financial jargon. It's hard to seriously describe the endogenous acceleration of inflation or the behavior of mesons without some math. Etc. The problem is that much of the stuff that involves abstract writing, jargon, and math doesn't really have anything to contribute. The costs of the AW, J, & M often exceed their benefits (and there are examples of this with all types of thinking, not just postmodernism). To test for this, we have to examine the abstract writing seriously, not via experiments of Bill's sort. Does the work say anything useful or serious about the world? does it reveal something about our emotional connection with the world (as poetry does)? etc. Try translating social-science or lit-crit jargon and abstraction into ordinary language (as much as is possible), following the example of C. Wright Mills who translated pages of Talcott Parsons into a few sentences. Check out to see if anything's lost in the translation. My abstract theory tells me that we have to try to translate our thoughts into more concrete thinking. BTW, Louis, wasn't it _Hal_ Draper who went from Trotskyism toward "third campism"? His brother, Theodore Draper is a scholar with a cold-war liberal bent. onward, jim devine
Deleuze and Guattari experiment
As promised, I'm posting the (somewhat long) results of my experiment with the Deleuze and Guattari essay, "Rhizome". This informal experiment consisted of making copies of the essay and giving it to 5 of my coworkers to read. I asked them to read through it and to respond to the following four items: Q1. A summary of the piece. This should be a shortish description that you could use to answer a friend's question, "Whatcha readin?". Q2. What you liked and disliked about the piece. Q3. What of practical use did you learn from reading this? Q4. Any further comments you wish to share. The gender, age, and education of the five co-workers were as follows: 1. Male, 33, B.S. Physics, M.S. Physics 2. Female, 30, B.A. Finance 3. Male, 30, B.A. English 4. Male, 25, Undergrad student in Electrical Engineering 5. Male, 22, Undergrad student in Psychology The responses (A1, A2, A3, A4, or just a paragraph or two), in order by coworker, were as follows: 1. I personally could not stand to read more than 1/2 page of it. I couldn't understand at all what they were saying in the 1/2 page. It was like being sprayed with a firehose. 2. A1: Ummm, I dunno. Very difficult to get something out of this. Impervious. Opaque. A2: The concept of a "rhizome" was interesting, although I failed to see how this related to the rest of the piece. I did NOT like how difficult it was for me to glean any intelligible concepts from the piece. It was quite dense and seemed to meander around points. A3: I learned nothing of practical use. A4: Brought me back to my college days -- the reader needs very compelling motivation to wade through this stuff. And an interpreter (teacher) to then "explain" the material. 3. A1: The essay is about the mutual immurement of art and reality via the decentrism of Postmodernity. A2: The dualistic oppositions established to illustrate the dichotomy between rhizome and the established root-tree hegemony were very resonant to me: - maps vs. tracings - schizoanalysis vs. psychoanalysis - neural pathways in the human brain vs. electronic pathways in human-built information systems - short-term vs. long-term memory - non-signification vs. signification - the multiple vs. the singular - American vs. European culture - the American West vs. the American East - nomads vs. the State apparatus - the General vs. the leaderless - non-Euclidean vs. Euclidean geometries - relativistic vs. Newtonian physics - content vs. boundary - interstices vs. foundations - "and" vs. "to be" - plateaus vs. peaks/valleys - lines vs. points - probability vs. determinism - the decentered vs. the centered One thing I took issue with: I get what they're saying about Burroughs cut-ups being a "mere" fragmentation of the original root into a complex, divided root structure which nevertheless retains and propagates the deplorable hierarchy with increased intricacy, but I think it's shortchanging WSB to not also comment on how a case could be made for his work being rhizomatic in its own right -- mutation and difference exploding outward from common reflective cultural images (the junky, the homosexual), the blending of the inner consciousness with the outer action (plugged into the addiction machine), etc. Burroughs also understood very well what the authors call the "rhizomatic West". A3: The rhizome is the embodiment of Postmodernity -- a decentered system that dissolves the hegemony of established power structures. The application of the rhizome to the Western predilection for time-based determinism in events (beginnings, origins, ends, climaxes, culminations) establishes an almost Zen philosophy of evaluating life as flows and lines without beginning or end, unvectored states that admit the local and shun the global. Way cool, and what an even way to live. The essay also gave a name to the kind of fiction I've always tried to write. Rhizomatic fiction doesn't allow the limiting structures hierarchical fiction does: to quote the essay "thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter". Dreams are exemplifications of this kind of rhizomatic thought: their linearity is of a completely indeterminate order -- dream content leaps from leaf-node to leaf-node in a method of traversal illegal in the hierarchical system, and the movement between points all connected to one another collapses the tree like space and matter in a black hole. All locations become accessible to one another. When I want to write the kind of fiction
more on Korea
Wednesday, December 31, 1997 PERSPECTIVE ON KOREA A Crisis From Underregulation The deflationary bias of the International Monetary Fund made the credit crunch worse, leading to bankruptcies. By HA-JOON CHANG [W]hen the Korean crisis first broke out, many commentators argued that it was the result of an intrusive state forcing banks to lend to unprofitable firms. The medicine to cure the country's economic ills, it was argued, was to ditch the defunct state directed economic system, which some people likened to those of the Soviet Union or East Germany, and to create in its place a "genuine" market economy through an extensive liberalization of finance, international trade and the labor market. But is this a valid approach? The current Korean crisis is essentially a financial problem rather than a crisis of the "real economy." Most of the country's manufacturing firms make products that sell even in the most demanding markets--if the exchange rate is right. During the last couple of years, the won clearly was overvalued by 10% to 20%; but even then, on the eve of the crisis, the current account deficit was just over 3% of gross domestic product and is now falling after the recent devaluation. Yet we saw current account deficits of 8% to 10% in Thailand and Mexico before their recent crises, and in previous downturns Korea had current account deficits approaching 9% of GDP. Furthermore, most foreign loans financed investments in export sectors rather than real estate development or imports of consumer goods, as was the case in Mexico and Southeast Asia. The Korean budget is largely in balance and gross public debt amounts to only 3% of GDP. There has been little significant inflationary pressure in the economy. Then why did Korea crash? The current crisis is largely the result of a policy failure by the outgoing government of Kim Young Sam. It is failure of underregulation rather than of overregulation as the popular view holds. Deregulation had been the proclaimed policy objective of Kim's government, and although no radical deregulation occurred, state control relaxed enough to make important differences. The government abandoned its traditional role of coordinating investments in large-scale industries, thus allowing excess capacities to emerge in industries like automobiles, shipbuilding, steel, petrochemicals and semiconductors, which eventually led to the fall in export prices and the accumulation of nonperforming loans. In the name of financial liberalization, the government also failed to monitor properly foreign borrowing activities, especially by inexperienced merchant banks. This resulted in a rapid buildup of debts totaling $100 billion with a very poor maturity structure; 70% of these debts carry less than a year's maturity. Finally, Kim's advisors were sold on the monetarist idea that inflation control is the most important objective of government policy and that the exchange rate should be an "anchor" in inflation control. This caused a significant overvaluation of the currency, hurting export performance. The Kim government was confused and incompetent as the economic troubles began. It dithered over the fate of the third largest car manufacturer, Kia, unnecessarily undermining confidence in the economy. As the currency crisis grew, it wasted $10 billion (more than one-third of its dwindling foreign exchange reserve) trying to defend an indefensible exchange rate, thus exacerbating the foreign exchange shortage. External causes also came into play. Southeast Asia's doldrums reduced demand for Korean exports and dealt a blow to some Korean financial companies that had been speculating in Southeast Asian financial markets. The entrance of new Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturers drove down the prices of memory chips, which accounted for nearly 20% of Korean exports when their prices were high. Chip prices fell from nearly $50 to $4. But the main problem was a failure of oversight by a government priding itself on deregulation. Having met the crisis, is the International Monetary Fund program the best medicine for Korea? The second bailout at the end of December underlines a number of important problems with the basic IMF package. First, its strong deflationary bias made the credit crunch that firms are facing even worse, leading to a chain of bankruptcies and possibly driving the economy toward depression. The IMF's 5% inflation target was already too deflationary, given that the economy has to deal with a big rise in import prices due to devaluation; with the excess liquidity released by financial sector bailouts and the further fall of the currency since the signing of the agreement, this target now seems indefensible. More worrying than the deflationary bias of the IMF is its insistence on financial liberalization of the economy. Korea needs better, not less, financial regulation. Bad debt
Re: Cornelius Castoriadis dead at 75
On Tue, December 30, 1997 at 16:52:08 (-0500) Doug Henwood writes: >Dennis R Redmond wrote: > >>I just wish we Leftists spent more time acknowledging the richness >>of the dissident tradition and thinking through its heritage instead of >>constantly creating our own imaginary Cold War internment camps for those >>thinkers deemed insufficiently radical, in unwitting echo of the real >>ones Castoriadis saw being constructed by both sides in the postwar Greek >>bloodbath. I presume the preceding prodded you to write the following because you feel Marxists should open up a bit and acknowledge some of the insights postmodernism offers us? >As part of my continuing corruption by postmodernism, I just came across >this in a short commentary by Adam Phillips that Judith Butler included in >her book The Psychic Life of Power: > >"Starting with two sexes, as we must - described as opposites or >alternatives or complements - locks us into a logic, a binary system that >often seems remote from lived and spoken experience We should be >speaking of paradoxes and spectrums, not contradictions and mutual >exclusion. Every child rightly wants to know whether there is a position >beyond exclusion or difference or separateness - a world in which leaving >and being left out disappears, an idea taken up at a different level in >utopian socialism, which aims at a society without margins and therefore >without humiliation > The language of boundaries that psychoanalysis is so intent >on...promotes a specific set of assumptions about what a person is and can >be. It is a picture of a person informed by the languages of purity and >property, what Mary Douglas more exactly called purity and danger. It may >be more useful to talk about gradations and blurring rather than contours >and outlines when we plot our stories about gender. Butler's language of >performance keeps definition on the move, which is where it is anyway" So, this points out that rigid dialectics is, well, rigid and something even a child sees beyond. We should see spectrums, rather than a Manichean thesis/antithesis. Do not limit yourself to rigid definitions, let them be a bit more mobile... I don't see that this is all that earthshatteringly interesting. Nicely written, but do we really need this drapery to tell us to be open-minded? I'm tempted to say that the one thing that postmodernism and Marxism can't offer to people, just ordinary people, is insight into how to think. Postmodernists might be able to tell Marxists a thing or two, and vice-versa. Perhaps postmodernism is just the sort of solvent that Marxism needs to break out of its self-imposed boundaries. But outside the halls of academe this stuff really is meaningless. The one thing the left does not need is more obscure prose describing society; clarity and simplicity should be sought, and the sooner the better. By the way, I did a little experiment with Deleuze and Guattari's "Rhizome" essay on a few co-workers. I will post the results of this later. Bill
