[PEN-L:12339] Re: Weber, Goody, and Blaut
Considering the number of times Blaut has reaised the name of Weber, to the point of a calling anyone who disagrees with him a "Weberian", I decided to forward to pen-l some of the postings I sent last Winter to the World-H list on Jack Goody's interpretation of Weber. Postings are not revised, except that I will try to reduce arguments specifically directed against Blaut, in fairness to the fact that I am forwarding only my responses. But let's continue with the concept of rationality. I have yet to receive a library copy of your book, so I will start with a few general remarks on Jack Goody's East in the West. 1) Recognizing that Goody is a highly versatile and resourceful scholar, *East in the West* is what I call a "fast book", full of insights and revelations but lacking in systematic argumentation. 2) He never claims there was no difference in level of rationality between west and east, but that the differences were "not as great" as traditional scholars had insisted; differences in degree rather than in kind. 3) He is really carrying a debate against dated scholars (like Evans-Pritchard, Pirenne, de Roover, Lopez, Parsons, Dumont, Stone) all of whom drew a sharp distinction between the values of the West and those of the East. Today many "Eurocentric" scholars recognize that eastern and western societies "participated, differentially at different times, in parallel traditions that were sometimes being cross-fertilised" (233). 4) A key aspect of Goody's thesis is that both East and West were "heirs to the same urban revolution of the Bronze Age". In this respect both were "unique" in contrast to Africa. (Is this "euroasiancentrism"?) Nonetheless, he admits that Europe moved ahead in "knowledge" after the Renaissance. Why? 5) Because the discursive nature of its alphabetic writing allowed for a higher level of theoretical reflection - though I don't want to push this point too far as Goody is quite unclear about it, which is due, I would say, to his mixing up practical, theoretical, and formal rationality. It is this latter issue which I hope to elaborate upon in a later thread. ricardo duchesne
[PEN-L:12340] Re: Goody on rationality
What follows is posting number 2 on Goody's book, East in the West, which Blaut has mentioned many times here in pen-l as being a decisive challenge to Weber. Culture is an inescapable subject - explicit or implicit - in any comparative study of Western and Eastern history. Goody's East in the West directly sets out to challenge the notion that the West had a "unique" culture, a special rationality; a challenge, therefore, against Weber and his followers. But Goody's work, as that of every other critic I know, including Gunder's Re-ORIENT, suffers from an inadequate or incomplete appreciation of Weber's concept of rationality. Although Goody does not reduce Weber's thesis to the Protestant Ethic, as so many critics still do, he too fails to distinguish *systematically* formal, theoretical, and practical rationality. He wrongly employs a general definition of rationality (p.12) as the basis from which he then evaluates three sorts of rational instances (like syllogistic reasoning, double entry accounting, and mercantile profit making activity) which are in fact instances of different types of rationality: theoretical, formal, and practical respectively. Let me start by presenting the logic of Goody's argument in the first chapter of East in the West, "Rationality in Review": 1) Goody is quite effective in demonstrating that syllogistic reasoning (formal logic) is an attribute of all literate societies, not just Ancient Greece and the West. Pre-literate societies like the Azande were rational, but their logic was still informal. Formal reasoning, which consists in making a postulate and then reasoning in a sequential, non-contradictory manner, requires the use of an alphabet. While the alphabetic system of writing makes it easier to use this logic, the Chinese with their logographic writing also developed - though there is no definitive conclusion on this - a system of logic similar to that of the West. 2) While the ancient Greeks may have achieved a "slightly" higher level of logical-theoretical sophistication, by providing rules for proof, they learned much from types of proto-syllogisms cultivated by earlier cultures. Plus it was the Arabs who preserved and elaborated their findings, which the West then learned from. HOWEVER, Goody notes that "it was the absence of this religious component that made Greece *so different*; there learning was distinctly secular" (p33). This is a mere marginal note, but one full of implications, for I take it that one of the legacies of Greece was precisely that they were not satisfied with whatever truth was handed-down to them from tradition or was revealed by the gods, but insisted that humans find out for themselves, by the use of their own reason, what truth is. Goody misses this point as he thinks it is simply a matter of who used or not syllogistic reasoning. He fails to realize that the uniqueness of Greece lies in the institutionalization of a philosophic-theoretical discourse in which the claims of any religion or viewpoint could be questioned through the sole - autonomous - use of our reflective theoretical capacities. 3) And Goody may have missed this accomplishment because he hardly understands Weber's definition of theoretical reason, which is just the very rationality we intellectuals employ as we try to give meaning to the world. Because we all have an intrinsic interest in finding symmetry and order in the world, this rationality is trans-cilivilizational. And, yes, it is very much a part of the history of religions; indeed, theoretical rationalization grows with the search for ultimate explanations, which is at the heart of salvation religions. But such rationalization eventually led to the separation of theoretical reason from religious values, and the Greeks took a major step in this direction. Goody's analysis of rationality in the first chapter, and later, is mainly of theoretical rationality. But he either thinks it is of rationality as such, or of formal rationality; and as he examines what is really theoretical rationality - syllogistic reasoning - he wrongly refers on many occasions to instances of formal or practical rationality in the East. (We should keep in mind, however, that Weber formally examines these types as IDEAL-TYPES, and that history exhibits many combinatory lines of rationalization processes Enough said for today, ricardo
[PEN-L:12341] Re: Euro-rationality
Charles: Does Weber discuss all the data on European slavery and colonialism ? I don't recall him saying much about all of that pertinent evidence when I read him in college. That's one type of data, or evidence; I was really thinking of them as historians. Marx simply did not have available the more empirically based historical scholarship that emerged in the late 19th century.
[PEN-L:12344] Re: Goody on rationality
What about dialectics ? "Ricardo Duchesne" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/05/99 10:15AM Although Goody does not reduce Weber's thesis to the Protestant Ethic, as so many critics still do, he too fails to distinguish *systematically* formal, theoretical, and practical rationality. He wrongly employs a general definition of rationality (p.12) as the basis from which he then evaluates three sorts of rational instances (like syllogistic reasoning, double entry accounting, and mercantile profit making activity) which are in fact instances of different types of rationality: theoretical, formal, and practical respectively. ( Charles: So, Weber is not aware of dialectical logic ? Let me start by presenting the logic of Goody's argument in the first chapter of East in the West, "Rationality in Review": 1) Goody is quite effective in demonstrating that syllogistic reasoning (formal logic) is an attribute of all literate societies, not just Ancient Greece and the West. Pre-literate societies like the Azande were rational, but their logic was still informal. Formal reasoning, which consists in making a postulate and then reasoning in a sequential, non-contradictory manner, requires the use of an alphabet. While the alphabetic system of writing makes it easier to use this logic, the Chinese with their logographic writing also developed - though there is no definitive conclusion on this - a system of logic similar to that of the West. ((( Charles: I have read that Egyptian hieroglyphics includes both a picture writing and alphabetic writing or a phonetic alphabet. Also, Claude Levi-Strauss in _The Elementary Structures of Kinship_ and other books claims that pre-literate societies have their social organizations and other cultural features in the form of Group Theory algebra. Seems this level of mathematical rationality would include consciousness of formal logic. Surely they have the principle of non-contradiction. They also have dialectical logics. Ricardo: 2) While the ancient Greeks may have achieved a "slightly" higher level of logical-theoretical sophistication, by providing rules for proof, they learned much from types of proto-syllogisms cultivated by earlier cultures. Plus it was the Arabs who preserved and elaborated their findings, which the West then learned from. HOWEVER, Goody notes that "it was the absence of this religious component that made Greece *so different*; there learning was distinctly secular" (p33). This is a mere marginal note, but one full of implications, for I take it that one of the legacies of Greece was precisely that they were not satisfied with whatever truth was handed-down to them from tradition or was revealed by the gods, but insisted that humans find out for themselves, by the use of their own reason, what truth is. Goody misses this point as he thinks it is simply a matter of who used or not syllogistic reasoning. He fails to realize that the uniqueness of Greece lies in the institutionalization of a philosophic-theoretical discourse in which the claims of any religion or viewpoint could be questioned through the sole - autonomous - use of our reflective theoretical capacities. ( Charles: This sounds interesting. This atheist theme may be another way of describing dialectics: everything changes, every authority may be challenged. This is the opposite of the canon of formal logic which is non-contradiction or identity as a first principle. The first principle of dialectics is contradiction. Did Weber acknowledge dialectics ? However, this seems to be idealist dialectics in that you say "humans find out for themselves, by the use of their own reason, what truth is" . This does not seem to acknowledge empiricism and materialism, objective reality. Perhaps , this is recognized in the practical reasoning category. ( 3) And Goody may have missed this accomplishment because he hardly understands Weber's definition of theoretical reason, which is just the very rationality we intellectuals employ as we try to give meaning to the world. Because we all have an intrinsic interest in finding symmetry and order in the world, this rationality is trans-cilivilizational. And, yes, it is very much a part of the history of religions; indeed, theoretical rationalization grows with the search for ultimate explanations, which is at the heart of salvation religions. But such rationalization eventually led to the separation of theoretical reason from religious values, and the Greeks took a major step in this direction. Goody's analysis of rationality in the first chapter, and later, is mainly of theoretical rationality. But he either thinks it is of rationality as such, or of formal rationality; and as he examines what is really theoretical rationality - syllogistic reasoning - he wrongly refers on many occasions to instances of
[PEN-L:12348] Re: Euro-rationality
"Ricardo Duchesne" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/05/99 10:43AM Charles: Does Weber discuss all the data on European slavery and colonialism ? I don't recall him saying much about all of that pertinent evidence when I read him in college. That's one type of data, or evidence; I was really thinking of them as historians. Marx simply did not have available the more empirically based historical scholarship that emerged in the late 19th century. Charles: I don't know. From the standpoint of the epistemology of history, primary documents are very important and considered more reliable, in general. Marx was closer to the primary documents than the late 19th century scholars, and thereby had an empirical advantage over those later researchers, including Weber. Also, the evidence of European slavery and colonialism IS data or evidence for historians. Marx did include use of that historical data and evidence and other historical data in _Capital_. He used a lot of historical economic data. Most of _Capital_ is based on historical economic data. His method is HISTORICAL materialism, or scientific history. In other words, Marx is a historian. If Weber did not include this historical evidence of slavery and colonialism then it is an aspect in which Marx is more historic data-based, or historically empirical than Weber. Marx's historical materialism is the founding of scientific or empirically based historiography. Marx is a historian, thus HISTORICAL materialism. Marx is empirical, thus MATERIALISM. Marx not only used the historical data on slavery and colonialism, but on all the other issues discussed on this thread. The claim that Weber was more data or empirically based, historical and otherwise, is highly questionable CB
[PEN-L:12355] Free Labour as a precondition of Capitalism
Paul Phillips wrote: The Canadian case: part 2 The "industrial revolution" in Canada originated, by and large, in what is now Ontario, though in functional economic terms, Montreal at this time can be thought of as part of the southern Ontario economic system. Agriculture had been the staple industry in Ontario exporting grain up to mid century. (clip) Needless to say, this well-researched and thought-provoking contribution from Paul is exactly what this discussion should aspire to. After discovering that I have access to JSTOR, an electronic archive of academic journals, I downloaded a fascinating 48 page piece by Steve Stern, an NYU professor who I have consulted in the past on Latin American history of the 16th and 17th century. It is titled "Feudalism, Capitalism and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean". Written in 1988, it is a critique both Wallerstein and Brenner. From his conclusion: "If Wallerstein's world-system runs aground on issues of substance and theory, however, so do the standard alternatives. The most prominent critical alternatives dispute the notion that integration of diverse territories into an international and profit-driven commercial system constitutes a sufficient basis for conceptionalizing the economy of such territories as 'capitalist.' [In a footnote, Stern cites Genovese, Laclau and Brenner as examples of this current.] The criticism is valid, but the alternative theses proposed or implied in such critiques are not--at least not necessarily. The problem arises because we remain too dependent on theoretical concepts derived from the experience of Western Europe. In this experience, feudalism precedes capitalism... "The Europe-centered alternative to Wallerstein, then, leads almost 'naturally' to the following four alternative theses: first, the colonized American periphery was feudal, pre-capitalist, or archaic rather than capitalist; second, social relations of production matter more than markets or the profit principle for establishing the capitalist or non-capitalist laws, or internal dynamics, of the economy, third, merchant capital was both profoundly conservative and parasitic because it characteristically limited itself to siphoning off a surplus from relatively backward and static modes of production; and fourth, the most perceptive theoretical way to interpret the colonial economy in its international context is through the concept of articulation between archaic and capitalist modes of production. "In my view, only the second of these four theses holds up under scrutiny, and problems with the other three points to particular insights that may be rescued from Wallerstein despite the failure of his paradigm as a whole..." Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:12357] Mumia Appeal Denied! Action Requested. (TINAF 3:81)
TINAF SPECIAL ON MUMIA __ The Internet Anti-Fascist: Wednesday, 6 October 1999 Vol. 3, Numbers 81 (#339) __ Sadly the U.S. Supreme Court has just refused to hear Mumia's appeal. The first news reports from Philadelphia papers are included below. But the Philadelphia Inquirer/News is running a public opinion poll on this. It is available at: http://news.philly.com/default_poll.asp At present the results are: YES: 59.8%; NO: 38.7%; with 1549 votes cast. We should all visit the site and cast our votes. Additionally, given the importance this case has been given by the various police organizations, we should also inform our friends and associates of the poll, its URL, and urge them to do the same. We should attempt to get this information out as far and wide as possible without abusing any recipients. To help here, the article "Net Organizing Without Spam" is included below. -- HIGH COURT SAYS NO TO ABU-JAMAL: RULING ENDED THE LATEST APPEAL OF HIS CONVICTION AND DEATH SENTENCE... Joseph A. Slobodzian (Philadelhpia Inquirer) 5 Oct 99 In a ruling that put convicted police killer Mumia Abu-Jamal one step closer to execution, the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday refused to consider his appeal claiming he was denied a fair trial. The ruling in Abu-Jamal's appeal was among almost 1,700 cases the high court said without comment that it would not consider as it opened its new term. While ending Abu-Jamal's second appeal of his conviction and death sentence in the 1981 shooting death of Philadelphia Officer Daniel Faulkner, the ruling leaves the former radio reporter and Black Panther turned cause celebre one last appeal: a federal petition known as habeas corpus, in which he may argue that his constitutional rights were violated. Abu-Jamal's attorney, Leonard Weinglass, could not be reached for comment. Tim Reeves, a spokesman for Gov. Ridge, said the governor would deal with Abu-Jamal's case "like any other death-penalty case" and sign a new death warrant within 30 days. That warrant would be executed within 60 days unless a judge blocked it after the appeal was filed. Deputy District Attorney Ronald Eisenberg said that he expected Weinglass to file within the month and that it would take several years for the case to wend its way through the federal courts before arriving at the U.S. Supreme Court a third time. The court first turned down his appeal in 1990. Faulkner's widow, Maureen, could not be reached for comment. She now lives in Southern California, where she divides her time between managing two medical offices and heading a nonprofit group, Justice for Police Officer Daniel Faulkner, which was founded last year to counter the campaign that has tried to get Abu-Jamal's conviction reversed. "I think the important thing is that the Supreme Court rejected without comment some of the most important aspects" Abu-Jamal's state appeal, said Michael A. Smerconish, a Center City lawyer and radio talk-show host who represents the Faulkner nonprofit group. Abu-Jamal's appeal raised three arguments, none of which focused on his claim of innocence. He contended that he was wrongly stripped of his right to represent himself during jury selection; that he was removed from the courtroom after disrupting the trial, which he said violated his right to confront witnesses against him; and that he was excluded from a meeting in which the trial judge disqualified a juror. Faulkner, 25, a decorated five-year officer, was shot dead near 13th and Locust Streets about 4 a.m. on Dec. 9, 1981. Faulkner had pulled over Abu-Jamal's brother in a traffic stop, and Abu-Jamal, then driving a taxicab, reportedly passed by, spotted Faulkner questioning his brother, and parked. When other officers arrived, they found the fatally injured Faulkner on the ground, shot at close range in the face, and Abu-Jamal lying nearby, wounded by a bullet from the officer's gun. Abu-Jamal's gun, with five spent shells, was also found. A jury convicted Abu-Jamal after about five hours of deliberation, and he was sentenced to death in 1982. Since then, the facts of the case have been clouded in the public debate between Abu-Jamal's vocal supporters, including anti-death penalty advocates and Hollywood celebrities, and Maureen Faulkner and her supporters, who maintain that the murder of her husband has been lost in Abu-Jamal's drive for publicity. - - - - - U.S. HIGH COURT SHUNS MUMIA CASE John M. Baer (Philadelphia Daily News) 5 Oct 99 The U.S. Supreme Court, on its first day of a new session, has rejected without comment
[PEN-L:12356] re: questioning the existence of racism
TIME Magazine October 2, 1995 Volume 146, No. 14 DIVIDING LINE THE BIGOT'S HANDBOOK BY JACK E. WHITE Back in the 1970s, Richard Pryor had a routine about a group of Asian boat people being introduced to American life. Lesson No. 1: How to pronouncewhat is now commonly known as the N word.Last week a real-life version of Pryor's comedy sketch was played out among a rarefied band of right-wing intellectuals. At its center: Dinesh D'Souza,a 34-year-old Indian-born conservative wunderkind who has made a name for himself by bashing women, gays and minorities ever since he presided over the Dartmouth Review, a fecklessly racist student publication, in the early'80s. Today he is a case study in assimilation through bigotry, an ambitious immigrant who has achieved minor celebrity in his new homeland--and a sort of honorary status as a white man--by taking advantage of opportunities created by the civil rights movement, then turning his guns on it. Nothing could be more American. D'Souza's latest manifesto, The End of Racism, is one of the creepiest books to appear in recent years. Even more than D'Souza's previousbook, Illiberal Education, which savaged the campus vogue ofmulticulturalism, it contains so much sophistry, half-baked erudition and small-minded zealotry that even right-wingers who share many of D'Souza's ideas are outraged by its, well, political incorrectness. Last week Robert Woodson and Glenn C. Loury, two of the country's most prominent black conservatives, disaffiliated themselves from the American Enterprise Institute, where D'Souza is a research fellow, in protest over the book. Sounding more like the Rev. Al Sharpton than a conservative Republican, Woodson denounced D'Souza as the Mark Fuhrman of public policy and called on conservatives, black and white, to publicly disavow the racist ideology his book espouses. This is a moment of truth for the conservative movement as to where they stand on the issue of race,says Woodson. The only time you hear from white conservatives is when there is a white fireman aggrieved over affirmative action. If they want to have any influence in this area, they have got to speak out when blacks and Hispanics are aggrieved.This is one such occasion. So far, says Woodson, not a single white conservative has responded. What's taking so long? Like Camille Paglia in the feminist literary sphere,D'Souza will say whatever it takes to attract attention, no matter how tasteless, irresponsible or distorted. He contends that white racism isnolonger much of a problem in the U.S. Instead, all our racial troubles can be traced to the fact that black culture is so dysfunctional it amounts to a civilizational gap between African Americans and the rest of society. He does not bother to differentiate between the crime-ridden urban underclass and the middle-class high achievers such as Woodson, head of the Washington-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, andLoury, a professor at Boston University. D'Souza also argues that because racism had its origins among intellectually gifted Europeans during the Enlightenment, it can't be all bad; that American slavery was not a racist institution; and thatsegregation was merely a well-meaning attempt by paternalistic whites to help blacks perform to the capacity of their arrested development. He urges the repeal of every major civil rights law in the land, including those that allow blacks to sit at lunch counters and use the same water fountains as everyone else.Thence forward the government would be required to function in arace-blind manner, but private citizens and institutions, from taxicab companiestohuge corporations, would be free to discriminate. Why would any respectable publisher choose to purvey this bunk? The answer, I'm afraid, is that bigotry sells books. New York City's Free Press has published a long list of first-rate works on political and social issues by writers from every point on the spectrum, yet so far the only blockbuster among them (with 400,000 copies in print) has been Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which argues that blacks are genetically stupider than whites. On the jacket of D'Souza's latest, the Free Press high-mindedly says its publication will further expand the range of acceptable discourse about race by setting forth the principles that should guide us in creating a multiracial society. But judging by theinitial 100,000 press run, the largest by far inthe company's history, the Free Press also sees D'Souza as a moneymaker and is willing to profiteer on the obscene ideas he has packaged in the plain brown wrapper of specious scholarship.The U.S. certainly does need a searching debate on racially tinged issues from affirmative action to welfare dependency and crime. It is quite clear, for example, that racism alone cannot account for the sorry plight of the underclass and that traditional civil
[PEN-L:12360] Re: Free Labour as a precondition of Capitalism
Paul. I have enjoyed your capsule economic history (I taught a couse on Canadian Economic History for twelve years). I would make one quibble with your story. I would question the importance of agricultural exports for Upper Canada before the coming of the railway. Production was rarely high enough to export more than a small percentage of total wheat grown. Much more important was the domestic market. Rod Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archives http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://members.tripod.com/rodhay/batochebooks.html http://www.abebooks.com/home/BATOCHEBOOKS/ __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
[PEN-L:12363] Some observations on leadership
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: Carroll, let's keep separate things separated. There is a difference between a genuine social movement -- i.e. one that has real support in a population or its segment -- and one that exists mostly in the imagination of moral entrepreneurs striving for a recognition. It is my opinion that Louis Proyect not only is an example of the latter, but a very unscrupulous one the top of it. He seems to specialize in inquisitorial personal attacks and smear campaigns against people to whom he imputes inferior motives. See for example his posting [PEN-L:11948] Open letter to NACLA, Susan Lowes and Jack Hammond to which nobody except myself bothered to respond. I am quite surprised that this snitch, his provocations and character assassinations are taken seriously or even tolerated on this listserv. I guess it is a sad testimony to the state of mind of many "Leftists" in this country who cannot tell shit from an argument anymore. From *On Bullshit* by Harry Frankfurt. "Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is more of it nowadays than at other times...The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves,then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness the, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising, and of public relations, and the nowadays closely interelated realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who--with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing and so forth-- dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every image and word they produce exactly right. "What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning the state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to. "This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it...For the bullshitter, he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose." *The Importance of What we Care About* Harry Frankfurt, p130-2. Cambridge U PRess, 1994. Odysseus Abercrombie Research Director Product Development Swenson's Fine TV Dinners 103, Friedlard Way, Des Moines, Iowa.
[PEN-L:12362] Re: Re: Free Labour as a precondition of Capitalism
From: "Rod Hay" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:[PEN-L:12360] Re: "Free Labour" as a precondition of Capitalism Date sent: Tue, 05 Oct 1999 17:53:50 PDT Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Paul. I have enjoyed your capsule economic history (I taught a couse on Canadian Economic History for twelve years). I would make one quibble with your story. I would question the importance of agricultural exports for Upper Canada before the coming of the railway. Production was rarely high enough to export more than a small percentage of total wheat grown. Much more important was the domestic market. Rod Hay Rod, "Estimated marketable surpluses of Individual Commodities, Ontario, 1861" Wheat (bu) Mean houshold consumption = 35 Mean surplus or deficit =150 Ratio of surplus to consumption = 4.3 Marvin McInnis, "Marketable Surpluses in Ontario Farming, 1860" "Wheat was exported from the St. Lawrence bar back in the French regime, and such exports constitutied part of the general provisions trade for garrisons, for fisheries, and for sugar planatations. So too did the exports made regualrly from Hew England . and also those from Upper Canada till well on into the first half of the nineteenth century. Wheat exports as developed generations late from the Prairie Provinces, however, were not thought of as constiuting part of the provisions trade: they had come to consitue an export staple. At some poin in the inverval wheat exported from Canad had pass from the status of a provision to that of a staple. Definition is difficult and unnecessary here, but the distinction seems to rest on the relative importance of wheat in athe export cargo. If wheat, or wheat and flour, comprised simploy one element in the assorted provisions carg, the cargo also containing perhaps other cerals and meal and salted meants, wheat would be thought of as a provision. From the early early eighteen-hundreds till the eighteen fifties on the St. Lawrence, there was first of all the trade in timber; there was also a gradually increasing trade in wheat; but with these trades there was always the general provisions trade which required a diversified ahgriculture as a source of diversified products, and which included wheat among its parts." V.C. Fowke, _Canadian Agricultural Policy_, Uof T 1946, reprinted 1978. Much of the exports from Ontario went to Quebec as provisions for the timber trade presumably. I have the source of that somewhere but can't put my hands on it. Jones certainly considered it a staple export in his history of agriculture in Ontario. Paul Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba
[PEN-L:12361] Re: Free Labour as a precondition
Here is part 3: Canada did not exist, either economically or politically, in 1850 when Britain cut the British North American Colonies off from its mercantile empire with the adoption of free trade. Rather it consisted of a number of independent colonies with little or no economic or political connections. The maritime colonies/now provinces were involved in fishing and mercantile commerce, a backward linkage of which was shipbuilding but on a craft, one-off basis. (Incidentally, one of the most famous clipper ships of this era, the Marco Polo, was a product of a Nova Scotian shipyard.) By Confederation in 1867, the maritime provinces collectively had the third or fourth largest commercial shipping fleet in the world. It was also a banking centre for world commerce, a fact that is evidenced by the number of Bank of Nova Scotia and Royal Bank of Canada branches all through the Caribbean where maritime commercial capital brokered the finance of the triangular trade between the maritimes (fish, ships), the Caribbean (sugar, rum) and Britain (manufactured goods.) In fact, you could say that the Atlantic colonies economy was based on fish and ships, with a liberal dose of rum sprinkled on. (;-)) From New Brunswick, this was supplemented by heavy timber and sawn lumber (deals) exports in part to Britain but also increasingly to the American North East. The maritime colonies had an Atlantic orientation and commercial capital ruled the roost. Labour was either independent commodity production (fishing) or semi-proletarianized (mixed agriculture and forestry) and industry, such as it was, was dominated by craft- production, not factory or industrial capitalist production. Again, there is no evidence of labour shortage though crews for the shipping industry were picked-up all over the world (as today) while the officers were almost exclusively Canadian. Immigration to this region was predominantly Scots/Irish which explains the wonderful fiddle and dance music from this area of Canada though there was also German immigration in areas such as Lunenberg. (By the way, the French expelled from the region Acadia in 1755 by the British conquerors, went to Louisiana, (the Cajuns) and brought their wonderful music with them. Just a note for Louis cultural file. One of the best folk festivals in Canada is the annual one in Lunenberg.) The one centre of industrial capital was the coal mines and steel facilities in Cape Breton, manned primarily by Celts, and a centre of class conflict from the earliest days to the present. Central Canada I have already talked about. Its orientation was also trans-Atlantic but it had little commercial intercourse with the maritime colonies. The prairie region of western Canada was also completely isolated from the eastern colonies. Until circa 1870 the dominant population/economy was the fur trade and its related supplier, the Buffalo hunt. Europeans were a distinct minority and capital was primarily commercial, dominated by the Hudsons Bay Company. Trade routes were exclusively north-south, either north to Britain through Hudson Bay, or south through St. Paul, Minnesota. Agriculture was primarily subsistence and/or a supplier to the fur trade. The prairie region, at this time was a common property resource. It was the threatened enclosure of the property rights that prompted both the first and second Riel rebellions (1870 1885) that resulted in the formation of Manitoba and the intensification of the treaty and reserve system for the aboriginal population. (See Irene Spry, The Transition from a Nomadic to a Settled Economy in Western Canada, 1856-1896", Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, June, 1968.) What is now British Columbia was even less integrated in the world/Canadian economy at the time. A small fur trade outpost (and later, British Navy fueling post) existed at Victoria on Vancouver Island with about 500 European inhabitants but it was not until the gold rush which began in the mid-1850s, that any significant European population (mainly from California) arrived in the most western colonies. But, again, these were mainly independent commodity producers (independent miners) though when the placer gold gave out around 20 years later, capital did move in to develop shaft (or quartz) mines but this was, by and large, a flash in the pan. (Hows that for a clever metaphor?) The main capital in the gold rush era was commercial indeed, commercial capital was the only segment of the economy that made money and was highly subsidized by government expenditures on roads and port developments. (See my Confederation and the Economy of British Columbia in _British Columbia and Confederation_, 1967.) But, with the exception of the development of Vancouver Island coal mines by indigenous capital of the robber baron, James Dunsmiur
[PEN-L:12359] Re: questioning the existence of racism
I will remind everyone that this thread started when some unmentionable claimed that there were people on this list (who shall also remain nameless) who were putting forward ideas that were the same as D'Souza's. That is total nonsense. The argument was not over the existence of racism, but on how to fight it. Of course, it is easier to smear than argue, so we got smears. Rod Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archives http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://members.tripod.com/rodhay/batochebooks.html http://www.abebooks.com/home/BATOCHEBOOKS/ __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
[PEN-L:12354] And the winner is ...
I was serious last night when I said I was unsubbing the first person to engage in personal invective. Wojtek can return after a week. Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: I am quite surprised that this snitch, his provocations and character assassinations are taken seriously or even tolerated on this listserv. I guess it is a sad testimony to the state of mind of many "Leftists" in this country who cannot tell shit from an argument anymore. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
[PEN-L:12352] agricultural revolution 2
Still dealing with point number one of Grantham's post. So I quote again: 1. The fundamental elements of European mixed husbandry, which consisted in the intensive utilization of animals for draft power and manure, were in place by the early Christian era, by which time the technology of smelting and forging iron required for plough shares and far more crucially, scythe blades, was fully diffused throughout western and northern Europe. Last post I concentrated on the iron technology of the Romans and the Germanic tribes, and less on the issue of mixed farming, though I did touch on the ploughshares which is a key component of mixed husbandry. Now, Grantham (G) does *not* say that mixed husbandry was widespread in the early Christian era, but that its technology was already "in place"; but, as far as the sources I used indicate, we saw that iron ploughshares were not widespread. Reading Duby further, we find that in the early medieval period (certainly before the 9th century AD), there was still a separation of tillage and animal husbandry. While there are cases in which animals were allowed to graze on the fallow land in order to quicken the recuperation of such land, the general impression, as revealed by the evidence, is one of shortages in livestock and of limited use of manure. "We can conclude that manuring had practically no part to play in the agrarian practices of those days." Remember that in a society which is living on the margins of subsistence, animals are likely to be viewed as competitors for food. Only those with the means could afford to experiment, say, with a triennial system of rotation, in which 1/3 of the land would be cultivated with wheat, another 1/3 with oats (which could be used as food for animals), and another 1/3 left uncultivated with grass for herds to graxe on. Now, evidence exists that this triennial system was practiced during the 9th century (for example in the big estates in the Paris basin) but "there is nothing to indicate that such methods for regenerating the soil were widely applied elsewhere" - that is, apart from a few big estates, mixed husbandry was rare.
[PEN-L:12353] Re: Re: Re: Some sponsors of Johns Hopkins Institute forPolicy Studies
Seems to me that you too are obviously a moral entrepreneur. Calling someone a snitch -who is he snitching on--and using the general term "hogwash" and accusing the person of character assassination is exactly the sort of thing you attribute to moral entrepreneurs. Cheers, Ken Hanly Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: At 11:21 PM 10/4/99 -0400, Michael Hoover wrote: Polish Solidarity, in many ways the prototype for the anticommunist movements that swept Eastern Europe in the name of free markets and Civil Society. The intellectuals who participated in these movements had a deep hatred for Stalinism and instead of opting for democratic socialism, they became convinced that a marriage of Jeffrey Sach's economic ideas and liberal democracy would work. Louis Proyect While I don't disagree about the role that dissident intellectuals in the Committee for Worker Defense (KOR) ended up playing (and it is ikely that, for some, the demand for free trade unions was always about establishing Western-model), I maintain that Solidarity's origins were in Polish workers asserting their primacy, in effect, justifying tactic of mass strike as championed by Rosa Luxemburg. Of course, the movement would be transformed - Walesa emerged as most visible leader, perceiving himself to be voice of moderation, later martial law was imposed, including imprisonment. Solidarity that Jaruzelski legalized in 1988 and that won 99 out of 100 seats in Senate in 1989 was quite different grouping. Michael, I am surprised that you responded to this hogwash. It is one thing to have a bona fide debate on worker's movements around the world that often include religious, conservative, nationalistic, or pro-US overtones and a quite different thing to respond to insinuations posted by a snitch for the sole purpose of character assassination. Let's stick to the former withour giving the legitimacy to the latter. wojtek
[PEN-L:12351] Re: Re: Goody on rationality
Ricardo Duchesne wrote: Weber's concept of rationality. Although Goody does not reduce Weber's thesis to the Protestant Ethic, as so many critics still do, he too fails to distinguish *systematically* formal, theoretical, and practical rationality. He wrongly employs a general definition of rationality (p.12) as the basis from which he then evaluates three sorts of rational instances (like syllogistic reasoning, double entry accounting, and mercantile profit making activity) which are in fact instances of different types of rationality: theoretical, formal, and practical respectively. COMMENT: What is the difference between theoretical and form reasoning?I would think that syllogistic reasoning would be formal. It is not theoretical in the sense that one can predict on the basis of it orthat it is tested, verified, or disverified by facts. Indeed it is formal in the sense that it is concerned purely with form and not content or fact. Let me start by presenting the logic of Goody's argument in the first chapter of East in the West, "Rationality in Review": 1) Goody is quite effective in demonstrating that syllogistic reasoning (formal logic) is an attribute of all literate societies, not just Ancient Greece and the West. Pre-literate societies like the Azande were rational, but their logic was still informal. Formal reasoning, which consists in making a postulate and then reasoning in a sequential, non-contradictory manner, requires the use of an alphabet. While the alphabetic system of writing makes it easier to use this logic, the Chinese with their logographic writing also developed - though there is no definitive conclusion on this - a system of logic similar to that of the West. COMMENT: So where is your evidence that formal reasoning (note you use the term "formal" not "theoretical" requires an alphabet? I can say something of the form "All A are B and all B are C and therefore All A are C in a language with no alphabet or written form. Indeed I don't see why you just cant "think" such forms. What would be the evidence that one cannot? What of Buddhist logic. There was surely an extensive development of logic within Buddhism? Cheers, Ken Hanly
[PEN-L:12350] Re: Free Labour as a precondition of Capitalism
The Canadian case: part 2
The "industrial revolution" in Canada originated, by and large, in
what is now Ontario, though in functional economic terms,
Montreal at this time can be thought of as part of the southern
Ontario economic system. Agriculture had been the staple
industry in Ontario exporting grain up to mid century. Labour was
primarily of the independent commodity producer variety and a
'shortage' of cheap labour relative to land was met by two means,
immigration where impoverished immigrants worked on farms only
long enough to save enough to claim there own land and farm, and
secondly, through mechanization. Agriculture was profitable
enough that the domestic market for manu-factures developed
considerably (for instance, by 1851, there were dozens of piano
factories spotted all across Ontario.) This would support the kind
of capitalist development maintained by Brenner. On the other
hand, the agriculture was based on export, not only of grain
protected by the British Corn Laws, but also by timber and pot ash
exports, a byproduct of land clearing, and also protected by British
imperial laws.
Here Ontario differed from Quebec, outside of Montreal and the
western St. Lawrence lowlands. Agriculture in Quebec never
became the same profitable commercial and mechanized
(capitalist) agriculture that it did in Ontario. Here, I maintain, one
reason was the legacy of the 'feudal' land tenure system that
remained in Quebec. Farms were divided among all male children
and, with the high birth rate in Quebec over many generations, the
labour/land ratio was very high -- i.e. there was no labour shortage.
Indeed, excess labour found its way into the timber industry which
was the major export from Canada over the first half of the century --
again protected by the British Timber Duties. (See my "Land
tenure and development in Upper and Lower Canada", J. of Cdn
Studies, May 1974; A.R.M. Lower, _Great Britain's Woodyard:
British America and the Timber Trade 1763-1867_, 1974 and his
other writings on the timber trade and other development of the
forest industry.) Nevertheless, it was the prosperity of rural Ontaria
that developed the home market, a market not initially met by the
output of capitalist industry but rather by craft production and
imports.
What changed this in the second half of the century was the
coming of railways. Indeed the largest factories in the early part of
the '1st industrial revolution' were those shops of the new railways
manufacturing engines and cars, rolling iron rails, etc. But the
impact of the railway on industrialization was far more profound
than just its own demand. By unifying the market previously
fragmented by transportation costs, it provided a mass market for
factory produced goods, not local craft produced goods. (See
Gilmour, _The Evolution of Manufacturing in South Central Ontario_
-- don't remember the date off hand.)
Again, labour was not a problem. Immigration provided an
elastic supply of both unskilled ("Paddy Works on the Railway")
and skilled tradesmen. At the same time, "free land" was all taken
up in Ontario and the prairies were not yet accessible and existing
farms were passed on to the eldest son so natural increase in the
rural areas was migrating to the cities to seek waged work. This
was particularly true of women who could not find husbands in the
rural area and had no other work alternatives. Indeed, they played
a disproportionate role in providing low paid factory labour in most
of the light manufacturing industries (tobacco, boot and shoe,
clothing, baking and confectionary, textiles) during the early
transition phase to industrial capitalism (up to around the turn of
the century.)
While industrial capitalism, allied with capitalist independent
commodity production agriculture (exports of grain were now
replaced by exports of factory-made cheese and butter), existed in
Central Canada (excluding rural Quebec which had a quasi-self-
sufficient agriculture allied with 'semi-proletarianized' seasonal
wage labour in the woods), the rest of Canada had yet to venture
into industrial capitalism (with the exception, briefly, of parts of the
Maritimes.)
To be continued
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba
[PEN-L:12349] re: questioning the existence of racism
The world according to Dinesh D'Souza _The End of Racism: Principles for a Multi-Racial Society_ By Dinesh D'Souza Review by Bill Goldstein Read this book and seethe with anger at the sheer blindness of Dinesh D'Souza, author of the best-seller _Illiberal Education_ and a research fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. For D'Souza, the real world -- the streets, neighborhoods and offices of America -- seems not to exist. This exhaustive study of the historical, pancultural roots of racism -- 556 pages of text, 144 pages of notes -- makes the startling claim that there is no racism in the United States today. If you are willing to accept D'Souza's narrow definitions of what racism is and isn't, then perhaps you will be convinced by _The End of Racism_ (The Free Press, 724 pages, $30). According to D'Souza, civil rights laws ensure that blacks enjoy the same legal status as whites and therefore, every remaining inequity between the races, he concludes, is caused by rational discrimination against the pathologies of black culture. D'Souza's historical exegesis of racism from the ancient Greeks to our own time serves as a prelude to the heart of his book, where his unfathomably deep hostility to black America comes to the fore-- two chapters called The Content of Our Chromosomes: Race and the IQ Debate and Uncle Tom's Dilemma: The Pathologies of Black Anger. In the former, D'Souza criticizes _The Bell Curve_ authors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray for failing to address the implications of their views about IQ inequity, and concludes that the supremacy of white culture and environments (as opposed to genetic supremacy) is at the root of IQ and achievement differentials. The latter chapter offers selective reasoning and sweeping generalization instead of careful analysis: A further dysfunctional feature of black culture is its repudiation of standard English and academic achievement as forms of 'acting white.' And, Perhaps the most serious of African American pathologies -- no less serious than violence -- is the normalization of illegitimacy as a way of life. Or, Yet black culture also has a vicious, self-defeating and repellent underside that it is no longer possible to ignore or euphemize. D'Souza's apparent strength-- the extent of his quotations froma vast panoply of writers on race, from Plato and Aristotle through Muslim writers of the Middle Ages down to Andrew Hacker, Cornel West and others of the modern period -- is also his weakness. The grounding of much of his argument in history --and the fact, for example, that slavery among the Greeks was not based on race --offers heft instead of focus and is patently irrelevant to the American experience of racism and certainly to the American experience of slavery itself. Slavery in this country, too, was not a racist institution, apparently because some blacks themselves owned slaves. D'Souza does not face the fact that even if slavery was not a racist system, racism was its lingering consequence. D'Souza prefers to believe that while there was a certain form of racism alive in the 19th century, mainly a reaction to Southern humiliation in the Civil War and black gains during Reconstruction, this faded by the 20th century; segregation, for example, was a system to protect blacks and therefore not fundamentally racist. D'Souza further argues that because Christianity was not rooted in racism (he quotes Paul and St. Augustine on the issue), there is no racist tinge to any of its modern institutions, to say nothing of the uses its present-day adherents make of it. After showing in detail how the civil rights movement and its aftermath have led African-Americans and white liberals astray-- the only racism that exists today seems to be black racism, according to the author -- D'Souza writes: Irrational discrimination of the sort that inspired the civil rights laws of the 1960s is now, as we have seen, a relatively infrequent occurrence. Although such discrimination continues to cause harm, it is irrelevant to the prospects of blacks as a group because it is selective rather than comprehensive in scope. The key words are 'as we have seen.' For we have seen D'Souza's truths only in the black and white canvas of _The End of Racism_. We live in a colorful world outside its covers. Open your eyes, not this book, to see it. Before coming to News Corp/MCI, Bill Goldstein was a senior editor at Scribner and an editor and book reviewer at Publishers Weekly, Newsday and Seven Days.
[PEN-L:12347] agricultural revolution 1
Below are some prelimary comments on Grantham's post to the EH- list, which Blaut forwarded to pen-l last week. I leave Greg Clark's own argument aside, as I think Gratham offers the more penetrating analysis on this subject. Just for glarification, Grantham is not a Canadian. He's an American teaching at a Canadian university, McGill. I took a course with him on 'Marxian Economics', though that's not his area of expertise. His reputation lies in economic history, having published a number of well-known and respected articles on the history of French agriculture. Grantham: If one defines the agricultural revolution as a technological event, I think a good case can be made for Greg Clark's argument that no such event occurred between the later middle ages -- I would put it back to classical antiquity -- and the early nineteenth century. My reasons for arguing this point are the following: 1. The fundamental elements of European mixed husbandry, which consisted in the intensive utilization of animals for draft power and manure, were in place by the early Christian era, by which time the technology of smelting and forging iron required for plough shares and far more crucially, scythe blades, was fully diffused throughout western and northern Europe. Ricardo: As I said, Grantham is an expert on this subject, having dedicated his entire academic life to this subject. But I cannot help thinking there is something fundamentally wrong with this assertion; it seems careless or extreme. Let's be clear about what he says in these two first paragraphs: that by the "early Christian era" (an era which he also calls "classical antiquity", presumably on the grounds that Christianity emerged during Roman times) the "fundamental elements of European mixed husbandry" were "in place". Note that he says that this mixed husbandry was "in place" in the sense that the iron technology necessary for plough teams, including scythe blades, was already, at that time, "fully diffused throughout western and northern Europe". That is, he is not saying that mixed husbandry was fully diffused, but that the iron technology required for such an agricultural system was diffused. Now, there is no doubt that the technology of iron-smelting, including the production of specialized iron farm tools, was well known in Roman times, or the early Christian era (even earlier in China). This technology, however, was *not* widely diffused throughout Europe at that time. Actually, in the very last sentence of his post, Grantham even speaks of "the diffusion of iron-making in the European countryside between 700-200 BC"! I guess he means that, as the Romans conquered western Europe, they spread this technology, or perhaps that the Germanic tribes already knew about it. Two criticisms: 1) The Roman contribution to technology was less in mechanical devices than in construction, hydraulic engineering and architecture. Thus, if I may sum-up Mokyr's (1990) findings: - labor saving inventions in agriculture were minimal - Romans never really solved the problem of how to feed the livestock and use it as a fertilizer (a key component of mixed husbandry). - Yes, the Gaul and Celtic peoples performed some innovations in harvesting equipment, but "there is no evidence that these devises were widely used" - Romans are said to have invented the waterwheel, but their use "was not widespread". - "When classical civilization succeeded in creating a novel technique it was often unable or unwilling to take it to its logical conclusion and to extract anything approximating the maximun economic benefit from it. Many inventions that could have led to major economic changes were underdeveloped, forgotten, or lost" 2) Up until about 800 AD, Western Europe was overwhelmingly a forested area, with some (many?) tribes still practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. Duby observes: "At the beginning of the 9th century the landed possessions of the abbey of St Germain-des-Pres just outside Paris lay in a region where agricultural endevour had probably made greater progress than anywhere else, yet woodland still covered two-fifths of the estate. Down to the end of the twelfth century the proximity of a vast forest reserve was reflected in all aspects of civilization" (*The Early Growth of the European Economy*, 1973). Having as his sources documents left behind "by the most extensive and efficiently managed estates, the pace setters of agricultural technique", Duby observes "the only metal implements used for agriculture were intended either for cutting grass or corn, or for turning the soil by hand - in particular, *no ploughing apparatus is mentioned*" Where a ploughshare is listed, in some huge farms "described in manuscripts of the Carolingian period", it is one "made wholly of wood hardened by fire or at best covered with a thin
[PEN-L:12346] Re: Re: Some sponsors of Johns Hopkins Institute forPolicy Studies
At 11:21 PM 10/4/99 -0400, Michael Hoover wrote: Polish Solidarity, in many ways the prototype for the anticommunist movements that swept Eastern Europe in the name of free markets and Civil Society. The intellectuals who participated in these movements had a deep hatred for Stalinism and instead of opting for democratic socialism, they became convinced that a marriage of Jeffrey Sach's economic ideas and liberal democracy would work. Louis Proyect While I don't disagree about the role that dissident intellectuals in the Committee for Worker Defense (KOR) ended up playing (and it is ikely that, for some, the demand for free trade unions was always about establishing Western-model), I maintain that Solidarity's origins were in Polish workers asserting their primacy, in effect, justifying tactic of mass strike as championed by Rosa Luxemburg. Of course, the movement would be transformed - Walesa emerged as most visible leader, perceiving himself to be voice of moderation, later martial law was imposed, including imprisonment. Solidarity that Jaruzelski legalized in 1988 and that won 99 out of 100 seats in Senate in 1989 was quite different grouping. Michael, I am surprised that you responded to this hogwash. It is one thing to have a bona fide debate on worker's movements around the world that often include religious, conservative, nationalistic, or pro-US overtones and a quite different thing to respond to insinuations posted by a snitch for the sole purpose of character assassination. Let's stick to the former withour giving the legitimacy to the latter. wojtek
[PEN-L:12345] Re: Re: Some observations on leadership, was Re: NGOs...
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: Carrol, let's keep separate things separated. There is a difference between a genuine social movement -- i.e. one that has real support in a population or its segment -- and one that exists mostly in the imagination of moral entrepreneurs striving for a recognition. It is my opinion that Louis Proyect not only is an example ... I was trying to keep separated things separate and focus on a matter of more general interest. Hence my post was cast at a different level of abstraction and did not concern itself with whether or what kind of a leader anyone on this list was or was not. Hence a discusssion of the other posters on this list is as irrelevant and immaterial to the issues I raised as Blaut's endless stream of data is to the question of eurocentrism. If what you say of X or Y is true, then that person will probably not gain much of a position of leadership in practice. Most personal charges, including such charges as being "self-appointed," are sometimes effective devices of moral entrepreneurship, sometimes not. I believe bourgeois politicians regularly call each other demogogues. This whole multi-sided debate became rancorous enough that I don't think one can make general judgments of any of the participants based on their recent performances. (Even without considering the tendency to unnecessary snarls that seems inherent in e-mail.) Carrol
[PEN-L:12343] Re: Some observations on leadership, was Re: NGOs...
At 05:34 PM 10/4/99 -0500, Carroll Cox wrote: Your phrase "self-appointed leaders" (or at least its evaluative implications) however id obscurantist. *All* leaders are in the first instance self- appointed -- or should we say self-nominated. Those led of course make the final decision on who leads, but without that self-nominating rpocess this option of approving or rejecting would not be available. (This is one of the subtopics on which *WITBD* retains current validity.) And one feature which, at least at times, characterizes successful self-appointed leaders is their capacity to identify groups actively seeking such leadership. The classical example, I believe, is *Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan*. -- snip --- Carroll, let's keep separate things separated. There is a difference between a genuine social movement -- i.e. one that has real support in a population or its segment -- and one that exists mostly in the imagination of moral entrepreneurs striving for a recognition. It is my opinion that Louis Proyect not only is an example of the latter, but a very unscrupulous one the top of it. He seems to specialize in inquisitorial personal attacks and smear campaigns against people to whom he imputes inferior motives. See for example his posting [PEN-L:11948] Open letter to NACLA, Susan Lowes and Jack Hammond to which nobody except myself bothered to respond. I am quite surprised that this snitch, his provocations and character assassinations are taken seriously or even tolerated on this listserv. I guess it is a sad testimony to the state of mind of many "Leftists" in this country who cannot tell shit from an argument anymore. While we are at that, my critique is not intended just against personalities like those of Proyect and others, but but against the practice of moral entreprenurship that in my view started to dominate the Left discourse. It seems to me that many Left intellectuals do not have much to say anymore, other than knee-jerk contumacy and nostalgic longing for the glorious struggles of the past, but they still have ambitions to a celebrity or a leadership status. So to cover up their intellectual shallowness and having nothing to contribute, moral entrepreneurs use a strategy of highjacking the issues that carry some currency in the broad population, and use them as vehicles for self-promotion. The trick lies in selecting an issue that raises general condemnation, and then to distinguish oneself from the crowd by adopting a holier-than-thou attitude toward that issue, usually by expressing self-righteousness, making grossly exaggerated claims and personal attacks against anyone who is insufficiently zealous. One of such issues, perhaps the most hackneyed one since even the Republicans oppose it, is racism. Others include school violence, gender inequality, foreign policy, the Holocaust, etc. Since all these are real issues and real grievances - it is difficult to expose faux claims made mainly for self-promotion without provoking a suspicion, fueled by the angry accusations of the moral entrepreneurs themselves, of being insensitive to or even denying the real issues. The signs to look for include: inquisitorial zeal and angry accusations, exaggerated, grandiose, all-embracing claims, treating disagreement as a personal offense, self-righteousness, high volume of personal attacks in debating issues, reliance on dogmatic interpretations of scriptures rather than on empirical support in making a point, cock-sure certainty in making pronouncements, blurring the distinction between facts and personal interpretation of them, and equating personal views with the interests and views of the claimed constituencies. To add flesh nad blood to this argument, the postings to this list and pen-l by Blaut, Brown, Furuhashi, and Proyect often exhibit all or most of these signs od moral entreprenurship. wojtek
[PEN-L:12342] BLS Daily Report
BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1999 Career web sites are gaining rapidly, along with job hopping. ... Whether the Web sites are stoking worker restlessness or responding to it, the on-line job bazaar does seem to be intensifying what employers see as an already worrisome trend. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been reporting a steady decline in median tenure among the nation's workers for years. Among men ages 35 to 44 -- a key category because it provides an apples-to-apples look at mid-career employees over the years -- the typical time on the current job has shrunk from 7.3 years in 1983 to 5.5 years in 1998. And among some types of information professionals -- who are very much in demand these days -- the generally accepted turnover rate hovers around 50 percent. That means the average worker switches jobs every 6 months, essentially on a project-to-project basis. ... (Evan Schwartz in New York Times, page C5). The Wall Street Journal's feature "Tracking the Economy" (page A17) predicts that nonfarm payroll employment for September, to be released Friday by BLS, increased 220,000 and that the unemployment rate was unchanged. Personal income rose 0.5 percent in August, outpaced by strong consumer spending, which grew 0.9 percent, the Commerce Department says. ... (Daily Labor Report, page D-1). The manufacturing sector proved stronger than expected in September, with nearly all indicators pointing to increased activity, and price pressures rose to their highest level in more than 4 years, the National Association of Purchasing Management reports. ... (Daily Labor Report, page A-4). Anyone looking for signs of a long-anticipated slowdown in the booming U.S. economy found little evidence in a series of economic reports, which showed consumers stepping up their spending and manufacturers continuing to rebound from the Asian economic crisis. Consumer spending posted its biggest jump since February, rising a stronger than expected 0.9 percent in August, as Americans continued to snap up big ticket items such as cars, trucks, and computers. ... Manufacturers, meanwhile, notched their eighth straight month of growth, as exports of such goods as electronics, furniture, and industrial equipment rose to Asia and elsewhere. ... (Washington Post, Oct. 2, page E1; New York Times, Oct. 2, page B3). There is no national formula for calculating a living wage. It is primarily a political number hashed out in the local legislative process, based on calculations of the cost of living in the jurisdiction, including housing, food, transportation, health care, and child care costs, says The Washington Post "Business" section (page 19). According to Wider Opportunities for Women, a Washington-based nonprofit research organization, the hourly wage necessary to support a family of four on two incomes is $9.78 an hour per wage earner in Price George's County, $12.48 an hour in the District, $11.62 an hour in Montgomery County, and $11.40 an hour in Alexandria -- all within the Greater Washington, D.C., area. ... The number of people in the United States without health insurance increased by 1 million in 1998, the Census Bureau reports. In 1998, 44.3 million people or 16.3 percent of the population did not have health insurance. In 1997, 43.4 million, or 16.1 percent, did not have insurance. However, the proportion of the uninsured population was "statistically unchanged" from 1998 to 1997. ... (Daily Labor Report, page A-8; The Washington Post, page 1; The New York Times, page 1). application/ms-tnef
[PEN-L:12337] Re: Some sponsors ofJohnsHopkinsInstituteforPolicyStudies
Okay Chas, one more go each and I'm out of this thread. My general answer to it was, if you noticed, the law or tendency of evolutionary potential. In other words, it was Europe or England's backwardness in previous periods ( reflected in their naming their own Medieval period as "dark", meaning of course bad or underdeveloped compared to the Roman empire before and capitalism afterward) that explains their special readiness to change in the next period. I tend to think that wage-labor was a sort of discovery. Wage-labor relations had been around the edges of societies for centuries. Somebody in the Dutch or English ruling class said "Hey , if we make EVERYBODY a wage-laborer, we could do this. " This was combined with a sort of feeling of "what have we got to lose. The Arabs, Chinese, and West Africans have been doing better than us for a while. Lets try it." [I don't know about any 'law of evolutionary potential' but, although I don't think the wage relation was 'discovered' in this sense, I reckon we might usefully embellish and slightly reorient your take. You posit too monolithic (both in consciousness and coordination) a ruling class, for mine (the Arabs and their technological/intellectual tradition did worry the Europeans, but I'm not sure they were particularly conscious of Chinese or West African rivalries). We're discussing a century (late 15th to late 16th centuries) within which Arab knowledges were seeping into European consciousness for the first time in centuries. Weaknesses in Catholicism as it was then institutionalised allowed this seepage in and would thus be transformed, for mine - from the reformist back-to-basics criticism of Erasmus, to the revolutionary theology of Luther and the radical doubt of Descartes. People were hurting in ways that did not make sense to them (the peasants' revolt of 1525 comes to mind) under a social order that neither met their Lord's standards as they understood them nor their own needs as they well knew them. I reckon Europe was simply in the thrall of a structural crisis. Possibly, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Middle-Eastern and African societies did have a better fit between mode and relations than Europe did (so mebbe very different, historically less significant questions were being asked there). And stability is good for developing all kinds of things except new modes of social organisation. Anyway, once Luther's cat was out of the bag, a new self was stalking the European imagination, and European institutions/modes of domination would have to legitimate themselves in wholly new ways. I actually think Weber was on to something with his protestantism thesis, and take my departure only from the assertion that the idea of protestantism was an indpendent causative variable. It was itself dependent on a social crisis and concomitant crises of legitimation.] I don't have a problem saying that the Europeans discovered something new in this period. But notice my explanation turns on them being a little behind the curve (rather than ahead of it) and therefore more willing to experiment with new relations of production than the others who were a little ahead of the curve and wanting to keep things the way they were. [So I'm not going the way of 'behind' and 'ahead' - just that medieval society was losing its regulative capacity.] Also, and I haven't mentioned this before, I think the Judeo-Christian /One God ideology (not the Protestant work ethic) may have fit with the project, though I can't think through the logic fully. I know someplace Engels said that Christianity is the perfect religious ideology for capitalism, but I haven't been able to find it lately. [I reckon capitalism has that rugged individual buried somewhere in the middle of it, and I reckon the medieval Catholic was too much part of the hiearchical whole - the protestant 'man-alone-with-his-god-and-conscience' (sicX2) is a better fit, for mine.] Charles: Is anything scientifically verifiable as far as you are concerned ? If not , then I'm not going to try and demonstrate it. What is objective to you ? Anything ? If you give me an example of something that you think is objective, then I will make the analogy with the statements. But I am not going to take the time if you don't think anything is objective. There is plenty of empirical data on racism. It's a pretty big issue , well discussed in the movement. A main position on the rightwing here today is that racism no longer exists. We say, it does, and here are the facts. To me putting forth the rightwing position on this is objectively racist. I'm sure of it. [Racism objectively exists if by that you mean the widespread positing of 'race', the making of distinctions between individuals on that constructed criterion, and (if not necessarily) making those distinctions hierarchical. It exists in your life - as you and I are precisely thus distinguished by this obscene residue (I know you don't think it's a residue,
[PEN-L:12338] Saving Pen-l and A Warning
Micheal, I dont think this higher rate of unsubs is an indication that people are bothered by the personal attacks, but simply that there are too many postings inundating their e-mails. Believe me, some people like lists in which nothing is ever said, like the WS. Every time someone starts writing regularly there, or a debate starts, people complain that their lives are being disturbed. Many are just interested in ads, a bit of news, weather and so on. Some very good people are leaving the list. When I monitor the unsubs, and see an upsurge of nonsense, it tells me that I had been remiss in not taking charge. I will be in class most of tomorrow, but the first person to post a message attacking someone on the list person will be taken off the list for a while. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:12336] Re: Re: Landes and clocks
James M. Blaut wrote: For Brenner, the arrival of capitalism quite magically produces technological inventiveness. Effectively, then, he imputes unique inventiveness to Europeans the moment they are toiuched by the magic wand of (what he thinks of as) capitalism. I call this Neo-Weberian. It has none of the racist undertones of Weber, of course. _ Why should this be characterized as "magical"? Isn't capitalist relations imply that the method of control of labor process must change? Moreover, isn't capitalist relation imply competitiveness amongst capitalists that creates the dynamics of technical change? What does the rhetoric of "magic" supposed to do here? Cheers, ajit sinha No, I've never met him. I assume that he's a nice guy and I know that he is solidly progressive on contemporary issues, at least issues within the developed capitalist world. And he does good political work. This is a complicated world we live in... Cheers Jim Blaut P.S. I gather that you're a colleague of Susan Place and Chrys Rodrigue, geographers, at Chico. They think a lot like me.
[PEN-L:12335] Re: Landes and clocks
Michael: You might look at the section in my Brenner critique entitled "Neo-Weberian Euro-Marxism." Brenner is Weberian in a very specific way. He sees capitalism descending on England, as it were by parachute, after which the minds of English yeoman farmers suddenly are opened and a technological revolution occurs. (Citations are in my paper.) This is in some ways parallel to Weber's idea about the Reformation and its effect on European minds. More crucially, Brenner takes Marx's point that a capitalist must constantly strive to improve technology, but Marx was talking about 19th century, post-industrial revolution capitalism, not 15th-century yeomn tenant farmers. For Brenner, the arrival of capitalism quite magically produces technological inventiveness. Effectively, then, he imputes unique inventiveness to Europeans the moment they are toiuched by the magic wand of (what he thinks of as) capitalism. I call this Neo-Weberian. It has none of the racist undertones of Weber, of course. No, I've never met him. I assume that he's a nice guy and I know that he is solidly progressive on contemporary issues, at least issues within the developed capitalist world. And he does good political work. This is a complicated world we live in... Cheers Jim Blaut P.S. I gather that you're a colleague of Susan Place and Chrys Rodrigue, geographers, at Chico. They think a lot like me.
[PEN-L:12330] Re: Some sponsors of Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies
Polish Solidarity, in many ways the prototype for the anticommunist movements that swept Eastern Europe in the name of free markets and Civil Society. The intellectuals who participated in these movements had a deep hatred for Stalinism and instead of opting for democratic socialism, they became convinced that a marriage of Jeffrey Sach's economic ideas and liberal democracy would work. Louis Proyect While I don't disagree about the role that dissident intellectuals in the Committee for Worker Defense (KOR) ended up playing (and it is ikely that, for some, the demand for free trade unions was always about establishing Western-model), I maintain that Solidarity's origins were in Polish workers asserting their primacy, in effect, justifying tactic of mass strike as championed by Rosa Luxemburg. Of course, the movement would be transformed - Walesa emerged as most visible leader, perceiving himself to be voice of moderation, later martial law was imposed, including imprisonment. Solidarity that Jaruzelski legalized in 1988 and that won 99 out of 100 seats in Senate in 1989 was quite different grouping. Michael Hoover
[PEN-L:12327] questioning the existence of racism
It's a pretty big issue , well discussed in the movement. A main position on the rightwing here today is that racism no longer exists. We say, it does, and here are the facts. To me putting forth the rightwing position on this is objectively racist. I'm sure of it. I am very surprised to hear that in the US a main rightwing position is that racism no longer exists. I cannot imagine how such a position could begin to be argued. I am not aware of any such view in England where racism appears to me to be recognized as a problem of social life by any person claiming to be reasonably thoughtful. There is a question of how intensely the ideological struggle should focus against any one individual member of a mailing list, even when that person is in ideological error. They are separate questions. Although I think eurocentrism is pervasive in this environment and derives in all sorts of different ways from the economic base in which we exist, I have reservations about directly calling it racist. One of the problems is if this reaches the intensity where two or more people cannot stay on the same list together, which weakens the breadth of potential debate in the list. But if there is a sort of political or cultural movement outside this list in the USA arguing that racism no longer exists, that is a different matter. Charles may have described it many times before and I may have missed it. But if not, a summary of the strengths and characteristic of this movement in the outside world would be useful and focus directly on a political problem rather than on an individual list member as an alleged representative of that problem. Chris Burford London
