economics, law and the old soviet economy/the big quote
by Waistline2 -clip- We have arrived at the very beginning of this process that abolishes property . . . and not simply allows for a change in the form of property . . . based on the revolution in the technological regime. ^^ CB: When you say abolish property instead of abolish private property are you putting forth a different concept than the one that Marx , Engels and Marxists use ? Or just shorthand for what Marxists refer to as the abolition of _private_ property ?
Economics and law
by andie nachgeborenen Do we really know at all what a socialist society would do about transportation safety? I think trying to predict from the hostory of Stalinist societies is a very shaky guide. A socialist society, as most conceive it in this list, would be one where there would be a lot more democratic input into decisions about how much weight to give values like transportation safety. Of course the very hallmark of Stalinism was that there was very little democratic input into such decisions. ^ CB: It is not quite clear that because there was a Gulag, show trials of Party members and other acts of state repression on specific occasions, that there was no or little democratic process in decisions on other matters in Soviet society during Stalin's rule or Stalinism ( other matters such as decisions on transportation safety) With respect to the infamous crimes of Stalin , it is not even established that majorities of people in the SU opposed them. So as to whether they were _democratic_ there is some dispute. In other words, much of the infamous Stalinist crimes may have been a tyranny of the majority, a problem with democracy discussed on LBO-talk about now. They might have been violations of due process and cruel and unusual punishment rights that should be universal, but not necessarily violations of the actual will of the Soviet majority. The majority opinion may have been based, in part , on lies from the CPSU, but that is not the same thing as the majority opinion having no impact on decisions. At any rate, in particular, criticism of Stalinism does not necessarily claim that decisions on many aspects of Soviet society, such as transportation forms, including safety, were undemocratic, i.e. lacked genuine input from masses of Soviet people; input every bit as genuine as the input from masses in liberal democratic nations such as the U.S. The idea that the CPSU did not authentically represent the Soviet masses and their self-determined opinions AT ALL WITH RESPECT TO ANYTHING is not established. Gross violations of due process rights in specific instances such as in show trials/purges or in use of terror during civil wars does not establish that there was universal lack of democratic/republican processes with respect to other issues in that society. ^ So you can't tell much from what people would do when they had no say about what they might do if they had a real say. Now, we might guess that if they had a say they would prefer to be safer, but (as this thread began) safety competes with other things that might matter a lot to them too. Cost in resources, availability of transportation, etc. So it's not really possible to say how the debate would come out beforehand. jks
Economics and law
by David B. Shemano I knew my statement would cause a problem, but I think the point is valid. You, Charles Brown, subjectively value safety in such a manner that you think the speed limit should be 40 and not 70. I am not sure why your entirely subjective opinion translates into a rule for everybody else. It seems to me that cost/benefit analysis rule-making should ultimately be determined by something other than one person's subjective opinion. CB: What problem did your statement cause ? I can't see where my subjective opinion has translated into a rule for everybody else. The only way it would become a rule would be if a lot of other people had the same opinion. You don't seem to be very much in touch with reality if you think my subjective opinions are being translated into rules for everybody else. Did you think I was on the supreme court or something ? ^^ Why do you assume such facts for a socialist society? We have 75 years of experience with socialist inspired economies. Did they place a higher value on safety compared to comparable capitalist societies? ^ CB: Well, yea for automobile safety. The Soviet cars were like tanks, which , Justin mentioned, would be the direction that you would go to have safer cars. They had more mass transportation in the form of omnibuses, trains, trolleys than individualized units, as Melvin alluded to as a safer form, generally. Obviously, there can be train accidents too. Has anybody ever done a comparison of transportation deaths among countries? It might be interesting. ^^^ CB: Agree Were they able to implement safety concerns more economically than comparable capitalist societies? ^ CB: Good question. I'm not sure how you would get a comparable capitalist society , but if you think my opinion on it is relevant, I'd say a comparable capitalist economy for the SU would be someplace like Brazil in some senses at some periods. It's hard because the Soviet Union (and all socialist inspired economies) had to put so much economic emphasis on military defense because capitalism was constantly invading them or threatening to nuke 'em. This throws off all ability to measure from Soviet and socialist inspired history what might be the benefits of a peaceful socialist development of a regime of safety from our own machines. Cop out. In my experience, there was one example of a socialist inspired car in the capitalist market: the Yugo. Case closed. ^^ CB: No, profound truth. Yugo was produced _for_ the capitalist market( a sort of redundancy). Case closed. ^^^ It seems to me that safety increases in value as a society becomes wealthier, and the value is not correlated to the economic system itself. ^ CB What do you mean by safety increases in value ? I'm not sure human life is valued more highly as society gets wealthier. Death and injury by automobile accidents is the main cause of premature death in the U.S., isn't it ? Unless we live in Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average, something has to be the main cause of premature deaths, right? What would you propose to be the main cause of premature deaths in lieu of auto accidents? ^ CB: Of course ,in the long run, we are all dead, but what a prima facie anti-human attitude that says don't try to figure out a way to reduce auto accident morbidity and mortality. I'd like to see execution for leading imperialist wars, crimes against peace, (as Goerring was executed) be the main cause of premature deaths.
Economics and law
by Chris Doss --- Yeah. Look at communal apartments, which were always adduced in anti-Soviet propaganda as evidence of the evils of the latter system. In fact, communal apartments were a response to massive and rapid urbanization. People have to live somewhere. When England industrialized, what happened to the people who flooded into the cities -- they lived in workhouses? Anyway I think both sides of this debate are missing the point of the Soviet experience (limiting the discussion to the USSR). Soviet Union policy was really not about socialism. The Soviet Union was about modernizing an agrarian country in lickety-split time. It succeeded. ^^ CB: Are you saying the Soviet people did not think their policy was about socialism or that they didn't know what they were really doing ?
Economics and law
by Chris Doss Mainly that was me writing off the cuff while trying to meet a deadline and working through a hangover. It wiould be better to say something like the shape of Soviet society was determined first and foremost by the need to develop an agrarian country. It succeeded. The rest of teh stuff is fluff. ^^ CB: Why was there a need to develop the agrarian country ? People had been surviving in agrarian societies for millenia.
economics, law and the old soviet economy
by michael a. lebowitz I'm without notes but roughly, as comrade Stalin correctly stated in 1931, we have 10 years in which to catch up or we will be defeated again.In support of Chris' point, I don't recall this statement as having anything to do with building socialism as such. michael ^^^ CB: If they hadn't been doing something that was building socialism some kind of threat to capitalism , they wouldn't have been in such imminent danger of being defeated again. The reason imperialism was especially focussed on invading and conquering the SU is that they were building socialism, however flawed.
economics, law and the old soviet economy
by Chris Doss Oh, I think a lot of Soviet policy was simply a utilitarian, how do we build up the country as quickly as possible to overtake our enemoies? thing. Russia engages in these grandiose catching up with the West adventures every couple of centuries or so. It has succeeded twice, under Peter the Great and Joseph the Steel, two historical figures I think have a lot in common, except that the Stalin had tanks instead of musketry. There's no way he could beat Peter's Drunken Synods, though. :) ^ CB: Are you saying that the Soviet people knew they were really just trying to catch up with the West again ,and just used the Communist terminology to cover it up or that they didn't realize what they were really, pragmatically doing ( simply trying to catch up with the West) ? Basically the best argument against what you are saying is what the Soviet people said.
economics, law and the old soviet economy
by Carrol Cox Agreed, but that wasn't what Stalin said. (I'm going by memory here: I hope someone can find the exact quotation.) He talked about how the West had beaten us repeatedly through Russian history: i.e., the whole was in nationalist, not socialist, terms. The earlier defeats (and he names several) were not of socialist regimes but of Czarist regimes. And he speaks of _Russia_ being behind militarily, culturally, economically, and several other adverbs. He undoubtedly _could_ have written what Charles writes above, but he didn't. Carrol ^^^ CB: Oh I missed that in what you said. What you say here supports Chris's position , I think. My thought is that he was using Russian national liberation sentiment to rally the people, in the way Fidel Castro refers to Jose Marti, or the Viet Namese were carrying out a national liberation struggle too, harking back to Chinese invasions for centuries.
economics, law and the old soviet economy
Carrol: Agreed, but that wasn't what Stalin said. (I'm going by memory here: I hope someone can find the exact quotation.) ... ^^ CB: Wait a minute, what you said was Stalin said that the USSR existed in a capitalist sea. The reference to capitalists seems to imply he was getting at the fact that the capitalists were invading them because the capitalists didn't like them building socialism. You had said: For one thing, the USSR existed in a capitalist sea, as Stalin said in 1930, they had 10 years to catch up with the west industrially, culturally, etc or they would be overrun. (This speech by Stalin was quoted by Carl Oglesby in a book the title of which I now forget, and I have never been able to run down the text in any of Stalin's works that I possess.) ^ CB: Why not appeal to socialist vision _and_ national liberation hopes ?
Economics and law
by David B. Shemano Why is your personal opinion relevant? I mean, I am sure I can find somebody (Melvin P.?) who apparently highly values going 100. Therefore, your opinion is cancelled out. Now what do we do? ^ CB: Well, it's like why vote ? Your vote is only one in millions. How can it be relevant ? David Shemano's vote is going to cancel yours , so why vote ? In general, all we have here on email is opinions ,no ? For example, you recognized that opinions are readily expressed in this mediuam when you said to Michael Perelman: I don't have a strong opinion on whether regulation should be done by legislation or litigation -- it seems like a peripheral issue. Would your opinion have been relevant if you had one ? ^ Why do you assume such facts for a socialist society? We have 75 years of experience with socialist inspired economies. Did they place a higher value on safety compared to comparable capitalist societies? ^ CB: Well, yea for automobile safety. The Soviet cars were like tanks, which , Justin mentioned, would be the direction that you would go to have safer cars. They had more mass transportation in the form of omnibuses, trains, trolleys than individualized units, as Melvin alluded to as a safer form, generally. Obviously, there can be train accidents too. We have too much capitalism in the world to get a full socialist test of more safety in general. Lets get rid of capitalism and find out what we can really do as humans. ^^^ Were they able to implement safety concerns more economically than comparable capitalist societies? ^ CB: Good question. I'm not sure how you would get a comparable capitalist society , but if you think my opinion on it is relevant, I'd say a comparable capitalist economy for the SU would be someplace like Brazil in some senses at some periods. It's hard because the Soviet Union (and all socialist inspired economies) had to put so much economic emphasis on military defense because capitalism was constantly invading them or threatening to nuke 'em. This throws off all ability to measure from Soviet and socialist inspired history what might be the benefits of a peaceful socialist development of a regime of safety from our own machines. ^^^ It seems to me that safety increases in value as a society becomes wealthier, and the value is not correlated to the economic system itself. ^ CB What do you mean by safety increases in value ? I'm not sure human life is valued more highly as society gets wealthier. Death and injury by automobile accidents is the main cause of premature death in the U.S., isn't it ?
Economics and law
Coincidently, here a news story today. Charles ^ Road deaths fall to new low Wednesday, August 11, 2004 Image http://www.detnews.com/pix/2004/08/11/0asec/081104-p1-nhtsa-fatality-ch.jpg http://www.detnews.com/pix/folios/dot.gif Road deaths fall to new low Seat-belt use, fewer drunk drivers cited, but SUV fatalities up By Lisa Zagaroli / Detroit News Washington Bureau See the reports http://www.detnews.com/pix/folios/general/redarrow.gif NHTSA announcement, state-by-state fatality statistics for two years http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/nhtsa/announce/press/pressdisplay.cfm?year=2004fi lename=pr35-04.html http://www.detnews.com/pix/folios/general/redarrow.gif NHTSA summary, analysis and full report http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/PPT/2003AARelease.pdf http://www.detnews.com/pix/folios/dot.gif WASHINGTON - Fewer people died on U.S. highways during 2003 in every type of passenger vehicle except sport utility vehicles, according to new data showing the lowest fatality rate since the government began tracking it. Safety officials said the decline - which ended a troubling rise in highway deaths in recent years - was owed largely to better seat-belt use and fewer drunken-driving accidents. Last year, 42,643 people died and 2.89 million were injured in crashes, compared to 43,005 deaths and 2.93 million injuries in 2002. We're encouraging safer cars, safer roads and aggressively discouraging impaired driving, said Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. The report noted several positive trends: * While Americans drove more miles last year, the death rate - highway fatalities per 100 million miles traveled - fell to a record low of 1.48 from 1.51 in 2002. * Only 56 percent of occupants who died in crashes weren't buckled up, compared to about 60 percent in 2002, said Dr. Jeffrey Runge, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. * Drunken-driving deaths dropped 3 percent, the first decline since 1999. Runge said it helped that 14 states adopted the tougher blood-alcohol standard of 0.08 last year to avoid losing federal funds. Local safe driving advocates cheered the news. That's very encouraging, said Lee Landes of Farmington Hills, who teamed up with his wife to found Wayne County Mothers Against Drunk Drivers in 1982 after their son, George, was killed by a drunken driver. I'm encouraged by the statistics, but it's also an incentive to keep up the work we've been doing. Jim Kress of Northville agrees that using seat belts saves lives and said he used them long before the Michigan law requiring it took effect in 1999. I've used seat belts ... because I personally think they're safer. But I still don't think the government should be making people use them, even if it does mean more safety. NHTSA's report differs notably from a preliminary report issued in April that suggested 2003 data would show another increase in highway fatalities. Runge said the projections issued in April didn't take into account the success of the agency's $25 million seat belt awareness campaign and tougher enforcement efforts. Fatalities in passenger cars dropped the most, by 5.4 percent to 19,460 deaths; followed by pickup trucks, by 3.2 percent to 2,066 deaths; and vans, by 2 percent to 2,066 deaths. SUV deaths increased 10 percent to 4,446, with rollovers linked to 59 percent of all SUV fatalities. Even so, Joan Williams-Cash of Southfield said she feels safe in my SUV. I feel better being a little more off the ground. When I'm driving anything else any more, I feel like I'm dragging the ground, she said. Rollover deaths in passenger cars fell 7.5 percent and in pickup trucks 6.8 percent, but they rose 3.6 percent in vans and 6.8 percent in SUVs. There were actually fewer rollover deaths than would have been predicted in SUVs by the (11 percent) increase in registrations, Runge said. What we don't have are data to say whether that was due to more people buckling up or whether there were fewer rollover crashes. Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook said the death rate has gone down steadily for 60 years, but the raw number of deaths has remained about the same since 1995. The reason they haven't gone down - even with the advent of air bags - is an increase in SUVs and increase in rollovers, she said. Runge said the number of serious crashes was down as well, reflecting improvements in crash avoidance as well as crashworthiness. Death rates among child occupants were slightly up through age 15, although the number of children killed as pedestrians, for example, fell, the report shows. Other problem areas include motorcycle rider fatalities, which have grown 73 percent to 3,661 deaths in six
What is the total wealth ?
Yea, a bridge the size and location of the Brooklyn Bridge seems like an inherently public use-value, especially for those who live and work in Manhattan and nearby Brooklyn. Big chunks of the total wealth would best be public, not private property. What proportion of the total wealth in the world is in less consumable forms ? Like hedge fund certificates or whatever is the sign of ownership in that ? Charles by Max B. Sawicky You consume a bridge -- make use of it, wear it out just a bit -- when you cross it. Or stand on it. Or jump off it. What proportion of total GDP is consumable ? How much is liquid ? What proportion is in plant , equipment and bridges ? Just full of questions. CB
Economics and law
by Kenneth Campbell CB: Another infamous case of this was the exploding Pinto of Ford. Thanks, CB. That was the 70s. May not apply to the original post I made, in the time frame... but same principle. Regardless... The notion that lives have worth based upon economic evaluation is hated amongst normal working North Americans. I think there is, in that, a chink in the armor that is worth a bit more than mere postings about the conditions in South America. It is not to diminish the rest of the world... more to recognize what is happening here. Here. Talk about your dialectical contradictions in the whole... Ken. ^^ Yes, the whole moral thing of placing monetary value on human life stares every law student in the face in torts class. You are probably aware that many juries ( composed largely on North American workers) have given such high awards often that the rightwing has been carrying out tort reform for a while, whereby caps are put on the amounts. A significant part of the leftwing bar in Michigan, National Lawyers Guilders, have had their practices substantially done away with by recent tort deform in Michigan. Left wing lawyers ( Maurice Sugar and others) played a big role in developing products liability law.
Economics and law
by Kenneth Campbell Charles wrote: You are probably aware that many juries ( composed largely on North American workers) have given such high awards often that the rightwing has been carrying out tort reform for a while, whereby caps are put on the amounts. It was my understanding that many of these awards are severely reduced on the appellate level... which does not involved juries (hence people outside the law). ^^ CB: Yes, appeals court judges, and in Michigan the legislature, led by insurance companies , using the trial lawyers (not the victims obviously) as the marketing target, changed the statutes to cap awards. There is a buffer there, too, no? ^^ CB: Sorry, the appeals courts are a buffer , you mean ? ^ (But you are right about the political agenda behind removing in the initial awards.) Left wing lawyers (Maurice Sugar and others) played a big role in developing products liability law. I do not currently know the development of product liability law. I would imagine it came out of the early 1900s in the US. If you have any more research, I would appreciate it. It would be helpful to put it in context. ^ CB: Yes, early 1900's exactly, with the rise of the automobile, as I was taught in law school. I don't have any specific research myself. However, products liability is a standard category in tort law, so if you put the term in search engine , there would be tons of stuff.
Economics and law
by ken hanly Actually I dont think that the Pinto Case was one of a straightforward cost-benefit analysis and didn't even include matters such as the cost of lawsuits per se except perhaps indirectly since it included the cost of human lives and of injuries. The human life values were themselves based upon government figures. ^ CB: Maybe I wasn't entirely clear on what Kenneth Campbell's original point was. In the Pinto case, not only was a human life given a dollar value, but it was determined (maybe even erroneously from the second post you sent) that because the cost of paying for a dead person's life in tort was less than making a standard modification of the Pinto, that they would let the people die , because the cost of paying for it was less ! That seems to have something to do with what he was getting at. I think they had to use approximate jury awards for wrongful death, as that would be what they would be paying out in lieu of making the change in the tank.
Fidel Castro horrified by China
by Louis Proyect -clip- He is the sort of man who does not want to see his legacy diluted in his lifetime, the diplomat said, adding that Castro was probably unaware of the extent of social decay in Cuba. ^^ CB: Social decay in Cuba or China ?
Economics and law
I think the thing with the Pinto is that Ford concluded that it would cost them less to pay for wrongful death suits than to put something in the Pintos that would stop them from exploding in rear end collisions. I suppose this is the issue in dispute, but the greater cost of the part to prevent the explosions doesn't seem astronomical to me. So, the problem is a difference of opinion in the value figures we should put in the cost/benefit slots, sort of . Myself, I think the benefit of reducing the speed limit substantially ( maybe not to 5 miles per hour), and more safety features of the type you mention would be worth it in the lives and injuries saved, and the cost would not be astronomical given what would be saved. In other words, the value of a human life _is_ astronomical, well, relative to the conveniences that are had by being able to go 75 instead of 40. I think you are right that the problem wouldn't just go away with socialism. There might , in general, in socialism be more focus on some safety issues when the decision would not depend upon how the safer engineering impacted an individual corporation's bottomline. I can see a socialism more readily developing its transportation system with all the safety features you suggest, and not experiencing them economically as astronomical. If there was safety focus comprehensively and for a long time, it might be very practical to do it better safety wise. Charles ^^ by David B. Shemano Regarding the Pinto, cost/benefit analysis, etc., what exactly is the issue? I mean, we know with certainty that a certain number of people are going to die each year from auto accidents. We also know that if we reduced the speed limit to 5 m.p.h. required all passengers to wear helmets, required safety designs used for race cars, etc., the deaths would all be eliminated. But we don't, because the costs of doing so would be astronomical, and most people seem prepared to assume certain risks in consideration for conveniences and benefits. So is the problem the concept of cost/benefit analysis, the improper implementation of cost/benefit analysis, or disagreement about what are costs and benefits? If you reject cost/benefit analysis, how could you ever decide whether any marginal rule should be accepted or rejected? Why does this issue have anything to do with capitalism/socialism -- would not these issues have to be addressed no matter how the society is organized? David Shemano
Tariq Ali on the US election
by Shane Mage No, its garden-variety Pabloism. war in Iraq...is very much a neocon agenda, dominated by the need to get the oil and appease the Israelis. (as if Kerry wasn't gung-ho to appease the Isrealis!) ^^ Next thing you know we'll be quoting the Protocols. Just kidding ! Charles
Economics and law
by Kenneth Campbell -clip- Calculate the number of deaths resulting from, say, a space heater (P) and multiply that by the average out of court settlement (P). If those estimated losses from defective products are less than the cost of removing those deaths through product improvement (B), then do not make those improvements ^^ CB: Another infamous case of this was the exploding Pinto of Ford.
Poletown decision overturned - Brush Park residents elated
The Michigan Supreme Court is dominated by Federalist Society members, i.e. rightwingers. However, here we have their conservatism/libertarianism turning into its opposite, in defense of small private property against monopolies. Charles http://www.michigancitizen.com/images/ptrans.gif http://www.michigancitizen.com/images/ptrans.gif By Diane Bukowski The Michigan Citizen DETROIT - Saying its landmark 1981 Poletown decision was a violation of the State Constitution and a contradiction of a century of previous case law, the Michigan Supreme Court on July 31 largely barred local governments from seizing land for private use. The unanimous ruling, in Wayne County v. Hathcock, was authored by the court's four most conservative justices. It prevents Wayne County from seizing 40 parcels of private land interspersed in a 1,300-acre tract the county wants to use to build the private $2 billion Pinnacle Aeropark. The project includes plans for hotels, factories, offices, and a golf course adjacent to Metropolitan Airport. The court said its decision is retroactive, meaning that it will affect pending cases that specifically challenged the Poletown decision, including a lawsuit filed by residents of Brush Park against the City of Detroit. In the Poletown case, the court allowed the City of Detroit to seize and bulldoze hundreds of private homes, businesses and churches on the near east side so that General Motors could build an auto plant that replaced its Cadillac and Fleetwood facilities, actually cutting its total workforce. The company had threatened to move that production out of Detroit if it was not allowed to build at the Poletown site. The Poletown ruling was the first of its kind in the country, and has been used since as precedent to seize private property in eminent domain cases nationwide. Because Poletown . . . was such a radical departure from fundamental constitutional principles and over a century of this Court's eminent domain jurisprudence . . . we must overrule Poletown in order to vindicate our Constitution, protect the people's property rights, and preserve the legitimacy of the judicial branch as the expositor - not creator - of fundamental law, said Justices Robert Young Jr., Maura Corrigan, Clifford Taylor and Stephen Markman. Noting that Article 10, Section 2 of the state constitution requires that government seizures be performed for public use, not just a public purpose, the Court went on, Before Poletown, we had never held that a private entity's pursuit of profit was a 'public use' . simply because one entity's profit maximization contributed to the health of the general economy. Alan Ackerman, attorney for the plaintiffs in Hathcock, said, This ruling means our government was meant to have limited powers, unlike in England, where private property could be taken for any use the king wanted. It will change the law of the land. It protects people's individual rights. Ackerman said those signing amicus briefs in support of his clients included a broad political spectrum, ranging from libertarian right wing organizations like the Civic Legal Foundation and the Institute for Justice to the American Civil Liberties Union and Ralph Nader. He said the decision should favorably impact residents of Brush Park, but that plaintiffs in the Graimark case, which involved land seizures on the city's far east side, had already signed off their property rights. Attorneys in that case failed to challenge the Poletown decision. Ackerman's clients included private home, business and farmland owners. Lead plaintiff Edward Hathcock, who owns Gem Products and Supply, a kitchenware and millwork plant in the path of the Pinnacle project, was exultant at the court's decision. This shows what can happen if you stand up and fight, when enough's enough, said Hathcock. This puts the county on notice that they can't just acquire our property. Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano issued a written statement in reaction, saying, The court ruling impacts economic development for the entire state. All municipalities and government entities are affected and must explore how they will be competitively leveraged to attract investments that result in jobs that improve the quality of life for those who live, work and raise their families in Wayne County. Gwen Mingo is lead plaintiff in the Brush Park suit against the City of Detroit, which has seized the majority of the land there. A good deal of the remaining buildings in this historic district located off Woodward and I-75, have been destroyed in unsolved arson cases. This is wonderful news, Mingo said. This shows that God works in high places and the victory is his. We give him the glory. Ours has been a horrendous ordeal for hundreds of people. Many have died or become very old, feeble and sick working to bring this to fruition. Many times I have driven burned up people to the hospital, and had to help those who were thrown out on the street and lost
Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior
Of course, there are also the reports that Bush has or had a drinking problem , and we know he has declared that he is a born again Christian. I wonder if , oddly, this means he has more of a conscience and sensitivity than your average president, and he is depressed because he feels guilty about all the bad stuff he is doing, or knows is going on. Perhaps he really believed in Amurika, and has become disallusioned from what he has learned about the truth since becoming president. Rush, Bush...whose next ? Charles ^ by Robert Naiman 04 August 2004 23:16 UTC From Capitol Hill Blue Bush Leagues Bush Using Drugs to Control Depression, Erratic Behavior By TERESA HAMPTON Editor, Capitol Hill Blue
What is the total wealth ?
Wow . Thanks Julio. I have to study your calculation more to understand it. What are the parts of this whole ? Like Max's Brooklyn Bridge. What proportion is fictional (?) capital ? What proportion is owned by the wealthiest individuals ? by Julio Huato I'm not sure I understand your points, but estimating the value of (global) aggregate wealth or what Marx called (global) social capital shouldn't be a challenge to make us feel nihilistic. Next I'll make a wild estimate of the value of world's capital. Well-informed people could correct it or refine it further. Today, with access to markets, accumulated wealth is capital in some phase of the canonical cycle (M-C... P... C'-M'). Sure there's some wealth already at the brink of being consumed, but neglect that. So, for our purpose, global wealth = global capital. Using Doug's figures, last year, global capital generated a *gross* income of USD 7,867.94 per capita. Since global population is, say, 6.3 billion, then we're talking about a gross income of 50 trillion USD, plus or minus change. That and a few other pieces of information (under some roughly plausible assumptions) should suffice to make an estimate. We're just trying to price an (aggregate) asset. How much of this gross income would be required for the simple reproduction of the economy? In other words, how much is it *net* global income, income that we could dissipate without jeopardizing the ability of global capital to generate the same net income every future year? Deduct depreciation and also the fraction of consumption that just replenishes the labor force at its current skill level. So, there's no labor force growth, no accumulation of human capital, and no addition to the capital stock. Assume there's no uncertainty or sustainability issues, so we're certain that global capital will re-generate the same net income forever. Hence, risk = 0. In other words, we are assuming perfect foresight, rational expectations, whatever. (Risk would lower the estimate a bit. But note that, after a few years, sustainability doesn't really matter, because we're going to discount net income and what comes in the far future will be worth little in terms of present value. So I'm making these assumptions to simplify matters only. For instance, if we know or suspect that the world will end by 2050, the calculation would only get more complicated, but the result would not be that different.) I cannot make an educated guess about net global income, so I'll just say it's 30 trillion USD. Global capital can be now treated as an annuity, which is very convenient because its present value formula is net income flow/r. To calculate the present value, we discount net income using its opportunity cost. And what would that be? The value of the next best alternative to dissipating the net global income back into the universe. Say, what we people are actually doing right now, using current net income to expand future income. How? By adding to current consumption (to expand the labor force and to expand its skill) and by adding to the stock of global capital. Say, the labor force will grow at 4% per year in the future and per-capita income at 1%. Then, the next best alternative is expanding global net income at a rate of 5% per year. This growth rate is assumed constant (since there's no risk, no volatility). So that's the global discount rate we should use to price our annuity. Thus, the discounted present value of global capital is: K = 30 trillion USD/0.05 = 600 trillion USD That's close to 100 thousand USD per person. Very roughly. Julio
What is the total wealth ?
I don't have the next thought wellformed, but don't the wealthiest people have to guarantee that they own a certain portion of the total wealth/social capital in order that it be capital with capital power ? If the bottom 6.28 billion people had a larger portion of the total, they could live comfortably and not depend on the richest to survive and live. Isn't the value of hedge fund wealth dependent in part on it being part of hedge fund owners and other finance capitalists owning a certain portion of total wealth ? Of the different forms of wealth, what is the significance of fictitous capital ( if I use that term correctly)being so attenuated from a result of a labor process and from use-values ? Isn't owning it a way of indirectly owning and controlling a major portion of wealth that is in the form of non-fictitious capital ? What proportion of total wealth is far attentuated from attachment to any use-value ? By defining wealth as capital, isn't the value of that capital defined based on its ability to generate more capital ? What proportion of total wealth is in a form that is of use to the vast majority of the people ? Charles Julio Huato wrote: Say, the labor force will grow at 4% per year in the future and per-capita income at 1%. Then, the next best alternative is expanding global net income at a rate of 5% per year. This growth rate is assumed constant (since there's no risk, no volatility). So that's the global discount rate we should use to price our annuity. Thus, the discounted present value of global capital is: K = 30 trillion USD/0.05 = 600 trillion USD Another approach. According to the BEA, the value of fixed reproducible tangible wealth (including consumer durables) in the U.S. was $32.8 trillion in 2002. (Note that the rate of return on those assets implied by GDP is a lot higher than Julio's estimate - around 30%.) That year, according to World Bank stats, the U.S. had 32% of world GDP. So, scaling up based on that income share, we can estimate that the global capital stock is worth $102.1 trillion - or roughly $16,000 per capita. Doug
new Rape situation
I don't know if this is a suburban legend ? Charles Subject: FW: Pay attention to this new Rape situation THIS IS NO JOKE A woman at a nightclub on Saturday night was taken by 5 men, who according to hospital and police reports, gang raped her before dumping her. Unable to remember the events of the evening, tests later confirmed the repeat rapes along with traces of Rohypnol in her blood and Progesterex, essentially a small sterilization pill. The drug is now being used by rapists at parties to rape AND sterilize their victims. Progesterex is available to vets to sterilize large animals. Progesterex is being used together with Rohypnol, the date rape drug. As with Rohypnol, all they have to do is drop it into the girl' drink. The girl can't remember a thing the next morning, of all that had taken place the nightb before. Progesterex, which dissolves in drinks just as easily, is such that the victim doesn't conceive from the rape and the rapist needn't worry about having a paternity test identifying him months later. The drug's effects ARE NOT TEMPORARY - They are P*E*R*M*A*N*E*N*T Progesterex was designed to sterilize horses. Any female who takes it WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO CONCEIVE. The weasels can get this drug from anyone who is in the vet school or any university. It'sthat easy, and Progesterex is about to break out big on campuses everywhere. Believe it or not, there are even sites on the Internet telling people how to use it. Please forward this to everyone you know, especially girls. Be careful when you're out and don't leave your drink unattended. Please make the effort to forward this on to all you know...Guys, please inform all your female friends and relatives.
Elementary school question
What is the total amount of "money" in the whole world ? Charles
What is the total wealth ?
What is the total wealth, networth, valueof all the economies of the world ? Do any economists estimate this ? What is total wealth divided by the population of the earth ? If total wealth were divided equally, what would be per capitanetworth ? Charles
What is the total wealth ?
by Max B. Sawicky The Fed Gov says it's $89.9 trillion for the U.S. Some of it -- like the Brooklyn Bridge -- would be hard to divvy up. Would you want a share in the Brooklyn Bridge? It would look nice on the wall. Mbs ^^ Ok I said it dumbly, but I'm trying to start a holistic thought like Levins and Lewontin might advise. Is there enough wealth in the whole world to give everybody a decent minimum ? Could we have a world minimum income/networth ? So, you want to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge ? I must look like a peasant from Detroit. Can I sell the paper on the bridge and buy some use-values I can use ? Charles ^ Subject: What is the total wealth ? What is the total wealth, networth, value of all the economies of the world ? Do any economists estimate this ? What is total wealth divided by the population of the earth ? If total wealth were divided equally, what would be per capita networth ? Charles
Date Rape Drug? HOAX
Sorry . CB ^ http://hoaxinfo.com/progesterex.htm Progesterex: Date Rape Drug? First Published June, 2000 Updated September, 2002 In 1999, an e-mail began circulating that proclaimed a new date rape drug had been introduced. This drug not only rendered the victim helpless to defend themselves against a would-be rapist, but caused permanent sterilization to the victim. That drug was called Progesterex. It is also, an absolute fabrication. There is no drug called Progesterex. An Go Ask Alice http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/1597.html , Columbia University's Internet Question and Answer Site looked in to this one and concluded there was no such drug. There are indeed date rape drugs, such as Rohypnol, and one would be wise to keep an eye out for those who might take advantage of a young, college aged woman at the many parties that are thrown on campus. However, this is one drug you can scratch off the list. This is a copy of the hoax e-mail circulating: PASS THIS ONTO YOUR FEMALE FRIENDS. Ladies, be more alert and cautious when getting a drink offer from a guy. Good guys out there, please forward this message to your lady friends. And boyfriends, take heed. There is a new drug that has been out for less than a year. Progesterex, that is a essentially a small sterilization pill. The drug is now being used by rapists at parties to rape AND sterilize their victims. Progesterex is available to vets to sterilize large animals. Rumour has it that the Progesterex is being used together with Rohypnol, the date rape drug. As with Rohypnol, all they have to do is drop it into the woman's drink. The woman can't remember a thing the next morning, of all that had taken place the night before. Progesterex, which dissolves in drinks just as easily, is such that the victim doesn't conceive from the rape and the rapist needn't worry about having a paternity test identifying him months later. The drug's effects AREN'T TEMPORARY. Progesterex was designed to sterilize horses. Any female that takes it WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO CONCEIVE. The crooks can get this drug from anyone who is in the vet school of any university. It's that easy, and Progesterex is about to break out big on campuses everywhere. Believe it or not, there is even a site on the internet telling people how to use it. Please forward this to everyone you know, especially the gals.
What is the total wealth ?
by Doug Henwood Wealth is tough. Income is easier. Acc to World Bank, per capita GDP (PPP, with all Paul A's caveats incorporated by reference) in 2002 was $7,867.94. Cash money, no PPP magic: $5,212.56. ^^ So, in a very abstract sense, if everybody had equal cut from GDP in 2002, everybody would be poor, but not real poor ? Or do I misinterpret this ? Charles
What is the total wealth ?
by Carrol Cox I don't think estimates of total wealth tell one much. What counts for your purposes is the flow of material goods and services available at any given moment. Or perhaps the productive capacity if everyone were employed, but I doubt anyone could make even a wild estimate of that. ^ What proportion of total GDP is consumable ? How much is liquid ? What proportion is in plant , equipment and bridges ? Just full of questions. CB
A Question for the Moderator
The Soviet Union was defeated, as was the Ottoman Empire before it and Yugoslavia after it -- first economically, later politically (mainly from inside the the Soviet Union, its multinational elites acting against its multinational masses) or with a combined political, economic, and military warfare (Yugoslavia). Russia and Serbia today cannot be expected to play the same roles that the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia used to be able to play. -- Yoshie ^^ In what sense do you mean that the Soviet Union was defeated economically ? Charles
Bailout Feared if Airlines Shed Their Pensions
Bailout Feared if Airlines Shed Their Pensions By Mary Williams Walsh New York Times Sunday 01 August 2004 In an echo of the savings and loan industry collapse of the 1980's, the federal agency that insures company pensions is facing a possible cascade of bankruptcies and pension defaults in the airline industry that some experts fear could lead to another multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout. The similarities are incredible, said George J. Benston, a finance professor at Emory University in Atlanta who has written extensively on the regulatory failures that led to the costly savings and loan bailout. Deposits in savings institutions are, like pensions, guaranteed by a federal insurance program. The savings industry first sickened because changes in market conditions made the traditional way savings and loans operated unprofitable, but government delays and policy missteps then made the situation much worse. In the end taxpayers bailed out the industry - at a cost, according to various estimates, of $150 billion to $200 billion. Now experts say they see similar forces gathering in the pension sector, with United Airlines perhaps the first to go down the path. Operating in bankruptcy, United is striving to attract the lenders and investors it needs to survive. It said last month that it would no longer contribute to its pension plans; United also seems intent on shedding some or all of its $13 billion in pension obligations as the only way to succeed in emerging from bankruptcy proceedings. If United manages to cut itself loose from the costly burden of its pension plans, it might force others determined to keep their costs similarly under control to emulate its move. Rivals may feel they are at a competitive disadvantage and follow suit, raising the specter of a domino effect in the industry, said Bradley D. Belt, the executive director of the government's Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures pensions. If every airline with a traditional pension plan were ultimately to default, the government would be on the hook for an estimated $31 billion. Its insurance coverage is limited, so some employees would have their benefits reduced. The pension insurance program is there to protect workers' benefits, said Mr. Belt, who took over the agency in April. It shouldn't be used as a piggy bank to help companies restructure. Already, some airline employees are taking steps to protect themselves against future pension losses. Each month, for example, about 30 pilots normally retire from Delta Air Lines. But in June, almost 300 did. Andrew Dean, one of the new retirees, said he and his colleagues watched in dismay as the financial debacle unfolded at United. He said that he and many of his fellow pilots decided they had better grab their pensions right away while the money was still there. These are very scary times right now for someone in my position, said Mr. Dean, who at 58 walked away from his job just as he was reaching the peak earning period of his career. His pension was also reduced because he retired early. But his decision now looks prescient. On Friday, Delta asked its pilots for a 35 percent pay cut and proposed a smaller pension plan. Foremost on the minds of the departing pilots, Mr. Dean said, were arcane pension rules that can offer advantages to workers who quit before a pension plan fails. At Delta, for example, as long as the pension plan stays afloat, pilots are allowed to take half of their benefit in a single check when they retire. But if the plan fails, the pilots lose their chance to take a big payout. What I've managed to do is secure half of my retirement, Mr. Dean said. He may still lose the rest if the government takes over the program and limits future payouts. I really lose sleep over that, he said. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is already hobbled by debt, having picked up the pieces of more than 3,200 failed pension plans in its 30-year life. The scale of the failures has risen sharply in the last three years, but the agency has few tools at its disposal to prevent the situation from becoming worse. Now it faces a possible $5 billion default by United which would be a record and the possibility of more big airline defaults after that. The agency can't take a lot of $5 billion hits, multiple times per year, year after year, and survive, said Steven A. Kandarian, the pension agency's immediate past director. Eventually, you'll run out of money. It is impossible to predict the exact size of any pension bailout, although economic projections by the agency suggest that in the worst case, a bailout within the next decade involving failures beyond the airlines could cost taxpayers up to $110 billion. But because pension obligations, unlike bank deposits, do not have to be paid off all at once, it is difficult to raise alarms about the threat. The
Israel pushing for Kurdish state?
by Chris Doss --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: there are other options besides secession: Ken mentions federalism, while simply increased democracy (including civil liberties and affirmative action) may do the trick in other situations. --- My personal favorite solution. It works for the rest of Russia, which is an enormously multiethnic country. Compare Chechnya and Dagestan, or Tatarstan. Ironically, Maskhadov, now that he's pretty much given up the independence idea and is struggling just to have some degree of power, is arguing that Chechnya's status in the Russian Federation should be basically like Tatarstan's -- broad autonomy. Considering that Tatarstan accomplished the same thing without firing a shot... well, you draw your own conclusions. ^^ CB: The SU had autonomous regions. I think Tibet is an autonomous region in China
Israel pushing for Kurdish state?
by Louis Proyect Charles Brown wrote: CB: The SU had autonomous regions. They were formally autonomous. In reality, there was Great Russian chauvinism from just around the time that Stalin was consolidating power. Lenin's concern over this matter prompted him to wage his final struggle against Stalin. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm ^^ CB: In this, Lenin actually discusses sovereign republics , not autonomous regions: The Question of Nationalities or Autonomisation I suppose I have been very remiss with respect to the workers of Russia for not having intervened energetically and decisively enough in the notorious question of autonomisation, which, it appears, is officially called the question of the Soviet socialist republics. CB: Nonetheless, the problem of great power, Russian chauvinism would be pertinent to autonomous regions. Lenin doesn't say don't establish autonomous regions, but that the Party must struggle against Russian chauvinism in doing so. ( Russian chauvinism arose centuries before Stalin consolidated power) And Lenin outlines issues for struggling against chauvinism including affirmative action: That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or great nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question, he is still essentially petty bourgeois in his point of view and is, therefore, sure to descend to the bourgeois point of view
Israel pushing for Kurdish state?
by Devine, James . The terrorist theory is that by blowing things up, the powers that be will crack down and alienate the population, so that the population will join the insurgent movement. Specifically in Iraq, it's supposed to show that the US hasn't brought order to the country. The hope is that the people will blame the US for the killings. ^^ CB: Are none of these killings done by agent provacateurs undercover for the U.S. ?
Israel pushing for Kurdish state?
Devine, James wrote: yoshie writes: Only those who do not vote for Kerry or Bush have the moral standing to criticize foreign terrorists. why so much emphasis on an essentially powerless and thus meaningless act, an individual vote? ^^ CB: However, isn't this in response to criticism of the essentially powerless act of supporting the Iraqi resistance on an email list ?
Israel pushing for Kurdish state?
by Chris Doss --- If a Georgian with a goofy accent can be a Great Russian chauvinist. Let's see, Stalin - Georgian, Khrushchev = Ukrainian, Brezhnev = probably an ethnic Ukrainian from Moldova, Gorbachev = from Ukraine too... hey, were any of the Great Russian chauvinist leaders actually Russian? Nope. ^^ CB: Ah, but Chernenko, he was Russian :) http://lego70.tripod.com/image/ussr/chernenko.jpg Konstantin Ustinovich CHERNENKO b. September 11 [24], 1911, Bolshaya Tes', Minusinsk region, Yeniseysk province, Russian Empire d. March 10, 1985, Moscow, USSR Title: Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR () Term:April 11, 1984 - March 10, 1985 Elected: April 11, 1984, 1st session of the 11th Supreme Soviet Term began: April 11, 1984, took the chair after election End of term: March 10, 1985, deceased Born to a Russian peasant family in Siberia, Konstantin Chernenko the Communist Party in 1931 during his army service. In 1933-1941 he headed department of propaganda and agitation in Novosyolovo and Uyar regions. In 1941-1943 Chernenko was a secretary of the Krasnoyarsk regional party committee, but quit the job to study in the Higher School of Party Organizers, Moscow (1943-45). He was sent to Penza as a secretary of party provincial committee in charge of propaganda and agitation (1945-48). Then he was moved to Moldavia becoming head of agitation and propaganda department (1948-56), where he met Leonid Brezhnev http://lego70.tripod.com/ussr/brezhnev.htm , who brought him to Moscow (1956) to head mass agitation section of agitation and propaganda department of the Central Committee. In May 1960 - July 1965 Chernenko served as chief of the chancellery of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium. When Brezhnev took over the party leadership, he made Chernenko chief of the General Department (July 1965 - Nov. 1982). Elected a candidate member of the Central Committee (1966-1971) at the 23rd party congress, Chernenko was promoted to full membership (1971-1985) at the 24th congress. In 1976 he was elected secretary (March 5, 1976 - Feb. 13, 1984) of the Central Committee and joined the Politburo as candidate member (Oct. 3, 1977 - Nov. 27, 1978). Then he was quickly promoted to full membership (Nov. 27, 1978 - March 10, 1985). Chernenko was considered a close associate of Brezhnev, but after his death he was unable to rally a majority of the party factions behind his candidacy to be head of the party and lost out to Yury Andropov http://lego70.tripod.com/ussr/andropov.htm who became general secretary on Nov. 12, 1982. Andropov's reforms targeted at eliminating corruption and cutting privileges in the higher party ranks estranged the party bureaucracy. In attempt to return to Brezhnevism, the aging Politburo, of which seven members died in advanced age in 1982-1984, plumped for the conservative Chernenko, who was elected (Feb. 13, 1984) general secretary following the death of Andropov on Feb. 9. On April 11, 1984, Chernenko was elected chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. However, deteriorating health of Chernenko made him unfit to govern effectively. His frequent absences from official functions left little doubt that his election had been an interim measure. He died in office on March 10, 1985. Sources: Text: Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 3rd edition; Annual Supplements to the Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, 1985, 1986; Izvestiya TsK KPSS, 1990, No. 7, p. 130; The Britannica Encyclopaedia, Multimedia Edition, 1994-1998.
Israel pushing for Kurdish state?
by Louis Proyect -clip- ... and the failure to make socialist revolution in the West--a failure in itself directly attributable to the Kremlin's own lack of Marxist insights. CB: Failure to make socialist revolution in the West was not attributable to the Kremlin, was it ? Responsibility for that lies with the workers of the West.
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/business/29tax.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/29/business/29tax.html ? hp=pagewanted=printposition= July 29, 2004 I.R.S. Says Americans' Income Shrank for 2 Consecutive Years By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON The overall income Americans reported to the government shrank for two consecutive years after the Internet stock market bubble burst in 2000, the first time that has effectively happened since the modern tax system was introduced during World War II, newly disclosed information from the Internal Revenue Service shows.
Housing bust.
Aren't there some benefits to the working class for people to be able to buy houses for less ? Charles ^ by Devine, James July 25, 2004 GRETCHEN MORGENSON Housing Bust: It Won't Be Pretty LET the stock market slide. Let the bond market sink. As long as home prices keep rocking, it's easy for Americans to feel fat and happy. But what happens when the run-up in housing prices loses steam, or worse? The implications are sobering, not only for homeowners but also for the economy as a whole. With the growth rate for home prices starting to slow, now may be the time to ponder what a bear market in real estate may bring. A recent study by two economists at Goldman Sachs provides some answers. For now, prices are still climbing over all. The average home price in the nation rose 7.71 percent in the 12 months ended in March. But the first three months of this year showed far slower growth than previous periods. Prices rose only 0.96 percent, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which keeps an eye on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The last time housing prices grew by less than 1 percent in a quarter was in the spring of 1998. More ominous, six states showed declines in housing prices in the first quarter: Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska. No state had price declines in the previous quarter. -clip
An emerging labor-led left in the DP?
by Marvin Gandall -clip- -- which explains their stubborn refusal to buy the argument that the Democrats are inimical to the interests of working people. I think there will first have to be a major change in the way most people, especially in the cities, experience the system and the two parties for them to even begin to entertain that notion. ^ This might be true, but how would we explain so many working people voting for Republicans ? Charles
dean baker vs. the dot com and the tulip bubbles
by Perelman, Michael -clip- Mr. Hassett of the conservative American Enterprise Institute thinks housing prices will be pretty much O.K. He acknowledges there might be some bubble dynamics at play in some regions. But he argues that for the most part people are paying more for homes because their incomes are higher and interest rates are lower, reducing the cost to own a home. ^ CB: Sounds like he is saying people are paying more for homes because the cost of them is less. Isn't the market theory of prices supposed to be determined by supply and demand ? Yet supply of houses is not less, and demand is not more, so why higher prices , by that theory ?
dean baker vs. the dot com and the tulip bubbles
Oh , I see what you mean on demand. People are paying more for homes, because the cost of money is down ? How long can the cost of money stay down in a creditor class dominion ? How long ? Not long ? They $hall overcome. Then again who is selling the houses ? Is Dean Baker of Univ of Mich ? Charles by Michael Perelman He is saying that lower interest rates higher incomes increase demand. In itself that is reasonable, but the question is whether it is enough to explain the soaring costs of housing. If you know nothing about economics you have to choose between Dean Baker someone who predicted a 36,000 NASDAQ On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 03:48:50PM -0400, Charles Brown wrote: by Perelman, Michael -clip- Mr. Hassett of the conservative American Enterprise Institute thinks housing prices will be pretty much O.K. He acknowledges there might be some bubble dynamics at play in some regions. But he argues that for the most part people are paying more for homes because their incomes are higher and interest rates are lower, reducing the cost to own a home. ^ CB: Sounds like he is saying people are paying more for homes because the cost of them is less. Isn't the market theory of prices supposed to be determined by supply and demand ? Yet supply of houses is not less, and demand is not more, so why higher prices , by that theory ?
Rock Financial
This weekend, I heard a commercial by Rock Financial saying that mortgage rates had unexpectedly gone down , despite the Fed raising rates recently. (They said that on the commercial). Is this theliquidity trap ? C
Michael Moore letter to las vegas
by Craven, Jim Response Jim C: Look, whatever the problems or deficiencies in Moore's film from any ideological purist's point of view (or from the point of view of those familiar with even more salient facts/perspectives than mentioned by Moorer in his film), I do applaud his effort and that he did manage to get some salient facts across to some very diverse audiences that would have not otherwise been exposed to such facts. But if part of the story that is missing--in order to get across another part of the story in ways more acceptable on a mass level--undermines the part of the story being put across and/or creates further illusions, and mystifications--or outright bourgeois falsehoods and lies about America--then what is the point? But... This appeal to de jure formalism and what America is really about and what those who put on uniform are really fighting for is noxious. Our young people--and not-so-young people--who put on a uniform may believe they are fighting for the American Way, American Freedom, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, etc. but they are really fighting for imperialism, plutocracy, oligarchy, despotism, illusions, puppet client-states, imperial hegemony and hubris, conspicuous consumption, unbridled environmental degradation, racism, sexism, fascism, militarism, etc--on the objective level--and on the subjective level, they are often fighting for money for college education, self-esteem issues, hero-complex, travel, adventure, relatively good pay for relatively little formal education, training, skills, resume embellishment, the Audy-Murphy-syndrome, family traditions, etc. And no, not all Americans hold the Bill of Rights as sacred; certainly not those who vote for Bush and also a good percentage of those who vote for Kerry do not hold these de jure (hardly rights de facto) rights as sacred. Jim C. ^ CB: I'd pick and choose among the Bill of Rights. Among my favorite Amendments are 13 ( Lucky 13 !), 14, 15, 19, and the Amendment Provision itself. Lawyers and judges have interpreted the Constitution; the thing is to change it ! As you say, Jim, a lot of de jure, of ideals. But this is a bourgeois idealist constitution with the _First_ Amendment being freedom of Conscience -speech, religion, press. We materialists would make the number one Amendment - in fact, lets put it in the original text - as a right to a living, to exist materially, bodily and economically, to thrive. You have to able to eat in order to speak. This provision is a premise for making the right to speak de facto. But what is it to just exist ? We must be able to thrive. We need an ERA for women's equality, if we are going to get real about life and the facts of it. And lets take the War Power away from Congress, because they have , in violation of the Constitution, abdicated it to the Executive. I'm for an Amendment that requires a vote of We, the People, before war can be declared. Well, all this is still idealist, constiutionalist talk. We've got to critique all, new Gotha Programmes more. Meanwhile, it seems as though Michael Moore is doing more good than harm, but criticism-self-criticism is one of our modes.
Query: Ford/General Motors
what is progressive economist take on ford and general motors releasng info the other day indicating that each only made profits from credit/lending operations... michael hoover ^ You must be reading Detroit newspapers in Ann Arbor, Michael. Charles
Spam I got
Subj: Bush large shareholder - New USA Oil Find USA SMALL CAP REVIEW DMT Energy, Inc. (DMTY) RECORD SETTING HIGH PREDICTED THIS WEEK!! Current Price @ Close July 22 $0.55 7-Day Price Target $1.70 30-Day Price Target $2.30 12-Month Target $3.75 Shares Outs 25.0 M Float 3.8 M We hear News expected about a large find due out Monday The outlook for North American oil and gas exploration is extremely positive from an investment perspective, with increasing US energy demands projected over the near and long term sustaining major gains for oil and gas producers. The recent California energy crisis, the looming United States energy crunch (the most serious domestic energy situation since the 1970's), and the increasingly unstable international environment for oil and natural gas exploration and production, have placed a renewed emphasis on domestic energy exploration. While crude oil and natural gas prices on the spot market are likely to come off of their current highs, the immediate term price outlook remains favorable, and long term price projections forecast significant increases. Even as government and academia invest billions in the search for alternative sources of energy, the demand for natural gas and oil continues to grow and is expected to expand exponentially over the next twenty years. According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) the US demand for refined petroleum products will grow by over 35 percent in the next two decades, increasing from 18.0 million barrels per day in 1996 to over 24.6 million barrels per day by 2020, a 35% increase. The growth of domestic demand for natural gas, driven by expanding natural gas-fired electric generation plants, will be even more pronounced skyrocketing from current levels of roughly 23 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) to 32-37 Tcf by 2020. As the recent energy crisis in California has demonstrated, the US natural gas and energy supply will prove increasingly tenuous without additional and vigorous exploration and production efforts are undertaken. At the same time, the international situations in Iraq and Venezuela have show the vulnerability of US petroleum stocks and highlighted the urgent need for increased domestic production. The recent National Energy Policy of President Bush and Vice President Cheney has called for dramatically increased production of domestic oil and natural gas resources to meet this expanding domestic energy demand. For the petroleum industry, this renewed impetus on domestic exploration and production has led to several new developments that improve the likelihood of exploration success and the location of new reserves. Many of the technologies associated with oil and gas exploration have been significantly enhanced over the last several years, and the refinement of techniques such as three dimensional seismic imaging have made oil exploration far more efficient, increasing the accuracy of modeling and decreasing the chances of missing oil. The second way that oil exploration is becoming more efficient is the increased practice of reexamining properties that were no longer thought to be profitable. Many properties through the 1970's were extracted only using primary production techniques and then prematurely abandoned when production became more expensive and problematic, leaving significant quantities of oil and natural gas. It has been estimated that many of these early producing fields can contain as much as 50-60% of recoverable production. Smaller oil exploration and production companies, such as Newfield Exploration Oil (NYSE: NFX) and Houston Exploration Company (NYSE: THX) have enjoyed huge successes through employing strategies that focus on reworking overlooked and bypassed production properties. With a diversified portfolio of balanced oil gas properties, an exploration and production strategy that emphasized the importance of developing and exploiting overlooked and bypassed reserves with new technologies and innovative approaches, and a seasoned management team and advisory board with over 150 years of collective petroleum industry experience, DMT Energy, Inc. is well positioned to benefit from new oil and gas production initiatives. DMT Energy has developed an impressive portfolio of oil and gas properties in Alberta and British Columbia, and Northern Canada that have B potential for successful production over the near-to-intermediate term period with limited capital investment. The Company is capitalizing on both of the major trends in domestic oil and gas EP efforts, carefully selecting and screening properties for maximum potential of overlooked and bypassed production opportunities in oil producing area, and utilizing 3-D seismic and other advanced exploration techniques, including proprietary reservoir modeling techniques developed by EVP Don Hryhor, to mitigate risks. The Company is within months of beginning production efforts on its Acadia and Wainwright properties, where B oil gas
Query: Ford/General Motors
It made the Chicago papers too; I can't remember now, but I think there was a brief story on it in the Bloomington Pantagraph. GM Ford are big news reverberate outside the City of Eddie Guest. :-) Carrol ^ CB: Well GM is only about the third largest company in the world now. I wonder if what's good for General Motors is still good for America. Way back in the thirties it was Alfred P. Sloan ( I think) who said GM is in the business of making money ,not cars. Nice slogan for the merger of industrial and finance capital as Finance Capital. Alfred P. Sloan - encyclopedia article about Alfred P. Sloan. Free ...encyclopedia article about Alfred P. Sloan. Alfred P. Sloan explanation. ... Alfred P. Sloan. Word: Word. ... encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Alfred%20P.%20Sloan - Alfred P. Sloan. 1875-1966. ... Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Too often we fail to recognize. and pay tribute to the. creative spirit.. -Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. ... www.virtualology.com/virtualpubliclibrary/ halloffounders/automotivefounders/ALFREDPSLOAN.COM/ - 22k - Cached - Similar pages Alfred P. Sloan, Late Chairman of General Motors Corporation... The reason is that I have a famous relative, or at least my father and grandfather believed that he was our relative, namely Alfred P. Sloan. ... www.ishipress.com/al-sloan.htm - 7k - Cached - Similar pages Alfred P. Sloan Museum in Flint, MI - Details | MuseumStuff.comAlfred P. Sloan Museum details page from MuseumStuff.com, the web's leading guide to 1000's of museums worldwide. ... Alfred P. Sloan Museum. ... www.museumstuff.com/rec/org_20020201_10164.html - 7k - Cached - Similar pages ^^ High anxiety for U.S. automakers Big summer sales needed; suppliers, analysts fret July 23, 2004 BY JEFFREY MCCRACKEN FREE PRESS BUSINESS WRITER About 60 degrees and six months ago, during the Detroit auto show, there was a feeling of hope and optimism that an improving economy and slew of new and redesigned vehicles -- Chevrolet Corvette, Ford minivan, Chrysler 300 sedan -- would combine to increase Detroit automakers' sales while slowing down the rebates and incentives that wreak havoc on profits. Now, just past the year's halfway point, as second-quarter financial results pour out from General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and the area's largest auto suppliers, a new feeling is in the air: uncertainty. Or nervousness. Or concern. Whatever word is used to capture it, there is a definite sense that the second half of the year needs to go better than the first for Detroit's auto industry. Already, some are warning it won't. A number of Detroit's largest auto-parts makers -- such as Delphi Corp. and Visteon Corp. -- have told Wall Street they won't make as much as predicted in the third quarter or have given less-than-rosy projections for the rest of 2004. GM, too, gave the investors and analysts that cover them a cautious view of the year. I think the real fear among these auto executives is that they only can get better auto sales with huge incentives. The automakers, like GM, misplaced their bets that better employment and a better economy would eliminate the need for these rebates and low-interest deals, and that hasn't been the case, said Diane Swonk, chief economist for Bank One Corp. There is concern that if July and August aren't blockbuster sales months for Detroit's three automakers -- especially GM -- they will have to slam on the brakes of vehicle production, which would cause a ripple effect across the industry and might push small suppliers into bankruptcy. The big fear: GM will need to idle some plants in the fourth quarter, and other automakers will follow suit. Already, GM's and Ford's plans for how many cars and trucks they will build from July through September are lower than they were last year by about 76,000 vehicles. Ford's third-quarter production plan calls for it to build 755,000 cars and trucks, the lowest third-quarter number in the automaker's history. GM's third-quarter production of 1.2 million vehicles is the lowest it has been since the 1990s and down about 4 percent from a year ago. GM and Ford will announce their production plans for the rest of the year Sept. 1, making that an important day in the immediate future of many Detroit suppliers. There are quite a few suppliers around town that are watching to see what happens because they are so dependent on GM and the domestics. If GM decides to pull back a lot, that will send a message to the whole industry and have some scary ripples for some local suppliers, said Jeff Schuster, executive director of vehicle forecasting at J.D. Power and Associates, the market analysis firm. Really, what Detroit needs is just a big, big sales month in July and August from the traditional Big Three. Schuster's firm recently lowered its production expectation for the rest of the year by about 100,000 cars and trucks. Schuster called that just a minor tweak. But noted it would have been lower, except
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by Ted Winslow The ontological idea of internal relations, the idea that makes Marx's analysis of capitalism dialectical, leads to the treatment of law as immanent. The nature of individuals, in the case of human individuals the degree of their rational self-consciousness as expressed in their motives and, based on these, their characteristic forms of behaviour, is the product of their relations. CB: Ted, here you seem to say that Marx's analysis has the virtue of using internal relations. But at the end of this post you seem to imply that despite his use of internal relations , his absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is mistaken, when you say: These claims about how a subjectivity willing and able to transform productive relations into rational relations are mistaken. Individuals immiserized in this way would ( not) be subjects of this kind. there is no necessity, however, for capitalism to produce immiserization. The organic composition of capital doesn't have to change in the way marx assumes. For this and other reasons, the creation of an industrial reserve army isn't a necessity i.e. a necessary feature of these relations. Nor is it necessary that: they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. One way of actually creating the kind of subjectivity required is to modify the working of capitalist relations so as to make them more and more consistent with the development of such a subjectivity. This requires that their existing form be consistent with a subjectivity sufficiently well developed to desire and create improvements such as reduction of the working day, increased wages, less alienated labour, improved developmental conditions for children, etc. In Canada, for instance, the political context has just been transformed by an election which has made it more likely that the existing medicare system will be significantly improved, that a national child care system attuned to some signfifcant degree to the developmental needs of children will be created, and that cities will be made better places to work and live. ^ CB: Nothing wrong with saying Marx is wrong, but what good is his internal relations approach if he makes a mistake , and especially on the fundamental issue of whether immiseration is a necessary result of capitalist relations of production ? I mean aside from internal relations, it seems more significant that you are the first one I recall on this thread who has said the law is invalid. You say both that the proletariat is not prepared by immiseration to be the subjectivity that ends capitalism , and that capitalism does not necessarily have to immiserate. You seem to be advocating a reform of capitalism, rather than a revolution to socialism. Do I read you correctly ?
United Nations Human Indicators Index 2004
by Doug Henwood That was long ago, in the HDI's early days. In the first iteration, the U.S. scored badly. As someone in the UN told me, orders came down from the top - the White House - to make the numbers look better. And they were remade to look better in subsequent years. One reason - the first Bush admin had published docs saying illiteracy rates in the U.S. were in the low teens. The HDI people picked up on this, hammering the U.S. standing. Literacy was dropped in favor of school enrollment stats, on which the U.S. does well. ^^^ CB: I notice they seem to just assume a 99% literacy rate for the U.S. ( footnote e ?) ? Is this a fudge ?
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by Chris Doss For formal logic , arriving at a contradiction means there is a mistake, something is false. -- Technically, this is false. In logic, ever since Plato, the rule has been that something cannot both be and not be in the same way at the same time. Dialectics in Hegel and Marx do not deny this; they are more interested in seeing how different trends within a single phenomenon cause it to break apart ^ CB: What's the difference between what you said and what I said ? I believe you state the rule of non-contradiction, which is what I am referring to.
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation/dialectics and logic
by Devine, James -clip- But for Marx, a contradiction was an empirical (real, practical) phenomenon, unlike the contradiction in logic. A social organization -- such as capitalism -- was a whole or totality, but in its structure, there were different parts that didn't work together well. (Kinda like putting an English-unit part in a car that has an engine that was specified built using metric units, as my father did once. Or like when NASA used metric and the private contractor used the English system, so the Mars probe crashed.) In Marx's case, the contradictions of capitalism were problems within the system such as class antagonism and competition amongst the capitalists, summarized by Engels as the contradiction between socialized production (the whole) and individualized appropriation (the parts). CB: Wouldn't you say that also for Marx, contradictions in the capitalist system are the motives for it to change into a different system, i.e. socialism ? Contradiction as the basis for change is a dialectical concept. Marx deals with dialectical, not formal logical contradictions. The contradictions dealt with in the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation are the poverty and unemployment that inherently accompany technological progress under capitalist relations of production, a contradiction of regress and progress, with regress being absolute and progress relative.
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by Chris Doss 21 July 2004 12:29 UTC CB: What's the difference between what you said and what I said ? I believe you state the rule of non-contradiction, which is what I am referring to. --- I thought you were implying that Marx and Hegel denied the RoNC. Maybe I misread you. ^^ CB: I can see how you might have misunderstood what I meant. I am saying that Hegel ( and Marx) employ both formal logic and dialectical logic. Within formal logic , they recognize the rule of non-contradiction. Within dialectical logic, contradictions are fruitful and important. There is no rule against contradiction, rather contradictions are sought, so to speak.
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation/dialectics and logic
by Devine, James I don't know about motives, but obviously for Marx, the contradictions in capitalism create possibilities for the emergence of socialism. CB: OK. Instead of motives , causes for it to change. The dialectical idea is that everything changes, and the change is based on the contradictions within the thing changing, and what it changes to is determined by the nature of those contradictions, I think. The contradiction of class divided society causes society to move toward classless society. This is a main preservation of Hegelian dialectics in Marx's sublation of Hegel. ^^ The contradictions dealt with in the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation are the poverty and unemployment that inherently accompany technological progress under capitalist relations of production, a contradiction of regress and progress, with regress being absolute and progress relative. I'd say that poverty and unemployment are _results_ of the contradiction. ^^ CB: A result of which contradiction ?
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by Chris Doss --- It is a system of logic in the Hegelian sense of the word, which refers to the relationships between ideas as the develop in the unfolding of Absolute Spirit. Hegel was using the word Logik with its Greek root, logos, in mind, esp. the use of logos in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy as a technical term for the rational order underlying all things, as in the Bible's en genesei en ho logos (in the beginning was the word [rational ordering priniciple]), or the Stoic happit of equating logos, nous (mind) and Zeus, the divinity. This is not logic in the Aristotelian or Russellian senses. ^ CB: In the context of this thread, in which the comparison between logic , grammar and math is thrown out there, I was going to mention logos as the root of logic, since word suggests the comparison and overlap between grammar (or language) and logic. Grammar, logic and math are systems of ordered symbols. The word was important at the beginning of the human species, because language was important. Perhaps the Gospel reflects this fact.
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by Devine, James dialectical thinking is a system of logic in the Hegelian sense of the word, [which] is not logic in the Aristotelian or Russellian senses. exactly. ^ The Aristotelian and Russllian senses are formal logic, for which the first principle is non-contradiction. Non-contradiction seems to be a principle that math shares with formal logic. A fundamental form of math proof or disproof is to make an assumption and derive a contradiction. For dialectics the first principle is contradiction. So, yes dialectics is not the same as formal logic ( Aristotelian and Russellian). For formal logic , arriving at a contradiction means there is a mistake, something is false. For dialectics, contradictions can be fruitful, drive the process to finding a truth. A dialectical question might be what contradictions is Marx dealing with in the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation ? Charles
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by Devine, James Charles asks:Are you saying someone has put Hegel ( or dialectics) into simpler language ? No. I'm saying that Marx's dialectical and materialist perspective (in CAPITAL) can be translated into relatively common-sense terms by using a non-Hegelian language. Jd ^^^ I'm thinking the use of absolute in the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is in the opposition absolute/relative, as in absolute and relative surplus value and other usages. However, here , Marx does not mention a relative. Perhaps these are the exceptions , the non-all other things being equal, aspects. He mentions countervailing tendencies when he describes the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. But here he says there are relative tendencies , but does not discuss them. This seems a way to emphasize this particular law, maybe. The funny thing is dialectics is logic. So, it is a way of talking about things. Formal logic is a linguistic project. Why not dialectical logic to some extent ? I certainly am not opposed to the translation you suggest above. CB
Venture Communism/morped/ Socialism Betrayed
by Waistline2 [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: CB: Yes, the South started the Civil War (a counter-revolutionary coup d'etat see Aptheker) because the slave system could only survive by constantly expanding geographically ,i.e. by geographical extension, or extensive development. Marx discusses this in his essays on the Civil War and U.S. economy at that time. Reply My understanding is that the plantation South attempted to secede from the Union . . . but that is not the point. By counterrevolution in the American Union . . . the Civil War itself is not referred to but rather the period of history constituting the overthrow of Reconstruction . . . or the chain of events that was the result of the Hayes Tilden agreement of 1876 . . . leading to Plessy versus Ferguson. ^^ CB: Yes, I can see use of counterrevolution in this post-Civil War context. Aptheker has the thesis that the initiation of the Civil War itself was a counterrevolution, because the election of Lincoln was essentially a revolution ( a change in the mode of production because a major form of property was negated) . Lincoln's election was a revolution, not because the he and the Republicans advocated abolition of slavery in the South, but because they were for forbidding the slave system to _extend_ in the terminology you have introduced, extensive territorial development. And since the slave form of organization could not develop intensively ( as you say below), it would die if it couldn't develop extensively, therefore Lincoln's policy would indirectly abolish slavery, was a revolution and the Southern firing on Fort Sumter was a counterrevolutionary assault. Also, the slavocracy had been the ruling class of the whole U.S. the period before the Civil War for , well all of it right back to Washington and Jefferson really. The South controlled the Presidency and the Supreme Court. The Democratic Parties were the parties of the Slavocracy. So, Lincoln's election was a rev overthrowing the slavocratic ruling class. This is Aptheker's explicit thesis, but really a lot of it is in Marx's writing on the U.S. Civil War. However, I understand your use of counterrevolution for Post-Reconstruction. The Civil War counterrevolution failed,was defeated. The Counterrevolution you discuss succeeded. ^ One aspect - among several factors, of the outward expansion of the system of plantation slavery is the form of labor itself and the laboring process of gangs of slaves. The form of the laboring process of the slave system contains its own barrier that prevents an internal intensive development. This limitation of the form of slave labor has everything to do with the tools and energy source deployed by masses of slaves. ^ CB: Well, it is the property form - human beings owned - that limits what the masters can trust the slaves with. Marx has a specific passage on this. I'll look for it. Empirically, slaves would tear up a form of machinery quicker. Slaves are more readily Luddites. But this is generated by the property relationship between slave and master , not the form of the technology. ^^^ Actually . . . we discussed this issue before . . . Sartesian, yourself and myself and it is all right to disagree over the form of the laboring process . . . the economic character of plantation slavery . . . why it was not a form of primitive accumulation . . . etc. ^ CB: Right. Slavery in 1860 is no longer primitive accumulation. Slavery at the time of the primitive accumulation of all capitalism in the 1400 and 1500's is one of the things that Marx terms the chief momenta of the primitive accumulation. ^^ Extensive and intensive development of the material power of production are not isolated categories . . . yet what is being discussed is on what basis the form of the laboring process itself is changed and what constitute a revolution in the form of the labor process - the basis or internal components of it intensive development . . . as opposed to extensive expansion. A soft ware programmer in the same building as a machinists is a different creature expressing a change in the form of the laboring process. The productive forces are revolutionized . . . sublated . . . and by definition this takes place incrementally. For instance, providing the slaves with better plows, hoes, etc., and the driver man with a better whip, cannot lead to the internal intensive development of agricultural production beyond the point of human muscle effort . . . because the form of slave labor as a laboring process contains its own barrier. This self contained barrier can only be shattered - sublated, with the development of the means of production . . . that is tools, instruments and machine development driven by a different energy source . . . radically different from the tools, instruments and energy source underlying the form of slave labor. Providing slaves with a tractor constitutes a revolution in the form of the laboring process . . .
/morped/ Socialism Betrayed - the property relations within, its meaning
by Waistline2 From the standpoint of the form of slave labor prior to Emancipation to Emancipation - (which ended in counterrevolution that would eventually trap five million blacks and six million whites in the sharecropping system), to deployment of the mechanical cotton picker and the tractor . . . to the growth of the huge industrial farms to the emergence of frankenfoods . . . or the application of science - biogenetic, to farming . . . we are speak of a huge revolution in the mode of production. The fact of the matter is that the instruments . . . tools . . . deployment of human labor as the primary energy source of Southern agriculture did not change between say 1865 and 1900. With all due respect to Mr. Aptheker . . . I profoundly disagree that Lincoln's election constituted a revolution. I also have disagreed with his economic description of slavery and the aftermath of the Civil War for the past 30 years. ^^ CB: The slavocratic ruling class recognized it as a revolution. That's why they started the Civil War. ^ Such is life. ^ CB: C'est la guerre. ^ What is being spoken of is a qualitatively different production process that forever changes the form of the laboring process that arose and emerged with the industrial system. The implications are staggering because this qualitatively new production technique - regime, begins unraveling and shattering the commodity form and value. This does not mean that all of the old mode of production (laboring process) disappears . . . but rather the old process is sublated. Farming still takes place in the Mississippi Delta using a set of instruments and machinery half a century old. ^ CB: Sure there are new qualities to the production process due to computers, but there were new qualities added to the production process by use of electricity, the internal combustion engine, the use of oil as fuel, telephonic and radio commuication, etc., etc. all post 1867. The bourgeoisie constantly _revolutionize_ ( a contradiction) the instruments of production. ^ The meaning of the property relations within is the property relations within a given mode of production. In my opinion this is at the base of our divergence and most Marxists have in the past defined modes of production on the basis of the form of the labor process . . . like slavery, feudalism and capitalism. I am aware that I divergence from this description, while remaining consistent with the method Marx deploys in describing the advance of industry in the Communist Manifesto and Engels description of the advance of industry in Anti-Durhing. Here is what Marx states concerning the property relations within: At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface -abs.htm The property relations within are not simply within the legal expression as abstraction . . . because what the legal expresses is relations of production or how people are aggregated together to utilize a given state of development of the mode of production. ^^ CB: OK. The passage you quote equates relations of production and property relations. ...the existing relations of production, or what is but a legal expression for the same thing with the property relations... The property relations within which the forces of production developed were a combination of wage-labor and capital and slave-labor and capital. When slave labor-capital was overthrown, this was revolutionary because it change the fundamental property relations within which the forces of production had been at work hitherto. The slave-capital relationship couldn't contain the full technological development potential of Modern Industry. ^ From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. The productive forces begin with human being and the specific mode of human labor + tools, instruments and/or machinery + energy source and how they are organized. How the people are organized are the relations being referred to this relation becomes a fetter in the face of the development of the productive forces - with the property relations within. ^^ CB: Well, property relations within WHICH the productive forces work ^^ The issue connected to Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny is the economic phenomena inherit to an industrial mode of production . . . no matter what the property relations within. ^ CB: Yea, I haven't read that book, but you pose the issue as it
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by Devine, James Charles writes: The funny thing is dialectics is logic. So, it is a way of talking about things. Formal logic is a linguistic project. Why not dialectical logic to some extent ? what exactly is logic then? I'm no expert on philosophy, but it seems to me that dialectics isn't a logic in the same sense that formal logic is a logic. (My handy-dandy DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION: EASTERN AND WESTERN THOUGHT, by W.L. Reese, defines logic as The theory of the conditions of valid ... [inference, i.e.,] passage from one or more statements which are called premises to a further statement called the conclusion.) If dialectics form a system of logic, it's one that's qualitatively different from formal logic. In fact, I'd call them a system of heuristics (which Webster's defines as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving ... that utilize self-educating techniques). ^^ CB: In part calling it logic comes from Hegel's book title _The Science of Logic_. To me you are correct that dialectical logic is qualitatively different than formal logic, although, I think Hegel's approach is that formal logic is part of dialectical logic. For short, the main principle of formal logic is non-contradiction ,whereas dialectics' first principle is contradiction. In formal logic, a thing must be identical with itself. In dialectical logic, as a way of expressing the fact that everything changes, a thing is not identical with itself. Of course, I didn't think of this, but got it from various Marxist commentaries on dialectics. Formal logic looks at a connection premises X...Z imply conclusion A and says either no they don't or yes they do. On the other hand, it seems to me that dialectics centers on empirical investigation, saying that we need to look at the big picture. A dialectician might say that it's true that premises X...Z logically imply conclusion A, but you left out a lot of stuff. Premise B isn't true, while because of factors F, G, and H, this proposition isn't empirically relevant. An example: there's a bunch of economists called the social choice school that derives all sorts of of theorems from their math (mostly about how bad democracy is and therefore how wonderful the market is). My (dialectical) response: you fools ignore the empirical fact that under capitalism, democracy works following the principle of one dollar, one vote much more than it follows the one person one vote principle that you assume. CB: Let me consider your idea. I haven't thought of it this way. Of course, there is the dialectical dictum that the truth is concrete. Perhaps, that is some of what you are getting at ? ^^ To my mind, Marx Engels were very strongly empirical in their orientation (without being empiricist). Their critique of Saint Max (no relation to Saint Max Sawicky) and his friends in THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY starts with the idea that Max _et al_ are talking about a revolution in thought but what really counts are revolutions in practice and, more generally, the empirical world of production, social relationships, history, etc. Given this empirical/practical orientation, it makes sense to embrace Hegel's dialectical heuristics and turn them upside down, away from speculation and toward humanity. jim devine CB: Yes, I think Gould referred to dialectics as a heuristic. I had a thought about that when it was raised years ago on Thaxis by Jim Farmelant, but I have to go into my memory banks. Of course there is this which has probably been copied here before: My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of the Idea, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of the Idea. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of Das Kapital, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre 'Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a dead dog. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell. In its
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by Gil Skillman Charles Brown wrote: by Devine, James Charles writes: The funny thing is dialectics is logic. So, it is a way of talking about things. Formal logic is a linguistic project. To which Ravi responds: i am not sure who wrote what, but addressing the above: i would submit that formal logic is a mathematical project, not a linguistic one (even wittgenstein might agree). fwiw, i agree with most of the rest of charles' summation of logic. For an in-depth defense and exploration of the idea that logic is grounded in mathematics rather than vice-versa, see G. Spencer-Brown's classic LAWS OF FORM. His argument rebuts the notion that formal logic is a linguistic project: Spencer-Brown's argument is that, given any consistent distinction (and thus any specific linguistic structure), and two rules, (essentially): 1) a double affirmative is equivalent to an affirmative ( Is is = is) and 2) a double negative is equivalent to an affirmative ( Not not = is), then certain results unavoidably follow, *whatever* the distinction or linguistic structure you begin with. Gil ^ CB: I want to go dialectical on y'all and say logic is mathematical and linguistic, but I am curious on the essential distinction between linguistics and mathematics implied here. As a coincidental side note, I have been trying to teach some math to my son, and I just decided to focus on word definitions. So, mathematics is linguistic is another proposition :) Anyway, I wonder if the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation is not an empirical generalization, but a statement of a theoretical conclusion or something. One of the earlier posts raised this. But, maybe if it is empirical and secular, it is intended to be monotonic, as Waistline compared it to the law of gravity. Focus on this might draw attention away from the issue of crisis cycles. Capitalism is continuously ( secularly) creating poverty, not just cyclically.
math
Math, grammar and logic are all sets of rules on how to use symbols. CB by Devine, James [was: RE: [PEN-L] absolute general law of capitalist accumulation] Charles writes: CB: I want to go dialectical on y'all and say logic is mathematical and linguistic, but I am curious on the essential distinction between linguistics and mathematics implied here. it's possible that math might be part of Chomsky's transformational grammar, i.e., the structure of human language that is inborn (built-in) in the human brain? In that case, math is linguistic, but not merely so. It seems to me that math represents the abstract aspects of reality. But since it leaves out the concrete, it must be incomplete. (oops, I'm going Johnny Cochrane on y'all.) jd
Venture Communism
by sartesian 17 July 2004 16:13 UTC Shares of what acquired by labor instead of property? What are you going to acquire buy your arm and hammer buy outs? Exxon? Flextronics? Tinto Rio? Coca-Cola? I don't think so. You cannot buy out, substitute, or displace the existing social accumulation. You can seize it, destroy it, etc. Splitting profits equally? No such thing. Oxymoron. Profits by definition are a function of inequality. And as soon as your isolated communist community comes into contact with the world of finance capital, you're venture begins its morping into good old private capitalism. Plenty of history to demonstrate all of the above and all of the above are compressed in the history of the Russian Revolution. ^^ CB: Right down to an almost literal Armand Hammer buyout ?
Venture Communism/morped/ Socialism Betrayed
by Waistline2 Comment Socialism Betrayed - Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny is worth owning and reading several times. On a scale of 1 - 10 . . . I would rate it 7.5. The 2.5 which prevents it from being a 10 . . . are highly theoretical and . . . has to do with the specific ideology and politics of the authors. Nevertheless, I would suggest the book to anyone seeking a general view of what happened ushering in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Why do communists fight over questions of extensive versus intensive development and financial markets as regulators of production? To answer the question one has to develop an understanding of the mechanics of industrial production and the shape of reproduction as determined by different property relations. Is central planning the essence of industrial socialism and why is it necessary to speak of industrial socialism and not simply socialism? Central planning is a method of something else and not . . . the something else. If Central planning is the method of something else then we have to define the something else. First of all central planning means the allocation of resources and labor power towards economic development and expansion . . . and this exists not as an abstraction . . . but in relationship to planning on the basis of property rights. Individuals owning the power of capital or capitalism and endowed with the legal right to invest and organized the material power of production gives a specific shape to how reproduction takes place and on what basis. The basis is what is profitable to me as an individual corporate entity and this individualism becomes the driving feature of a system of reproduction. Individuals owning the power of capital as factories and having the social power - authority, to hire labor power and put it to work, or accumulate the power of money as property can reinvest this money into production and create a distinct shape of the cycles of reproduction. What is fundamental to socialism and most certainly industrial socialism is the property relations or the property rights of individuals . . . acting and behaving as individuals. Property relations does not mean workers control. Property relations or property rights refer to the rights of individual members of society in relationship to the factors of production. Property rights under Soviet industrial socialism meant that individuals did not have the legal right to convert money possession or governmental authority into individual ownership of the means of production . . . especially in the industrial infrastructure. Individual ownership of means of production imparts an individual will to reproduction that comes into conflict with other individual wills as competition over market shares. In Marx Critique of the Gotha Program he makes this fairly clear and when speaking of the transition to a communist society, states that nothing but means of consumption can pass into the hands of individuals. According to the Communists in the Soviet Union - writing during the early 1960s, what you had in the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev, was the development of a caricature of the bourgeoisie . . . these are their exact words . . . and not simply a petty bourgeoisie. Keeran and Kenny's insights and articulation of the extensive and intensive development of the second economy (black market) is extremely insightful and important and explains how the caricature of the bourgeoisie was able to usher in the counter revolution and abolish public property in the industrial infrastructure and change the cycle of reproduction. What is the origin of this caricature of the bourgeoisie . . . according to the Soviet communist? This caricature of the bourgeoisie is not a petty bourgeoisie as I understand the meaning of the term or small scale producer laboring in the second economy but an excretion of the state . . . while the low scale producer in the second economy is an expression of shortage and the value relationship in any industrial society. Then it is helpful that one has an understanding of the history of the system that was the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . which was never reducible to the state or the party. The system of the dictatorship of the proletariat is described in remarkable detail by Mr. J. Stalin as the series of transmission belts - organizations of people, that allows production and distribution to take place outside the bourgeois property relations and not just Soviets. This system of transmission belts required central planning as the basis of extensive industrial development. There is of course the question of the bureaucracy that needs to be unraveled and part of this is because of the impact of the ideologists. Those not familiar with the mechanics of the evolution of industrial society . . . falsely collapse the state, government and party system with the industrial bureaucracy as an incomprehensible mass.
Venture Communism
by Dmytri Kleiner You cannot buy out, substitute, or displace the existing social accumulation. You can seize it, destroy it, etc. Please explain why you believe this is so. Capital can be seized, social accumulation is accumulated capital, therefor social accumlation can be seized. Capital can be destroyed, social accumulation is accumulated capital, therefor social accumlation can be destroyed. Capital can be purchaced, social accumulation is accumulated capital, therefor social accumlation can be purchaced. Why do you think the last syllogism is different from the first two? ^^ SOME capital can be purchased. ALL of it cannot be purchased. MOST of it cannot be purchased by us. To buyout capitalism , you have to buy all of it, pretty much, no ? Charles
frontiers of intellectual property
You know what they say. Possession of a lawyer is nine-tenths of the law. Possession of the Constitution is probably worth about .9 of the law. So, those prices are inflated. Charles ^^^ by Perelman, Michael Porges, Seth. 2004. We The People...Can't Make Copies? Business Week (12 July): p. 12. How much is the U.S. Constitution worth to you? On Amazon.com, the going rate is $2.99. A copy of the founding document, long in the public domain, can be acquired easily and legally for free on the Internet or at any public library. But e-book publisher NuVision Publications has begun selling it online as an e-book in an encrypted format that can be printed only twice per year. Oddly enough, people seem to be buying the Constitution. The e-book's Amazon sales ranking, as of June 29, was a respectable 1,016 out of the hundreds of thousands of books Amazon sells on its Web site. That's despite the fact that helping someone print the e-book more than twice could violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that forbids tampering with anti-piracy protections, according to Wendy Seltzer, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Venture Communism/morped/ Socialism Betrayed
by Waistline2 Comment Post industrial is defined on the basis of that which distinguishes manufacture from industrial. ^ CB: Looking at the elements that distinguish manufacture from industrial, I wouldn't call it post because it makes it seem that he elements that distinguish industry from manufacture have abated or something. Rather the elements that distinguished industry from manufaucture have been augmented by the revolutions in communication, transportation and cyberization. Also, post-industrial has specific baggage from its use in bourgeois literature. ^^^ No one defines the industrial system as the manufacturing system or the industrial bureaucracy as the bureaucracy of the manufacturing process because of the specific combination of human labor + resources + energy grid as a process. The world technological regime that is evolving in no way resembles one big industrial machine . . . ^ CB: One big industrial factory, not machine. Sure, the division of labor , the socialization of production continues to increase. This is a process Marx and Engels noted that has not abated. ^^ or an extensively developed industrial machine embracing the world as a system of electro- mechanical process. The period of history of extensive development of increasingly large industrial factories, as the basis of increased production as the primarily signature of industrial society - electromechanical process, is over. CB: Right, the individual factories are not getting larger. The points of production are more geographically scattered, however they are more integrated with each other, such that their combination becomes like a big factory spread over a giant geographical area. Cyberization-worldwideweb communication and advanced transportation make this possible. This isn't a return to manufacture. Rather the machine aspect of industry is so augmented that the bringing workers together physically close in a factory like old Ford Rouge is not necessary. ^ This does not mean there will be no more industrial machines on earth. The word post in post industrial society means that the extensive and intense development of the productive forces as driven by the electro mechanical process is halted and a different process of radical intensive development and expansion of the material power of production is under way. ^^ CB: Disagree. Cyberization is a continuation and qualitative leap in exactly the electro mechanical process. The productive forces are still driven by the new developments in the electro mechanical processs. CAD-CAM, just in time delivery, containerization, more and more trucks, jets, international cyberspace, steel mini-mills are all new aspects of the electro mechanical process,not at all an indication of that process's end. ^ Manufacture is the predominance of man over machine and strictly speaking means hand . . . human and animal power as energy grid. Manufacture refers to a period of history before the emergence and domination of machino-facture and steam power. ^ CB: Agree. Machino-facture and steam power, and as we discussed a number of times, Co-operation as termed by Marx. Co-operation and Machinery are the two main elements that Marx notes as constituting Modern Industry: Part IV: Production of Relative Surplus Value Ch. 12: The Concept of Relative Surplus-Value Ch. 13: Co-operation Ch. 14: Division of Labour and Manufacture Ch. 15: Machinery and Modern Industry Co-operation is being negated. Machinery , especially electro (post steam energy grid) mechanical processes are being augmented, not negated. ^^6 Industrial production proper is an electromechanical process that supersede or sublates machino-facture and steam power. CB: I'd use Industrial production proper as equivalent to how Marx defines it the above sections of Capital I. as Modern Industry. The shift to electricity and oil from steam does not touch the essence of _industry_, which is co-operation + machines, whether the machines are steam or oil and electricity powered. ^^^ The post industrial society in front of us is not a further extensive development of the electro- mechanical process but the evolution of the electro-computerized era. It is this electro-computerized process that makes a revolutionary intensive development and expansion of the material power of productive forces possible. CB: I'd call it superindustrial, because the machines are augmented by the computers, and the machines are the absolute in industry and the cooperation is the relative term. The scattering of the co-operation is better termed more industrial rather than post industrial. Industry also refers to the large number of products produced, mass production. This also continues. Post-industrial sounds like there is no longer massproduction. There is more mass production than ever. ^^ The industrial bureaucracy does not simply go away but is sublated and
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation/ Hegel/Marx
Hegel Marx by Ted Winslow Whitehead's ontology is a scientific worldview. It's a sublation of the scientific materialist form of science that includes, for instance, a sublation of relativity and quantum theory. ^ CB: So what is overcome and what is preserved ? The sublation produces an ontology consistent with the existence of freedom not only as self-determination, but as self-determination potentially able, in the case of human being, to take the form of a will proper and a universal will. As I've pointed out before, Whitehead makes science in this enlarged sense the essence of freedom understood as the practicability of purpose, a conception of freedom he explicitly associates with the economic interpretation of history. CB: So, is he rediscovering Engels on these issues ? ^^^ Scientific materialism has no logical space for self-determination in any form let alone this one, ^^ CB: What do you mean by scientific materialism ? ^ i.e. no room for will where we mean by this some degree of self-determination. This produces logical incoherence, as in the claim that science so conceived can enhance human freedom. A will proper contrasts with an animal will which has more of less limitation or a content which is immediately extant through nature. ^ CB: Human will in contrast with animal will has much more social content, including especially social connections to life experience and activities of now dead generations of humans. This is the main difference between human and animal consciousness/will. Referring to your previous post crtiicizing Darwin, Lewontin, et.al, since Darwin, Lewontin and other biologists are dealing with animals, the will proper wouldn't play the same role for them as in dealing with human society, right ? ^^ The Will Proper, or the Higher Appetite, is (a) pure indeterminateness of the Ego, which as such has no limitation or a content which is immediately extant through nature but is indifferent towards any and every determinateness. (b) The Ego can, at the same time, pass over to a determinateness and make a choice of some one or other and then actualize it. (Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic p. 2) In the articles I recently cited, Julie Nelson appropriates an object relations psychoanalytic interpretation both of the dogmatic misidentification of science with scientific materialist ontological premises and of the inability of minds dogmatically attached to these premises to comprehend alternative premises such as the premise that relations are internal. CB: How does the concept of internal relations help explicate the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation ? ^^^ On this basis she makes the following claims: This feminist critique of economic methodology, then, springs not from ad hoc dissatisfaction with various aspects, but from a deep analysis of the social, historical, and psychosexual meanings the traditional image of science holds for its participants. The idea that the universe may be open, in some ways fundamentally unpredictable, and intrinsically purposive ^^ CB: Unpredictable , yet purposive ? Doesn't knowing the purpose give a basis to predict ? ^^ - in contrast to being a closed system, ultimately distillable into formulae, controllable, and fundamentally indifferent - is not simply a reasonable alternative ontology that can be carefully weighed for its logical implications and neutrally evaluated for its relative merits. As Harding writes, 'it requires a great deal more than just 'clear thinking' to dislodge ... ontologies from their status as obvious' (1999: 130). The idea of an open universe feels fundamentally _scary_ for those who sense that not only their status as scientists set above the objects they study, but also their safety vis-a-vis chaos, their 'manhood' (whether actual, or, in the case of female scientists, symbolic), and their very own distinct selfhood are threatened unless they can keep the living, novel, relational aspects of nature safely at bay. Feminists who delve into the historical, social, emotional, and psychosexual dynamics that have kept women suppressed and oppressed have found a complex of dualistic, hierarchical belief patterns that manifest themselves not only in the social realm, but also in intellectual (and religious and artistic) endeavors. Historically, well-reasoned criticisms of neoclassical economics - targeting its unrealistic assumptions, narrow methodology, over-formalism, false detachment, etc. - have been legion, as any perusal of a bibliographic database will show. Also historically, they have generally failed to alter the mainstream ideas of the discipline. Yet the present feminist analysis does not simply add to this legion of critiques; it suggests, at a basic emotional and motivational level, that such critique is suppressed because it is _feared_. It points out how reasonableness is taking a
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
In the following Engels uses the categories absolute and relative to analyze Hegel. See especially the last sentence in the passage below. Perhaps this usage can help understand Marx's use of absolute in the absolute law of capitalist accumulation. CB ^^ Frederick Engels' LUDWIG FEUERBACH AND THE END OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY part 1 HEGEL -Clip- But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves), that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained. And what holds good for the realm of philosophical knowledge holds good also for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical action. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect state, are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses vitality and justification. It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute -- the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits. http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1886-ECGP/lf1.html
Hegel Marx
by Ted Winslow This misinterprets Whitehead. Like Marx's, his ontology is alternative to and radically inconsistent with the materialist ontology that has dominated science since the 17th century. In elaborating it, he provides a systematic critique of this scientific materialism in all its forms (including the Darwinian form embraced by Lewontin, Levins and Gould). Scientific materialism is anti-humanist and anti-subjective where we mean by an ontology that is humanist and subjective one having logical space for the conception of human being as a being capable of the kind of self-determination expressible by Hegel's ideas of a will proper and a universal will. ^ CB: Perhaps a scientific worldview enhances achievement of self-determinaton through greater mastery of necessity and thereby freedom. Radical acknowledgement of objective reality implies the existence of subjective reality. Darwin, Lewontin, Levin and Gould's work concern an area with a lot of non-human wills (improper wills ?), animal psychology. A dialectical materialist approach to biology is not identical with Hegel's. ^^ Specifically Whitehead is, as I've many times indicated, an adherent of the doctrine of relations as internal. Among other things he points to the implications of this doctrine for logic and language mentioned in my previous e-mail. In all this his ontological beliefs contrast sharply with Russell's (as Russell himself indicates). Here are some passages from the two of them which include consideration of the implications of the doctrine for language, logic, arithmetic and counting. So far, this lecture has proceeded in the form of dogmatic statement. What is the evidence to which it appeals? The only answer is the reaction of our own nature to the general aspect of life in the Universe. This answer involves complete disagreement with a widespread tradition of philosophic thought. This erroneous tradition presupposes independent existences; and this presupposition involves the possibility of an adequate description of finite fact. The result is the presupposition of adequate separate premises from which argument can proceed. For example, much philosophic thought is based upon the faked adequacy of some account of various modes of human experience. Thence we reach some simple conclusion as to the essential character of human knowledge, and of its essential limitation. Namely, we know what we cannot know. Understand that I am not denying the importance of the analysis of experience: far from it. The progress of human thought is derived from the progressive enlightenment produced thereby. What I am objecting to is the absurd trust in the adequacy of our knowledge. The self-confidence of learned people is the comic tragedy of civilization. There is not a sentence which adequately states its own meaning. There is always a background of presupposition which defies analysis by reason of its infinitude. Let us take the simplest case; for example, the sentence, 'One and one makes two.' Obviously this sentence omits a necessary limitation. For one thing and itself make one thing. So we ought to say, 'One thing and another thing make two things.' This must mean the togetherness of one thing with another thing issues in a group of two things. At this stage all sorts of difficulties arise. There must be the proper sort of things in the proper sort of togetherness. The togetherness of a spark and gunpowder produces an explosion, which is very unlike two things. Thus we should say, 'The proper sort of togetherness of one thing and another thing produces the sort of group which we call two things.' Common sense at once tells you what is meant. But unfortunately there is no adequate analysis of common sense, because it involves our relation to the infinity of the Universe. CB: This one plus one equal two story reminds of the undergraduates who had a math class in which Whitehead and Russell's _Principia Mathematica_ was mentioned and something about their really proving that one plus one equals two. Yea the joke went we really weren't sure that one plus one equalled two. I'm glad they proved it. Fungibility, the individual, the specific and the general.
Absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
Trickle down effect -Clip- Though Kuznets' law seems to describe the process of industrialization in the U.S., at this point it is past its application, with steady increases in inequality in wealth and income. Rises in gross domestic product in recent decades have usually coincided with increases in inequality. The opposite of this version of the trickle-down effect can be seen in Karl Marx 's absolute general law of capitalist accumulation, in which he posits the normal tendency of economic growth under capitalism as being that wages fall behind the growth of labor productivity . This immiseration tendency implies that the workers' share of the total product will fall in percentage terms. In recent decades, when this theory fits better with the empirical data in the United Sates than it did during the 1950s or 1960s, more people have begun to think in these terms (though probably without citing Marx). For example, people posit a race to the bottom, in which wages around the world are being dragged down to the standards of manufacturing in poor countries (adjusted for differences in labor productivity). (See Globalization .) ( This reminds of Jim Devine's earlier observation - CB) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle_down_effect
[stop-imf] Africa should not pay its debts - Jeffrey Sachs
I happened upon this in the LBO-archive. Carl Remick asked a similar question about Jeffrey Sachs in 1998. CB ^^ Has Jeffrey Sachs changed his tune... Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us mailto:lbo-talk%40lbo-talk.org?Subject=Has%20Jeffrey%20Sachs%20changed%20hi s%20tune...In-Reply-To= Tue Sep 15 06:34:34 PDT 1998 * Search LBO-Talk Archives Sounds like post-neo-neo-classical neo-keynesian globalism. Charles Brown Carl Remick cremick at rlmnet.com http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk 09/15 9:31 AM ...or am I just tone deaf? Just read a piece of his in the current Economist (9/12) Making It Work, where he emerges as a nemesis of the whole West-o-centric, top-down, model of global economic development. He says that a G16 (including eight LDC members) should be substituted for the G8, that there should be massive cancellation of external debt in the poorest nations and that developmental aid should shift from short-term loans to outright grants. He says it should be recognized that the IMF/World Bank have no political legitimacy in the developing world, e.g.: A G16 summit should take up fundamental reform of the international assistance process itself. The aim should be to restore legitimacy to local politics, and abandon the misguided belief that the IMF and World Bank can micro-manage the process of economic reform. To be sure, he also says: Developing countries are not trying to overturn Washington's vision of global capitalism, but rather to become productive players in it -- and that's what he want to help. Nonetheless, Sachs seems to be more fundamentally critical of central institutions of global capitalism than I had been aware. I'm confused. When The Wall Came Down, Sachs struck me as the embodiment of Western arrogance in his meddlesome, market-oriented prescriptions for Russian reform. When did he become such a bleeding heart? Carl Remick by Perelman, Michael I mentioned a couple days ago how much Jeffrey Sachs has moved to the left. Chris's message is further confirmation. As I said before, he has also been very strong on Haiti. Perhaps Paul A. has something to add about the relationship between Sachs and the United Nations. Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898 ^^
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
Reviews of Capital by Frederick Engels 1867 Review of Volume One of Capital for the Demokratisches Wochenblatt March 1868 excerpt ...We will pass over a number of further excellent investigations of more theoretical interest and will pause only at the final chapter which deals with the accumulation or amassing of capital. Here it is first shown that the capitalist mode of production, i.e. that inaugurated by capitalists on the one hand and wage-workers on the other, not only continually regenerates capital for the capitalist, but at the same time also continually produces the poverty of the workers; thereby it is provided for a constant regeneration of, on one hand, capitalists who are the owners of all means of subsistence, all raw materials and instruments of labour, and on the other hand, the great mass of the workers, who are quantum of the means of subsistence which at best just suffices to keep them able-bodied and to bring up a new generation of able-bodied proletarians. But capital does not merely reproduce itself: it is continually increased and multiplied--and thereby its power over the propertyless class of workers. And just as it itself is reproduced on an ever greater scale, so the modern capitalist mode of production reproduces the class of propertyless workers also on an ever greater scale, in even greater numbers. ...Accumulation of capital reproduces the capital-relation on a progressive scale, more capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage-workers at that Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat (p 600). Since, however, owing to the progress of machinery, owing to improved agriculture, etc., fewer and fewer workers are necessary in order to produce the same quantity of products, since this perfecting, that is, this making the workers superfluous, is more rapid than even the growth of capital, what becomes of this ever-increasing number of workers? They form an industrial reserve army, which, when business is bad or middling, is paid below the value of its labour and is irregularly employed or is left to be cared for by public charity, but which is indispensable to the capitalist class at times when business is especially lively, as is palpably evident in England--but which under all circumstances serves to break the power of resistance of the regularly employed workers and to keep their wages down. The greater the social wealth ... the greater is the relative surplus-population, or industrial-reserve-army. But the greater this reserve-army in proportion to the active (regularly employed) labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated (permanent) surplus-population, or strata of workers, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve-army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation (p. 631) These, strictly scientifically-proved--and the official economists are taking great care not to make even an attempt at a refutation--are some of the chief laws of the modern, capitalist, social system. But does this tell the whole story? By no means. Marx sharply stresses the bad sides of capitalist production but with equal emphasis clearly proves that this social form was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this. Capitalist production is the first to create the wealth and the productive forces necessary for this, but at the same time it also creates, in the numerous and oppressed workers, the social class which is compelled more and more to claim the utilisation of this wealth and these productive forces for the whole of society--instead of their being utilised, as they are today, for a monopolist class. Reviews of Volume One of Capital ... greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation (p. 631). These, strictly scientifically ... www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1867/reviews-capital/dwochenblatt.htm - 19k - Cached - Similar pages
the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Fri, 10 Jul 1998 Subject: capitalism AND dialectics AND nature From David Black On Wed, 8 Jul 1998, Kenneth Ferris wrote: The Nation magazine in the U.S. has recently said (probably not the first time anyone has said this), that capitalism is always in crisis. Any thoughts on why that is so? A number of recent studies have highlighted the odd resemblance between the self-moving, self-manifesting and self-grounded categories of Hegel's Logic and the value-form of capital, as a totalizing abstract universal; in Marx's words, growing big with itself as it sucks in the living labour of human beings and invades every area of their existence. Istvan Meszaros, a former student of George Lukacs, has produced a magisterial critique of Capital as an order of social metabolic reproduction which subjects humanity under its shadow of unconrollability and asks: are we really destined to live forever under the spell of capital's global system glorified in it's Hegelian conceptualization, resigned - as he advised us to be in his poetic reference to 'the owl of Minerva [that] spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk' - to the tyrannical exploitation of the World Spirit? Hegel's absolutes however, end up being permeated with absolute negativity, there his dialectic remains relevant to Marx's dialectic of Labour and Capital. In Capital, Vol. I in the chapter on the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation; capitalism, which cannot produce wealth without producing poverty, eventually begets its own negation, the organised working class and other new passions, new forces. Because Nature, according to Hegel, is incapable of self-movement, it is the job of pure thought to discover its own Essence as Freedom. The Absolute Idea thus externalizes itself, allowing the moment of the Particular to go freely from itself into Nature. But in Hegel's view of Nature, which is the very opposite to Rousseau's, Humanity's natural state of Particularity is that of untamed individual wills, selfishness and irrational passions. In societies in which individual wills are fully under the rule of such external necessity, freedom can only have the most an abstract existence. Thus Hegel, having proceeded from his Phenomenology of consciousness to Science as the of pure thought of Logic whose Nature if is its Essential freedom, now has need of another element to transcend the state of nature: the Philosophy of Mind. For Hegel, the Beginning is also the End, although the self-movement of reality is not so much circular, as a circle of cirles; what goes around comes round, but at a higher level, as in a spiral. However, what is involved in this process of reconstitution at a higher level is not just a spiral of Progress; from Hegel's standpoint of political economy progress is implicitly a spiral of Crisis. As Marx puts capital is destructive as well as productive. As early as 1841 Marx argues that the practice of philosophy is the critique that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea. Marx, in breaking with Hegel, declares: theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses and in mid-1843, in his unpublished Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, he attacks Hegel for failing to measure the idea by what exists and for making an a priori deduction of Prussian reality from a philosophical construction. However, Marx, as Dunayevskaya would have it, by no means leaves behind the notion of Hegel's self-determined Idea when he takes onboard labour and political economy; and in this light, to go off on another track, Althusserian arguments on Marx's allegedly Feuerbachian attempt to project the recuperation of an alienated essence through the subject becoming an identical subject/object are highly questionable. Marx does not project the notion of an alienated human 'essence' unconditioned by history. Rather, in his sixth Theses on Feuerbach in 1845, Marx writes: Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. In the 1844 Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic, Marx writes that the greatness of Hegel's dialectic of negativity as the moving and creative principle is its grasp of the essence of labour and the possibility of human self-realisation through human collectivity and as a result of history. Hegel had put activity as the mediator between subject and object, but he presented it as thinking activity mediating between thought-entities. Although Feuerbach, in breaking from Hegel, wanted to differentiate thought-objects from sensuous objects, Marx found Feuerbach's materialist dualism wanting; Feuerbach conceived reality only in the form of an object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Marx sees Hegel's standpoint as that of modern political economy. In
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
In Hegelian jargon absolute is contrasted with relative. Perhaps Marx sharply stresses the bad sides of capitalist production as its absolute aspect, but with equal emphasis clearly proves that this social form was necessary to develop the productive forces of society, etc. , as the relative aspect. The impoverishment is the absolute and the progressive aspect is relative. CB Reviews of Capital by Frederick Engels 1867 Review of Volume One of Capital for the Demokratisches Wochenblatt March 1868 Excerpt These, strictly scientifically-proved--and the official economists are taking great care not to make even an attempt at a refutation--are some of the chief laws of the modern, capitalist, social system. But does this tell the whole story? By no means. Marx sharply stresses the bad sides of capitalist production but with equal emphasis clearly proves that this social form was necessary to develop the productive forces of society to a level which will make possible an equal development worthy of human beings for all members of society. All earlier forms of society were too poor for this. Capitalist production is the first to create the wealth and the productive forces necessary for this, but at the same time it also creates
The End Of Management?
TIME.com: The End Of Management? -- Jul. 12, 2004 http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1101040712-660965,00.html /
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
Please excuse a layperson's answer: Secular is a trend without end. Carl That's one of those terms of art that reverses the lay sense. In a religious sense a trend without end is sacred. Charles
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by Devine, James CB: Maybe the use of absolute here is not significant. JD:As I said, I think the word probably means abstract, but I'd have to consult a Hegel expert. Unfortunately, Marx decided to play with the use of Hegelian language in CAPITAL. This has put off and/or confused a lot of readers, while creating a sector of academics (not all working in colleges) who dwell on the Hegelian mysticism of it all. I'm afraid that old Karlos was in love with jargon as much as many academics are. (Of course, among the econfolk, some people are in love with math more than with jargon.) CB: On this, I take the position that Marx actually believed that dialectics is valid and therefore necessary as part of his conception ( not merely the word forms to be coquetted with, despite Marx's own description). In other words, we can't dispense with dialectics and still understand _Capital_. I think your idea of sort of abstract is on point. Vol. III laws are more concrete. Maybe the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a Concrete General Law. Still, this is an interesting Absolute law in that it says capitalism must produce more and more poverty. Is it reasserting itself in the U.S. ? I think Marx's wording leaves open that he is referring to absolute numbers of poor people, not relative numbers of poor people. Anyway, it would be important to show , if true, that _even in the U.S._ one of the richest countries the law is reasserting itself. In other words, I think we all see the application of the generalization by looking at a global economy and taking into account world poverty rather than only looking at the U.S. national economy. But if we can say that the generalization even has some current validity in the rich, U.S. economy, this would give significant, fresh credibility to Marx' theory. ... I don't think the absolute number of paupers is useful, since the population has increased and is increasing. I'd say that Marx's tendency has reasserted itself in the US since about 1980. ^^ CB: It seems to me that it would still be significant if the absolute number of paupers increases with the increase in the population. That would be a very damning social fact for capitalism. There may be new qualitative social problems associated with various levels of increased absolute numbers of poor. The new quantitative dimensions and numbers of Lazurus layers and poverty layers, generations of poverty may give rise to new qualitative social problems. There need not be increasing rates of poverty to generate new types of social problems. I'm not sure that he is saying that the _rate_ of poverty increases. Has the rate staid the same, or within the same range ? ^^ JD: the Federal government's official measure of poverty actually fell from 9.2% in 1979 to 8.7% of families in 2000 (between two business-cycle peaks). However, the downward trend of official poverty from 1959 or so _ended_ in the 1970s and started upward for quite awhile. (Numbers come from http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/histpov/famindex.html.) Further, over the long haul, the poverty rate isn't worth much. Poverty is defined by an income level that assumes that 1/3 of a family's budget goes to food. That seems more and more obsolete (even though the poverty level is increased as money loses value due to inflation), since these day's it's housing which is swallowing the lion's share. The rise of poverty rates after 2000 (to 9.6% in 2002) might indicate that in 2000, even officially-defined poverty was too low for capitalism's health. That is, the business-cycle downturn after 2000 may have followed Marx's volume I scenario of low unemployment squeezing profits and encouraging slow-downs. ^^ CB: So, we can say that there is evidence to support the continuing operation of this general law. Thanks for the discussion below ^ Another way to measure poverty is in terms of relative poverty, i.e., the percentage of the families (or the population or the households) that are below some measure of how high an income is needed to attain a middle class life-style. For example, one could use a measure like 60% of the median income as the cut-off. I don't have the statistics here. But Doug Henwood writes A more honest count of the poor - one either based on an updated market basket (rather than the 1955 or 1960 one today's line is based on) or figured on a poverty line measured against average incomes rather than a fixed standard from long ago (like, say, setting the poverty line at half the average income, which would push the line up to $19,250 for two people or $26,852 for four, 90% and 67% higher than official levels) - would yield a poverty rate almost twice the present level, in the 20-25% range in 1995. (see http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Stats_incpov.html.) The share of total income received by the poorest 1/5 of the families in 1975 was 5.6%, while in 2001 it was 4.2%. This
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by Devine, James just one point, since I'm busy: CB writes On this, I take the position that Marx actually believed that dialectics is valid and therefore necessary as part of his conception ( not merely the word forms to be coquetted with, despite Marx's own description). In other words, we can't dispense with dialectics and still understand _Capital_. I don't reject dialectical thinking. I just don't like Hegelian jargon. I think that all of CAPITAL could be translated in relatively simple language without dropping Marx's dialectical method, mode of presentation, or understanding of the world. jim ^ CB: I'm quite open to Hegel in relatively simple language compared to the original. From my experience, the translation to simpler language would be a complicated project itself though. Are you saying someone has put Hegel ( or dialectics) into simpler language ?
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
Speaking of Hegel... CB News and Letters October 1998 Journal of Marxist-Humanism ... Class 5: The Notion of Capitalism: The Absolute General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. Class 5 focuses on the absolute general law ... www.newsandletters.org/ Issues/1999/Jan-Feb/1.99_classes.htm - 6k - Cached - Similar pages News http://www.newsandletters.org/images/banner_a.gif January-February 1999 Announcing a new series of discussions beginning in March... The Dialectic of CAPITAL and Today's Global Crisis The economic meltdown in such areas as East Asia, Russia, and parts of Latin America and the possibility that it might spread to the entire world economy has helped impel new interest in Marx's CAPITAL. At the same time, a new generation of thinkers and activists has come of age which is searching for an alternative to both free market capitalism and the state-capitalism that once called itself Communism. This series speaks to these questions and concerns by exploring what Marxist-Humanism has contributed to the understanding of Marx's greatest theoretical work. As Lenin once said, It is impossible to understand Marx's CAPITAL, and especially it's first chapter, unless one has understood the whole of Hegel's Logic. For this reason, the core readings will be selections from Marx's CAPITAL, writings on CAPITAL from the archives of Marxist-Humanism, and Raya Dunayevskaya's Rough Notes on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC. For a syllabus and a schedule of classes, contact the News and Letters Committee nearest to you. (See directory.) Class 1: The Origin and Scope of CAPITAL: Marx's Re-creation of Hegel's Dialectic Class 1 discusses the origin and development of Vol. I of CAPITAL, especially the impact of the Civil War in the U.S. and the struggle for a shorter working day upon Marx's thinking. Far from acting as a limiting factor on what he called the power of abstraction, by integrating the revolutionary subject into his dialectical analysis Marx unchained the power of revolutionary thought itself. Class 2: The Phenomenon of Capitalism: The Commodity-Form Class 2 focuses on the most difficult, controversial, and important chapter in CAPITAL-The Commodity. Of foremost importance here is its concluding section-The Fetishism of Commodities. Dunayevskaya's Notes on Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC can greatly aid comprehension of the fundamental phenomenon of capitalism which contains in embryo the whole of its contradictions. Class 3: The Essence of Capitalism (I): The Labor Process Class 3 focuses on the essence of capitalism-the labor process and on the production of what Marx called absolute surplus value. This is also the area in which Marx discusses the conditions and struggles of working women. Class 4: The Essence of Capitalism (II): The Labor Process and the Transformation of the Value of Labor Power into Wages Class 4 continues the focus on the essence of capitalism, the labor process, by exploring what Marx called relative surplus value. It also discusses Marx's theory of wages, one of his three original contributions to the critique of political economy, along with the split in the concept of labor and the treatment of surplus value independently of profit. Class 5: The Notion of Capitalism: The Absolute General Law of Capitalist Accumulation Class 5 focuses on the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation-the concentration and centralization of capital at one pole and the socialization of labor at the other, from which spring new passions and new forces for the reconstruction of society. Class 6: The Logic of Capitalist Crisis: Overproduction, Underconsumption, or the Decline In the Rate of Profit? Class 6 focuses on the dialectic and humanism of Vols. II and III of CAPITAL, long serving as the arena of debate in the radical movement over the cause and consequences of capitalist crisis, the relation between capitalism and imperialism/racism, and the kind of human relations which can transcend class society. News Letters - The Journal of Marxist-Humanism - August ... ... inflation and unemployment are today at historic lows, in no other period has Marx's notion of the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation come more ... www.newsandletters.org/Issues/1999/Aug-Sept/8.99_bw.htm - 8k - Cached - Similar pages [ More results from www.newsandletters.org ]
LAW OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION
Graphic Witness home page http://www.graphicwitness.org/ineye/index2.htm Hugo Gellert: http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/gellert.htm Karl Marx' 'Capital' in Lithographs http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/marx51.htm http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/marx53.htm page 52. LAW OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/marx52.htm#pg52 http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/marx53.htm LAW OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION The law in accordance with which a continually increasing quantity of the means of production can, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labor, be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human energy -- this law, in a capitalist society (where the worker does not make use of the means of production, but where the means of production make use of the worker), undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed as follows: The higher the productivity of labor, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment; and the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence, namely, the sale of their own labor power for the increasing of another's wealth, or to promote the self-expansion of capital. Under capitalism, likewise, the fact that the means of production and the productivity of labor grow more rapidly than does the productive population, secures expression in an inverse way, namely that the working population always grows more quickly than capital's need for self-expansion. . . . . . . All the methods for the production of surplus value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and, conversely, every extension of accumulation becomes a means for the development of the methods of production. The result is that, in proportion as capital accumulates, the condition of the worker, be his wages high or low, necessarily grows worse. . . . Thanks to the working of this law, poverty grows as the accumulation of capital grows. The accumulation of wealth at one pole of society involves a simultaneous accumulation of poverty, labor torment, slavery, ignorance, brutalization, and moral degradation, at the opposite pole -- where dwells the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. Political economists have in various ways drawn attention to this inherent contradiction in capitalist accumulation, although in their disquisitions they confound it with phenomena which, though to some extent analogous, are essentially distinct -- belonging as they do to pre-capitalist methods of production. Ortes, the Venetian monk, who was one of the greatest economists of the eighteenth century, regards this contradictory character of capitalist production as a general natural law of social wealth. He writes: In the economy of a nation, good and evil always balance each other; abundance of wealth for some is invariably counterpoised by the lack of wealth for others. Great wealth for some is ever accompanied by an absolute privation of the necessaries of life for a much larger number of persons. The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and its poverty corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in others. The poor and the idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and the active,, and so on. About ten years after Ortes, Townsend, the High Church parson, writing with characteristic brutality, glorified poverty as the necessary condition of wealth. Legal constraint [to labor] is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise; . . . whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but, as the most natural motive to industry and labor, it calls forth the most powerful exertions. Everything, therefore, depends upon making hunger permanent in the ranks of the working class; and for this, according to Townsend, the principle of population, especially active among the poor, provides. It seems to be a law of nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident [so improvident as to be born without a silver spoon in the mouth], that there may always be some to fulfill the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery, . . . but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions. . . . Finally, hear Destutt de Tracy, the cold-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire, who bluntly tells us the truth: In poor nations the common people are comfortable; in rich nations they are generally poor. http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/marx53.htm
LAW OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION
Gellert: Karl Marx' 'Capital' in Lithographs LAW OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION: effect of crises on the better-paid part of the working-class . . .I wish to give an example showing how crises affect even the better-paid portion of the working class, the labor aristocracy. . . .To show the condition of the workers, I will now quote the circumstantial report of a correspondent of the Morning Star, who, at the end of 1866 and the beginning of 1867, visited the chief centers of distress: In the East End districts of Poplar, Millwall, Greenwich, Depford, Limehouse, and Canning Town, at least 15,000 workmen and their families were in a state of utter destitution, and 3,000 skilled mechanics were breaking stones in the workhouse yard (after distress of over half a year's duration). . . . Men were busy, however, in the open shed breaking paving stones into macadam. Each man had a big paving-stone for a seat, and he chipped away at the rime-covered granite with a big hammer until he had broken up, just think! five bushels of it, and then he had done his day's work, and got his day's pay -- threepence and an allowance of food. In another part of the yard was a rickety little wooden house, and when we opened the door of it, we found it filled with men who were huddled together, shoulder to shoulder, for the warmth of one another's bodies and breath. . . . Leaving the workhouse, I took a walk through the streets, mostly of little one-story houses, that abound in the neighborhood of Poplar. My guide was a member of the Committee of the Unemployed. . . .My first call was on an ironworker who had been seven-and-twenty weeks out of employment. I found the man with his family sitting in a little back room. The room was bare of furniture, and there was a fire in it. This was necessary to keep the naked feet of the young children from getting frost-bitten, for it was a bitterly cold day. On a tray in front of the fire lay a quantity of oakum which the wife and children were picking in return for their allowance from the parish. The man worked in the stone yard of the workhouse for a certain ration of food, and threepence per day. He had now come home to dinner quite hungry, as he told us with a melancholy smile, and his dinner consisted of a couple of slices of bread and dripping, and a cup of milkless tea. . . . The next door at which we knocked was opened by a middle aged woman, who, without saying a word, led us into a little back parlor, in which sat all her family, silent and fixedly staring at a rapidly dying fire. Such desolation, such hopelessness was about these people and their little room, as I should not care to witness again. 'Nothing have they done, sir,' said the woman, pointing to her boys, 'for six-and-twenty weeks; and all our money gone -- all the twenty pounds that me and father saved when times were better, thinking it would yield a little to keep us when we got past work. Look at it,' she said, almost fiercely, bringing out a bank-book with all its well-kept entries of money paid in, and money taken out, so that we could see how the little fortune had begun with the first five shilling deposit, and had grown by little and little to be twenty pounds, and how it had melted down again till the sum in hand got from pounds to shillings, and the last entry made the book as worthless as a blank sheet. This family received relief from the workhouse, and it furnished them with just one scanty meal per day. . . . Our next visit was to an iron laborer's wife, whose husband had worked in the yards. We found her ill from want of food, lying on a mattress in her clothes, and just covered with a strip of carpet, for all the bedding had been pawned. Two wretched children were tending her, themselves looking as much in need of nursing as their mother. Nineteen weeks of enforced idleness had brought them to this pass, and while the mother told the history of that bitter past, she moaned as if all her faith in a future that should atone for it were dead. . . . On getting outside, a young fellow came running after us, and asked us to step inside his house and see if anything could be done for him. A young wife, two pretty children, a cluster of pawntickets, and a bare room, were all he had to show. . . . They are dying of hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are 40,000 of them. . . In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, are packed -- next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world ever saw -- cheek by jowl with this are . . . .40,000 helpless, starving people. . . . http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/marx54.htm
CAPITAL IS ONLY THE FRUIT OF LABOR
CAPITAL IS ONLY THE FRUIT OF LABOR* (The Bees, the Drones, and the Wasp) Some Bees had built their comb in the hollow trunk of an oak. The Drones asserted that it was their work, and belonged to them. The case was brought into court before Judge Wasp. Knowing something of the parties, he thus addressed them: The ends of justice, and the object of the court, will best be furthered by the plan which I propose. Let each party take a hive to itself and build up a new comb, so that from the shape of the cells, and the taste of the honey, the lawful proprietors of the property in dispute may appear. The Bees readily assented to the Wasp's plan. The Drones declined it. Whereupon the Wasp gave judgement: It is clear now who made the comb, and who cannot make it; the court adjudges the honey to the Bees. * From Abraham Lincoln's message to Congress, December 3, 1861: Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/aesop17.htm Graphic Witness home page http://www.graphicwitness.org/ineye/index2.htm Aesop Said So: Lithographs by Hugo Gellert http://www.graphicwitness.org/contemp/gellert.htm
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
Thanks for your comment, Gil. Please excuse a layperson's question, but I have never quite been able to understand this economist's use of secular. What is the definition of secular. Charles by Gil Skillman You could certainly point to recent economic phenomena supporting an affirmative answer to this question. E.g., in the US, the fact that significant increases in productivity have helped make it possible for capitalist firms to make do with their existing workforces rather than increasing employment in proportion to the increase in national output. However, I'd argue that such changes, where they occur, are not *secular* as Marx's general law requires. Specifically: Marx understands his law to apply to the situation of developed capitalist economies. His statement of the law implies secularly or tendentially increasing rates of poverty and unemployment in such economies. I don't think we've seen secularly increasing rates of poverty and unemployment in developed capitalist economies (though I'd be interested to hear others' assessments of the long-run trends for these phenomena), despite overall population growth and consequent increases in the size of the working class. -clip-
the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
How broad does Marx intend this generalization to be ? His use of the term absolute seems to indicate that he is predicting that this generalization reaches beyond the specific English illustrations of the law he discusses. Charles ^^ The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here. The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the labourers the accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist production and accumulation constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army. Its last word is the misery of constantly extending strata of the active army of labour, and the dead weight of pauperism. The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labour, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society where the labourer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the labourer undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence, viz., the sale of their own labour-power for the increasing of another's wealth, or for the self-expansion of capital. The fact that the means of production, and the productiveness of labour, increase more rapidly than the productive population, expresses itself, therefore, capitalistically in the inverse form that the labouring population always increases more rapidly than the conditions under which capital can employ this increase for its own self-expansion. We saw in Part IV., when analysing the production of relative surplus-value: within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. [25] This antagonistic character of capitalistic accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, and belonging to pre-capitalistic modes of production. The Venetian monk Ortes, one of the great economic
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
by sartesian -clip- Any number of radicals, of left or right, can and will argue that the workers in the advanced countries must sacrifice their wealth for reasons of right and left-- like the national good, the international good, the moral good, and for the sake of the soul. But such sacrifice has nothing in common with Marx's analysis. ^^^ CB: Not only that but has the absolute number of official paupers increased even _in the U.S._ since 1867, with the growth of capital , leaving aside for the moment official paupers around the world ? Is the generalization valid for the U.S. nation, abstracting that economy for a moment ? Or has the tendency of increase in paupers in the U.S. been pawned off on neo-colonies ?
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
I appreciate what you are saying about Marx qualifying his statement. I believe all social scientific empirical generalizations are less than 100% true ( including the one I am making here ? Reflexivity alert :)). I wonder whether the use of the term absolute is some type of rhetorical advice to emphasize , what ? That this generalization or tendency is strong ? He of course uses law of the tendency with respect to the rate of profit falling, and discusses countervailing tendencies right there ( in Vol.III). Maybe the use of absolute here is not significant. I really posed one of my questions wrongly, because it is not an issue of looking at the trend since 1867 and showing a monotonic rise in official pauperism in the U.S. It is more finding , as you mention the tendency being displaced to sections of a more globally integrated economy, and then perhaps reasserting itself even in the U.S.. Is it reasserting itself in the U.S. ? I think Marx's wording leaves open that he is referring to absolute numbers of poor people, not relative numbers of poor people. Anyway, it would be important to show , if true, that _even in the U.S._ one of the richest countries the law is reasserting itself. In other words, I think we all see the application of the generalization by looking at a global economy and taking into account world poverty rather than only looking at the U.S. national economy. But if we can say that the generalization even has some current validity in the rich, U.S. economy, this would give significant, fresh credibility to Marx' theory. It also might ameliorate somewhat the issues sartesian raises. Then what's offical pauperism ? A person can have a car, a television and a rented house, et al. and be officially poor today, even though having more material wealth in the absolute sense than some middle class person from 1867. On this issue of poverty, I want to say there is in Marx's concept a mixture of objectivity and subjectivity. Part of immiseration is a state of mind and situation relative to the norm and average of the day. There is disgrace and anxiety in being unemployed even with unemployment benefits or welfare. Does Marx's term official get at this ? Charles ^ by Devine, James Marx qualifies this absolute law immediately after stating it. For him, it's a law at the level of capital in general, the subject of volume I of CAPITAL. However, it might be changed by the competition of capitals, e.g., the uneven development of capital on the world scale. During the period from World War II to 1980 or so, the law seems to have shifted in its application from the first world to the third world. Now, in the era of neoliberal capitalism (which seems aimed at restoring the classical capitalism that Marx described), it seems more general, incorporating even the US. Mike Lebowitz, in his book BEYOND CAPITAL (now in its 2nd edition!), argues that in CAPITAL, Marx took the working class' situation as given, assuming (for example) that working-class reaction to capital's depredations is largely passive. You might see the relatively good situation of the US working class during the 1945-1980 period as a result of the fact that this assumption didn't apply, i.e., that struggles of the 1930s and after allowed workers to get a piece of the pie. The decline of workers' power since then meant that the absolute law reasserted itself.
absolute general law of capitalist accumulation
Does the empirical generalization suggested below have validity today nationally or globally ? Charles The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army, the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S4
Enron
by David B. Shemano Charles Brown writes: Hey , on an old thread, I haven't seen you since Enron. What to you think about bookcooking on Wall Street,now ? What do I think about it? I am against it. Look, fraud is illegal in a capitalist economy. There is a certain percentage of the population that is going to try and bend the rules to take advantage. I am sure that would never occur in a socialist economy. ^^^ CB: I might remember incorrectly , but I thought you were saying that it doesn't happen much in this capitalist economy.
Sowell
Sowell paints a picture of himself as having a rather shallow grasp of Marxism, if the narrow experience he describes really changed his mind. I'm pretty sure that there is no principle in Marxism that says that capitalists won't lay people off in response to minimum wage hikes, if only as a way to retaliate against the minimum wage hike. On analogy to something Marx says in _Value,Price and Proift_, Marxists might say there is no _natural_ law that says things must be that way, that rather than laying people off , the capitalists' profits could be reduced. Assuming that Sowell is smarter than the way he portrays himself, the inference would be that he had another motive than reasoning based on the empirical study he mentions to change from left to right. In other words, it's a bit idiotic or slick to conclude that the ideas Marx sets out in his many works are false because in Puerto Rico at a certain time ,with capitalism in place, a minimum wage hike was followed by a rise in unemployment. I say it might be slick if Sowell is wanting to move to the right for opportunist reasons as discussed earlier on this thread. He seems to be casting the federal ,wage-and-hour, regulatory agents and unions as practitioners of Marxism. How ridiculous is that ? And then having set up these straw Marxists, knocks them down and moves on to the right. Pleeeassse. At this point , I guess I would have to question what kind and whether Sowell was a Marxist. He sounds more like a Marxist. He seems to equate liberals and Marxists. When Sowell and the interviewer have the following exchange: What's it like for you on the right? I certainly have met racist Republicans. I ask this question for the Salon readership, many of whom are probably convinced that the Republican party is made up entirely of racists. Sowell: That's not true, of course. It's amazing, for example, how many people on the right have for years been up in Harlem spending their money and their time trying to help the kids, including one whose name would be very familiar to you. But he hasn't chosen to say it publicly, so I won't either. CB: One wonders whether that Republican's generosity will cause a rise in the unemployment rate , since back at the company where the Rep got the ducets to give to poor in Harlem, they might have to layoff some people to pay for the gifts being distributed to those Black ( no doubt) recipients of loving, non-racist charity. Charles -- From:David B. Shemano The wonders of the internet. Here is Sowell explaining his shift away from Marxism: http://www.salon.com/books/int/1999/11/10/sowell/index1.html David Shemano Interviewer: So you were a lefty once. Sowell: Through the decade of my 20s, I was a Marxist. What made you turn around? Sowell: What began to change my mind was working in the summer of 1960 as an intern in the federal government, studying minimum-wage laws in Puerto Rico. It was painfully clear that as they pushed up minimum wage levels, which they did at that time industry by industry, the employment levels were falling. I was studying the sugar industry. There were two explanations of what was happening. One was the conventional economic explanation: that as you pushed up the minimum-wage level, you were pricing people out of their jobs. The other one was that there were a series of hurricanes that had come through Puerto Rico, destroying sugar cane in the field, and therefore employment was lower. The unions preferred that explanation, and some of the liberals did, too. Did you discover something that surprised you? I spent the summer trying to figure out how to tell empirically which explanation was true. And one day I figured it out. I came to the office and announced that what we needed was data on the amount of sugar cane standing in the field before the hurricane moved through. I expected to be congratulated. And I saw these looks of shock on people's faces. As if, This idiot has stumbled on something that's going to blow the whole game! To me the question was: Is this law making poor people better off or worse off? That was the not the question the labor department was looking at. About one-third of their budget at that time came from administering the wages and hours laws. They may have chosen to believe that the law was benign, but they certainly weren't going to engage in any scrutiny of the law. What that said to me was that the incentives of government agencies are different than what the laws they were set up to administer were intended to accomplish. That may not sound very original in the James Buchanan era, when we know about Public Choice theory. But it was a revelation for me. You start thinking in those terms, and you no longer ask, what is the goal of that law, and do I agree with that goal? You start to ask instead: What are the incentives, what are the consequences of those incentives, and do I agree with those?
Sowell
From: David B. Shemano Some times you guys are just insufferable -- must you always resort to caricature? Read the entire exchange!! The relevant factor wasn't that minimum wage laws (not raising wages) reduce employment. It was the reaction of the government bureaucrats to his suggestion of an empirical test to determine why employment was falling, which led him to philosophically shift from the importance of goals to incentives. ^ CB: Well, sufferin' suckatash, is he saying the government bureaucrats were Marxists ?
Thomas Sowell
by David B. Shemano That the Left has not the same is not a matter of luck. The bourgeoisie do not pay people to be revolutionary propagandists and agitators or public intellectuals, unsurprisingly. Nonsense. The bourgeoise would sell the rope to a revolutionary if it would make a profit, would they not? What is the No. 1 movie in America? Who financed it? Why do the bourgeoise fund universities which employ Profs. Perelman and Devine? The answer must lay elsewhere. CB: But they aren't going to make any profit off of a radical newspaper columnist, so... Michael Perelman and Jim Devine are not given the public prominence that Sowell is. Michael Moore did creep up on them, as a sort of clown. I don't know all the specifics of his financing. He comes out of the alternative newspapers ( small business) in Michigan. He is not in the monopoly/mainstream media like Sowell. The answer , in general, is right where it seems to be. With very rare exceptions (if Moore is really one), the right , not the left will get gigs like Sowell's because of the right has money and the left doesn't, natch, obviously. Why do you think Sowell switched ? Hey , on an old thread, I haven't seen you since Enron. What to you think about bookcooking on Wall Street,now ?
Thomas Sowell
As a Lefty myself, I have never really thought very much about whether Sowell and Thomas really believe what they say or not. My criticism of them is not based on their insincerety , but on the atrocious content of their political positions in general and on racism in particular. As a Black person, for me there is an added factor that they are anti-Black racists, which adds an element of their being a type of traitor. When I say racists , I mean objectively speaking. Their subjective mindset that conservative policies are good for Black people (and their sincerety or lack thereof) is a minor issue. It doesn't much matter that they really believe something that is false. The objective impact of their actions is to bolster and preserve racism. Charles ^^^ by Michael Perelman David makes a good point, but with so much money and so many resources flowing to amenable conservatives, careerism is a legitimate suspicion. To raise such a suspicion is not to deny that conservatives are real people. I do not mean to imply that careerism is a part of most conservatives mindset, but the suspicion does seem legitimate for the movement conservatives, such as Sowell. On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 06:26:09PM -0700, David B. Shemano wrote: To the extent this has any relevancy, I do not think this applies to Sowell and certainly does not apply to Thomas. Again, this highlights the very point repeatedly raised by Sowell and Thomas -- the refusal of Lefties to treat them as real people with their own mind who believe what they say based upon honest reflection. David Shemano
Low Taxes Do What!?
Why is he a hack? The man turns out a book every year on far-ranging topics. His writings on international affirmative action and cultural migrations are first-rate. He writes a popular syndicated column that is clear, informative and entertaining. He is a true public intellectual. Disagree if you want, but give the man some respect. The Left shoud be so lucky to have a Thomas Sowell. David Shemano ^^ That the Left has not the same is not a matter of luck. The bourgeoisie do not pay people to be revolutionary propagandists and agitators or public intellectuals, unsurprisingly. Charles
Chat about Financial Advice, was Re: Marxist Financial Advice
Marx made a killing on the stock market one time according to Tussie's biographer, slavers,pirates and all behind that historic market. CB by Carrol Cox Sabri Oncu wrote: This is not diversification at all. It is a single bet, a bet on the US dollar hegemony, whose future is more uncertain than ever. Let's remember that very few if any of the subscribers to this list have much in the way of discretionary investment. So the question (which probably ought not to have Marx's name tagged to it) simply concerns a chat among fellow leftists about how people in their situation can have a trifle better chance of surviving at least until dementia sets in and medicaid takes over. And the first question emphasized the ethics of the topic. I argued at the time that there was no ethics to it. That is, that (leaving aside organized boycotts) progressive politics placed no constraints on how one spent or saved one's money. There would be no _political_ or _ethical_ constraint in investing in Shell, in investing in a napalm manufacturer, in shopping at Wal-Mart or Naiman-Marcus, etc etc. (Assuming no organized boycotts, which one honors.) Carrol Sabri
Marxist Fianancial Advice
by Doug Henwood Devine, James wrote: I said that the superficial stuff of volume III I missed this. What's superficial in v 3? Doug ^^^ CB: Perhaps superficial in the sense of not having to do with what a _revolutionary_ working class movement could or would directly impact or would undergird and motivate a workingclass party program. What do workers programs do about the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall ? Try to thwart it as long as possible ? There might be guidance for social democratic reforms in Vol. III. When reading Vol. I you feel constantly the fundamental importance and exploitation of labor, no ? And this gives the scientific basis for fundamental , revolutionary elan and action. In the larger picture of Marx's main work, reforms are superficial compared to revolutionary measures. That's not an exaggeration or ultra-leftist bs if we think about what we know about Marx's character. I mean we get the focus on revolution in contrast with reform from him. It doesn't mean that Marxists wouldn't _support_ certain soc. Dem reforms today or tomorrow. Marx supported the shorter work day struggles.
Marxist Fianancial Advice
I always wonder whether Marx intended the concepts in _Capital_ to be used in detailed analyses of things like oil price fluctuations or concrete business cycles. The only practice that might accompany such analyses would be such things as Keynesian and social dem reforms to soften the impact of recessions or regulation of the oil companies and their prices: Marxist advice on how to reform capitalism. Marx's discussion of the struggle for shorter work week reforms is related to actual mass movements of workers at the time, situations where masses of workers were in fact in organized motion and thereby with potential to turn into revolutionary struggles. But today , there are not mass worker movements to influence oil prices or blunt the business cycle. Charles ^ by sartesian Keerist, can't we at least spell financial correctly? And then terminate this thread? Marxist financial advice. Come on. Cut it out. Where doe s this take us? Marxist arbitrage? Marxist hedge funds? Behind every free market there's a death squad, at least one. You need more money? S. Don't tell anyone. Figure it out yourself or go get a CFA. Next subject, Marxist methods of seducing housekeepers?
Marxist Fianancial Advice
by sartesian Marx wrote volumes criticizing bourgeois economic theory, analyzing its class origins, its ideological obfuscations, and the necessity for the overthrow of bourgeois economic practice, with the emphasis on the last. He did not present an alternative political economy, propose morally or socially acceptable investment instruments, or AARP discount packages. ^ CB: Right. He did discuss the movement for a shorter work day. But would he be doing detailed analyses oil price fluctuations ?
Putin
If there are going to be memorials, monuments and statues to great people, like the Lincoln Monument, for example, the actual person's body is a kind of cool variation of those institutions. The actual person's body is , I don't know, heavier/deeper, if one is not skiddish about dead bodies. In a way, oddly, it is more human (?) than a stone statue or monument. Did you tell me once or did I hear that they closed or moved the Lenin museum at the end of Red Square there ? Anyway, they already had the museum. John Reed and Big Bill Haywood are outback with Stalin. It really is a political and symbolic decision and issue. There was also the change of Leningrad back to St. Petersburg. The issue is does one think the movement and struggles Lenin led ,and now his body emblemizes, are still important guides for what is to be done today. I almost want to make the sad commentary that Lenin dead could be more fresh and lively than almost all of today's actually living leaders and movements in Russia and the world. But to say so would be unLeninlike. There is irony and paradox. Lenin's theory and philosophy was the antithesis of rigi (spelling) mortis , stiffness, unmotion, death. His dead body is an ironic emblem of life, motion, revolution, movement. There also is a paradox related to the Marxist ,anti-great man theory of history, a little dialectic maybe, even. Of course, Lenin would not have approved of putting himself on display because he didn't have a Napoleon complex :). He was physically little though. He must have been 5' 4' or something (?) Hopefully, the Cubans will clone Fidel. ^^^ by Chris Doss I wish they would follow his wishes. he wanted to be buried or cremated, I forget which. I doubt that anyone wants to be put on permanent display... jd --- It's a political decision. It was outrage a lot of conservatives (in the Russian sense of the word). Most people think he should be buried and the mausoleum turned into a museum. Wasn't putting Stalin into the mausoleum alongside Lenin the former's decision? He was in there a few years (now he's about 20 meters away).
EMH
by Chris Doss no, that won't do. Hubbert hated Native Americans! jd --- Lenin ruined Russia, but then luckily Stalin came to restore it! ^^^ Heidegger was a Nazi. 9/11 was a conspiracy. There is objective reality. Ban the Klan. Vote for Nader/Vote for Kerry. The war on Iraq has to do with oil.
