Re: From NAFTA to Chenalho
yOn Wed, 24 Dec 1997, Tom Walker wrote: What do we know about the massacre in Chenalho and when did we know it? We know a great deal about it. There are dozens of messages posted since the story first broke. Visit the Chiapas95 archives and look in the file called "current". This kind of killing on a smaller scale has been going on for some time, in the North of Chiapas and has recently moved into the Highlands. It is the paramilitary branch of the low-intensity warfare strategy that the Mexican government has been following for some time. There have been warnings specifically about Chenalho for days, ignored by the government, of course, since it is their strategy to terrorize the population. The Chiapas95 homepage url is given below. Click on archives, then on current. Harry Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ Know Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/ . Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/ .
Re: Maybe we _should_ ban some books...
I had a run-in with Esther Dyson in New York a while back, at a conference at Columbia. She's ferociously pro-business and took nasty exception to my critique of the commercialization of the web and to my suggesting that Russia peasants were right to be wary of privatization because the history of private farming in capitalism was that of enclosure and people being forced off the land. She was offering contacts for anyone "wanting to do business in Russia" and was introduced as one of the most influencial Westerners there when it comes to high-tech. A guy who runs the local progressive bookstore with losts of stuff on high-tech, communications etc commented that he thought her new book had "near-zero" informational content. Harry On Thu, 11 Dec 1997, R. Anders Schneiderman wrote: From the latest Salon Magazine: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - E S T H E R__D Y S O N_ DISCOURSES ON MICROSOFT, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, THE FUTURE OF RUSSIA -- AND WHY SHE BANISHED HER TELEPHONE. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Two quick excerpts: --- ( #1: yet another example of people who have not used the bus in a long, long time...) I: This, I guess, is what you mean in "Release 2.0" when you talk about how the Net erodes the separation between work lives and personal lives. D: It's not just a matter of time. You know, when you're in a steel mill, you make steel and you leave and that's it. But when you're online, if someone meets you downtown or someone e-mails you, let's face it, if you're a jerk, it affects Salon, in a way that it wouldn't if you were making steel. This is a big social issue; again, the problem here is people. You can't be paternalistic and get upset if your employee goes drinking Saturday night, but at the same time, now, your company consists of the people. They're much more visible. And so what do you do if your employee not only goes drinking Saturday night but says your company sucks on his private e-mail account? I: Even when you try to keep a healthy separation between work and personal time, the technology of the Net encourages people to expect that you're available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. D: In addition to that, it's pretty sad if you're working for a company doing intellectual work and you don't identify with the company. Which is why I'm so cheerful about the notion of smaller companies. One way or another people are there by choice, and there's more personality. ( #2: in response to those who say Jerry Brown is too bizarre to be put into a position of any responsibility--say, the mayor of Oakland...) I: A lot of companies keep getting bigger, though. "Release 2.0" argues that the Net is a great decentralizing force, yet today we're seeing more power concentrated in the hands of companies like Microsoft and WorldCom. D: These big things are getting more and more stuff, and obviously hardware is different from content. So yes, with hardware or the infrastructure or Microsoft -- there are benefits there to size and economies of scale. But in content, in intellectual work, there are really disadvantages of scale. So you see these divergent trends. But I think the value is increasingly at the edges, even if the physical bulk is in the middle. I: You mean, one reason the physical assets of the network get collected is that they're worth less? D: To some extent. They are commodities. WorldCom will tell you, "Our customer service makes us unique." I'm just not sure about
Re: Sachs denounces IMF!
Sounds like Sachs is fed up with having his advice ignored. He repeatedly called for IMF austerity programs in Eastern Europe to be backed by debt forgiveness and large scale aid --neither of which was forthcoming in most cases. It is worth remembering, however, that Sachs and the IMF mostly agreed on shock therapy in which sticking it to the working class was a central objective. Hammering down real wages, smashing any welfare state institutions and privatization to break worker organization were all key elements in what the IMF calls "removing structural rigidities in labor markets." What Sachs is denouncing is not new; only the shrillness of his denunciation has increased. Harry On Thu, 11 Dec 1997, Doug Henwood wrote: from "Power Unto Itself," an op-ed piece in the Dec 10 Financial Times, by Harvard shock therapist Jeffrey Sachs: "The world waits to see what the [International Monetary] Fund will demand of country X, assuming that the IMF has chosen the best course of action. The world accepts as normal the idea that crucial details of IMF programmes should remain confidential, even though those 'details' affect the well-being of millions. Staff at the Fund, meanwhile, are unaccountable for their decisions. The people most affected by these policies have little knowledge or input. In Korea, the IMF insisted that all presidential candidates immediately 'endorse' an agreement they had no part in drafting or negotiating - and no time to understand. The situation is out of hand. However useful the IMF may be to the world community, it defies logic to believe that a small group of 1,000 economists on 19th Street in Washington should dictate the economic conditions of life to 75 developing countries [the number presently under an IMF program] with around 1.4bn people. These people cosntitute 57 percent of the developing world outisde of China and India (which are not under IMF programmes). Since perhaps half of the IMF's professional time is devoted to these countries - with the rest tied up in surveillance of advanced countries, management, research, and other tasks - about 500 staff cover the 75 countries. That is an average of about seven economists per country. One might suspect that seven staffers would not be enough to get a very sophisticated view of what is happening. That suspicion would be right" . Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/ .
SUDAN Update: Send signatures to ... (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 16:08:42 -0500 (EST) From: Tracy Quan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Harry M. Cleaver" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: SUDAN Update: Send signatures to ... Feel free to pass this note along... I hope I'm not making some huge electronic blunder but Magda can't get to her mail til later. -- Forwarded message -- Date: Mon, 8 Dec 1997 16:03:51 -0500 (EST) From: Tracy Quan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Undisclosed recipients: ; Subject: SUDAN Update: Send signatures to... THE PROBLEM: If you signed the petition regarding four women who have been sentenced to death in Sudan, you may have encountered difficulty with the e-mail address. Magda, who is collecting signatures, has not been able to get to her e-mail and her mail spool is full -- e-mail keeps coming back to the sender. THE SOLUTION: From now until noon Tuesday: Please e-mail your signature -- full name, city, state/country -- to me, [EMAIL PROTECTED] I will collect the names and e-mail addresses and send them to Magda. She cannot get to her mail until Monday evening. Thank you for your support. = Tracy Quan E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice: (212) 969-0931
Appeal for women threatened with death
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Fri, 05 Dec 1997 17:53:56 -0500 From: Tracy Quan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Harry M. Cleaver" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Please post this to PEN-L and other lists: Four Women Facing Imminent Death Date: Fri, 05 Dec 1997 12:03:12 -0500 Subject: Four Women Facing Imminent Death ! (fwd) If you would like to add your name to the list write to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] as soon as possible Subject: Four Women Facing Imminent Death ! (fwd) Dear friends, Please support this URGENT APPEAL to save the lives of four Sudanese women who are now facing the death penalty by the NIF regime. To support this appeal, add your signature to the list below. Feel free to pass it to all your friends, Thank you magda _ The Secretary General Of The UN, New York The Secretary General Of The OAU, Addis Ababa The UN Commission For Human Rights, Geneva The Chair Of The UN Women s Committee, New York The UN Representative In Sudan, Khartoum The Heads Of The Diplomatic Missions In Sudan Khartoum Amnesty International, London Human Rights Watch, Washington, D.C. The Sudan Human Rights Organization, London The Arab Bar Association, Cairo * Four Women Facing Imminent Execution! * We, the undersigned, respectfully ask for your prompt action to stop the death sentence issued by a Sudanese court against four women accused of engaging in prostitution . On Tuesday November 25, 1997, the Sudan News Agency (SUNA) reported, that four women have been sentenced to death by an Islamic Shariaa Court for prostitution . The convicted women have been allowed only 15 days (until Dec. 10/97) to appeal this brutal sentence. Sudan s Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Abdelbasit Sabdrat, has confirmed that the women s case is before the Supreme Court and that the execution would be carried out unless it is reversed. Since 1983, those sentenced for prostitution had been subjected to death by stoning in public. The penal code in Sudan is part of the abhored 1983 Sharia laws, introduced by the deposed dictator Numeiri and carried over by the National Islamic Front (NIF) and the present military junta. These laws contravene the universally accepted principles of justice. In the Sudan, thoughtful Muslims and other citizens have persistently opposed the introduction of Numeiri s/NIF selfstyled Shariaa law, especially the application of the hudud punishments (amputation, crucifixion and stoning) at a time of enormous social and economic distress in the country.Unlike the adultery offense for which the Islamic Shariaa has laid down stricter rules, the prostitution offense is vague and often based on hearsay and circumstantial evidence. The death sentence handed down to the four convicted women is unjustified and unusually cruel. The excessive punishment, notwithstanding, the convicted women have been allowed only 15 days for appeal. This is a travesty of justice and a flagrant violation of the Universal Declaration On Human Rights and the OAU Human Rights Convention to which the Sudan government is a signatory. An offense such as prostitution should have been considered in the context of the enormous economic and social hardships emanating from decades of civil war, displacement and other reprisals primarily endured by women. By ignoring these mitigating circumstances, the court officials who convicted the four women have demonstrated incompetence and shameful disregard for justice and human lives. We, the undersigned, are gravely incensed by the cruelty of the sentence meted out to the four convicted women. We are extremely concerned the death sentence might be carried out, unless a powerful, worldwide campaign is launched on their behalf. Here and today, we call on the advocates of human rights everywhere to raise their voices and demand this extremely cruel punishment against the four convicted women be quashed. We are in a tight race against time to prevent a senseless tragedy from happening on Dec. 10th. Your voice and expeditious intervention will make a colossal difference in the struggle to save four precious lives. Please, support this appeal by every possible means! Demand this mockery trial be declared null and void. The military government in Sudan should be put on notice that its assault on human rights will not go unchecked!. Thank you very much for your sympathy and support. Signatures: Hashim Mohd Salih, California Asma Abdelhalim, New York Dr. Abdel Magid Bob, California Omar Hassan, California Ahmad Al-Kheiry Al-Dabi, Washington, D.C. Dr. Rasheed Khalifa, California Um Al-Kheir Kambal, California Sondra Hale, California Sausan Gafaar, California Abdel Rahim Mohd Minalla, California Igbal Mohd, California Tartiq Abel Moneim, Toronto Amir Mohammed, Texas Arhab Abdalla, N. Carolina Amin kamil saeed, Pennsylvania Jamal Mahgoub, California Is
Re: Physicists Take Philosophers to Task in Paris (N.Y. Times)
On Mon, 6 Oct 1997, Louis N Proyect wrote: So what's the problem with historical materialism? I happen to find it very useful in understanding fascism. What methodology DG use in understanding fascism is simply beyond me, but their conclusions are nuts: Louis: My problems with historical materialism are several. First, I have NOT found it useful. At one point I tried to use it as a frame of reference for thinking about several different problems I was working on --having to do with capitalist social engineering in the Third World-- and found it unhelpful in understanding what was going on. In every version I have come across I have found only rigid formulas into which various historical phenomena are to be fitted and a lack of concepts to help me understand the dynamics of whatever I have been studying at the time. I think the machine illustrations in E.P.Thompson's book The Poverty of Theory were very much to the point, even tho Thompson himself failed, IMHO, to break free of the structuralism he was critiquing. I like some of his students' work (in Albion's Fatal Tree, and The London Hanged) much better. Second, methodologically I think HM violates Marx's discussion in the Grundrisse about not retrospectively projecting concepts from contemporary society, i.e., capitalism, back onto earlier social relationships. In as much as concepts are generated within specific historical contexts, and are more or less adequate to grasping them, they are marked and limited by those contexts. I think this applies to Marxist theory as well. I neither project/apply it to human society backwards and forwards, a la HM, or in all directions a la Dialectical Materialism qua cosmology. [DG] "The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole." [LP] This is a totally superficial understanding of how fascism came about. What is Left fascism? It is true that the Communist Party employed thuggish behavior on occasion during the ultraleft "Third Period". They broke up meetings of small Trotskyist groups while the Nazis were breaking up the meetings of trade unions or Communists. Does this behavior equal left Fascism? Fascism is a class term. It describes a mass movement of the petty-bourgeoisie that seeks to destroy all vestiges of the working-class movement. This at least is the Marxist definition. Louis: Your characterization of fascism as "a mass movement of the petty-bourgeoisie that seeks to destroy all vestiges of the working-class movement" certainly grasps some aspects of that pheonmenon. But except for reminding people that it IS anti-working class, I don't think it is very helpful. I don't find the concept of "petty-bourgeoisie" helpful at all, but even if it did denote some meaningfully distinct group, the label doesn't help us understand what was going on in the genesis of fascism. You say DG's discussion of "how it came about" is superficial, but you offer no alternative. Defining it doesn't explain its genesis. What DG are trying to theorize is precisely the emergence of that body of behaviors and policies that we call fascism. They are offering a formulation which interconnects what's going on at the "molecular level", i.e., with individuals, families, schools, etc., and the emergence of a social movement. This seems to me to be exactly what is required to understand how fascism came about as such a devastatingly destructive social force. The same kind of analysis is needed, I think, for the emergence of cycles of working class struggle, especially the powerful ones that rupture capitalist development and/or precipitate revolution. A lot of interesting work has been done in recent years about the struggles of everyday life, e.g., popular culture theorists, students of peasant struggles. But what has been missing is analysis of how widespread "resistance" reaches a point where it coallesces into revolutionary upheaval. What were the molecular forces (to use DG term) that generated macro upheavals? What came together in 1789, in 1848, in 1870, in 1905, in 1910, in 1917 and so on in such a way as to explode? We can perhaps find limits to DG's analysis, but what they are offering, it seems to me, is exactly the KIND of analysis we need. In comparison, to return to the earlier point, HM comments about contraditions between base and superstructure
Re: Physicists Take Philosophers to Task in Paris (N.Y. Times)
On Mon, 6 Oct 1997, Doug Henwood wrote: Well I am actually pretty familiar with that literature, and not just the classic stuff on Oedipal neuroses, but the pre-oedipal/narcissistic stuff too. (One of my prized possessions is a Standard Edition of the complete Freud. snip And I still found AO preposterously obscure. I think they wrote it while on LSD (and I'm only partly joking there). Doug: You'll get no argument from me over the obscurity of much of Anti-Oedipus. It pissed me off when I read it and reinforce my general anglo-saxon ire at continental philosophers who seem to via to see who can be the most opaque. However, much of what is difficult in the text comes from two sources: first, they have taken over some of Artaud's language and concepts such as the "body without organs" (who could get away with it more easily as a poet) and second, they were trying to find new ways of talking about both old and new subjects --which is always risky and often harder for others to follow than for them to come up with new concepts and words. So you've got these two guys, one a philosopher, whose own treatises on Spinosa, Nietsche have their own difficulties, the other steeped in a backlash against mainstream psychiatry which has sought to turn much of it upsidedown, mix them together and you get some pretty difficult texts. I'm not apologizing for it, or excusing it, just saying that I feel like some of the effort of working through it pays off in useful stuff. (PS: I also don't try to excuse Marx's crafting of Chapter 1 of Volume 1 of Capital either; it was a bad idea to structure it along the lines of Hegel's logic, no matter how neatly it all fit together. It has remained impenetrable or misleading for most Marxists since! But in that case too, I think a lot of work figuring out how to put flesh on the painfully bare bones of the analysis revealed a semantically meaningful and politically useful interpretation, e.g., Reading Capital Politically. IMHO) In the end I found Anti-Oedipus limited by, among other things, a taking over of rather primitive Marxist analysis, a la Baran Sweezy. What do you find primitive about BS? Doug Doug: BS's interpretation of Marx's value theory was all too orthodox (in Sweezy's book) and effectively sterilized it (as usual) so with a dose of Frankfurt School influence (Baran) the two of them wound up rewording Keynesian economics in Marxist terms and offered us a one-sided theory of capitalist power and irrationality that provided no point of departure for understanding our own power, both to rupture capitalist development and to move in new directions. As far as I can remember they both considered themselves to be dialectical and historical materialists --theories which have kept their practitioners trapped within the neverending synthesis of capital's master narrative (as some pomo people might say). They apologized for Stalin, then for Mao (another Stalinist) throughout the 50s and 60s while being almost totally blind, deaf and dumb to the struggles of American industrial workers. If I remember right in the whole decade of the 50s there is only one article in Monthly Review on such struggles. I don't know if "primitive" is the best word for this kind of work, but it was the one that came to mind. DG's work which shifts our attention from domination to desire (and studies the former in terms of constraints on the latter) evokes, for me, the centrality of living labor (one form of human self activity) in Marx's own work, but is broader and evocative of more diverse meanings of self-activity. THAT moves us away from the productivist interpretation of Marx (despite their prediliction for talking about desiring-machines and production). You know, like everyone else, I was delighted to have their stuff back in the 60s, it helped in denouncing capitalist excesses. It was only when I wanted to answer Lenin's question of what is to be done, and realized that it could only be answered fruitfully on the basis of understanding what kind of power we already had, that I realized that they had virtually nothing to offer in the way of conceptual tools to generate such an understanding. Oh, well, back I went to Marx and found a different guy than the one they told us about. Harry . Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/ .
Re: Physicists Take Philosophers to Task in Paris (N.Y. Times)
On Sun, 5 Oct 1997, Doug Henwood wrote: I haven't read Thousand Plateaus. I tried to read Anti-Oedipus, but I gave up after about 50 pages because I thought it was complete nonsense. Since I respect your opinions a lot, Harry, I'll give 1000Ps a shot. Doug Doug: Thanks for the kind words and I think you just might like at least some parts of Thousand Plateaus. Like any huge work its really uneven, ranging from the easily comprehensible and thought provoking to the irritatingly obscure. I don't think Anti-Oedipus was nonsense, but there's no doubt it was written in a way that asumed complete familiarity not just with Freudian and post-Freudian psychiatry but with many of the classic cases as well --something very few people outside the field have. When I hit the second page and sunbeams shining out of Schreber's ass, I thought they were nuts. But the attempt to break the Feudian one-dimensional focus on Oedipus is well taken and their discourse on desire, for all its convolutedness, is helpful for thinking about what some of us call self-valorization that takes off (in their terms) in varous "lines of flight". I came to their work through that of Laing Cooper's earlier writings on schizophrenia and their critique of the failure of pyschiatry to grasp the insanity within which many people are trapped and to which only what appears to be an "insane" response is sane (e.g., double binds). In the end I found Anti-Oedipus limited by, among other things, a taking over of rather primitive Marxist analysis, a la Baran Sweezy. They are more interesting when striking out on their own to find new ways of explaining the limits and possibilities of self-activity. Yet even here, I don't like all their choices --such as the metaphor of the machine which pervades their work and seems unable to escape the capitalist paradigm of production and manufacturing. But their essay on rhizome is not only useful for thinking about non-hierarchical "networks" but is an also an inspiring demonstration of just how useful the exploration of metaphors can be. Makes you want to go out and think through some others. And there is much, much more that I find enriches my conceptual imagination. I read Guattari's Molecular Revolution first, which was a better introduction to his work than the joint book and found many parts of it useful. Guattari was very involved politically in France, not just in campaigns such as the one to support the Italian exiles (e.g., Negri with whom he later wrote Communists Like Us) but also with efforts to expand the range and availability of tools of all sorts for people to use in elaborating their own collective directions autonomously from capital. Except for the centrality of work (which probably came from Negri) ClikeUs was a nice little book reasonably focused on the need for non-homogenizing alliances among a diverse array of struggles. Anyway, when you do get around to it, have fun and don't get hung up on the opaque stuff, just keep reading. Read it a little as poetry perhaps, the way I'm convinced many read Marx's discussion on value. Eventually you can make sense out of most of it, but only if it tweaks your imagination and it seems worth the effort. Harry . Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/ .
Re: Physicists Take Philosophers to Task in Paris (N.Y. Times)
On Sat, 4 Oct 1997, Doug Henwood wrote: Ok, Deleuze Guattari are nutters, Lacan a bit of a fraud, Irigaray an arcane idealist - but what do we do now? How do you do real critical science studies? I think Alan Sokal should give us a hint of what he thinks. Doug Doug: I beg to differ, especially about Deleuze Guattari some of whose works I know quite well. There is a great deal of extremely thought provoking and useful material in their writings. While there was no excuse for writing Anti-Oedipus the way they did, Thousand Plateaus, beginning with the lovely essay on "rhizomes", more than made up for it. Deleuze's work more generally has elaborated readings of Spinoza, Nietsche others highlighting what might called moments of an anti-dialectical tradition which is a healthy antidote to the cosmology of orthodox Marxism and some ideas for thinking about going beyond capitalism which complement, in my mind, Marx's own work. Regardless of legitimacy of Sokal's critique of these writers understanding of science (I haven't read the book but I would not ASSUME he is correct) their work provides a wealth of useful material. Harry . Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/ .
[PEN-L:12442] M-FEM: Role of Prostitutes Shoe-shiners union in Spain? (fwd)
Does anyone know anything about the bit of Spanish Civil war history mentioned below? Or do you know someone who might know? If you do know could you reply to both the M-Fem list below and to me. Thanks Harry -- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 21:59:38 +0200 (SAT) From: Peter van Heusden [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: M-FEM: Role of Prostitutes Shoe-shiners union in Spain? Returning to our discussion of a time ago on prostitution, I recall hearing that a 'Prostitutes and Shoe-shiners Union' was a significant force supporting anarchism at the time of the Spanish Civil War - has anyone heard anything about this? Is it true? If so, does anyone know how the organisation of this union worked? Peter -- Peter van Heusden |Computers Networks Reds Greens Justice Peace Beer Africa [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Support the SAMWU 50 litres campaign!
[PEN-L:12441] Re: Peadophile cover-up all the way to the top of Aussie politics?
Andrew: Can you resend this message in the body of the text and/or as text-only? On Thu, 18 Sep 1997, Andrew Dragun wrote: Peadophilia, cover-up and dirty politics? Some folks might find this interesting! ... Ms Arena, who made the allegations, is highly believable ... she was responsible for outing a senior judge in a similar context. akd Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
[PEN-L:12291] Re: WWW at UCLA
Why don't you tell us about how you have been "teaching on the internet" and what you have learned from it? Harry On Fri, 12 Sep 1997, A. S. Fatemi wrote: As one who has been engaged in teaching on the internet for some two years, I'm glad this article from the NYT was posted for the benefit of those of us who do not get to see the Times. I believe many of the issues raised in this article need to be considered by the profession in great detai. One major way in which teaching on the net can enhance education was not mentioned in that story. Currently, with the support of UNESCO, here at AUP, in Paris, are engaged in developing a network among several European universities and their counterparts in the developing nations where shortage of qualified faculty is a major constraint on their expansion of higher education. I sincerely appreciate any comments or assistance from colleagues on PEN-L in this respect. Regards, A. S. Fatemi Professor of Economics The American University of Paris 102 rue Saint Dominique 75007 Paris Tel: (33) 01 40 62 06 40 Fax: (33) 01 47 53 88 03 http://www.Fatemi.com E-MAIL SAVES TREES! Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
[PEN-L:12252] Re: Fire Down Below
Louis: I read somewhere --and I don't know whether it is true or not-- that Seagal demanded the right to say anything he wanted at the end of his Alaska film, with no producer censorship, as a condition for making the flick. As you probably know, he used those ten minutes to denounce multinational corporate destruction of the environment. I haven't seen his latest, but look forward to it. I went to see "Above the Law" with my brother who is a black belt, "this guy has some GREAT moves", he said, and we staggered out in a state of shock at the powerful denunciation of CIA drug trafficing in Central American in support of the Contras --AND the explicit connection to their earlier actions in Indochina. It was a little like watching a revealing documentary on what was going on at the time. While he might do the job better with some advice from us :-) there is no doubt that he is reaching one hell of a lot of people with at least part of what they need to hear and see. Harry On Wed, 10 Sep 1997, Louis Proyect wrote: There is a genuine integrity to Steven Seagal's body of work. While the critical establishment is finally giving Jackie Chan the acclaim that he richly deserves as martial artist/film star, isn't it about time that we recognize Seagal for the politically progressive trail-blazer that he is? Make way, Oliver Stone, for a genuine rebel--one who is at home delivering class-struggle speeches or karate kicks to a villain's teeth. In his latest film "Fire Down Below," Seagal plays Jack Taggart, an EPA inspector who goes undercover in rural Kentucky to find out who has killed his partner. His partner was investigating toxic spills. His cover is as a volunteer church worker who repairs the porches of congregation members. The pastor is played by Levon Helm, formerly of the band called The Band. It turns out that a most reactionary member of the bourgeoisie, Orin Hanner (Kris Kristofferson), is being paid big money to hide toxic waste in the hills and waters of the beautiful Appalachian countryside, and the chemicals are killing fish and making children sick. Orin Jr.(Brad Hunt) runs the day-to-day operations in the hills while his dad sits in the corporate headquarters like an Appalachian version of the rotten businessman J.R. Ewing on the old TV show "Dallas". Now in his sixties, Kristofferson has adapted well to villainous roles. He was outstanding as the sadist cop in John Sayles "Lone Star" and equals that performance here. Orin Jr. sends out one goon squad after another to kill Seagal, but he always manages to defeat them with well-placed kicks and punches. The charm of watching Seagal in action has a lot to do with his growing middle-aged paunch which many cinema fans can identify with. Seagal wears long coats throughout the film which tastefully disguise his love handles, but you can discern their contour if you look carefully. Not only does he have lethal extremities, he is also cunning and lethal behind the wheel. One of Hanner's thugs tries to run him off the road, but Seagal dodges him at the edge of a cliff and the would-be killer drives to his death. This is an action hero par excellence: a combination of the Roadrunner, Bruce Lee and--best of all--Big Bill Heywood. As soon as he returns to town after the car chase, he walks into the middle of a church service and mounts the pulpit. He tells the congregation that there are rich people who are trying to poison them. Their profits come at the expense of the town's children or the beauty of the environment. It is time to stand up to these greedy businessmen and fight for justice, says Seagal with a steely glint in his eye. Highly recommended: Five hammer-and-sickles Louis Proyect Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
[PEN-L:12202] Re: Dark humor posted to Chinese Christian Newsgroup
I first heard this story during the Iraq-Iran War when the Iranians were reported to be using soldiers to clear land mines by just marching through the fields. Then it was a flat out joke: Ali sees Mohammed walking ten feet behind his wife and says "Mohammed, don't you know that according to the Koran your wife should be walking ten feet behind YOU?" And Mohammed replies: "Ah, yes. But that was before land mines." My guess is that the story originated in that period and circulated as part of the then rabid anti-Islamic humor/ideology that flowered during the post-1978 hostage conflict. On Mon, 8 Sep 1997, Michael Eisenscher wrote: A journalist had done a story on gender roles in Kuwait several years before the Gulf War, and she noted then that women customarily walked about 10 feet behind their husbands. She returned to Kuwait recently and observed that the men now walked several yards behind their wives. She approached one of the women for an explanation.. "This is marvelous," said the journalist. "What enabled women here to achieve this reversal of roles?" Replied the Kuwaiti woman: "Land mines" Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
[PEN-L:11955] Re: Big mouth
On Mon, 25 Aug 1997, Louis Proyect wrote: I'm glad god blessed me with a big mouth. The TV show "Law and Order" is filming on the premises of Columbia Teachers College where I work. The show presents a right-wing version of the crime problem, as would be indicated by the title. It is basically "Dirty Harry" without the vigilantism. The "bad guys" who are usually minorities get their comeuppance in the courts rather than the streets. Louis Proyect Louis: I haven't watched LO with any regularity but I have watched it often enough to see that it is NOT "a right-wing version of the crime problem". It is much more of a liberal version --still very much within the system-- but frequently giving a liberal view of various social issues. For instance, I have seen at least two shows in which right-wing, pro-lifers (if you will excuse the term) used violence against abortion clinics. In both cases the treatment was anything but favorable to the usual right wing positions and attitudes. I suspect that if they haven't done a show, or shows, dealing with crooked or sadistic cops, they well might. It would fit nicely into the liberal agenda favoring reform to clean up the dirty corners of society --without of course questioning the basic fabric of "law and order". I haven't done a head count --as I say I haven't watched it systematically-- but I'd also guess that the majority of the "bad guys" are NOT minorities, for all the same reasons. Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/ .
[PEN-L:11960] Re: Big mouth
On Mon, 25 Aug 1997, Louis N Proyect wrote: I was wrong about the usual villain being a minority member on "Law and Order" but I'll stick with everything else I said about the show. There is nothing liberal about it. To use the word liberal to describe it would strip the word of all meaning. Louis: We just use terms somewhat differently. As a child of the 60s the term "liberal" has almost no positive connotations for me whatsoever. "Liberals" gave us Vietnam, the Green Berets and the murder of Che abroad, and Southeast Asian heroin in American cities, massive military reprisal against central city uprisings, and so on. BTW the American use of the term "liberal" is peculiar anyway, traditionally it was associated with very conservative politics --as in contemporary neo-liberalism. The biggest problem with "Law and Order" is that poverty as a causal explanation of crime is simply absent from the show. All of the gangsters, drug dealers and other predators who appear in the plot are simply bad guys that the cops and DA's office have to protect the citizenry from. The show presents the victim's point of view, who are inevitably white and middle class. There are "white collar" criminals on the show, but the big nightmare in NYC is not some executive who decides to poison a corporate rival (which never really happens in real-life) but the black or Puerto Rican hoodlums that Giuliani is trying to crack down on. Louis: Like I said, I haven't watched it much so I can't judge the accuracy of your generalizations. snip The other thing to keep in mind about "Law and Order" is the way that the occasional prostitute is depicted. Pay close attention, Harry; they are seen as part of the general anti-social fabric that makes NYC unpalatable, along with squeegee guys, crack dealers and boom-box carrying teenagers. The push to rid Times Square of the "sex industries" is fully in line with the social message of the Giuliani campaign and "Law and Order". Louis: the only episode that I've seen that dealt with prostitutes fit the Craven worst-case scenario: a young girl corrupted, used, and abused by a pimp who was already pimping her mother (if I remember right). In that case the girl was treated very favorably as having been brought up in difficult circumstances and deluded by Mass Media into thinking that if she could become a model/cover-girl her life would be perfect. As I remember, although she killed the pimp, after hearing her story, the DA's office basically dropped all charges, just getting her into some psych program. That one episode didn't fit your description. snip American society is in a fairly deep crisis and the police are functioning more and more like occupation troops in communities where injustice cuts deepest. Police brutality simply does not exist on NYPD, Homicide, or Law and Order, etc. When Jerry Orbach grabs a guy by the collar and tells him, "You better tell me what I'm looking for or else", this is about as far as the show will ever go. But this will not disturb the liberal yuppie enjoying his or her TV show. What will disturb them is the sight of two cops holding a black man down while a third sticks a toilet plunger up his ass. This is real life and will not appear on "Law and Order". Louis Proyect Louis: Generally, I agree with you about how cops are functioning and who suffers the consequences and the likelihood of an ACCURATE depiction on TV. Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
[PEN-L:11858] A Prostitute on Prostitution
Folks: The recent exchange on prostitution came to an end and I am not interested in reopening it where we left off, but I think most of you will find the following communication of considerable interest. It comes from Sera Pinwell, a woman working in the sex industry in Australia --one who is also active in the political struggles of that industry. I have been contacted by another prostitute, from New York, also an activist, whose comments were very similar. It is nice to have people come forward and verify that your ideas about them and their struggles are on target. Harry PS:I am reproducing this with Sera's permission. I have deleted the names of two others mentioned only tangentially. -- Forwarded message -- Date: Mon, 18 Aug 1997 13:03:37 +1000 From: WISE [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Prostitution Dear Harry, __ posted some of your correspondence with James Craven on Whorenet (for sex workers and interested others), and I have to say that I think Craven's arguments are so typically thoughtless and patronizing. A bit of background: My name is Sera Pinwill. I am the co-ordinator of Workers In Sex Employment (WISE) in the ACT Inc., which is a sex worker education/advocacy group in Canberra, Australia. I have worked as a whore on and off (no pun intended) for the past 15 years, both on the streets of Melbourne and Sydney, in brothels and massage parlours, and for myself as a high class call girl. It enrages me to hear other people - people who have absolutely NO IDEA of how I feel and what my life is like, making assumptions and judgments on my behalf, and that is exactly what Craven has done. You wrote: Why can you not imagine that sex workers hire other prostitutes for real pleasure? Why do you jump to the interpretation that they just want someone to abuse? Why do you keep repeating horror stories or dreaming up possible horror stories instead of accepting the possibility that there are attitudes and behaviors different from those you have encountered. If you refuse to accept any evidence that differs from your own, then there is no point to discussion --and your own understanding will stagnate. Of course - this is my truth and the truth of many, many women and men who I am involved with on a daily basis. Knowing how much pride I take in my professionalism, I am much more inclined to seek out the services of a professional during the times when I feel that I need someone to cater for my desires. I do not abuse them, nor they me. We fulfill each others needs. We are adults engaging in consensual and pleasurable activity - and to suggest that I am abusive or deluded in my thinking is patronizing and shows egomania in its extremes. Craven wrote: In the course of that work, I interviewed literally hundreds of prostitutes (always in confidence and not one was ever turned in and they knew it). I never met even one "sex worker" who looked forward to going to work or who did not have dreams of using the money "to get out of the business. And of course, these workers being interviewed are, by the nature of their work, experts at reading people. They know what the interviewer wants to hear, while the interviewer is in the position of power over them ( he could have turned them in to police) they will tell him what he wants to hear. With Craven's attitude - I sincerely doubt that even if someone did confess to enjoying their work or gaining job satisfaction from it - he would not hear them anyway.. Craven wrote: Further there are some unique dangers and forms of degradation involved when, as you put it, the commodity being exchanged is "use of genitals". Why? Where are these unique dangers and forms of degradation? They are in the mind of someone whose sexual repression is so complete that genitals = dirty. I am not arguing that all prostitution is equal and consensual. Of course there are some women and men who are forced to work in the industry and some who are forced by economic circumstances when they would rather not be there. But I can clearly and categorically state that the evidence from Canberra - which is much the same as any other city of its size - shows that by far the large majority of women and men who are sex workers, are doing it BECAUSE THEY WANT TO. Because they enjoy the financial freedom it brings them, because they enjoy the sex, because they enjoy the flexibility of the hours - and for lots of other reasons. To say that all these people are abusers/abused, deluded etc, etc, etc, is denying their reality. In a study that was done by myself and ___ from the National Sex Worker Rights Organisation in Australia (The Scarlet Alliance) of sex workers in the Canberra district, both brothel workers and those working privately from home, those who reported being sexually assaulted as children was around 15%. This is, in fact,
[PEN-L:11825] Re: Is Capitalism Sustainable?
Is Capitalism Sustainable? Let's hope not, or rather let's do our best to make sure that it continues to be able to sustain itself for as short a time as possible. "Sustainable Capitalism" is a nightmare.(That includes "sustainable development" because "development" has always meant capitalist development.) Economists, as a rule, don't worry about whether or not it is sustainable in theory; they are hard at work doing their best to make it so for as long as possible. What do you expect? It's what economics has always been about. For one take on "sustainablity" see url: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/port.html Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
[PEN-L:11817] Re: ups and the need for a pen-l web site
On Sat, 16 Aug 1997, Michael Perelman wrote: I am getting very positive feedback about Michael E.'s UPS postings, plus a couple of complaints about the volume that one individual is sending. Michael: I may have an unusually powerful delete finger, but I don't mind using it and E's postings are good whether on pen-l or labor-l or elsewhere. Harry Cleaver was doing something similar -- on a smaller scale with Chiapas, but now he uses the web and his own list -- which is probably the appropriate way to go. I do wish that someone had the time and the expertise to create a web site for pen-l -- so that we could have information such as Michael is providing in a handier form. Michael:Creating a web page for pen-l is simple, I could do it for you anytime. The only problem is who is going to do something with it. If you look at the chiapas95 page you'll see not only subscription information and hotlinks to the gopher site archives of the list (which already exists for pen-l) but a variety of special collections of materials, e.g., on the Zapatistas and the Net. While anyone could prepare such a collection --say on the UPS strike-- you still need a webmaster to receive the material and put intros and links on the page. THAT, I'm afraid I don't have time to do. Can you? Do you know html, or how to use a web page editor such as the one in Netscape 3.0 Gold? What makes web pages useful is when they grow and change and evolve so as to bring things to peoples attention, gather materials that are useful, etc. If you`re willing to be the webmaster, I'll whip you out a basic webpage and send it to you. Someone like E could prepare all the UPS material into a packet and you could insert it into the csf gopher site where the pen-l archives are, or he could keep it on his local server and just give you the link and a paragraph of prose to introduce it on the web site. Harry Also, I would like to know if my sample is biased -- if more of you think that the volume of Michael's postings are burdensome, or if you appreciate the service he is performing. I am only raising the question because 1) it has been posed to me and 2) I would like to know how to make the list as useful as possible. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 916-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/ .
[PEN-L:11765] Re: Prostitution and Lumpenproletariat
On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, James Michael Craven wrote: I did not find these women and men seeing themselves as "self- valorizing" themselves or practicing a form of "self-determination" or "empowered" in any meaningful way. Sure some would mock the tricks and take delite in getting over on them but there was always a look of sadness and expression of marginal pleasure out of a situation of desperation and hopelessness. Jim:Once again since I have no idea what you mean by "self-valorization" and I'm convinced you have had no idea what I mean by it, I hardly know how to evaluate your "evidence". Since I rather doubt on the basis of your last post that we might agree about what "meaningful" empowerment or self-detrmination might be, I can wonder if I might come to the same conclusions from the same interviews. Given what I do mean by self-valorization (which I spelled out briefly in my last response) I would hope that things are not as bleak in Puerto Rico as you paint them, but they may well be. I'm willing to assume that there are any number of very desperate situations in the world of prostitution, as there are in so many other domains of work. Prostitutes by virtue of their conditions of work, atomization (atomization is consciously designed to keep them powerless and unorganized) and isolation, attitudes (many were extremely anti- communist and anti-socialist eventhough they sometimes had a hard time articulating what it was about communism and socialism they opposed) typically belong more in the lumpenproletariat than in the classical proletariat. Of course there are many in the lumpenproletariat who have progressive sympathies and have played progressive roles while there are also some in the proletariat who are reactionary and have inhibited progressive struggles. I think that much of Franz Fanon's work helped to break down some of the anti- lumpenproletariat biases and stereotypes common in the left and that he was right on in suggesting that the potentially progressive sympathies and roles played among some in the lumpenproletariat have been grossly underestimated. Jim: 1.Certainly those that seek to control prostitutes try (and often succeed) in keeping them seperated from each other, atomized as it were. On the other hand, clearly in some places at some times, prostitutes have been able to organize themselves and have fought for and won better working conditions, etc. What is needed is an analysis of the conditions under which and the means through which some have succeeded and others failed to do this, not just a focus on failure and a dismissal of success. 2.I don't think the "classical proletariat" - "lumpenproletariat" dichotomy is very useful, especially not now, perhaps not ever. I certainly don't see what we gain in understanding of the exploitation and struggles of prostitutes through the use of these terms. Recent Marxist studies of 18th C England have shown how the "criminal class" usually lumped in with the lumpen was actually made up of ordinary workers. (See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, and also Albion's Fatal Tree by Linebaugh and other Thompson ex-students.) At any rate all you have done is label them, not used the concept to reveal anything. On the other hand, it was not because of petit-bourgeois morality that the Chinese and Cuban revolutions de jure abolished prostitution as one of the first official acts and worked to abolish it de facto. They understood that prostitution is about much more than the "exchange of use of genitals"; it is about commodification, which under capitalism is more about degradation and depreciation than "self-valorization" and "empowerment"; it can cause all sorts of problems in families (imagine the husband goes home and after giving his wife STDs from a visit to a prostitute says "But honey, I was only aiding in the empowerment and self-valorization of a fellow worker who just happens to be selling a different kind of product but essentially doing what I do at work"), for the families of prostitutes as well as prostitutes themselves (drug addiction, pimps). Jim:Pretending that I think prostitution is just about fucking and then making fun of it is not a convincing way of arguing. Concocting a ridiculous scene and then making fun of it does not consistute a serious argument either, however entertaining. Obviously prostitution is about "commodification","degradation" and "depreciation", as is every other sale of labor power. Self-valorization and empowerment are things people sometimes manage to accomplish despite and against these things. What I don't understand about the whole trend of your comments is your continual tendency to ridicule or dismiss the possibility that such accomplishment CAN happen. Why are you so determined to deny the possibility of sucessful struggle? Further, in the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, there was an understanding based on bloody experience
[PEN-L:11766] Re: Query for Harry Cleaver
On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, James Michael Craven wrote:
Harry,
Since you assert that my assertions about the nature and effects of
prostitution are mere a priori assertions, please answer the
following: 1) How many prostitutes have you personally spoken with at
length about these issues? 2) How many prostitutes has your graduate
student spoken with? 3) Under what conditions? (e.g. a Japanese
person interviewing prostitutes in Japan might have a real problem
because of the pervasive and brutal influences of the Yakuza and
prostitutes might fear reprisals); 4) What empirical work have you
done/published in this area?; 5) How many activists dealing with mail-
order-brides, prostitution etc in Asia and elsewhere have you spoken
with?
Jim: THIS kind of argument, I think, is called "appeal to authority". I
haven't done ANY formal field research in the sex industry, nor have I
pretended to. What I know has come from informal interaction and
investigatiang the results of others research. You sound like a Pentagon
spokesperson back in the 1960s to anti-war dissidents: "If you haven't
been in the battlefields in Vietnam, then you don't know what you're
talking about and should shut up and believe the authorities!" This kind
of argument assumes that we disagree about facts and that you can one-up
me because you have "been there". Our arguments here have never been about
"facts" Mr Gradgrind, but about what we make of various situations we have
seen, heard and read about. Indeed, you have never disputed the examples I
have pointed to, only thrown up evidence of other situations as an excuse
for dismissing the former. You have been so intent on laying out
evidence from your experience and waving your revolutionary fervor that a
real dialog has never happened. (As to Satoko's work, I've already given
the url for her proposal and she can speak for her self when she returns
from the field. What I can tell you is that she has been living and
working in the red-light district of a major Japanese industrial city and
keeping a detailed journal on her experiences and what she has learned
from her sex-worker friends.)
If anyone is interested, I can make copies of my work (in Spanish)
in Puerto Rico ("Dimensions, Impacts and Dynamics of Some Industries
of the Underground Economy of Puerto Rico") including some of my raw
notes and informant reports available.
Jim: Like I said, although I might disagree with your interpretations if I
had been with you, given our different perspectives, I have not disputed
your experience. Your research has not been challenged and there is no
need to offers your notebooks as proof.
Here we go back to an old debate. When any and all forms of rebellion
or counter-culture are framed as progressive and characterized as
"self-valorization", "individualistic empowerment" etc, then it
becomes very easy to legitimate--even commodify--narcissistic self-
indulgence as "revolution."
Jim: Here you go again. Please cite, concretely, where I have "framed"
"all forms of rebellion or counter-culture" as "progressive" or called
them "self-valorization"?? I have not. You rave and rant, raise up straw
men and burn them to the ground. You convince, I dare say, no one, of
anything except your own intemperateness.
The libertarians and other anarchists
love this stuff because it allows them to indulge in their own
individualistic acts and self-indulgent life styles (that really do
nothing for anybody except themselves and a few followers) and handle
the congnitive dissonance problem by framing any and all acts of
ultra-individualism as "rebellion" and therefore "revolutionary."
Jim:Ah, ha! So now you flail away at "libertarians and other anarchists"
and try to tar me in the process, just like you did with Satoko and
Japanese racists. You don't come right out and attack me directly, you do
so through loose association. Tsk,tisk! You may think that all
libertarians and anarchists "indulge" themselves and rationalize it as
revolutionary, but if you do, it just shows you don't know many of them.
They can say "we are all whores" in some way so therefore what the
hell, one kind of whoring is the same as another.
Jim: Show me some anarchist writing where this is done. You won't find it
in Emma Goldmann's work, or any other that I have seen. In as much as I
have said "we are all prostitutes" you are clearing trying to smear me
indirectly. But I have never said "therefore what the hell"! That's your
fantasy, conjured up because, I guess, you can't see what to do with the
arguments that I have suggested to you.
On one level I can
see the argument, and certainly academics who do Faustian bargains
for tenure, promotions, publish-or-perish etc have no business
"looking down" on prostitutes; on the other hand, I just can't forget
the pain and devastation I have seen in Asia and elsewhere. I'm
sorry, but this crap
Jim: "Crap"? There is a basic rule in
[PEN-L:11768] Re: Prostitutes and Choice
On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, Louis Proyect wrote: So I guess this autonomic Marxism is something I have to learn more about. My only reaction to Harry's post is that anything that coincides with the thinking of the dreadful Karl Carlile must be re-examined. But what do I know. Louis: Although Franco has explained some things already, let me just add a couple of things. First, I think you will find, upon examination, that neither my arguments nor those of the people I associate with "autonomist Marxism" have much in common with the thinking of Carlile. Indeed, we have spoken past each other before and his vehement attacks on autonomist Marxist thought resemble Craven's rants more than anything else. On the question of prostitution itself, I tend to think that one of the great things about the Cuban and Chinese revolutions is that they put a stop to the "sex industry" right away. Louis: If I remember the history correctly, the unhelpful thing they did was to outlaw it, the good thing was to provide some alternative employment to prostitutes. I have no idea of what "self-valorization" under capitalism means. This sounds like a contradiction in terms. Louis: Historically it its. Marx used the term to talk about capital's own expansion, the way it "valorized" itself quantitatively. Negri took the term, obscure as it was, and turned it inside out applying it to working class subjectivity. Instead of capital valorizing itself, workers sometimes valorize themselves, not as moments of capital but as autonomous subjects (building post capitalist social relations or communism). Some of us have used in this sense to focus on the creative positive side of struggle that goes beyond resistance and attack to constitutive power --the founding of alternatives. I do think that the re-emergence of prostitution in Cuba is an awful symptom of what is being lost there. Louis: I suspect you are quite right, but don't know enough to be sure. I guess we all fear that Cuba will slide back into the hands of the sugar kings and casino lords that ran it before --regardless of how differently we may view workers struggles in Cuba today. At any rate I suppose I will have to find out more about this autonomic Marxism stuff at some point and render my untutored and autodidactic opinion here. Louis Proyect Louis: there is an incomplete course outline with partially annotated bibliography for a course I teach on the subject at url: gopher://mundo.eco.utexas.edu:70/00/fac/hmcleave/Class%20Materials/Eco%20387L%20Autonomist%20Marxism/Syllabus which can be reached through my home page whose url is given below. Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
[PEN-L:11764] Re: Prostitutes and Choice
On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, James Michael Craven wrote: Response (Jim C): I agree with your notion that there are many forms and levels of prostitution and indeed many forms and levels of brutality and degradation under capitalism. But another way of interpreting your comments above--about sex workers hiring others for their own "pleasure" is that it is analogous to abused becoming abusers; further, the glowing descriptions of the "power" their sexual competence gives them could also be interpreted as a typical reaction of the powerless seeking some marginal form of power in their own lives. Jim:What's with you? Why is it that in each argument your mind leaps to the worst possible interpretation and ignores any other? Why can you not imagine that sex workers hire other prostitutes for real pleasure? Why do you jump to the intepretation that they just want someone to abuse? Why do you keep repeating horror stories or dreaming up possible horror stories instead of accepting the possibility that there are attitudes and behaviors different from those you have encountered. If you refuse to accept any evidence that differs from your own, then there is no point to discussion --and your own understanding will stagnate. I see no a priori reason to dismiss all this as mere delusion by perhaps once abused individuals. Just as other workers can subvert their work for their own purposes and empowerment, so can some sex workers. "Detournement" as the situationists called it, is a common element of subversion in many jobs. Why not this one? Response (Jim C): My reasons are not "a priori". I once worked as an Analista de Planificacion for the government of Puerto Rico. My work involved analysis and estimation of linkages/leakages of the underground economy in P.R (drugs, prostitution, bolitos etc) from the ground up. In the course of that work, I interviewed literally hundreds of prostitutes (always in confidence and not one was ever turned in and they knew it). I never met even one "sex worker" who looked forward to going to work or who did not have dreams of using the money "to get out of the business." Yes, workers have various ways of suberting the power relations and brutality in the work place but real empowerment comes through collective action which may or may not come about or be enhanced through individualistic reactions and forms of subversion in the workplace; sometimes these individualistic reactions and attempts at "empowerment" through individual acts of subversion--not coupled with collective action--may even set back the forms and levels of collective action necessary. Jim: Straw man and belittlement. I never said that all, or even most, prostitutes "like going to work", so why are you arguing against the idea that they might. I have no doubt that many don't. I never said that all, or even most, prostitutes wouldn't like to "get out of the business", so why are you arguing that many do. I wouldn't be surprised; most of us would like to change jobs to better working conditions, more control and higher income. "Real empowerment"? Why do you attack "individual acts of empowerment" because they "may" not lead to collective empowerment. How about analysing how they they sometimes do "lead to collective empowerment". How are we to differentiate if we don't examine both situations. How do you think people get to the point of acting collectively? They come to it through their own self-activity, which is always social, always connected to others. This individual/collective dichotomy is both old and misleading because of this. Only individuals act. They may act collectively but individuals are doing the acting. Ignore what motivates them to do so and you fail to understand even collective action. And don't tell me about the fallacy of composition. I'm NOT arguing that collective action is some summation of indiviual action neoclassical style. How do you think organized of groups of prostitutes, like PONY in New York, got organized? that they regard sex as a business and that housewives and girlfriends are essentially in the same business they are in, Jim: And they are all too often right, I would say. More frequently than many would like to admit a marriage is just a long term contract to provide sexual and other services in exchange for income and job tenure. (Jane Austin wrote about his in her novels, without calling a spade a spade but the lesson is spelled out clear as day.) Prostitutes negotiate short-term contracts, spouses negotiate long term ones (often with legal documents these days). In general I think one of the best descriptions of capitalism is a society of generalized prostitution. We are all prostitutes, the only choice we have is which part of our selves are we going to make available for work. Some make their genitals available, others their hands and arms, others their minds, others their
[PEN-L:11754] Re: Sex work and choice
On Tue, 12 Aug 1997, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: A comment on the issue whether women forced into prostitution have some choice. 1. The fact of depriving a person some choices, even those deemed important in our society, does not meet depriving that person of all choices. A prostitute may have little choice as far as the selection of her occupation is concerned, but she may still have considerable (or some) choice of how she practices that occupation, howe she compensates for power inequalities etc. Wojtek:I'd say except in the case of outright slavery (e.g., comfort women) those who enter the sex work market generally do have choices about both whether to get in and how to behave once in. The conditions on those choices, of course, vary enormously. 2. In fact, if we take the petty bourgeois morality out of the picture, prostitution is work just as any other work, except that a prostitute owns the means of production, and under most circumstances she is paid for the "product" rather than for the time. These arrangements may vary, however. In case of "Comfort Women" or Asiatic forms of sex work in general, where women are held in some form of capitivity or debt slavery, their work is more like hiring a labourer who must toil for the capitalit for a fixed period of time during which the capitalist squeezes as much use value out of the worker as possible. Wojtek: I think the "owning of the means of production" assumes a dualistic and alienated relationship between prostitutes and their bodies/minds/personalities. I can't see any more reason for looking at these aspects of prostitutes as "means of production" than I can for any worker. These are parts of themselves, the parts they must sell the use of in order to earn income, just like other workers sell the use of their arms, hands, minds, personalities. We may not like the way these parts of us are used/abused but that doesn't make them "means of production". They are elements of our laborpower, our ability and willingness to work as well as parts of our being and potential for all kinds of activity, not just work. Similarly, I think the usefulness of thinking about prostitutes as if they are independent entrepreneurs selling "products", e.g. pleasure, understanding or catharsis, is limited. Even when they are independent operators, e.g. working without bosses (pimps or brothels), their situation resembles that of "independent" peasants, truckers, and many small "businesspeople". That is to say, while they have the FORM of a capitalist, the CONTENT of their work and lives is that of workers: they work, they earn enough income to reproduce themselves, but the banks, landlords, moneylenders and the state take any surplus they might generate and they rarely accumulate in the social sense of gathering enough money to put others to work. Like housewives, their "unwaged" status hides the working class character of their lives. Also like housewives, their work is primarily the work of reproducing labor power. 3. Since we should not view prostitution differently from any other kind of work (in fact, the term 'sex worker' is more appropriate than petty bourgeois 'prostitute') Wojtek:Personally I like the term prostitute, precisely for its connotations. Instead of casting it aside in the case of sex workers, I prefer to apply it to all of us who sell some aspect of ourselves to survive (as I suggested in a previous post). - whatever can be said of how workers deal with the lack of choice should apply for sex workers as well. That problem was specifically addressed by Michael Borawoy in his book _Manufacturing Consent_ -- which is an ethnography of how manual workers in Chicago area deal with the very limited choices they have regarding their work. The bottom line is that they usually develop a quite elaborate informal system that allows them to adapt (at least emotionally) to a situation that significantly affects their lives (how much their earn what hours they have to work, what they have to do) -- but over which they have very little choice. That is, depriving them of some, even important, choices does not mean depriving them of all choices. Wojtek: Yes, the parallel is a good one. But I think such informal (and sometimes formal) networks often go far beyond just emotional adaptation and come to provide all kinds of mutual aid and support, often laying the groundwork for more formal and collective forms of struggle. In the case of prostitutes such networks probably predated, to some degree, the formation of formal groupings who fight for their rights. 4. Given the informal nature of sex work and the absence of any written rules, a sex worker has a greater latitude in negotiating with her employer how the work will be performed. Wojtek: In the first place, you are talking here about a sub-set of prostitutes. There are lots of prostitutes with quite formal work relations, e.g., those who work in
[PEN-L:11665] Prostitutes and Choice
On Thu, 7 Aug 1997, James Michael Craven wrote: These women were slaves, pure and simple--which is not to say that "prostitutes" are doing what they are doing out of some "choice" or without coercion. Jim: Thanks for your comments. In general I agree with them. I do think, however, that not to see that many prostitutes have in fact "chosen" their line of work (given their limited options) means also not to see their subjectivity and struggles. I have a graduate student (a Japanese woman) who is doing field work with Thai prostitutes in Japan and she has collected detailed and convincing information from them about their choices and how they struggle. The "limited options" just refered to, of course, are why this choice looks good. So within a larger context their "choice", like that of workers more generally, is hardly a "free choice". Nevertheless, the common view of prostitutes as pure victims does not do a great many of them justice, nor accord them the respect they so richly deserve for their struggles. Harry PS: My graduate student's detailed dissertation proposal can be found at: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/satprop.html Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
[PEN-L:11443] E;Interact with the 2nd Encuentro via the Web! Jul 25 (fwd)
Folks: Some of you with internationalist leanings might be interested in paying some attention to the 2nd Intercontinental Encounter now underway in Spain. This 2nd Encounter follows the first which was held in Chiapas, Mexico last summer. There were over 3,000 grassroots activists at that meeting; some 4,000 are expected at this one. There are a wide variety of materials available that have been prepared for it and some ways you can interact with it if you are so inclined. Harry -- Forwarded message -- Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 02:36:30 -0500 (CDT) From: Chiapas95-Lite [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Chiapas 95 Moderators [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: E;Interact with the 2nd Encuentro via the Web! Jul 25 This posting has been forwarded to you as a service of Accion Zapatista de Austin. Note:Please repost this message to other relevant lists. Folks: This is to call your attention to three new items which are now available on the WWW that make it possible for you to interact with the 2nd Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism even if you can't go to Spain. 1. A collection of materials in English prepared for the the 2nd Intercontinental Encounter in Spain. These materials are organized by workshop (1 - 6). The site gathers papers that can be found on the official multilingual Spanish site and others. The papers are html formatted and can be downloaded from the web with a simple "print" command without needing any further formatting. (The Spanish site papers require formatting with a word processing program.) The URL for accessing these materials is: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/wk0index.html 2. A Web Page with Daily Reports from Spain. The URL for this page is: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/dailyreports.html 3. An interactive "web foro on Encounter 2" where you can post your ideas about the encounter, or encounters in general, or about the papers prepared for the meetings, or respond to others comments already posted. This is a "threaded" posting board to make it easy to follow various lines of discussion. The URL for this foro is: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/nave/webforo.pl Comments and contribution too long to post on this board can be sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for posting on Daily Report page, to relevant lists and to Spain where substantive messages and comments will be downloaded and posted at the Encuentro sites for public consumption. All three sites can be accessed through the Chiapas95 webpage at URL: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html These pages and these materials have been constructed by a team of members of Accion Zapatista and of the Zapnet Collective. Some are attending the Encuentro in Spain and some are managing the web sites from Austin. -- To unsubscribe from this list send a message containing the words unsubscribe chiapas95-lite to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:10929] Fwd: Is globalisation inevitable and desirable? (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 22:21:39 -0400 (EDT) From:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Fwd: Is globalisation inevitable and desirable? - Forwarded message: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Le Monde diplomatique) Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition) Date: 97-06-09 14:12:59 EDT _ IS GLOBALISATION INEVITABLE AND DESIRABLE? A public debate held on May 7th, 1997 Chairman: Professor Leslie Hannah, Pro-Director, LSE http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/md/dossiers/ft/ DEMOCRACY seems in short supply, so lacklustre the debate. In this respect, the United Kingdom is no better off than France and the other countries of Europe. If "la pensée unique" has found no proper translation in English, it nonetheless has great currency: in particular, insofar as globalisation is treated in almost all the quality media as a given which does not bear discussion. Among them, the prestigious daily Financial Times, and with the weekly The Economist, both salute the liberal credo. Reputed for its quality coverage of international affairs and for the rigour of its economic, financial and social news, the FT always distinguishes facts (held sacred) from commentary (where it vigorously defends its convictions). On 29 April, prior to the British elections, it affirmed its preference for Tony Blair's New Labour and also recalled that the paper's editorial policy was grounded in its belief in the market economy, free trade and creating an outward-looking Europe. The points of view expressed, in their diversity, by Le Monde diplomatique are also founded on rigorous news and hard fact, but they draw on values beyond those of the market. Translated in five European countries, le Diplo resolutely supports a Europe of its citizens with common policies and is critical of a free trade zone as just a segment of the world market. It believes that the economy should be put to the service of society, and not vice versa. Here are two differing visions of the world which rarely have the chance to engage each other directly. This is why Le Monde diplomatique welcomed the initiative of Howard Machin, director of the European Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in organising a debate with the Financial Times in London on 7 May on the subject of globalisation. The meeting attracted a large audience and will reconvene this autumn in Paris, also in a university setting. The six participants did not try to reach a false consensus - as can be seen in the following pages. * Why this hatred of the market? by Martin Wolf, Financial Times http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/md/dossiers/ft/dbwolf.html * To save society by Bernard Cassen, Le Monde diplomatique http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/md/dossiers/ft/dbcass2.html * The Moral case of globalization by Peter Martin, Financial Times http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/md/dossiers/ft/dbmart.html * When Market Journalism Invades the World by Serge Halimi, Le Monde diplomatique http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/md/dossiers/ft/dbserge.html * Reform has not yet gone far enough by Guy de Jonquières, Financial Times http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/md/dossiers/ft/dbjonq.html * The great war machine by Riccardo Petrella, President of the Reader's Association, Le Monde diplomatique http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/md/dossiers/ft/dbpet.html French version: http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/md/dossiers/ft/frindex.html _ FINANCIAL TIMEShttp://www.ft.com/ Le Monde diplomatique http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/ THE EUROPEAN INSTITUTE, LSEhttp://www.lse.ac.uk/depts/european/
[PEN-L:9745] ALERT! Hse. Committee to Vote on Internet Privacy Bill Soon (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 15:39:26 -0400 From: Bob Palacios [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ALERT! Hse. Committee to Vote on Internet Privacy Bill Soon Resent-Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 15:37:55 -0400 Resent-From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] == ___ _ _ _ _ / _ \| | | | _ \_ _| | THE HOUSE PREPARES TO ENSURE ENCRYPTION | |_| | | | _| | |_) || | | |AND PRIVACY ON THE INTERNET; SAFE | _ | |___| |___| _ | | |_| BILL (HR 695) ABOUT TO BE VOTED ON! |_| |_|_|_|_| \_\|_| (_) April 28, 1997 Do not forward this alert after June 1, 1997. This alert brought to you by: Americans for Tax ReformCenter for Democracy and Technology Eagle Forum EF-Florida Electronic Frontier Foundation Electronic Privacy Information Ctr. Voters Telecommunications Watch Wired Magazine _ Table of Contents What's Happening Right Now What You Can Do To Help Privacy And Security On The Internet Background On SAFE (HR 695) Why Is This Issue Important To Internet Users? About This Alert / Participating Organizations _ WHAT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE TO VOTE ON "SAFE" PRO-INTERNET PRIVACY BILL The House Judiciary Committee is set to vote on a bill designed to protect privacy and promote electronic commerce on the Internet as early as the second week of May. The SAFE bill will also be considered by a Judiciary subcommittee this week and is expected to pass without difficulty. The House Judiciary committee vote on HR695 will mark a critical stage in the effort to pass real reform of US encryption policy in a way that protects privacy, promotes electronic commerce, and recognizes the realities of the global Internet. Although no bill is perfect, Internet advocates including CDT, EFF, EPIC, VTW and others, including the Internet Privacy Coalition, have expressed support for the bill. Supporters agree that the SAFE bill holds great promise for enhancing privacy and security on the Internet and have offered their strong support and suggestions to improve it in a detailed letter at http://www.privacy.org/ipc/safe_letter.html Please take a moment to read the attached alert, and make a phone call to urge the committee to pass the bill. ___ WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP PRIVACY AND SECURITY ON THE INTERNET 1. Check out the information on the SAFE bill below. 2. Call the Representative on the Judiciary committee from your state. Note that there may be more than one person from your state on the committee. The list is enclosed below the telephone script. SAMPLE SCRIPT You: dial Capitol switchboard +1.202.224.3121 May I speak to the office of Rep. (INSERT NAME FROM LIST BELOW) Them: Hello, Rep. Mojo's office! You: May I speak with the staffer who deals with Internet or telecom issues? Them: One minute.. SAYYou: Hello! HR695 will be voted on by the Judiciary committee in a THIS- couple of weeks. I'm calling to urge Rep. Mojo to pass the bill because it's important to security and privacy on the Internet. Them: Thanks, goodbye! You: Goodbye! click If you have concerns about specific improvements to the bill, bringing them up when you're on the phone with the staffer is a good opportunity for raising issues. Judiciary Committee Members (from committee Web page) MR. HYDE (ILLINOIS), CHAIRMAN Mr. Sensenbrenner (Wisconsin)Mr. Conyers (Michigan) Mr. McCollum (Florida) Mr. Frank (Massachusetts) Mr. Gekas (Pennsylvania) Mr. Schumer (New York) Mr. Coble (North Carolina) Mr. Berman (California) Mr. Smith (Texas)Mr. Boucher (Virginia) Mr. Schiff (New Mexico) Mr. Nadler (New York) Mr. Gallegly (California)Mr. Scott (Virginia) Mr. Canady (Florida) Mr. Watt (North Carolina) Mr. Inglis (South Carolina) Ms. Lofgren (California) Mr. Goodlatte (Virginia) Ms. Jackson Lee (Texas) Mr. Buyer (Indiana) Ms. Waters (California) Mr. Bono (California)Mr. Meehan (Massachusetts) Mr. Bryant (Tennessee) Mr. Delahunt (Massachusetts) Mr. Chabot (Ohio)Mr. Wexler (Florida) Mr. Barr
[PEN-L:8657] Re: market socialism, planned socialism
On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, Doug Henwood wrote: This is an important point. In a time when so many of the dwindling band of radical political economists are in hot pursuit of respectability - math, suits and/or stockings, and everything - it's easy to lose the sense that capitalism is a really weird social system. Not only the fetishism of commodities, but the ghostly power of money, the colonization of mental and erotic life by what Keynes called the Benthamite contraption... I could go on. In finance, the capitalist subfield I spend all too much time following, human ingenuity and material resources are devoted to crafting inverse floaters, swaptions, reset notes, and butterfly spreads. Capitalism does give new meaning to the word odd, though by now it shouldn't be unexpected. Doug Doug: Well said. The sense, the feeling, that there is something "odd" or downright insane about capitalism is not only a healthy antidote to being sucked into the system but also an essential ingredient in being able to visualize alternatives. It should be founded on both experience and theory but the feeling of "we've got to be able to do better than this! This is a screwy way to organize a society" is a necessary complement to the usual critique of alienation, exploitation and brutality. Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 478-8427 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html Accion Zapatista homepage: http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
[PEN-L:6381] Anyone care to respond?
Anyone been reading the stories refered to? Anyone care to counter Samuelson's piece? OPINION The News Mexico City, September 27 1996. IGNORANT EDITORS PUBLISH JUNK JOURNALISM By ROBERT J. SAMUELSON Washington Post Writers Group WASHINGTON-The Philadelphia Inquirer began a 10-part series last week that will attract attention. Its title is ''America: Who Stole the Dream?'' and its thesis is simple: Big Government and Big Business are relentlessly reducing living standards and job security for most Americans. The series by Donald Barlett and James Steele portrays living in America as a constant hell for all but the super-wealthy. This seems overdrawn, because it is. It's junk journalism, and the intriguing question is why a reputable newspaper publishes it. I call it ''junk,'' because it fails the basic test of journalistic integrity and competence: it does not strive for truthfulness, however impossible that ideal is to attain. It does not seek a balanced picture of the economy-strengths as well as shortcomings-or an accurate profile of living standards. Instead, it offers endless stories of people who have suffered setbacks. Their troubles are supposed to speak for (and to) everyone. They don't. Statistics implying lower living standards are contradicted by what people buy or own. Home ownership (65 percent of households) is near a record. In 1980, 11 percent of households owned a microwave oven, 37 percent a dishwasher and 56 percent a dryer; by 1993, those figures were 78 percent, 50 percent and 68 percent. People buy more because their incomes are higher. (Statistics understate incomes by overstating inflation's effect on ''real'' wages and salaries.) As for anxiety, it exists-and always will. But America is not clinically depressed. The Gallup Poll reports that 66 percent of Americans expect their financial situation to improve in the next year. The Inquirer's twisted portrait of the economy is not, unfortunately, unique. Earlier this year, the New York Times ran a distorted series on corporate ''downsizing.'' Journalism copes awkwardly with the ambiguities of many economic stories. We're most comfortable with scandals, politics and wars. The conflicts are obvious; moral judgments can be made; and stories have clean endings. The economy defies such simple theater. The process by which wealth is created is unending and complex. Costs and benefits are commingled. What's bad today may be good tomorrow. What hurts some may help many others. Low inflation is good, but ending high inflation may require something bad: a harsh recession. The capacity of journalists to recognize such distinctions has grown since the late '60s. But there's one glaring exception to this progress: the nation's top editors. Outside the business press, the people who run newspapers, magazines and TV news divisions don't know much about the economy. The assumption is that most economic stories are done by specialized reporters and aimed at specialized audiences. While this assumption holds, editorial ignorance doesn't matter much. But on big projects- newspaper series, magazine cover stories, TV documentaries-the assumption collapses. Editorial control shifts upward, and there's a scramble for familiar news formulas. Editors want villains and heroes, victims and predators. Reporters who promise simple morality tales can sell their stories. The frequent result is journalistic trash. The Inquirer series blames the ''global economy'' and ''free trade'' policies for lowering wages and destroying jobs. What it doesn't say is that the trade balance and employment are hardly connected. Barlett and Steele deplore the fact that the last U.S. trade surplus was in 1975; but they don't tell readers that the unemployment rate in 1975 was 8.5 percent. They note that other countries run trade surpluses. Between 1980 and 1995, Germany had 16 and Sweden 13. But they don't say that Germany and Sweden have unemployment rates of 9 percent. By contrast, the U.S. rate is 5.1 percent. Trade doesn't determine unemployment, because trade mainly affects a small part of the job base: manufacturing. In 1995, its share of all U.S. jobs was 16 percent. The United States runs regular trade deficits in part because the rest of the world wants dollars to finance global commerce. As a result, we don't have to sell as much abroad as we buy. All those extra imports raise-not lower-U.S. living standards. If Barlett and Steele wanted to inform readers, they'd explain all this. Everything they discuss (trade policies, growing income inequality, executive compensation) is the legitimate stuff of journalism. What's illegitimate is to report matters so selectively- with so little attention to conflicting evidence or any larger context- that readers are misled. The real fault here lies with the top editors who commission or approve these distortions. There's no excuse for their
[PEN-L:5819] Debate on the economy and economics
Folks: Over the last few days, energized by paricipation in the Intercontinental Encuentro, I have given in to the temptation to debate some pro-capitalist ideologues over the nature of the economy and of economics. I usually resist getting involved in such debates because they are often enormously time consuming. However, in as much as there are still progressive people out there who think we only need to build a "better", i.e., more just, more equal, economy (perhaps a socialist economy), I think it is worth taking the time to spell out why we not only need to get beyond capitalism but also need to get beyond the "economic" organization of life in general. Basically my arguments run through Marx and Polanyi to my own brand of "autonomist Marxism" and maintain that "the economy" is a modern invention and is made up of the capitalist organization of life around work. Economics, therefore, has been constructed for managing and apologizing for this organization. So when we think of going beyond capitalism we need to think in terms of both reorganizing the activities that make up what we call economic life into quite different kinds of relationships and reconceptualizing their meaning in different ways as well. The debate, as it has developed on the list Mexico2000, is much too long to burden other lists with but I have gathered the contributions together and made them accessible through the Chiapas95 home page (whose url is given below. (The original postings can be found, in principle, in the archives of the Mexico2000 list.) The subjects touched on are primarily: monetary aggregation, measurement, the economy, community, economics, utility, market value, money, interest rates, regulation, wages, profits, the Marxist theory of value, mirrors and red-baiting. Any feedback would, of course, be appreciated. Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
[PEN-L:5700] Re: CNN appearance
On Thu, 15 Aug 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: To whoever it was who appeared on CNN and wanted us all to comment on it: It would have been helpful if you had signed your name! Barkley Rosser The name was there, in the header, i.e., Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 11:29:21 -0700 (PDT) From: "Eugene P. Coyle" [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---NOTE!! Reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:5696] Myself on CNN Self-promotion: I was on CNN last night, interviewed re the de-regulation of electric power. The opening was provided by the blackouts experienced in the Western US this summer. I'm opposed to the deregulation, though in most States regulation serves the large customers, and to some extent the utilities, more than it serves the public interest. My analysis is that deregulation will be worse. There are multiple reasons for my position, including the anticipation of serious environmental degradation in the future, compared to what might be achieved through public control. But in thinking about this for a couple of years I've come to the conclusion that there is almost no competition in the neo-classical sense for the consumer dollar. Electricity, the proponents of de-regulation argue, is a commodity, and thus will be subject to neo-classical competiton. But in watching the strategies unfold I realize that what is planned is the conversion of this commodity to a brand-name botique product, with the market highly segmented (read customer discrimination) and the smaller customers paying the highest prices. I don't have cable TV and so I didn't see the two-minute spot, of which I probably had ten or fifteen seconds. How did I look? Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
[PEN-L:5140] Cyberdemo against Bridgestone
From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jul 12 07:38:40 1996 Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 07:41:48 -0400 From: Tom Patterson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply to: Forum on Labor in the Global Economy [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Multiple recipients of list LABOR-L [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Cyberdemo: ICEM-USWA Bridgestone/Firestone Day of action (fwd) This seems to me to be an interesting and novel example of net-organizing. Please forward. -- Forwarded message -- Date: Fri, 12 Jul 1996 08:30:46 +0100 (BST) From: Steve Walker [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Multiple recipients of list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Cyberdemo: ICEM-USWA Bridgestone/Firestone Day of action For circulation. And, of course, participation! Steve ICEM UPDATE No. 37/1996 8 July 1996 The following is from the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM): BRIDGESTONE FACES A CYBERDEMO Join the cybermarchers! As rogue employers go global, workers are responding with a creative new use of the World Wide Web. Behind the new cyberdemo technique is the 20-million-strong International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM). Long a pioneer of international electronic networking between unions, the ICEM has now taken the process a step further. The first target for the electronic activists is the Japanese-based tyre giant Bridgestone. At issue is Bridgestone's treatment of its American workers, who are members of the ICEM-affiliated United Steelworkers of America (USWA). On 12-13 July, Bridgestone will face a "Day of Outrage" campaign by ICEM-affiliated unions worldwide.The date marks the second anniversary of the largest illegal "replacement" of workers in the history of the United States, by the company's US subsidiary Bridgestone/Firestone. 2,300 workers in five Bridgestone plants were "replaced". More than 500 of them still remain out on the streets, denied the opportunity to return to their jobs and provide for their families. Through the National Labor Relations Board, the US government issued a complaint against the company, accusing it of multiple violations of US labour law and seeking millions of dollars of back pay owed to the workers. Bridgestone/Firestone refuses to comply, and has rebuffed repeated attempts by US Labor Secretary Robert Reich to work out a settlement to the dispute. Hence the cyberdemo. Key to the technique is a particular strength of the World Wide Web - the ability to set up "hot links" from one Web site to another. "Company network" pages are a feature of the ICEM's web site at http://www.icem.org/. ICEM pages about Bridgestone now provide direct links to the e-mail addresses of top Bridgestone executives. Also included are the addresses of Bridgestone subsidiaries worldwide. This makes it easy for the Web's millions of users to send protests to the right people in Bridgestone. And for readers in the US, the pages list toll-free phone numbers where Bridgestone can be told off - at Bridgestone's expense. More and more companies are using the Web for advertising. Bridgestone is no exception. But cybermarchers can put these sites to quite different uses. The ICEM Bridgestone pages also provide direct "hot links" to the company's own sites, and hints on livening them up. Web sites intended for ordering Bridgestone publicity leaflets, for example, usually include some space for customer feed-back. Cyberprotesters will be filling these with their own robust views. The union site also has a link to the company's own Web listing of Bridgestone/Firestone stockists. This will be very helpful in the continuing consumer boycott of the company's products (see ICEM UPDATE 38/1996). The boycott symbol is a black flag - borrowed from motor racing, where a black flag means immediate disqualification for serious violations of the rules. The ICEM Bridgestone pages include a scanned black flag logo that can be electronically clipped and sent directly to Bridgestone, but also to a range of the company's business partners - car makers, for instance, or mining and other companies that use special Bridgestone tyres. Nor will Bridgestone's major shareholders be spared. The ICEM Bridgestone pages list by name the banks and others that have major holdings in Bridgestone. Plus, of course, "hot links" to the investors' own global networks on the Web. Meanwhile, have you had a car accident in which Bridgestone/Firestone tyres may have been a contributory factor? The ICEM site includes a link to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration - and, for good measure, an on-line version of the standard US form for a complaint about motor vehicle equipment... And on the links go. For the first time, anyone with Web access will be able to wage an integrated "corporate campaign" against a leading multinational. As the cyberdemo mounts, Bridgestone will be seeing some home truths on its home pages. _ ICEM UPDATE is available by e-mail or fax. Individual
[PEN-L:4380] re: French Strike
On Tue, 21 May 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This announcement ran in the 1996 3rd issue of New York STREET NEWS: "Paris in December" "What the mainstream media did not tell you about the French Strikes on December 95. What has happened in France is directly related to what has been happening right here to the U. S. worker. This show takes a thorough look at the bold move of French workers standing up to the neoliberal agenda of privatization, deregulation and free trade. With Host Janine Jackson and original footage from the December 95 strike in France. On CUNY TV Channel 75: Wednesday May 22, 1996 at 8 am, 12 noon, 5 pm, 10 pm 1 am, Saturday May 25, 1996 at 7:30 pm and Sunday May 26, 1996 at 10 am. On MNN Channel 34: Wednesday May 29, 1996 at 7 pm." maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Maggie: How can those of us outside of the New York area get access to this material? Can you video tape it and share it with us? I imagine that there will be many who will want to see it, especially if it proves to be well done. Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
[PEN-L:4364] Dissertation Information on the Web
To those of you who are professors with graduate students: I have recently added to my homepage some information on past and current M.A. Theses and Ph.D. dissertations which I have supervised. In the case of current dissertations, i.e., under construction, I am including the formal proposals which students have prepared and defended before their committees. I have done this for several reasons: 1. The information gives undergraduates or new graduate students some sense of the kinds of research they might do in the future. 2. This information gives graduate students who are trying to figure out what to write about and how to go about it some examples to stimulate their thinking. 3. For students who want to work with me, the complete proposals show them the kind of text they will need to prepare. (Most professors in my department do NOT require such formal proposals.) 4. Because the proposals can be reached by web search engines, having their proposals online may result in my students being contacted by others with related interests --something which might prove of use to them in their research. So I am curious as to whether any of the rest of you have done anything similar? If you have I would like to be able to provide links to the relevant web sites to provide students here with further materials for thought, comparisons and contrasts. Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cleaver homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html Chiapas95 homepage: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html
[PEN-L:3670] E;EZLN Communique (To Continental Encounter) Apr 6
This posting has been forwarded to you as a service of=20 Accion Zapatista de Austin. -- Forwarded message -- Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 09:55:53 -0500 From: Malicia [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Marcos' Speech to Encuentro La Jornada, April 6, 1996 MESSAGE OF THE EZLN DURING THE INAUGURATION CEREMONY OF THE AMERICAN PREPARATORY MEETING FOR THE INTERCONTINENTAL ENCOUNTER FOR HUMANITY AND AGAINST NEOLIBERALISM THE REALITY, America. April 4th, 1996 A journalist and video producer who had covered the Zapatista rebellion since January of 1994, Javier Elorriaga Berdegue, came to see me one day as a volunteer seeking a political and peaceful solution to the conflict. I listened to him. He gave me all the arguments in favor of peace and those against the war. At that time he seemed to be one of those men who believes in what he says, one of those who is accountable to his ideas. I told him we would lose nothing by trying. On September 16, 1994, the anniversary of Mexican independence, he arrived with the first of many letters from Mister Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon. After the 1st of December of 1994, Javier came and went with messages from then Governance Secretary, Esteban Moctezuma Barragan. His role as a messenger of peace went on for 6 months. The last time I saw him was on February 8th of 1995. I told him I saw no sign of any willingness to dialogue on behalf of the government. He insisted on seeking a new encounter for peace. As he was leaving the Lacandon Jungle during the morning of February 9th, 1995, Javier Elorriaga was detained and accused of "terrorism". The government began an offensive against the indigenous communities of the Lacandon Jungle and it detained dozens of Mexicans in different parts of the country. It accused them of "terrorism" and exhibited as proof a "terrible" arsenal: paper bombs and some old guns. While the government congratulated itself in the press because they had supposedly recuperated the "sovereignty of the nation", in the Lacandon Jungle Swiss airplanes bombed the surrounding communities, Northamerican helicopters machine gunned the mountains, French tanks of war occupied the houses of the indigenous people who fled to the jungle, Spanish policemen interrogated the suspects, and the Northamerican military advisors reviewed with great care an artifact that perhaps had a dangerous military intention. The artifact traveled all the way to the Pentagon and was examined with the best and most modern military technology. After a few days, the experts handed over their report to Washington and from there it was turned over to the offices of the Mexican military, the political police and the Presidential residence. The report said that everything seemed to indicate that the artifact in question, had been snatched from the forces of the transgressors of the law, it had all the appearance of..a toy car made of plastic and metal. The report said that they had also found a tiny inscription made with a black pen which said: "This car belongs to Heriberto.." 420 days have passed since then. Mister Zedillo sits in the presidential chair, Heriberto lives in the mountains, the army lives in Heriberto's house, and Javier Elorriaga and another 17 Mexicans are still in jail accused of "terrorism". One of the 17, Joel Martinez has developed respiratory problems caused by the torture to which he was subjected. His serious condition has sent him to the hospital. Now they have chains on his hands and feet, as though he were a rabid animal, as though dignity could be chained. Today 420 days after the facts have defined the true terrorist, we want to dedicate the following words, Vale. To Javier Elorriaga Berdegu=C8 and, through him, to all the prisoners accused of being Zapatistas. In the definition of your future, Much more is defined than can be contained by your jailers. Through my voice speaks the voice of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Brothers and sisters of America: Welcome to THE REALITY. We extend special thanks to the men, women children and elderly of THE REALITY, because it is they who have given us permission and have supported us in order to hold this preparatory meeting in their community. I want to ask all who are present, to salute our indigenous brothers and sisters of THE REALITY. Welcome to the brothers and sisters of the Canadian delegation, of the delegation from the United States of America, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina. Welcome to the observers who attend from France, Germany and Spain. Welcome to the Mexican brothers and sisters of the Organizing Commission. Our acknowledgement and salute for the effort which today is realized. We want to thank all of you who have accepted our invitation to this preparatory meeting for your effort in traveling from your countries to the Lacandon Jungle. Headquarters of the transgressors of the law and
[PEN-L:1922] Re: chase manatthan bank (fwd)
I sent Nello a reference to the Chase materials accessible through the Chiapas95 homepage. Harry On Tue, 12 Dec 1995, Jim Jaszewski wrote: I'm forwarding this to the erudite crew in PEN-L. Perhaps y'all can help: -- Forwarded message -- Date: Mon, 11 Dec 95 23:05:57 +0100 (CET) From: Aniello Margiotta [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: chase manatthan bank Hi, I need a report about Chase manatthan bank,because in my area Bagnoli-Naples, where there are the headquarter of NATO which drive militar operation in Bosnia, after closing a big steel farmer, a speculative project for VIP tourism has been prepared with financial support of US bank. Every news are accepted expecially about interestings of the bank in tourist projects in foregn countries in support of military operations. Thanks Nello * [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.synapsis.it/uw/amargiotta/nello.htm Change the world before the world changes you * +=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-+ |stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal | | if you agree copy these 3 sentences in your own sig| | more info: http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm | +=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-+ | Jim Jaszewski [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Public Key available. | | http://www.freenet.hamilton.on.ca/~ab975/Profile.html | +=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-+ Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html
[PEN-L:1926] Property Right Cops on the Internet --Bounty hunters next?
Is anyone, anywhere undertaking the serious work of attacking "intellectual property rights" --besides the pro-indigenous groups who are trying to keep them from getting ripped off? Harry Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1995 10:42:16 -0500 (EST) From: JB [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Copyright Holders Patrol the Internet fyi -- Forwarded message -- Money and Investing Update Navigation to other Update sections Wednesday, December 13, 1995 Copyright Holders Patrol the Internet With Vigilance, Looking for Violations By ROSS KERBER Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal Matt Carlson's home page on the Internet used to feature pictures of Winnie-the-Pooh. But last June, after Dutton Children's Books said the images violated its copyright, the New Mexico State University student removed them. ''I didn't want to mess with Winnie's high-powered lawyers,'' he says. Copyright owners used to pay little heed to unauthorized on-line use of their material by nonprofit users like Mr. Carlson. While copyright holders have to defend protected material or risk losing their rights, nonprofit on-line use was considered too arcane. In addition, it isn't entirely clear that such use is illegal. But now, with the spread of the Internet -- and especially its World Wide Web segment, which includes audio and video -- copyright holders are going after fans and other noncommercial reproducers. Never, they say, has there been a threat quite like the Internet. It is a medium capable of making endless copies of any material -- songs, software, text, films -- at virtually no cost. ''To lose control over the material can be death,'' says Eileen Kent, Playboy Enterprises Inc.'s vice president for new media. Playboy complained to about a dozen universities after it found that students were posting its photos on the Internet using their university accounts. Tyco Toys Inc. sends a letter a week to stop home pages from displaying images that resemble its fortune-telling Magic 8 Ball toy. Paramount Pictures started several years ago trying to stop the many technically adept fans of ''Star Trek'' from spreading photos from the TV series and the movies. And Elvis Presley Enterprises Inc. recently ordered the removal of sound clips of ''Blue Suede Shoes'' and ''Hound Dog'' from a fan's home page, along with images she had scanned from Graceland postcards. ''We don't want carpetbaggers putting up the digital equivalent of Elvis on black velvet,'' says Mark Lee, a Los Angeles attorney for Presley Enterprises. Christopher M. Franceschelli, president of Dutton Children's Books, New York, says the company applies the same rights-protection standards to the Web that it uses in the print world. Dutton is also concerned about how characters like Pooh are depicted. Mr. Franceschelli says Dutton staffers have found Web pages showing A.A. Milne characters taking part in murder and suicide rituals. In the past, most on-line copyright suits have targeted for-profit enterprises that were peddling software programs or pornographic photos. But the law is murky when money or sex isn't involved. Last year, a federal prosecutor in Boston brought criminal fraud charges against a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who ran a bulletin board for users to copy and exchange copyrighted software. Because the student wasn't making money, his actions weren't criminal violations of copyright law, ruled U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns, who threw out the case in December 1994. Copyright lawyers say that cases involving nonprofit entities are likely to be decided on such grounds as what portion of a work is copied, whether the use cuts into a copyright holder's sales and whether the copying should be protected as a ''fair use'' purpose such as parody, criticism, comment or review. ''You don't have the God-given right to put everything you feel like up on the Internet,'' says Bruce Sunstein, a Boston intellectual-property lawyer. ''But there's still a lot of freedom in what you can do.'' ! Worries about alienating their fans complicate matters for some entertainment companies that want to retain their copyrights. Sony Music Entertainment Inc. has sent notices to creators of Web pages honoring Pearl Jam, one of its bands. But the company says it may allow sites to use its images free by license, as long as they agree that they won't alter images. Besides unleashing lawyers, publishers are pushing Congress to pass copyright-law changes proposed by a Clinton administration working group. The group backed defining digital transmission as a form of publication and supported electronic coding of all copyrighted material that
[PEN-L:1923] TA Grade Strike at Yale --Profs as strike breakers
Friends: Check this out! Harry -- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1995 09:15:26 -0600 (CST) From: Harry M. Cleaver hmcleave@mundo To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Grade Strike Eve: Please put me on your mailing list for any and all information about this strike. You have all my support. I am a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. I am attaching a letter I wrote to Stanford last year about grades/wages. I hope you may find it of some use. Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 475-8535 Fax:(512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html -- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1995 00:39:45 -0600 From: Seth Wigderson, H-Labor [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Forwarded mail...yale ta strike I recently received this post. I thought that H-Labor subscribers might be interested in this partisan report. Seth Wigderson, H-labor Moderator - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Mark E. Wilkens) Dr. Wigderson, As you might have heard, the ta's at Yale have been trying to organize for the last several years. Despite their efforts, including two brief demonstration strikes, the university has stonewalled, refusing to negotiate in any way, shape or form with their union, the Graduate Students and Employees Organization (GESO). Just recently, GESO voted to initiate a grade strike, refusing to grade final exams until the university recognized them. This evening, I received the following post from a good friend of mine in the poly sci department, asking me to spread the word about the abominable threats some faculty are making against their students. While I understand some faculty might oppose the strike, it is contemptible that some would seek to sabotage their students' careers because they are doing what they can to get Yale to recognize them as a union. Could you please post something about this matter on h-labor? In this case, the opinion of the academic community can actually count for something. People can register their opinion with the following numbers: Office of the President: (203) 432-2550 Office of the Provost:(203) 432- Department of History:(203) 432-1366 Apparently, the English department is being particularly bad, their number is (203) 432-1366. People wanting further information can contact a spokesperson for GESO, her email address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] (her name is Eve Weinbaum) If anybody should be offended by this sort of behavior, it is certainly the subscribers of h-labor. As a post of yours noted last week, some of the faculty of Yale have already demonstrated that they are willing to engage in McCarthyite tactics to crush the ta organizing effort. Mark Wilkens, A.B.D. Univ of Pennsylvania [EMAIL PROTECTED] P.S. Eric gave permission to quote from his post. Eric Schickler wrote: From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Dec 12 16:28 EST 1995 Posted-Date: Tue, 12 Dec 1995 16:28:07 -0500 Received-Date: Tue, 12 Dec 1995 16:28:07 -0500 Date: Tue, 12 Dec 95 16:23:23 EST From: Eric Schickler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: Yale University To: Mark Wilkens [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 712 Hey mark. The University is greeting our grade strike with strong arm, nasty tactics. Actually, central administration is quiet, except for asking faculty quietly to grade in place of their ta's. BUT individual faculty in a lot of depts are threatening their TA's--with expulsion, academic probation, "poisoned academic advising" relations, refusal to write letters of recommendation, and intention to write nasty letters of recommendation that blackball students for their activities. Any help you can give with your labor history mailing list pals, and with spreading the word, would be appreciated. WE NEED SOME PRESS!!! This really sucks . Eric WORRIED ABOUT GRADE INFLATION? ABOLISH GRADES! by Harry Cleaver* (Stanford Ph.D., 1975) Special to the Stanford Daily Austin, Texas., May 31 -- 6:30am. Bleary-eyed, I sip my caffeine and flip through the morning NEW YORK TIMES looking for inspiration, some sign of grassroots struggle, maybe even a victory to get the adrenlin flowing. Finally, on page 7, a title jumps out at me: "At Stanford, A Rebellion On Grades". All right! Something's stirring at my old alma mater! "The grade F does not exist here", I read, "The C is fast becoming extinct." Hmm! The current generation has things well in hand, I t
[PEN-L:1613] Internet Workshop for Activists
On Wed, 29 Nov 1995, Louis N Proyect wrote: I have been giving a monthly workshop on the Internet to community activists, labor organizers, students, professors and radicals at the Brecht Forum for over a year now. On Friday, I will be going out to New Jersey to give a workshop on the Internet to people with disabilities sponsored by the New Jersey Dept. of Labor. This is the second time I've been out there. The people I've spoken to out there feel as "threatened" by computers as they do by any other technological advice that gives them more freedom. Louis: Could you describe in some detail just what your workshops consist of? It sounds like you have a routine, script, presentation or what not, that works. I for one would be interested in knowing just what you do and how you do it. Brooks Bitterman, a restaurant workers union organizer, took my class and as a result got in touch with people on this list, including Doug Henwood who wrote about a strike at Smith and Wollensky restaurant that Brooks is organizing support for. Not only did he get in touch with Doug, he got in touch with me, a Bard College graduate. Smith and Wollensky is owned by Jerome Levy, the patron of the Jerome Levy Institute at Bard College and a member of the Bard board of trustees. I am working with Brooks to turn up the heat under Jerome Levy to arrive at a fair settlement with the restaurant workers. Louis: Nice story. Networking, on line or off, will mobilize those resources almost everytime. Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 471-3211, ext. 181 Fax: (512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html
[PEN-L:1607] THE SPACE OF CYBERSPACE: Body Politics, Frontiers and Enclosures
Friends: This following notes were a byproduct of reading, and of work on an essay on "The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle" which I will share with you one day soon. Any comments would be welcome. Harry THE "SPACE" OF CYBERSPACE: Body Politics, Frontiers and Enclosures The following comments were prompted by the reading of Laura Miller "Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier", one of the essays in James Brook and Iain A. Boal, RESISTING THE VIRTUAL LIFE: The Culture and Politics of Information, San Franciso: City Lights, 1995. Miller's essay is the first and only one I have read after buying the book. I was drawn to it by the circumstance that I have been revising an essay of my own on the terrain of electronic communication in the Zapatista struggle for autonomy and democracy. In my own writing I had used the metaphor of the "frontier" and for that reason was curious about Miller's essay. Miller's essay critiques the metaphor of "frontier" as part of a discussion of how the assumption that traditional gender roles are simply reproduced in cyberspace might help provide a rationale for state regulation. Her point of departure is the word "frontier" in the name of the "Electronic Frontier Foundation", a well-known institution that argues for self-regulation and fights against government interference in cyberspace. She makes two arguments which interest me. First, she argues that the adoption of the metaphor of "frontier" is a problematic extension of the traditional American spacial concept to what is actually a non-spacial phenomena: The Net. Second, she warns that applying traditional American notions of the "frontier" --such as those embodied in classical Western narratives-- risks an unconscious reproduction of the social roles (gender) characteristic of those notions. Spaceless cyberspace? With respect to the first of these arguments, she writes: "The Net on the other hand, occupies precisely no physical space (although the computers and phone lines that make it possible do). It is a completely bodiless, symbolic thing with no discernable boundaries or location. . . . Unlike land, the Net was created by its pioneers." (p. 51) She also refers to the Net as "an artifact" (p. 51) and as "incorporeal" (p. 57). While this concept of the Net fits in nicely with the title of the book in which the essay appears (Resisting the Virtual Life), the rest of her essay demonstrates how its formulation misleads. The problem with the characterization is that it treats the Net as if it were a system of machines (computers and phone lines) whereas it has only existed and only continues to exist in the communicative actions of the humans who created and continue to recreate it. This particular system of machines is just like any other system of machines: a moment of human social relationships. While the machine system is truly an "artifact so humanly constructed", the machine system is not "the Net"; it is only the sinew or perhaps the nervous system of a Net constituted by human interactions. As an evolving series of human interactions the Net occupies precisely the space of those participating human beings. Humans as corporeal beings always occupy space and their personal and collective interactions structure and restructure that space. One of the things that discussion of cyberspace requires is a recognition of its "body politics" --something Miller clearly understands in the later part of her essay although she doesn't bring it to bear in this characterization of the Net. While arguing against the overstatement of women's vulnerability to aggression on line, she points to important differences between "cyber-rapists" and real rapists. "I see my body", she writes, "as the site of my heightened vulnerability as a woman. But on line --where I have no body and neither does anyone else-- I consider rape to be impossible." But of course, she does have a body and when she is on line her body is seated in front of a computer terminal, alone or in company, comfortably or uncomfortably, with her fingers punching a mouse button or banging on a keyboard, her eyes more or less glued to the screen and her mind flickering back and forth from the images on the screen to the rest of her physical existence. The very real "corporality" not only of the Net but of all computer work has been pointed out by all those concerned with the various ways in which the use of computers has involved very real bodily harm. (This issue is apparently treated in the same book in a separate essay by Dennis Hayes on "Digital Palsy".) The most immediately salient aspect of Miller's body's situation, however, is that it cannot be touched physically by any would-be cyber-rapists --except through the mediation of typed words and her reception of them, which she considers ought to be and are in fact under her
[PEN-L:1482] Speedup and Lordstown
Two questions: 1. Does anyone know a good reference/discription/analysis of the conflict over speedup at the Lordstown plant of Ford(?) that led to widespread sabotage by young workers. This was back in the 1970s I think. 2. Has anyone seen, or written, anything interesting on the use of speedup as a management technique in higher education and of consequent conflict and resistance by students (or even faculty)? Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 471-3211, ext. 181 Fax: (512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html
[PEN-L:1285] Re: important measures
On Tue, 7 Nov 1995, Doug Henwood wrote: The current issue of the IMF Survey (November 6, 1995), reports on the Fund's new data initiative, which would "encourage," in their ever-so-persuasive way, countries to publish a minimum set of economic statistics "on a regular and timely basis." Here's what the IMF considers the "absolute minimum" of crucial indicators: "exchange rates; international reserves; the balance sheet of the central bank; reserve or base money; interest rates; the consumer price index; exports/imports; external current account balance; overall fiscal balance; external debt and debt service; and GDP." Conspicuously absent: wage and (un)employment figures, obviously not important to the big domes in Washington. Doug Now Doug, wages and unemployment ARE important to the IMF, but when your real goals (a decrease of the former and an increase of the latter) might deligitimize your public image, you keep them in the background. No need to publish them up front where you might have to discuss them. Let others bring them up and then you can express your regrets over the unfortunate by-products of oh-so-necessary structural adjustment.:-( Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 471-3211, ext. 181 Fax: (512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html
[PEN-L:1125] Re: GREAT STUFF--also some to share with you
On Wed, 25 Oct 1995 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Folks, I just finished reading "THE CASE FOR SHORTER WORK TIME by Bruce O'Hara." This is GREAT STUFF. I noticed the next topic is on leisure. I finished book on that topic last year (Ten Speed Press) entitled "Serious Play." To honor these terrific essays I'm willing to send you all a copy of my book to help further the dialogue on shortening the work weeking, balancing our work and leisure ethics, and the pursuit of leisure wellness. -martin kimeldorf Martin: I would be delighted to have a copy of your book. So, I imagine would everyone. But you are going to "send" us a copy Free copies to all? Better maybe to upload a juicy chapter or two and let us support your work (?) by buying copies once we've seen a sample. Of course, you could also (if the publisher agrees) follow the example of the book we did on the Zapatistas and upload the whole thing with an anti-copyright! (see: gopher://lanic.utexas.edu:70/11/la/Mexico/Zapatistas/) Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 471-3211, ext. 181 Fax: (512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html
[PEN-L:460] TAX THE RICH!
For those who like the idea --mean spirited, resentful failures that you are-- take a look at the TAX THE RICH homepage and its various followup pages: http://www.webcom.com/~ttr/home.html The following is from the homepage, though you can't see which items you can click on, I'll bet you can guess. Welcome to the TAX THE RICH Nationwide Saturation Postering campaign. If you are unfamiliar with the campaign or this is your first visit to our Web site, please get acquainted by following one of the links under "General Info." General Info: Just What Is This Campaign, Anyway? The TAX THE RICH Interaqt-a-FAQ Membership: About TAX THE RICH Membership Become a TAX THE RICH Member Activities: View, download and order TAX THE RICH products. Browse the poster catalog, download and print posters, view and order TAX THE RICH stickers... Keep an eye on this section; it's growing fast! Join the TAX THE RICH email discussion list. The discussion list is unmoderated and open to all interested. Its purpose is to serve as a forum for discussion of the campaign, and to allow members to easily share resources and relevant information. Supplementary Reading A selection of interesting articles united by their relevance to economic, political, artistic and philosophical issues surrounding the campaign. Not recommended as light reading. The Outlinks. Links to some other pages of interest to TTR members. The Mail. Comments? Suggestions? Use this link to send us mail. Coming Soon Full Local Organizer Packet Expanded links and info on related organizations Geographical listing of TTR members and local groups More Posters TTR T-shirts . Harry Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 471-3211, ext. 181 Fax: (512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html
[PEN-L:193] Re: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
Doug: Thanks for the update. Have they joined the Right Wing National Association of Scholars? Have they joined David Horowitz's "Second Thoughts" group of ex-new lefties turned neoconservative? Probably not the latter. After all Eugene was blasting the New Left years ago. His wife's association with the Right appears quite consistent with his history of reactionary politics. The question is how many readers of his "Marxist" work on slavery understood how those politics were embodied in that work? Those who didn`t understand it should go back and read it again. Harry On Thu, 24 Aug 1995, Doug Henwood wrote: I just got the press pack from the Independent Women's Forum, the Washginton-based right-wing women's group headed by Barbara Ledeen, wife of the notorious covert operator Michael Ledeen. The IWF is funded in part by the Bradley Foundation, one of the major funders of the big-time right. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has joined the advisory board for their journal, and she also appears in their guide of experts along with Sheila Burke, Bob Dole's chief of staff; Wendy Lee Gramm, free marketeer and spouse of Phil; and hip Gen X rightists Laura Ingraham and Lisa Schiffren; a number of Republican staffers at Congressional committees; and a biger number of think tanks at the usual places, from Heritage to the property rights theorists at PERC in Bozeman, Mont. E F-G modestly lists herself as an expert in: "Children Family, Family Leave Child Care, Education, Welfare, Ethics Religion, Feminist Ideology, Health: General, Health: Ethics, Health: Women's, Popular Culture, Public Policy, Race Ethnicity, Affirmative Acdtion Equal Opportunity, Glass Ceiling, Multiculturalism, Sexual Harassment, Civil Rights, Economic Policy/Budget, Legal Issues/The Law, Politics." I've not measured this scientifically but this list looks longer than any other entrant's. This comes upon news that E F-G's spouse, Eugene, in one evening in 1992 announced that he: 1) planned to vote for Bush, 2) loved the Gulf War, and 3) praised Pat Robertson as "a good anti-racist." Doug -- Doug Henwood [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Left Business Observer 250 W 85 St New York NY 10024-3217 USA +1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 471-3211, ext. 181 Fax: (512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/index.html
[PEN-L:197] Re: Re: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
On Thu, 24 Aug 1995, John R. Ernst wrote: Harry, Can you suggest critiques of Genovese's slavery stuff that show how his present and past politics are "embodied" in his Political Economy of Slavery, Roll, Jordan Roll, et al. John: If by "critiques" you mean written/published critiques, I cannot. I've never seen the kind of critique I have in mind. However, it is implicit in the work of what I would casually call "real" Marxist historians of slavery, such as C.L.R.James in his BLACK JACOBINS and George Rawick in his FROM SUNDOWN TO SUNUP. Whereas Genovese's preoccupations from early on were primarily concerned with understanding southern slavery in terms of a non-capitalist "mode of production" headed by a distinct planter ruling class --an approach which diverted our attention from the self-activity of the slaves and from class struggle-- those two authors approached slavery from the bottom-up, seeking an understanding of the dynamics of struggle from the point of view of the slaves themselves. Although I can't prove it, my guess is that it was this kind of infinately more interesting work --that constituted a political alternative to his own previous approach-- that prompted Genovese to do the work that led to ROLL, JORDON ROLL. When James reissued THE BLACK JAOBINS in 1962 he attached an essay "From Toussaint L'Overture to Fidel Castro" tying his 1938 work directly to Third World revolution in the 1960s. James was getting plenty of play from the New Left by the end of 1960s, e.g., RADICAL AMERICA's Special Issue in May 1970. Rawick, who had worked with and was inspired by James, and who had been assembling a massive collection of slave narratives, published his FROM SUNDOWN TO SUNUP in 1972. More generally, by the late 1960s "bottom-up" history focusing on the self-activity of the working class (e.g., Thompson, Hill, Hilton) was rapidly displacing top-down narratives both from the right (most mainstream history) and from the left (e.g., Dobb, Geneovese) in the attentions of young, progressive historians and activist readers of history. Genovese's ROLL,JORDON,ROLL appeared in 1974. Now the interrelationship of the historical work of all these authors with their theory and their politics is one of the most interesting things about them --and too often ignored by those who read their work as merely history. Just as we can only understand Genovese's approach to slavery within the context of his own politics, so is this also true for the others. THE BLACK JACOBINS certainly bears the mark of James' Trotskyism in that period, just as Thompson's MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS was shaped by his prior experience in the Communist Party. The ability of their students and followers to go beyond the limits of the work of such major figures in Marxist history, has in turn been closely related to their own experience with theory and politics. You can begin to get a sense of this by looking at the work of one of Thompson's students, Peter Linebaugh. On the one hand you can examine his historical work in ALBION'S FATAL TREE and his magistral THE LONDON HANGED; on the other you can look at his pamphleteering political uses of his historical research, e.g., his LIZARD TALK gift to the AIDS movement (now available on-line at gopher://mundo.eco.utexas.edu:70/1m/mailing/chiapas95.archive/Lizard%20Talk) or his recent article to THE NATION concerning Mumia and the death penalty. I wish I knew, and could give you, a citation to an article of the kind that needs to be written about Genovese's history, his theory and his politics, but I can't. Nor do I have time to write one, at this point. Sorry. Harry On Thu, 24 Aug 1995 "Harry M. Cleaver" [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Doug: Thanks for the update. Have they joined the Right Wing National Association of Scholars? Have they joined David Horowitz's "Second Thoughts" group of ex-new lefties turned neoconservative? Probably not the latter. After all Eugene was blasting the New Left years ago. His wife's association with the Right appears quite consistent with his history of reactionary politics. The question is how many readers of his "Marxist" work on slavery understood how those politics were embodied in that work? Those who didn`t understand it should go back and read it again. Harry On Thu, 24 Aug 1995, Doug Henwood wrote: I just got the press pack from the Independent Women's Forum, the Washginton-based right-wing women's group headed by Barbara Ledeen, wife of the notorious covert operator Michael Ledeen. The IWF is funded in part by the Bradley Foundation, one of the major funders of the big-time right. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has joined the advisory board for their journal, and she also appears in their guide of experts along w
[PEN-L:11] Re: Abstract Labor
On Tue, 25 Jul 1995, Massimo De Angelis wrote: On Mon, 24 Jul 1995, John R. Ernst wrote: Let me keep it simple. The only way any quantity of labor can become abstract (social) is via exchange. Given that so much linen exchanges for so much gold, the labor that produced the linen becomes abstract(social) labor in that process. Without exhange, the concrete labor that produced the linen is simply concrete labor and does not have the dual nature of labor that Marx "discovered." Thus, abstract labor can only be seen by looking at the the prices. Massimo I disagree. Abstract labour definetivelly can be seen in the form of price, but is is lived in the form of capitalist work. This is exactly what Marx is talking about when referring to fetishism. I would reformulate John sentence above in this way: given the fact that both linen and gold are produced by capitalist work, then linen and gold can be exchanged with eachother. Even if exchange does not take place, the labour that produces linen has a twofold character: concrete labout and abstract labour. The former refer to the concrete determinations of labour, the latter refers to those determinations of labour which make it CAPITALIST LABOUR. The twofold character of labour means that when you are working for capital you cannot distinguish between concrete and abstract because the forms of the "how" and "what" to produce (concrete labour) are shaped by the questions of "how much" . If I work for capital, one hour of my labour has a concrete and abstract dimension. I am , say, a teacher, and therefore teach pupils. From the strict point of view of this activity considered only as concrete activity, i am in the "business" of transmission of historical memory, generational experience. I could do this in the way I, and my "sudents" , wanted, without needs of examination and grades: if one is interested just come along. At the same time however, as waged teacher, I am in the business of making my employer richer, and this means that there are quite a few constraints on the way (concrete determinations) I do what has now become a "job". This human activity of communicating with younger generations is, for the perspective of my employer, important only to the extent it generates money. My employer definetively knows how to do that. Increase class size, increase my administration load, make me write dozens of meaningless papers which can attract funding, regulate my marking criteria so as we compare well with other "educational institutions", etc. etc. And of course there are dozens of carrot-stick tricks my employer knows to make me comply with this money need: promotion, gost of redundancy, wage, tenure, etc. And of course, If I tell my employer that this way of proceeding ABSTRACTS (that is poses as secondary and meaningless from his or her point of view) from the form of the expenditure of my human energy, my employer would agree. But so what. the point is that my activity is, from the point of view of my employer, an abstraction, it is considered only as "HUMAN LABOUR POWER EXPENDED WITHOUT REGARD TO THE FORM OF ITS EXPENDITURE" (Marx, Volume One, p. 128). And this is preciselly how Marx defines ABSTRACT LABOUR. But my employer's abstraction is a real lived experience for me. And note, this concreteness of the abstraction is defined at the point of production, BEFORE commodities are exchanged. Massimo De Angelis -- London While I agree completely with Massimo's account of the meaning of "abstract labor", he doesn't deal with the point of intersection with John's argument, namely exchange. John emphasizes exchange, Massimo production (work). However, Marx's concepts are, above all, those of process. They denote processes within expanded reproduction. Therefore, for the abstract labor that Massimo describes to exist as an on-going moment of the expanded reproduction of capital, the imposed work it denotes must be such as to produce commodities which are exchanged. That is to say the circuit must be completed. The "content" (abstract labor, i.e., imposed capitalist work) must be realized through its "form" (exchange value). No matter how much work capitalists suceed in imposing, if they are unable to turn C' into M', they cannot begin the circuit again (i.e., they will be unable to reimpose more work (abstract labor)--unless they get their hands on new capital (M), via credit or whatever, but then the original capital investment still hasn't been realized. So, in a certain, restricted sense, John is right --the realization of price (C' being sold) IS the only way the imposed work "really" becomes abstract, "really" in the sense that it becomes re-imposable. However, to focus on form as John does, while neglecting content (which is NOT simply derivable from form) is a mistake --one which Massimo has nicely
[PEN-L:5652] Re: Iqbal Masih -- escaped child laborer, murdered in
On Fri, 23 Jun 1995, john rosenthal wrote: I don't know what's in the WWW site. But just a slight (actually kind of a huge) correction. While it's true that Iqbal Masih at some point visited the US and "then" was shot to death -- it's not true that he was murdered *in* the US. Unless I'm very mistaken, I believe he was murdered in Pakistan. John Rosenthal [EMAIL PROTECTED] The story in the NYT said the poor kid was gunned down while playing in his village. Riding his bicycle, if I remember right. While we're on the subject, there was a very good investigative report on slave labor in the carpet industry in South Asia on one of those TV shows (not 60 minutes but another like it). It showed a raid on a factory that liberated a whole lot of kids, gave good background, etc. Harry == Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 471-3211 Fax: (512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
[PEN-L:4494] On Money: some views from the jungles of Mexico
Pen-l people: Sometimes it helps to be outside the money economy of capitalism to recognize that Freud and Marx were both right (in their own ways), money is shit. In the following report on the resistance of Chiapanecos who fled the onslaught of the Mexican military, you will find some very intuitive, but insightful observations on Money and some of its its uses in capitalism. Harry -- Forwarded message -- Date: Sun, 26 Mar 1995 14:33:38 -0600 (CST) From: Harry M. Cleaver hmcleave@mundo To: Chiapas95 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Jornada, Mar. 25 Refugees Refuse to Return (English) This posting has been forwarded to you as a service of the Austin Comite de Solidaridad con Chiapas y Mexico. -- Forwarded message -- Date: Sat, 25 Mar 1995 18:58:55 -0800 From: National Commission for Democracy in Mexico [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Refugees Refuse to Return (Jorn. 3/25) Jornada March 25 Jose Gil Olmos, correspondent, Lacandon Jungle, March 24 After 44 days of refuge in the mountains about 4,000 Tzeltal and Tojobal indigenous ratified the agreement made recently to not return to their communities because the Mexican Army troops continue to mobilize in the conflict region and only two days ago they began to withdraw from some communities in the Lacandon jungle, including Guadalupe Victoria, where the soliders harassed the indigenous, destroyed their properties and took possession of their houses. Despite the attack of hunger, intestinal and skin infections, the extreme climate that the meager clothing that they managed to take from the villages is hardly suitable for, and the scarcity of medicines in these corners of the world where men, women and children hide from the military flybys day and night, the refugees maintain that "they will not give in" before the governmental forces because their struggle is to achieve a dignified justice which their parents and grandparents did not have. "The government wants to force us to give up and to buy us off. It makes us an offer that we exchange for our dignity for two kilos of food. We are very sorry that other brothers and sisters have accepted it. We will not do it; we are not willing to return under these conditions. We will continue resisting until we do not see that there is any security forces", stated Isaias, during a report on the agreements developed among the communities, ranches and villages called Morelia, La Grandeza, Lazaro Cardenas, and Venustiano Carranza. The mountains stand tall in the background. The heat surpasses 30 degrees Celcius even though it is early in the morning. A drum sounds, calling the children, women and men to take a plate of beans and helping of tortillas. From among the "cobachas" come "malcilentos" faces. The ration has diminished with the passage of time. Now, a month and a half after having fled, the quantity of food is measured in handfuls: one of beans and a half of one of rice in the morning and again in the afternoon. The drum stops. The meager food is distributed, and with their hands as trays, the indigenous people take refugee in the shadows to eat. In the cracks of a palm "cobache" two indigenous people practically count the number of beans and corn grains that each has received. The grains fall in poor cascades from two sacks that are only one-fourth full. This is the food for 200 people who can not leave their refuge for fear of the soldiers who marauded, the cattlemen who have taken away the cows, oxen, horses and mules although they do not have their brand, helped by day workers who have injested great quantities of beer and liquor while leaving behind a trail of glass bottles and aluminum cans that shine on the dirt road under the sun's rays. Now another indigenous person from Lazaro Cardenas who speaks Spanish slowly and sometimes mixes it with Tzeltal. "When the rain and strong winds come and take away the people's belongings, the government begins to take applications for credit. They offer them 3,500 new pesos ($1,366 before the devaluation). But we are fighting against that now, since in those monies we see the face of the devil, because first it shows itself and then it disappears. The government gives something today and then tomorrow it takes it back. We can't eat money, we can't plant it like our seeds. What we need most, the government refuses to give, and what it does give at any given moment, some use it up to buy drink. "We know why we are struggling. The sun is going to shine again, and we want to go forward, not back. It's not only for us; it's for everyone. Money is the God of the Government and to this God they want to sacrifice us. This already happened to our ancestors. "They killed one of the companeros from La Grandeza so that the God of Money could come, b
[PEN-L:4259] Next Up: A Mexican Currency Board
As North American and international capital seek to drum into the heads of economists the oneness of money and blood, the push is on to formally tie the peso to the dollar, to hand over control of Mexican monetary policy to Alan Greenspan. Item #1: Steve Hanke, "Critics Err--Mexico Still Needs a currency Board" Wall Street Journal, Feb. 22, 1995, ed.page. Note: Hanke, like fellow faculty member Riordan Roett,is at Johns Hopkins. Hanke, who has written a book on the virtues of currency boards, i.e., tying a weak currency to a stronger one so tightly that the supply of the weak currency can expand only with an expansion of holdings of the stronger currency, has attacked the current bailout deal as a return to Teddy Roosevelt's methods of seizing customs houses. He argues instead for seizing the Central Bank. He prefers the kind of thing Argentina has done to limit the power of the government: "With a board, the peso's monetary base (notes and coins) would be solely determined by the free market demand for pesos, at a permanently fixed exchange rate. The base would not be determined by the Bank of Mexico..." Thus no expanding the money supply to accomodate public employment programs, no drawing down of foreign exchange reserves to finance balance of trade deficits to keep the ruling party in power. Hanke estimates financing for such a program would cost about $11b --something he says the IMF is authorized to provide. "a currency board," he writes, "would produce stability in Mexico". Item #2: Business Week editorial, February 27, 1995, p. 136. Business Week, which quotes Hanke (see p. 62), says the following: "The big victory of the conservative PAN and the failure to capture the leader of teh Chiapas rebellion are raising doubts about the political as well as economic leadership of President Zedillo. ...His ability to enforce harsh anti-inflation poicies on a restive publc in the face of a sharp 40% devaluation is now being sharply questioned by the marketsl ...A dramatic new gesture is needed. Enter the currency board." "...it would be tying its inflation rate and interest rates to the U.S. The Mexican government and the central bank would give up all discretionary power to pump up the money supply or to act as lender of last resort. . . The PACTO, the annual agreement on wages and prices, would have to be abolished. And state-owned assets would have to be sold off to the plrivate sector to sop up excess pesos." As usual Business Week is lucid about the political side of its economics. Unlike Riordan Roett in his infamous Chase Report, BW doesn't call for "eliminating" the Zapatistas (though implicitly it would help ease doubts about Zedillo's "political leadership") but it does join him in calling for sticking it to the Mexican working class and in calling on on the Mexican state to sell off its assets (undoubtedly to include PEMEX --although with all of PEMEX's oil revenues now obligated to the US all that would do would be to return control over Mexico's oil to US capital as it was before Cardenas nationalized it). So far, Zedillo has merely acquiesced to the old game of the 1980s, i.e., impose austerity, slash standards of living, some privatization, to pay off debt. These guys want it all. Fed up with Zedillo's lack of "leadership", they want the Mexican economy firmly in the hands of those tough enough to handle it: Alan Greenspan and American corporations. Let the Fed run monetary policy, the IMF run fiscal policy, and the multinational corporations run the private sector (from oil to banks). That would pretty much annex the whole Mexican economy to the U.S. --which is what NAFTA was really all about anyway. And annexing the Mexican economy means first and foremost annexing the Mexican working class to the needs of American/multinational capital. Next, I suppose, the Mexican army will be formally run from the Pentagon and the national police forces from FBI headquarters. But what the hell, the nationstate is dead, right? Why should any little people want to hang on to its autonomy? Why should they be allowed to? You've got to play by the rules, right? Otherwise you`re out of the game! Oh, forgot to mention: capital generally, like its more savage wing (the mafia), doesn't let people "quit". The Mexican army in in the Selva Lancandona right now to prevent a bunch of Indians from "quitting". The situation there is getting bloodier and bloodier but it's still a ways to go before it reaches the proportions of the Mantanza --the 1932 butchering of 30,000 peasants in El Salvador that brought the peace and quiet of the graveyard to that country's rulling 14 capitalist families for 30 years. Of course, if things get totally out of hand, in Mexico, if one of those little marches of 150,000 people should decide to topple the state, you can bet Zedillo, or one of his hinchmen, will put in a quick call to the Pentagon and ask for
[PEN-L:4243] Re: Mexico
OK folks. Those of you who are actively involved in solidarity work with chiapas and the Zapatistas but who don't want to subscribe to every relevant list can send me a note and get added to MY list, which is not a regular list, just a mailing list. I subscribe to most relevant lists, gather, sift, filter and pass on what I judge to be useful information --useful to those involved in this struggle. I send on both Spanish and English language material from the Internet and from PeaceNet. My list now has about 100 addresses from all over the world. It's a lot of information, you have to want/need it, pay attention and not let your mailbox fill up with it. It's not for everyone. It's not for those with a casual interest. Harry On Mon, 20 Feb 1995, D Shniad wrote: Sorry, Barkley, but I too, am finding the amount of info overwhelming. Given that following the situation in Mexico is not my full time job, I think it makes more sense for folks who are interested in the subject to sign on to the lists themselves. Sorry if the burden's too great, but I can't function as editor on this subject. Cheers, Sid Shniad To D. Shniad: It is true that the messages got a bit overwhelming there for awhile. But I for one am wondering if there might not be a happy medium between "nothing" versus "go sign up on one of these nets" (appreciate the sources). Perhaps you could selectively forward especially informative and newsworthy ones, things not showing up in the newspapers, that are not mere appeals, or in Spanish, or pure gibberish. There have been several interesting ones, such as the report from EZLN top committee, the report from the demonstrating grandfather, the initial reports on Roett, and some of the AI reports on torture. These may reflect my personal interests, and you may wish to consult with michael p., but I think there is still room on pen-l for at least some of this, if edited carefully. Barkley Rosser James Madison University == Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 471-3211 Fax: (512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
[PEN-L:4167] Chase, Mexico and Guerrilla Research
On Wed, 15 Feb 1995, Doug Henwood wrote:
I think Counterpunch did an important thing by circulating this famous
memo, but the danger of this sort of muckraking is always that it focuses
too much attention on individuals and away from systemic forces. You don't
need a memo to know that Wall Street wants to see the Zapatistas crushed -
all of Wall Street, and the Mexican elite as well, not just Chase and
Roett. Let's give a moment's thought to Goldman Sachs, former home of
Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, present home to the ubiquitous Jorge
Mariscal, and the biggest foreign underwriter of Mexican securities from
1992-4.
Doug
Doug:
I see no "danger" here. I see no opposition between identifying the
functionaries of capital and understanding "systemic forces". In the
first place theoretical arguments about "systemic forces" means little or
nothing to most people. What does means something is who knew what, when
and what they did about it. In the second place, theoretically speaking
the concept of "systemic forces" has no meaning without agency. I don't
mind the use of the term but I would never give it the kind of
structuralist interpretation that leaves out subjects. Things certainly
happen behind the backs of the actors, but mostly what that means is that
the outcomes of their actions are not always what they expect or intend.
In this case we get a glimpse of what has beem said by those actors
behind closed doors. We get a better understanding of some of the forces
in U.S. capitalist policy making. Sure, we all think that ALL of Wall
Street wants the Zapatistas crushed, but that doesn't mean the story of
their internal discussions is useless to know. There is not always
consensus in policy matters and it is often very useful to know who is
saying what to whom, to take advantage of it in struggle.
Remember Vietnam. There was consensus, more or less, for a long time with
a few exceptions such as George Ball. But as that consensus began to
disintegrate and those of us in the anti-war movement recognized it as
such, we were able to widen the conflicts into a split that weakened the
Johnson and then Nixon administrations and helped bring their war to an
end.
Chase is clearly embarassed by this report getting out, enought to
disassociate itself from Roett. Roett is probably royally irritated even
if he might have suspected that was one of the rules of the game. Knowing
that Zedillo chose to go into Chiapas partly under pressure from Wall
Street is useful for the anti-war effort in Mexico. Few there enjoy the
idea that their government is an agent of WAll Street whatever they think
of the Zapatistas etc.
This kind of thing also allows us to raise an issue which has been
ignored for too long by too many: the role of the university in foreign
policy making. Roett is Director of Latin American Studies at Johns
Hopkins. Such area studies were created to feed scholars and analysts
into the American imperial machine. We realized all that back in the
1960s. NACLA did a lot of reserch on area studies in Latin AMerica.
Attacks on such connections were an important part of the anti-Vietnam
war effort, they helped rupture the socialization of students into the
establishment and disrupted the research and public images of those who
had sold their souls to the Defense Department or to State or to the CIA.
Remember the revelation of Project Camelot in Chile where individual
social science researcher activities were being paid for and coordinated
as part of a counterinsurgency agenda? Remember the articles in VIET
REPORT on the Peasant and the Professors about the role of the Unversity
of Michigan in Vietam? Remember the expose "Anthropology on the Warpath"
in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS about the use of anthropologists research
in the counterinsurgency campaign there? All these revelations
contributed to the struggle.
The result was a crisis in the connections between the universities and
business. For the last 15 years business and the government have been
trying to renew those ties and craft new ones. It has not always been
easy. Part of the Vietnam syndrome has been the memory of distaste over
such links.
For example, a couple of years ago a new administration in the Institute
for Latin American Studies here at University of Texas wanted to open a
program to train military personnel in Latin American studies. It would
bring in new money they said! The reaction of most faculty and students
was quick and aggressively negative. The program was not started.
Hopefully, the information about Roett will reach the faculty and
students at Johns Hopkins and there will be those who will protest his
position there, perhaps call for his resignation --considering that he
has called for murder ("elimination of the Zapatistas"). That's a hell of
thing for a "scholar" to be doing.
Therefore, I say: the more such information we can lay our hands on, the
[PEN-L:4181] Re: Chase, Mexico and Guerrilla Research
On Wed, 15 Feb 1995, Doug Henwood wrote: At 10:52 AM 2/15/95, Harry M. Cleaver wrote: I see no "danger" here. I see no opposition between identifying the functionaries of capital and understanding "systemic forces". In the first place theoretical arguments about "systemic forces" means little or nothing to most people. What does means something is who knew what, when and what they did about it. In the second place, theoretically speaking the concept of "systemic forces" has no meaning without agency. I don't mind the use of the term but I would never give it the kind of structuralist interpretation that leaves out subjects. Things certainly happen behind the backs of the actors, but mostly what that means is that the outcomes of their actions are not always what they expect or intend. As I said, it was important that the memo was published; it proved that accusations that "Wall Street" wants the Zaps dead are no mere leftist inventions. And of course it's important to put a face on abstractions like "Wall Street" and "capital." But because "systemic forces" may not mean much to most people is no reason to ignore them. Doug: As I suspect you know. I don't ignore them. Chase can now disown Roett, as it's done; Goldman Sachs could disown Chase if it wanted to. When I spoke with Counterpunch's editor, Ken Silverstein, this morning, I made this point, and he entirely agreed, adding, "It's not like Goldman Sachs came out for social reform in Mexico or anything." Doug: Sure, no doubt. It's being done as we speak. But my guess is it doesn't matter to most people who have heard the story and read Roett's report. They get the picture, despite the doubletalk. The liberal-populist/muckraking/journalistic instinct is very prosecutorial and individualized; throw out the bad apples and all will be well. But of course all won't be well. Doug: Of course not. But muckraking only devolves into throwing out JUST the "bad" apples if we let it. We are prefectly free to use the results of muckraking to attack apples in general. So to speak. :-) In this case I haven't heard ANYONE on the nets talking about good apples. I think everyone is just delighted with the confirmation of their suspicions, or bothered by the collapse of their illusions. Roett in this case is capital personified; it's important to make that broader point, but it can get lost in this kind of talk. Doug: Again, it will only get lost if we let it get lost, and we aren't doing that. In fact, I'll bet that GS is happy Chase is taking the heat. Doug: Frankly I could care less about the sordid family quarrels of capital. I'm just hoping some energetic guerrilla researcher comes up with a similar internal report from GS. In the meantime, we go on making all the points we can, at every level, to whatever audiences we think we can reach. I'd say, so far, we're doing pretty well. Zedillo has (apparently) stopped the military advance and the PRI govenor has resigned (unfortunately to be replaced with another PRI goon.) Now the point is to work to get the troops out of the areas they have invaded, liberate the prisoners they have taken, expose the torture (and who knows what else) they have committed and get on with pushing demands for democracy and social restructuring in Mexico (and in the U.S. and elsewhere). Along the way we learn what we can about the enemy and think about how to use it to best advantage. I think we agree about this. == Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 471-3211 Fax: (512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
[PEN-L:4184] More on Banks vs Zapatistas (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 15 Feb 1995 22:00:18 -0600 (CST) From: Harry M. Cleaver hmcleave@mundo Subject: More on Banks vs Zapatistas Note Bene: The information in this interview complements the Chase internal report and Silverstein and Cockburn's article on it. The CSIS meeting refered to here may be the same one mentioned by them at which Roett spoke. Perhaps not. The point is the same. Dresser mentions Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and the Wall Street Journal as wanting the Zapatistas' heads. The list of headhunters could undoubtedly be lengthened. Perhaps it will be. == -- Forwarded message -- Date: 15 Feb 95 19:45:00 -0600 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: NPR 1/14 Trans. - Copyright 1995 National Public Radio NPR SHOW: Weekend Edition - Saturday ( NPR 10:00 am ET) January 14, 1995 Transcript # 1106-13 TYPE: Package SECTION: News; International LENGTH: 1073 words HEADLINE: Analyst Reveals Prospects of Mexico's Economic Crisis BYLINE: DENISE DRESSER HIGHLIGHT: A political analyst of Mexico says that despite the financial crisis being over, there is still the crisis of expectation and the crisis in political leadership. The Mexican populace will be paying a high price. BODY: SCOTT SIMON, Host: I'm Scott Simon and coming up on Weekend Edition, the impact of Mexico's economic crisis on what had been one of the hottest areas of investment - international markets. But first, only six Saturdays ago, Mexican Political Analyst Denise Dresser [sp] spoke with us about the prospects for her country as new President Ernesto Zedillo took office. An earthquake of a kind has occurred since then - the economic crisis that has sliced some 40 percent off the value of the peso and 50 percent off the value of Mexican stocks. We've asked Ms. Dresser back now. She's on leave from her post at Mexico's prestigious technological University Eta [sp]. She joins us in our studios here. Thanks for being with us again, Ms. Dresser. DENISE DRESSER, Political Analyst: Thank you for the invitation. SCOTT SIMON: As they say, first the news. The Mexican stock market has rallied a bit, in part because the U.S. government was willing to provide about $40 billion of loan guarantees, so the immediate crisis is over but one would think hardly the effect in Mexico. Help us understand what the impact there has been. DENISE DRESSER: Well, even though the immediate financial crisis is over, I think the crisis of expectations and the crisis in political leadership in Mexico remain. Over the next three or four years, Mexicans are going to be paying a very high price. They've lost 40 percent of their buying power. They're going to face, in all likelihood, spiraling inflation. And, above all, there's a sense of collective despair that Mexico has gone through so many economic adjustments over the last 12 years and yet we're being asked to sacrifice one more time and it's not clear that there will be a new recipe, a new formula that will finally propel us into the first world. SCOTT SIMON: This was hardly the making of the new administration of President Zedillo, but do you think that they might have acted more wisely in meeting the crisis? DENISE DRESSER: I think there were structural problems that determined the crisis, but it was probably exacerbated by Zedillo's lack of political leadership. I think we're witnessing the economic manifestations of political problems, of a technocratic team that came into power viewing politics as a residual variable and haven't been able to market this adjustment program to the Mexican people. I think in the next couple of months, we're going to see severe problems, in terms of the political management of economic adjustment in Mexico city. He was going to have to keep the unions in line in order to maintain wages down and keep inflation down. And given that there's a collective sense that Zedillo is not someone who's in charge, it may be difficult to maintain controls over disaffected and discontented groups in Mexico. SCOTT SIMON: Now, as you point out, President Zedillo is in the position now of having to try and hold the line, or even reduce wages among many labor union members, exactly at the same time many union workers felt they were entitled to feel that wages would be expanded. DENISE DRESSER: Well, because President Salinas had created an enormous sense of expectations about Mexico metamorphasizing into a modern economy, and those expectations have been dashed. We're going to witness a series of very difficult
[PEN-L:3961] Re: seek info on mexico steel
On Fri, 27 Jan 1995, Ted Kuster wrote: Does anyone know of a good resource (in English or Spanish) on the Mexican steel industry? I've got an assignment from a steel trade publication to look into the consequences of privatization, NAFTA and economic collapse for steel in Mexico, and like a true American reporter I am starting out quite clueless. All hints appreciated. -- Ted Kuster, or [EMAIL PROTECTED] I don't have any sources off-hand. But the question does remind me of a nice story. A few years back, as I remember, there was a graduate student here at the University of Texas who was writing his dissertation with David Kendrick. The subject was a planning model for the steel industry in Mexico. Once the model was built and running, the student, just for grins, used it to see what would be the best strike strategy for the steelworkers to shut down the whole industry. I don't think that little exercize got into the dissertation, but it was one of the only examples I've heard of mathematical sectoral models being put to good use. == Harry Cleaver Department of Economics University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1173 USA Phone Numbers: (hm) (512) 442-5036 (off) (512) 471-3211 Fax: (512) 471-3510 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==
Re: Need quotes critique utopian socialism
On Fri, 15 Jul 1994, Trond Andresen wrote: I am hunting for Marx/Engels quotations re their critique of utopian socialism(- ists). Can anybody help? Trond Trond: The most obvious refs are the last part of the MANIFESTO and Engel's comments in ANTI-DUHRING. You need more than that? Harry
Re: Grading: deja vue all over again
Day after day, I noted and downloaded the stream of messages on grades, grade inflation and related issues, but could not --in the midst of the end of semester rush-- take the time to read them. This morning a piece in the NEW YORK TIMES on my old alma mater (Stanford) caught my eye and inspired me to deal with the subject politically, i.e., by writing an intervention into an ongoing struggle. So I did, and you all will find it appended below. When I finished, I printed out the collection of Pen-l messages and read them to see if I was missing anything important that might fit into the line of argument I had laid out. There was a little overlap but not much, so after posting the piece to the Stanford student newspaper I decided to post it here for discussion. It turns out that the last paper of the quarter has already been put to bed, so the piece will only circulate among some student and faculty activists I've been in touch with today and will NOT appear in the paper, at least not this quarter. I've posted it as a reply to Penny's intervention because I liked her broad questions demanding that the subject be situated in a larger context. So, without further ado. WORRIED ABOUT GRADE INFLATION? ABOLISH GRADES! by Harry Cleaver* (Stanford Ph.D., 1975) Special to the Stanford Daily Austin, Texas., May 31 -- 6:30am. Bleary-eyed, I sip my caffeine and flip through the morning New York Times looking for inspiration, some sign of grassroots struggle, maybe even a victory to get the adrenlin flowing. Finally, on page 7, a title jumps out at me: "At Stanford, A Rebellion On Grades". All right! Something's stirring at my old alma mater! "The grade F does not exist here", I read, "The C is fast becoming extinct." Hmm! The current generation has things well in hand, I think to myself. Maybe they are pushing for the complete abolition of grades. At a place like Stanford, that would be a real change! But no, reading on I discover that instead of students in rebellion against grades, a handful of conservative faculty members are trying to crack down on students, to whip up faculty support for harder grading! So the anti- grade inflation counter-revolution has come to Stanford! It's a campaign I know well, for it has been going on here at the University of Texas where I teach for years. The arguments for harder grading, I see, are familiar, especially: "Stanford doesn't give failing grades. This penalizes good students at the expense of poor students." What such statements really mean, of course, is that employers can't identify students who do what they are told and work hard because their record of obedience and toil doesn't stand out if the grade hierarchy is too narrow. Standard ploy: mobilize the workaholics against the slackers. Use the would-be CEOs against the independently-minded who resist discipline and follow their own paths of learning. Let's cut through the euphemistic rhetoric of the debate and get to the real issues. The fight over grade inflation is about the imposition of work and how much freedom students have to pursue their own studies, in the classroom and out. The harder the grading, the more students have to obey higher "authorities" (professors and the adminstration). The easier the grading, the more time and energy are liberated for each student (or for groups of students collectively) to think independently, to read on their own, to explore aspects of life they may have just discovered, or to delve into whatever issues their intellectual and sensual curiosities may have raised for them. Sources of Grade Inflation: the Historical Background During the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, many of us who were students (and a few professors) understood this. We saw that the university had been organized by business as a factory to produce both research and waged workers. We fought to sever the links with business, partly through easier grading. We fought to open space and create time to do the things we felt we had to do (such as research into Stanford's complicity with the war against Vietnam) and the things we wanted to do (such as all those bizarre and fun courses that thrived for a while in the Mid-Peninsula Free University we created alongside Stanford). We looked at how the university had divided up knowledge and sought to mold us into narrow disciplines and set to work overcoming the divisions and creating our own syntheses. We caught glimpses of all the drama of life the university excluded from its curriculum and set about creating the courses that weren't being taught (Black Studies, Women's studies and so on) and went outside the university to get what couldn't be brought in. At the time success on the grade front was mostly achieved indirectly rather than directly. The general atmosphere created by frequent confrontations with both administrators and professors led even
Re: People`s war strategy out ?
Trond: Urban "liberated areas" may not make much sense in a strict military sense, e.g., in an urban guerrilla war conceived in terms of a military strategy to seize power in the old Leninist sense, but once we shift from such one-dimensional notions of war and resituate the notion within political struggle, then certainly we can talk about liberated areas, even if they are only "temporary autonomous zones" as in the book by Hakim Bey. The creation of TAZ's has been an integral component of a great many urban struggles for a long time. They range from whole neighborhoods to youth centers (sometimes squats) used as focal points of organizing and mobilization. Did you read the articles in MIDNIGHT NOTES about the youth struggles in Zurich? The struggle for Cartago by those associated with P.M. the author of BOLO BOLO? Are you familiar with the widespread "social centers" throughout Italy, almost always in squatted buildings or factories. Although they have not had to be defended against military assault, they have been repeatedly defended with force against paramilitary assault by fascist thugs who recognize their subversive character. Have you heard of the battles for Tompson Square Park in New York City? As I know you know, the processes of primitive accumulation, e.g., of enclosure, long ago became permanent features of capitalist accumulation. Where there is enclosure, from the Amazon to urban renewal, there is resistance. But it is also true that people in many places and in many times have also taken the offensive to roll-back enclosure, to open new spaces for struggle and self-valorization, from the Diggers to the EZLN. What changes are the circumstances within which such struggles take place and the potentialities they create. Just like the use of computer networks or any other tool, the interesting question is always which forms are most appropriate in a given situation and how best can they be used to achieve the goals at hand? On Wed, 27 Apr 1994, Trond Andresen wrote: Re my first message on this topic: I will add one more point which supports a new liberation war paradigm: The depopulation of the countryside, and growth of megacities. You can't have liberated areas in a meaningful sense in a city. This also underscores the need of a shift from military struggle to international solidarity and political action. --- | Trond Andresen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) | | Department of Engineering Cybernetics | | The Norwegian Institute of Technology | | N-7034 Trondheim, NORWAY| | | | phone +47 73 59 43 58 | | fax +47 73 59 43 99 | ---
