Re: People vs. Property in Chico
Tim, Keep an eye out for a road warrior named Wendell Cox who gets parachuted around the country by right-wing think tanks to attack rail transport and transit-oriented urban planning. An op-ed by him showed up in the Vancouver Province last week -- there's a bus strike on and one of the issues is contracting out to private operators (Cox also carries a brief for privatizing public bus services). The op-ed identified the St. Louis area consultant as being with a Winnipeg-area institute. Tim Bousquet wrote, The rail system would provide at least two morning trains going south and two afternoon or evening trains going north, such that one could travel between any two of the cities in a relatively easy and timely manner to conduct whatever business needed to be done. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Michael Yates Yellowstone Journal #2
NOT a stupid question at all. Perhaps naive to assume that the desk clerk would have the answer. Michael Yates wrote, the questions are sometime so stupid that you want to scream one person from the US asked if it was safe to drink the water! Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: vaseline
Even? Even? Tony Blair has ALWAYS vaselined his gums. Even Tony Blair has to vaseline his gums to keep smiling. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: True Hegelian Truth
Well, according to Tim Horton's the hole is the Timbit. Jim Devine writes: As Baran Sweezy quote Hegel to say, the truth is the whole. = According to Paul Diesing, this should actually read the true is the whole. Michael K. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: time (was left the mita running?)
I think it is gas. Gene Coyloe It was those beans again. Speaking of beans and inevitably of bean counting, what seems important to me is the transition from a regime of calculation to first a regime of automated calculation and ultimately to a regime where the instruments of measurement construct the things being measured. This doesn't work for physical commodities like gas (the fuel) or water or sealing wax, but it does for derived categories like unemployment/employment, inflation, public opinion, entertainment, gross domestic product and . . . the wage. Wage labour is presumably something that can or could crop up ephemerally anywhere at any time historically for any number of locally significant reasons. But wage labour as we know it is something historically specific and, *whatever its origins*, it is something that is becoming increasingly incompatible with the continuation of social life. All puns aside, the meter has become the message. As Doug has correctly (if perhaps only kiddingly) perceived, this does have something to do with the length of the workday although it doesn't have to do exclusively with the length of the workday. More broadly, it has to do with the whole spectrum (or is it a lump?) of social statistics with which we intellectuals and ideologists entertain ourselves. However, the quantification of labour power in units of labour time is the point at which all this socially calculated rubber hits the road. It is consequently the point at which one may well expect the metered shit to hit the fan. Something about all that is solid melts into air; gas again -- greenhouse or beanhouse. The METER is running but the cab is parked at the curb with the engine idling. The meter is RUNNING but does it really count? Tom Walker wrote: A meter is an instrument for measuring and recording the quantity of something, as of gas, water, miles, or time. Take your pick. Doug Henwood asked, Does this have something to do with the length of the workday, or the lump of entertainment fallacy? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Oz Competition update
Competition is like sex. Whether it is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing very much depends on who, what, when, where and how. Doug Henwood asked: I keep forgetting - is competition a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Oz Competition update
What is distinctly odd is the way in which monopoly is fostered in the name of competition. Neo-liberalism thus heralds a magical transition from monopoly to monopoly with the main difference that the metamorphosed monopoly is relieved of its historically accumulated burden of countervailing constraints and reciprocal obligations. I would read Rob's implicit praise of competition as ironic, in much the same vein as Marx's implicit praise of property, family and religion in the Eighteenth Brumaire. As much as one might disparage the ideals that appear as slogans on the reactionary banner, those ideals are benign compared with the crapulent social forces that march under that banner. Doug Henwood wrote, Yeah, I'm with you on this. But it's a bit odd to see competition implicitly praised on a Progressive Economists list. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Oz Competition update
Ah, Max, you are confusing good and bad with right and wrong. Max Sawicky wrote, I beg to differ. One of my favorite lines in a movie by Jessica Tandy was, When sex is right it can be wonderful; but when it's wrong it can be wonderful too. mbs Competition is like sex. Whether it is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing very much depends on who, what, when, where and how. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
The good, the bad and the ugly
Clarification That is to say, that utility and morality BOTH depend on who, what, where, when and how but not necessarily the same who, what, where, when or how. Ah, Max, you are confusing good and bad with right and wrong. Max Sawicky wrote, I beg to differ. One of my favorite lines in a movie by Jessica Tandy was, When sex is right it can be wonderful; but when it's wrong it can be wonderful too. mbs Competition is like sex. Whether it is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing very much depends on who, what, when, where and how. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
left the mita running?
Doug Henwood cracked, And such revolutions aren't likely to happen in the rich imperial nations if their left intellectuals are interested only in affairs thousands of miles from where they sit. Louis Proyect riposted, You forgot to mention that I live on the Upper East Side. Slipping in your old age? When I was a kid, people didn't worry much about getting to the movie on time. They would just find a seat whenever they got there and watch the last 2/3 or 3/4 of the movie, wait for it to start again and then watch the part they had missed. When scenes showed up that they had seen before someone would ask isn't this where we came in? and they would leave. If it was a tedious movie, someone would ask isn't this where we came in? after about 10 minutes. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
re: time (was left the mita running?)
A meter is an instrument for measuring and recording the quantity of something, as of gas, water, miles, or time. Take your pick. Doug Henwood asked, Does this have something to do with the length of the workday, or the lump of entertainment fallacy? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Floyd Norris: An Exaggerated Productivity Boom May Soon Be a Bust
Or, productivity is cracked up to be something that it isn't. And therein lies the one great enduring fallacy of bourgeois economics, which is concerned above all to demonstrate the contribution to production of a non-tangible essence, i.e. a contribution of capital that cannot be attributed to previous accumulation of surplus value. [P]roductivity is not what it was cracked up to be. And therein lies one of the great fallacies of the recent boom and bubble. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Any thoughts
Again with reference to the Air Canada takeover of Canadian Airlines, the experts for CAW Local 1990 argue that Canadian Airlines was by far the more cost effective operator but was done in by its heavier debt servicing costs. Stuart wrote: We can see that finance capital drove a great deal of the restructuring but has it left the industry with a fundamentally different role, primarily that of leveraged buyer of aircraft and servicer of debt? Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
the enemy's stuh tis'tiks
The word statistics refers to three distinctively different things: the science that deals with the collection, analysis, and interpretation of numerical data, often using probability theory, the data themselves and a branch of political science dealing with the collection of data RELEVANT TO A STATE [emphasis added]. One can postulate the objectivity and neutrality of the latter kind of statistics only on the premise that the state itself is a neutral and objective enterprise. This would be rather like analyzing the economy on the premise that wage labour is a neutral and objective relationship, freely entered into by two parties with equal opportunities to engage in or withdraw from the relationship. A given state may be more or less inclusive in the data it deems relevant to itself and that inclusiveness may change over time. The use of any specific data series as a barometer of a state's performance makes it a target for manipulation, either directly in the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data or indirectly in the targeting of state policies to get the numbers right, regardless of whether the better looking numbers reflect real improvements or merely an opportunistic inflation of the selected performance indicators. IT'S THE MAP, STUPID One anecdote is only an anecdote, a million anecdotes is a statistic. Considering the *relevance to a state* angle, the data must be viewed as fundamentally geopolitical. The GDP of Canada should not contain the value of goods and services produced in Nebraska. The data presupposes a map. I am conducting the 2001 Canaada census for a portion of the island where I live and I was supplied with a map of my area that could best be described as a travesty of a map. It makes the Palm Beach County butterfly ballot look like a paragon of logic and design. My map shows roads connecting that don't connect, calls roads names they've never had and leaves off quite a few. It numbers as a 'census block' a small triangle of dust left between two roads that intersect in a 'V' and their cut-off. It leaves a vast, occupied territory unsullied with any census block number. The collection, analysis and interpretation of data is also a labour process. The census takers (who are *required* to supply their own vehicle) are paid at a piece-rate, presumably calibrated to compensate them at slightly above minimum wage -- if they work at a steady pace and make no mistakes. Given a map that doesn't show the territory, that would be impossible. In other words, to be blunt, viewed from the bottom of the division of labour, the 2001 Canada census appears to be a pantomime. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Utility on display
In a foyer of University College London, in a glass fronted cabinet, sits the preserved body of Jeremy Bentham; philosopher, economist, expounder of Utilitarianism, Bentham is chiefly remembered for inventing the Panopticon; a glass walled prison designed for total surveillance. A video camera pointed at Jeremy Bentham's body, updating images onto the Internet every five minutes. http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/web/Nina/JBentham.html Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
RE: It's a Jungle In Here
This explains Microsoft documentation and 'help' files. I do hope though that Bill has the foresight to make provision in his will to follow in the footsteps of Jeremy Bentham. Alt-Ctrl-Del . . . Jim Devine wrote, BTW, Bill Gates is clearer: there was a story in TIME awhile back that described his social skills: he'd go to his office fridge to get a soda for himself, not even thinking of offering one to his guest. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Sweatshops and featherbeds
The sophistry in Krugman's argument is that he relies on a universal premise of rational utility maximization in order to demonstrate the irrationality of some particulars. All swans are white . . . therefore, those black swans over there are not swans. Obviously it takes a great deal of skill to perform such a feat but it also takes the indulgence of an audience that would rather watch and believe -- or watch and *disbelieve* -- such a performance than attend to the annoying question of what time it is. Sweatshops are a phenomenon of decay, pure and simple. They spring up like mushrooms in the crevices of a putrifying social formation. Sweatshop labour is a middleman operation heavily subsidized by state repression and uncompensated expropriation of population health. Wages are low not because of productivity but because of the legions of brokers, sub-contractors, petty officials and toad swallowers that have to be maintained to stoke the furnace with cheap labour. The middlemen are not cheap. Think of it this way: the difference between the price of an item produced by sweatshop labour and the cost of the labour that went into it is not all gravy for the capitalist. Some part of it went to feather the beds of so-called economists and columnists who churn out hoary tales about what a cracking good deal it all is. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Sweatshops and featherbeds
Does the L.A. times Normally capitalize words other than Proper nouns in the Middle of a sentence? A Sweatshop Is Better Than Nothing soph-o-mor-ic (sof uh môr'ik, -mor'-) adj. 1. of or pertaining to sophomores. 2. intellectually pretentious and conceited but immature and ill-informed. Daniel L. Jacobs, a Native of Los Angeles, Is a Sophomore at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: what is economics?
Jim Devine wrote, what is economics, anyway? orthodox economics seems to be a matter of preaching either free-market philosophy or technocratic superiority, along with a lot of purely academic stuff. Or as the Krugman/Jacobs consensus illustrates, purely sophomoric stuff. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Disappearing in Quebec City
from Naomi Klein: "They were dressed like activists," said Helen Nazon, a 23-year-old from Quebec City, with hooded sweatshirts, bandannas on their faces, flannel shirts, a little grubby. "They pushed Jaggi on the ground and kicked him. It was really violent." "Then they dragged him off," said Michele Luellen. All the witnesses told me that when Mr. Singh's friends closed in to try to rescue him, the men dressed as activists pulled out long batons, beat back the crowd and identified themselves: "Police!" they shouted. Then they threw him into a beige van and drove off. Several of the young activists have open cuts where they were hit. Three hours after Mr. Singh's arrest, there was still no word of where he was being held. http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/RTGAMArticleHTMLTemplate/B,B/20010421/wk lei?tf=RT/fullstory.htmlcf=RT/config-neutralvg=BigAdVariableGeneratorslug =wkleidate=20010421archive=RTGAMsite=Front Meanwhile, back at the ranch: In a speech hastily rewritten to address the clashes between police and small groups of protesters, Mr. Chrtien condemned the violence and said the 34 leaders gathered for the summit represent the will of the citizens who elected them. [Like Dubya, for example?] "Violence and provocation is unacceptable in a democracy," Mr. Chrtien said. "The type of behaviour that we have seen outside this afternoon by small groups of extremists is contrary to the democratic principles we all hold dear. "The creation of a free-trade area is not an end in itself," he said at the opening ceremony, which was attended by a host of dignitaries from across the hemisphere. "It is a means; a tool for growth that will allow us to promote closer, more dynamic economic relations among the nations of the Americas. In time, it will assure a higher standard of living and a better quality of life for all peoples of the hemisphere." Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, said activists representing unions, church groups and other citizens' group flatly reject Mr. Chrtien's contention that free trade creates prosperity. "It has increased poverty in Canada and in the United States and in Mexico, and it will do the same throughout the rest of the Americas," Ms. Barlow said. The summit leaders are also expected to focus on ways to enshrine and promote democracy in the region. The heads of government are expected to include in their final communique a "democracy clause," which Canadian officials described as a major advance for a region that has a history of brutal military dictatorships. "They were dressed like activists," said Helen Nazon, a 23-year-old from Quebec City, with hooded sweatshirts, bandannas on their faces, flannel shirts, a little grubby. "They pushed Jaggi on the ground and kicked him. It was really violent." Mr. Chrtien said Friday night the promotion of democracy cannot take a back seat to the advancement of free trade. "Then they dragged him off," said Michele Luellen. All the witnesses told me that when Mr. Singh's friends closed in to try to rescue him, the men dressed as activists pulled out long batons, beat back the crowd and identified themselves: "Police!" they shouted. Then they threw him into a beige van and drove off. Several of the young activists have open cuts where they were hit. "Economic integration is only one pillar in our hemispheric edifice," he said. "After all, prosperity has no meaning if our citizens are not free, if they are not equal before the law or if they cannot make use of the opportunities open to them." Three hours after Mr. Singh's arrest, there was still no word of where he was being held. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Final exam question
Sorry, I thought I had beaten this dead horse so much that people would pick up on the intended irony. The key phrase is "the infamous lump of labor fallacy" the Arizona State U professor cites as the basis for the hope that reducing the work week will create jobs. Infamous indeed! There is no such thing. It is a hoax, a canard, a phony, a counterfeit, a figment of the imagination, a relic of textbook lore. Students in Professor Hendricks' class are eligible to get "30 points" for regurgitating baseless nonsense or possibly zero for a thoughtful answer. But since you asked . . . I'll plug my chapter on "The 'lump of labor' case against work-sharing: populist fallacy or marginalist throwback" in _Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives_, published by Routledge. In that chapter I examined the scholarly credentials (or lack of them) of the alleged lump and show (to my own satisfaction and my editors', at least) how this phony doctrine actually contradicts orthodox marginalist theory on the hours of labour. Admittedly the lump of labor fallacy is itself a piece of trivia, but lurking behind it is an important issue. The eclipsed theory of the hours of labour (Sir Sydney Chapman's) is radically inconvenient to the standard economic assumptions of rationality and market tendency to equilibrium, yet it strictly adheres to the axiom of wages equal to marginal productivity. This inconvenient aspect of the theory meant that its implications had to be assumed away "for the sake of argument" in the 1930s by, e.g., J.R. Hicks and Lionel Robbins and eventually the acknowledgement that the argument rested on a counter-factual assumption had to be quietly set aside for the sake of ideological respectability. We might thus say that the standard analysis -- the "answer" in the final exam -- now rests on a lump of contradictory assumptions fallacy. Marxist economists should also take note of this odd episode because, as Chris Nyland argued about 12 years ago, Chapman's theory of the hours of labour substantially confirmed, from a radically different theoretical standpoint, Marx's position regarding the *historical* as well as immediate relationship between the intensity and duration of the expenditure of labour power. The lump of labor fallacy is, in effect, the bushy tail peeking out from behind Grandma's nightgown that should alert Red Riding Hood to the possibility that the canine-toothed creature in Grandma's bed is not Grandma. Carrol Cox wrote, I don't understand the point. Is this an attack on or defense of the exam questions? It needs more explanation for the non-economists on the list. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Re: Final exam question: Op-ed
ut time we called the bluff of the textbook-thumping experts who seem to think that a toxic cocktail of overwork and underemployment is "good for the economy"? Isn't it about time we buried the bogus lump-of-labor fallacy alongside the remains of that other scientific hoax, the Piltdown Man? -- Tom Walker is a social policy analyst and advocate of shorter working time. His chapter on "The 'lump-of-labor' case against work-sharing" is in _Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives_ edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah Figart, published by Routledge. Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213
Final exam question
Here's a question (and answer) from the final exam for Professor Lutz Hendricks' Economics 503 course at Arizona State University: Essay Questions (30 points each). Answer 4 questions. Question 1. Unemployment and the Work Week A recent French law intends to shorten the working week from 39 to 35 hours without loss of pay for workers. It is hoped that the plan could provide an extra 1.4 million jobs. What are the likely consequences of this law for employment, unemployment, real GDP, and government revenues? Would the law create new jobs, if pay was reduced in proportion to hours, so as to hold hourly wages constant? Explain your reasoning. Answer Sketches: Essay Questions Case 1: Hold hourly wages constant. Roughly nothing should happen to unemployment. If this is true, then real GDP should fall in proportion to hours (product per hour staying the same). Government revenues would accordingly fall. Employment might also fall because the relative attractiveness of unemployment rises. Why does unemployment stay the same? Essentially because aggregate demand is reduced by exactly the same amount as the reduction in earnings. The hope that new jobs might be created is the infamous lump of labor fallacy which ignores this reduction in demand. Case 2: No loss of pay. This case is similar, except that we now add a wage hike, which further reduces employment and GDP.
Re: profits and corporate speculation
And by the way, it was Gretchen Morgenson who did the piece in Forbes a few years back on employee stock options. Louis Proyect just posted a piece by her on consumer debt. I guess she's another one of those gloom and doom loving lefties.
Re: recent economic trends
Michael Perelman wrote, The actual conspiracy that I was accused suggesting was that Adam Smith wrote in such a way as to intentionally mislead his readers. In that case, the conspiracy consisted of Adams Smith alone. So he must have engaged in a "spiracy," since there were no cons involved in the plot. Unless, that is, he plagiarized his work, in which case the ghost of some dead Frenchman could be held as a con-spiriting henchman. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: recent economic trends
Jim Devine wrote saith Rev. Tom: Sounds interesting. Could you expand a bit? sure, I'm a sucker for such things. No -- on second thought, I can't, since I've got too much work. Look at my article in Baiman, Boushey, and Saunders, eds., POLITICAL ECONOMY AND CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM: RADICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ECONOMIC THEORY AND POLICY (M.E. Sharpe, 2000). The CHALLENGE article (to come) is a revised version of that article, with more up-to-date data. Thanks, Jim, that's all I need. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Faith-based securities?
Seeing as how the religion of the market is the quasi-official public faith, isn't it about time the tax code was amended to enable the faithful to claim appropriately pious financial investments as charitable deductions? Some prospective names: Full Gospel Mutual Fund, First National Bank of Christ, the Redeemer, or just plain old "Jesus Saves" . . . Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: recent economic trends
Jim Devine wrote, it's on the "cost of living" inflation rate, something that first appeared in rudimentary form in pen-l a couple of years ago. The basic idea is that if you include non-market aspects of the cost of living as part of a measure of average prices (the actual price of buying the use-values measured by real GDP), then the inflation rate has been higher than even as measured by the old, non-bowdlerized, version of the CPI. Of course, it's not a kind of inflation that's relevant to monetary policy, but it's relevant to our real living standards. Sounds interesting. Could you expand a bit? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Stop the light
Scientists Bring Light to Full Stop, Hold It, Then Send It on Its Way But can they stop the time? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: The Problem -- faith vetted by Bushevik central committee
Kelley Walker wrote, Yep, you got it, they're leaving the welfare bureaucracy behind in order to instantiate an emerging Charity-Religious Perplex? I have no doubt that it will be just as wasteful as the welfare bureaucracy and after a few exposes of Tammy Faye Bakers buying false eyelashes with public funds... It's a tough one, but, as I said, why let them define what it means to be "faith-based". . . . Finally, while I see no problem with criticizing and refusing to work within the system, when it comes to the impoverished and what their lives will be like, having been homeless and impoverished and applying for food stamps as recently as last year, I'd like to see a lot of folks on the left actually doing something once in awhile. I had utterly no food in my home last holiday season. I would have liked to have gone to a food bank with women's health center pamplets shoved in my hands, not praise jesus flyers. First, they won't be leaving the welfare bureaucracy behind because it's too powerful a constituency and will be all too happy to make the right or righteous noises to save their positions. What they'll do is graft a piously partisan layer of bureaucracy to oversee the career bureaucracy and purge it of "leftists". If there are any exposes, they won't have legs. There could be a third course besides refusing to work within the system and trying to subvert it from within. It isn't an easy one and it IS perilous. That would be to develop complementary design proposals that could, if implemented, make the faith-based approach both more likely to succeed and, at the same time, more emancipatory. WHOA!, you should be thinking. What's this guy been smoking? As I said, it wouldn't be easy and would be perilous. Brad DeLong and Nathan Newman should be appalled, I'm sure. But if Shrubby's going to be around for eight more years, why not make him/it an offer they can't refuse -- five, six, seven and eight are on us? The key element in any complementary faith-based proposal is time -- "compassion time". You can talk all you want about not throwing money at problems, but "suffering with" people means spending time with them, time that working Americans -- and especially working families -- have less and less of (Juliet Shor etc. etc.). Stupid Al Gore kicked off his campaign on the keynote of healing the "time deficit" and, as far as I know buried the theme right then and there. Either Gore and his advisors figured they didn't need it or they figured it would be a campaign liability. Without boring Pen-ler's with concrete proposals, I can simply say I've got plenty of detailed proposals for facilitating the voluntary reduction of working time, if that is what is necessary to enable people to do one-on-one "charity" work. With regard to the quotes around charity, it is the bad connotations (just like the bad connotations of welfare) that make the idea offensive -- the idea of some self-important robber baron philanthropist preaching thrift and handing out dimes to the widows and orphans of miners who've died in his mines. Nobody wants that kind of charity, but then nobody wants welfare, either. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
The clincher
egro problem is grave enough at best. It is vexing the calm of our greatest statesmen and baffling already the efforts of our most strenuous intellects. Who is going to provide entertainment, profitable and wholesome entertainment, for our negroes in their hours of ease? Who is going to guarantee that the passions of the blacks -- the millions of blacks -- will conform themselves to the invocations of the lyceum and the library? It is a matter of record that the towns and urban communities throughout the South show that there is most crime among negroes on days on which they are not at work, their few whole holidays and their once-a-week half-holidays. The eight-hour system would give them some holiday every day and the race would either degrade every community in the South or have to be exterminated. The negro is not the only human creature to whom enforced or optional idleness is a bane. The best gift of our institutions is in the chance of manful, self-reliant independence. The law should foster it and not hamper and degrade it. The eight-hour crusade, once having enlisted the aid of the Congress of the United States, would be as stupendous and deplorable an absurdity as was the crusade of the fanatical children of the middle ages. (Report on Farquhar's testimony) In his testimony Mr. A. B. Farquhar, a member of the Legislative Committee of the National Association of Manufacturers, treated the subject in a philosophical manner from a point of view of a political economist and doctrinaire. Mr. Farquhar is a well-known writer on these subjects and his views were heard by the committee with interest. He took the broad ground that an eight-hour day would not be beneficial to the workers of the country even if it came about by process of evolution instead of by law. He did not believe an eight-hour day would make the workingmen better Christians or better citizens. Mr. Farquhar pointed out the industrial decadence of England, which writers on economics maintain has set in, and briefly detailed the causes. The hold of labor organizations on English industries, he pointed out, was so strong that it might even be termed a death grip. In England they have secured their shorter day, "and not only that but have successfully resisted in many instances the introduction of improved machinery and have seriously cut down the aggregate productive power of the country by their too-effective limiting the amount of work that one of their members may do in a given time." Because of this subservience to labor unions the predominance of England his fallen to Germany and the United States. " Another sad result, " he said " is a decline in the wage scale in England. It is an infallible economic law that labor is paid from what labor produces. Cut down production and you cut down wages." Mr. Farquhar pointed out that the bill did not take cognizance of the different kinds of service but reduced all in its socialistic prescription to one dead level -- the mechanical draughtsman or designer in his office, the superintendent of a mill, the laborer engaged in heavy manual work or the mechanic who merely watched a lathe -- all will be limited to eight hours work a day, regardless of their capacity to do more. He pointed out the method proposed was a direct attack on the liberty of the citizen, terming it pure, undisguised paternalism. "The amount of espionage and arbitrary interferences, involving possibilities of blackmail which must accompany the operation of such a law, if it is not to remain a dead letter, " he said, would benefit tin Oriental despotism but it is utterly foreign to an enlightened Republic." Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: hires
Hires? I am an Old Fashioned Mug man, myself. Seriously, though, the drift of this conversation seems to me symptomatic of something more disturbing that the lack of quality of heterodox candidates or the lack of opportunities for quality heterodocs -- that is the bland assumption that jumping through the "quality" hoop, the academic hoop and the heterodox hoop is, at least in theory, feasible and desirable. What a pile of stinking dog shit, if I may be so rude. I don't have no PhD. but I've been close enough to 'em and spent enough time in a program to see quite clearly that the trodden scholarship, recognition and heterodoxy paths point in different directions and the untrodden paths go nowhere near the tenure track. It may be entirely possible for the odd extremely bright young person to negotiate these hoops or paths but the foregone conclusion that candicacy+heterodoxy = mediocrity is a foregone conclusion, if you'll pardon the deliberate redundancy. When I went to Cornell (not in economics) I was told I was a star, drooled over and told to put my mind and my politics on the shelf and wank-off for seven years so I could inherit the teaching load of some geezer at Columbia, Berkeley or MIT. This advice was from a faculty member who specialized in Habermasian communicative ethics and had written a book titled "Speaking Truth to Power". (No bitterness, he did me a favour). Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
In search of excellence
I wrote, the foregone conclusion that candicacy+heterodoxy = mediocrity is a foregone conclusion, if you'll pardon the deliberate redundancy. What I was trying to say is: C + H = M is a design principle. Do you want to know how to get better quality heterodox applicants? Drop the degree requirements. But then there would be no way of systematically screening and short-listing the applicants. You would get better quality applicants, but you wouldn't know which ones they were they were! Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: The clincher
maggie coleman wrote, Tom, Great pamphlet -- does my heart good to read what the conservatives really think and not have their beliefs couched in careful language. Another source of incredibly racist labor writings are those of Henry George of the nineteenth century. His anti-Chinese ravings were used as the basis for the Chinese Exclusion Acts. maggie coleman To be even-handed, I have to raise the issue of the anti-Chinese racism of the A.F. of L. and Samuel Gompers. I found an article in a issue of the A.F.L newsletter from this same period celebrating anti-Chinese riots in Vancouver as if they were a great victory for the working class and another report on travels in China that was as every bit as vile as the stuff I just posted. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: The Problem -- faith vetted by Bushevik central committee
Kelley wrote, i say, take their money. and if they have the..ahem..bush to go after people for distributing political literature, then we have grounds to fight the distribution of anti-abortion literature, etc. :) Fight? Grounds to fight? Do you mean legal grounds? Fight all the way to the Supreme Court? First of all, it's not "their money". It's tax revenues that they want to divert to ideologically screened 'charity' cadre. On the prospects of "taking the money and running with it", "Starve'em" Marvin Olasky is several steps ahead. In 1987, he produced the first edition of "Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy", to expose the leftist bias of corporate charitable donations and persuade corps to move in a far-right direction more in accordance with their self-interests."With his personal experience and research, Olasky debunked the myth of corporate conservatism." According to the latest rating, the American Cancer Society and the Committee for Economic Development are on the left. The "most extreme elements in left-wing activism" include Planned Parenthood, the Children's Defense Fund and the NAACP. see: http://www.capitalresearch.org/patterns/PatternsXI_SummEssay(2).htm Which contains arguments like the following: "Funneling public money through the nonprofit sector inevitably politicizes real charities and attracts political non-charities. Government regulation of industry also allows liberal nonprofits to hold companies for ransom. Current law is largely to blame for the long-term dominance of the nonprofit Left. "The structure of the nonprofit sector will change only when new public policies reduce the perverse incentives described above. Cutting government programs will de-fund the left-wing nonprofits that benefit now. "If corporations do not take a critical look at grant-seeking groups, then conservative policymakers may do it for them. Perceptive lawmakers have caught on to the ways left-wing groups exploit their charity status to seek government funding of political lobbying." Toward the end of his most recent book extolling the Bush candidacy and explaining compassionate conservativism, Olasky also gives a three tier series of checklists for government granters to evaluate the worthiness of faith-based programs. Aside from the wonderfully contradictory mass of bureaucracy that would be required to operationalize these checklists, one can't really imagine wanting to try to jump through all 30 odd hoops without some pretty effusive letters of recommendation from the folks at Heritage, Cato, Hoover, Hudson, AEI or Bill Rehnquist. With regard to kelley's other points about the failings of conventional methods of dispensing funds, I couldn't agree more. In fact, Olasky's analysis draws strength from the very real failings of the welfare bureaucracy. What he advocates instead, though, amounts to even more bureaucracy, more overtly antagonistic and paternalistic (not to mention fiercely partisan), to administer less welfare. kelley wrote, heh. my fear too, but according to the preliminary research on these programs, they are putting the monies into AME, etc. and not just into reactionary evangelical and born-again christian orgs. after all, not many of those orgs are located in high poverty, high minority population areas. they ought to be watched like hawks, of course., because no doubt that they are going to funnel monies to ridiculous organizations. so, nail them on the hypocrisy and expose the ludicrousness of it all. anyway, although black churches aren't progressive per se, they also aren't exactly reactionary per se. admittedly, i just did a quick skim of the lit, but i'd agree with the findings, in so far as church leaders do often have some sense of the plight their flocks often face. in this sense, i think it might be worth considering how the conventional method of dispensing "the dole" has typically created a gulf between the social workers and managers of the welfare bureaucracy (see research on organizing social workers' ) who often see themselves as different from their clientele. here, a very good case study is Lynn Haney's article, Homeboys, Babies and Men in Suits. it was the lead in an ASA journal a few years ago and I'll hunt up the ref if anyone is interested. Haney shows how even the most left-conscious administrators of these programs--women who weren't that unlike the young women they were trying to help--could easily see themselves in antagonistic, paternalistic relationships with their clients as they tended to blame them, rather than bigger social problems or the vagaries of the welfare bureaucracy. i'm not certain how easy that is for church leaders and workers who might be managing these funds. obviously, there is no predictable pattern. but, i'd say that there is, especially among black churches, enough of a tradition of cri
Re: query: economic clichés
"The 'r' word." Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
On getting excited when there's a crisis
with diminishing 'definition' over time. To summarize, I'm predicting that the baby-boom exit from the labour force will be a troubled and conflictual one. I am "predicting" that it is very much underway right now and will be spiked by the recess. The debate about social security finances was and is a phoney one in that it mistakes the issue to be about compound interest, rather than about changes that have taken place over the last 30-40 years in the labour process itself and the inadequacy of institutional arrangements to contend with those changes. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Will the Five-Day-Week Become Universal? IT WILL NOT!
Pocket Bulletin, Official Publication of the National Association of Manufacturers, October 1926 The Five-Day-Work Week; Can It Become Universal? Presidents of Numerous Large Establishments Employing Hundreds of Thousands of Men in Various Lines of Manufacture, Declare Tendency to Less Work and More Pay Will Leave Us Wide Open for European Onslaught Will Henry Ford's five-day week, just put into operation in his plants, and now urged as ideal by labor leaders, be adopted generally by the industries of the country? It will not! For the following chief reasons: 1. It would greatly increase the cost of living. 2. It would increase wages generally by more than 15 per cent and decrease production. 3. It would be impracticable for all industries. 4. It would create a craving for additional luxuries to occupy the additional time. 5. It would mean a trend toward the Arena, Rome did that and Rome died. 6. It would be against the best interests of the men who want to work and advance. 7. It would be all right to meet a sales emergency but would not work out as a permanent thing. 8. It would make us more vulnerable to the economic onslaughts of Europe, now working as hard as she can to overcome our lead. These are some of the conclusions drawn by the presidents of some of the largest industrial concerns in the country, members of the National Association of Manufacturers and employing thousands of workers in various phases of industry. Mankind does not thrive on holidays. Idle hours breed mischief. The days are too short for the worthwhile men of the world to accomplish the tasks which they set themselves. No man has ever attained success in industry, in science, or in any other worthwhile activity of life by limiting his hours of labor. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: The doctor gazed at me and a wild look came into his eyes.
Jim Devine asked At 11:01 PM 1/2/01 -0800, you wrote: An excerpt from "The Scarlet Empire" by David M. Parry (1906) Tom, what kind of book is this? a utopian novel? Dystopian. The author, incidentally (ha!), was president of the National Association of Manufacturers and launched its aggressive anti-union strategy in 1902. Swathes of the narrative were lifted almost intact from a anti-trade union propaganda tirade, The Crisis in British Industry, that appeared in the London Times in November 1901. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Let them eat fed
Snap quiz: 1. What is the meaning of this 1/2 point fed rate cut, 4 weeks ahead of schedule and the euphoric stock market response? 2. Why is the fed "always right"? 3. Is there a danger that over reaction in financial markets could undermine the impact of the rate cut on the real economy? 4. Do interest rate cuts and/or increases always have direct linear effects on economic activity or might they, under some circumstances lead to perverse consequences? 5. Why did the US dollar strengthen in response to the rate cut? 6. What does "hair of the dog that bit you" mean? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Sandwichman and Deconsultant
PS Tom, I am nervous of your signature line about Sandwichman and Deconsultant. In the context of a very tricky theoretical discussion, I am not entirely joking. Could you explain this in a separate post? I appreciate the anxiety. It is a long story so I'll just fill in some of the details. The sandwichman in question refers to his/her/its/my status as "last incarnation of the flaneur", according to Walter Benjamin and as elaborated on by Susan Buck-Morss in a 1986 essay in New German Critique, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering". The essay and Benjamin's remarks are about the precariousness of "the social individual", although Benjamin wouldn't have been aware of that passage on page 705 in the Grundrisse and Buck-Morss doesn't specifically refer to it. I've gone so far as to construct a sandwich board and walk around town in uniform and was quite pleased at the positive reception I got from people. It is, admittedly, one of those experiments in mixed media that might be called an intervention, although it's not entirely clear just what it is an intervention into. In my subsequent research, I've discovered that the women's suffrage movement in Britain in the early 1900s used the sandwichboard to powerful effect and also that there was a novel written in the 1930s called the Sandwichman about a young coal miner who seeks to "better himself" through higher education and ends up pretty much outcast from both worlds. You will probably be relieved to hear that the deconsultant has nothing to do with deconstruction, other than alliteration. For the past 11 years, I have worked as a social policy research consultant and have been somewhat disconcerted to note that my services have become progressively less in commercial demand in inverse proportion to my grasp of the issues, command of the relevant literature, record of publication and recognition by my peers. The most elegantly crafted, carefully researched and respectfully submitted research proposal I ever wrote elicited a swarm of verbal abuse. This leaves me with a great deal of time between contracts during which to de-consult, which is basically to pursue my own projects and tell people, not clients, about my findings. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: US men working 4 hours a week longer II
. It is also crucially important what different perspective one takes. According to Postone, traditional Marxism assumes that the other perspective is from the standpoint of labor, which Postone points out, however, is not "outside" of capital but is itself "historically specific and constitutes the essential structures of the society". Postone argues that Marx developed a critique *of* labor in capitalist society, not a critique of capitalist society from this (transhistorical) perspective of labor. With regard to the provisional nature of the law of value within capitalism, talking about a "within" and "outside" capitalist society as I do above implies that the anachronism and the abolition of value refers only to some end state, the last days so to speak. This is misleading. It seems to me that the tendency to anachronism of the value form is already implicated in the incessant drive to obsolescence of fixed capital. Might we even say that devalorization of individual capitals through periodic crises is both a microcosm of the anachronism of the value form and a way of restoring the law and forestalling its final abolition? The quasi-objective law of value thus requires perpetual sacrifice, or transgression, of precisely those values that are (provisionally) determined by the law. If the law of value was "strictly enforced", development would come to a standstill. The thing to be wary of here is the drift of the concept or metaphor of "lawfulness" from the quasi-objective to the juridical to the customary. In the case of US men working 4 hours a week longer, we have just such a congeries of laws, e.g.,: 1. the physiological relationship between output and fatigue, 2. the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 establishing the 40-hour workweek standard and 3. corporate culture norms regarding face time as "revealed work ethic". Nothing says that all of these laws have to operate in alignment with each other, although political economy and the law of value imply "self-correction" if 2 or 3 stray too far, for too long, from the anchor of 1. Here we reach the other side of that danger detected in the astonishing formulations of the Grundrisse -- namely the danger of being consoled by expectations of a correction that may never come because the law of value upon which that reckoning depends has been suspended. I don't know where the greater danger lies, I wish I did. As for advanced capitalism, on the one hand, needing and getting a more flexible, educated workforce and on the other hand the burn-out, social fragmentation and mental illness, I see that as basically emptying the granaries. Once they're empty, it's a hard act to follow, at least on the same scale. The *need* of advanced capitalism for a more flexible, more educated workforce is also the historical result of the *supply* of a surplus more educated population -- at the front end of which was a baby boom and a defense education act. Yes, it does take time and skill to develop the social individuals who can connect with other middle class folks on the internet or at an airport. But that time was expended amorphously and not necessarily ON the beautiful people in proportion to the compensation they will receive for representing BOTH the labour time expended on their social development and that expended on the care and grooming of Ted Kaczynski. It's not that production has been completely disconnected from the expenditure of human labour, but that it becomes increasingly difficult to attribute any particular output to any particular direct expenditure of labour time. I am not sure if what I have said above really clarifies anything or simply dwells on the gaping uncertainty. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: US men working 4 hours a week longer II
tion between the foundation of bourgeois production and its development." "HOLY SHIT! JEEEZUS FUCKING CHRIST!" he may as well have been muttering to himself (in German, though, of course). Contra-diction -- could it not be, then, that the expression (increasing hours of work) is somehow "saying the opposite" of what the development is unfolding (decreasing socially necessary labour time). And isn't this disjuncture -- a widening gulf, really -- exactly what many of us are experiencing or anticipating as "crisis"? "The material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high." Kinda scary, isn't it? Maybe if we just put in a few more hours of overtime at work it will go away. Welcome to the new millennium. Tom Walker wrote: In my previous post, I gave what one might call my more conventional, das kapitalian, view of what's happening with hours. There is, however, another interpretation -- call it the grundrisse scenario -- that I think is at least as plausible but might seem a bit far out. That scenario would be that productivity has become so detached from labour input that the expenditure of hours of work as a source of value is increasingly a token exercise, but one that remains culturally necessary for the valorization of capital. Thus the increase of 4 hours a week could very well reflect the social non-necessity not only of those 4 extra hours but of a considerable number of the base hours from 20 years ago. Or -- to take another stab at it -- men are working 4 more hours to *cover-up* the perplexing circumstance that there may be no measureable difference in the out! ! put from a workweek having a length of 44 or 40 or 36 or 32 or 28 or 24 or 16 hours of work. Because of institutional arrangements built up around the 40 hour week, to reduce hours so drastically would IMPLY either a huge loss in income and benefits or an inconceivable class struggle and working class victory. And capital is taking those superfluous hours, socially unnecessary as they may be, because 1. this is the way it has always valorized itself, 2. society has not yet caught on to the fictitiousness of all this superfluous value and 3. as long as everyone else keeps doing it, the hours still count as if they were "socially necessary labour time". Chris Burford asked CNN on stress quotes the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety as saying that men are working on average 4 hours a week longer than 20 years ago. Figures presumably for the USA Yes, figures would definitely be for USA, according to the ILO annual hours in most other jurisdictions (with a few developing country exceptions) have declined so weekly hours would presumably also have declined. Are they true? They are in the right ball park. Average weekly hours are tricky because there are different ways of collecting the data and different ways of reporting it. The 4 hour a week increase would probably be for full-time employed workers, rather than an across the board average. Why is it happening? My call is mismanagement -- a combination of inept labour cost accounting practices and management credulity toward their own stupid propaganda has led U.S. employers to pursue lower hourly labour _rates_ even at the expense of productivity. Stanford Business School Prof. Jeffery Pfeffer argued in a Harvard Review of Business article a few years ago that most managers don't know the difference between labour rates and labour costs (which is the rate divided by hourly of output). Apparently a lot of workers are foolish enough to work a lot more hours for just a tiny bit more take home pay -- less pay even than the added expense of working the extra time. For more on the mythology surrounding working time see the summary of my forthcoming chapter at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/execsum.htm or better yet see the chapter, "The 'lump of labor' case against work-sharing: populist fallacy or marginalist throwback" in _Working Time: International Trends, Theory and Policy Perspectives_, edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah Figart forthcoming from Routledge in February 2001. and who benefits? Is there a Satan? Seriously though, there is undoubtedly a short term accounting advantage to employers roughly equivalent to the real loss experienced by workers as a result of what is in effect a "cost shift" strategy. In the longer term, that ficticious profit will certainly be wiped out as employers (in general) face bottlenecks, labour shortages and pent-up unrest. Of course, those who have benefited from the swindle and those who will have to pay for the damage are not likely to be the same corporations -- tough shit. The closest analogy I can think of is the situation in the former Soviet Bloc where managers of state-owned enterprise
financial prosthetics?
"It will be a very difficult first-quarter comparison for a lot of technology companies," said Richard Cripps, chief market strategist at Legg Mason Wood Walker. "The die has been cast in terms of the economic backdrop being very difficult for all stocks. And with very high growth rates and high price-to-earnings ratios, tech stocks are the most vulnerable." For some reason, the firm Legg Mason Wood Walker reminds me of Long John Silver. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Linda Chavez
Michael Perelman wrote, What a fine representative of labor's interests. Might there perhaps be an attempt to capitalize on a coincidence of last name? Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk. And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest though for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men. Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not? But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them. Whose is this image and superscription? They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them. Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's: and unto God the things that are God's. (Matt. 22:15-22) Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Linda Chavez
Michael Perelman wrote: I believe that she was associated with Lyndon Larouche. I couldn't find anything on the web to suggest any such association. I did find something interesting in her bio on the home page of her organization, "Center for Equal Opportunity". Chavez was editor of the quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers, American Educator, from 1977-1983. So she does have union credentials. . . Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Linda Chavez
Michael Perelman wrote, On her way to the right Well, as Linda Chavez herself said, she went from Al Shanker to Ronald Reagan and there wasn't really that much of a difference. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
The doctor gazed at me and a wild look came into his eyes.
f the State." "But you have a laboratory," I suggested. The doctor gazed at me and a wild look came into his eyes. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: US men working 4 hours a week longer
Chris Burford asked CNN on stress quotes the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety as saying that men are working on average 4 hours a week longer than 20 years ago. Figures presumably for the USA Yes, figures would definitely be for USA, according to the ILO annual hours in most other jurisdictions (with a few developing country exceptions) have declined so weekly hours would presumably also have declined. Are they true? They are in the right ball park. Average weekly hours are tricky because there are different ways of collecting the data and different ways of reporting it. The 4 hour a week increase would probably be for full-time employed workers, rather than an across the board average. Why is it happening? My call is mismanagement -- a combination of inept labour cost accounting practices and management credulity toward their own stupid propaganda has led U.S. employers to pursue lower hourly labour _rates_ even at the expense of productivity. Stanford Business School Prof. Jeffery Pfeffer argued in a Harvard Review of Business article a few years ago that most managers don't know the difference between labour rates and labour costs (which is the rate divided by hourly of output). Apparently a lot of workers are foolish enough to work a lot more hours for just a tiny bit more take home pay -- less pay even than the added expense of working the extra time. For more on the mythology surrounding working time see the summary of my forthcoming chapter at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/execsum.htm or better yet see the chapter, "The 'lump of labor' case against work-sharing: populist fallacy or marginalist throwback" in _Working Time: International Trends, Theory and Policy Perspectives_, edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah Figart forthcoming from Routledge in February 2001. and who benefits? Is there a Satan? Seriously though, there is undoubtedly a short term accounting advantage to employers roughly equivalent to the real loss experienced by workers as a result of what is in effect a "cost shift" strategy. In the longer term, that ficticious profit will certainly be wiped out as employers (in general) face bottlenecks, labour shortages and pent-up unrest. Of course, those who have benefited from the swindle and those who will have to pay for the damage are not likely to be the same corporations -- tough shit. The closest analogy I can think of is the situation in the former Soviet Bloc where managers of state-owned enterprises faced incentives to over-value their obsolete and depreciated capital equipment and warehouses full of unsaleable inventory. In my opinion, this has been THE big unreported story of the last 20 years and a story that the left in North America seems eerily blase about (unlike a certain K. Marx who in Das Kapital cited, with admiration, the redundantly unequivocal resolution drafted by that very same K. Marx in 1866 for the Congress of International Working Men's Association: "We declare that the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive."). Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: US men working 4 hours a week longer II
In my previous post, I gave what one might call my more conventional, das kapitalian, view of what's happening with hours. There is, however, another interpretation -- call it the grundrisse scenario -- that I think is at least as plausible but might seem a bit far out. That scenario would be that productivity has become so detached from labour input that the expenditure of hours of work as a source of value is increasingly a token exercise, but one that remains culturally necessary for the valorization of capital. Thus the increase of 4 hours a week could very well reflect the social non-necessity not only of those 4 extra hours but of a considerable number of the base hours from 20 years ago. Or -- to take another stab at it -- men are working 4 more hours to *cover-up* the perplexing circumstance that there may be no measureable difference in the output from a workweek having a length of 44 or 40 or 36 or 32 or 28 or 24 or 16 hours of work. Because of institutional arrangements built up around the 40 hour week, to reduce hours so drastically would IMPLY either a huge loss in income and benefits or an inconceivable class struggle and working class victory. And capital is taking those superfluous hours, socially unnecessary as they may be, because 1. this is the way it has always valorized itself, 2. society has not yet caught on to the fictitiousness of all this superfluous value and 3. as long as everyone else keeps doing it, the hours still count as if they were "socially necessary labour time". Chris Burford asked CNN on stress quotes the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety as saying that men are working on average 4 hours a week longer than 20 years ago. Figures presumably for the USA Yes, figures would definitely be for USA, according to the ILO annual hours in most other jurisdictions (with a few developing country exceptions) have declined so weekly hours would presumably also have declined. Are they true? They are in the right ball park. Average weekly hours are tricky because there are different ways of collecting the data and different ways of reporting it. The 4 hour a week increase would probably be for full-time employed workers, rather than an across the board average. Why is it happening? My call is mismanagement -- a combination of inept labour cost accounting practices and management credulity toward their own stupid propaganda has led U.S. employers to pursue lower hourly labour _rates_ even at the expense of productivity. Stanford Business School Prof. Jeffery Pfeffer argued in a Harvard Review of Business article a few years ago that most managers don't know the difference between labour rates and labour costs (which is the rate divided by hourly of output). Apparently a lot of workers are foolish enough to work a lot more hours for just a tiny bit more take home pay -- less pay even than the added expense of working the extra time. For more on the mythology surrounding working time see the summary of my forthcoming chapter at http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/execsum.htm or better yet see the chapter, "The 'lump of labor' case against work-sharing: populist fallacy or marginalist throwback" in _Working Time: International Trends, Theory and Policy Perspectives_, edited by Lonnie Golden and Deborah Figart forthcoming from Routledge in February 2001. and who benefits? Is there a Satan? Seriously though, there is undoubtedly a short term accounting advantage to employers roughly equivalent to the real loss experienced by workers as a result of what is in effect a "cost shift" strategy. In the longer term, that ficticious profit will certainly be wiped out as employers (in general) face bottlenecks, labour shortages and pent-up unrest. Of course, those who have benefited from the swindle and those who will have to pay for the damage are not likely to be the same corporations -- tough shit. The closest analogy I can think of is the situation in the former Soviet Bloc where managers of state-owned enterprises faced incentives to over-value their obsolete and depreciated capital equipment and warehouses full of unsaleable inventory. In my opinion, this has been THE big unreported story of the last 20 years and a story that the left in North America seems eerily blase about (unlike a certain K. Marx who in Das Kapital cited, with admiration, the redundantly unequivocal resolution drafted by that very same K. Marx in 1866 for the Congress of International Working Men's Association: "We declare that the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive."). Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Natural v. Artificial
David Shemano wrote: My point is, even if you are correct that no price is "natural," you still need to explain why the "artificial" price generated by a market is not presumptively preferable to the "artificial" price generated by a non-market method. This line of argument seems circular to me. A market could refer either to an evolved social institution or to an analytical abstraction. It appears that David assumes that the social institution approximates the abstraction. His evidence for such an approximation consists mainly of failures from what are presumed to be "non-market" methods of price generation. It would be helpful first of all to dispense with the simplistic dichotomy of market/non-market. There are varieties of non-market institutions. One small step beyond the market/non-market dichotomy would be to acknowledge at least three forms in which transactions could be made -- exchange, cooperation and command -- each with distinctive characteristics. Any actual transaction will manifest some weighted combination of those three abstract forms. No actual tranaction can express a "pure form". Furthermore, the weights assigned to each form in any given transaction will vary according to the perspective from which the transaction is viewed. The linguistic trick of shuttling between the analytical abstraction and imagined social institutions could as easily be performed for cooperation or command as for exchange. Perfect cooperation and even perfect command should render every bit as optimal an ideal as exchange under perfect competition. The fact that perfect cooperation and perfect command are transparent utopias should alert us to the real world status of perfect competitive exchange. The question should be: why doesn't it? My tentative answer is that both cooperation and command implicitly refer to relationships between people, whereas exchange *seems* to refer to a relationship between things -- that is, an objective relationship. The conservative's otherwise vigilant suspicion of human perfectability beads up and rolls off the teflon surface of this seeming objectivity. The relationship, however, is only objective when viewed from a particular angle and when assumed to exist outside of any historical context. That is to say, only in the abstraction is exchange a relationship between things and not people. The market is the last refuge of the utopian. People who call themselves conservatives or neo-liberals these days construct their new utopia out of the rejection of other utopias and a last desperate leap onto the imagined hard ground of subjective utility. As Gertrude Stein said in another context, "there is no there there". As Thorstein Veblen said, "It is not simply that the hedonistic interpretation of modern economic phenomena is inadequate or misleading; if the phenomena are subjected to the hedonistic interpretation in the theoretical analysis they disappear from the theory; and if they would bear the interpretation in fact they would disappear in fact." Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: New direction/recession?
Yoshie asked: Beyond the tips, what other supply bottlenecks infrastructure failures do you see or foresee? It may be rash to extrapolate from local conditions, but the things that I'm seeing developing here are skilled/qualified/experienced labour shortages in, for example, public education, health care and trades. My sense is that employers have played beggar-my-neighbour during too many years of NAIRU policy-induced labour surplus and corporations have played beggar-my-neighbour with public services. They are running out of neighbours to beggar. Here in Canada, the inquest into the Walkerton water contamination disaster are revealing the inevitable consequences of bleeding public services -- the incompentent manager with too many responsibilities faked test results and failed to read important faxes. People drank the water, got sick and died. As they used to say about HTML -- it's not rocket science. Given the recent performance of of NASDAQ (or should it be called HALFDAQ?), I doubt there will be much momentum left in stock option employee compensation schemes, which means employers are going to have to either pay for critical skills development up front or face disruptions in production schedules. I think there's an uncanny mirror-image parallel between the way that state owned enterprises in the former Soviet Bloc countries systematically (mis)accounted for capital equipment depreciation and inventory accumulation and the way that western accounting has systematically misaccounted for labour costs by shifting social costs off the private books. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: supply-side economics
Piltdown Max wrote (grunted): Every left position can be matched with some evil twin analog in capitalist ideology. And as soon as I figure out what DH's position is, I'll identify that analog. Every position also has some primitive reflection. I hope this doesn't lead you to change your mind mind, Max, but I think you're on to something primal. My own view is that the National Review is, evolutionarily speaking, trotskyist. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Gore's concession speech
Nathan Newman wrote: Gore's speech was pathetic- I'm gratified to see Nathan's reaction to Gore's speech. My own reaction is that while I am appalled at the supreme court/florida mafia coup d'etat and can take no comfort from Bush's obligatory homilies, I also can't find any regret that Gore will not preside over the next four years. Had the union, black and latino Democrating activists actually succeeded in dragging Gore's corpse across the finish line (and getting the result certified by Kathryn Harris, Antonin Scalia and Just Our Bill Rehnquist) I have no doubt a Gore administration would have repayed them with the same patrician patronizing Gore displayed in his speech. Images of vegetation and nakedness abound. Emperor Shrub will wear the Gored olive branch as a fig leaf at his unauguration to conceal the nakedness uncovered by his magnificent, invisible new clothes that only a fool could fail to see were woven of the finest judicial gold and twenty pieces of silver. How fitting that Chief Just Our Bill will administer the Oaf of Orifice. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Kicking off the unaugural ball II
Michael, Isn't Bob Perelman your brother? I wanted to check the status of the coined word "unaugural" as of Dec. 13, 2000 and did an Alta Vista and Google search (6 and 26 hits respectively). Most of the entries appear to be typos but one of them referred to an essay by Bob Perelman that briefly discusses The Unaugural Poem, a parody of Maya Angelou's Inaugural Poem read at Clinton's first inauguration. I've pasted the excerpt below. Here's my proposition: Do an Alta Vista and Google search on unaugural on Feb. 13, 2001 and on Dec. 13 2001 to gauge the spread of the term. Uncanny. excerpt from BUILDING A MORE POWERFUL VOCABULARY: BRUCE ANDREWS AND THE WORLD (TRADE CENTER) http://www.english.upenn.edu/~perelman/ANDREWS.txt Coolidge and Fagin wrote a parody of Angelou's inaugural poem that uses an OuLiPo method of defamilization. Every noun Angelou used was replaced by a noun five words removed in the dictionary. Thus the passage I quoted earlier becomes: There is a true yawn to respond to The singing Roach and the wise Rock Crystal. So say the Ash Can, the Hippogriff, the Jetsam, The Afterbirth, the Native American Legion, the Sinner, The Catnip, the Musskellunge, the Freezer, the Great White Way, The Ipso Facto, the Quota, the Prima Donna, the Sheet, The Gavel, the Stovepipe, the Prawn, The Prism, the Homburg, the Taxi. They hear. They all hear The spatter of the Tree of Heaven. If Andrews is playing with fire in a decentered, all-over fashion, Coolidge and Fagin are, with these substitutions, picking up specific burning brands one after the other. Some of the changes are particularly charged: Asian = Ash Can; Native American = Native American Legion; Rabbi = Quota, etc. To any identifying reader these substitutions might feel like insulting jokes. But if one tried to ascribe a particular location to the source of the insult, it wouldn't be easy. This isn't Andrew Dice Clay joking about faggots, or a racist attack. It is the dictionary's random speech. If we allow ourselves the double vision that the parody assumes, the oddness of the results can be funny. The alphabetic proximity of "Catholic" to "Catnip" or of "Gay" to "Gavel" furnishes a compact display of the arbitrariness of language. And then there's a second level, on which the arbitrary suddenly becomes paradoxically meaningful. Being gay will mean, for the next few decades, dealing with courtrooms and gavels directly or indirectly; "stovepipe" is a surprisingly good nickname for "straight," both geometrically and with its New England crackerbarrel connotations. But we shouldn't lose sight of the basic fuel of the parody, which is a great dissatisfaction with the coalition of identities that Angelou is positing, and the emphatic rejection of its rhetoric that works with established cadences and symbols, not single words. I imagine that it was the specific inclusiveness of Angelou's poem, plus its being officially recognized as poetry by an incoming administration, that triggered the desire to pull the rug from under it. I doubt that it would have seemed like a particularly good idea to redo, say, Amiri Baraka's "It's Nation Time." But for all of its vocabularistic satire on names and specific identities, the subject position from which "The Unaugural Poem" is funny is itself specific: it is one where all resources of language are present and equally available: the writer must be able to take possession of all the words in the dictionary without any moments of alienation. There is one restriction involved, however: all particular identification has to be eliminated. Any investment in present tense collectivities--or to put it another way, any present tense political identity--is banished. To parody Angelou is to reject a unification of poetry and politics of a far different kind than Andrews calls for. But if political poetry is defined as having an effect beyond the purely literary sphere, then Angelou's unificiation has a much stronger grip on the title than Andrews' aggressiveness. Rock, river, and tree used as large symbols may grate on a spectrum of poetic sensibilities, but as political speech their vacuousness can be seen is strategic and as forming vehicles for more specific messages. She used her momentary political capital to recite a rhythmic call for a multicultural coalition with anti-militarist overtones. How much efficacy we want to grant these overtones is a question. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Gene Coyle , take a bow!
December 10, 2000 RECKONINGS California Screaming By PAUL KRUGMAN http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/10/opinion/10KRUG.html California's deregulated power industry, in which producers can sell electricity for whatever the traffic will bear, was supposed to deliver cheaper, cleaner power. But instead the state faces an electricity shortage so severe that the governor has turned off the lights on the official Christmas tree a shortage that has proved highly profitable to power companies, and raised suspicions of market manipulation. - snip - Maybe California power companies aren't rigging electricity prices. But they clearly have both the means and the incentive to do so and you have to wonder why the deregulators didn't worry about this, why they didn't ask seemingly obvious questions about whether the market they proposed to create would really work as advertised. And maybe that is the broader lesson of the debacle: Don't rush into a market solution when there are serious questions about whether the market will work. Both economic analysis and British experience should have rung warning bells about California's deregulation scheme; but those warnings were ignored just as similar warnings are being ignored by enthusiasts for market solutions for everything from prescription drug coverage to education. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Bach. machine/fetishism
Rob wrote: Capitalism has long since democratised 'the gaze', hasn't it, Yoshie? Men are sex symbols, too. Yoshie replied: Yes, but not to the same extent. Perhaps affirmative action is necessary to de-gender the gaze. Maybe it's the incongruity of the term "democratised" in this context. Could one say, e.g., that the state of Florida (or the U.S. twopartysystem) has *democratised* disenfranchisement and still retain any sense of the word? This is exactly one of the ploys of fetishization: to present an extension or expansion of domination as evidence that it is emancipatory. The title of the recent book by Thomas Frank: One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy better expresses the anti-democratic character of such "affirmative action". I know, I know, youse guys are using the term ironically. But don't leave your irony out in the rain -- rust never sleeps. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Cyborg variations
Glad to see some of that good BC weed has made it down under. I couple of
weeks ago I was working on the sandwichman-ifesto (but calling it the "lump
of Layard of fantasy") but had to put it aside because it was looking too
bleak or shrill or pedantic. Maybe reworked as the sandwichman-ifesto I can
get it smuggled in to the undergrad curriculum in countless universities and
be profiled in Wired, koo-koo-ca-choo.
Rob Schaap wrote:
And we the eggmen, calibrated prettily all in a row, ere we be beaten into
yellow matter custard that we might drip at a properly regulated flow from
the dead dog's eye?
Talk of cyborgs inevitably attends an assumption that we live in an age so
exceptional that a 'new' way of thinking about it is called for
('information exceptionalism' some call this technodeterministic fetishism).
The cyborg cannot know of history, nor that it is still in it, for it would
then not be a cyborg at all. It would be a proletarian - calibrated,
regulated, replaced, and declared dead by The Machine not because of the
internal rhythm of That Machine, but because of the rhythms that spawned,
diffused, tasked and deified It. We have ALWAYS been networked. *And so
have our Machines* (so much for the Professor of the History of
Consciousness). And we are cyborgs only insofar as we have not undertaken
to criticise our subjectivity self-consciously from within. And it must be
from within, for, as poor old Lewis Mumford told us a long time ago, We Are
The Machine.
Haraway is indeed a cyborg. The assembled Penpals are not, however, and
eagerly await the Sandwichman's Manifesto - the full expression of which I
dare hope is in the offing ... ?
These beans are good,
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
Recipe: Grilled Green Cheese and Baloney
INGREDIENTS: ONE LUMP OF GREEN CHEESE Unemployment develops . . . because people want the moon; -- men cannot be employed when the object of desire (i.e. money) is something which cannot be produced and the demand for which cannot be readily choked off. There is no remedy but to persuade the public that green cheese is practically the same thing and to have a green cheese factory (i.e. a central bank) under public control. -- J.M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936, p. 235 ONE SLICE OF BALONEY In the very short-run there is of course a limit to the number of jobs, which is set by the level of aggregate demand. But aggregate demand in Europe is rising and will continue to do so until it hits its long-run upper limit. This limit is set not by demand but by the effective supply of employable labour. And if the supply of labour rises the number of jobs responds. If history tells any lesson, it is that. -- T. Boeri, R. Layard and S. Nickell, Welfare-to-Work and the Fight Against Long-term Unemployment, a report to Prime Ministers Blair and D'Alema and the Council of Europe, March 2000 http://www.palazzochigi.it/approfondimenti/sindacati/inglese.html THE GRILLING: Inflation develops because giving people green cheese just makes them want more. There is no remedy but to persuade the public that baloney is practically the same thing and to have a baloney factory (i.e. the economics conventional wisdom) under peer review and generous corporate and state sponsorship. If history tells any lesson, it is that in the very short-run the number of jobs can be augmented by increasing the effective supply of employable labour and thus depressing wages. The long-run upper limit to this strategy is that what people actually desire is not a "number of jobs" but money (i.e. bread). In the US, the green cheese factory reopened when it became obvious that the demand for baloney was falling in proportion to the rise in its supply (i.e., "unemployment develops because people want _the moon_ [not baloney]"). But inflation develops because giving people green cheese just makes them want more. . . Seconds, anyone? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Cyborg variations
Ian Murray wrote: that BC weed shouldn't be given to islanders. Max Sawicky thinks my hallucinations come from eating too much beans. Seriously, though, they are not MY hallucinations. The mythological (or neurotic) cyborg represents something real but unspeakable. A search on two search engines indicates that there are a little more than one and a half times as many web pages containing the terms cyborg and manifesto as there are pages containing commodity and fetish. As an article in a recent Wired magazine noted, Donna Haraway's 1984 essay, The Cyborg Manifesto, "has become part of the undergraduate curriculum at countless universities." http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffharaway.html To me, Haraway's essay appears as an untenable hash of undigested concepts, marxish/feminish gleanings, fey posturing and unmitigated hype. I suspect, however, that if I hired a hall and invited her to give a lecture, it would attract a large audience. If I invited Moishe Postone, I might be able to round up a few friends (maybe Ian would drive up from Seattle). This realization both repels me and attracts me. There is something here I think I can almost put my finger on. For all the cyber-this and cyber-that we've seen in the eternity since the internet blossomed, there doesn't seem to be a lot of clear realization that Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics to refer to the computer's function as a _control mechanism_. What the mechanism ultimately controls, according to Marx, is a labour process. The grotesque image of a fusion of body and machine turns out to be not a new idea at all but a clearly developed theme in Marx's discussion of the capitalist production process. It is symptomatic that Haraway "discovers" and superficially glosses something that Marx dissected thoroughly more than a hundred years earlier, just as Gary Becker churns out tomes on a fantasy of "human capital" that Marx had tossed out in two sentences. In spite of her declared intentions, Haraway's cyborg IS the heroic proletariat of traditional Marxism. So, in a perverse way, is Becker's wily accumulator of human capital. That heroic proletariat is not quite yet Marx's proletariat, though. It is, rather, an affirmation from "without" of a subjectivity that needs to be criticized from within. I showed a Ukrainian artist a Chase National Bank advertisement promoting profit sharing from a 1946 Fortune magazine and she laughed, "socialist realism!" which had been exactly my reaction and was the reason I had showed it to her. Perhaps smoking a little BC weed would make it easier to visualize the all-encompassing cultural bolshevization that presents itself as ersatz liberal capitalist restoration. What am I trying to say? It has something to do with how ripe the fruit is. We are not at the End of History as Francis Fukuyama supposed a decade ago but tantalizingly close to its beginning. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Energy and politics
Gene Coyle wrote: This I fear is going to seem doubly or triply provincial. First it is California centered, second energy centered, and third USA centered. But here goes. I wish I could do that self-effacing bit. Gene, what happens to energy prices if there is a considerable slowdown in the economy, particularly in the tech sector? Are they sensitive to relatively small changes in demand? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: GOP vs Dem Behavior (e.g., voting)
David Shemano wrote: I am not sure what your question is, so I will answer as follows. First, I am conservative, so I don't believe in perfection and am willing to defend and conserve imperfection -- I am not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. In this sense I am also a conservative. Over the past 20 years in North America radical policies have been introduced in the name of conservatism that have had the effect, literally, of throwing out the baby. Ten years ago, the Canadian parliament unanimously passed a resolution calling for the elimiination of child poverty by the year 2000. Of course it didn't happen. But more specifically, child poverty increased as a direct consequence of changes in government policies, many of which have been enacted in the name of conservatism and with the proclaimed purpose of encouraging and defending private initiative, etc. One can, of course, justifiably argue that there was nothing genuinely conservative about the policy changes and that in their implementation they didn't in fact pursue their proclaimed purpose, but sought instead to coerce and regulate low-income people. One rationale articulated by one of the drafters of unemployment insurance reform in Canada referred to widely-held *perceptions* that large numbers of people were abusing the system, acknowledged the lack of substance to the perception and went on to recommend sanctions against claimants as a palliative for the hostile perceptions. I've said before that one can't dance with two left feet and I can't see how the "expropriation of private property" offers more than a rhetorical solution to the achievement of the good life. Beyond that, though, I think there's an important issue of how and why it is that under capitalism -- and uniquely under capitalism -- private property comes to refer exclusively to the ownership of things and not to other traditionally established relationships and why it is that the notion of private property couldn't (or shouldn't) evolve to refer, for example, to universal entitlement to a share of social production instead of decaying to refer to the ever more exclusive ownership of an even bigger pile of things (i.e., "intellectual property"). From my perspective, it seems that a major thrust of so-called conservative initiatives over the past 20 years has been to usurp established entitlements to a share of social production in the name of promoting incentives to work and to invest. That is to say, the direction has been to expropriate one kind of private property in the name of narrowly promoting the accumulation of another kind (the ownership of things). Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Scrubbing for Shrub
Dec. 4, 2000 | If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might want to look at a "scrub list" of 173,000 names knocked off the Florida voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. A close examination suggests thousands of voters may have lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list of purported "felons" provided by a private firm with tight Republican ties. Early in the year, the company, ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to "scrub" from their list of voters. But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. The company acknowledged the error, and blamed it on the original source of the list -- the state of Texas. Florida officials moved to put those falsely accused by Texas back on voter rolls before the election. Nevertheless, the large number of errors uncovered in individual counties suggests that thousands of eligible voters may have been turned away at the polls. http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/12/04/voter_file/index.html?CP=YA HDN=110 Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Private property
David Shemano wrote: The issue, from my perspective, is not whether property is "private" in the sense you seem to be asking, or whether rather metaphysical notions of freedom and consent can exist under capitalism. and "Private property" is my shorthand for saying the rules will provide that with respect to any specific resource, commodity, etc., a single individual gets to decide issues of possession, use and transfer. The problem here, David, is that private property is NOT a relationship between an individual and a thing it is a social relationship between many individuals within a definite form of society REGARDING the status of the thing as a possession. To view the relationship as being between a *single* individual and any specific resource, commodity, etc. is precisely a *metaphysical* understanding of private property -- or in other words a *fetishization* of the social relations that recognize ownership of objects. Just between me, the mountain and the sea I can proclaim myself possessor of all I behold. It's strictly a social/historical question though whether or not my ownership claim gives me any right of disposal over the mountain or the sea. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Vol. 18 of The Collected Works
Louis Proyect wrote: The only problem is that Lenin openly repudiated this formulation not long after it was written. In a report to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, he explained the change in his thinking: "Comrades, the traitorous Kautsky uses our words against us and questions why we repudiate the big bourgeoisie in 1918, when previously we announced our willingness to extend a hand for the 'good of the cause.' It is not surprising that when the vacillators who have mistaken the forward path of the masses for a sack of potatoes fallen between two stools when the suppression of the counter-revolution dictates a ruthless but cleansing stroke of the sword. We understand that the dialectical turn of the clock will always strike midnight when the wheat is being gathered. Hence we denounce the narrow-mindedness, timidity and book-keeper mentality of the Prubylzytelnayo Vgdenayaists [Kautsky's supporters]. They forget the main lessons in the struggle against Bogdanov, who also came close to infecting the party with the liberal-bourgeois infection of empirico-symbolism purchased at the price of a wholesale chicken in a country market is not necessarily the same thing as an organic bond with merciless destruction of opportunism." (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 18, p 315) Wouldn't you know it! It is precisely that page of my copy of Vol 18 of the collected works that has been ruthlessly and deceitfully torn out, presumably by some police spy or revisionist. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
re: depressions (and needs)
Michael Perelman wrote:
I tried to tell the story of the Great Depression of the late 19th century
in my
book, End of Economics. Not only did the Depression occur in the way Jim
cited
Doug Dowd, but most of the leading economists of the time in the United States
explicitly recognized that reality.
Right. And it's pretty much Michael's story of the late 19th century, from
a piece I came across online, that I had in mind. See:
Marx, Devalorization, and the Theory of Value
http://www.ucm.es/wwwboard/bas/messages/223.htm
also, more specifically:
Devalorization, Crises, and Capital Accumulation in the Late Nineteenth
Century
United States
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/econ-value/files/96sessions.txt
I was also thinking of an intriguing expression -- "the left-wing of
devalorization" -- used by my long ago Cazadero camp-mate, Loren Goldner, to
refer to proponents of Keynesian welfare state policies. Goldner used the
expression polemically but his usage got me to thinking about its deeper
implications for crisis theory. If we think of welfare statism as the
"left-wing of devalorization", might not we think of NAIRU era labour
supply-side policies as the "right-wing of 'left-wing' devalorization".
In the second piece, Michael refers to the post-civil-war overinvestment in
fixed capital. To me the striking parallel in the more recent period is the
post-WW II overinvestment in educational credentials, which incidentally
shifted from social overinvestment in the 1960-1970s ("do not fold spindle
or mutilate") to competitive private overinvestment in the 1980s-1990s (the
pursuit of marketable skills). And, yes, Veblen has an uncanny contemporary
relevance, here.
Often when people talk about the historical composition of "needs", they
have in mind simply an enlarging absolute bundle of commodities. But what
about the _specificity_ of many of those needs to labour market entry and
participation? Are life-long learning, home offices, dressing for success,
UMC (upwardly mobile copulation), and owning a car to commute to work final
consumption goods or a subtle repackaging and "putting out" of the more
highly competitive (and less profitable) means of production? Immiseration
may thus be conceived of as not just relative to other people's consumption
-- let alone some absolute standard of subsistence -- but also as relating
to the mix of individually optional and objectively compulsory
(conspicuous?) items of consumption.
If anyone has the slightest clue what I'm rambling on about, I'd appreciate
feedback. I sense that what I'm saying is at the margin of comprehensibility
and hence hard to articulate. The best I can do is pile up metaphors in the
hope that they come crashing down in the right direction. What I'm getting
at is a sense in which "labour" in the late 20th century has come to display
characteristics more or less specific to "capital" in the late 19th -- not a
physical, but a social "cyborganization".
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
Re: depressions
Jim Devine wrote: Tom wrote: Somewhere in vol. III of Capital (I haven't been able to track down the location), Marx criticized those vulgar political economists who become so enamored of the idea of interest-bearing capital that they even proclaim wages as a form of interest on the labourer's "capital". Gary Becker, eat your heart out. in the International Publishers' paperback edition of volume III, it's on page 465-6. Marx provides quite a relevant critique of those who seen labor-power as a kind of "capital" that pays "interest" to its owner (the worker). Becker was obsolete before he wrote. Thanks. The passage reads: "instead of explaining the expansion of capital on the basis of the exploitation of labour-power, the matter is reversed and the productivity of labour-power is explained by attributing this mystical quality of interest-bearing capital to labour-power itself. . . Unfortunately two disagreeably frustrating facts mar this thoughtless conception. In the first place, the labourer must work in order to obtain this interest. In the second place, he cannot transform the capital-value of his labour-power into cash by transferring it. . ." The identity of surplus-value and surplus-labour imposes a qualitative limit upon the accumulation of capital. This consists of the *total working-day*, and the prevailing development of the productive forces and of the population, which limits the number of simultaneously exploitable working-days. But if one conceives of surplus-value in the meaningless form of interest, the limit is merely quantitative and defies all fantasy. I don't get this. It's from vol. III again. Although the "total working day" may be hard to quantify, it has qualitative limits, depending upon definite technical, historical and physiological factors. At some unspecifiable (and malleable) point, increasing the length of the working day won't do any more good because it reduces the productivity of labour below the prevailing average. Similarly, at some unspecifiable point, intensifying the productivity of labour won't do any good because it will devalorize a greater quantity of existing capital than it will produce new surplus-value. Fictitious values allow capital to exceed (on paper) these qualtitative barriers to accumulation -- for a while, but only for a while. I interpret what's been happening in simpler terms. If given a chance, bosses will pay workers with promises. If given a chance, they'll break them. Since the "market for fictitious human capital" isn't as important as the stock market for the day-to-day functioning of capitalism, I don't read it this way. However, if credentialed workers get enough in the way of broken promises, they might unionize or similar. Here in the US, they sue. I think this gets to the heart of what I'm asking. Is the stock market _really_ more important for the day-to-day functioning of capitalism or is it simply so much easier to quantify and index? The vote-o-matic gives us President Bush and the NASDAQ index shows an 8.5% gain with an hour of trading left. The vote-o-matic chokes on chad. What does the NASDAQ choke on -- options? Is the stock market really more important for the day-to-day functioning of capitalism or has it simply become -- like American elections -- an icon of capitalism as divinely-guided and spontaneously self-correcting? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Business thoroughly sound
Stocks added to strong gains in late afternoon trading on Tuesday, pushed upward by speculation that the U.S. central bank may consider cutting interest rates and the battle for the White House is nearing a conclusion. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Tuesday the U.S. central bank must be alert to the risks of a sharp economic slowdown, signaling he may be willing to contemplate interest rate cuts before too long. Shares of managed care companies shot up Tuesday along with the broader stock market as investors anticipated a likely Republican victory in the White House that may spell relief for HMO reform in Washington. Orders for new goods from U.S. factories plummeted in October, reflecting weakened demand in most key sectors, the government said on Tuesday in a report signaling a slowing in the world's strongest economy. The global economy looks set for solid growth in the coming years as technological advances and globalization have helped boost growth prospects, the World Bank said in a report released on Tuesday. Business is always thoroughly sound and the campaign in full swing, until suddenly the debacle takes place. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
re: Open Letter to Readers Of Kolakowski
Rhetorical question: is ex-Marxism among Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism? Seriously, I keep coming back to the spectre (pun intended) of all the former Marxists who define what has come to stand as "other than Marxism" in contemporary academic thought and journalistic certitude. This particular other-than stands on precisely the ground of historical inevitability that it insists Marxism must vacate. It's like the reformation, I suppose. Martin Luther and his followers didn't cook up something entirely new, nor did they go around establishing Buddhist shrines and Hindu temples. On the one hand, there are clear continuities in ritual and theology. On the other, there are points of doctrine that can only be understood in terms of a deep-seated hostility, positions born of a will to differentiate. These differentia come forward in ways that baffle the un-schooled. One wonders how a population presumably ignorant of a particular mode of thought can, nevertheless, 'instinctively' detect and repudiate it. They have been vaccinated. Remember, one doesn't get vaccinated with an antibody but with a modified strain of the organism. Extra credit: What do "capital" and "vaccination" have in common? (hint: Kola-_ _ _-ski) Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Greenspan, the red-nosed reindeer
Greenspan intimates that the economy is slowing too fast, the stock market takes that as a sign of lower interest rates to come and instantly discounts those not-yet-hatched lower rates. The wealth effect of the run-up in stock prices will encourage folks to extend their credit card debt more than they had planned during the christmas season. Higher than anticipated christmas sales will cause the GDP to grow at a faster rate during the fourth quarter, which will lead investors to speculate that the fed will hold steady on interest rates, as a consequence of which the NASDAQ will plunge 10% in a day. Greenspan, the central banker had a very pliant fed and if you ever saw it you would even say it spread. All of the Wall Street brokers used to laugh and call him names. They always made poor Alan play in all their hedging games. Then one stalling GDP NASDAQ came to say, "Greenspan with your rate so high won't you light my index tonight." Then all the exuberant brokers shouted out with irrational glee "Greenspan, the central banker you'll go down in his-tor-y" Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Cyborg variations
The image of the cyborg entails a double process of objectification (of social relations) and anthropomorphic animation (of the resulting object). The analysis of this double process is already present in Marx's discussion of the commodity fetish. Thus the cyborg is in a way a redundant figure. Although fantastically constructed of body and machine, the actually-existing cyborg is constructed of labour power and *real* (as opposed to formal) domination of labour by capital. In its fictitious guise as human capital, the cyborg holds out an ambiguous promise of endowment "by attributing [the] mystical quality of interest-bearing capital to labour power itself." Marx noted two "disagreeably frustrating facts [to] mar this thoughtless conception." The labourer must work to obtain this interest and he cannot cash in the fictitious capital-value. A third disagreeable fact arises from the illiquidity of the worker's supposed capital: accelerated depreciation as a result of technical innovation. In six months, the six-million man may become a mere six-hundred thousand dollar man. Meanwhile, the original invoice price keeps showing up on his VISA bill. Accelerated depreciation lends a second meaning to the "redundancy" of the cyborg -- this time as reserve army of the un(der)employed. All of this doubling suggests that the cyborg is in fact a doppelganger, spectre of labour power and harbinger of its demise. The cyborg has nothing to add to the sandwichman, who was always already objectified, animated, redundant and in disguise. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: depressions
Jim Devine wrote: Some might say that the period from 1973 to 1992 or so in the US was a "great depression" of sorts. I don't find this very useful, either. If people want to call it a great depression, that's fine with me, but since the three "depressions" were so different from each other, it's hard to lump them all together. Maybe "times of troubles" is a good substitute... Jim's comment on great depressions frames an issue that I've been wanting to bring up but haven't figured out how to express. Suppose the period 1873 to 1897 might be best characterized with regard to Marx's observation that: a large part of available capital is constantly more or less depreciated in the course of the reproduction process, because the value of commodities is not determined by the labour-time originally expended in their production, but by the labour-time expended in their reproduction, and this decreases continually owing to the development of the social productivity of labour. What if we push the preceding argument "Beyond Capital" (so to speak) to consider the depreciation of wage labour on more or less the same basis? Somewhere in vol. III of Capital (I haven't been able to track down the location), Marx criticized those vulgar political economists who become so enamored of the idea of interest-bearing capital that they even proclaim wages as a form of interest on the labourer's "capital". Gary Becker, eat your heart out. But couldn't we imagine that by some time around the third quarter of the twentieth century a considerable portion of employment income in the U.S. had taken on the characteristics of a legal claim on revenues, backed by "credentials", similar to what share ownership represents (thereby anticipating the trend of compensating employees with stock options)? By analogy, this would give us "fictitious human capital" and we could view the 1973-1992 period as one of shaking out the fictitious human capitals and concentrating the legal claims on future revenues. Telling the story this way begins to make 1973-1992 look a bit more like 1873-1897 -- or perhaps I should say more like its mirror image. The identity of surplus-value and surplus-labour imposes a qualitative limit upon the accumulation of capital. This consists of the *total working-day*, and the prevailing development of the productive forces and of the population, which limits the number of simultaneously exploitable working-days. But if one conceives of surplus-value in the meaningless form of interest, the limit is merely quantitative and defies all fantasy. That qualitative limit on the accumulation of capital is also, *pari passu*, a limit on the extent to which the worker can participate as a "stake holder" in his/her self-exploitation. The problem with the analogy between fictitious capital and fictitious human capital is, of course, that the owners of human capital also have to supply labour-power in order to receive their "interest payments". This might explain why hours worked have become unhinged from productivity considerations over the last 25 years or so -- people are getting paid for "putting in hours", not for performing work. Are we headed for a crash? I'll be provocative here: I don't think it matters. At this point it seems to me that the end of the recent boom will have immense social and political consequences. That is to say, a "soft landing" may be the worst thing that could happen to the "new economy" -- just as a stalemate was the worst thing that could happen to the two-party political monopoly. My inclination is to expect a lull that after a while will begin to feel uncomfortably entrenched. "Business is always thoroughly sound and the campaign in full swing, until suddenly the debacle takes place." Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: shocked! shocked!
I think what Barkley meant to say was, In England, what is not forbidden is permitted. In Germany, what is _not_ permitted is forbidden. In France, what is forbidden is permitted. In Russia, what is permitted is forbidden. Also: In Canada, what is not forbidden is not permitted, eh? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Eschewing the cud
fish* thing one could possibly want under capitalism? And what's wrong with that? In the preface to the first edition of Vol. I of Capital (dated London, 25 July 1867), Marx commented on the "palpable evidence" in England of a "process of transformation" and of the eventual certainty of upheaval on the European continent. "There it will take a form more brutal or more humane, according to the degree of development of the working class itself. Apart from any higher motives, then, the most basic interests of the present ruling classes dictate to them that they clear out of the way all the legally removable obstacles to the development of the working class." What was Marx doing in the above passage except *appealing to the most basic interests* of the ruling classes? Marx to bourgeoisie: "Be selfish!" Yoshie wrote, Moralism = Individualism. I think of Green consumerism as an expression of self-satisfaction of middle-strata folks in rich nations (those whom Michael Hoover would call "granola lunch bunch"). Most of the Green consumerists don't want to abolish capitalism at all, but their consumption of organic produce "cruelty-free" products; eschewal of "bad" products (e.g., fur, meat, tobacco, recreational drugs, etc.); exercise meditation; etc. make them feel that they are morally superior to poor sods who "don't know any better" (e.g., factory workers who smoke in front of their children). Carrol wrote, The context for this I suppose is the claim, sometimes quite explict, that the moderation is a political act. Engels complained well over a century ago about the rabble of (among other things) vegetarians at the margins of the workers' movement. I doubt he would have complained about personal vegetarianism for strictly personal reasons. On the recent John Bellamy Foster cyberseminar someone explained that she/he did not have the book yet because [an "of course!" implicit here] s(he) would not buy from any of the corporate stores and the friendly corner bookstore didn't have it in stock. Repellant! Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
What I learned in electoral college . . .
"Things which in and for themselves are not commodities, things such as conscience, honour, etc., can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price. Hence a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value." "Under the present system, if a crooked spine, twisted limbs, a one-sided development and strengthening of certain muscles, etc., makes you more capable of working (more productive), then your crooked spine, your twisted limbs, your one-sided muscular movement are a productive force. If your intellectual vacuity is more productive than your abundant intellectual activity, then your intellectual vacuity is a productive force, etc. etc. If the monotony of an occupation makes you better suited for that occupation, then monotony is a productive force." Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Smoke
Smoking may be a pretty cheap means of stress reduction and aid to conviviality. I used to smoke and when I quit I became aware of a heightened sense of social awkwardness. Smoking may not make one suave but it seems to distract from awareness of the awkwardness. I remember going to Seattle in 1974 with my then wife who was attending a meeting of the "IS". I walked into the meeting hall with her and was amazed that people could actually survive in a room that contained so much smoke. I took the smoke as an index of the anxiety level that would have prevailed if those folks didn't smoke (not to mention if they had just quit smoking). Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Eschewing the cud
Yoshie wrote, individual eschewal of any product _when no organized boycott is on_ seems to me to be completely futile even counter-productive. Uhm. Could you perhaps elaborate on how moderating one's own consumption could in any way be construed as "completely futile even counter-productive"? Marxists' jobs is to disabuse them of the illusion of green consumerism. Am I missing a chapter of Capital or an episode or something? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: rebuilding the left
no primary vehicle for social change and we will all have to get out and walk . . . and thereby make the road by walking. By eschewing the chimerical notion of a "revolutionary subject", we would at least be spared the indignity of repeating the farce of substitutionism -- i.e., the party for the class, the central committee for the party and the leader for the central committee (so much for the little red book of "Chairman Buzz Thought", eh? ;-). Besides, I think this notion of the revolutionary subject leads directly to the "yearning for a vital oppositional culture" I mentioned earlier. "At least if we can't have fundamental social change," so the yearning goes, "we can have a designated group (a God term?, a substitute parent figure?) who affirms our desires." I suspect that ultimately for some people this consolaton prize becomes THE prize and for others (particularly those folks who have 'second thoughts' about their political commitments, veer to the right and then tell us 'there is no alternative') it becomes a source of derision and contempt. 4. "An anti-oppression agenda needs to be our agenda, not an afterthought. We can start this process by dismantling systems of dominance within our own organizing." - Kheya Bag It's embarrassing to have to come right out in favour of oppression, but it seems to me worthwhile to distinguish between oppression and capitalism. For one thing, capitalism has not been and is not now one-dimensionally oppressive. For another, forms of oppression can and do exist outside of capitalism. I've spent a lot of time recently with young people who have been thoroughly steeped in the catechism of "anti-sexism, racism and homophobia" and I have noticed an unhealthy superstition regarding the inherent righteousness of designated oppressed groups -- exactly the kind of thing that a Tom Wolfe would satirize to such devastating effect. One problem with jumbling all this oppression and dominance shit together in one big lumpy stew is that it all tends to get reduced to questions of "behaviour" and "attitude" -- a magical analysis that invites magical solutions. Another problem is that it fosters that yearning for vibrant oppositional culture where oppressed people are affirmed -- who needs a social transformation when you can achieve status gratification NOW in a small group? Sure oppression sucks, but capitalism has a dynamic that can transform endemic antagonisms into cataclysm. It also has a contradictory dynamic that may point to a way out of capitalism and hence enable a sustained dismantling of oppression. That's enough of what I think, now for a few questions: -- Is "re-building the left" about changing society or is it about resuscitating a "vibrant oppositional culture"? -- Is the "crisis of Marxism" based on an inherent limitations in traditional left strategies and analyses? If so, would a fully-developed critique of those limitations lead struggle down a more fruitful path? -- Do we want simply to enjoy more of the fruits of our labour or do we want more fundamentally to labour less compulsively and live and work more interestingly? -- Can we as associated individuals take responsibility for changing society or must we identify and identify with a transcendental "vehicle for change" or "revolutionary subject"? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island (604) 947-2213 Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Eschewing the cud
Yoshie wrote, Moderating one's own consumption would improve one's health, for sure. However, boycotting products when workers or peasants are not calling for the boycott of the said products would not improve their lives at all. Don't be selfish. Don't be selfish? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
re: rebuilding the left
For the benefit of non-Canadians or non-Vancouverites the following acronyms were used in my previous message on this subject: CLC = Canadian Labour Congress CAW = Canadian Auto Workers Union TURB = Trade Union Research Bureau Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Capitalism = Fetters on Growth?
In his criticism of traditional Marxism, Postone zeros in on the notion that the "forces of production" and the "relations of production" refer respectively to the production process of modern industry and private ownership of the means of production. According to Postone, that is simply not what Marx meant by forces and relations of production. The fundamental contradiction of capitalism is thus not that private ownership and the anarchy of the market unduly limit the development of industry or "economic growth" -- in many respects, they unduly promote it! The contradiction resides rather in the specifically capitalist *value form* of material wealth, which relies on the expenditure of units of abstract human labour. The production of material wealth by modern industry is increasingly a function of the application of general social knowledge (powers of science and nature) in the process of production but the measure of value created remains units of abstract labour time. What this fundamental contradiction explains is not simply why there is "not enough" or why there is "too much" but precisely why there is poverty in the midst of excess. Or as Marx put it in the Grundrisse, why capital "posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition -- question of life or death -- for the necessary." The nice thing about Postone's critique of traditional Marxism is that it specifies exactly how that misreading of Marx "makes sense" within its own historical context, just as Marx's immanent critique of political economy showed how the bourgeois concepts made sense within the historically determinate context of capitalism. A not inconsiderable side benefit (IMHO) is that it relieves the "story of Marxism" of its otherwise inexplicable parade of renegades, apostates, deviants, mass-murderers-posing-as-saviours, turncoats and sourpusses. And it even opens up the potential for attributing avowedly anti-socialist thought to something other than unmitigated bad faith, stupidity, copiously-funded conspiracy or simply false consciousness. Postone's book, regretably, is gruellingly repetitive, dizzingly abstract and irritatingly reticent about some of the more gossipy, horoscopic concerns us ordinary folks thrive on: Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? When will it all end? Where will NASDAQ and DJIA be six months from now? And, by the way, isn't there some way I can place a bet on the outcome and still hedge it just in case it doesn't turn out that way? Yoshie wrote, Workers of the world, unite, take it easy I sense in this close both the intended irony but also a (fey?) residue of *enchantment* with the idea of the proletariat as the Subject of history. According to Postone, however, the "historical 'irony'" of capitalism, as analyzed by Marx, is that "productive labor is the structural source of its own domination." Or, in Marx's own words, "To be a productive worker is . . . not a piece of luck, but a misfortune." The Subject is Capital . . . Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: Flash: Medical Bulletin on George Bush
Ken Hanly wrote, Medical Bulletin: George W. Bush is now under treatment for two problems--electile dysfunction and premature congratulation. Wouldn't that be sort of like being both anorexic and obese? Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: 400,000 Palm Beach votes for hand count
Nathan Newman wrote, It's an odd contradiction, but we need to see why voting rights challenges are THE FUNDAMENTAL FIGHT in eletoral politics, far more important than any third party diversions, because expanded franchise is a pure expansion of worker power. First of all I want to acknowledge the importance of the work that Nathan and the Campaign for a Legal Election are doing and to thank them for it. At this point, strategically, I agree that voting rights are more important than a third party challenge. But that agreement is qualified by the fact that in the U.S. "two party system", third parties are necessary to ensure that the fundamental right to vote is something more than a formalism. In the 2000 election, the third party Nader campaign was largely about the sclerosis of that two-party system -- its fiduciary disconnect -- not about electing a third party's candidate. The aftermath of the election has confirmed that position, not invalidated it. The design of the Palm Beach ballot doesn't appear to have been a deliberate attempt to deny people the right to vote but an extraordinary act of distraction by a presumably well-meaning _Democratic_ election official. The first, second and third principles of good document design are TEST, TEST and TEST. The Palm Beach ballot could not have survived rigourous, realistic testing with a representative sample of the prospective voters. Period. This in an age where every sound bite of each candidate is focus group tested to a slippery patina. The contrast is striking and highlights not a deliberate fraud but a set of political priorities so systematically negligent that fraud and overt denial of the right to vote become superfluous. Having said that, it is important to focus on what is most important NOW, which is not recriminations against third party challengers or registered Democrat election officials. What is important now is the struggle to ensure the legal counting of votes and the protection of voter rights and to oppose the usurpation of those rights by a brokered "concession". Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: PEN-L digest 814
Brad DeLong wrote Which has nothing to do with whether Nader's intervention in this election helped make the world a better place. If someone's bleeding arterially, you get a tourniquet: you don't cut their throat. Brad, Focus, Brad! It is now November 12 and there is a very different and more important struggle going on. For the first time since the Civil Rights Movement, the U.S. faces the very real possibility of a broad democratic movement emerging. The work that Nathan Newman is doing is pointing in that direction. The quarrel you are rehashing has been pre-empted by history. REAL politics requires the flexibility to recognize and respond to a new situation. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
CounterCoup
Have a look at this one and CIRCULATE WIDELY: http://www.geocities.com/countercoup Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Re: CounterCoup
Max Sawicky wrote, I think this is the right protest at the wrong time, and timing is everything in politics. It is clearly predicated on Gore's margin of defeat, not on any abiding concern with democracy. I agree about the wrong timing but also about the remarkable extent of activity. With apologies for the byzantine 'dialectic' of the following, I think it is inevitable that popular protest express itself in inarticulate and perhaps inappropriate slogans. CounterCoup foregrounds a slogan -- a leap to making the popular vote total decisive -- that is really the flip side of the Bush/Baker demand to "get it over with for the sake of the system". There's also the reckless claim that the Palm Beach fiasco was a deliberate fraud. Conspiracy theories travel faster than the speed of light. But there is the fact that the complexity of the situation is hard to grasp (even among the elite group of intellectuals on this list). Our job (if I can put it that way) is neither to affirm or deny simplistic reductions but to situate them in their historical specificity (only partly kidding). Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Chernobyl at Palm Beach?
On tuesday at lunch with my theatre workshop colleagues, one of the participants remarked how the election outcome in the states could only be discouraging -- either Gore or Bush. I suggested there was a third possibility: an unresolved dead heat that would result in recounts and legal challenges. It was not a prediction that this _would_ happen, only an observation that if it _did_ happen it would be an event that has the potential to lay bare the machinations and evasions of "the system". It happened. Today, the responsibility of progressives is above all to recognize that a new era has begun. The design of the electoral system in the U.S. has become the issue. As Bush campaign chairman Don Evans inadvertently confirmed, that system has been elaborately designed with the intention of de-politicizing "democracy". Ralph Nader campaigned on the issue of the un-democratic design of the electoral system. The protest against corporate campaign funding and the exclusive two-party debates is a matter of record. On that record hinges the margin of difference between an system-affirming outcome and a critical one. Candidates Gore and Bush were both products of an arcane and manipulative primary circus, designed more than anything else to produce a cypher-candidate whose message could be marketed to a demographic target on an electoral college grid. That process inevitably produces a _massage_ that is (pardon the loaded image) the gestalt of political evasion. The Palm Beach ballot is perhaps an accident, but an accident that expresses the arrogance and ineptitude of the political apparatchiki in the U.S. As Joel Blau pointed out, the obsolescence of voting machines in Palm Beach is symptomatic of a much broader refusal to invest in public infrastructure. What matters in the U.S. system is the manipulation of the outcome, not the counting of the votes. The politically evasive and technologically obsolete electoral system in the U.S. has melted down. Don't be suprised to hear, repeated over and over, that everything is under control. That's what they have to say. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
A note on the voting irregularities in Palm Beach, Florida. (fwd)
Please circulate widely. Background According to several news accounts, many voters in Palm Beach, Florida, have claimed that they were confused by the ballot structure and may have inadvertently voted for Buchanan when in fact they intended to vote for Gore. The event prompted a discussion among several academic friends and colleagues about whether the results could be statistically detected, since Palm Beach county alone had the unusual ballot structure. One of the participants in the discussion, Chris Fastnow, a political scientist and director of the Center for Women in Politics in Pennsylvania at Chatham College (and who is also my wife) found the Florida county-level returns for the election on the internet at the CBS News website and passed them on to me. We reasoned that if enough voters in Palm Beach county were confused and mistakenly voted for Buchanan, it should be statistically detectable by examining the vote for Buchanan relative to the votes for Gore and Bush for all of the counties in Florida. . . http://madison.hss.cmu.edu/ Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
Worth quoting
"The Democrats ... are politicizing and distorting these events ... at the expense of our democracy," -- Bush campaign chairman Don Evans. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island
Re: Voter turnout 52%
The entire message is in the subject line.
Re: Fwd: Electoral Dance.
Jim Devine wrote, Thought this website might be good for a quick relief from the election http://www.tvdance.com/bush-gore/ Totally awesome surfing, o devine one! Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
capitalism, patriarchy wealth
Brian Milani wrote, The occasion was a big lecture here in Toronto last week by Anthony Giddens of the LSE on "the globalization debate". What I wouldn't have given to be there in full sandwich regalia! See my post a couple of weeks ago to Pen-l on Giddens' "Runaway World Debate" and the disconnect between "rights and responsibilities" for the LSE experts orchestrating it. First, I think it's important to see class in civilization as one form of domination, but always related to and generally reinforcing other forms of domination: humans over nature, nation over nation, men over women, and even certain aspects of the individual human psyche over others. Brian, I think it is a big mistake to address the issue at the transhistorical level of "civilization". We are in a historically specific, dynamic and totalizing structure of domination -- capitalism and if we can't get out of that box, it ain't no good pining about getting out of all the other boxes. Period. Sometimes I think it's counterproductive to try definitively isolate whether one form of oppression or exploitation was the determinant one, rather than working to see how the different forms interacted. It may well be counterproductive to try to isolate forms of oppression or exploitation. However, if there is a determinant STRUCTURE within which various forms operate it is not counterproductive to try to identify that structure. The problem that we may be mistaken about that structure or our own position within it is contingent. If you are lost in the woods and you come across a road, you don't ask whether it is the shortest route to your destination. I do not believe truly qualitative production can be implemented by capitalism, which is intrinsically a system of quantitative development. Real human development and ecological regeneration can not be produced as a by-product, a side-effect or a trickle down of accumulation. I think this is entirely correct and I would add that the traditional left focus on matters of distribution leave this matter of accumulation untouched or in some respects imply an even more productivist turn "once the forces of production (misunderstood as modern industry) are freed from the fetter of the relations of production (misunderstood as the market and private property). As you are no doubt aware, your fellow Torontonian, Anders Hayden, has addressed these issues beautifully and in an popularly accessible way in _Sharing the Work, Saving the Planet_. A more theoretical (and ultimately, I would say, decisive) analysis is presented by Moishe Postone in _Time, Labor and Social Domination_. To sum it up in a few phrases: value, based on labor time, is a misleading and distorting measure of material wealth but it stands as both the driving force and the ultimate contradiction of capitalism and thus of the society that we are in. Civilization can wait.
Re: voting for Nader
Max Sawicky wrote, I've been working 'inside' for a decade now. Any support I have rendered to Clinton et al. has not helped me in anything I have done in the slightest bit. Max, According to Leonard, you've only served have your sentence. I was sentenced to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island
The problem of the unintelligentsia
Bullshit. Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island
Re: Engels' (non)reply to Wicksteed
"'To-Day' has become a mere 'symposium', i.e. a review in which everyone can write for and against socialism. Next No. a critique of 'Capital'! I was supposed to reply to this anonymous writer, but declined with thanks." -- Engels to Kautsky, Sept. 20, 1884. I've read Wicksteed's critique of Capital now and, interestingly, it rests upon the presumed identity of meaning between 'value' and exchange value, against which Marx issued a disclaimer on page 152 (Vintage) and which came up recently on Pen-l in the comments about Charles Andrews' book. In the absense of a reply from Engels, George Bernard Shaw wrote an utterly inadequate, although charmingly ill-informed response to Wicksteed. Poor Shaw was way over his head. Wicksteed didn't say much about rent in his critique of Marx. He dealt specifically with the labour theory of value. In his critique, Wicksteed identified what he believed was a formal and substantive error in passing "unwarrantably and without warning, from one category inot another, when he makes the great leap from specific utilities into objectivised abstract labour and has give us an argument which can only become formally correct when so modified and supplemented as to accept *abstract utility* as the measure of value." Wicksteed then went on to make the suggested 'modification' by interjecting Jevon's analysis of marginal utility. On the basis of this substitution of Jevons for Marx, Wicksteed concluded that "value does not depend upon the 'amount of labour contained,' and does not always coincide with it. . . [Except when] labour can be freely directed to the production of A or B optionally." According to Wicksteed, labour power does not possess the foregoing characteristic, and hence its value doesn't necessarily coincide with the amount of labour contained in it. It appears that in this conclusion, Wicksteed fumbled the distinction established by Marx between labour and labour power. The long Jevonian detour thus established nothing other than to prepare the ground for a last ditch confusion. Wicksteed seems to have forgotten that labour power can be withheld as well as expended. Once that potential is factored in, labour power does possess the characteristic of being directed to the production of "A" or "B" -- that is, to labour or leisure, a trade-off about which Jevons himself had something or other to say (although not by any stretch the last word).
Re: Engels' (non)reply to Wicksteed
This "classic (marginal) utilitarian defence of equality" is precisely the invideous "comparison" that the mathematically obsessed wunderkinder of the 1930s (e.g. Bergson, Samuelson) banished from the social welfare function and replaced with Pareto optimality as the "ethical test". There is a comic "Mr. and Mrs. Vinegar" aspect to the series of substitutions that lead from an aversion to class analysis to the idea of "distributional justice" then to the notion that economic expansion will help the poor without taking from the rich and ultimately back to the social Darwinist apologetics of blaming the victim. Mr. and Mrs. Vinegar is a nursery tale about a foolish man who buys a cow but then trades his cow for a bagpipe, then trades the bagpipe for a pair of gloves, trades the gloves for a stick and finally throws the stick at a bird who is laughing at him for his foolishness. Michael Perelman quoted, http://www.qut.edu.au/arts/human/ethics/conf/flat.htm A relatively large number of references to distributional issues can be found in Wicksteeds non-economic works in this later period. It is of some interest to record, for example, Wicksteeds views of the distribution of income at about the time of the publication of An essay on the co-ordination of the laws of distribution in 1894. In the following year, Wicksteed in his short paper The advent of the people provides support for a more equal distribution of wealth. In so doing he presents the classic (marginal) utilitarian defence of greater equality:
Engels' (non)reply to Wicksteed
"'To-Day' has become a mere 'symposium', i.e. a review in which everyone can write for and against socialism. Next No. a critique of 'Capital'! I was supposed to reply to this anonymous writer, but declined with thanks." -- Engels to Kautsky, Sept. 20, 1884. The critique in question was titled "Das Kapital. A Criticism by Philip H. Wicksteed". Does anyone happen to have an electronic copy of that article on hand that they could send me or know of the location of one on the web? I've already searched to no avail. Wicksteed's 1910 textbook, "The Common Sense of Political Economy", contains the most extraordinarily ornate and long-winded discussion of what he eventually admits to being reluctant to call the market for labour. This discussion concludes with a bizarre five-paragraph tirade against the "lump-of-labour" mentality of the working classes, the point of which would seem to be that, "When we understand that local distress is incidental to general progress, we shall not indeed try to stay general progress in order to escape the local distress, but we shall try to mitigate the local distress by diverting to its relief some portion of the general access of wealth to which it is incidental." I can't help but get the feeling, reading Chapter 8 of Wicksteed's textbook, that the poor sot "meant well". Wicksteed seems to be engaging a characteristically Fabian "rhetoric of courtship" -- conceding the "economic" ground to the most reactionary and rapacious representatives of capital in order that he may, at the last instance, append a plea for enlighted compassion as the best way of combatting such "misdirected sympathies" and "anti-social ways". Seen in this light, the third way politics of Blair, Giddens et.al., is classic Fabianism reduced to its absurd (and Orwellian!) conclusion -- a rhetoric that absolutely identifies reactionary means with "progressive" ends. In other words, I regret that Engels didn't reply. I suspect that Wicksteed missed the point about the labour theory of value and demolished a straw man of his own construction.
Re: Engels' (non)reply to Wicksteed
Michael Perelman wrote, As I recall this devastating critique of Marx, Wicksteed concentrated on Marx's lack of the theory of rent. I suspect that he never saw volume 3. Volume III was published in 1894, Vol. II in 1885. Therefore, Wicksteed could only have seen Volume I. (Unless Engels showed him the unpublished manuscripts ;-)) So I take it from the discrepency between the superlative adjective and the narrow focus that you weren't impressed? In his introduction to the collected works, Steedman writes that "some writers have regarded Bohm Bawerks later attack on the labour theory of value, of 1896, as inferior to that of Wicksteed."
Re: Time Magazine poll
Ken Hanly wrote, So this shows that Nader supporters are all tuned in to netvoting and have lots of time to repeat votes. Yeh. I voted for Nader. First US election I ever voted in. I voted twice (just to check to see if they had any device to block repeat voting). I'm not going to tell you who I voted for because its a secret ballot, eh? What struck me was that the number of votes registered was over 1,000,000. Watch out for RSI, Nader fans! Having said that -- considering the state of corporate campaign financing and considering the weight of media bias, the Time poll results are probably a better reflection of popular sentiment than the actual vote results will be.
New Labour, Free Labour and lump labour (was Giddens' . . .)
Further to the despicable and revolting travesty of "employment policy analysis" by T. Boeri, R. Layard and S. Nickell in their Welfare to Work report to Prime Ministers Blair and D'Alema and the Council of Europe, I am forwarding three texts. The first is the central argument of the 1901 London Times series, The Crisis in British Industry, allegedly co-authored by William Collison, debonair scoundrel and publicist for the "National Free Labour Association", an organization whose main purpose was to supply scab labour for the strike-breaking but whose secondary role was to pose as a phony "Labour" political party, presumably to confuse working class voters and split the labour vote. I believe they actually ran candidates in an election around 1911. The second is the "lumpy bit" from the Boeri, Layard, Nickell (the latter two from the London School of Economics) report to the Council of Europe at http://www.palazzochigi.it/esteri/lisbona/dalema_blair/inglese.html Please note that the paragraphs presented here were emphasized by bold text in the report. The third text is a letter to the editor of the London Times, from Sidney and Beatrice Webb, responding to the Crisis in British Industry series. It should be remembered that the Webbs had considerable to do with the founding of the British Labour Party as well as the establishment of the London School of Economics. Sidney also co-authored a book in the 1890s on the economics of the eight-hour day. Beatrice was a prominant dissenting member of a Royal Commission on Unemployment, whose minority report was influential in establishing the social insurance benefits that the Boeri, Layard, Nickell report is bent on dismantling. 1. The Collison/Pratt hypothesis about the motive behind the movement for an eight-hour day (from "The Crisis in British Industry, London Times, November 28, 1901: It was hoped to "absorb" all the unemployed in course of time, not by the laudable and much-to-be-desired means of increasing the volume of trade, and hence, also, the amount of work to be done, but simply by obtaining employment for a larger number of persons on such work as there was already. The motive of this aspiration, however, was not one of philanthropy pure and simple. When all the unemployed had been absorbed the workers would have the employers entirely at their mercy, and would be able to command such wages and such terms as they might think fit. The general adoption of the eight hours system was to bring in a certain proportion of the unemployed; if there were still too many left the eight hours system was to be followed by a six hours system; while if, within the six, or eight, or any other term of hours, every one took things easy and did as little work as he conveniently could, still more openings would be found for the remaining unemployed, and still better would be the chances for the Socialist propaganda. 2. From the Report to Prime Ministers Blair and DAlema, WELFARE-TO-WORK AND THE FIGHT AGAINST LONG-TERM UNEMPLOYMENT, by T. Boeri, R. Layard and S. Nickell: The welfare-to-work approach outlined above is incompatible with the view that full employment can be achieved only by reducing the number of persons in the labour market. Yet many people doubt whether society can actually provide jobs for more people. According to this popular wisdom (the so-called "lump-of-labour" fallacy), the number of jobs is fixed. Hence unemployment can only be reduced by redistributing the stock of jobs available across individuals and pushing people out of the labour force. This widespread belief lies at the root of the campaign for earlier retirement, and explains much of the pessimism about welfare-to-work policies for the unemployed. We discuss these issues at some length in our report. In the very short-run there is of course a limit to the number of jobs, which is set by the level of aggregate demand. But aggregate demand in Europe is rising and will continue to do so until it hits its long-run upper limit. This limit is set not by demand but by the effective supply of employable labour. And if the supply of labour rises the number of jobs responds. If history tells any lesson, it is that. 3. The Webb's reply to THE CRISIS IN BRITISH INDUSTRY: December 6, 1901 TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES. Sir, In the articles which you have lately published attacking trade unionism you expressly challenge reply, and you even infer that the absence of contradiction in your columns proves, not only the correctness of the allegations themselves, but also the validity of the deductions made from them. We venture therefore, to say that six years' detailed investigation into the actual working of trade unionism all over Great Britain convinced us that, as an institution, it has a good and (to those who will take the trouble to study the facts) a conclusive answer to your charges. But working men do not read The Times, any more than your Correspondent reads our Industrial
