Re: Re: Nader, etc (fwd)
"neil": The LP acts as a political filter to keep escaping workers from fleeing the Democrats deceit and lies and building an anti-capitalist movement Whenever I read stuff like this, I am drawn back to Trotsky's description of the July Days, when Bolsheviks went out in the streets to try to persuade angry workers from demonstrating for the immediate overthrow of Kerensky. Basically, the peasants had to be drawn in or else the revolution would be unsuccessful.Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/ Drawing peasent support makes sense. No? The other difference it seems to me is that Bolshevik party was a communist party whereas LP is a labor party. Not every labor party is per se a communist party altough we socialists desire that it should be. May be I am wrong, Lou. Mine
global keynesianism (fwd)] (fwd)
It is true that Keynesianism was severely hit as a national strategy by the circumstances of the 70's and 80's when the rich social democratic governments of the west were under economic attack from newly developing countries. But that does not mean that Keynesian (or for Doug's sake, so-called Keynesian) interventions could not logically be applied on a world scale. Chris, on the contrary, monetarism was already applied on a world scale, additionaly on third world countries, in the form of _military keynesianism_ after the 1980s. Keynesianism was not seriously hit. It was channeled into a new direction. In fact, as you know, political economic policies of the New Right (Ronald-Margaret couple) was nothing but monetarism dressed up in keynesianism. The only difference was that the keynesianism of the new right abondened the keynesian redistribution of imcome and employment _while_ it followed expansionary policies, (demand side management of the economy), associated with keynesianism. Originating in the core, but gradually expanding to the periphery, global keynesianism enforced 1) tight monetary policies 2) state policies of austerity 3) structural adjustment programs 4) privatization 5) mass unemployment and lower wages 6) tight control of trade unions 7) deregulation of wage protection 8) tax cuts to protect the interests of capitalists 9) expansion of speculative credits 10) the TERROR to export under any circusmtances to repay debt, which forced countries, for example, such as Argentina (1982) and Mexico (1982) to declare bankruptcy... Capitalism is continuing to mess up the world... Mine
Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: [Fwd:Position in theWorld-System and National Emissions of] (fwd)
o! come on.. You folks still continue to see the political spectrum divided between "liberals" and "conservatives" in the US. Liberal is left; conservative is right. This distinction is FALSE, FALSE, FALSE! Even the political discourse of conservatism has a liberal flavour to it, especially if one thinks about the rise of _New Right_ after the 1980s. Somebody has mentioned that Nader supports reproductive freedoms thus he is progressive. What a big diffence? so does George Bush, so do neo-conservatives, so do libertarians...it has long been on _the_ agende of _new right_ that couples can choose the gender of their children freely before they are born. Initial stages of fetus formation (sex) can be modified through genetic engineering. The logical consequence of this engineering automatically matches with the religious idea that "produce more males and have less female babies". Does Nader have any problem with this sexist project of choosing your child's gender freely when he seemingly supports reproductive freedoms-- the same freedoms that are being strategically used by corporate powers in the US that design fascist genetic programs and export those programs to third world? I don't think so. They are all capitalist male pigs! they all want to control women's bodies. We should send all of them to the trash box! As a marxist feminist I am not giving any support to Nader obscurantist! (i can not vote anway so very good) Mine At this time, at least in electoral politics, Nader is the most successful anti-corporate messenger we got--frightening enough to warrant a full denuciatory editorial in the New York Times. This may not speak well for Joel Blau
surrealism on abortion (fwd)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Somebody has mentioned that Nader supports reproductive freedoms thus he is progressive. What a big diffence? so does George Bush, so do neo-conservatives, so do libertarians... Really? http://www.gallup.com/poll/indicators/indabortion.asp. Doug YOU ARE GIVING ME GALLUP POLL INDICATORS HERE. YOU DON'T SEEM TO GET THE BIG PICTURE. I WAS HARSH IN MY CRITICISM OF JOEL, BUT HE GOT THE POINT. WHY NOT YOU? I WAS *NOT* REFERRING TO REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOMS IN THE SENSE OF HAVING THE RIGHT TO ABORTION. I WAS REFERRING TO REPRODUCTIVE ISSUES STRATEGICALLY USED BY THE NEW RIGHT *IN THE NAME OF* REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOMS GENETIC ENGINEERING PROGRAMS DESIGNED TO ENGINEER REPRODUCTION IN ORDER TO REORIENT THE SEX OF THE FETUS BEFORE IT IS BORN IF FEMALE BABY IS NOT DESIRED. SO I CAN SHOP MY CHILD' SEX JUST AS I SHOP APPLES IN THE MARKET PLACE. THIS PROJECT IS IMPLICITY CONSERVATIVE (REACTIONARY) ALTHOUGH DRESSED UP IN RHETORICS LIKE LIBERALISM AND FREEDOM TO CHOOSE BULLSHITS. DOES NADER CRITICIZE THIS NEW CONSERVATIVE/CULTURAL PROJECT? WHY DON'T YOU READ THE REST OF MY POST? you are telling me that one capitalist is different from another capitalist. that is all you say.. Mine
Re: surrealism on abortion (fwd)
Confessions Mine I always like to choose my bullshits, myself, but I'm a known liberal. Doug
Collapse of capitalism (Mao): Whatever it is
Carrol, my e-mail system sucks nowadays, so some of pen-l messages have suddenly disappeared. Some of them don't even reach to my current address and bounce back.I will be transferred to a new system soon. If i am not mistaken, you were talking about the following: I did not say that capitalism would collapse fatalistically. We all know that it needs effective organizing and anti-systemic struggle, in the sense that, for example, as Gramsci understands it. My *problem* is that to talk about the contradictions of capitalism _does not have to exclude the possibility of organizing_ and I don't seriously remember anyone else imposing such a dichotomy (capitalism versus agency).In fact, the devastating realities of capitalism signal that we need to organize urgently. I am no expert on US left so I will leave to the judgement of you folks to decide how much organizing you need. I am more aware of the activities of the Turkish left and depending on my young experience, it seems to me more organized, less secterian and less coapted by liberal ideology, so more alien to the kind of semantics you discuss here: If privatization! yes let's oppose to it. We don't spend years thinking about what is gonna happen if the big business opposes too (which it did). We oppose for different reasons and that is what really matters. Regarding the classical Marxists, eventhough I would tend to suggest that Luxemburg turned out to be more orthodox than Lenin (especially after the Russian revolution and her concerns about the fact that socialist revolution can not take place in a "backward country"), wasn't she the one who still beleived that, despite her orthodoxy, collapse of capitalism also depended on the day to day struggle of working classes--mass spontaneous movement? and Lenin on the role of the _party_, and Mao on _protracted war_? None of those talking about the crisis of capitalism eliminated the possibility of organizing. On the contrary, the ones who eliminated this possibility were those who deliberately thought that capitalism could overcome its contradictions (through state, cartels etc), so they did not see "organizing'" central to struggle against capitalism. They were wrong. If Marxism were not emphasizing crisis, it would not be a revolutionary theory. Theory guides praxis; praxis reflects upon theory. "I can be influenced by what seems to be justice and good sense; but the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie" (Keynes, 1972). Mine
RE: capitalist collapse -- socialism? (fwd)
Jim Devine writes: Given the world-wide competitive effort by capitalists and their governments to push wages down relative to labor productivity, it's quite possible that capitalism will collapse, in the sense that it did in the 1930s. But such a collapse eventually creates forces that allow the revival of capitalism. The most spectacular in the 1930s was the This talk of a possible capitalist revival is fantasy. There is no Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList I agree with Mark here. JD sounds like a reformist who does not want to see the ongoing crisis of capitalism. The keynesian demand side policies of the 1930s and the class alliences it formed in order to manage the economy did not solve the fundamental conflicts between the capitalist and the working class in the long run. Keynesianism was a capitalist project aimed at the integration of labor that would serve the interests of capital, but it could not even achieve this goal successfully (given that, for example, Ford found it exteremely difficult to maintain a large labor force because of the problems of high turnover and internal resistance of workers in the factories, so he had to introduce new forms of control and management--five dollars wage contracts, special bonuses, etc..)) Keynesianism only postponed the crisis of capitalism for a while and then when it reached its limits (the end of the Bretton Woods System), it already generated a crisis in the early 70s, followed by rapid monetary accumulation and credit expansionism, with declining rates of profit and slow productive accumulation. The 1970s were charecterized by stagnation. Period. Moreover, if Keynesian policies were directed at revival of capitalism, let's say, stabilizing international credit relations to maintain demand, which the BWS aimed to establish, in the final analysis, Keynesianism could not contain capitalism. the fragility of international capital markets made it more urgent that the costs of exploiting labor were associated with falling profits and increasing social tension. Mandel points out that "in the US, private indebtedness rose from 73.6% to 140% of the annual GNP between the years 1946 and 1974, while the public debt actually fell proportionally" (Mandel 1975, in Holloway "the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism, _Global Capital, Nation State and the Politics of Money_, p.30). Another sign of the crisis and unsustainaibility of capitalism was the difficulty with which the guarantee of money by central banks was becoming increasingly questionable. Following upon the bank crashes of 1974 here (ie Franklin National), banks found it difficult to secure their loans to countries such as Argentina, Turkey. Crisis jumped to other countries later: British IMF crisis of 1975, the pound crisis of 1976, the dollar crisis of 1977... capitalism is a crisis driven model, and history does not provide us any other option to prove the contrary. Inter-imperialist rivalry is a natural associate of capitalism.Keynesianism and fascism are bourgeois solutions that postponed the crisis of capitalism (if that is what it is meant by "revival of capitalism"). It is a bourgeois/revisionist way of thinking that all these had failed the collapse of capitalism. I think Mark was quite correct when he pointed out the revisionist/revolutionary debate in the SI. Changing circumstances do not mean that these debates are no longer relevant. They surely are, and that is what we have on pen-l. History always repeats itself. We should learn from history. That is why economists should either become historians.. or transfer to any other social science discipline immediately (yuppp! I am so happy with studying sociology and political science...) have a crisis day! Mine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: how many? (fwd)
Carrol, look! please! I have been following the discussions with amazement here! "Eco-fascism" is a mistakenly directed ad hominem-- an unfortunate mischarecterization, to justify the eco-fascism of capitalism and the demands of the mainstream environmental movement. Association of socialist critique of capitalism with stalinism is a liberal sillines: the product of eco-centric mentality. It does not apply to any of the comrades here just because they have said capitalism is an unsustainable system. I find the repititive anology made by a poster on this list unfortunately absurd and sad! let's not use eco-fascism out of context here. we know who eco-fascists are.. thanks, Mine simple to pose): at what standard of living (if conditions are even moderately equalized) can 7 or 10 billion people live? Unless that is reasonably high (and those who lose, if some do, can be reconciled to that loss), then we are seemingly left with Jim Devine's eco-fascism some "stalinist" equivalent. The question of how do we get from here to there is as binding on those who are skeptical of the Proyect/Jones theses as they are on Lou and Mark -- perhaps more binding.
Re: RE: capitalist collapse -- socialism? (fwd)
I agree with Mark here. JD sounds like a reformist who does not want to see the ongoing crisis of capitalism. The keynesian demand side policies of the 1930s and the class alliences it formed in order to manage the economy did not solve the fundamental conflicts between the capitalist and the working class in the long run. Let's see just *one* possible scenario that might fit Jim's position. We imagine that the kind of collapse that Mark predicts begins and a terrible energy crunch hits, combined say with the flooding of coastal cities around the world from global warming. How could capitalism -- or specifically U.S. capitalism survive. Well, first of all blockade Japan and Japan, having no oil, slips back into the 18th century with accompanying mass starvation. Now the key is U.S. monopolization of *all* the remaining oil in the Near East and in the Caucasian area -- plus "excess" population in the U.S. itself. Well anthrax will get rid of "surplus" population in North Africa, the Near East, Turkey, the Ukraine -- and they can ship the excess u.s. population in to run the oil wells there. India is more or less useless now so perhaps use anthrax there. Perhaps they can make an alliance with the Chinese oligarchy and together they can wipe out 2/3rds of the Chinese and enslave more or less the remaining third. true, which is why capitalism is a crisis driven model. I don't see how you contradict my argument here. Capitalism may survive but it does not eliminate the possibility of crisis in the long run, and inter-imperialist rivalry of the kind you mention above. does it? for example, historically, crisis of keynesianism (1970s) was followed by a crisis of monetarism, crash of 1987, and then recession of 1990s. I think these were important discontinuities in the history of capitalism since they show that capitalism is not a self-regulating or sustainable system. the elements of ruling class hegemony and integration of working classes should be discussed within this framework of unstable (fragile) charecter of capitalism. I need to go back to study I have already spent time more than I intended.. bye, Mine Carrol
Re: Gore, Bush and another Gulf War? (fwd)
- Original Message - From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Alan Spector" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: "PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK" [EMAIL PROTECTED]; "WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 12:13 AM Subject: Re: Gore, Bush and another Gulf War? The following is from the Wall Street Journal. No doubt there are some who would say that "at least Gore might get us a few more day care centers." etc. etc. etc. But both candidates are committed to the continuing and intensified slaughter of Iraqi civilians. Should we regard supporting Gore as "at least getting a few reforms but having to reluctantly go along with his mass murder" or should we regard those few reforms as the bribe to some of the American people to go along with this mass murder and imperialism in general? Now that's a different way of looking at the old expression "Half a loaf is better than none." Alan Spector -- Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2000 Gore, Bush Seem Committed To Ousting Saddam Hussein UNDERSTANDABLY ENOUGH, most Americans are only starting to take a close look at the coming presidential election. Six thousand miles from here, though, stands a man who ought to be watching very closely -- and getting a little worried. He's Saddam Hussein, the maddeningly resilient dictator of Iraq. Slowly but surely, he's becoming an issue in the presidential race, and inspiring a bitter war of words between the presidential camps of Al Gore and George W. Bush. Through the rhetoric, though, one reality is becoming clear: Saddam next year will face a new American president who is publicly committed to get rid of him, not merely contain him. On the Gore side of the equation, the vice president himself met just this week with the leaders of the Iraqi National Congress, the umbrella organization of Saddam foes. The meeting was loaded with symbolism. The intended message was that Mr. Gore isn't interested in simply humoring the Iraqi opposition, which critics charge the Clinton administration has done, but rather in working with the opposition to drive him out. Lest anyone miss the point, Mr. Gore's office issued a statement declaring: "The vice president reaffirmed the administration's strong commitment to the objective of removing Saddam Hussein from power, and to bringing him and his inner circle to justice for their war crimes and crimes against humanity." There also was one tangible move to buttress those words, Gore aides say. The Iraqi opposition leaders delivered to Mr. Gore a list of 140 candidates for American training in ways to build the opposition into a meaningful force. PRIVATELY, GORE ADVISERS talk of a kind of three-step process for going after Saddam. Step one would be to turn the Iraqi National Congress, still a young and frequently querulous organization, into a unified voice that can win international respect. Step two would be to use that international respect to persuade Iraq's neighbors to let the opposition operate from their territory. Step three would be to figure out how to move -- and whether to try to precipitate a crisis that creates an opening. Such talk leaves some Bush backers sputtering in anger and charging that the words are hollow after the Clinton-Gore administration has let the opposition wilt over the last seven years. "I have never seen, in 30 years in Washington, a more sustained hypocrisy, never," says Richard Perle, a former senior Pentagon administration aide who now advises the Bush campaign. In his own remarks, Texas Gov. Bush hasn't been particularly specific, saying merely that he would hit Iraq hard if he saw any clear sign that it is building weapons of mass destruction or massing its military forces. But look for Mr. Bush to hold his own meeting with the Iraqi opposition soon. And Mr. Bush's lead foreign-policy adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is explicit: "Regime change is necessary," she declares. She is careful not to overpromise, asserting: "This is something that could take some time." Like team Gore, she talks of the need to rebuild the anti-Iraq coalition, including Persian Gulf states and Turkey, as a precondition for eliminating Saddam. Others in the Bush orbit, offering their personal ideas, sound more aggressive. Both Mr. Perle and Robert Zoellick, a former top aide to Gov. Bush's father, advocate specific steps to oust Saddam. Mr. Perle calls for giving the Iraqi National Congress tools such as radio transmitters to beam an anti-Saddam message into Iraq and for more extensive training for Saddam's foes in ways to mobilize opposition, particularly in the Iraqi military. THEN, MR. PERLE suggests, the U.S. should help the opposition "re-establish control over some piece of territory" inside Iraq and remove international
Re: Successful Mindwashing of Doug Henwood!! (fwd)
Instead, you should feel proud of yourself... Mine Brad De Long wrote: There can be no doubt. Now we neoclassicals can reveal the truth: Henwood is one of *us* now... I'm not sure whether to feel exonerated or to call my shrink. Doug -- Mine Aysen Doyran PhD Student Department of Political Science SUNY at Albany Nelson A. Rockefeller College 135 Western Ave.; Milne 102 Albany, NY 1 NetZero Free Internet Access and Email_ Download Now http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html Request a CDROM 1-800-333-3633 ___
Cinton Fungus (fwd)
Emilio Apocalypse Now By Alfredo Molano B. The Anti-Narcotics Brigade, in a victory march, will open door after door in Putumayo and Caqueta so that Carlos Castano's troops can, in Mrs. Albright's words "extend democracy to the south". EL ESPECTADOR Sunday, 25 June 2000 Ever since I read news of the approval of the two trillion Colombian pesos to strengthen the "oldest democracy in South America" black butterflies in my stomach have not stopped fluttering. How many Colombians, who today are alive, have dreams, and sweat doing odd jobs, will die with the decision of the United States Congress? Do the settlers of Caño Mosco, pushed into growing coca by the landowners of Villanueva who robbed them of their lands, know what awaits them? What are the dentist, the carter, the motorboatman, the mayors office employee of Pinuña Negra, innocent of the fact that the bombs that will kill them are already made and that the helicopters that will fire them are ready to take off, doing? Tomorrow, while Senator Lotts boys continue getting high on the heroin produced by the Mujadeen that defeated the Russian Communists in Afganistan a few years ago, or on the cocaine that their new allies in southern Bolivar department produce, in the mountains of Almaguer, Cauca, the peasants will be left with the sockets of their own eyes to hide in because everything else will be scorched earth. The Anti-Narcotics Brigade, in a victory march, will open door after door in Putumayo and Caquetá so that Carlos Castaños troops can, in Mrs. Albrights words "extend democracy to the south". Each day, reports of human rights violations will attribute less and less responsibility to the Armed Forces for obvious, evident, and tacit reasons. And Senator Helms will pass them over to Senator Leahy, who will not be able to say anything. Perhaps General Wilhelm will land at the Tres Esquinas base to distribute cans of American powdered milk, American corn, and American deviled meat, and a photo of the American First lady to 20 displaced families prepared especially for the occasion while General McCaffrey copiously gives out an English primer with the basic principals of the International Human Rights, put into practice by him in the Persian Gulf War. The Minister of Defense, without a tie, as is customary these days, will frenetically applaud the exemplary act of generosity and sovereignty. I do not want to think of what awaits the small black children who try to fly kites made from potato chip packages on the banks of the Atrato River, the day that the paramilitaries are given the green light to finish off even the seeds as the chulavitas (the Conservative paramilitaries during the Violence period) did in Rovira, Tolima in the 1950s. Nor, of what will happen to the Uwa Indian people when the national army, with painted faces, laser sensors, and grenade launchers, carry out an aerial operation on their sacred lands to show off the Black Hawk helicopters, whose makers managed to prevail in the Senate after extensive lobbying. I wouldnt want to imagine - today is the day of Saint John, who wrote - "and there were lightening bolts and thunder and a great tremor on the earth" - what 40,000 guerrillas armed to the teeth will do, once they step away from the negotiating table and go out to wage war without quarter and with no return. I am not going to read - in a way I have already read them - the headlines of the media exalting the bravery and abnegation of the U.S. advisors that sacrifice their golf games on the greens of the School of the Americas to come and "give us a hand" as Luis Alberto Moreno would say. I would prefer to read within a few years, God-willing, the reports of the diverted funds, crooked dealings, payoffs, bribes, and the trafficking of cocaine and heroin on the part of the new allies in defense of the oldest democracy in Latin America, in order to write, if I am still able: "Live - and Learn". Weekly News Update on the Americas * Nicaragua Solidarity Network of NY 339 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10012 * 212-674-9499 fax: 212-674-9139 http://home.earthlink.net/~dbwilson/wnuhome.html * [EMAIL PROTECTED] * CLM-NEWS is brought to you by the COLOMBIAN LABOR MONITOR at * * http://www.prairienet.org/clm * * and the CHICAGO COLOMBIA COMMITTEE * * Email us at [EMAIL PROTECTED] or * * Dennis Grammenos at [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To subscribe send request to [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * subscribe clm-news Your Name * Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
Re: re: energy (fwd)
o la la.. Jay Hanson's energy list serv? never been to, but it must be interesting. Jay is a phenomenal guy personality wise. Three basic ideas he subscribes to in every occasion I have been to: 1) genetic roots of authoritarianism 2)inherent destructiveness of human nature 3) inevitability of energy crisis. I *love* Hobbesians when they present themselves as Marxists... bye, Mine This kind of thing is debated on Jay Hanson's list, where ex-vice presidents of PV companies argue that PV's are the future and people answer them like this From: Mark Boberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed Jun 28, 2000 11:02pm Subject: PV (was RE: Re: Lynch recap) --- In [EMAIL PROTECTED], Glenn Lieding [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Investing today's oil-energy in manufacturing, deploying, and maintaining PV, in order to realize an energy return on that investment in the future, makes sense if the average rate of energy made available by the PV, multiplied by the lifespan of the PV, exceeds the total energy invested. A real world test of PV viability would be for a PV manufacturer to commit to building and operating a PV production facility using only PV power to do it. Solarex (BPAmoco) has a plant with an impressive all-PV roof. I sent them an Email asking whether that plant was self sufficient. Their answer was: no, actually we are the second largest electricity consumer in the county. So, PV industry, if you're listening, here's the challenge: 1) Using your coolest, best, most efficient technology, build say 10 megawatts of PV panels. Acquire all the necessary mounts,trackers, inverters, wire, batteries, controllers, etc. We won't even count the energy required to make all this, its a freebie. 2) Find the best solar site in the World and set up your system there. 3) Locate, lease, and set up the equipment necessary to construct a PV plant from scratch. Select versions of all this stuff that will run on PV electrical power (invent new versions as required - an electric backhoe comes to mind). Use a PV powered truck, train, boat to bring the equipment and raw materials to the site. The lease cost of this stuff will be charged to the future PV production of the plant on an energy basis (ie equivalent PV panel lifetime energy production). 4) Saw the wood, smelt the steel, burn the limestone for the cement, crush the gravel, machine the bolts, dig the dirt,etc, etc, and erect the building, all using the PV from your 10 megawatt system. 5) Locate, lease, and set up the equipment necessary to produce PV panels complete (silicon production, wafer production, panel assembly, etc.) The lease cost for this stuff will also be charged to the future PV production of the plant on an energy basis. 6) Operate the plant, the employee housing, the stores and utilities supporting the employees, all from the 10 megawatt system. Don't forget to pay the employees in scrip redeemable in PV panels. 7) Produce PV panels until "breakeven", which would be something like 10 megawatts worth (item 1) plus a bunch more (items 3, 5 and 6). 8) (Maybe) produce a bunch more "net" panels until the plant wears out. Don't forget to subtract any panels made to replace "burnouts" in your 10 megawatt array and PV panel scrip redemptions by the employees (I'm guessing about one to three 100 watt panels per employee per week). 9) Divide the number of panels produced by the number of "breakeven" panels in item 7). If the number is say, 2.0 or more, you win. Less than 2.0, we all lose. This isn't really an unreasonable challenge, IF PV really has what it takes to replace some significant portion of the hydrocarbon energy demand. So, how about it? Solarex? Siemens? Koyocera? Solec? Anybody?
Re: Re: Re: Re: [Fwd: Position in the World-System andNational Emissions of] (fwd)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: what are you trying to prove with your insults Doug? are you implying the impossibility of a socialist agenda? who is fantasizing here? Ok, so you don't have any idea what changes are necessary in the actual structures of production and consumption. All that's required is loyalty to Marx and a critical attitude. That's pretty much what I suspected, but it's good to see my suspicions confirmed. this is complete BS. We discussed what changes were necessary in the "actual structures of production" if you had paid enough attention to the subject matter of the posts instead of insulting people. One of them being, as it was mentioned, is the abolution of the distinction between town and country side. This distinction exists in every advacned capitalist country and it has been taking place in every developing country that is in the process of capitalist modernization.On the one hand, we have uneven urbanization and industrilization in the cities, on the other, we have commercialized agriculture in the country side: two forms of inequalities and class conflicts existing side by side and refinforcing each other. why to abolish this distinction as a sociialist agenda (since there is a rationale for it) 1) first, as MArx said in primitive accumulation chapter of Capital that capitalism first started in the country side, tranforming the property relations and generating the surplus necessary to build capitalism in the cities, so country had to be modernized first with new instruments and techniques of production. 2) although this transformation was progressive, it also impoverished the agricultural folk., either by forcing them to work under new capitalist landlords or forcing them to migrate to cities as wage laborers. If you also look at the actually existing socialisms, Doug, you will see an attempt to abolish this country/city duality towards a more equitable redistribution of wealth, so we are not talking about fantasy here or something which did not exist.. Land reforms in Russia, China, Cuba all attemped to achieve abolition of property in land; since traditional agricultural economy was also largely untransformed in those countries due to historical reasons, land reforms played an important role in applying rents of land to public purposes through a progressive income tax (which Marx talks in the Manifesto) and "abolution of right of inheritance". I am not saying land reforms were compeletely sucessfull; I am saying they were historically progessive compared to previous times (capitalism). For example, in Russia, between 1917-1921, various decrees were implemented by the soviet government to abolish the special priviliges of aristocrats, tsarist officials and capitalists (at a time when there were still monarchies in Europe). in 1929, the revolutionary cadre accomplished the elimination of estates of nobles (structurally) and their various "honorofic and political priviliges and their landed properties.the class of capitalists too with its private ownership and control of various industrial and commercial enterprises met its demise in this periodduring the 1920s, Red army and party leaders were heavily recruited from industial workers and peasent background" (Skocpol, p. 227) Socialism should be judged vis a vis historical circumstances by means of assesing the resources available to actors. We should learn from history and the experiences of actually existing socialisms.I know this is of zero interest to you Doug. Regarding population-- the part of your post which does not directly concern me, but i will answer. 0 population rate in Europe has nothing to do with the sustainability of environment there. Over-population pressures are created by capitalism, not by people, among the several reasons being HISTORY OF COLONIALISM, IMPERIALISM, POVERTY, PLUNDERING OF NON-WHITES AND THEIR RESOURCES, DECLINING LIVING STANDARTS IN THE THIRD WORLD, GLOBAL INEQUALITIES, INCREASING ECONOMIC INSECURITY. IN THOSE COUNTRIES FACING EXTEREME POVERTY, CHILDREN ARE SEEN AS AN ASSET-- A SOURCE OF INCOME AND CHEAP LABOR. THINK ABOUT CHILD SLAVERY, THINK ABOUT CHILD SEX.. Another point worth mentioning: strawman of over-population is one's of the ways of obscuring capitalism's inequalities and racism.. I am working in an underclass black neigh, and I generally walk there. The people are structurally marginalized in that area of Albany, living below the poverty line. They are isolated into a small area; living as a big family, children playing outside etc.. so what happens is that they seem to be over-populated: small houses not having enough capacity to carry people and unevenly built to marginalize african american people there!! This is racism, dude racism! okey, my blood pressure is gradually increasing. have a suny day on wall street! Mine Oh, and solving the population problem? When people are happier they'll have fewer babies. Population growth is virtually 0 in Western
Re: Position within the World System (fwd)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: what are you trying to prove with your insults Doug? are you implying the impossibility of a socialist agenda? who is fantasizing here? Ok, so you don't have any idea what changes are necessary in the actual structures of production and consumption. All that's required is loyalty to Marx and a critical attitude. That's pretty much what I suspected, but it's good to see my suspicions confirmed. BS. We discussed what changes were necesary in the "actual structures of production", if you had paid enough attention to the subject matter of the posts insteaed of insulting people. One of them being, as it was mentioned, is the abolution of the distinction between town and country side. This distinction exists in every advanced capitalist country, and it has been taking place in every developing country that is in the process of capitalist modernization.On the one hand we have uneven urbanization and industrilization in the cities, on the other we have commercialized forms of agriculture in the country side: two forms of inequalities and class conflicts existing side by side and refinforcing each other. why to abolish this distinction as part of the agenda (since there is a rationale for it) 1) first as MArx said in primitive accumulation chapter of Capital that capitalism first started in the country side, tranforming the property relations and generating the surplus necessary to build capitalism in the cities, so country had to be modernized first with new instruments and techniques of production. 2) although this transformation was progressive, it also impoverished the agricultural folk, either by forcing them to work under new capitalist landlords or forcing them to migrate to cities as wage laborers. If you also look at the actually existing socialisms, Doug, you will see an attempt to abolish this country/city duality towards a more equitable redistribution of wealth.If you also look at the actually existing socialisms, you will see an attempt to abolish this country/city duality towards a more equitable redistribution of wealth. Land reforms in Russia, China, Cuba all attemped to achieve abolition of property in land. Since traditional agricultural economy was also largely untransformed in those countries due to historical reasons, land reforms played an important role in applying rents of land to public purposes through a progressive income tax (which Marx talks in the Manifesto) and "abolution of right of inheritance". I am not saying land reforms were compeletely sucessfull; I am saying they were historically progessive compared to previous times (capitalism). For example, in Russia, between 1917-1921, various decrees were implemented by the soviet government to abolish the specaial priviliges of aristocrats, tsarist officials and capitalists ( at a time when there were still monarchies in Europe). in 1929, the revolutionary cadre accomplished the elimination of estates of nobles (structurally) and their various "honorofic and political priviliges and their landed properties.the class of capitalists too with its private ownership and control of various industrial and commercial enterprises met its demise in this period" (SKOCPOL, _States and Revolutions_, P.227). Socialism should be judged vis a vis historical circumstances by means of assesing the resources available to actors. We should learn from history and the experiences of actually existing socialisms.I know this is of zero interest to you, Doug. Regarding population-- the part of your post which does not direclty concern me-- but I will answer. 0 population rate in Europe nothing to do with the sustainability of environment there. Over-population pressures are created by capitalism, not by people, among the several reasons being HISTORY OF COLONIALISM, POVERTY, PLUNDERING OF NON-WHITES AND THEIR RESOURCES, DECLINING LIVING STANDARTS IN THE THIRD WORLD, GLOBAL INEQUALITIES, INCREASING ECONOMIC INSECURITY. IN THOSE COUNTRIES FACING EXTEREME POVERTY, CHILDREN ARE SEEN AS AN ASSET-- A SOURCE OF INCOME AND CHEAP LABOR. THINK ABOUT CHILD SLAVERY, THINK ABOUT CHILD SEX.. Another point worth mentioning: Strawman of over-population is one's of the ways of obscuring capitalism's inequalities and racism.. I am working in an underclass black neigh, and I generally walk there. Black people are structurally marginalized in that area of Albany, living below the poverty line. They are isolated into a small area; children playing outside etc.. so what happens is that they seem to be over-populated-- small houses not having enough capacity to carry people and unevenly built to marginalize african american people. This is racism, DUDE racism! okey, my blood pressure is gradually increasing. I wish you a suny day on Wall Street! Mine Oh, and solving the population problem? When people are happier they'll have fewer babies. Population growth is virtually 0 in Western Europe, but Western Europe is only a bit more ecologically
Growth (fwd)
Be very careful. The population of the rich grows in two ways: (i) the rich have lots of children, and (ii) the poor become rich... do you know that african american women are sterilized at a significantly higher rate than white women? (according to our sociologist friend,Andy Austin, 3-4 times) doesn't it also bother you that the US elite(particulary the new right) celebrate the decline in black fertility rates? What bothers you actually? Mine That worry about "overpopulation" soon turns into an action planaimed at making sure that the poor people of the world--and theirdescendants--stay poor... Brad Delong Brad, why don't you have a look at how IMF deals with population control, poverty reduction and debt relief in the third world? It looks like an excellent agenda of making the poor rich. I am sure some other defenders of Bartlett will find the piece quite appealing too... Mine From: Robert Weissman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [stop-imf] IMF explains its role in poverty reduction This is one of the clearer explanations, from the IMF's point of view, of the new and improved, kinder, gentler IMF. Robert Weissman Essential Information | Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From http://www.imf.org/external/np/speeches/2000/061500.htm Strengthening the Focus on Poverty Reduction Remarks by Mr. Eduardo Aninat Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund At the Development Policy Forum Berlin, June 15, 2000 Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to open this international policy dialogue on poverty reduction and debt relief. We all know the problem, one of the greatest faced by mankind today: 1.2billion people worldwide living on less than $1 per day, a number that has held roughly unchanged over the past decade and threatens to rise in the years ahead. What we need is a solution, and here, perhaps we can draw inspiration from the famous inventor, Benjamin Franklin. For it was on this day, in 1752, that he is said to have tossed a kite into the sky with a key tied to its string and proved that lightning contained electricity. It was a small step, achieved with simple means, but it was catalytic enough so as to transform our very existence. So what step can we, the international community, take to transform the existence of the world's poor? I would like to suggest that perhaps we, together, have started that step by last September adopting a new approach to poverty reductionone that builds on decisive good practices in countries and in donor agencies. The emphasis now will be more on the poor countries themselves taking the lead in setting their own priorities and defining their own programs through participatory processes, with the full involvement of the international community. What is really different in this approach? Why should it deliver better results than old, past efforts? And how will debt relief tie in? I will try to answer these questions in my remarks today, but first a little background on why we are even headed down this road. Origin of stronger poverty focus Quite frankly, the old approaches were not yielding the hoped-for results in most parts of the world, including Africa and much of Asia. In1995, the international community formally pledged to reduce by half the proportion of people living in extreme poverty by2015, achieve universal primary education in all countries, reduce infant mortality rates, and improve a number of other social and environmental indicators. But a few years later, despite important progress on many fronts, it was clear that the chances of meeting these pledges were becoming slimmer. The regional variations have been great, with East Asia and the Pacific ahead of schedule, particularly on poverty reduction, but the other regions behind schedule. Another influence was the greater recognition of the mutually reinforcing nature of growth and poverty reduction. We had long known that sound macroeconomic policies favor growth. We had also long known that sound macroeconomic policies and growth-enhancing structural reforms favor the poor, since growth is the single most important source of poverty reduction and an important source of financing for targeted social outlays. For instance, in Chile during the1990s, four-fifths of the achieved 50percent increase in real per capita social expenditure emanated from accelerated growth. But there now is greater acceptance that causation also runs in the other direction. Poverty reduction and social equity feed back positively into growth. Without poverty reduction, it is difficult to sustain sound macro policies and structural reforms long enough to eradicate inflation and increase the growth ratethere is unlikely to be the political support to persevere. Indeed, for countries with a high proportion of the population in poverty, it is difficult to increase growth without tackling poverty directly. Also, policies that help the poor directly, such as investing in primary education
Re: Malthus revisited (fwd)
Louis Proyect wrote: Mark Jones' alleged raising of the overpopulation question leads us once again into a discussion of the Marxist critique of Malthus. I would refer PEN-L'ers to Michael Perelman's "Marx's Crises Theory: Scarcity, Labor and Finance", Lou, I agree with the rest of your post. I should, however, open a small paranthesis that I don't frankly think that comrade Mark has Marx's critique of Malthus in his mind when he defends Bartlett, since Bartlett, is not a Marxist. What we should instead try to address here is the urgent necessity of preserving Marx from the intrusions of social darwinist theories of over-population. so the issue here is *not* to refuse to see _overpopulation as an aspect of capitalism_ but rather to refuse to see it as part of the _solution_ to capitalism's energy crisis actually, it is interesting to see below how Malthus' ideas are linked to a particular religious world view. I have always wondered about how social darwinism and religion meet at some point,although they seem exact opposites in the first place. here is Marx's reply. Marx (Volume 1) pp.766-767: " the principle of population slowly worked out in the 18th century, and then, in the midst of a great social crisis, proclaimed with drums and trumpets as the infallible antitode to the doctrines of Condorcet, etc., was greated jubilantly by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after a progressive development of humanityLet us note incidentally that although Malthus was a parson of the Church of England he had taken the monastic view of celibacyThe circumstances favourably distinguishes Malthus from other protestant parsons, who have flung off the Catholic requirement of the celibacy of the priesthood, and taken "be fruitfull and multiply" as their special Biblical missionto such an extend that they generally contribute to the increase of population to a really unbecoming extent, while at the same time preaching the principle of population to workers. ... With the exception of the Venetical monk Ortes, an original and clever writer,most of the population theorists are Protestant clerics. For instance Bruckner's Theorie du systeme animal (Leyden 1767) in which the the whole of the modern theory of population is exhaustively terated , using ideas furnished by the passing dispute between Quesnay and his pupil, the elder Mirabeau, then Parson Wallace,Parson Townsend, Parson Malthus and his pupil, the arch Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing of lesser reverend scribblers in this line" Mine, SUNY/Albany
Re: Re: Re: RE: My looniness (fwd)
Mark, I have been watching your sarcasmic criticisms with enthusiasm for two days. You F many on the list left and right. What can I say? I really admire your sense of humor. Marxists are generally known to be cool people. You are truly sarcastic! sarcastically, Mine
Review Article: World Resources Institute. (fwd)
A mainstream source on environmental regulation.. Mine Volume 2, Review 1, 1996 http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html ISSN 1076-156X World Resources Institute. WORLD RESOURCES 1994-95: A GUIDE TO THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. xii+400 pp. ISBN 0-19-521044-1, $35.00 (hardcover); ISBN 0-19-521045-X, $21.95 (paper). Reviewed by Brad Bullock, Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, Virginia, USA v. 8/12/96 Scholars familiar with the difficulties of finding good sources of comparable, international statistics will appreciate the stated purpose of the WORLD RESOURCES series: "to meet the critical need for accessible, accurate information on environment and development" (p. ix). The volumes are published biennially by the World Resources Institute (WRI), an independent, not-for-profit corporation, in collaboration with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the related United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The 1994-95 report, sixth in the series, examines the relationship between people and the environment and emphasizes global resource consumption, population growth, and the roles of women -- especially how women will figure into efforts to protect or manage environmental resources. The structure and style of WORLD RESOURCES will remind you of the UNDP's HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORT, or perhaps even more the World Bank's WORLD DEVELOPMENT REPORT -- a particular theme is presented in analytical overview, complete with multitudinous color graphics and all the boxed inserts one could possibly want. A distinguishing feature here is the tradition of examining, in painstaking detail, the volume's thematic issues for a particular region (in this volume China and India, the world's two most populous nations and those facing the most serious resource challenges). For research and teaching, this series excels in its conscious focus on the environment and who actually uses the world's resources. WRI claims, validly, that their organizational status allows them to take a more independent stance on [Page 1] Journal of World-Systems Research development issues. The ongoing project of data gathering is guided by the premise that sustainable development requires wise resource management that "puts people first." Clearly stated, "sustainable development is based on the recognition that a nation cannot reach its economic goals without also achieving environmental and social goals -- that is, universal education and employment opportunity, universal health and reproductive care, equitable access to and distribution of resources, stable populations, and a sustained natural resource base" (p. 43). By now scholars generally appreciate the growing interdependency of environmental and development issues, as socioeconomic facts about the consequences of resource depletion and degradation continue to pile up. This resource book, however, stands out for how thoroughly it explores related conditions and trends. The sheer breadth of the topics covered is impressive -- e.g., there are whole chapters devoted to forest and rangelands, biodiversity, atmospheric pollution and climate, and the structure of national and local policies. I found particularly impressive the chapters on food and agriculture and on energy. It should not surprise us that such a careful look at trends in resource consumption or patterns of trade, while confirming some of our worst suspicions, also challenges conventional wisdom. For example, the resources most in danger of depletion are the renewable, rather than the nonrenewable ones, and manufactured exports from developing countries are growing considerably more rapidly than are raw material exports. This volume is also commendable for acknowledging as primary, rather than secondary, the roles of women in achieving sustainable development. At least since Ester Boserups' A ROLE IN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT (1970), a growing literature has criticized traditional schemes for marginalizing women, and more recent works (e.g., Gita Sen and Caren Grown, DEVELOPMENT, CRISES, AND ALTERNATIVE VISIONS, 1987) stress that the reigning development models themselves are flawed and must be redrawn to fully utilize the potential of women in development. The present work [Page 2] Journal of World-Systems Research emphasizes that "women have greater influence than men on rates of population growth and infant and child mortality, on health and nutrition, on children's education, and on natural resource management . . . inequalities that are detrimental to them . . . are detrimental as well to society at large and to the environment" (p. 43). The data tables and technical notes presented in the back of the publication are extensive and, generally, the country data is fairly complete. Among interesting tables of note: Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Industrial
World-system Studies of the Environment (fwd)
Journal of World-Systems Research Volume 3, Number 3 (Fall 1997) http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html ISSN 1076-156X World-system Studies of the Environment by Tim Bartley Department of Sociology University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 [EMAIL PROTECTED] and Albert Bergesen Department of Sociology University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cite: Bartley, Tim, and Albert Bergesen. (1997). "World-system Studies of the Environment." Journal of World-Systems Research (http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html) 3: 369 - 380. ABSTRACT: The world-system idea has been used to explain a great deal about national institutional life, from rates of economic growth to changing patterns of schooling. One of the newer areas of interest is the environment. In the following review we examine scholarship that deals with environmental problems from a distinctly world systemic perspective. © 1997 Tim Bartley Albert Bergesen. [Page 369] Journal of World-Systems Research 1. Environmental Degradation 1.1 Deforestation Several quantitative studies have shown that the semiperiphery is the site of the most intense deforestation (Burns, Kick, Murray, and Murray 1994; Kick, Burns, Davis, Murray, and Murray 1996). First, there is a long history of exploitation of peripheral and semiperipheral forests by core countries, and as Chew (1996) notes there is an historical association between colonialism and deforestation in Southeast Asia. Spain and Portugal, Holland, Britain, and the U.S. have all exploited Asian forests during their periods of dominance in the world-system. When a country is rapidly developing and rising to a hegemonic status its level of timber consumption rises. Japan for instance has recently experienced a dramatic increase in wood and timber consumption, with as much as 50% of log imports and 98% of plywood imports coming from southeast Asia. Second, while population growth leads to deforestation in all sectors of the world-system, its effects are exacerbated in the semiperiphery, as population growth necessitates the production of more lumber and thus leads to deforestation (Kick et al. 1996). Yet Burns et al. (1994) and Kick et al. (1996) find that for semiperipheral countries, rural population growth is a better predictor of deforestation than is total population growth, arguing that urban concentration in the semiperiphery causes landless people to migrate out of the city into forested areas--what is called the process of rural encroachment. Since these migrants possess little knowledge of agricultural practices they end up contributing to deforestation. Much more deforestation is attributable to 'slash and burn' activity by landless migrant poor people, conversion of forests to pasture land, and over-harvesting of fuel wood, than it is to commercial logging (Burns et al. 1994:225). Although the process of rural encroachment occurs within a society, the urbanization that leads to out-migration is a consequence of rapid uneven development of semiperipheral countries in the world-system. In addition, semiperipheral countries deforest more than others because of their position of potential upward mobility in the world-system, which leads them to place more weight on industrialization than on environmental protection.1 Smith (1994) notes that Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) tend to have lax environmental regulations. Because of their potential for economic development, semiperipheral countries are more eager to reap the economic benefits of forest exploitation than are developed countries. Further, semiperipheral countries have a greater technological capability to deforest than do peripheral countries (Burns et al. 1994; Kick et al. 1996). Such semiperipheral states have historically allowed or even encouraged deforestation in attempting to economically develop. Chew (1996) provides an example in his analysis of post-colonial southeast Asia. He argues that attempts to build export-led economies and Western-style states have secured the cooperation of political elites and transnational corporations in exploiting forests. Nazmi (1991), though not espousing a world-system perspective, offers a similar example for the case of Brazil, noting that government incentives for cattle ranching have increased deforestation; badly defined property rights have encouraged small-scale, destructive agriculture; and an emphasis on pig iron
[Fwd: Position in the World-System and National Emissions of] (fwd)
I have found myself in agreement with Lou's recent post suggesting that the roots of ecological crisis and overpopulation pressures lie in the contradictions of capitalism, and that a socialist revolution is not only necessary but also desirable if we are to have a sustainable ecological system in the future. I have not quite followed where Mark is going with energy crisis, partly because I don't understand his exuberant use of language. Regarding reformist folks who think energy crisis is not inevitable if we use other natural sources in place of oil such as solar energy (or wheel-chair friendly busses in LA), I find their views helpful, but failing to take into account the big *global* picture. Parelman said that Southern citizens do not want California beaches to polluted any longer. Whole protecting the beaches is of great concern to some people, it is EQUALLY important yet urgently necessary to consider human environmental destruction from the perspective of world system analysis, international division of labor, core periphery and "global power dependency relationships". The following article suggests a research agenda along these lines, transcending the limitations of american centric approaches. It is a cross national study on the environmental implications of greenhouse gases. The authors argue that "The United States is the largest global emitter of CO2". Mine
Position in the World-System and National Emissions of Greenhousegases (fwd)
ops, here is the article... Mine Journal of World-Systems Research Volume 3, Number 3 (Fall 1997) http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html ISSN 1076-156X Position in the World-System and National Emissions of Greenhouse Gases* by Thomas J. Burns Department of Sociology University of Utah Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Byron L. Davis Department of Sociology University of Utah Edward L. Kick Department of Sociology University of Utah Cite: Burns, Thomas J., Byron L. Davis, and Edward L. Kick. (1997). "Position in the World-System and National Emissions of Greenhouse Gases." Journal of World-Systems Research 3: 432 - ??. *An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Third World Studies Conference, Omaha, Nebraska, October 1995. © 1997 Thomas J. Burns, Byron L. Davis, and Edward L. Kick. [Page 432] Journal of World-Systems Research INTRODUCTION The "greenhouse effect" is the Earth's trapping of infrared radiation or heat. Physical scientists have linked the greenhouse effect to the emission of two primary sources, or "greenhouse gases"carbon dioxide and methane. While this in itself is a naturallyoccurring phenomenon, the amount of trapped heat has increased substantially along with heightened human production and consumption. In fact, the amount of heat trapped in the earth's atmosphere through the greenhouse effect has risen dramatically in the last thirty years, and has done so in rough proportion to the loss of world carbon sinks (most notably through deforestation) in that same period (Grimes and Roberts 1995; Schneider 1989). Despite the apparent importance of these dynamics, there is relatively little social science theorization and crossnational research on such global environmental issues. There is especially a paucity of crossnational, quantitative research in sociology that focuses on the social antecedents to environmental outcomes (for exceptions, see Burns et al. 1994, 1995; Kick et al. 1996; Grimes and Roberts 1995). We find this condition surprising given the substantial initial work of environmental sociologists (Dunlap and Catton 1978, 1979; Buttel 1987) and the key role social scientists might in principle play in addressing such worldwide problems (Laska 1993). As a consequence, we propose and assess a perspective on the global and national social causes of one environmental dynamic, the greenhouse effect. [Page 433] Journal of World-Systems Research THE NATURE OF GREENHOUSE GASES For present purposes it is sufficient to underscore just a few essentials about the "greenhouse effect." It refers to the atmospheric trapping of heat that, for the most part, emanates from natural compounds (e.g., carbon dioxide, methane), but it is vitally important to recognize that global social life has greatly augmented the concentration of these and other gases. Physical scientists theorize that if this humangenerated trend continues, global climatic changes will occur that have serious, if not catastrophic, longterm effects (e.g. Schneider 1989; CDAC 1983). These effects range from the destruction of agriculture to mammoth flooding as a result of the melting of the polar ice caps. The most important humanproduced greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide (CO2), which is primarily a product of fossil fuel usage. The United States is the largest global emitter of CO2, followed by the former U.S.S.R., China, India, and Germany. Net amounts of CO2 are also increased through human land use, especially as it involves deforestation. Because forests are the primary locus of CO2oxygen exchange, their depletion reduces the rate of natural CO2 uptake. Large amounts of another greenhouse gas, methane (CH4), similarly result from wet rice agriculture, livestock, uncontrolled coal mine emissions, and petroleum and natural gas leakages (World Resources Institute 1994:199202, 361272). China is the world's leading emitter of methane, followed by India, the United States, Brazil, and Bulgaria. [Page 434] Journal of World-Systems Research It should be emphasized that the social dynamics leading to CO2, CH4 and to environmental degradation generally, may operate quite differently across structural positions in the worldsystem (Olsen 1990; Burns et al. 1994, 1995; Kick et al. 1996; Grimes and Roberts 1993), and that these dynamics themselves depend upon global processes (e.g. Kone 1993; Thiele and Wiebelt
Position in the World-System and National Emissions of (fwd)
this article is huge. my system does not allow me to send it. here is the web address. I did not attach it to my previous post... Mine Journal of World-Systems Research Volume 3, Number 3 (Fall 1997) http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html ISSN 1076-156X Position in the World-System and National Emissions of Greenhouse Gases* by
Position in the World-System and National Emissions of (fwd)
Journal of World-Systems Research Volume 3, Number 3 (Fall 1997) http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html ISSN 1076-156X Position in the World-System and National Emissions of Greenhouse Gases* by Thomas J. Burns Department of Sociology University of Utah Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Byron L. Davis Department of Sociology University of Utah Edward L. Kick Department of Sociology University of Utah Cite: Burns, Thomas J., Byron L. Davis, and Edward L. Kick. (1997). "Position in the World-System and National Emissions of Greenhouse Gases." Journal of World-Systems Research 3: 432 - ??. *An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Third World Studies Conference, Omaha, Nebraska, October 1995. © 1997 Thomas J. Burns, Byron L. Davis, and Edward L. Kick. [Page 432] Journal of World-Systems Research INTRODUCTION The "greenhouse effect" is the Earth's trapping of infrared radiation or heat. Physical scientists have linked the greenhouse effect to the emission of two primary sources, or "greenhouse gases"carbon dioxide and methane. While this in itself is a naturallyoccurring phenomenon, the amount of trapped heat has increased substantially along with heightened human production and consumption. In fact, the amount of heat trapped in the earth's atmosphere through the greenhouse effect has risen dramatically in the last thirty years, and has done so in rough proportion to the loss of world carbon sinks (most notably through deforestation) in that same period (Grimes and Roberts 1995; Schneider 1989). Despite the apparent importance of these dynamics, there is relatively little social science theorization and crossnational research on such global environmental issues. There is especially a paucity of crossnational, quantitative research in sociology that focuses on the social antecedents to environmental outcomes (for exceptions, see Burns et al. 1994, 1995; Kick et al. 1996; Grimes and Roberts 1995). We find this condition surprising given the substantial initial work of environmental sociologists (Dunlap and Catton 1978, 1979; Buttel 1987) and the key role social scientists might in principle play in addressing such worldwide problems (Laska 1993). As a consequence, we propose and assess a perspective on the global and national social causes of one environmental dynamic, the greenhouse effect. [Page 433] Journal of World-Systems Research THE NATURE OF GREENHOUSE GASES For present purposes it is sufficient to underscore just a few essentials about the "greenhouse effect." It refers to the atmospheric trapping of heat that, for the most part, emanates from natural compounds (e.g., carbon dioxide, methane), but it is vitally important to recognize that global social life has greatly augmented the concentration of these and other gases. Physical scientists theorize that if this humangenerated trend continues, global climatic changes will occur that have serious, if not catastrophic, longterm effects (e.g. Schneider 1989; CDAC 1983). These effects range from the destruction of agriculture to mammoth flooding as a result of the melting of the polar ice caps. The most important humanproduced greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide (CO2), which is primarily a product of fossil fuel usage. The United States is the largest global emitter of CO2, followed by the former U.S.S.R., China, India, and Germany. Net amounts of CO2 are also increased through human land use, especially as it involves deforestation. Because forests are the primary locus of CO2oxygen exchange, their depletion reduces the rate of natural CO2 uptake. Large amounts of another greenhouse gas, methane (CH4), similarly result from wet rice agriculture, livestock, uncontrolled coal mine emissions, and petroleum and natural gas leakages (World Resources Institute 1994:199202, 361272). China is the world's leading emitter of methane, followed by India, the United States, Brazil, and Bulgaria. [Page 434] Journal of World-Systems Research It should be emphasized that the social dynamics leading to CO2, CH4 and to environmental degradation generally, may operate quite differently across structural positions in the worldsystem (Olsen 1990; Burns et al. 1994, 1995; Kick et al. 1996; Grimes and Roberts 1993), and that these dynamics themselves depend upon global processes (e.g. Kone 1993; Thiele and Wiebelt 1993; Bunker 1984). It is to
ILO REPORT SAYS GLOBALIZATION CAUSES JOB LOSSES (fwd)
_World Bank Development_ news summarizes ILO report! Mine -- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 16:53:09 -0700 (PDT) From: David Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: world-system network [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ILO REPORT SAYS GLOBALIZATION CAUSES JOB LOSSES (fwd) This is probably not big news to most subscribers to this list, but it's interesting that the World Bank/ILO are reporting this... ds -- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 13:39:07 -0700 From: Gilbert G. Gonzalez [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From the World Bank's Development News, June 21, 2000 ILO REPORT SAYS GLOBALIZATION CAUSES JOB LOSSES Increasing trade liberalization and the effects of globalization have resulted in job losses and less secure work arrangements, the International Labor Organization said in a study released yesterday. Some 75% of the world's 150 million jobless have no unemployment benefits and the vast majority of populations in many developing countries has no social protection whatsoever, the report added. According to the ILO's "World Labor Report 2000," most industrialized countries have reduced unemployment insurance, limiting eligibility and cutting benefits in the past decade. Among the countries providing less worker benefits and belonging to a second-tier position globally were Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Many European countries over the past 10 years have lead in assuring unemployment benefits, even though European governments have reduced their assistance programs. Critics of unemployment programs and other social protection schemes have argued that countries with high levels of benefits, like those in Europe, are so burdened with social costs that they cannot compete with economies providing less assistance. The report's chief author, Roger Beattie, called such criticism "naive," arguing that countries can simultaneously protect their workers and expand their economies. "Countries can increase social security spending, and it will take out only 20% of future real increases in earnings," he said (Elizabeth Olson, International Herald Tribune, 21 June). The study warns of the dangers of reducing or eliminating jobless benefits. "Alarmist rhetoric notwithstanding, social protection, even in the supposedly expensive forms to be found in most advanced countries, is affordable in the long term," says ILO Director-General Juan Somavia in the report's introduction. "It is affordable because it is essential for people, but also because it is productive in the longer term. Societies which do not pay enough attention to security, especially the security of their weaker members, eventually suffer a destructive backlash," he said (ILO release, 21 June). The report also takes into account underemployed and informal sector workers, noting that these people "earn very low incomes and have an extremely limited capacity to contribute to social protection schemes." For these workers, the ILO study suggests that governments should provide assistance by employing them in labor-intensive infrastructure programs, such as road construction or land reclamation. The report notes India's Jawahar Rozgar Yojana and Maharashtra Government's Employment Scheme as examples of employment guarantee programs (Chennai Hindu, 20 June). The report highlights several trends and issues affecting social protection services today: The number of people living in extreme poverty has risen by 200 million in the past five years, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. 850 million people earn less than a living wage or work less than they want. Poverty is a major factor in driving 250 million children into the labor force, jeopardizing their education. In several developed countries, divorce rates have increased up to 500% over the past 30 years, creating more single-parent households. In many of these same countries, births to unmarried women jumped up to six times in the same 20-year period, creating even more single-parent households. Poverty rates for households headed by a single mother are at least three times higher than for two-parent households in a number of developed countries. Social security spending as a percentage of gross domestic product has risen in most countries from 1975-1992, with several exceptions, mainly in Africa and Latin America. Changes in family structures, as well as rising unemployment and income inequality, have caused an increase in child poverty rates between the 1960s and the 1990s. Due to falling fertility rates worldwide, more women are able to enter the work force. The drop in fertility has also created a population that is rapidly aging, reducing the ratio of workers to retired individuals. The report outlines measures for improving
Re: Re: Re: [Fwd: Position in the World-System andNational Emissions of] (fwd)
what are you trying to prove with your insults Doug? are you implying the impossibility of a socialist agenda? who is fantasizing here? nobody is suggesting a _blue print_ for the future, as far as I can tell. Marx did not suggest either. Politics is a day to day struggle and what we can do is to take advantage of the circumstances in the context of limited resources available to us. In order to do that, once should first understand what the problem with the present system is. with of all its inequalities, declining living standarts, mass consumption, wars, diseases, nuclear power plants, sexism, racism, the system sucks by any human standarts. It is unsustainable from a political as well as a scientific point of view. Capitalism is the most unsustainable system that the world has witnesssed so far. Isn't an alternative system already implicit in the realities of our system and aren't the people have been taking action (and actually TOOK action in the past)? OH but NO socialist revolutions are a bounch of elite conspricies!! as for others too, people have been discussing for hours here whether it is "desirable"? or whether it is "necessary"? or whether it is "imaginable" to talk about socialism. Complete waste of time and pessimism of the intellectual. YES all of them! Too much semantics kills political praxis, and this is one of the reasons why the US left is so messed up, thanks to legacy of american individualism. divide and rule. We folks at least agree on the principles and take the necessary steps to bring about a certain set of agenda.. well, I think, you should read the post once again! and please leave aside your liberal bias for a while.. btw, it does not matter _where_ one lives-- Manhattan, Istanbul, Alaska, Dubai, Virgin Islands-- as long as one is critical of the system. Marxism is not limited to physical location. It is a universal world viewThis sort of red-baiting reminds of the assults directed to third world progressives (Samir, Said, etc...) on the assumption that they can not be critical of US imperialism while living in the US. Mine Louis P wrote: The disappearance of fossil-based fuels is a whole other story. My guess is that a radically different kind of life-style will be necessary in the future for the survival of humanity. I don't think that this will be palatable to many of the people who post regularly to PEN-L, who seem rather committed to the urban, consumerist life-style found in the imperialist centers. For those of us who have read and admired William Morris, these alternative prospects might seem more attractive. I think that people will democratically elect a new life-style based on the premise of greatly expanded leisure time, less regimentation, decreased risks to health and closeness to nature. Of course some socialists will continue to see socialism as an extension of capitalist civilization with the working class at the steering wheel instead of the bourgeoisie. But that's been a problem for Marxism since the 19th century. It's weird to hear this coming from someone who lives works on Manhattan Island, but I'll leave that aside for now, along with my suspicion that a lot of this is the fantasy of an exhausted and alienated urbanite. I don't see how you can achieve a William Morris-y arts crafts lifestyle with a global population of 6 billion people. Maybe I'm wrong. If I'm not wrong, what is the ideal population, and what will happen to all the surplus billions? Doug
Racism and Ecology. (fwd)
Not an appropriate comparison. Consider rather the way in which Broca the founder of neurology wasted so much of his life and twisted his own scientific discoveries by his attempts to prove that women's brains weighed less than men's brains. Carrol We don't even need to turn to Broca. Richard Dawkins, the great scientific evolutionist of the year 2000, dedicated so much of his time to proving in _Selfish Gene_ that it is a survival strategy for men to be polygamous while it is biologically necessary for women to remain monogamous. Scientific sexism still sleeps with us. Mine
Re: RE:RE:We used 10 times as much energy in the 20th century as in the 1,000previousyears (fwd)
Mark Jones wrote: Mine, Of course Bartlett is not a Marxist. That only adds weight to his central conclusion, which is about thew terminally unsustainable nature of capitalist crisis and not about population growth (don't get sidetracked into wasting time on his *opinions* about that; it's his *arguments* about exponential growth that need to addressed). Mark, I was not arguing that Bartlett was a Marxist. Obviously, he is not. Given that Bartlett makes _population growth_ central to his analysis of _exponential growth_ and _unsustainability of capitalism_, how can I *not* talk about his opinions about _exponential growth_ without at the same time talking about his opinions about _population_? I don't logically see why it is a waste of time to point out the political ramifications of Bartlett's population fanaticism. B is openly stating in his article that "population growth must drop to zero" if we are to have a sustainable economic system. Does he say this or not? since he makes himself quite clear about what he defends. No misreading here. As Eugene Coyle rigthly pointed out a while ago, and I tend to agree with this, Bartlett's problem is not _really_ with the unsustainability of capitalism. On the contarary, he thinks capitalism can be made more sustainable if we are to control population and immigration. His logic is the other way around, not against capitalism. Energy crisis, which is what B means by unsustainability, does *not* come from population growth. Population is a *highly* political issue and it does not explain in and off itself why energy crisis happens in the first place. There would have been enough natural resources for us to use sustainabily if we had not happened to have capitalism. I don't want a system, like Bartlett's or eco-centric radicals', where people are constantly posed againist nature, bearing the burden of energy imbalances. I want a system where we live in harmony with nature in some reasonable sense. Capitalism burns up the earth, and in order to correct its human and environmental destruction, it finds the solution in the elimination of people (Social Darwinism), so it creates a strawman of over-population (indians, chinese, africans, etc..) to achieve its goals, one of them being the suppression of wages. Evidently, Bartlett subscribes to this Social Darwinist world view in his final statements about why immigration should be controlled in the US. BTW 20% of US electricity is generated by nuclear. well, my response was a response to Bartlett's statement that since 1970s "nuclear powers plants have banned in the US". (quote). merci, Mine
Population, racism and capitalism (no subject) (fwd)
From a Marxist piont of view, Steven Rosenthal comrade responds to defenders of over-population thesis, one them being, I may include, _Bartlett._.. Mine - I agree with most of what Andy and Mine have said during the debate about population. The problems of the world today are due to capitalism, not to overpopulation. During the past week, the New York Times ran several stories that substantiate this point. First, U.S. president Clinton has been unable to get European government leaders to agree with any of the military or economic proposals he brought with him on his current trip. The Europeans want the U.S. to discontinue its $5 billion a year tax subsidy to exporting US corporations. The Europeans don't want the U.S. to break the anti-missile treaty by embarking on a missile shield for protection against "rogue states." The U.S. wants Europeans (especially Germany) to increase military spending but only within a NATO framework led by the U.S., while Europeans want to take steps toward building a more independent military force. These developments illustrate the continued development of inter-imperialist rivalry. Second, the World Bank released a report acknowledging the immense decline in living standards in sub-Saharan Africa during the last decades of the 20th century. They noted that, even if some progress is made in checking the AIDS epidemic in Africa, which accounts for some 70% of all AIDS cases worldwide, the epidemic will reduce life expectancy by 20 years. The World Bank acknowledged that its policies and those of the IMF have contributed to some extent to the worsening conditions. Nothing more profoundly illustrates the devastating effect of racism in the world capitalist system. Imperialist exploitation of Africa, with the collusion of local capitalist elites in African countries, is destroying more lives in Africa today than during the height of the slave trade. A note of clarification here: I'm not suggesting that the AIDS virus was created by imperialists to inflict genocide on Africans. It is possible that the AIDS virus crossed over into the human population during imperialist experimental programs in sub-Saharan Africa during the early or middle part of the 20th century. What is more important, however, is that the epidemic has been shaped by contemporary imperialism and capitalism in Africa. Migrant labor, prostitution and sex slavery, wars and the creation of large populations of refugees, the decline of already small health budgets at the insistence of IMF structural adjustment plans--these are factors that have concentrated the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Third, UNICEF reported in "Domestic Violence Against Women and Girls" that up to half of the female population of the world comes under attack at some point in their lives from men. The report estimated that there are more females than males infected with AIDS in Africa. What connects these three developments? First, global capitalism is the most racist and sexist system the world has ever known. Despite all the hype about the efforts capitalist countries have made during the past century to reduce racism and sexism and to end colonialism, capitalism is worse than ever today. This is proof that the system cannot be reformed, which means that its central problems cannot be ameliorated. Second, as inter-imperialist rivalry sharpens--as illustrated by the first point--imperialists are driven to intensify racist and sexist super-exploitation of the working class. This deepening crisis demands the growth of revolutionary organization of the working class as the only solution. Third, leading biological determinists--including many proponents of the overpopulation thesis--have promoted the ideological argument that male domination of women, racism, nationalism, and wars are naturally evolved genetic traits of human nature. This ideology represents an attempt to portray inter-imperialist conflict, racism, and sexism as natural, rather than as part of capitalism in crisis and decay. Steve Rosenthal -- Mine Aysen Doyran PhD Student Department of Political Science SUNY at Albany Nelson A. Rockefeller College 135 Western Ave.; Milne 102 Albany, NY 1
Re: Re: RE: Re: RE:RE:We used 10 times as much energy in the 20th century as in the 1,000previousyears (fwd)
Be very careful. The population of the rich grows in two ways: (i) the rich have lots of children, and (ii) the poor become rich... do you know that african american women are sterilized at a significantly higher rate than white women? (according to our sociologist friend, Andy Austin, 3-4 times) doesn't it also bother you that the US elite (particulary the new right) celebrate the decline in black fertility rates? What bothers you actually? Mine
Re: RE: Re: RE:RE:We used 10 times as much energy in the 20th century as in the 1,000previousyears (fwd)
Yes, Mark, I am "twitching" my ass on a "library stool" because some magical person mentioned that population growth rate "must drop to zero" and made himself clear that the _US government_ should adjust its population accordingly. Yes, I am still twitching my ass because the same magical person warned me that I should be against population fanatics, Social Darwinists and hard-nosed empiricists who deliberately present ideology as science and facts No, Bartlett did "not" indeed mention "anything" about population!!! I was just twitching my ass! Frankly, I agree with you on many issues, Mark, particulary with your deep awarenesss of the Soviet history and Leninism. but, somehow, we disagree on the fundamentals about socio-biology, gender, and race issues. why? I think Marxism would benefit a lot if we were to incorporate and discuss these topics more seriously than we regulary do. What I am saying is in agreement with Marx. You will get angry but I don't particulary see why you are so defensive of Bartlett at this point. Mine Daydreamers like Dennis Redmond and Doug Henwood are having amiably inane conversations about 'the next great upswing', while the planet is burning around them. Mine Doyran is twitching her bottom on a library stool somewhere because someone mentioned the word population. I used to have the same argument with the beloved Yoshie who once called me a racist because I wrote about 'surplus population', until I pointed out that the coinage was Marx's; I guess she must of went away and read Marx because now she too talks about 'surplus population'. Doug is a political voyeur, who reported on Seattle, DC, etc, and then came back and reported equally well on Tulipomania, the latest silly headlines, Zizek's latest silly 'text' etc, instead of doing what he should and could do, ie, show commitment and start ORGANISING. Michael Perelman, whose book Invention of Capitalism I'm just serialising on the CrashList, so let no-one say I don't like him, I do, I really do, nonetheless has arguments about energy which go like this: what is a waterfall? What is differential rent? What is absolute rent? Gimme a break, Michael.Get with the programme, all of you. Get with the programme.Mark Jones
My looniness (fwd)
Michael! how can you say this? I am not saying you mean it, but isn't it a racist common sense that, for example, Mexicans damage the environment more so regulary than white people, or let's say, from a capitalist point of view, working classes are less responsible towards environment than the rich. I hope I misunderstood your second statement.. Mine I am always appreciative of superlatives. If you had merely said, it was stupid, I would be hurt. I was merely trying to make 2 points. 1. The the rich to whom Brad referred were rarely from the ranks of the poor. 2. That extreme poverty makes people take environmentally damaging actions. Mark Jones wrote: How often do the poor become rich? The environment would be helped if the very poor became better off -- Michael, this is really and truly the looniest thing I've read all day, no, all week. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
RE:We used 10 times as much energy in the 20th century as in the 1,000 previousyears (fwd)
Anyone who has any doubts at all about the utter unsustainability of modern world capitalism and the onset of terminal crisis, should read Albert Bartlett's original article on the meaning of exponential growth, archived at: http://www.npg.org/reports/bartlett_index.htm Below is Bartlett's comments on the 20th anniversary of this classic prediction of the end of Big Oil. Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList Mark, thanks for posting this information. The author raises interesting questions about the relationship between population growth, economic growth and energy crisis. Although I generally agree with Bartlett's view that "unsustainability of modern world capitalism" will eventually lead to "terminal crisis", as you put it, I find his remarks about "over-population" quite Malthusian, given his implicit, yet unarticulated, assumption that world resources are scarce and population growth should be adjusted accordingly. Strawman of over-population is a conspiracy theory. World's energy crisis is not due to population problem, but due to capitalism. Oil is not running out because of the number of people consuming it, but because of the imperatives of capitalist production that creates population pressures, for capitalism can not afford to employ everbody. It seem to me that seeing population as an impediment to economic growth is to take a position on modernization theory and Social Darwinism (which nowadays eco-centric radicals _implicitly_ subscribe in the name of _sustainable ecological development_). The relevance of these theories for energy crisis and economic growth is that they are a component of post-cold war hegemomic/ transnational policy formation articulated by the US and global elites, and designed to be imposed upon people in the periphery of the world system--largely racialized, poor, women and working classes. From what I see, Bartlett does not seem to be addressing the underlying ideological framework of the solutions, ie., population control strategies-- offered to deal with the problem of energy crisis. Let me continue with his remaks I find politically problematic. 2) III. The world population was reported in 1975 to be 4 billion people growing at approximately 1.9 % per year. In 1998 it is now a little under 6 billion people and the growth rate is reported to be around 1.5 % per year. The decline in the rate of growth is certainly good news, but the population growth won't stop until the growth rate has dropped to zero. Evidently, the author sees "population growth" as THE problem behind some perceiveble energy crisis in the future, so the growth rate must be dropped to zero to prevent a crisis. Bartlett is operating on the teleological assumption that increase in population rate puts pressure on consumption rate, and destroys the energy balance of the world. however, rise or decline in the rate of population growth does not tell us why the so called "over-population" myth exists in the first place. The author is referring to population figures in the 70s, celebrating a decline in the growh rate in the 90s. Fine. How can one evaluate these figures in isolation from the idelogical orientation of global policy formations (US)--state imposed population design advocacies--that have been in existence since the cold war?. In the 30s and 40s, we witnessed the proliferation of racialized population discourses and eugenics, welcomed by the western governments as part of the agenda of securing the fertility rates of desirable races. Ford, who anticipated the Keynesian demand side economic policies, was _the_ man whose name was put on the front pages of anti-semite publications like _International Jew_, _Eternal Jew_. Population growth was seen as the motto of _Non-Communist state developmental model_ and the idea was to counter balance the perceived Soviet risk in the existence of declining mortality rates. In the 70s, population control had become THE issue of the US government, integrated into policy frameworks funded by insititutions like Ford and Rockefeller. In the 80s, we have witnessed the rise of _New Right_ and neo-liberalism. Given that Soviet evil is finally over, population control and other structural adjustment policies (IMF) are operating under a cultural idiocy "over-populated, traditional cultures" and the key to lowering their birth rates is a key to replacing their "backward institutions" with market capitalism and modern economic structures resembling bourgeois democracies. 4) IX. The paper reported that by 1973 nuclear reactors (fission) supplied approximately 4.6 % of our national electrical power. By 1998 this had climbed to approximately 20 % of our electrical power, but no new nuclear power plants have been installed in the U.S. since the 1970s. OH yes. We are all concerned with nuclear power plants and we all should. While we feel sorry about our own enviromental destruction, the people (ie. women) in Africa are injected
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Definition of Political Economy(fwd)
In a message dated 6/24/00 2:33:36 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Bebel, like Kautsky, was a social democrat. Zetkin, like Luxemburg, was a socialist. Their approach to _Woman Question_ differed accordingly. Both Z and L criticized the party line orthodoxy represented by Kautsky in the second international. Furthermore, Zetkin criticized the notion of extending women's suffrage to middle class women only. Her socialist feminism was an achievement over liberal feminism. That was the point. Hey, Carrol, orthodox Marxism is a myth? I wish. --jks Justin, this sort of red-baiting Marxists does not solve the problem since you still have *not* clarified what you mean by orthodoxy. Rational communication requires logical arguments and empirical evidences not unsubstantiated ad hominem attacks. If you think whatever I said about Zetkin is *false* or makes me subscribe to *your* orthodoxy then you have the responsibility of explaining the "rational grounds" which your assumptions of orthodoxy rest upon. If you don't, I am afraid, you are being dogmatic. Furthermore, if you mean by orthodoxy holistic conception of history and vulgar determinism of the kind Kautsky defended, ie., inevitability of the theory of stages, it is obvious that Marx would *not* subscribe to your definition of orthodoxy. You may not have Kautsky in your mind, but I am afraid that like many of the bourgeois critics or defenders (Cohen) of MArx, you implicitly take the mechanistic formulation of historical materialism as the orthodoxy. Unfortunately, not only bourgeois critics of Marx but also some Marxist followers of Marx were responsible for misrepresenting Marx, turning Marx's dynamic theory of history into economic determinism and political passivity--the kind of things that bourgeois minded people *want" to see in Marx. Nowhere Marx in his writings appears to be a fatalistic believer in the functionalist causality between economics and politics, even in the _Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_. When Marx says in this text that legal and political structure of society "rise on the economic basis of society", he does not mean that A determines B or B mechanistically flows from A. Quite differently, what Marx means to say is that the mode of production of material life, which is itself a historically changing _social relationship_, conditions, if not determine, the political and legal structures of society and their corresponding forms of ideology. Marx does not give us a hint of determinism because "conditioning" may be given lots of interpretations. As Cohen mistakenly does, one may read the relationship between economics and politics in instrumental terms as if Marx specified the direction or degree of causality between the two. On the other hand, as Gramsci correctly did, one may read the basis-superstructure model in counter- productive terms to mean by conditioning "corresponding" or even "limiting", in place of determination (Since Marx beleived in the final analysis that capitalism _only to a degree_ liberated human beings, yet "limited" the development of human potential as a whole). Instead of red-baiting Marxists or calling them orthodox on the basis of superstitious reading of Marx, one should instead come across with what is meant by what is said about Marx. Ideology is a distortion of reality personified in the body of the intellectual! Mine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Definition of Political Economy(fwd)
Justin repeats my comments: I have and do. Alison, who is a friend of mine, btw, would be disappointed if you took the lesson from her book that Firestone doesn't count, and indeedd, has nothing to teach historical materialists, or isn't one in her way. I did *not* say that Firestone did *not* count. I said that Alison classifies Firestone under the subtitle _radical feminism_ in her book.Since Alison Jaggar is a _socialist feminist_, she also points out the flaws (biological essentialism) in Firestone's analysis of gender inequality, including Firestone's expectation of the radical feminist agenda to liberate women from the biological "oppresiveness of their bodies". Unlike Firestone, I don't think that women's biology is oppresive. To say the opposite is to accept par excellence the patriarchal definition of biology as the biology. My point. however, was that Marxists were up on the Woman Question a long time before 1970. actually this was *my* point initally, but it is nice to see you coming to this conclusion (refer to my previous post) I said: we were talking about the _classical_ architects of _Marxist feminism_ just as we were talking about the classical architects of liberal feminism (Mill, Taylor). Quite right, which is why I mentioned Bebel and Zetkin. --jks Bebel, like Kautsky, was a social democrat. Zetkin, like Luxemburg, was a socialist. Their approach to _Woman Question_ differed accordingly. Both Z and L criticized the party line othodoxy represented by Kautsky in the second international. Furthermore, Zetkin criticized the notion of extending women's suffrage to middle class women only. Her socialist feminism was an achievement over liberal feminism. That was the point. Mine
Re: Re: Definition of Political Economy (fwd)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Radical feminists do not find them perfect either. That being said, however, they were the ones who first raised the question of Women in Marxism Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg would also be surprsied to hear it took Shulamith Firestone to raise The Woman Question in Marxism. Mine, you gotta hit the boooks--jks ** http://www.marxists.org/glossary/index.htm; Zetkin, Clara (1857-1933) A prominent figure in the German and international workers' movement, most notably in the struggles womens workers' movement. From 1895, a National Executive member of the German SPD, and on its left-wing; member of the Bookbinders Union in Stuttgart, and active in the Tailors and Seamstresses Union, becoming its provisional International Secretary in 1896, despite the fact that it was illegal for women to be members of trade unions in Germany at that time. As Secretary of the International Bureau of Socialist Women, Zetkin organised the Socialist Women's Conference in March 1915. Along with Alexandra Kollontai, Zetkin fought for unrestricted suffrage, and against the 'bourgeois feminist' position supporting the restriction of the vote by property or income. Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg led the left-wing and waged a fierce struggle against revisionism as well as the center represented by Kautsky. During the War joined the Spartacists along with Luxemburg and Liebknecht. A founding member of the German Communist Party in 1918 along with comrades including Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Became a delegate to the Reichstag from 1920; secretary of the International Women's Secretariat and member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International from 1921, but lived in Russia from 1924 until her death in 1933. -- Mine Aysen Doyran PhD Student Department of Political Science SUNY at Albany Nelson A. Rockefeller College 135 Western Ave.; Milne 102 Albany, NY 1 _ NetZero - Defenders of the Free World Click here for FREE Internet Access and Email http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html
[Elster, Jon (1982), Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory: The ,Case for Methodological Individualism, Theory and (fwd)-- False ,Distinction between functionalism and game theory.
http://home.sol.no/~hmelberg/els1b.htm [Elster, Jon (1982), Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory: The Case for Methodological Individualism, Theory and Society 11:453-482] http://home.sol.no/~hmelberg/ar82mfgt.htm MARXISM, FUNCTIONALISM, AND GAME THEORY The Case for Methodological Individualism [start of page 453] JON ELSTER How should Marxist social analysis relate to bourgeois social science? The obvious answer is: retain and develop what is valuable, criticize and reject what is worthless. Marxist social science has followed the opposite course, however. By assimilating the principles of functionalist sociology, reinforced by the Hegelian tradition, Marxist social analysis has acquired an apparently powerful theory that in fact encourages lazy and frictionless thinking. By contrast, virtually all Marxists have rejected rational-choice theory in general and game theory in particular. Yet game theory is invaluable to any analysis of the historical process that centers on exploitation, struggle, alliances, and revolution. This issue is related to the conflict over methodological individualism, rejected by many Marxists who wrongly link it with individualism in the ethical or political sense. By methodological individualism I mean the doctrine that all social phenomena (their structure and their change) are in principle explicable only in terms of individuals - their properties, goals, and beliefs. This doctrine is not incompatible with any of the following true statements. (a) Individuals often have goals that involve the welfare of other individuals. (b) They often have beliefs about supra-individual entities that are not reducible to beliefs about individuals. "The capitalists fear the working class" cannot be reduced to the feelings of capitalists concerning individual workers. By contrast, "The capitalists' profit is threatened by the working class" can be reduced to a complex statement about the consequences of the actions taken by individual workers.1 (c) Many properties of individuals, such as "powerful," are irreducibly relational, so that accurate description of one individual may require reference to other individuals.2 [end of page 453, start of page 454] The insistence on methodological individualism leads to a search for micro- foundations of Marxist social theory. The need for such foundations is by now widely, but far from universally, appreciated by writers on Marxist economic theory,3 The Marxist theory of the state or of ideologies is, by contrast, in a lamentable state. In particular, Marxists have not taken up the challenge of showing how ideological hegemony is created and entrenched at the level of the individual. What microeconomics is for Marxist economic theory, social psychology should be for the Marxist theory of ideology.9 Without a firm knowledge about the mechanisms that operate at the individual level, the grand Marxist claims about macrostructures and long-term change are condemned to remain at the level of speculation. The Poverty of Functionalist Marxism Functional analysis 5 in sociology has a long history. The origin of functionalist explanation is probably the Christian theodicies, which reach their summit in Leibniz: all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds; each apparent evil has good consequences in the larger view, and is to be explained by these consequences. The first secular proponent perhaps wasMandeville, whose slogan "Private Vices, Public Benefits" foreshadows Merton's concept of latent function. To Mandeville we owe the Weak Functional Paradigm: an institution or behavioral pattern often has consequences that are (a) beneficial for some dominant economic or political structure; (b) unintended by the actors; and (c) not recognized by the beneficiaries as owing to that behavior. This paradigm, which we may also call the invisible-hand paradigm, is ubiquitous in the social sciences. Observe that it provides no explanation of the institution or behavior that has these consequences. If we use "function" for consequences that satisfy condition (a) and "latent function" for consequences that satisfy all three conditions, we can go on to state the Main Functional Paradigm: the latent functions (if any) of an institution or behavior explain the presence of that institution or behavior. Finally, there is the Strong Functional Paradigm: all institutions or behavioral patterns have a function that explains their presence. Leibniz invoked the Strong Paradigm on a cosmic scale; Hegel applied it to society and history, but without the theological underpinning that alone could justify it. Althusser sees merit in Hegel's recognition that history is a "process without a subject," though for Hegel the process still has a goal. Indeed, this is a characteristic feature of both the main and strong paradigms: to postulate a purpose without a purposive actor or, in grammatical terms, a predicate without a subject. (Functionalist thinkers
Elster:[Elster, Jon (1982), Marxism, Functionalism,and Game , Theory: The , Case for Methodological Individualism, Theory and ,(fwd)-- False , Distinction between functionalism and , game theory. , (fwd)
Elster further continues his misrepresentation and functionalist reading of Marx: Elsewhere Marx states that "insofar as it is the coercion of capital which forces the great mass of society to this [surplus labour] beyond its immediate needs, capital creates culture and exercises an historical and social function."20 He also quotes one of his favorite verses from Goethe: Sollte diese Qual uns quäen, Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt, Hat nicht Myriaden Seelen Timur's Herrschaft aufgezehrt?21 It is difficult, although perhaps not impossible, to read these passages otherwise than as statements of an objective teleology. Marx, as all Hegelians, was obsessed with meaning. If class society and exploitation are necessary for the creation of communism, this lends them a significance that also has explanatory power. In direct continuation, Marx can also argue that various institutions of the capitalist era can be explained by their functions for capitalism, as in this analysis of social mobility: Mine
Re: Definition of Political Economy(fwd)
well." _Considerations of Representative Government_, read (against the grain) as description of liberal democracy and not as an apologia of it, beautifully summarizes what it is. Yoshie good point Yoshie, but this is what "liberal democracy" is all about, so _Considerations of Representative Government_is indeed an apologia of liberalism. It is not an anti-liberal text. The problem with liberal thinking is that it wants to maintain individual freedoms (including "economic freedoms" such as right to "private property") and protect the public at the same time from the "evils" they entail. This liberalism is typical of Mill's moralism, if we read the rest of the text on the role of "prudent" government. Liberalism wants to deliver justice within an unjust system--bourgeois idealism. The only way liberalism can live up to its idealism is by extending the scope of freedoms to middle classes (white, male) while effectively using public authority in the name of justice to obscure inequalities liberalism generates. thanks, Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany
Re: Re: Definition of Political Economy(fwd)
And it seems to me likely that Harriet Taylor had more fun than Jenny von Westphalen... No use pretending Marx was as sensitive a feminist as Mill (although the former was well ahead of the pack in this regard), Rob. J. S. Mill and Harriet Taylor are the architects of what came to be known as _liberal feminist movement_. You need female folks like Kollontai, Zetkin, Luxemburg, and male feminists like Engels, in order to make sense of the systemic roots of Women's Opression, including class. Radical feminists do not find them perfect either. That being said, however, they were the ones who first raised the question of Women in Marxism. Liberal feminism wants to liberate women without trying to liberate them from sexism, the class society, with all its petty moralism and bourgeois traditionalism, entails. In their agenda, some women are emancipated, but the rest is unliberated. Marxist feminism wants to liberate women from capitalism and sexism simultaneously. It is an advancement over Sir Mill's and Lady Taylor's limited feminism. thanks, Mine
A little thought or two (fwd)
Dear Doyle, Those jerks deserve more than I said, but I just felt like not throwing gas to the fire any longer. As always, I am very much appreciated by your supportive remarks and sincere comments, and will continue the struggle against those unjustly attacking people! in solidarity, Mine Hi Mine, I was very touched by your remarks to me. I thought about writing for the list, but I decided I wanted to say how much it seems to me struggle does draw people together. Anyhow, like you addressed me, I feel you are dear to me now. Doyle
Sorry: A little thought or two (fwd)
I apologize for this private correspondence. I really thought I sent this to Doyle's address, and somehow it mistakenly went to the list. sorry again.. Doyle sorry! I did not do it on purpose... Mine Doyran -- Forwarded message -- Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 21:28:52 EDT From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: A little thought or two (fwd) Dear Doyle, Those jerks deserve more than I said, but I just felt like not throwing gas to the fire any longer. As always, I am very much appreciated by your supportive remarks and sincere comments, and will continue the struggle against those unjustly attacking people! in solidarity, Mine Hi Mine, I was very touched by your remarks to me. I thought about writing for the list, but I decided I wanted to say how much it seems to me struggle does draw people together. Anyhow, like you addressed me, I feel you are dear to me now. Doyle
Definition of Political Economy (fwd)
Can someone please comment on whether or not the following is correct?
The meaning of the expression "political economy", as it is used
today, is not identical with the meaning of the expression "political
economy", as it was used by Marx and his contemporaries.
Gert, _political economy_ is relatively a new sub-field in social
sciences, particularly in political science and sociology. I doubt that
it has a strong foundation in economics departments, with the exception
of few radical places may be. Although originally the concept was
invented by Marx and his contemporaries, the definition of political
economy as a "social science dealing with the interrelationship of
political and economic processes" (_Webster's Third New International
Dictionary_) is a new contribution, a product of 60s, brought to our
attention by the proliferation of radical perspectives in social
sciences (world system, underdevelopment, imperialism theories, etc..).
Previously, in the 50s, specialists in the field, particularly
mainstream political scientists, looked at the role of the government
and the state only. They generally emphasized pure politics (let's say
how a bill becomes a law) and overlooked economic considerations. Their
use of political system detracted attention from class society, and was
limited to "legal and institutional meanings" (Ronald Chilcote, p.342)
Economists, on the hand, always found political science less scientific,
and they continue to do so, especially the ones who think that other
social sciences need a strong neo-classical foundation and objectivity. In
the 60s, when radical perspectives began to address the questions of
imperialism and dependency in international politics and emphasized the
politics behind economics, political economy was able to become a coherent
body of knowledge and integrated to the cirriculum of political science
departments. This development also anticipated the growth of international
political economy as a new subfield within political economy.
In today's usage, "political economy" refers to a treatment of
economic problems with a strong emphasis on the political side (the
politics of economics), as opposed to a de-politicized ("economistic")
view of economics.
True. You may like to consider for this distinction Stephen Gill's
book on _Gramsci and Historical Materialism_,or Jeffrey Frieden's edited
volume_International Political Economy: Perspectives on Global Power and
Wealth_. Mind you that economists and other social scientists approach
political economy slightly differently. Economists generally stress the
economic ramifications of political economy (let's say market
inefficiency, supply and demand, price determinations, etc...).
Sometimes this approach develops a tendency towards a "depoliticized",
reified, economistic view of economics, which Marx wholeheartedly
criticized, and then later Gramsci rediscovered by developing a
_politically articulated historical materialism_. Considerably
differently from economists, sociologists, for example, stresss more
vehemently the societal, historical and idelological ramifications of
political economy (class, gender, race issues). I should admit that the
conteporary birth of interest in political economy is more of an effort
by sociologists than of efforsts by other scientists. This effort is
disseminating to other fields of social sciences too.
Origins and evoluton of political economy, however, dates back to much
earlier times. For example, Mandel dated the birth of political
economy " to the development of society based on commodity production".
On the other hand Marx's capital was a "Critique of Political Economy"
and emphasized commodities, surplus value, wages, accumulation of
capital. I generally disagree with the views that reduce Marx to Smith
and other classical economists. These views tend to see Marx the
Economist only, not Marx the revolutionary. Regardingly, Marx criticized
bourgeois economists for basing economics upon illusions of free
competition in which individuals "seemed" to be liberated. Marx reminded
us the fact that this notion of competitive market capitalism and
individual freedom was an historical product, not a natural state of
affairs, and would die one day as it was born.
At Marx's time the discipline of economics had not been ravaged by
scientism yet. At his time "political economy" meant the same as
"public economy" or "Staatswirtschaft" or macroeconomics
(macroeconomy), as opposed to business administration,
business management or microeconomics.
Historically speaking, what you are saying makes sense. Remember that at
Marx's time, in the German nation state, the concept of political
economy was used to refer to a field of government concerned with
directing policies towards distribution of resources, and national
wealth. This is where the concept of "public economy" comes from.
Although the use of political economy was related to economics, it was
still primarily
Ronald Chilcote's New Volume on Imperialism (fwd)
Ron Chilcote has edited a new volume titled "The Political Economy of Imperialism: Critical Appraisals" Boston: Kluwer Academic (1999), 260 pp. isbn 0-7923-8470-9. The table of contents contributors: Part I. SImperialism: Its Legacy and Contemporary Significance M.C. Howard and J.E. King, "Whatever happened to Imperialism?" Michael Barratt Brown "Imperialism Revisited" Anthony Brewer, "Imperilaism in Retrospect" Gregory Nowell "Hobson's Imperialism: Its Histoircal Validity and Contemporary Relevance" Part II Imperialism and Development John Willoughby, "Early Marxist Critiques of Capitalist Development J.M. Blaut "Marxism and Eurocentricc Diffusionism" Ronaldo Munck, "Dependency and Imperialism in Latin America: New horizons" Part III: Globalism or Imperialism? Samir Amin, Capitalism Imperialism, Globalization Prabhat Patnaik, On the Pitfalls of Bourgeois Internationalism James Petras, Globailization: A Critical Analysis The book has an astoundingly high price tag so I'll just say: please ask your libraries to order it. Ron Chilcote is trying to get a paperback out with a different publisher (Kluwer is willing). Your emails of support should go to him at [EMAIL PROTECTED] If he gets enough such emails he might be able to include them in packet to help convince a publisher to do the paperback. -- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 1 Fax 518-442-5298 -- Mine Aysen Doyran PhD Student Department of Political Science SUNY at Albany Nelson A. Rockefeller College 135 Western Ave.; Milne 102 Albany, NY 1 _ NetZero - Defenders of the Free World Click here for FREE Internet Access and Email http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html
Re: Re: GT (fwd)
funny, like other religious followers of neo-classical bourgeois ideology, Elster, in _Making Sense of Marx_, attempts to demonstrate that Marx was indeed a founder of rational choice. I am sure Ricardo was the father of socialism then... No No Marx was indeed a spy.. Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany
Re: Re: Definition of Political Economy (fwd)
M. Hoover wrote: I had grad school prof who thought it'd be really good idea for me to read, in addition to Smith, some other 18th century Scottish political economists such as Adam Ferguson, James Steuart. If memory serves, Steuart's book _Inquiry into Principles of Political Economy_ appeared decade or so before Smith's _Inquiry into Wealth of Nations_ (JS may have been first to use term as such but some listers no doubt know more about that stuff than me). Marx. who *critiqued* political economy, refers approvingly to Steuart as thinker with historical view and understanding of historically different modes of production (contrasting him to those positing/holding bourgeois individual to be natural). This, I agree. _On James Mill_ (McL. _Selected Political Writings of Marx_), Marx refers somewhat "approvingly" to John's father. I have to read the text once again though, since my memory poorly serves me at the moment.. James Mill must belong to the tradition of utilitarianism, sharing a great deal of philosophical ideas with Bentham. Bentham's individualism was later criticized by John, the son who thought that pleasure maximizing principle should not be the sole concern of individualism. So John wanted to extend the scope of utility to areas other than individuals (public education, etc..). I have to open my exam notes for the distinction between James and John Mill to make sense of the debate between James and Marx. It does not seem terrribly clear to me at the moment, but I know Marx talks positively of James, if not very supportively. Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany Early 19th century saw number of books with political economy in title: Say, Ricardo, Malthus, among better known... Michael Hoover
Re: Ronald Chilcote's New Volume on Imperialism (fwd)
I don't think that we should continue this unproductive debate about who is who. Ronald Chilcote is well known to be an _established_ Marxist scholar. Actually, in his book, he _vehemently_ criticizes mainstream social theories, including game theory and rational choice as well as those who distort Marxism in the name of defending NC economics. thanks, Mine Doyran Actually, I was thinking of someone else, I'm mistaken in my characterization of Chilcote. In addition to agreeing that Chilcote is a fine progressive thinker, I might add that I think Jim Devine's a real sharp thinker who makes very insightful use of Marx in his writing btw... His web page is great also. Steve Stephen Philion Lecturer/PhD Candidate Department of Sociology 2424 Maile Way Social Sciences Bldg. # 247 Honolulu, HI 96822
Re: RE: Peter Dorman and Robin Hahnel (fwd)
Joe wrote:, Regarding utopianism, I thought regaining some semblance of vision was all the rage on the Left these days. I realize there remains a great deal of self-consciousness regarding these speculations. Immanuel Wallerstein actually invented a new word, "Utopistics," to provide cover for such indulgences. cheers, joe "The underdeveloped state of the class struggle,as well as their own surroundings, causes of socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class, nay by preference to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see it in the best possible plan of the best possible state of society? Hence they reject all political especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and the force of example, to pave the way for the new SOCIAL GOSPEL ( Marx, On Utopian Socialism, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Tucker, p.498). good night, Mine Doyran, Phd student, SUNY/Albany, Politics... By this sort of definition, there must be about 347 "progressives" in the U.S., and 5,132 around the world. But as Lenin said, better fewer but better. Doug
Dorman and Hahnel (fwd)
Pat Devine is a market socialist. Market socialism is an attempt to establish socialism in a capitalist economy. It is an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. Market socialists treat market ahistorically, abstracting it from its capitalist and historical content. Recently, market socialists have used right-wing economist Hayek's arguments about information assymetry in planned economies to suggest that socialism without a market economy is an inefficient economic system. btw, Hahnel and Albert seem to overstate their differences from market socalists, as fas as I can tell from what they post on Z magazine concerning participatory economics. Since they have converged somewhat, according to recent information, I assume they must be the same. Mine Doyran
Re: Re: Re: Definition of Political Economy (fwd)
okey,I have to respond to this. I did not say that Marx personally debated with James Mill.I know that James was dead before Marx was up. Merci. I said that Marx wrote a short article called _On James Mill_, which you can find in in McL's Marx: Political Writings... Mine the Philosophical Radicals. There was no debate bewteen James M and Marx, since James M was dead before Marx was up and running, but Marx's attack on James M is hardly what I would call approving. He was likewise dubiousabout son JS, the preeminant political economist of his age. (And later a market socialist, as we would say). --jks In a message dated 6/21/00 4:19:09 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: This, I agree. _On James Mill_ (McL. _Selected Political Writings of Marx_), Marx refers somewhat "approvingly" to John's father. I have to read the text once again though, since my memory poorly serves me at the moment.. James Mill must belong to the tradition of utilitarianism, sharing a great deal of philosophical ideas with Bentham. Bentham's individualism was later criticized by John, the son who thought that pleasure maximizing principle should not be the sole concern of individualism. So John wanted to extend the scope of utility to areas other than individuals (public education, etc..). I have to open my exam notes for the distinction between James and John Mill to make sense of the debate between James and Marx. It does not seem terrribly clear to me at the moment, but I know Marx talks positively of James, if not very supportively.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Peter Dorman and Robin Hahnel(fwd)
Dear Doyle, in polemics concerned with red-baiting Marxism, the term "jerk" is used in a way to stigmatize the people on the Marxist left. Additionally, it serves the religious purposes of classifying them as dogmatic. The term dogma refers to religious convinction or faith. Associating Marxism with dogma is to dogmatize Marxism and invite the Church to the discussion. Like Carrol, I would not, of course, advise people not to use jerk. People need to stress out in a polemic, and "jerk" is one of the advisable terms to attack. I always look at the context of the meaning of jerk though. What it means and what it stays for can have class, gender, race and disability connotations, because our language is not always politically correct and neutral. For example, sometimes, drug abusers are called jerks and criticized as being individually responsible for their own victimization. Regarding gender, I don't know how it applies here, but I am sure it must be pretty the same, in my culture, a similar term to jerk is used to stigmatize women who do not follow the traditional feminine practices (cooking, birth giving etc..). Many times Marxist women, feminists on the left have been attacked for being masculine and imitating men--masculinity complex they call-- both by the mainstream culture and women on the far radical front. good night, It is also very interesting to put this point out in regard to how mental illness is stigmatized repeatedly this way. The point being, that the word, jerk, is not certainly about a mentally ill person. But that if someone is obsessive, then they belong in the social structure not external to society exactly in the sense that the liberal Democratic law ADA was intended. There is a way in which the sense of these sorts of discussions is that we are healthy functioning people and there are those who aren't and we certainly know the difference don't we. That is the dividing line between us and the dogmatists. it was written: By mistake, I've been sending pen-l my wrong web-page address, the one that refers to the support group for parents of kids with Asperger's Syndrome (mild autism) that my wife and I run. Doyle With regard to this web site, your phrase irony-impaired is offensive. You have a lot of gall to criticize anyone for being "irony-impaired". thanks, Doyle Saylor
Re: Re: Re: Re: GT (fwd)
Sometimes, it is interesting to follow the "orientation" of discussion taking place in this list. The intellectual ranks of _Analytical Marxism_ include people like Cohen, Elster, Przeworski, Roemer and Olin Wright. It is increasingly becoming hard for me to understand how one criticizes Cohen's functionalism, and takes a position on Elster's or Hahnel's application of game theory at the same time, given that both disregard the broad conception of history, economy and society in Marx's thought... ohhh well... life! Mine
f capital: Information requested: US finance capital?which fraction of the bourgeoisie (fwd)
Bill, thanks very much for the citations, particularly Brewer's book (I was almost ignoring his work). List(s), I am thinking at the moment about the possible ways of operationalizing "finance capitalism". I have similar questions about finance capital, as they relate to whether Canada is dominated by Canadian finance capital, i.e. is an imperialist country. The usual argument is that the Canadian bourgeoisie is divided between financial and industrial fractions and overall dominated by US capital; thus Canada is somewhere in between colony and imperialist. But it is a little confusing to try to apply the "classic" definitions. You are right. I don't specifically know about the situation in Canada, but as far as the classical definition is concerned,I think that the distinction between "finance" and "industrial" capital is significanly blurred nowadays. This is primarily because many non-financial firms such as Microsoft, General Motors, General Electric, etc.. have a large share of capital circulating in the financial markets. Futhermore, bank capital has been historically known as facilitating the organization of corporations, through lending and barrowing, and contributing to the accumulation of real-industrial capital, as described by Marx's M-C-P-M'-C' formula. As one may suggest, however, the distinction between "finance" and "industrial" capital is still analytically useful if we need to distinguish unique forms of capital with discrete functions and class interests. While I may tend to agree with this approach, it is still necessary to see the relationship in dialectical terms. I would not suggest to say, for example, finance capial is unproductive because it does not directly enter into production process. Both forms of capital represent appropriation of surplus value, and direclty or indirectly involve in the process of production and distribution of goods.. We should not reify the opposition between two forms of capital (finance versus industrial). so you are right in principle. Regarding the classical definition, Hilferding's definition of finance capital can be misleading. From an historical point of view, it makes sense for understanding the historical development of banking industry in Germany (merging of finance and industrial capital, with banks maintaining their relative autonomy from small firms, as a financial oligarchy). The problem with Hilferding's analysis was that although he was right to point out this merging as a unique phase of capitalist development, he still thought that finance capital was an unproductive capital (maintaining the vulgar orthodoxy). Seeing the banks as the enemy, he offered a social democratic nationalization of credit via state regulation of banking industry.Social democratic state, he thought, could transform unproductive "finance capital" into productive "industrial capital". His resolutions were bourgeois reformist in the final analysis. From what you say below, it seems to me that Canada may share the same historical experience of bank-state regulation of finance. One of my arguments is that the 'bank control of industry' formula (e.g. through ownership ties) misses what is a key pattern in Canada, namely a broader form of 'merging' of financial and industrial capital through their common ownership by holding companies, with the banks remaining relatively separate. I am trying to show there is a relatively independent Canadian imperialist class (that Canada is not dependent), so I tend to lead away from the grand schemes of an 'Atlantic' or other super-international imperialism. My thought is that these tend towards the old 'ultraimperialist' fantasy that national bourgeoisies are not longer primarily based on a particular state. I definetly agree. Mind you that Pijl's use of the term "transatlantic bourgeoisie" is not necessarily meant to imply "super-international imperialism" It does not disregard the role of national bourgeoisies (of course, there are anti-free trade capitalist factions of the bourgeoisie in every country). Pijl does not use the term liberalism in the American sense of the term (opposite of nationalism or protectionism) For example, the US steel industry also wants to compete internationally, but the way it defines the rules of "fair competition" may be seen as protectionist by free traders. It all depends on which class interest we are talking about. Accordingly, Pijl historicizes how the _factions_ within the transatlantic bourgeoisie defines their own interests during the formation of the US global hegemony launched by Woodrow Wilson. His methodology is Gramscian and pays a lot of attention to inner politics of transnational elites.. As you see at the of the book, he anticipates the breakdown of the internationalist capitalist order, predicting _fragmentation_ within the capitalist class in the 70s. You are probably familiar with M. Fennema, International Networks of Banks and Industry, 1982.
Peter Dorman and Robin Hahnel (fwd)
Peter Dorman and Robin Hahnel are very progressive, I made some inquiry on Peter Dorman. He does not look like an ideologue, but he does not look *very* progressive either. I read a speech by him called "Economic Costs" of something presented in a rountable discussion. Dorman was suggesting alternative ways of increasing efficiency, participation and rationality in the work place. His solution seemed to me a humanist version of Fordism. Dorman was *not* attacking capitalism, relations of production, or power hierarchy in the work place. He was not attacking capitalism as a *system*. There was even no mentioning of exploitaiton in some identifiable sense, so i did not find Dorman's work particulary useful for Marxist politics. Regarding Hahnel, I may call him progressive, but what he challenges is not terribly clear to me, especially his attack at Marx in the name of participatory economics.. Like Dorman, he does *not* openly use the words socialism or Marxism in his critique of market capitalism. I would tend to describe him institutionalist, liberal reformist or social libertarian, but not Marxist per se. Mine http://www.parecon.org/media.htm The Political Economy of Participatory Economics by Albert and Hahnel (Princeton University Press, 1991) With the near bankruptcy of centrally planned economies now apparent and with capitalism seemingly incapable of generating egalitarian outcomes in the first world and economic development in the third world, alternative approaches to managing economic affairs are an urgent necessity. Until now, however, descriptions of alternatives have been unconvincing. Here Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel support the libertarian socialist tradition by presenting a rigorous, well-defined model of how producers and consumers could democratically plan their interconnected activities. After explaining why hierarchical production, inegalitarian consumption, central planning, and market allocations are incompatible with "classlessness," the authors present an alternative model of democratic workers' and consumers' councils operating in a decentralized, social planning procedure. They show how egalitarian consumption and job complexes in which all engage in conceptual as well as executionary labor can be efficient. They demonstrate the ability of their planning procedure to yield equitable and efficient outcomes even in the context of externalities and public goods and its power to stimulate rather than subvert participatory impulses. Also included is a discussion of information management and how simulation experiments can substantiate the feasibility of their model. Available through Amazon.Com. But if Capitalism is Here for at Least Another Fifty Years... by Rabin Hahnel http://www.parecon.org/writings/hahnelumasstalk.htm Moreover, fewer can find solace in old left doctrines of inevitable capitalist collapse. Many twentieth century progressives sustained themselves emotionally and psychologically with false beliefs that capitalism's dynamism and technological creativity would prove to be its weakness as well as its strength. Grandiose Marxist crisis theories -- a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as machinery was substituted for exploitable living labor, or insufficient demand to keep the capitalist bubble afloat as productive potential outstripped the buying power of wages used to buoy the hopes of the faithful in face of crushing political defeats. And less ideological reformers were still affected by the myth that capitalism organized its own replacement. Unfortunately, none of this was ever true. Planks in a Progressive Reform Program Marx's prophesy of economic emiseration did not prove true for the first world. But capitalism has never delivered sustained growth, much less economic development in the periphery, and the prospects for third world economies are more bleak than ever. Junior status in the global capitalist system is hardly an attractive prospect as we enter the twenty-first century. But it does mean that governments of third world countries must not enter into international economic relations that undermine programs that reorient their economies toward basic need provision. If this means trade, investment, and credit relations must be limited largely to the Scandinavian economies and other third world economies dedicated to basic need provision as well, so be it. Referring to AFL-CIO (:Mine) Union leadership is less hostile to political activity outside the Democratic Party, more critical of centrist Democratic Party politicians, and more aggressive at punishing Democrats who fail to vote pro-labor than at any time in
Re: Peter Dorman and Robin Hahnel (fwd)
Lou, you have hit the heart of the matter once again! Unfortunately, the equation of game theory+utopian socialism produces such results... Mine Regarding Hahnel, I may call him progressive, but what he challenges is not terribly clear to me, especially his attack at Marx in the name of participatory economics.. Like Dorman, he does *not* openly use the words socialism or Marxism in his critique of market capitalism. I would tend to describe him institutionalist, liberal reformist or social libertarian, but not Marxist per se.Mine Lou wrote: Robin Hahnel and his partner Michael Albert are basically modern versions of utopian socialism, a political current that combines: 1) Ahistoricism: The utopian socialists did not see the class struggle as the locomotive of history. While they saw socialism as being preferable to capitalism, they neither understood the historical contradictions that would undermine it in the long run, nor the historical agency that was capable of resolving these contradictions: the working-class. 2) Moralism: What counts for the utopian socialists is the moral example of their program. If there is no historical agency such as the working-class to fulfill the role of abolishing class society, then it is up to the moral power of the utopian scheme to persuade humanity for the need for change. 3) Rationalism: The utopian scheme must not only be morally uplifting, it must also make sense. The best utopian socialist projects would be those that stood up to relentless logical analysis. If you look at their "Looking Forward", you are presented with a vision of social transformation virtually identical to that of the 19th century utopians. In a reply to somebody's question about social change and human nature on the Z Magazine bulletin board, Albert states: "I look at history and see even one admirable person--someone's aunt, Che Guevara, doesn't matter--and say that is the hard thing to explain. That is: that person's social attitudes and behavior runs contrary to the pressures of society's dominant institutions. If it is part of human nature to be a thug, and on top of that all the institutions are structured to promote and reward thuggishness, then any non-thuggishness becomes a kind of miracle. Hard to explain. Where did it come from, like a plant growing out of the middle of a cement floor. Yet we see it all around. To me it means that social traits are what is wired in, in fact, though these are subject to violation under pressure." Such obsessive moralizing was characteristic of the New Left of the 1960s. Who can forget the memorable slogan "if you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem." With such a moralistic approach, the hope for socialism is grounded not in the class struggle, but on the utopian prospects of good people stepping forward. Guevara is seen as moral agent rather than as an individual connected with powerful class forces in motion such as the Cuban rural proletariat backed by the Soviet socialist state. Albert's and Hahnel's enthusiasm for the saintly Che Guevara is in direct contrast to his judgement on the demon Leon Trotsky, who becomes responsible along with Lenin for all of the evil that befell Russia after 1917. Why? It is because Trotsky advocated "one-man management". Lenin was also guilty because he argued that "all authority in the factories be concentrated in the hands of management." To explain Stalinist dictatorship, they look not to historical factors such as economic isolation and military pressure, but the top-down management policies of Lenin and Trotsky. To set things straight, Albert and Hahnel provide a detailed description of counter-institutions that avoid these nasty hierarchies. This forms the whole basis of their particular schema called "participatory planning" described in "Looking Forward": "Participatory planning in the new economy is a means by which worker and consumer councils negotiate and revise their proposals for what they will produce and consume. All parties relay their proposals to one another via 'facilitation boards'. In light of each round's new information, workers and consumers revise their proposals in a way that finally yields a workable match between consumption requests and production proposals." Their idea of a feasible socialism is beyond reproach, just as any idealized schema will be. The problem is that it is doomed to meet the same fate as ancestral schemas of the 19th century. It will be besides the point. Socialism comes about through revolutionary upheavals, not as the result of action inspired by flawless plans. There will also be a large element of the irrational in any revolution. The very real possibility of a reign of terror or even the fear of one is largely absent in the rationalist scenarios of the new utopians. Nothing can do more harm to a new socialist economy than the flight of skilled technicians and professionals. For example, there was very
RE: Peter Dorman and Robin Hahnel (fwd)
Just to open a small parenthesis here. I was in fact criticizing Dorman and Hahnel againist the claim that they were progressive. I don't wanna be associated with the folks, or the imperialist agency of American orientalism--American University--Hahnel is a part of. The first sentence does not belong to me. Mine JD wrote: Peter Dorman and Robin Hahnel are very progressive, I wrote: " . . . I made some inquiry on Peter Dorman. He does not look like an ideologue, but he does not look *very* progressive either. . . . " You gotta watch out for these guys. Dorman, if that's his real name, is heavily invested in the potentially "benign" reforms of the Capitalist State. He advocates a free market in body parts. Hahnel looks like he hasn't shaved since the 80's. Teaches at American U. in Washington, D.C., a school whose extensions in the Middle East are well-known incubators for U.S. intelligence agents. Hahnel has these loopy schemes for democratic planning, an oxymoron if I've ever heard one. a word to the wise. mbs
Re: name calling (fwd)
then you should follow the list closely, Micheal, as a moderator. If people have done implicitly racist comments in the past, they should be reminded not to repeat the same mistake again! If you think there is no such a comment, then you should go and read the archieves of the list, which is what the job of the moderator is. I say zero tolerance for racist use of language! Mine I have to agree with Rod here. I have not been following the list as closely as I should have for the last couple of days. I have stepped in sooner. This sort of stuff has no business here. Rod Hay wrote: Jim is now the third person that has been called a racist, by our new champion name caller. Mine wrote: you are being *disgustingly racist*, -- Rod Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archive http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://Batoche.co-ltd.net/ 52 Eby Street South Kitchener, Ontario N2G 3L1 Canada -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: GT [was: Re: McArthur grantee (fwd)
G'day Mine, G'day... I wrote: Altruism has a pragmatic connotation in cooperative game theory. You give in order to receive. As Richard Dawkins wrote in _Selfish Gene_, the book that is a prototype of fascism and sexism, men compete to fuck women in order to transfer their superior genes to their offsprings. The possibility of being fucked or selected from the pool depends on how men are altrustic to women as well as how much women can offer. I think there's a lot to Dawkins' theory - and it is a theory that may or may not be deployed to support fascism and sexism (I think Dawkins himself read too much and too little into his theory, especially in his first edition), but I maintain it is not *necessarily* what you say it is. Part of the environment within which our genes march through history is human culture and the particular power relations of the moment - that makes our genetic history a rather particular and complex business - but it doesn't deny Dawkins so much as introduce a dialectical relationship into the mix. Fine. Rob, as the author himself said in many occasions, the main purpose of Dawkin's book is to reject Marx's dialectic and instead to introduce the _primacy_ of genes in determining human behavoir. In other words, Dawkins is not saying the things you would like to attribute to him-- ie., evolution of human genetic structure throughout history. On the contrary, he is saying that social environment, history, power relations have no influence on the development of human nature. He is trying to eliminate the role of external factors to openly say that we (like other non human animals) are "machines created by genes". In the book, Dawkins goes into a deep explanation of what genes are, what they serve for and how they survive. The politically dangerous aspect of this genetic reductionism is that it sees the charecteristics human beings learn in society (competitiveness, selfishness, egoism, possessiveness, private property, rape etc..) in the human genetic make up. His argument is implicity reactionary not only because he sees human nature as fixed and unchanging but also because it ahistorically projects the charectristics of competitive market society (which he *reifies* like neo-classical economists) onto human nature to *imply* that capitalism is what we *naturally* have and it is what we are doomed to have in the future. Accordingly, he is ridiculing at the Marxist agenda of replacing capitalism with socialism or an egalitarian form of society. The man's problem is with equality. And anyway, experience tells us that women in liberal capitalist polities compete no less than men when it comes to the mating game (I imagine this would be true in much, but perhaps not all, of Turkey, too). Correct, but this is not Dawkins. Dawkins is *not* saying that "liberal capitalist policies" force men and women to act in certain ways, though I would still suggest capitalism reinforces traditional sexual practices by disempowering women in the mating game. Yes, women compete no less than men, but when it comes to how women expect men to treat them in certain ways, you will see that capitalism maintains the hierarchial structure of gender relations. Regarding competition and cooperation, many anthropological studies show that these concepts gain their meanings within the form of social organization and type of society individuals live in. It also depends on which historical period we are talking about. We can not expect ancient Athenians, for example, subscribing to the notion of capitalist rationality and competitive individualism that we understand in the modern sense of the term today. They had a different societal structure and property regime.or think about hunting gathering societies; Eventhough in those societies, there was still a division of labor by sex, gender inegualities were not as systemic and cumulative as they are under capitalism. Furthermore, cross-cultural and cross-historical studies have proven variations among how these terms apply given country's situatedness with the capitalist world system. in any case, as somebody's post clarifed about what Rabin's work is and where the source of funding comes from,I see neither Rabin's work nor Dawkin's particulary useful for leftist politics..whoever thinks it is useful is mistaken and does harm to Marxism. DAwkins say: "Each individual wants as many surviving children as possible. The less he or she is obliged to invest in any one of those children, the more children he or she can have. The obvious way to achieve this desirable state of affairs is to induce your sexual partner to invest more than his or her fair share of resources in each child, leaving you free to have other children with other partners. This would be a desirable strategy for either sex, but it is more difficult for the female to achieve".
Re: Re: name calling (fwd)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I say zero tolerance for racist use of language! Zero tolerance? I love it when Marxists try to sound like Rudy Giuliani. Doug himm??? Are you confusing me with someonelse? Mine
Re: Re: GT [was: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: McArthur grantee(fwd)
GT is methodologically on the right. Period. The reason for this is that the attention to micro foundations through rational choice, game theoric models and formal modeling of neo-classical economics have tended to obscure the importance of relations of production and the exploitative relationship between the capitalist and the worker. GT lacks a progressive framework to explain systemic inequalities. no, the problem is that GT typically assumes relative equality in "games." It need not do so. well, my argument is that one can not start with a relative equality assumption to desribe a capital-labor relationship. If you do, you are implying that capitalism is a system of equality, given that it is not. While I respectfully say that this is A bullshit [a BS what? a BS argument?], supposed "neutrality" of game theory...I think that the very assumptions of game theory--individualism, profit maximizing agency, egoism, alturism [altruism?] in return for benefit--are bombastically IDEOLOGICAL. first of all, don't correct my words or intervene in the text. You are not the editor here. Actually, I am (and an economist too). One of the frustrating things about threads in on-line discussions is that they rapidly become incomprehensible to the readers. I don't see it. Whoever reads "alturism" above can perfectly understand that it is meant "altruism", if s(he) does not suffer from an acute mental problem of comprehension, of course... I write quickly, and sometimes misuse letters. Knowing that English is my second language, you are being *disgustingly racist*, like once upon a time you called third world people *irrational* here. As far as I am concerned, you can have any opinion of me that you want. But the fact that you're stooping to calling me names says that this conversation is over. This is my last contribution to this thread. yuppie! More importantly, I _never_ referred to third world people as irrational. I would like to see documentation of this totally outrageous claim. If you have any evidence, I _will_ respond, to show that it is spurious and libelous. I did not say that you were a racist par excellence. Once upon a time, however, you made a comment in this list which I thought had culturally racist implications, despite your own intentions.. In the below passage, you are labeling some people as irrational from the standpoint of rationality you are socialized into. I don't mind quick comments _that_ much and let them go, but when it comes to religious labeling, I strongly disagree. Here is your post: http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2000I/msg02544.html Non-religious folks have this kind of upbringing, training, faith in the socialist tradition etc. Either way, there seems to be an "irrational" component, an element of _faith_. Furthermore, you posted and wholeheartedly defended an article published in SLATE magazine by a right wing journalist who was implictly suggesting that blacks were not discriminated in the criminal justice sytem. I am sure you remember the debate. The author is well known to be relating racial inequality to black cultural patterns. Excuse me but the article was a destructive nonsense. I always take a second before posting such articles and seriously think about where the argument of the author politically goes. You should consider an apology to the list, or at least to the international members of the list! An apology is appropriate only appropriate if I'd done something wrong. Fine. If somebody had warned me about an inappropriate use of language (especially with regards to racism and sexism issues), I would have automatically apologized. I don't approach criticism dogmatically. ... I am saying that the game theoretical applications of conflict resolution to international relations and security studies (which I don't think you are aware, btw) come up with explanations and results that tend to promote the foreign policy interests of the US. Have you ever attempted to see where game theorists publish their articles in the majority of cases? They are the kind of journals such as _Foreign Affairs_, _Washington Report_ _Strategic Studies_, _Journal of Military Studies_, etc.. How do you assume that these people having their articles published in these journals are objective, given that the institutional basis of these journals is intimately related to the US political system and the international political order it is trying to endorse. Once I was reading a game theoretical explanation of military intervention in Haiti in one of these journals. The study was briefly talking about how to keep the junta in power with the US help and democratize Haiti in the mean time without causing social conflict (revolt). The author was constructing a game theory of how to make democracy work in Haiti without pissing off the US as well as the junta. If this is not ideology, what is it? This suggests that GT is so empty that it can be used to justify
Re: GT [was: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: McArthur grantee (fwd)
The argument that evil is not in the "economist but in the technique" misses the point since it assumes that the technique of game theory is neutral, Would you consider, first, going and reading something that Matthew Rabin has actually written? Why don't you enlighten us about the hero's work, Brad? particulary his assumptions about how a capitalist economy should work??. Mine
Re: GT [was: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: McArthur grantee (fwd)
MD wrote: The argument that evil is not in the "economist but in the technique" misses the point since it assumes that the technique of game theory is neutral, just as it assumes that economists are neutral. But Rod did not assume that economists are neutral. Nor did I. Again, I think that the problem with GT arises when it excludes other ways of understanding the world and other ways of understanding what to do. I see nothing in GT _per se_ which indicates that its use automatically leads to reactionary conclusions. I have not seen among game theorists any Marxists, any socialists with a progressive agenda. Show me one? The ones who have applied a rational-choice brand of game theory to Marxism (Elster, Perzeworski, Roemer, Wright) have moved away from Marxism in their attemps to build economics on micro-foundations and individual decisions. GT is methodologically on the right. Period. The reason for this is that the attention to micro foundations through rational choice, game theoric models and formal modeling of neo-classical economics have tended to obscure the importance of relations of production and the exploitative relationship between the capitalist and the worker. GT lacks a progressive framework to explain systemic inequalities. While I respectfully say that this is A bullshit [a BS what? a BS argument?], supposed "neutrality" of game theory... I think that the very assumptions of game theory--individualism, profit maximizing agency, egoism, alturism [altruism?] in return for benefit-- are bombastically IDEOLOGICAL. first of all, don't correct my words or intervene in the text. You are not the editor here. I write quickly, and sometimes misuse letters. Knowing that English is my second language, you are being *disgustingly racist*, like once upon a time you called third world people *irrational* here. You should consider an apology to the list, or at least to the international members of the list! Someone already pointed out that GT need not involve individualism or profit-maximizing or egoism. One can apply altruism in making decisions in the game. I don't think it's a very good theory of altruism, but that's another issue. Altruism has a pragmatic connotation in cooperative game theory. You give in order to receive. As Richard Dawkins wrote in _Selfish Gene_, the book that is a prototype of fascism and sexism, men compete to fuck women in order to transfer their superior genes to their offsprings. The possibility of being fucked or selected from the pool depends on how men are altrustic to women as well how much women can offer. Game theorists do not need to conspire with the US government at the moment, this is de passe; what they need to do is to teach the governments about how to resolve conflicts and play the diplomacy game correctly in a way to minimize nuclear threat in a post-cold war era.. This sounds as if you think that GT is a neutral tool that can be used to preserve peace. So GT isn't all bad? NO. I am saying that the game theoretical applications of conflict resolution to international relations and security studies (which I don't think you are aware, btw) come up with explanations and results that tend to promote the foreign policy interests of the US. Have you ever attempted to see where game theorists publish their articles in the majority of cases? They are the kind of journals such as _Foreign Affairs_, _Washington Report_ _Strategic Studies_, _Journal of Military Studies_, etc.. How do you assume that these people having their articles published in these journals are objective, given that the institutional basis of these journals is intimately related to the US political system and the international political order it is trying to endorse. Once I was reading a game theoretical explanation of military intervention in Haiti in one of these journals. The study was briefly talking about how to keep the junta in power with the US help and democratize Haiti in the mean time without causing social conflict (revolt). The author was constructing a game theory of how to make democracy work in Haiti without pissing off the US as well as the junta. If this is not ideology, what is it? Furthermore, if something _empirically_ does not happen, it does not mean that game theory is not ideological. To argue otherwise is very much like saying that I do not beat my wife, so there is no sexism.. I don't get this. Please tell me how GT is nothing but ideological. Is there something about GT that makes it inherently reactionary? More importantly, what is your alternative? My alternative is not to use game theory as a methodological tool. Just like socio-biology crap, game theory is inherently non Marxist, if not anti liberal-left. African Americans have not chosen to be discrimanated by whites. Women have not chosen to be beaten by men..Nobody chooses the heads of corporations (even in some formal sense). If there is oppression, it is because there has
name calling (fwd)
*You* *definetly* ARE with your energetic support for socio-biology and praising people like Wilson who called Ruandan people barbaric creatures and genetically ill people! Mine Jim is now the third person that has been called a racist, by our new champion name caller. Mine wrote: you are being *disgustingly racist*, -- Rod Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archive http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://Batoche.co-ltd.net/ 52 Eby Street South Kitchener, Ontario N2G 3L1 Canada
Re: Information requested: US finance capital? which fraction of thebourgeosie? (70s vs 90s) (fwd)
Chris, your articles really help a lot, especially at the conceptualization stage. I will check them out tomorrow. Actually, I was just reading Christian Marazzi's article, published in _Zerowork_, Fall 1977, under the title "Money in the World Crisis: The New Basis of Capitalist power". Marazzi critically comments on the political implications of Hilferding's distinction between "productive" and "non-productive capital", where Hilferding opposes finance capital as "unproductive income formed through credit as capital". Mind you that Marazzi was writing specifically about the historical crisis of 1970-71, the crisis following decline of Keynesian capitalist development and the Bretton Woods System.. Marazzini comments: "Like Marx Hilferding saw that there was no real such thing as any real value of money as such; there was only a qualitatively determined rate of exchange money, and that rate was manipulated by finance capital. Hilferding had the merit of seeing that one aspect of the problem for the composition of capital at that time, and the reason for the way in which money was being manipulated , was the relation between the banking system and the capitalization of the rentier class, and the mobilization of unproductive income through credit as capital. This new relation between the banks and the state--the centralization of credit--he saw to be the lever whereby sush non productive income coould be mobilized for a relaunching of productive industrial capital.The relevance of this for the present period should be clear: today, once again,capital is manipulating money to transfer value from an unproductive role to a productive use in capital investment. but today the unproductive income is not financing a rentier class, but rather the working class; which converts wages to income through its refusal to function as labor power". "But is a reading of Hilferding reveals this sort of useful similarity, it can also be misleading, because of Hilferding's limitations. For he unfortunately hypostatized the regime of inconvertable money and failed to see the finance capitalism he confronted as an historical phase of capital centered on the emergence of the big banks and joint stock enterprises. The subsequent dominance from the big banks to industrial capital marked the transitory nature of what he studied" "Moreover, even in the period of its usefullness for understanding the mobilization of income for capital, other limitations of Hilferding's analysis led to disastrous political pratice. Seeing the big banks as the enenmy, his strategy was the social democratic nationalization of the banks, pension funds, insurance funds etc..Socialism in this perspective becomes the socializaiton of credit for the development of the prodcutive forces such as capital was unable to achieve. ... What Hilferding and his successors failed to see, and what we must grasp today, is the process of socialization which was at the root of the finance capital phase... The working class in Hilferding's approach is seen as external, as an exagonous factor in this reorganization, for he could not see the historically defined composition of the working class upon which and against which capital was forced to reorganize itself and which had historicaly contradicted both the previous industrial and monetary systems. What Hilferding and official Marxism (he is referring to vulgar orthodoxy here) of all varieties failed to see was that the gold standart depended on an international class composition thathad been superseded. When we examine capital recourse to incorvertable money in the present crisis, we must see how it is a means of transforming working class conquests into a further socializaiton and concentration of control" (p.99). When I read the literature on the crises of 1970s (Mazzini, Pijl, Prof. Wallerstein's article in _Foreign Policy_), I see a common preoccupation with the demise of the capitalist world system. Some leftish fellows writing around those times, such as Pijl, for example, thought that the internationalist capitalist system was falling apart, expecting unresolvable conflicts among the trans-atlantic bourgeoisie. Looking retrospectively, however, it did not happen that way. Capitalism has once again found a solution to obscure its own contradictions _on the surface_, not by resorting to Keynesianism this time, but by switching to neo-liberal class hegemony headed by the US finance capital. How can one explain this shift in the economic policy with respect to the role of American finance, and its ideological and organizational capacity to survive under crisis circumstances (from 1970s through 1990s, ie., South East Asian Crisis)? Any prospective views are welcome.. (especially in light of IPE and world system theory. Other theories are okey too).. merci... Mine There is some evidence that the distinction between financial and industrial capital is increasingly blurred, from the perspective of
Re: McArthur grantee (fwd)
Which is why people preach him, and give such people grants game theorization of economics has unfortunately imperialized other fields of social sciences too. sorry, i am waging a total war against game theory. it is an intellectual establishment designed to perpetuate the ideology of mainstream social sciences a little bit of psychology, a litle bit of "actor" theory, a little bit of pragmatism.. It teaches you how to play the role of a good capitalist!! bingo.. Mine He's brilliant, and very witty: good company. Lots of interesting ideas about how game theory should be developed... this fellow got a McArthur grant yesterday. Anybody know of him? Matthew Rabin Professor of Economics University of California, Berkeley Age: 36 Residence: San Francisco, California Links: Matthew Rabin's home page Rabin is a pioneer in behavioral economics, a field that applies such psychological insights as fairness, impulsiveness, biases, and risk aversion to economic theory and research. He is credited with influencing the practice of economics by seamlessly integrating psychology and economics, freeing economists to talk with new perspectives on such phenomena as group behavior and addiction. Rabin has demonstrated particular strength in distilling from psychological research those insights that can be modeled mathematically.
Re: Re: McArthur grantee (fwd)
Rob, you may wish to consider Ronal Chilcote's _Theories of Comparative Politics: The Search for a Paradigm Reconsidered_, for an excellent critique of game theory and methodology of mainstream social sciences. (Westview Press, 1994)..The book presents a critique of modernization theory, game theory and rational choice theories.. I have got to go.. Mine Game theory has always irritated the hell out of me, too, Mine (artificially bounded, neglectful of interpersonal and cultural norms, and ever in the thrall of that inevitable moment of equilibrium). I'd be most interested to watch you wage your noble war, anyway. Or perhaps, point me at any concise demolition article of which you might be aware. Cheers, Rob.
Re: Re: Re: Re: McArthur grantee (fwd)
well, actually, some people, were bombastically praising the man's work a couple of posts ago. It is not a novel thing to see that people update their arguments according to the member composition of the list... Mine Good point Jim. "Cooperative game theory" is just another bullshit cover for competitive equilibrium. It is being used in the battles I'm in to justify deregulating electric power, concluding that just the "right" amount of capacity can be built as the fierce competitors play out their games. I hope that Rabin is leading the fight against cooperative game theory. But I'd like to hear what Rabin's contributions to this field have been. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine/AS
Re: Re: Re: Re: McArthur grantee (fwd)
You can not understand the antogonism to game theory, because you are blind to ideology behind it: "Game theory and formal modeling have generated mathemetical explanations of strategies, especially for marketing adn advertising in business firms.Game theory has had an impact on economics and it has been widely used in political science analyses of international confrontations and electoral strategies. In fact, game theory has been extensively used by political scientists in the testing and implementation of rational choice theory, which assumes that THE STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINTS OF SOCIETY DO NOT NECESSARILY DETERMINE THE ACTIONS OF INDIVIDUALS AND THAT INDIVIDUALS TEND TO CHOOSE ACTIONS THAT BRING THEM THE BEST RESULTS. Cooperative and competitive relations in one's bargaining with allies and opponents are emphasized by the social scientists in a fashion modeled after the economist's attention to exchange, especially through competitive market system" " In focusing on systemic forecasting, Jantsch (1972) identified a number of tendencies in other social sciences. For sociology, he alluded to ways of " guiding human thinking in systemic fashion" and he mentioned scenario writing, gaming, historical analogy, and other techniques. For the policy sciences, he referred to the "outcome-orinted framework for strategic planning" known as the PLANNING-PROGRAMMING- BUDGETING SYSTEM, WHICH IS USED BY THE US GOVERNMENT AND OTHER COUNTRIES AS WELL" (Ronald Chilcote, p.125). Mine I don't understand the antagonism to game theory. It is a logical technique--a tool that can be used to focus the mind on strategic decisions. It has the weakness that it can only practically discuss the interaction of two people, but surely there is nothing inherent in it that would bring out this scorn. Rod Jim Devine wrote: Brad De Long wrote: He's [Matt Rabin is] brilliant, and very witty: good company. Lots of interesting ideas about how game theory should be developed... Doug writes: To what end? What's the point of game theory? What does it explain that things other than game theory don't? I hope that Rabin is leading the fight against cooperative game theory. But I'd like to hear what Rabin's contributions to this field have been. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine/AS -- Rod Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archive http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://Batoche.co-ltd.net/ 52 Eby Street South Kitchener, Ontario N2G 3L1 Canada
GT [was: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: McArthur grantee (fwd)
The argument that evil is not in the "economist but in the technique" misses the point since it assumes that the technique of game theory is neutral, just as it assumes that economists are neutral. While I respectfully say that this is A bullshit, I think that the very assumptions of game theory--individualism, profit maximizing agency, egoism, alturism in return for benefit-- are bombastically IDEOLOGICAL. One can not seperate the assummptions from the technique on the fallistic assumption that game theorists will not automatically apply their theories to engage in a nuclear attack against USSR. Game theorists do not need to conspire with the US government at the moment, this is de passe; what they need to do is to teach the governments about how to resolve conflicts and play the diplomacy game correctly in a way to minimize nuclear threat in a post-cold war era..Furthermore, if something _empirically_ does not happen, it does not mean that game theory is not ideological. To argue otherwise is very much like saying that I do not beat my wife, so there is no sexism.. Jim Devine wrote: I'm not antagonistic toward game theory, _per se_. I even studied it in High School (back in 1967 or 1968) and thought it was pretty cool. The problem, as with all theory, is how it's used and whether the theory is reified or not. I've been convinced (partly by previous discussions on pen-l) that there's nothing inherent in game theory that says that John von Neumann would automatically apply it to call for a preemptive unilateral nuclear attack on the USSR. There's nothing inherent in game theory that says that up-and-coming young economists have to prove their cojones by using fancy techniques like game theory (GT). See above.. Mine quotes Ronald Chilcote: Game theory and formal modeling have generated mathemetical explanations of strategies, especially for marketing and advertising in business firms. Game theory has had an impact on economics and it has been widely used in political science analyses of international confrontations and electoral strategies. In fact, game theory has been extensively used by political scientists in the testing and implementation of rational choice theory, which assumes that THE STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINTS OF SOCIETY DO NOT NECESSARILY DETERMINE THE ACTIONS OF INDIVIDUALS AND THAT INDIVIDUALS TEND TO CHOOSE ACTIONS THAT BRING THEM THE BEST RESULTS. I presume that the use of ALL CAPS indicates that you don't approve of these aspects of the theory. YES But the idea that people choose actions that bring them the best results is tautological and therefore unobjectionable as long as it's not reified. Where is the tautology here? I did not choose to live in a capitalist system. African Americans have not chosen to be discrimanated by whites. Women have not chosen to be beaten by men..Nobody chooses the heads of corporations (even in some formal sense). If there is oppression, it is because there has been oppression against some others' rights to equality. The idea that people actually choose -- i.e. are not necessarily determined by the structural constraints of society -- is pretty obvious. People choose to post stuff on pen-l. They're not totally determined by their societal environments. We are not talking about pen-l here. We are talking about a capitalist system charecterized by systemic inqualities-- the kind of inequalities that are beyond individuals' choices. I prefer Marx's view, i.e., that individuals create society (though hardly ever as intended) _and_ the society limits and shapes individual choices, personalities, and the results of their actions, as a unified and dynamic (dialectical) process. I know all these. I don't adulterate Marx's ideas to apologize game theory.. Cooperative and competitive relations in one's bargaining with allies and opponents are emphasized by the social scientists in a fashion modeled after the economist's attention to exchange, especially through competitive market system well, the real world has both cooperative and competitive situations, so that GT isn't irrelevant. ABOVE, the man is criticizing what the game is trying to ENDORSE as a model of social relationships, and this model is competitive market system. He is attacking the hard core assumptions of game theory. In focusing on systemic forecasting, Jantsch (1972) identified a number of tendencies in other social sciences. For sociology, he alluded to ways of " guiding human thinking in systemic fashion" and he mentioned scenario writing, gaming, historical analogy, and other techniques. For the policy sciences, he referred to the "outcome-orinted framework for strategic planning" known as the PLANNING-PROGRAMMING- BUDGETING SYSTEM, WHICH IS USED BY THE US GOVERNMENT AND OTHER COUNTRIES AS WELL" are you saying that if the government uses something, it's bad? so if President Clinton breathes oxygen, we should avoid it? Yes Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Information requested: US finance capital? which fraction of thebourgeosie? (70s vs 90s) (fwd)
Apologies for cross-posting...
List(s),
I am thinking at the moment about the possible ways of operationalizing
"finance capitalism". The literature I have read up to now develops
a sociological formulation of the concept from the vantage points of
international political economy and world systems theory. Evidently, there
are diverse theoretical approaches within each group (Marxist, historical,
institutional, Keynesian, etc..). Here are some of the debates I have in
mind that I would like you to comment on, if possible..
1. Van der Pijl (1984), in his study of the formation of the Atlantic
ruling class in the modern practice of US liberalism (between Wilson's
launch for "offensive democratic universalism" and the world economic
crisis of the 1970s) traces the fractional interests within the capitalist
class to two major conflicts of interests: _money capital_ (commercial
capital) and _productive capital_ (industrial capital). He argues that,
traditionally, money-capital interests (financiers, bankers, foreign
investors) adhere to the principles of classical liberal doctrine
(free trade liberalism) whereas industrialists do show a tendecy towards
"state monopoly" capitalism. Following Marx (Vol 3, where Marx opposes
"fictitios capital" to productive capital) Hilferding (financial oligarchy
merged with industry), Lenin and Gramsci, Pijl illustrates how these two
interests of capital dialectically move in such a way to allow "the basic
social conditions of production to be preserved, and if possible,
reinforced". He later continues: " The money capital concept underlay the
liberal internationalism of the early 20th century. It rose to prominence
with the internationalization of the circuit of money capital, which
generalized a rentier ideology among the bourgeosie, both in Europe and
United States. The productive capital on the other hand, provided the
frame of reference for ruling class hegemony when the Atlantic hegemony
subsequently became compartmentalized into spheres of influence due to the
pressures generated by the introduction of mass production (or large scale
industrial production generally) in a context of acute imperialist rivalry
and nationalism" (p.9). The central tenet of Pijl's argument is that the
US capitalism has been able to forge a synthesis between these two
fractions of capital by introducing what is called "corporate liberalism--
allience between organized labor and big business. Although the French
popular front had a smilar sort of class allience, partly of fordist
inspiration, it failed to realize a program comperable to New Deal
liberalism.
In Pijl's formulation, _finance capital_ (bank capital) serves as a frame
of reference to_ money capital_ concept, and, in functional terms, money
capital concept represents _finance capital_, so to speak. Pijl then
introduces critiques and proponents of money-capital from various vantage
points and class interests (This is the part where I am a little bit
confused)
1. Agrarian capitalist critique from the standpoint of rural economy
("farmers' resentment of deflationary policies" ; American populism and
others populist movements in continental Europe)
2. Anti-Semite capitalist critique of _money lenders_ (anti-chrematism of
the Nazi movement in the practice of German capitalism) and nationalist
bourgeois critiques of economic liberalism (List, Hamilton, etc..)
3. Critique of money capital from the standpoint of capitalist productive
capital ,as articulated in the writings of Hobson (his critique of
speculative financiers, rentier class,orienting the British foreign
policies), Keynes (his proponence of the state as the key agency for
capitalist reform", and redistribution of wealth via "inflationary
financing by the state") and Ford (his anticipation of Keynesian
demand-side economic policy as a means to promote mass production and mass
consumption)
4. Gramsci's critique of American fordism..
Question 1: I am confused with the third category. How does Keynes's
notion of state interventionism differs from, let's say, Hamilton's
defense of national economy, especially with respect to the role of
finance capitalism? We know that Keynes was still a liberal, however,
differently from classical liberals, he believed in the need to
intervene in the self-regulating market, allowing the state to protect the
market from the "petty money interests represented by the rentier class".
So he essentially beleived that capitalism could be reformed by an
activist state, but I don't see how this differs from the need to build a
national economy and industrial state as proposed by Hamilton? Does
Hamilton's ideas represent the internationalist or the protectionist
faction of the US bourgeoisie (Similar to Hamilton, List, for example,
promoted the idea of continental customs union)? Does the difference
between Keynes and Hamilton lie in the distinction between free trade
capitalism and anti-free trade capitalism? If so? how so?
for example, Pijl
Re: Re: New Economy??? (fwd)
I do *not* remember getting this message because my account was full so Brad's question probably bounced back. Can you repost the rest of your post? Chris, I understand what you say but the article is not suggesting that the world economy is charecterized by monopoly capitalism. This not my suggestion below too. Kohler's "figures" are supposed to show that free market capitalism's notion of "equal exchange" is not actually as equal as _free trade liberals_ think it is. The notion that free trade will increase prosperity by increasing the level of third world countries to the level of advanced capitalist countries is untrue (equality of nations rhetoric). Free market here should not be read as the opposite of monopoly or protectionism. Inequality is built into free market by definition within a world system charecterized by capitalist trade realtions. at the moment, I am _trying_ to concentrate on my doctoral pproposal so I will reply when I have time. Mine At 13:37 13/06/00 -0700, you wrote: they are supposed to show that capitalism is not the capitalism of free trade. Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany So do you refuse to give answers to my questions? Brad DeLong Although there are strong monopoly features in global capitalism, these figures do not necessarily seem to me to show that there is not "free trade". Surely the heart of the article is the validity of the formula of the term ERD, the "the exchange rate deviation index". I suspect that both Mine and Brad are to some extent correct but we need to look at the problem in a different way. We have to look for unequal exchange as being not necessarily dependent on political conspiracies, but on the process of exchange between areas of very different levels of technological development. (cf Mark's explanation of exploitation of labour power through free exchange of commodities in an unequal market). Have I missed discussion of ERD, or could anyone comment on what it seems to mea? Is it a genuine expression of a real process or an arithmetic fiddle? Chris Burford London
Re: Re: Re: Mau-mauing The Oppressor and other crazyshit (fwd)
But this sends you down the road that Franz Neumann went down in his _Behemoth_ interpetation of Nazism: that the Nazis would never exterminate the Jews because they needed to keep them around as an object of collective hate lest the masses turn against their rulers and bosses. I don't remember Neumann putting exactly in these terms, since I read _Behemoth_ many moons ago, except the intro part that I reread in a grad seminar here. Neumann does not specifically go into the psychological details of why the Nazis particularly chose Jews to exterminate (although I don't agree, you need people like Adorno to figure out that, especially his piece on Anti-Semitism where Adorno sees fascism as an extention of Christianity and enlightenment thought). Assuming that Neumann makes a counterfactual that Nazis would never exterminate Jews because they wanted to keep somebody around as an object of collective hate to detract attention, he is wrong since it did not happen that way.. The matter of the fact is that the folks were exterminated, and we need to understand more seriously the ideology of racism behind those killings and the circumstances, social forces in other words, that made this ideology more convenient to become a hegemonic form of rule. Plus, my general point is that fascism was becoming trendy in every country at that time, not only in Germany. Let's not praise US democracy here. Of course, only in a couple of countries, it was established so to speak. Other countries in the Anglo Saxon world came closer to fascism by orienting their economies towards corporate capitalism and industrial nationalism using protective legislation and other methods of intervention, and introducing Fordism as a class comprimise between big business and organized labor (thanks to bourgeois unions!), as we see in the practice of New Deal liberalism. If you folks here had strong landed clases with organic ties to the army, you would have the same destiny. at the cultural level, I won't go into details of reminding how eugenics, socio-biology, positive anthropology (brain size studies), criminology etc became so popular in the US. I remember once when I was so much into anthropology that I was amazed to see how Turkish History Thesis about the racial superiority of Turks was written and funded under the supervision of American anthropologists and German orientalists (and their respective governments), such as Rolan Dixon, for example, from Harvard University who wrote a sexy book called The racial History of Mankind Same story still goes except that people like Pearson have cocktail parties with washington policy analysts to run their think thanks.. Neumann thought that with strikes forbidden, unions broken, wages frozen, and prices rising, that some *distraction* was needed--but that the party bosses knew it was a distraction, and new that it needed to be kept within bounds. As I said, Neumann relates the rise of fascism to political economy. He may be too Marxist for your taste Brad, but actually Neumann is not a Marxist, if you wanna hint that. He is a leftish of a liberal democratic variety.. He was wrong... I am too tried to have a dabate over Neumann at the moment, but I generally like the man's work, although I am not a liberal leftish democrat.. Moreover, we often underestimate the *scope* of Nazi hatred: not just Jews, but Gypsies; not just Jews and Gypsies, but Poles and Russians. and african americans, and Kurds, and Palestians... racism is not dead!. it exists both within nations and inter-nationally! And given Hitler's reaction to Jesse Owens, what would have happened had the Nazis won World War II and moved south into Africa? US counter hegemony has replaced it anyway.. Viva washington! Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany Brad DeLong
ADB Annual Meeting (Chiang Mai) (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2000 21:34:24 -0700 (PDT) From: David Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: world-system network [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: ADB Annual Meeting (Chiang Mai) (fwd) This might be of interest... -- Forwarded message -- Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 08:21:36 +1000 From: Greg Young [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Australian Mekong Research Network [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: MEKONG: ADB Annual Meeting (Chiang Mai) From: Ted Chapman [EMAIL PROTECTED] About: ADB's Annual Meeting (Chiang Mai, Thailand, 4-8 May) AMRN Item 36/2000 The following report was published in the "Vientiane Times", 9-11 May (Vol.7, No. 36). It is one of many reports published at the time in the regional press and more widely. "Thai Police Deploy in Force to Protect ADB Meeting" "CHIANG MAI, Thailand (AP)-- Riot police deployed in overwhelming force Monday to protect the final day of the Asian Development Bank's annual meeting from protesters demanding an end to policies they say punish the poor and hurt the environment. Tadao Chino, President of the Bank, told a news conference that his schedule was 'too hectic' to meet the demonstrators and sent them a new copy of (the) letter sent to them a day previously, saying the ADB would form up a committee to study their demands. The 1,200 demonstrators, who say their livelihood is threatened by ADB-funded infrastructure projects, burned it and accused the Manila-based bank of stalling. They then lit off firecrackers and started dispersing peacefully. Earlier, 2,000 police, many of them bearing clubs and shields, took up positions at the entrances and streets outside the Westin Hotel, which had been besieged Sunday by 4,000 people bulldozed through an outer perimeter of police barricades. Police took no chances Monday, allowing protesters to assemble across the street while confronting them with a show of force aimed at deterring more trouble. Brief pushing broke out at noontime, but there was no violence. Three fire trucks with water cannon were on standby, parked next to fleets of Mercedes-Benz cars used by the delegates. Weeraporn Sopa, 33,leader of (a) confederation of farmers from Thailand's poor northeast, said the demonstration was building on the protests he attended against the World Trade Organization last year in Seattle. "I don't think the ADB will meet our demands, because it would mean they would have to abolish themselves,' Weeraporn said. 'Our protest is a part of the world fighting against this kind of organization, which catalyzes the growth of capitalism in Third World countries. In the process. we poor have lost everything.' Police Lt.Gen. Aram Chanpen also called the protests a success, saying cooperation between police and the crowd had led to no violence or destruction of property over the three-day meeting. The protesters are mostly people who say their livelihood has suffered because of ADB-funded projects, particularly dams that have displaced farmers and fisherfolk and a mammoth wastewater treatment plant planned for Klong Dan, near the capital, Bangkok. They demand that the ADB stop funding the Klong Dan project and cease loans that increase the indebtedness of impoverished nations and worsen the plight of farmers and the poor in the name of restructuring. The Klong Dan villagers say they are unjustly paying the price for extensive pollution caused by barely regulated industry that has sprouted around Bangkok. The ADB contends that millions will benefit, including the villagers who should get cleaner water. But officials admit consultations beforehand were poor and have fueled the current trouble. The protesters have been inspired by a worldwide series of demonstrations against multilateral economic institutions like the ADB, perceived as arrogant and out of touch with people they profess to help." (quoted in full) +++ MEKONG is a mailing list for circulating information on conferences, publications, and research about the Mekong Basin countries, and regional cooperation. * moderator: Greg Young [EMAIL PROTECTED] * director: Ted Chapman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Faculty of Asian Studies Australian National University * email your announcement to [EMAIL PROTECTED] * help at http://asia.anu.edu.au/mail/mailinglists.html * to unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with no subject line and the message: unsubscribe mekong
McArthur grantee (fwd)
himm.. what is the deal with McArhur grant? Mine this fellow got a McArthur grant yesterday. Anybody know of him? Matthew Rabin Professor of Economics University of California, Berkeley Age: 36 Residence: San Francisco, California Links: Matthew Rabin's home page Rabin is a pioneer in behavioral economics, a field that applies such psychological insights as fairness, impulsiveness, biases, and risk aversion to economic theory and research. He is credited with influencing the practice of economics by seamlessly integrating psychology and economics, freeing economists to talk with new perspectives on such phenomena as group behavior and addiction. Rabin has demonstrated particular strength in distilling from psychological research those insights that can be modeled mathematically.
Re: Mau-mauing The Oppressor and other crazy shit (fwd)
"Collective pathology" is a politically suspect term to accept. Not only it has been strategically used to label and criminalize certain races (so called _backward, irrational, non- white peoples_), but also been instrumental in safeguarding the ideology of racism for the benefit of American jingoism!! The concept itself has fascist connotations, however used liberally! Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany Brad asked: What, then, are we to call Nazi Germany? Or China during the Great Leap Forward? Broadly defined, fascism is one of the theories of collective pathology that describes certain groups of people as racially superior and others as racially inferior (and pathologic). The second group constitutes those to be eliminated and subordinated to the rule of the first group, since they are not only seen as culturally backward, because they belong to an inferior race, as the argument goes, but also regarded as genetically ill. This is what the fascists believed when they established their system in Germany to eliminate Jews. This is also what the British capitalists beleived when they imperialized the rest of the world to modernize so called "underdeveloped" nations (Read Hobson's discussion on scientific racism in his book _Imperialism_). Racial inferiority thesis is also what the ordinary Americans believe in their everyday treatment of blacks. Many modern theories of race and culture, including the ones that became popular in Anglo Saxon tradition at the height of positivism and evolutionary sciences during the 50s (including socio-biologist's Pearson who was brought to US by an anti-Semite, and who is the editor of _Mankind Quaterly_ currently, a very popular so called liberal Washington based think tank journal that publishes articles in eugenics, ecology, virtues in racism shits) derive their definition of race from biologically and culturally predetermined notions of pathology. These studies so bombasticaly appealing to US audience at the moment are racist. Racism is the ideology that people differ because they differ genetically, so even their perceptions of culture automatically derive from this reductionist equation. Once you start attributing some inherent and unchanging charecteristics to certain groups of people, either cultural or biological (let's say Vietnamese people are authoritarian because of their culture, or African Americans are over-populated so they are ones to be sterilized, or we are overcrowded by Chinese labor force), you are doing racism: different people, different cultures, different natures... and so on. Racism constitutes the cultutral common sense at the moment while collective pathology studies legitimize it. In response to Tom Walker: To a certain extend, I agree with what you say. Not _every_ theory of collective pathology is necessarily fascist. I meant that, however, the _intellectual tradition_ you mention (Adorno's totalitarian personality, LeBon's group psychology, Freud's discussion on war, etc..) carry a dangerous potential to rationalize and reify fascism in the name of criticizing fascism. Adorno thought that fascism and socialism were the same because they were both so called collectivist, and made his first pessimistic attack on Marxism in the name of critical theory. He looked at the wrong example, the Stalinist model, and mistakenly generalized about the possible future of socialism. Therefore he killed praxis and apoliticized Marxism in the direction of bourgeois liberal theory. If one believes that every form of collectivity (or let's say _social relationship_ in more _appropriate_ terms) is by definition fascist, s(he) indeed believes that humanity is doomed to nothing but fascism; the kind of manifesto similar to human nature essentialism. I don't buy such dogmatic arguments... in my vision of socialism, there is _indeed_ an alternative to liberal indvidualism and capitalism, but this alternative should not necassarily regress into fascism as critical theorists hinted to suggest. In response to Chris about the table of uenqual exchange: Kohler fellow is not in the list at the moment. Let me have a look at that part of his article you mention, while I contact him in the mean time to see how he is gonna respond to your question.. ..I have to run at the moment! Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany -- Professor J. Bradford DeLong Department of Economics, #3880 University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 (510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 voice (510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 fax http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/
Re: Mau-mauing The Oppressor and other crazy shit (fwd)
Walker wrote: Ideology? Racism? Jingoism? Your own terminology tacitly accepts some kind of collective determination of consciousness. The next step is to acknowledge that, e.g., racism is dysfunctional for the racist as well as for the victim. Nothing that I've said implies a genetic etiology. I did not say that you have implied a genetic etiology! That is the heart of the argument! No racist would apperently say so, if you read the mainstream studies on race closely. What one has to do is to look at the scientific enterprise as a _whole_, not only Benjamin's work, to see what is IMPLIED behind immediate appereances. Racism is part of the social REALITY oppressive of blacks and other minorities. Whites benefit from this oppression, so racism is "functional" for them to maintain their hegemony. To insist that whites are as affected from racism as equally as blacks is to deny the reality of racism and structural discrimination! Sure!! whites and blacks, men and women, capitalists and workers stand on an equal foot! so why to mention racism? why to mention sexism? Mine Tom Walker
New Economy??? (fwd)
Is this a claim that Algerian standards of living would rise by 47% if Algeria were to shut off all trade with the rest of the world, and that standards of living in Zimbabwe would rise by 56% if Zimbabwe were to shut off all trade with the rest of the world? The author himself writes in the tradition of the political economy of the _world system_, so he has no intention of making a case for state _capitalism_ or protectionism-- the model already followed by Algeria in the 60s, if that is what you have in mind as being anti-free trade. A country can perfectly be capitalist and protectionist without necessarily being socialist (ie., Keynesian class compromise you folks have here). In fact, the argument must be that (although I have not asked him, but which I will), the capitalist world system, that is the liberal internationalist economic order, dialectially reproduces _laissez faire liberalism_ and _state interventionism_ to protect the very structure of capitalism within the _same_ system. Liberalism is not used in the common American sense as the opposite of protectionism. To see these as opposites is obscurantist. For those societies in the periphery of the world system, national development was already part of an historical process of primitive accumulation to become part of an international division of labor charecteried by US internationalist strategy of expansionism and trade relations. If not, then just what *are* all these numbers in the final column supposed to be? they are supposed to show that capitalism is not the capitalism of free trade. Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany Brad DeLong -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- "Now 'in the long run' this [way of summarizing the quantity theory of money] is probably true But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. **In the long run** we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again." moderl --J.M. Keynes -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- J. Bradford De Long; Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley; Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives. Dept. of Economics, U.C. Berkeley, #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 (510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 phones (510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 faxes http://econ161.berkeley.edu/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: My Take on Competition (fwd)
He used _relative surplus value_ and _absolute surplus value_.. aren't these parts of LTV by definition? Mine Brad, Marx's theory of value is not nearly as mechanistic as you make it out to be. In fact, he never used the term, LTV. Meek and Dobb and some other interpreters presented the LTV as a mere expansion on Ricardo. I suspect that you already know this, but like to act as a curmudgeon. The argument being made was as follows: "Because changes in the regime of intellectual property enforcement do not affect what happens on the factory floor, they cannot affect the rate of exploitation. Hence changes in IP do not increase surplus value. Hence changes in IP *redistribute* profits, but do not change the economy-wide profit rate." If the LTV is true--if surplus-value is a kind of *stuff* that, once created, is subject to some kind of conservation law, and bears some relationship to profits--then this is a cogent, coherent, and correct argument. But it ain't: changes in IP can and do change the economy-wide profit rate (and wage rate as well). My point--that thinking in LTV terms gets you so tangled up in knots that you cannot think straight--is not a new one... -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Mau-mauing The Oppressor and other crazy shit(fwd)
"Collective pathology" is a politically suspect term to accept. Not only it has been strategically used to label and criminalize certain races (so called _backward, irrational, non- white peoples_), but also been instrumental in safeguarding the ideology of racism for the benefit of American jingoism!! The concept itself has fascist connotations, however used liberally! Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany Brad asked: What, then, are we to call Nazi Germany? Or China during the Great Leap Forward? Broadly defined, fascism is one of the theories of collective pathology that describes certain groups of people as racially superior and others as racially inferior (and pathologic). Hmmm... How can Nazism be a collective theory of collective pathology without ipso facto being a collective pathology as well? Brad, Nazism is both a product of an insane intellectual mind (a product of pre-war reactionary German intelligentsia growing under the influence of German nationalism and idealism) and an authoritarian, hierarchial socio-political system brought by a crisis of capitalism. In other words, it was "another" form of capitalism, "systemic" pathology, let's say, instrumental in protecting the interests of the ruling classes as a last resort of survival strategy. There was indeed *some* conciousness element built into fascism-- the identifiable material interests of the ruling classes. It was *not* simply a sub-concious *pathology*. To say so is to mystify the mass murders and atrocities of Nazis. Shall we say that Eichmann or other SS soldiers did not know what they were doing when they sent thousands of Jews to death? I highly doubt so.. merci, Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany
Re: Mau-mauing The Oppressor and other crazy shit (fwd)
Michael, don't get me wrong, but why are you so dense? You sound like an authoritarian father. don't discuss this! don't discuss that! shut up! why don't you let the river flow instead? I think people should be reminded if they misrepresent certain realities, and this is, naturally, the part of critical communication on pen-l? isn't it? do you expect us to discuss pure economics instead, if such a term applies? thanks, Mine You see, Brad, once this sort of debate begins it will do nothing than create this sort of discussion. Louis Proyect wrote: Brad: So let me ask you: what do you call a society where upwards of 50 million people die because no one in authority (save Peng Dehuai) dares tell the Great Helmsman that local party committees are grossly overstating the size of the harvest? Are you using real numbers or the ones that Rudy Rummel likes to make up? How come you don't feature his bogus numbers any more on your webpage? I'd like to think that you were embarrassed out of using them. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/ -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 the part of critical communication on pen-l? isn't it? do you expect us to Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mau-mauing The Oppressor and other crazy shit (fwd)
Tom Walker wrote: things. Redeploying the clinical diagnostic terms from their use as labels for individuals to a broader critique of collective pathology is about as far from "anti-disabled thinking" as I can imagine. "Collective pathology" is a politically suspect term to accept. Not ony it has been strategically used to label and criminalize certain races (so called _backward, irrational, non- white peoples_), but also been instrumental in safeguarding the ideology of racism for the benefit of American jingoism!! The concept itself has fascist connotations, however used liberally! Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany
New Economy??? (fwd)
Micheal Parelman posted on pen-l: ECONOMISTS struggling to make sense of the American economy agree about some big things. Nobody denies that its performance since the middle of the 1990s has been remarkable. Nobody denies that technological progress in the computer industry has accelerated dramatically, and that this has directly boosted overall output and productivity. I don't know where Parelman extracted this article from (Gordon?), but the author's statement sounds terribly mainstream and US centric to me!! Reading the US economy in isolation from the rest of the world must be the wisest thing economists subscribe... Viva boom and productivity! here are the real reasons for America's prosperity: Mine http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol4/v4n2a4.htm APPENDIX WORLD TABLES OF UNEQUAL EXCHANGE 1995, 119 countries 21. INTRODUCTION The statistical tables below present quantitative estimates of unequal exchange for 119 countries. The tables are based on the theory and method developed in the main body of the article. The calculations are based on export/import data and the exchange rate deviation index. Losses or gains from unequal exchange are calculated as the difference between a "fair value" of exports/imports and the "actual (unfair) value" of exports/imports. The estimation formula is: T = d*X - X where d = the exchange rate deviation index (also designated as "ERD" in the literature) X = the volume of exports from a low- or middle-income country to high-income countries (valued at the actual exchange rate) T = the unrecorded transfer of value (gain or loss) resulting from unequal exchange In the tables (below), this formula is applied to the data for 119 countries for the year 1995. 22. HOW TO READ THE TABLES Table 1 presents the step-by-step calculations. Countries are arranged in alphabetical order and in two groups -- first, non-OECD countries and, secondly, OECD countries. The losses or gains from unequal exchange are shown at the right-hand side (in terms of U.S. dollars and as a percent of the country's GNP). Table 2 presents the losses and gains (same as in Table 1), sorted by dollar volume. Table 3 presents the losses and gains (same as in Table 1), sorted by percent of GNP. The tables are followed by a brief discussion and further methodological details. 23. THE WORLD TABLES [Page 160] Journal of World-Systems Research Table A-1 -- WORLD TABLE OF UNEQUAL EXCHANGE 1995 NON-OECD countries (N=97) Exchange Fair Country GNP PopulGNP/capita Exports Rate Value of UNEQUAL EXCHANGE 1995 1995 1995 1995 to OECD Deviat'n ExportsLOSS (-) LOSS (-) US $ US $ PPP $US $ D/C (G/0.9)*FJ=F-H K=J/A millions millions year millions ratio $millions $millions % of GNP (A) (B)(C) (D) (E) (F) (G) (H)(J) (K) Algeria44,800 28.01,600 5,300 1994 7,807 3.31 28,712 -20,905 -47% Angola 4,428 10.8 410 1,310 92 3,512 3.20 12,486 -8,974 -203% Argentina 278,641 34.78,030 8,310 95 7,259 1.03 8,308 -1,049 0% Armenia 2,774 3.8 730 2,260 92 4 3.10 14 -10 0% Bahamas 3,295 0.3 11,940 14,710 91 120 1.23 164 -44-1% Bahrain 4,524 0.67,840 13,400 95 561 1.71 1,066-505 -11% Bangladesh 28,752 119.8 240 1,380 93 1,745 5.75 11,149 -9,404 -33% Barbados1,745 0.36,560 10,620 95 103 1.62 185 -82-5% Belize568 0.22,630 5,400 95 151 2.05 343-192 -34% Benin 2,035 5.5 370 1,760 95 54 4.76 287-233 -11% Bhutan292 0.7 420 1,260 92 0 3.000 0 0% Bolivia 5,920 7.4 800 2,540 95 603 3.18 2,131 -1,528 -26% Brazil579,488 159.23,640 5,400 95 37,389 1.48 61,483 -24,095-4% Bulgaria 11,172 8.41,330 4,480 95 2,214 3.37
The Long Twentieth Century (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 02:54:54 -0400 From: Mine Aysen Doyran [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: The Long Twentieth Century Review, Giovanni Arrighi, _The Long Twentieth Century_ (Verso, 1994) by Immanuel Wallerstein Copyright (c) 1995 by Immanuel Wallerstein v.10/4/95 Despite its title, this book is not really about the twentieth century, long or otherwise. It is an attempt to understand the de- cline of U.S. hegemony and the present dilemmas of the world-system in the light of the historical evolution of world capitalism begin- ning with Venice and Genoa. It is a historicized political economy of the world-system, a major contribution to our understanding of our world. It is ambitious theoretically, since Arrighi is trying to put together a whole series of familiar stories and theoretical propositions in a provocative and original way. It will be dis- cussed and debated and used widely. Arrighi sees a constant tension between the "revenue-maximiz- ing logic of trade expansions" and the "profit-maximizing logic of capital accumulation" (p. 232) which alternately coincide with and [Page 1] reinforce each other and bifurcate. Lest this seem abstruse, Arrighi immediately translates this into a concrete interpretation of 600 years of world history. He builds his story on the idea of successive, alternating forms of hegemony within the world-system, what he calls the dialectic of state and capital. He takes off from a boutade of Braudel: "[In] Venice the state was all; in Genoa capital was all" (p. 145). In Venice the strength of capital rested on the coercive power of the state; in Genoa, capital stood on its own two feet, and the state, such as it was, was dependent upon it. Arrighi's summary judgment: In the short run (in which a century is a short run), Venice's method seemed unbeat- able, but in the long run it was Genoa that created the "first world-embracing cycle of capital accumulation" (p. 147). Then, in one of those clever antinomies of which he is fond, Arrighi says: "Just as Venice's inherent strength in state- and war-making was its weakness, so Genoa's weakness in these same activities was its strength" (p. 148). Venice became the prototype of "state (monopo- ly) capitalism" and Genoa of "cosmopolitan (finance) capitalism." So far, most readers will nod hazily in their fuzziness about the details of the fifteenth-century world. It is when Arrighi starts applying these categories closer to home that the surprises come. It turns out the "Dutch regime, like the Venetian, was rooted from the start in fundamental self-reliance and competitiveness in the use and control of force" (p. 151), which explains its hegemony and which then "backfired...[by creating] a new enticement for ter- ritorialist organizations to imitate and compete with the Dutch..." (p. 158). Once again, success would mean failure, Arrighi's repeated leitmotiv. [Page 2]Journal of World-Systems Research The British replaced the Dutch, and the Age of the Genoese was paralleled by the Age of the Rothschilds. They did this by reviving "the organizational structures of Iberian imperialism and Genoese cosmopolitan finance capital, both of which the Dutch had supersed- ed" (p. 177). "Control over the world market was the specificity of British capitalism" (p. 287). The Germans tried to suspend the ex- cessive competition this brought about, but the U.S. "superseded" it (p.285). U.S. corporate capitalism, expanding transnationally became "so many 'Trojan horses' in the domestic markets of other countries" (p. 294). This destroyed the structures of accumulation of British market capitalism but once done, "U.S. capitalism was pow- erless to create the conditions of its own self-expansion in a cha- otic world" (p. 295). The impasse was overcome only by inventing the cold war. In the light of this history, the financial expansion of the 1970s and 1980s does not seem revolutionary but a repeat of an old story. The overall picture is of four successive hegemonies: Genoese, Dutch, British, and U.S., about which three major statements can be made: they successively were briefer; there was a long-term tendency for the leading agencies to be successively larger and more complex; there was a double movement, backward and forward in time, with each shift of hegemony (Venice/United Provinces/U.S. [Page 3] contrasted with Genoa/United Kingdom). What can we say about such a vast canvas, most inadequately summarized here? Its greatest strength is its clear vision of capi- talism as a single-mindedly rational attempt to accumulate capital endlessly, which means, says Arrighi, capitalists are interested in the expansion of production only if it's profitable, which is true only about half the time. The rest of the time, the capitalists ex- pand their money
COMMODITY CHAINS AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM. (fwd)
Book reviewed: Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds. COMMODITY CHAINS AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1994. xiv + 334 pp. ISBN 0-313-28914-X, $59.95 (hardcover); ISBN 0-275-94573-1, $22.95 (paper). Reviewed by Wilma A. Dunaway and Donald A. Clelland Department of Sociology University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA Copyright (c) Wilma Dunaway and Donald A. Clelland 1995. v.10/4/95 Despite early recognition of its theoretical centrality (Immanuel Wallerstein, HISTORICAL CAPITALISM, 1983, pp. 13-16), the "commodity chain" has been inadequately conceptualized by world-system researchers. This book aims to correct that deficiency by aggregating papers that were presented at the 1992 annual conference of the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association. The book is organized around four themes: commodity chains in the capitalist world-economy prior to 1800; the economic restructuring of commodity chains; the geographic [Page 1]Journal of World-Systems Research organization of commodity chains; and the shaping role of core consumption upon shifts in peripheral production and distribution. Each of the articles is rich in empirical details that reflect lengthy and involved research on the part of the writers; the book, as a whole, provides the basis for comparing trends in several different countries and industries. That dense detail is condensed through the use of 21 tables and 34 commodity chain diagrams and maps. When we used this book in a Fall, 1994 graduate seminar, we quickly became aware that the book's preoccupation with the presentation of that empirical detail is also its primary weakness. Most of the articles focus upon documenting the various nodes and linkages that comprise the production and/or distribution processes involved in several different international industries. The editors declare that COMMODITY CHAINS fleshes out, for the first time, the "global commodity chains approach." Theoretically, this volume never achieves that goal. Indeed, we are disappointed to find so little world-system theory in a volume derived from a PEWS Conference. In addition to seven pages by Hopkins and Wallerstein, the index [Page 2]Journal of World-Systems Research enumerates only seven brief references to "world-system theory," out of 311 pages of substantive content! For our graduate seminar, we repeatedly were forced to demonstrate how the assigned readings contributed to world-system theory, for most of the writers get caught up in a descriptive style or fail to link their explanations with world-system theory. Even more fundamentally, we are troubled by the absence of a key world-systems notion. Hidden, only once (p. 49), Hopkins and Wallerstein introduce what they consider to be the pivotal question that should be addressed in commodity chain analysis: "If one thinks of the entire chain as having a total amount of surplus value that has been appropriated, what is the division of this surplus value among the boxes of the chain?" Surprisingly, this central idea is ignored by the other contributors. None of the articles in this volume directly analyzes the extraction of surplus between the nodes of the chains or the exploitation of labor that occurs in the many processes. Instead, the editors contend that the global commodity chains approach "promotes a nuanced [Page 3]Journal of World-Systems Research analysis of world-economic spatial inequalities in terms of differential access to markets and resources" (p.2). Without adequate linkage to broader world-system arguments, that line of reasoning sounds more like a disquieting apparition from the work of Rostow than a conceptual extension of world-system theory. What never appears in this book is the key idea that lies at the heart of understanding the international division of labor: unequal exchange. There is little or no attention to the central world-system thesis that exploitation and domination are structured at multiple levels of the commodity chains that are so painstakingly depicted. COMMODITY CHAINS makes a needed beginning; but its proposed framework will not be soundly grounded in world-systems theory until it factors in the messy inequities that really result from the neat boxes and lines in the commodity chain diagrams. We will lose sight of the research agenda for social change that Wallerstein (REVIEW, 1 (1-2), 1977) originally proposed for world-system analysis if we get caught up in an approach that "explains the distribution of wealth ... as an outcome of the relative intensity of competition [Page 4]Journal of World-Systems Research within different nodes" (p. 4). Mainstream economists embrace exactly that kind of
What is US economy?My Take on Competition.
M. Parelman wrote:
The forces tending to increase competition in the United States were
deregulation, as Jim mentioned, and the pressure from imports. The
forces
tending to diminish competition were intellectual property, mergers, and
possibly government contracting. In fact, as Jim seemed to suggest -- if
he didn't, he should have -- the pressures from deregulation and imports
have encouraged more mergers and acquisitions. Anthony specifically
pointed to this dialectical relationship.
I think that one should understand the capitalist economy as a whole. Too
much emphasis on competition or monopoly detracts attention from the fact
that capitalism is a regime of special priviliges to begin with.
Broadly defined, capitalism is a modern form of theft and acquisition by
illegitimate means. It does not so much matter if there are so many or few
capitalists on the market in so far as capitalists are in control of
economic activity and subordinate labor to their own class interests.
What we are dealing here is not capitalism in the abstract where monopoly
capitalism should be seen as a 'derivative form' of free market, but
_historical capitalisms_, as Immanuel Wallerstein has put it, the concrete
historical manifestations of a particular form of capitalist activity.
From what I see among the participants of the discussion is that some
people want to see competitive markets, some emphasize increasing
centralization of economic power in the form of monopolies, oligarchic
interests and mergers. There is a misleading tendecy to see capitalism
represented by "single" (or more) capitalists. This way of seeing
capitalism is methodologically individualistic. Period. While the question
that market is competitive or monopolistic can be emprically proven by
looking at the forces tending to decrease or increase competition ( let's
say evolution of autombile industry from 1950 to 1970s or any other
specific industry), one should not focus on attiributing hyper pluralism
to capitalist class interests (Nike, Klein, etc..) ("capitalism as
the total sum of particular interests" rhetoric). If capitalism were that
competitive, capitalist class would never form a ruling class as a
hegemonic block (economically, politically, culturally speaking). It would
be exteremely fragmented and diversified. Eventhough in the overall
distribution of surplus value among capitalists specific fractions of
capital may develop, when it comes to protect their own interests,
capitalists enter into alliences and press their particular strategic
demands as a CLASS. To support this abstractly, In Volume 2 of Capital,
Marx talks about the functional differentiation of capital into
productive/industrial capital and two other forms of capital belonging to
the circulation process; money capital and commodity capital. This
distinction gives us a clue about how fractions of social capital are
formed in relation to differing interests between various categories of
capitalists: bank, commercial and industrial. However Marx later develops
a concept of "fictitious" capital to show that the distinction between
commercial and industrial capital transcends as a "total social capital"
under the overall conditions of economic activity: "money capital is not
represented by single capitalists, by the owner of this or that particle
of capital present in the market but it appears as concentrated, organized
mass, which, entirely, unlike real produciton, is subject to the control
of bankers representing social capital". Capitalist interest articulation,
in this respect, is formed by a dialectical process of class integration
in the political economy as part of the overall economic apparatus.
In his excellent book and phd thesis, _The Making of an Atlantic Ruling
class_ Kees van de Pijl describes the formation of a capitalist
class hegemony and bourgeois integration in the North Atlantic era from
the vantage point of Marxist international political economy. He does so
in such a way to pay atttention to international dynamics and social
forces within the world capitalist system operative during the periods of
Woodrow Wilson's launch for offensive cosmopolitanism in 1917, Marshall
Plan of offsetting communism in the 50s and the world economic crisis of
1974-75. Van der Pijl does not exclusively focus on the question of
whether US economy is competitive or monopolistic. One can not talk about
the US economy as if one is talking about the Norwegian or Turkish
economy, taking the nation-state as the unit of analysis, which is what I
got from the participants of the recent discussion on pen-l. The crucial
aspect of Pijl's argument is that he discusses the US economy in relation
to its role in promoting imperialism, anti-communism and
hegemonic globalization. By taking the "world system" as a unit of
analysis and combining Marxian political economy with Gramscian political
insights, Pijl shows how the state monopoly and internationalist
fractions within the
AVIVA:June Press Release (fwd)
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Post Cold War Cuba-US Relations (fwd)
I have a graduate student doing research on Cuba-US relations after the end of the Cold War. Can anyone suggest some good material in journals, books or the web? I teach in North Cyprus, and our library has very limited resources, so I would appreciate any information on resources available over the net. Any sources will be greatly appreciated, Leopoldo Rodriguez Leopoldo hi! I did not know you were in pen-l so I was almost sending this info to IPE. I think I understand your concern about your library's limited resources, since I had similar experiences back to my country. On the other hand, any information you will find over the internet on Cuba-US relations may not be reliable, unless it is published in a well known journal or magazine, either critical or mainstream. Besides, the topic is fishy. Personally, I always find it difficult to have access to articles on the net for the simple fact that some journals just name the articles without posting them on their web pages. So I go with the classical method and visit the library. Why don't you consider the following sources to see if your library owns them? Halliday, Fred., 1986, The Making of the Second Cold War, London, Verso. Gill, Stephan., 1990, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Cuba and the United States : will the cold war in the Caribbean end? / Publisher: Boulder, Colo. Cuba : confronting the U.S. embargo / Author: Schwab, Peter, 1940- Edition: 1st ed. Publisher: New York :St. Martin's Press,1999. McCormick, T.J., 1989, America's Half Century. United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press. Graham T. Allison, _Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis_ Boston: Little Brown, 1971. Mary Caldor, "After the Cold War", _New Left Review_, 180, March/April, 1990:5-23. Enrico Augelli and Craig N. Murphy, "Gramsci and International Relations: A General Perspective and example from recent US policy toward the thirld world" in Stephan Gill ed., _Gramsci, Historical Materialism and International Relations_, Cambridge Press, 1993. hope this helps, ps: regarding our discussion on crisis, in addition to your useful readings, I have found Kees Van Der Pijl's book _The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class_ quite helpful. It does a very good job with 70s. I don't know if you have had a chance to look at it though (University of Amsterdam, phd,1984). cheers, Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany
Auto Industry
Somebody was asking info about auto-industry a few days ago. As I was surfing over the net, I accidently found these articles in _Journal of World System Research_. I don't know if this is still useful for your purposes: "International Division of Labor and Global Economic Process: An Analysis of International Trade in Automobiles" Journal of World-Systems Research, Vol V, 3, 1999, 487-498 ISSN 1076-156X by Lothar Krempel and Thomas Pl|mper. http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol5/vol5_number3/krempel/krempel_print.ht ml "Cross-Border Labor Organizing in the Garment and Automobile Industries: The Phillips Van-Heusen and Ford Cuautitlan Cases" by Ralph Armbruster University of California, Riverside http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol4/v4n1a3.htm Cite: Armbruster, Ralph. (1998). "Cross-Border Labor Organizing in the Garment and Automobile Industries: The Phillips Van-Heusen and Ford Cuautitlan Cases." Journal of World-Systems R Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany
CFP: MARXISM 2000 -- extended deadline 15 July (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 15:45:53 +0200 (MEST) From: Stephen Cullenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: CFP: MARXISM 2000 -- extended deadline 15 July RETHINKING MARXISM announces its fourth International Gala Conference MARXISM 2000 21-24 September (Thursday-Sunday) 2000 University of Massachusetts at Amherst JOIN WITH Jack Amariglio, Enid Arvidson, Margot Backus, Carole Biewener, Joseph Buttigieg, Antonio Callari, John Cammett, S. Charusheela, Stephen Cullenberg, Angela Davis, Mike Davis, Gerard Dumenil, Gregory Elliot, Susan Feiner, Benedetto Fontana, John Foster, Harriet Fraad, Rob Garnett, Norman Geras, Katherine Gibson, Julie Graham, Michael Hardt, David Harvey, Rosemary Hennessy, Peter Hitchcock, Noel Ignatiev, Susan Jahoda, Joel Kovel, Amitava Kumar, Richard Levins, Dominique Levy, David Lloyd, Lisa Lowe, Warren Montag, Bertell Ollman, Andrew Parker, Robert Pollin, Stephen Resnick, John Roche, David Ruccio, David Shumway, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Darko Suvin, Evan Watkins, Richard Wolff, Howard Zinn and many others in celebrating the richness of contemporary Marxism and other liberation communities. Plenary sessions include: (Re)Claiming Utopia with Norman Geras, JK Gibson-Graham, and Lisa Lowe; Global (Dis)Orders with David Harvey, David Ruccio, and Gayatri Spivak; (Re)Turns to Class with Angela Davis and Mike Davis. There will also be a performance of Howard Zinn's nationally acclaimed play, Marx in Soho, with Brian Jones. CALL FOR PAPERS AND SESSION PROPOSALS (Extended deadline for proposal submission is 15 July 2000) PURPOSE: The editors of RETHINKING MARXISM announce the fourth in its series of international Gala conferences that aim to celebrate the richness of contemporary Marxism in all its varieties. The prior three conferences, each attended by well over one thousand persons from across the globe, brought together a variety of Marxian and other liberation communities to discuss, debate, and strategize about diverse theoretical and political concerns. *In 1989, "Marxism Now: Traditions and Difference" created a forum where new, heterogeneous directions in Marxism and the Left could be debated after the breakup of orthodoxy. *In 1992, "Marxism in the New World Order: Crises and Possibilities" confronted directly the challenges--theoretical, organizational, and spiritual--which faced the Left and Marxism as the new millennium neared. *In 1996, "Politics and Languages of Contemporary Marxism" continued the dialogue to open creative new spaces for political, cultural and scholarly interventions in the face of global restructuring of social relations. With the new millennium upon us, the editors of RETHINKING MARXISM intend "Marxism 2000" to explore and engender fresh insights and hopes, struggles and pleasures, and to (re)claim utopian visions for just and humane global alternatives. As Marxism's long first century draws to a close, we may reflect back on its many successes and unfortunate failures. The history of Marxism has certainly been contradictory, and we can learn from and embrace the insights of the many Marxisms that have profoundly shaped the last 150 years. Today, as a new millennium dawns, familiar specters have now dematerialized and capital is becoming increasingly global. New visions and analyses beg for articulation. As we enter Marxism's next century, the Left once again faces tremendous challenges and exciting opportunities. It is time to take stock and move Marxism's future forward. STRUCTURE: We invite the submission of pre-organized sessions that follow traditional or non-traditional formats (such as workshops, roundtables, and dialogue among and between presenters and audience). We encourage those working in areas that intersect with Marxism, such as feminism, political economy, cultural and literary studies, queer theory, working class and labor studies, postcolonial studies, geography and urban studies, social and natural sciences, philosophy, and around the issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability, to submit paper and panel proposals. We welcome video, poetry, performance, and all other modes of presentation. Indeed, we encourage paper or panel submissions from those working on any and all subjects of interest for a world without exploitation and oppression. The conference will be held over four days, beginning on Thursday 21 September and ending on Sunday 24 September. In addition to three plenary sessions and a performance, there will be concurrent panels and art/cultural events, tentatively scheduled as follows: Thursday, September 21 11 am: Registration Desk Opens 1 pm: Concurrent Sessions 5 pm: Dinner (in local restaurants) 7:30 pm: Plenary Session -- (Re)Claiming Utopia 9:30 pm: Cash Bar and Music Friday, September 22 9:30 am: Concurrent Sessions 11:30 am: Lunch (in local restaurants) 1 pm: Concurrent Sessions 3:30
Re: Re: Re: Moses and monetarism (fwd)
References to hermeneutics and deconstruction don't convince me. I've never been into that kind of lit crit sh*t. I prefer logic, empirical research, and the philosophy of science (methodology). If there would be a philosophy or literature person here, s(he) would *really* be pissed, not only by the unprofessional use of language but also by ignorance. I am not a big fun of hermeneutics and deconstruction either, but I never make the mistake of considering those theorists writing outside the realm of philosopy of science. Science, by its nature, requires *some form* of hermeneutical understanding-- the question of what is that we are studying? why and how? Many people who have written about hermeneutics have also written about the philosophy of social sciences: nature of understanding, nature of inquiry, different methodologies, interpretation (don't we interpret facts in economics. oh!), the status of the relationship between positive and social sciences, etc, etc..okey I have not seen very many critical studies in hermeneutics (mind you that hermeneutics and deconstruction are very different things). I have not seen among *empricists* or pure logicists either. Empricists are well known to be supportive of status quo by distorting facts in the name of science. They present ideology as science. I would not be too quick to accept empricist methodology at face value. Regarding *critical* hermeneutics, one should have a look at Paul Ricour's works, not Gadamer's. Paul R. tries to abridge the gap between Marxism and understanding, and the role of marxist methodology in interpretation. Why do economists constantly make the claim that what they are doing are objective science given that it is not-- given that distribution of resources is by definition a political act! Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany
Re: Re: Re: Re: Moses and monetarism (fwd)
I'm not sure what that has to do with literary criticism (which is basically supposed to help us understand the fiction we read). It is true that the meaning of a theory varies with context, but that says we have to be very clear by what _we_ mean by the theory. The sociology or psychology of its writing and interpretation is interesting, but doesn't say much if anything about a theory's validity. WHY? In what sense does sociology differ in saying about "theory's validity" from let's say economics? How do you judge theory's validity? According to which criteria? The best works in business cycles, economic crises, world systemicy trends are done by *sociologists* like Wallerstein, Arrighi, Frank etc.. Are you gonna say that their works are fiction, or not scientific enough? okey, I will send a post about how Wallerstein views the methodology of social sciences. wait! Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany
Re: Re: Re: Re: Moses and monetarism (fwd)
Justin, Please see my reply to Tom Walker where I both criticize hermeneutics and empiricism. btw, to my knowledge, Richard Rorty has nothing do with left. He is a new pragmatic following the footsteps of Dewey... thanks, Mine Mine, I am actually a "philosophy person"--used to be a philosophy professor before I was a lawyer. Although I do not necessary share the vehemence of the rejection of (the very different, as you remark) approaches of deconstruction or hermeneutics, I am fairly suspicious of their value when applied in a cookie cutter manner to scientific questions. The Sokal hoax shows what happens when scientifically illiterate postmodernists try to talk about science. I don't know enough about hermeneutics (Gadamer, Otto-Appel, that lot) to say whether scientific illiteracy is a defect of that tendency, although it wouldn't surprise me if it was. (However, I will remark that Heidegger, of all people, an important influence on both decontruction and hermeneutics, wrote some excellent philosophy of science based in obviously solid knowledge of early modern science.) I would refrain from broad brush statements about "empiricism." What do you have in mind when you say that empiricists "support the status quo by distorting the facts in the name of science"? Empiricism in its broadest sense is quintessentially respect for the facts as established by scientific research. This is not an approach that is for or against the status quo. Now, logical empiricism, the philosophy expounded by Carnap, Hempel, Reichenbach, Ayer, and so forth, has been pretty thoroughly discredited in most of its details, and has not had any serious exponents for a quarter century, even among those who consider themselves in some sense empiricists--like me. The closest is perhaps Larry Sklar, although I wonder whether Michael Dummett isn't really a logical empiricist. Still, he doesn't advertise that he is one. G.A. Cohen, a leading (former?) analytical Marxist is pretty close to logical empiricism in his philosophy of science. It was, however, deeply respectful of facts, and, for what it was worth, thought to be consitent with the left social democratic politics of those figures. Ayer, in fact, was a pretty radical left Labourite. One of the key logical empiricists, Otto Neurath, was a Marxist who made substantial contributions to the theory of the planned economy. Contemporary empiricism tends to be of two main types, which are not necesasrily inconsistent. One is neopragmatism of the sort represented by W.V. Quine (a reactionary), Wilfred Sellars (a radical), and the new Hilary Putnam (a former Marxist), as well as by Richard Rorty (a left liberal). The other is scientific realism, represented, e.g., by the old Putnam and his students, Michael Devitt, Richard Boyd, Richard Miller, Peter Railton--Marxists or former Marxists of some stripe all, Quine and Sellars are also scientific realists. I consider myself both a neopragmatist and a scientific realist. Railton was on my dissertation committee. --jks In a message dated Wed, 7 Jun 2000 2:23:56 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: References to hermeneutics and deconstruction don't convince me. I've never been into that kind of lit crit sh*t. I prefer logic, empirical research, and the philosophy of science (methodology). If there would be a philosophy or literature person here, s(he) would *really* be pissed, not only by the unprofessional use of language but also by ignorance. I am not a big fun of hermeneutics and deconstruction either, but I never make the mistake of considering those theorists writing outside the realm of philosopy of science. Science, by its nature, requires *some form* of hermeneutical understanding-- the question of what is that we are studying? why and how? Many people who have written about hermeneutics have also written about the philosophy of social sciences: nature of understanding, nature of inquiry, different methodologies, interpretation (don't we interpret facts in economics. oh!), the status of the relationship between positive and social sciences, etc, etc..okey I have not seen very many critical studies in hermeneutics (mind you that hermeneutics and deconstruction are very different things). I have not seen among *empricists* or pure logicists either. Empricists are well known to be supportive of status quo by distorting facts in the name of science. They present ideology as science. I would not be too quick to accept empricist methodology at face value. Regarding *critical* hermeneutics, one should have a look at Paul Ricour's works, not Gadamer's. Paul R. tries to abridge the gap between Marxism and understanding, and the role of marxist methodology in interpretation. Why do economists constantly make the claim that what they are doing are objective science given that it is not-- given that distribution of resources is by definition a political act! Mine Doyran
The Hermen Ideology (fwd)
Tom Walker wrote: I second the endorsement for Ricoeur but wouldn't disdain Gadamer. In general, my point was that both of them were not perfect either.One does not need to be *empricist* to criticize hermeneutics.Empricism alone does not guarentee radical science, as such it is an *ideology* as a method. It is non-marxist in its methodological orientation. The whole empirical tradition in social sciences people like Parsons, Dahl (bingo American pluralism!), Verba (bingo civic culture!), Deutsch, Huntington or positivist (fascist) socio-biologists like Wilson, Dawkins, Pearson belong to are famous in their bombastic claims to neutrality--studying the reality as it is without any reference to value judgements or political preferences. They claim so called objectivity when they link rape to human genetic structure or study brain size differences and eugenics to make claims about the racial inferiority of blacks, hispanics etc. There is INDEED politics that shapes their arguments. Ideological preferences, maintanence of a power structure within empricism ensures the continuity of mainstream practices. People who bullshit about sociology saying that it has no theoretical validity can not see that postivist/social science distinction so much celebrated by empricists to impose their own intellectual hegemony does indeed promote a distorted wiew of reality, IDEOLOGY. On the other hand, hermeneutical method of sciences, which is an interpretative understanding of a phenomenon through a textual reading (btw still the text has a *coherent* meaning for them, which is not the case for deconstructionist postmodernists) runs the risk of being too text centric, like those post modernists who they claim to be critical. Since they focus heavily on understanding and interpretation they can not see that our understandings can be distorted or ideology distorts reality in our understandings of the social world. They assume that the reader can freely interpret the text, thus they are as ideologs as empricists. Hermeneutical method can be radicalized only if one is self-concious of the *ideological orientation* of the text she is reading. One needs a critical distance between the text and the self. In my view, Gadamer fails this test at this moment; he idealizes the author and makes any critical reflection impossible. That being said, he treats the text conservatively and uncritically ( I am not big a fun of Habermas, but his critique of Gademer as well as postmodernists deserve some legitimate credit here). Marx's critique of The German Ideology. Lukacs addressed the issue as "false consciousness" in _History and Class Consciousness_. That's where this critical theory "lit crit sh*t" comes from. Literary critique does not *necessarily* have to be *shit*. That was the point I was resisting. Such a way of brushing literary critique carries an empricist bias. There are many Marxist literary critics out there who are not a shit, evidently. understanding to others. One of the problems that Freud addressed in Moses and Monotheism was Moses' inarticulateness, an inarticulateness that might even be attributed to his understanding. Freud would have less distorted reality if he had not assumed that WAR originated from our *inner agressive drives* or women had a penis envy he was so much into Hobbes' sexism and phsycological individualism.. Gramsci called for pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. I guess I can lay claim at least to the first part of that formula. Correct! Grasmci advocates a politically articulated historical materialism, which is why I love him... he is a very dynamic thinker.. Tom Walker Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany
The Heritage of Sociology, The Promise of Social Science (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 00:27:31 -0400 From: Mine Aysen Doyran [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: "The Heritage of Sociology, The Promise of Social Science" For those who think sociology is not a science or has very little theoretical validity! Mine http://fbc.binghamton.edu/iwpradfp.htm "The Heritage of Sociology, The Promise of Social Science" by Immanuel Wallerstein Introduction © Immanuel Wallerstein 1998. (Presidential Address, XIVth World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, July 26, 1998) I. The Heritage II. The Challenges III. The Perspectives Bibliography We are met here to discuss "Social Knowledge: Heritage, Challenges, Perspectives." I shall argue that our heritage is something I shall call "the culture of sociology," and I shall try to define what I think this is. I shall further argue that, for several decades now, there have been significant challenges precisely to that culture. These challenges essentially consist of calls to unthink the culture of sociology. Given both the persistent reassertion of the culture of sociology and the strength of these challenges, I shall try finally to persuade you that the only perspective we have that is plausible and rewarding is to create a new open culture, this time not of sociology but of social science, and (most importantly) one that is located within an epistemologically reunified world of knowledge. We divide and bound knowledge in three different ways: intellectually as disciplines; organizationally as corporate structures; and culturally as communities of scholars sharing certain elementary premises. We may think of a discipline as an intellectual construct, a sort of heuristic device. It is a mode of laying claim to a so-called field of study, with its particular domain, its appropriate methods, and consequently its boundaries. It is a discipline in the sense that it seeks to discipline the intellect. A discipline defines not only what to think about and how to think about it, but also what is outside its purview. To say that a given subject is a discipline is to say not only what it is but what it is not. To assert therefore that sociology is a discipline is, among other things, to assert that it is not economics or history or anthropology. And sociology is said not to be these other names because it is considered to have a different field of study, a different set of methods, a different approach to social knowledge. Sociology as a discipline was an invention of the late nineteenth century, alongside the other disciplines we place under the covering label of the social sciences. Sociology as a discipline was elaborated more or less during the period 1880 to 1945. The leading figures of the field in that period all sought to write at least one book that purported to define sociology as a discipline. Perhaps the last major work in this tradition was that written in 1937 by Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, a book of great importance in our heritage, and to whose role I shall return. It is certainly true that, in the first half of the twentieth century, the various divisions of the social sciences established themselves and received recognition as disciplines. They each defined themselves in ways that emphasized clearly how they were different from other neighboring disciplines. As a result, few could doubt whether a given book or article was written within the framework of one discipline or another. It was a period in which the statement, "that is not sociology; it is economic history, or it is political science" was a meaningful statement. I do not intend here to review the logic of the boundaries that were established in this period. They reflected three cleavages in objects of study that seemed obvious to scholars at the time, and were strongly enunciated and defended as crucial. There was the cleavage past/present that separated idiographic history from the nomothetic trio of economics, political science, and sociology. There was the cleavage civilized/other or European/non-European that separated all four of the previous disciplines (which essentially studied the pan-European world) from anthropology and Oriental studies. And there was the cleavage - relevant only, it was thought, to the modern civilized world - of market, state, and civil society that constitued the domains respectively of economics, political science, and sociology (Wallerstein et al., 1996, ch. I). The intellectual problem with these sets of boundaries is that the changes in the world-system after 1945 - the rise of the U.S. to world hegemony, the political resurgence of the non-Western world, and the expansion of the world-economy with its correlative expansion of the world university system - all conspired to undermine the logic of these three cleavages (Wallerstein et al., 1996, ch. II), such that by 1970 there had begun to be in practice a serious blurring of the boundaries. The blurring
The Racist Albatross: Social Science, Jrg Haider,and Widerstand (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2000 00:33:42 -0400 From: Mine Aysen Doyran [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: The Racist Albatross: Social Science, [iso-8859-9] Jörg Haider, and Widerstand http://fbc.binghamton.edu/iwvienna.htm "The Racist Albatross: Social Science, Jörg Haider, and Widerstand" Science, Jörg Haider, and Widerstand" ©Immanuel Wallerstein 2000 [Lecture at the Universität Wien, Mar. 9, 2000, in the series, "Von der Notwendigkeit des Überflüssigen - Sozialwissenschaften und Gesellschaft"] [An abridged version appeared in the London Review of Books, May 18, 2000.] "God save thee, ancient Mariner from the fiends that plague thee thus! Why look'st thou so?" - "With my crossbow I shot the albatross." Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ll. 79-82 In Coleridge's poem, a ship was driven astray by the winds into hostile climate. The only solace of the seamen was an albatross, which came to share their food. But Coleridge's mariner shot him, for some unknown reason - perhaps sheer arrogance. And, as a result, all on the ship suffered. The gods were punishing the misdeed. The other sailors hung the albatross around the mariner's neck. The albatross, symbol of friendship, now became symbol of guilt and shame. The mariner was the sole survivor of the voyage. And he spent his life obsessed with what he had done. The live albatross is the other who opened himself to us in strange and far off lands. The dead albatross that hangs around our neck is our legacy of arrogance, our racism. We are obsessed with it, and we find no peace. I was asked more than a year ago to come to Vienna to speak on "Social Science in an Age of Transition." My talk was to be in the context of a series entitled "Von der Notwendigkeit des Überflüssigen - Sozialwissenschaften und Gesellschaft." I happily accepted. I believed I was coming to the Vienna which had a glorious role in the building of world social science, especially in the era of Traum und Wirklichkeit, 1870-1930. Vienna was the home of Sigmund Freud, whom I believe to have been the single most important figure in social science in the twentieth century. Or at least Vienna was his home until he was forced by the Nazis to flee to London in his dying year. Vienna also was home, for an important part of their lives, to Joseph Alois Schumpeter and Karl Polanyi. Men of strikingly opposite political opinions, they were in my view the two most important political economists of the twentieth century, underrecognized and undercelebrated. And Vienna was the home to my own teacher, Paul Lazarsfeld, whose combination of policy-oriented research and pathbreaking methodological innovations began with Arbeitlösen von Marienthal, a study he did with Marie Jahoda and Hans Zeisel. It was to this Vienna I was coming. Then, as you know, came the last Austrian elections, with their far from inevitable consequence, the inclusion of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) in the government. The other states in the European Union (EU) reacted strongly to this change of regime, and suspended bilateral relations with Austria. I had to consider whether I still would come, and I hesitated. If I am here today, it is for two reasons. First, I wished to affirm my solidarity with der andere Österreich, which has manifested itself so visibly since the new government was installed. But secondly, and even more importantly, I came to assume my own responsibilities as a social scientist. We have all shot the albatross. It hangs around all our necks. And we must struggle with our souls and our minds to atone, to reconstruct, to create a different kind of historical system, one that would be beyond the racism that afflicts the modern world so deeply and so viciously. I have therefore retitled my talk. It is now: "The Racist Albatross: Social Science, Jörg Haider, and Widerstand." The facts of what has happened in Austria seem quite simple on the surface. For a number of successive legislatures, Austria had been governed by a national coalition of the two major and mainline parties, the Sozialdemocratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ) and the Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP). One was center-left and the other was center-right and Christian Democratic. Their combined vote, at one time overwhelming, declined throughout the 1990's. And in the 1999 elections, the FPÖ for the first time came in second in the vote, surpassing the ÖVP, albeit by only several hundred votes. The subsequent discussions between the two mainstream parties on forming still one more national coalition failed, and the ÖVP turned to the FPÖ as a partner. This decision of the ÖVP upset many people in Austria, including President Klestil. But the ÖVP persisted, and the government was formed. The decision also upset, and it must be added surprised, the political leaders of the other EU states. They decided collectively to suspend bilateral relations with Austria, and
Re: RE: Re: URPE reader book party - June 8 (fwd)
After you pressed the reply button?? Mine okay. Just send me a check and I'll sign it. Also, sorry to the list: I thought that this was going only to Susan. At 11:43 AM 6/6/00 -0400, you wrote: Jim, That would be great if we could fly all book contributors out, but alack alas, those interested in your signature will just have to mail their copy to you with a SASE since you will be absent. Susan Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
The C (fwd)
Justin wrote: So what's y'alls point? The original Constitution enshrined slavery and was in part designed to protect property owners. It was a bourgeois document in an era of bourgeois revolution. After the more or less completion of the bourgeois revolution in the civil war, a laissez faire Court interpreted the Constitution in a way favorable to corporations (the Lochner era equal protection jurisprudence) and turned a blind eye to Jim Crow. So it didn't have an immaculate conception. That doesn't mean it isn't, or can't be made, a good government framework. By analogy, the writings of Marx, and (someone whom some here admire) Lenin were interpreted to justify horrific repression and savage cruelty on an unimaginable scale; Lenin himself expressly advocated one party rule, repression of dssent, and force without the constraints if law against class enemies. Setting aside those who might thing that those are good and justified and addressing myself just to those wo have qualms about those purposes and such a history, I ask you, do those ourposes and history mean you want to deep six Marx and Lenin? (In my case, I say yes, for Lenin, but that's another story.) --jks Justin, if the writings of Marx and Lenin were misinterpreted to justifty repression and stupidities, the blame should not be put on their ideas that were essentially democratic and critical of class priviliges. Their ideas can not be responsible for the misdoings of the Soviet regime. As opposed to the writings of Marx, the constitution set by the founding fathers of the United States is a piece of work designed to establish the ruling hegemony of the white, male, propertied classes. By any standarts, it can not be misinterpreted. It is fundamentally a non-democratic establishment to begin with. With the political economic developments precipitating after the civil war (bourgeois democratic revolution you are mentioning), new social groups, professional, financial, and industrial elites, began to take control of of the political, cultural and economic power. They were the new ruling/ hegemonic block, to use a Gramscian terminology. In accordance with the political pricinciples set by the bourgeois democratic government, these new political economic elites, including the municipal reformers, rejected citizenship as the basis for public participation. Consititution of the United States was/is a deliberate piece of work written to reinforce the class hegemony of the bourgeoisie. These people issued innovations to public meetings "only to tax payers, property holders, the most respectable citizens or even capitalists. The Economic interest of the affluent but parsimonious tax payer was now the measure of public virtue" (Mary Ryan, "Gender and Public Access: Women and Politics in 19th century America", Calhoun eds., Habermas and the Public Sphere, p.277). As lower classes claimed access to political power and resisted significantly, they were deliberately pushed behind the scenes by their social superiors. The regime that was being formed and consolidated by the constitution was racist and sexist. For example, the republican demand for a family wage abided by laissez-faire principles was used as a "countersymbol to Chinese immigration" which was pictured "as a flood of bachelors and prostitutes. According to this gender logic, immigration from Asia robbed working class women of jobs as domestic servants and bred Chinese prostitution, which was especially offensive to ladies" (p.278). The political economic context that shaped the Constitution for years has not been radically altered. Although there is equal protection clause, marginalized groups, such as women, blacks, Indians, working classes still find it difficult to find a voice in the formal political sphere. They are structurally excluded, as capitalism renforces their powerlessness. The constitution is set to channel their interests in a reformist, moderate direction (especially with the feminist movement), but not in a revolutionary direction. The Constittion is set to block social upheavel, and to rearticulate the interests of the minority elite (white male property owners )! Mine Doyran SUNY/Albany
Writing History (fwd)
"Writing History" http://fbc.binghamton.edu/iwchv-hi.htm by Immanuel Wallerstein [Key-text for Session on "Writing History," at the Colloquium on History and Legitimisation, "[Re]constructing the Past," 24-27 February 1999, Brussels] The problem about writing history can be seen in the very title of the colloquium, which exists in three language versions. In English it is "[Re]constructing the Past." This version indicates an ambivalence between construction and reconstruction, the latter term fitting in more with an evolutionary, cumulative concept of knowledge than the former. In French the title is "Le Passé Composé." No reconstruction here, but the title permits an allusion to grammatical syntax, and refers to the verb tense that denotes a past that continues into the present and is not yet totally completed. In French, this form is distinguished from the Preterite, which is sometimes called "Le Passé Historique." In everyday conversation, one normally uses "le passé composé." Finally in Dutch/Flemish, the title is "Het Verleden als Instrument," a far more structuralist title than the others. I do not know if the organizers intended this ambiguity deliberately. But it is hard to speak about history, especially these days, unambiguously. Let me raise still another ambiguity. In English, "story" and "history" are separate words, and the distinction is thought to be not only clear but crucial. But in French and Dutch, "histoire" and "geschiedenis" can have both connotations. Is the distinction less clear in these linguistic traditions? I hesitate to answer. I do notice that the organizers have charged us collectively, at least in the English-language version of their announcement, with the task of conducting "a large-scale meditation on the usefulness and disadvantages of history for life." This seems to me a wise starting-point, since it recognizes that what we are about might not necessarily be useful; it might possibly be unuseful, actually disadvantageous for life. And a final comment on the title. This is said to be a "Colloquium on History and Legitimisation." Is the legitimation of something the instrumental goal that was mentioned in the Dutch title? Are we to be very Foucauldian, and assume that all knowledge is primarily an exercise in legitimating power? I am tempted to say, of course, what else could it possibly be? But then it occurs to me that, if this is all that it were, it could not possibly serve its purpose very effectively, since knowledge is most likely to succeed in legitimating power if the people, that is those who consume this knowledge produced by historians, thought that it had independent truth-value. It would follow that knowledge might be most useful to those in power if it were perceived as being at most only partially respondent to power's beck and call. But of course, on the other hand, it might not be useful at all if it were entirely antagonistic to power. So, from the point of view of those with power, the relation they might want to have with intellectuals purporting to write history is an intricate, mediated, and delicate one. I propose to discuss what are, what can be, the lines between four kinds of knowledge production: fictional tales, propaganda, journalism, and history as written by persons called historians. And then I wish to relate that to remembering and forgetting, to secrecy and publicity, to advocacy and refutation. Fictional tales are the earliest knowledge product to which most people are exposed. Children are told stories, or stories are read to them. Such stories convey messages. Parents and other adults consider these messages very important. There is considerable censorship by adults of what children may hear or read. Most people rate possible stories along a continuum running from taboo subjects to highly undesirable subjects to subjects that are considered innocent to tales with a virtuous moral. The form of such stories may vary, from those that are sweet and/or charming to those that are frightening and/or exciting. We frequently assess and reassess the effect of such stories on children, and adjust what we do in the light of such assessments. Such stories are of course fictional in the sense that a person named Cinderella is not thought by the adults telling it to have actually existed, and the place where the tale occurs cannot be located on a standard map. But the story is also considered to be about some reality - perhaps the existence of mean adults in charge of a child's welfare, perhaps the existence of good adults (fairy godmothers) who counteract the mean adults, perhaps the reality of (or at least the legitimacy of) hope in difficult situations. Is children's fiction different from fiction that is said to be intended for adults? If we take a work by Balzac or by Dickens, by Dante or by Cervantes, by Shakespeare or by Goethe, we are aware that each is describing a social reality via invented characters. And we evaluate
Re: The C (fwd)
To be fair: Louis wrote and I agreed with him, since he wrote before me... Just a small note... Mine Justin wrote: Mine says, and Louis agrees with her: If the writings of Marx and Lenin were misinterpreted to justifty repression and stupidities, the blame should not be put on their ideas that were essentially democratic and critical of class priviliges. Their ideas can not be responsible for the misdoings of the Soviet regime. As opposed to the writings of Marx, the constitution set by the founding fathers of the United States is a piece of work designed to establish the ruling hegemony of the white, male, propertied classes. By any standarts, it can not be misinterpreted. It is fundamentally a non-democratic establishment to begin with. Apparently the Marxist classics were immaculately conceived and float free in their purity of historical context, unsullied by the misuse that has been made of them. But this is doubly unhistorical. The Constitution was the work of the bourgeois revolution, and therefore sought to establish bourgeois hegemony in all its gloryt and with all its limits. That means it was meant to establish the rule of the white male propertied classes. It also was meant to put a republican system of popular rule and individual rights on a stable footing. It did both of those things. They are dialectical opposite sides of the coin. Moreover, the Constitution was and is not a static thing. Like every real world political enterprise, it embodied some nasty compromises on its own terms, notably slavery, whoch was even at the time seen by most of the framers as an obscenity that could not be legislated away. They put it off for another day, and when that day came in 1860, it was not pretty. The legal resolution of that conflict brought us the Reconstruction Amendments, which, despite the comoplicated, contradictory, and limited (certainly not socialist!) intentions of the framers, are a priceless heritage, as is the republicanism of the original constitution. The long and short of it is that the Constitution was ot "fundamentally antidemocrtic to start with." It was a revolutionary democratic threat to the ancien regime. And the values that it animate it still are, although the ancien regimes is now a bit different. Likewise you cannot take Marx or Lenin out of context. I agree far more with the total package of values espoused by Marx than I do with those espoused by Madison or John Bingham (framer of the 14th Amendment). But Marx had his limitations, and some of these made it a lot easier for people like Lenin, and worse, to make his own name a bogeyman; he cannot be wholly exonerated from these because he had good intentions. Nor would he want to be made a plaster saint or holy father whose writings are quoted as holy writ. There's no point getting into the debate over Lenin. You can have him. But he at least recognized that what he was doing involved nasty compromises, and refused to apologize for that. He was a better materialist than his defenders here. --jks
Re: Excess Capacity in Auto Industry (fwd)
on 5/6/00 6:28 am, Anthony D'Costa at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Could anyone suggest some "good" books on auto industry restructuring globally that specifically ties it to (or discusses) excess capacity? They could have been written any time since the late 1960s. Thanks in advance. Brown, Jonathan., _The Franchised Car Retailing Industry in the UK_ (October 1988). Jones, Danile T., _The Europoean Motor Industry and Japan in the 1990s_ Universisy of Wales, UK, Sept 1989. Graves, Andrew., _Technology Trends in the World Automobile Industry_, University of Sussex, UK, Oct 1988. Marler, Dennis L., _The Post Japanese Model of Automotive Compenent Supply: Selected North American Case Studies_, MIT, May 1989. Meltz, Noah., _Changing work practices and Productivity in the Auto Industry: A U.S- Canada Comparison_, University of Toronto, Proceedings of the 26the Conference on Industrial Relations, June 4-6, 1989, Laval University, Canada... I don't like the book, but you can also check out the biblio. of _The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production_ by James P. Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos, Harper Collins Publishers, 1990. Mine Aysen Doyran SUNY/Albany
