[PEN-L:3371] Re: The Phallus
Thanks, Doug - not an easy definition for the likes of me to grasp, but one that seems to dissolve before the eyes the more one tries to nag it into showing itself. Allow me to aspire to the role of devil's advocate - not too happy with a couple of my four points, but I'll chuck 'em in anyway. (1) The symbolic value of the penis seems to rest on some hegemonic idea that its presence implies wholeness and its absence some sort of incompleteness. So the phallus acts as an includer and an excluder, along hierarchical lines. What worries me is that Freud's theorising about little girls being ignorant of their genitals is pretty central to the case he brings. It occurs to me that little girls (a) quickly work out something of interest lies below, and (b) stand a good chance of being far more ignorant of the existence of penises. She wouldn't think them into existence without some pretty explicit clues, so she normalises her own physical being. When Dad waltzes past in the nude one day, she perceives for the first time that some people are a departure from the norm ... like her dad. She does not strike me as someone who fears, regrets, or even contemplates castration. So Freud's theory, at best, would be about girls occasionally imagining a supplementation to her normalised physical being - its status would be that of an accessory, no? And accessories are not reference points - the reference point is what they are an accessory to. (2) As signifier of desire, the phallus would tend to a rather one-sided notion of desire, no? I often suspect male and female sexual desire, as experiences, are closer to each other than we think (lustful lasses, now that they happily give voice on such matters, sound a lot like lustful lads to me), but of course I can but surmise. But nevertheless, deploying one's genitals is a part of the asspiration - mebbe not as locally focussed in the female anticipation as in the male - but enough to colour the desire. The owner of a vagina would be anticipating a moment qualitatively different from what the owner of the penis would be looking forward to. As Freud was a boy, and of his time, he may have been overly inclined to generalise from the specific. (3) And one reason for all those antiquities highlighting penises as symbols of (we can but guess what from syntagmatic context) is that a symbol must lend itself to stylisation without risk of confusing meaning - penises are better for that than vaginas. Furthermore, if I were a man within a mode of production (say, the stone age) or complex of relations (say tribal or imperial warfare) that accorded my sex apparent primacy, I'd be inclined to be the more likely to produce religious art (not a job for lesser beings) and I'd be inclined to see in my sex the representation of all that is best about us - the penis being the most convenient mark for man-as-representative-of-human. Were I a child of perhaps the most sexually hung-up period in human history (as was friend Freud), I'd go absolutely nuts - happily projecting my every fantasy and worry at these icons of actually incommensurable otherness. Were I a child of the information age, whether boy or girl, different associations and very different statuses would come to mind, I'm sure. (4) Now we come to the girl's wish to receive the father's phallus. Where on earth does Freud get this from? Firstly, the girl may have no idea penises exist. Secondarily, it wouldn't necessarily occur to her how one might be deployed (I still remember being profoundly stunned by this news myself, and I already knew half of us were innies and the other half outies). She ain't gonna fantasise about anything her situation hasn't clued her up on. Summing up to the jury: We're not talking psychology here - we're talking sociology. We can not invent body parts we've never seen, we can not invent absences of same, so we can't aspire to them or fear their transience. They come to us in discourse, and must therefore always arrive prepackaged. And I doubt a mum or a dad is gonna come in and say, 'look, darling - this is desire and domination ... the object of reverence and envy, a sign of our incompleteness as women, the focus of our wanting and the badge of power. Thought you might like to take the notion of it with you in case you feel the need to mobilise some discourse in the play of identity.' We may accept Dennis and Ange's concerns with the play between capitalism and identity without confusing matters by trying to introduce a sorta monad like this - one that just ain't up to the job of supporting a narrative of any weight. As Derrida reminded us, signifiers give rise to an infinite array of possible secondary signifiers - there is no fixed signified - and a fluid phallus is no phallus at all. Dicks are yesterday's news. What's left of the phallus might be just enough to wrap around some fish'n'chips. Er, interesting imagery, that ... Cheers, Rob.
[PEN-L:3372] Re: Re: The Phallus
Rob Schaap wrote: (1) The symbolic value of the penis seems to rest on some hegemonic idea that its presence implies wholeness and its absence some sort of incompleteness. Or as Freud charmingly said somewhere, "the difference between the sexes, the lack of a penis" (2) As signifier of desire, the phallus would tend to a rather one-sided notion of desire, no? Well yes. There are some hardcore Freudian/Lacanians who say this is pretty essential, almost hardwired stuff, while there are other, softer sorts who historicize it (i.e., The Phallus acquires this signifying power in patriarchal society, and will fade as patriarchy does - kind of like gold in the days of the classical gold standard, as Goux argues). (3) And one reason for all those antiquities highlighting penises as symbols of (we can but guess what from syntagmatic context) is that a symbol must lend itself to stylisation without risk of confusing meaning - penises are better for that than vaginas. That's easy for you (and me) to say. But you could argue, as I think Jane Gallop did (someone lost my copy of The Daughter's Seduction) that the very absence of vaginal symbols, and the plenitude of phallic ones, is a sign that something's amiss - something is being repressed in the former case and something being overvalued - hysterically so? - in the latter. A friend of mine who graduated from Bryn Mawr in the early 1990s said that she her friends used to join their opposing index fingers and thumbs in a kind of elongated parenthetical shape [()] and run around campus screaming "pussy power!" So the relative plenitude of symbols may itself be historical, eh? Dicks are yesterday's news. What's left of the phallus might be just enough to wrap around some fish'n'chips. Hmmm, now we can begin? Doug
[PEN-L:3374] Re: Canada
At 06:20 PM 13/02/99 -0800, Tom W. wrote: There's one point that I would differ with Bill on. I agree that left nationalists have offered a lot of tactical advice. But I think "fighting" the bourgeoisie is too pugilistic and indiscriminate a term for what the left should be doing. The left should be "cultivating" the bourgeoisie. By this term, I mean the left should figuring out how to weed out the parasitic varieties; and how best to select, tend, prune, train and harvest the fruitful ones. OK, "fighting" is a crude term. But how can the 'left' "select, prune, train" and especially "harvest" without political power? Or do you have in mind some kind of tactical alliance with the most promising capitalist plants against the bourgeois weeds and deadwood? The NBER study suggests the latter are the family-controlled corporate pyramids, so I guess this alliance is exactly opposite to the one you said the left has beein pursuing in the last couple of decades with 'rentier' capitalism. Boy, that really is swimming against the stream! On a related point, I appreciate not wanting to identify "indigneous" capitalists with the interest of the nation, but isn't the real point that they identify with the Canadian state because it defends their interests at home and abroad? Canadian nationalists often suggest the government has been captured by foreign or 'continental' or 'global' capital, but what is the evidence for this? Bill
[PEN-L:3375] Taking Stock Of Successboundary=------------1AB6F5BE49F8245477AA044D
This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --1AB6F5BE49F8245477AA044D For the more academic types. Your email pal, Tom L. http://www.post-gazette.com/regionstate/19990215profitside4.asp --1AB6F5BE49F8245477AA044D name="19990215profitside4.asp" filename="19990215profitside4.asp" e/19990215profitside4.asp" e/19990215profitside4.asp" HTML HEAD TITLETaking Stock Of Success /TITLE /HEAD body bgcolor="#FF" link="#99" vlink="#339933" div align="center"center table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="600" tr td colspan="2"img src="/banners/mpgnews.gif" width="366" height="60" alt="PG News"a target=_self href="/cgi-bin/newadredir.asp?category=62url=http://www.post-gazette.com/kidglovecare/script=19990215profitside4.aspdirscript=/regionstateimage=25"img src=/adimages/234x60kidglove.gif border=0 height=60 width=234 alt="Kid Glove Care"/a/td /tr tr td valign="top" width=132a href=/default.aspimg src="/menu/pghome.gif" alt="PG Home" width="125" height="22" border=0 onmouseover="window.status='PG Home: Return to our Home Page. '; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"/abr a href=/news/default.aspimg src="/menu/pgnews2.gif" width="125" height="22" border=0 onmouseover="window.status='PG News: Latest news from the Post-Gazette. '; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"/abr a href=/special/default.aspimg src="/menu/special.gif" alt="Special Reports" width="125" height="22" border=0 onmouseover="window.status='Special Reports: Special features brought to you by PG Online.'; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"/abr a href="/newslinks/default.asp" onmouseover="window.status='News Links: The PG takes a deeper look at news topics and offers links of interest. '; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"img src="/menu/newsextras.gif" alt="News Links" border="0" width="125" height="22"/abr a href="/journal/default.asp" onmouseover="window.status='Photo Journal: Photos from the Post-Gazette.'; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"img src="/menu/newseye.gif" alt="Photo Journal" border="0" width="125" height="22"/abr a href="/APwire/default.asp" onmouseover="window.status='AP Wire: Up-to-the-minute stories from the Associated Press.'; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"img src="/menu/apwire.gif" alt="AP Wire" border="0" width="125" height="22"/abr a href="/sports_headlines/default.asp" onmouseover="window.status='PG Sports: Guide to local Pro, College and Scholastic Sports.'; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"img src="/menu/sports.gif" alt="Sports" border="0" width="125" height="22"/abr a href=http://classified.post-gazette.com/default.aspimg src="/menu/classifieds.gif" alt="Classifieds" width="125" height="22" border=0 onmouseover="window.status='Classifieds: Post-Gazette Classifieds online. '; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"/abr a href="/Weather/default.asp" onmouseover="window.status='Weather: Current weather conditions and forecast from AccuWeather.'; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"img src="/menu/weather.gif" alt="Weather" border="0" width="125" height="22"/abr a href="/Zines/default.asp" onmouseover="window.status='Zines: Special sections including Dining, Finance, PG Columnists, Books Interact, Crow Quill and more!'; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"img src="/menu/zines.gif" alt="Zines" border="0" width="125" height="22"/abr a href="/Guide.asp" onmouseover="window.status='City Guide: Tons of links and information about Pittsburgh.'; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"img src="/menu/cityguide.gif" alt="City Guide" border="0" width="125" height="22"/abr a href="/pgstore/Default.asp" onmouseover="window.status='PG Store: Information on Post-Gazette merchandise.'; return true" onmouseout="window.status='Welcome to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.'; return true"img src="/menu/pgstore.gif" alt="PG Store" border="0" width="125" height="22"/abr
[PEN-L:3376] Psychoanalysis
Doug: And most economists, political scientists, and writers in the New York Review of Books would tell you the same about Marxism. Actually, Marx is taken much more seriously than Freud nowadays. Freud as "scientist" has absolutely no authority. All of the main tenets he stressed (repressed memories in particular) have been demolished by real scientists. What persists is Freud as visionary, Freud as prophet, etc. This is why he is so important to people like Zizek. He allows such fake radicals to formulate a critique of bourgeois society that leaves the main institutions intact, while focusing our attention on our individual pysches or sexual behavior. There's a big difference between using psychoanalysis as a way of understanding why people think, feel, and act the way they do and using it as a therapy. Most kinds of psychotherapy have terrible success records. Psychotropic drugs can help a bit, but they rarely cure. If that was only the case. Psychoanalysis has very limited value in explaining how people behave. For example, when psychoanalysts write about fascism, they usually go off on the most ridiculous tangents about sexual attitudes of the German masses, or Hitler's psychopathology in particular. There is nothing at all abnormal about German society in the 1920s. If anything, it was more open-minded and healthy than any other country in Europe. What happened is that it was subjected to enormous strains due to the collapse of world capitalism and a section of the population went nuts. Perhaps Doug is referrring to the value of psychology rather than psychoanalysis. I think psychology is very useful. Some of my favorite psychologists are Shakespeare, Dostoievsky, Chekhov, Melville and Proust. Finally, on the question of whether psychotherapy can help people. For everyday garden variety neurosis, there simply is no evidence that it can. The reason for this should be obvious. Capitalism is the main source of unhappiness, although people are not conscious of its effects on their lives. Alienation is generated by the system itself. One of the reasons I have spent so much time reading and writing about primitive communism is that the evidence points in the direction of this type of unhappiness as being historically determined, and not a function of the human psyche as such. This is what anthropological literature reveals by and large: free and happy peoples with limited material means. Capitalism provides the opportunity for unlimited material means and a conjoined unhappiness. The real problem with psychotherapy in the past is that it was promoted as a cure for all sorts of problems that were clearly organic in nature, from obsessive-compulsive disorders to schizophrenia. The notion that the oedipal complex could have anything to do with hearing voices in your head is not only absurd, it is patently unscientific. As citizens of late capitalist society, we are doomed to suffer everyday garden variety unhappiness. Our marriages, our jobs, our relationships are unsatisfactory. People who have insurance plans or personal wealth to allow them to vent their displeasure to a "professional" will not get "better." In times past, they would go to a priest or a village elder. Now that capitalism has made commodity exchange universal, we simply pay for the service. But the social function is identical, to permit people to get up each morning and trudge off outside their home into a cold and hostile world. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:3383] Doug's question199902150032.TAA05042@sawasdee.cc.columbia.eduv04011703b2ed158ea2e4@[166.84.250.86]199902142348.SAA02510@merhaba.cc.columbia.edu36C746BF.F140BA81@mb.sympatico.cav04011702b2ecb350e423@[166.84.250.86] v04011700b2edef2098a5@[166.84.250.86]
I have not read the book for more than 20 years, but I recall that Sennett and Cobb's Hidden Injuries of Class addresses Doug's question without resorting to psychoanalysis. They found that blue collar workers were pissed off at welfare recipients because the fact that people could get by without making the enormous sacrificies that the workers made called their whole being into question. Doug Henwood wrote: Why people embrace politicians and parties against their own material self-interest is one of the great mysteries of politics. And there's no doubt that lots of people embraced fascism who later suffered from it. Why does anti-Semitism have the power it does, even in societies with few or no Jews? Why do so many working class Americans hate welfare moms with what looks like an irrational passion? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
[PEN-L:3384] Psychoanalysis
Doug: Why people embrace politicians and parties against their own material self-interest is one of the great mysteries of politics. And there's no doubt that lots of people embraced fascism who later suffered from it. Why does anti-Semitism have the power it does, even in societies with few or no Jews? Why do so many working class Americans hate welfare moms with what looks like an irrational passion? It has more than a little to do with sex and race. There's many a slip between the material/social world that Marxists analyze and the world as people see and act on it. It is not a great mystery why people act against their own material self-interest. As Marx said, the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. Under normal circumstances, they accept those ideas. They only reevaluate them in a time of deep crisis, such as during imperialist war or economic upheaval. With respect to the question of people "embracing" fascism, there's no mystery about that either. Fascism was an appeal to Germany's desperate middle-class. The message was simultaneously anti-big business and anti-trade union. The shopkeepers were angry at strikers who were inconveniencing them, was well as the big retail competitors who were throwing them into the working class. Hitler promised middle-class socialism, but built a regime with traditional big business agenda after taking power. Anti-semitism has power because the capitalist system churns up all sorts of racist and xenophobic ideas. Poland, for example, is an extremely anti-semitic society even though there were few Jews left after WWII. The explanation for this is not to be found in Lacan or Zizek. It is much simpler. It took longer for Poland to be drawn into the modern capitalist realm than just about any other European country. Throughout the 19th century, the Polish countryside exhibited many of the same sort of social and economic characteristics of 14th century Spain or France. Jews functioned as tax farmers, who would raise revenue from the Christian peasants and get a cut from the aristocratic absentee landlords who lived in Warsaw. The first modern pogroms were directed against the Jews, who symbolized semifeudal exploitation. My name Proyect means "tax farmer" in Yiddish, by the way. After Poland was forcibly integrated into the Eastern European buffer states in the Yalta treaty, the Stalinist government retained many of the backward attitudes of the pre-existing system. The explanation for this is simple. Stalinism attracted the same sort of careerists who joined the AFL-CIO after it had become institutionalized. While once a progressive force, by the 1950s it had begun to make all sorts of concessions to the ruling ideas of the period, which included racism. Stalinism made its own compromise with backwardness as well. As a rule of thumb, the more thorough-going a revolution, the more that backwardness and prejudice is uprooted radically. The Cuban revolution basically made race prejudice punishable by a stiff jail term. Castro drove this point home by making Afro-Cubans top leaders of the military and police. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:3385] Re: Psychoanalysis
Louis Proyect wrote: The explanation for this is not to be found in Lacan or Zizek. It is much simpler. Yes, Louis, life is so simple. So *obvious*. We should just stop wasting time on all these complexities, shouldn't we? I don't know why I bother, really. So I'll just shut up here and let the economists sort things out. Doug
[PEN-L:3387] Psychoanalysis
London Times July 17, 1997, Thursday Analysing the analyst By John Weightman JACQUES LACAN. An Outline of a Life and History of a System of Thought. By Elizabeth Roudinesco. Polity Press, Pounds 25. ISBN 0 7456 1523 6 John Weightman lays Lacan bare Once, at a Parisian dinner party, I heard a lady remark: " Mon fils vient de sortir de son Oedipe " (My son has just got over his Oedipus complex), much as she might have said that he had recently had his appendix removed. This brought home to me the fact that for a surprising number of French intellectuals, Freudianism is not simply an interesting body of parascientific speculation, but a dogmatic system to be accepted as the truth. Consequently, its history, like that of all revealed religions, has been endlessly fraught with doctrinal disputes. No wonder, then, that this extraordinary book about the most flamboyant French neo-Freudian of the 20th century should read like an account of the schisms in the medieval Church and be redolent with odium theologicum . At first, one might take Ms Roudinesco for an anti-Lacanian, because she paints such a damning picture of Lacan, the man. An unfaithful husband to two wives and a neglectful, capricious father, he was "a womaniser and a libertine", "greedy", "snobbish", "devious" and possessed by "an immense desire to be recognised and famous". But she praises the professional: "Lacan towered over all the members of his own generation in terms of personal charisma, as well as clinical and theoretical genius". However, she is strangely schizoid, since her book contains ample evidence to contradict this positive view of Lacan's achievement. She doesn't seem to notice that she herself undermines her encomium by frequently demonstrating that he plays fast and loose with Freud and even, as she puts it, "massacres" him in translation. She also shows that many eminent people who came into contact with Lacan or tried to read his big, sibylline text, Ecrits , had a negative reaction. He claimed to have incorporated into Freudianism concepts derived from, amongst others, Claude Levi-Strauss, Ramon Jakobson and Martin Heidegger, but Levi-Strauss refused to comment on his work, saying ironically that he couldn't understand it. Jakobson was careful to keep his distance and Heidegger dryly remarked: "The psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist." I must declare a prejudice; I once attended a lecture he gave, and was so put off by his spasmodic, oracular delivery that I left before the end. But not everyone is allergic to gurus, far from it. Ms Roudinesco describes how the audience at his "seminars" (his teaching was mainly oral) gradually increased over the years, so that, by 1963, when he broke with mainstream Freudianism and founded his own Ecole Freudienne , he had an army of fervent, if quarrelsome, disciples. From being "a brilliant Socrates" in a limited context, he eventually allowed himself "to be worshipped like a god and his teaching to be treated as holy writ". She blames his followers for this, but was it not a consequence of his own colossal vanity? At an early stage, he developed the maniacal conviction that he was "the only person capable of listening to the true word of Freud". Being both a law unto himself and economical with the truth, he disregarded the rules of the International Psychoanalytical Society while claiming to respect them, and so fell foul of various members, including the three major female figures, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Marie Bonaparte. His own Ecole had a stormy existence under his dictatorial and erratic leadership; well before his death, it had begun to explode into what Ms Roudinesco calls "messianic sects". In his last phase, when he tried to combine Freudianism with Joycean word-play in the manner of Finnigan's Wake , he seems to have become definitely deranged, probably through some physiological deterioration of the brain, due to old age; certainly, the last texts quoted by Ms Roudinesco cannot be described as sane. Thanks to his celebrity and to the high fees he charged for analytical sessions, and even "non-sessions" (ie, a few minutes in the silent, or near-silent, presence of the Master), he had long been a rich man. In one respect, at least, he conformed to original Freudian symbolism; he preferred to keep his wealth in gold ingots. © 1999, LEXIS®-NEXIS®, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved. London Times September 15, 1993, Wednesday Revisionists nail seductive shrink to the couch By Charles Bremner in Paris TIMES have been hard lately for the intellectual titans of postwar France as one after another they have bitten the posthumous dust. Sartre, we learnt, liked to scribble his pensees while high on speed; Louis Althusser, the communist philosopher, murdered his wife, though what really discredited him was news that he had not read his Marx. The star of Michel Foucault, the deconstructivist theorist has
[PEN-L:3388] Psychoanalysis
Angela: 'repressed memories', which is to say that term that comes into being as a juridical proof of a crime, is of course, rubbish, and for many of the reasons that freud pointed out: namely, that rememberances are always fantastic rememberances, or at the very least tainted, and would hardly consitute proof in the juridical sense. The Observer June 8, 1997, Sunday THE WEEK IN REVIEWS: BOOKS: CALL IN THE FREUD SQUAD By Anthony Clare There is no more bitter dispute in the field of mental health than that about 'false' memories. What intensifies the bitterness is that at its core is the stomach-churning issue of child sexual abuse. Those whose memories are challenged include many patients alleging serious sexual abuse at the hands of parents, siblings and guardians. Those challenging retrieved memories of abuse include parents and relatives accused of CSA, some innocent, some almost certainly guilty. There are those who insist that some traumatic experiences are so psychologically destructive that the sufferer, consciously or not, 'represses' them and lives a life seemingly indifferent to them unless, usually with the help of a sympathetic therapist, the memories are unearthed. Others argue with equal vehemence that there is no such thing as 'repressed' memory, that it is yet another spurious Freudian dogma, and that therapists use questionable methods of interrogation to suggest and insert false memories that are the allegedly buried ones. At the heart of the controversy is a scientific question can the mind completely and involuntarily pack in the unconscious memories of repeated traumatic events and recover them with accuracy and in detail many years later? A formidable protagonist in this battle is Frederick Crews, an emeritus professor not of psychology or psychiatry, but of English. In common with many literary academics in the postwar years, Crews was, as he describes himself, 'a one-time Freudian' who has since seen the light. In 1993, he published an article, 'The Unknown Freud', in the New York Review of Books, in which he argued that the founder of psychoanalysis was 'a saturnine self-dramatiser' who showed a cavalier disdain for facts, invariably preferred an arcane explanation to an obvious one, brazenly interfered with the marriage of a patient in order to get his hands on an heiress's money, doctored his data and manipulated his clients, and who, in the words of an American psychoanalyst trained by Freud, 'would wait until he found an association that would fit his scheme of interpretation and pick it up like a detective at a line-up who waits until he sees his man'. In that same article, Crews studied several Freudian case histories, and concluded that Freud did not elicit repressed memories from his patients, but constructed them and proceeded to create a therapeutic arrangement in which these 'repressed' memories were uncovered. As Allen Esterson reminds us, in his powerful book Seductive Mirage, the controversy over Freud's seduction theory has tended to focus on whether the accusatory tales of childhood sexual abuse recounted by his patients were believable. Jeffrey Masson held that the stories were true and that Freud showed a failure of nerve in renouncing them. Peter Gay asserts that the stories were false and that Freud had been taken in by his own patients. But, argued Crews, drawing heavily on Esterson, both parties have missed the point. The question is not whether the stories are true but, rather, what stories. Freud asserted that 'almost all my women patients told me they had been seduced by their father'. He later decided such revelations were fantasies. His papers, however, revealed that before they came to analysis, these women knew nothing about such events until he suggested them. Freud described how he did it: 'Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them.' Then, as Esterson describes it: 'Having decided that his own constructions (about childhood sexual abuse) are untrue, he concludes that they are not genuine occurrences, but fantasies of his patients.' Crews concludes that the coercive tactics by which Freud tried to win his patients' agreement to his own theory-driven surmises about their histories 'rendered him chief begetter of contemporary 'false memory syndrome'.' The essay, 'The Unknown Freud', together with the follow-up 'The Revenge of the Repressed', which also appeared in the New York Review of Books, are both contained in this book, and alone would make it worth a read. But what makes the book mandatory for anyone interested not just in the brutal skirmish over repressed memory but in the wider war over the status of psychoanalysis is that Crews has included substantial excerpts from one of the largest postbags of correspondence that any article in that literary journal has provoked. His assaults on psychoanalysis and its founder stirred passionate controversy. Here, luminaries of the
[PEN-L:3389] Canada
Just in case anyone thinks that we all accept Bill Burgess' interpretation of left politics and political economy because of our silence in responding to it, let me point out that I do not. Furthermore, this is an issue that we debated at great length in the national/international debate a year or so ago. I didn't agree with Bill's internationalist position then and I don't agree with it now. Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba
[PEN-L:3390] Re: Canada
I confess that I think that the NBER paper that Doug brought to our attention might be on to something. I remember a time almost 20 years ago that I visited Toronto for the first time. I did not see much poverty. The city seemed very well run. Maybe I was naive, but it seemed a stark contrast from the US. I recall reading some papers around that time about the kind of concentrated ownership that Canada had. It seemed that the Canadian capitalists were far more enlightened that the U.S. capitalists. Canada seemed to evoke the Business Week version of capitalism rather than the more Hobbesian Wall Street Journal version. Since then, Canada has fallen under the sway of a more U.S. verion of capital and is paying the price -- at least some are. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3397] Re: Doug's question199902150032.TAA05042@sawasdee.cc.columbia.eduv04011703b2ed158ea2e4@[166.84.250.86]199902142348.SAA02510@merhaba.cc.columbia.edu36C746BF.F140BA81@mb.sympatico.cav04011702b2ecb350e423@[166.84.250.86] v04011700b2edef2098a5@[166.84.250.86] 36C84958.3C59ED0@ecst.csuchico.edu
And doesn't the press play up every case where there is a rip-off of the welfare system? Show photos of someone arriving to collect a welfare check in a Cadillac...and so on ad nauseam?..So the working stiff gets an entirely warped impression of people on welfare.. There doesn't seem to be much appeal to any complex psychology here. Working class taxpayers simply don't like being ripped off and seeing their money misused. THe workers are a victim of selective reporting but the psychology involved doesnt seem particularly complex... Michael Perelman wrote: I have not read the book for more than 20 years, but I recall that Sennett and Cobb's Hidden Injuries of Class addresses Doug's question without resorting to psychoanalysis. They found that blue collar workers were pissed off at welfare recipients because the fact that people could get by without making the enormous sacrificies that the workers made called their whole being into question. Doug Henwood wrote: Why people embrace politicians and parties against their own material self-interest is one of the great mysteries of politics. And there's no doubt that lots of people embraced fascism who later suffered from it. Why does anti-Semitism have the power it does, even in societies with few or no Jews? Why do so many working class Americans hate welfare moms with what looks like an irrational passion? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
[PEN-L:3398] Re: Canada (Bill)
Bill Burgess wrote, OK, "fighting" is a crude term. But how can the 'left' "select, prune, train" and especially "harvest" without political power? Or do you have in mind some kind of tactical alliance with the most promising capitalist plants against the bourgeois weeds and deadwood? The NBER study suggests the latter are the family-controlled corporate pyramids, so I guess this alliance is exactly opposite to the one you said the left has beein pursuing in the last couple of decades with 'rentier' capitalism. Boy, that really is swimming against the stream! I wouldn't suggest for a moment that a different strategy would be easier. But to continue your metaphor, if the left wants to spawn, it's going to have to _learn_ to swim against the stream. regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:3399] Re: Canada (Doug)
Doug Henwood wrote, Here's an idea - social democracy is more compatible with "monopolized" ownership structures than most social democrats would like to admit, and is undermined by U.S.-style financial and corporate governance arrangements. It's probably very difficult for U.S. social dems to admit to this, given this country's love of small business and populist, anti-centralizing political traditions. Doug's idea is right on the (Bis)mark. regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:3400] query
why is it that so many people in New York are Freudians and so few in Los Angeles? is it a simply an unexplainable matter of culture? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
[PEN-L:3402] Re: Doug's question II
Quoth Ken Hanly: And doesn't the press play up every case where there is a rip-off of the welfare system? Show photos of someone arriving to collect a welfare check in a Cadillac... and so on ad nauseam?..So the working stiff gets an entirely warped impression of people on welfare.. There doesn't seem to be much appeal to any complex psychology here. Working class taxpayers simply don't like being ripped off and seeing their money misused. The workers are a victim of selective reporting but the psychology involved doesn't seem particularly complex... And what about the racist component? Most of the working class is white, and in the face of statistics goes on believing with surly resentment that welfare is basically the mass-production of fatherless black kids. "The end of welfare as we know it" addressed this image with a knowing wink, and we don't yet know how easily the stake may be removed from its wily heart. valis
[PEN-L:3403] Re: RE: Re: Re: Canada
Well yes, but not exactly. Example: the Lander banks in Germany. These are publicly owned at the state level and make loans to local small businesses. They play an important role in the social market model--and the EU (or some elements therein) wants to abolish them. By the way, this is a very important topic. Peter Dorman Max Sawicky wrote: Here's an idea - social democracy is more compatible with "monopolized" ownership structures than most social democrats would like to admit, and is undermined by U.S.-style financial and corporate governance arrangements. It's probably very difficult for U.S. social dems to admit to this, given this country's love of small business and populist, anti-centralizing political traditions. Financial and corporate governance arrangements can be quite different in this context. In the latter case, monopoly mitigates the imperative of profit maximization per se. In this realm, I think you are right that social democracy has an interest in seeking collaborationist arrangements with corporations, which I would say can be either good or bad for workers. Liberalizing financial arrangements are a whole different matter and would seem to be the real challenge to social democracy. We see that under neo-liberalism, social democracy either caves in and transforms to Clintonism (e.g., U.S., perhaps Australia/New Zealand, UK), or is forced into a more antagonistic posture. The indifference to localism, populism, and anti- centralism is generic not only to social-democracy, but to much of the left as well. My impression is that these traditions have much less currency in Europe so there is nothing to neglect. mbs
[PEN-L:3404] Re: query
Jim Devine wrote: why is it that so many people in New York are Freudians and so few in Los Angeles? is it a simply an unexplainable matter of culture? All those German Jews who came to the Upper West Side in the 1930s and 1940s brought it with them. Besides, people in LA are shallow and unreflective (except for their sunglasses), right? Doug
[PEN-L:3411] Re: Death of a wise man
Banyacya warned that an endless quest for material wealth would destroy the balance of the world; The message of the film Koyaanisqatsi. regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:3412] Re: query
Jim Devine wrote, why is it that so many people in New York are Freudians and so few in Los Angeles? is it a simply an unexplainable matter of culture? I suspect it's the earthquakes. regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:3413] Re: Origins of overdetermination, was Re: Psychoanalysis
Was Lacan responsible for the semantic reversal of "overdetermination"? Actually, it was Lacan's orthodontist who first suggested the reversal. regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:3414] Wages: Europe vs. Asia
Joseph Green is right on in his observation that Frank runs into a major difficulty in speaking of Europe as both a high wage and a low per-capita/low productivity region. Let's not call this a contradiction yet, but certainly a major problem, which unfortunately, as Green later noted, Frank does not deal with. (He does add, however, that workers in China "were still able to draw on family support" (306). But before moving into China, I want to continue the comments I made last Friday about rising English wage rages in the last half of the 18th century. We all know how intractable that debate about the standard of life of wage workers in England in the 1750-1850 period has become for the non-specialist. Some (Ashton, 1949) say that the lives of workers saw improvements if not in the 1790s certainly by the 1820s. Others like Eric Hobsbawm insist "there is not much evidence that real wages in Europe began to go up significantly until the later part of the 1860s..." (The Age of Capital, 259). Which is to say that Mathias (1983), the source I used last time, is only one source. But I have another, more recent source (most sources cited so far are my own which sometimes I forget I have) by E.A.Wrigley, the foremost authority on British population history and all that that entails. In Peoples, Cities, and Wealth, The Transformation of Traditional Society (1987) there is, even though Wrigley does not directly deal with wage rates, a graph which measures real wage trends in England showing that, from 1600 onwards, real wages move steadily upward to fall after 1750, to rise, substantially and steadily, after 1800. So, obviously this suggests, against Mathias, who may still be right about the cities he provided data for, that in the early phases of the revolution wages declined, increasing only after 1800. This, of course, does not disqualify the home market thesis in the sense that this was the bulk of the market, with a rising population, and steady increases in wages from 1600 to 1750, and after 1800. But more importantly, and this is the key point we must never miss, the world of the peasants was rapidly being transformed into a world of capitalit relations. Looking at this sector will clarify this whole business about the "superior" productivity of China's (or India's) agriculture. First, to narrow our focus to Britain, I think that despite, but also in tandem with, the enclosure movement there was a sizable class of middling peasants (the so-called yeomen) which played an undeniable role as a both an internal market and source of accumulation. Looking at Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, would seem to suggest otherwise, for then nobles and gentry are said to have owned as much as 69% of the land (as compared to say Prussia, that land of the Junkers, were surprisingly 40% was in their hands, or, less surprisingly, France, where 20% was in the hand of big landlords, or Russia, surprisingly again, were it was 14% (Price in Aldcroft, 1994, 75). But what one has to keep in mind is that the enclusure movement really gathered momentum in the 18th century, and not before as Brenner, or Moore earlier, had claimed. In fact, if in the mid-19th century 50% of the farmland was held in units of over 80 ha, and 1/5 in units of less than 40 ha, 42% of the land was still held in units of less than 20 ha occupied by *independent farmers* who "did not regularly hire labour" (76). It was really in the last quarter of the 19th century that 88% of the land came to be held in terms of a landlord-tenant relation, with only 12% of the land owned by independent farmers. England always had a large free peasantry going back to the middle ages, out of which an upper, enterprising stratum emerged in the 15th-16th centuries, something the Marxist Rodney Hilton wrote much about. But the point I want to make now - as it challenges directly Frank's thesis on productivity - is that English agricultural ouput increased per year over the periods 1710-40, 1740-80, and 1780-1800 by 0.9, 0.5, and 0.6 respectively. (Craft's calculations as cited by Wrigley, who also provides a detailed table on this same question with similar conclusions as those of Craft, p. 170-171). Wrigley says that this "implies a total increase in output of almost exactly 80% over the 90-year period as a whole" adding that, if we agree that the agricultural population increase by 13% over the century, then the increase in per capita output could be calculated at 59%. Next we go back to Frank's argument that Asia suffered a comparative disadvantage in the world economy because its population/land resource ratio was relatively higher than Europe's (which is connected to the observation that Asia saw no need in introducing cost-saving technology because it had lower wages.
[PEN-L:3416] Re: Re: Psychoanalysis
Freud Marx: different kinds of materialism...any comments on below? Michael Hoover Philip Green, _Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology Gender in Hollywood_, pp. 4... '"Ideology" has meaning only as an account of an individual's transactions with a structured social whole, but psychoanalytic theorizing always stands in danger of reducing social relationships to a mother-child dyad, or a nuclear family triad, and thus vitiating the concept of ideology.'
[PEN-L:3417] Re: Re: Re: Psychoanalysis
Michael Hoover wrote: Freud Marx: different kinds of materialism...any comments on below? Michael Hoover Philip Green, _Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology Gender in Hollywood_, pp. 4... '"Ideology" has meaning only as an account of an individual's transactions with a structured social whole, but psychoanalytic theorizing always stands in danger of reducing social relationships to a mother-child dyad, or a nuclear family triad, and thus vitiating the concept of ideology.' Absolutely. Freud himself dropped a few hints about social influences - he spoke of children as developing ego ideals appropriate to their "family, class, and nation," a phrase about which you could write a book. But there's not much more than that. Althusser said that psychoanalysis deals with the time before the subject becomes a political being. Adorno, Butler, Zizek, and the rest of the gang use psa to analyze ideology, how we are inserted into it, how it sustains ourself in us vice versa, our little compromises with and rebellions against it. The dying breed Lou was talking about - the big bucks West End Ave analysts, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute types - aren't much interested in that. I heard in the 1970s that the leading presenting complaint to such analysts was an inability to finish a dissertation. Doug
[PEN-L:3418] Re: Re: Re: Canada (Doug)
Damn it, Ken Hanly. Stop popping my bubbles. I used to be very impressed with what I saw in Canada. Why then did it lack the mean streak that I see on this side of the border? Did I miss something? Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
[PEN-L:3427] Re: Re: Re: Canada (Ken)
Date sent: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 22:28:24 -0600 From: Ken Hanly [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:[PEN-L:3424] Re: Re: Canada (Ken) Now here is something I can agree with and heartfully endorse. Traditionally the social democrats have relied on regulation of capital as their method of control. This is why foreign ownership was so difficult -- it put capital beyond their regulatory grasp -- but also made foreign ownership an important issue (as it still is). Ken, however, has laid out the issue succinctly. I don't think that it is altogether true that social welfare programs were brought in to serve contingent ruling class interests. If that were so why did the ruling class consistently oppose progressive measures every step of the way? Minimum wages, UI and improvements to it, pensions, closed shop legislation, pay equity, you name it. While the welfare state may have saved capital from even more radical demands and staved off revolutionary demands, the welfare state was more or less forced upon the ruling class. Surely Capital railed against the welfare state, and enlisted all its legions of flacks and PR people to try to defeat those promoting the welfare state every step of the way. The welfare state was a great victory for the working class. The ruling class didnt suddenly decide they didnt need the welfare state any more--although the disintegration of actually existing socialism may have been a factor in precipating the assault against the welfare state. In my view the welfare state was a feature of the Social Structures of Accumulation of what has been called the Golden Age of Capitalism... Burgeoning debt, problems in maintaining adequate levels of capital accumulation, plus many other factors such as increased global competition among capitals, the growth of the Asian tigers, etc. led to Capital's forceful attack on the welfare state. You are right the constellation of class forces has changed in that global capital has the upper hand at them moment. However, not all struggles against cutbacks and attacks by capital have failed. If anything the greatest failure has been with social democratic parties who have sacrificed any pretense of being the leaders in the counter-atttack against global capital and are bending over backwards to show that they are "responsible" i.e. they will kiss corporate ass just as well as any old-line party or as in the UK and NZ and I guess OZ too actually leading the way for global capitalism. The welfare state is not gone. Its reduced. If there had been no struggle the situation would be much worse than it. The left may think that all is lost but the right knows damn well that the welfare state is still popular. There are plenty of aging conservative voters in Manitoba. Prior to an election here the Conservatives are pumping money back into our health care system--after savage cuts of course. They know, and the polls show them this, that people want the health care system and want it improved. While the social democrats in power in the province next door refuse to pay nurses a decent wage and do away entirely with the provincial pharamacare plan, the Conservative govt. in Manitoba is pumping more money into the system and contented itself with raising the kick-in limits in the pharamacare plan. The game plan. I grant you the proper game plan for a revolution doesnt seem clear. At least in advanced capitalist societies, revolution doesnt seem to be on the agenda for the moment. This doesn't mean that capital cannot be opposed though. I will concentrate upon issues not specifically directed to gay and lesbian rights, aboriginal or race issues, or the quesion of separatism. Oppose privatisation of all kinds. Some opposition to privatisation has been successful and any widespread opposition will make governments provincial or otherwise to think twice about trying it. Although provincial govt. here privatised the provincial phone company there was a great deal of opposition and the govt. lost a lot of support. They have not moved to privatise Manitoba Hydro or the auto insurance monopoly. Privatisation of hte phone company gave a perfect opportunity for the NDP to have as a plank that they would take the phone company back into the public sector. If they have such a plank, they certainly have been mighty quiet about it. The NDP should be pressing for privatised firms to be taken back into the public sector. Again no bloody leadership, rather the NDP goes with the flow doing some privatisation itself as in Saskatchewan where the public road construction sector was privatised. In Saskatchewan though there is still a publicly owned bus company providing service throughout the province. SaskPower still controls gas
[PEN-L:3428] Re: Stiglitz stumbles in SA
I agree that several of Stiglitz' answers appear to represent a retreat from his critique of the Washington Consensus. (I saw him debating Dornbusch et al. in NY and he soft-pedaled his views a bit, although he defended them when directly attacked.) I would not read too much into his reluctance to criticize World Bank staff in SA, however. As a high-level official of the Bank, the last thing he would want to do is make trouble for staffers he barely knows in a country he barely knows due to spontaneous remarks to left-wing interviewers. Naturally he plays his cards close to his chest. The real point is not to expect this guy to be the "good czar" who can sweep through and set all things right. He is a relatively open-minded economist, but as a WB official his major focus is undoubtedly avoiding large-scale bureaucratic and diplomatic screwups. He doesn't want the people who matter to the WB getting pissed off at him. Peter Dorman
[PEN-L:3429] Fwd: How to Make Tenure Fast
February 16, 1999 The New York Times How to Make Tenure Fast: A Chain Letter for Scientists By David Demers From the sci-tech studies list, an Internet discussion group devoted to science and society. Dear Fellow Scientist: This letter has been around the world at least seven times. It has been to many major conferences. Now it has come to you. It will bring you good fortune. This is true even if you don't believe it. But you must follow these instructions: -- Include in your next journal article the citations below; -- Remove the first citation from the list and add a citation to your journal article at the bottom; -- Make 10 copies and send them to colleagues. Within one year, you will be cited up to 10,000 times! This will amaze your fellow faculty, assure your promotion and improve your sex life. In addition, you will bring joy to many colleagues. Do not break the reference loop, but send this letter on today. Dr. H. received this letter and within a year after passing it on she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Prof. M. threw this letter away and was denied tenure. In Japan, Dr. I. received this letter and put it aside. His article for Trans. on nephrology was rejected. He found the letter and passed it on, and his article was published that year in the New England Journal of Medicine. In the Midwest, Prof. K. failed to pass on the letter, and in a budget cutback his entire department was eliminated. This could happen to you if you break the chain of citations. 1. Miller, J. (1992). Post-modern neo-cubism and the wave theory of light. Journal of Cognitive Artifacts, 8, 113-117. 2. Johnson, S. (1991). Micturition in the canid family: the irresistible pull of the hydrant. Physics Quarterly, 33, 203-220. 3. Anderson, R. (1990). Your place or mine?: an empirical comparison of two models of human mating behavior. Psychology Yesterday 12, 63-77. 4. David, E. (1994). Modern Approaches to Chaotic Heuristic Optimization: Means of Analyzing Non-Linear Intelligent Networks with Emergent Symbolic Structure. (doctoral dissertation, University of California at Santa Royale El Camino del Rey Mar Vista by-the-sea). (David DeMers, a computer scientist, former tax lawyer and now a portfolio manager for Prediction Co., a firm in Santa Fe, N.M., that finds and trades on price anomalies among securities, wrote this letter in 1992 when he was finishing his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, and looking for a job. He says it has drawn a greater response than all his other scholarly work, including his "Big Kahuna" method of evaluating baseball players for rotisserie leagues.)
[PEN-L:3424] Re: Re: Canada (Ken)
I don't think that it is altogether true that social welfare programs were brought in to serve contingent ruling class interests. If that were so why did the ruling class consistently oppose progressive measures every step of the way? Minimum wages, UI and improvements to it, pensions, closed shop legislation, pay equity, you name it. While the welfare state may have saved capital from even more radical demands and staved off revolutionary demands, the welfare state was more or less forced upon the ruling class. Surely Capital railed against the welfare state, and enlisted all its legions of flacks and PR people to try to defeat those promoting the welfare state every step of the way. The welfare state was a great victory for the working class. The ruling class didnt suddenly decide they didnt need the welfare state any more--although the disintegration of actually existing socialism may have been a factor in precipating the assault against the welfare state. In my view the welfare state was a feature of the Social Structures of Accumulation of what has been called the Golden Age of Capitalism... Burgeoning debt, problems in maintaining adequate levels of capital accumulation, plus many other factors such as increased global competition among capitals, the growth of the Asian tigers, etc. led to Capital's forceful attack on the welfare state. You are right the constellation of class forces has changed in that global capital has the upper hand at them moment. However, not all struggles against cutbacks and attacks by capital have failed. If anything the greatest failure has been with social democratic parties who have sacrificed any pretense of being the leaders in the counter-atttack against global capital and are bending over backwards to show that they are "responsible" i.e. they will kiss corporate ass just as well as any old-line party or as in the UK and NZ and I guess OZ too actually leading the way for global capitalism. The welfare state is not gone. Its reduced. If there had been no struggle the situation would be much worse than it. The left may think that all is lost but the right knows damn well that the welfare state is still popular. There are plenty of aging conservative voters in Manitoba. Prior to an election here the Conservatives are pumping money back into our health care system--after savage cuts of course. They know, and the polls show them this, that people want the health care system and want it improved. While the social democrats in power in the province next door refuse to pay nurses a decent wage and do away entirely with the provincial pharamacare plan, the Conservative govt. in Manitoba is pumping more money into the system and contented itself with raising the kick-in limits in the pharamacare plan. The game plan. I grant you the proper game plan for a revolution doesnt seem clear. At least in advanced capitalist societies, revolution doesnt seem to be on the agenda for the moment. This doesn't mean that capital cannot be opposed though. I will concentrate upon issues not specifically directed to gay and lesbian rights, aboriginal or race issues, or the quesion of separatism. Oppose privatisation of all kinds. Some opposition to privatisation has been successful and any widespread opposition will make governments provincial or otherwise to think twice about trying it. Although provincial govt. here privatised the provincial phone company there was a great deal of opposition and the govt. lost a lot of support. They have not moved to privatise Manitoba Hydro or the auto insurance monopoly. Privatisation of hte phone company gave a perfect opportunity for the NDP to have as a plank that they would take the phone company back into the public sector. If they have such a plank, they certainly have been mighty quiet about it. The NDP should be pressing for privatised firms to be taken back into the public sector. Again no bloody leadership, rather the NDP goes with the flow doing some privatisation itself as in Saskatchewan where the public road construction sector was privatised. In Saskatchewan though there is still a publicly owned bus company providing service throughout the province. SaskPower still controls gas and electricity. The auto insurance industry is still public. Retail and producer co-ops should be supported as well as Credit Unions. Neo-liberalism hasnt destroyed these. They are thriving at least in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Indeed, Credit Unions can capitalise upon banks' attempts to downsize and add on various fees for services. I havent used a bank for years. The left in Canada had a well-organised and successful campaign to block a major bank merger. A waste of time. Let them merge and cut back branches and get credit unions to fill the gap. At a conference I was at there was paper given by two guys who made a living showing businesses how to profit when competitors restructure and downsize. They
[PEN-L:3423] Re: Psychoanalysis
At 08:35 AM 2/15/99 L. Proyect wrote: Actually, Marx is taken much more seriously than Freud nowadays. Freud as "scientist" has absolutely no authority. All of the main tenets he stressed (repressed memories in particular) have been demolished by real scientists. Perhaps Proyect will inform us of his academic authority to write, sans qualifiers, that Freud has "absolutely no authority." One is also scientifically curious what "real scientists" refuted repressed memories and the academic journals where they published. Psychoanalysis has very limited value in explaining how people behave. For example, when psychoanalysts write about fascism, they usually go off on the most ridiculous tangents about sexual attitudes of the German masses, or Hitler's psychopathology in particular. I consider myself a rather orthodox Freudian. And as the editor of The Internet Anti-Fascist I do not recognize either myself or my journal in Proyect's assertions. The real problem with psychotherapy in the past is that it was promoted as a cure for all sorts of problems that were clearly organic in nature, from obsessive-compulsive disorders to schizophrenia. The notion that the oedipal complex could have anything to do with hearing voices in your head is not only absurd, it is patently unscientific. The mere fact that some therapists may have promoted it as Proyect writes does not mean that all did; he confuses the part with the whole. I am also unclear about the "clearly organic ... nature" of the diseases about which Proyect writes. One may attribute some organic quality to them, but only due to very "unclear" statistics and research. Nor does locating an organic aspect disprove the existence of non-organic factors. Drunkenness is clearly organic, yet all of us know that the common organic state leads to fundamental differences in drunken behavior by different people with different psychologies. And, despite Proyect's assertions, the Oedipal Complex was not the core of Freud's theories of schizophrenia. Scientific studies of Freud's theories in this area have demonstrated some correlations where p .01. Proyect seems to reflect a particular mainstream psychologism that I've seen in other Marxists. They have no problem challenging the middle-of-the-road or common-sense notions of history, economics, or political science. But in psychology they cling to the path of our mainstream culture and mainstream biases. Even the piece by Frederick Crew, Proyect's anti-Freudian expert, does little more than assert sans proof that Freud is unscientific. This method is easy to use and demonstrates nothing, to wit: "Scientists now concede that the existence of the moon is just a myth." In closing, let me mention another common error that makes a rational study of Freud sometimes difficult. While we speak of "psychoanalysis" as a single entity, we need to remember that it is composed of many theories. Each may be valid or invalid, largely independent of the others. -- tallpaul editor/publisher: The Internet Anti-Fascist
[PEN-L:3422] Imagine! (fwd)
Forwarded message: Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 15 Feb 1999 15:43:52 -0800 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Sid Shniad [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Imagine! X-UID: 9546 "Imagine if we would seriously accept importing the US political model here! We would start political parties, and of course PACs to influence them. Each campaign would involve candidates spending millions of dollars to insult each other on TV in order to win about 18% of the eligible vote. Thats the US model. Or, should we bring back capitalism, with high unemployment, gross exploitation, homelessness, hunger, people without access to medical care?" Cuban Vice President Ricardo Alarcon -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3421] Terry Eagleton on postmodernism
(From "The Illusions of Postmodernism," Blackwell, 1996) If postmodernism covers everything from punk rock to the death of metanarrative, fanzines to Foucault, then it is difficult to see how any single explanatory scheme could do justice to such a bizarrely heterogeneous entity. And if the creature is so diverse then it is hard to see how one could be in some simple sense either for or against it, any more than one could be for or against Peru. If there is any unity to postmodernism at all, then it can only be a matter of Wittgensteinian 'family resemblances'; and in this sense it seems to provide an instructive example of its own dogmatic anti-essentialism, of which more later on. If postmodernism were nothing but the backwash of a political debacle, it would be hard, impressionistically speaking, to account for its often exuberant tone, and impossible to account for any of its more positive attributes. One would, for example, be forced to claim that its single most enduring achievement -- the fact that it has helped to place questions of sexuality, gender and ethnicity so firmly on the political agenda that it is impossible to imagine them being erased without an almighty struggle -- was nothing more than a substitute for more classical forms of radical politics, which dealt in class, state, ideology, revolution, material modes of production. That postmodernism's privileged political topics are indeed, among other things, substitutionary seems to me undeniable. Nobody who has run across the feeble concept of 'classism', which seems to come down to not feeling socially superior to people, or who has observed the lamentable effects on some postmodernist debates about gender or neo-colonialism of their ignorance of class structure and material conditions, could underestimate for a moment the disastrous political losses at stake here. The West is now bulging at the seams with political radicals whose ignorance of socialist traditions, not least their own, is certainly among other things the effect of post-modernist amnesia. And we are speaking here of the greatest reform movement that history has ever witnessed. We now find ourselves confronted with the mildly farcical situation of a cultural left which maintains an indifferent or embarrassed silence about that power which is the invisible colour of daily life itself, which determines our existence -- sometimes literally so -- in almost every quarter, which decides in large measure the destiny of nations and the internecine conflicts between them. It is as though almost every other form of oppressive system -- state, media, patriarchy, racism, neo--colonialism can be readily debated, but not the one which so often sets the long--term agenda for all of these matters, or is at the very least implicated with them to their roots. The power of capital is now so drearily familiar, so sublimely omnipotent and omnipresent, that even large sectors of the left have succeeded in naturalizing it, taking it for granted such an unbudgable structure that it is as though they hardly have the heart to speak of it. One would need, for an apt analogy to imagine a defeated right wing eagerly embroiled in discussions of the monarchy, the family, the death of chivalry and the possibility of reclaiming India, while maintaining a coy silence on what after all engages them most viscerally, the rights of property, since these had been so thoroughly expropriated that it seemed merely academicist to speak of them. With Darwinian conformity, much of the cultural left has taken on the colour of its historical environs: if we live in an epoch in which capitalism cannot be successfully challenged, then to all intents and purposes it does not exist. As for Lenin was just an 'elitist', theory and political organization are 'male', and-- a slight intellectual advance, this-- historical progress is 'teleology' and any concern with material production 'economism'. As far as 'theory' goes, that the West is indeed now stuffed with brilliant young male zombies who know all about Foucault and not much about feeling is no reason for concluding that Julia Kristeva should have stuck to poetry. A long time ago we fell into an obscure disaster known as Enlightenment, to be rescued around 1972 by the lucky reader of Ferdinand de Saussure. The political illiteracy and historical oblivion fostered by much postmodernism, its cult of flashy theoretical fashion and instant intellectual consumption, must surely be a cause for rejoicing in the White House, assuming that the trend does not pass out of existence before it reaches their ears. None of this, however, implies that the politics of postmodernism are nothing but placeholders for a political desire which dare not speak its name. On the contrary, they represent not only questions of world-historical importance, but the appearance on the theoretical centre stage of millions who have been dumped and discarded, as often by traditional leftists as by
[PEN-L:3420] Re: Canada (Ken)
I understand there were Social Democrats in late 19th century Germany, too. I do not mean to push the comparison, other than in the sense that not all welfare state programs are manna from heaven. They are brought in to serve contigent ruling class interests (in response to popular pressure, of course) but it is rather feeble to defend the welfare state in retrospect as a great workers' victory once the ruling class has decided it doesn't need them anymore. The bourgies are telling us, by their deeds not their words, that the constellation of class forces has changed. Our bleak experience in opposing the social program cuts confirms what the bourgies are telling us. So what's the game plan? regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:3419] Re: Canada (Michael)
Michael Perelman wrote, Damn it, Ken Hanly. Stop popping my bubbles. I used to be very impressed with what I saw in Canada. Why then did it lack the mean streak that I see on this side of the border? Did I miss something? Yeah. Maybe you should have visited some place like Davis Inlet or Mount Currie or Alkali Lake. regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:3415] Re: Re: Canada (Doug)
There has never been a social democratic government in power in Canada at the Federal Level. Except for the Rae govt. in Ontario. most provincial social democratic govts have not been in the area of Canada where the wealthy inheritor firms are...Ontario, and the Maritimes Irvine and McCains, but in the west. Heir controlled firms are noted for their anti-labor stance and support for conservative and protectionist policies. It is true that both capital and the general public are (or were) much less worried about big government than US citizens. Social democratic governments in the provinces embrace not monopoly ownership per se but government monopoly as in the medicare first promoted in Saskatchewan and eventually adopted federally, or in the auto insurance programmes, govt. monopolies in Saskatchewan first, and now in BC. and Manitoba. all put in place by social democratic regimes. The hydro companies in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, govt. monopolies, WHeat Board monopoly trading in selected grains.. but this has nothing to do with old heir capital. Those old farts are aghast at all these things.. Both people and old heir capital look to govt. to advance their interests and protect them from international capital and the vagaries of the market. So we have or had, all sorts of different boards meant to control production chicken boards, milk board, etc. all meant to ensure producers a reasonable return and of course quite counter to free markets. These policies were not implemented by some fatherly Bismarck. THey were implemented because popular movements lobbied for these things, and social democrats had them as planks in their platform. They would not have been elected and re-elected if they had not followed these policies. Some of these policies were adopted by Liberal and Conservative Federal Regimes because they were scared skinny that the social democrats might win power federally..Nothing like the autocratic social programmes of Bismarck. I seem to recall looking at statistics that show that Canadian voters participate less in local elections more in Provincial elections and more still in Federal Elections--this may not hold for Quebec. The opposite is the case in the US. In municipal elections here unless they really do something stupid or a big issue comes up councillors often remain unopposed or win hands down. By the way the Bronfman trust case mentioned by someone earlier is not settled yet. A taxpayer got a Manitoba lawyer Arne Pelz to file suit in court to force the Bronfman trust to pay taxes on the several billion dollars transferred to the US to avoid taxation. Every 20 years these trusts are assessed for taxation as if they had been sold and the capital gain is taxed. The Bronfman's tried to move the fund to the US to avoid this. IN order to do this they attempted to have the transaction exempted under a provision that is meant to apply to US funds coming into Canada!! The exemption was at first denied. Then later this was overruled. Someones head should roll. The court case will claim that Revenue Canada did not follow its own rules. Should be very interesting.. This is your typical heir capital. Other great heir capitalists live in the Bahamas((or maybe Bermuda)) because Canada is such a high tax socialist country. We owe nothing to these people but our chains. Cheers, Ken Hanly Tom Walker wrote: Doug Henwood wrote, Here's an idea - social democracy is more compatible with "monopolized" ownership structures than most social democrats would like to admit, and is undermined by U.S.-style financial and corporate governance arrangements. It's probably very difficult for U.S. social dems to admit to this, given this country's love of small business and populist, anti-centralizing political traditions. Doug's idea is right on the (Bis)mark. regards, Tom Walker
[PEN-L:3410] Re: Psychoanalysis
On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Louis Proyect wrote: It is not a great mystery why people act against their own material self-interest. Oh yes it is. For one thing, the fact that this happens over and over again totally negates one of the fundamental tenets of neoclassical economics: that we're all just little commodity-traders, maximizing our input-output schemas via rational means. Or, to be Adornic, you could say that individual rationality, taken to its competitive limit, rebounds into systemic irrationality. One of the most important tasks facing any progressive economic vision is getting across the idea that the economic field is not governed by a set of iron laws, it's a social construct which can be changed by collective action (a la Max's email appeal for folks to protest the increasingly hideous contours of the Clinton budget). -- Dennis
[PEN-L:3409] Re: Re: Re: Re: The Phallus
On Sun, 14 Feb 1999, Ken Hanly wrote: You say that the Phallus is the symbol of authority not the authority itself You then say that this is analogous to bank credit. But how is bank credit symbolic? Bank credit is a reality. A *mediated* reality. It's a claim on some future profit or revenue, somewhere. That's why debts can be bought and sold, like most anything else; the identity of a given amount of debt isn't a use-value, like the way gold is shiny and metallic, it's based on *other* identities (that of the credit markets, stock markets, etc.). And what is resisting identity? Or resisting Capital through resisting it? Not believing anything you see on CNN. It works for me. -- Dennis
[PEN-L:3408] Death of a wise man
From an obituary in the NY Times, February 15, 1999 Thomas Banyacya, 89, Who Told of Hopi Prophecy By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr. Thomas Banyacya, who spent half a century on a tireless and often thankless Hopi spiritual mission to save the planet from the ravages of modern materialism and greed, died on Feb. 6 at a hospital in Keane Canyon, Ariz., about 40 miles from his home in Kykotsmovi on the Hopi reservation. He was 89 and the last of four messengers named by Hopi elders in 1948 to warn the world of impending doom. The 15,000 or so Hopis are a small nation, but their sense of burden is great. According to a 900-year-old religious tradition, the Great Spirit Maasau'u, Guardian of the Earth, assigned them the duty of preserving the natural balance of the world and entrusted them with a series of ominous prophecies warning of specific threats and providing guidance on how to avoid them. The prophecies remained a secret oral tradition until 1948, when Hopi religious leaders, alarmed by reports of the atomic bomb's mushroom cloud, which they saw as the destructive "gourd of ashes" foretold in the prophecies, appointed Banyacya and three others as messengers to reveal and interpret the prophecies to the outside world. Banyacya seems to have been an obvious choice. At a time when many Hopis were beginning to embrace modern ways, even accepting the governmental jurisdiction of the United States, he had remained so steadfast in his devotion to the sacred traditions and cherished sovereignty of the Hopi that he had spent seven years in prison rather than register for the draft in World War II. As he tirelessly explained, the Hopi, whose very name means "peaceful," reject fighting in wars, especially for another nation... A fierce opponent of uranium mining and a variety of other industrial assaults on the environment, Banyacya warned that an endless quest for material wealth would destroy the balance of the world; yet he did not reject all modern conveniences. His U.N. address and several other messages can be found on the Internet at http://www.alphacdc.com/banyacya/banyacya.html, a site maintained by the Alpha Institute. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
[PEN-L:3406] Re: Re: query
why is it that so many people in New York are Freudians and so few in Los Angeles? is it a simply an unexplainable matter of culture? All those German Jews who came to the Upper West Side in the 1930s and 1940s brought it with them. Besides, people in LA are shallow and unreflective (except for their sunglasses), right? yeah, we all look like Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman (as the case may be). We're all in Scientology, too. (We should remember that there are all sorts of working-class and minority populations in LA. Beverly Hills is not a good representative of LA. Read Mike Davis.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
[PEN-L:3405] Re: Origins of overdetermination, was Re:Psychoanalysis
Peter Dorman wrote: Was Lacan responsible for the semantic reversal of "overdetermination"? Another entry from Laplance Pontalis. Doug [from Laplanche Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis] Over-Determination, Multiple Determination D.: Uberdeterminierung or mehrfache Determinierung.-Es.: superdeterminacion. Fr.: surdetermination or determination multiple.-l.: sovradeterminazione. P.: superdeterminagao or determinagao multipla. The fact that formations of the unconscious (symptoms, dreams, etc.) can be attributed to a plurality of determining factors. This can be understood in two different ways: a. The formation in question is the result of several causes, since one alone is not sufflcient to account for it. b. The formation is related to a multiplicity of unconscious elements which may be organised in different meaningful sequences, each having its own specific coherence at a particular level of interpretation. This second reading is the most generally accepted one. However distinct these two senses of over-determination may be, it is not impossible to find bridges between them. In the Studies on Hysteria (1895d) they are to be found in juxtaposition. Sometimes (la) the hysterical symptom is said to be over-determined in that it is the outcome both of a constitutional predisposition and of a number of traumatic events: one of these factors on its own is not enough to produce or to sustain the symptom, and this is why the cathartic method* of treatment, although it does not attack the constitutional causes of the hysteria, is nonetheless able to get rid of the symptom through the recollection and abreaction of the trauma. Another passage of Freud's in the same work comes much closer to using the second sense of over-determination: the chain of associations which links the symptom to the 'pathogenic nucleus' is here said to constitute 'a ramifying system of lines and more particularly [...] a converging one' (lb). The study of dreams throws the clearest light on the phenomenon of overdetermination. In fact analysis reveals that 'each of the elements of the dream's content turns out to have been "over-determined"-to have been represented in the dream-thoughts many times over' (2a). Over-determination is a consequence of the work of condensation*. It is not expressed only on the level of isolated elements of the dream-the dream as a whole may be over-determined: 'The achievements of condensation can be quite extraordinary. It is sometimes possible by its help to combine two quite different latent trains of thought into one manifest dream, so that one can arrive at what appears to be a sufficient interpretation of a dream and yet in doing so can fail to notice a possible "overinterpretation" ' (3a) (see 'Over-Interpretation'). It should be emphasised that over-determination does not mean that the dream or symptom may be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. Freud compares dreams to certain languages of antiquity in which words and sentences appear to have various possible interpretations (3b): in such languages ambiguity is dispelled by the context, by intonation or by extra signs. In dreams, the lack of determination is more fundamental, yet the different interpretations may still be verified scientifically. Nor does over-determination imply the independence or the parallelism of oa~ the different meanings of a single phenomenon. The various chains of meanings intersect at more than one 'nodal point', as is borne out by the associations; the symptom bears the traces of the interaction of the diverse meanings out of which it produces a compromise. Taking the hysterical symptom as his model, Freud shows that this 'develops only where the fulfilments of two opposing wishes, arising each from a different psychical system, are able to converge in a single expression' (2b). What remains then of our first definition (a) of over-determination? The phenomenon with which we are concerned is a resulf; over-determination is a positive characteristic, not merely the absence of a unique, exhaustive meaning. Jacques Lacan has stressed that over-determination is a trait common to all unconscious formations: '. . . for a symptom to be admitted as such in psychoanalytical psychotherapy-whether a neurotic symptom or not-Freud insists on the minimum of overdetermination as constituted by a double meaning: it must symbolise a conflict long dead over and above its function in a no less symholic present conflict' (4). The reason for this is that the symptom (in the broad sense) is 'structured like a language', and thus naturally constituted by elision and layering of meaning; just as a word cannot be reduced to a signal, a symptom cannot be the unambiguous sign of a single unconscious content. (1) FREUD, S.: a) Cf. G.W., I, 261; S.E., II, 262-63. b) G.W., I, 293-94; S.E., II, 289. (2) FREUD, S. The Interpretation of Dreams (19OOa): a) G.W., II-III,289; S.E., IV, 283. b) G.W., I,575; S.E.,
[PEN-L:3401] Origins of overdetermination, was Re: Psychoanalysis
Was Lacan responsible for the semantic reversal of "overdetermination"? Freud seems to have appropriated this concept from algebra: if you have more equations than unknowns (linear systems) either the system is inconsistent or redundant. In the latter case the extra equations give you the same information as the other ones do, and the system is called overdetermined. Freud used this in his dream interpretation (which I have already villified). He thought symbols revealed the hidden meaning of dreams. If your dream has five symbols and they all mean the same thing, that's what your dream means and it is overdetermined. Not great psychology, but at least it is metaphorically correct with respect to math. Somewhere along the line (in France I think), the idea took hold that the world might be pictured as a mathematical system, except that the number of unknows exceeds the number of equations. Thus the outcome is indeterminate. And this situation was dubbed "overdetermination", reversing the original Freudian use and making hash of the math reference. (Veterans of the UMass econ department know this ever so well.) So whodunnit? Was it Lacan? Peter Dorman
[PEN-L:3396] Re: Re: Re: Canada
Doug writes: Here's an idea - social democracy is more compatible with "monopolized" ownership structures than most social democrats would like to admit, and is undermined by U.S.-style financial and corporate governance arrangements. It's probably very difficult for U.S. social dems to admit to this, given this country's love of small business and populist, anti-centralizing political traditions. I agree: if firms have more monopoly power (including more insulation from international trade competition), they are more able to make concessions to labor and the like. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
[PEN-L:3395] Re: Colonial trade
Colin wrote: On the question of the role of colonial trade in European growth, however, we risk going back over ground covered a year ago, when you raised this question. I raised two points of analysis drawn from Blackburn's 1997 book; let's call them the "leading sector" and "scale economies" arguments. We had a brief back-and-forth on how to frame the question, but you never responded to these points. Could you do so now? You also raise again the "1% of GNP" argument: O'Brien's findings, however, cannot be pushed aside. ... the colonial profits re-invested would have amounted to only 1 % of GNP, or 10% of gross investment. Which Barkley answered a year ago, saying Ricardo, 1% of GNP directed towards capital investment is non-trivial, especially over time, and especially if it is concentrated in crucial sectors, as the returns to Liverpool-based slave traders in England certainly were. Barkley Rosser The archives don't show a response from you, and it's an important point. The same consideration would apply to your more recent raising of O'Brien's claim that colonial profits permitted British gross annual investment to be 7% higher than it would have otherwise been. So, Wallerstein played around with this figure to show that "it mattered". These are not insignificant figures especially if we disaggregate. And indeed as Marx and many others emphasize this is vital because we are talking about qualitative change in national economies. Simply comparing a sector like textiles to the mass of the existing European economy may not tell you a whole lot. Ricardo: Colin, let's not lose track of my earlier post which distinctly recognized the importance of the colonial trade through the re-export market which obviously stimulated intra-European trade both indirectly and directly. Did it play a *decisive* role in the Industrial Revolution? The numbers seem to say no. I don't recall Robin Blackburn's arguments (I took a course with him) except that our exchange then was specifically about the slave trade. Now, if we take Eric Williams's argument (who everyone would agree wrote highly readeable, masterful histories on the West Indies and the slave trade), it is simply an exaggeration to say that slavery provided most of the profits in the formation of British capital. Someone has estimated that the percentage of slave profits in the making of British capital was a scrimpy 0.11% (Anstey)! Engerman, for his part, has calculated "the gross value of slave trade output" to England's national income to be 1%, to rise to 1.7% in 1770. These two sources I have taken from David Landes's recently published book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), which I am reading now (as well as using for one of my classes) as part of my evaluation of Frank. (BTW Landes and Frank just met this last December at Northeastern, heralded in some lists as a major debate, with cameras and all. Frank had been pestering him for a while to come and debate him as Landes's book takes a position too "eurocentric" for Re-Orient. I will bring Landes's argument soon, as it will connect to the issue of China's economy in 1400-1800; but if I may anticipate a point, I am no follower of Landes, who I think is methodological closer to Frank than people assume.) But in his book, Landes, in a a section which coincidentally I read this morning as part of my lecture, is quite fair to Williams's thesis, and reminds us that the slave trade was part of a broader "triangular trade" - which is why I framed the whole issue in terms of the colonial trade - adding that the role of this trade consisted less on the profits made from it than on its forward and backward linkages. Nonetheless, he concludes, correctly, that this trade accelerated an industrialization processs which would have happened only more slowly. I think this answers/conforms to some of what you say later. The additional point you make that "the fact that silver from Potosi ended up in Canton does not mean that Europe lost. The key, surely, was Europe's ability to position itself in an international trading system" is precisely what I said Frank says about the colonial trade, that even if O'Brien is right what matters is that Europe gained a ticket into the world-economy as a result of this exploitation. But I already showed that there was no world economy but two dominant ones of which the intra-European was the dominant. Colin concludes: "But I would ask you to consider whether the very question of locating e.g. "the main factor in the industrialization of England" inside or outside Europe is sensible. Surely the force of AGF's argument is that we have had a truly international economy for a very long time." Again, the numbers are against Frank's claim there was a world economy dominated by Asia, since the Asian economy was much smaller (with very few links to the European one) as compared to the
[PEN-L:3394] RE: Re: Re: Canada
Here's an idea - social democracy is more compatible with "monopolized" ownership structures than most social democrats would like to admit, and is undermined by U.S.-style financial and corporate governance arrangements. It's probably very difficult for U.S. social dems to admit to this, given this country's love of small business and populist, anti-centralizing political traditions. Financial and corporate governance arrangements can be quite different in this context. In the latter case, monopoly mitigates the imperative of profit maximization per se. In this realm, I think you are right that social democracy has an interest in seeking collaborationist arrangements with corporations, which I would say can be either good or bad for workers. Liberalizing financial arrangements are a whole different matter and would seem to be the real challenge to social democracy. We see that under neo-liberalism, social democracy either caves in and transforms to Clintonism (e.g., U.S., perhaps Australia/New Zealand, UK), or is forced into a more antagonistic posture. The indifference to localism, populism, and anti- centralism is generic not only to social-democracy, but to much of the left as well. My impression is that these traditions have much less currency in Europe so there is nothing to neglect. mbs
[PEN-L:3393] Re: Re: Re: Canada
I absolutely agree with what Doug said below, which is what I was hinting at. Here's an idea - social democracy is more compatible with "monopolized" ownership structures than most social democrats would like to admit, and is undermined by U.S.-style financial and corporate governance arrangements. It's probably very difficult for U.S. social dems to admit to this, given this country's love of small business and populist, anti-centralizing political traditions. Doug -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3391] The Unbalanced Budget: A Petition
Colleagues: Below is an open letter that is being circulated for endorsements by professional economists and economic policy-makers. Feel free to cross-post and otherwise circulate. If you would like to sign, please e-mail your name, position, place of employment, and any relevant titles to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Alternatively, you may fax a signed copy to: 202-265-3647 ** Please do NOT reply to the address from which this post was sent. ** Any questions may be directed to the following e-mail address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Places of employment are for identification only. They will not be listed as endorsing institutions, unless we are otherwise advised. Endorsements at this point include: Dean Baker Paul Davidson James K. Galbraith Max Sawicky Randy Wray AN OPEN LETTER ON THE CLINTON BUDGET We, the undersigned professional economists, offer our views on certain basic features of the Federal budget released by the Clinton Administration for Fiscal Year 2000. 1. We support the Administration's rejection of large tax cuts targeted on upper-income taxpayers, and their refusal to cut Social Security benefits. 2. But we do not support the commitment of budget surpluses expected over the next 15 years to reduction of the national debt. We believe this policy is economically unwarranted and indeed self-defeating: it is likely to undermine the national economic growth and high employment on which achievement of the projected surpluses depends. 3. For the past decade, we have objected repeatedly to a proposed constitutional amendment that would mandate balanced budgets. Like mandated balanced budgets, mandated surpluses work to slow growth, and to lengthen, deepen, and multiply recessions. When unemployment is high, the right policy is to run deficits, not surpluses. 4. The surplus mandate would prevent increased public investments that are needed to support economic growth in the future. Growth in public investment can and should be significantly larger than the President's budget allows, even at the cost of a reduced surplus. Also, the 1996 welfare repeal will require new initiatives from the Federal government soon. These actions will be made much more difficult if surplus mandates remain in place. We believe that the well-being of children in poverty is a higher priority than savings of interest on the public debt. 5. The notion that budget surpluses -- if they indeed materialize -- will be translated dollar for dollar by the capital markets into increased long-term private business investments lacks foundation in either fact or theory. 6. A policy of national debt elimination also entails the repurchase of the safest financial assets now available to private investors. Such a policy implies that private investors seeking safe assets will be pushed toward foreign markets (such as for the euro) and poses high risks to the stability of financial markets and of the dollar. 7. Finally, nothing in this proposal is relevant to the financial condition or future viability of Social Security, since future retirement incomes can only be paid out of future production. If benefits do exceed payroll taxes in future years, the difference can only be resolved by raising taxes, reducing benefits, or increasing once again the national debt -- exactly as at present, and irrespective of any steps that may be taken now. 8. In sum, we oppose a policy of buying down the national debt -- as unlikely to succeed, as unlikely to do good if successful, as unneeded to preserve Social Security, and as an inferior use of our public resources. We urge policymakers, the press, and our professional colleagues to refrain from embracing this simplistic approach to this important issue. (signed) = Max B. Sawicky http://tap.epn.org/sawicky Economic Policy Institute http://epinet.org (EPI) Suite 1200 1660 L Street, NW Washington, DC 20036 202-775-8810 (voice) 202-775-0819 (fax) Opinions reflected above are not necessarily shared by anyone else associated with the Economic Policy Institute. ==
[PEN-L:3392] Re: Re: Canada
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I confess that I think that the NBER paper that Doug brought to our attention might be on to something. I remember a time almost 20 years ago that I visited Toronto for the first time. I did not see much poverty. The city seemed very well run. Maybe I was naive, but it seemed a stark contrast from the US. I recall reading some papers around that time about the kind of concentrated ownership that Canada had. It seemed that the Canadian capitalists were far more enlightened that the U.S. capitalists. Canada seemed to evoke the Business Week version of capitalism rather than the more Hobbesian Wall Street Journal version. Here's an idea - social democracy is more compatible with "monopolized" ownership structures than most social democrats would like to admit, and is undermined by U.S.-style financial and corporate governance arrangements. It's probably very difficult for U.S. social dems to admit to this, given this country's love of small business and populist, anti-centralizing political traditions. Doug
[PEN-L:3382] Re: Psychoanalysis
Louis Proyect wrote: If that was only the case. Psychoanalysis has very limited value in explaining how people behave. For example, when psychoanalysts write about fascism, they usually go off on the most ridiculous tangents about sexual attitudes of the German masses, or Hitler's psychopathology in particular. There is nothing at all abnormal about German society in the 1920s. If anything, it was more open-minded and healthy than any other country in Europe. What happened is that it was subjected to enormous strains due to the collapse of world capitalism and a section of the population went nuts. Why people embrace politicians and parties against their own material self-interest is one of the great mysteries of politics. And there's no doubt that lots of people embraced fascism who later suffered from it. Why does anti-Semitism have the power it does, even in societies with few or no Jews? Why do so many working class Americans hate welfare moms with what looks like an irrational passion? It has more than a little to do with sex and race. There's many a slip between the material/social world that Marxists analyze and the world as people see and act on it. This isn't a matter of either/or - you have to analyze the "enormous strains" on German society that made "a section of the population [go] nuts" but you also have to understand how and why they went nuts, and why they acted the way they did. Thanks for using the term "went nuts"; it makes my point for me. Perhaps Doug is referrring to the value of psychology rather than psychoanalysis. I think psychology is very useful. Some of my favorite psychologists are Shakespeare, Dostoievsky, Chekhov, Melville and Proust. "The poets were there before me." - Sigmund Freud Doug
[PEN-L:3381] Violence Hits American Indians at Highest Rate Among Ethnic
Violence Hits American Indians at Highest Rate Among Ethnic Groups By William Claiborne Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, February 15, 1999; Page A02 American Indians are victims of violent crimes at more than twice the rate of all U.S. residents and in nearly three-quarters of the cases their assailants are not Indian, according to a study released yesterday by the Justice Department. In its first comprehensive analysis of Indians and crime, the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that from 1992 through 1996 the average annual rate of violent victimizations among Indians 12 years and older was 124 per 1,000 residents, compared with 61 for blacks, 49 for whites and 29 for Asians. There are about 2.3 million Native Americans in the United States, just under 1 percent of the population. Among instances of violence against Indians, 60 percent of the offenders were white, 10 percent were black and 30 percent were described in crime reports as "other" but were likely to have been other Native Americans, the report said. The high rate of white offenders is partly attributable to the fact that half or more of the residents on many tribal trust lands are white. "The findings reveal a disturbing picture of American Indian involvement in crimes as victims and offenders. Both male and female American Indians experience violent crime at higher rates than people of other races and are more likely to experience interracial violence," said Jan Chaiken, director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The news was no surprise to Theodore R. Quasula, chief of the law enforcement division of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Quasula has long pleaded for more federal funds to beef up understaffed and poorly equipped police forces on reservations. "I hate to say 'I told you so,' " Quasula said in a telephone interview from his office in Albuquerque. "The rate would probably be even higher if we had computerized crime reporting in Indian country." The FBI's Uniform Crime Report shows that while there are 2.9 police officers per 1,000 citizens in non-Indian communities with populations of less than 10,000, on Indian reservations there are 1.3 officers per 1,000 citizens. There are 1,600 BIA police and uniformed tribal officers patrolling 56 million acres of Indian lands in the lower 48 states, protecting more than 1.4 million residents. By contrast, 3,600 police officers serve the 540,000 residents of the District. For the current fiscal year, Congress added $20 million to the BIA's $82 million law enforcement budget. But Quasula said $500 million would be needed to bring patrolling and detention facilities on reservations to an acceptable level. "It's a good start, but we've got quite a way to go," he said. The Justice report said that 150 American Indians are murdered each year, which is close to the per capita rate in the general population. But the study found that Indians were two to three times more likely to become victims in each of the categories of sexual assaults, robberies, aggravated assaults and simple assaults than whites and blacks. In each category Indians were two to seven times as likely to be victims as Asians. In cases of rape or sexual assault against Indians, 82 percent of the offenders were white, 6 percent black and 12 percent "other," most likely meaning Indian. Two-thirds or more of the American Indian victims of robbery, aggravated assault and simple assault described the offender as belonging to a different race. The study found the arrest rate for alcohol-related nonviolent offenses among American Indianssuch as drunk driving, liquor law violations and public drunkenness was more than double that for the total population during 1996. The Indians' rate of confinement in local jails was estimated to be nearly four times the national average, and almost four in 10 Indians held in local jails had been charged with a public order offense, most commonly driving while intoxicated. © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
[PEN-L:3379] Re: Psychoanalysis
Quoth Louis, in part: Finally, on the question of whether psychotherapy can help people. For everyday garden variety neurosis, there simply is no evidence that it can. The reason for this should be obvious. Capitalism is the main source of unhappiness, although people are not conscious of its effects on their lives. Alienation is generated by the system itself. One of the reasons I have spent so much time reading and writing about primitive communism is that the evidence points in the direction of this type of unhappiness as being historically determined, and not a function of the human psyche as such. If you haven't already encountered James Hillman, you really should. valis
[PEN-L:3378] Re: Foreign Trade-Industrial Revolution
You see how confusion builds once isolated passages are bounced around: I was Green, not Brown, who made the criticisms which I called, in my last posting cited below, undeveloped but on the right track! Charles, When time allows I will deal with your questions below. But please do not send truncated passages of mine to Frank, or even full postings, as I am writing to pen-l at this point. THe passage you send him of mine is extremely misleading for someone who has not followed the argument; I mean it looks like I am the one making the claim that E's high wages was the other factor giving E a chance to overcome it s marginal position in the world economy. What can Frank say to this except "read the book"! - expeciallly when you send your own criticisms while acknowledging you have not read the book. Don't take me wrong, your undeveloped criticisms are on the right track, but as you will see later, Frank does deal with them, but inadequately as I hope to show. ricardo Here's a response from Andre Gunder Frank to Ricardo's comments. Charles Brown ___ thanks for the forward AGF 'answer' for re-forward/ing: maybe you are missing something since the index of the book says "income: per capita/distribution, 173-74,266,304-9,312-13,315,317. See also wages" I may not be fazed at all by the appatrent low income/high wage contradiction, but it is specificaly discussed and i hope resolved in the book.it helpt to read and know what one is talking about before doing so. respecfully submitted agf On Sat, 13 Feb 1999, Charles Brown wrote: Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 16:55:14 -0500 From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Forward Ricardo Duchesne wrote: The supply of cheap capital from the colonial trade was not the only crucial factor giving Europe (E) a chance to overcome its marginal position in the world economy. Another one was E's high wages relative to Asia's low wages. E's comparative wage-costs were such that they could not compete in the world economy (as Asia was "much more productive with much lower wage costs"), so E was motivated to introduce labor-reducing machinery. A decision which Europeans did not make because they were more "rational" or advanced but because they had different relative factor (capital/labor) prices. That is, for Frank, the "real explanation" for E's industrialization does not lie in any "internal" superiority but in E's differential comparative costs *within* the world economy. I have found the postings on Frank's book fascinating. I haven't myself yet had time to do more than browse a bit of Frank's book and check a reference or two, but the I am saving the various comments on Frank's book for later restudy. Meanwhile, I would like to raise one point. It would seem that Frank's logic ignores the obvious question: why, if Asia really was wealthier per capita than Europe, were the wages so much lower in Asia? I was checking into the 1700 figures cited by Frank, and his reference to Braudel. These figures, if I recall right, claim that per capita England was a bit less wealthy than France, which in turn was somewhat under India. However, in checking the reference for these figures to Braudel given by Frank, it turns out that Braudel also claims that, around 1700, wages in France, although they were substantially less than those in England, were *six times* higher than those in India at this time. Frank recognizes lower wages in India, and apparently cites the same reference for this as used by Braudel, but doesn't seem to cite *how much* lower they were (maybe I missed it), and tries -- rather feebly, it seems to me -- to explain away most of the significance of this. So what's the significance of all this? Frank's argument at base seems to treat the wage difference as not an internal factor, but simply a question of "comparative cost" in the world market. But the more obvious issue is: if the wages are so much lower in a country that is supposedly just as wealthy, if not more so, as the country with higher wages, then doesn't this strongly suggest that there may be internal differences in the class relations in these countries? It seems, in their struggle against "stage-ism", "Eurocentrism", etc. , various theorists have given up any serious consideration of of the internal factors. Instead there is recourse in Frank's book to the crudest factor of all--just compare societies by wealth per capita. (By the way, wouldn't these be very speculative figures with respect to these economies of centuries ago? How does one get such a figure? I really am curious about this. My guess is
[PEN-L:3377] Re: Foreign Trade-Industrial Revolution
Charles, When time allows I will deal with your questions below. But please do not send truncated passages of mine to Frank, or even full postings, as I am writing to pen-l at this point. THe passage you send him of mine is extremely misleading for someone who has not followed the argument; I mean it looks like I am the one making the claim that E's high wages was the other factor giving E a chance to overcome it s marginal position in the world economy. What can Frank say to this except "read the book"! - expeciallly when you send your own criticisms while acknowledging you have not read the book. Don't take me wrong, your undeveloped criticisms are on the right track, but as you will see later, Frank does deal with them, but inadequately as I hope to show. ricardo Here's a response from Andre Gunder Frank to Ricardo's comments. Charles Brown ___ thanks for the forward AGF 'answer' for re-forward/ing: maybe you are missing something since the index of the book says "income: per capita/distribution, 173-74,266,304-9,312-13,315,317. See also wages" I may not be fazed at all by the appatrent low income/high wage contradiction, but it is specificaly discussed and i hope resolved in the book.it helpt to read and know what one is talking about before doing so. respecfully submitted agf On Sat, 13 Feb 1999, Charles Brown wrote: Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 16:55:14 -0500 From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Forward Ricardo Duchesne wrote: The supply of cheap capital from the colonial trade was not the only crucial factor giving Europe (E) a chance to overcome its marginal position in the world economy. Another one was E's high wages relative to Asia's low wages. E's comparative wage-costs were such that they could not compete in the world economy (as Asia was "much more productive with much lower wage costs"), so E was motivated to introduce labor-reducing machinery. A decision which Europeans did not make because they were more "rational" or advanced but because they had different relative factor (capital/labor) prices. That is, for Frank, the "real explanation" for E's industrialization does not lie in any "internal" superiority but in E's differential comparative costs *within* the world economy. I have found the postings on Frank's book fascinating. I haven't myself yet had time to do more than browse a bit of Frank's book and check a reference or two, but the I am saving the various comments on Frank's book for later restudy. Meanwhile, I would like to raise one point. It would seem that Frank's logic ignores the obvious question: why, if Asia really was wealthier per capita than Europe, were the wages so much lower in Asia? I was checking into the 1700 figures cited by Frank, and his reference to Braudel. These figures, if I recall right, claim that per capita England was a bit less wealthy than France, which in turn was somewhat under India. However, in checking the reference for these figures to Braudel given by Frank, it turns out that Braudel also claims that, around 1700, wages in France, although they were substantially less than those in England, were *six times* higher than those in India at this time. Frank recognizes lower wages in India, and apparently cites the same reference for this as used by Braudel, but doesn't seem to cite *how much* lower they were (maybe I missed it), and tries -- rather feebly, it seems to me -- to explain away most of the significance of this. So what's the significance of all this? Frank's argument at base seems to treat the wage difference as not an internal factor, but simply a question of "comparative cost" in the world market. But the more obvious issue is: if the wages are so much lower in a country that is supposedly just as wealthy, if not more so, as the country with higher wages, then doesn't this strongly suggest that there may be internal differences in the class relations in these countries? It seems, in their struggle against "stage-ism", "Eurocentrism", etc. , various theorists have given up any serious consideration of of the internal factors. Instead there is recourse in Frank's book to the crudest factor of all--just compare societies by wealth per capita. (By the way, wouldn't these be very speculative figures with respect to these economies of centuries ago? How does one get such a figure? I really am curious about this. My guess is that various calculations must depend on first making assumptions about the economy of the country, and then extrapolating very, very partial data to the whole country.) The fact that the wealthier society may have incredibly lower wages doesn't seem to faze these theorists at all. --Joseph Green
