Re: [PEN-L] london bombings
and after I had just stuck my neck out claiming that Blair has become the most acceptable face of international finance capital. Yet the London stock exchange hardly wobbled. All other preparatory services seemed to work efficiently. And as I drove into central London in the early evening I saw lots of ordinarily people following directions and walking home for miles quietly and in dignity. Later in the evening saw Blair on television with his newsclips from his press conference at the G8+2 before flying to London. Flanked by the main leaders with whom he is skirmishing - Bush and Chirac on either side, Kofi Annan over his right shoulder, and in the longer shot with the wider view, the leaders of China, India immediately next to them. Putin a little wider off. Same image management as during the election - have your nominal audience behind you so that their consitutency supports you and communicates their support to the viewer. Message - this is an attack on all civilized nations. Terrorism cannot change our way of life. No run on the stock exchange. No global crisis of capitalism. The system can contain it. Just as it can contain and tinker with reforms to a world in which 20 thousand children die each day, each of whom has a weeping mother. Blair says something acceptable about that too, but not quite so loud. Even in this crisis he remains the most acceptable face of international finance capital. IMHO Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2005 4:03 PM Subject: [PEN-L] london bombings From a US perspective, the bombings are horrible. People had been giving Bush a free ride because he was playing the terrorism card. That game was not going so well because people were starting to look at Iraq and the economy as well. Now they can move on from Patriot Act 2 to number 3. Will they have us go through airline-like security to ride on a bus? Grumpily, -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
[PEN-L] Blair ascendant over Chirac
A senior civil servant in the UK is said to have remarked that no-one can feign sincerity like Tony Blair. The dramatic Olympic win for London over Paris (and New York) at the moment when Blair flew back early to chair the G8 is his apotheosis as world leader in front of all the others. It is not just that he is a great escapologist. It is not just that he is an opportunist. It is that his opportunism is systematic and scientific. He and the whole generation of New Labour around him are prepared to analyse the whole sweep of the issues, very much including the subjective impressions, and are also prepared to analyse process control in detail. The BBC coverage ahead of the decision on the Olympic bid, told us, with subtle spin management, that the British team were quietly hopeful and that it was a good thing in these situations to be the second, not the first favourite. But if Britain won, it would be because of the tremendus personal lobbying of Tony Blair that had turned round several significant voters personally in the previous couple of days, even though he had to fly back early to chair the world economic summit. And so it turned out to be. The symobolic defeat of Chirac so soon after the public row over European Finances and Chirac's referendum failure, and Schroeder's imminent defeat, is the moment when everyone can see that the torch has passed from old Europe to New Europe. Tony Blair, far from being a lame duck with just 24 months to run as UK prime minister, is now front runner to become within 5 years president of a refashioned European Federation, which combines a more competitive anglo-saxon economic model with the skills of total social management that are the mark of New Labour but *not* of the German SPD. Blair instinctively always plays both ends against the middle. He is also willing to reframe any question, positions himself, advantageously, and loves the battle. As the right wing core Conservative Daily Telegraph says today, it would be churlish not to recognise that Tony Blair has the qualities of being a great statesman. President of Europe Chris Burford
Re: [PEN-L] PK on China Challenge
I too was surprised about this angle, and I appreciate Jim's posting this important article, which caught my eye when copied into the International Herald Tribune which I get in London. There it was printed above another article also copied from the NYTimes, by Nicholas Kristof, who doesn't strike me as being particularly left-wing, entitled Playing into China's hands [June 28 edn] This starts The biggest risk we Americans face to our way of life and our place in the world probably doesn't come from Al Qaeda or the Iraq war. Rather, the biggest risk may come from this administration's fiscal recklessness and the way this is putting us in hock to China. My impression from a distance is that various voices are trying to create a liberal consensus, mainly by opportunist shifts of course, that will leave Bush relatively isolated and weak by the midterm elections. This could include appeals to selfish national factors, and even racism. I find Krugman's article more interesting for the details and the picture of how China is moving, almost amoeba-like now, to penetrate, and incorporate the USA into a world system open as much as possible to its influence. Remember China has a culture of continuous highly complex social consciousness, well before any claims to socialism (debatable though that is). It knows its massive inertia and momentum, and is relaxed enough to view its position in the world strategically. Among its cultural strengths is a sophisticated theory of managing conflict. It may use sudden dramatic confrontation or humiliation, as when they dismantled the high technology spy plane screw by screw soon after the start of Bush's first term and the neo-con suggestion that China was the US's main strategic opponent. But there is much in Chinese tradition about the merits of managing relations with significant others without direct confrontation but by careful manoeuvre. Reading Krugman's article it is possible to see the reasonable argument that China now owns so many US treasury bonds that it has successfully ensured itself against anti-Yuan speculation. Unless it is to stop balancing the payments exchanges by continued capital inflow, it must start turning to stocks. And the US would not like China to stop supporting the balance of payments all of a sudden would it?? ... And being Chinese they may think rather carefully about which stocks to buy and they may take the long term view . Including in a world in which there will be pressure on natural resources ... There are also interesting echoes in this article updating to my mind some of the arguments Lenin rehearsed in Imperialism - yes it is of great strategic importance in the era of finance capital still to secure access to resources and markets. But compared to 100 years ago it is cheaper and easier to do this through finance capitalist companies, than by warfare between states. Especially if Chinese culture anyway fosters a degree of collective cohesion and subtle centralised direction between these companies. China has two millennia of continuous culture without needing to build bourgeois civil society from scratch for purposes of social coherence. This enormous social value would be called by some today social capital. This, coupled with the massively growing accumulation of *finance capital* by the Chinese, is shifting the balance of forces in the world insidiously more dramatically than any dramatic shift of the tectonic plates can move a continent a few centimeters. And this is happening under the surface, while Bush and Blair posture for the moral ideological high ground over Africa and the environment, These issues are the ideological drapery for the enthronement of some sort of new world government. But who will have control of the money? Chris Burford PS CARTOON The accompanying cartoon in the IHT was particularly apposite, by Danziger. One letter change between Khruschev and Hu Jin Tao - BURY vs BUY Khruschev pounding his shoe at the UN shouting We will BURY you!! Hu Jin Tao, smiling like a young smart sales rep with his hands innocently behind his back, in front of a sign Red China - We will BUY you!! One letter difference, but if the Soviet Union had found a path to economic growth which did indeed overtake the west, and the Soviet Bloc had not collapsed, then we might well have faced this new phase of financial interdigitation by that route. (Of course the compromises the Chinese have made to reach the present remarkable situation are another matter And it has taken almost 50 years. But what is that in the lifetime of the human race? CB - Original Message - From: Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Monday, June 27, 2005 4:35 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] PK on China Challenge The part that surprised me in Krugman's article was the final paragraph in which he revealed his preference for blocking China. In his pre-leftish phase, wasn't Krugman angry
[PEN-L] patronising Africa
Assertions are not usually very helpful on a discussion list, but having just listened to an admirably articulate African from Sierra Leone, with a 'perfect' English accent, suggesting through politely gritted teeth, that the Live 8 events in London today are an opportunity for a pleasant party but are a bit irrelevant to Africans, allow me to assert ... that all the talk of forgiving debts and of promoting employment, good governance, and sound business practices, is an endlessly patronising and virtually racist snub to a very large continent, teaming with intelligent men and women, twice the cradle of the human race, who flaked exquisitely beautiful lozenge-shaped axes half a million years ago, and who never knew unemployment before the era of capitalism. They need and want no condescending saviours. But unless intellectual hegemony is somehow won in global economics for a perspective influenced by Marxist thinking about the uneven accumulation of exchange value as capital, all talk of cancelling debts, and ensuring fair trade will reproduce this patronising outlook. Chris Burford London most of whose forebears left Africa 3,000 generations ago.
[PEN-L] traffic control
Following the marked success of the computerised congestion charge in London, the UK government has trailed a pilot project for taxing care road usage by the mile, at differential rates according time of day and location. England is good country to test drive this. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4610755.stm This might replace the petrol tax. What is important for the wider social control of capitalist society is that it would enable some social control to limit the centralising effects of capitalism, and to mitigate the contradiction between town and country. It sounds possible, allowing for the glitches to be ironed out. Remember capital is not against social control. It is only against social control that is in the interests of working people. But if the principle of social control is established, it is the eve of the socialist revolution, provided the political consciousness rises. Chris Burford
Re: [PEN-L] is the EU on a path towards monetary disintegration?
Larry Elliott comes from a long standing critical point of view about the European Union which differs from mine. In my opinion like Marx and Engels I believe in looking at the balance of power between the major states and making judgements about which sides are more progressive. That leads to some uncomfortable and apparently unprincipled tergiversations but I think there is a principled materialist basis for it. On the other hand I really do not think Larry Elliott shows any signs of signalling even in code a more profound marxist inspired critique. Yet the contradictions are getting more complex, as my previous post also argued. My hunch is that there will be cross cutting tendencies both to integrate more and to break up. But Elliott does not seem to refer to certain general trends of capitalism that should be recognisable to a marxist, if not to a radical moralist: the tendency for capital once it has gone beyond the size of the nation state, to want increasingly free trade and essentially global trade to be able to maximise its control of markets, and ability to choose out of a range of possibilities to increase exploitation. Secondly the tendency of capital to uneven accumulation. That is so Marx argues an *absolute* law. Without more intricate political measures than the EU has at present to smooth out these tendencies, there will be considerable insecurity among the population. The main problem for the European Economy is that it has had to stay loyal to monetarist ideas of the 90's when Bush's USA has thrown this to the winds, and because it does not issue world money like the dollar, although it certainly gets some substantial benefit from its super-imperialist position, this is significantly less so than the USA. Therefore its currency rises in value while the USA can maintain economic turnover on massive borrowings a little longer, while Europe stagnates. In the last five years I think Europe has been useful as something of an alternative pole to the USA. Imagine if the USA had been able to charge into Iraq even faster than it did, or if it could threaten Iran or North Korea with nuclear weapons. But the main reason now that the US is getting tangled in a web of power calculations is the rising economic power of Asia not the existence of Europe. Europe may evolve as a wider common market, even involving not just Turkey but say Syria Lebanon, Israel and Egypt, but with measures for close financial and industrial planning in core areas of western Europe who feel comfortable with this. Besides, when thinking of money these days, it is necessary to have a relativist view. There are many forms of money in circulation as we move towards greater integration not just on a European but on a global level. The largest finance capitalist countries essentially calculate with the aid of computer models on some sort of world money which is a resultant of the relative strengths of existing moneys. What matters more is about local and regional measures for coordinating investment, perhaps in public private partnerships. No, I would not be triumphalist about Europe unravelling, nor wish it to unravel. I think the bigger contradiction is on a larger scale - that of the multitude against the imperium of finance capital in all its forms. Chris Burford London - Original Message - From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 2:53 PM Subject: [PEN-L] is the EU on a path towards monetary disintegration? http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1498334,00.html What do no votes mean for the union? Voters have clearly rejected closer union and Europe will start to unravel, says Larry Elliott ^^ CB: What Europe needs is an international union organized by the working class of Europe ,not the bourgeoisie, based on Proletarian Internationalism in a 5th International. A Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Europe, not a United States of Europe. Workers of all countries , unite !
[PEN-L] multitudes against Empire
The terminology is out of fashion, but judging from the Dutch referendum, the habit is not. In country after country in Europe the population is disaffected with the government, and core countries of the European Union have become discontented with the pan European ideal. There is a tone of populist nationalism. In Germany too, Angela Merkel is signalling a slowing down of enlargement towards the east, and Turkey in the south-east. This may not be openly racist, but reflects a profound mistrust at the homogenising agenda of international finance capitalism that just wants one rational global Empire laid out for the most efficient exploitation. The reaction and counter moves begin to look exponentially complex. Just one idea is that any future referendum on a very much revised constitution should be held in the whole of Europe on the same day, but counted separately by country. That would provide more of an opinion poll on which countries felt they were gaining most from the EU and which least. Perhaps but only perhaps, the European equivalent of pork barrel politics might in due course smooth this out. But state structures are looking more and more fragile in their ability to coordinate consent to and acquiescence in the requirements of finance capitalism. And while Europe has got a major problem in finding a new direction, the countries of Asia continue to build up a competitive advantage against the US. It is alleged that US borrowing already absorbs 80% of the world's available savings. The whole pattern looks very unstable. Organising pop conferences to give charity to Africa, may only give a moral cover to what looks like a chaotically fragile global and economic political system. Chris Burford
Re: [PEN-L] Galloway - BBC
For a time the story pushed the Queen's speech off the front page of the BBC newswebpage http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4553601.stm It looked as if the BBC assume that even his enemies will be delighted with his performance in the USA. It's enough to make you believe in parliamentary elections. Click for the video replay. Sheer pleasure and amusement apart, this is not just a bravura performance by an old fashioned politician with passion. It is a dramatic incremental step in world globalisation. British MP, as an individual, challenging the US state, in front of an international network of media. A world concept of justice is being forged in battle. Chris Burford London - Original Message - From: Carl Remick [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 12:40 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Galloway The BBC World News tonight led with story, and yes, Galloway was videogenic. I just watched the coverage on the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and PBS showed Galloway in a less favorable light than the BBC. E.g., concerning Galloway's meetings with S. Hussein, the BBC report included only Galloway's (very effective) testimony that he met with Hussein twice, the same number of times that Rumsfeld did, and that unlike Rumsfeld his aim hadn't been to sell Hussein guns. The PBS News Hour, OTOH, emphasized footage of Galloway being received by Hussein and speaking in flowery terms about him (btw, didn't that used to be called diplomacy?). Carl
[PEN-L] Christian Fascists
There is an ecological niche in politics for groups with titles like Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigades and for journalists who get the permutations slightly wrong and don't care. The title does not come up on Google as clearly linked to any organisation, though I see another commentary links them with Furedi's group and Living Marxism, which took a turn towards radical libertarianism. The actual remark quoted by CNN does not sound unreasonable: [Terri Schiavo's] brain is not functional. It's not going to recover. Let her die in peace, pleaded Sunsari Taylor, a member of the group. While I don't defend the tactics, and admittedly from a long distance away, I get the impression that there are indeed large sections of the Christian Right who are in fact Christian Fascists, and maybe the issue is *how* they should be challenged rather than *whether* they should be challenged. I suspect however it is a mistake to regard Roman Catholics as in this group. Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Michael Hoover [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2005 8:00 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Avakian vs Terry: Loser Leave Town Outside the Florida hospice where Terri Schiavo is dying, supporters of the RCP and Bob Avakian took on the Christian Fascists who have been raving virtually unopposed. Here is what CNN wrote: http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/27/schiavo/index.html After remarks by Randall Terry -- an activist against abortion rights who has been acting as a spokesman for Terri Schiavo's family, the Schindlers -- members of a group calling itself the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigades seized control of the microphones and blasted [Randall] Terry as a Christian fascist thug trying to interfere in the most intimate affairs of life and death. whoops, avakian wasn't actually there, only his acolytes, still there's an image for ya' - world rasslin' federation 'let's get ready to rumble' - in this corner, the one time self-proclaimed 'most dangerous man in amerikkka', in the other, a vile man about whom so many things could be said we don't have time to list them... -- Please Note: Due to Florida's very broad public records law, most written communications to or from College employees regarding College business are public records, available to the public and media upon request. Therefore, this e-mail communication may be subject to public disclosure.
Re: [PEN-L] moral framing, vision
I assuming the not in the fourth line from the end of Jim's letter is a misprint, but overall it is a good question. Perhaps the answer in part is that we may want a positive perspective but not a positivist one. These moral questions between people are even more tricky than the conflicts between different rights, which as Marx points out, can only be solved by force. Already I submit, we have to posit not just the coming of socialism (the lower phase of communism) but also the higher phase of communism, in which the power of the state withdraws increasingly from some of these moral dilemmas. The battles of bourgeois right, using expensive lawyers, are characteristic of capitalist society. They privilege the rich, who can afford these battles. Though occasionally now there are also class actions on behalf of collective rights. Over the decades this might help tame firearms capitalism and big tobacco. But really the conflicts for Schiavo's parents and her partner are ones that need understanding and reconciliation, as well as, yes a decision on whether a tube is removed or re-inserted. It is the wider emotional and social context that gets trampled on and ignored in battles of bourgeois right through highly paid legal surrogates fighters. This is my long winded way of asserting that under a communist non-violent society there will still be contradictions, and the clash as well as the unity of opposites. There will remain very difficult decisions. It will often *not* feel like a utopia. There probably are *no* simple positive visions, except perhaps that respect for each individual working person, the free development of each, is perhaps the free development of all. Who is offering bereavement counselling and reconciliation to those around Terri Schiavo? It is not just the coming death but the death that occurred a long time ago of the person they loved, but who cannot be buried. Who, apart from his priest, can give Jeb Bush permission *not* to have to say he only wishes he had the power to take the decision himself, just because he is a Roman Catholic and has to fear the Christian Right. No wonder he looked emotional on CNN this afternoon. Much as dislike him, I do not think his distress was entirely feigned. I don't know if this takes it any further. Although there are no easy answers I sense Jim is right to say that the left has to have a moral as well as an economic and a political perspective. Chris Burford London - Original Message - From: Michael Hoover [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2005 12:02 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] moral framing, vision [EMAIL PROTECTED] 03/25/05 2:12 PM Michael H's response was useful, but I was thinking more generally. If the Left wants to revive, it needs a clear moral perspective -- and a clear method of moral framing. Sure, we can lambaste the establishment and its system for hypocrisy and the like. But what is our positive vision? Marx didn't help much here, because his emphasis (perhaps rightly at the time) was almost entirely a critique of capitalism. In olden days, socialists were often utopians, often bringing in religious ideas. Later, the USSR (or other places) was the model to be trumpeted. That's gone. Even people who see Cuba or Chavez as great don't see these models as ideal for the US and other rich countries. What can we say now, beyond not hating capitalism and other systems of oppression (patriarchy, ethnic supremacy, etc.) and resisting its depredations? I know that this is abstract... Jim Devine no disagreement with above, think it is imperative that left not only consider possibilities and develop ideas but that it actually create 'prefigurative practices institutions' (in gramscian sense), some of which exist to varying degrees (and which, i would point out the populist right has done good bit of and quite successfully, origins of which are in the 'other 60s', so much bigger story than has generally been recognized or acknowledged)... i'm personally hopeful (a little anyway) about efforts being made in direction of 'social unionism' (for lack of better term) in which unions, community orgs, social justice (including religious ones) groups are working together - with a little success - quite small steps obviously - in some places with 'living wage'... michael hoover
[PEN-L] capital lost clout?
Floyd Norris: Has capital lost clout in world? http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/24/business/norris25.html This analysis in the International Herald Tribune, is in my opinion fully compatible with a marxist analysis. He correctly points out Why is there too much capital? One answer is that central banks reacted to the bursting of the technology bubble by cutting interest rates by too much for too long. The resulting liquidity might in other times have sent inflation soaring His explanation however is that what prevented it from being inflationary is the great increase in Chinese productivity, which has a global impact. I would however stress that this abundance of cheap liquidity by central banks, was in fact a very powerful Keynesian type counter-cyclical maintenance of purchasing power and it avoided having an open inflationary impact because it maintained the circulation of goods and services in the economies of the metropolitan countries at a far higher level than would have been the case if the capitalist cycle had been allowed to run its course and produce the financial and then the economic crisis that would otherwise have occurred. But on a world scale what happened was a proportional discounting and therefore *destruction* of the exchange value of existing capital by the dilution of total world capital by the creation of cheap credit by the central banks. This has maintained the circulation of commodities and commodity services at a global level at the price of discounting old capital by stealth. This means that globally the oversupply of capital has exerted itself once again, but in a new form (remember that in classical dogmatic interpretations of marxist economics, financial crises always start with an oversupply of capital - relative to the purchasing power of the masses - leading to a drastic fall in the rate of profit, leading to a scarcity of credit for new capital, and a general economic crisis that in turn leads to an intensified collapse of the exchange value of existing capital.Remember that the marxist analysis of unmodified crisis is that the capitalist system recovers from them only by a destruction of a proportion of existing capital. This is what is happening now through the hidden inflation of total global exchange value through the cheap credit policies of central banks.) *Within* the now integrated global economy, there are important shifts between different capitals and different economies. The USA in particular has bought the illusion of consumer prosperity while considerably weakening the position of the dollar as a vast mass of capital in contrast to the Chinse renminbi. The article by Floyd Norris does not make any mention of the interesting phenomenon certainly in the USA and the UK when the government overspent in order to maintain circulation of the economy, of the sharp rise in property values, as a large section of the population with some savings switched from shares to property as a store of value. So the capitalist system is once again reproducting itself, but now on a more integrated world level than every before, and with the help of Keyesian counter-cyclical policies. The marxian law of value continues to rule in its dialectical way! We must merely try to lay bear what is happening before our very eyes, and add a little class struggle. Chris Burford London economic autodidact.
[PEN-L] working class revolution in Kyrgyzstan
In educated circles in the world nowadays, not only is capital a perfectly neutral objective scientific concept now to analyse what is actually happening, which does not immediately signify that the speaker is a card-carrying communist, working class is creeping back. Yesterday I was startled to hear, admittedly on Newsnight, the BBC 2 authoritative late evening tv programme for the political intelligentsia, an authoritative spokesperson from some organisation with an impressive title like institute for war and peace studies note that what has happened inKyrgyztan is indeed a little different from say the Ukraine, and Lebanon, in that it is actually a working class revolution arising from the extreme poverty of ordinary people. Leaving aside details about whether some of these people are not quite working class in the marxist sense of the word, but possibly are located in more semi-feudal, or semi-peasant position in the means of production, the message as far as the enlightened supporters of capital is concerned is one of well meaning (?) concern. Clearly it is alarming that riots and looting are occuring and unfortunate that people in an out of the way corner of the world are so poor and desperate that a government can be toppled almost overnight. I understand the (London) Times today is expressing some unease that authority may break down in the whole of central Asia and suggesting that Russia and the USA who both have important military basis in this country may want to cooperate very cautiously to stabilize the situation. [After all if the populist and even working class uprising should spread to Uzbekistan and destabilise that regime, this would reduce the possibility of US authorities routinely handing over suspected islamic terrorists for colourful interrogation methods with which the Putin regime probably has no difference of principle.] Contradictions. Contradictions. How to put a lid on them? Chris Burford London
[PEN-L] corporate seismic shift
Bourgeois right catches up with finance capitalism:- Being above it all is no longer a viable defence The corporate world felt a seismic shift when a New York jury found Bernie Ebbers guilty from Guardian (UK) http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldcom/story/0,12167,1441446,00.html It is not clear how this is all going to pan out, but it seems to me they are up against the fact that financial control to be done properly is almost irreducibly complex. Modern stock companies can no longer be left to buccaneer CEO's who act as if they are the embodiment of individual capitalists. The pressureto maintain the share price of their company safely on stock exchanges dominated by financial capitalist institutions is now too great. This implies that companies will have to be run by an increasingly complex system of elite intelligentsia and technical feedback systems. The CEO and board of directors will remain disgustingly highly paid but they will in effect by gilded intelligentsia employed by capital, rather than tantamount to capitalists in their own right as if they are the direct owners of the means of production, who have just borrowed a bit of money on the stock exchange. They now have to be the elite employees of finance capital itself. It seems to me this clash between legal bourgeois right and the modern conditions of finance capitalism, if the author is correct that this is a seismic shift, is another step towards finance capitalism being so highly socialised in form, that it just needs political struggle to start tipping it over into socialism. A bit of class struggle might help the political battle too. IMHO Chris Burford London
[PEN-L] truly terrifying appointment
World Development Movement blames European governments for Wolfowitz nomination http://www.wdm.org.uk/news/presrel/current/wolfowitz.htm
[PEN-L] why a global matrix exists now
Without cutting across Doyle very correct points, below, about the fantasy of the Matrix, and without necessarily asking people to see it my way, I am still suggesting that there is a matrix (small M) of human communication, which is getting stronger with globalisation and with advances in finance capitalism. Iironically the efforts of Empire to impose its well on 6 billion people stir it up all the more (see the Wolfowitz nomination) Perhaps it is just another way of saying that that there is such a thing as civil society. Although often very problematical, it is an arena for struggle. Chris Burford London - Original Message - From: Doyle Saylor [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2005 3:39 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] why a Matrix couldn't be realized in real life Greetings Economists, The matrix is a fantasy about creating versimultudenous world to keep humans busy thinking so they provide electricity. It is waste of time, resources, and energy to make a plausible world wide amusement park for humans to lie around (in the movie) to participate in. That's simple enough. Humans have been inventing and using artificial intelligence tools for a long time. Written language, books, etc. are just versions of computing tools. While writing novels is powerful, we still have to do something in our lives to get things moving. That's the point of what's wrong with the matrix conception. The proposition is that machines can interact with humans in some kind of symbiosis where the machines are farming humans for energy sort of like we farm pigs for meat has a great deal to do with how little we understand a global system and how it might work. One might especially if one is Marxist ask these sorts of questions of society. Where is the egalitarianism of socialism in that? Can even capitalism go down this road? A machine with intelligence would have to get resources to continue just like other living constructs. That is a systemic question for them as well as us. What's the relationship of groups, individuals, history, material resources? thanks, Doyle
[PEN-L] why a Matrix couldn't be realized in real life
I can't state an abstract principle as to why a Matrix couldn't be realized in real life. [see thread between Charles and Ravi below] My chip in on this is that the granularity of connections and the probability of any next connection depolarising and passing a stimullation onto the next neurone in the human brain goes right down to the atomic and subatomic level, not excluding the possibility of probabilistic events at the quantum level. Computers can model fuzzy logic, but even here it will be by a precise algorithm which will not be fuzzy, although the interactive effects could, yes, lead to emergent properties, and the possibility of sudden phase changes in the overall configuration of the interactions of the system, fully consistent with phase changes described in classical chaos theory. The Matrix (which I have not seen) is a shrewdly judged science fiction fantasy. However in group analytic theory a matrix is used to mean a representation of the group interactions in which each individual plays a part that arises out of the network of communication. Thus a small group has a group matrix. This is created by the individuals over a number of sessions, in which they draw also from their foundation matrix of associations of a psychosocial nature from their social background and experience. Clearly there are no points of absolute separation in such a model of human matrixes, and as we almost all interact directly or indirectly on a world scale, except for a few remainining isolated tribes, and people sunk in a life of spiritual meditation or in psychosis, what is happening under the economic march of the globalisation of finance capitalism is the ever more powerful emergence of a world matrix (small m) of human mental interconnectiveness. Thus IMHO finance capitalism remains the eve of the world socialist revolution. Thus a matrix (but not a Matrix) is indeed being realized in real life in front of our very eyes. It is just that it is invisible to our eyeballs. Regards to Charles and Ravi Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 5:04 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Lewontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book on the brain [Charles had first written:- The part of this metaphor that has whole people doing things in the thinking part of the brain of an individual is actually very good. What distinguishes human thinking from computers or other species brain activity is that humans minds are a vast network of connections to other actual whole people , their brains and experiences through the medium of culture, tradition, custom, language. Culture is a great social network, people to people, including even past generations. Human mind is especially social mind.} [Ravi asked:-] is there a reason why a network of computers cannot exhibit similar characteristics? (and now we can link this thread to jimD's godel one! ;-)). --ravi [Charles replied:-] CB: So far, except in a Matrix fantasy, it takes extensive human mediation to plug computers into culture. It's like chimps can learn some language, but no chimps have learned sign language on their own initiative. There is lots of human intervention when chimps learn language. I can't state an abstract principle as to why a Matrix couldn't be realized in real life.
[PEN-L] Leowontin reviews Steven Rose's latest book on the brain
From the Lancet March 12 2005 The 21st-Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind Steven Rose. Jonathan Cape, 2005. Pp 344. £20·00. ISBN 0-224-06254-9. In their attempts to make the mysterious complexities of the natural world understandable, scientists have over and over again used metaphors. Descartes likened the animal body to a machine, and physicists tell us that if we are to understand the way molecules of a gas behave we should think of them as billiard balls that, unlike any real ball, undergo perfectly elastic collisions. Hanging on the wall of my study is a German scroll from the 1920s, The Human Factory, which depicts the inner workings of the human torso below the neck as an interconnected series of assembly lines, supply pipes, spray guns, crushers, storage vats, wheels, and pulleys. Then, as one's gaze rises to the head, the form of the metaphor changes. At the base of the skull, connecting the factory floor to the offices on the upper stories, is a telephone exchange with women operators plugging and unplugging wires in a switchboard. And in those offices, labelled Willpower, Intelligence, and Judgement are men sitting at tables and desks arguing, consulting, and--thinking. Even the electric line metaphor of pathways of communication requires operators to decide whom to connect with whom. The metaphor for thought is just more thought. Technology had not yet provided devices that could serve as models for memory, consciousness, and rationality. We have changed all that. In the three-quarters of a century since Fricke and Company produced The Human Factory, science has produced elaborate devices for the manipulation and storage of information, and these have been seized upon by scientists desperate to make the mental concrete. There are computer models in which various regions of the brain are analogised to disk memory, in which both data and program instructions are stored, chip processors that manipulate the information and modify the programs, and input-output circuits for connections to the rest of the body. When it became clear that much mental information is diffusely located rather than concentrated at discrete spots, the brain as hologram was substituted for brain as electronic computer. But these devices have not succeeded in capturing what is now known about mental processes. The optimism that we will understand the brain as just another form of some object we have already invented has given way to a renewed puzzlement about how to connect the mental with the physical. The naive reductionist 20th-century Mental Machine has given way to the undoubtedly physical yet mysterious entity, The 21st-Century Brain. Steven Rose, an accomplished investigator of the neurobiology of memory and producer of careful essays and books on what is surely biology's most difficult question, has not fallen into the temptation that has ensnared so many big thinkers about thinking. Rose does not try to produce the sort of grand theory that has been so attractive to scientists anxious to be remembered as the Newton of the mind. Rather, he presents us with the outcome of experiments, recorded anatomical traumata, and surgical interventions in human beings and other animals that have led us to reject simple mechanical models, and he makes clear what phenomena must be incorporated (in both senses of that word) in a correct physical picture of mental processes. In so doing, Rose necessarily destroys the basis for every simple physical model of mental function that has been constructed and leaves us hanging where we belong for the present, in perplexity. So what are the essential facts? First, the brain as a whole is broadly regionally differentiated and brain imaging studies certainly show specific areas of the brain that light up when specific mental functions are in process. However, the relation between these areas and particular functions is complex. There is, for example, no memory bank corresponding to a computer memory. Damage to the hippocampus interferes with the ability to retain new long-term memories, but those memories are not encoded in specific neuronal connections. Over time other brain regions and connections become involved in specific memories. Second, there is no process of the build-up and then slow loss of fixed wiring connections of neurons in the brain that corresponds to fixed mental states. Certainly new neurons and synaptic connections are being produced and are dying throughout life with, alas, a preponderance of losses as we grow older, but these births and deaths are not in some one-to-one connection with events remembered or individual mental processes. There is not some fixed physical module corresponding to the ability to do long division or remembering Pi to six decimal places. Third, just as new neurons become
Re: [PEN-L] slime mold socialism
I agree we should be talking about communism as well as socialism. Where the repressive powers of the state to stop street demonstrations are increasingly weak (in practice) and where the market network is quite sophisticated, values other than that of commodity exchange value can be incorporated into the matrix of the social communication. EG concepts that are at first quite woolly, like work-life balance, which was discussed last year in the UK. Walking a bit more rather than using transport because you feel better after a bit of mild exercise, and you relate better to other people afterwards. The irony is that as finance capitalism matures to the eve of the socialist revolution, there may be a blurring of the first (socialist) and the higher phase of communist society. Could we dare to reframe the debate this way, after decades in which there was just one model of socialist camp starkly counterposed to capitalism, and communism was assumed to be a distant utopia? It might just not be Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 4:34 PM Subject: [PEN-L] slime mold socialism [Was: RE: [PEN-L] in which the professoriate is linked to a slime mold] I wrote: Shouldn't socialism be organized somewhat like a slime mold? David Shemano writes: Impossible. No central authority? Looks like the invisible hand in action and socialists know that could never work. I was somewhat kidding, of course. More importantly, in standard Marxian terminology it's not socialism that would be organized like a slime mold, but communism (the second stage of socialism, in which the distinction between the state and civil society fades and goes away, with the latter swallowing the former). Unlike communism, socialism needs a centralized state to allow democratic rule of society and to defend the workers against internal and external attacks. Only when democracy is perfected and threats go away can their be a move toward communism and the withering away of the state. It's a mistake to conflate decentralized organization with the invisible hand of the market. Among other things, a key basis for markets is the centralized and coercive power of the state, which enforces, defines, and even creates individual[*] property rights. The protection of individual property rights is especially important in a market-oriented society -- such as capitalism -- that's divided by class antagonisms. The forced separation between the direct producers and society's means of production and subsistence -- and thus the class power of the minority capitalists -- must be maintained. Second, there are other decentralized mechanisms besides markets. To some extent, academia fits this bill (though there are important elements of hierarchy/bureaucracy, tradition, and democracy). The classic model for decentralized communism appears in William Morris' NEWS FROM NOWHERE, 1890, found at http://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1890/nowhere/nowhere.htm). [*] I avoid the word private here, since few property rights are truly private (in terms of impact on society, etc.) The more private they are, typically the less important they are. Jim Devine, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web: http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/
[PEN-L] 8 million children die each year within the first month
From the editor of the Lancet (UK medical journal) - Original Message - From: Lancet [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 7:37 PM Subject: The Lancet - Neonatal Survival Series Eight million children are either stillborn or die each year within the first month of life. This figure never makes news. The issue of child survival is a moral as well as a health barometer of our times. The aim of the present Lancet series (Neonatal Survival) is to erase the excuse of ignorance for public and political inaction once and for all. This series is the product of a partnership between scientists, health workers, and journal editors. Together we can make a difference to the lives of those who have no voice. We believe that this is the most important public health campaign we have taken part in for a generation. It is for this reason that we are making this special issue available at no cost to all 1.1 million registered users of thelancet.com. Simply click through this link: http://www.activemag.co.uk/lancet.htm to a digital edition of this entire 56 page special issue. Please also feel free to forward this email to your colleagues. Yours sincerely, Richard Horton
Re: [PEN-L] Fwd: White Paper on Regional Autonomy for Ethnic Minorities in China
This article claims that both the GDP and the average income of the ethnic minority areas has increased significantly. Does anyone know how the Chinese claim to counteract the centripetal tendencies of a massive market to leave peripheral areas, often inhabited by ethnic minorities, in *relative* decline by comparison with the economic epicentres? Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 8:58 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Fwd: White Paper on Regional Autonomy for Ethnic Minorities in China Hi Louis, Would you please post this to the lists? Thanks, Jim http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200502/28/eng20050228_174941.htmlhttp://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200502/28/eng20050228_174941.html James M. Craven Blackfoot Name: Omahkohkiaayo-i'poyi Professor/Consultant,Economics;Business Division Chair Clark College, 1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd. Vancouver, WA. USA 98663 Tel: (360) 992-2283; Fax: (360) 992-2863 The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. Josef Stalin http://www.aradicalblackfoot.blogspot.com/http://www.aradicalblackfoot.blogspot.com Employer has no association with private/protected opinion FREE LEONARD PELTIER!! -- www.marxmail.org
[PEN-L] CEO's as gilded intelligentsia
A lament in the City Comment column of the Business Section of the London Evening Standard - the paper read by most middle class commuters - Anthony Hilton tonight. while the caes described may be isolated, they are actually happening out there, and we ignore them at our peril The chairman of one of our larger companies told me the other day that when he was hunting round for a new chief executive last year, he assumed that he would be flooded with offers. He was shocked to find that the phone did not ring. It got little better when he let the headhunters loose, for what he discovered - which was quite different from when he was beginning his career - was how few of today's ambitious 40 year olds have much interest in running a public company. Their objections are not to the job but to almost everything that goes with it - the governance, the plethora of board committees, the excessive attentions of analysts and fund managers, the unpleasantness of pay and other personal details being publicly broadcast and the growing danger of being personally sued by disgruntled shareholders if something goes disastrously wrong. Separately, the director of an American listed company claimed that its audit committee, of which he was a member, now met monthly by telephone conference call and the meetings lasted three or four hours. He added that the legal advice the directors received was never to say anything because then they could not be held to account for their words. So they just listened. We may not quite have reached that point here, but look at the trend. Twenty years ago, audit committees barely existed but when they did, they met annually. Then a meeting to coincide with the interims was added. Now it is the norm for them to meet quarterly, and the meetings run for three or four hours. In this country, it may still be permissible for members to speak, so we are not quite as process-driven as the US, but there are still odd things happening. I heard of a retired senior partner of one of the big four accounting firms sho has let his membership of the Institute of Chartered Accountants lapse and has advised his accountant friends to do likewise. Not paying the sub means the member loses the right to use the letters FCA after his or her name. This lowers the profile and makes the director less of a target if something goes wrong. COMMENT by CB If this article could just blame government bureaucracy it would. But it doesn't. Indeed some of the most striking examples of the burden of public scrutiny come from the even freer market of the US. It is not just a moan in the wider fabric of supply and demand, implying that to avoid this shortage of supply, they should just offer even more monumental salaries to the highest flyers. But those salaries would not only now be published. More significantly there is a web of public accountability even though capitalist laws of production apply and the companies are privately owned - increasingly often by other corporations of fund managers. The author speculates that there could be a further move away from the public company as an embodiment of the ownership of the means of production by a capitalist - a collective structure in which there is a division of powers, to ensure safety to public scrutiny - a chairman obliged to come from outside with his power circumscribed by the head of the sudit committee, by the snior non-excutive director (cince the non-exec's will no longer be able to trust the execs), and probably by the head of the nominations and remunerations committee, leading to four separate centres of power - five if you count the chief executive. Whatever permutations in structure of these seriously publicly accountable companies, this is now a gilded stratum of higher intelligentsia subtly different from the capitalist magnates of the past, caught up with risk management and management of public perceptions, momentum and the laws of chaos theory. This is a further twist in the socialisation of the means of production, inseparably linked with the increasing rationalisation of finance capitalism. Is it really possible to bring back red-blooded owner-entrepreneur capitalism? Probably not as the dominant mode of capitalist production. Chris Burford London
[PEN-L] crumbling NATO - growing Empire?
An article in today's International Herald Tribune presents a highly complex picture of why NATO appears to be losing momentum, as the USA and Europe skirmish for areas of influence. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/18/news/allies.html Despite close overlap in the membership of NATO and the EU some discrepancies are causing difficulties that have become obstacles. A formula called Partnership for Peace allowed some European countries not in NATO to share military and security information as if in NATO. But Turkey has blocked the entry of Cyprus into this arrangement for tactical reasons of its own. Probably more significantly, last week Rumsfeld, unchastened by events in Iraq, declared that the US would use coalitions of the willing with or without NATO depending on the operation. Meanwhile during complex skirmishing narrowing their differences on Iran both the USA and Europe are confirming that interference in the internal affairs of other countries is necessary and desirable - it is just about the most appropriate way of doing it! Is the paradox that NATO can crumble a little as a more complex agenda of Empire emerges and gathers pace? Ukraine has just tipped into the camp of finance capitalist consumer democracy. The Palestinians have been crushed at just the time when a grand coalition has miraculously emerged in Israel to make gestures of a recently unprecedented nature to Arafat's successor. As the Palestinian intafada has finally surrendered, an amazing non-violent Lebanese Intafada for Democracy has emerged, carrying candles demanding Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, shortly after Bush demanded the enforcement of a United Nations resolution demanding it. These are strange times. Less dramatically than last year, changes may nevertheless be accelerating. Chris Burford London
[PEN-L] Intifada in Lebanon
The term used was Intifada for Independence http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1categ_id=2article_id=12818 Opposition demands 'intifada for independence' Interestingly a Google search for Lebanon and intifada takes you immediately to an article back in April 2000 by the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin jointly published by the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon and the Middle East Forum:- http://www.meib.org/articles/0004_l1.htm Some apples take long to ripen. Chris Burford
[PEN-L] Significant legal victory against transnationals from European Court
http://www.guardian.co.uk/food/Story/0,2763,1415031,00.html The ruling is likely to be warmly welcomed by other social campaigners and groups. Mr Morris, speaking ahead of the ruling, said today he and Ms Steel felt completely vindicated. Mr Morris told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: There's growing public concern and debate about the activities of the fast food industry and multinational corporations in general. We feel completely vindicated by our stance. We can see the effects of not just what McDonald's are doing but what all multinationals are doing to our planet. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4266209.stm Their legal team said multinational companies should not be allowed to sue for libel because they wield huge power over people's lives and the environment and therefore should be open to scrutiny and criticism. But government lawyers argued that campaigners for social justice are subject to the same laws of libel as anyone else, even when wealthy multinational corporations are their targets. Reacting to Tuesday's decision, a spokesman for the Department of Constitutional Affairs said: We are studying the judgement very carefully. Celebrating the decision outside a London McDonald's, Mr Morris said they had won both points hands down. We believe in people power and we believe people should make the decisions themselves in their own communities, he said. It encourages to people to speak up in their own interests. Ms Steel described the 15-year case as a complete nightmare but said it had been good to fight it. Hopefully the government will be forced to change the law and that will mean greater freedom of speech, she said. BBC radio commented that this would remedy an imbalance in the law, whereby at present the public is able to criticise central and local government agencies, but not big financial corporations without risk of libel actions. My comment: The stringent laws on libel in Britain were applied unequally in that campaigners are not entitled to legal aid if finance capitalist corporations counterattack with an action for libel. This increases the opportunities under bourgeois democratic law, for radical democratic groups to hold finance capitalist corporations to account, without being suject to an unequal judicial process in a libel court. It shifts the balance of bourgeois democracy marginally in the direction of peoples democracy. McDonalds have already accepted that their action was a public relations disaster, but this ruling will probably have to be implemented by the British Government, and finance capitalist organisations will have to factor it into their readiness to adapt their policies to respond to the demands of radical campaigners for social accountability and responsibility. Food is becoming a front line. Chris Burford London
Re: [PEN-L] Arthur Miller, Playwright, Is Dead at 89
Thank you Arthur Miller. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/233032.stm http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1411098,00.html His plays played quite often in London, where the cheaper price of theatre seats made him arguably more accessible than in the USA. I particularly liked The Man Who Had all the Luck although that was an early failure. He was more surely than a dignified, humane, liberal moralist, disillusioned about the direction of capitalism, and more than a talented writer. My feeling is that he got inside a the granularity of human relationships, which will remain a challenge even under socialism, and communism. Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 3:54 PM Subject: [PEN-L] FW: News Alert: Arthur Miller, Playwright, Is Dead at 89 Arthur Miller, Legendary American Playwright, Is Dead at 89 Arthur Miller, one of the great American playwrights, whose work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 89. The cause was congestive heart failure, said Julia Bolus, his assistant. Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/?8na Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Re: [PEN-L] Thinking for Ourselves: What do we mean by democracy?
Although the author is of course right to be sceptical, she (he?) still holds an idealised view of democracy. Even in perfect peace it is subject to oppression and class struggle. The election in Iraq was about giving some legitimacy to certain bodies of armed men who are to hold some sort of state power in the Kurdish and the Shiite areas, and how their masters will balance out competing interests and negotiate with the imperialist powers. They will then be using this as a basis, to subdue and buy off the rebellion in the Sunni areas. The result will be the resultant of the balance of forces. At least something along these lines. Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2005 5:06 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Thinking for Ourselves: What do we mean by democracy? Thinking for Ourselves: What do we mean by democracy? By Shea Howell Special to The Michigan Citizen Within an hour after the closing of polls in Iraq, George Bush declared a victory for democracy. Amidst bombs, bullets and threats many Iraqis, mostly in the Shiite- dominated South and the Kurdish North, turned out to cast their ballots. Almost before the voting boxes were loaded into armored vehicles to be taken to Baghdad, results were being announced. Anxious for good news, the Bush administration released numbers claiming a 72 percent voter turnout. The effort to use this election to vindicate a failed policy is predictable in politicians. But the willingness of the American media to go along with equating a flawed voting process with democracy is dangerous. Democracy did not happen in Iraq. A vote did. Democracy is a difficult, multi-textured process. It requires a rich context of public argument. It means the engagement of people in debate, dialogue and conversation over ideas that matter to them. It is the living process of people cajoling, compromising and influencing one another as they advance ideas, challenge friends, argue with relatives and reflect on experience. It happens as people argue over what is important in their lives, about what they believe and why. Democracy happens in the public square. And there is no public square in Iraq. People do not gather in public places to talk about their future. Most are afraid to leave their homes. People do not sit in cafés and coffee shops to argue over newspaper editorials that are critical of the government or that pose new ways of thinking. The United States padlocked the doors of those papers long ago. The Iraqi people do not hold public debates over policies and public accountability. There are no town hall meetings, candidate nights, or stickers on cars. Cars themselves were banned on voting day. Candidates and polling places were kept secret for security. These elections were a sign of how empty the context of democracy has become. It has been reduced to the solitary act of casting a ballot. By focusing on the balloting process and percentage of voter turnout, the media perpetuates the myth that democracy is contained in ballots, not in a vigorous public life. The failures of this democracy are not in the votes but in every bomb and bullet that sears through daily life. Democracy lives in the triumph of words over weapons, of persuasion over force. In places and times when words give way to violence, democracy is not disrupted, it is dead. No vote will bring it to life. In the easy equation of voting with democracy, the mainstream media placed balloting on one side, violence on the other. It did not help us understand that there is a direct link between these two opposites. In a country run by an occupying power, where dissent is equated with terrorism, where the public forum is circumscribed by guns and tanks, where every effort to put forward an authentic voice risks bringing down the wrath of occupiers, and where the decisions on the ballot have little meaning, a rich civic life is impossible. This election happened because Ayatollah Sistani pushed the administration into it. Recognizing the possibility gaining a long denied dominant voice for the Shiites, Sistani used his power to insist on these elections over Bush opposition. He did everything to use the private space of the mosque to get out the vote. Shallow reporting that buys the Bush spin does nothing to help anyone understand what is going on in Iraq. That we could mistake this vote for democracy is a sign of how empty our own public square has become.
[PEN-L] Collapse of anti-communism
It is little consolation to socialists but alongside the collapse of the spectre of communism, there has been a collapse of anti-communism. The BBC radio this morning was noting how the European Union appears intent on lifting the embargo on selling arms to China (no doubt for highly prinicpled reasons!) even though the US is still strongly against it. And this evening BBC TV's main lead on this weekends G7 meeting was about how it will soon change with everyone talking about the rise of China. Flag's illustrated the simple point: already the sixth largest economy in the world, this year, the British public were told, it is about to overtake Britain and China. By 2007 it will overtake Germany. By 2016 Japan, leave it number two in the world. These facts are well known to many members of this list. What I am commenting on is the way this was presented without contraction as the way things will be. There were graphic images about Chinese crates unloading regularly at British ports, and a bit about two way trade. This is the future. No hint of the anti-communism that made the bipolar world of the nuclear threat, so stable, and obliged other capitalist powers gratefully, as well as sometimes grudgingly, to accept the hegemony of the US. We are already in a multi-polar world, and the US is going to have to think hard about how it tries to maximise its power. It has the misfortune of having been deprived of an enemy. And to be surrounded by competitors who also use their heads and know how to play the game on their own terms. Chris Burford London
Re: [PEN-L] Collapse of anti-communism
Sorry for the fuzzy logic. Sentence should read Flags illustrated the simple point: already the sixth largest economy in the world, this year, the British public were told, it is about to overtake Britain and France. But in a way this illustrates that there are such sophisticated ways of equilbrating material and psychological interests, that that multi-polar world has arrived. The battle is about perceptions. And a few inaccuracies about which flag flashes up on the television screen which I goofed in relaying to this list, does not matter. The drift of world economics and politics appears irreversible. And it is connected with the change in the means of production and reproduction. We do not need a single mega world computer, for computerised networks to have already created one highly complex, extremely interconnected, matrix, including classes and strata, as well as individuals, and capital. And Capital. Chris Burford Lodnon - Original Message - From: Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 7:35 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Collapse of anti-communism It is little consolation to socialists but alongside the collapse of the spectre of communism, there has been a collapse of anti-communism. The BBC radio this morning was noting how the European Union appears intent on lifting the embargo on selling arms to China (no doubt for highly prinicpled reasons!) even though the US is still strongly against it. And this evening BBC TV's main lead on this weekends G7 meeting was about how it will soon change with everyone talking about the rise of China. Flag's illustrated the simple point: already the sixth largest economy in the world, this year, the British public were told, it is about to overtake Britain and China. By 2007 it will overtake Germany. By 2016 Japan, leave it number two in the world. These facts are well known to many members of this list. What I am commenting on is the way this was presented without contraction as the way things will be. There were graphic images about Chinese crates unloading regularly at British ports, and a bit about two way trade. This is the future. No hint of the anti-communism that made the bipolar world of the nuclear threat, so stable, and obliged other capitalist powers gratefully, as well as sometimes grudgingly, to accept the hegemony of the US. We are already in a multi-polar world, and the US is going to have to think hard about how it tries to maximise its power. It has the misfortune of having been deprived of an enemy. And to be surrounded by competitors who also use their heads and know how to play the game on their own terms. Chris Burford London
[PEN-L] Make Poverty History
http://www.cafod.org.uk/policy_and_analysis/policy_papers/make_poverty_history/mph_briefing christian liberal rubbish? skirmishing between aid voluntary organisations for profile - eg who can get Nelson Mandela to endorse a news story? Or utopian socialism on a world scale? Chris Burford PS I believe they or associates of the campaign are claiming that 30,000 children a day die of preventable causes. That is about 10,000 a day more than I recall about ten years ago, but I do not know how the figures are derived.
[PEN-L] Ghana water privatisation
Does anyone know how well founded this campaign is. WDM, World Development Movement, is a well organised campaigning non-charity that came out of Oxfam and it has had some legal and political successes. But I am wondering whether to send it to a Quaker friend of mine, who has just come back from Ghana after a well intentioned visit to promote a youth exchange. I do not want to burden him with a contentious obligation, if it does not grow naturally out of the concerns of the people there. WDM is so well organised, including about raising money for its campaigns, it is just possible that is extremely valid but a bit artificial as far as the consciousness of the local people is concerned. On the other hand I could well imagine that the very opposite is the case ... Any comments please? http://www.wdm.org.uk/biwater/index.htm Chris Burford London
[PEN-L] Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction
This is the subtitle of Architects of Annihilation by Goetz Aly and Susanne Heim. p 294 Our study has shown that the modern praxis-oriented social sciences and the reception of their findings in the seats of political power played a significant part in the decisions that led to systematic mass murder. If the links between Auschwitz and visionary German projects of the time for a modernized and pacified Europe are denied or ignored, then Germany's crimes appear as a descent into barbarism and a break with Western civilization - rather than a potentiality inherent within it. Such an interpretation fails to engage with the larger truth, and makes the German annihilation policy of those years appear the product of a completely atypical historical situation, without context or explanation. Architects of Annihilation by Goetz Aly and Susanne Heim. Phoenix pb 2003, LondonISBN 1 84212 670 9 Weidenfeld and Nicolson hb 2002 London, translation by Allan Blunden First published 1991 Germany by Hoffman and Campe as Vordenker der Vernichtung
[PEN-L] Heterodox Economics
Does anyone know any of the organisations in this Association? and have a recommendation? http://hetecon.com/ Chris Burford London
Re: [PEN-L] all quiet on the Leftern front
With the benefit of the Atlantic between us, what I picked up from the BBC is that the address is an unprecedented declaration of massive global intervention, with the only compromise that there might be a bit more subtlety in how this is coordinated with Europe. That is Blair's only qualification. This is total Empire. In the name of freedom the bourgeois rights of finance capitalism will rule in every corner of the world. Nothing to be quiet about, but the strategy and the tactics of resisting this and turning it against itself into global socialism will be highly complex. Chris Burford PS thanks for the helpful information about heterodox economics and related links. - Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2005 6:51 PM Subject: [PEN-L] all quiet on the Leftern front Pen-l is quiet, too quiet, today. What you folks doin', watching the coronation on TV? Jim Devine, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] web: http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/
[PEN-L] The Historicising of Auschwitz
of Auschwitz as a symbol of the new ideology which we must embrace, is I suggest, still a highly problematic act of historicisation that should be contested, for the sake not just of people of Jewish cultural descent, nor just of ordinary German people, like my deaf old friend who is both, but for the sake of the ordinary people of the world. Chris Burford London
Re: [PEN-L] British exceptionalism
There have been many factors, which in my opinion are broadly in conformity with a framework of historical materialism, but it should also be said that the English have been lucky. Randomness is part of a pattern of probability. Chris Burford Quoting Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Leandro Prados de la Escosura, ed. Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and Its European Rivals, 1688-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xv + 335 pp. Tables, figures, bibliography, index. No price listed (cloth), ISBN 0-521-79304-1. Reviewed by: Andrew Hann, Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester. Published by: H-HistGeog (December, 2004) Europe's Industrialization Compared This collection of essays, assembled to honor the distinguished career of Patrick O'Brien, began as a series of papers delivered at a March 2001 conference in Madrid. The volume brings together some of Europe's leading economic historians to address the enduring question of British exceptionalism in the period 1688-1815. It examines why during this period Britain emerged from comparative obscurity to a discernible position of hegemony in the domains of naval power, empire, global commerce, agricultural efficiency, industrial production, fiscal capacity and advanced technology (p. i). The contributors' stated intention is to produce a textschrift that will make these debates accessible to a larger audience of university students and non-specialist readers, and in this respect they are at least partially successful (p. xv). Key arguments are sketched out clearly in a readable style that will appeal to a wide audience. The assembled papers provide a good overview of current scholarship in the field, and highlight the variety of approaches that have been used. At the same time contributors have been given some latitude to introduce original research, so the volume is also a platform for taking the debate forward, while the extensive bibliography will prove useful for those who wish to trace the development of this debate in greater detail. full: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=80051105032296 -- www.marxmail.org This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
[PEN-L] WSJ finds caring role?
According to BBC News 24 the WSJ has a front page article, as does the Financial Times, speculating whether the tsunami disaster will give the Bush administration the opprortunitz to develop a new image towards the most populous muslim country in the world, and towards islam in general. The meeting of the World Bank in Jakarta this week, will be the perfect opportunity for caring capitalism to move forward in its global coordination, with the Germans singing from the same hymn sheet as the US administration. Capitalism has never been against charity. The question is whether the demands for international technical and managerial planning will start to alter the nature of global capitalism, and address the massive contradiction between the price of labour power in different parts of the world, which is the mirror image of the uneven accumulation of capital on a world scale. Chris Burford temprorarily in Budapest This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.
[PEN-L] Lisbon Earthquake 1755
It occurs to me that the Aceh earthquake and its consequences will have a comparable impact to that of the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 in influencing the European enlightenment and the push for bourgeois democracy. http://nisee.berkeley.edu/lisbon/ Although not the strongest or most deadly earthquake in human history, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake's impact, not only on Portugal but on all of Europe, was profound and lasting. Depictions of the earthquake in art and literature can be found in several European countries, and these were produced and reproduced for centuries following the event, which came to be known as The Great Lisbon Earthquake. Other good discussion. Then this conclusion The extensive number of renderings of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake found throughout Europe demonstrate the traumatic effect the disaster had on the continent. Depictions of the Lisbon earthquake were created, copied, and widely distributed and discussed throughout all of southern, western and central Europe. Whether created by the new desire to investigate, record, and understand the earthquake in natural rather than strictly metaphysical terms, or created by the more sensational desire to report on human calamity, these depictions indicate that the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 represents a watershed event in European history. The earthquake appears to have been probably of the order of Richter 9 and to have been associated with widespread tsunami's. Voltaire refers to it in his widely-read Candide. The civil society that will be united by this latest earthquake however is global and not merely European, and that has something to do with the development of the means of production. Chris Burford
Re: [PEN-L] economics and class struggle - UN Declaration of Human Rights
are entitled to special care and assistance All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection. in reply to: --- To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: economics and class struggle behind legal victory. From: Chris Burford Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2004 --- snip
Re: [PEN-L] economics and class struggle behind legal victory
- Original Message - From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2004 1:07 PM Subject: [PEN-L] economics and class struggle behind legal victory US has adopted much of UN law by treaty. By US Constitution, treaties have same legal status as federal statutes. Ergo, UN rights are U.S. law of the land. This is the basic legal theory. Interesting approach. It sounds like the web of international law is getting increasingly interwoven. The UK government wrote the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law through the Human Rights Act. This allows a higher court to rule that an existing law or procedure is incompatible, and requires the government to propose to Parliament a remedy. I have probably put that in lay language that is a bit too crude, but the legal approach has the advantage of some flexibility, but longer term some real impact. It was under these provisions that 8/9 UK law lords have just ruled that the continued detention of 9 foreigners suspected of terrorism is incompatible with the life of the nation! It does not immediately release the 9 but it means the government has little option but to respond, with legal and administrative concessions. It allows us to participate in a Gramscian struggle of global dimensions, although each individual contribution may appear petty. Thanks for sharing. Chris Burford
Re: [PEN-L] economics and class struggle behind legal victory
Of course The ideas of the ruling class are normally the prevailing ideas, and have all the force of the state, not just military but financial and ideological, to back them. The Gramscian struggle for hegemony is and always will be uphill. It is still not impossible. Nobody is suggesting getting excited. The suggestion is that it will need years, probably decades of perseverance to win some advances. Like bourgeois democratic rights to vote, independent of colour of skin. And that people like Ann Ginger toiling away in unexciting corners may nevertheless help to change the world. It takes years of struggle to stop people dying of AIDS just because they cannot afford the drugs. What's new in this debate, Patrick, despite the important factual information. Can you share Jubilee's experience of how to get round this set back rather than just counselling us not to get excited? I personally think I am lugubrious enough already, but as Michael discourages characterisations I will not invite corrections at this point. Seasons greetings! Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Patrick Bond [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Sent: Thursday, December 23, 2004 5:44 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] economics and class struggle behind legal victory - Original Message - From: Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] It sounds like the web of international law is getting increasingly interwoven. One of SA's most active radical social movements, Jubilee, has had a bad experience you should all know about before getting too excited by juristic moves. A 'reactionary' government in league with transnational corporations can foil the Alien Tort Claims Act quite easily, it seems - at least in this first round... (Colin Powell told Pretoria to oppose the lawsuit - while on the other side people like Desmond Tutu and Joe Stiglitz were friends of the court in favour of reparations.) Apartheid struggle continues 6 December 2004 14:49 - (SA) Johannesburg - A group of apartheid victims vowed on Monday to step up their fight for reparation after a US court dismissed their claims against big companies. The Khulumani group, who filed their suit under the auspices of Jubilee South Africa, said they would appeal the court's decision while intensifying their international campaign for reparation. A spokesperson for the 82 plaintiffs, anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus said the group was deeply disappointed with the court's dismissal of their claim. Brutus accused New York Judge John Sprizzo of putting the importance of economic investment above human rights. In our judgment both the judge and the (former) minister of justice (Penuell Maduna) were valuing financial matters higher than humane values and we find this deeply troubling, Brutus said in Johannesburg. The lawsuit was filed in the Southern District Court of New York under the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789. This law allows foreign victims of serious human rights abuses to sue in US courts. The group claimed their human rights were violated by the apartheid government in that they, or family members, were the victims of indiscriminate shootings, unlawful killings, rape, torture and kidnapping. The defendants in the action included such multinational as Barclays National Bank, Ford Motor Company, Mobil, Daimler-Chrysler, Caltex Petroleum, Deutsche Bank and British Petroleum. Sprizzo dismissed the claims on the grounds that forcing these companies to pay reparations would have a negative impact on foreign investment in South Africa. Jubilee South Africa criticised both Sprizzo and the South African government for its role in the court's decision. Jubilee chairperson MP Giyose accused Sprizzo of putting economic considerations above human rights. Sprizzo was particularly pleased to rely for his economic doctrine in the judgment on the commercial motives invested in a letter deposited before his court by the weightless, light-minded Penuell Maduna on behalf of a South African government dominated by free marketeers. Giyose also lashed out at President Thabo Mbeki. ... for the people of South Africa, as for the Khulumani plaintiffs, it is critical to note the reactionary role played by the Mbeki government on this question. Originally the government did not interfere in the reparation lawsuits, but, said Giyose, pressure from the US government caused its South African counterpart to file papers with the New York court, asking for the case to be dismissed. It was not yet clear when the Khulumani group's appeal would be heard. /than Re: Contents of DEBATE digest...
[PEN-L] economics and class struggle behind legal victory.
Re: [PEN-L] Stunning legal victory on the "real threat to the life of the nation" If I am right in accepting the verdict of "Liberty" that this is one of the biggest progressive constitutional changes in UK legal history for a long time, to what extent is it a victory in the superstructure, independent of the economic base? To what extent is it congruent with the economic base? The passage I quoted from Engels noted that there is a degree of autonomy in a sphere like the law and "the faithful reflection of economic conditions suffers increasingly". Clearly the ruling is producing ideas consistent not only with a democratic image of British nationalism, but with a European citizenship. Bearing in mind that the victims that the law lords were moving to protect, came in some cases from outside Europe, the widening scope of the legal ruling about "human rights" is potentially world-wide. Any economic or social grouping, not just a nation, can be a "social organism" across the globe. It is not dependent on the historical development of the nation state. Lord Hoffman, in fact has long been associated with Amnesty International. So this could be seen as a victory of abstract utopian justice which is being applied increasingly on a world scale, devoid of class content. Eg it could be applied against Cuba. On the other hand the forces of international finance capital arguably on balance favour, and even require, a fairly homogenous global state system and civil society, for the fastest circulation of commodities, and turnover of capital, for the more efficient exploitation of labour power, including educated labour power, which is especially important in utilising advanced technological innovations. Yes there are clusters of capital such as that around the Neo-Cons, which prefer to trample carelessly over civil rights. Yes, there was a wing of capital that favoured the brutal crushing of the anti-capitalist protesters at Genoa. Nevertheless I would argue that finance capital itself, as seen in the spreading influence of the European Union even to Turkey, and to the Ukraine, on balance favours the more smoothly controlledbourgeois democratic rights agenda contained in this legal victory. The implication about terrorism, is that the markets can stand a quick sharp overthrow of an internally repressive nationalistic regime, if it is done quickly and successfully. But they will gravitate towards a smoother control of and digestion of, repressive regimes if unsure. They would rather assimilate Iran.than invade.. It produces less uncertainty, and surer results over a 10-20 year timescale. And that is the timescale that finance capital is interested in. It implies a complex agenda for countering terrorism. Thus terrorism does not imperil the "life of the nation". Repressive laws do. So much for global finance capital. As for working people - working class and self-employed workers on the land - a more radical agenda of human rights is to their advantage, but there is a downside in that it ultimately tends to emphasise atomised individualised rights, despite Lord Hoffman's praise for the "social organism". My take on the dialectics, behind this victory. Chris Burford London
[PEN-L] Stunning legal victory on the real threat to the life of the nation
On the application of Gareth Peirce, one of the bravest civil liberties lawyers in the land, backed by Liberty, the civil liberties union, the law lords in the UK have ruled the government's indefinite detention of 9 foreigners without trial on suspicion of terrorism is incompatible with the Human Rights Act and the European Convention of Human Rights. Although couched in ancient and majestic language the most revolutionary phrases came from Lord Hoffman and they weld the best of the British tradition to that of the best of the European. As you read it, remember what is at stake are not the lives of thousands, caught up in a catastrophe, but the lives of 9 foreigners, and what Lord Hoffman redefines as the life of the nation, that will not be subordinated to the politics of fear. And remember Engels to Schmidt Oct 27 1890 As soon as the new division of labour which creates professional lawyeres becomes necessary, another new and independent sphere is opened up which, for all its general dependence on production and trade, still has also a special capacity for reacting upon these spheres. In a modern state, the law must not only correspond to the general economic condition and be its expression, but must also be an internally coherent expression which does not, owing to inner contradictions, reduce itself to nought. And in order to achieve this, the faithful reflection of economic conditions suffers increasingly. Lord Hoffman was also one of the three law lords who granted the application of the eccentric Spanish judge Baltazar Garzon, against Pinochet 6 years ago. http://www.wsws.org/news/1998/nov1998/pin-n28.shtml These struggles are part of the Gramscian struggle for ideological hegemony, in Britain, in Chile, in Europe and in the world. They will succeed. Chris Burford London _ Lord Hoffman 91. What is meant by threatening the life of the nation? The nation is a social organism, living in its territory (in this case, the United Kingdom) under its own form of government and subject to a system of laws which expresses its own political and moral values. When one speaks of a threat to the life of the nation, the word life is being used in a metaphorical sense. The life of the nation is not coterminous with the lives of its people. The nation, its institutions and values, endure through generations. In many important respects, England is the same nation as it was at the time of the first Elizabeth or the Glorious Revolution. The Armada threatened to destroy the life of the nation, not by loss of life in battle, but by subjecting English institutions to the rule of Spain and the Inquisition. The same was true of the threat posed to the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany in the Second World War. This country, more than any other in the world, has an unbroken history of living for centuries under institutions and in accordance with values which show a recognisable continuity. 92. This, I think, is the idea which the European Court of Human Rights was attempting to convey when it said (in Lawless v Ireland (No 3) (1961) 1 EHRR 15) that it must be a threat to the organised life of the community of which the State is composed, although I find this a rather dessicated description. Nor do I find the European cases particularly helpful. All that can be taken from them is that the Strasbourg court allows a wide margin of appreciation to the national authorities in deciding both on the presence of such an emergency and on the nature and scope of derogations necessary to avert it: Ireland v United Kingdom (1978) 2 EHRR 25, at para 207. What this means is that we, as a United Kingdom court, have to decide the matter for ourselves. 93. Perhaps it is wise for the Strasbourg court to distance itself from these matters. The institutions of some countries are less firmly based than those of others. Their communities are not equally united in their loyalty to their values and system of government. I think that it was reasonable to say that terrorism in Northern Ireland threatened the life of that part of the nation and the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom as a whole. In a community riven by sectarian passions, such a campaign of violence threatened the fabric of organised society. The question is whether the threat of terrorism from Muslim extremists similarly threatens the life of the British nation. 94. The Home Secretary has adduced evidence, both open and secret, to show the existence of a threat of serious terrorist outrages. The Attorney General did not invite us to examine the secret evidence, but despite the widespread scepticism which has attached to intelligence assessments since the fiasco over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, I am willing to accept that credible evidence of such plots exist. The events of 11 September 2001 in New York and Washington and 11 March 2003 in Madrid make it entirely likely that the threat of similar atrocities in the United Kingdom is a real one. 95. But the question
Re: [PEN-L] online source on German left affairs
Thanks. Perhaps you would draw attention to a particular article from time to time and briefly say why. I see Bisky advises caution about PDS prospects in 2006, despite the successes earlier this year. Chris Burford - Original Message - From: g kohler [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 7:28 PM Subject: [PEN-L] online source on German left affairs for those who read German - the online edition of Neues Deutschland reports on labour and leftist issues in Germany. The reporting is pretty good and the editorials are worth reading at times. http://www.nd-online.de/
[PEN-L] Marx seems clearly to have gotten wrong
Marx was clearly wrong if he ever suggested physical uprising was the only way to change He did not. But he considered that capitalist power is inseparable from the potential use of force. It is usually the bourgeoisie that puts the bayonet first on the agenda. It is a fair reading of Marx that he considered it idealist and unhistorical to assume that political change could occur without phyical force being part of the equation of forces, potential if not actual. Lenin was even more of that opinion, although he praised the progressive role of street demonstrations There are different emphases on different aspects of this at different times. The Communist Manifesto declares that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie. Writing in 1848, Marx would have had to be politically blind not to have seen the probabilities of revolution and counter-revolution. He also wrote about revolutions that did not serve the interest of the working class. But even on the assumption of political supremacy he recognised that change had to go through steps. In the earlier 1845 Theses on Feuerback the final word is the German word veraendern meaning gradually change, whereas aendern would mean change. (Philosphers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point however, is to change it.) In the globalised world Marx is not invalidated by any requirement that the global change must be virtually instantaneous. Nor is it invalidated by the fact that some of finance capitalisms methods are subversive and deeply controlling rather than directly confrontational. The philosophy or political system you promote may be drawing on the reality that advanced finance capitalism is capitalism at a very high level of abstraction. It requires a vast layer of managers and administrators, who will identify with the capital of the organisation they run, and may get financial benefits from its stock exchange price, but are not necessarily outright owners in the way a small or medium-sized industrial capitalist might be in the 19th century. Only a small minority on this list might think it relevant consciously to call themselves marxists, whereas other lists which cross post here, would have a higher proportion of self-identified marxists. I doubt also if change will take place globally by rallying under the banner of Aikidio, although from a marxist point of view aikidio might have progressive features relative to the objective state of 21st century global finance capitalism. That will most persuasively emerge in the course of struggle. I suggest Chris Burford
Re: [PEN-L] Decline of the dollar
Is this how the dollar slips from being world money - to be replaced by a basket of currencies, equilibrated technically and with maximum diplomacy by a network of interconnecting computers? Is this process really happening already, in front of our very eyes? Perhaps it depends on whether the size of the global economy and the knowledge system is able to manage the US economy as only one component part of the world economy, and not, as it was seen as recently as the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the only engine of world growth? Are the contradictions really finally accelerating towards a qualitative change in the mode of world-wide capitalist organisation? Can this be happening? Now?? And what are the future implications for class struggle? Chris Burford London - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 27, 2004 3:39 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Decline of the dollar NY Times, November 27, 2004 Foreign Interest Appears to Flag as Dollar Falls By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 - Investors and market analysts are increasingly worried that the last big source of support for the American dollar - heavy buying by foreign central banks - is fading. The anxiety was on full display Friday, when the dollar abruptly slid to a record low against the euro after a report suggesting that the Chinese central bank might start to reduce its holdings in the American currency. Though Chinese officials later denied the report, and the dollar recovered, analysts say the broader trend is that foreign governments are becoming less willing to finance the growing debt of the United States government. On Tuesday, a top official with the Russian central bank said his government had become worried about the sinking value of the dollar and might switch some foreign reserves to euros. A day later, India's central bank hinted that it was worried about the same issue and might shift some reserves into other currencies. Japan and China, which together have amassed nearly $900 billion in United States Treasury securities, have both slowed their buying sharply from the frenetic pace in February and March. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/27/business/27dollar.html === In yesterday's NY Times, Morgan Bank economist tried to put a positive spin on this: NY Times, November 26, 2004 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR When Weakness Is a Strength By STEPHEN S. ROACH Suddenly all eyes are on a weakening dollar. In recent days, the American currency has fallen against the euro, the yen and most other currencies around the world. The renminbi is a notable exception; China has kept its currency firmly pegged to the dollar for a decade. The fall of the dollar is not a surprise. It is the logical outgrowth of an unbalanced world economy, and America's gaping current account deficit - the difference between foreign trade and investment in the United States and American trade and investment abroad - is just the most visible manifestation of these imbalances. The deficit ran at a record annual rate of $665 billion, or 5.7 percent of gross domestic product, in the second quarter of 2004. While a decline in the dollar is not a cure-all for what ails the world, it should go a long way toward bringing about a sorely needed rebalancing. With a weaker dollar, economic and even political tensions among nations would be relieved, helping to promote more sustainable growth in the global economy. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/26/opinion/26roach.html === However, the 11/23 Boston Herald reported Roach as predicting Armageddon. Could he be hedging his bets? Economic `Armageddon' predicted By Brett Arends/ On State Street Tuesday, November 23, 2004 Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish. But you should hear what he's saying in private. Roach met select groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a group at Fidelity. His prediction: America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic ``armageddon.'' Press were not allowed into the meetings. But the Herald has obtained a copy of Roach's presentation. A stunned source who was at one meeting said, ``it struck me how extreme he was - much more, it seemed to me, than in public.'' Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 percent chance that ``we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual armageddon.'' The chance we'll get through OK: one in 10. Maybe. In a nutshell, Roach's argument is that America's record trade deficit means the dollar will keep falling. To keep foreigners buying T-bills and prevent a resulting rise in inflation, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan will be forced to raise interest rates further and faster than he wants. The result: U.S. consumers, who are in debt up to their eyeballs, will get pounded. Less a case of ``Armageddon,'' maybe, than of a ``Perfect
[PEN-L] class struggle in the Ukraine
This looks like a pivotal moment when the Ukraine will fall either mainly into the orbit of the European Union, or back into the orbit of Russia. Street demonstrations could lead to violence. In a previous century these would have led to threats of armed invasion. In this century it is not impossible that they will lead to offers of peace-keeping forces. There is also an understated linked contradiction with the religious split reflecting centuries of different historical experience between the Catholic west and the Orthodox east. And there will be confused class differences in the stance taken by different layers of society. However obscurely understood, this too is class struggle, and the demonstraters will intuitively immediately know whether they are among their own type. On thisthe future history of middle Europe may depend, as to which of two main blocs of capital dominate. I suggest. Chris Burford London
Re: [PEN-L] Impact of dollar decline?
Clearly (albeit in coded terms) the Bush administration sees no merit in defending the dollar. I would have thought the Bush administration is counting on the size of the US economy and the parochialism of the US population, most of whom do not travel outside the USA. If imports become somewhat more expensive will that be noticed? It is more important to let the dollar slide and avoid further short-term destruction of industry, like the furniture industry. US imperial stategy seems to be shifting slightly to a perspective that it will not defend the almighty dollar, when it can use its almighty military as a pre-eminent chip in international power politics. In the long term this is foolish but it might be the best strategy for keeping the Republicans in power for the next ten years. Chris Burford London. - Original Message - From: Eugene Coyle [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 6:25 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Impact of dollar decline? Reading about the dollar's decline leads to this speculation. The dollar slides. Consumer prices rise as imports get more expensive. A second rise in consumer prices comes from revaluation of China's currency. Interest rates rise as the old guard tries to choke inflation by tightening money. Interest rates also rise to defend the dollar. Federal budget is tightened to defend the dollar. Supply-siders are nowhere to be seen. Jobs are lost -- much faster than rising exports plus substition of domestic for imported products offsets with new jobs. Loss of jobs and rising interest rates punctures the housing bubble. Residential construction drops sharply. Recession, which deepens as the above plays out. Recession obvious by April 2005. Bush gets more aggressive internationally (Wag The Dog) as his approval ratings plummet. World-wide economic troubles deepen as USA engine parks.
Re: [PEN-L] Growing Chinese economic influence
Yes. Extraordinary Only a few days ago we heard of the export of Chinese capital to Argentina Now to England. Partly a sign of their rising ascendancy in many ways, partly in the short term for exchange rate reasons they cannot get rid of capital fast enough. But being Chinese, they will probably get the best possible price for it. The interest payments over the next five years are completely unimportant to them on this sum. It may take three to five years to see what they do with the technology and the brand name of MG Rover. But my guess is that it is not in their interests to close the Birmingham base of Rover. One of the key things the Chinese economy needs at the moment is brand names that can penetrate the west. Even a tarnished brand name like Rover, may be better for motor vehicles than something like Butterfly This is all about shuffling around capital measured not just in millions but in billions, and ultimately in trillions. To cut through the arguments about whether there is any progressive particle of hope left in China, let us say that from one dialectical point of view the Chinese regime is possibly the largest, certainly the most aggressive, finance capitalist corporation in the world. Probably with a smoother life expectancy than the Murdoch corporation over the next ten years, and proven ability to outmanouevre someone like George Soros. Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, November 20, 2004 3:55 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Growing Chinese economic influence The Independent, 20 November 2004 Saved: Chinese bail out Rover for £1bn By Michael Harrison Business Editor MG Rover, the last remaining British-owned volume car-maker, is set to be rescued with the help of more than £1bn of Chinese cash. But the agreement with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), which is due to be signed early next year, will mean that control of the Longbridge-based motor manufacturer will pass out of British hands. A new joint-venture company will design, develop and produce cars. It will be 70 per cent owned by the Chinese and 30 per cent by MG Rover. The deal comes as MG Rover's financial plight worsens. Its losses this year are expected to be more than £100m and its share of UK car sales has slumped to an all-time low of under 3 per cent. Huge damage has been done to the brand by accusations of boardroom greed and asset-stripping levelled at the four Midlands businessmen who bought it from BMW four years ago for a symbolic £10. Last week, a senior BMW executive called them the unacceptable face of capitalism. There will be separate British and Chinese companies to manufacture the new models in Birmingham and Shanghai but the key assets and intellectual property rights of the two car-makers will be contained in the Chinese-controlled joint venture. full: http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=584777 === NY Times, November 20, 2004 China Widens Economic Role in Latin America By LARRY ROHTER SANTIAGO, Chile, Nov. 19 - The expected arrival here on Friday of President Bush, who personifies for Latin Americans the economic and political power of Washington, is being greeted with an uneasy mix of protests and hopes for greater growth. But while the United States may still regard the region as its backyard, its dominance is no longer unquestioned. Suddenly, the presence of China can be felt everywhere, from the backwaters of the Amazon to mining camps in the Andes. Driven by one the largest and most sustained economic expansions in history, and facing bottlenecks and shortages in Asia, China is increasingly turning to South America as a supplier. It is busy buying huge quantities of iron ore, bauxite, soybeans, timber, zinc and manganese in Brazil. It is vying for tin in Bolivia, oil in Venezuela and copper here in Chile, where last month it displaced the United States as the leading market for Chilean exports. While President Bush is spending the weekend here for the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, President Hu Jintao of China is here in the midst of a two-week visit to Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Cuba. In the course of it, he has announced more than $30 billion in new investments and signed long-term contracts that will guarantee China supplies of the vital materials it needs for its factories. full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/20/international/asia/20china.html -- Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: [PEN-L] Growing Chinese economic influence
Oh dear, I wondered if the phrase gave hostages to fortune. But I thought the context made clear that I assumed the Chinese had long term strategic goals in mind rather than quick profits by way of asset stripping etc. I did add The interest payments over the next five years are completely unimportant to them on this sum. I was referring to what I thought was the widely held perception that the Chinese may expect negotiations to go on a long time and to be entirely satisfactory to them, before confirming. The news releases in Britain about this deal note as inevitable that the company will pass wholly into Chinese hands. No I do not think they are money grubbing about this. I think they are operating in a world in which they know the rules are ones of control by large blocks of finance capitalism over workers, resources and markets. Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Marvin Gandall [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 21, 2004 5:23 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Growing Chinese economic influence James Devine: Chris writes: But being Chinese, they will probably get the best possible price for it. is this a genetic predisposition that you're positing? or is it cultural? Are Chinese more money-grubbing than others? JD - Well, the Jews and the Scots have also been prominently mentioned. :) I'm still looking to meet the capitalist - of any nationality - who doesn't want to get the best possible price for his or her product, or the worker who doesn't want to get the same for his or her labour. MG
Re: [PEN-L] in hock to the Chinese
My sense too. I do not deny the importance of Martin's question The issue here is whether Chinese workers are benefiting from this ongoing shift to a foreign driven export led growth model. But in terms of geo-politics this looks like a pivotal moment. The Chinese have still a unified power system, however you define it in class terms, and they can coordinate how they deploy the capital at their disposal on a massive scale. It is highly debatable, to say the least, that it is even a form of socialism, but in terms of capital being ultimately a social relation, this is monopoly finance capital being wielded on a world scale against the hegemonism of the US, very cunningly. I cannot see how the US can escape the snare. The Chinese can be quite sophisticated in how they tweak the noose very occasionally, eg with the sudden absence of bond buyers in the market, studiously NOT connected with any public policy comment. Whether it ultimately provides conditions for a more socialist world and the overthrow of the power of capital as dead labour, will be highly contested territory. Chris Burford London - Original Message - From: Max B. Sawicky [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 2:06 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] in hock to the Chinese Marty's comments are all well-taken, but I think he understates a tad the Chinese advantage. Yes the Chinese need to sell into the U.S., but in this vein they are riding the wave of free- trade policy originating in the U.S., plus the U.S. appetite for imports. At the same time they can diddle with their holdings and purchases of U.S. Gov bonds under no restrictions. I would say in this way they have fingertip control of interest rate deviations. They don't have to cause any large change or suffer from it. All they have to do is jiggle the table a bit to neutralize any annoying U.S. overtures. Between this and North Korea, it looks like they have Bush by the short hairs. mbs -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Martin Hart-Landsberg Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 6:57 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] in hock to the Chinese
Re: [PEN-L] on the subject of China
Yes CNN are just running an interview with Lagos of Chile, following the signing of an agreement with China. I could not quite understand what was being said about APEC. At first it seems intuitively strange to think of a free trade area, even one that takes 20 years to develop that actually straddles the Pacific. South East Asia, yes, but across the Pacific ...? Yet here in this clip below is further evidence that China is planting its feet strategically in Latin America. To outflank the USA? To start to add a few more threads around the web in which the fly has already been caught? After all, if China is trying to get rid of capital, in order to keep the exchange rate of the yuan low, it only has to have a relatively benign official public policy, to start investing in Latin America, as conscientiously as the British did in the 19th century, quietly to build up a dominant stakeholding over a decade or two. How could the USA object to this pleasant offer below that the poor Chinese will generously help tourism and rail travel in Argentina? Chris Burford London - Original Message - From: Anthony D'Costa [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 17, 2004 10:48 PM Subject: [PEN-L] on the subject of China China to invest $20 billion in Argentina Wednesday, November 17,2004 BUENOS AIRES: China's President Hu Jintao and Argentine President Nestor Kirchner signed cooperation agreements as Chinese companies pledged investments of 20 billion dollars. Chinese companies would develop railway and aerospace projects and send tourists to the South American country on holiday packages. The goals will be to strengthen strategic cooperation and continue the firm reciprocal support in terms of sovereignty, such as the territorial integrity of both countries, Hu said through an interpreter. Lo Fong Hung, chief executive of the China Construction Bureau, said during a ceremony that 20 billion dollars would be invested in Argentina. Some eight billion dollars would finance urban and interurban railways and five billion dollars would be invested in fossil fuels over five years, according to Argentine officials. Another six billion would build 300,000 homes and other infrastructure projects, such as 450 million in communications and 260 million in satellite technology. Welcomed by dozens of children waving the two countries' flags at Buenos Aires airport, Hu and his official delegation took a 50-car convoy into the capital ahead of meeting Kirchner. Argentina laid out maximum civilian and military honors for the visit with a cavalry guard escorting Hu and his wife, Liu Yongqing to the government headquarters. Hu has sought to use this Latin American tour -- ahead of a major Asia-Pacific leaders' summit in Santiago this week -- to extend China's economic reach in the region. Argentina has been desperate to attract new investment since its spectacular default on its foreign debt in 2001. Hu said the accords were intended to strengthen strategic cooperation. The two governments are going to stimulate enterprises to increase initiatives in the agro-food, industrial, mining and infrastructure sectors, said the Chinese leader after signing the accord. One poll published Tuesday said 78 percent of Argentines believe the economic agreements will be important to help Argentina's efforts to escape its economic crisis. In Brazil, where he spent five days, Hu secured recognition from the government that China is a market economy which helps its case in international anti-dumping disputes. In exchange, Brazil obtained greater access to the Chinese market for its beef and poultry industry, as well as a 200 million dollar order for at least 10 Embraer airplanes. Hu was expected to seek the same concession from Argentina. As in Brazil this has caused concern in Argentina that such a move could weaken Argentina's defenses against a flood of Chinese goods. It is impossible to compete with China equally, said Aldo Karagosian, who heads Argentina's textile industry federation. We fear an avalanche of Chinese products. On Wednesday, Hu will meet the Supreme Court president and the mayor of Buenos Aires before heading to San Carlos de Bariloche in the foothills of the Patagonian Andes for a private visit. Hu will leave Argentina on Thursday for the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Santiago. Trade between China and Argentina reached 2.6 billion dollars between January-October. But it favored Argentina whose exports reached 2.1 billion dollars -- more than 80 percent of that in soy exports. http://www.southasianmedia.net/index_story.cfm?id=161617category=FrontendCountry=world# AFP | REUTERS | xxx Anthony P. D'Costa, Professor Comparative International Development South Asian and International Studies Programs University of WashingtonCampus Box 358436 1900 Commerce Street Tacoma, WA
Re: [PEN-L] Sam Smith on bad times
wheels will be dropping off within two years, not just four. I think there will be a price for the support from the rest of the world. I mean it's not just about the time frame, it's about somehow some changes in the nature of politics that hopefully are more fundamental than which president is in office. Chris Burford - Original Message - From: Carl Remick [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 3:46 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Sam Smith on bad times I remember how bleak the world looked at the time of Nixon's second inaugural, when the prospect of Four More Years! seemed the curse of the ages. Then, presto, in no time at all the wheels started to come off the Nixon presidency with the advent of Watergate. Likewise, GWB's second term doesn't signal the start of any thousand-year reich. I have a sure sense that this second term will spell finis for the conservative ascendancy that started in the late '70s. However content Americans may be to live in a fantasy world, the rest of the planet simply will not continue to support our self-indulgence -- in areas ranging from Mideast policy to the US external debt -- as it has until now. GWB's mandate-driven second term will be exceptionally unpleasant for progressives in the U.S., but there's no question that the mass of Americans will be in the mood for something completely different in four years. There are great opportunities for the left ahead if the left prepares for them. Carl
