But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence,
they were gathered together. Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him
a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment
in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
And what was your point?
This song don't have a video
So you'll just have to listen
Focus on the audio,
The visual is missin',
How am I gonna get it
Is probably what you're thinking
Your ears aren't tuned for singing
Without watching lip synching
This song don't have a video,
You'll have to pay
HI Mike,
Thanks for all the back-handed compliments. ;D And
special thanks to Jurriaan for putting in excellent,
skilled labour time in answering some of the questions
which I've posed, most lately, the one about Fidel's
comment on unequal exchange.
Well of course we can talk about Marx's
Suppose that Bushies loved Saddam Hussein as they love themselves and their
own country, what sort of love would it be ?
J.
Castro's aim is what the primary aim has _always_
been in almost _all_ of his speeches, even those nominally addressed to
the U.N. or other audience of rulers or their representatives -- he is
aiming at creating solidarity among the victims of imperialism. The
premise is (as it has always
Mike asked:
I can see how an employer can profit from selling the
commodities her workers produce for wages. I'm afraid
I'm ignorant about how one State can expoit another
State through purchasing. Is China now exploiting the
USA because it buys less than it sells to the US?
Unequal
I wrote:
In the meantime, wise men which consult about how to continue the system of
exploitation for the long haul.
It should be:
In the meantime, wise men will consult about how to continue the system of
exploitation for the long haul.
J.
You might ask, how can we empirically verify that unequal exchange has
occurred ? Of course, economists who think in the spirit of Marx don't just
want theory or moral diatribes, they want empirical evidence. Well, there
are at least six good indicators of unequal exchange in price terms:
(1) the
Amin's and many Indian Marxists' writings on
unequal exchange.
Anwar Shaikh, The theory of international exchange, article in Jesse
Schwartz, The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism
Ahmet Tonak
Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
I wrote:
In the meantime, wise men which consult about how to continue
There are forms of abuse that are a lot worse than child abuse.
J.
Das Kapital Vol. 1 came out on 14 September 1867 in an edition of 1,000
copies, priced at 3 Taler and 10 groschen per copy.
J.
I think he said it in The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural
History. N.Y.: Norton, 1980, but I'm not absolutely sure. By very strange
coincidence, on the day he died, I was on a a visit at my mother's, and the
place she arranged me to stay at had a bookcase which, apart from a lot of
old
SAMAWA, IRAQ - While US troops face a guerrilla war that coalition officials
fear will continue despite Saddam Hussein's capture, in the less-volatile
south, a battalion of Dutch marines is employing softer tactics to prevent
resistance from forming.
Not one attack against coalition forces has
They (i.e. The European Union) purchased some $500 million from us, and we
purchased more than $1,500 million from them. Conservatively estimating the
profits that they obtained from that unequal exchange, they received from
Cuba no less than $400 million in profits
President Fidel Castro of
I think that what balancing the budget illustrates very nicely is that
economics is not just a technical problem of economics, but a moral and
political problem, which must inescapably refer to an ethics which isn't
objective but partisan. When you have to cut costs and expenditures, and
increase
Amsterdam has an image of tolerance, built up over the centuries, as
refugees from religious strife and ethnic persecution found a haven here,
and sailors brought the latest trends to the city from their travels across
the seven seas. We don't have a statue of liberty to prove it, but there's a
I wrote:
qualified labour is often better able to negotiate higher wages because of
its indispensability.
If you look at the DoL data, you'll see that the US official unemployment
rate is highest for construction workers and production workers, and lowest
for managerial and professional workers.
The Amsterdam district councils are less and less successful in spending
their money. The total reserves in five years increased by more than a
hundred million euro, to a good 430 million euro in 2002. Especially money
earmarked for education and the reparation of school buildings remains
unspent
Well, I'm sad that you're unsubscribing. We might spar over particular
issues, but I don't forget whose side you're on.
Have a good one,
J.
I quoted Powell as follows:
His On War, written 106 years before I was born, was light a beam of light
from the
past, still illuminating present-day military quandaries.
That should be like a beam of light. I ought to spellcheck the message
before I send it I suppose.
J.
Hi Joanna,
You accuse me of being an FBI agent and then you say that you don't
forget whose side I'm on???
I didn't accuse you of being an FBI agent at all, so that is mistake number
one. Specifically, what I wrote to you offlist, responding to your own
comment to me in person that you had
the use of the word bosses for elected officials suggests that the LA
TIMES is turning further against the locked-out and strikers...
Couldn't that situation be turned around ? Editors and journalists are human
beings too :-)
J.
I do not think that it would be a good idea for an international trial of
Hussein.
I agree. Likewise, I think that Milosovic should stand trial in his own
country - the trial in the Hague is another one of those racist middleclass
shams that waste a lot of breath and taxpayer's money. The same
I wrote previously:
depreciation schedules implemented are crucial for the amount of
distributed and undistributed profits.
Yesterday I was looking at the most recent detailed US IRD and NIPA data,
which I hadn't done before, and I noticed this fact is actually acknowledged
in the NIPA
Given that the US citizenry nor Congress is going to impeach the Bushies
for said violations of international law, do you favor an international
trial for them?
Well, I think the American people should trial their own rulers for their
crimes, and not just because international law and
The NYT reported today:
Mr. Bush's approval rating jumped to 58 percent after Mr. Hussein was
captured, from 52 percent, and the number of Americans who disapproved of
his performance fell to 33 percent, from 40 percent.
This is moronic melodrama. What does the capture of Hussein have to do with
Tadeusz (Tad) Witold Szulc (pronounced Shultz) was born in Warsaw on July
25, 1926, the son of Seweryn and Janina Baruch Szulc. His parents left
Poland for Brazil in the mid-1930's, but kept Tadeusz in a Swiss boarding
school, Le Rosey. He rejoined his family in 1941, and studied at the
What's tougher than that is to be able to stop thinking while remaining
conscious and highly sensitive. (not claiming to have achieved that
myself...)
That's true. A lot of Buddhist-type spiritual culture is about that, about
clearing the mind of thoughts that bedevil it. I suppose mental
Hi Joanna,
You wrote: Using thought to choose a lover or determine how we interact
with our friends or our children is not appropriate.
I couldn't disagree more strongly with you there, that's boring, and I guess
that's why you and I are incompatible, but I suppose it depends what you
mean by
I sent the original message in this
thread, asking for help with a problem raised by Sweezy, and look where
it's
come to.
As regards monopolisation, Ernest Mandel gave an orthodox Marxist reply to
Sweezy in a number of articles and books. For the empirical data, see
www.euromonitor.com, they
It has to do with the connection between the accumulation of capital
ascribable to the creation of surplus value on one side, and the cascading
mountainous accretion of debt instruments on the other, the whole
multi-trillion dollar financial complex. How, basically, do the two
connect
in a
I thought we could generate a million dollars for the company and reach a
million people with the extraordinary story of Playboy and its impact on the
world of literature, design, ideas and art, says Christie Hefner, chairman
and CEO of Playboy Enterprises, the founder's daughter. We know we have
Dutch troops in Iraq will be relieved in January and the replacement troops
will start transferring power to the Iraqis in March. The troops will
gradually withdraw from cities and villages. They are currently carrying out
patrols, engaged in the provision of armed escorts to convoys or manning
Saddam Hussein should be trialed in Iraq, said Minister Bot of Foreign
Affairs on Sunday, in response to the arrest of the former dictator.
Trialing by an international tribunal would give a wrong signal towards
Iraq. Iraqi's had indicated that they want to handle things themselves, said
the
Hi Ralph,
I think that Marxists have a certain defensiveness about Keynes: we
mustn't
take seriously a bourgeois thinker because it may infect us and we may
turn
out to be revisionists without wanting to be, you know.
Well, I think the nature of the thing is that many people who read Das
FWIW, Christie Hefner graduated from my high school when I graduated (and
Hugh showed up at our graduation), though she was known as Christie Gunn
back then and I didn't know her very well. She changed her last name to her
biological father's and then got the big money.
Amazing. I didn't know
Hi Ken,
You wrote:
Playboy deserves a rightful place in Yanqui social liberation history. The
interviews were remarkable. As a lad, I was obviously attracted because of
beautiful females. And we males can't help that, being hard wired as such.
But there were these incredibly intelligent
The Fidel Castro article I referred to was actually by Fernando Morais, in
Penthouse, December 1978 issue (a collector's item these days). Tad Szulc
wrote mainly on American subversion of foreign governments as I recall,
although he later also published a biography of Castro. Oui magazine also
What a story...
It hurts, but it will be worth it to be
taller. I'll have more opportunities in life and a better chance of
finding a good job and husband.
It isn't even true, in my experience.
J.
Paul or someone on the list...do you mean by
unproductive labour, that labour which does not produce
a profit for an employer of wage-labour?
In the capitalist mode of production, labour is productive if it directly
participates in the production of use-values as commodities which, upon
sale,
a capitalist might figure that so and so
much amount of fixed capital depreciates into so and
so many commodities over say five years and then the
piece of fixed capital is replaced. But what happens
when the technological advance is so rapid that the
old calculation is off by years?
In the non-short run, fixed capital isn't even fixedit's as
malleable as wax, just like the institutions that make 'it' what 'it' is.
For accounting purposes, fixed capital is normally defined as tangible
durable assets held for one year or more. For Marx, the distinction between
I suspect that the measurement of profit rates is a very, very inexact
exercise, because the denominator cannot be measured.
I believe this is a mistake. Of course it can be measured, but not very
accurately. But only an empiricist believes in perfect data. The rest of
us understand more about
We need a philosopher to invent some adequate concept for the
below...somehow, fetishism doesn't quite cover it. Perhaps, it is
just that academics are finally getting around to prostituting entities
more appropriate to prostitution. Who knows. I become nostalgic for
those days when we
If this is the level of analysis and knowledge displayed in the rest of
the book, then I wouldn't waste my time reading the book. It suggests a
profound ignorance of Balkan history and the politico-economic basis of
the ethnic divisions that resulted and which were fanned, not by
democracy
Review of: Catherine Blackledge, The Story of V: Opening Pandora's Box
(London: Weidenfeld Nicholson, 2003), 322 pp.
What in heaven's name is this book about, and why would anybody buy it ?
Does it make sense, or is it a fuck-up ? What is V, is it the 21st letter
in the alfabet, or a Latin
Typo. A bit blurry I guess. I wrote:
Anthropology texts from the early twentieth century detail
how among the Ashanti of Ghana, and in Afghanistan, an adulteress was
chastised by the serving of her nose,
serving should be severing.
J.
I am withdrawing from this list.
J.
An interesting point about the CIA role in this coup was that, as in
Indonesia in 1965, the Agency was instrumental in supplying the names
of the Communists to be eliminated. This has been confirmed by
different sources. For example, Qasim's foreign minister later told
two analysts that 'the
Hey Jude, don't make it bad.
Take a sad song, and make it better.
Remember, to let her into your heart,
Then you can start, to make it better.
Hey Jude, don't be afraid.
You were made to go out and get her.
The minute, you let her under your skin,
Then you begin, to make it better.
And anytime
Machine out to erase green guilt
Friday 05 December 2003, 14:54 Makka Time, 11:54 GMT
Erasing machine uses heat treatment to remove words and images
It may not be the paperless office many once thought possible, but it may be
the next best thing. With Toshiba Corp's new erasable ink, the green
There are many different sides to me, and my life consisted of phases which
differed markedly from each other... I always moved about in the light and
supple way. I could walk easily and quickly until I was 70. I could do
everything fast and I organised my life in such a way, that everything was
As you say, tranlating the bourgeois stats into Marxian
categories takes lots of work; why spend all that time crunching
numbers when you could better spend it by thinking politically?
I really do think it's important that some people do crunch the numbers,
since, to get an objective picture,
I personally think Jews, like anybody else, should have the right to
emigrate anywhere, provided that they honour the rights and
obligations/duties this involves, on the basis of clear knowledge, so they
know what they're getting themselves involved in. But personally I am not a
Jew and don't
If Pogrebin were to apply the logic of affirmative action -- positive
discrimination in favor of the oppressed to bring about equality --
to Israel, she ought to reverse her argument, defending the
Palestinian refugees' right of return while advocating taking in only
Jews who are actually
Hi Mike,
I wrote that:
In a socialist society, the allocation of human labour-time in the economy,
required to sustain and develop human life, would be evaluated and decided
upon according to (1) whether the labour promotes an increase in real
material wealth, (2) whether it is socially useful,
They're for free trade if it works politically and they're for
protectionism if it works politically, he said.
- Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategic Institute, on the
Bush administration's trade policy.
Source:
Okay, so...
At the moment we do not have agreement, but we have informed the
Governing Council we intend to sign an agreement which allows
coalition forces to continue to help Iraq to defend itself and to
defend itself against former regime members after July 1.
Here Bremer is saying nothing
My life has been so much of a public one, that any review of it must mainly
consist of the agency which was my lot in public transactions.
Letter of James Madison to James Robertson, April 20, 1831
In explanation of my microscopic writing, I must remark that the older I
grow the more my
Trotsky's commitment to the anti-market philosophy of war communism became
even more apparent following his appointment in March 1920 as Commissar of
Transport. The transport system was both vital to the recovery of the
Russian economy and in a parlous condition. When Trotsky took over
I need a holiday.
J.
- Original Message -
From: Mike Ballard [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Saturday, December 06, 2003 11:16 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Productive labour - reply to Jim
--- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
In a socialist society, the allocation
This controversy was covered on OPE-L. I think the question for Marxian
social accounting here is whether the wages of unproductive labour, assuming
we can define and isolate the relevant labour costs involved, derive
directly from the sales of new net output in the current accounting period,
Its not just Marxist but a Marxist Classical concept: investment
drives the economy; expectation of future profit drives investment;
current
profit rates *help* drive those expectations (all this in the 'long
run'). Hence the big focus on profit rates.
You are partly correct I think, but
Thank you for that reference.
J.
In the United States, in the last survey year, 1998, the richest 1 percent
of households owned 38 percent of all wealth. (...) the level of wealth
inequality today is almost double what it was in the mid-1970s. (...) The
top 5 percent own more than half of all wealth. In 1998, they owned 59
Mark Perlman has a wonderful account of Kuznets and the creation of
national accounts in the US
Would this be Mark Perlman, The Character of Economic Thought, Economic
Characters, and Economic Institutions ?
J.
Jim,
You wrote:
The question is whether Marx's concept is _useful_ for understanding the
world. I'm not convinced that it is. My presumption is that it isn't.
Well, I didn't have much success today myself, but at least I tracked down
something I lost. But just a quick comment on the conceptual
Yes, a very interesting person.
And I'm a dork ?
Kozo Uno makes the additional point that work is not naturally productive,
both in the sense that it takes work to make work productive, and that
productive work depends on tools and techniques to be productive. Thus, he
seeks to distinguish between a transhistorical concept of productive labour,
The NYT today stated: Iraqi census officials devised a detailed plan to
count the country's entire population next summer and prepare a voter roll
that would open the way to national elections in September. But American
officials say they rejected the idea, and the Iraqi Governing Council
members
Yep, I passed it, but as regards this blog you post, in my opinion is shows
only the moral and scientific understanding of an ant. In which case you'd
have to recommend a track from Adam and the Ants.
J.
- Original Message -
From: Max B. Sawicky [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I wrote:
...future exploitation is best left to specialists.
That should of course be ...future exploitation is best left to specialists,
and what the specialists actually do, should be shrouded in ultimate
mystery, authority must have its mystique. For example, a war is fought in
Iraq. Why is
I wrote:
But if you should win in the sphere of love, you might be able to take back
everything that has been thieved from you, a sort of redemption,...
I should add of course that this magnificently imaginative social vision is
also predicated on the social-structural reality of competition:
(well normally a kidney weighs less than a pound)
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F064D8EE-4834-44A1-9B0C-29E88432E788.
htm
I have possess'd your grace of what I purpose;
And by our holy Sabbath have I sworn
To have the due and forfeit of my bond:
If you deny it, let the danger light
Upon
to grad school together -- and he is
REALLY smart, very learned, and very sympathetic to
sensible socialist projects. Blow him off at your
peril. He's an _ally_. Cherish people like him! jks
--- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Yep, I passed it, but as regards this blog you post
For example, I am not as deeply in love with Marxian
theory of value as Jurriaan is, nor I am as deeply in
love with contract theory as who knows whom?
It makes absolutely no sense for a socialist to be in love with a theory,
because a theory is only a means to an end.
The only thing I can
Robert asks:
Would you give the citation for these?
There's a good paper at http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/staff/wkolsen/ahe2002/GT1.docalthough
how appealing Californians would find the notion of "grounded theory" I do not
know.
I was born in a cross-fire hurricane And I
howled, at my ma in the
The NYT reported today as follows: The increase in productivity -- the
amount an employee produces per hour of work -- reported by the Labor
Department on Wednesday was even stronger than the 8.1 percent pace
initially estimated for the July-to-September quarter a month ago and was up
from a 7
(K-K')/K should be (K'-K)/K. Typo, I didn't put the dash in correctly
(obviously this refers to the rate of accumulation expressed as the growth
in the value of the capital stock in real terms, rather than the rate of
reinvestment of realised surplus-value, and not the nelimination of the Klux
Stop building prisons and other pyramids of sacrifice but concentrate on
improving the social fabric of California, using the best technology to do
it. This may sound simplistic, but a budget has two main features: incomes
and expenditures, and balancing the budget means increasing incomes and
Couldn't they ask Baba, Helena and Genro to come up with an alternative
proposal ?
J.
- Original Message -
From: Mario José de Lima [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 7:49 PM
Subject: [PEN-L] Brazilian radicals under threat
What these cuts are about is forcing the liberals to defend the weakest
-- which constituency Arnold doesn't really want to cut because it would
be bad politically. Arnold wants the liberals to spend time and money
protecting something he really can't destroy, so that they have to give
in to
Will you be overwhelmed by foreign businesses ? The answer depends on
you... Only the best of you will survive.
- Michael Fleisher, the Coalition Provisional Authority's head of private
sector development,
Perhaps another way of looking at it is this: why lend money to build
gigantic prisons, when you could lend money to put people who are likely to
commit criminal activities into jobs, that generate new income and tax
revenue and thus help balance the budget ? I mean if you pauperise people so
that
Well the situation drove me crazy today, I couldn't find a page of a
bibliography either, and lost a key trying to find it in my attic, didn't
get done what I wanted to get done, in the end lost my temper and headbutted
the kitchen cupboard, and kicked against the righthand kitchen drawer, so
the
piece in the Sept. 2003 edition of Monthly
Review http://www.monthlyreview.org/0903vogel.htm.
Seth Sandronsky
Re: threatened cut-backs for the disabled in California
by Jurriaan Bendien
03 December 2003
Perhaps another way of looking at it is this: why lend money to build
gigantic
As Business Week editorialized sometime around 1947 (and I'm
paraphrasing a bit), government spending on the military reinforces
existing hierarchies, while social spending undermines them. Ditto
prisons.
Hi Doug, hope things are working out. I'm not against all hierarchy, you
know, the
(Previously I have mentioned gated communities in the USA, which is of
course a much more extreme assertion of boundaries. In talking about
Rotterdam, I didn't get my facts quite right yesterday though - apologies -
the cutoff point for residence is actually said to be 20 percent above the
minimum
My own situation supports Ahmed's interpretation of the academic market
for left economists. Here at Chico, my application had been passed over
by the faculty. I guess it was sort of flippant.
I a really surprised at that, because, beyond a bit of humour, you're
basically not a flippant
Sharing a vision: Palestinian Christians
By Khalid Amayreh in West Bank
Sunday 30 November 2003, 19:43 Makka Time, 16:43 GMT
The Israeli policy of divide and conquer has not split Christian and Muslim
Palestinians despite attempts to sow discord between the two communities.
According to
Konrad Adenauer, the first post-war West german leader has been chosen by TV
watchers as the greatest German in the ZDF-show called Unsere Besten. When
3,2 million Germans voted in the finals, he beat Martin Luther (second) and
Karl Marx (third). The ZDF-show was ridiculed by some, but the
AMSTERDAM - Faced with a community backlash against ethnic crime and
headline-stealing violence, Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner has in
principle backed the idea of sentencing immigrants who commit crime
differently than Dutch nationals.
But the conservative Christian Democrat CDA minister
Showing a breast in the parliament grounds, flshing a V sign and holding a
miniature doll image of herself, Cicciolina was on the campaign trail in The
Hague, although the theme was a bit blurry beyond her comment that she was
against a too tame approach in Ducth politics. We're giving a bit of
Marriage has changed more in roles and function in the last 30 years than
in the last 3,000, says historian Stephanie Coontz of the Evergreen State
College in Olympia, Wash. Coontz is writing a book on the history of
marriage. She says efforts to focus on traditional religious views of
marriage
01] GREECE HAS THE LOWEST CRIME RATE IN EUROPE Athens, 8 November 2003
(15:27 UTC+2)
Greece has the lowest crime rate of all EU countries, according to research
on crime rates in community countries, however, Greeks are the most insecure
and in greatest fear of crime of all other peoples in
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storycid=568ncid=749e=7u=/nm/bs_nm
/markets_stocks_dc
See further: http://www.drudgereport.com/
I have no brief for Soros. I don't see why he's relevant here. He seems to
represent simply a different fraction of the capitalist class than the one
that's currently dominant.
Haven't got time to deal with this in detail, but obviously for Soros money
isn't the root of all evil. That provides a
To be honest, my mathematical ability really isn't that great, I got no
further than Calculus at high school, wagging a few classes, and basic
analysis of variance and basic time series analysis at university, for the
rest I am an intuitionist. My father was a good mathematician, but he got
Louis wrote:
What's missing from all the happy talk is any engagement with the real
lives of real people.
I agree, I guess I will stop writing and do more things not related to
sitting behind the PC. It's just that I got hooked on the PC but I am really
better off attending to other, more
The Rotterdam city council delta plan prescribes a tough policy. It will
tackle the city's ethnic 'problem' districts by setting lower income limits
for people wanting to take up residence in Rotterdam (it has been agreed you
must earn 25% above the minimum personal income and have a job, I think
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