Thatcher and nationalism
Brad de Long wrote: Nationalist militarism is truly a powerful and insidious poison. One need only study the ends to which the entire Falklands debacle was used by Margaret Thatcher herself. Prior to the invasion (which, incidentally, was known of for months in advance by MI6 and the FCO) the British government was ideologically committed to spending cuts across the board (some more than others, of course -- the first thing Thatcher did on coming to power, prior to her assault on labour, was to raise the salaries of the police, judiciary and military). In order to pay for the monstrously expensive Trident missiles, cuts were being made elsewhere in the military budget, including the planned sale of battle cruiser HMS Invincible to the Australians. How convenient, then, that the hapless Galtieri should provide the perfect excuse to cancel these cuts, and in so doing allow Thatcher to ride to an otherwise impossible election victory in 1983 on the back of some of the most sickening gung ho imperialistic nationalism witnessed since 1945. Obituaries for the recently deceased Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, reminded everyone of Thatcher's fury at his reconciliatory prayers for the Argentine dead at Westminster Abbey. The needless slaughter of the conscripts (poorly trained, hardly willing participants) who were on board the Belgrano, outside the exclusion zone and sailing AWAY from it, was also given the go-ahead by Thatcher herself -- an order that took years to establish, despite the supposed sovereignty of the British parliament. It was only thanks to the persistence of one MP, Tam Dalyell, and a brave civil servant, Clive Ponting, who, believing that his duty was to Parliament, leaked the information to Dalyell. Thatcher subsequently passed legislation changing the employment conditions of civil servants, thereby swearing them to secrecy. When most of us outside of Argentina look at the Junta's early 1980s war to conquer the Malvinas Islands, we see it as analogous to Indonesia's occupation of East Timor: not a "just war" but a most unjust war. Fair enough. Few could condone the actions of the desperate Galtieri junta. But, given that the UK govt had plenty of advance warning over his planned invasion, the war was not only unjust, but wholly unnecessary. The Thatcher govt is as implicated for having allowed it to happen at all. Michael K.
Aux armes citoyens! (was A slight advantage of poverty)
From Brad to Nestor: No, we wouldn't. We wouldn't particularly in a semicolony such as Argentina, where the deeds of those you call "nationalist- militaristic" were in fact deeds effected during a revolutionary war, a war that carried the flags of the most modern ideas in the times against absolutism, the remnants of feudalism, slavery and the bondage of the Indians. So does the iconography of the square focus on the triumph of liberty? Is it like the Place of the Bastille, or the Lincoln Memorial, or the 55th Massachusetts Memorial on Boston Common? From your description it would seem not: that the lesson taught is not that it is good to fight for liberty but that it is good to die to protect your hierarchical superiors. The cause memorialized is just--but the nationalist-militarist iconography seems destructive. Brad DeLong, off to read Barbara Ehrenreich's _Blood Rites_ Here's a song for lovers of liberty: La Marseillaise. Militant patriotism at its most full-blooded. Nestor's description of an Argentine nationalist icon sounds serene, with its sense of duty to patria fulfilled, in comparison to La Marseillaise. Allons enfants de la Patrie Le jour de gloire est arrivé. Contre nous, de la tyrannie, L'étandard sanglant est levé, l'étandard sanglant est levé, Entendez-vous, dans la compagnes. Mugir ces farouches soldats Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes. [Let us go, children of the fatherland Our day of Glory has arrived. Against us stands tyranny, The bloody flag is raised, The bloody flag is raised. Do you hear in the countryside The roar of these savage soldiers They come right into our arms To cut the throats of your sons, your country.] Aux armes citoyens! Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons. [To arms, citizens! Form up your battalions Let us march, Let us march! That their impure blood Should water our fields] Amour sacré de la Patrie, Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs, Liberté, liberté cherie, Combats avec tes defénseurs; Combats avec tes défenseurs. Sous drapeaux, que la victoire Acoure à tes mâles accents; Que tes ennemis expirants Voient ton triomphe et notre gloire! [Sacred love of the fatherland Guide and support our vengeful arms. Liberty, beloved liberty, Fight with your defenders; Fight with your defenders. Under our flags, so that victory Will rush to your manly strains; That your dying enemies Should see your triumph and glory] Aux armes citoyens! Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/marseill.html Yoshie
Re: Re: A slight advantage of poverty (was Re: Random thoughts on BigBrother, adv
So as I said back at the beginning of this: it's much better to have a square filled with banners from supermarkets competing to sell you better food cheaper than one filled with statues teaching that dulce et decorum pro patria mori... Most country towns in Australia have a park where the town square used to be - a few young folk lie on the grass and nibble a little face by a statue (sometimes) of a muddy old private and a modest plaque (always) with the names of the town's war dead on it - the whole cycle, really, and none of it very rabid. Anyway, the choice for urban focii ain't one between supermarket banners and exhortations to rabid nationalism, Brad. And those supermarkets of yours might offer larger ranges than ever before, some even at lower prices than before, but none of the 'fresh' food is better than it used to be. None. I used to think it was my ageing taste buds, or maybe my smoking, but it ain't. It was simply that I ate out of supermarkets. Now I eat stuff where but one pair of hands gets between the ground and my gob, and that's because the food is much, much better (just not always prettier). And not dearer either, interestingly enough. The increase in choice seems to derive more from the assortment of peoples who live around these parts these days. The rest of the 'choice' is between brands, and I can do without that, meself. So can we all. Cheers, Rob.
Re: Hume the Postmodern Grin without a Cat (was Re: pomoistas)
One thing that always struck me is that second-generation postmodernists ( later models) seldom exhibit any familiarity with primary philosophical texts (Plato, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, etc.) on which first-generation postmodernists -- Derrida Co. -- make endless marginal comments. That said, Hume has been seldom commented upon by first-generation postmodernists, even though Hume probably stands the closest to the postmodern worldview, especially his combination of the Separability Principle the Conceivability Principle, which leads to the reification of perceptions (in the postmodern case the reification of discourse) Yoshie from Louise M. Antony, "Quine as Feminist: The Radical Import of Naturalized Epistemology, in Antony Charlotte Witt, eds., _A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason Objectivity_, Boulder: Westview Press, 1993, pp. 185-225: "...if one of the defining themes of the modern period was the search for an externalist justification of epistemic practice, then Hume must be acknowledged to be the first postmodernist. Hume, an empiricist's empiricist, discovered a fatal flaw in his particular proposal for justifying human epistemic practice. He realized that belief in the principle of induction - the principle that says that the future will resemble the past or that similar things will behave similarly - could not be rationally justified. It was clearly not a truth of reason, since its denial was not self-contradictory. But neither could it be justified by experience: Any attempt to do so would be circular, because the practice of using past experience as evidence about the future is itself only warranted if one accepts the principle of induction. Hume's 'skeptical solution' to his own problem amounted to an abandonment of the externalist hopes of his time. Belief in induction, he concluded, was a custom, a tendency of mind ingrained by nature, one of a 'species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able, either to produce or to prevent [_An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977, p. 30.] For better or worse, Hume contended, we're stuck with belief in induction - we are constituionally incapable of doubting it and conceptually barred from justifying it. The best we can do is to explain it. Hume's idea was thus to offer as a replacement for the failed externalist project of rational justification of epistemic practice, the empirical project of characterizing the cognitive nature of creatures like ourselves, and then figuring out how such creatures, built to seek knowledge in the ways we do, could manage to survive and flourish. In this way, he anticipated to a significant degree the "postmodernist" turn taken by analytical philosophy in the twentieth century as the result of Quine's and others' critiques of externalism's last gasp - logical positivism." (pp. 199-200) Michael Hoover
Imperialist progressivism (was Re: Thatcher and nationalism)
Not only Brad DeLong but also Mike Kearney. OK, politics is a long exercise in patience... As Toussaint Louverture said: "La France entiére vient contre nous!" Will answer to just two basic assertions here, which are the only ones that matter. As to condemnation of "militarism", won't return to the issue any more. I reserve to my own people the right to resort to military means (or any other) to put an end to this abject era of imperialist exaction and social crime that Argentina is passing through since 1975 at least.. 1) Thatcher's use of the Argentinian war over the Malvinas (Falklands is a wrong name, sorry, it is as if you explained a Palestinian that Israel is the name of his/her own land) in 1982 and the duty of an English progressive. If, as Tam Dalyell has shown, Thatcher prepared the war in order to win her elections, the duty of a socialist or a progressive in England would have been to support Argentina. Had Thatcher lost the war her carreer would have melt down. But British Leftists (with exceptions, some of which I am proud to be friend to) preferred to hide their pro-imperialist soul by adducing that this war against the sovereign rights of a Third World people was, in fact, a war against "tyrant Galtieri". In so doing, they immediately ranked with the Thatcher they said to defend. For an imperialist "progressive" it is absolutely unimportant whether the armies of a semicolonial country are aiming at their own population or at the invading armies of the imperial powers. For a true progressive, this "slight" difference is full of meaning. And it certainly was full of meaning for us here in Argentina, who were tear gassed on March 30th 1982 and were surprised to see that, by a chance of History, the same regime adopted a progressive position on the basic issue of sovereignty that marks the essence of being a Third World nation. I am convinced that many in the Western Powers will "explain" away, with the shallowness of an empyricist sociologist from Harvard or London, that we Argentinians were goaded into a frenzy of nationalism by a decaying military regime, just as the lower strata of their own countries saw themselves intoxicated with (this time, yes) chauvinistic militarism. This is very logic, they are taking care of the backs of the imperialists, they are "Her Majesty's opposition". The problem, however, is that precisely because they are members of an imperialist community they exert a strong pressure on people in the countries under military and economic attack from their own ruling classes. Cultural imperialism is the name of this, and it is a basic weapon in the arsenal of Meggy Bloodihands. Ah, the strange roads by which the Empires are built 2) Malvinas and East Timor. I am very suspicious, indeed, of the situation in East Timor. Will not extend on this, because this is an issue I know little about and because I know that the Eastern Timorese have been waging a protracted and tremendous war for their own rights. There are two things that I have in clear, however, and they are that (a) East Timor exists as an independent area of the Malay world because at the moment of decolonization it was in the hands of the Portuguese empire, in fact the most putrid of all colonial empires (yes, most putrid than the British empire, which is a lot of rot indeed, but well, the metropolis itself was, since the Treaty of Methuen, a virtual colony of England!). Had in 1945 East Timor been in the hands of these other "great civilizators", the Dutch, then there would have never existed an East Timor issue, and (b) it is becoming more obvious with the days that the outcome of this "humanitarian" intervention by Australian troops in Indonesian internal affairs to defend the East Timorese has created a new protectorat in the Asia-Pacific area, at the same time that it has boosted Australian imperialist militarism high. The Malvinas are not the same thing as East Timor. The population in the Malvinas are the result of forcible eviction, by a British fleet, of the legal and recognized Argentinian settlement there. Argentina has never surrendered to the joint American-British invasion of the islands in 1833, nor have we ever denied the right of the transplanted populations of the islands to become full Argentinians with due respect to their cultural traditions provided they ceased to consider themselves a Plantation. On this, we shall be inflexible, and in the end we shall win. This issue is a basic question for our politics, and a good standing on the Malvinas issue may turn a rogue into a sometimes unexpected revolutionary. FYI, when Galtieri, the _majestic General_ of Haigh and Reagan, discovered that he had been trapped by his supposed friends, he faintly discovered that in order to go ahead and win the war he had to mobilize the most progressive forces in the country, he had to organize a militant national front, he
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Argentina/GDP (2)
En relación a [PEN-L:1448] Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Argentina/GD,
el 7 Sep 00, a las 22:12, Brad DeLong dijo:
The first
hyperinflation was a coup d'etat. It was provoked intentionally
(there are proofs and declarations in this sense, as well as there
are others on the milder hyperinflation provoked in 1975 to generate
the chaos that led to the 1976 coup) and ended with the downfall of
Alfonsín.
Provoked intentionally by whom? The central bank? The Alfonsin
government?
Ah, Brad, you are forcing me to break my votes. Not a way to get to
Paradise. Will answer this but next time, please refer to bibliography.
By the Argentinian ruling class, a very compact "rosca" ("lobby")
which has the advantage of being the ONLY class in Argentina with
clear consciousness of their class goals. In 1989 it was very easy
for a gang of bankers and foreign trade speculators to forge a
scarcity of foreign currency, for example. And they did it. By the
way, I personally benefitted from that, because I had earned some
dollars in a job, and had contracted a week of vacations with the
"old" exchange rate, only to find that hyperinflation in the midst of
the vacations had magically multiplied the purchasing power of my
scant savings, and could thus multiply the days at the hotel...
Jim Devine has given you some hints, and curiously enough without
trying to show that he knows anything on Argentina, on how might
things happen here. Are you always so undeservedly haughty and so
despective of the concrete realities outside your own country?
Brad DeLong
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Imperialist progressivism (was Re: Thatcher andnationalism)
If, as Tam Dalyell has shown, Thatcher prepared the war in order to win her elections... How did Thatcher do that? Did she bribe the Junta to send troops to the Malvinas Islands? Brad DeLong The population in the Malvinas are the result of forcible eviction, by a British fleet, of the legal and recognized Argentinian settlement there. Argentina has never surrendered to the joint American-British invasion of the islands in 1833, nor have we ever denied the right of the transplanted populations of the islands to become full Argentinians with due respect to their cultural traditions provided they ceased to consider themselves a Plantation. On this, we shall be inflexible, and in the end we shall win. This issue is a basic question for our politics, and a good standing on the Malvinas issue may turn a rogue into a sometimes unexpected revolutionary. Yeah. Right. sarcasm And the Palestinian population are the result of the forcible eviction, by the Emperor Hadrian, of the Jewish population after the Bar Kochba revolt /sarcasm. Germans today don't demand the reversal of Richelieu's conquest of Alsace. Americans don't demand Canadian withdrawal from the northern half of the Oregon Territory. Italians don't demand that the French, the Spanish, the Greeks, the Turks, and the Egyptians recognize their historical allegiance to the Roman Empire. And the world is a better place for it. Consent of the governed trumps historical connection. Brad DeLong FYI, when Galtieri, the _majestic General_ of Haig and Reagan, discovered that he had been trapped by his supposed friends, he faintly discovered that in order to go ahead and win the war he had to mobilize the most progressive forces in the country, he had to organize a militant national front, he had to return the basic control of economy to the hands of the State, he had to confront in the arena of the Foreign Debt, he had to cleanse the Army of butchers (being one himself!), and he almost made some of those moves: in fact, the Argentinian Foreign Relations Minister gave a 180 degrees turn to our foreign policy, siding with Castro and other progressive regimes that were supporting us in the effort... So Galtieri's strategy would have worked: the domestic opposition on the left would have forgotten his crimes and thrown their support behind his regime--if only he had won his war, and so distracted giddy minds with foreign quarrels. Who was it--Count Witte?--who said at the start of the Russo-Japanese War that the only thing the Czar's government needed was a "short victorious war"? Brad DeLong
Re: Aux armes citoyens! (was A slight advantage ofpoverty)
Here's a song for lovers of liberty: La Marseillaise. Militant patriotism at its most full-blooded. Nestor's description of an Argentine nationalist icon sounds serene, with its sense of duty to patria fulfilled, in comparison to La Marseillaise. Allons enfants de la Patrie Le jour de gloire est arrivé. Contre nous, de la tyrannie, L'étandard sanglant est levé, l'étandard sanglant est levé, Entendez-vous, dans la compagnes. Mugir ces farouches soldats Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes. [Let us go, children of the fatherland Our day of Glory has arrived. Against us stands tyranny, The bloody flag is raised, The bloody flag is raised. Do you hear in the countryside The roar of these savage soldiers They come right into our arms To cut the throats of your sons, your country.] Aux armes citoyens! Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons. [To arms, citizens! Form up your battalions Let us march, Let us march! That their impure blood Should water our fields] Amour sacré de la Patrie, Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs, Liberté, liberté cherie, Combats avec tes defénseurs; Combats avec tes défenseurs. Sous drapeaux, que la victoire Acoure à tes mâles accents; Que tes ennemis expirants Voient ton triomphe et notre gloire! [Sacred love of the fatherland Guide and support our vengeful arms. Liberty, beloved liberty, Fight with your defenders; Fight with your defenders. Under our flags, so that victory Will rush to your manly strains; That your dying enemies Should see your triumph and glory] Aux armes citoyens! Formez vos bataillons, Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/marseill.html Yoshie Touche... It *has* always made me feel a little bit creepy... Brad DeLong
Imperialist progressivism (was Re: Thatcher and nationalism)
Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky wrote: I reserve to my own people the right to resort to military means (or any other) to put an end to this abject era of imperialist exaction and social crime that Argentina is passing through since 1975 at least.. Fair enough. I am surprised, however, by your implication that you would count among the exercises of this right the diktats of oppressive military rulers. 1) Thatcher's use of the Argentinian war over the Malvinas (Falklands is a wrong name, sorry, it is as if you explained a Palestinian that Israel is the name of his/her own land) in 1982 and the duty of an English progressive. I am well aware of this, and my use of the name "Falklands" was never intended to be a slur upon you or any other Argentinian member of the list. Surely the tone of my previous contribution sufficiently communicated my opposition to the official British line. If, as Tam Dalyell has shown, Thatcher prepared the war in order to win her elections, the duty of a socialist or a progressive in England would have been to support Argentina. Supporting "Argentina" in this case would have been to support Galtieri and his entourage. As a socialist/progressive/call it what you will, I, in retrospect (being the tender age of 14 at the time) do not consider it my duty to have done so. There were many who actively opposed the needless slaughter of Argentinian conscripts by British forces under direct orders from an administration eager for some "good copy". And much of the information to which I referred became known only subsequently, making it rather difficult to identify "duty" at the time. Nevertheless, the lack of that information did not preclude active opposition to Thatcher's militarism. Had Thatcher lost the war her carreer would have melt down. That is very probable. But British Leftists (with exceptions, some of which I am proud to be friend to) preferred to hide their pro-imperialist soul by adducing that this war against the sovereign rights of a Third World people was, in fact, a war against "tyrant Galtieri". In so doing, they immediately ranked with the Thatcher they said to defend. That's a gross over-statement. There were many within Thatcher's own party, administration even, who were very unhappy with the manner in which she conducted the entire episode. Her foreign secretary, Francis Pym, for example, spent much of his time trying to find a means to a negotiated settlement and found himself frozen out of Thatcher's "Star Chamber" as a result. And whatever the capitulations of the Labour Party leadership, there were plenty of leftists who campaigned against a "military solution". For an imperialist "progressive" it is absolutely unimportant whether the armies of a semicolonial country are aiming at their own population or at the invading armies of the imperial powers. For a true progressive, this "slight" difference is full of meaning. And it certainly was full of meaning for us here in Argentina, who were tear gassed on March 30th 1982 and were surprised to see that, by a chance of History, the same regime adopted a progressive position on the basic issue of sovereignty that marks the essence of being a Third World nation. So opportunism had nothing to do with it then? I am convinced that many in the Western Powers will "explain" away, with the shallowness of an empyricist sociologist from Harvard or London, that we Argentinians were goaded into a frenzy of nationalism by a decaying military regime, just as the lower strata of their own countries saw themselves intoxicated with (this time, yes) chauvinistic militarism. This is very logic, they are taking care of the backs of the imperialists, they are "Her Majesty's opposition". The problem, however, is that precisely because they are members of an imperialist community they exert a strong pressure on people in the countries under military and economic attack from their own ruling classes. Cultural imperialism is the name of this, and it is a basic weapon in the arsenal of Meggy Bloodihands. Ah, the strange roads by which the Empires are built Well I guess that's me sorted out then. I had no idea I was such an imperialist for not backing Galtieri. For what they are worth, my views on the Malvinas are very simple. Geography alone would suggest that they are a part of Argentina, and I would recognise Argentinian sovereignty. I don't recognise the progressivism of opportunists who employ nationalism as a means (unsuccessful in Galtieri's case) to distract the oppressed from their oppression. And if you read my original post you will find that I made that point squarely with regard to the actions of Margaret Thatcher and her administration. Thank you for your earlier post on Peron. Michael K.
Malvinas (2)
En relación a [PEN-L:1449] Re: A slight advantage of poverty (w, el 7 Sep 00, a las 22:26, Brad DeLong dijo: I think this is--as a result of the reference to the Argentine Junta's attempt to conquer the Malvinas Islands, and unintentionally on Nestor's part--game and set to me A lot of imperialist "leftist" wisecrack of ignoramuses follows. I have answered part of this on my reply to Kearney, will not lose more time. Brad DeLong has a built-in inability to perceive the realities of national revolution in the Third World. Unless some careful engineer helps him in assembling that missing part of his mental apparatus, I won't lose more time with him. I am really very busy. You can be certain, on PEN-L, that I enjoy little time in my life to go around wasting it in this kind of arguments. Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Aux armes citoyens! (was A slight advantage of poverty)
En relación a [PEN-L:1460] Re: Aux armes citoyens! (was A sligh, el 8 Sep 00, a las 4:51, Brad De Long dijo: Here's a song for lovers of liberty: La Marseillaise. Yoshie Touche... It *has* always made me feel a little bit creepy... Yes, of course, because it does not come from a demonized as Fascistic semicolonial people that had the guts to confront the American imperialists for decades, but from another imperialist country. If it is French, thus "civilized", it makes Brad feel creepy. If it is Argentinian, that is "barbarious" it makes feel disgusted. Well, we know these people a lot. We have been dragging them behind us for decades. Sometimes they realize the reactionary character of their positions, sometimes they don't. Since we Argentinians (and Third World peoples in general) are forced by history to display largesse, then we greet them in the flock, something that resembles those French revolutionaries offering Paine (if I am not wrong) to become a French citizen. O tempora, o mores... Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Imperialist progressivism (was Re: Thatcher and nationalism)
En relación a [PEN-L:1459] Re: Imperialist progressivism (was R, el 8 Sep 00, a las 4:46, Brad De Long dijo: So Galtieri's strategy would have worked: the domestic opposition on the left would have forgotten his crimes and thrown their support behind his regime--if only he had won his war, and so distracted giddy minds with foreign quarrels. The imperialist mind is strong. When the issue is that of socialist revolution to win an anticolonial war he brings the fate of that small individual, Galtieri -[long digression here] whose hands were by the way, blood stained but less blood stained than the hands of those (included many colleagues of our economist in California) who opposed the war, and, for example, continued to pay the Foreign Debt to England during the confrontation [end of long digression]-, as if it mattered a dime. The only thing that Brad DeLong is interested in, in fact, is a personal vendetta with a despicable rogue, not the opening of a vast battlefield for socialism and revolution. Progressive imperialism, not imperialist progressivism. The adjective was misplaced. Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Imperialist progressivism (was Re: Thatcher and nationalism)
Dear Michael Kearney, I apologize for my harshness on you. It is evident that you are interested in discussion, not in deploying your wisdom on me as Brad does. So that excuse me if, for the time being, I cannot answer to your posting (by the way, I am afraid that we are getting too far away from the main subject on PEN-L, what does our moderator think?). If you want, I can answer you later. So that you were 14 in 1982? Well, then there are a lot of things that I need to explain to you. I was much older, 30 to be precise, and I already had a long history of socialist and revolutionary struggle behind me by that moment. And it was precisely due to that history that I knew that the reasons why Galtieri was deciding the war (which later on proved not to be mere opportunism) were unimportant. You say on your letter that supporting Argentina was supporting Galtieri. That is wrong. Supporting Galtieri was supporting Argentina --against everything that Galtieri stood for!! Such is history in a semicolonial country, dear Michael More later. A friendly hug from an apologizing Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Fwd]: [sixties-l] more on 'Steal This Movie'
I realize that routine animation has been taken over by 3rd world factories, but I know we had 3 well known animators in Winnipeg (I think one was nominated for an academy award or at least the film he worked on was). They (or one or two) were contracted by Disney I believe to develop some projects. Canadian animation from the NFB in any case has had a number of Academy award nominations through the years. Paul Phillips, Apologies for any misunderstanding, I should have distinguished between pre-production (script preparation, story boarding, etc.) post-production (editing, tinting, sound) done in North America from production (cel drawing, hand coloring) done in Asia. Michael Hoover
Re: Reich on Vouchers
An obvious problem with Reich's proposal, which he blithely overlooks, is that rich suburbs would not take the vouchers. Massachusetts (where Reich lives) already has in place a system which allows students in poorly funded districts to transfer to another district. The town where the transfering student lives then has to pay the receiving town the average per-pupil expenditure of the receiving town (generally higher than the per-pupil expenditure of the town where the student lives). Almost all of the better school districts have refused to participate. I doubt that the added incentive of a higher than average payment would change anything. There is a reason that upper-income people segregate themselves and their children in exclusive suburbs. Ellen
Re: Re: Re: Re: Reich on Vouchers
Yes, Reich has flunked political economy 101. He has been seduced by the delusion of "choice" when we already have much evidence how the notion of choice plays out among poor people. Residents of the inner city use welfare dollars to obtain housing, and get slums; they have medicaid, and uniformly poorer indices of health; and they have a choice of banks, or at least those banks who have not left for more profitable climes elsewhere. If the vouchers is small, it will fail to make a difference; if it is bigger, as Reich suggests, it will be even more vulnerable to hijacking by private interests. Either way, a few additional government dollars cannot compensate for a much broader social inequity. Joel Blau Peter Dorman wrote: My sense of Reich is that he is genuinely egalitarian and regrets that markets generate inequality, but other than that he likes how markets operate and, in particular, believes them to be creative and efficient. So the position he stakes out in the WSJ is not surprising. I agree with Michael and Jim, however, that he is too clever by half, if not a lot more: if we can't get the progressive funding for education we need in a public system, how are we going to get it when the privatizers take over and implement their vouchers? Maybe Reich thinks he can cut some kind of deal -- progressive financing for privatization -- but if so he has really flunked political economy 101. Peter
Re: anti-Pomo babble
I have read and indeed taught the major pomos poststructuralists--Derrida, DeMan, Foucault, DeLeuze Guttari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Rorty, and made an effort to get a grip on Irigaray, Kristev, Butler, and Spivak. I am pretty confident that they share a family resemblance in advocating: 1) antifoundationalism, by which they seem to mean a sort of naive realtivism, a denial of objective truth, in favor of social constructiism; 2) antiessentialism,a denial that humans as such or specific groups of humans have an objective nature, social or biological; this is associated with a sort of individualistic nominalism, an insistence on "difference"; 3) anti-grand-narrativism, specifically a rejection of the idea that history has any directionality of thes ort espoused by historical materialism (in particular); 4) Linguistic idealism; the idea that reality is constituted by local linguistic conventions; 5) "marginalism," an affection for groups at the margins of society (not the working class) which is also connected with 6) An identity politics that focuses on respect and recognition rather than a class politics taht focuses on interests and power. Not every pomo recapitulates all of these themes, but most of them recapitulate most of them, in their own way, an their epiones in the American academy ampliy and vulgarize them to a ludirous extent. I am not any more embarassed about attributing these views to pomo than I am about attriuting class politics, etc. to Marxism, without necessarily getting real specific about which marxists have class politics. Besides, we have here an advocate of (1) and (2), Nicole, who clearly does hold these positions and has put them up for discussions. And finally, I think that if Temps or any other pomo fan, such as Doug, can explain why their favorite pomo does not advocate a relevantly large subset of these positions, I would be enlightened. --jks In a message dated Fri, 8 Sep 2000 12:05:50 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Timework Web [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Gee, it seems that either a lot of folks have read much more post-modernist stuff than I have or maybe it's that it is easier to make sweeping generalizations about something on the basis of hearsay. There's a lot of crap that gets written under the pretension of post-modernism. The same can easily be said for "marxism" or "sociology". The "Post Modern Condition" happens to be the name of a specific book by a particular author, Lyotard. Other than that "post-modern" is a sloppy label or a reviewer's crib for "a bunch of those French guys, you know the ones I mean." Temps Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Re: pomo again (response to Jim)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/08/00 01:34AM truth is partisan (to the working class), (( CB: Hear , hear ! My kind of epistemology. And as Maurice Cornforth says in _Materialism and the Dialectical Method_ "Every philosophy expresses a class outlook. But in contrast to the exploiting classes, which have always sought to uphold and justify class positions by various disguises and falsifications, the working class, from its very class position and aims, is concerned to know and understand things just as they are, without diguise or falsification."
Re: Re: hyperinflation
At 09:58 PM 09/07/2000 -0700, you wrote: Brad, quoting the bible written by that charlatan Milton Friedman doesn't prove a thing. It's the logical fallacy of appeal to authority -- or to appeal to a slogan that has captured the minds of the orthodox school of economics. I didn't quote Friedman, who said "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." I misquoted him, saying "hyperinflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." okay. I think that the first is false, and the second is true... see my long missive on this subject. The second is true by definition. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Re: Re: A slight advantage of poverty (was Re: Random thoughts on Big Brother, adv
At 10:26 PM 09/07/2000 -0700, you wrote: --Governments that throw people out of helicopters into the South Atlantic have no business ruling anybody, let along waging war to increase the number of people they rule. what if they dump them into the South China Sea? Brad, you're threatening to undermine the legitimacy of the US government (which also allied with the Argentine junta until the latter came into conflict with the UK, a more important ally). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Re: Thatcher and nationalism
At 09:35 AM 09/08/2000 +0300, you wrote: Brad de Long wrote: Nationalist militarism is truly a powerful and insidious poison. Michael Keaney leaves out the apparent punch-line in his response to the above: Margaret Thatcher also suffered from the disease of "nationalist militarism," in an equally powerful and insidious way. The same thing can be said for Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Gore, and Bush2, except that their militaristic nationalism is cloaked in universalistic rhetoric. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
RE: Re: Aux armes citoyens! (was A slight advantage ofpoverty)
Never knew the words to this. Yuck. I guess you had to be there. mbs Here's a song for lovers of liberty: La Marseillaise. Militant patriotism at its most full-blooded. Nestor's description of an Argentine nationalist icon sounds serene, with its sense of duty to patria fulfilled, in comparison to La Marseillaise. Allons enfants de la Patrie Le jour de gloire est arrivé. Contre nous, de la tyrannie, L'étandard sanglant est levé, l'étandard sanglant est levé, Entendez-vous, dans la compagnes. Mugir ces farouches soldats Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes.
RE: Re: hyperinflation
I didn't quote Friedman, who said "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." I misquoted him, saying "hyperinflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." I think that the first is false, and the second is true... Brad DeLong Seems to me that either statement is tantamount to saying car accidents are everywhere and always an automotive phenomenon. How can politics be separated from whatever it is that launches hyperinflation? If anything, more so than with garden-variety inflation. perplexed, mbs
RE: Re: Being serious about Pomotismo (with quotes for Doug)
So, how did feminism start? -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Yoshie Furuhashi Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 9:48 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:[PEN-L:1394] Re: Being serious about Pomotismo (with quotes for Doug) (How degrading - naïve relativism, sounds harsh. Anyway, you answered that question yourself with Hume. Realizing that it is all relative does not preclude the fact that we must walk out of our front doors or wear clothes. Understanding that this is relative however makes passing judgment almost impossible. And I am not talking about the judgment of whether or not to walk off the cliff which so many of you seem to think I am talking about. I am talking about academia and establishment of grand narratives, theories, definitive works which so often are passed off as truth. At least now I know to limit my discussions of relativism to the life of the mind. Lacan and Kristeva discussing language, signs and symbols are surely limiting their discussion to the life of the mind. The new question then becomes do pomos actually discuss anything that takes place outside of the mind? This would then automatically limit the criticism to the same orientation. I know Foucault discussed prisons, but wasn't this just on how they made people feel? Kristeva discusses the language of science, but not scientific findings themselves... Well? -Nico Theories that refuse to pass judgments retreat into "the life of the mind" (whatever is meant by the term) do not further but in fact hinder political projects that aim at social emancipation: feminism, socialism, etc. Yoshie _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
RE: Hume the Postmodern Grin without a Cat (was Re: pomoistas)
I think you are right, but understand that pomo is not a philosophy. It is a way of analyzing theory, methods, almost anything that uses language and metaphor. At its base it points out misnomers and illogical arguments. It is dialectical criticism of theory. It is a lot more, but I am hoping this short answer will suffice considering it is Friday evening and time to have fun. -Nico -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Yoshie Furuhashi Sent: Thursday, September 07, 2000 4:24 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Hume the Postmodern Grin without a Cat (was Re: pomoistas) Sam wrote to Nicole: Check out David Hume: "When we run over our libraries persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." Enquiry Into Human Understanding final paragraph. One thing that always struck me is that second-generation postmodernists ( later models) seldom exhibit any familiarity with primary philosophical texts (Plato, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, etc.) on which first-generation postmodernists -- Derrida Co. -- make endless marginal comments. That said, Hume has been seldom commented upon by first-generation postmodernists, even though Hume probably stands the closest to the postmodern worldview, especially his combination of the Separability Principle the Conceivability Principle, which leads to the reification of perceptions (in the postmodern case the reification of discourse): "We may observe that what we call a _mind_, is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptionsNow as every perception may...be consider'd as separably existent...it evidently follows, that there is no absurdity in separating any particular perception from the mind; that is, in breaking off all its relations, with that connected mass of perceptions, which constitutes a thinking being" (_A Treatise of Human Nature_, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978, p.207). According to Hume, causes and effects are not necessarily connected (causes and effects are separable), so it is conceivable that causes exist without effects *and* effects exist without causes. Nothing is logically dependent for its existence on anything else (an effect of commodity fetishism at its most extreme). John Cook illustrates the logical consequence of Hume's position: "Indeed if we take Hume at his word, we must take him to be saying that he would see no absurdity in Alice's remark: 'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!" (John Cook, "Hume's Scepticism with regard to the Senses," _American Philosophical Quarterly_ 5 [1968], p. 8). Hume was, however, not interested in pursuing the logic of his argument to radical scepticism of the Pyrrhonian kind (and its recommended attitudes of epoche ataraxia -- suspending judgement for the Pyrrhonian sceptics meant living without belief [dogma] and hence with tranquility). "Thus the sceptic still continues to reason and believe, even tho' he asserts that he cannot defend his reason by reason; and by the same rule he must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body, tho' he cannot pretend by any arguments of philosophy to maintain its veracity. Nature has not left this to his choice..." (_Treatise_, p. 187). Postmodernists don't even want to concede this much. They'd rather go down the rabbit hole and play with the Cheshire Cat (the world disappears into discourse, and discourse achieves Platonic independence from the world and human beings). Yoshie _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Albert Beveridge: The March of the Flag
(Senator Albert Beveridge, who was Senator from Indiana between 1899-1911, gave this campaign speech on September 16, 1898.) The March of the Flag It is a noble land that God has given us; a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose coastlines would inclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe, a greater England with a nobler destiny. It is a mighty people that He has planted on this soil; a people sprung from the most masterful blood of history; a people perpetually revitalized by the virile, manproducing workingfolk of all the earth; a people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of their institutions, by authority of their Heaven-directed purposes-the propagandists and not the misers of liberty. It is a glorious history our God has bestowed upon His chosen people; a history heroic with faith in our mission and our future; a history of statesmen who flung the boundaries of the Republic out into unexplored lands and savage wilderness; a history of soldiers who carried the flag across blazing deserts and through the ranks of hostile mountains, even to the gates of sunset; a history of a multiplying people who overran a continent in half a century; a history of prophets who saw the consequences of evils inherited from the past and of martyrs who died to save us from them; a history divinely logical, in the process of whose tremendous reasoning we find ourselves today. Therefore, in this campaign, the question is larger than a party question. It is an American question. It is a world question. Shall the American people continue their march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of liberty wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind? Have we no mission to perform no duty to discharge to our fellow man? Has God endowed us with gifts beyond our deserts and marked us as the people of His peculiar favor, merely to rot in our own selfishness, as men and nations must, who take cowardice for their companion and self for their deity-as China has, as India has, as Egypt has? Shall we be as the man who had one talent and hid it, or as he who had ten talents and used them until they grew to riches? And shall we reap the reward that waits on our discharge of our high duty; shall we occupy new markets for what our farmers raise, our factories make, our merchants sell-aye, and please God, new markets for what our ships shall carry? Hawaii is ours; Porto Rico is to be ours; at the prayer of her people Cuba finally will be ours; in the islands of the East, even to the gates of Asia, coaling stations are to be ours at the very least; the flag of a liberal government is to float over the Philippines, and may it be the banner that Taylor unfurled in Texas and Fremont carried to the coast. The Opposition tells us that we ought not to govern a people without their consent. I answer, The rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of selfgovernment We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent. How do they know what our government would be without their consent? Would not the people of the Philippines prefer the just, humane, civilizing government of this Republic to the savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion from which we have rescued them? And, regardless of this formula of words made only for enlightened, selfgoverning people, do we owe no duty to the world? Shall we turn these peoples back to the reeking hands from which we have taken them? Shall we abandon them, with Germany, England, Japan, hungering for them? Shall we save them from those nations, to give them a selfrule of tragedy? They ask us how we shall govern these new possessions. I answer: Out of local conditions and the necessities of the case methods of government will grow. If England can govern foreign lands, so can America. If Germany can govern foreign lands, so can America. If they can supervise protectorates, so can America. Why is it more difficult to administer Hawaii than Nevs Mexico or California? Both had a savage and an alien population: both were more remote from the seat of government when they came under our dominion than the Philippines are today. Will you say by your vote that American ability to govern has decayed, that a century s experience in selfrule has failed of a result? Will you affirm by your vote that you are an infidel to American power and practical sense? Or will you say that ours is the blood of government; ours the heart of dominion; ours the brain and genius of administration? Will you remember that we do but what our fathers did-we but pitch the tents of liberty farther westward, farther southward-we only
Re: Re: hyperinflation
Friedman's words are often cited as gospel. He is correct that increases in the money supply validate inflation but I don't think that it is the cause. For example prices fell in the late 19th C. because of competition, not a smaller money supply. As firms consolidated, prices began to rise. New gold discoveries might have helped, but only helped. Brad DeLong wrote: Brad, quoting the bible written by that charlatan Milton Friedman doesn't prove a thing. It's the logical fallacy of appeal to authority -- or to appeal to a slogan that has captured the minds of the orthodox school of economics. I didn't quote Friedman, who said "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." I misquoted him, saying "hyperinflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." I think that the first is false, and the second is true... Brad DeLong -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Imperialist progressivism (was Re: Thatcher andnationalism)
The debate on the Falklands/Malvinas is troubling. I thought the the outcome meant that Thatcher triumphed politically, while the junta had to face political defeat, eventually. As to rights, such matters are troubling. I live on property stolen from the Mexicans who stole it from the Native Americans. While I recognize past injustices, I would not be happy to see either group reclaim their land. Africa still suffers enormously from the problems caused by imperialist borders, but how could you rectify the past mistakes today? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Gore's plan
Driving into work, on US National Public Radio I heard a conservative economist from the Center for the Study of American Business commenting on Al Gore's economic plan. Despite the source, he made two valid points: 1) the Gore plan asserts that shrinking government deficits (growing surpluses) reduce interest rates and stimulate business investment, but the connection between the deficit and interest rates is very weak. Though the economist did not make this point, Gore's economics is profoundly pre-Keynesian, with an obsession with more than balancing the budget in order to "pay down" the government debt, which (all else equal) encourages recession. 2) the Gore plan misses the fact that interest rates have generally _risen_ during the last few years. If you calculate _real_ interest rates (which this economist did not), real interest rates fell during the last year or so. That's not because of the deficit, but because of rising inflation. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
RE: Gore's plan
He did all right, except at the end. His punchline was that the boom is due to the Fed's zeal against inflation. mbs Driving into work, on US National Public Radio I heard a conservative economist from the Center for the Study of American Business commenting on Al Gore's economic plan. Despite the source, he made two valid points:
Re: anti-Pomo babble
JKSCHW wrote, I have read and indeed taught the major pomos poststructuralists--Derrida, DeMan, Foucault, DeLeuze Guttari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Rorty, and made an effort to get a grip on Irigaray, Kristev, Butler, and Spivak. I am pretty confident that they share a family resemblance in advocating: 1) antifoundationalism, by which they seem to mean a sort of naive realtivism, a denial of objective truth, in favor of social constructiism; [etc.] ". . . their epigones in the American academy amplify and vulgarize them to a ludicrous extent. . . " This last comment is something that I agree with. The triviality of the American epigones is certainly as much a reflection of the "higher learning in America" as it is of the errors of post-modernist thought. A typical graduate seminar might throw the above laundery list at its students, perhaps even seasoned with Gramsci, as a sort of a book-of-the-week boot camp. The point then becomes to affect a style, not to plumb any depths. One can then "apply" the style to an essay on the subversive subtext of "I Love Lucy". The earlier list, starting with antifoundationism, seems to me to be a projection -- "they _seem_ to mean a sort of naive realitivism". Kafka said (roughly) "there is hope, but not for us." Why can't one say there is objective truth, but it eludes discourse? Yoshie wrote, I've read every postmodern philosopher literary critic of importance (and then some); it's a part of the occupational hazards of grad students in English. Therefore, my view is a considered view, and if you so desire, I can quote from Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, etc., chapter verse, and point out problems with more specificity. -snip- Should you find my criticisms unsatisfactory, take a look at Ellen Meiksins Wood, _The Retreat from Class_, for instance. Ahem. I'm not saying there are no "problems" with, for example, Derrida or Foucault. It would be a surprise if there were none. Without reading Wood, I would wager there must be "problems" with some of her criticisms. It seems to me that a lot of the misunderstanding arises from the resistance to grasping some of the paradoxes that post-modernist writers address. The distinction between object and subject is a convention of discourse that never quite means the same thing each time we use it. To contrast "objective truth" with naive relativism is to first of all assert the extra-temporal stability of the object -- that is to say, it is to pose an objective reality "outside of time". Since time is part of reality, such an assertion of objective truth is self-contradictory. That's more or less dialectics. The problem always seems to be one of distinguishing between a negative critique and a positive foundation. The latter is always an artifice, an artifact of language, while the former is not in and of itself a sufficient ground for action. Some people choose to dwell forever in the twilight zone of critique (Adorno, Horkheimer). Others build ornate castles in the air over the rubble (Hayek). Temps Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Re: Re: Feminism (posted originally onmarxism@lists.panix.com)
Jim Devine wrote: As someone who was outside the process, my impression was that the recent wave of feminism that came out of the 1960s anti-war and other movements in the US was a reaction to the male chauvinism of the "New Left" leaders. I can give one dramatic instance (with the proviso that I have forgotten my source so cannot guarantee its accuracy). SDS at one point had a national program called J.O.I.N. (Jobs or Income Now), a community organizing project. I believe there were units in Baltimore, Minneapolis, Chicago, and (way down in the sticks) Cairo, Illinois among other places. The program was coordinated from the National Office, the Director being Rennie Davis (who I remember as a most unpleasant character -- he ended up as a Christer of some sort). Or at least he was *officially* in charge. As I heard the story most of the actual work was done by Heather Booth, while Davis trapised the world being a big shot. When he resigned the position to go on to better and greater things, SDS dissolved the project, since there was no longer anyone to coordinate it. I think it was also at some SDS meetings (local and national) that some women carried noisemeters -- measuring the amount of background noise in the room when men were speaking as compared to when women were speaking. But on these issues let's also record an important footnote. The CPUSA had a terrible record on race -- merely being better on race than any other organization, left or right, in U.S. history. The CPUSA had an even more terrible record on gender -- merely being better on gender than any other organization, left or right, in U.S. history. Carrol
Re: Canada, Australia, Argentina
I agree with Paul and Nestor's point about the difference in class structure, and Paul's work on Canada's WW1 financing is an excellent illustration of the consolidation of an indigenous bourgeoisie. Nestor, I think, has put his finger on the critical difference -- neither Canada nor Australia had a landed elite such that the role of Canada and Australia vs GB was one of subsidiary (dependent?) capital vs imperial capital. In Argentina, there was an intervening class, the landed aristocracy. (See, for instance, Baran on this) I have not done comparable work for Australia and Argentina, but for Canada the turning point, in my opinion, was the 1st World War. In Canada's case, Britain ceased to be a creditor to Canada because of war created debts. Canada financed the war from borrowing from capitalists made rich by war profiteering on government contracts to supply GB. After the war, the state helped smash labour and tax the working and middle class to pay off capital debt incurred during the war, a classic case of (marxist) primitive accumulation. (By the way -- more shameless promotion -- I have written a paper on this.) The railways went bankrupt and reneged on their obligations to British bond holders. Though borrowing shifted after the war from GB to the US, it was not until the "American boom in Canada" after the 2nd WW that American (direct) investment in Canada came to dominate the resourse and manufacturing industries. However, by the mid 1980s the US-controlled share of all non-financial industres in Canada declined to levels below the post-WW2 buildup (the US share has risen slightly since then, as has foreign control in all countries). I consider this 'repatriation' partial evidence that Canadian capital never lost _overal_ control of the domestic economy, which they originally gained, as I think Paul agrees, by around WW1. Just as a 'national bourgeoisie' was able to develop while formally still a British colony, it was able to survive and even gain relative strength despite extensive US ownership and control in _some_ industrial sectors. I don't think the Argentine bourgeoisie ever developed this kind of hegemony over the economy and state. As a well known member of Bill Burgess's detested left-nationalist cabal, I have also argued a form of Canadian dependency. I winced here until I remembered how Paul has written far more and better than I have against some forms of Canadian dependency. All one has to do is look at the Cdn and Australian $s and see how they dropped in parallel as "commodity currencies" (also NZ) to realize the dependency of the Cdn/Oz/NZ economies on the imperial centre dominated by the US but, in Oz/NZ also the Japanese economies. Canada has recovered somewhat better than Ozzieland in large part because the US economy has done much better than Japan. Since I don't know where Argentina's markets are dominated by, I can't comment. However, one common denominator is grain -- more particularly wheat. We are all part of the Cairns group trying to get the US and the UE to stop subsidizing agriculture so we can sell our grain at a decent price. Right now our agriculture is in the tank. This demonstrates, I would think, a certain dependence over which neither Canada, Australia, nor Argentina have little control. Where we differ is that Paul interprets this as Canadian and Australian dependence a la Frank. This would be appropriate for Argentina, but Canada and Australia are in the qualitatively different position of secondary imperialist countries. They get bullied by the US as do other secondary imperialist countries (e.g. in Europe, by the US and Japan, Germany, UK, etc.) but the politics of this relationship are very different than the politics of Frankian-like dependency. Sorry to harp on this issue but I think the failure to distinguish between the two kinds of relations with bigger-power imperialism has long been a key failing of socialism in Canada (and I think the same applies to Australia and New Zealand). Bill Burgess
Re: Re: Reich on Vouchers
An obvious problem with Reich's proposal, which he blithely overlooks, is that rich suburbs would not take the vouchers. Massachusetts (where Reich lives) already has in place a system which allows students in poorly funded districts to transfer to another district. The town where the transfering student lives then has to pay the receiving town the average per-pupil expenditure of the receiving town (generally higher than the per-pupil expenditure of the town where the student lives). Almost all of the better school districts have refused to participate. I doubt that the added incentive of a higher than average payment would change anything. There is a reason that upper-income people segregate themselves and their children in exclusive suburbs. Ellen Middle upper-middle strata suburbanites don't have to care about dysfunctional urban schools. They are, in general, satisfied with their kids' public schools. Voucher system offering lower-income students measure of actual choice (i.e., covering full cost of tuition) runs counter to MUM interests because it devalues premium linking school quality to value of homes. Michael Hoover
Re: Re: hyperinflation
Brad DeLong wrote: Brad, quoting the bible written by that charlatan Milton Friedman doesn't prove a thing. It's the logical fallacy of appeal to authority -- or to appeal to a slogan that has captured the minds of the orthodox school of economics. I didn't quote Friedman, who said "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." I misquoted him, saying "hyperinflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." I think that the first is false, and the second is true... Trivially true, in that you can't have a hyperinflation without rapid monetary growth, but it leaves the causes of rapid monetary growth uninvestigated. Is there any example of hyperinflation happening independently of a political or social crisis - war, famine, heightened class struggle, etc.? Doug
Re: RE: Gore's plan
At 12:51 PM 9/8/00 -0400, you wrote: He did all right, except at the end. His punchline was that the boom is due to the Fed's zeal against inflation. I missed that (perhaps because some jerk cut me off in traffic). Did you get the economist's name? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yoshie, do you get extra hazard pay for reading these people? Are "these people" any worse than most of the economics literature, which is all too often obscure, abstract, remote from reality, and apologetics for the status quo? Doug
Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
At 10:12 AM 9/8/00 -0700, you wrote: ". . . their epigones in the American academy amplify and vulgarize them to a ludicrous extent. . . " isn't that what epigones always do, no matter what the school of thought? isn't that what defines epigones? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
At 02:06 PM 9/8/00 -0400, you wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yoshie, do you get extra hazard pay for reading these people? Are "these people" any worse than most of the economics literature, which is all too often obscure, abstract, remote from reality, and apologetics for the status quo? I, for one, get paid for reading the economics literature! BTW, Doug, is this the comparison we want to make (pomotistas vs. neoclassical econ.)? isn't there a third alternative, like reading LBO? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
RE: Re: RE: Gore's plan
Russell Roberts. I think he was from Washington U./St. Louis. Here's the link: http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/me/2908.me.08.rmm mbs At 12:51 PM 9/8/00 -0400, you wrote: He did all right, except at the end. His punchline was that the boom is due to the Fed's zeal against inflation. I missed that (perhaps because some jerk cut me off in traffic). Did you get the economist's name? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Thatcher and nationalism
Keaney Michael wrote: . Few could condone the actions of the desperate Galtieri junta. But, given that the UK govt had plenty of advance warning over his planned invasion, the war was not only unjust, but wholly unnecessary. The Thatcher govt is as implicated for having allowed it to happen at all. There was only *one* conceivable just action by the UK -- returning the Malvinas to Argentina without any conditions. I don't see how for progressives this can be a question with two sides -- there is only one: the UK was wrong and Argentina was right. (The internal structure of Argentina is not the business of interlopers from the imperialist world -- and interloping from alleged leftists is the worst of all. The question for leftists is not whether the UK was wrong but how we can make the wrongness of the UK visible to as many as possible. It is a tactical problem in the war against imperialism. Carrol
Re: Re: Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
Doug Henwood wrote: Are "these people" any worse than most of the economics literature, which is all too often obscure, abstract, remote from reality, and apologetics for the status quo? The economists are clearly of the enemy, and are recognized as such by all on the left. So I would say the SWP, MIM, Butler, the BUFFALOS, Left Democrats, the left-over Third International Parties, Kristeva, Lacan, RCP, are much worse than the economists. They are barriers, of varying degrees of seriousness, to the formation of a left in the U.S. Carrol
Revolutionary Defeatism (was Re: Imperialist progressivism)
Michael Keaney wrote to Nestor: Had Thatcher lost the war her carreer would have melt down. That is very probable. snip I am convinced that many in the Western Powers will "explain" away, with the shallowness of an empyricist sociologist from Harvard or London, that we Argentinians were goaded into a frenzy of nationalism by a decaying military regime, just as the lower strata of their own countries saw themselves intoxicated with (this time, yes) chauvinistic militarism. This is very logic, they are taking care of the backs of the imperialists, they are "Her Majesty's opposition". The problem, however, is that precisely because they are members of an imperialist community they exert a strong pressure on people in the countries under military and economic attack from their own ruling classes. Cultural imperialism is the name of this, and it is a basic weapon in the arsenal of Meggy Bloodihands. Ah, the strange roads by which the Empires are built Well I guess that's me sorted out then. I had no idea I was such an imperialist for not backing Galtieri. Have you heard of "revolutionary defeatism"? * From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 15:40:29 EST To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Revolutionary Defeatism Revolutionary defeatism is a phrase from Lenin referring to the duty of Marxists in imperialist countries to oppose the war efforts of their own governments (and thus in effect to encourage the defeat of their countries' armies by their imperialist opponents, although the actual slogans of the Soviet of Workers and Soldiers were "Turn the guns around!" and "Turn the imperialist war into civil war!"; Lenin used the term defiantly and provocatively, to stiffen his comrades' resolve in the face of the Second International's collapse into national patriotism). Naturally revolutionary defeatists also hope for the rest of what Doug wrote, but those points are beyond the usual meaning of the term. Hal Draper as a Shachtmanite leader once wrote an article titled "The Myth of Lenin's 'Revolutionary Defeatism'," which was a tortured argument that Lenin didn't really mean it, that it would have been contradictory for German workers to advocate the defeat of Germany; British, the defeat of Britain; Russians, the defeat of Russia, and so forth, as though those outcomes were mutually exclusive of one another and of the revolutionary project. Hal's real problem was his anti-Stalinist discomfort in calling for the defeat of the U.S. in a hypothetical war with the USSR; his article was a fundamental text for the Third Camp, shortly before the main Third Camp leaders abandoned their pretense and declared themselves in support of U.S. military conquests. As a consequence of Hal's tutelage, many otherwise radical Third Campers had great difficulty in taking a positive view of a Vietnamese victory over U.S. forces, because they regarded both Ho Chi Minh and the NLF as surrogates of Soviet "imperialism," against which they were holding out their Third Camp alternative. Ken Lawrence http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9903/2082.html * Yoshie
Re: anti-Pomo babble
I appreciate and am edified by Justin's summary below. Seems to me also behind much of the work of this school of thought is the project of getting more support for women's and gay liberation on the Left, and reputedly for liberations of peoples of color ( socalled new social movements). However, this project is formulated mainly as a philosophical (especially epistemological), not explicity political , critique of the classical Left; and as a misrepresentation and arrogation of a lot of the peoples of color part. The critique of the Left goal is good, but the project is undermined by the indirection through philosophy, and by the poor philosophy. Also, the project ends up as a form of petit bourgeois liberalism in its anti-Marxism. CB [EMAIL PROTECTED] 09/08/00 10:33AM I have read and indeed taught the major pomos poststructuralists--Derrida, DeMan, Foucault, DeLeuze Guttari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Rorty, and made an effort to get a grip on Irigaray, Kristev, Butler, and Spivak. I am pretty confident that they share a family resemblance in advocating: 1) antifoundationalism, by which they seem to mean a sort of naive realtivism, a denial of objective truth, in favor of social constructiism; 2) antiessentialism,a denial that humans as such or specific groups of humans have an objective nature, social or biological; this is associated with a sort of individualistic nominalism, an insistence on "difference"; 3) anti-grand-narrativism, specifically a rejection of the idea that history has any directionality of thes ort espoused by historical materialism (in particular); 4) Linguistic idealism; the idea that reality is constituted by local linguistic conventions; 5) "marginalism," an affection for groups at the margins of society (not the working class) which is also connected with 6) An identity politics that focuses on respect and recognition rather than a class politics taht focuses on interests and power. Not every pomo recapitulates all of these themes, but most of them recapitulate most of them, in their own way, an their epiones in the American academy ampliy and vulgarize them to a ludirous extent. I am not any more embarassed about attributing these views to pomo than I am about attriuting class politics, etc. to Marxism, without necessarily getting real specific about which marxists have class politics. Besides, we have here an advocate of (1) and (2), Nicole, who clearly does hold these positions and has put them up for discussions. And finally, I think that if Temps or any other pomo fan, such as Doug, can explain why their favorite pomo does not advocate a relevantly large subset of these positions, I would be enlightened. --jks
Re: anti-Pomo babble
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yoshie, do you get extra hazard pay for reading these people? Are "these people" any worse than most of the economics literature, which is all too often obscure, abstract, remote from reality, and apologetics for the status quo? Doug Hume Deleuze, Hayek Foucault, Keynes Queer Theory: clues for inter-disciplinary research in political economy postmodern philosophy? Yoshie
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
Jim Devine wrote: BTW, Doug, is this the comparison we want to make (pomotistas vs. neoclassical econ.)? isn't there a third alternative, like reading LBO? Well of course. But I'm biased. Carrol Cox wrote: The economists are clearly of the enemy, and are recognized as such by all on the left. Yes, but I'm continually baffled by the energy with which a group of progressive economists denounce "pomo," having otherwise shown little interest in culture, philosophy, or "Theory." It's a little like old vets getting together to re-fight the war, except there was no war. Bashing postmodernists seems to satisfy some deep emotional need among left political economists, as if it were some kind of compensation for being so marginal. Doug
Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Hume Deleuze, Hayek Foucault, Keynes Queer Theory: clues for inter-disciplinary research in political economy postmodern philosophy? Excellent idea; want to collaborate? Doug
Faculty on Strike at EMU
Dear Colleagues, The faculty at Eastern Michigan University have gone out on strike. They are asking people to write letters of support to the President of EMU. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send a copy of your letter to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The University cut them off from their web page. They have a new web page up at: http://www.geocities.com/emu_aaup2000/ although the links are not working. Rudy -- Rudy Fichtenbaum Professor of Economics Chief Negotiator AAUP-WSU Department of Economics Wright State University Voice: 937-775-3085 3640 Colonel Glenn Hwy. FAX: 937-775-3545 Dayton, OH 45435-0001 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: anti-Pomo babble
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Hume Deleuze, Hayek Foucault, Keynes Queer Theory: clues for inter-disciplinary research in political economy postmodern philosophy? Excellent idea; want to collaborate? Doug That will be really interesting. As a matter of fact, it is you who gave me a hint by your description of Keynes as bourgeois renegade in _Wall Street_. Yoshie P.S. Greg Ransom -- yuck! -- might have already claimed Foucault for Hayek.
E-con-omists for Dubya
Dubya has a list of economist endorsements now. It ran in USA Today in selected markets. Focus is on the fiscal kosherness of his tax cut, the need to cut government spending, vouchers, and free trade. The Nobels are Friedman, Lucas, Buchanan, Scholes, Becker, and Mundell. There seems to be a curious gap in the sense of few of the better public universities or the private second-tier schools. Many from Stanford/Hoover, a bunch from Harvard and USC, the usual Buchananoids and think tank suspects, and many from small schools, not much else. Jim Devine's name was a surprise. Conspicuous absences (from a DC-centric standpoint): Republicans Niskanen, Rudy Penner, and Gene Steuerle. I predict a pro-Gore counter-list. And no, I will not be on it. If anyone wants a copy, the best I can do is a JPG file. You have to load it in Paintbrush or something like that, then turn up the zoom setting. mbs
Re: Anti-Jacobin (was anti-Pomo babble)
Yoshie writes: In the case of many -- though by no means all -- postmodernists, they have progressed from anti-Stalinism to anti-Leninism to anti-Marxism to finally anti-Jacobinism. Most explicitly in the case of Laclau Mouffe: ellipsis ... Laclau and Mouffe assert that the concept of the working class as an actor in history is a "Jacobin imaginary" (a term interchangeable for them with "Stalinist imaginary") and that it is illegitimate -- and "utopian" -- to move from the description of a subject position to the "naming of an agent." Hi, Yoshie. According to Hal Draper (in one of the volumes of his KARL MARX'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION), Marx himself was anti-Jacobin, since the Jacobins were petty-bourgeois, professionals, or even haute bourgeois. He sided instead with the plebeian _sans culottes_, and if memory serves me well, with the Hebertistes (sorry but I don't remember the what kind of accents there are on this term) and to some extent with Graccus Babeuf, though Marx did not like the latter's conspiratorial methods after he himself grew out of them. There was not yet a true proletariat of significant size in Paris (the locus of most revolutionary activity). The CP of France, on the other hand, has always favored the Jacobin side of the 1789 revolution. This probably doesn't undermine your point, since L M probably were using "Jacobin" as synonymous with revolutionary. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: anti-Pomo babble
I tried to avoid getting reimmersed in these recurrent pen-lpomo discussions, which are a sort of chronic cyberdisease. But this latest by "jks" was a little much. I have read and indeed taught the major pomos poststructuralists--Derrida, DeMan, Foucault, DeLeuze Guttari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Rorty, and made an effort to get a grip on Irigaray, Kristev, Butler, and Spivak. Then he should know that there are very large differences among them. I am pretty confident that they share a family resemblance in advocating: 1) antifoundationalism, by which they seem to mean a sort of naive realtivism, a denial of objective truth, in favor of social constructiism; I assume "relativism" is meant. Who is the naive relativist in the list above? "Relativism" is the key term in the standard, ignorant, conflationst attack on the mythical unity of "pomo". Relativism is in fact a highly modernist position. See for example Haraway's blistering attack on relativism in her "Situated Knowledges" essay. 2) antiessentialism,a denial that humans as such or specific groups of humans have an objective nature, social or biological; this is associated with a sort of individualistic nominalism, an insistence on "difference"; 3) anti-grand-narrativism, specifically a rejection of the idea that history has any directionality of thes ort espoused by historical materialism (in particular); These 2 apply only in the sense that learning how to critique these things helped a lot of different people see deeper problems. But this is just a first babystep. Indeed this kind of critique, by itself, is not even terribly new. 4) Linguistic idealism; the idea that reality is constituted by local linguistic conventions; Wrong, if this phrase means anything at all. Here we can see the kind of confusion that conflating pomo and post-structralism produces. 5) "marginalism," an affection for groups at the margins of society (not the working class) which is also connected with Right only to the extent that 2-3 above compel attention to exclusions and omissions, and call into question (which is not the same thing as deny) simple unities like "the working class." 6) An identity politics that focuses on respect and recognition rather than a class politics that focuses on interests and power. Howlingly wrong. Post-structuralists like Said and Spivak are sharply critical of identity politics. Postmodernism is *nothing* if not a critique of the whole notion of identity, and has thus always been sharply at odds with identity politics and standpoint theories. Not every pomo recapitulates all of these themes, Wiggle room. but most of them recapitulate most of them, in their own way, More wiggling, as was the phrase "family resemblance" earlier. The author wants to make a set of sweeping claims and yet escape responsibility for them. The first logical problem here is that the set of theorists named is so broad and diverse that if you try to find a set of propositions that they all share, you either get a very reduced set of banal propositions (e.g. 2 and 3 above) or if you try to find broader agreement, you get mush. People who want to debate "pomo" construed in these broad terms want to debate mush. There is no there there. As a general rule, folks, anyone who conflates post-structuralism and postmodernism doesn't know what they're talking about. Pomo, when used in these conflationist terms, is a bogeyman, a term for everything that makes the person who is using it nervous. an their epiones in the American academy ampliy and vulgarize them to a ludirous extent. THis is another illogical move, widely represented on pen-l. You assail the silliest postmodernist you can find. When it's pointed out that this is mere strawmanbashing, you claim that there is nonetheless some essential link -- that the serious theorists are responsible for the silly ones, as in the metaphor "amplify" above. As a result of these two forms of conflationism, the silliness of the silliest pomo becomes a justification for not reading, or not reading carefully, several genres of theory. ... explain why their favorite pomo does not advocate a relevantly large subset of these positions, I would be enlightened. Yet more illogic. You cannot prove a negative. It is up to the author to pick a particular theorist and make a critique, with textual evidence. * * * About a year and a half ago, when I was a more regular participant on this list, this topic came up and I pointed to examples in recent ethnography (e.g. Clark, _Onions are My Husband_, Tsing, _In the Realm of the Diamond Queen_, Steedly, _Hanging Without a Rope_.) for evidence that work informed by post-structuralism can produce insights about the social organization of material life. I might also have pointed to work in history like the subaltern studies school, and a lot of important work on gender. Part of our trouble is the backwardness of econ as a
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
BUFFALOS? --jks In a message dated Fri, 8 Sep 2000 2:45:29 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Doug Henwood wrote: Are "these people" any worse than most of the economics literature, which is all too often obscure, abstract, remote from reality, and apologetics for the status quo? The economists are clearly of the enemy, and are recognized as such by all on the left. So I would say the SWP, MIM, Butler, the BUFFALOS, Left Democrats, the left-over Third International Parties, Kristeva, Lacan, RCP, are much worse than the economists. They are barriers, of varying degrees of seriousness, to the formation of a left in the U.S. Carrol
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
Me, an economist? Sir, there is my gage! And having shown little interest in philosophy? What would show a lot. pray tell, beyond gettimng a PhD in it and working the field until the jobs ran out? --jks In a message dated Fri, 8 Sep 2000 3:20:41 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Jim Devine wrote: BTW, Doug, is this the comparison we want to make (pomotistas vs. neoclassical econ.)? isn't there a third alternative, like reading LBO? Well of course. But I'm biased. Carrol Cox wrote: The economists are clearly of the enemy, and are recognized as such by all on the left. Yes, but I'm continually baffled by the energy with which a group of progressive economists denounce "pomo," having otherwise shown little interest in culture, philosophy, or "Theory." It's a little like old vets getting together to re-fight the war, except there was no war. Bashing postmodernists seems to satisfy some deep emotional need among left political economists, as if it were some kind of compensation for being so marginal. Doug
Re: anti-Pomo babble
Any number of problems that Popper cited were rejected, and finally, when Popper turned to problems of moral justification, Wittgenstein asked for an example of a moral rule. Since Wittgenstein had happened to pick up a poker from the fireplace and was waving it around while making his points (was this, as analytic philosophers like to say, "hand waving"?), the example Popper offered was, "Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers!" Wittgenstein then threw down the poker and stormed out of the room, slamming the door (the rumor quickly spread that they had even come to blows). Unlike Popper, who did physically assault one of his students. [in WW Bartley "Unfathomed Knowledge Infinite Wealth, Open Court P.] Ian
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: BUFFALOS? --jks http://ils.unc.edu/~lindgren/RedOrange/index.html, http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/4401/RCMain.html. Doug
Re: Re: Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
You can get the gist of most economics works fairly quickly. All the math and the like is just used to "prove" a simple a simple point. There is little complexity. In that respect, economics might be the easiest discipline in the world. The hard part is putting together all the weird little ideas into a comprehensive vision of how things work. Of course, if you start out with a preconcieved idea, say that markets work efficiently, then that part is also easy. Doug Henwood wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yoshie, do you get extra hazard pay for reading these people? Are "these people" any worse than most of the economics literature, which is all too often obscure, abstract, remote from reality, and apologetics for the status quo? Doug -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Progress at Chico State
Subject: News Release: Electronic Fingerprinting Expedites Background Check Process Date: 9/8/00 1:26:16 PM From: Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 7, 2000 Contact: Ann Walker TEL: 530-898-4143 Electronic Fingerprinting Expedites Background Check Process Live Scan, a system for the electronic submission of fingerprints and a subsequent automated background check, is now being offered by the California State University, Chico Police Department. This new technology has improved upon the traditional ink rolling method by reducing turn around time from up to six months to 72 hours. Individuals requesting background checks from the University Police in the past had to get fingerprinted the old-fashioned way or go to the Chico Police Department or the Butte County Sheriff's Department to use Live Scan. Now they can be scanned on campus at the University Police office on 2nd and Normal Streets. "Community service is our primary function," said Paula Carr, University Police sergeant. "Live Scan has made the campus more user-friendly and has helped us build a relationship with many of the departments. Rather than sending them off-campus, we could take on that process ourselves." Certain departments and programs, including the nursing department, credential program and CAVE, as well as various off-campus businesses require applicants to receive background checks before being accepted. Live Scan works in conjunction with the Department of Justice and the FBI to ensure these individuals are free of criminal records. "This is going to be better for us," said Susan Toussaint, director of the Associated Students Children's Center. "It's much more convenient that students don't have to leave campus for fingerprinting." Appointments are available Monday from 6 to 9 p.m. and Tuesday through Friday from 5 to 8 p.m. Applications with all required information should be submitted one to two days in advance. University Police will charge an $8 processing fee for campus-related users and $10 for off-campus users. Applicants must also pay fees to the Department of Justice ($32) and, if applicable, the FBI ($24). All fees must be paid by cash or money order prior to service. For more information or to schedule an appointment, call 898-5372. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Anti-Jacobin (was anti-Pomo babble)
Hi Jim: According to Hal Draper (in one of the volumes of his KARL MARX'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION), Marx himself was anti-Jacobin, since the Jacobins were petty-bourgeois, professionals, or even haute bourgeois. He sided instead with the plebeian _sans culottes_, and if memory serves me well, with the Hebertistes (sorry but I don't remember the what kind of accents there are on this term) and to some extent with Graccus Babeuf, though Marx did not like the latter's conspiratorial methods after he himself grew out of them. There was not yet a true proletariat of significant size in Paris (the locus of most revolutionary activity). The CP of France, on the other hand, has always favored the Jacobin side of the 1789 revolution. This probably doesn't undermine your point, since L M probably were using "Jacobin" as synonymous with revolutionary. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine Draper's is a possible interpretation of the Jacobins (as real historical actors, not as strawmen of Laclau Mouffe's making). However, Gramsci provides an alternative interpretation. He argues that "The Jacobins strove with determination to ensure a bond between town and country" (_Prison Notebooks_ 63) "made the demands of the popular masses one's own" (66). Of course, the Jacobins did so within the limits of the bourgeois revolution enlightenment philosophy (e.g., they maintained the Le Chapelier law, which denied the workers the right of combination), but Gramsci says that the absence of the Jacobins in Italy created many problems: the Southern Question (oppression of peasants in the South by landlordism underdevelopment); the lack of religious reform through anti-clericalism; the failure to forge progressive republican national culture; and so forth. In contrast to France, Italy only experienced what he calls "passive revolution,": "restoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals, without the French machinery of terror. The old feudal classes are demoted from their dominant position to a 'governing' one, but are not eliminated, nor is there any attempt to liquidate them as an organic whole; instead of a class they become a 'caste' with specific cultural and psychological characteristics, but no longer with predominant economic functions" (115). The absence of Jacobinism, in short, left Italy under material cultural conditions vulnerable to the rise of fascism (itself a kind of passive revolution). In other words, Gramsci took strong exception to conservative historians' one-sided interpretation of Jacobinism: "If the conservative historicists, theorists of the old, are well placed to criticise the utopian character of the mummified Jacobin ideologies, philosophers of praxis are better placed to appreciate the real and not abstract value that Jacobinism had as an element in the creation of the new French nation (that is to say as a fact of circumscribed activity in specific circumstances and not as something ideolgised) and are better placed also to appreciate the historical role of the conservatives themselves, who were in reality the shame-faced children of the Jacobins, who damned their excesses while carefully administering their heritage" (399). Hailing from Japan (itself a country with no Jacobin tradition, modernized through passive revolution militarism), I am inclined to agree with Gramsci. Japan would have been a better country now if it had been led by the Japanese Jacobins into modernity. At least, we would have had a song like La Marseillaise for "national anthem," instead of Kimigayo (a praise song for the imperial dynasty!): * Kimi ga yo wa Chiyo ni yachiyo ni Sazare ishi no iwao to narite Koko no musu made. Thousands of years of happy reign be time; Rule on, my lord, till what are pebbles now By age united to mighty rocks shall grow Whose venerable sides the moss doth line. Translated by Basil H. Chamberlain * Here's the JCP's view of Kimigayo Hinomaru: http://www.jcp.or.jp/english/e-990315-flag_song.html Yoshie
Paul Zarembka on Charlie Andrews
For years I have been looking for a basic introduction to Marx which would work in the classroom. I think I have found it in "From Capitalism to Equality" by Charles Andrews, just published with the last week or so. The web page for the book is www.LaborRepublic.org while the table of contents is at www.LaborRepublic.org/LRtoc.htm . At least for the month of September the price cannot be beaten at $20.95 for hardback (plus $3.90 for shipping)! The writing style is simple and clearly Marxist, the major issues covered, and the substance connected to the lives of ordinary people reading the book in 2000. Furthermore, it introduces the idea of a Labor Republic as a contrast to our capitalism, but leaves a lot open for discussion of what such a republic would actually look like. Probably all of us would have certain questions about emphases in the book (e.g., I like its deemphasis on using any falling tendency of a rate of profit to predict, but would rather prefer some discussion of unproductive labor and have hesitations about "accumulation"). Such is expected. By the way, the author had only intro. courses to economics as part of his own education! He is an activist in San Francisco (heretofore unknown to me). Paul Z. P.S. Anyone may post this endorsement onto any list they wish. I think the book needs to get as much exposure as possible. * Paul Zarembka, editor, RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY at ** http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
pomo or the economy?
Colin reminded us that the discussion on postmodernism seems to crop up every couple years. I cannot for the life of me understand why on this list people get so much more energized discussing the subject, when economic questions, such as the discussion of educational vouchers, seem to get relatively little attention here. I subscribe to the Sacramento Bee, which today had a headline suggesting that higher oil prices might be leading to a recession. I would think that would be very important for us to be ready to explain why a recession happened. It would be easy to fob it off onto environmental restrictions, that supposedly cause higher oil prices. Or perhaps excessive regulation or any of the other usual suspects. Don't you think that we should be more interested in what's happening or what is about to happen in the economy rather than debates about literary criticism? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: pomo or the economy?
Michael Perelman wrote: Colin reminded us that the discussion on postmodernism seems to crop up every couple years. I cannot for the life of me understand why on this list people get so much more energized discussing the subject, when economic questions, such as the discussion of educational vouchers, seem to get relatively little attention here. Because even economists find economics boring? Keynes didn't call it "our miserable profession" for nothing. Doug
Re: pomo or the economy?
Michael Perelman wrote: I subscribe to the Sacramento Bee, which today had a headline suggesting that higher oil prices might be leading to a recession. I would think that would be very important for us to be ready to explain why a recession happened. It would be easy to fob it off onto environmental restrictions, that supposedly cause higher oil prices. Or perhaps excessive regulation or any of the other usual suspects. Thomas Friedman is gearing up to blame it on Chavez Hussein: * NY Times 9/8/00 FOREIGN AFFAIRS The Secret Oil Talks By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN The heads of state from the OPEC oil countries will gather in Venezuela Sept. 26 to 28 for only their second top-level meeting since OPEC was founded in 1960. The meeting comes as oil prices hit a 10-year high this week at $34 a barrel. Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, the host of the summit, just broke the ring of isolation around Iraq and personally flew to Baghdad to consult Saddam Hussein. Here's what I imagine was their conversation. Saddam: Hurricane Hugo, how are you? I love the way you snub the Americans. You remind me so much of Fidel. I'm sorry I can't attend your OPEC summit, but the minute I get on a plane, the Americans will either shoot it down or force it down. Just promise me you won't let the Saudis talk everyone there into keeping prices low. The Saudis keep repeating this mantra to OPEC: "The stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones. People invented alternative tools. And the oil age won't end because of a shortage of oil, but because we drive the price up so far, so fast, we stimulate alternatives." But the fact is, the price of oil today, in real terms, is a fraction of what it used to be in 1973. That's why Americans all drive S.U.V.'s. Why should we subsidize their gas guzzling? Chávez: Brother Saddam, I couldn't agree more. Let's face it, I need the money now. Iran needs the money now. You need the money now. We all have soaring populations, we've all, frankly, destroyed the entrepreneurial middle class in our countries, and none of us want to go through the restructuring, deregulation or privatization required for globalization, because it would mean ceding power. So pushing up oil prices is our only means of economic survival. Bush and Gore say, how dare we raise prices? Oh, give me a break. I think we should propose this at our summit: We'll stop acting like a cartel if Microsoft stops acting like a monopoly. We'll cut the price of oil to its real production cost when Microsoft cuts the price of Windows 2000 to its real production cost. How's that? Saddam: I love it! And the Americans are just playing into our hands. You'd think I was their energy secretary. They're totally unprepared for winter: U.S. heating oil inventories are down nearly 40 percent from a year ago, and crude inventories are at a 24-year low! Heating oil prices have jumped to a 10-year high because of panic that U.S. refiners won't be able to produce enough fuel to heat homes by winter. I read one story where U.S. experts were quoting something called The Farmers' Almanac as predicting it was going to be a mild winter, so they don't have to worry about us. Can you imagine? Betting your whole economy on some almanac written by farmers? Chávez: They're cocky. They think everything runs on silicon now - it's all this new-economy stuff. The fact is, we're still the biggest threat to their prosperity and new economy. Without oil, baby, there ain't no bits and there ain't no bytes. We're the real dot in dot-com. They're just depending on the Saudis to increase production. The fools don't understand the Saudis' real situation. The Saudis are $140 billion in debt, with a huge public payroll and an electricity grid so in need of upgrading they had blackouts this summer. They need cash too. Show me the money, baby! Moreover, the excess capacity the Saudis have is largely in heavy oil, not in the sweet crude the market wants. If Iran, Iraq and Venezuela cut production just a bit we could soak up any Saudi increase. Saddam: Maybe it's time for a little October surprise. I've waited nine years to get revenge on George Bush. Now I'll get it on his son. Can you imagine if we make oil prices an issue in this U.S. election, with Bush Jr. and Cheney - the embodiments of Big Oil - running for office? Gore and Liebowitz, or whatever that Jewish guy's name is, will eat them alive. Chávez: If either of these candidates was a real leader he would be telling Americans that they actually need to push energy conservation immediately, by raising gas taxes and aggressively reducing their dependence on us. Look who their dot-com economy depends on today - Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Russia and Nigeria. Hah! The rogues' gallery! No serious U.S. presidential contender would tolerate that. Saddam: Then we're safe - $40 here we come! * Yoshie
Re: Re: pomo or the economy?
You might be right. Michael Perelman wrote: Colin reminded us that the discussion on postmodernism seems to crop up every couple years. I cannot for the life of me understand why on this list people get so much more energized discussing the subject, when economic questions, such as the discussion of educational vouchers, seem to get relatively little attention here. Because even economists find economics boring? Keynes didn't call it "our miserable profession" for nothing. Doug -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Anti-Jacobin (was anti-Pomo babble)
Yoshie wrote: ... In contrast to France, Italy only experienced what he [Gramsci] calls "passive revolution,": "restoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals, without the French machinery of terror. The old feudal classes are demoted from their dominant position to a 'governing' one, but are not eliminated, nor is there any attempt to liquidate them as an organic whole; instead of a class they become a 'caste' with specific cultural and psychological characteristics, but no longer with predominant economic functions" (115). The absence of Jacobinism, in short, left Italy under material cultural conditions vulnerable to the rise of fascism (itself a kind of passive revolution) Of course, just because Marx opposed the Jacobins doesn't mean they're all bad. In Western Europe, the Jacobins and their ilk led the process that didn't simply undermine the traditional "feudal" ruling classes. They helped the process of the unification of the nation-state and the creation of the state as an institution largely separate from civil society -- all of which had been started under Absolutism. All of this creates possibilities for the development of capital and in fact continues to this day, with "bourgeois revolution" being instituted world-wide nowadays by the IMF and its friends. It also creates possibilities for working people getting more and even for transforming capitalism into socialism, though there's clearly nothing automatic about realizing these possibilities. Now that I'm at home, I could skim a little of Draper's exposition of Marx's position: he was arguing that workers couldn't trust the bourgeoisie, that they could only fight exploitation and the like via struggle independent of the capitalists, and that revolution from above was not the solution to the specific problems of the working class. Tactically and strategically, Marx opposed the conspiratorial or putschist methods that grew out of the Jacobin tradition and had been taken up by Auguste Blanqui. The bottom line was that only the self-organization of the working class could liberate that class. BTW, I was wrong about Marx's support for the Hebertists, who were left-Jacobins. Babeuf was a non-Jacobin who "invented" modern communism, but Marx opposed his conspiratorial bent. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Re: Re: pomo or the economy?
On Democracy Now today, Juan Gonzalez suggested that the money for Colombia may be in part a preparation to "Allende" Chavez. Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Thomas Friedman is gearing up to blame it on Chavez Hussein: * NY Times 9/8/00 FOREIGN AFFAIRS -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reich on Vouchers
In addition to the points about private and religious schools' elitism, racism , obscurantism taught etc. which are in the main superstructural aspects in any class divided society. Other horrors are wrapped up in schools for profit vouchers.. And here too -- "It's the economy stupid!!" There is a lot of foot loose capital lying around with rich idlers and venture capitalists searching for industries to make better than the average rates of profits than in their existing ones. Prop 38 would mean a $4,000 voucher for EACH student, each yr. . That is a hefty chunk of cash . There will be a myriad of street corner outfits ready to set up those Play Chess-Checkers and Blocks all day schools of parasite 'entrepreneurs' that would love to get in on this gravy train . If each new Street corner school for profit got 35 kids , thats $140,000.00-yr before meager expenses. Nothing to spit at for start up exploiters (probably those who failed in other businesses). And no doubt larger capital ( small banks, etc) might also want to get in on this action. Under Prop 38 they could warehouse the kids all day --and there is NO accountability! Also wahts to stop some smaller Corner Basement "Academy" from cashing in vouchers for $4 G-s each and giving a kick back of $1000 to "friends" and "neighbors" who enroll their kids? Also back to the politics, there are NO credential requirements (as mentioned), NO background checks for employees and owners of these voucher schools (That would be costly and cut into profits -always held sacred by profiteers !) And ZERO safety concerns for the kids ! Anybody can set up a "Voucher Academy" . Who knows if they are criminals, scam artists, or WORSE for the kids . This is the epitome of the bosses "free market" where for-profit means ultimate "freedom" -- to rip-off and scam,even prey on children ,etc. More license for the most despicable predators --all in the name of their blessed 'free market"! Neil
pomo or the economy?
PEN-Lers, Item from The Sacramento Bee website: OPEC boost in oil output not expected to cool prices By BRUCE STANLEY, Associated Press (clip) LONDON (September 8, 2000 2:28 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Analysts predict that OPEC will agree to raise its official output by no more than 800,000 barrels a day -- 3 percent of each member's production quota. They say such an increase would do little if anything to rein in oil prices, which have more than tripled during the past 20 months and have continued rising this week to new post-Gulf War highs. Well, yes. But the Sac. Bee article deftly omits one big part of the global oil production story: World consumption of oil was 76 million barrels a day during January-April 2000, an increase of eight million barrels a day since 1990, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). And the US? Its oil consumption was a mere 19 million barrels per day during January-April 2000 versus 17 million barrels in January-April 1990. Will Goldilocks meet the Three Bears now, Jim D.? Seth Sandronsky pomo or the economy? by Michael Perelman 08 September 2000 23:40 UTC Colin reminded us that the discussion on postmodernism seems to crop up every couple years. I cannot for the life of me understand why on this list people get so much more energized discussing the subject, when economic questions, such as the discussion of educational vouchers, seem to get relatively little attention here. I subscribe to the Sacramento Bee, which today had a headline suggesting that higher oil prices might be leading to a recession. I would think that would be very important for us to be ready to explain why a recession happened. It would be easy to fob it off onto environmental restrictions, that supposedly cause higher oil prices. Or perhaps excessive regulation or any of the other usual suspects. Don't you think that we should be more interested in what's happening or what is about to happen in the economy rather than debates about literary criticism? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
RE: Re: Re: pomo or the economy?
Echelon is working overtime... and the latest econ. report of the prez. show a big leap in nanotechnology investment. better, smaller "bugs" to put on those plastic plants... :-) Ian -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Michael Perelman Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 5:30 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:1529] Re: Re: pomo or the economy? On Democracy Now today, Juan Gonzalez suggested that the money for Colombia may be in part a preparation to "Allende" Chavez. Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Thomas Friedman is gearing up to blame it on Chavez Hussein: * NY Times 9/8/00 FOREIGN AFFAIRS -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bears Are Everywhere! (was Re: pomo or the economy?)
Well, yes. But the Sac. Bee article deftly omits one big part of the global oil production story: World consumption of oil was 76 million barrels a day during January-April 2000, an increase of eight million barrels a day since 1990, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). And the US? Its oil consumption was a mere 19 million barrels per day during January-April 2000 versus 17 million barrels in January-April 1990. Will Goldilocks meet the Three Bears now, Jim D.? Seth Sandronsky There have been some literal encounters between Goldilocks more than three bears (animal bears, not bears on the Wall Street, but they may be related -- gas-guzzling economic boom + more sprawl = higher oil prices = bears, natural or economic, closer to home). Where is Colorado's answer to Mike Davis? * The New York Times September 7, 2000, Thursday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 18; Column 1; National Desk HEADLINE: Basalt Journal; This Land Is Their Land: Bears Are Everywhere BYLINE: By MICHAEL JANOFSKY DATELINE: BASALT, Colo., Sept. 6 It was bad enough when Steve Solomon and his wife, Bates, found the skunk crawling around under their bed at 2 a.m. That they could deal with. Sooner or later, Mr. Solomon figured, the critter would make its way out the front door, which they routinely left open for the breeze. But was the door still open? Mr. Solomon had to check. That's when he froze. It was open, all right. But standing only 20 feet away at the compost bin was a large black bear, chomping on the remains of a cantaloupe. "It must have been twice my size," Mr. Solomon said today, guessing the bear's weight at 400 pounds or more. "I had a skunk behind me, a bear in front of me. I didn't know which one was worse." Mr. Solomon is hardly the only Coloradan who of late has lived out a Goldilocks tale in reverse. Because of a hot, dry summer that has withered natural food supplies, and with an ever increasing number of people living closer to forests and wilderness areas, bears have been meeting up with humans at an alarming rate throughout the state. So far, only a smattering of human injuries have been reported, all of them minor. The encounters have been worse on the bears, more than 25 of which have been put to death this year under Colorado's two-strikes-and-you're-out policy for those that forage too close to people. Over the same period last year, the state killed only six. Biologists and state officials say that if there are more summers like this one, and if home construction near mountainous areas continues at its feverish pace, more dangerous confrontations are inevitable. "If a bear learns where to find human foods, he's likely to come back," said Chuck Schwartz, an expert in bears as the leader of the United States Geological Survey's Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, in Bozeman, Mont. "They have very good memory, and they don't differentiate. If it's edible, they'll eat it." Grizzlies are not to be confused with the black bears roaming Colorado and other states. Grizzlies, larger than black bears and more threatening to humans, are generally found only in areas around two national parks in the northwest Rockies, Yellowstone and Glacier, putting them at greater distances from population centers. Black bears, which are known to attack humans only when they feel trapped, are commonly found in dense forests and mountain terrain at high elevations, where they have encountered unsuitable conditions in Colorado this year. A late spring frost and endless summer weeks of uncommonly hot and dry weather have cost them their usual meals of acorns and berries. Bears typically eat up to 20 hours a day in the warm months to put on enough weight to last the winter. Denied their natural foods, they have been foraging closer to homes and towns to scavenge landfills, trash cans, even dog dishes, making this year one of the most active for officials responding to calls from frightened people throughout the Rocky Mountain West. In Colorado, reports of bear sightings and encounters now occur almost daily. "Everybody has a bear story," said Mr. Solomon, a jewelry maker who has lived for 15 years in Basalt (pronounced buh-SALT), a mountain town 20 miles northwest of Aspen. "One woman on the next street down was canning in her kitchen with the door open. A bear wandered in to help her out." "I know another family," he said, "who eliminated every bit of food from their house, scrubbed it down and now only eats in restaurants." In Aspen, the food is apparently so tasty that for the first time bears have been spotted poking into garbage bins along Main Street this year. Other bears have wandered along streets in Grand Junction. Tom Theobald, a beekeeper near Boulder, said bears had twice ravaged his colonies, eating the honey and destroying equipment at a cost that now exceeds $2,000. "I don't know how they do it," he said of the
Possible Progress vs. sweatshops
Dear Sisters and Brothers, I am working with the Taiwan Confederation of Trade Unions (TCTU), a new federation of independent unions in Taiwan founded this past May Day. Recently, we have received a number newspaper reports on the horrible working conditions and union busting in the Taiwanese-owned garment and textile factories in Nicaragua, and the struggles being waged by workers there. We have also heard about the solidarity action taken the US and Honduras unionists are taking in support of the Nicaraguan workers. And we would like to do our share here in Taiwan. I am wondering whether anyone on the list can point me to the direction of the people who are currently doing solidarity work with Nicaraguan workers? Your help will be most appreciated. Yours, Hsin-Hsing Chen Graduate School for Social Transformation Studies Shih-Hsin University Wenshan Dist., Taipei Taiwan [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 8 Sep 2000 -- 4:73 (#466)
--- Support our Sponsor CarClub: Join today and get a $15 Amazon.com Gift Certificate absolutely FREE. Save 10% on gas every time you fill up. Get the same AUTO insurance coverage you have now for $250 less. http://click.topica.com/ycbz8SnrbAjwjxa/CarClub __ The Internet Anti-Fascist: Friday, 8 September 2000 Vol. 4, Number 73 (#466) __ Religion and Fascism In the News Bill Morlin and Thomas Clouse (Spokane Spokesman Review), "Verdict busts Butler: Jury orders Aryans to pay $6.3 million," 8 Sep 00 Imre Karacs, "Church agrees to pay war slaves" Rightwing Quote of the Week What's Worth Checking: 10 stories -- RELIGION AND FASCISM IN THE NEWS Verdict busts Butler: Jury orders Aryans to pay $6.3 million Bill Morlin and Thomas Clouse (Spokane Spokesman Review) 8 Sep 00 COEUR D'ALENE -- A jury returned a $6.3 million judgment Thursday against the Aryan Nations, its founder Richard Butler and three former members. The verdict in the civil trial means the jury believed the 82-year-old white supremacist and his organization were guilty of "gross negligence'' in appointing security guards who carried out a 1998 assault on two passers-by, Victoria and Jason Keenan. The panel of three men and nine women awarded $250,000 to Victoria Keenan and $80,000 to her 21-year-old son. But the big punch came in punitive damages -- just the kind of award the plaintiffs' attorneys believe will bankrupt the Aryan Nations. The jury tagged Butler with $4.8 million in punitive damages and his former chief of staff Michael Teague with $600,000. Aryan guards Jesse Warfield and John Yeager were hit with $100,000 and $500,000, respectively, in punitive damages. "If it hadn't been for three of us, they would have gotten Butler for $100 million,'' said juror Judy Jacobson, a 45-yearold carpet layer from Spirit Lake. "They wanted to bury the whole Aryan Nations,'' Jacobson told The Spokesman-Review late Thursday night from her home. Five other jurors contacted by the newspaper did not want to talk about the verdict. To collect the award, civil rights attorney Morris Dees said he will move immediately to seize the Aryan compound and all of Butler's assets except the clothes on his back. Dees said he will also take legal moves to gain ownership of the name "Aryan Nations'' so he can retire it. The co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center said he wants to turn the Aryan hate compound into a school for tolerance. After deliberating nine hours over two days, the jury returned its verdict at 5 p.m. to a packed and well-guarded courtroom in the Kootenai County Justice Building. Butler arrived at the courthouse as police snipers patrolled the rooftops. After being told of the judgment by his attorney Edgar Steele, Butler walked outside, appearing somewhat stunned. "This is nothing,'' Butler said of the award. The man who founded the Aryan Nations two decades ago said his message of white supremacy and separatism will live on despite the jury's decision. "We have planted the seed,'' Butler said. "Most of North Idaho is fertile with people who don't want multiculturalism.'' The Aryan Nations will live on, he said, despite the jury award. "I'm still here,'' Butler shouted, getting into an old Pontiac LeMans. "I'll remain in business until the day I die.'' Following Butler out of the courthouse was Teague, wearing a crewcut and a $5 suit he bought in a thrift shop for the trial. "They think this verdict is like a magic pill they can swallow to make the Aryan Nations go away,'' Teague said. "You can shut down the Aryan Nations, but you can't stop our hearts. You can't stop our minds. The Aryan Nations will live as long as the white race is alive.'' But others who've fought Butler and his minions of hate were jubilant after the verdict. Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, visiting Moscow, praised the jury for sending a clear message that Idaho doesn't tolerate racism. "This is a significant event,'' the governor said. "We finally, through a court of law, could put a voice to how we feel, and I think the jury did a great job. "I think those 12 individuals spoke for hundreds of thousands of Idahoans, and I'm very proud of that jury,'' Kempthorne said. Coeur d'Alene Mayor Steve Judy said Butler "is not a member of our community and never has been. "He may call himself an American, but he's not one of us who live in Coeur d'Alene,'' Judy said. Dees and Law Center attorneys J. Richard Cohen and Peter Tepley teamed with Coeur d'Alene attorneys Ken Howard and Norm Gissel for the suit. The legal team is now expected to move immediately to seize all of
Re: pomo or the economy?
Michael Perelman said on 9/8/00 4:29 PM On Democracy Now today, Juan Gonzalez suggested that the money for Colombia may be in part a preparation to "Allende" Chavez. There are others who suggest that it's a simple, blatant money-laundering scheme. Martin
Another Summary of Postmodernism
I tried to spend a whole summer reading Foucault and Derrida. The problem for anyone who was trained in analtyical philosophy is that one has to simply turn off all the battery of critical skills that one has learned. I grew up on G.E. Moore, John Austin, Wittgenstein, O.K. Bouwsma, and Frank Ebersole. I found that I really could not read Foucault or Derrida critically because I would never get beyond the first page of any work. Most secondary sources seemed equally difficult. I found Eagleton to be at least intelligible but I have no idea how close he comes to a reasonable interpretation of postmodern authors or whether this summary is at all accurate--but then since there probably is no such thing as a reasonable interpretation except relative to a particular group of interpreters, we cannot *privilege* Danby's corrosive replies. CHeers, Ken Hanly Terry EAGLETON, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 1996. Blackwell, 1996. 147 pp. The first chapter is an outline of the position of postmodernism, by the ironical device of hypothesising what kind of reaction one might expect when a radical movement finds itself confronted with the wholesale 'victory' -- as far, that is, as 'the real world' is concerned -- of the system which it was its purpose to oppose: (i) an interest in epistemology, in the question of how we can know about the world, would conveniently replace the will to act on the world; (ii) faced with a totality which is both all-pervasive and -- hence -- invisible, the distrust and/or denial of all universals would become common; (iii) since issues essential to the system -- such as modes of production and social formations -- are out of bounds, the emphasis would shift to marginal matters: either to ones that are in the crevices of the system -- such as the body and its sexuality, and language and our discourses --, or to acceptable topics, like prisons and patriarchy; (iv) and essentialism itself, the view that such things as a political system and human beings have an essence, which one can criticise or respect, would become suspect; (v) having lost their purpose, the members would deny that purposive action is feasible, and having cut themselves off from their history, they would reduce history to 'histories', to accident and story telling; (vi) in the attempt to cope with being overwhelmed by the system, some would see in it, hopefully, the seeds of its own subversion, while others would make believe that the end they had been aspiring to, or at least some end, had been reached. (Some of these facets only become explicit in the subsequent arguments against.) -- The situation is not hypothetical of course, in that in most people's view the collapse, largely due to internal contradictions, of the political and economic system of the Soviet block means that the capitalist system has 'won' -- to the point that we have reached (pace Fukuyama) ''the end of history'' --, and that a large part of the radical movement has indeed not been able to stick to its moral and intellectual principles in confronting that system, and has instead retreated into the ineffective particularism of a postmodernist critique at its margins. Terry Eagleton, professor of English at Oxford, here raises a spirited, colourful, often entertaining defence of a 'good old-fashioned' Marx-leaning socialism, unashamedly reasserting the values of an hierarchical, essentialistic, teleological, metahistorical, universalist humanism, against the lures of the lately popular postmodernist school of thought, and at the same time manages to get in a few digs at the now prevailing system. (Postmodernism is of course also a movement in the arts and in criticism, with corresponding values -- such as ''a sense of artifice, a suspicion of absolute truth'' in literature, ''an allusive, eclectic mode, which refers in a ... parodic pastiche to earlier styles'' in architecture, and in general an inclusive, perhaps irresponsible playfulness which may be contributing to a dissolution of the subject [Microsoft, Encarta, 1996] --, but the author says at the outset that this is not what he will be concerned with.) In very condensed form, his arguments against postmodernism -- which apply equally in different areas, such as history, politics and morality -- seem to run as follows: (i) by denying such notions as totality, essence and purpose, by particularising and reducing all differences to a non-evaluative otherness, postmodernism introduces a new, levelling universalism, and is therefore guilty of a logical contradiction; (ii) more seriously, by thus treating everything and everybody as of equal value, it empties the very notion of value of meaning, and so deprives political action of purpose; (iii) and in thus levelling all values, postmodernism, far from being a critical movement, is actually in collusion with capitalism's spirit of the marketplace, where the value of everything is determined by nothing else than supply and demand, and a person is
EXPAND THE DEBATE TEACH-IN SERIES - Boston, MA (Distribute Widely)
The first Presidential Debate in the U.S. has been scheduled to come to the University of Massachusetts-Boston on October 3rd. All third party candidates, and with them a broad spectrum of positions, ideas, and options will be excluded from the debate. The values of diversity and plurality - essential to any democracy - have been increasingly violated in the U.S. as its two major parties lean towards the same platform, funded by and catering to corporate interests and big money. UMass Boston's Radical Student Alliance has assembled a series of seven panels of speakers and a debate on independent progressive politics to scrutinize important issues which will find no dissenting voice in the mainstream debates or media, as well as to challenge the political structure that supports such monopolitics. Please, join us and find out whether alternative politics offer a more just and fair alternative for you! UMass Boston's Radical Student Alliance Presents: EXPAND THE DEBATE TEACH-IN SERIES [All seven teach-ins will be held in the Lipke Auditorium at UMass Boston - directions listed below.] THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES IN AMERICA Friday September 15 - 2:30-5:00 * Ben Day from UMass Boston's Radical Student Alliance. * Thomas Ferguson author of Golden Rule, Senior Associate Provost at UMass Boston. * Reverend David Carl Olson Minister of the Community Church of Boston. MILITARY SPENDING AND FOREIGN INTERVENTION Monday September 18 - 2:30-5:00 * Anthony Arnove of South End Press and the International Socialist Organization, editor of Iraq Under Siege. * Kim Foster from the Rainforest Action Network. * Mathew Knoester from the Colombia Support Network. CONTINGENT LABOR AND SOCIAL WAGE Friday September 22 - 2:30-5:00 * Diane Dujon Director of Independent Learning, CPCS at UMass Boston. * Barbara Gottfried Field organizer with the American Association of University Professors. * Jason Pramas Associate Director, Campaign on Contingent Work. * Gary Zabel Co-Chair, Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor. PUBLIC EDUCATION AND PUBLIC SPENDING Monday September 25 - 2:30-5:00 * Annie Zirin from the Lynn Teachers Union and the International Socialist Organization. * Jonathan King MIT Professor and Chair, Mass. Labor Party Education Committee. * Representative from Fair Test. HEALTH CARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY Wednesday September 27 - 2:30-5:00 * Judith Atkins President, District 2, United Electrical Workers Union. * Phil Mamber President, Mass. Senior Action. THE U.S. AND GLOBALIZATION Thursday September 28 - 7:00-10:00 * Michael Albert editor of Z Magazine. * Hardip Man from South Asian Women For Action * Arthur MacEwan author of Neoliberalism or Democracy?, Professor of Economics at UMass Boston. * Robert Naiman Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (DC). THE DEATH PENALTY (Organized by the Coalition for Mumia.) Friday September 29 - 6:30-9:30 * Moderated by City Counselor Chuck Turner. * Taped message from Mumia Abu Jamal on death row. * Ramona Africa from MOVE. * Steven Hawking lawyer for Mumia's federal appeal. * Laywer Johnson former MA death row inmate. * Monica Moorehead presidential candidate for the Workers World party. * Professor Becky Thompson of Simmons College and Academics for Mumia. * Kazi Toure former political prisoner. (For directions to the UMass campus: http://www.umb.edu/about_umb/directions.html ) (To find Lipke Auditorium on a map of the campus: http://www.umb.edu/campus_tour/science/second.html ) SEE ALSO: "WHERE DOES INDEPENDENT PROGRESSIVE POLITICS GO FROM HERE?" Monday October 2 - 4:30-6:30 ... a debate between representatives of: * The Green Party (Howie Hawkins) * The Labor Party (Ed Bruno) * The Socialist Party (Eric Chester) Moderated by: Marisa Figueiredo of Redstockings of the Women's Liberation Movement. To be held at: MIT - 25 Ames St. - Room 66-110 (Down the street from Kendal Square.) (For more information and other events: http://www.expandthedebate.org )
Re: Re: anti-Pomo babble
I had the same sort of training as Ken Hanly, somewhat later on, basically high powered analytical philosophy: rather than Austin and Bowsma, my icons were Quine, Davidson, and Rawls, my teachers Rorty, Harman, Kuhn, and Scanlon (undergrad), Gibbard, Railton, and Mary Hesse (grad). I did pick up a love for classical German philosophy from Kant and Hegel through Marx, and I was never allegic to the continentals. Unlike Ken, I think very highly of Foucault, and in particular of Discipline and Punish, which I regard as a genuinely great book; Derrida is obviously very deep and interesting too, though I do not pretend to have mastered his thought to my own satisfaction. But I took this material seriosuly enough to work on it and, when I was teaching, to attempt to teach it--as much to learn it myself as anything else. By and large, I didn't like it, with the exceptions noted above and a few others--Nancy Fraser and Iris Young are excellent. Colin's irritated response here accuses me of not getting it, given my summary of what I learned. I make certain generalizations, and he says there are exceptions. I admit that, and he accuses me of weaseling. Can't win on that sort of argument, of course, but this is part of pomo nominalism: everything is difference, nothing is like anything else, there are no valid generalizations, so the very sort of critique of pomo, indeed the very idea of a critique of pomo, is flawed from the start. Oh well. Some brief replies: Then he should know that there are very large differences among them. Of course. As I said. But I think most of them advocate most of the positions that I indicated. Who is the naive relativist in the list above? "Relativism" is the key term in the standard, ignorant, conflationst attack on the mythical unity of "pomo". Relativism is in fact a highly modernist position. See for example Haraway's blistering attack on relativism in her "Situated Knowledges" essay. Yeah, and Rorty has denied that he is a relativist or that relativism is a coherent position. But he also accepts the doctrine that I understand to be relativist that there is no nonarbitrary way of choosing between different basic conceptions of the world or justice. We start where we are and we stay there; our ideas are ours that thus justified. That's realtivism as I understand it. Foucault claims that "truth" is just the operation of power--which claims are true is determined by what the structures of discipline and normativity will allow to be said and accepted. What's that if not relativism? Etc. Most of the big guys and gals in this game are not "naive"--unlike Nicole, they know the moves and countermoves, but that doesn'r mean they are not relativists as we "modernists"--I guess I am one--understand the term. 2) antiessentialism, and 3) anti-grand-narrativism, These 2 apply only in the sense that learning how to critique these things helped a lot of different people see deeper problems. But this is just a first babystep. Indeed this kind of critique, by itself, is not even terribly new. OK, so Colin admits that these "babysteps" are actually held by most pomos, although he regards them as nothing new. Well, Marx never claimed that class analysis was anything new, but it's acharacterustic Marxist position anyway. And what are these great new insights we get by discarding the idea that people or groups of them have any objective nature or that history has any directionality, including any progressive tendency towards greater technical productivity or emancipation from class oppression? 4) Linguistic idealism; the idea that reality is constituted by local linguistic conventions; Wrong, if this phrase means anything at all. Here we can see the kind of confusion that conflating pomo and post-structralism produces. Two can play at that game. No, you are wrong, and probably meaningless too. But in fact, the relativist doctrines (denied to be such) urged by Rorty and Foucault implicate precisely such a linuistic idealism, which after all is no more (or less) puzzling than the claim that material objects are constituted by ideas (Berkeley), the operation of the understanding on the intuitions generated by the affection of the thing in itself on the mind (Kant), or lots of other wacky idealist theories. I suppose the second sentence is meant to suggests that postrucs may be linguistic idealists but pomos are not. But poststrucs are an early moment in the history of pomo, and pomos like Derrida do treat everything as a text. 5) "marginalism," an affection for groups at the margins of society (not the working class) which is also connected with Right only to the extent that 2-3 above compel attention to exclusions and omissions, and call into question (which is not the same thing as deny) simple unities like "the working class." OK, so I am 3 for 5 so far by your very own
Feminism (posted originally on marxism@lists.panix.com)
Nicole wrote: So, how did feminism start? When I moved up to Boston in 1970 to take an assignment with the branch of the Socialist Workers Party, the new feminist movement was beginning to take shape. Unlike other groups on the left, the SWP took an entirely positive attitude toward the movement, even though some of the feminist leaders had no use for Marxism and us in particular. They can be faulted on the former, but not on the latter. The strongest feminist group was called Female Liberation, which emerged out of something called Cell 16. The principal leaders were Roxanne Dunbar and Abby Rockefeller. One or two of our comrades were assigned to work in Female Liberation, but they were not welcomed--nor were they excluded. One of the leaders of Female Liberation, besides the 2 already noted, was a woman named Nancy Williamson whose husband was in the SWP branch. Not only was their marriage was on the rocks, she hated the SWP as well. In 1971 changes began to be felt both in Female Liberation and the SWP, as Marxism and feminism began to cross-pollinate. (In addition to Female Liberation, there was another group called Bread and Roses that was more broadly based. One of the women who led Bread and Roses was an old-timer named Gustie Traynor, a working class member of the SWP in her 60s of Sicilian descent. She really wasn't too keyed into the new feminist movement, but she was an expert on the "woman question". She had read Kollontai and just about every other Marxist thinker on the subject.) Another important element was the publication of SWP'er Evelyn Reed's "Woman's Liberation from Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family", whose thesis is indicated in the title of the book. The idea of a matriarchy was immensely attractive to the young women coming around the feminist movement at the time. Although many saw their oppression as wrapped up in their gender, Reed was always clear in her lectures to them that only the overthrow of capitalism could open up the possibility of regaining the independence and power once enjoyed under matriarchies. Reed's thesis was controversial both inside and outside the party, but she was respected as an audacious thinker whatever one thought of her theory. Another key shift that opened up the possibility of feminists moving closer to the SWP was the mass radicalization itself, focused on the Vietnam antiwar movement. Among a rather broad layer of radicals, including feminists and black nationalists, a recognition was taking shape that the primary contradiction--capitalist property relations--would have to be resolved in order for particular oppressions to be overcome. In 1971 the Boston branch ran Peter Camejo against Ted Kennedy for the office of Senator. He was a gifted speaker and often spoke to crowds of several hundred at local campuses or our headquarters. These talks, ostensibly election campaign speeches, were meant to recruit people to the SWP. Among those who came around in this period were a group of about 5 or 6 Female Liberation activists. After they joined, the SWP went through a feminist transformation mostly on the strength of the example set by the new members. In some respects this was reflected in a total embrace of the ideas of the feminist movement, which were synthesized with Marxism. This, of course, was the direction that the party was taking on a national level. Boston and New York were spearheading this development. In short order, women assumed leadership responsibilities in the branch as everybody had become sensitized to the kind of male chauvinism that existed on the left, but a shade less so in the SWP. The branch had about one hundred members, and half were women. The branch executive committee was majority woman. The other profound change took place on personal and social institutions in the branch. Women began to leave oppressive relationships at a rapid pace. Many also became lesbians, including the woman I was in a relationship with. Sexual roles were being redefined under the impact of the gay liberation movement as well. Most rank-and-file SWP'ers assumed that the party would embrace the slogan of the movement that "Gay is Good". In the first sign that the SWP was to retreat from the 60s radicalization, the 1973 convention passed a resolution written by the party leadership that it was wrong to support such a slogan. Furthermore, we could not orient to the gay movement as we had to the woman's movement. And why? We did not know enough about psychology to pass judgement on whether "Gay is Good"-- that was the excuse. We also characterized the gay movement as insufficiently proletarian. This was the first hint that the SWP was moving in a workerist direction. In about 4 years, the party launched a "turn" which would effectively cut its ties to the feminist movement. It stated that all of the social movements would be based in the industrial trade unions. This included the peace movement, the antiracist movement and the
Re: Aux armes citoyens! (was A slight advantage of poverty)
En relación a [PEN-L:1454] Aux armes citoyens! (was A slight ad, el 8 Sep 00, a las 3:16, Yoshie Furuhashi dijo: Here's a song for lovers of liberty: La Marseillaise. Militant patriotism at its most full-blooded. Nestor's description of an Argentine nationalist icon sounds serene, with its sense of duty to patria fulfilled, in comparison to La Marseillaise. Allons enfants de la Patrie Le jour de gloire est arrivé. Contre nous, de la tyrannie, L'étandard sanglant est levé, l'étandard sanglant est levé, Entendez-vous, dans la compagnes. Mugir ces farouches soldats Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras Egorger vos fils, vos compagnes. The complete Argentinian National Song (130 years ago an abridged version was made so that the Spanish community here would not feel uncomfortable!), which in fact was a war song of the Latin American revolutionary armies that was chanted even in the Venezuelan Llanos, is very similar. On the advances of the Royalist counterrevolutionary armies in Latin America (the song was written in 1813, during a bad moment for the revolution) it runs No los veis sobre Méjico y Quito Arrojarse con saña tenaz? Y cuál lloran, bañadas en sangre, Potosí, Cochabamba y La Paz? A vosotros se atreve, argentinos, el orgullo del fiero invasor... (Can't you see them on Mexico and Quito throwing themselves in tenacious rage? And the blood bathed tears that shed Potosí, Cochabamba, and La Paz? Against you, Argentinians, is rising the pride of the savage invader...) Can't help thinking that these lines were written yesterday, not a couple of centuries ago. Only that the savage invader does not speak Spanish any more. This is a piece of "patriotic rant" as most probably Professor DeLong would say, that it would be very healthy for our socialist tasks to reinstate. And on and on. More on the revolutionary credentials of poor Sergeant Cabral who most probably did not imagine that he would have to wage battle against a Californian economist. I was once at the beautiful city of Mendoza, where San Martín organized the advance of our revolutionary armies into Chile, then in the hands of a bloody Royalist regime and the only door to Perú, since the High Perú was strongly defended. There is a great monument to the army of San Martín there, the Cerro de la Gloria. The monument rescues the massive popular mobilisation on the liberation war that our Independence wars actually were, and there is an impressive high relief of advancing grenadiers (San Martin's élite troops, mostly constituted by gaucho -and partly by black- soldiers) in their uniforms of battle. A couple of Israelis was on visit that same day, and we pooled to rent a taxi to the monument. Along the road, I told them some facts on Mendoza and the place they were at. When we came to the monument, one in the couple asked me "But why are you paying hommage to a French army?". Then I realized how strong were the links between the revolutionary generation of the Independence and the great revolutionaries of 1789. After that I began to study the influence of the French Revolution and French Illuminists on our early revolutionary leaders, and it was astonishingly deep and radical, reasonably enough because deep and radical had been its influence on the Spanish bureaucracy in general Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Castro statement to UN Millennium conference
REPUBLICA DE CUBA MISION PERMANENTE ANTE LAS NACIONES UNIDAS ADDRESS BY DR. FIDEL CASTRO RUZ, PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF CUBA MILLENNIUM SUMMIT New York, September 6, 2000 Excellencies: There is chaos in our world, both within the countries' borders and beyond. Blind laws are offered like divine norms that would bring peace, order, well being and the security our planet so badly needs. That is what they would have us believe. Three dozen developed and wealthy nations that monopolize the economic, political and technological power have joined us in this gathering to offer more of the same recipes that have only served to make us poorer, more exploited and more dependent. There is not even discussion about a radical reform of this old institution over a half century ago when there were few independent nations-- to turn it into a true representative body of the interests of all the peoples on Earth-, an institution where no one would have the irritating and anti-democratic right of veto and where a transparent process could be undertaken to expand membership and representation in the Security Council, an executive body subordinated to the General Assembly, which should be the one making the decisions on such crucial issues as intervention and the use of force. It should be clearly stated that the principle of sovereignty cannot be sacrificed to an abusive and unfair order that a hegemonic superpower uses, together with its own might and strength, to try to decide everything by itself. That, Cuba will never accept. The poverty and underdevelopment prevailing in most nations as well as the inequality in the distribution of wealth and knowledge in the world are basically at the source of the present conflicts. It cannot be overlooked that current underdevelopment and poverty have resulted from conquest, colonization, slavery and plundering in most countries of the planet by the colonial powers and from the emergence of imperialism and the bloody wars motivated by new distributions of the world. Today, it is their moral obligation to compensate our nations for the damages caused throughout centuries. Humanity should be aware of what we have been so far and what we cannot continue to be. Presently, our species has enough accumulated knowledge, ethical values and scientific resources to move towards a new historical era of true justice and humanism. There is nothing in the existing economic and political order that can serve the interests of Humankind. Thus, it is unsustainable and it must be changed. Suffice it to say that the world population is already 6 billion, 80% of which live in poverty. Ages-old diseases from Third World nations such as malaria, tuberculosis and others equally lethal have not been eradicated while new epidemics like AIDS threaten to exterminate the population of entire nations. On the other hand, wealthy countries keep investing enormous amounts of money in the military and in luxurious items and a voracious plague of speculators exchange currencies, stocks and other real or fictitious values for trillions of dollars every day. Nature is being devastated. The climate is changing under our own eyes and drinking water is increasingly contaminated or scarce. The sources of man's seafood are being depleted and crucial non-renewable resources are wasted in luxury and triviality. Anyone understands that the United Nations basic role in the pressing new century is to save the world not only from war but also from underdevelopment, hunger, diseases, poverty and the destruction of the natural resources indispensable to human life. And it should do so promptly before it is too late! The dream of having truly fair and sensible rules to guide human destiny seems impossible to many. However, we are convinced that the struggle for the impossible should be the motto of this institution that brings us together today! Thank you. Louis Proyect The Marxism mailing-list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Feminism (posted originally on marxism@lists.panix.com)
Nicole wrote: So, how did feminism start? As someone who was outside the process, my impression was that the recent wave of feminism that came out of the 1960s anti-war and other movements in the US was a reaction to the male chauvinism of the "New Left" leaders. Paraphrasing, many women said: you men talk about liberating Vietnam, liberating Blacks, etc., but what about women? Why are you men making all the decisions while we make coffee? (FYI, according to eye-witness accounts I've heard, no bras were actually burned, at least at the first, famous, "bra-burning" event.) BTW, I can see no reason why feminism is necessarily postmodernist, nor why postmodernist is necessarily feminist. (Justin, thanks for the summary of what "pomo" means.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
Re: Re: Feminism (posted originally on marxism@lists.panix.com)
Jim Devine: As someone who was outside the process, my impression was that the recent wave of feminism that came out of the 1960s anti-war and other movements in the US was a reaction to the male chauvinism of the "New Left" leaders. Paraphrasing, many women said: you men talk about liberating Vietnam, liberating Blacks, etc., but what about women? Why are you men making all the decisions while we make coffee? (FYI, according to eye-witness accounts I've heard, no bras were actually burned, at least at the first, famous, "bra-burning" event.) While this might have been an element, I suspect that the true driving force was identification with groups in struggle, such as American blacks or Vietnamese. The Boston-area feminists had no background in the New Left. When the Gay movement arose a couple of years later, it was on the basis of a riot against police harrassment at the Stonewall bar in Greenwich Village. BTW, I can see no reason why feminism is necessarily postmodernist, nor why postmodernist is necessarily feminist. (Justin, thanks for the summary of what "pomo" means.) I honestly have never read any of the pomo feminists, except for a Judith Butler article in NLR that originally was presented at a plenary talk at the last Rethinking Marxism conference. It seems fairly obvious to me what the connection is based on, however. When Foucault became a critic of Marxism, he directed his fire at a rather hidebound variety: the French CP. Against the sexism and traditionalism of the party tops, he oriented to the social movements of the 1960s and 70s, particularly those that involved a large element of the 'personal'. (Foucault was gay.) So you end up with a kind of boneheaded dichotomy between French Stalinism (Walter Reuther with a hammer-and-sickle) and liberatory movements emerging in the wake of the 1968 student movement. Most of the French postmoderists were grappling with the problem of Stalinism, although their literature rarely made distinctions between Roger Garaudy and, for example, CLR James. The answer to all this is to deepen the Marxist dialectic and not to dump Marxism. Without socialist revolution, personal emancipation is hollow. Somebody like Judith Butler can babble on all she wants about "performativity" but as long as there are capitalist property relations, most of the women in the world will continue to be beaten by their husbands, forced to take second-rate jobs at lower pay and denied cheap and safe abortion. Louis Proyect The Marxism mailing-list: http://www.marxmail.org
Re: Feminism (posted originally onmarxism@lists.panix.com)
Louis Proyect wrote: I suspect that the scarcity of female subbers on various left and Marxist lists is related to this. My guess is that the reason LBO-Talk attracts more women is that it has become identified as a haven for postmodernist thought. I hope it's a haven for all kinds of thought, "postmodernist" among them - and feminist (however modified) most definitely among them. Doug
