Re: Re: Re: Re: holy trinity/Yugoslavia in transition
Jim, I fully agree that the WC does not like what I have proposed, nor do I think that they will like at least parts of what this Serbian economic official has claimed (they not all that keen on Scandinavian social safety nets either, even if most of us are rather partial to them). My point was that we should be supporting this guy against the WC and not merely wringing our hands at his (and their) hopeless doom at the hands of the WC. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 26 Jan 2001 15:07:40 -0800 Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Barkely wrote: Don't you think that Kostunica has more political capital than many of the transition leaders and thus might be in a better position to hold out for at least parts of a reasonable program along theses lines if he is so inclined? maybe, but since he's a nationalist he's not Washington's "boy," so that he doesn't have much. It depends on whether Washington can find a substitute (Gingich? sp?). He's also head of the Yugoslav federation, not of Serbia, so he might be declared irrelevant, no? In a different missive, Barkley wrote: In terms of the anti-inflation policy itself, the IMF and the usual Washington Consensus Gang tends to support fiscal spending cuts and tight monetary policies. I certainly agree with Jim Devine that such a combination of policies makes it very hard to have the kinds of "Scandinavian social safety net" policies that I think a lot of us would like to see there, whatever their precise forms. But, my Post Keynesian tendencies suggest that incomes policies are another way to go that can get inflation under control while minimizing the impact in terms of unemployment. isn't the Washington Consensus (which would appropriately be abbreviated the "WC") against incomes policies, too? Indeed, I am in print stating that the corporatist nationwide collective bargaining approach long used in Austria is an obvious model for countries that were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Serbia was not that, but is certainly a near neighbor. isn't the WC against labor unions and collective bargaining, too, leaning toward a different kind of corporatism? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: holy trinity/Yugoslavia in transition
capital is depreciating. Perhaps Kostunica needs to be overthrown to satisfy the powers that be... On the other hand, maybe the new Bush League government will decide to follow a more "hands off" policy toward the former Yugoslavia, as suggested in the Bore/Gush debates last year. Powell seems to lack the moral fervor of Allbright. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901 -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Paul P is right...
Actually, I have recently taken to pointing to Germany whenever I am talking with someone who starts hyperventilating about how the US must do something about its "social security crisis" (usually meaning some kind of privatization/ cutbacks). After all, Germany's demographics are now about what they will be in the US in 2030 when supposedly all hell will break loose unless "something is done soon!!!" Only now do the Germans seem to feel that they maybe have to do something and their system is far more generous than that in the US. Of course, it is true that they have higher taxes in Germany than in the US, with that gap likely to widen substantially more in the near future... Barkley Rosser On Fri, 26 Jan 2001 17:30:26 -0800 Lisa Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: full article at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Europe/2001-01/taboo270101.shtml Germany breaks taboo to defuse its pensions timebomb By Imre Karacs in Berlin 27 January 2001 A much-trimmed blueprint for the overhaul of Germany's stretched state pension system was passed by the lower house of parliament yesterday. Hailed by the government as "the greatest social reform since the war", the Bill breaks a taboo by cutting benefits and encouraging workers to make up the difference through private pensions. The changes have become necessary because individual as well as state contributions were heading for an explosion. Under the new system, state pensions will gradually fall to 67 per cent of final salary from the current 70 per cent over the next 30 years. Though that will still leave German senior citizens the envy of the world, in a country that has taken index-linked pensions for granted, the small cut has provoked deep anxiety. According to a poll conducted yesterday, 77 per cent of Germans feared that their pensions were unsafe. Unlike almost everywhere in the industrial world, Germans have had no need for private or company pensions, so generously has the state treated them until now. Few Germans have bothered to save forretirement, even though the state pension is taxed. But the population is shrinking and ageing. Over the next decades, there will be fewer workers to pay for an ever- larger number of the idle rich. The need for reform has been recognised for decades, but previous attempts at reform were scuppered by powerful lobbies. Chancellor Gerhard Schrder's government has also been forced to rein in its early ambition, after vehement protests from trade unions. Now it is the opposition's turn to force through further amendments before it allows the Bill's passage through the upper house, the Bundesrat. It faces further tinkering before becoming law after a vote expected on 16 February. But modest as the reform may be, German business is generally relieved that the government is at last pruning a little bit of the bloated wage bill. Yesterday's debate was poisoned by a dispute over an opposition poster depicting the Chancellor as a criminal guilty of "pension fraud". The leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats, Angela Merkel, stopped short of apologising outright for the poster, which was scrapped on Wednesday, the day after it was unveiled. "We didn't want to criminalise the Chancellor, but in effect that happened," Ms Merkel said. "I regret that it could have been understood that way." Ms Merkel, who broadly favours liberal reforms, called the end result of much haggling a "bureaucratic monster". -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3762] long waves
Have just received a copy of the _Encyclopedia of Political Economy_ edited by Phillip Anthony O'Hara, Routledge, 1999, London, which contains stuff by a lot of listmembers, some of it not bad. Anyway, was just looking at the entry on long waves, written by the editior (O'Hara) who claims that the first people to discuss long waves were Hyde Clark in 1847 and Tugan-Baranowski in 1894. He gives no citations in the bibliography, unfortunately, and says nothing about what their theories were. I have never heard of Hyde Clark myself. Oh well, back to the horoscope Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3551] Re: Interesting comments on G.A. Cohen from another list
Well, I know that the arguments and emphases on this go back and forth. But I think that there is a pretty straightforward interpretation that is widely accepted, even if its application is not universally agreed upon. It is that the "mode of production" is the dialectical combination of the "forces of production" and the "relations of production." In some sense the latter is the key to the class struggle, but how the economy evolves depends on its dialectical interaction with the forces of production (technology). Barkley Rosser On Thu, 18 Feb 1999 11:55:21 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: George may want to take a look at Richard W. Miller's 1984 book, _Analyzing Marx_ for a critique of Cohen's interpretation of historical materialism. Miller understands Cohen as interpreting Marx as being both an economic determinist and a technological determinism. Miller argues that such an interpretation of Marx is erroneous especially when we take into account Marx's practice as a historian and not just confine ourselves to Marx's statements in his Preface to his _A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_. As Miller notes there has long existed a at least two schools of thought within Marxism concerning the relative roles of class struggle and the dialectic between the forces of production and the relations of production. Technological determinists from Plekhanov to Cohen have tended to privilege the latter over the former in their interpretations of Marx's theory of history. On the other hand there have always been dissenters from this technological determinism who placed their emphasis on class struggle as the main force determining the direction of history. Just as Miller criticizes the technological determinists, so he also criticizes at least some of the dissenters on the grounds that they fail to explain Marx's concern with the development of the forces of production as determining the direction of social change. Miller offers as an alternative to the "technological interpretation" (to use Cohen's term) of historical materialism, what he calls "the mode of production interpretation." In this view, internal economic change is said to arise on the basis of the mode of production's self-transforming tendencies. These tendencies are said to be rooted in its relations of production, the forms of cooperation and the technology through which production is carried out. Processes that initially sustain its relations of production will eventually over time lead to its abolition. Change need not come because of the existence of barriers to material production. Changes in the forms of cooperation or in technology may enhance the power of initially subordinate groups while motivating them to resist the old relations of production because they have come to inhibit further development of that productive power. However, it is also possible for change to come from factors that are wholly internal to the relations of production. The patterns of control in the existing mode of production may make it inevitable that certain initially subordinate groups will acquire the power and the motivation to overthrow the existing relations of production. Like George, Miller criticizes the technological determinist reading of Marx on the grounds that it does not give sufficient scope to class struggle as an independent variable in the making of history. Cohen, for instance clearly treats class struggle as a dependent variable that is subordinate to the forces-relations dialectic. He fails to perceive that their might be contradictions that are internal to the relations of production which will manifest themselves in the form of class struggle. Miller, also attempts to relate the competing understandings of Marx's materialist conception of history to competing philosophies of science. Miller sees the technological interpretation as being closely tied to a positivist philosophy of science while he links his own "mode of production interpretation" with the anti-positivist philosophies of T.S. Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. Jim Farmelant Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3553] Re: The Unbalanced Budget, Cont'd
Economics, University of Memphis Charles M. Clark, Professor of Economics, St. John's University Ellen J. Dannin, Professor of Law, California Western School of Law Paul Davidson, Holly Chair of Excellence in Political Economy, University of Tennessee James Devine, Professor of Economics, Loyola Marymount University Peter Dorman, Professor of Economics, Evergreen State College Gerald Epstein, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Co-director of Political Economy Research Institute Marianne A. Ferber, Professor of Economics and Women's Studies, University of Illinois, Champaign Deborah M. Figart, Associate Professor of Economics, Richard Stockton College Mathew K. Forstater, The Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College Ellen Frank, Professor of Economics, Emmanuel College William Hildred, Professor of Economics, Northern Arizona University James K. Galbraith, Professor of Economics, University of Texas, Austin Karen J. Gibson, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University Helen Lachs Ginsburg, Professor Emerita of Economics, Brooklyn College, CUNY David Gleicher, Associate Professor of Economics and Finance, Adelphi University Eban Goodstein, Associate Professor of Economics, Lewis and Clark College Jim Grant, Associate Professor of Economics, Lewis and Clark College John T. Harvey, Associate Professor of Economics, Texas Christian University John F. Henry, Professor of Economics, California State University, Sacramento Ric Holt, Associate Professor of Economics, Southern Oregon University (Ashland, OR) Ellen Houston, Center of Economic Analysis, New School for Social Research Andrew Larkin, Professor of Economics, St. Cloud State University Catherine Lynde, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston Arthur MacEwan, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston Ann Markusen, Director of Project on Regional and Industrial Economics, Rutgers University Gwendolyn Mink, Professor of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz Edward J. Nell, Malcolm B. Smith Professor, New School University Reynold F. Nesiba, Assistant Professor of Economics, Augustana College Christopher J. Niggle, Professor of Economics, University of Redlands Paulette Olson, Professor of Economics, Wright State University Michael Perelman, Professor of Economics, California State University, Chico Sumner M. Rosen, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Columbia University and Vice-Chair, National Jobs for All Coalition J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., Professor of Economics, James Madison University Roy J. Rotheim, Professor of Economics, Skidmore College Dawn M. Saunders, Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Vermont Max B. Sawicky, Economist, Economic Policy Institute James R. Stanfield, Professor of Economics, Colorado State University James Sturgeon, Professor of Economics, University of Missouri, Kansas City Marc R. Tool, Professor Emeritus of Economics, California State University, Sacramento Gunnar Tomasson, Economist for International Monetary Fund (1966-1989) Andres Torres, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston William Waller, Professor of Economics, Hobart and William Smith Colleges Mark Weisbrot, Research Director, Preamble Center Delane E. Welsch, Professor of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota Julie M. Whittaker, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Rutgers University Karl Widerquist, Resident Research Associate, The Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College L. Randall Wray, Senior Scholar, The Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College Michael Yates, Professor of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown June Zaccone, Associate Professor Emerita of Economics, Hofstra University Michael Zweig, Professor of Economics, SUNY, Stony Brook -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3554] Re: The Unbalanced Budget, Cont'd
University, Fresno Robert Cherry, Professor of Economics, Brooklyn College, CUNY David H. Ciscel, Professor of Economics, University of Memphis Charles M. Clark, Professor of Economics, St. John's University Ellen J. Dannin, Professor of Law, California Western School of Law Paul Davidson, Holly Chair of Excellence in Political Economy, University of Tennessee James Devine, Professor of Economics, Loyola Marymount University Peter Dorman, Professor of Economics, Evergreen State College Gerald Epstein, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Co-director of Political Economy Research Institute Marianne A. Ferber, Professor of Economics and Women's Studies, University of Illinois, Champaign Deborah M. Figart, Associate Professor of Economics, Richard Stockton College Mathew K. Forstater, The Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College Ellen Frank, Professor of Economics, Emmanuel College William Hildred, Professor of Economics, Northern Arizona University James K. Galbraith, Professor of Economics, University of Texas, Austin Karen J. Gibson, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University Helen Lachs Ginsburg, Professor Emerita of Economics, Brooklyn College, CUNY David Gleicher, Associate Professor of Economics and Finance, Adelphi University Eban Goodstein, Associate Professor of Economics, Lewis and Clark College Jim Grant, Associate Professor of Economics, Lewis and Clark College John T. Harvey, Associate Professor of Economics, Texas Christian University John F. Henry, Professor of Economics, California State University, Sacramento Ric Holt, Associate Professor of Economics, Southern Oregon University (Ashland, OR) Ellen Houston, Center of Economic Analysis, New School for Social Research Andrew Larkin, Professor of Economics, St. Cloud State University Catherine Lynde, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston Arthur MacEwan, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston Ann Markusen, Director of Project on Regional and Industrial Economics, Rutgers University Gwendolyn Mink, Professor of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz Edward J. Nell, Malcolm B. Smith Professor, New School University Reynold F. Nesiba, Assistant Professor of Economics, Augustana College Christopher J. Niggle, Professor of Economics, University of Redlands Paulette Olson, Professor of Economics, Wright State University Michael Perelman, Professor of Economics, California State University, Chico Sumner M. Rosen, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Columbia University and Vice-Chair, National Jobs for All Coalition J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., Professor of Economics, James Madison University Roy J. Rotheim, Professor of Economics, Skidmore College Dawn M. Saunders, Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Vermont Max B. Sawicky, Economist, Economic Policy Institute James R. Stanfield, Professor of Economics, Colorado State University James Sturgeon, Professor of Economics, University of Missouri, Kansas City Marc R. Tool, Professor Emeritus of Economics, California State University, Sacramento Gunnar Tomasson, Economist for International Monetary Fund (1966-1989) Andres Torres, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston William Waller, Professor of Economics, Hobart and William Smith Colleges Mark Weisbrot, Research Director, Preamble Center Delane E. Welsch, Professor of Applied Economics, University of Minnesota Julie M. Whittaker, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Rutgers University Karl Widerquist, Resident Research Associate, The Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College L. Randall Wray, Senior Scholar, The Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College Michael Yates, Professor of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown June Zaccone, Associate Professor Emerita of Economics, Hofstra University Michael Zweig, Professor of Economics, SUNY, Stony Brook -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3508] Re: Tragedy of the Commons
Brad, True enough. But Michael P. is on to something that Hardin and most commentators regarding the "tragedy of the medieval grazing commons" case that Hardin was talking about rarely recognize. The "tragedy" not only coincided with the emergence of privatization, but that privatization in fact actively aggravated the problem as the commons grazing areas were reduced in size due to the enclosures. All these people who claim that the enclosures were a "rational response to the tragedy" have things backwards. More generally, as has been mentioned, it is possible for "common property" to be managed in ways that control or limit access. The original economics literature on this from Gordon's 1954 JPE paper on fisheries totally confused "common property" with "open access," a confusion that Hardin picked up on and amplified with his much-cited _Science_ article. The realization that these are distinct issues and that it is open access that is the source of the problem came later. I would date it to the 1975 paper in the _Natural Resources Journal_ by S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup and Richard C. Bishop, "'Common Property' as a Concept in Natural Resources Policy." Since then we have had a huge literature on this by people like Elinor Ostrom and Daniel Bromley on how to manage access in commonly owned properties, with a classic example of a successful system being the Swiss alpine grazing commons that are owned by Swiss villages and have been well managed since the 1200s. Certainly, the bigger the thing to be managed and the more people involved in it, the harder it is to set up a system of access control. These are the problems with the very large Ogallala aquifer. And this applies to privately owned property as well, which most of the Ogallala aquifer is, although by many different parties. I have a paper on this that emphasizes that the nature and scale of the ecosystem being managed is crucial, "Systemic Crises in Hierarchical Ecological Economies," _Land Economics_, May 1995, vol. 71, no. 2, pp. 163-172. Barkley Rosser On Wed, 17 Feb 1999 10:03:38 -0800 Brad De Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hardin's story is a myth. In truth, the communities that he describes had customs and institutions that kept the amount of livestock in check. As long as population densities are low, and social pressures are strong... -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3304] Re: selling Manhatten and Very Long Waves
Brad, Thanks. Barkley Rosser On Wed, 10 Feb 1999 13:49:48 -0800 Brad De Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Brad DeL. is surely hoping that this complex lunatic stays away from the jep. Hey. The complexity piece is quite nice, in its complex way... -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3265] fwd: [HAYEK-L:] H-WEB: R Hahnel on Roemer, Socialism Hayek
--- Begin Forwarded Message --- Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 13:05:57 EST From: Hayek-L List Host [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [HAYEK-L:] H-WEB: R Hahnel on Roemer, Socialism Hayek Sender: Hayek Related Research [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Hayek Related Research [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hayek On The Web -- Socialism / Roemer Robin Hahnel, "A Review of _A Future For Socialism_ by John Roemer", on the web at: http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hahnel.htm Hyperlink: A HREF="http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hahnel.htm"A Review of A Future For Socialism/A From the review: "In the introduction, Roemer graciously surrenders, posthumously, for Oscar Lange, the original proponent of managerial market socialism, to Friedreich Hayek, the arch-conservative critic of market socialism: "Lange argued that what economists now call neoclassical price theory showed the possibility of combining central planning and the market, and Hayek retorted that planning would subvert at its heart the mechanism that gave capitalism its vitality. Hayek's criticisms of market socialism, and more recently those of Janos Kornai, are for the most part on the mark." No matter that Lange's model was, essentially, a pure market model without anything resembling planning, much less central planning. No matter that Roemer's own model reduces to a minor variation on Lange's model. I'm sure Lange along with Abba Lerner, Frederick Taylor, and other proponents of managerial market socialism -- as well as all who have objected to the tautological equation of efficiency and freedom with free market exchange and private ownership preached by Hayek's disciples in the ultra-conservative Austrian school of economics -- will appreciate that Roemer has spared them the trouble and embarrassment of running up their own white flag ,,, It is fascinating how fast a tactical retreat urged on us by our academic fellow travelers turns into a complete rout. In response to the collapse of communism some self-styled radical economists at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York five years ago argued that market "rejectionism" should be reconsidered, and perhaps markets could be a useful part of a socialist economy provided they were properly "socialized," to use a phrase coined by Diane Elson. Now Roemer is congratulated by the likes of Samuel Bowles and Erik Olin Wright for admitting that Lange was wrong and Hayek was right, for pointing out that the only corrective needed to free market allocations is indicative planning modeled on Japanese Keiretsu and MITI, German investment banks, and investment planning in Taiwan, for over throwing capitalism by making every citizen a capitalist -- everyone must play the coupon market poker game and you can't even cash out--and for chastising socialists for demonizing private ownership and fetishizing public ownership. Market socialists have, indeed, "come a long way, baby." Robin Hahnel, "A Review of _A Future For Socialism_ by John Roemer". _Z Magazine_. http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hahnel.htm Hayek On The Web is a regular feature of the Hayek-L list. --- End Forwarded Message ---
[PEN-L:3264] fwd: [HAYEK-L:] H-WEB: R Hahnel on Publishing Under Participatory Democracy
--- Begin Forwarded Message --- Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 13:11:34 EST From: Hayek-L List Host [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [HAYEK-L:] H-WEB: R Hahnel on Publishing Under Participatory Democracy Sender: Hayek Related Research [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Hayek Related Research [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hayek On The Web -- Publishing Under Participatory Democracy Robin Hahnel Answers Various Criticisms of Participatory Economics relayed to him from the LBO listserv by William S. Lear on the web at: http://www.zmag.org/hahnelanwers.htm From the Answers: "Justin Schwartz, discussing consumption requests, apparently believes that all requests must be approved at a local level before being sent "upward" (my term). He seems to believe that if a person desires a good that others at the local level do not want, it will be impossible for the person to purchase the good. He says "decisions about what is made have to be approved at the lower levels before being aggregated and sent on several times If my preferences for the works of Hayek never get past the local level, they will [not] be printed, and I will be unable to buy them with what I earn." This seems, to me, to confuse how consumption requests are made. I was not aware that particular consumption requests were approved, just the amount of "effort-money" that you had earned. Whether or not you get what you want depends only on your request being within the limits of your effort and a producer of the good you want able to supply it. Bill correctly understands how consumption works. One's local consumption council [neighborhood or anonymous] can only disapprove a consumption request if its social cost is greater than that warranted by the individual's effort rating. They cannot disapprove particular items. If the request is not anonymous they can provide feed back and advice about particular items, but that is all. But once individual request are approved via this process, it is true that the local consumption council then sums the requests into an aggregate request for individual consumption from all those in the council, and forwards that aggregate on along with the average effort work effort rating of the members of the local council. Whether Hayek will get published in a participatory economy depends on whether or not his work is approved for publication by the councils of writers and/or university councils. Of course they have to deal with consumer federations who provide information on what and who people want to read. Since this is an issue that transcends economics, I also would recommend special provisions to guarantee access to expression in the form of publication, radio, TV etc. for new and minority views. But once Hayek is in print, no council can keep someone from ordering copies." Robin Hahnel is co-author, with Michael Albert of the books, _Looking Forward: Participatory Economics For The Twenty First Century_ and _The Political Economy Of Participatory Economics_. Hayek On The Web is a regular feature of the Hayek-L list. --- End Forwarded Message ---
[PEN-L:3260] fwd: Keynes queer birthing...
pendix 2 to ch. 5, pp. 136-140, especially where Lawrence writes about a meeting with Keynes: "I never knew what it meant until I saw K[eynes] ..." and earlier in the same letter: "It is foolish of you to say it doesn't matter either way - the men loving men. It doesn't matter in a public way. But it matters so much, ... to the man himself - at any rate to us northern nations [sic] - that it is like a blow of triumphant decay, ... It is so wrong, it is unbearable. ... so repulsive as if it came from a deep inward dirt - a sort of sewer - deep in men like K[eynes] ... D[uncan] G[rant]." References Amariglio, Jack, "Economics as a postmodern discourse," ch. 2, pp. 15 -46 in Warren J. Samuels, "Economics As Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economists" [1990] Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Anscombe, F. J. and R. J. Aumann, "A definition of subjective probability," "Annals of Mathematical Statistics" [1963] 199-205. Bateman, Bradley W. 1987. Keynes's changing conception of probability. Economics and Philosophy 3(1): 97-120. Bem, Sandra Lipsitz, "Gender schema theory: a cognitive account of set typing," "Psychological Review" 88, 4 [1981] 354-364. Blaug, Mark, "Recent biographies of Keynes," "Journal of Economic Literature" 32, 3 [September 1994] 1204-1215. Butler, Judith, "Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of 'Sex'" [1993] New York: Routledge. Cornwall, Richard R., "deconstructing silence: the queer political economy of the social articulation of desire" "Review of Radical Political Economics" 29, 1 [March 1997] Escoffier, Jeffrey, "Sexual revolution and the politics of gay identity," "Socialist Review" 15 [July-October, 1985] 119-153. Escoffier, Jeffrey, "John Maynard Keynes" [1995] New York: Chelsea House Publishers. Keynes, John Maynard, "My early beliefs," in "Essays in Biography, The Collected Writings," vol. 10 [1972] London: Macmillan. Keynes, John Maynard, "The general theory of employment," "Quarterly Journal of Economics" 51, 2 [1937] 209-223. Keynes, John Maynard, "A Treatise on Probability" [1943, originally 1921] London: Macmillan. Lindley, Dennis V., "John Maynard Keynes: Contributions to Statistics," pp. 375-376 in vol. 8 of "International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences" [1968] New York: Macmillan Company The Free Press. Moggridge, D. E., "Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography" [1992] London: Routledge. Ponse, Barbara, Identities in the Lesbian World [1978] Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Ramsey, Frank Plumpton, "Truth and probability," ch. VII, pp. 156-198 in "The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays" edited by R. B. Braithwaite, with a preface by G. E. Moore [1960, orig. 1931] Paterson, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams Co. Savage, Leonard J., "The Foundations of Statistics" [1972, originally 1954] New York: Dover. Searle, John R., "The Construction of Social Reality" [1995] New York: The Free Press. Searle, John R., "The Rediscovery of the Mind" [1992] Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Searle, John R., "Collective intentions and actions," ch. 19, pp. 401-415 in Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha E. Pollack (eds) "Intentions in Communication" [1990] Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. --- End Forwarded Message --- -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3256] re: Jerry Levy
michael, re: Jerry Levy. Give the pathetic sucker another chance. Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3255] Re: Re: Re: Back to the land
Uh oh. I never thought that I would say that we would need that Sendero spokesman, Adolpho Olaechea on pen-l. But, speaking for him in his absence, I would note that there is a large difference between what they propose and what was carried out by the Khmer Rouge. Conflating the two in such a manner is quite misleading. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 12 Feb 1999 02:50:37 +1100 rc-am [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -Original Message- From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] This is a gross distortion of what Marxism stands for. The Khmer Rouge were not Marxists, they were a virulent strain of middle-class radicalism that turned against its own social roots. They wanted to "purge" Cambodian society and took people like Doug Henwood and forced them to leave Pnomh Penh at the point of a gun. It was a nightmare version of the Cultural Revolution. absolutely the case. so we agree. To frame this in terms of the Khmer Rouge is completely outrageous and stupid. but, i did not frame this as such. it has already been framed as such by the khmer rouge and by shining path. my comments go to the question of how exactly you would distinguish your version of 'back to the land' from these historical experiences of it. that is to say, how exactly can you be sure that this is not simply a version of a middle-class radicalism turned against its roots through the longing for an idealised version of what 'the land' (or at least peasant cultures) are? angela -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3254] Re: Back to the land
Louis, Yeah, but does Betty Boop have a lesbian phallus? Barkley Rosser On Thu, 11 Feb 1999 12:06:49 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Angela: not at all. i was asking how you would distinguish your yearning from their's. both of which, as zizek notes, echoing marx, are dreams of the past from the position of the present. idealisations - in short, a kind of reverse utopianism, in the sense in which marx spoke of it: as idealisation, one-sided dreaming. I haven't yearned for anything since a new Scwinn bicycle, which was back in 1957. For christs sake, can't you and Doug stop thinking in philosophical/psychological terms for five minutes? I am a prosaic, plodding, history-oriented moldy old Marxist fig who sees things in terms that can be quantified. Like how many acres a peasant got. Like how many children die of malnutrition. Like the literacy rate. Why don't we strike a compromise. You lace your posts with some historical or economic facts and I'll try to throw in some empty rhetoric in mine. How's this: The bifurcation of the subject in post-Fordist society reflects the Lacanian dispostion toward a quasi-material psychoanalytic rebellion against the reconstituted ego. The penile rejection of virtual commodities, by the same token, is the dialectical obverse of the uterine search for the Holderlin. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3172] Re: Aztecs
y, at the local kinship level of the ayllu, the tribe owned the property communally and made decisions collectively. As long as the local unit could satisfy the requirements of the imperial state, the social organization of the village could adhere to its own standards. The Inca state, while imperial, was not totalitarian. The Spanish colonial administration was not a pure case of feudalism either. Its purpose was to organize and regulate wage labor for the needs of commercial-capitalism in Europe. Hence, the relations between lord and serf were not as organic and traditional as those that had evolved in Europe over centuries. Alienation and hatred characterized the relationship between ruler and ruled. Racism and religious bigotry were the root causes. Centuries of meztiso attempts to wipe out Indian identity have not pacified them, as the recent Maoist rebellion proves. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3186] selling Manhatten and Very Long Waves
Probably a final footnote on these threads... I think we all agree by now that the transactors in those initial European/Indian contacts really did not know what was coming, although some had very definite plans, especially those on religious conversion missions such as many of the Spanish. It is worth keeping in mind that although the "sale of Manhatten" eventually led to a place containing both David Rockefeller and the HQ of the CPUSA, lots of other such transactions (or attempted thefts) led nowhere at all. Thus, the Spanish attempted to settle Virginia near Jamestown in the early 1780s, only to be driven off by the local Indians (no Pocahontas around then). Walter Raleigh's Roanoke colony failed, possibly ending up assimilating with the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina (so the Lumbee claim, anyway). The Russians in northern California gave up and went "home" to Alaska in the late 1830s after overharvesting the local sea otters near the mouth of the Russian River. Of course Jamestown was successfully settled later, barely, and led to Virginia, and a decade after the Russians left, east coast Americans rushed for gold in northern California without bothering to attempt to "deal fairly" with the local tribes, leading to the Free Speech movement, North Beach, Haight-Ashbury, and Castro Street A larger problem that is not easily resolved is that of mass migrations leading groups to "bump" each other across landscapes, with many of those migrations being triggered by outmovements from Central Asia going both east and west, as detailed by such folks as Frank and Braudel. These have even been tied to the Braudel "very long waves" (duree) by some authors (Ricardo will correct me no doubt). In Europe we have seen wave after wave of "barbarians" flooding in and conquering/dispacing earlier groups (e.g. the Basques). The eastern direction of this spilled over into the Americas where we know that there were multiple waves of migration across the Bering Strait with the later arrivals bumping the earlier ones. The Inuit, closely related to the Asian Chukchi, bumped the Na-Dene (including Athabaskans) whose language is related to Yeniseian in central Siberia. The Na-Dene bumped various tribes to their south and east who bumped others. In the 1200s the Algonkians were bumped into invading the northeastern US, thus pushing the Iroquois into their holdout areas in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. At about the same time the Aztecs were bumped from the southwestern US to head south and take over the central valley of Mexico, yes, from the Toltecs as Charles B. noted. And, lots of species would be a lot better off if all the descendents of genus Homo would go back to Africa where we all came from originally (although the current Africans would probably not be too pleased about that one). I agree with Jim Craven that what is needed is to deal with ongoing wrongs and crimes and oppression where they are going on, rather than attempting to undo history. Well, I am going to shut up on all this now as various people I am sure have had quite enough. Max S. is probably breathing a sigh of relief that I did not babble like this when I spoke at EPI last September. If he were still around to be disgusted, Jerry L. would applaud my promise to stop spamming pen-l and would recommend that I get a(nother) Ph.D. in economics to make myself more pen-l relevant. Brad DeL. is surely hoping that this complex lunatic stays away from the jep. And, Dough has decided that if I can't come up with some wonkier stats (btw, oil exporters are another group hurting in the late 90s), then I should do something really useful like deconstructing Judith Butler. That's all for now, folks, :-). Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3175] Re: Frank's long waves/kondratieff cycles
Ricardo, Sorry. I meant to say 50 years, not centuries. Braudel sees the collapse of the tenth century as the result of a century of depravations due to the Viking invasions, which started earlier, along with a final collapse of leftover Roman urban settlements. Barkley Rosser On Wed, 10 Feb 1999 10:10:59 -0400 Ricardo Duchesne [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Barkley, perhaps because pen-l was inundated by postings yesterday, the logic of my own post may have escaped readers, but if you read my paragraph on long waves, cited again below, you will see that what I say about Frank's long waves (which are *not* the same as Braudel's long duree) is that they were interrupted by shorter kondratieff cycles. Another point, the viking invasions were not associated with a Malthusian crisis, nor was the Malthusian crisis of the 14th century preceded by "50 centuries" of famines, but I guess this latter one was just a typo. ricardo Since Ricardo brings up "long waves" in connection with the discussion of Frank, let me simply note that these are Braudel "la duree" 300-400 year waves and not the lower level 40-50 year Kondratievs. Braudel also labeled these "geographical" cycles and they have demographic, even Malthusian, component that is very important. Thus, for Braudel, "crashes" coincided with Malthusian population declines due to war, famine, pestilence. In Europe these include the plague deaths in the Eastern Mediterranean that paved the way for the displacement of Greeks with Slavs and Turks. Then in the 900s associated with Viking invasions and general collapses. Then there is the major blowout of the "Black Death" of the mid 1300s which was preceded by about 50 centuries of mounting famines weakening the immune systems of the populations that died of plague. And then we have a similar blowout in the late 1600s. Frank used to argue that such points are when one can get a switch between European and Asian dominance and that we are now at such a switch point again on this much longer long wave (Braudel, not Kondratiev), even if we are not having a collapse/blowout in the European/North American zone. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 9 Feb 1999 15:30:17 -0400 Ricardo Duchesne Frank approaches this using the theory of long waves. He speaks of a major "A" phase period of world expansion from AD 1000/1050 to 1250/1300, followed by a contraction from 1250 to 1450, followed by a a new "A" phase expansion after 1450. In both these two "A" phases, he says, China was the center of world expansion. This post 1450 growth lasted into the 18th century, followed by "B" phase contraction after 1800. Now, this long post-1450 expansive cycle, like any other long wave, experienced a Kondratieff "B" phase downturn in the 17th century, one which, however, hit the "weaker" European economy harder than it did Asia. But another Kondratieff "B" cycle that hit after the 1760s gave Europe the chance to overcome its (still) marginal position in the world economy -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3104] Re: selling Manhattan
Charles, Well, I guess I'll add a bit more on this pre-European intertribal conflicts issue. Again, of course, except for places like the central valley of Mexico where there are historical records, we only know about things that went on either after or just before the Europeans arrived in other places. But I fear that conjuring an Edenic paradise where all the tribes lived in harmony with one another is yet another "projection," however lovely. Certainly there were lots of intertribal conflicts that were triggered by the European colonists pushing tribes west, as with the Chippewas pushing the Sioux out of northern Wisconsin even before any Europeans got into that area. But a lot of other cases are less clear. In the case of the Tuscaroras versus the Shawnees in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, I am not aware of their conflict being triggered by other tribes moving in pushed by the Europeans. Neither of them lived east of the Blue Ridge, the limit of settlement at the time of the Battle of Rawley Springs between them. It may be "European projections" but it is certainly recorded that it was over access to the valley. I note that the Shenandoah Valley and what is now West Virginia were one of the few (on some maps the only) places in North America that was not clearly predomiantly under the control and use of a single tribe or group of tribes. It was an intertribal collective hunting ground. But that in itself meant that priority rights of use were murky and could be disputed from time to time, possibly even violently as happened at Rawley Springs sometime in the 1720s (forget the exact date). Actually that particular conflict reflected a broader one that get tangled up in European conflicts but which most reports suggest had been around before they arrived. That was the one between the Iroquois group of tribes (including the Tuscaroras) and the Algonkian group of tribes (including the Shawnees). Indeed, the Iroquois Confederacy, viewed by Benjamin Franklin as a model for the United States, was by most accounts formed to defend those tribes against the larger numbers of Algonkians around them, who were not so well organized. These differences were linguistic and also socio-cultural, with the Iroquois being matrilineal whereas the Algonkians were patrilineal. In the "French and Indian War" the Iroquois sided with the British against the French and the majority Algonkians. In the American Revolution, the British opposed the entry of settlers into the Iroquois lands because of this past alliance (although by then the British were defending Indian land rights against the colonists in many areas) and I know that my original hometown, Ithaca, NY, was not settled by Europeans until 1782, after the defeat of the British and the removal of their protection of the Iroquois. Although the arrival of the Europeans may have aggravated the Iroquois-Algonkian conflict and certainly the conflicts on both sides became intertwined, I see little reason to believe that there was total peace between these two groups prior to the arrival of the Europeans. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 09 Feb 1999 10:48:17 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/08 6:28 PM Barkley: Charles,We're getting close enough to a "meeting of the minds" here that are transactions might be almost not void. Just a couple of points. ___ Charles: Sounds good to me. __ Barkley: One is that it may well be (I don't know) that the Dutch actually did not do anything that was unexpected of them by the Indians they dealt with. The unexpected and unpleasant may have come later after the British displaced the Dutch. After all, the northern border of Nieuw Amsterdam was Wall Street (named for the wall). Broadway was the country road linking it to the Dutch village of Haarlem. There was still plenty of land for the local Indians to do their thing on Manhatten, although perhaps the Dutch had already acted badly. This is a reminder that sometimes Europeans attempted to deal fairly with the Indians only to have their agreements undercut and violated later by their descendents or others taking their place. Something similar happened in Pennsylvania I believe. ___ Charles: This may be. I don't think that the European invasion was uniformly purposeful viciousness, or that all Indian/European relations were European crimes. Neither the Europeans nor Indians understood exactly what was going on especially early on. I don't think that every ( or even any necessarily at sometimes) European had a conscious "genocidal"motive for their actions. That kind of creeped up on everybody. One comment though: I don't know the specific traditions of the Manhattan Indians, but in general the attitude to the land
[PEN-L:3107] Re: Re: Aztecs
with the people who were under the thumb. The odd thing about civilization is that it takes societies with strictly defined divisions of labor to produce museum quality artifacts. As Freud said, the purpose of civilization is repression. Such divisions are inevitably the result of having somebody pointing a gun or spear at you, either implicitly or explicitly. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3131] Re: selling Manhattan
Charles, Well, we're wearing this thin. But, just to put it in context: I brought up the violent transfer of land control between tribes to contrast it with the peaceful transfer that occurred, at least initially, in some places such as the "purchase" (however non-meeting of the minds) of land by some Europeans from the Indians, e.g. the Dutch in Manhatten, the English Quakers in Philadelphia, the Russians in northern California. I put those activities forward as more admirable certainly than the usual outright forcible theft by Europeans, and as certainly not worse than the forcible seizure of land by one tribe from another. Many on this list, including you, denied any such comparison, decrying all land transfers from Indians to Europeans as equally invalid, illegimate, imperialistic, and immoral. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 09 Feb 1999 16:32:40 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/09 4:02 PM Charles, I think you are still evading the issue here. It is fine to argue that there was no conception of "private property in land" and also that there was no juridically defined "territory" because (at least in what is now the US) there were no "states." But, are all those books one picks up that identify certain parts of North America with certain tribes some bogus "projection"? Charles: I'm not sure what you think is being evaded. Nothing in what I have said contradicts tribes being in certain places. Remember what I said about "sacred spots" ? What I am saying would exactly predict that tribes would be located in a certain place - by their specific "sacred spots." THE important thing in this discussion is they didn't have private property. Private property is not panhuman. Communism is not a pipedream. I long ago addressed your implied argument that if the Indians took land from each other by force, then this justifies European taking from the takers. This is not a valid argument. So, what even if there was less than a peaceful process (it wasn't a "business") before European arrival, so what ? Barkley: We know that in those zones were spots viewed as sacred by the tribes in question, some of them ancestral burial grounds. Somehow it came about that certain tribes predominated in certain areas rather than others, with some zones being shared such as the collective hunting zone of West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley. The process of this was not always a peaceful business. Charles: Ok but we are starting to go over the same thing again and again. Far from evasion, I am giving the same logical and cogent answer to your same question repeatedly. When you say "the process of this was not always a peaceful business" I refer you to my previous posts. Fighting but not for "territory". And a different order of magnitude in fighting than Europe. What is new in what you are saying here ? Barkley BTW, it may be true that the ancestors of the Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). But from there they conquered and dominated the previous rulers of the central valley of Mexico, who operated from a different headquarters, just as those rulers had conquered and displaced as rulers the "Teotihuacaners" some time earlier who had their base at the pyramids about 30 miles north of modern Mexico City. I note that the central valley of Mexico has long been a major culture basin, as being near the likely original site of the cultivation of maize (corn). Charles: Yea, I think the Toltec were there before the Aztec. I mentioned Teotihuacan in another post (or was that another list ?) pyramids of the sun and the moon. I'm not sure the occupants of Teo were conquered. I think it might be a mystery still what happened to them. They have Maya settlements that just "went down" and they don't know why yet. Archeologist Kent Flannery (University of Michigan) argues that maize was invented by paleo-botanists. I think it was derived from teocintle (spelling) However, I think that is like 200 BC or earlier. Charles Brown Barkley Rosser On Tue, 09 Feb 1999 13:55:01 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/09 1:22 PM Charles, Well, I guess I'll add a bit more on this pre-European intertribal conflicts issue. Again, of course, except for places like the central valley of Mexico where there are historical records, we only know about things that went on either after or just before the Europeans arrived in other places. But I fear that conjuring an Edenic paradise where all the tribes lived in harmony with one another is yet another "projection," however lovely.
[PEN-L:3135] Re: selling Manhattan
Charles, Aw, heck. The Indians should tell the Europeans to go back where they came from. And I think that the Basques should tell all of those blankety blank Aryans to go back where they came from in Eurasia. And, the Iroquois should tell the Algonkians to go back where they came from and... All I'm going to say about all those forceful folks. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 09 Feb 1999 17:12:27 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/09 4:46 PM Charles, Well, we're wearing this thin. But, just to put it in context: I brought up the violent transfer of land control between tribes to contrast it with the peaceful transfer that occurred, at least initially, in some places such as the "purchase" (however non-meeting of the minds) of land by some Europeans from the Indians, e.g. the Dutch in Manhatten, the English Quakers in Philadelphia, the Russians in northern California. I put those activities forward as more admirable certainly than the usual outright forcible theft by Europeans, and as certainly not worse than the forcible seizure of land by one tribe from another. Charles: But I don't agree that you made this factual point. You asserted it, but did not prove it. Many on this list, including you, denied any such comparison, decrying all land transfers from Indians to Europeans as equally invalid, illegimate, imperialistic, and immoral. ___ Charles: Want to show me where I said this ? The Indians probaby didn't think of them as "transfers". Even if peaceful, they didn't anticipate it as prelude to massive invasion. Anyway, even if some Europeans were peaceful, ultimately the whole relationship was by force. The determining occurrences as to how we got to where we are today were the imperialistic takings. The few peaceful sharings do not validate the warlike takings. Your effort to contrast European "peaceful" actions with Indian fighting is really off and backward. All Europeans should feel uncomfortable about this history, and any effort to lessen the European crime is a disservice. Charles Brown Barkley Rosser On Tue, 09 Feb 1999 16:32:40 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/09 4:02 PM Charles, I think you are still evading the issue here. It is fine to argue that there was no conception of "private property in land" and also that there was no juridically defined "territory" because (at least in what is now the US) there were no "states." But, are all those books one picks up that identify certain parts of North America with certain tribes some bogus "projection"? Charles: I'm not sure what you think is being evaded. Nothing in what I have said contradicts tribes being in certain places. Remember what I said about "sacred spots" ? What I am saying would exactly predict that tribes would be located in a certain place - by their specific "sacred spots." THE important thing in this discussion is they didn't have private property. Private property is not panhuman. Communism is not a pipedream. I long ago addressed your implied argument that if the Indians took land from each other by force, then this justifies European taking from the takers. This is not a valid argument. So, what even if there was less than a peaceful process (it wasn't a "business") before European arrival, so what ? Barkley: We know that in those zones were spots viewed as sacred by the tribes in question, some of them ancestral burial grounds. Somehow it came about that certain tribes predominated in certain areas rather than others, with some zones being shared such as the collective hunting zone of West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley. The process of this was not always a peaceful business. Charles: Ok but we are starting to go over the same thing again and again. Far from evasion, I am giving the same logical and cogent answer to your same question repeatedly. When you say "the process of this was not always a peaceful business" I refer you to my previous posts. Fighting but not for "territory". And a different order of magnitude in fighting than Europe. What is new in what you are saying here ? Barkley BTW, it may be true that the ancestors of the Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). But from there they conquered and dominated the previous rulers of the central valley of Mexico, who operated from a different headquarters, just as those rulers had conquered and displaced as rulers the "Teotihuacaners" some time earlier who had their base at the pyramids about 30 miles north of modern Mexico City.
[PEN-L:3137] long waves
Tom, By "up" I meant an increase in growth rates. Doug, So, just out of curiosity, how does a comparison between 1975-95 with post 1995 look both globally and regionally, as I think you've got the numbers reasonably at hand? I would guess that my forecasts about who is "up" and who is not will hold, although the socialist bloc will look very good for the early period compared to the late. I would think Latin America would look better in the 90s than in the 80s, although there are certainly plenty of blips there, such as Brazil right now. Also, although East Asia is doing badly, some parts of Asia have never done better, including the very important India, at least in terms of aggregate growth rates. Finally I would note that the figures would look better for the more recent period in per capita terms as world population growth has been decelerating. Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3126] Re: selling Manhattan
Charles, I think you are still evading the issue here. It is fine to argue that there was no conception of "private property in land" and also that there was no juridically defined "territory" because (at least in what is now the US) there were no "states." But, are all those books one picks up that identify certain parts of North America with certain tribes some bogus "projection"? We know that in those zones were spots viewed as sacred by the tribes in question, some of them ancestral burial grounds. Somehow it came about that certain tribes predominated in certain areas rather than others, with some zones being shared such as the collective hunting zone of West Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley. The process of this was not always a peaceful business. BTW, it may be true that the ancestors of the Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan (Mexico City). But from there they conquered and dominated the previous rulers of the central valley of Mexico, who operated from a different headquarters, just as those rulers had conquered and displaced as rulers the "Teotihuacaners" some time earlier who had their base at the pyramids about 30 miles north of modern Mexico City. I note that the central valley of Mexico has long been a major culture basin, as being near the likely original site of the cultivation of maize (corn). Barkley Rosser On Tue, 09 Feb 1999 13:55:01 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/09 1:22 PM Charles, Well, I guess I'll add a bit more on this pre-European intertribal conflicts issue. Again, of course, except for places like the central valley of Mexico where there are historical records, we only know about things that went on either after or just before the Europeans arrived in other places. But I fear that conjuring an Edenic paradise where all the tribes lived in harmony with one another is yet another "projection," however lovely. Charles: Of course, I didn't say that. I said there is evidence of fighting, but there is also evidence of lack of private property and territory. There is archaeological evidence too, of course. Also, there is an anthropological generalization about modes of production, so that evidence from elsewhere , though "projected", is more scientific than projecting a Hebrew Biblical myth ( although I find it interesting that the Garden of Eden was a GARDEN , and horticulture is what anthropology/archaeology has concluded was the mode of production which "fell out of the Garden" with agriculture and civilization) ___ Barkley: Certainly there were lots of intertribal conflicts that were triggered by the European colonists pushing tribes west, as with the Chippewas pushing the Sioux out of northern Wisconsin even before any Europeans got into that area. But a lot of other cases are less clear. In the case of the Tuscaroras versus the Shawnees in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, I am not aware of their conflict being triggered by other tribes moving in pushed by the Europeans. Neither of them lived east of the Blue Ridge, the limit of settlement at the time of the Battle of Rawley Springs between them. It may be "European projections" but it is certainly recorded that it was over access to the valley. I note that the Shenandoah Valley and what is now West Virginia were one of the few (on some maps the only) places in North America that was not clearly predomiantly under the control and use of a single tribe or group of tribes. It was an intertribal collective hunting ground. But that in itself meant that priority rights of use were murky and could be disputed from time to time, possibly even violently as happened at Rawley Springs sometime in the 1720s (forget the exact date). Charles: You have no evidentiary basis for saying that because it was intertribal , therefore the priority of rights of use were murky, etc. It is possible for human beings from different groups to share with almost no disputes compared to our experience. Communism is possible. Capitalist and acquisative conceptions are not human universals. Barkley: Actually that particular conflict reflected a broader one that get tangled up in European conflicts but which most reports suggest had been around before they arrived. Charles: Unfortunately, these reports were written by people who had a motive to say what you are saying here: that " we Europeans are not doing anything that the Savages (sic) weren't doing to each other already." - in other words, as justification for taking the land themselves. The regularly used term "savage" implies they were even more warlike than the Europeans. I definitely disbelieve that.
[PEN-L:3125] Re: Re: Re: The trouble with long waves
Doug, And since 1995? Of course East Asia is down, but is not most of the rest of the world up somewhat? Certainly the US has been and Europe, both East and West (although parts of the East are not up relative to the socialist period), and, I think, Africa. Latin America maybe not. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 9 Feb 1999 14:17:49 -0500 Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: Personally I prefer GDP growth rates, not profit rates. And, no, I am not going to get into a data slinging match with you. If you want to argue that GDP growth in the 1990s is lower than in the 1970s or 1980s, fine. Be my guest. I want to argue that because it's true, at least according to these superficial bourgeois numbers from the bloodsucking imperialists at the IMF: 1970-79 1980-891990-99 world 4.1 3.43.0 "industrial" 3.3 2.92.3 U.S.2.8 2.72.4 Japan 5.2 3.81.5 Germany 3.1 1.82.4 EU 2.32.0 "developing" 5.6 4.35.3 Africa 4.4 2.52.8 Asia5.4 7.07.0 Europe 5.7 Middle East 7.3 Middle East/Europe 2.23.8 Western Hemisphere 5.7 2.23.2 source: IMF, World Economic Outlook, April 1988 and October 1998 editions Obviously, the 1998 numbers are based on estimates, and the 1999 ones on projections. Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3124] Re: If Asia was more advanced, why did West rise?
colonial trade amounted to no more than 2% of Europe's GNP in the late 18th century? On the one hand, Frank appears to take this evidence seriously but thinks there other types of evidence do suggest this trade was highly important to Europe's economy: "we must agree with O'Brien that the evidence will never settle this issue" (42). On the other, he says that O'Brien's figures do not "bear so much on the real dispute between us" (42). What he means, I take it, is that it was the monies extracted from the Americas which allowed Europe to enter the Asian market, and that Europe, without ever dominating the world market, accumulated huge profits "from the carrying trade and from parleying multiple transactions in bullion, money, and commodities in multiple markets (177). In the end, actually, Frank more or less dismisses O'Brien's evidence, as he goes on to say that the colonial trade was the crucial source of capital for Europe, for colonies "supplied not only almost free money, but also servile labor and the cheap sugar, tabacco, timber, cotton, and other goods produced in the Americas for European consumption [which] gave them access to the silk, cotton textles, and spices" of Asia (295). To boot, he even cites such outdated sources as Mandel and Eric Williams, with the additional, if rather lame argument, that the supply of colonial capital brought interest rates down from 12% in the 1690s to 8% in 1694 to 3% in 1752, thus cheapening investment (296). But a simple quesion now needs to be posed: did not the bullion extracted from the Americas, or at least a high proportion of it, ended up in Asia or China as the ultimate "sink"?! Whatever happened to Asia's "massive balance of trade surplus with Europe"? -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3123] Re: fwd: Wampum
--- Begin Forwarded Message --- Date: Tue, 09 Feb 1999 13:29:18 -0500 From: Stephanie Ann Bell [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: fwd: [PEN-L:3038] Wampum Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] John Henry is off PKT, so i sent him the 'wampum' post. here's his response: Wampum was (were) "story-telling" belts. The stones/shells (size, order, color) when properly interpreted allowed those affected to recall various agreements, events, etc. that were important in the tribal history. In the Iroquois Confederacy, they were also made and presented at the conclusion of various discussions among the different tribes. THese signified both agreement and commitment to honor that agreement. Or, as one sachem said, "This belt preserves my words." Possibly (though I don't know) belts were made and GIVEN (note emphasis) as symbols of a successful trade, but they themselves would never be traded as long as they were still the history books of the tribe. It is probable that once a propertied society impinged on the Indians, these belts became converted into money but I don't know the process (nor does anyone else). We could probably speculate. P.S. I saw some beauties in an Iroquois museum we saw in the Adirondacks - including the one the Iroquois gave to George Washington for some reason. (He was known to the Iroquois as "Destroyer of Villages" so I don't know why they would give him a belt.) Stephanie Bell --- End Forwarded Message --- -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3111] Re: Re: The trouble with long waves
Doug, Personally I prefer GDP growth rates, not profit rates. And, no, I am not going to get into a data slinging match with you. If you want to argue that GDP growth in the 1990s is lower than in the 1970s or 1980s, fine. Be my guest. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 8 Feb 1999 20:57:32 -0500 Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: Of course when Mandel's book came out was just at the end of what most long wavers would say was the last uptick, just before the down phase that came in after 1973. Whether the new uptick began in the 1980s as Shaikh and some others argue or after the recession of the early 1990s as others would argue (and I tend to think) is a matter for open dispute. What's your metric for long waves? Profit rates? In the U.S., 1982 was the bottom. But Japan has since fallen apart and Europe has long been in the mud. The 1990s? U.S. profit rates have flattened, Europe is still in the mud, as is Japan, and the Asian NICs fell apart. What's up, besides the NASDAQ? Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3110] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Ernest Mandel on long waves
Doug, No. But this is an example of the "septic tank effect" as Jim Devine put it. We only got the internet after a certain level of development of computers (the PC) and a certain level of saturation and spread of their use. This allowed the emergence of a qualitatively different result with a related series of investments and expansion. I did not pose the internet as the source of the current uptick but as simply a part and in response to your remark that "we have had computers around for 50 years." Barkley Rosser On Mon, 8 Feb 1999 21:00:38 -0500 Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: And the internet is largely a 1990s phenomenon. And, for the masses, about 2 years old. Is a long wave based on 2 years evidence? Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3031] Re: Ernest Mandel on long waves
kind of metaphysical superimposition upon them. The first writer who seems to have discerned these 'long waves' in the history of capitalism was the Russian Marxist, Alexander Helphand (Parvus). Though a study of agricultural crises he came to the conclusion, in the mid-1890s, that the long depression which began in 1878 and to which Friedrich Engels had attached such great importance ought soon to be replaced by a new long-term upswing. He expressed this idea for the first time in an article which appeared in the Sachsische Arbeiterzeitung in 1896, and then further elaborated it in his 1901 brochure, Die Handelskrise und die Gewerkschaften. Basing himself on a well-known passage from Marx, Parvus used the notion of a Sturm und Drang period of capital to provide a conceptual framework for 'long waves' of expansion followed by long waves of 'economic depression'. The determinant of this long-term wave-movement was for Parvus the extension of the world market by changes which were 'under way in all areas of the capitalist economy -- in technology, the money market, trade, the colonies' -- and were lifting 'the whole of world production onto a new and much more comprehensive basis'. He did not give statistical data in support of his thesis; and he committed grave errors in his periodization. Despite this, however, his sketch remains the brilliant attempt of a Marxist thinker possessed of a mind which was uncommonly acute, even if also undisciplined and inconsequent. COMMENT: Mandel is a very smart guy, but I question once again whether "long waves" are any thing different than the evolution of the modern capitalist economy in Western Europe and the United States. Mandel seems to understand that "long waves" can be interpreted as effects, since he does raise a number of points in response to the claim that "Kondratieff’s own retort to his critics applies equally well to the five causal relations listed by him: he has by no means proved that these are causes and not effects. The increased gap between supply and demand for agricultural goods in the expansive ‘long waves’ up to the First World War might well be regarded more as an effect than as a cause of general expansion: growing unemployment and increasing industrial output in fact create a demand of this kind, while agrarian production is less elastic than industrial." Apparently, I was not the first person to raise the issue of cause versus effect. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3037] fwd: [Fwd: state money redux]
--Part9902081518.F --- Begin Forwarded Message --- Date: Mon, 08 Feb 1999 13:05:15 -0500 From: Mathew Forstater [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Fwd: state money redux] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] from Randy Wray. --- End Forwarded Message --- -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED] --Part9902081518.F X-Ident: IDENT protocol sender: chandra.levy.org [192.76.239.11] Date: Mon, 08 Feb 1999 12:47:01 -0500 From: "L. Randall Wray" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: Jerome Levy Economics Institute To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: state money redux mat please forward this will be brief; and we can't continue meeting this way because mat's hospitality will be worn out. the following might help to clear-up some confusion. we can probably then just leave these topics alone. 1. alan isaac: i agree that acceptation in taxes is sufficient, but not necessarily a necessary condition to get govt tokens accepted. indeed, those are the words i use. you may well be able to come up w/another reason why people would accept govt tokens even where the govt doesn't impose a tax payable in them. if you are happy to believe that govt tokens will be accecpted "only because these are expected to be accepted by others in turn" (eg, i take them because billy-bob takes them, because he expects sally-jo to accept them--that is, the old infinite regress), then i am happy to let it go at that. 2. paul davidson/stephanie bell. the civil law of contracts is a great invention; legal tender laws are great. i don't think i have much to quarrel with paul over these. legal tender laws might be sufficient to get the public to accept govt tokens (at least on some occasions, there actually are many historical examples to the contrary). however, i think it is a misreading of knapp, chartalism, and keynes to suppose they hung the whole argument over writing the dictionary etc on legal tender laws. for his part, knapp specifically denied this. i do know that schumpeter misled generations by identifying chartalism w/legal tender laws, and perhaps that is the source of the confusion here. knapp is difficult going. i will admit that the first time around, eg when i wrote wray 1990 book, i didn't fully grasp the arguments. however, i was more careful this time. knapp presents a "state" theory of money, endorsed by keynes and by others of the circus. nowell may be correct in arguing that this approach is not "keynesian", but it clearly is "keynes". strangely, paul's citations to korea during the war seem to support the state theory, not the legal tender theory. greg's discussion of very recent history (eg 5000 years after money was "invented") seems to me to be rather beside the point, which is the important role played by the "state" in the "origins" of money. sure, one can find relatively recent examples of non-state money (units of account privately created as in the giro moneys). that in no way is evidence to the contrary of the state money view. w.r.t. orange and green money--you introduce them and i'll arbitrage for you. the differential will be driven down to a couple of basis points so long as either can be used to pay taxes. greg's view that evil govt's somehow "horned in on the process" may be applicable to some govts at some points in time. the way i see it, govts were there from the very beginning; indeed one cannot even conceive of a "mkt" preceding govt (as polayni insisted). 3. elr as marxian reserve army of unemployed. first, as i said, some will argue that govt employment is by definition the same thing as being unemployed. i don't accept that. second, my example was--i thought--clearly to show that even in the worst case scenario, where govt set the elr wage at an inappropriately low level (say, $1 per hour, or even 1 cent per hour), if it is possible to get the necessary deflation, that will then devalue the currency as govt exogenously sets elr wage. the govt ought instead to follow the old fagg foster principle of minimal institutional dislocation, setting the wage at the existing minimum wage. then massive deflation is not necessary. i estimate that somewhere between 8 million and 26 million elr workers will show up to work for that wage. no govt spending cuts or tax increases will be necessary. indeed, i think that the buffer stock at the existing minimum wage will be so effective at constraining inflation that we may want to increase non-elr spending at the same time that elr is instituted. given projected budget surpluses, this is probably reqd in any case. as to the charge that this is nairu or monetarism w/a human face, fine. i'll take the label if it will get millions of people working. if there is overwhelming demand for tip or any other sort of incomes policy to be instituted at the same time, that is also fine by me. i don't see it. personally,
[PEN-L:3036] Re: [Fwd: state money redux]
There has recently been a thread on pen-l of some
possible relevance to this discussion. It has had to do
with whether or not the Dutch actually "bought" Manhatten
or not. Most participants don't think so and view the
Dutch as thieves either because the transaction was backed
by military superiority or because the Indians supposedly
lacked a concept of private property in land such as that
of the Dutch and therefore were effectively cheated,
thinking they were offering rights to share the land rather
than giving it up totally, although it may not have been
until after the British took over operation of the former
Nieuw Amsterdam that this latter interpretation was really
enforced upon the Indians of Manhatten.
In any case, the Dutch gave the Indians glass
("wampum") beads for the transaction. It is known that
such beads were widely used as a medium of exchange in
intertribal transactions on the North American East Coast.
Were these beads "money" and if not did this affect in any
way the historical and moral legitimacy of the transaction?
Barkley Rosser
On Mon, 08 Feb 1999 13:05:15 -0500 Mathew Forstater
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
from Randy Wray.
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3044] Re: Re: Re: Re: Ernest Mandel on long waves
Doug, And that political victory has freed up funds for a major investment drive in computers and internet systems that is now affecting the economy significantly. It should be noted that many of the arguments for the long wave are not mutually exclusive and can reinforce each other, although some do not fit with others. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 8 Feb 1999 16:12:07 -0500 Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jim Devine wrote: The usual long-wave argument is that we're starting a long-wave upturn because of one of the periodic technological revolutions is taking hold. Shaikh told me that he thought the offensive against labor had succeeded in cutting wages sufficiently to restore profitability - i.e., a political, not a technological, argument. Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3046] Re: Re: Re: Ernest Mandel on long waves
erity. But in the 1920s and 1980s-90s, labor was relatively abundant, so that capital accumulation did not pull up real wages except for short cyclical blips (like 1998). Is this a wave? I don't think so. One problem is that the labor abundance in the 1920s was different from that of the 1990s. Nowadays, the international mobility of productive fixed capital is important, whereas it was unimportant in the 1920s. In general, it's progressively getting harder to treat the US as separate from the rest of the world. In the pen-l debate, someone referred to a class struggle theory of long waves. This seems to assume that class struggle has a rhythm that is totally independent of our wills. But Marxism is supposed to tell us how to get the class struggle to beat according to our wishes (the working class' wishes) rather than simply following some natural or pseudo-natural cycle (like the tides). I guess the big problem with long-wave thinking is its naturalism. It assumes that people don't make history, so that history makes us with no causation running the opposite way. But causation goes both ways. For fans of my long article on the 1930s Depression, I've added all sorts of comments to update it. (It was orginally written in about 1992.) Related to the issue of "cycles" or "stages" of world hegemony referred to above, I've changed my mind a bit. As I wrote: As seen sporadically above, one key issue came up in the process of my writing comments on this paper in 1999. Is the problem of international instability in the 1990s that of the hegemon being "too weak" as in the 1920s or that of it being "too strong"? Thinking in these terms can be misleading, since power is not a one-dimensional variable. The hegemon's power can be measured (1) relative to that of nonhegemonic capitalist powers or (2) relative to noncapitalist elements. The original paper emphasized the first, following the lead of the global Keynesians like Kindleberger. But it is the second that is crucial to the present question: the key difference between the hegemon's role in the 1960s and that of the 1990s should be seen more in terms of the relative strength of the hegemon vis-Ã -vis labor and other forces preventing unfettered capitalism and pushing to share in productivity gains. In the 1960s, unlike the 1990s, the power of the U.S., the I.M.F., and the World Bank was moderated by competition from the U.S.S.R., the power of social democracy in Western Europe, and the more anemic might of the U.S. labor movement, together with "labor scarce" conditions in the core countries. In the 1960s, these forces encouraged the general sharing of prosperity in the core countries. But the problem of the 1990s is that the hegemon does not face such political limits, while labor abundance prevails due to capital mobility. In this sense, we might conclude that the key issue is that of the relative power of labor versus capital on a world scale, with the 1990s being an era of global labor abundance and weakness encouraging the reassertion of underconsumption tendencies. We need to strengthen labor. (see http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/subpages/depr/D0.html and http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/subpages/depr/nushortdepr.html ) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3049] Re: The trouble with long waves
Louis, Of course when Mandel's book came out was just at the end of what most long wavers would say was the last uptick, just before the down phase that came in after 1973. Whether the new uptick began in the 1980s as Shaikh and some others argue or after the recession of the early 1990s as others would argue (and I tend to think) is a matter for open dispute. BTW, I agree that plenty of awful stuff can go on during upticks. Barkley Rosser On Sat, 06 Feb 1999 12:14:06 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The problem with "long waves" is that it encourages us to think in terms of capitalism having some kind of self-regulating mechanism, namely the ability to foster "technological revolutions" ad infinitum, which is based on an extrapolation from capitalism's history into the future. Just because capitalism utilized certain technological breakthroughs (steam power, electricity, etc.) in combination with colonial plunder to fuel enormous economic upturns in centuries past, there is no reason to assume that this is intrinsic to the system. While I have only heard Shaikh in person and have not had the dubious pleasure of wading through his assorted manuscripts, I am much more familiar with Mandel's arguments. "Late Capitalism" posits the notion that the computer revolution of the 1960s --a second "technological revolution" as he dubs it-- might set off a new long wave. Mandel insisted that the powerful economic expansion concomitant with this new long wave does not mean that capitalism "works". He states that "the worst form of waste, inherent in late capitalism, lies in the MISUSE of existing material and human forces of production; instead of being used for the development of free men and women, they are increasingly employed in the production of harmless and useless things." While this critique might have had some descriptive power in 1972, when the book was published, it seems rather dated now. Not only are we facing a problem of "misuse", we are also facing a global economic crisis which seems intractable in nature. Lenin's analysis of imperialism as a stagnant economic system that retards development seems more relevant than ever. I recall that when Mandel visited in the United States in the early 70s, the question on many people's minds was whether socialist revolution was possible without the sort of shocks to the system that occurred in the 1930s. Mandel and the American Trotskyist movement accepted the possibility that a new "long wave" might already be in place. We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that economic expansion might not necessarily guarantee class peace, as the relatively affluent French working-class demonstrated in 1968. The belief in capitalism's ability to innovate infinitely is not based on evidence, but on faith. The picture that is emerging today is one of crisis that no "technological revolution" on the horizon can resolve. Furthermore, world capitalism is facing a number of impasses based on energy shortages and environmental blowback that would seem to block a new "long wave". Allow me to quote from my own favorite thinker of late, who certainly will never be nominated for a Bad Writing contest. Harry Shutt states the following in the concluding pages of "The Trouble with Capitalism," (Zed Books, 1998): "Confronted with the obstinate refusal of growth to revive, a significant number of economists and others have been inclined to flirt with quasi-metaphysical theories which supposedly give grounds for expecting a spontaneous recovery in the global economy irrespective of the revealed current tendency of market forces. According to such theories economic growth is governed by very long cycles (of fifty years or more), which their advocates claim can explain the ups and downs of the world economy at least since the Industrial Revolution, and that these unfold more or less independently of any 'man-made' events or influences such as world wars, political changes or innovations in technology. To anyone who recognises economics to be a social science -- and hence inherently subject to the unpredictable actions and reactions of ever-changing human society --such attempts to subject it to a series of rigid laws of motion can scarcely seem worthy of a moment's consideration. That some respectable academics have allowed themselves to take such theories seriously is thus only of interest as an indicator of how far some will go to avoid addressing the harsh realities of systemic failure." Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3050] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Ernest Mandel on long waves
Doug, The usual argument is that there are "critical masses" of a certain technology that bring about qualitative change in the economy. The steam engine was around after Newcomen in 1701 but could not be said to qualitatively transform the economy until it was much improved and much more widespread. The same applies to computers. And the internet is largely a 1990s phenomenon. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 8 Feb 1999 17:36:01 -0500 Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: And that political victory has freed up funds for a major investment drive in computers and internet systems that is now affecting the economy significantly. Computers have been around for over 50 years, and the microcomputer for 20. They've been "affecting the economy significantly" for a long time, in other words.Dating a long wave on that would be to use the same flexible timing as monetarists, with their "long and variable lags." Why not throw in the phone, which has been around for 100, while we're at it? Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3048] Re: selling Manhattan
Charles, We're getting close enough to a "meeting of the minds" here that are transactions might be almost not void. Just a couple of points. One is that it may well be (I don't know) that the Dutch actually did not do anything that was unexpected of them by the Indians they dealt with. The unexpected and unpleasant may have come later after the British displaced the Dutch. After all, the northern border of Nieuw Amsterdam was Wall Street (named for the wall). Broadway was the country road linking it to the Dutch village of Haarlem. There was still plenty of land for the local Indians to do their thing on Manhatten, although perhaps the Dutch had already acted badly. This is a reminder that sometimes Europeans attempted to deal fairly with the Indians only to have their agreements undercut and violated later by their descendents or others taking their place. Something similar happened in Pennsylvania I believe. Probably the remaining major disagreement we have involves how the Indians determined rights of use of land among their respective tribes (I agree that they, by and large, did not have concepts of "property in land" like the Europeans). I would contend that we lack evidence about much of what went on. But where we do have evidence there certainly was intertribal warfare and some of it involved who could live and hunt where. A major one of course involves the changes in who controlled the central valley of Mexico regarding which there are historical records. Periodically outside tribes would come in and conquer and take over, as did the Aztecs who came out of the north. I know that near where I live about ten years before any Europeans arrived, there was a major battle between the Tuscaroras and the Shawnees over access to the Shenandoah Valley. I seriously doubt that such things were as rare as you make them out to be. BTW, thanks to Lou for the informative post on wampum. So, does anybody know if the Dutch paid in wampum shells or glass beads or what? Barkley Rosser On Sat, 06 Feb 1999 14:26:15 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/05 5:48 PM Charles, I think that we need to be clear about exactly at what point there was a "taking" here, illegal, unethical, inappropriately capitalistic, insufficiently "meeting of th minds" or whatever. I would contend that it was not when the Dutch gave some Lenapes or whomever some glass beads, but when they enforced that the Lenapes could not use certain parts of the land that they were somehow under the impression that they could still use after having received the glass beads. ___ Charles: This seems ok to me. __ I would contend that we still do not know what was meant in the minds of the receivers of the glass beads when they did that. Charles: I would contend we DO know that they didn't have the same thing in mind as the Dutch. That's enough to "void the transaction" theoretically. Practically is another matter. __- Perhaps it was that they would "share" the land, even though you and others accept that somehow there were recognized areas that certain groups had some kind of agreed upon primary rights to usufruct. Charles: I didn't say it exactly that way. The important thing is that the overall system (and there was an overall system, a culture) was not the same as the European one. Or was an organized relationship to production and "the land", the Earth that was quite different than the Dutch and European, such that the Indians had no reasonable expectations ( as the contract professors say) that the Dutch were going to do all that they did. _ Did the receivers of the glass beads in doing so recognize that the Dutch had somehow some kind of primary right of usufruct that superseded their own, or did they believe that this allowed the Dutch to share with them the land? ___ Charles: Probably closer to the latter if that at all. This was a very new relationship from the Indian end too. But they certainly didn't have a custom that you give me some beads and then you take over and dominate this area of the Earth that has been the home of our ancestors and our people from time in memorium. ___ In any case, I would say that, especially that the Dutch themselves thought that they were "purchasing" the land, that they are in a much superior legal and moral position than the other Europeans who simply seized land or the tribes who, prior to the invasion of the Europeans, displaced other tribes by force from territory that the displaced tribe had previously inhabited. I do not know whether or not this was how the Lenape took Manhatten originally or if there were earl
[PEN-L:3042] fwd: Re: [Fwd: state money redux]
--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
Date: Mon, 08 Feb 1999 16:50:18 -0500
From: Greg Nowell [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [Fwd: state money redux]
Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Legitimate is whatever you can get away with. There is a kind
of "externality problem" here: whatever it was they (the
Indians) thought they were getting by letting the Dutch "use
the island," they weren't expecting to get an invasion and
subsequent annihilation of their civilization.l
It is sometimes the case that transactions which putatively
exchange goods at a "fair price" include many "unfair
consequences." Hamilton observed, long after the Manhattan
Indians had been pushed out, that it was "unfair" that the fair
value exchange of manufactured goods for raw materials brought
to the manufacturing country scientific and engineering
progress, and a general advancement in technique, which the raw
material provider did not get on his end of the transaction.
This suggests that even between people fully integrated into
the hows and whys of capitalist transactions, there still can
be power disparities and inqualities not captured in the
mechanism of price or in the theory of exchange which depends
on price. That being the case, we would have to say that the
uninitiated are even more screwed. -gn
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:
There has recently been a thread on pen-l of some
possible relevance to this discussion. It has had to do
with whether or not the Dutch actually "bought" Manhatten
or not. Most participants don't think so and view the
Dutch as thieves either because the transaction was backed
by military superiority or because the Indians supposedly
lacked a concept of private property in land such as that
of the Dutch and therefore were effectively cheated,
thinking they were offering rights to share the land rather
than giving it up totally, although it may not have been
until after the British took over operation of the former
Nieuw Amsterdam that this latter interpretation was really
enforced upon the Indians of Manhatten.
In any case, the Dutch gave the Indians glass
("wampum") beads for the transaction. It is known that
such beads were widely used as a medium of exchange in
intertribal transactions on the North American East Coast.
Were these beads "money" and if not did this affect in any
way the historical and moral legitimacy of the transaction?
Barkley Rosser
On Mon, 08 Feb 1999 13:05:15 -0500 Mathew Forstater
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
from Randy Wray.
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Gregory P. Nowell
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science, Milne 100
State University of New York
135 Western Ave.
Albany, New York 1
Fax 518-442-5298
--- End Forwarded Message ---
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3030] Re: Ernest Mandel on long waves
wave' is conceivable only as the result of these cyclical fluctuations and never as some kind of metaphysical superimposition upon them. The first writer who seems to have discerned these 'long waves' in the history of capitalism was the Russian Marxist, Alexander Helphand (Parvus). Though a study of agricultural crises he came to the conclusion, in the mid-1890s, that the long depression which began in 1878 and to which Friedrich Engels had attached such great importance ought soon to be replaced by a new long-term upswing. He expressed this idea for the first time in an article which appeared in the Sachsische Arbeiterzeitung in 1896, and then further elaborated it in his 1901 brochure, Die Handelskrise und die Gewerkschaften. Basing himself on a well-known passage from Marx, Parvus used the notion of a Sturm und Drang period of capital to provide a conceptual framework for 'long waves' of expansion followed by long waves of 'economic depression'. The determinant of this long-term wave-movement was for Parvus the extension of the world market by changes which were 'under way in all areas of the capitalist economy -- in technology, the money market, trade, the colonies' -- and were lifting 'the whole of world production onto a new and much more comprehensive basis'. He did not give statistical data in support of his thesis; and he committed grave errors in his periodization. Despite this, however, his sketch remains the brilliant attempt of a Marxist thinker possessed of a mind which was uncommonly acute, even if also undisciplined and inconsequent. COMMENT: Mandel is a very smart guy, but I question once again whether "long waves" are any thing different than the evolution of the modern capitalist economy in Western Europe and the United States. Mandel seems to understand that "long waves" can be interpreted as effects, since he does raise a number of points in response to the claim that "Kondratieff’s own retort to his critics applies equally well to the five causal relations listed by him: he has by no means proved that these are causes and not effects. The increased gap between supply and demand for agricultural goods in the expansive ‘long waves’ up to the First World War might well be regarded more as an effect than as a cause of general expansion: growing unemployment and increasing industrial output in fact create a demand of this kind, while agrarian production is less elastic than industrial." Apparently, I was not the first person to raise the issue of cause versus effect. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:3029] Re: Bounced from Anwar Shaikh
Jerry, Gosh, if both Doug and Louis were to be removed from pen-l then I guess that we would never ever hear from you again as the only things that you post to this list seem to be slams on one or the other of them. How tiresome. Really, Jerry, I know that you are capable of offering more intelligent things to say. We are waiting. Barkley Rosser On Sat, 6 Feb 1999 06:45:36 -0500 (EST) Gerald Levy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: An intelligent discussion would begin by reading the references that Anwar Shaikh (NB: _not_ "Sheik") gives rather than spinning one's wheels in ignorance. Or is it too much to ask that one become familiar with a person's work before passing judgment on it? Jerry PS1: As this same person has on *several occasions* referred to "Anwar Sheik", one has to believe that this is not an accidental error in spelling. One could argue instead that this "humor" has racist overtones. PS2 (to Michael and PEN, in reference to PS1): am I not allowed to object to racist statements on PEN-L? -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2933] Re: selling Manhattan
I confess to having no idea what was in the minds of the Indians who participated in the transaction in question. I think that the blanket claim that "Indians had no conception of private property" is highly questionable as they engaged in all kinds of trade with each other and presumably understood that some kind of right to control or whatever was being exchanged in such transactions. That this concept differed from how we think now, I have little doubt. I am aware that "private property in land" was not a standard Indian concept and it is likely that those participants probably had a different view of what was going on when they accepted the glass beads than did the Dutch, and it is quite likely that at some point later they may well have been unhappy or disappointed when they learned how the Dutch interpreted (and enforced) what had transpired, given the Dutch military superiority, as Jim D. notes. Nevertheless, the behavior of the Dutch is a contrast to the usual European behavior of simply arriving and declaring that some king or pope or whoever has given them the land, period. I just learned, btw, that the Russians in Northern California paid for their use of the land at Fort Ross, in contrast to the Spanish in Southern California who simply arrived and asserted ownership. I would note that among most tribes there was at least a rudimentary sense of tribal ownership, if not of personal ownership.. Certain tribes had primary rights in certain territories and this was often decided by intertribal warfare. Sometimes a home base involved some kind of tribal burial grounds. I note that Lewis Mumford in his _The City in History_ claims that burial grounds were the original nuclei of urban settlements (cemetary by the church in the center of town) and also the original form of landed property. But, again, I doubt that anybody on this list knows what was the actual conception of the Indians who "sold" Manhatten to the Dutch and any efforts to claim what they did think is pure fantasy. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 11:36:24 -0800 Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 10:44 AM 2/5/99 -0800, Michael wrote: Barkley know[s] better. The Dutch did not BUY Manhattan since the indigenous people had no conception [of] private proerty. They gave beads and the people let them stay there and use the land. Only later did they declare it to be private property. also, didn't the Dutch have military superiority at the time, so as to make sure that they got a good deal and that they could interpret the deal the way they wanted? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2940] Re: Long waves
Louis, I beg to differ. There is plenty of disagreement about the existence of long waves. A lot of people, including many on this list, think that they are just a bunch of hooey. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 14:14:03 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What is the political significance of long waves ? At the crest or the trough or in between , capitalism still needs to go. How does knowing there are long waves help to bring that about ? What is Shaikh's practice ? Charles Brown Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/05 2:04 PM Barkley wrote: Anyway, as a former participant not particularly interested in getting into again in any depth, and not knowing the details of Shaikh's particular take on the theory, let me note that there are many explanations promulgated out there for long waves. However, the most frequently cited and most credible to my mind involve technological change. This just reinforces what I was trying to say. What is the relevance of "technological change" for the economies of most of the world in the 19th century? It seems to me that the whole paradigm of "long waves" is very much tied up with West Europe and the US. There is no disagreement about the existence of "long waves", just how insightful they are. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2947] selling Manhatten
In regard to Louis's remarks about the Lenape trails in New York, I just learned while visiting LA some days ago that Wilshire Boulevard was originally an Indian trail, at least at its upper end. Before the Spanish establishe El Pueblo de Nuestro Senora de la Reina de Los Angeles de Portiuncula in 1781, the Gabrieleno Indians had a village on the site of downtown LA, Nang-Ya. They had a trail to the La Brea tar pits which they used for gathering sealants and other uses. That trail later became Wilshire Blvd. Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2950] Re: selling Manhattan
Charles, In most locations the tribes that were in place when Europeans first showed up were not the first tribes to inhabit or claim as "tribal territory" that land. So, if the tribes there when the Europeans arrived have permanent property rights because they had no concept of property and therefore could not sell their property, what are the rights of the tribes that they displaced, often by warfare? Such a "transaction" looks no better than the thefts by warfare by most of the Europeans and arguably worse than the transactions where the Europeans actually paid, as with the Dutch for Manhatten, even if the "sellers" did not know what was going to be the long term result. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 15:28:47 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/05 3:06 I would note that among most tribes there was at least a rudimentary sense of tribal ownership, if not of personal ownership.. Certain tribes had primary rights in certain territories and this was often decided by intertribal warfare. Sometimes a home base involved some kind of tribal burial grounds. I note that Lewis Mumford in his _The City in History_ claims that burial grounds were the original nuclei of urban settlements (cemetary by the church in the center of town) and also the original form of landed property. But, again, I doubt that anybody on this list knows what was the actual conception of the Indians who "sold" Manhatten to the Dutch and any efforts to claim what they did think is pure fantasy. _ Charles: We may not know exactly what the indigenous conceptions were, but archeology, anthropology and paleo-history are not based on pure fantasy. There were definite cultural rules just as we are sure that they had languages with grammars, though we may not know the exact grammar. We know what they didn't have, which was a conception that was the same as the Dutch. Thus, when I did legal research for the land recovery project of the Yuroks of Northern California, I argued that the early land transfers to whites should be voided for failure of meeting of the minds, which is necessary for a contract; and other theories based on the anthropological principle that whatever the Yurok coneption of land, it was not of European capitalist private property. There is quite a bit of ethnography on what the Yurok conceptions of land were ( Waterman ; Kroeber, a famous student of Boas ). There are lots of sacred spots etc. such that the land becomes a giant library of the tribe's history. The land was a repository of indigenous knowledge in conjunction with myths and the whole culture. There is likel! ! y ! to be some similar affirmative evidence of the Manhattan groups' conceptions. It is not fantastic that indigenous Manhattan conception would not meet with a Dutch mind (conception) as necessary for a contract ,and it is possibly less fantastic than theories about long economic waves. Charles Brown -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2952] Re: Long waves
Louis, You may think that "business cycles" are a "bourgeois concept" but Karl Marx certainly didn't. Check it out in Volume III of _Capital_. As for Trotsky, see "The Curve of Capitalist Development" [1923] reprinted in _Problems of Everyday Life_, 1973, New York: Monad Press, pp. 273-280. That you have never heard of Nikolai D. Kondratiev (or Kondratieff in some transliterations) is your problem. The original version of his famous paper was in German in 1926, meaning that Trotsky's interest predated his. It was "Die Langen Wellen der Konjunktur," _Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft_, vol. 56, pp. 573-609. An abridged version was published in English as, "The Long Waves in Economic Life," _Review of Economics and Statistics_, 1935, vol. 17, pp. 105-115. The originator of the concept was a Dutch economist (living off the proceeds of theft from American Indians), J. van Gelderen, "Springvloed: Beschouwingen over industrieele ontwikkeling en prijsbeweging," _De Niewe Tijd_, 1913, vol. 18, pp. 4-6. That paper was only translated very recently into English by Bart Varspagen in some Edward Elgar volume on long waves, but the theory has long enjoyed an especial popularity among Dutch economists. I know nothing of van Gelderen's politics or ideology. I would note, however, that most of the Marxist long wave theorists have tied it to trends in the class struggle. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 15:25:55 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Although there are bourgeois economists who do long waves, it has a long history of study by Marxists who were among the first to promulgate the idea. Trotsky was a fan of the idea very early on, the obvious source of Mandel's interest. The person most widely associated with it was Kondratiev who was indeed a Soviet Marxist. However Stalin agreed with your views on math in econ and had Kondratiev executed during the 1930s purges for "formalism," that awful crime against the international proletariat. And Anwar Shaikh is one of the purer Marxists operating in today's economics academia. Barkley Rosser Barkley, as I pointed out in my initial reply to Anwar, I admire Mandel greatly. Except for Marx himself, the only other economists I have taken the trouble to read in any kind of depth are Mandel, O'Connor, Sweezy, Baran and Magdoff. I am not sure, by the way, about Trotsky and Kondratiev. This does not ring a bell. That being said, I still would argue that the concept is not particularly Marxist. It seems to be analogous to the concept of a "business cycle", another troubling concept. Such notions seem to be based on the premise that bourgeois economics follows some sort of intrinsic patterns like, the path of comets or something like that. The reason this has been on my mind of late, obviously, is that there are huge changes going on in the world economy and I find bourgeois explanations to have little merit. Idle chatter about what phase of the "business cycle" we are in always seemed besides the point, now more so than ever. I think the most useful way to approach the problem of capitalist accumulation is by grounding it in the large-scale historical events which allow very large blocs of capital to either be amassed or depleted. Such events include wars, invasions and fascism. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2961] Re: selling Manhattan
Charles, Not so simple. You say that "it's between them," but then if a European shows up the latest holder somehow has a mystical right that their ignorance of what the Europeans are about grants them in perpetuity. Why does this not apply to former Indian tribal holders of the land, if you don't like the term "territory" for a defined piece of land? I note as a simple example, that the Chippewa drove the Sioux out of Northern Wisconsin after they defeated them in a battle in 1666 in Solon Spring. Of course the Chippewa were fleeing from European invaders, but there were plenty of such displacements prior to the European arrival that we just don't know the exact dates or details of. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 16:30:12 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/05 3:45 PM Charles, In most locations the tribes that were in place when Europeans first showed up were not the first tribes to inhabit or claim as "tribal territory" that land. Charles: "Territory" is a term referring to the land within a state. The groups around Manhattan didn't have states. __ So, if the tribes there when the Europeans arrived have permanent property rights because they had no concept of property Charles: They had property concepts. They didn't have PRIVATE property concepts in land. Property means relations between people with respect to things, with respect to production. They had an organized relationship to the land, but the form of organization was not private property relations. __ and therefore could not sell their property, what are the rights of the tribes that they displaced, often by warfare? _ Charles: Assuming arguendo that your claim of violent displacement is true, that's between them. The Europeans ain't in it. But every European claim of indigenous "savagery" as in warfare worse than what the Europeans did, IS SUSPECT as European propaganda as an excuse to displace them. __ __ Such a "transaction" looks no better than the thefts by warfare by most of the Europeans and arguably worse than the transactions where the Europeans actually paid, as with the Dutch for Manhatten, even if the "sellers" did not know what was going to be the long term result. ___ Charles: The European claims that regarding indigenous transactions worse than European transactions are suspect as evidence from biased witnesses. Europeans had an ulterior motive to portray indigenous peoples as "savage" as an excuse for taking the land as "unsettled by humans". The Europeans are in no position to judge the situation and say, "their 'crime' justifies our crime ( I refer to the indigenous "crime" arguendo, for the sake of argument, but I don't accept it as anything but a fantastic and grandiose false generalization). Charles Brown Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 15:28:47 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/05 3:06 I would note that among most tribes there was at least a rudimentary sense of tribal ownership, if not of personal ownership.. Certain tribes had primary rights in certain territories and this was often decided by intertribal warfare. Sometimes a home base involved some kind of tribal burial grounds. I note that Lewis Mumford in his _The City in History_ claims that burial grounds were the original nuclei of urban settlements (cemetary by the church in the center of town) and also the original form of landed property. But, again, I doubt that anybody on this list knows what was the actual conception of the Indians who "sold" Manhatten to the Dutch and any efforts to claim what they did think is pure fantasy. _ Charles: We may not know exactly what the indigenous conceptions were, but archeology, anthropology and paleo-history are not based on pure fantasy. There were definite cultural rules just as we are sure that they had languages with grammars, though we may not know the exact grammar. We know what they didn't have, which was a conception that was the same as the Dutch. Thus, when I did legal research for the land recovery project of the Yuroks of Northern California, I argued that the early land transfers to whites should be voided for failure of meeting of the minds, which is necessary for a contract; and other theories based on the anthropological principle that whatever the Yurok coneption of land, it was not of European capitalist private property. There is quite a bit of ethnography on what the Yurok conceptions of land were ( Waterman ; Kroeber, a famous student of Boas ). There are lots of sacred spots etc
[PEN-L:2967] Re: selling Manhattan
Charles, I think that we need to be clear about exactly at what point there was a "taking" here, illegal, unethical, inappropriately capitalistic, insufficiently "meeting of th minds" or whatever. I would contend that it was not when the Dutch gave some Lenapes or whomever some glass beads, but when they enforced that the Lenapes could not use certain parts of the land that they were somehow under the impression that they could still use after having received the glass beads. I would contend that we still do not know what was meant in the minds of the receivers of the glass beads when they did that. Perhaps it was that they would "share" the land, even though you and others accept that somehow there were recognized areas that certain groups had some kind of agreed upon primary rights to usufruct. Did the receivers of the glass beads in doing so recognize that the Dutch had somehow some kind of primary right of usufruct that superseded their own, or did they believe that this allowed the Dutch to share with them the land? In any case, I would say that, especially that the Dutch themselves thought that they were "purchasing" the land, that they are in a much superior legal and moral position than the other Europeans who simply seized land or the tribes who, prior to the invasion of the Europeans, displaced other tribes by force from territory that the displaced tribe had previously inhabited. I do not know whether or not this was how the Lenape took Manhatten originally or if there were earlier inhabitants. But anybody who thinks that this did not happen prior to the arrival of the Europeans, and a whole lot, is simply naive. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 17:16:21 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/05 4:51 PM Barkley comments: Not so simple. You say that "it's between them," but then if a European shows up the latest holder somehow has a mystical right that their ignorance of what the Europeans are about grants them in perpetuity. __ Charles: Again, I don't grant your premise that the "latest holder" got the land by violence. But even assuming that, the European wrongful taking does not become valid. If I steal Louis' land, you can't assert my wrongful act as a basis for validating your subsequent wrongful taking from me. You can't assert Louis' right as making your taking legal. ___ Barkley: Why does this not apply to former Indian tribal holders of the land, if you don't like the term "territory" for a defined piece of land? __ Charles: The Dutch can't validate their wrongful taking through a prior wrongful taking by those from whom they take. But please note, I am going along with these reasoning chains, arguendo. I have problems with some of your factual and "legal" or cultural logic premises. ___ Barkley: I note as a simple example, that the Chippewa drove the Sioux out of Northern Wisconsin after they defeated them in a battle in 1666 in Solon Spring. Of course the Chippewa were fleeing from European invaders, but there were plenty of such displacements prior to the European arrival that we just don't know the exact dates or details of. _ Charles: The "we know there were plenty " is suspect, for reasons I stated regarding ulterior motives of European "knowers". But even assuming "we know" some of what you say, Europeans can't assert Sioux rights vis-a-vis Chippewa in order to justify or legalize Eurpean takings. The "best" they might do is give the land back to the Sioux and get their European shit out of Dodge, so to speak. " Who was that masked man who gave us back our land from the Ojibwa (Chippewa) ? It was the great white do gooder Kemosabi. He went back to Europe." Charles Brown Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 16:30:12 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/05 3:45 PM Charles, In most locations the tribes that were in place when Europeans first showed up were not the first tribes to inhabit or claim as "tribal territory" that land. Charles: "Territory" is a term referring to the land within a state. The groups around Manhattan didn't have states. __ So, if the tribes there when the Europeans arrived have permanent property rights because they had no concept of property Charles: They had property concepts. They didn't have PRIVATE property concepts in land. Property means relations between people with respect to things, with respect to production. They had an organized relationship to the land, but the form of organization was not private property relations. __
[PEN-L:2958] Re: Re: Bounced from Anwar Shaikh
Henry, You may not be a Post Keynesian, but many of them would argue that any calculation of present value is a crock, even out a few years, because of fundamental uncertainty. Perhaps in practice the Brits used 30 years on valuing consols, although that is not what I have read. But there are policymakers today who are doing cost/benefit analyses with present value calculations that go out more then 200 years. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 14:47:18 -0800 "Henry C.K. Liu" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" wrote: Henry, Every present value formula actually goes to infinity, although often the entries are zeroes after some finite point in time. Barkley, please read carefully. I wrote : "I cannot conceive a present value formula that covers 200 years." A present value is the value today of a future payment, or stream of payments, discounted at appropriate discount rate. Present value formulae are not natural laws. They are set by users based on judgement. Every present value formula has a set date beyond which present value is assigned a value of zero by the user. Beyond that date, the formula ceases to function. That date occurs way before 200 years in busisness applications. When I say that I cannot conceive of one that covers 200 years, it is entirely my perogative to say so. It means I will not assign a value to any future payment up to that date. It is a declarative truism. Your statement: "Every present value formula actually goes to infinity", is false. One can choose to set the zero present value date at infinity, but that would be an exercise in futility. Even in interantional politics, when France sold Louisiana to America, it did not use a 200 year present value formula. Extending present value to infinity has no mathematical or financial value. For business calculations, division by infinity has no application. Infinitely lived consols, first issued in 1751 by the British government, are interest bearing government bonds having no maturity date but redeemable on call. The present value calculation used by buyers did not use infinity as a date. Their prices in the secondary market were determined by 30 year present value calculations, constantly extended until called. Infinity did not enter into the claculations. Anyway, Victoria England did a lot of weird things. Henry C.K. Liu -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2956] Re: long waves references (fwd)
Needless to say, this bit from the archives from me (thanks, Michael) is much more complete and accurate than the little bit I just sent. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 5 Feb 1999 12:08:37 -0800 (PST) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Forwarded message: From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thu Dec 17 16:13:43 1998 Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 14:55:14 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Originator: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk From: "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:8194] long waves references X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Comment: Progressive Economics Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mozilla-Status: X-Mozilla-Status2: X-UIDL: 367944ef0006 X-Status: X-UID: 4236 Status: O [long] It occurs to me that we had this discussion of long waves on this list before, but what the heck. Anyway, let me put this in broader perspective with some history of the debate and some references. I shall leave it to Paul Phillips to provide good ones from David Gordon on the SSA approach and from Robert Boyer (or whomever) on the French regulationist approach. I note that the original literature was in Dutch and German and that the theory remains most popular in those countries, along with Russia, where there has been a revival of interest since the Kondratiev centennial in 1991 with a lot of new literature in Russian coming out over there (a few in English: Leonid Abalkin, "Scientific Heritage of N. Kondratiev and contemporaneity: The Report to the International Scientific Conference devoted to the 100th birth anniversary of N. Kondratiev," Institute of Economics, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1992, and Yuri V Yakovets, "Civilization cycles and the model of reproduction structure dynamics," The Academy of National Economy under the Government of the Russian Federation, 1992). Kondratiev's original paper in 1926 was in German, but a shorter version was published in English a number of years later, thereby giving him "credit" in English language sources and discussions as their discoverer. However, the first paper on long waves, which used much of the data later used by Kondratiev and many of his arguments as well, was in Dutch by J. van Gelderen, "Springvloed: Beschouwingen over industrieele ontwikkeling en prijsbeweging," _De Neuwe Tijd_, 1913, 18, nos. 4-6. This paper, which focused more on price data, as did Kondratiev's (which as Jim Devine has noted shows long wave effects more clearly than does output data), has just been translated into English by Bart Varspagen as "Springflood," and appears as the first paper in the newly released Edward Elgar volume of readings on Long Waves, edited by Alfred Steinherr. Neither van Gelderen nor Kondratiev was definitive about the mechanism, and both threw out elements of what show up in several later theories as possibilities. The Dutch have continued to be the biggest fans, including with papers regularly appearing in _De Economist_, (Jay Forrester, "Growth Cycles," _De Economist_, 1977, 125, 525-543 and K.B.T. Thio, "On Simultaneous Explanation of Long and Medium-Term Employment Cycles," _De Economist_, 1991, 139, 331-357) as well as the book by J.J. van Duijn, _De Lange Golf in de Economie_, 1979, Assen: Van Gorcum (translated into English several years later as _The Long Wave in Economic Life_). After falling out of favor for some time, the theory picked up adherents in the 1970s with the apparently long wave slowdown occurring then, which still looks like a very serious explanation, with the previous "Golden Age" being the upswing after the Great Depression downswing. In German this was symbolized by Gerhard Mensch's _Das Techologishe Patt_, Frankfurt am Main: Umschau Verlag, which was translated several years later into English as _The Stalemate in Technology_. As has been already mentioned, probably the most widely discussed theory has been the technological clustering/wave theory, which had a strong early statement by Schumpeter in his 1939 _Business Cycles_. Others supporting variations on this include Mensch, Richard M. Goodwin, "The Economy as an Evolutionary Pulsator," _Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization_, 1986, 7, 341-349, and Andrew Tylecote, ""History as a Forecasting Tool: The Future of the European Economy in a Long-Wave/Long-Cycle Perspective," _Review of Political Economy_, 1992, 4, 226-248. A technical way of analyzing "technique clusters" can be found in Chapter 8 of my 1991 _From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities_, Boston: Kluwer, which d
[PEN-L:2942] Re: selling Manhattan
Charles, You are doing something that we have seen a bit too much of on some of these lists, namely making grandiose generalizations about all "indigenous peoples" especially Native American Indians. There were lots of tribal variations in many practices and social/economic relations and patterns. Although many were arguably exemplars of "primitive communism," many were not. I would note the Aztecs for starters, but could go on. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 14:09:56 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Indigenous people didn't have no concept of property. They had no PRIVATE property. Private property is not the only form of property. Property is a social relation of production, a relationship between people regarding things. Indigenous peoples had production and relations of production. The latter organized their relationship to each other with respect to "the land", productive sources in nature or their genome. Early communism doesn't mean there was no sense of "our genome". The solution is to put the land back into communist relations of production, abolish private property in the basic means of production , including the land. Charles Brown Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] 02/05 1:49 PM [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Barkley know better. The Dutch did not BUY Manhattan since the indigenous people had no conception private proerty. They gave beads and the people let them stay there and use the land. Only later did they declare it to be private property. Sorting out rights and wrongs after a theft is difficult. I think the real value of the ongoing dialogue is the ongoing theft from indigenous people -- whether taking of their plant genome, their land, or their genes. How'd we go from "no conception of private property" to "their plant genome"? Whose genome is it anyway? Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2937] Re: Long waves
Louis, Although there are bourgeois economists who do long waves, it has a long history of study by Marxists who were among the first to promulgate the idea. Trotsky was a fan of the idea very early on, the obvious source of Mandel's interest. The person most widely associated with it was Kondratiev who was indeed a Soviet Marxist. However Stalin agreed with your views on math in econ and had Kondratiev executed during the 1930s purges for "formalism," that awful crime against the international proletariat. And Anwar Shaikh is one of the purer Marxists operating in today's economics academia. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 14:30:17 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Charles wrote: What is the political significance of long waves ? At the crest or the trough or in between , capitalism still needs to go. How does knowing there are long waves help to bring that about ? What is Shaikh's practice ? Charles, economists have always strived for inclusion in the world of science, especially those with ties to the academy, like most PEN-L'ers. The reason something like "long waves" has such an appeal is that by writing dense, math-clogged treatises on the subject, you can fool yourself into believing that you are doing something akin to what the people at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty earth science labs are doing. In reality, all bourgeois economics--all of it--is unscientific. When Marxist economists try to vie with their professional colleagues, they inevitably make concessions to the empirical bias of this very unscientific profession. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2915] Re: Elgin marbles, museums, etc.
Actually the Dutch purchased Manhatten from the local tribes. So, there is no issue of "giving back" there, unless one nullifies all such transactions or says that the tribes did not have the right to sell it. Many have ridiculed the price and method of payment, wampum (glass) beads, stated to be worth $24 when I first read about it around 30 years ago. Of course such beads were the standard medium of exchange used among different tribes on the North American east coast, and thus perfectly good "money" as far as the sellers were concerned. One can argue that they got cheated. But then nobody knew what would eventually transpire on that particular piece of land (holding Doug Henwood, Louis Proyect, and Jerry Levy all together!). I have also seen a claim that if the Indians had invested their proceeds in a good Dutch bank and left it there to accumulate, the current worth would be about that of Manhatten Island. So there, :-). Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 12:55:59 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This must be from the same part of your program as returning Manhattan to the Indians. I suppose you wouldn't be interested in arguments that the Elgin marbles or Kennewick Man are part of the common patrimony of humanity rather than the property of their creators' decendants. But is "to each according to their ancestry" really compatible with "to each according to their need"? Josh Mason Returning Manhattan to the Indians? This is a joke, right? I haven't hear this kind of Rush Limbaugh-tainted leftism, since I first started posting about indigenous struggles on PEN-L a year ago. As far as the Elgin marbles are concerned, I absolutely support the Greek claims, just as I support the American Indian Movement's fight in Florida to ban an exhibit of relics stolen from Inca gravesites. From the website at http://kola-hq.hypermart.net/actaimfl.htm. === St. Petersburg, Florida PETITION TO: THE FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL MUSEUM THE ST PETERSBURG CITY COUNCIL On October 23, 1998 the Florida International Museum began an exhibit called "Empires of Mystery". This exhibit includes the display of eight (8) remains from Indigenous people from Peru, as well as what are believed to be associated funerary related objects. This display has the permission of the Peruvian government but not that of the Indigenous people of Peru. Further the Florida International Museum's marketing had geared towards a Halloween theme with major Florida newspapers running advertisements that stated: "This Halloween come in contact with a sorceress, skulls, mummies, tombs and magic tablets." The American Indian Movement of Florida has demanded the repatriation of the Peruvian (Inka) remains and the associated funerary objects to the Peruvian Indigenous Nations, which can be facilitated through the IITC (International Indian Treaty Council), Yacha Ayawasi, and COICA. Florida AIM has further filed complaints of violations of ILO 169 and 107, as well as Title 19 USC 2607 as these items were stolen from the Indigenous Nations of Peru. === As far as the Kennewick man is concerned, the skeleton was protected by the Native American Graveyard Protection Act and the army had no choice except to keep out the archaelologists and anthropologists. How would you like it if the Umatilla went out to the cemetery where your great-grandparents were buried and dug up some skeletons to examine Jewish craniology? (Joshua is a Jewish name, isn't it? The gentiles I don't care about. Let the Umatilla dig them up till the cows come home.) Finally, what kind of research are these scientists up to anyhow? Are you aware that one of the lead scientists has also spent decades trying to find "Big Foot"? What's next? The Loch Ness monster? Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2916] Re: Bounced from Anwar Shaikh
Henry, Every present value formula actually goes to infinity, although often the entries are zeroes after some finite point in time. However, I would remind that in the heyday of pompous capitalism in Victorian England, they used to issue infinitely lived consols. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 12:07:17 -0800 "Henry C.K. Liu" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "Perelman, Michael" wrote: From: "Anwar Shaikh" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Part of my work has involved showing that a secular fall in the rate of profit provides a theoretical foundation for long waves. In the US, the mass of profit began a strong persistent upward trend in the early 1980's, and has been trending upward steadily since. For this reason, I trace the turnaround point in the US to the mid-1980's. There another also other quite remarkably consistent measure of long waves which I have been able to extend back about 200 years in the US and the UK, and it too pointed in much the same direction. Mary Malloy, at Iona College, is another person who has worked on linking long waves to profits, and has taken her data back almost 150 years. Profit is only an accounting concept. I am unaware of any financial contract that exceeds 100 years, most are 30 years with one adjustable renewable term. In fact, any leasehold exceeding 99 years is legally a sale. I cannot conceive a present value formula that covers 200 years. I must be missing some basic insight. Henry C.K. Liu -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2920] Re: Bounced from Anwar Shaikh
Louis, Well, we've debated long wave theory at length on this list before. Don't know if you were around for those episodes, Lou, but it should be in the archives. Anyway, as a former participant not particularly interested in getting into again in any depth, and not knowing the details of Shaikh's particular take on the theory, let me note that there are many explanations promulgated out there for long waves. However, the most frequently cited and most credible to my mind involve technological change. One can dislike or reject the argument, but it involves the downturns triggering new innovations and the upturns essentially being the adoptions of the new innovations and their various spinoffs. Schumpeter in his 1939 _Business Cycles_ gives one of the more famous accounts of this, laying it out historically up to his time. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 10:46:19 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Anwar Sheik: In the US, the mass of profit began a strong persistent upward trend in the early 1980's, and has been trending upward steadily since. For this reason, I trace the turnaround point in the US to the mid-1980's. There another also other quite remarkably consistent measure of long waves which I have been able to extend back about 200 years in the US and the UK, and it too pointed in much the same direction. Mary Malloy, at Iona College, is another person who has worked on linking long waves to profits, and has taken her data back almost 150 years. Although I have the highest regard for Ernest Mandel, who believed in "long waves", there is something about this theory that bothers me. It strikes me as having almost no explanatory value and confuses cause with effect. The "long waves" in American economic history would seem more related to its particular fate in a given epoch with respect to internal and external factors. For example, the slave trade would be a more fundamental explanatory mechanism than a "long wave", as would the expansion into Mexico and Latin America. If Great Britain had resisted the Monroe Doctrine, would there have been a "long wave" or would the US economy have stagnated? Perhaps the long waves are nothing but a barometer of the imperialist lurches forward of the Yankee republic. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2889] Re: Surrender, Dorothy.
e peculiar policy of the government in employing so weak and vacillating a person as General Miles to look after the uneasy Indians, has resulted in a terrible loss of blood to our soldiers, and a battle which, at best, is a disgrace to the war department. There has been plenty of time for prompt and decisive measures, the employment of which would have prevented this disaster." Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2890] Re: Surrender, Dorothy.
BTW, I stand corrected by Max S. Bryan was the Cowardly Lion. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 4 Feb 1999 18:10:04 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time) "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Louis, None of this is inconsistent with Baum being a populist. Although some were socialist or quasi-socialist, many were pro-small business and entrepreneurship and also not necessarily friendly to American Indians, as they supported westward expansion and all that. The interpretation suggesed about Scarecrow = farmer, Tin Woodman = industrial worker, Wizard = W.J. Bryan, etc. is well known and well established with much to support that it was indeed on Baum's mind. And it is the case that the slippers were changed from silver to ruby between the book and the most famous movie version. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 04 Feb 1999 17:01:35 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From David Traxel's "1898," (A. Knopf, 1998): LYMAN FRANK BAUM grew up in a wealthy New York family, but had decided while still a teenager against following his father into the oil business. Instead he had been drawn to the theater, and in his early twenties wrote and produced his own plays, The Maid of Arran and The Queen of Killarney, starring in them with his wife as they toured through the East and Midwest. This was a wonderful creative experience, but less successful as a money-maker. While not completely giving up the theater, he worked as a traveling salesman, and then started an enterprise related to his father's: Baum's Castorine Company, producing an axle grease made from crude oil. In 1888, at the age of thirty-two, he opened a retail store, Baum's Bazaar. in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where his wife's brother and sisters had homesteaded a farm. A sudden downturn in the local economy put the Bazaar into bankruptcy, but Baum, displaying the optimistic adaptability of the American entrepreneur, then shifted to journalism, not only publishing the Aberdeen Saturdai Pioneer, but also writing and setting in type almost even word that went onto its pages, both news stories and advertising. To gain all the meat from the nut of life is the essence of wisdom,' he informed the readers of Aberdeen. 'therefore, eat, drink, and be merry--for tomorrow you die.' This emphasis on sensual pleasures must have been somewhat shocking to the conservative farmers of the region, but Baum saw himself as a revolutionary force for changing Americans from pinch-penny savers to consumers of the good things in life. Yes, you might "be forced to borrow a few dollars" in order to afford worldly comforts, but "who will be the gainer when Death calls him to the last account--the man who can say 'I have lived!' or the man who can say 'I have saved'?" Baum's view of the world had been formed in the wealthy surroundings of his childhood, but he was also influenced by his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Cage, who was a leading feminist and the coauthor, along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of History of Woman Suffrage. Gage had found the Protestantism of her own youth too resistant to women's rights, and had instead turned to theosophy, a quirky blend of Eastern mysticism, the paranormal, and a respect for the "objectivity" of science put together by Madame Helena Blavatsky. One of the New Thought or Mind Cure philosophies that had arisen to fill needs brought about by Darwin's undermining of established religion, theosophy taught that happiness was something to be sought in this world, not postponed until Heaven. There was no Heaven, although theosophists did believe that the "spirits" of dead people were present in another dimension, which could only be reached through mediums and s6ances. Nor was there a God as traditionally worshipped, but "There is a latent power," one theosophist wrote, "a force of indestructible life, an immortal principle of health, in every individual, which if developed would heal all our wounds." If one developed this latent power, not only good health but money enough to provide comforts and luxuries would result. There was no need to defer happiness. This made eminent good sense to Baum, but he had a hard time living up to the model in Aberdeen, South Dakota. Continuing bad times sank the Saturday Pioneer, and booming, bustling Chicago pulled him to its busy streets, just as it did so many ambitious and penniless young men. He briefly worked as a reporter for the Chicago Evening News, then went on the road selling crockery and glassware. Salesmanship was a perfect calling for a man of his optimistic nature, and he was successful enough that soon he, his wife, and four children were able to afford a large house with modern conveniences such as gaslight and a bathroom. But by the l
[PEN-L:2709] Re: Re: Duke University's literature department
Peter, The quick answer is probably not. I have just looked at my massive (673 pp.) _Contributions to Urban Sociology: The Chicago School_ ed. by Ernest W. Burgess [he of the "zones"] and Donald J. Bogue, 1964, U. of Chicago Press. It is not in the index. BTW, I don't know if it is the first place, and of course we are dealing with a translation from the French, but I find the phrase in _Outline of a Theory of Practice_, originally published in French in 1972 and in English in 1977. The latter is the year that Glenn Loury first used it according to Robert Putnam. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 12:12:50 -0800 Peter Dorman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Did any of the Chicago "urban ecological" sociologists use the term "social capital"? It would seem to fit their ideas. Peter Dorman "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" wrote: Michael, This quote from Senior looks like it might fit. But whose concept of "social capital" does it resemble if any, Bourdieu's or Loury-Coleman-Putnam's? Also, I note that this is still not a use of the term "social capital" even if it is getting at the concept maybe. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:43:40 -0800 Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: 1) Bourdieu was the first to coin the term "social capital." According to Senior, England was successful because "the intellectual and moral capital of Great Britain far exceeds all the material capital, not only in importance, but in productiveness" (Senior 1836, p. 134). By the way is David Yaffe, the same fellow that wrote marxists stuff a few decades ago?[ -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901 -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2704] Re: Duke University's literature department
Michael, This quote from Senior looks like it might fit. But whose concept of "social capital" does it resemble if any, Bourdieu's or Loury-Coleman-Putnam's? Also, I note that this is still not a use of the term "social capital" even if it is getting at the concept maybe. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 28 Jan 1999 15:43:40 -0800 Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: 1) Bourdieu was the first to coin the term "social capital." According to Senior, England was successful because "the intellectual and moral capital of Great Britain far exceeds all the material capital, not only in importance, but in productiveness" (Senior 1836, p. 134). By the way is David Yaffe, the same fellow that wrote marxists stuff a few decades ago?[ -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901 -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2703] Re: Re: [Fwd: Re: Shleifer and Incentives]
Egads! This sounds like a cosmic Noise. Or is it just some noise trading? We know that you did that stuff with "Clean As A Hound's Tooth" Andrei and "Master Of The Universe" Larry. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 28 Jan 1999 16:12:16 -0800 Brad De Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (The spell-checker translated Shliefer as "Slicer" and "Shifter" and "neo-liberalism" as "neocolonialism." From the mouths of machines! Of course, Peter was Doorman.) Beware. The spell-checker translates the name of Shleifer's frequent co-author Robert Vishny as "Vishnu." OM MANI PADME HUM... -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2695] Re: Re: Re. euro-query
Trevor, You are right about how the nineteenth century US case differs from the euro case. But, how do you answer my arguments about a possible black market in cash, with my potential Dutch drug dealers as a possibility. Answering that Moroccan hashish dealers don't prefer marks or something like that is not an answer. We are dealing with a _potential_ problem. You have ruled it out "by definition" because "there are no national currencies." I contend that there still are. They are just very strongly fixed in rates with each other through the euro, almost as strongly as dollars printed by the Richmond Fed are to those printed by the New York Fed, but not quite as strongly. Again, a currency can trade against itself in the real world at varying rates under weird conditions, e.g. my rubles for kopecks example that really happened in August 1992 in Moscow. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 28 Jan 1999 17:40:26 -0500 Trevor Evans [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think that Barkley's examples differ from the situation regarding the euro. Notes issued by US banks in the nineteenth century exchanged at varying discounts because there was no central bank that integrated the monetary system. In the case of the euro, the European System of Central Banks stands ready to convert all currency issued by member states at the official rate. Before answering Jim Devine's important question about thinking the impossible - what could lead to the break up of the european monetary system - I wanted to consult with some comrades here who I meet with in a discussion group every couple of weeks. The first response was to ask, what could lead to the collapse of the US monetary system. The next suggestion was a revolution in France. Unfortunately this doesn't look very likely in the near future. A last response was that, if the European Central Bank pursued a highly restrictive monetary policy, some countries might chose to opt out of the system - something for which there is no provision, but would be difficult to prevent if a government was really determined. But even then, unless it were Germany or France, its not clear that this would threaten the euro; and its also very difficult to envisage realistic conditions under which a member country would wish to do so, given the increasing degree of integration of the economies, and also that the euro is an attempt to reduce countries vulnerability to external financial crisis. As I have already said, in my opion, the time when the system of exchage rates was potentially at risk was between last summer, when the decision was taken to adopt the central EMS rates as the basis for the euro conversion rates, and the end of the year, when the rates were fixed irrevocably. Now that the rates are fixed, euro-zone countries have ensured themselves against exchange-rate instability within the zone. Trevor Evans Paul Lincke Ufer 44 10999 Berlin Tel. fax: +49 30 612 3951 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2685] Re: Duke University's literature department
educational diploma. Thus while for an orthodox economist the choice of Great Expectations over Neuromancer (say) is of no concern, for the economist of cultural capital such distinctions are the essential points of analysis. Indeed, Bourdieu appears to overturn the common economistic conception that use is the immediate and uncomplex satisfaction of need. Rather, he demonstrates the way in which use value is transformed into a new form of value, and thus produces cultural capital, at a scene removed from the initial, economic exchange. The question now is that of the relation between these two moments of exchange." The Spoons Marxism list was characterized by internal contradictions from the very beginning. The post-Marxists like Beasley-Murray were frustrated by the direction the list took, when activists and classical Marxist academics signed up. By the same token, this camp found itself at war with sectarians from across the political spectrum who thought that they were in the Russian Duma of 1911 rather than a mailing-list. Jon, in keeping with the free speech metaphysic that had been institutionalized by Duke department head Stanley Fish, insisted that the list remain unmoderated. It was only during the course of a particularly bitter flame war with supporters of Peru's Shining Path that a decision was made to moderate the list. Unfortunately, one of the moderators turned out to be not only incurably sectarian, but certifiably insane, so we were forced to look elsewhere. Doug's LBO-Talk list and the Marxism list at Panix are the grandchildren of Jon Beasley-Murray's original list. I suspect that the internal crisis at Duke and other shake-ups in the world of postmodernism have taken their toll on Jon. He was profoundly shaken by the Sokal affair and wrote a short article on how this had made him reconsider many of his theoretical assumptions. Unfortunately, his web page no longer has the piece otherwise I would have included it. The most interesting observation in the Lingua Franca article is that nearly all of the Duke literature professors had gone off on a memoir-writing jag. Postmodernism, with its obsession with the "subject", seems to have compelled all the various professors to describe how their own subject was constructed. Hence, confessional writings became the norm for such superstars as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who dwelt on childhood spankings in her anthology "Tendencies". David Yaffe observes that "In retrospect, the department's memoir-writing phase seems virtually predestined, an inevitable turn for an institution that made little effort to foster a sense of collective purpose or identity among its members, stressing their value as individuals instead." This is the underlying logic of all postmodernist thought, and is at the root of Judith Butler's philosophy as well. "Collective purpose" is nowhere to be found, as each individual seeks his or her own personal liberation. Bracketing out politics and society seems essential to this enterprise. Once you do this, you end up with the sort of extreme individual isolation that characterizes existential philosophy. I know that Duke was driving Jon a bit crazy. Now that he has gone back to England and is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, he must be a lot happier. I can't help but wondering whether a class he gave at Duke might be a commentary on the insanity that was taking place all around him at the time: Lit 20s.01: Why Education is Bad for You (and for everyone else you know) Instructor: Jon Beasley-Murray Synopsis of course content: This course will look at debates concerning school and schooling from a variety of perspectives, and in a variety of media (social theory, literature, film, etc.). Particular (but not exclusive) attention will be given to the suggestion that the function of educational institutions is above all to perpetuate and legitimate an unjust social order. This suggestion will be compared above all to the contrasting proposals either that a) schooling can be a force for liberation or b) that it is possible to liberate oneself from schooling. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2618] euro black markets
I guess this thread may be dead as Trevor Evans has not responded to the latest salvos. However, I thought I would add a bit more on how black markets in "euro currencies" are not impossible, if unlikely. I have already provided the weird case of a currency trading against itself at something other than a one-to-one rate, e.g. rubles for kopecks in Russia in 1992. Another example along similar lines that may be more relevant for the euro case is that of the US paper dollar prior to the US Civil War. Then the federal government minted coins but did not print paper dollars. These were printed by banks which were regulated by the states they were located in. Prior to the Civil War when the federal government began printing "greenback" dollars, these different "state dollars" traded at different rates against each other. I think the analogy to the current situation in the EU is pretty obvious. Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2622] Re: Terribly Sorry
Charles, Not at all. We are dealing with the very serious matter of the reproduction of Judith Butler citations. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 26 Jan 1999 14:08:08 -0500 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Barkley, Do I sense a note of sarcasm ? Charles "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/26 1:40 PM Gosh! I have been counseling with my Freudian psychoanalyst who has informed that Comedic Mark is right and I am wrong. Actually I thought that I was referring to "socially constructed academic reputation" when I referred to "it." But I have been corrected and shown that I clearly was really referring to that awful signifier of male privilege and oppression whose performativity brings into existence resisting subjects, however dispersed or uncitated. I can't express how Terribly Sorry I am for this awfulness. I question myself as to how I could have done something like this. I think it is my agent encouraging me to resist the dispersion of my social construction. Judith Butler has not citated any of my performations. Of course neither has Paul Krugman, but then he does not citate many others far more deserving than my ludicrous self. I guess that I must simply face the fact of my social deconstruction and the utter insignificance of my attempted significations. Sob! Totally Repentant And Remorseful! Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2626] Re: Re: Terribly Sorry
Mark,
Critical analysis unfortunately can dialectically
validate and socially structure that which which it seeks
to refute as a subject.
Laughter may be a more effective method of
invalidating. But then, I'm in the dog house, so, what do
I know?
Barkley Rosser
On Tue, 26 Jan 99 16:39:29 EST Mark Laffey
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Keep working on that sense of humour, Barkley.
More seriously, I'm curious what Barkley (and others) might recommend. Let's
assume, for the sake of argument, that you inhabit a small corner of the
academic world. Let's further assume that you have progressive politics, as
defined by the 'p' in PEN-L, say. The left opposition, let alone socialist or
historical materialist, is largely defunct and the critical position has been
more or less colonized by various forms of poststructuralist and postmodern
work. Words like totalising, economistic and reductionist tend to get bandied
around a lot. Obviously you don't devote all of your time to trying to debunk
this sort of thing but what should you do? There are a variety of options.
Do you 1) ignore it and simply acquiesce as devotees acquire more control of
the means of academic production (editorships of major journals, positions on
the boards of funding agencies, editorships of book series, chairs of depart-
ments etc etc.)? 2) join in -- 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong? 3) write
at least one paper that tries to point out where and how this stuff is wrong?
4) talk to your friends, and mutter about the decline of intellectual life or
blame it on the dialectic ('post-Fordism is responsible for post-modernism,
gosh darn it and there ain't a thing we can do about it')? 5) quit academe?
(I went with 3 obviously, which alas does require reading and citing Butler).
Mark Laffey
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2623] Re: Immutability of Subjects
Brad, I think that there is a sea change on this matter going on. Quite aside from the work of such folks as Robert Frank, we have the excellent review article in the March, 1998 _Journal of Economic Literature_ by Matthew Rabin, recently identified by _The Economist_ as one of the new comers in economics, especially in conjunction with the penetration into economics of ideas from psychology (not sociology). People like Kahneman and Tversky, not to mention that devotee of "behavioral finance" Richard Thaler and his _Winner's Curse_, have been plowing these fields for some time. Rabin's article reviews quite a few studies that have been done about how peoples' preferences can change and indeed how they are not very good at predicting those changes or taking them into account. I agree that most economists continue to have a lot of trouble with all of this, and it is certainly a lot easier to just assume it all away as we usually do. But that is getting to be less and less viable and there is a serious and new discussion going on out there. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 26 Jan 1999 07:33:32 -0800 Brad De Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Which group of idiots assumes "subjects are immutable"? Why does anybody pay any attention to them? Most economists do, with their neoclassical models and schemes of rationality... -- Dennis Economics is hard enough to do without thinking about the mutability of the subject too. (Gary Becker and company have been trying to think about the economics of addiction; and George Constantinides has been trying to think about investors' extraordinary aversion to stock market risk as a result of the fact that being rich *changes* you, so that you can no longer be happy if stock market losses forced you back into middle-class consumption patterns. I think both have been spinning their wheels.) We are happy enough to hand over the mutability of the subject to the sociologists, and have been waiting for them to report back for a long time... Brad DeLong -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2616] Terribly Sorry
Gosh! I have been counseling with my Freudian psychoanalyst who has informed that Comedic Mark is right and I am wrong. Actually I thought that I was referring to "socially constructed academic reputation" when I referred to "it." But I have been corrected and shown that I clearly was really referring to that awful signifier of male privilege and oppression whose performativity brings into existence resisting subjects, however dispersed or uncitated. I can't express how Terribly Sorry I am for this awfulness. I question myself as to how I could have done something like this. I think it is my agent encouraging me to resist the dispersion of my social construction. Judith Butler has not citated any of my performations. Of course neither has Paul Krugman, but then he does not citate many others far more deserving than my ludicrous self. I guess that I must simply face the fact of my social deconstruction and the utter insignificance of my attempted significations. Sob! Totally Repentant And Remorseful! Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2572] Re: The value of an education
t comes to questions of the value of an education, we have gradually adopted a disturbingly anemic vocabulary. Discussing the benefits of education, the U.S. Department of Education mentions only the following: "higher earnings, better job opportunities, jobs that are less sensitive to general economic conditions, reduced reliance on welfare subsidies, increased participation in civic activities, and greater productivity." Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2574] Re: Re: Economic's narrow focus
Brad, Well, I've already pointed out that Mankiw in his textbook wishes to replace "old-fashioned" textbook pseudo-Keynesianism with some kind of half-baked new classical economics. An example of this is his proud claim to have eliminated any discussion of "the paradox of thift" since "we know" that savings correlates with capital investment and long run growth, despite the relative experiences of the US and Japan in the 1990s. Now, given that Mankiw gets labeled a "New Keynesian" I suppose one could say that this is an example of open-minded scientific positive economics at work, with someone being willing to abandon long-held ideological beliefs when confronted with the (new classical) "facts." But this is not how it looks to me. We have the replacement of the Keynesian model wholesale with a pro-free market, anti-interventionist structure that skews the discussion entirely. The classical model is what counts in his book. Barkley Rosser On Sun, 24 Jan 1999 15:41:02 -0800 Brad De Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Explaining why, N. Gregory Mankiw, a 40-year-old Harvard economist and author of a popular new textbook, "Principles of Economics," said: "We make a distinction now between positive or descriptive statements that are scientifically verifiable and normative statements that reflect values and judgments. The question is, can you do positive economics without normative economics. I think so." This is a lie. Economists *disguise* value judgements as descriptive statements and then mine the data to "verify" their position. An example? Preferably one from the work of N. Gregory Mankiw? Brad DeLong -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2589] Re: Re: Butler and bad writing
Mark, Sorry you don't get "it" and are offended. Heavens, on such a pc list and in a discussion of such a notable feminist scholar, there is no way that I would be making a "penis joke". Obviously the "it" referred to intellectual creative energy. You just have a dirty mind, that's all. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 25 Jan 99 16:23:19 EST Mark Laffey [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Academic males won't be able to get it up unless they cite Butler? Hey, pretty funny, Barkley. Penis jokes yet. Smiley faces make everything alright, don't they? Depending on which parts of the academic terrain one is writing and working in, Butler might or might not be important. Since mine was a critique of the turn to Butler, presumably this puts me on the side of the penis deflators? Leaving aside the unpleasant metaphor for a minute, Butler, whether one likes her work or not, is trying to deal with some fairly serious and complicated issues. I for one have found some of her writing very lucid (e.g, her contribution to Feminists Theorize the Political (eds.) Judith Butler and Joan Scott, Routledge 1992). Some of the rest is more technical and harder -- pause for the penis joke from Barkley -- but that is equally true of almost any specialised field you care to name. I guess I just don't get it either: part of what seems to be implied by some of the responses to the discussion of Butler is the view -- profoundly undialectical in my opinion -- that there really isn't anything to be learned from all of the work carried out by scholars like Butler. Either 1) Marx -- or some other card-carrying Marxist -- said it already or 2) its just idealism/bourgeois etc. etc. (take your pick). Gee, I guess Marx was pretty lucky that the major bourgeois economists and other writers of his day -- whom he read very carefully -- just were important. Timing, it appears, is everything. Mark Laffey -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2580] Re: Re: Re: Re. euro-query
Trevor, They say it can't be. But you yourself admit that banks still accept Dutch guilder and exchange them for other currencies. They still exist and will until they are not printed or used anymore. The rate could be changed, although I agree that I think that this is highly unlikely as all those involved are working overtime to avoid it. But they must make an effort to do so. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 25 Jan 1999 15:11:23 -0500 Trevor Evans [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jim Devine asks: what if one thinks that in the near future, the Guilder will be devalued relative to the Euro, because of the (assumed) misbehavior of the Dutch? wouldn't this create the incentive to sell the Guider short? (If you think that the G will fall from 100 to 90, then you can sign a contract that offers to sell the G at 92, hoping to make a profit by buying at 90 and then fulfilling your futures contract.) The Guilder cannot be devalued because it no longer exists as an independent currency! The only conceivable circumstances in which the Guilder might be reestablished would involve the collapse of monetary union, in which case the euro would no longer exist. But such a massive defeat for the major thrust of state development in Western Europe since the 1950s is virtually inconceivable. Its worth noting that the turbulence in international markets after the Russian debt default didn't lead to any significant tensions within the exchange rate mechanism in the months immediately prior to the irrevocable locking of the currencies when the system was still vulnerable. Trevor Evans Paul Lincke Ufer 44 10999 Berlin Tel. fax: +49 30 612 3951 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2579] Re: Re: Re. euro-query
Let me give a more specific hypothetical example. Suppose that the people who sell cannabinoids in the quasi-legal bars in the Netherlands use DM when buying their supplies from Morocco or wherever. Suppose that they offer a premium to anybody purchasing their wares with DM cash rather than Dutch guilders cash. Given that these people do not want to deal with banks and want to operate strictly in cash, we would have an incentive for there to be a street market in DM and guilders that might have a different rate than the official one, even without the expectational argument put forward by Jim Devine. I don't think this is happening, but it is certainly possible as long as there are different national pieces of paper that "represent the euro." Let me give an even weirder example. In August, 1992 I was in Moscow with my Russian wife for the IEA meetings. Pay phones still cost two kopecks, just like in the bad old days when sneaky people hiding from the KGB had to use them to contact each other. Well, this was also a period of hyperinflation with kopecks now worth more as copper than as kopecks and with them rapidly being melted down and disappearing. Officially a ruble is worth 100 kopecks, but my wife had to pay three rubles on the street to get two kopecks to make a pay phone call. Funny things can happen in real world economies not dreamed of in your models, Horatio. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 25 Jan 1999 15:11:27 -0500 Trevor Evans [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Barkley Rosser wrote: Why should there be any black markets in currency since one can "get the official rate from the banks"? Because the street might be offering a better rate than the bank, that's why. Barkley, I am aware why black markets in currency develop - I lived in Nicaragua for many years in the 1980s. The point is that under the institutional arrangements of the European System of Central Banks there is no restriction on the supply of other member currencies, so that it is not possible to get a better rate than the official rate. In fact, the Central Banks have hived off their obligation to exchange all member currencies that are presented at the official rate to commercial banks, and there is currently some dispute about the fees they can charge for retail transactions. But that is a different issue from the emergence of a black market. Trevor Evans Paul Lincke Ufer 44 10999 Berlin Tel. fax: +49 30 612 3951 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2578] Re: Re: The value of an education
The tests are multiple choice. But I also make students in my principles classes write three papers. The performance on the papers was also pathetic. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 25 Jan 1999 15:10:06 -0500 Tom Lehman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear Barkley, Just what type of tests do you give anyway? Multiple choice, essay, true-false, true- false double jeopardy, fill in the blank, show your work etc.? This question is from a guy who spent more time asleep than awake during economics classes in college. Your email pal, Tom L. BA "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" wrote: As with some of Louis's posts on these matters I'm not sure where he is coming from on this, but... I can say that here at boondocks James Madison University, home (allegedly) of the nation's largest College Republicans club, there is a great uproar going on on campus right now about the issue of grade inflation. I even had a piece in the student paper about it and will be on the student radio station tonight about it, hence my current interest. I got involved because there was an article in the student paper last semester alleging grade inflation in one of my classes because the highest grade on an exam was a 72 and it was falsely claimed that "one can get an A with just a 59". The editorial writers in the student paper also claimed that higher grades today are justified because today's students are better than they used to be in the past. Talk about throwing red meat in the face of a baby boomer! Anyway, the performance on last semester's final exam in my principles of macroeconomics class was by far the worst I have ever seen, only one student out of 73 getting above a 58%. The final GPA was well below 2.0, no grade inflation in my classes, although we have plenty on campus, much of it encouraged by our corrupt administration. Anyway, I wrote a rather scathing piece about all this to the student paper. Will be curious this evening to see how the call-ins go. So far, a lot of faculty members have been very pleased with my observations. The administration is holding its tongue for now, although I do not think that they are pleased as I trashed them on a bunch of other stuff too. If I keep this up I might become another Jim C. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 25 Jan 1999 11:06:21 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (from another very interesting article in Salon, at http://www.salon1999.com/) A C A D E M I A , I N C . Why have today's students become a bunch of grade-grubbing morons? Editor's note: This is the second in a series of stories on the influence of corporations and corporate culture on universities. BY MICHAEL O'DONOVAN-ANDERSON | Teachers, as you may not know, complain a lot. There is, after all, a great deal to complain about, and teachers, being smarter (and having more flexible hours) than the average malcontent, fully exploit their opportunities. Class size (too high), pay (too low), culture (too little), the administration (too administrative), government (too corrupt), pay (still too low), vacation time (never you mind, I work hard!). Among favorite topics, however, nothing comes close to students (too much to fit between parentheses). Most of the griping is summed up by Miss Parker: "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." But some of the mutterings to which I am privy suggest something worse: whorses who cannot even be led to culture. Having taught philosophy, history of science and ancient Greek literature at schools from 400-student liberal arts colleges to Ivy League universities, I think I know what they mean. I recall one student in particular who had done rather poorly on a writing assignment and had come to office hours to talk me out of her grade. I explained what I expected from such a paper, what was fruitful, what was unlikely to be so, and tried to get her to see the demand for thoughtful writing as a way to come to terms with issues that she cared about. Me: Let's talk more about this paragraph: Why do you think that Antigone's obligation to her brother is the most important factor? Her: Is that wrong? Did I lose points for that? Clearly, something about this approach was deeply puzzling to her, and we replayed the same conversation until she suddenly realized what it was I was having trouble seeing. "You don't understand," she announced with a trumpish air. "I need this class to balance the GPA in my major." Well, why didn't she say so before? Perhaps it has always been thus. As I have just complained about my students to you, my colleagues complain to me, and Augustine and Epictetus complain to us all. Poor Socrates tried dialogue after dialogue to teach philosophy to the budding politic
[PEN-L:2568] Re: Butler and bad writing
ormulations of norms ("multiple logics"?), subjects are
able to somehow detect this inconsistency and to thereby "act" as
agents (do they commit an act of agency in detecting this?).
So culture ("cultural practices") reinforces heterosexual norms
through marriage and the division of labor. Then, "reproduction"
(intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth?) is "overdetermined" by things
that "are not reducible to ... citation", i.e., marriage and division
of labor. By "overdetermined", I assume she means there are multiple
factors pushing in the same (similar, given the lack of precise
overlap?) direction (some of) which are individually capable of
producing the observed effect of subject formation.
I'm sorry to be dense, but just how is any of this novel? Don't we
know that despite vicious and repeated attacks on people, they can
retain dignity, hope, sense of self, agency? And don't we know that
this same repetition is sometimes extremely difficult to overcome?
And why does Butler assume that it is *further* efforts to undermine a
person's sense of self, their agency, that produce the effect of
agency? What role would activism and scholarship aimed at undermining
power and its institutions have? It is not a form of resignification,
but it does often have the effect of freeing people from the labels
they have come to internalize. And how does what she describes fall
outside of "social context", whatever that might encompass? She tries
to say subject formation is not "completely determined by social
context", but if she is to do so, she needs to show how *her* account
is not a part of "social context".
Also, why doesn't she travel more the route of Chomsky in his
description of language development, according to which the innate
capacities interact and grow within a certain environment, much like
the formation of the ocular apparatus. Can't agency and subjectivity
be looked at similarly? Could not the capacity for agency (and
subjectivity) be innate capacities which are formed in interaction
with the (social) environment? Wouldn't we then be interested in
social practice which enhanced the former and diminished the latter?
Haven't we seen this before?
I am not getting it.
Bill
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2526] Re: Re: Papal potatoes
The Pope has come out against "the excesses of
capitalism," not capitalism per se. Bit of a difference
there.
Barkley Rosser
On Fri, 22 Jan 1999 15:22:02 +0100 "Eugene P. Coyle"
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The NY Times front page headline on this story is that the Pope has come
out against CAPITALISM!
GENE COYLE
Jim D, only half believing it, reports from today's SLATE:
The NY Times front reports that the Pope is returning to Mexico. But it's
an inside piece at the WP that has the most surprising news about the
upcoming visit--this time, he has corporate sponsors, including Pepsi,
Federal Express, Sheraton Hotels, Kodak, Hewlett-Packard and Mercedes-Benz.
.
Jim 'n Tammy anticipated this ages ago with their much-absolving line
"God's people go 1st class!"
Look for Vatican City to become a crasser sort of theme park than
it already is. The boys on Wall Street have their own special way
of assuring the world that nothing but the market is holy.
Bro valis
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2525] Re: Re: Orwell's rules
I agree with Michael that most economists, both the math types and the non-math types, write horribly. Heilbroner is certainly one who writes well. Another mathy type who writes well some of the time is the inimitable Paul Samuelson, but not always. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 22 Jan 1999 20:54:23 -0600 Barnet Wagman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Even though his work is very formal, Jean-Pascal Benassy manages to write quite clearly. This is particularly impressive (and ironic) as he is a frenchman writing in english. (There are no translators listed in his books, so I presume that he writes in english.) [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A few economists write well. Irving fisher was perhaps the clearest. Milton Friedman, also. Galbraith, of course, is the most fun to read. The rest of us are an abomination. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Barnet Wagman [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1361 N. Hoyne, 2nd floor Chicago, IL 60622 773-645-8369 -- -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2523] Re: Economic's narrow focus
structure." "You are condemning him to failure," he continued. "We do not know if there are applicable rules." Yet in an autobiographical sketch, he argued against thinking of economics as science with a capital S. "That is perfectly consistent," he wrote, "with a strong belief that economics should try very hard to be scientific with a small s. By that I mean only that we should think logically and respect fact." Fact, he said, should be enlarged "to include, say, the opinions and casual generalizations of experts and market participants, attitudinal surveys, institutional regularities, even our judgments of plausibility. My preferred image is the vacuum cleaner, not the microscope." Gradually economics is moving this way. The younger generation, while holding tight to its scientific approach, is nevertheless opening up its equations, feeding into them all sorts of new data from other disciplines, then trying, more than in the past, to make the hypotheses fit the data. Surveys are increasingly being used, and old assumptions -- that supply and demand, for example, balance at a healthy level -- are being amended or put aside. The new approach was on display at the recent annual meeting of the American Economics Association, where economists at one session reviewed their research into today's unusual spectacle of an unemployment rate and an inflation rate falling together instead of moving in opposite directions, as economic theory dictates and as they once did. Drawing on psychology, the researchers even tried to quantify how people actually behave or feel about work. Heilbroner applauds. But it is not in his view enough. The questions that absorb the younger economists are too narrow, he says. Economists, for example, cannot just chronicle the rise of output as an economy grows. There must also be a judgment about the quality of that output: Does it show up as more school construction or warmer clothing in winter or as more channels of bad television programs and higher pay for chief executives. That is how the worldly philosophers would have thought, Heilbroner suggests in a new chapter added to the seventh edition of "The Worldly Philosophers," to be published in the spring by Simon Schuster. "Economics will not, and should not, become a political torch that lights our way into the future," he writes, "but it can and should become the source of an awareness of ways by which a capitalist structure can broaden its motivations, increase its flexibility and develop its social morale." Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2410] Re: Re: Re. euro-query
Doug, Only if you believe in "backward-unraveling" theories. But the evidence is that a lot of economic decisions are made on short-run factors. Your argument becomes more valid as we get into 2001 and approach the time of the ending of the national pieces of paper. But for now? Such black markets are perfectly possible, although I am not forecasting them as most of the governments involved are being pretty "well behaved." Barkley Rosser On Thu, 21 Jan 1999 13:29:49 -0500 Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: Now, although most eurofinanciers poo-poo the possibility, it is not out of the question that black markets in actual currencies could develop in the next three years, that somebody might be trading guilders for marks on the streets of Amsterdam, or wherever, for something other than the rate implied by their fixed ratios with the euro. As long as these distinct "national forms of the euro" exist, such an outcome is possible. But the guilder will cease to exist in 2002, at which time it must be exchanged for euros at the fixed and "irrevocable" rate established the other week, or it will become a cute but useless piece of colored paper. No doubt Scholes and his pals at LTCM could put a value on such an instrument, but wouldn't that execution date undermine any street value of the guilder? Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2443] Re: Ben Shahn links (addendum)
I would note that socialist realism did not begin with the Stalinist period in the USSR. It has a long and conscious history in the nineteenth century with such French painters as Gustave Courbet prominently associated with it. This tradition in turn draws on much older but less consciously political traditions of painting common people in everyday scenes by such French painters as Chardin and many of the Dutch and Flemish painters. BTW, many of the recent reviews of the Ben Shahn show have been very negative, characterizing him as out-of-date and political naive. H. Says more about the critics than him, I think, although some of the critics who come from leftist Jewish backgrounds fondly reminisce about their youths in houses where Ben Shahn pictures hung while people listened to Pete Seeger and the Weavers and indulged in other icons of fashionable 1950s leftism. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 21 Jan 1999 16:55:54 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Cyberexhibits of Shahn's work can be linked to from: http://www.auburn.edu/~folkegw/univ/arboadva.htm Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2423] Re: SWM May Have Lied About Liking Sunsets, Long Walks
Hey! As someone who spends parts of his summers in
Mad City, Wisconsin where the venerable (or should that be
"venereal") _Onion_ is published, and has been reading
since well before its recent internet fame, I gotta say
that it is great. Don't knock it; laugh with it.
Barkley Rosser
On Thu, 21 Jan 1999 13:31:47 -0600 (CST) valis
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
{sigh} OK, it's official: American academia is choking in
hyperprolix pomposities which not only the average person
but even the average intellectual and average Marxist find
utterly devoid of substantive content!
Hardly a mystery, then, that The Onion (www.theonion.com),
an inane rag calling itself "America's Finest News Source,"
is indeed the most popular publication among the country's
20-somethings the past few years, with titles like the one
gracing the current subject line introducing "news reports"
of grotesquely extended irony: parodies of actual issues and
social tendencies. I wonder who's compensating for what,
encountered where?! Next case!
valis
--
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2404] Re: Re. euro-query
Doug H. is right in how this will show up. The analogy is to state governments in the US. Some have to pay higher interest on their bonds because of their "unsound" finances. We are, however, in a weird and essentially unprecedented zone in financial and monetary history as near as I can tell. One can say that that the individual remnant national monies are merely "forms of the euro." That is true from the standpoint of demand deposits or any form of bank money. The Dutch cannot "expand their money supply" through any of the usual textbook methods. The only way they can do so is the old fashioned one, print or mint more M0 actual physical guilders. Now, although most eurofinanciers poo-poo the possibility, it is not out of the question that black markets in actual currencies could develop in the next three years, that somebody might be trading guilders for marks on the streets of Amsterdam, or wherever, for something other than the rate implied by their fixed ratios with the euro. As long as these distinct "national forms of the euro" exist, such an outcome is possible. That it would or could force a change in those fixed ratios is highly unlikely. However, it is not totally impossible despite the assurances of the eurofinanciers. To avoid it will involve offsetting behavior by the new European Central Bank which will probably be forthcoming, not to mention pressure on any country whose behavior is leading to such black markets. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 21 Jan 1999 08:20:47 -0800 Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 03:31 AM 1/21/99 -0500, you wrote: There is no longer a free-market exchange rate for the guilder since the guilder no longer exists as an independent currency. It is form in which the euro circulates in the Netherlands pending the introduction of euro notes and coins in 2002. The same is true for the lira in Italy. Under the stability pact, euro-zone countries are required to maintain their fiscal deficit below 3 per cent. This was originally proposed by the German CDU government, who wanted automatic fines introduced for governments that broke the rule. However the French government successfully insisted that any fines must be subject to political approval by the EU authorities. Even though the the current social-democratic governments in France, Italy and Germany are fiscally conservative, it is difficult to envisage them approving fines. so what happens if the Dutch (for example) over-spend? would it put stress on the unity of the Euro? are there any consequences? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2354] Re: Judith Butler, etc.
Jerry, But, gee, Louis has confessed to all of us his bad behavior. We now know that he was drunk at the LM conference, by his own admission, and that he skipped crucial sessions because he was in his room reading, by his own admission. So, we can all see what his behavior was and judge for ourselves. Why doesn't this satisfy you? Barkley PS: Congrats on finally opening the OPE-L archives. On Wed, 20 Jan 1999 06:56:43 -0500 (EST) Gerald Levy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Reply to Michael P: a) I did not re-raise this issue. Proyect did when he revealed his drunken behavior, etc. at the "Rethinking Marxism" conference. Blame him. b) There was nothing in my post that could fit any reasonable definition of a flame. c) The *reason* this issue won't go away is because it is a legitimate one to raise. d) You say that Proyect is a "valuable member" of PEN-L. THIS WAS GUARANTEED TO EVOKE A RESPONSE FROM ME. How is Proyect "valuable"? Is he valuable when he libels the late Paul Mattick Sr. the other day? Is he valuable when he sends us *daily* doses of *SPAM* Yes, spam. Posts that have *nothing* to do with PEN-L, were authored for another list, and are sent here as junk mail. Is this "valuable"? (I won't even bother going into Proyect's other "valuable" contributions here -- like the time he engaged in and later admitted to outrageous sexism on this list). BUT, MICHAEL, YOU CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS. If you don't want us -- anyone on this list -- to say anything to or about Proyect, fine. I can live with that. But, if you have praise for him, then you MUST expect and allow those with a contrary perspective to be heard. Jerry -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2361] Re: Re: Re: Alan Sokal
This is accurate as far as it goes, but there are some weird twists in addition. In particular, the ultimate fan of Lysenko was Khrushchev and it was during his rule that Lysenko's power reached its peak, although it did not coincide then with deadly purges of his opponents as it did under Stalin. Of course Khrushchev was very focused on agriculture, in contrast with Stalin, and interestingly agricultural production experienced its biggest increases in the USSR in the early years of the Khrushchev period when Lysenko was riding high. Of course some bad harvest years in the early 1960s were among the contributing factors in K's downfall as a "hare-brained schemer" and it was Brezhnev who finally gave Lysenko the boot. Barkley Rosser On Wed, 20 Jan 1999 11:27:13 -0800 Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 01:04 AM 1/20/99 -0600, Ken wrote: It is a long time I have read about Lysenko but what is said in the review sounds partly right. He was not a fraud but a good practical biologist. Nevertheless the rejection of Mendel's work was surely wrong and some of the propoganda e.g. citing against him that he was a monk are ludicrous. My understanding is that Lysenko was a serious biologist, especially since Lamarckism hadn't been totally discredited for non-microbes yet. The problem was that the Soviet bureaucracy saw "Lysenkism" as a magic bullet they could use to solve the country's agricultural problems at the time. Then it became the party line, which goes against all standards of scientific scepticism. Given that this was the Stalin era, becoming the party line meant that scientists could suffer from jailtime or worse from dissent. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2319] Re: Judith Butler, etc.
Louis, You have noted that there are people (e.g. Heartfield) who are for nuclear power and who question global warming. It should be understood that nuclear power is one way out of dealing with global warming. Of course, it is not the only way and obviously has lots of problems. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 19 Jan 1999 12:11:51 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Angela: much of marx's work is 'theory', no? a debate over texts, in this instacne the texts of political economy. is the analogy with your papa's response to subtitles a self-critical one? No, much of his earlier work was an attempt to come to grips with the idealist philosophical tradition, while breaking free from it. It is impossible to grapple with thinkers like Feuerbach without speaking in their own technical language. Once he had made the necessary theoretical breakthrough, he turned his attention to economic matters and wrote Capital. Once he completed this work, his entire career was devoted to explaining current events from this new historical materialist perspective. He wrote about class struggles in France, slavery in the US, Ireland, the Russian populist movement, etc. He left philosophy behind. The only time that the great Marxists have dealt with philosophy is when it is in the context of a challenge to historical materialism. That is why Lenin wrote "Materialism and Empiro-Criticism." He never would have bothered unless his opponent Bogdanov was trying to junk the theoretical foundations of Marxism. Trotsky got into the same kind of debate with James Burnham in the American Trotskyist movement in the 1930s. Burnham was strongly influenced by Sidney Hook and was trying to junk historical materialism. The most recent challenge has come from the postmodernists, which in most respects is warmed over Heidegger. I find Perry Anderson, Terry Eagleton and Alex Callinicos's defense of Marxism most useful. now you wait a minute, i happen to agree with you, it is a caricature of marx. but not, unfortuantely, of marxism. that there has been a lengthy history of struggles within marxism over this and related questions is not to be denied, not by us or butler. Of course, I blasted Frederic Sorge, who was Karl Marx's hand-picked leader in the USA and defended Victoria Woodhull. The point is that this is a struggle that must be conducted WITHIN Marxism. Judith Butler has no use for Marxism in its totality and would replace it with radical democracy. From what I can gather, she is very close to Laclau-Mouffe. it is not 'utterly false' in the sense that many marxists who do consider this to be the true marx. important ot have that debate, but to have that debate with those who may only have seen this side of marxism and been appalled is i reckon to minimise the possibility of disussing how this comes about, and how it came about within marxism for instance. Absolutely. Jim Heartfield's group defends nuclear power, fox hunting, uninhibited automobile usage, and professional boxing in the name of Marxism. What a dreadful state of affairs, especially when Monthly Review--who stands for just the opposite--makes the mistake of publishing one of their books. It is an uphill battle, I tell you, against dogmatic Marxists and prolix, obfuscatory, highly-paid "radical" professors. Sometimes I feel like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2270] Re: Judith Butler, Alan Sokal and Doug Henwood
Jerry, Gosh! Wow! Am I ever glad that you raised that issue! Louis! Behave yourself! The next time you report on a conference, don't drink so much and attend more sessions! (Are you happy now, Jerry?) Barkley Rosser On Sun, 17 Jan 1999 07:32:08 -0500 (EST) Gerald Levy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Proyect on his participation at the December 1996 Rethinking Marxism conference in Amherst: At the opening night's reception, I downed 3 scotches in rapid succession to put me in the proper frame of mind for the opening session. He then went on to make a comment in the discussion period at the plenary which he describes, no doubt accurately, as "my drunken tirade". Then, rather than attending the plenary where Judith Butler spoke, he says that he: remained in my hotel room reading a history of coffee production in Central America. For those unfamiliar with this affair, let me refresh your memory: 1) On an Internet list, Proyect denounces the conference in the harshest possible terms based only his reading of the conference schedule. 2) Proyect then decides to go to the conference anyway, having agreed to report on the conference for the German journal _Sozializm_. We already knew that his reportage could hardly be considered impartial and unbiased. Now we see that he was either not attending the very sessions that he claimed to be reporting on or was engaged in a "drunken tirade". Why has there been so much discussion about the "Social Text affair" and so little discussion about this fraud? Jerry -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2271] Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Re: Junk Science
Ken, "Always" is way too long. I think the term "libertarian" did not exist prior to the late 1950s, being the invention of right-wing anarhist types who were upset that "liberal" in English had lost its old libertarian meaning in the English-speaking countries. Anarchist is the old term, and were originally mostly of the left-wing variety, although today they are at least as likely to be right-wing libertarians. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 18 Jan 1999 13:19:02 -0600 Ken Hanly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As I recall, anarchists have always referred to themselves as "libertarians". Anarchists of all stripes have traditionally been leftist opponents of capitalism and Chomsky is himself a type of anarchist libertarian. Only in the last few decades has the term "libertarian" been associated with right wing pro-market views such as those of the anarchist economist Rothbard or the non-anarchist Nozick. The libertarian tradition was overwhelmingly leftist in orientation. Unfortunately, the term is now associated with right-wing views. Cheers, Ken Hanly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated 1/17/99 11:03:04 PM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Subj: [PEN-L:2233] Re: Fwd: Re: Re: Junk Science Date: 1/17/99 11:03:04 PM Pacific Standard Time From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Doug Henwood) Sender:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For myself, noting and agreeing with the assertion of the general function of institutions like MIT in capitalist society and as instruments of expanded reproduction of that system, a few like Noam Chomsky do slip through and manage to survive. It was explained to me once that at MIT, Chomsky is thought of as the Einstein of linguistics, a scientific giant. His politics are marginal to that reputation - just a personality quirk I guess. Doug Yeah Doug, it is amazing what is considered central and what is marginalized. I for one, consider some of Chomsky's politics to be an applied extension of some of his work in linguistics or at least not contradictory with some of his theses in linguistics. Certainly some of his work in linguistics guided some of his work on the political economy of the media under capitalism--on symbology, on class-interests and paradigms embodied in the rhetoric, syntax and loaded language of the media, etc. Also some of Chomsky's deconstructing the deconstructionists and some of his stuff on pomo I have seen seemed to be guided by some of his work in linguistics. Although I disagree with Chomsky on the term "left libertarian" which I believe is an oxymoron, no doubt that he has added richly and significantly to the study and documentation of the ugly and varied dynamics, instruments and consequences of imperialism and in his case, there is at least one example where tenure might protect competence instead of incompetence. Jim - Subject: [PEN-L:2233] Re: Fwd: Re: Re: Junk Science Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1999 23:50:22 -0500 From: Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For myself, noting and agreeing with the assertion of the general function of institutions like MIT in capitalist society and as instruments of expanded reproduction of that system, a few like Noam Chomsky do slip through and manage to survive. It was explained to me once that at MIT, Chomsky is thought of as the Einstein of linguistics, a scientific giant. His politics are marginal to that reputation - just a personality quirk I guess. Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2272] Re: Re: : Alan Sokal
BTW, just for the record, I think the question of ownership of old bones is quite distinct from any issue of the nature of the bones. Even if the bones are of people not directly ancestral to tribes currently inhabiting the area in question, does not mean that the tribes currently inhabiting the area in question might not have the rights to the bones. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 18 Jan 1999 11:16:16 -0500 Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Louis Proyect wrote: This is just Wall Street Journal crap. So Indians didn't walk across the Bering Straits, but they've been in North America since Day 1? Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2267] Re: Re: : Alan Sokal
I am not aware of any reputable anthropologist or scientist who claims that the original Native American Indians did not cross the Bering Strait, although there may have been scattered crossings from various directions at various other times. The problem is that there is great debate as to when the first crossing was and how many there were across the Bering Strait. At a minimum there are three broadly distinct groups based on languages, which almost certainly came at different times. Much of the more recent controversy has arisen because of claims that some of the oldest known skulls appear to be somewhat more "Caucasoid" than more modern skulls, suggesting that some of the earliest groups might have been more "Caucasoid" than "Asiatic" or whatever terms one wants to use here. This has created a lot of huffing and puffing, but frankly I don't see why. The question of the "race" of Native American Indians is one that properly considered raises questions about the whole category of "race" as a scientific category anyway. In many older lists they are assigned as their own race, which neatly sidesteps the issue. If one insists on their being at most three "races" into which everybody must be fit, then there becomes the question whether they are more "European" or "Asiatic" or whatever, with most saying "more Asiatic". But the argument of some "Caucasoid" element is not at all unlikely for an earlier wave as we see groups in parts of Northeast Asia who are identified as being "semi-Caucasoid," i.e. the "hairy" Ainu of Hokkaido in Japan, the aboriginal group of Japan. Going the other way there are groups in Northern Europe who are "semi-Asiatic," i.e. the Laplanders. In Central Asia there are "Eurasiatics" who are not easily categorized, all of which simply points out that there are not neat boundaries between these groups. That the ancestors of the modern Native American Indians might have elements of both "Caucasians" and "East Asians" thus is not at all surprising and should not be viewed as a big deal. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 18 Jan 1999 11:16:16 -0500 Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Louis Proyect wrote: This is just Wall Street Journal crap. So Indians didn't walk across the Bering Straits, but they've been in North America since Day 1? Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2143] Re: Now for Something Completely Different
As for the Second Coming of Christ, well, the latest best estimate is that he was probably born in 4 B.C.E. That means that we have already passed his 2000th birthday and are in the third millennium from that particular apocalyptic perspective. Whew, made it! Barkley Rosser On Wed, 13 Jan 1999 08:42:38 -0800 Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 11:16 PM 1/12/99 -0600, you wrote: A letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Sun maintains that the millenium doesn't begin until Jan 1, 2001. Is that right? Bill Hamm, the author, claims that the first year AD was year 1. AD did not begin with year 0. Therefore, it will be on Jan 1, 2001 that a thousand years will have elapsed. Is that correct? Shouldn't it be the the Y2K minus 1 problem? The Millennium indeed starts at midnight December 31, 2000, since there was no year 0. But everyone is celebrating the start of the new M on Dec. 31, 1999, basically for the same reason one celebrates the turning over of one's car's odometer. It's cool. The Greenwich observatory is compromising by celebrating for the entire year of 2000. Unfortunately, it's not going with my plan to give everyone a year off with pay that year, along with a blanket debt cancellation Jubilee. The Y2K doesn't refer to the Millennium. It simply refers to the year 2000 (with K standing for thousand) and the computing problems arising because a lot of programs and BIOSes treat 2000 the same as 1900. The problem is that the Second Coming of Christ isn't going to happen, since Jesus's computer isn't Y2K resistant and will melt down. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2053] Re: Jackson Pollock
n no time at all, Jackson Pollock had fallen out of fashion and he had become a pathetic figure by 1952 as Naifeh/Smith relate: startquote The search was growing increasingly desperate. Whether out of spite, incompetence. or circumstance, Parsons had sold virtually nothing during the second half of the season. In a last-ditch effort to prevent other artists from bolting, she had borrowed $5,000 from a childhood friend and bought three Rothkos and three Stills--but no Pollocks... For the first time since the forties. Jackson considered designing textiles to supplement his income. He talked vaguely about finding a teaching job and asked Jeffrey Potter if he needed an extra hand around the farm. For a while. be even toyed with an offer from the Armstrong Rubber Company to create designs for a new line of linoleum. The combination of uncertainty over a dealer and perilous finances left him, according to one of his few guests that spring. "exhausted and fatigued." And obsessed. Galleries and dealers were all he could think about. Tony Smith. who still visited occasionally, complained that "Jackson spent the whole damn day talking about galleries 'Which one would be the best one for me?' and 'What are they doing?' and so on and so on like he was making a shopping list... .It was just a lot of ambitious, selfserving nonsense. endquote Capitalism will do that to you. Three years later Jackson Pollock was killed in an automobile accident along with a woman he had just had a weekend tryst with. He was driving while drunk. In my next post, I will examine the work of Ben Shahn, who came from a similar place socially and politically as Jackson Pollock but who stayed true to his roots. (A cyber-version of the Jackson Pollock exhibition is at http://www.moma.org and I encourage everybody to examine it.) Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html) -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2008] Re: Re: BLS Daily Report
Gosh, well I didn't get to any of those sessions where people were being so pollyannaish about the US stock market. OTOH lots of us have gotten burned predicting imminent collapses, etc., that have not happened, or were followed more than compensatory runups, as in the second half of last year. Nevertheless, I note that yesterday's Financial Times reports that the US $ has hit a recent low against the Japanese yen, partly triggered by comments by E. Seikekabaru (sp?), known as "Mr. Yen", that the US stock market is overvalued and that the US economy will shortly slow significantly. He used the term "bubble." Of course he could be wrong and this is January, when the "January Effect" of unusually rapidly rising stock prices frequently happens. But then October is often a time of unusual declines and this last one saw a record runup. Oh well, we shall just have to wait and see. Good to see a number of you in New York. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 07 Jan 1999 09:45:19 -0800 Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ellen quotes: BLS DAILY REPORT, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6, 1999 The prevailing view at the three-day meeting of the American Economic Association was that high stock prices probably reflect the economy's actual strength and not a speculative bubble that could burst. ... In the minds of many economists, the stock market serves mainly as a gauge of the real economy and a stimulus for spending. Ellen writes: Over the last few days, I have been looking over data on wages, exports, bankruptcies, etc. in the former so-called emerging markets. International capital, it seems, is really putting the screws to the laboring classes in Asia and South America. Asian assets are on sale at rock-bottom prices; commodity prices are so low, they're practically giving them away. Is this not the triumph of capitalism? Little wonder the Dow hit 9500. IMHO, the strength of the US stock market first and foremost reflects the strength of the US profit rate, with the speculative bubble being present but secondary. Orthodox economists tend to conflate what's good for capital (the profit rate, a high stock market) with what's good for the people (the GDP and its distribution, with limited negative environmental impact, etc., etc.) So it's natural that they would make this mistake. The question is whether the high US profit rate will persist given the mess that the rest of the world is in, not to mention the dynamic problems the result when an economy enjoys (and suffers from) a high and rising profit rate. (See my 1994 RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY paper, on-line at: http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/subpages/depr/D0.html or /Depr.html) Can the "triumph of capitalism" (or more accurately of some sectors of US capitalism) persist? It didn't after 1929, the previous period of similar capitalist triumphalism. So the question is: are we currently in the historical analogy of 1929 or of 1927? Ellen, it was good to see you at the convention! Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1913] Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Vicious Holiday Silliness
Just as a further addition to this I note that in Arabic even now the Palestinians are the "Filistineen". "Palestine" is the name the Romans gave to their province in that region of the world. Happy New Year everybody and hope to see some of you in New York! Barkley Rosser On Mon, 28 Dec 1998 13:40:53 EST [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated 12/28/98 10:24:01 AM Pacific Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I was wondering: is the word "philistine" a version of the word "Palestine"? (That's why I put this negative term in quotation marks.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html Response: Indeed it--the term "Philistine"--is the origin of the modern Palestinian just as the ancient Philistines are considered descendants of the modern Palestinians who stood versus Caananites in various Biblical accounts. The perjorative aspects of the term "philistine" and the slurs associated with the term to the point that the term "philistine" itself became a slur embodying--as a kind of shorthand--a set of other slurs (mercenary, pecuniary, lacking in good taste and graces, crass materialistic etc) go way back. But suffice to say that many Palestinians--and non-Palestinians--know the popular or vulgar use and know that most who use it are unaware of the ethnic orgins/implications, but nonetheless feel that it can be likened to terms like "Jewing down", "Gypping or Gypped", etc. After all, no one says "Caananite capitalists" or "The Pawnbroker 'Anglo- Saxoned me down from the price I should have got. Just as a point of history and clarification in response to your question and in no way intended as a criticism off use of term quite obviously used with no intent to slur any group Jim Craven -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1878] Re: Hopeful Signs of Polarization
is over before criticizing it, when its too late to have any impact? Lotts criticism was a hopeful sign of polarization. Happy New Year! --- Robert Naiman [EMAIL PROTECTED] Preamble Center 1737 21st NW Washington, DC 20009 phone: 202-265-3263 fax: 202-265-3647 http://www.preamble.org/ 12/23/98 17:11:36 --- -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1877] Re: Worker managed firms and n-c theory (RE: Soc.dem and Utopia)
Anders, As the person who more or less brought this subject up, with some response from Brad De Long, let me note that I did not assume the neoclassical position at all. My discussion has been entirely empirical, that is, what has actually happened in Yugoslavia and why with also some references to worker-owned cooperatives in the US, e.g. the much-studies plywood coops of the US northwest. It is from these that the conclusion that there are fewer layoffs comes. It is a neoclassical theoretical paper from 1958 that by Benjamin Ward that suggests less hiring. Brad also claims that Laura Tyson supports such views. A long time ago she wrote a book (at least one) about the Yugoslav economy, although she has gotten distracted with other stuff in more recent decades... Again, the evidence from Yugoslavia is a mixed bag. Based on unemployment rates, Slovenia did very well, with some of the lowest unemployment rates around. But other parts of the country, most extremely pathetic Kosovo, did rather poorly. I claimed not to have the answers regarding this disparity of regional performances in the former Yugoslavia. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 24 Dec 1998 10:16:16 +0100 Anders Ekeland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am always a bit surprised that progressive economist are so willing to discuss the Yougoslav experience and worker managed firms in general on the basis of on the traditional neo-classical assumptions about the firm. Drawing conclusions that they would employ less labour, lay-off less labour etc. etc. But the n-c "theory of the firm" is utterly divorced from reality. In reality there are not smooth production functions, there are Knightian uncertainties, there are shareholders, CEOs, managers, technicians, workers - all with their specific knowledgebases and interests. For most firms it is survival/expansion and not marginal adjustment of employment that is the interesting question. Concerning employment: judging from my anecdotal experience, very many worker owned/managed would not exist at all if they were not - worker managed. The alternative (unique stable equilibrium??) is no employment. No production at all of that specific product. The n-c framework is IMHO not suited to say anything interesting about worker managed firms. The real interesting problems with worker managed firms has very little to do with their employment effect. Much more interesting is the internal division of labour/power among the workers, their innovation strategies/processes etc. For the Yugoslav experience, Cahterine Samarys book "Le marche contre l'autogestion" is an example of a discussion of real problems. (La Breche and PUBLISUD, 1988) Since n-c is a pure deductive theory, they are not interested in empirical facts, ignoring the evidence contrary to their theory. They always reason as if we were in equilibrium and not developing a backward country, not trying to modify regional differences etc. etc. We are always out of the totally imaginary n-c equilibrium so none of their conclusions actually apply even on their own terms! Why should we accept them? The n-c theory of the firm is a theory that cannot function as an guide for real policy recomendations. Let me take an example from a field I know better, research policy. The traditional n-c model talks about additionality, marked failure, social and privat returns etc. ad nauseam. But the fact is that very many firms do not do any such calculations, have no concrete idea of an (risc adjusted) expected rate of return on research projects (BTW: even fewer calculate the rates of return post fact - as everybody who have tried know: it is very, very difficult!). So how are public research councils to pick those projects that the private firms do not find profitable enough, but wich have great social returns when the firms themselves do not calculate or know? And those firms that do calculate rates of return are often wildly optimistic, often badly mistaken on wich projects are the real winners (Microsoft Net vs. Internett). How do such facts fit into a n-c modell? How do you handle them if you are into the business of distributing research funds and not in the easy biznizz of writing articles full of tautological n-c deductions? If one wants to know how real firms operate, read Dilbert, the first chapters of NelsonWinter, Penrose, use your own experience, read the bizniz press. Of course we - the progressive economists need to come forward with a detailed, empirically substantiated critique of the hegemonic n-c model. We need to develop alternative theories, but an important firste step is to not accept it as the natural starting point for discussions about workermanaged firms, public research policy etc. etc. Let the n-c people prove the empirical fundament of their elegant theory! Merry Christmas Anders Ekeland -- Rosser Jr,
[PEN-L:1851] Yugoslav inequality
I feel a need to express some further observations on this topic that came up in conjunction with the social democracy thread. Why did regional inequalities get so bad in Yugoslavia? One aspect of this that is especially puzzling is that there was quite a bit of regional redistribution under the old regime. Indeed this was one of the grievances of the secessionists in both Slovenia and Croatia, the desire to stop sending funds to the poorer southern republics and autonomous republics. Which raises the question as to why did the sent funds fail to help? Conservatives might argue that this is what one should expect, that people do not do well who are being given handouts. Another argument has to do with corruption and mafias. After all, nearby Italy has also had a major divergence between north and south in per capita income since WW II with many blaming the mafia for the Mezzogiorno problem. It is curious that more market capitalist economies have had more regional convergence, e.g. the catching up by the South in the US, as have the more command socialist type economies such as the USSR or China under Mao. Of course in China under Mao the development of the interior was partly driven by defense motives. The local self-sufficiency laid the foundation for growth later with the TVEs. In the old USSR there was a successful effort to develop hinterlands, including the far north, the far east, and Central Asia. The "conservatism" of the Central Asian nations, maintaining much of the previous system and resisting Islamic fundamentalism must be at least partly attributed to this successful development, although some of it was ecologically disastrous as in the Aral Sea region, and there is much local despotism by leaders, many simply left over from the ancien regime. But in Russia the hinterland is now suffering and badly. Anyway, I don't have any answers as to why the regional inequality problem was so bad in Yugoslavia, but I am skeptical that one can attribute Slovenia's success to an alleged exploitation of the poorer regions of the former nation state. Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1768] Re: Social Democracy and Utopia
Well, a few more comments on this business. One is to note that for worker-owned and managed coops the review by Bonin, Jones, and Putterman in the JEL in 1993 makes it pretty clear that such firms are more efficient in production than traditional firms, the major reason being the elimination of extras layers of management as workers monitor each other. It is not clear that this will happen if the workers are not the owners of the firm. Apparently the big problem for such firms in most market capitalist economies is financing, their being a bias against them by funding sources and the problem of what if a worker wants to leave and unload their share. Several years ago on this list there was a long debate about Yugoslav worker-managed market socialism as part of a broader debate about market socialism. A lot of people still on the list were involved in that debate in one form or another, with Louis Proyect being one of the more articulate critics from the left. Some points that were made from that direction (most of them by LP, if I remember correctly) were the problems of unemployment and inflation in Yugoslavia and the problem of regional inequality that worsened over the post-1945 period. He and those agreeing with him saw these as inevitable consequences of such a system and as reflecting its inherently quasi-capitalist nature. I would note that until Tito died the problems of both unemployment and inflation were not too bad in Yugoslavia, although there had been a gradual drift upwards of both, with them being in upper single digits in the late 60s and early 70s and low double digits in the late 70s and early 80s. In the 80s inflation got out of control and became at near hyper levels by 1989. At that time a vigorous anti-inflation program was put in place involving pegging to the DM, which was apparently beginning to work just before the breakup of the country and system. Unemployment was tied to the more serious problem of regional inequality to which I do not have a simple answer. Indeed, this is the more sophisticated critique of Slovenia, that it was the republic that gained at the expense of some of the others. Whereas its unemployment rate fell from 1967-75 to 1976-87 from 2.5% to 1.7% (pretty damned good), it rose in the poorest (autonomous) republic of Kosovo from 20.5% to 29.6% in the same periods, pretty awful. Also, the ratio of per capita income between those two areas went from three to one to nine to one from 1945 to 1989, ugh. In any case, Slovenia continues to do well and retains considerable elements of the previous system. By most accounts and data is easily the best off of any of the formerly communist states. Unfortunately the EU is demanding that it weaken its worker ownership and control to allow foreign direct investment as a condition of Slovenia entering the EU. I am afraid they are going to cave. Barkley Rosser On Sat, 19 Dec 1998 14:39:50 -0800 Brad De Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's certainly the case that worker-managed firms don't lay off their members in downturns (very much). But--at least the last time I talked to Laura Tyson about this--she did say that it really seemed true that worker-managed firms had a very difficult time expanding in response to increased demand. But I don't know nearly as much about this as I should... Brad DeLong -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1737] Re: Re: Re: Re: Social Democracy and Utopia
Brad, Well, I've already granted that Scandinavian social democracies were more liberal democratic than Tito's Yugoslavia, which was a one-party state after all. However, despite Tito's despotism, it was clearly the most politically and civilly liberal of any of the "communist" states. This story about worker-managed firms not hiring is at least partly one of those theoretical results that (the 1958 Benjamin Ward AER paper) that has become a standard poop line among most economists. However it is not always true. Again, I picked Slovenia precisely because up until the collapse of Yugoslavia it had an unemployment rate of less than 5%. I also note that the same theoretical texts, as well as the studies by Pencavel of the northwest US plywood cooperatives, suggests that labor does not get laid off as much in downturns as in traditional firms. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 18 Dec 1998 16:30:55 -0800 Brad De Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Brad, OK, for the umpteenth time I am going to point something out to you to which you have never responded. What about Slovenia and worker-managed market socialism? Taking a look at where it started from in 1945, the record is pretty good and although not as liberal of a democracy as the Scandinavian social democracies, it was pretty free and easy, more so than other states ruled by a Communist Party (actually the League of Yugoslav Workers, to be technically precise). I must grant that Slovenia's virtues are only clearer since the collapse of Yugoslavia, and that the overall record there on a lot of grounds has been not as good, although your constant inclusion of Tito in your list of awful leaders looks pretty thin. Things only went bad in Yugoslavia after old "last of the Hapsburgs" kicked the bucket. Barkley Rosser Milovan Djilas has... interesting views of Tito. A believer in political democracy Tito was not. There is the problem that successful worker-managed firms tend to want to not hire new workers (because it dilutes the value of their ownership share), so you have higher demand for a factory's products leading to a contraction in the factory's production. But I would love it if ESOPs became the chief means by which corporations raised capital. And I have always been profoundly depressed that both co-determination and worker-managed firms have not managed to expand faster... Brad DeLong -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1713] Re: Re: Re: Very Strange Argument
Wojtek, Although I said some things similar to those said by Brad, I view what went on in the "Great Pacific War" as the Japanese call it as pretty much of an imperialist competition between the US and Japan, even if control of natural resources was not such a big issue for the US (it certainly was for Japan). More important for the US was market access. This is of course a major factor in the US opposition to the Japanese invasion of China where the US had always supported the "Open Door" policy, meaning allowing access for the US along with the other outsiders, although I do think that there were at least some Americans who were genuinely horrified by Japanese atrocities in China, still a sore point between those two countries. I don't think the US was sufficiently on top of things to figure out ahead of time that the oil embargo would help the Soviets in the battle of Moscow. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 18 Dec 1998 10:18:58 -0500 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 03:37 PM 12/17/98 -0500, you wrote: Wojtek, You don't have the timing right here. It was not a threat to cut off Japan's oil supplies. The US did so a full six months prior to Pearl Harbor. As I have explained in another post, FDR fully expected this to bring a Japanese attack on Philippines on the way to the Indonesian oil sources, which would bring the US into the war and allow FDR to fight the Germans, which he wished to do but for which there was little support in the US. The surprise was the strategic move by the Japanese to weaken the US naval fleet in anticipation of their southward move that they knew would bring forth retaliation by the US. Barkley: I read your post in question after I wrote my missive. However, I think that what you wrote there still supports my larger point that the US motives behind entering the war were less than eleemosynary - to say the least. That was in reply to Brad's argument about the supposedly positive role of the US policies. I object to that argument on the grounds that the reasons behind such policies did not include bringing about a progressive change, save for window dressing and PR; and that citing the positive outcomes of that policy that could not have been predicted when the policy was made is a teleological argument, a hindsight rationalization rather than a casue-effect explanation. Regards, Wojtek -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1715] Re: Re: Re: Social Democracy and Utopia
Brad, OK, for the umpteenth time I am going to point something out to you to which you have never responded. What about Slovenia and worker-managed market socialism? Taking a look at where it started from in 1945, the record is pretty good and although not as liberal of a democracy as the Scandinavian social democracies, it was pretty free and easy, more so than other states ruled by a Communist Party (actually the League of Yugoslav Workers, to be technically precise). I must grant that Slovenia's virtues are only clearer since the collapse of Yugoslavia, and that the overall record there on a lot of grounds has been not as good, although your constant inclusion of Tito in your list of awful leaders looks pretty thin. Things only went bad in Yugoslavia after old "last of the Hapsburgs" kicked the bucket. Barkley Rosser Barkley Rosser On Fri, 18 Dec 1998 06:16:34 -0800 Brad De Long [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Whether or not Truman was acting as a pawn of the aircraft industry it is fairly clear that Truman misinterpreted Soviet intentions in Korea. Indeed, the entire conception of the Cold War affected by "Last War Syndrome", the tendency for American policy makers to see the world through the lens of their last major conflict. Every colonial liberation struggle and civil war in the post-War period was a Hitleresque machination aimed toward world domination by the Soviet Union. Whether or not S. Korea and/or Taiwan are better off for having fallen under the Western umbrella is an entirely separate issue from whether the world really benefited from a staggeringly expensive arms race and 40 years of playing the game of nuclear chicken. That's simply not true. On the minus side we do have a staggeringly expensive nuclear arms race, 40 years of playing the game of nuclear chicken, significant damage done to democratic institutions in the United States, and active aid and assistance to a bunch of state terrorists who happened to dislike Communists as well. On the plus side we have a somewhat smaller set of countries spending a generation or two under the rule of Communist regimes of varying quality--from Pol Pot or Mao or Kim Il Sung at the bottom end to Castro at the top end. Whether U.S. post-WWII foreign policy was--broadly speaking--a good (or at least a not-so-bad) idea depends on whether the plus side outweighs the minus side. And so you cannot say that the quality of life in South Korea relative to North Korea is an "entirely separate issue." It just isn't. Brad DeLong -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1664] Re: treatment of James Craven
Ajit, You may be right. But, I figure every little bit helps. They need to have a barrage of pressure coming from a lot of directions. The report that the Chronicle of Higher Education is getting interested in Jim's case is the best news I've heard so far on this unfortunate matter. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 17 Dec 1998 16:17:26 +1100 Ajit Sinha [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't think these letters to Hasart is going to have any impact, that's why I'm not writing a second letter. I think the case should be taken up by civil liberties union or some such national level organization, and it should be written about in newspapers and magazines. I have a case too, in some sense more serious than Jim's. Someday I intend to write an article intitled, "My experience of an Australian University". Cheers, ajit sinha At 14:35 16/12/98 -0500, you wrote: Dear President Hasart, Dec. 16, 1998 Having written to you before regarding the situation of Professor James Craven, I am disappointed to learn that the result has been further harassment of him and an attack by Interim Vice-President Ramsey upon his ability to use Clark College email. Clearly his use has been related to his scholarly and educational activities at Clark College. This action by Interim Vice President Ramsey constitutes an unconscionalbe violation of both his academic freedom and civil rights.. It is a blot and stain upon the reputation of Clark College. The sooner this deplorable action is undone, the better for all concerned. Yours Sincerely, J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. Professor of Economics James Madison University Harrisonburg, VA 22807 -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:1665] Re: Re: Very Strange Argument
Wojtek, You don't have the timing right here. It was not a threat to cut off Japan's oil supplies. The US did so a full six months prior to Pearl Harbor. As I have explained in another post, FDR fully expected this to bring a Japanese attack on Philippines on the way to the Indonesian oil sources, which would bring the US into the war and allow FDR to fight the Germans, which he wished to do but for which there was little support in the US. The surprise was the strategic move by the Japanese to weaken the US naval fleet in anticipation of their southward move that they knew would bring forth retaliation by the US. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 17 Dec 1998 14:20:16 -0500 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 10:36 AM 12/17/98 -0800, Brad de Long wrote: I reply (WS): I am not a historian, but was not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour a response to the US militarism in the region, specifically the threat of cutting off the Japanese oil supply lines? A decision to destroy the US navy was was a logical defensive movement on the part of Japan's military. Ummm... The U.S. embargoes exports of oil to Japan (because Japan continues its campaign to conquer China, and prepares to send its armies north into Siberia). A Japanese attack on the U.S. is a "logical defensive movement" in response? A very, very strange argument... What is so strange about it? Imagine an industrialized country with no fuel supply, and facing two imperial powers, proven to use "gunboat diplomacy" in the past and threatening to use their navies again to cut off that country's oil supply lines. The only _logical_ response in that situation is to incapacitate your enemy's navy, no? Otherwise, you may as well turn the lights off and go home to watch your entire industry coming to a halt. That, of course, does not mean it is a morally justified response, but that is an entirely different story. Japan's imperial project is rather difficult to defend on moral grounds, but so are the imperial projects of the European powers or the US. That was the essence of my argument. You can defend each country's position by the logic of imperial expansion, but you cannot defend them on moral grounds as we commonly understand them, unless we assume some sort of tribal mentality of the we-good, them-bad variety. regards Wojtek -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
