Greetings Economists, I've been following Lou Proyect's essay on Argentina, Australia, and Canada. I wanted to observe this series from a different perspective. I will start at a juncture where Lou responds to J. Devine,
On Wed, 17 Apr 2002 14:33:53 -0700, Devine, James wrote: > >getting away from sparring such as the above, it >seems to me that if one wants to understand the >concrete condions, it really helps to have >statistics. Both kinds of analysis seem >relevant, and can be complementary. >JD Let me take this opportunity to clear something up. I returned to PEN-L not to be baited by Doug Henwood. I take the question of development and statistics quite seriously. If Henwood wanted to respond to what I wrote, he could have explained why the statistics instead revealed some deeper truths about Nicaragua and Norway. Instead, he baited me. This all he knows how to do apparently. This is really too bad, since I have earned quite a bit of respect through the posts I have contributed to PEN-L and other leftwing lists. To throw Lenin at me is just a step above red-baiting and the sign of an exhausted intellect. Doyle What I want to write about is collaboration. I am glad to see Lou writing here, and the series he produced is interesting, though I am not in a position to comment on the content of the series. Rather where D. Henwood responds with a one liner to Lou, I think one can look at how people work together and what on the left could build things more. Obviously both Lou, and Doug have conflict. I'm not arguing for them to just get along. I think producing documents like what Lou did is important. He has said in the past he has access to the library at Columbia University, and he has feed back from his list of international leftists to utilize in a paper. These elements probably contributed to the depth of his work on this series of papers. Those though are exceptional circumstances most on the left don't share. I would like to see more development of the underlying methodology that made Lou's work strong with the tools that are available to us on the internet. I think collaboration is an issue that goes beyond Lou's efforts here, but also illustrated by various elements in Lou's series of thoughts. To do substantial work on the internet, we need to better utilize the internet in producing brainwork. I think that instant messaging, working on the same document, archiving and metadata are important issues for the left to advocate and build upon. Documents that are produced need to be accessible to people via more reliable attention to search engines. I am thinking of an anecdote of Venezuela that the press recently reported. According to press accounts the television stations maintained a blackout and biased reporting against Chavez, but that ordinary people using cell phones were able to get the word out anyway. We need to use the 'interactive' tools that the whole left can use to our advantage. Interactive here meaning collaboration technology. To me then applying the example of cellphones to collaboration here I think important work needs to be done in teamwork for online left lists. The sort of one line irritation of antagonists needs to be replaced by common collective work that takes advantage of principles of computing that serves our brain work best. thanks, Doyle Saylor
