[Marxism-Thaxis] Beware of the new racist counteroffensive
Beware of the new racist counteroffensive by: Sam Webb March 25 2010 tags: racism, African Americans, labor, Obama, ultra-right Many people say that racism is simply an attitude or a prejudice of one people toward another people. That allowed Republican senators to make the ludicrous claim that Sonia Sotomayor was a racist, during the hearings on her Supreme Court nomination. In reality, racism is a historically developed set of practices, institutions and beliefs that systematically subordinate racially oppressed people to an inferior status in every area of life. It dates back to the 17th century and its genesis lies in the practical economic and political requirements of the interwoven systems of predatory colonialism, slavery and nascent capitalism in the new world at that time. These systems of oppression and exploitation in the Americas needed not only an unlimited supply of unpaid or underpaid labor, but also a system of rationalization - racism - to legitimize the theft of lands and resources and the unparalleled subjugation and/or enslavement of peoples of the Americas, Africa and Asia. Because slavery and other forms of subjugation were tied to a young but expanding system of capitalism, racist oppression and exploitation had a particularly brutal and bloody character. No longer did the subjugated produce for a local market; now they produced commodities for consumers in distant lands and in the context of an expanding world system of production for the sole purpose of accumulating capital and maximizing profits. With the overthrow of slavery within our borders, a major breech in the system of racist oppression, exploitation and ideology occurred. It at once forced the slave owning/planter class and its supporters to retreat, and created a more favorable terrain for the freed slaves and their allies to secure new rights and recast the struggle against racist ideas. This moment, however, proved fleeting. Only a decade after the end of the Civil War, a counteroffensive by the old ruling class in the South and its allies in southern and northern states restored them to power and crushed the interracial movement that had advanced democracy in the post-war aftermath. The system of slavery didn't get a new lease on life, however. The old unpaid slave labor mode of production gave way to a new one, resting on underpaid labor (sharecropping and extractive industries), lynchings and other forms of vigilante terror, and legalized and comprehensive discrimination against African Americans and other peoples of color. In short, the pre-war reactionary coalition, defeated on the battlefield, was able after a brief retreat to regroup, violently seize political power, and then construct with the continued use of coercion (by state and non-state entities like the KKK) a new system of racial oppression and exploitation - popularly called Jim Crow. While its structural features (political, economic and ideological) were new, its racist essence remained the same. It wasn't until nearly a century later that the modern civil rights movement upended these legal forms and structures. But, as Martin Luther King said more than once, racism, though no longer legally sanctioned, persisted in day-to-day life. Moreover, in some ways racism worsened as it took on new material (deindustrialization) and ideological (reverse racism) forms, shaped by the exploitive pressures and crisis tendencies of globalizing capitalism, the unraveling of the New Deal coalition, and the rise of the extreme right in the early 1980s. Seen through this optic, the election of Barack Obama constitutes a historic moment and turn in the struggle against racism and for social progress for our nation. It carries the potential to set in train a new era of racial progress, multiracial unity, and overall progressive advance. Of course, Obama's stunning victory, as significant it was and as promising as it is, doesn't eliminate in one fell swoop the structures and institutions that are the material ground on which racist oppression and ideology rest in the early part of the 21st century. Nor does it mark a withdrawal from political life of the forces of reaction and racism. Proclamations of a post-racial era are exceedingly premature. In fact, the election of the nation's first African American president has triggered a new racist counteroffensive in much the same way as the North's victory in the Civil War set into motion a racist and revanchist counteroffensive by the former slaveholders and their allies. The new racist counteroffensive, much like the earlier one, hopes to turn the clock back. It aims to strip away the legitimacy of the first African American president in ways that are both coded and crude (witness the use of the n word and other vicious epithets). But it also hopes to obscure the democratic, class, and human bonds shared by tens of millions of American people of all nationalities and colors, introduce racial fissures in
[Marxism-Thaxis] Crisis: The Motor of Capitalism
Crisis: The Motor of Capitalism by: André Orléan, Le Monde Truthout 29 March 2010 http://www.truthout.org/the-crisis-motor-capitalism58234 Capitalism's history coincides with the history of its crises. Over the 1970-2007 period, there were at least 124 banking crises, 208 exchange rate crises and 63 sovereign debt crises! Even though most of those crises remained restricted to peripheral countries, this nonetheless remains a very alarming fact. In the face of such figures, the idea of market self- regulation appears inadequate. To understand how capitalism manages its excesses, it seems that the alternative theory of regulation through crises does not lack for arguments. If one needs proof, one need only consider those crises we call great or structural crises. Since they are periods of deep transformation, their role in the historic development of capitalism is crucial. The most famous of these great crises is the Great Depression (1929-1939). At issue are deep crises, not only quantitatively by their intensity, but also in the scope of the institutional transformations that they initiate. These crises originate in the exhaustion of a growth model that no longer succeeds in containing its own imbalances. To pick up again, the economic system needs new rules of the game, new institutions, new compromises. That is what's at stake with the great crises: reinventing a new growth model. Thus, during the 1929-1945 period, capitalism had to transform itself by putting forward a plan no longer based on all-out competition, but on a permanent adequacy - centered around the big industrial company - between real salary increases, productivity gains and growth. This model that emerged at the end of the Second World War was designated by terms such as Fordist regulation, referring to Henry Ford, who had understood that in order to be able to sell his cars and make profits, his workers had to be well-paid. After leading to an exceptional prosperity, known in France as the trente glorieuses [thirty glorious years] (1945-1973), the Fordist regime in its turn entered a crisis. That was the stagflation of the 1970's (1973-1982), which combined weak growth and inflation in an unprecedented way. Although that great crisis differed from that of 1929, its significance remains the same: the end of an era and the advent of a new form of capitalism. Consequently, in the beginning of the 1980's after stagflation, financialized capitalism, also called patrimonial capitalism or neoliberal capitalism, emerged. The rupture with the preceding regime was colossal, especially in the scope of financial deregulation. We witnessed the progressive dismantling of the regulatory framework which - a significant fact - had led to the elimination of any banking crisis during the Fordist period between 1945 and 1970. Politically, it was the ascension of the neoliberal governments of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom (May 1979) and Ronald Reagan in the United States (January 1981) that marked the outset of this new phase. However, from the viewpoint of economic regulation, the origins of this new capitalism were to be found in the revolutionary transformation which characterized monetary policy. Inflation had become the primary target. To fight it, Paul Volcker, who was installed at the head of the American Federal Reserve (Fed) in 1979, proceeded to an astonishing increase in short-term interest rates, which reached 20 percent in June 1981. That policy generated a complete and definitive change in the balance of power between borrowers and lenders - in favor of the latter. From then on, holders of financial assets no longer risked seeing their profitability eroded by inflation. Their field was clear. That was the beginning of a twenty-five year period the central characteristic of which was to place market finance at the center of regulation, well beyond the mere technical question of financing. In simple terms, from then on it was the financial markets that controlled property rights, something never known before. In the preceding capitalisms, capital ownership was exercised in the form of majority control within specific structures outside the market, as for example in the German Hausbank (house bank) or family control. The emblematic representative of patrimonial capitalism is the institutional investor. The institutional investor is the bearer of a new form of corporate governance, centered on shareholder value. The crisis that began in August 2007 must be understood, I believe, as marking the onset of the limits to patrimonial capitalism and its entry into a great crisis. Like the preceding capitalisms, it succumbed when the very principle of its dynamism turned against it to become the source of imbalances. In this case, it was the financial question that proved decisive. Patrimonial capitalism no longer succeeds in controlling the expansion of its financial sector, the weight of which became a handicap at a certain
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Evolution of Culture
CeJ jannuzi Why did we need dogs to develop gesturing. We could gesture to people. But drove forward that development? There is a really cute program on TV here in Japan that shows the adventures of a chimpanzee (who is very socialized to humans) who is paired up with a bull dog. The two animals do communicate, but they have to learn to read each other's body language and gestures. The question here being, does their communication constitute something outside of what chimps usually use, what dogs usually use, to communicate? One particular theory about the possible gestural origins of human language says that humans developed gestural routines and phonetic skills, and the gestural routines basically migrated over to the phonetic realm (we use our faces, vocal tracts and upper body to SPEAK a language). If two species like hominids and wolves interact, it might overall mean that their paths of evolutions only partly converge. A recent development in human-dog development, or at least one that is obvious, is the fairly recent creation of cute, child-like breeds (while the archetypal dog is still wolf-like in appearance--the Alsatian, the Husky, the Japanese Akita, etc.). Has the co-evolutionary story of humans-dogs more or less hit a deadend for both species (with wolves themselves threatened by extinction and the future of dogs totally dependent on humans' abilities to feed and house them). ^ CB: You're the linguist. But to me, the essence of language is symbolling. Using something to represent something that it is not. The co-operation of dogs and humans was most likely very adaptive for dogs. I bet their population is a lot bigger than that of wolves , now. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Arms Control Experts Applaud Announcement of New Nuclear Reductions Treaty with Russia
CeJ jannuzi CB:Nope. Nuclear disarmament is still species-being project numero uno. Which is why Israel ought to be disarmed. I think they are the only country that ever threatened to use its nukes indiscriminately to try and commit suicide and take the world with it. CB: Does Israel have enough nukes to take the whole world with it ? Anyway, sure Israel needs to be disarmed, though doesn't sound like disarming a suicide bomber. But the US and Russia have many more nukes than Israel ^ I mean, not just in theory. That would be after Egypt whipped their asses in conventional warfare, using rather primitive (I assume Stalinist) wire-guided missiles to destroy the IDF. Operation Masada would have been Israel taking its nukes and using them to blow up as much of the world as it could reach, and then exploding very dirty cobalt-laced bombs to try and poison the rest of the world--it would do that if it had to come to terms with a victorious Egypt (which is why both the US and the USSR had to intervene to defuse the situation). It's project no. 1 for whom? ^ CB: For the human species. ^^^ For pro-war, pro-militarism hacks retired from the US military placed on panels of 'arms control experts' , writing propaganda for think tanks and politicians? -- Japan Higher Education Outlook ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Great British Tea Heist
The Great British Tea Heist Botanist Robert Fortune traveled to China and stole trade secrets of the tea industry, discovering a fraud in the process By Sarah Rose Smithsonian.com March 09, 2010 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Great-British-Tea-Heist.html [This is an excerpt from For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History by Sarah Rose.] In 1848, the British East India Company sent Robert Fortune on a trip to China's interior, an area forbidden to foreigners. Fortune's mission was to steal the secrets of tea horticulture and manufacturing. The Scotsman donned a disguise and headed into the Wu Si Shan hills in a bold act of corporate espionage. With [his servant] Wang walking five paces ahead to announce his arrival, Robert Fortune, dressed in his mandarin garb, entered the gates of a green tea factory. Wang began to supplicate frantically. Would the master of the factory allow an inspection from a visitor, an honored and wise official who had traveled from a far province to see how such glorious tea was made? The factory superintendent nodded politely and led them into a large building with peeling gray stucco walls. Beyond it lay courtyards, open work spaces, and storerooms. It was warm and dry, full of workers manufacturing the last of the season's crop, and the woody smell of green tea hung in the air. This factory was a place of established ceremony, where tea was prepared for export through the large tea distributors in Canton and the burgeoning tea trade in Shanghai. Although the concept of tea is simple-dry leaf infused in hot water-the manufacture of it is not intuitive at all. Tea is a highly processed product. At the time of Fortune's visit the recipe for tea had remained unchanged for two thousand years, and Europe had been addicted to it for at least two hundred of them. But few in Britain's dominions had any firsthand or even secondhand information about the production of tea before it went into the pot. Fortune's horticultural contemporaries in London and the directors of the East India Company all believed that tea would yield its secrets if it were held up to the clear light and scrutiny of Western science. Among Fortune's tasks in China, and certainly as critical as providing Indian tea gardens with quality nursery stock, was to learn the procedure for manufacturing tea. From the picking to the brewing there was a great deal of factory work involved: drying, firing, rolling, and, for black tea, fermenting. Fortune had explicit instructions from the East India Company to discover everything he could: Besides the collection of tea plants and seeds from the best localities for transmission to India, it will be your duty to avail yourself of every opportunity of acquiring information as to the cultivation of the tea plant and the manufacture of tea as practised by the Chinese and on all other points with which it may be desirable that those entrusted with the superintendence of the tea nurseries in India should be made acquainted. But the recipe for the tea was a closely guarded state secret. In the entry to the tea factory, hanging on the wall, were inspiring calligraphic words of praise, a selection from Lu Yu's great work on tea, the classic Cha Ching. The best quality tea must have The creases like the leather boots of Tartar horsemen, Curl like the dewlap of a mighty bullock, Unfold like a mist rising out of a ravine, Gleam like a lake touched by a zephyr, And be wet and soft like Earth newly swept by rain. Proceeding into the otherwise empty courtyard, Fortune found fresh tea set to dry on large woven rattan plates, each the size of a kitchen table. The sun beat down on the containers, cooking the tea. No one walked past; no one touched or moved the delicate tea leaves as they dried. Fortune learned that for green tea the leaves were left exposed to the sun for one to two hours. The sun-baked leaves were then taken to a furnace room and tossed into an enormous pan-what amounted to a very large iron wok. Men stood working before a row of coal furnaces, tossing the contents of their pans in an open hearth. The crisp leaves were vigorously stirred, kept constantly in motion, and became moist as the fierce heat drew their sap toward the surface. Stir-frying the leaves in this way breaks down their cell walls, just as vegetables soften over high heat. The cooked leaves were then emptied onto a table where four or five workers moved piles of them back and forth over bamboo rollers. They were rolled continuously to bring their essential oils to the surface and then wrung out, their green juice pooling on the tables. I cannot give a better idea of this operation than comparing it to a baker working and rolling his dough, Fortune recalled. Tightly curled by this stage, the tea leaves were not even a quarter the size they had been when picked. A tea picker plucks perhaps a pound a day, and the leaves are constantly
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Evolution of Culture
Carrol Cox wrote: This was a fascinating post, I learned a lot from it. But it seems to me the understandings of language and change it describes could be expressed in other terms than the metaphor of evolution. Natural selection, applied to human history, including the history of language, seems to caught up in false notions of Progress as a comprehensive theory of histoy. Carrol ^^ CB: I agree that natural selection shouldn't be brought over from biology to the historical developments of language. Of course , there isn't progress in biological evolution either. However, I'd say there is a progressive _way_ in the development of human society _today_. But such progress is _not_ inevitable. We have to struggle for it consciously. Anyway, the progressive way today is to socialism, including social reforms of capitalism short of full socialism. I suppose the dying out of such terms as free enterprise, nigger and bitch would be progress in language. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Riddle of Antagonism: (still at work)
Waistline2 Antagonism: Antagonism means the mutual resistance or active opposition of two opposing forces, physical or mental; active opposition to a force. Antagonism is a form of change resolution by annihilation and nullification. Antagonism as destruction, and nullification is a form of society transition to a new mode of production. It is a form of resolution of relations of production relations that have entered collision with qualitatively changing productive forces. (see productive forces). Qualitatively new productive forces nullify and annihilate a previously existing development of means of production as a basis for the growth and expansion of the new productive forces. ^^^ CB: Integrating change in is a good idea. How about all real change ( as opposed to circular change) is based in antagonism ? How about it is the antagonism between the increasingly privatized (to the point of monopoly) mode of _appropriation_ , that is form of ownership or property, and the socialized mode of production ( the organization of production , not new technologies or machines) that generates the change to socialism from capitalism ? ( See penultimate chapter of _Capital_ you quoted earlier). Here is part of it: Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolize all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. CB: It is the _centralization_ or monopoly ownership of means of production and the increasing socialization of the organization of labor that is the key antagonism. The question might be asked how more specifically is centralized ownership in antagonism with socialized labor. Part is the answer is :come to Detroit and see (smile) ^ In class society, the collision between qualitatively new productive forces and old relations of production - (the old classes connected to these relations), cannot be resolved based on the struggle of the two classes constituting the old relations of production. ^^^ CB: The new _quality_ in the productive forces is their greater and greater socialization of the laborers. Notice Marx refers toThe shifts from steam to oil as a main fuel, or the shift to electricity, or the shift to computers and new forms of communication and transportation all allow greater numbers of workers working in cooperation, over larger areas. ^ Resolution takes place outside - external, the contradiction that is the two classes constituting the system. The struggle between serf and nobility cannot be resolved by the serf overthrowing the nobility and establishing a new society of serfs. Resolution takes place by destruction of both serf and nobility at the hands of new classes; bourgeoisie and proletariat. ^ CB: I'd say Marx's theory is that the proletariat defeats the bourgeoisie , _and then_ all classes are abolished. In The Manifesto, Marx and Engels assert that capitalism is different than feudalism and slavery in that the number of classes is rapidly reduced to two. They don't discuss any new classes arising to do away with capitalism as with feudalism. The passage in _Capital_ above is in chapter with this footnote quoting The Manifesto: The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable Of all the classes that stand face-to-face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes perish and disappear in the face of Modern Industry, the proletariat is its special and essential product The lower middle-classes, the small manufacturers, the shopkeepers, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle-class... they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Evolution of Culture
CB: You're the linguist. But to me, the essence of language is symbolling. Using something to represent something that it is not. The co-operation of dogs and humans was most likely very adaptive for dogs. I bet their population is a lot bigger than that of wolves , now. But the theory about co-evolution is about how adaptive it was for both, including a certain type of homonids who then differentiated from others and became us. Could this--just speculating--have been one reason why our direct ancestors were able to displace Neanderthal? I'm just using that as a very speculative example. I think the article I cited goes back further than this in homonid evolution. If we take a selection of domesticated dogs and let them go feral they form a pack that then propagates. I have even seen a Golden Retriever and a Chihuahua go feral and form a bond together (saw this on Miyako Island, Okinawa, where the weather is very mild). One doubts dogs that deviate too far from the wolf-coyote type contribute much to future generations (but also remember that most exotic breeds are fairly recent in the human-dog relationship). In several generations you have something that looks like what? Well, like the coy-dogs of the east coast of the US. Now about language. If a group of homonids able to signal using vocalizations and hand-and-arm gestures go out as a group with dogs in order to hunt prey or herd animals (actually the two activities over-lap), are they symbolling among themselves (homonids, canines) in order to pass down a previous generation's knowledge of hunting? They may do that in the activities of preparation and hunting/herding, but their 'here and now' is about communicating individual and collective intent in order to achieve a common goal--manipulation of the herd of animals for future use, food supply for immediate use. We could take the discussion back to that issue of what is arbitrary and what is motivated in human communication. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Great British Tea Heist
Interesting article, but with a few comments seem in order. Tea is really a type of camellia bush (a broad-leafed evergreen), which grows as part of the undergrowth of southern temperate and sub-tropical broad-leaf evergreen forests across S. Asia. Hence, the great tea cultures of China, SE Asia, Formosa, Taiwan, Okinawa and Japan. Most likely the Han cultures didn't get there first. It was cultures to their south who developed the 'shiny leaf and root culture' of S. Asia, all the way over to Japan. This food culture is characterized by the use of the camelia bush and roots and tubers, many of which are pounded into pastes to make them more edible. Camellia have also been an important source of cooking oil. It is most likely these cultures brewed teas from different varieties of camellias long before the Han did. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
