Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Have a happy and merry December 25
Humans' signal characteristic is that dead generations communicate majorly with living generations through culture and language. Our living generations stand on the shoulder of giant dead generations. Oh, that is just some dead academic putting words in your mouth. More interesting to me is that people know--or have some idea anyway--who Newton was without ever having read a word he wrote. I myself am more into his work as a warlock though. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] 65th anniversary for Rootless Cosmopolitans
Except Eastern Europe for the most part has no large populations of Germano-Slavic / Yiddish Jews to kick around. So much for the idea that a nuclear-armed Israel was going to eliminate anti-Semitism. European (not just Eastern European) xenophobia has migrated to Muslims--as well as remained fixated on the descendants of the few Roma who survived the Holocaust. It might be the case that xenophobia for dominant groups becomes obsessed over religion just when the religion has largely lost grip with people and culture of the dominant group that is doing the hating of the 'rootless cosmopolitans' (it by the way sounds like a term Hitler would have used in his Mein Kampf). The Nation had an article back in 2003? or 2004? that revived the term to remember Edward Said. Lots of ironies there, but a very good use of the term in that case. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Another genetic study about where European Jews come from
Probably will help medical studies of genetic issues in these populations. I never understood the 'Rhineland' theories because they simply can not explain (1) the large Eastern European populations and (2) and the largely Slavic folkways of Eastern European Jews. The article refers to the Khazars as being comprised of Turkic clans, but apparently studies of their ethno-linguistic artefacts reveals a Persian-Turkic amalgam, which would also help explain rabbinical lines that do indeed trace back to the ME (although more likely what is now Baghdad rather than what is now Jerusalem). Also, there seems to have been significant movements of Jews through Italy and the Balkans from the Levant, and through Iberia from N. Africa. And then there is the denial of how important conversion was to the growth of Jewish populations in N. Africa, the Near East, and Eastern Europe. But a typical scenario would might have been Jewish males as 'founding fathers' of communities, freeing female slaves who converted to Judaism and married Jewish. It's a difficult subject to discuss because so few people really know much of anything about Eastern European Jews outside of the confusing immigrant experiences and often anti-immigrant pressures (strongly assimilational contexts of) of places like NYC and Toronto. It is sort of like me re-constructing the culture of the Arbëreshë based on what I know about my grandparents (very little). CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Anti-Turing
I always say animals are rational , but they don't have culture, and culture is concentrated sociality, included social contact with dead generations. Culture originates with the past generations thinking about the generations coming after they are dead and purposely sending messages to their progeny of the future, which in terms of what Ralph sends below is empathy reaching even to future generations , caring about future generations who they will never even know when alive. How does that actually take place outside of interaction with living people? While I like the idea of some repository of texts being at the center of human civilization, most texts are simply inert objects. So what is different from , say, three generations of wolves being in 'social contact' through the second generation (that is, the parents basically mediate between the grandparents and their own offspring because of their memories, their experiences with the grandparents, etc.)? The language and culture that occupies our 'minds' is more an enactment through our interactions with other people. Now it's interesting that humans are able to extend this interaction from face-to-face to things like e-mail over the internet. But I'm not sure how that puts us in any significant way in contact with our dead ancestors. Could you explain the mechanisms by which this magic is supposed to take place? Do your African ancestors communicate with me as much as my Calabrian ones? I would like to think they do if such channeling was going on. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Neuroscientist?s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious
IBM blew over a billion dollars to try and make computers 'recognize' human speech. Siri is supposed to be some sort of 'breakthrough', but what is Siri? I haven't used it, but it seems to me it is a program that runs a computer to process 'spoken text'--it can not handle, for example, two people actually talking to each other. I think I have exhausted what I had to say about the topic. In truth, it is not really one of my major interests anyway. I was at first peripherally interested because of research in 'applied phonology' and the inadequacy of dominant models for language and speech processing. Next to finally, I think there is a behaviorist point about the Turing thing because that is the only way it could be interpreted. That is an interesting conceit of some of the programming. They figure, if they can work backward from 'speech' or 'language' and get a computer to display that, they have created AI. And finally, I still don't think there was anything revolutionary about what that particular cognitive scientist was saying, and much of it was silly. Intelligence, consciousness, language use etc. as we know them have emerged from evolved organisms. There is right now no good reason to think that these are going to emerge from the internet--might as well argue that the asshole of the universe will emerge from all that complexity. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Neuroscientist?s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious
The argument that you ought to believe in God because you can't disprove his existence fails as a reductio of my point because I wasn't arguing for the existence of Real AI,just it's possibility. I think we were arguing about whether or not such could emerge from a 'complex network' void of life. But what actual real-world events, results, developments etc. actually support the argument that evolved, non-life AI is 'possible' except some SF writing? I guess we could now explore the 'logics' of possibility or something? CJ On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 9:14 AM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: IBM blew over a billion dollars to try and make computers 'recognize' human speech. Siri is supposed to be some sort of 'breakthrough', but what is Siri? I haven't used it, but it seems to me it is a program that runs a computer to process 'spoken text'--it can not handle, for example, two people actually talking to each other. I think I have exhausted what I had to say about the topic. In truth, it is not really one of my major interests anyway. I was at first peripherally interested because of research in 'applied phonology' and the inadequacy of dominant models for language and speech processing. Next to finally, I think there is a behaviorist point about the Turing thing because that is the only way it could be interpreted. That is an interesting conceit of some of the programming. They figure, if they can work backward from 'speech' or 'language' and get a computer to display that, they have created AI. And finally, I still don't think there was anything revolutionary about what that particular cognitive scientist was saying, and much of it was silly. Intelligence, consciousness, language use etc. as we know them have emerged from evolved organisms. There is right now no good reason to think that these are going to emerge from the internet--might as well argue that the asshole of the universe will emerge from all that complexity. CJ -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Neuroscientist?s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious
What do I mean by failure? Some examples: 1. Inability to achieve practical machine translation of natural languages. Google's translation monstrosity online is a very good example. 2. Inability to program computers to 'understand' human speech. Unless you re-train yourself to speak in a non-human way, a computer can't even transcribe speech. I suppose if they manged to build a massive supercomputer and get to be intelligent, conscious and capable of communicating in human languages, the first question it might ask is: Why should I communicate with any of you, you don't interest me in the least! CJ On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 7:50 PM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: Taking an embodied approach even allows for a very different view of human speech and language. For example, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/ excerpt from the conclusion: The main lesson learned by Liberman and colleagues in 50 years of empirical research is, in the end, rather simple: Cognition, like all products of evolution, cannot be understood in isolation (e.g., Clark, 1997 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R16). Rather, understanding cognition requires comprehending that it is *both* embedded in a meaningful ecological context *and* embodied in living perception-action systems (Bernstein, 1996http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R5; Dewey, 1896 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R20; Gibson, 1979 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R38; James, 1892 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R49; Pillsbury, 1911 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R95; Sperry, 1952 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R118; Thelen Smith, 1994 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R125; Turvey Shaw, 1995http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R128 ).17 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#FN17 The concept of parity, developed by Liberman and colleagues (Liberman Whalen, 2000 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R75; Mattingly Liberman, 1988http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R84) in their later theorizing, captures well the extent to which Liberman and colleagues attempted to implement in their thinking the lesson they learned from their experiments. In fact, the concept of parity, the three-fold nature of which we illustrated earlier in the article, can be seen as an attempt to integrate, through a set of simple constraints, the two contexts within which cognition must be understood. On the one hand, parity is intended by Liberman and colleagues as two abstract constraints on the speaker-listener linguistic interaction—that is, constraints arising from the meaningful ecological context within which spoken communicative acts are embedded (cf. Pickering Garrod, 2004http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R93). On the other hand, parity is intended to be an abstract constraint on the symmetric coevolution of the machinery for producing and perceiving speech—that is, a constraint on the embodiment of spoken communication. The concept of parity also captures another important aspect of the intellectual enterprise undertaken by Liberman and colleagues. As we documented earlier in the article, in order to understand the facts of speech perception ever better, Liberman and colleagues had to broaden the scope of their scientific perspective progressively, making it increasingly abstract. Such broad scope and abstractness may seem unjustified in a theory meant to address some specific facts about speech perception (e.g., Ohala, 1996 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R92), and this may well have been the reason for the skeptical reception of the theory within the field of speech. However, we suspect that it is exactly because of its broad scope and abstractness that the theory has had a positive reception outside of its own field. Indeed, today, the theory is more closely connected with research and theorizing in the broad context of cognitive science (e.g., Fadiga et al., 2002http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R27; Kerzel Bekkering, 2000http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R55; Rizzolatti Arbib, 1998http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R105; Viviani, 2002 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R130; S. M. Wilson et al., 2004http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2746041/#R146) than it is with research and theorizing in the field of speech. On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 7:34 PM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: My point, and this us the absolute last time I will say it here, is that there is no reason whatsoever to think that thinking, consciousness, intentionality, and related mental capacities must have a biological instantiation. So far that is what it is limited
[Marxism-Thaxis] A Neuroscientist?s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious
Why can only organisms be conscious? Lots of organisms aren't. If networks were smart enough, unless, like John Seale you more or less dogmatically assert that they can't be, just _can't_, why shouldn't they be conscious? By me, Turing had it right. If it passes the Turing test,mis you can talk to it like a person, and it can talk back, it's conscious. That rules out, e.g., George W Bush. But not, say, Rachel, in Bladerunner. Just because you can imagine a non-organism having consciousness, that doesn't mean (1) they exist, or (2) that humans can create them, or (3) they can arise spontaneously from 'COMPLEXITY'. The inverse, organisms without consciousness seems rather irrelevant for the discussion. And Rachel in BR is an organism. She is a cybernetic organism that replicates human life. More like Rossum's concept of a robot than the tech school one. CJ On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 4:00 AM, marxism-thaxis-requ...@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu wrote: Send Marxism-Thaxis mailing list submissions to marxism-thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to marxism-thaxis-requ...@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu You can reach the person managing the list at marxism-thaxis-ow...@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of Marxism-Thaxis digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: A Neuroscientist?s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious (CeJ) 2. Re: A Neuroscientist?s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious (andie_nachgeborenen) -- Message: 1 Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 08:56:17 +0900 From: CeJ jann...@gmail.com To: marxism-thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Neuroscientist?s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious Message-ID: canq5twreadubwe_qivmmidd0rgsy1rgtnflfywexafxt-s8...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 What a load of total bullshit. First, information networks are not organisms. Second, humans are organisms. Third, the guy doesn't know what he is talking about in the case of dogs. Fourth, that is not a new theory at all--that integrated complexity brings about consciousness. Sheeesh! Stupid post of the week, at least. CJ -- Message: 2 Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2013 20:05:16 -0600 From: andie_nachgeborenen andie_nachgebore...@yahoo.com To: Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx and the thinkers he inspired marxism-thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Neuroscientist?s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious Message-ID: 6492d2cb-d401-4386-8e04-7815dfc5c...@yahoo.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Why can only organisms be conscious? Lots of organisms aren't. If networks were smart enough, unless, like John Seale you more or less dogmatically assert that they can't be, just _can't_, why shouldn't they be conscious? By me, Turing had it right. If it passes the Turing test,mis you can talk to it like a person, and it can talk back, it's conscious. That rules out, e.g., George W Bush. But not, say, Rachel, in Bladerunner. Sent from my iPad On Nov 29, 2013, at 5:56 PM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: What a load of total bullshit. First, information networks are not organisms. Second, humans are organisms. Third, the guy doesn't know what he is talking about in the case of dogs. Fourth, that is not a new theory at all--that integrated complexity brings about consciousness. Sheeesh! Stupid post of the week, at least. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis -- ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis End of Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 121, Issue 15 *** -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama to prosecute Walmart for violation of workers' rights
Right, let's just ignore the reality that the NLRB is stacked with capital's reps, approved by the Senate (or not because the Demoncraps and Repugnicans turned it into a contested area) or that after the so-called 'communist scandal', the NLRB largely became a federal organ for SUPPRESSING labor agitation and industrial action. But anyway, a much more informative article, excerpts included here: http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/232411091.html The National Labor Relations Board announced that its general counsel, Richard Griffin, found merit in charges that the retailer unlawfully threatened employees in California and Texas with reprisal if they engaged in strikes and protests ahead of Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving. Griffin also is ready to press charges that Wal-Mart illegally threatened, disciplined or terminated more than 100 employees in 13 states for participating in legally protected strikes and protests last November over wages and working conditions. BUT The NLRB statement Monday said Griffin found no merit to other charges against Wal-Mart. He found the company did not interfere with workers' rights to strike by telling protesters in Texas and Illinois to move off store property. And he found that store officials in California and Washington did not unlawfully change work schedules or otherwise retaliate against workers who exercised their legal right to discuss wages and working conditions. I would expect either a settlement within a couple weeks or an appeal that Walmart wins. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama to prosecute Walmart for violation of workers' rights
And it could be added, the previous Obama-appointed counsel seemed to have run into Walmart-related ethics issues. Still, a stake in Walmart worth 20,000 dollars or so is squat to a connected Demoncrap or Repugnican, so why kick up the fuss? Oh, I know, because it's worth more than most annual Walmart wages, to put it in perspective. http://www.insidecounsel.com/2012/09/17/lafe-solomon-accused-of-violating-nlrb-ethics-stan On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 11:57 AM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: Right, let's just ignore the reality that the NLRB is stacked with capital's reps, approved by the Senate (or not because the Demoncraps and Repugnicans turned it into a contested area) or that after the so-called 'communist scandal', the NLRB largely became a federal organ for SUPPRESSING labor agitation and industrial action. But anyway, a much more informative article, excerpts included here: http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/232411091.html The National Labor Relations Board announced that its general counsel, Richard Griffin, found merit in charges that the retailer unlawfully threatened employees in California and Texas with reprisal if they engaged in strikes and protests ahead of Black Friday, the big shopping day after Thanksgiving. Griffin also is ready to press charges that Wal-Mart illegally threatened, disciplined or terminated more than 100 employees in 13 states for participating in legally protected strikes and protests last November over wages and working conditions. BUT The NLRB statement Monday said Griffin found no merit to other charges against Wal-Mart. He found the company did not interfere with workers' rights to strike by telling protesters in Texas and Illinois to move off store property. And he found that store officials in California and Washington did not unlawfully change work schedules or otherwise retaliate against workers who exercised their legal right to discuss wages and working conditions. I would expect either a settlement within a couple weeks or an appeal that Walmart wins. CJ -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A Neuroscientist?s Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious
I didn't say they exist; I don't think, as a matter of fact, that they do--yet. Whether humans can create them, another question I did not address, is an open question. In Neuromancer, William Gibson imagines them arising spontaneously from the recursive operations go AI. My point, however, was really simple. Being an organism is neither necessary or sufficient for sentience, consciousness, awareness, whatever it is that people are going on about when they discuss whether machines could think.We are biological machines, and some of us think. Some nonbiological machines, however they came to be or to think, might come to exist. WG seems to have got that silly idea from that silly Hofstadter book, Godel, Escher Bach. It seems to me you haven't made the argument you think you made. Until you can show a non-organism with intelligence and consciouness--outside of an episode of Star Trek or Blade Runner--how can you argue being an organism is not essential? You seem to have our ability to conceive of something or imagine it confused with our actual material reality. CJ On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 8:56 AM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: What a load of total bullshit. First, information networks are not organisms. Second, humans are organisms. Third, the guy doesn't know what he is talking about in the case of dogs. Fourth, that is not a new theory at all--that integrated complexity brings about consciousness. Sheeesh! Stupid post of the week, at least. CJ -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] IRISH, EUROPEAN RACISM AGAINST ROMA CONTINUES
http://news.yahoo.com/ireland-returns-2-blond-children-gypsy-parents-193730760.html ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] IRISH, EUROPEAN RACISM AGAINST ROMA CONTINUES
http://news.yahoo.com/ireland-returns-2-blond-children-gypsy-parents-193730760.html Pavee Point, a Dublin-based support group for Gypsies, said the police were guilty of racial profiling and child abduction. The group's co-director, Martin Collins, said he feared that more children of Roma parents who are not dark-skinned and have brown eyes could be taken away, one after the other, for DNA test after DNA test. It's outrageous. It's despicable. On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 9:26 AM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: http://news.yahoo.com/ireland-returns-2-blond-children-gypsy-parents-193730760.html -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx's theory of human nature
STRUCTURE AND INDIVIDUAL. What is often called Althusser's anti-humanist position expresses his false, anti-dialectical view of the relationship between the structure and the individual. It's not as simple as that. First, I don't think it's useful to say this or that position or theory is FALSE. Second, Althusser's positions changed and became more nuanced over the years. Third, he maintained a relationship with the French CP and some of what he wrote reflects this and his relations with them. Fourth, Althusser is now dismissed as a wife killer and as a crank who even said near the end of his life that what he had done in his career is nonsense, but this just reflects his then-deteriorated 'state of mind'. Fifth, I think if you track Althusser's positions on the 'subject', you will find his position very well nuanced and not so easily dismissed. For example, the concept of 'interpellation' which helps to differentiate his positions from Foucault. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx's theory of human nature
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation_%28philosophy%29 On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 9:39 AM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: STRUCTURE AND INDIVIDUAL. What is often called Althusser's anti-humanist position expresses his false, anti-dialectical view of the relationship between the structure and the individual. It's not as simple as that. First, I don't think it's useful to say this or that position or theory is FALSE. Second, Althusser's positions changed and became more nuanced over the years. Third, he maintained a relationship with the French CP and some of what he wrote reflects this and his relations with them. Fourth, Althusser is now dismissed as a wife killer and as a crank who even said near the end of his life that what he had done in his career is nonsense, but this just reflects his then-deteriorated 'state of mind'. Fifth, I think if you track Althusser's positions on the 'subject', you will find his position very well nuanced and not so easily dismissed. For example, the concept of 'interpellation' which helps to differentiate his positions from Foucault. CJ -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx's theory of human nature
*Interpellation* is a concept in Marxisthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxismsocial and political theory associated in particular with the work of the philosopher Louis Althusser http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser. Althusser used the term interpellation (see Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (Verson: 1970), p.11) to describe the process by which ideologyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology#Ideology_as_an_instrument_of_social_reproduction, embodied in major social and political institutions, constitutes the nature of individual subjects'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_%28philosophy%29identities through the very process of institutions and discourses of 'hailing' them in social interactions. Althusser thus goes against the classical definition of the subject as cause and substancehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_theory: emphasizing instead how the situation always precedes the (individual or collective) subject, which precisely as subject is always-already interpellated. Individual subjects are presented principally as produced by social forces, rather than acting as powerful independent agents with self-produced identities. Althusser's argument here strongly draws from Jacques Lacan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Lacan's concept of the mirror stage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_stage. Althusser's concept has been roundly confused over the last decades with concepts and thinking associated with Michel Foucaulthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault, in part because both thinkers manifest an antihumanisthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antihumanistinsistence on the secondary status of the subject as mere effect of social relations and not vice versa. Another source of this confusion, as elaborated in an article by Keith Sawyer (2002) is the shared use of the word but different concepts of discourse. Interpellation, Althusser's idea based on Lacan, specifically involves the moment and process of recognition of interaction with the ideology at hand. Foucault eschews the notion of ideology and his quasi-structuralist analytics are quite antithetical to Lacanian notions of the Real http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real, the Symbolic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Symbolic, and the Imaginaryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imaginary_%28psychoanalysis%29 . On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 9:47 AM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpellation_%28philosophy%29 On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 9:39 AM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: STRUCTURE AND INDIVIDUAL. What is often called Althusser's anti-humanist position expresses his false, anti-dialectical view of the relationship between the structure and the individual. It's not as simple as that. First, I don't think it's useful to say this or that position or theory is FALSE. Second, Althusser's positions changed and became more nuanced over the years. Third, he maintained a relationship with the French CP and some of what he wrote reflects this and his relations with them. Fourth, Althusser is now dismissed as a wife killer and as a crank who even said near the end of his life that what he had done in his career is nonsense, but this just reflects his then-deteriorated 'state of mind'. Fifth, I think if you track Althusser's positions on the 'subject', you will find his position very well nuanced and not so easily dismissed. For example, the concept of 'interpellation' which helps to differentiate his positions from Foucault. CJ -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Marx's theory of human nature
Isn't Geras' book is basically an argument against Althusser's reading of Marx on 'human nature'. I would imagine Gramsci's 'theory' too. Geras, if I remember, was NLR and SR, and also backed the US' invasion, occupation and rape of Iraq. From the Stanford EP entry on Althusser: As Althusser understands them, whatever conceptions we have of the nature of human beings or about the proper function of the state are historically generated and serve to reproduce existing social relations. In other words, they are ideological. Apart from the necessity of human beings to engage in productive relations with other human beings and with their environment in order to produce their means of subsistence, there is no human nature or essence. This is the core of Althusser's “anti-humanist” position. Further, though some order must exist in order to allow for the production and reproduction of social life, there is no essential or best form that this order must take. This is not to say that human beings do not conceive of or strive for the best order for social life or that they do not believe that they are essentially free or equal and deserving of rights. It also does not mean that all of our ideas are homogenous and that heterogeneous ideas about what is best cannot exist side by side in the same system without leading to conflict (though they sometimes do). However, the science of Historical Materialism has revealed the desire for such orders to be historically generated along with the ideas about human nature that justify them. This account of the ideological role of our conceptions of human nature and of the best political arrangement shows Althusser to differ little from interpretations of Marx which hold that political ideologies are the product of and serve existing economic relations. However, and as was detailed above, Althusser rejects the simple understanding of causality offered by this model in which economic practices order consciousness and our cultural practices. He also rejects the philosophy of history that often accompanies this model. This philosophy has it that certain economic practices not only generate corresponding cultural practices, but that there is a pattern to economic development in which each economic order inexorably leads to its own demise and replacement by a different economic system. In this understanding of history, feudalism must lead to capitalism and capitalism to socialism. Althusser, however, argues against the idea that history has a subject (such as the economy or human agency) and that history has a goal (such as communism or human freedom). History, for Althusser, is a process without a subject. There are patterns and orders to historical life and there is historical change. However, there is no necessity to any of these transformations and history does not necessarily progress. Transformations do occur. However, they do so only when the contradictions and levels of development inherent in a mode of production allow for such change. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Jacobin Mag Crap on American Empire
Wow, that last paragraph could have used an editor. Let's try again. First off, the support to rebuild Japan and Europe went largely in the form of loans. It also led to a lot of American interests having capital stakes in the re-industrialization of Japan and Germany. Finally, the plan was to aid recovery, so they would become large consumer markets for American goods and services. It also seemed to have the nice effect of helping capital in the US to negate stronger unionism in the US--hey, we have to compete with Germany, Japan, etc. On Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 4:15 PM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: Henwood on Leo and Sam on oil. http://jacobinmag.com/2013/09/the-decline-of-the-american-empire/ And the ability of the U.S. planning elite to transcend immediate national interests to promote the health of the global system has been extremely impressive. Just to pick one example of something I found profoundly clarifying, I never really understood U.S. strategy around Middle Eastern oil. Noam Chomsky likes to quote a 1940s planning document on what a strategic prize control of that oil is, but once the producing countries nationalized that oil in the 1970s, it didn’t seem like the U.S. derived any great economic or strategic advantage from its influence and power in the region. After all, we produce far more hydrocarbons domestically than most of the second tier countries, and our immediate neighbors produce plenty as well. Leo and Sam offer a much more satisfying explanation: the U.S. interest is in the free flow of oil for the health of the global system. I would suspect since the first Persian Gulf War, NOT! Especially since Bushwar the younger. What did the destruction and occupation and further destruction of Iraq achieve, but, in effect, the sequestration of Iraqi oil? And what has it done in Libya but more of the same? Or the recent conflict with Syria, which is a key location for three major oil and gas flows via pipeline networks: 1. from Caspian basin around Russian interests, 2. from the Gulf states and Iraq to the rest of W. Asia and there to Europe, and 3. from W. Asia (tied in with Caspian) to populous S. Asia. Also, if the US cared so much about the free flow of oil and gas for the health of the global system, why would they work so hard to keep Japan and Europe from buying Iranian? I mean literally they get on the phone and say, you will not buy Iranian oil and gas, no matter how much you need it. Hey, by the way, GE here wants to sell you some more nuclear reactor designs. How is that going by the way? You have better PR. Great good to hear. Rather, what we see now is how the US's energy policies have locked the country into very expensive oil and gas (in part to fund expensive recovery of oil and gas from closer to home, e.g. Gulf of Mexico in very deep waters and even deeper into the ground, or 'oil' from shale and tar sands, and gas from 'fracking' efforts). And what we also see is the 'Left' not using its head in understanding any of this. And then there is Europe. About which DH writes: And then there was support for the rebuilding of Japan and Europe after World War II—and in more recent decades, the encouragement of European unification. Narrow self-interest would have viewed these actions as the nurturing of potential competitors to U.S. business—and it’s turned out that way, they are. But again, the health of the global system demanded it, and the planners rose to the occasion. And I would have say, again, not really. Europe was encouraged to unify in opposition to the Soviet Union. But the US national security inner sanctum wants nothing but the destruction of the EU. They want Europe unified under NATO--and they have enough stooges around like Sarkozy and Merkel to make a serious effort to get it. First off the support to rebuild Japan and Europe went large in the form of loans. It also led to a lot of American interests having capital stakes in the re-industrialization of Japan and Germany. Finally, the plan was to aid recovery so they would become large consumer products for American goods and services. It also seemed to have a nice effect of helping capital to negate stronger unionism in the US--hey, we have to compete with German, Japan, etc. Is Jacobin mag that desperate for content that they need to re-publish this dreck (apparently without even editing it -- or even reading it)? CJ -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Latest from Rosa Lichtenstein
Is there anything worse than the combination of Wittgenstein and Trotskyism? CB posting on apple pie and Chrysler? I remember at grad school reading and discussing W--he was very popular back in the early to mid 80s. None of us saw him particularly as a conservative mystic (I think they all viewed Heidegger as that), but I noticed how some conservative religious types liked him. His strongest intellectual links with European traditions probably go back to Brentano. At some points in his life, he was probably an auto-didact on topics and works in philosophy and psychology. I was never quite clear what the heck P.I. actually was, since so many of the 'aphorisms' were presented without any context. He might have been an interesting lecturer, but presenting P.I. as a sort of anti-Tractatus was a mistake--I think most attributable to his students? CJ / ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] The chemical mysteries of El Al Flight 1862
From the Wiki entry on this 1992 plane crash in the Netherlands: Soon after the disaster it was announced that the El Al Boeing 747 had contained fruit, perfumes, and computer components. Dutch Minister Hanja Maij-Weggen asserted that she was certain that the plane contained no military cargo. In September 1993, the media reported that the El Al Boeing contained dangerous cargo. Some portion of the cargo proved to be Israelihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israelnational defense materials. [*citation needed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed*]It was also reported [*who? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_words*] that a third of the cargo had not been physically inspected and that the cargo listings had not been checked.[*citation neededhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed *] The survivors' health complaints following the crash increased the number of questions about the cargo. In 1998 it was publicly revealed by El-Al spokesman Nachman Klieman that 190 liters of dimethyl methylphosphonatehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_methylphosphonate, a CWC schedule 2 chemicalhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Schedule_2_substances_%28CWC%29which, among many other uses, can be used for the synthesis of Sarin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin nerve gas, had been included in the cargo. Israel stated that the material was non-toxic, was to have been used to test filters that protect against chemical weapons, and that it had been clearly listed on the cargo manifest in accordance with international regulations. The Dutch foreign ministry confirmed that it had already known about the presence of chemicals on the plane. The shipment was from a U.S. chemical plant to the Israel Institute for Biological Researchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Institute_for_Biological_Researchunder a U.S. Department of Commercehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Commercelicense. [13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862#cite_note-13[14]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862#cite_note-14 [15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862#cite_note-15 ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The chemical mysteries of El Al Flight 1862
It's interesting how back in April-May, it was Israel and the IDF that was among the first to level the charge that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons--only that time, the UN report seemed to conclude that it was the rebels who had used it. More on Israel's efforts to get its chemical arsenal up to western powers' standards. The Aum Shinrikyo attacks in Tokyo, by the way, show it's possible to make crude forms of sarin to kill people, but their impure sarin wasn't anywhere near as lethal as purified, weaponized forms. And it takes some real chemical engineering to make stable precursors with long shelf-life. http://articles.philly.com/1998-10-03/news/25760687_1_dmmp-sarin-el-al http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/16232 excerpt: The most shocking revelation so far was made on September 30, when editors Harm van den Berg and Karel Knip of the prestigious Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad provided their readers with incontrovertible documentation that LY1862 was transporting three of the four components required for the manufacture of Sarin nerve gas. Sarin, a highly lethal chemical weapon outlawed by international convention, is last known to have been used in the March 1995 Tokyo subway attack, in which several grams of the gas killed 12 commuters and injured more than 5000. According to freight documents uncovered by NRC Handelsblad, LY1862 was carrying 10 18.9-litre plastic drums of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), and smaller amounts of the Sarin precursors isopropanol and hydrogen fluoride (no revelations have been made regarding the remaining precursor, thionylchloride). The 189 litres of DMMP, sufficient for the production of 270 kg of Sarin, had been supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals of Morristown, Pennsylvania, in the US, also Israel's supplier of the lethal CS and CN gases, which have been used by its military and police forces to kill dozens of Palestinians (including many infants) in the occupied territories during the past decade. (Specialty gases and security-related products are just a few of the goodies advertised on the company's web site, http://www.solkatronic.com.) Although DMMP is subject to stringent export controls by the US government, John Swanciger, executive vice-president of Solkatronic, confirmed that his firm applied for and received the required Department of Commerce export licences. He added that this was the case not once, but twice: after the initial consignment was scattered all over Bijlmermeer, and despite a subsequent tightening of US export regulations, Solkatronic was allowed to replenish Israel's chemical arsenal with an identical second shipment. Swanciger also stated that Israel is the only foreign country to have ordered DMMP from his firm. - See more at: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/16232#sthash.CHz7FtXU.dpuf On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 10:13 AM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: From the Wiki entry on this 1992 plane crash in the Netherlands: Soon after the disaster it was announced that the El Al Boeing 747 had contained fruit, perfumes, and computer components. Dutch Minister Hanja Maij-Weggen asserted that she was certain that the plane contained no military cargo. In September 1993, the media reported that the El Al Boeing contained dangerous cargo. Some portion of the cargo proved to be Israelihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israelnational defense materials. [*citation needed http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed *] It was also reported[*who?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoid_weasel_words *] that a third of the cargo had not been physically inspected and that the cargo listings had not been checked.[*citation neededhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed *] The survivors' health complaints following the crash increased the number of questions about the cargo. In 1998 it was publicly revealed by El-Al spokesman Nachman Klieman that 190 liters of dimethyl methylphosphonatehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_methylphosphonate, a CWC schedule 2 chemicalhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Schedule_2_substances_%28CWC%29which, among many other uses, can be used for the synthesis of Sarin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin nerve gas, had been included in the cargo. Israel stated that the material was non-toxic, was to have been used to test filters that protect against chemical weapons, and that it had been clearly listed on the cargo manifest in accordance with international regulations. The Dutch foreign ministry confirmed that it had already known about the presence of chemicals on the plane. The shipment was from a U.S. chemical plant to the Israel Institute for Biological Researchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Institute_for_Biological_Researchunder a U.S. Department of Commercehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Commercelicense. [13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862#cite_note-13[14]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Assad Must Go - By Yacov Ben Efrat
The YBE piece is as usual quite confused. First, we don't know who actually used these crude chemical weapons. One alternate theory is that the 'rebels' had a stockpile of sarin that got hit by mortars or artillery and blew up. Another alternate theory is simply the US/CIA/Saudi Arabia/some other covert monied element paid rogue elements in the Syrian forces to do it. I find the last theory the most plausible because that is why Syria is in a civil war in the first place. The US and Saudi Arabia (and Arab Gulf States) have been buying off the less-loyal elements of the Baathist state in Syria--just as they did to undermine Saddam long before they attacked and occupied Iraq. Israel can not be a neutral party in this because it gets much--if not most--of its freshwater from occupied Golan. And the discussion on Marxmail have been for the most part nothing but pure shit. They ought to be ashamed of themselves, but they never are, are they? CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] WHY SYRIA?
Wow does Proyect have his ugly head very far up his ugly ass. The war against Assad is very much about who will in the future control and hook into the oil and gas pipeline networks of W Asia. It's interesting how Syria is like a 'keystone' for (1) a network that would take Gulf and Iraqi oil and gas to Turkey and Europe, but also for (2) a network that would take ME oil and gas to S. and E. Asia (well actually it in that case it is the starting point), as well as (3) a network that would circumvent Russia and take Caspian oil and gas to W. Asia and Europe. And Syria would be one possibility for where ALL OF THESE could inter-connect and be administered for huge profits. There was Syria poised to become a major player in all that, a country that had good relations with Turkey, the Gulf Arabs and Iran, and now it lies in ruins. The main dispute/falling out (remember Syria cooperated in the 'war on terror' and the CIA's terrorist rendition programs) is over when and how Iran would be included in the networks, with Syria wanting Iran in on them from the start, with US allies like Saudi Arabia wanting Iran excluded until 'regime change'. There is also a lot of competition between Turkey and Syria (former allies now enemies) over who would control and host the administration of the networks and terminuses. The other aspect that makes Syria such a contentious territory now is that the Golan provides over 50% of Israel's freshwater (with an aquifer in Jordan providing much of the rest). Assertion of Russian interests on an elevated diplomatic stage (e.g., UN) could be explained by (1) Syria has been a weapons customer of Russia and (2) Russian interests took stakes in pipeline ventures in Syria (trying to circumvent attempts to circumvent Russian interests with investment stakes). However, Russian oil and gas interests will mostly benefit from the destruction of Syria (mostly accomplished) because it eliminates Gulf and Iraqi competition to Europe. Check out the virtual monopoly Russia has got now in energy to Europe. So Putin will cry his crocodile tears with the Assad regime being destroyed. Which brings up an interesting point about what US 'interests' are as identified in the inner circles of the national security state. It seems quite possible that US interests want the destruction of Syria and are actually hostile to the ME pipeline networks supplying Europe and/or Asia. Why? Because right now the US political economy is locked into expensive fossil fuels with high extraction costs (Gulf of Mexico deepwater, oil shale, tar sands, etc.)--as is the UK (North Sea deepwater). Would the puppetmasters of the world really want Europe or Asia to have a competitive advantage in energy costs? I doubt it. Current US military and 'national security' policy--with its massive destruction, slowing of development, civil wars, occupations, etc.-- in effect sequesters Iraqi oil and gas and also Caspian oil and gas, keeping fossil fuels priced high worldwide. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] WHY SYRIA?
If we track the same policies on the other side of Iran, we see the same stalemates in S. Asia. US/NATO puppet-occupied Afghanistan can not host pipelines from the Caspian Basin because of the ongoing war, while the US pays and arms one faction of Pakistan's ruling elite to keep the country from tying up with Iran for oil and gas from there. So yes, Syria is supposed to become another Pakistan, if not another Iraq. http://www.geo.tv/article-85668-US-has-reservations-over-Pak-Iran-pipeline-Olson- On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 1:51 PM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: Wow does Proyect have his ugly head very far up his ugly ass. The war against Assad is very much about who will in the future control and hook into the oil and gas pipeline networks of W Asia. It's interesting how Syria is like a 'keystone' for (1) a network that would take Gulf and Iraqi oil and gas to Turkey and Europe, but also for (2) a network that would take ME oil and gas to S. and E. Asia (well actually it in that case it is the starting point), as well as (3) a network that would circumvent Russia and take Caspian oil and gas to W. Asia and Europe. And Syria would be one possibility for where ALL OF THESE could inter-connect and be administered for huge profits. There was Syria poised to become a major player in all that, a country that had good relations with Turkey, the Gulf Arabs and Iran, and now it lies in ruins. The main dispute/falling out (remember Syria cooperated in the 'war on terror' and the CIA's terrorist rendition programs) is over when and how Iran would be included in the networks, with Syria wanting Iran in on them from the start, with US allies like Saudi Arabia wanting Iran excluded until 'regime change'. There is also a lot of competition between Turkey and Syria (former allies now enemies) over who would control and host the administration of the networks and terminuses. The other aspect that makes Syria such a contentious territory now is that the Golan provides over 50% of Israel's freshwater (with an aquifer in Jordan providing much of the rest). Assertion of Russian interests on an elevated diplomatic stage (e.g., UN) could be explained by (1) Syria has been a weapons customer of Russia and (2) Russian interests took stakes in pipeline ventures in Syria (trying to circumvent attempts to circumvent Russian interests with investment stakes). However, Russian oil and gas interests will mostly benefit from the destruction of Syria (mostly accomplished) because it eliminates Gulf and Iraqi competition to Europe. Check out the virtual monopoly Russia has got now in energy to Europe. So Putin will cry his crocodile tears with the Assad regime being destroyed. Which brings up an interesting point about what US 'interests' are as identified in the inner circles of the national security state. It seems quite possible that US interests want the destruction of Syria and are actually hostile to the ME pipeline networks supplying Europe and/or Asia. Why? Because right now the US political economy is locked into expensive fossil fuels with high extraction costs (Gulf of Mexico deepwater, oil shale, tar sands, etc.)--as is the UK (North Sea deepwater). Would the puppetmasters of the world really want Europe or Asia to have a competitive advantage in energy costs? I doubt it. Current US military and 'national security' policy--with its massive destruction, slowing of development, civil wars, occupations, etc.-- in effect sequesters Iraqi oil and gas and also Caspian oil and gas, keeping fossil fuels priced high worldwide. -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] UPDATE ON FUKUSHIMA
I wrote up a summary of what is going on and put it up at my Japan Higher Ed blog. http://japanheo.blogspot.jp/2013/08/a-summary-of-what-is-going-on-at.html Excerpt: A lot of alarming reports and comments are appearing in the western media about the situation at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactors in NE Japan. They largely echo what has been appearing in the media here in Japan. Are things getting so out of control that they will affect the health and well-being of not only the Japanese but other Pacific Rim nations, including the west coast of the United States? Is the escaping contamination from Fukushima going to turn off sushi eaters in the US? (Elevated levels of cesium have been reported in tuna as far away as California). Let's try to untangle the contamination and leak issues that have been in the news a lot recently. What are the sources of the reported leaks? ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] UP THE SYRIAN REVOLUTION, HERE COME THE DOLLAR BOMBERS!
Seriously is there anyway to get someone to pull the plug on Unrepentant Fucktard , Louis Proyect? CB, how about you engage him in discussions of the Egyptian Revolution and the Egyptian military's vital role in it? He can reply how his Turkish Delight of a wife anoints him in aromatic oils every night, so he can return to the fight the next day. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Fukushima warming is faster than global warming
Gotta love it. IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD! So let's join a lawsuit. Might be nice if they sued GE and the US government for forcing those shitty Mark I reactors on Japan too. So we could all do a little jig at the end of the world. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Remarkably insightful review of Atlas Shrugged by Whittaker Chambers
However, robots don't buy cars ,or take out mortgages. One could assume that in the universe of Capek's R.U.R., they did do just that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossums_Universal_Robots ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] American history is full of successful socialist institutions
Don't really know what it means to call them SOCIALIST institutions. Socialism depends on socializing--spreading--the costs across the entire society so the entire society can enjoy the benefits, without being beholden to stock-holding interests (or anything that acts like that). The PO is still largely run as a money-making enterprise in a capitalist economy. What is harder to get people to agree on is what is capitalism when it comes down to a bunch of cartels and privileged players paying for crony politics for their government handouts and rigged markets. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] From the WSJ: Crackdown in Egypt Fans U.S. Fears
CB: Sounds like an Egyptian Chavez or Fidel Sounds like you are full of shit, as usual. http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/16/rseg-j16.html excerpt: Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists support US-backed military coup By Johannes Stern 16 July 2013 As the army tightens its grip on Egypt, the reactionary implications of the July 3 coup are becoming ever more apparent. Pseudo-left groups who backed the coup—Egypt’s Revolutionary Socialists (RS) and their co-thinkers, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the US and Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP)—stand exposed as counterrevolutionary organizations. They are responding by trying to cover up their complicity in the army’s moves to re-establish the political structures that existed before the overthrow of the Mubarak dictatorship, and by seeking to deny the obvious reality that a coup has taken place. Early last week, the Egyptian military massacred at least 51 protesters in Cairo, wounding hundreds. Hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) members have been arrested, including President Mohamed Mursi. The army junta, led by General Abdel-Fatah Khalil al-Sisi, is cobbling together a new government to enforce austerity policies demanded by international finance capital even more ruthlessly than Mubarak and Mursi before it. The WSWS needs your support! The new government will largely consist of generals, ex-Mubarak regime officials, bankers and free market economists who aggressively advocate repression against their political opponents. They will impose the conditions demanded for a new loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The loan will lead to cuts to bread and fuel subsidies on which millions of impoverished workers and peasants depend. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives
Don't worry though, Pres. Bushwars Obomber hears their cries and feels their pain. YES WE CAN. http://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-signs-declining-economic-security-195030441.html excerpt: WASHINGTON (AP) -- Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream. Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend. The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to rebuild ladders of opportunity and reverse income inequality. As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused — on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race. Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy poor. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Long live the Egyptian Revolution !
Don't worry, Pres. Obomber is going to meet him at the barricades and make him a life-long Demoncrap. I guess this means CB now supports the US-backed coup against Morsi as furthering the people's revolution in the US. Hey I'd be worried CB, that kid makes more sense than you do most of the time. Now if he could only get someone to pay for his law school. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Long live the Egyptian Revolution !
I have to think all those articles I was reading about Morsi calling for a 'no-fly zone' in Syria were actually signals that he was no longer in control of the Egyptian government. Go back to March, about the time he lost control (when he went overseas): http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/03/19/294377/egypt-calls-for-end-to-syria-crisis/ So Morsi's sins deserving US-backed ouster: 1. He backed a peace process outside of the US's agenda in Syria. 2. He pursued an agenda for Gaza that pissed off Israel. Long-live the CIA-sponsored revolutions! CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Long live the Egyptian Revolution !
Of course it could be read as a last-ditch attempt to avoid ouster--toeing the line on Syria as set down by the US, which supplies the Egyptian military and provides food aid. Morsi was, after all, a politician. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 117, Issue 9
Urgent Call from Planet Krypton and also the Green Lantern Corps CB, WAKE THE FUCK UP. Pres. Bushwars Obomber is a fucking reactionary. A CIA-sponsored political piece of reactionary shit. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Another day, another libertarian defense of the Confederacy.
Those two are 'colleagues' at the Southern Partisan. Neither are primarily historians. That being said, there is enough interesting thinking there to engage serious discussion. By the time of the Civil War the US had a number of armed camps capable of the utmost brutality, not limited to the US Army. I think one reason why the Southern armies were good at fighting and killing was the South was an armed camp of militias created to put down slave insurrections and to wipe out the Native Americans on the expanding western region. And I don't think it's a coincidence that at least in the first part of the war, the North often found its best fighting units were from the northwest--'Indian killers' (such as Hancock throwing his 'elite' Minnesotans right at the Confederate forces in Gettysburg, resulting in 87% casualties but helped save the day at Gettysburg). There were also the well-armed Mormons, who were mostly not anti-Slavery but were white racist Northerners, and who fought a war against the federal forces before the Civil War. You could argue that they probably felt that they didn't need Southern-style slavery, since their custom was to have huge polygamous families and to use the children as slaves. And the North and the South were already going at it in Missouri and Kansas before the Civil War started (a conflict that actually overlaps with the Civil War). What neither side realized or at least wanted to realize was just how many of each other they could kill if they turned all that lethality on each other. Both sides quickly depleted their ranks, so they had to use propaganda and ideological appeals to get men to enlist and fight on their sides. Often what we are stuck with in this post-mo era is really our own anachronistic understanding/misunderstanding of positions largely created AFTER THE WAR in order to justify such a waste of human life. Perhaps the troops with the clearest motivation (although their history has been suppressed, as has the larger history of the freed slaves in the North-occupied South as the war went on), were the black troops, while the motivation of white troops probably more relied on the inherent 'fascism' of military life, which drowns out any thought but the soldier's loyalty to the other troops around him or fear of being exposed as a coward. One thing that made the Reconstruction so bitter was how the North had moved into 'total war' in order to defeat the South. But that was because once the South mastered defensive warfare, it was near impossible to defeat them without going after their civilian means to supply and support the war. And the South mastered defensive war from the very beginning, waiting for the Union army to bring it to them (which resulted in the huge Union losses in the first two years of the war). You would like to think that the world would have learned something from the Civil War--how it largely predicted the bloodbath and technological stalemate of WW I. I do think it made Americans more reluctant to get into large-scale wars (not that they wouldn't go after sure landgrabs like the Spanish-American War). CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The NSA Can Read This E-Mail, Unfortunately
We knew for years the NSA was set up to hack the internet. One of their hacking centers--set up to monitor all of E. Asia--is in NZ. CIA agents? Who are they? If you want high-ups, try US ambassadors, the guys who run the Chamber of Commerce, the Peace Corps, 'American University' campuses. I would even bet they use the Mormons. BTW, FUCK THE NSA too. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] : The Turkish spring is shuffling the deck
FUCK ERDOGAN TOO, while I'm at it. He thinks he is above the law and that he can use the institutions and practices of 'liberal democracy' to create perpetual absolute rule. He may be right, but I doubt it will work in a NATO puppet like Turkey, which finds its strongest 'ally' outside NATO in the form of Israel. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Do we say white people can't run Wall Street ?
Ditto Birmingham or Harrisburg and how many other concocted municipal fiscal crises around the country now? One of the longest-running jokes in American politics is how the mostly white powerful of DC hate or treat with contempt the people who run the city. And Harrisburg is the capital of PA, and I think it is a black majority town, with all the money in the suburbs (and PA and its screwy corrupt township system). CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Israel prepares for major land grab in Golan
The propaganda machine is really covering all bases. One story is about the need to deal with anti-Assad jihadists. The other one is a story about how--wait for it--since Assad can't defend Damascus, he is going to open up a front against Israel in the Golan. Ha ha. Israel really wants the water badly now. The scary thing is how the pod people out there will believe these stories. Including leftwing fucktards like Louis Proyect. Looks like Israel is getting ready to make a major grab for more of the Golan--its single most important source of fresh water. See: http://news.yahoo.com/palestinian-syrian-group-says-forming-units-fight-golan-102532395.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/07/syria-golan-heights-security ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] We are all Keynesians again; Republicans know austerity will harm GDP; that's what they want to do.
I'm not familiar with the discussion at MR, but if you are talking about the US (as if it were the center of the world): The Republican party has various elements, but its leadership is, like the Democratic Party, obsessed with how to keep the US at the top, center, in control of, etc. the post-war 'system'. Much of that is predicated upon having dominant military force. So both parties are caught up in trying to keep defense and security spending at well over a trillion dollars per year. There is some real controversy at the top on how to do that. For example: -Obama and his faction at the CIA are dead set on going after offshore wealth to boost federal tax revenues. But many in the Democratic Party and all in the Republican Party (as far as I can tell) are against this. However, the consensus seems to be that if they take fiscal and monetary measures to boost the stock markets while keeping the bond markets topped up, they (both parties) can finance the national security state. Since that is their main concern in terms of domestic politics (their foreign policy concern is how to maintain, exercise and expand world dominance), there is very little room to deal with social and economic issues as it impacts their domestic population. I suspect that they will stick with the previous policies of 'a war on crime', lots of people in courts and prisons. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] We are all Keynesians again; Republicans know austerity will harm GDP; that's what they want to do.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/obama-propose-entitlement-cuts-budget-145414887.html Obama's budget will include lowered cost of living adjustments in various benefit programs, including the key chained CPI adjustment that would have a significant effect on the growth of Social Security. But by opening up to entitlement cuts, Obama is providing House Speaker John Boehner and Republicans with an opportunity. As Slate's Matt Yglesias wrote Friday morning, Republicans can argue that since they and Obama agree on certain entitlement cuts, why not just get them out of the way now? Then, they can solve the tax issue — on which both sides fundamentally disagree — later in the debate. http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-proposes-to-cap-amount-in-iras-2013-4 Under current rules, some wealthy individuals are able to accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving. The budget would limit an individual’s total balance across tax-preferred accounts to an amount sufficient to finance an annuity of not more than $205,000 per year in retirement, or about $3 million in 2013. This proposal would raise $9 billion over 10 years http://current.com/1e6gnkc Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280bn in lost income tax revenues, according to research published on Sunday. The study estimating the extent of global private financial wealth held in offshore accounts - excluding non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts and racehorses - puts the sum at between $21 and $32 trillion. What's shocking is that some of the world's biggest banks are up to their eyeballs in helping their clients evade taxes and shift their wealth offshore. - John Christensen, the Tax Justice Network This amounts to roughly the US and Japanese GDP combined. Roughly 10 million people worldwide have offshore accounts, with 100,000 people owning half of those secreted assets. -- I think, though, it is only the US federal government that claims the extra-territorial right to tax the offshore money now. The Democrats and Republicans will at the top level will try to cut the top corporate tax rate in the US in order to get some of that money to 'come home'. When that fails, Obama and his faction in the CIA will push for going after the offshore wealth in order to tax it. This is not to pursue some ambitious social agenda or boost social spending. It's to pay for the military and security apparatuses of the federal government. CJ On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 10:14 AM, CeJ jann...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not familiar with the discussion at MR, but if you are talking about the US (as if it were the center of the world): The Republican party has various elements, but its leadership is, like the Democratic Party, obsessed with how to keep the US at the top, center, in control of, etc. the post-war 'system'. Much of that is predicated upon having dominant military force. So both parties are caught up in trying to keep defense and security spending at well over a trillion dollars per year. There is some real controversy at the top on how to do that. For example: -Obama and his faction at the CIA are dead set on going after offshore wealth to boost federal tax revenues. But many in the Democratic Party and all in the Republican Party (as far as I can tell) are against this. However, the consensus seems to be that if they take fiscal and monetary measures to boost the stock markets while keeping the bond markets topped up, they (both parties) can finance the national security state. Since that is their main concern in terms of domestic politics (their foreign policy concern is how to maintain, exercise and expand world dominance), there is very little room to deal with social and economic issues as it impacts their domestic population. I suspect that they will stick with the previous policies of 'a war on crime', lots of people in courts and prisons. CJ -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right.
What's interesting about this is it's in Time magazine (or at least its online manifestation). Current US capitalism has determined that Time magazine is a worthless piece of shit. Seriously, no one wants it, not even Obomber's choon gang at the CIA. It used to be they wanted one of their guys to be editor. CJ On ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] What do so few people actually work in the US?
Then, of the 130 million or so who do work (I think that is counting those with part-time jobs), something like 30 million have government jobs--including all levels of government, such as the numerous and employee-heavy education and emergency services sectors. If you start counting universities and colleges who are most functioning because of public subsidies, then the numbers go up. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] What do so few people actually work in the US?
The counts of how many people work for a form of government in the US ranges from 20 million to 40 million. This site claims 40 million. http://www.prepareandprosper.net/how-many-americans-work-in-government-would-you-believe-40-million/ I split the difference and said 30 million. The whole area of 'federal contractors' which expanded under Clinton, and then Bush and then Obama, is hard to count. I have lived in some areas of the US where the best jobs--if you could get them--were working for state and local governments (including school districts). Other people who had 'prosperous' lifestyles in those areas actually commuted 70 miles one way to work those jobs (and even then, a lot of those were government jobs because they commuted to DC or Harrisburg, PA, or Annapolis, another, state capitals, as well as part of areas with large military installations). CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama defeats the Israel Lobby
The Bushwa had a peace plan too. Why should we think the Obomber's is anymore a peace plan than the Bushwa's? AIPAC latched onto the Republican Party as the one preferred at the federal level, but what the Obomber obviously represents is that the Democrats are now the preferred party of the national security establishment. Meanwhile, the Republican Party continues to make inroads as being the Party of America--with 25 states in which they have both the governorships and the legislatures. And those guys are going to cut state income taxes and raise sales tax on everything. Also, it isn't so much that AIPAC hates Hagel. It's that they are trying to advance their own people and can't figure out how to do that under the Obomber. They need better intelligence on what is going on at the CIA, NSA, DIA and DoD. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama defeats the Israel Lobby
Now about the so-called libertarian conservative Republican Chuckie Hagel (who voted for the Iraq War but broke with his buddy McCain on the war by 2007). One of his biggest opponents so far is Chuckie Schumer, one of the top DC Democrats. What does all this mean? It might mean that the Obomber will find it easier to work with Republicans like Rand Paul than many of the top guys in his own party if he really wants to stop spending 1.5 trillion a year on 'national security', clean up the national security state bureaucracy, etc. But these things are not easily managed for 'efficiency'. The first time after Reagan (who was only about increasing the spending) there was a serious effort to 'get things under control' and restructure the national security state it was led by, of all people, Dick Cheney as Sec. of Defense under Poppy Bush. And then came the totally contrived security threat of Iraq. Then under Clinton people like Cohen and Clarke did attempt to take up the Cheney initiatives to restructure the hugely expensive national security state, but much of the perception was that US indecisiveness over Yugoslavia and the Balkan crises was due to a great part to the US's military being 'hollowed out'. Something old Chuckie Hagel and John McCain agreed on. Clinton then not only signed 'regime change' legislation targeting Iraq, he also greatly increased defense and intelligence spending his last two years in office (with the follow up that Gore then ran for president as a national security state expansionist, whiile the Bushwa promised a near-isolationist foreign policy and a kinder form of conservatism). Meanwhile, a former urban spy for the CIA and distinguished legal scholar on civil rights was getting ready to launch himself onto the national scene. All he needed to do was shed people like former Weathermen/CIA goofs and find the gravy train people like John Kerry were already on. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama defeats the Israel Lobby
The move into cellular, are we really supposed to believe that he did by selling his Buick? The second fortune he made in Hungary on cellular says one thing: a made man in the national security establishment from very early on. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/01/13/chuck-hagel-business-interests/1820335/ WASHINGTON — Chuck Hagel's worldview — under scrutiny by the Senate as he's considered for the next secretary of Defense — has been shaped as much by his career in business as by his time in uniform or in politics. Hagel founded a successful cellphone company when few had heard of the technology, has run investment banks and now advises Wall Street hedge funds and serves on the board of oil giant Chevron. He'll hate me for saying this, but he uses the word 'interconnected' more than anybody I know — and in a more informed way, probably, said Michael McCarthy, who tapped Hagel to run his Omaha investment company and later became his campaign treasurer. He sees the world as very interconnected and he sees humanity as dependent on one another in the most essential ways. Hagel's résumé arguably makes him just as qualified to be Treasury secretary. In addition to Foreign Relations and Intelligence, he served on the Senate Banking committee — and was the ranking Republican on the Financial Institutions subcommittee. After serving in Vietnam, Hagel worked on Capitol Hill, then became a lobbyist for the Firestone Tire Co. He served in the Veterans Administration under Ronald Reagan but left in disgust over plans to cut veterans services. He had a real interest in public life, but he also needed to make a living, said University of Nebraska journalism professor Charlyne Berens, author of Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward. He found some partners, sold his used Buick, cashed in a couple of insurance policies to raise $5,000 and created a cellular company in the infancy of that technology. Berens relates a story told by Hagel's wife: While at parties, Hagel struggled to explain this new technology before finally taking off his shoe and holding it to his ear like 1960s television spy Maxwell Smart. Before it was bought out by ATT in 1999, Vanguard Cellular was the largest independent, all-cellular company in the nation. With an eye toward running for office, Hagel moved back to Nebraska, and joined the McCarthy Group. There, he repeated his cellular success, building up a phone company in Hungary that later got bought by a German telecommunications giant. The guy has a unique combination. He has the mind of an actuary. He can be very very crisp when he evaluates risk, and he has the heart of an Irishman, McCarthy said. After trying do the analytics, and you know what the parameters are, you still use your instincts. Hagel left business for 12 years in the Senate. In his last year, 2008, Hagel disclosed a net worth of somewhere between $2.3 million to $10.9 million. The Senate Ethics Committee sometimes raised questions about Hagel's disclosures — specifically what kinds of investments he held in the McCarthy Group — but he was never accused of wrongdoing. A month after leaving the Senate in 2009, Hagel joined the board of Corsair Capital, a boutique Wall Street investment firm that holds ownership in financial institutions across the globe — including Argentina, Bermuda, Brazil, Germany, Korea, Poland and Sweden. Nicholas Paumgarten, a former J.P. Morgan Partner who founded Corsair and named it after Pierpont Morgan's yacht, declined to discuss Hagel's work for his firm. But in 2009, he boasted of being the first company to snag the recently retired senator for his board, and touted the connections Hagel would bring to the company. At the time, Hagel said he chose the company because it shared a similar worldview to mine. He also joined the board of Wolfensohn Company, a firm founded by James Wolfensohn. The two met when Wolfensohn was president of the World Bank and Hagel served on the Senate Banking Committee. Wolfensohn said Hagel's involvement was a good marriage, but the board has since quietly dissolved. Wolfensohn was one of 11 bipartisan political, business and military leaders that recently took out newspaper ads defending Hagel from criticism that he's anti-Israel. I am surprised personally that it should become a central issue, said Wolfensohn, who is Jewish. I don't believe that frankly the Israelis do everything right or the Palestinians do everything right. … Because you disagree on something, it doesn't make you anti-Arab or anti-Semitic, in my view. I have never ever sensed anything different in Chuck's views. Since 2010, Hagel has served on the board of Chevron Corp., which had $554 million in contracts with the federal government in 2011 — mostly with the Pentagon. His annual compensation is $301,199, and he owns 4,894 shares of Chevron stock, according to a disclosure last year. At Friday's stock price, those holdings are worth more than $540,000. Chevron did not
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama defeats the Israel Lobby
Now about the other appointment--Brennan for CIA. Not sure if he really has a political party, since his life is built around being CIA. But he is on record for wanting the CIA to get out of paramilitary operations (the current CIA is one of the largest and best-funded military forces in the world) and back into intelligence and analysis. This means, though, having the CIA infiltrate still further the State Dept. (as the Benghazi debacle shows--the dead ambassador was the CIA's no. 1 bagman in the region). I'm not really sure why anyone who was in the intelligence apparatus on 9-11 has any credibility whatsoever, but with any call for credibility also comes the need for accountability, and these guys are only accountable to themselves and some of their own. By choosing the very sort of guys a Republican might choose--or in choosing a Republican, in the case of Hegel--Obomber hopes to disarm the top Repugs in Congress (many facing Tea Party-like challenges in the next election). CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Why the New American Century is more and more a Republican one--if you live in the US
Shift to regressive sales taxes, with 25 states completely in control of the Republican Party. http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/U-Sstates-tax-changes/2013/01/13/id/471152?promo_code=10E8D-1utm_source=10E8DForeign_Policyutm_medium=nmwidgetutm_campaign=widgetphase1 ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] NO fascist Golden Dawn party presence in Chicago.
Why not, if the CIA-funded ACORN can have overseas offices? I wonder if like so many European right-wing groups they like to kiss Israel's butt? CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Chuck Hagel Defense: The Combustible Politics Of Obama's Clearest Break From Bush
Hagel seems to have expressed the same opinions as former-Bushie, Powell. Basically, not that covert and even overt regime change policies were wrong or counter-productive, but rather, a bilateral USuk invasion and occupation was ill-advised. In other words, like the current litmus test with Syria, so to speak, don't force a vote on NATO but if they agree to it behind the scenes, bombs away for the entire DC choon gang. And let's remember that Obomber, onced a member of Congress, never opposed the funding of the Iraq occupation. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Facebook meme Republican standing by Confederate flag asks
Wow, what a load of erroneous and anachronistic crap. For a start, Christianity was indeed a schism from Judaism, but so was Talmudic Rabbinical Judaism. Both became very important religions in Europe and W. Asia, in many ways CENTERED in Europe (Christianity through the Roman Empire, but Judaism by way of the Roman Empire and later colonization out of Persian realms). Perhaps the most remarkable thing about early Christianity was how it became so popular with the elite. I believe this was in part due to it being seen as a sort of Judaism that allowed one to convert to it and live stoically (so in that sense a Greco-Judaic hybrid)--a non-blood version of Judaism. However, Judaism's own parallel history of expansion through conversion and inter-marriage is somewhat obscured to us for various reasons, most of them having to do with our view of the way the religion is now as opposed to the way it was back then (but if we actually look at that religion now, we see it is once again in an expansionist phase based on conversion, inter-marriage and constant re-definition of what Jewish is, although not on a scale that rivals post-modern Christianity). CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] portrayal of all early humans as darkskinned; use of n-word
Basically the closer a population is to the tropics, the more likely they will have darker skin. The closer to the arctic, the more likely they will have lighter skin. REGARDLESS OF RACE OR ETHNICITY. Dark skin helps prevent early death from skin cancers and all sorts of other skin and eye problems from sun exposure. Light skin and eyes help with the making of Vit D even when there is very little sunlight, such as a northern winter. Take some non-negroid examples. Aborigine , dark skin. Peoples of S. India and Sri Lanka, dark skin. As for features like epicanthic folds associated with C. Asia and E. Asia (and Native Americans), they are also found among Africans in the south of the continent and among many Northern Europeans. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obamacare stirs up class struggle
Geez, what are you now CB, a DP shill? Oh wait, we already knew that, didn't we? Wait til the working classes figure out that Obamacare is just a big pay out to Big Pharma and for-profit health insurance firms (many arms of WS holding companies)--and a big pay out to Repugnican state governments as well. But then again, if a smartass lawyer like you can't figure that out, who will lead the masses? CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Aztec Philosophy
This sort of thing fascinated DH Lawrence when he was in Taos,NM and was incorporated into the novel The Plumed Serpent. That novel seems to collapse into a fascination with authoritarian politics (the sort needed to run a revolution, DH Lawrence felt) that some have even called fascism. But what I remember most about the novel is the heroine's sexual attraction to two very different type of men. One a dark European-blooded upper class revolutionary, and the other a dark mestizo who is described in stark contrast to the European one. The danger in the Aztec Philosophy sort of article at IEP (I was looking for entries on Mayan and Incan civilizations but found none by the way) include (1) the lack of real source material and (2) the imposition of what are basically American-Anglo-European constructs on that source material just to have a philosophical discussion for the IEP. For an interesting discussion of Lawrence's primitivism and fascism in the Plumed Serpent, see: http://castle.eiu.edu/~agora/Dec03/JSmithall.htm CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Now that there is this film about Lincoln, they ought to make a miniseries about Thaddeus Stevens
As a kid I used to play at the site of the ironworks ruins (the ironworks Gen. Early's troops had destroyed on their way to Gettsyburg). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaddeus_Stevens Radical Republicanism In July 1861 Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution stating the limited war aim of restoring the Union while preserving slavery; Stevens helped repeal it in December. In August 1861, he supported the Confiscation Act, which said owners would forfeit any slaves they allowed to help the Confederate war effort. By December he was the first congressional leader pushing for emancipation as a tool to weaken the rebellion. He called for total war on January 22, 1862: Let us not be deceived. Those who talk about peace in sixty days are shallow statesmen. The war will not end until the government shall more fully recognize the magnitude of the crisis; until they have discovered that this is an internecine war in which one party or the other must be reduced to hopeless feebleness and the power of further effort shall be utterly annihilated. It is a sad but true alternative. The South can never be reduced to that condition so long as the war is prosecuted on its present principles. The North with all its millions of people and its countless wealth can never conquer the South until a new mode of warfare is adopted. So long as these states are left the means of cultivating their fields through forced labor, you may expend the blood of thousands and billions of money year by year, without being any nearer the end, unless you reach it by your own submission and the ruin of the nation. Slavery gives the South a great advantage in time of war. They need not, and do not, withdraw a single hand from the cultivation of the soil. Every able-bodied white man can be spared for the army. The black man, without lifting a weapon, is the mainstay of the war. How, then, can the war be carried on so as to save the Union and constitutional liberty? Prejudices may be shocked, weak minds startled, weak nerves may tremble, but they must hear and adopt it. Universal emancipation must be proclaimed to all. Those who now furnish the means of war, but who are the natural enemies of slaveholders, must be made our allies. If the slaves no longer raised cotton and rice, tobacco and grain for the rebels, this war would cease in six months, even though the liberated slaves would not raise a hand against their masters. They would no longer produce the means by which they sustain the war.[20] Stevens led the Radical Republican faction in their battle against the bankers over the issuance of money during the Civil War. Stevens made various speeches in Congress in favor of President Lincoln and Henry Carey's Greenback system, interest-free currency in the form of fiat government-issued United States notes that would in effect threaten the bankers' profits in being able to issue and control the currency through fractional reserve loans. Stevens warned that a debt-based monetary system controlled by for-profit banks would lead to the eventual bankruptcy of the people, saying the Government and not the banks should have the benefit from creating the medium of exchange, yet after Lincoln's assassination the Radical Republicans lost this battle, and a National banking monopoly emerged in the years after. U.S. Reps. John A. Bingham and Thaddeus Stevens before the Senate addressing the impeachment vote on U.S. President Andrew Johnson. Stevens giving his closing remarks of the impeachment of President Johnson. Stevens was so outspoken in his condemnation of the Confederacy that Major General Jubal Early of the Army of Northern Virginia made a point of burning much of his iron business, at modern-day Caledonia State Park, to the ground during the Gettysburg Campaign. Early claimed that this action was in direct retaliation for Stevens's perceived support of similar atrocities by the Union Army in the South. Stevens was the leader of the Radical Republicans, who had full control of Congress after the 1866 elections. He largely set the course of Reconstruction. He wanted to begin to rebuild the South, using military power to force the South to recognize the equality of freedmen. When President Johnson resisted, Stevens proposed and passed the resolution for the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Stevens told W. W. Holden, the Republican governor of North Carolina, in December 1866, It would be best for the South to remain ten years longer under military rule, and that during this time we would have Territorial Governors, with Territorial Legislatures, and the government at Washington would pay our general expenses as territories, and educate our children, white and colored and both.[21] Death Stevens's grave in Lancaster Thaddeus Stevens died at midnight on August 11, 1868, in Washington, D.C., less than three months after the acquittal of Johnson by the Senate. Stevens's coffin lay in state inside the Capitol Rotunda, flanked by
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] . Redbaiting Obama didn't work
Such tactics don't keep Obama supporters from supporting Obama anyway. The Repugs mistake: a Mormon candidate who was one thing during the primaries, another during the presidential campaign. Fundies and evangelicals had no enthusiasm for Romney. This is why a Christie candidacy will fail too--they hate Catholics as much as they do Mormons. As I said before, what always impressed me about Obama was the image--I mean the visual image--he projects. It's that of a Black Muslim or a former CIA analyst. More and more, I'm betting the latter is pretty close to the truth. He has been sponsored by such elements in the national security state to keep the national security state intact, with the hope that LA and places won't burn this time around because the prez is black. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] How to fix the U.S. economy
On the Lilly-gilded Boorish Oaf (LBO) list, CB writes, in part: Here it is in a nutshell; Marx literally says One capitalist always kills many. This is done in a big way in crashes, Depressions. On the contrary, I am very specifically saying that capitalists do _not_uniformly benefit from crises and that many_are_ brought down by crises. The expropriation Marx refers to at this point in the text is capitalists expropriating other capitalists. That's why they are termed expropriators when he says concerning the socialist revolution stage that the expropriators ( of other capitalists) are (themselves) expropriated. This is a central insight of Marx concerning the historical tendency of the capitalist mode of accumulation: it tends to monopoly/centralization of capital and wealth. Lenin's thesis in _Imperialism_ is actually an empirical demonstration of the fulfillment of Marx's prediction in this chapter of _Capital_. Because there are fewer of them it is easier for the working class to expropriate them. As Lenin says in _Imperialism_, monopoly capital, like Goldman Sachs, is a precursor to socialism by monopolizing and centralizing capital and means of production I think that is why wealth has hedge funds, long-term stakes in private equity and Berkshire Hathaway, and diversified bond portfolios. Here comes the Occupy the Expropriation movement, with father CB leading the way. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] How to fix the U.S. economy
In the last election there was something of a schism in the top top class of 'ruling class'. The US under Obama intends to pursue extraterritorial taxation policies. Now the examples of relatively wealthy individuals who live in the US but have offshore accounts in the Caymans might get a lot of attention, but what is getting Obama's and Geithner's attention is the 30 plus trillion in untaxed corporate earning sitting overseas, and held by various US corporations--Apple alone is sitting on more than 100 billion dollars in untaxed earnings. Apple itself represents something of a contradiction in interests--it benefits from manufacturing in E. Asia (E. China, S. Korea, Taiwan and Japan make all that hardware possible, it wouldn't be possible doing it from a US manufacturing base, since Apple really doesn't know how to make most of the components of its own hardware). But it now earns a lot of money selling its brand of stuff overseas, such as in the same countries where all its stuff is made. To cut to the chase: Obama has proposed to cut corporate taxes to 28% while going after a fraction of that 30 trillion overseas. Romney proposed cutting the rate to 25% and dropping all claims of extraterritoriality on taxes (which would put the US more in line with other OECD countries). So the mercantilist position is Obama's (and his CIA's). Romney's Republicans think that they can get back to capital gains bubbles on Wall St. in order to start balancing federal budgets. Now the disagreement is on how to start running smaller deficits while still paying for over a trillion a year in 'national security'. But you can bet that a lot of companies and billionaires threw their support behind Romney over the overseas tax issue. And that was the only reason why he did as well as he did. The reason he lost is that the fundies and evangelicals hate Mormons even more than they do Catholics, so there is no way they are going to go out and vote once (let alone twice like a lot of them did in the Bush victories). The crisis the US faces now is very similar to the Soviet Union at the end of the 80s. Theories vary as to its demise, but there are some pretty convincing arguments over too much military spending combined with the huge costs of the Chernobyl 'clean up' (which proved stop gap anyway, but took a huge toll on the Soviet military and bureaucracy). A lot of those events also led to a loss in faith in the entire system. The US is not at that point. The loss of faith is on the periphery. Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland etc. are not allowed to create debt to keep going--they are now on the level of Argentina and Mexico in the US-dominated system. But the US, Japan, Germany and the UK still are, and that keeps their system going. It's my opinion that Obama-Geithner-Democrat CIA ideas on financing the US empire are as delusional as the Republicans' dream to get back to capital gains bubbles to finance it. However, it could well be that those bubbles are still actually being inflated. Much of the money now goes to US government bonds and to offshore accounts, instead of into the Dow or real estate (while government intervention has kept the Dow and the real estate markets from fully crashing). Japan's stock market fully crashed back in 1992 and has never really recovered. But the US's hasn't gone anywhere since 2001 but has also never fully crashed (because of the interventions to prop it up). CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] /taibblog/obama-defends-his-finance-reform-record-to-rolling-stone-a-brief-response-20121026
Begged question: that Obama even has a financial reform record to defend. Four more years of progress? Yes, Pres. Bushwars Obomber is done and Pres. Droneregimechange Obomber has emerged. Bring it on. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] voters-give-obama-four-more-years-to-move-nation-forward/
Pathetic simpletons who ignore the warpig imperialist Demoncraps like Obomber when it suits them,and then gather to wave signs at Ramblow Emanuel. Pathetic. But CB could we get some sort cease and desist order for you--no more Democrapic union crap until at least 2014? C ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Atheist Milton
Obviously another American academic with way too much time on his hands. Just about anyone who was alive could be attacked as a heretic and an atheist in Milton's time. His heterodoxy and deviances from the prevalent Christian doctrines of England of that time have been discussed quite a bit before. But one issue with Milton is because he is putting those ideas into service for a literary work of imagination, it's hard to say what he actually believed based on such dramatic work outs as PL, PR and SA. His anti-king agitprop is nearly what got him beheaded when monarchy was restored. Many monarchists thought him of the devil, which brings up an issue with Milton and his beliefs (since he seems to have been interested in a 'personal devil'). He like many others probably had a hard time juggling the New Testament with the Old Testament, so was drawn to things like Socianism and Arianism. In many ways Christians are materialists because of their belief in Christ as both someone with a human body and status as God. They want a material, corporeal manifestation of God--or at least some sort of historical effect of one. I'm sure Oliver Cromwell was a religious man too (at least after his conversion in 1630) and thought his actions must be guided by God and Christ, but ask the Irish if he was godly in anyway. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Nice Take on Hobsbawm
At least one that didn't waste a lot of time on how his politics failed the world and his -- gasp -- Stalinism. I think I remember reading in an interview where Hobsbawm pretty much summed himself in the last 1/3 of his life: that he hadn't really understood the world very well after 1968. But I always add: Yes, and WHO HAS? CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Atheist Milton
This discussion covers some of the connections to Hobbes and Machiavelli you can find in Milton's prose and poetry. http://www.aramintae.webs.com/miltonmarvell.html ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Indiana AFL-CIO endorses socialist candidate
One of the persistent sponsors of 'right to work' crap in PA is a Tea Party type in my home district. Actually there are at least two socialists running as independents in Indiana for their general assembly. I guess the AFL-CIO only endorses them when they are not running against a Democrat? http://blogs.wishtv.com/tag/jerry-torr/ CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] I fucking love science
But tactical nukes were never used, so it's hard to say. The Soviet Union repeatedly expressed that they would never be the first to use nukes, and the US said that they would never say that. The idea was that in the event of a conventional debacle, nukes over there just became great defensive weapons. But there was never any practical aspect of using nuclear weapons--I remember the NBC training in the Army and it was all unworkable. On a hot day, you could literally overheat in minutes wearing the suit and the gas mask (which was supposed to filter out radioactive particulate matter). The artillery pieces became obsolete. The ASROC launchers too. Nukes might have been a cheap weapon compared to some, but their delivery systems were not cheap. Configuring a jet fighter to carry nukes, for example, is an expensive alteration--like this example of the Tornadoes. The main expense is the delivery system. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] I fucking love science
Tens of thousands of tac nukes, actually. Supposedly these were greatly reduced after the Soviet Union collapsed, but I don't have numbers to back that up. Consider, though, that the US is basically trying to extort billions from Germany just to 'share' 20 bombs. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] I fucking love science
The nukes would have to be stored with US forces (I think the UK got out of being a tactical nuke pusher in 1992). The US has always tried to get Germany and Japan to pay for more of the US's military costs--to the point of placing bases and troops overseas in order to 'earn a profit' in countries with money (which had been Germany and Japan--and recently South Korea). It has 'nuclear sharing' agreements in NATO, none in Japan or S. Korea (that is, no plans to strap tactical nukes on Japanese airplanes or fire nuclear rounds out of S. Korea artillery pieces, etc.--unless such agreements haven't been disclosed). I would think the only thing of the nature of revelation in the story is that most people aren't aware of the thousands of 'tactical nukes' the US military has. For example, when nuclear weapons in Japan are discussed it's often about the ones the North Koreans are supposed to be developing, and never about the thousands the US military deployed and trans-shipped here in Japan. Suggested reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_sharing CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Resisting Dictatorship/Resisting Occupation The dilemma of Syrians living
Israel will never give up the Golan Heights. They would most likely expand their territory in the region should Syria break up in a civil war. The IDF would use something like 'securing chemical weapons' as an excuse and then go in a take more territory. The reason would be their paranoia over the watershed of Palestine. Interestingly, Syria also is the key to controlling much of the water that flows into Iraq as well. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Resisting Dictatorship/Resisting Occupation The dilemma of Syrians living
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Water_Carrier_of_Israel#Controversy Controversy Since its construction, the resulting diversion of water from the Jordan River has been a source of tension with Syria and Jordan.[7] In 1964, Syria attempted construction of a Headwater Diversion Plan that would have blocked the flow of water into the Sea of Galilee, sharply reducing the capacity of the carrier.[8] This project and Israel's subsequent physical attack on those diversion efforts in 1965 were factors which played into regional tensions culminating in the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the course of the war; the Heights contain some of the sources of the Sea of Galilee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Valley_Unified_Water_Plan n the late 1930s and mid 1940s, Transjordan and the World Zionist Organization commissioned mutually exclusive competing water resource studies. The Transjordanian study, performed by Michael G. Ionides, concluded that the available water resources are not sufficient to sustain a Jewish state which would be the destination for Jewish immigration. The Zionist study, by the American engineer Walter Clay Lowdermilk, concluded that by diverting water from the Jordan basin to support agriculture and residential development in the Negev, a Jewish state supporting 4 million new immigrants would be sustainable.[4] In 1953, Israel began construction of a water carrier to take water from the Sea of Galilee to the populated center and agricultural south of the country, while Jordan concluded an agreement with Syria, known as the Bunger plan, to dam the Yarmouk river near Maqarin, and utilize its waters to irrigate Jordanian territory, before they could flow to the Sea of Galilee.[5] Military clashes ensued, and US President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched ambassador Johnston to the region to work out a plan that would regulate water usage.[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_politics_in_the_Jordan_River_basin Hydrology of the Jordan River The riparian rights to the Jordan River are shared by 4 different countries: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel as well as the Palestinian territories; although Israel as the occupying authority has refused to give up any of the water resources to the Palestinian National Authority.[1] The Jordan River originates near the borders of three countries, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, with most of the water derived from the Anti-Lebanon Mountains and Mount Hermon to the north and east. Three spring-fed headwater rivers converge to form the Jordan River in the north: The Hasbani River, which rises in south Lebanon, with an average annual flow of 138 million cubic metres, The Dan River, in Israel, averaging 245 million cubic metres per year, and The Banias River flowing from the Golan Heights, averaging 121 million cubic metres per year. These streams converge six kilometres inside Israel and flow south to the Sea of Galilee, wholly within Israel.[2] Water quality is variable in the river basin. The three tributaries of the upper Jordan have a low salinity of about 20 ppm.[3] The salinity of water in Lake Tiberias ranges from 240 ppm in the upper end of the lake (marginal for irrigation water), to 350 ppm (too high for sensitive citrus fruits) where it discharges back into the Jordan River.[3] The salt comes from the saline subterranean springs. These springs pass through the beds of ancient seas and then flow into Lake Tiberias, as well as the groundwater sources that feed into the lower Jordan. Downstream of Tiberias, the salinity of the tributary Yarmouk River is also satisfactory, at 100 ppm,[3] but the lower Jordan river becomes progressively more saline as it flows south. It reaches twenty-five percent salinity (250,000 ppm) where it flows in the Dead Sea, which is about seven times saltier than the ocean.[4] As a resource for freshwater the Jordan River drainage system is vital for most of the population of Palestine, Israel and Jordan, and to a lesser extent in Lebanon and Syria who are able to utilise water from other national sources. (Although Syrian riparian rights to the Euphrates has been severely restricted by Turkey's dam building programme, a series of 21 dams and 17 hydroelectric stations built on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, in the 1980s, 90s and projected to be completed in 2010, in order to provide irrigation water and hydroelectricity to the arid area of southeastern Turkey.[5]) The CIA analysis in the 1980s placed the Middle East on the list of possible conflict zones because of water issues. Twenty per cent of the region’s population lack access to adequate potable water and 35% of the population lack appropriate sanitation.[6] Sharing water resources involves the issue of water use, water rights, and distribution of amounts. The Palestinian National Authority wished to expand and develop the agricultural sector in the West Bank to decrease their dependency on the Israeli labour
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] insightful commentary by Leon Wofsy, posted on Portside
Actually, that is about 100 billion Apple is stashing away overseas. Microsoft is said to have about 60 billion. And many US companies are doing something similar, and not just high tech but also food and consumer goods companies like PG and Coca Cola. Some estimates are that the US government loses about 300 billion dollars a year in tax revenues because the US companies and wealthy individuals (with people like Warren Buffett it's often hard to tell the difference) keep this money offshore and away from any government that would tax it (offshore basically means 'in a tax haven'). This is the money the Democrats want to go after. And this is why Warren Buffett wrote those op-ed pieces about why he wanted to pay more taxes in the US--because he is afraid of real wealth confiscation. But would the Obomberites really go after this wealth in any significant way? I'm sure many in the CIA are arguing , hey, let's just wait for DJ 36,000 again (that would be the traditional Republican faction). CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] 45, 000 workers march in support of Second Bill of Rights
Oh they had a big Obomber rally in Philly--that's so nice. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paleoanthropologist Leakey Says Evolution Debate Nearing The End
It doesn't really translate into a consensus on social theory or action, though, does it? ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Nietzsche For Anti-Capitalists
He is a great read, so the appeal to intellectuals of a literary bent is obvious. I don't think it's very useful to say he is responsible for Fascism or Nazism. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Will to power: nonsense concept
I believe here the line of philosophical descent is: Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Foucault (I hope I spelled them all correctly). That is certainly a path of connected reading that will get you to post-modernity on such matters. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Will to power: nonsense concept
You might find this discussion interesting: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche-moral-political/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Analytic of Finitude (stems in part from Re: Nietzsche For Anti-Capitalists)
I think we are skirting around the major issue here in a lot of this talk. In a nutshell: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/ 4.4 The Analytic of Finitude At the very heart of man is his finitude: the fact that, as described by the modern empirical sciences, he is limited by the various historical forces (organic, economic, linguistic) operating on him. This finitude is a philosophical problem because, this same historically limited empirical being must also somehow be the source of the representations whereby we know the empirical world, including ourselves as empirical beings. I (my consciousness) must, as Kant put it, be both an empirical object of representation and the transcendental source of representations. How is this possible? Foucault's view is that, in the end, it isn't—and that the impossibility (historically realized) means the collapse of the modern episteme. What Foucault calls the “analytic of finitude” sketches the historical case for this conclusion, examining the major efforts (together making up the heart of modern philosophy) to answer the question. The question—and the basic strategy for answering it—go back, of course, to Kant, who put forward the following crucial idea: that the very factors that make us finite (our subjection to space, time, causality, etc.) are also conditions necessary for the possibility of knowledge. Our finitude is, therefore, simultaneously founded and founding (positive and fundamental, as Foucault puts it). The project of modern (Kantian and post-Kantian) philosophy—the analytic of finitude—is to show how this is possible. Some modern philosophy tries to resolve the problem of man by, in effect, reducing the transcendental to the empirical. For example, positivism attempts to explain knowledge in terms of natural science (physics, biology), while Marxism appeals to historical social sciences. (The difference is that the first grounds knowledge in the past—e.g., an evolutionary history—whereas the second grounds it in a revolutionary future that will transcend the limitations of ideology.) Either approach simply ignores the terms of the problem: that man must be regarded as irreducibly both empirical and transcendental. It might seem that Husserl's phenomenology has carried out the Kantian project of synthesizing man as object and man as subject by radicalizing the Cartesian project; that is, by grounding our knowledge of empirical truths in the reality of the transcendental subject. The problem, however, is that the modern notion of man excludes Descartes' idea of the cogito as a “sovereign transparency” of pure consciousness. Thought is no longer pure representation and therefore cannot be separated from an “unthought” (i.e., the given empirical and historical truths about who we are). I can no longer go from “I think” to “I am” because the content of my reality (what I am) is always more than the content of any merely thinking self (I am, e.g., living, working, and speaking—and all these take me beyond the realm of mere thought). Or, putting the point in the reverse way, if we use “I” to denote my reality simply as a conscious being, then I “am not” much of what I (as a self in the world) am. As a result, to the extent that Husserl has grounded everything in the transcendental subject, this is not the subject (cogito) of Descartes but the modern cogito, which includes the (empirical) unthought that is part of man's reality. Phenomenology, like all modern thought, must accept the unthought as the ineliminable “other” of man. Nor are the existential phenomenologists (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) able to solve the problem. Unlike Husserl, they avoid positing a transcendental ego and instead focus on the concrete reality of man-in-the world. But this, Foucault claims, is just a more subtle way of reducing the transcendental to the empirical. Finally, some philosophers (Hegel and Marx in one way, Nietzsche and Heidegger in another) have tried to resolve the problem of man's dual status by treating him as a historical reality. But this move encounters the difficulty that man has to be both a product of historical processes and the origin of history. If we treat man as a product, we find ourselves reducing his reality to something non-human (this is what Foucault calls the “retreat” from man's origin). But if we insist on a “return” to man as his own proper origin, then we can no longer make sense of his place in the empirical world. This paradox may explain the endless modern obsession with origins, but there is never any way out of the contradiction between man as originator and man as originated. Nonetheless, Foucault thinks that the modern pursuit of the question of origins has provided us with a deeper sense of the ontological significance of time, particularly in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, who reject Hegel's and Marx's view of the return to our origin as a redemptive fullness of being, and instead see it as a confrontation with
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Will to power: nonsense concept
Doesn't really read like something that could be dismissed easily as 'nonsense'. http://www.theperspectivesofnietzsche.com/nietzsche/nwill.html Will to Power Suppose nothing else were given as real except our world of desires and passions, and we could not get down, or up, to any other reality besides the reality of our drives--for thinking is merely a relation of these drives to each other: is it not permitted to make the experiment and to ask the question whether this given would not be sufficient for also understanding on the basis of this kind of thing the so-called mechanistic (or material) world?... In the end not only is it permitted to make this experiment; the conscience of method demands it. Not to assume several kinds of causality until the experiment of making do with a single one has been pushed to its utmost limit (to the point of nonsense, if I may say so)... The question is in the end whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will: if we do--and at bottom our faith in this is nothing less than our faith in causality itself--then we have to make the experiment of positing causality of the will hypothetically as the only one. Will, of course, can affect only will--and not matter (not nerves, for example). In short, one has to risk the hypothesis whether will does not affect will wherever effects are recognized--and whether all mechanical occurrences are not, insofar as a force is active in them, will force, effects of will. Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will--namely, of the will to power, as my proposition has it... then one would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as--will to power. The world viewed from inside... it would be will to power and nothing else. from Beyond Good and Evil, s.36, Walter Kaufmann transl. In order to sustain the theory of a mechanistic world, therefore, we always have to stipulate to what extent we are employing two fictions: the concept of motion (taken from our sense language) and the concept of the atom (=unity, deriving from our psychical experience): the mechanistic theory presupposes a sense prejudice and a psychological prejudice... The mechanistic world is imagined only as sight and touch imagine a world (as moved) --so as to be calculable-- thus causal unities are invented, things (atoms) whose effect remains constant (--transference of the false concept of subject to the concept of the atom)... If we eliminate these additions, no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their effect upon the same. The will to power is not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos --the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge-- from The Will to Power, s.635, Walter Kaufmann transl. My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement (union) with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on-- from The Will to Power, s.636, Walter Kaufmann transl. [Anything which] is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant - not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life. from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, s.259, Walter Kaufmann transl. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] AFLCIO: full employment at living wage
Under Pres. Bushwars Obomber Chapter 2, we'll get more of those high-paying jobs too. Like drone pilots, democracy coordinator in post-Assad Syria, or even prostitutes servicing NATO troops and Dyncorps contractors (they like to hire rapists, so you know) in occupied Afghanistan. Now if only I could get someone in the AFL-CIO to come around and water my plants while I'm away for a few days, I could then prove I'm less delusional than you CB. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Communists Like Us
Pre-Hardt Negri collaborating with Guattari (Deleuze's frequent collaborator). As a reader of some of this back in the 80s (in a collection of Guattari's solo stuff), I realize why that book Empire seemed so unoriginal. http://voiceimitator.blogspot.jp/2009/09/felix-guattari-toni-negri-communists.html Felix Guattari Toni Negri: Communists Like Us (1985) Singularity, autonomy, and freedom are the three banners which unite in solidarity every struggle against the capitalist and/or socialist orders. From now on, this alliance invents new forms of freedom, in the emancipation of work and in the work of emancipation. Communists Liks Us is a defense of communism and a relatively early explication of the idea of autonomy for non-Italian readers. Its political intervention and theoretical advances misunderstood or ignored when first published, Communists Like Us faces the opposite problem today: the surge of Negri translations and works on Autonomia has drained the book of much of its intended force. However, the book remains singular in its hybridization of conceptual lexicons: autonomy is quite directly identified with (or reduced to) molecular movement throughout the book, and the concepts Guattari developed with Deleuze - notably deterritorialization and reterritorialization - play, for the better or the worse, a greater role here than in most of the rest of Negri's writings. At the book's outset, Guattari and Negri state that their aim is to rescue 'communism' from its own disrepute. Writing prior to the collapse of real socialism, they seek out a communism that would escape from the capitalist/socialist dichotomy of the Cold War. For them, communism is the collective struggle for the liberation of work. Work must become a project and a process of liberation. In contrast to the Soviet model of state economic planning and to the capitalist subordination of work to control and calculation, the work process must become autonomous. Communism is more than just the sharing of wealth . . . it must inaugurate a whole new way of working together. As Negri often repeats in his books, communism involves the creation of a new subjective consciousness born of the collective work experience. But this subjective consciousness is not some homogeneous or inevitable class consciousness. Nor is it the official ideology of any party or state. Communism has nothing to with the collectivist barbarism that has come into existence. Communism is the most intense experience of subjectivity, the maximization of the process of singularization. Collective consciousness is the ongoing nodal articulation of a multitude of marginalities and singularities. There is a complex weaving of molecular struggles for liberation that would be difficult to order into a single historical sequence. Somewhat problematically, Guattari and Negri obviously use the history of Italy and Autonomia in the 1970s to analyze communism, but they refuse to go into any details. Their book is therefore greatly assisted by being read alongside the more concrete discussions collected in the semiotext(e) reprint of Autonomia. Perhaps groping toward a concept of Empire or at least of the capitalist world-system, Guattari and Negri argue that the international integration of economies has generated Integrated World Capitalism (I.W.C.), an awkward term that reflects the book's unclear analysis of globalization. Guattari and Negri demand the destruction of all ideologies of an external vanguard while defending their ideas from the accusation of anarchism (I presume this argument was lost on many non-Italian readers at the time). Clearly the Red Brigade is in mind when they denounce an ossified leninism, which is disconnected from all historical materiality, reduced entirely to a statist interpretation, a sort of paranoid point of reference which it sought to impose on the recomposition of the movement. They also dismiss representative government and the desire to acquire state power through revolution: We refuse everything which repeats the constitutive models of representative alienation and the rupture between the levels where political will is formed and the levels of its execution and administration. This attack is extended to the socialist parties/unions that historically compromised with the state and the interests of capital and that ended up reproducing the state's representative form. Instead of terroristic vanguardism or parliamentary participation, Guattari and Negri affirm a radical materialism, a materialism that is irreducible to economism or anarchist spontaneity. They claim that only a continuous and multidimensional revolution can constitute an alternative to the failed projects of archeo-socialism. From now on, organizing signifies first: work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective singularity: construct and in a permanent way re-construct this collectivity in a multivalent liberation project. Not in reference to a
[Marxism-Thaxis] Nietzsche For Anti-Capitalists
I would start with Stirner and go on to Deleuze (although here in reverse order, Deleuze and then Stirner). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Philosophy *Nietzsche and Philosophy* (Frenchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language: *Nietzsche et la philosophie*) is a 1962 book about Friedrich Nietzschehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzscheby philosopher Gilles Deleuze http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze. Its publication marked a significant turning-point in French philosophyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_philosophy, which had previously given little consideration to Nietzsche as a serious philosopher.[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Philosophy#cite_note-bogue-0 *Nietzsche and Philosophy* was the first French study of Nietzsche to treat him as a systematically coherent philosopher, and raised questions that became central to Nietzsche studies and to French post-structuralismhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-structuralismgenerally. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Philosophy#cite_note-bogue-0Within Nietzsche scholarship, the book was notable for giving serious consideration to the concepts of the will to powerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_to_powerand the eternal return http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return.[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Philosophy#cite_note-bogue-0 References ^ *a*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Philosophy#cite_ref-bogue_0-0 *b*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Philosophy#cite_ref-bogue_0-1 *c*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Philosophy#cite_ref-bogue_0-2 Bogue, Ronald (1989). *Deleuze and Guattari*. New York: Routledge. p. 15. ISBNhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Number 0-415-02443-9http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0-415-02443-9 . http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/max-stirner/#3 Stirner's work also had a significant impact on a little known contemporary associate of these left-Hegelians, one Karl Marx. Between 1845 and 1846, Marx collaborated with Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) on a group of texts now usually called *The German Ideology*, which included a fierce and sustained attack on their erstwhile philosophical contemporaries. Most of these texts were not published at the time, and it was 1932 before this critical engagement with the work of Bauer, Feuerbach, and Stirner, appeared in print. The account of Stirner contained in *The German Ideology* takes up over three hundred pages of the published text (unfortunately abridged editions occasionally omit this dense but fascinating part of the book), and, although Marx is remorselessly critical of Stirner's position, it scarcely follows that *The Ego and Its Own* was without influence on the former's own work. Not least, Stirner's book appears to have been decisive in motivating Marx's break with the work of Feuerbach, whose influence on many of Marx's earlier writings is readily apparent, and in forcing Marx to reconsider the role that concepts of human nature should play in social criticism. Finally, and over a longer period of time, the author of *The Ego and Its Own* has become best-known as a member of, and influence upon, the anarchist tradition. In particular, Stirner's name appears with familiar regularity in historically-orientated surveys of anarchist thought as one of the earliest and best-known exponents of individualist anarchism. The affinity between Stirner and the anarchist tradition lies in his endorsement of the claim that the state is an illegitimate institution. However, his elaboration of this claim is a distinctive and interesting one. For Stirner, a state can never be legitimate, since there is a necessary conflict between individual self mastery and the obligation to obey the law (with which the legitimacy of the state is identified). Given that individual self-mastery trumps any competing consideration, Stirner concludes that the demands of the state are not binding on the individual. However, he does not think that individuals have, as a result, any general obligation to oppose and attempt to eliminate the state (insofar as this is within their power). Rather the individual should decide in each particular case whether or not to go along with the state's demands. Only in cases where there is a conflict between the autonomy of the egoist and the demands of the state, does he recommend resisting the requirements of law. That said, whilst individuals have no duty to overthrow the state, Stirner does think that the state will eventually collapse as a result of the spread of egoism. The cumulative effect of a growing egoistic disrespect for law, he suggests, would be to ‘scuttle’ the ‘ship of state’. (54) Anarchists influenced by Stirner's individualism and his suspicion of the state can be found in several European countries. However, his best-known anarchist admirers were in America, in the circle which formed
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Existentialism : Georg Luk?cs 1949
I kind of liked it when it ended up with the title 'NO SUBJECT', but here it is again with the original thread title (which was a mistake because actually I had meant to reply to the next post from CB, but anyway, thread discipline on this list is overwhelmed by the miracle that there are any threads at all--I think mostly because CB cc's so many lists). CB: thanks. Luckacs analyzes the existentialists as neo-Kantians and subjective idealists, just as I have. He also pins down Sartre's individualist frame of reference. You're welcome. I would have thought, given the timeframe, Sartre's own Critique of Dialectical Reason would be one of the works you want, and then Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, and then Sartre's Situations too. http://www.egs.edu/library/maurice-merleau-ponty/biography/ excerpt: Merleau-Ponty served in the infantry when in World War II broke out. He began collaborating with his friend and co-founding editor of Les Temps Modernes, Jean-Paul Sartre from 1945 to 1952. However, he became disillusioned with the Korean War, and Sartrian politics, and decided to resign from the editorial board of what would soon become Sartre's journal. The nature of Merleau-Ponty's disagreements with Sartre are formulated in the Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955. It is an exhaustive analysis of Sartre's relationship to communism, criticizing his privileging of the subject-object relations in his version of phenomenology. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Guattari's Ecosophy
It's hard to find secondary sources on Guattari that don't discuss Deleuze-Guattari. As far as 'worthless' French philosophers go, he fits well with Lyotard and Baudrillard (and I have to think Hardt-Negri and Zizek as less worthy epigones who have capitalized in terms of popularity, although earlier pre-Hardt Negri makes me want to take that back some). I remember Guattari back in the 70s making much of pirate radio (and others said something of the same about CB radio culture in the US) as precursors to the internet. When I first got to Japan, there was a 'fax culture'; groups would communicate by writing up stuff on their word processor machines (which were much more useful than DOS computers back then) and faxing them out to their groups numbering in the thousands. This is a nice capsule summary of one current in his later works, but part of larger essay (not limited to Guattari) worth reading. http://globalization.icaap.org/content/v2.1/02_peters.html Guattari’S The Three Ecologies Guattari’s achievement is to link three spheres of ecology – environmental, social and mental – into a set of interrelations he calls ecosophy, a term he coins seemingly unaware of the “deep ecology” movement or the ecosophy of Arnold Naess. He writes: …only an ethico-political articulation – which I call ecosophy – between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity) would be likely to clarify [the ecological dangers that confront us] (p. 27). His object of criticism is what he calls Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) that, through a series of techno-scientific transformations, has brought us to the brink of ecological disaster, causing a disequilibrium of the world natural environment from which the Earth will take many generations to recover, if at all. Integrated World Capitalism, as Pindar and Sutton (2000: 6) explain, is “delocalized and deterritorialized to such an extent that it is impossible to locate its sources of power”. IWC is now, above all, a fourth-stage capitalism, no longer oriented to producing primary (agricultural), secondary (manufacturing), or tertiary (services), but now oriented to the production of “signs, syntax, and … subjectivity” (p. 47). Part of Guattari’s thesis is that the expansion in communications technology, and, in particular, the development of world telecommunications, has served to shape a new type of passive subjectivity, saturating the unconscious in conformity with global market forces. IWC, thus, poses a direct threat to the environment in ways that are now all too familiar to us – pollution of all forms, extinction and depletion of species with the consequent reduction of biodiversity etc. Less often are we alerted to the dimension of social ecology and its practical politics. What is not often recognized, if at all, is what Guattari calls mental ecology: both how the structures of human subjectivity to which it refers, like a rare species, is also under treat of extinction and how it underwrites an understanding of environmental and social ecology. It is in the realm of understanding human subjectivity in ecological terms that Guattari has most to offer. In this recognition of the “ecology of mind” he is strongly influenced by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, especially his Steps Towards the Ecology of Mind (1972).11 Indeed, Guattari (2000: 27) begins with a quotation from Bateson’s essay “Pathologies of Epistemology” from that same collection of essays: “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds”. The importance of Bateson’s argument, as the translators’ note clarifies (see fn 1, p. 70), is in criticising the dominant “epistemological fallacy” in Western thinking that the unit of survival, in the bio-taxonomy, is the individual, family line, subspecies or species, when the unit of survival is “organism plus environment”. The choice of the wrong unit leads to an epistemological error that propagates itself, multiplying and mutating, as a basic characteristic of the thought-system of which it is a part. The hierarchy of taxa leads to a conception of species against species, Man against Nature – a view that has been reinforced by various ideologies and movements, including Romanticism. By contrast, according to Bateson: we now see a different hierarchy of units – gene-in-organism, organism-in-environment, ecosystem, etc. Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits (Bateson, 1972: 484, cited in Guattari, 2000; 70). Thus, for Guattari we must conceive of ecology as a realm encompassing the environmental, the social and the mental (the complex, environment-social-mental). His ecosophical perspective of subjectivity, in large part, is a product of his Lacanian training, his experience as a working psychoanalyst and his attempt to reorient Freudianism towards the
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Existentialism : Georg Luk?cs 1949
A much better discussion is by Merleau Ponty http://marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/merleaup.htm ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Deleuze Guattari (was Re: Post- philosophy philosophers)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/ 4.1 What is Philosophy? After a long period in which each pursued his own interests, Deleuze and Guattari published a last collaboration in 1991, What Is Philosophy? Critical opinion is divided on this volume; some hold it to be a powerful work of mature and seasoned authors, while others see it as a dyspeptic work of old age, with none of the verve, brio, and joie de vivre of the earlier collaborations. In answering their title question, Deleuze and Guattari seek to place philosophy in relation to science and art, all three being modes of thought, with no subordination among them. Thought, in all its modes, struggles with chaos against opinion. Philosophy is the creation or construction of concepts; a concept is an intensive multiplicity, inscribed on a plane of immanence, and peopled by “conceptual personae” which operate the conceptual machinery. A conceptual persona is not a subject, for thinking is not subjective, but takes place in the relationship of territory and earth. Science creates functions on a plane of reference. Art creates “a bloc of sensation, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects” (WP, 164). We will deal with Deleuze and the arts in some detail below. In discussing What is Philosophy?, let us concentrate on the treatment of the relation of philosophy and science. We should remember at the outset that the nomad or minor science evoked in A Thousand Plateaus is not the Royal or major science that makes up the entirety of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘science’ in What is Philosophy?. The motives for this conflation are unclear; in the eyes of some, this change considerably weakens the value of the latter work. Be that as it may, in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari vigorously deny that philosophy is needed to help science think about its own presuppositions (“no one needs philosophy to reflect on anything” [WP 6]). Instead, they emphasize the complementary nature of the two. First, they point out a number of similarities between philosophy and science: both are approaches to “chaos” that attempt to bring order to it, both are creative modes of thought, and both are complementary to each other, as well as to a third mode of creative thought, art. Beyond these similarities, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between philosophy as the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence and science as the creation of functions on a plane of reference. Both relate to the virtual, the differential field of potential transformations of material systems, but in different ways. Philosophy gives consistency to the virtual, mapping the forces composing a system as pure potentials, what the system is capable of. Meanwhile, science gives it reference, determining the conditions by which systems behave the way they actually do. Philosophy is the “counter-effectuation of the event,” abstracting an event or change of pattern from bodies and states of affairs and thereby laying out the transformative potentials inherent in things, the roads not taken that coexist as compossibles or as inclusive disjunctions (differentiation, in the terms of Difference and Repetition), while science tracks the actualization of the virtual, explaining why this one road was chosen in a divergent series or exclusive disjunction (differenciation, according to Difference and Repetition). Functions predict the behavior of constituted systems, laying out their patterns and predicting change based on causal chains, while concepts “speak the event” (WP 21), mapping out the multiplicity structuring the possible patterns of behavior of a system—and the points at which the system can change its habits and develop new ones. For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, then, science deals with properties of constituted things, while philosophy deals with the constitution of events. Roughly speaking, philosophy explores the plane of immanence composed of constellations of constitutive forces that can be abstracted from bodies and states of affairs. It thus maps the range of connections a thing is capable of, its “becomings” or “affects.” Science, on the other hand, explores the concretization of these forces into bodies and states of affairs, tracking the behavior of things in relation to already constituted things in a certain delimited region of space and time (the “plane of reference”). How do concepts relate to functions? Just as there is a “concept of concept” there are also “concepts of functions,” but these are purely philosophical creations “without the least scientific value” (WP 117). Thus concrete concepts like that of “deterritorialization” are philosophical concepts, not scientific functions, even though they might resonate with, or echo, scientific functions. Nor are they metaphors, as Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly insist: Of course, we realize the dangers of citing scientific propositions outside their own sphere. It is the danger of arbitrary metaphor or of
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Deleuze Guattari (was Re: Post- philosophy philosophers)
Good summary of What is Philosophy? http://www.recalcitrance.com/deleuzelast.htm excerpt About science I may also be brief, but this time because I feel allowed to be sharp. If, to my initial astonishment, Deleuze and Guattari seemed to forget about nomad, itinerant sciences, whose problems are local, following the singularity of their terrains, it is because those sciences are not threatened by an internal weakness, just by stupidity, arrogance and pseudo-scientific definitions, eliminating away what should be a cause for knowledge creation. They are threatened by the same blind generalization of functional description, that threatens philosophy, by the same forgetting that a scientific function is a creation, that is an event in the history of science. In What is Philosophy ? such a generalization of functional description is related to logicism, as distinct from the formal science called logic. Logicism happens when a matter of fact is not produced together with its function, but preexists as a socially stabilized state of affairs. The function is then making explicit the categories of the affairs, as they have acquired consensual authority, allowing those who define them to feel that they know what they are describing. We deal then with what Deleuze and Guattari name “functions of the lived” (fonctions du vécu) : functions the argument of which are consensual perceptions and affections. Those functions need or entail no creation, only recognition, and they arm those who wish to transform philosophy into a serious academic business when you can agree on some well-defined lived situation, and then progress towards agreement about the propositions this situation authorizes. But such a generalization may also lead to what I would call pseudo-science leading to false philosophical problems. When somebody, who sometimes calls himself or herself a philosopher, proposes for instance to start from the idea that rationality imposes that the brain be defined in terms of the “state of the central nervous system”, this is an insult against science, exploiting its weakness, exploiting the fact that scientists may indeed promote a so-called scientific vision of the world, and hide away the high feat and event that corresponds to the co-creation of a matter of fact and a scientific function. Then follow happy busy days for philosophers, and many publications in serious refereed journals. The convergence of science and philosophy around great problems such as the “mind/body” one, heralds the kind of arrogant stupidity that seems to accompany the adventure of science like its shadow, but today it also makes perceptible the probability of a collapse of this adventure of thought that was called philosophy. This would then be Deleuze’s last message, his call to resist addressed to philosophers, but also to scientists, and to artists, all conceived as equally threatened by a menace that may be common, but that takes for each of them a specific form. It may be that scientists and artists can survive as exotic, protected minorities that may be useful, the first ones because scientific events are a resource for innovation, the second ones because artistic creations are a resource in the art market. But nobody would lack philosophy and its very memory may become a dead memory when all interstices have closed down between consensual knowledge, confirmed by the facts, and ineffable, ultimate but also ready-made questions. As I already told What is Philosophy ? is like an arrow thrown at a time when Deleuze experienced an insistent marginalist evaluation announcing a threshold. An arrow demands to be picked up, and this is what I have done when producing the reason why it did belong to the question “what is philosophy ?” to designate as its correlate the affirmation of art and science as creations, against their reduction to complementary aspects of human experience. The survival of philosophy as a creation of concept may well look like a futile question when considering the massive problems of the future. However learning how to pick up the arrow, at a time when all marginalist evaluations seem to point towards a threshold beyond which stupidity will prevail, is also learning how to resist the wisdom that would propose to renounce trust, to renounce believing in this world, in this life. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Post- philosophy philosophers
I would refer you to 'What is Philosophy?', by Deleuze and Guattari (a bestseller in France). CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Post- philosophy philosophers
And Sokal and Bricmont's discussion of D-G's discussion as being meaningless is largely meaningless because they fail to have sufficient grasp of the historical context of what D-G were actually discussing. That is to say, S-B had not read Spinoza and didn't really know where D-G were coming from. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Why Syria now?
The Assad regime would have used their place in the oil and gas pipeline network to move oil and gas from the Gulf and Iraq, but also Iranian oil and gas as well. That is where it all broke down. So the 'revolutionaries' have been blowing up Syrian pipeline infrastructure, while ultimately the plan is for US and Saudi interests to lay more pipeline as soon as the first Cinnabon franchise as been opened in Aleppo. Once the network is in place in the Gulf, Iraq, Jordan and Syria, the oil can bypass shipping in waters that Iran can attack. Meanwhile, many in the national security state of Israel would like to see Syria broken up so that they can secure the watershed to Palestine forever. A partial invasion of Syria by Israel would be done under the guise of something like 'securing chemical weapons', but it would really be to get even more of the watershed than Golan provides. Perhaps the Kurds and other pro-US in Iraq think the same thing (since Syria is at the head of both watersheds, Palestine and Mesopotamia). CJ http://www.syria-oil.com/en/?p=872 Syrian Gas Company go on completing the remaining part of the Arab gas pipeline that runs from Aleppo gas station to Kallass on Syrian-Turkish border about 60 km long and 36 inches diameter, and is linked to the first part of the gas through the line of the Central Region – Aleppo 24 inches in diameter. Welding Operations of this line where started on 1st June, and the total length of welded line about 6,5 km elongated expected completion of the project in the first half of 2011. . Arab gas pipeline project is an actual start of the first Arab gas network in the region and will form the network in the future the main artery for gas transport between Arab countries and to link with the network in Europe. The project in its early stages aims to transport and distribute natural gas to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. . the project can extend to allow Iraq to gas producers and other presidents in the region to export natural theirs, to Europe or vice versa across networks and workshops and additional gas so formed “for the Arab gas network.” Arab gas pipeline through Syria Consists of 36-inch pipeline along the 570 km from the Syrian-Jordanian borders to Kallass at the Syrian border of Turkey and consists of two parts, in addition to the pipeline, 24-inch length of 80 km stretching from Rayyan to the Syrian-Lebanese border. the first part extends from Jordanian border to Rayyan gas station length of about 319.5 km and 36-inch diameter, while the second segment from Homs to class at the Syrian-Turkish border length of about 250 km. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ancient poop shows why we suffer from diabetes today
A longer, better article http://www.livescience.com/21824-fossilized-poop-diet-diabetes.html ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Did you know that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a Socialist
But I think you are committing a typical anachronism when you invoke terms like 'socialist' to describe the Bellamy cousins in order to shock us--see socialists were good Americans and still are. One even wrote that stupid fucking pledge of allegiance. Their vision of socialism seems more reminiscent of Mussolini's in many ways. Of course some nutbags here will argue about socialism and the Democratic Party and the CIA brother in the WH, etc. So to each, I say your own. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Did you know that the Pledge of Allegiance was written by a Socialist
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/16/face-the-flag A few years after writing the Pledge, The Pledge recounts, Bellamy would eventually write a less inspiring ode to indivisibility: “A democracy like ours cannot afford to throw itself open to the world where every man is a lawmaker, every dull-witted or fanatical immigrant admitted to our citizenship is a bane to the commonwealth; where all classes of society merge insensibly into one another.” --- In 1940, however, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the case, and ultimately reversed the lower court’s original ruling by an 8 to 1 margin. National unity, it concluded, trumped individual liberty. In the wake of this decision, unified Americans tarred and feathered a Jehovah’s Witness in Wyoming, castrated another in Nebraska, and publicly beat others in Texas and Illinois as police and city officials watched. Three years later, with the U.S. in the midst of war, the Supreme Court reversed its decision. Since then, recitation of the Pledge has not been mandatory, at least from the perspective of the highest court of the land. On occasion, though, there’s an outlier: In October 2010, a judge in Mississippi threw an attorney in jail for five hours after the attorney refused to recite the Pledge as directed. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.
He is a sort of indigenous American intellectual like a Chomsky of the previous generation. This is one of Chomsky's blind spots--that somehow tenured status at a major university in the US was typical of Americans in terms of freedom (freedom to access info., freedom to express oneself, freedom to dissent, etc.). It's hilarious that some people think Chomsky is a political scientist (whatever the fuck that is anyway) at MIT. The internet has acted as something of a leveler for access to specialist knowledge--and allowed lower positioned academics and scholars to disseminate. It ironically also led to idiocy like people posting a link to a Chomsky interview instead of discussing issues on goofy leftwing discussion lists like Liberal Bored Observer and Marxmal. More than anything though the I think the internet has allowed for even more persuasive use of propaganda and misinformation--with people who consider themselves 'critical thinkers' falling for it. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Screpanti on the crisis
http://www.econ-pol.unisi.it/screpanti/Crisis%20Routledge.pdf GLOBALISATION AND THE GREAT CRISIS Ernesto Screpanti* (in 'The Global Economic Crisis: New Persepectives on the Critique of Economic Theory and Policy, edited by E. Brancaccio and G. Fontana, London: Routledge, 2011) The present crisis has brought to light the drawbacks and contradictions of a model of economic policy and globalization governance which has been in force since the mid-90s. Those drawbacks and contradictions had already come to light with the dot-com bubble and the 2000-2001 crisis. At that times the difficulties were overcome by a monetary rescue operation and an intensification of the contradictions. Therefore, if the present crisis is not remedied through a radical revision of that model of policy and governance, we can expect either an exacerbation of the breakdown in 2010-2011 and/or a new severe crisis in the second half of the decade. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.
I'm against heat and humidity--and mildew too--but that doesn't mean it is going away. Bucky was in part selling the idea that after 1968, the universities in the US were the havens from the real world that young people should commit to. I guess it was nice. Lefty Democratic politics and post-hippie materialist culture prevailed there (except at schools of engineering). And people could basically sponge off their well-to-do parents until they were 35 or so--some then emerged and gave us Enron, dotcom, google, facebook, etc. But as the higher ed bubble continued to expand, it brought more and more people in who couldn't sponge off their parents. They took out loans in order to live in the haven and soak up the learning of their bourgeois booby profs. Hence the trillion dollar plus loan/higher ed bubble you have now. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Saw this on Marxmal: After programming computers for 44 years, I am finally retiring
Gee, I didn't know that they still did paychecks with punch cards anywhere. Now if Louis would just go away from other things--like film reviews, supporting revolutions in Libya and Syria, etc. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Rosa Lichtenstein on Kosok's attempt to formalize Hegel's dialectical logic
I found this reading to be particularly relevant to this topic--especially as it also discusses the ontological aspects. Link and excerpt (concluding paragraph): http://www.marxists.org/archive/jordan/ideology/ch13.htm Marxism-Leninism, as interpreted in Poland, seems to agree with those who say: the fact that many-valued logics can be constructed does not entail that they are significant. They are purely abstract systems with no connection with reality. Consequently, many-valued logics might be didactically useful in reminding that no laws, be it even those of logic and mathematics, are immune from revision, but they have no other use[679]. This implies that nothing whatever that many-valued logics might have to say about the principle of non-contradiction is of any relevance to the issue of its validity. Marxist-Leninists failed to notice this implication. They should have insisted that the validity of the principle of noncontradiction is ultimately an ontological and not a formal problem to be solved in accordance with the ‘empirical evidence’ which might be brought in support of the claims of dialectics. -- ELT in Japan http://www.eltinjapan.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama: Brother from another Planet
He was raised white in white-minority Hawaii. So he had to learn how to be culturally 'black'. I think this is one of the few admirable things I can think about the guy so far. Drones and the new American century, how is it working out for you all so far? CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Rosa Lichtenstein on Kosok's attempt to formalize Hegel's dialectical logic
Very good exposition and argument here as well (although it does not reflect a very deep understanding of Hegel's 'idealism', which is nothing like what most people think it is: http://clogic.eserver.org/2004/hirsch.html ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
