Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O and racism
CeJ [EMAIL PROTECTED] 03/28/2008 9:54 PM Another thing the discussion so far seems to have overlooked is finances. McCain isn't Bush 3.0 (or is that Bush 1.2?) because unlike Poppy Bush and Bushwa Jr., he can't seem to raise money. The fundamentalists and evangelicals aren't going to pay for his campaign (they didn't even really pay for Huckabee's). But the corporate establishment seems to be betting that the crisis is like the downturn at the end of Poppy's presidency and that a Democrat can fix it. That is also why national security state establishment types keep popping up (usually dressed like 'common people') at Obama rallies. ^^^ CB: There was a long term 20th Century pattern , division of labor between Dems and Reps, wherein Dems brought war and Reps brought depression , with Reps not bringing war and Dems not bringing economic downturn. This pattern was broken by Carter not bringing a war. That is about the only way to explain why Clinton and Obama both have so much money. We might be seeing a fundamental shift, too, like the way the business and military establishment got behind Blair's purged Labour Party and made it the party of the British establishment. But it is THE empire we are talking about here, not a former one. So the analogy is a weak one most likely. I would say it's still the Demoncrat's election to lose. I really hope that Obama becomes president and that his first appointment to the Supreme Court is Anita Hill. Then I would know he really is different. Guess I could have titled this with the crisis thread title. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] O and racism
CeJ [EMAIL PROTECTED] 03/29/2008 12:17 AM Poor Bill, if only he had Cameron Diaz's surname! This is why I say Obama needs either an ethnic or Hispanic strategy, and I think he is probably smart enough that he does have one--as soon as he gets rid of the Clintons. ^^^ CB: Believe me, Bill Richardson is not the only Hispanic who became an O supporter when Richardson did. Colored solidarity took a big leap with the racist moves on O. Richardson could feel it, because he has experienced similar things. All people of color have analogous experiences. O is quite international. However, by his very nature, he has upset the status quo of the Demoncrats. They are getting ready to absorb him into their bourgeois collective. The question is, will he see it as a loser strategy and do something really different with his one chance at the presidency and this election? If he loses, whatever strategy he chooses will always be second guessed. So chances are he will throw in with the Demoncrat consensus. If I were a betting man, that would give slightly better than even odds to win (because McCain thus far has failed to raise much money, because national security state types are showing up on the side of the Demoncrats too, not just the Repugs, and because the Repug in not an entrenched incumbent). OTOH, it all seems dicey precisely because of the racism, because of a lack so far of Hispanic support to Obama (or am I being misled by the media--afterall, he won Nevada, right?), and because the Demoncrats lose close elections because of the conservative/Repug/rural/southern/western biases built into the electoral system (and Senate too). They need a blow out. For a blow out strategy, Obama will have to lead. He will have to step outside the Demoncrat party that has rewarded him so far. http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/61293.html key quote: More than half of Latino voters in 23 states said no Latino was running for president. Only a quarter recognized Richardson as a Hispanic in the race. 2008 Presidential election: Richardson races to gain Hispanic recognition Related News---New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Democratic candidate for president, holds a forum with the Culinary Union at union headquarters Tuesday May 1,2007. Also on the Web More Richardson video resources The Richardson File Advertisement By Barbara Ferry | The New Mexican Sat May 5, 2007 10:31 pm Poll shows majority of Latinos unaware of governor's heritage If Bill Richardson's mother had been an American banker and his father had been the son of a prominent Mexico City clan, things might be different. As it is, the native Spanish-speaking presidential candidate with an Anglo last name faces a challenge convincing Hispanic voters that he, too, is Hispanic. ``For all the Latinos here, I want you to know that I'm Latino,'' Richardson said in Spanish at a recent campaign stop in California, according to a report by New American Media, a coalition of ethnic media outlets. ``I can't convince people with this last name.'' Richardson has repeated that he's running not as a Hispanic candidate but as a ``mainstream candidate'' who is proud of his heritage. He's also repeated that he's running on his resume and not as ``a rock star'' like Democratic front-runners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But in the Hispanic press, Richardson has celebrity status. At campaign stops in Texas, Spanish outlets arrived en masse. He's been featured heavily on media such as Telemundo, which asked in one segment whether America was ready for ``a Mexican'' in the White House. In Los Angeles, he made history by giving a half-hour radio interview in Spanish to popular radio host Eddie ``El Piolin'' Sotelo. Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas greeted him with a kiss at a convention of Hispanic journalists and wrote a boosterish column about him, ``El Presidente Richardson,'' on her Web site. In New York, Spanish radio station owners hosted a fundraiser for him. America Rodriguez, a professor of radio and television at the University of Texas at Austin, said Richardson's heritage and fluency in Spanish boosts him out of third-tier status for her and other Latinos. ``When it gets around to election time, we usually hear these candidates speaking this horrible Spanish,'' said Rodriguez, author of the book Making Latino News. ``For Latinos to be hearing someone who speaks our language correctly is very exciting.'' ``That's what makes him interesting to me,'' said Rodriguez, who is Cuban American. ``Otherwise, he's just another mainstream Democrat.'' Despite the Spanish media's excitement over having a candidate who can handle more than ``si se puede'' and other tired slogans, Richardson has an uphill battle ahead of him with Latino voters, according to one recent national poll. More than half of Latino voters in 23 states said no Latino was running for president. Only a quarter recognized Richardson as a Hispanic in the
[Marxism-Thaxis] Deleuze/Guattari on fascism: blast from the past
Deleuze/Guattari on fascism http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/1996-01-21.000/msg00362.htm Subject: Deleuze/Guattari on fascism From: Louis N Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 20:57:37 -0500 (EST) Louis: In the translator's foreword to A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi tells us that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze was prompted by the French worker-student revolt of 1968 to question the role of the intellectual in society. Felix Guattari, his writing partner, was a psychoanalyst who identified with R.D. Laing's antipsychiatry movement of the 1960's. Laing created group homes where schizophrenics were treated identically to the sane, sort of like the Marxism list. Guattari also embraced the protests of 1968 and discovered an intellectual kinship with Deleuze. Their first collaboration was the 1972 Anti-Oedipus. Massumi interprets this work as a polemic against State-happy or pro-party versions of Marxism. A Thousand Plateaus, written in 1987, is basically part two of the earlier work. Deleuze and Guattari state that the two books make up a grand opus they call Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I read the chapter 1933 in A Thousand Plateaus with as much concentration as I can muster. Stylistically, it has a lot in common with philosophers inspired by Nietzsche. I am reminded of some of the reading I did in Wyndham Lewis and Oswald Spengler in a previous lifetime. These sorts of authors pride themselves in being able to weave together strands from many different disciplines and hate being categorized. Within a few pages of the chapter on 1933 you will see references to Kafka, American movies, Andre Gorz's theory of work and Clausewitz's military writings. I used to be able to do this sort of thing myself before I became doctrinaire and boring. Their approach to fascism is totally at odds with the approach we have been developing in our cyberseminar. Thinkers such as Marx and Trotsky focus on the class dynamics of bourgeois society. Bonapartism is rooted in the attempt of the French bourgeoisie in 1848 to stave off proletarian revolution. Trotsky explains fascism as a totalitarian last- ditch measure to preserve private property when bourgeois democracy or the Bonapartist state fail. Deleuze and Guattari see fascism as a permanent feature of social life. Class is not so important to them. They are concerned with what they call microfascism, the fascism that lurks in heart of each and every one of us. (Oooh, scary stuff.) When they talk about societies that were swept by fascism, such as Germany, they totally ignore the objective social and economic framework: depression, hyperinflation, loss of territory, etc. This is wrong. Fascism is a product of objective historical factors, not shortcomings in the human psyche or imperfections in the way society is structured. The way to prevent fascism is not to have unfascist attitudes or live in unfascist communities, like the hippies did in the 1960's. It is to confront the capitalist class during periods of mounting crisis and win a socialist victory. In a key description of the problem, they say, The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole. This is a totally superficial understanding of how fascism came about. What is Left fascism? It is true that the Communist Party employed thuggish behavior on occasion during the ultraleft Third Period. They broke up meetings of small Trotskyist groups while the Nazis were breaking up the meetings of trade unions or Communists. Does this behavior equal left Fascism? Fascism is a class term. It describes a mass movement of the petty-bourgeoisie that seeks to destroy all vestiges of the working-class movement. This at least is the Marxist definition. Fascism is not intolerance, bad attitudes, meanness or insensitivity. It is a violent, procapitalist mass movement of the middle-class that employs socialist phrase-mongering. I want to conclude with a few words about Felix Guattari and Toni Negri's Communists like Us. Unlike Deleuze/Guattari's collaborations, this is a perfectly straightforward political manifesto that puts forward a basic challenge to Marxism. It is deeply inspired by a reading
[Marxism-Thaxis] Al Dhameer Al Arabi
Al Dhameer Al Arabi Yoshie Furuhashi Mon Mar 31 02:06:22 MDT 2008 http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2008-March/070670.html http://montages.blogspot.com/2008/03/al-dhameer-al-arabi.html Al Dhameer Al Arabi Watch a video of Al Dhameer Al Arabi, The Arab Conscience, produced and directed by Ahmed Al Arian, featuring 106 Arab singers. Much of the video cuts back and forth between harrowing images of deaths and destructions inflicted upon Arabs by American and Israeli wars and occupations, from Iraq to Lebanon to Palestine, and shots of singers reminding the audience that Arabs must overcome the game of divide and conquer played by the empire. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1380976485995401321 The only source of pride for Arabs today, as suggested by the video, is Hizballah. Arabs who listen to this song must go beyond its pan-Arabist framework and consider why the only governments in the Middle East that are giving material support to Hizballah are the governments of Iran and Syria. When the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon began, the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia were in fact quick to condemn Hizballah till the overwhelming Arab support for the Party of God forced them to retreat, at least in rhetoric. Hamas's breach of the Egyptian border to break the siege of Gaza in January this year also briefly highlighted the Egyptian government's role in imprisoning Palestinians under the Israeli occupation. The same role is played by the other pro-American Arab governments as well, albeit less visibly. Arabs who care about Palestine and admire Hizballah, a majority of common people in the Arab world, therefore must reject the empire's attempt to pit Sunnis against Shi'is and Arabs against Iranians and establish new governments in their own countries that actually reflect the Arab public opinion. By the same token, Iranians mustn't fall for an illusion that, if they abandon Hamas and Hizballah and help the Americans in Iraq, the empire will make peace with them. It won't. Now, an aside to Western leftists. Western leftists must stop and think about who in Iran are the least enthusiastic about supporting Hamas and Hizballah: secular and religious liberals who solicit the support of the West in the name of human rights and democracy, the very type of people whom Western leftists professed to love. The only thought about Palestine that occurs to Iranian liberals, in Iran as well as in the diaspora, is usually a waste of money (the same thought that Russian liberals thought under the Soviet government as they contemplated the expenses of the Soviet Union's international commitments). A line from a Persian band Kiosk's song Eshgh-e Sorat, Love for Speed, speaks for them: scraped up the very last dime / sent it all to Palestine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi0egvuCRCo The most fervently anti-Arab Iranians, dogmatic secularists, even think that their nation began a long decline when Arabs conquered Persia and brought Islam to its people. In conclusion, all major problems for Arabs and Iranians -- the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the US occupation of Iraq, the US-Israeli threat to Iran -- really require regional, not national, solutions. Whether such regional solutions can be found depends on whether Arabs and Iranians can learn to collaborate with each other in search of them and include both Turks and Kurds as part of their common regional project in the end. -- Yoshie http://montages.blogspot.com/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Police Arrest Anti-War Protester, 80, At Mall
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/30/7974/ Published on Sunday, March 30, 2008 by Newsday.com (New York) Police Arrest Anti-War Protester, 80, At Mall by Anastasia Economides Matthew Chayes An 80-year-old church deacon was removed from the Smith Haven Mall yesterday in a wheelchair and arrested by police for refusing to remove a T-shirt protesting the Iraq War. Police said that Don Zirkel, of Bethpage, was disturbing shoppers at the Lake Grove mall with his T-shirt, which had what they described as “graphic anti-war images.” Zirkel, a deacon at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal in Wyandanch, said his shirt had the death tolls of American military personnel and Iraqis - 4,000 and 1 million - and the words “Dead” and “Enough.” The shirt also has three blotches resembling blood splatters. Police said in a release last night that Zirkel was handing out anti-war pamphlets to mallgoers and that mall security told him to stop and turn his shirt inside out. Zirkel refused to turn his shirt inside out and wouldn’t leave, police said. Security placed him on “civilian arrest” and called police. When police arrived, Zirkel passively resisted attempts to bring him to a police car, the release said. But Zirkel said he was sitting in the food court drinking coffee with his wife Marie, 77, and several others when police and mall security officers approached and demanded they remove their anti-war T-shirts. The others complied, but Zirkel said he refused, and when he wouldn’t stand up to be removed and arrested, authorities brought over a wheelchair. “They forcibly picked me up and put me in the wheelchair,” said Zirkel, a deacon at one of the poorest Catholic parishes on Long Island, where a devastating fire recently destroyed the rectory and storage areas. Zirkel was charged with criminal trespassing and resisting arrest. He was released on bail. A spokeswoman for mall owner Simon Property Group did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Generally speaking, a mall has the right to control what happens on its property, said John McEntee, a Uniondale commercial litigation lawyer. Activists with dueling opinions had gathered to support and oppose America’s five-year campaign. As Zirkel was being wheeled to the police car, the crowd chanted “We shall not be moved!” Moments later, they moved; police and mall security had ordered them off the property. Many joined a larger anti-war crowd assembled by the mall’s entrance, off mall property, on Veterans Memorial Highway. They were complemented nearby by protesters saying the Iraq war is vital for security. Copyright © 2008, Newsday Inc. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Discuss this story Print This Post E-Mail This Article 135 Comments so far greatbear215 March 30th, 2008 10:23 am Life in a police state; thanks to conservative political ideology. A lot like the “nipple,” the “tee-shirt” is also a big threat to America’s security. Perhaps they should cover the nipple with the tee-shirt; that way America won’t be so frightened. MeAlsoToo_ARealist March 30th, 2008 10:23 am “But Zirkel said he was sitting in the food court drinking coffee with his wife Marie, 77, and several others when police and mall security officers approached and demanded they remove their anti-war T-shirts.” They should be glad they weren’t Tasered by Security, forcibly stripped of their tee-shirts, then arrested for ‘Indecent Exposure’ once the official Policia-arrived on-scene…[maybe during the next-Admin…as Kerry so obviously would have approved-of in FL…?]. “Don’t Taze me, Bro” truthmonger March 30th, 2008 10:33 am I guess it’s okay for war recruiters to hand out pro-war pamphlets but not for anti-war folks to hand out anti-war pamphlets. I guess freedom isn’t free. citizen1 March 30th, 2008 10:37 am Police and corporate state …. that’s how you get fascism. lino March 30th, 2008 10:43 am yes, sad to see army recruitment spots on prime time tv, mulit-million dollar “recruitment centers” being built everywhere, even in towns of under 25,000 population, army recruiters on high school campuses, seeing recruiters driving star-spangled hummers along freeways in major cities. but try wearing the wrong clothing… even sadder to see, here, only three posts on this article. perhaps the poor response here is due to the fact that the names of nader or clinton or obama were omitted. KEM PATRICK March 30th, 2008 10:46 am Well, the GOOD news is, he was released on bail. _ Wonder how long that benefit will still be in effect? barksnotbites March 30th, 2008 10:47 am Okay all you non-Americans sitting in judgement of the American people. Do you get it? The Empire wants ALL under its thumb. There is no place on the planet to be free of these criminals - unless all Earth citizens unite. There is not a living creature that is not being or is to be -
[Marxism-Thaxis] Vienna Circle ettc.
The argument between the Vienna Circle and Karl Popper on the matter of the verification principle. Popper susbtituted the falsficaion principle for the verification principle. I believe that this and related issues have been at best neglected by marxism. Yet is a matter of signifcance. The problem of the entire relationship between the physical sciences, the human sciences and what is known as everyday common sense is one that needs badly to be solved. Without a solution to it communism stands on weak and unconvincing ground. Perhaps it should be recalled that the Vienna Circle contained socialists and was not a right wing intellectual circle. Even Popper had been associated with marxism in his youth. He was later to become a liberal. These people as marxism often suggests were not extreme right wing ideologues. Bertrand Russell exercised an enormous influence on the Vienna Circle and on Popper. Yet it cannot be said that he was politically reactionary. Paddy Hackett ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Vienna Circle ettc.
rasherrs The argument between the Vienna Circle and Karl Popper on the matter of the verification principle. Popper susbtituted the falsficaion principle for the verification principle. I believe that this and related issues have been at best neglected by marxism. ^ CB: Marxist Philosopher Maurice Cornforth wrote a 350 page book all on Popper , including extensive discussion of falsifiability. Cornforth isn't the only Marxist to discuss it. http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2001/msg04772.htm http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2004w52/msg00212.htm See Ralph Dumain's discussions of Cornforth http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/cornforth7/SVI-0.html Yet is a matter of signifcance. The problem of the entire relationship between the physical sciences, the human sciences and what is known as everyday common sense is one that needs badly to be solved. Without a solution to it communism stands on weak and unconvincing ground. Perhaps it should be recalled that the Vienna Circle contained socialists and was not a right wing intellectual circle. Even Popper had been associated with marxism in his youth. He was later to become a liberal. These people as marxism often suggests were not extreme right wing ideologues. Bertrand Russell exercised an enormous influence on the Vienna Circle and on Popper. Yet it cannot be said that he was politically reactionary. Paddy Hackett ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Vienna Circle ettc.
rasherrs rasherrs The argument between the Vienna Circle and Karl Popper on the matter of the verification principle. Popper susbtituted the falsficaion principle for the verification principle. I believe that this and related issues have been at best neglected by marxism. Yet is a matter of signifcance. The problem of the entire relationship between the physical sciences, the human sciences and what is known as everyday common sense is one that needs badly to be solved. Without a solution to it communism stands on weak and unconvincing ground. Perhaps it should be recalled that the Vienna Circle contained socialists and was not a right wing intellectual circle. Even Popper had been associated with marxism in his youth. He was later to become a liberal. These people as marxism often suggests were not extreme right wing ideologues. Bertrand Russell exercised an enormous influence on the Vienna Circle and on Popper. Yet it cannot be said that he was politically reactionary. ^ CB: Yea, Russell was a liberal. Jim F. can tell you who was a Marxist and who not in the Vienna Circle , and among the logical positivists. The name of the Marxist among them will come to me in a minute. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Vienna Circle ettc.
On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:22:21 -0400 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: rasherrs rasherrs - --- The argument between the Vienna Circle and Karl Popper on the matter of the verification principle. Popper susbtituted the falsficaion principle for the verification principle. I believe that this and related issues have been at best neglected by marxism. Yet is a matter of signifcance. The problem of the entire relationship between the physical sciences, the human sciences and what is known as everyday common sense is one that needs badly to be solved. Without a solution to it communism stands on weak and unconvincing ground. Perhaps it should be recalled that the Vienna Circle contained socialists and was not a right wing intellectual circle. Even Popper had been associated with marxism in his youth. He was later to become a liberal. These people as marxism often suggests were not extreme right wing ideologues. Bertrand Russell exercised an enormous influence on the Vienna Circle and on Popper. Yet it cannot be said that he was politically reactionary. ^ CB: Yea, Russell was a liberal. Jim F. can tell you who was a Marxist and who not in the Vienna Circle , and among the logical positivists. The name of the Marxist among them will come to me in a minute. ___ Among the Vienna Circle, Otto Neurath was an avowed Marxist. He was by training a mathematician, an economist and a sociologist. At the time of the 1919 revolution in Germany, he was appointed by the Social Democratic government in Bavaria to run a commission for overseeing the socialization of the economy. Not long after that, the Social Democrats were displaced by a radical left government comprised of Communists, left Social Democrats and anarchists. They kept Neurath in his post. Later after the 1919 revolution was suppressed, Neurath was arrested and put on trial for treason. The treason charges against him were eventually dropped after protests from the Austrian government and the intercession of prominent academics in Germany, including his old teacher Max Weber. After that, he returned to his native Austria, where he remained active in the Austrian SPD and became very much involved in worker education. As an admirer of Ernst Mach, Neurath fell in with a loosely knit group of scientifically minded philosophers and philosophically minded scientists who were concerned with updating Mach's philosophy in light of then recent developments in science and mathematical logic. This group became known as the Vienna Circle and although Moritz Schlick was its titular head. Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap were its dominant figures. It was Neurath and Carnap who drew up the group's manifesto, The Scientific Conception of the World; The Vienna Circle. In that document, Neurath and Carnap emphasized the broader concerns of the circle which extended beyond logic and the philosophy of science to encompass issues in culture, education and politics. They made clear their orientation to socialism and they included Karl Marx in their list of thinkers who considered to be progenitors of the scientific conception of the world. Politically, most of the Vienna Circle were left social democrats. However, there were a few members like Schlick, and Richard von Mises (the brother of economist Ludwig von Mises) who were not all socialists or social democrats but were liberals in the continental European senses (that is they were they were free marketeers). ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Deleuze/Guattari on fascism: blast from the past
Proyect seems to have skimmed the anti-Oedipus book and then read one pamphlet Negri wrote with Guattari. ((By the way, let me point out that the excitement about the Empire book (Hardt and Negri) might have actually come with a bit more reading comprehension if some of the many Americans who acclaimed it had actually read it in relation to Lyotard and D-G. )) At any rate, Proyect has read more of D-G than most 'Marxists'. But he is wrong to see them as belonging to some simple Nietzschean tradition (I have to assume to see them as irrationalist in order to dismiss them). And he seems to have got so many of the basic facts about them and their authoring relationship wrong. But then again, most Americans of his age don't know much about France 1968 because they were caught up in 1968 US. I really have to recommend D-G's 'What is Philosophy'. It's a great read, and if someone wants to pay me to review it, I'll be happy to. I could imagine Wittgenstein would have love it. Some very interesting analysis of Heidgegger too. It wouldn't be fair to Louis or his sophomoric attempt at a review of D-G to tell him to read 'What is Philosophy' as some sort of corrective, since the review was written in 1996 and I think the English-language version of 'What is Philosophy' came out in 1998. It was, by the way, a bestseller in France. CJ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Vienna Circle ettc.
Interesting! Are there available any English copies of The Scientific Conception of the World? - Original Message - From: Jim Farmelant [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu Cc: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 1:25 AM Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Vienna Circle ettc. On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:22:21 -0400 Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: rasherrs rasherrs - --- The argument between the Vienna Circle and Karl Popper on the matter of the verification principle. Popper susbtituted the falsficaion principle for the verification principle. I believe that this and related issues have been at best neglected by marxism. Yet is a matter of signifcance. The problem of the entire relationship between the physical sciences, the human sciences and what is known as everyday common sense is one that needs badly to be solved. Without a solution to it communism stands on weak and unconvincing ground. Perhaps it should be recalled that the Vienna Circle contained socialists and was not a right wing intellectual circle. Even Popper had been associated with marxism in his youth. He was later to become a liberal. These people as marxism often suggests were not extreme right wing ideologues. Bertrand Russell exercised an enormous influence on the Vienna Circle and on Popper. Yet it cannot be said that he was politically reactionary. ^ CB: Yea, Russell was a liberal. Jim F. can tell you who was a Marxist and who not in the Vienna Circle , and among the logical positivists. The name of the Marxist among them will come to me in a minute. ___ Among the Vienna Circle, Otto Neurath was an avowed Marxist. He was by training a mathematician, an economist and a sociologist. At the time of the 1919 revolution in Germany, he was appointed by the Social Democratic government in Bavaria to run a commission for overseeing the socialization of the economy. Not long after that, the Social Democrats were displaced by a radical left government comprised of Communists, left Social Democrats and anarchists. They kept Neurath in his post. Later after the 1919 revolution was suppressed, Neurath was arrested and put on trial for treason. The treason charges against him were eventually dropped after protests from the Austrian government and the intercession of prominent academics in Germany, including his old teacher Max Weber. After that, he returned to his native Austria, where he remained active in the Austrian SPD and became very much involved in worker education. As an admirer of Ernst Mach, Neurath fell in with a loosely knit group of scientifically minded philosophers and philosophically minded scientists who were concerned with updating Mach's philosophy in light of then recent developments in science and mathematical logic. This group became known as the Vienna Circle and although Moritz Schlick was its titular head. Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap were its dominant figures. It was Neurath and Carnap who drew up the group's manifesto, The Scientific Conception of the World; The Vienna Circle. In that document, Neurath and Carnap emphasized the broader concerns of the circle which extended beyond logic and the philosophy of science to encompass issues in culture, education and politics. They made clear their orientation to socialism and they included Karl Marx in their list of thinkers who considered to be progenitors of the scientific conception of the world. Politically, most of the Vienna Circle were left social democrats. However, there were a few members like Schlick, and Richard von Mises (the brother of economist Ludwig von Mises) who were not all socialists or social democrats but were liberals in the continental European senses (that is they were they were free marketeers). ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
