Chernobyling (fwd)
>-- Forwarded message -- >Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 14:36:20 -0500 >From: DEW <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Reply-To: Electronic Democracy in Nova Scotia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Chernobyling > >Originally To: comp.software.year-2000 newsgroup > >Driving home one recent night I heard a CBC radio program on Three Mile >Island. I was surprised to learn how out-of-control the plant was. Personnel >who retrieved test samples and worked to control the reactor spent hours in >showers scrubbing their skin raw even though they wore state-of-the-art >protective suits. A meltdown can occur around 5000 degrees. Three Mile >Island passed 4000 degrees before it was brought down. It was disturbing to >hear that the same problem had occurred shortly before at another American >reactor but management types had suppressed information about the occurrence >and how to avoid it at other sites. > >Before hearing the program I thought that the worse the year 2000 mess might >bring could be a bit worse than what folks had suffered between 1929 and >1950. I read about power problems but most mentioned shutdowns and >blackouts. The radio program made me think hard about nuclear reactors. > >I searched the Internet for how nuclear reactors and nuclear workers might >behave in the year 2000. I found lots of information on reactor problems; >waste and unplanned environmental releases that remain dangerous >for thousands of years, terrorist threats, weaknesses, disasters and near >disasters, cancer increases, etc. The Virtual Nuclear Tourist site even >told me that 'Chernobyl was not a meltdown in the traditional sense..' >Perhaps we should call it Chernobyling. Comp.software.year-2000 e-mails >turned up on the issue. However, I found few solid answers to my questions >on what might happen in the year 2000 at hundreds of nuclear reactors >around the world. > >Rick Cowles, wrote to comp.software.year-2000 in October 97: >[The folks running the Y2K effort at this particular nuke facility are in a >stage 5 panic. They haven't even finished inventorying their software yet. >Risk assessment? Ha! Embedded controls? Ha! I laugh in your general >direction. They don't have an inkling of a clue (that's the pre-clueless >stage) as to how to approach the embedded controls issue. They can get >absolutely no upper level management support or funding.] > >Rick's words ring true. Nuclear workers and managers are probably much like >ordinary human beings. A Statistics Canada survey released Dec. 97 found >that 9% of Canadian companies had formal plans, 36% had 'informal plans', >46% knew about the problem but had done nothing, and 9% were ignorant of the >problem. If about 10% of the world has taken the problem seriously, the same >probably applies to nuclear reactor staffing, management and officials. >Rick's friends would probably fit into the 'informal plans' group. Should we >have a high level of confidence in their systems when the clock rolls around >to 2000? Considering that some of the 9% with formal plans will failÂ… > >Many comp.software.year-2000 e-mails argued that nuclear reactor designs >have a kind of built in graceful degradation. Most e-mails avoided details. >A >moose outside a Canadian reactor might be a lovely picture but it does not >mean that the moose is safe. We should try not to be as dumb as a moose >about technologies that can kill millions of us as well as moose, birds, >fish, >pets, etc. > >Daniel P. B. Smith wrote about graceful nuclear degradation. He came closer >to giving details than most and he even wrote with grace. >[ Speaking as a pinko left-wing peace creep, member of the Union of >Concerned Scientists, etc: I hope and believe that nuclear power plants >ultimately rely for their safety on nice, big, simple low-tech things like >big heavy containnment buildings. > Nuclear power plants are supposed not to irradiate state-sized chunks >of real estate merely because the pipe burst and the control rod stuck and >the pump failed. Now, maybe they won't act exactly the way they're supposed >to. But I do tend to credit those that think that the most likely scenario >is that if the nuclear plants have Y2K problems they'll shut down, more or >less safely. And it may then be days/months/years/eternity before they ever >generate any more power.'] > >I would love to have faith in DanielÂ’s arguments but I have doubts. I doubt >an intelligent and well-trained auditor would accept these arguments as >proof of safety, let alone a scientist. Chernobyl was not supposed to spread >highly toxic radioactivity over the 100,000 square kilometers that surround >it but it did. Russians were not supposed to eat radioactive food, but they >are eating radioactive food. Fins were not supposed to dispose of >radioactive reindeer, Brits were not supposed to dispose of radioactive >sheep, but they have had to because of Chernobyl which is miles away. (I >believe the sheep and reindeer had less r
Re: The situation in Cuba
On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Sid Shniad wrote, about the TINA line: > > How do you keep from careening along this slippery slope once you've set > foot on it? > Seems to me that this was the issue posed by Brian's interventions. > I agree this is a real question, but I thought Brian's intervention tried to bypass the problem altogether by not even considering the difference between tactical concessions and strategic concessions (poor choice of words here, but all I can think of right now). Castro explains each of these measures as concessions, as necessary evils, as forced on Cuba by circumstances beyond its control. That they are accepted as a _strategy_ is carefully rejected. Social democracy el all around the world turn them from evils into virtues, and they don't even have to change their strategy because that was it all along. The strategy in Cuba is still to build socialism by appealing to the higher qualities that human beings are capable of, not individual greed, and to go down to defeat before submitting to imperialism. The concessions to foreign capital are still minor exceptions in the Cuban economy, and firmly within the control of the Cuban state. As tricky as it is, this problem is trivial compared with the real challenges in Cuba. For example, just how _do_ you overcome bureaucratic tendencies in economic management that stifle workers intitative and morale, especially in a poor country? This was the whole theme of the "rectification campaign" against the USSR-type methods that had prevailed for the previous decade or two. Much more interesting issue for this list, IMHO. Bill Burgess Bill Burgess
Re: Selective responses (second try)
Sid Schniad: > Does anything and everything go under such circumstances? Of course not, but on the big question of NEP-like measures, there are no alternatives. With the collapse of the USSR, these measures became painfully necessary. In order to make them disappear, it requires money not political exhortation. >Following this line of reasoning, would place criticism of the Sandinistas' >adherence to IMF-imposed neoliberal strictures (as published in NACLA >Reports and elsewhere) similarly off limits. > The neoliberal adjustments that took place in Nicaragua in 1989 have the same cause as those taking place in Cuba today: the collapse of the USSR. When Gorbachev was in power, Eduard Scheverznade told Nicaragua that it would have to fend for itself. All aid was cut off to placate Washington. These neoliberal measures are not the sort of thing that Sandinistas had an ideological predisposition toward--they were forced on them. After they adopted them, they unfortunately developed a vision of socialism that was more social democratic than anything else. They made a virtue out of necessity. A new left is emerging in Central America and surely will sidestep Daniel Ortega and company. >It seems to me that Louis's position comes down to this: genuine socialists >should treat the revolutionary party in power as being beyond criticism. I advocate that socialists concentrate their fire on the American government. Mostly what Brian Green has to offer is a variation of the sort of thing I hear from Trotskyites all the time on the Spoons mail-list. It is an abstract call for proletarian democracy, with no clue as to how to achieve it. It is a harmless pasttime, which functions as rotisserie baseball for frustrated leftists in imperialist countries. Who can be opposed to democratic socialism everywhere at once? Not me. >If this is an improper inference from what you've been saying, Louis -- >apologies in advance if it is -- could you please provide some specific >instances of policies/actions of the Cuban government that you yourself >have criticized from your own perspective? I regard the task of constructing socialism in Russia in the 1920s or Cuba today as akin to juggling chainsaws. It is a miracle if you can keep them all in the air and not lose too many fingers in the process. My main complaint with Castro is not unlike the criticism I have made on the net of another revolutionary icon, Lenin. They both failed to understand the nature of the revolutionary process that allowed them to take power and fostered the development of poorly conceived clones. Lenin gave his blessing to the "21 conditions" which would create clones of the Bolshevik party everywhere in the world. Guevara tried to recreate the Cuban experience in Bolivia with disastrous results, while a myriad of "Castroite" armed groups came to naught through the 60s and 70s. The FSLN succeeded, and the FMLN nearly succeeded, because they achieved roots in the mass movement and did not make a fetish of armed actions. The other big mistake that Castro made was to give political credit to Allende, whose horrible class-collaborationist policies helped drown the workers movement in blood. Louis Proyect
Re: Ecology and the American Indian
Jim Devine:. > >I am far from being an expert on this stuff. I would appreciate factual >evidence for and against -- plus logical criticisms of the theory above. > In a couple of weeks I plan to write extensively about Mariategui, the great Peruvian Marxist who believed that the ayllus could constitute the basis of a revolutionary state, as Marx thought the Russian zemstvos could in the 1800s. The ayllus were the communal, agrarian societies rooted in the Incan past. Within Maoist circles, there has been fierce controversy over these writings as who has the proper "Mariategui" franchise for Shining Path support. Those who tend to lose the franchise make a big stink about how beastly the Incans were and, therefore, what a knucklehead Mariategui was. I plan to cover all this in more depth than anybody is probably interested in, but my eventual purpose is to put this into some kind of book form. Louis Proyect
Re: Ecology and the American Indian
Dear Friends, But isn't it the case that in precapitalist societies, there is nothing inherent in the societies which leads to the destruction of nature. On the contrary, there appear to be many what we might call social reproductive mechanisms designed to insure some sort of ecological balance. In capitalism, on the other hand, the drive to accumulate capital is tied to the drive to turn all into commodities for the accumulation of capital. This is a system guaranteed to ravage nature, no? I mean did the Indiands produce the mining towns of Montana, or for that matter the minng town I was born in, where there were no trees and everything was covered with dust? Michael Yates Ellen Dannin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > A visit to Cahokia (across the river from St. Louis) is fascinating in and > of itself and also for the evidence it provides that the large number of > residents there overused the local resources, which then led to its > decline. There may have been other factors, such as climate, but the > decline took place sufficiently recently -- i.e. just before contact -- > that climate records should be sufficiently revealing to decide whether > this was a factor. > > Just as it's wrong to assume that an Indian is an Indian with no > variations, it is also wrong to assume that all there is to the > Judaeo-Christian tradition can be summed up in one sentence of Genesis. > Other parts of the bible make it clear that parts of a field had to remain > unharvested and that every seventh year the land had to be allowed to > rest. It was forbidden to cut down fruit trees in time of war, for > example. Not paying workers on a daily basis was a crime against the > community because it could lead to poverty and anti-social behaviour. > > There were lots of rabbinic exegeses on these and other points which > expanded the protections. There is a whole line of analysis on baalei > chayot - the pain of living things - and of the demand that humans not > cause pain to animals or other living things. > > How much or how little individuals observed these is open to debate, just > as it seems likely that not all Indians, even members of a very > ecologically oriented tribe, likely behaved in a fully reverent way > towards nature. > > Ellen J. Dannin > California Western School of Law > 225 Cedar Street > San Diego, CA 92101 > Phone: 619-525-1449 > Fax:619-696-
BLS Daily Reportboundary="---- =_NextPart_000_01BD2A86.2F94FF40"
This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. -- =_NextPart_000_01BD2A86.2F94FF40 charset="iso-8859-1" > BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 1998 > > In October, there were 1,362 mass layoff events in U.S. workplaces > that involved 134,742 workers, BLS reports. Mass layoffs are those > involving 50 or more workers from a single business or establishment > who filed new claims for unemployment insurance benefits. Drawing > from these UI databases, BLS finds that the number of layoff events in > October was a little higher than the number of events in October 1996. > However, the number of employees involved in layoffs was comparable. > Manufacturing industries accounted for 27 percent of all mass layoff > events and 33 percent of all initial claims filed in October > (Daily Labor Report, page D-1). > > In a "commentary" article (Washington Times) on the minimum wage, > "Marginal Workers, Minimized Jobs," Bruce Bartlett, syndicated > columnist, discusses the unemployment rate for black teenage males and > says - "All of these data are available from the Bureau of Labor > Statistics at http://stats.bls.gov". > > Merit pay raises will range from 4.1 percent for low-level workers to > 4.3 percent for top-level executives this year, according to a survey > of 1,600 companies with 10 million employees. William M. Mercer Inc., > a benefits and compensation consulting company, conducted the survey > (Washington Post, Jan. 25, page H4). > > What working couples - both men and women - want most from their > employers these days are flexible hours that allow them to handle > doctors' appointments, home repairs, classes, and parent-teacher > conferences, according to a study conducted by Catalyst, a nonprofit > business research organization that focuses on corporate efforts to > promote women (Washington Post, Jan. 25, page H4). > > U.S. firms may lose labor-cost advantage, says "The Outlook" column > (Wall Street Journal, page A1). During most of the 1990s, U.S. > manufacturers have cashed in on a great bargain: the American worker. > U.S. factory wages and benefits have remained low, compared with those > in many other industrialized countries. And companies have turned > that edge into growing global market share and solid profits. > Recently, however, several factors have combined to reduce that > labor-cost advantage. Even though wages, especially for less-skilled > jobs, are rising slowly, American workers are rapidly becoming pricier > compared with those abroad At least three factors are helping > change the global competitive landscape. The most obvious is the > rising dollar Secondly, with U.S. unemployment at just 4.7 > percent, actual wages are starting to creep up. Benefit costs, which > have been restrained, could soon begin to climb Lastly, foreign > companies are starting to adopt some of the cost-cutting tactics that > U.S. companies introduced earlier in the decade Hourly > compensation costs for factory workers in different countries are > shown in a table and credited to BLS. > > Nearly 1.1 million jobs would be lost from the U.S. workforce over the > next two years if the Asian economic crisis causes the nation's > foreign trade deficit to balloon an additional $100 billion, the > Economic Policy Institute said in a report The report was based on > final 1995 demand data from the BLS 183-categorization of the U.S. > economy (Daily Labor Report, page A-4). > > DUE OUT TOMORROW: Employment Cost Index - December 1997 > -- =_NextPart_000_01BD2A86.2F94FF40 b3NvZnQgTWFpbC5Ob3RlADEIAQWAAwAOzgcBABoAEgAQAAoAAQAdAQEggAMADgAAAM4HAQAa ABIADgADAAEAFAEBCYABACEAAABDQzAzOTc1NDJFOTZEMTExODg4RTAwMjBBRjlDMDMwOAD8BgEE gAEAEQAAAEJMUyBEYWlseSBSZXBvcnQAkAUBDYAEAAICAAIAAQOQBgDYCwAAHQMALgAA AAABvSqtHMb2bD9allkR0ageACCvnAIwAAAS0CAAAJ4teR4AMUABDQAAAFJJQ0hBUkRTT05f RAADABpAAB4AMEABDQAAAFJJQ0hBUkRTT05fRAADABlAAAIBCRAB BgkAAAIJAAC3DgAATFpGdU1gcd3/AAoBDwIVAqQD5AXrAoMAUBMDVAIAY2gKwHNldG4yBgAGwwKD MgPFAgBw3HJxEiAHEwKAfQqACM/FCdk7FS8yNTUCgAqBAw2xC2BuZzEwMzPPCvsS8gwBE5BvdAWQ BUAEQkwF8ERBSUxZgQfwRVBPUlQsBdAUT04akFkbUEpBTkhVQVIa0DI2G1AxWDk5OAqFCoVJA6BP mRogb2IEkBtQdGgEkAhlIHcesjEsMzZPEiAAwAQRC2B5bw3QIDRldgnwdAQgC4AgVVguUy4e4AWw awtRY9sHkR6QYQVAC4B2BvAgcIJkHKAzNCw3NBIguyFSBJBzG1AaUhUwcBTR/nMhMAXQH7gEIArA HtAekA5vEfAiRQuAZyA1MN4gBbEEYB7CI3QgA1IlkJYgAJAYMGwe0GJ1KIFfB5AEIAWxB5ABkWwE AGj/B4ACMB7gJfAoAAMQIrEpMLUH4GMLYW0n8QWxdSkwum0LUG8GwCpSC4BzCHBfAHAhwCjgCfAN wGkkg0Q/LTAD8CaxKBMekSYRVUn8IGQiIAGgH7AHkCPUKtDcbmQh5R6RKyB1BtAEkP8nACBAH/8e BR7gH7AoUSoA4wJAKMFoaWceoSHyA6CXMUwynxyiNiShSG8e8P8gcB5kNXosUwngILIidSDRvyUm M7IFoCxQCsAp4WUko/UxgGYA0HQIcSaxMKEpAPZ0CIElgWMFoCwgGgAiwOEr4jI3IHAEkCHAKmG/ MfEHQAMgH68lgTCwIBhwfz6uC4At4AcxK2cq4zMJXEAnODUuKEQLcGzYeSBMAaAFsVIkQxtQBQqw Zx7QRC0xKS47HP8oYCI7QSpCCsB5Is8lkUJgK3Ae0ChXP7A0gG8YMB4gA6AHYyknADUkbb1
Bear Market? (Formerly Japan's MoF)boundary="---- =_NextPart_000_01BD2A85.511C5470"
This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand this format, some or all of this message may not be legible. -- =_NextPart_000_01BD2A85.511C5470 Hi Doug -- As far as I can see the Fed is controlling the market very closely these days with 3-month treasuries. At least when the market is down interest rates seem to be down as well and conversely. Thus it seems that the Fed is preventing a real melt down in stocks while at the same time denying any impulses the market may have to go up. Thus you may very well be in luck and the bear market be well established fairly soon. The recent experience we have had with central bank control of the stock market is in Japan from 1987 to the present when the market gradually fell from the 38000's (?) to the current 14000's (?), a truly prolonged bear market. At the same time the short interest rate was reduced below 1%. It is interesting to attempt to apply this history to the current U.S. situation. For me the most upsetting element of Wall St. was the chart on p. 81 showing the net U.S. credit position since 1952 as a percent of GDP. From a break even position in 1982 we now are in hock for 16% of GDP, an amount that is increasing rapidly. The Fed must be aware of this, and must also be aware of the powerful effect interest rate cuts can have in reducing the value of the dollar and thereby tending to restore some sort of trade balance. On the other hand it may be that the situation has gone too far already, and if the dollar were to begin a long descent speculation would force an immediate crash and an abrupt end to the current world economic system, i.e., with the dollar as the international currency and the U.S. as the consumer of last resort. Indeed there is real peril here since roughly half of international trade consists of INTRA-corporate transfers and, except for the EC and Japan most currencies are pegged to the dollar anyway. Thus it is not clear that devaluation can restore the U.S. trade balance, at least at dollar values that are acceptable to speculators and in terms of its role as the international currency. Yet what else can they try? At some level of international indebtedness the willingness of speculators to hold dollars will disappear, and it would appear from your chart that that day is fast approaching. At least the low interest rate approach has some hope of saving the U.S. stock market from a true melt down and could provide benefits both domestically and internationally in propping up demand and staving off the global recession (depression?). Dave -- Sent: Friday, January 23, 1998 11:17 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: Japan's MoF Jay Hecht wrote: >The "bears" in the latest Barron's roundtable all repeat the same thing. >Another "Rational Expectations" hypothesis - all assertion, no facts. I can't read that crap anymore. Either makes me want to scream or go to sleep. All I care about is that a bear market be well established by the time the paperback of Wall Street comes out. Doug -- =_NextPart_000_01BD2A85.511C5470 b3NvZnQgTWFpbC5Ob3RlADEIAQWAAwAOzgcBABoAEgAMADoAAQBJAQEggAMADgAAAM4HAQAa ABIABwAyAAEAPAEBCYABACEAAABDODAzOTc1NDJFOTZEMTExODg4RTAwMjBBRjlDMDMwOADxBgEE gAEAJEJlYXIgTWFya2V0PyAoRm9ybWVybHkgSmFwYW4ncyBNb0YpAMQLAQ2ABAACAgAC AAEDkAYAGAsAAB0DAC4AAEAAOQCgwebwryq9AR4AcAABJEJlYXIgTWFya2V0 PyAoRm9ybWVybHkgSmFwYW4ncyBNb0YpAAIBcQABFgG9Kq927FSXA8mWLhHRiI4AIK+c AwgAAB4AMUABDQAAAFJJQ0hBUkRTT05fRAADABpAAB4AMEABDQAAAFJJQ0hB UkRTT05fRAADABlAAAIBCRABLggAACoIAACBDgAATFpGdcKG1PP/AAoBDwIVAqQD 5AXrAoMAUBMDVAIAY2gKwHNldO4yBgAGwwKDMgPGBxMCgzIzEw9mNAPFAgBwcvZxEiAThX0KgAjP CdkCgAcKgQ2xC2BuZzEwMw8UIAsKFVIB0CBIaSBCRAhgZyAtLQqFQRUEIGYKwWEEIEkgY0MDkRHw ZSB0aB0QRj0JgCAEABygAiEDYGxsTwuAG0AdMgDAcmsSACC6dgSQeRygFyAR8GwfgMMdMRHwIGRh eQQgA/DxHTAgMy0EYAIwIQAeEMZlHGAIcnMuIBNwBUD2bCHBBUB3HUADoB6pHbHYZG93A6ALgHQE kAeQuQVAcmEkoAQgHPFtHSC4byBiIGEkQhxhdx/gfwMgAHAdkB3hH1Ef0iJBVPxodQQgIOAlYwQg HTAlILsdKhXwZR9QAjAeYmElAPchwAMgB4BsBUAkNRzgJcB0Y2sgsWgDEB0QKQVzvmEHgB0gB3Eg cAnweSpTwy3QHaBtcHVsEfAowr8exwDAH4ARwB9QJbJnJdD0dXAn1nkIYC+jH1Mmo/8l8SuhCkAs ACbjHTIl8ArBvx7lJfEmoyTRAaAeUHMdQJMdkBwgaXIf8XNvAiC+LgqFCoUoAB0QF5BjKiH5NMB4 cAZxCfA3kCaRL+T/EcAdkCDTN5IlEDJBAHAy8PEd5SBvZizEK+IjiSuhHEphCrADoANSIDE5/Dg3 JbIdMinhEfA3sSMO2wnAOSB1B0Af8WYmsjzzUR0yMzgwQSAnBCAodD8pPYZjCHAXkDexMfo0QScs KoEeEC6gH4AV8H8XERlAHYEzmSJELNws02j/FzEkfCDAHGEXkTLQRHMXIOkH4DElNk1JPBUkpB5j vyXQJSAkoC6AKRFLcXALUD8gAh2xTLElwB9xQc1VLvZTIkAAkHQ/wCpANiEiUP5GBbFGZQRgItEw oBHxKkM/H+AlkDeiOvEZ/AxAIFf/P9EGAEVAGf1IA0HzEcFRcXMDoDCxODFGwgPwHnVu3x8hTmMF AAmAKFFwH8Ag4O9PEU6hOFI9QDUSIBxhKpDHOAE3kzrxR0RQT0I9Av0qkGIhsTLwKgJXeCuhPUH7 EiA4kW5JAQrAMnNG4DLh4wIQBcAxNiVZhUNhJlH9BGB1N7Eo4zwzVxEcYB5isSUQcGlkJ7UdVG0o IP00M2FIEFzROvMEAF5iYVW/B0A2AGG9PeEkQASQZi6g3zTADdAFkEceQjB0HcEDke8v8yuhSFMe ZnYHQApQOubfJDAeQBwyMyQXkGIgAQnw/1dASzQkwgWwLPEDcGuSVQJ/OwE/kTNxB0AAcDeQNk1P /SM0b2oCL+EnAShRL7Il8f8o5063L
Re: The situation in Cuba
Bill Burgess comments that these kinds of (regressive) changes are what you have to do if you want to attract foreign capital. True enough. But this is the very argument that's being used around the world by regimes of conservative, liberal and social democratic stripe. This is the essence of the position that There Is No Alternative, isn't it? How do you keep from careening along this slippery slope once you've set foot on it? Seems to me that this was the issue posed by Brian's interventions. Sid
Re: Ecology and the American Indian
At 09:03 AM 1/27/98 +1100, you wrote: >Interesting story Louis but how do you account for the practice >whereby some tribes in the plains used to stampede whole herds >of bison over cliffs as a quick way of killing them and then >picking only bits and pieces of the bodies below. Incredible >waste and lack of concern for their natural partners. > >kind regards >bill mitchell This, along with the disappearance of the saber-tooth tiger, is another one of those "gotchas" that figures prominently in the right-wing repertory. Hutchinson, in "Remaking of the Amerind", wrote that the Crow once drove 700 buffalo off the edge of a cliff. This anecdote has made the rounds of the Rush Limbaugh show, the National Review and other venues. What he does not deal with is the question of whether the Crow *wasted* the meat, but only projected what whites would do in capitalist society into hunting-and-gathering society. But, even granting the possibility that Indians left the meat to rot, are we supposed to draw general conclusions about this one incident? It is amazing that such events are so isolated in Indian societies. When whites killed millions of beaver and buffalo wantonly and allowed valuable parts of the animal to go to waste, how can we even begin to compare our society to their's? This of course is the goal of Hutchinson and other apologists for capitalism, to legitimize the waste that our system has institutionalized. Louis Proyect
Re: The situation in Cuba
Brian Green: >State farms were officially named co-ops, yes. You are referring here to the >'basic units of cooperative production'. Here's the deal with these. Workers >collectively 'own' the machinery and the harvest; land, however, remains in >state hands, production quotas are set by the state, and the coop can only >sell its produce to the state, at government-set prices. The country's >established pay scales do not apply, but rather wages vary according to >productivity, a measure intended to establish a subsistence-based incentive >to labour - sounds alot like pieve-work/ commission to me! I know I should just ignore this nonsense, but my god, it is just so blatantly wrong. Green says that co-op land remains in state hands, production quotas are set by the state, at government-set prices. And what is this evidence of? Capitalism? The reason that prices are set is that the government wants to prevent price inflation, as occurred in Nicaragua during the last years of Sandinista rule. This is a socialist measure and is intended to keep a steady supply of food to the urban working-class. And wages vary according to productivity? How beastly. In the United States, wages are not tied to productivity but to the dictates of finance capital which brings in people like the CEO of Scott Paper who lays off workers and freeze wages--all so that the share price goes up. In Cuba, there is no unemployment. There is poverty, alas. What Brian Green is agitated about is poverty and austerity and social decay. He really has no answer for any of this, except vague calls for new approaches to socialism. How this will raise the standard of living in Cuba is beyond me. Everybody should find the time in their lives to read Harrison Salisbury's "900 Days", which is the story of the siege of Leningrad. After a year or so, people were forced to make bread out of sawdust and rancid grain. They died in the tens of thousands from from malnutrition and lack of heat. The bodies stacked up in the street because nobody had any strength to bury them. Salisbury says that Leningrand withstood the siege because there was a lingering sense of the worth of socialism, even with the experience of Stalinism. Leningrad was home to many intellectuals and revolutionaries who held on to the vision of the 1917 revolution. Brian's posts are the equivalent of a complaint about Russian socialism during the 900 days. "We have to disassociate ourselves from a socialism that allows people to eat loaves of bread made up of sawdust and rancid grain," I can hear him saying. Well, of course we do. But, for god's sake, this is a function of being under siege from Nazi imperialism. Cuba is under siege as well and all the social misery and austerity measures are occuring because the wolf is at the door. Instead of preaching to the Cuban government not to make concessions, the only honorable thing that we can call for is an end to the blockade. Blockade and siege is what American leftists should fight against, not try to dispense spurious advice that nobody is in a position to act upon. Louis Proyect
Re: Pope Scolds Capitalist Neoliberalism & Embargo
Wojtek Sokolowski: > Workers today are clearly better off than >their counterparts some 150 years ago. However, today's workers would have >been much better off, had they received (individually or collectively) all >the surplus their labor produced. Of course workers are better off, if you are talking about merrie old England. What does this have to do with Latin America, Asia and most of Africa where there is no industry? People are driven off the land and congregate in shanty-towns in large cities like Lagos or Lima. They do not become proletarianized. Rather they are part of the subproletariat. The reason that these countries do not become proletarianized is because there is no capitalist class in formation the way there was in 1840 England. Without a bourgeoisie, there is no proletariat. Hence, it is up to revolutionary parties led by people like Mao and Castro to drive imperialism out and create the possibilities for national economic development. Marx did not anticipate any of this, but Lenin and Trotsky analyzed it thoroughly. >As far as low wages/standards of living in the Third world are concerned, >again, that is not the effect of capitalism. In most such countries the >value of labour is low due to the low social cost of reproduction of the >labour supply (consistently with the theory of value). This is mumbo-jumbo. Wages are low to start with because these countries are backward and have been so since the 19th century. Ecuador manufactures lawn furniture, not machine tools. The other reason wages are low is that cops, the army and death squads kill union organizers. The theory of value does not address politics and politics is a key element in the class struggle, which affects wages. The only difference >capitalism makes is undercutting the marginal subsistence of those people, >pushing them to pursue non-existent employment -- thus making the problem >visible. I have no idea what this sentence is supposed to mean. Try harder next time, unless you are relying on obfuscation to make dubious political points. Louis Proyect
Re: The situation in Cuba
Thanks, Brian, for the specific examples I asked for. It makes for a more useful discussion. Having said that, I'm running up against the limits of my knowledge on specifics, so my replies are not really adequate. But, a few points: On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Brian Green wrote: > > There are many. I'll list just a few in point form: > - 1990, law promulgated for the tourist sector (Cuba's fastest-growing) > releasing management from the requirement to follow the Labour Code; > workers in tourism could be made to work overtime, and country-wide > grievance procedures were not available to tourist sector workers. I belive it was _some_ parts of the Labour code. Not, for example, the part that guarantees union representation. But the main point is that if you want to attract foreign capital, some adjustments are necessary. The fact remains that workers in the foreign sectors are the highest paid in Cuba, almost a 'labour aristoracy' by comparison. > - 1992, law passes allowing foriegn individuals and enterprises to buy > property and housing in Cuba, despite chronic shortage of housing for Cubans > - indeed, a few years later Cuba actually had to open homeless shelters > - also 1992, a constitutional ammendment allowing for privatization of state > property As before: if you want to attract foreign capital... Are you opposed to this in principle, or in Cuba's specific circumstances? There is a terrible lack of housing stock in Cuba, mainly because they can't afford to build it, including importing the furnishings, elevators etc. Cuba does not have the capacity to produce. That is why they need the foreign capital! Still, Cubans are better housed than any other population in a poor country. There is very high security of tenure, because most Cubans actually _own_ their own apartment! Mortgage payments and rents are at _most_ 10% of income/15 years (someone correct me if I am wrong). I met Cubans who told me their rents were 5.5% of income. And there were "homless shelters" when I was there too, i.e. _dormitories_ for workers on seasonal assignments, people whose new housing was not ready, etc. There are no "homeless" in Cuba in the way we know of. Let's stick to real issues; there are enough of them! > - free trade zones were established; these are open to 100% foreign-owned > enterprises, and wages and conditions are set by 'competitive market > standards' rather than Cuban laws and regulations (what is more, the foreign > companies themselves are responsible for determining those 'competitive > market standards'. This one is new to me. Is it any different than the examples discussed above, i.e. tax and labour contract concessions to attract foreign investment? Are these unlimited free trade zones, e.g. any economic activity; no restrictions on profit repatriation, no conditions for technology transfer, etc. etc? Hosting foreign capitalits is not necessarily becoming capitalist yourself. "Free enterprise" is not transmitted by virus. > - Cuban government has helped Plyaboy seek models for a 'Girls of Cuba' > pictorial What, did they give a visa for a Playboy photographer who got around in a government-owned taxi? Anyway, so what? The Young Communists organized beauty pagents for awhile. You and I would vote against this shit, but we aren't Cuban and socialism and Cuba is strong enough to recover. Now, if they made abortion illegal that would be something. The Pope's #1 theme in Cuba was to push women back, but as the coverage shows, he didn't get very far. > - austerity has been imposed in areas of basic subsistence -- food, > medicine, gasoline -- while all of these are avaialable in abundance to > tourists, visiting business people etc. Cuba is _desparate_ for foreign exchange, foreign capital, etc. People _die_ because they can't buy drugs, etc. You can't get it without giving the tourists and business people that they pay for! Castro is right to call it a petty-bourgeois attitude to pretend that Cuba is not a poor country, and to oppose selling things to rich people, even when you don't have enough for yourself. > - unemployment has become a reality; what is more, unemploymt benefits have > been capped and time-restrictions applied Unemployment as we know it (i.e. due to overproduction) does not exist. During the worst of the "special period" most (over 60%?) of the countries enterprises were shut for lack of supplies, parts etc. Of course they had to curtail unemployment benefits (still far better than anyting here). Managers also got sent home. There are no capitalists in Cuba who kept on clipping coupons. > - the state has blamed its crisis on 'excessive egalitarianism' of socialism > ; such egalitarianism has had an 'anti-economic and anti-efficient > connotation' - these are our revolutionary heroes?? I don't know what these quotes may mean. The basic point, that I think is hard to avoid, is that Cuban policy is to _not_ follow the x-USSR-type strategy of "using market mechanis
Re: Ecology and the American Indian
Barkley Rosser; > One famous counerexample to the view that Indians were >always "in harmony with nature" is the high probability >that the extinction of the sabre-tooth tiger and several >other large mammals in North America probably resulted from >overhunting arising from the initial invasion of the >continent by the human species, the first Native American >Indians to be precise. This does not say that many tribes >later adopted highly ecologically sound approaches. I am not saying that Barkely is a racist, but this argument is part of the ideological repertory of those who try to apologize for the genocide of the Indian. It goes along with references to Inca human sacrifice, and other items that get passed from one right-wing scholar to another. Simon Schama is a master of this kind of bullshit. We have no knowledge of the exact circumstances surrounding the extinction of the saber-tooth tiger and other large animals during the late ice age. Despite all the data on the subject, there is no convincing evidence that Indians were the chief or even the major contributing factor in the demise of such animals. Climate and dozens of other factors could have been just as significant. These questions are dealt with in the scholarly "Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for A Cause", edited by Paul Martin and H.E. Wright Jr. (Yale Univ., 1967). Where does Barkely get his information from? Louis Proyect
Selective responses (second try)
Louis compares Green's criticisms of the Cuban government's policies vis- a-vis Cuba's workers to a criticism of socialism based on what happened in Leningrad during the Nazi seige. A better analogy is to criticism of the actions of the Stalinist regime (including the purges of the Soviet general staff, the ignoring of the looming Nazi military threat, etc.) which made the defense of the country so much more difficult and costly. In his missive, Green included some very telling examples of what the Cuban government has done in recent years in response to the crisis, including anti-worker changes to the labour code, etc. Are these actions beyond criticism because the U.S. has had the country in the vise of a blockade? Does anything and everything go under such circumstances? Following this line of reasoning, would place criticism of the Sandinistas' adherence to IMF-imposed neoliberal strictures (as published in NACLA Reports and elsewhere) similarly off limits. It seems to me that Louis's position comes down to this: genuine socialists should treat the revolutionary party in power as being beyond criticism. If this is an improper inference from what you've been saying, Louis -- apologies in advance if it is -- could you please provide some specific instances of policies/actions of the Cuban government that you yourself have criticized from your own perspective? Sid Shniad
Re: Flat Earth, Curved Sun
On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Tom Walker wrote: > Productivity has become > largely a managerial afterthought. It is more a way of retroactively > matching outlays to output than it is a way of adjusting output. The whole point of the computer revolution is that capital can increasingly measure the productivity of the service and symbolic economy. I know, I know, such measures are still notoriously sketchy, and the BLS is revising its survey methodology, but I'm talking about the difference between Ford's white-collar bureaucracy circa 1955 with, say, the free-floating e-mail networks of Microsoft, where each new software release reduces the labor-time it takes to download a program, copy an image file, etc. To be sure, programmers and professional workers have been very canny about defending their class interests, and creating new niche markets and expensive services (marketing, finance, etc.) as a way of extracting lucre from management and keeping their wages high (a kind of high-tech version of the high wages created by the American frontier in the 19th century, and certainly not as effective as unionization, but a strategy which has put a floor beneath the income of the aristocracy of labor). > Given the immense transformations of capitalism since the late 18th century > -- that is, transformations of the *capitalist labour process* -- can anyone > seriously argue that units of output are directly proportional to hours of > labour in any but the most peripheral and inconsequential niches of > production? They're not directly proportional, but they are mediated by the world average of labor-time per given commodity (a fancy way of saying that it's not just a question of market forces: these forces themselves are complex constellations of class struggle, local market power, tariff protection, the effectiveness of unions, Government regulation, international competition etc.). Presumably, a socialist society would have a completely different concept of productivity and labor-value than we have today. -- Dennis
Re: Iraq crisis
Tom Walker wrote: >What makes you think the restructuring will work so smoothly, Doug? Oh, there's no guarantee it will, I wasn't saying that. I was just saying that as it stands, the U.S. propaganda apparatus can deal with it easily within its conventional paradigm. Russia hasn't worked very smoothly, but they still blame Communism. Latin America hasn't worked too smoothly, except for the billionaires, but it doesn't matter on the U.S. ideological radar. Asia's a bit of a problem, but there's always that fallback position - they're just not lucky enough to be Americans! Doug
Re: Ecology and the American Indian
The last sentence of my reply to Louis P. should have said that this did not imply that later tribes did not use ecologically sound practices. Another clear counterexample is the self-destructive behavior of the Mayans. Not all Indians were or are the same. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 26 Jan 1998 14:36:53 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time) "Rosser Jr, John Barkley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am generally in sympathy with Louis Proyect's > posting on ecological attitudes/practices of American > Native Indians in contrast with the European > invaders/settlers. But I fear that he overdoes both the > unity of views among Indian tribes and the universality of > these views among them. The idea of them as "Indians" is > really a European abstraction imposed on people who viewed > themselves according to tribal identities and who had and > have very distinct languages, ethnic histories, and > cultures. > One famous counerexample to the view that Indians were > always "in harmony with nature" is the high probability > that the extinction of the sabre-tooth tiger and several > other large mammals in North America probably resulted from > overhunting arising from the initial invasion of the > continent by the human species, the first Native American > Indians to be precise. This does not say that many tribes > later adopted highly ecologically sound approaches. > Barkley Rosser > On Mon, 26 Jan 1998 14:03:20 -0500 Louis Proyect > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Indian religious beliefs are intrinsically ecological since they regard > > nature as sacred. The various tribes who inhabited North America before the > > European invasion had been here for tens of thousands of years, where they > > developed economically sustainable hunting-and-gathering economies that > > were respectful of the environment. They did not consider themselves ruling > > over nature, but as part of nature. Humanity was sacred, but so were the > > animals and vegetation that sustained it. Even the soil, the minerals and > > the rest of the material world were part of a great chain of being. An > > assault on a single element of this living fabric was an assault on the > > whole. They had a radical interpretation of the old labor movement slogan, > > "An injury to one was an injury to all." > > > > The Indian draws upon ritual to maintain a sustainable relationship with > > nature. These rituals functioned as a surrogate for ecological science. > > Instead of measuring soil acidity in a test-tube or attaching > > radio-transmitters to bears, they simply relied on empirical observation of > > their environment that they had mastered. For example, the Hopi Indians had > > identified 150 different plant types in their ecosphere and knew the role > > of each. There is even evidence that had learned from mistakes in their > > past. If overfishing or hunting had punished a tribe with famine, then it > > developed a myth to explain the dangers of such practices. Our modern, > > "scientific" society has no myths that function in this manner. We will > > simply exhaust all fishing stock in the oceans, because there is profit in > > it for some. > > > > The Indian thought that waste of natural resources was insane, especially > > for profit. The Paiute of Nevada tell a story of a trapper who has caught a > > coyote. When the trapper was about to shoot the animal, it told him, "My > > friend, we as people have found it necessary to warn you against trapping > > us, taking from our bodies our skins, and selling them for your happiness." > > > > In essence, the attitude Indians took toward the environment was one of > > restraint. The role of religion was to reinforce this behavior. When the > > Menominee of Wisconsin gathered wild rice, they made sure that some of the > > rice fell back into the water the next year so that there would be future > > crops. In other instances, reseeding was the subject of special prayers. > > For example, whenever a Seneca located medicinal herbs, he would build a > > small ceremonial fire. After the flames died, he would throw a pinch of > > tobacco on the ashes and pray, "I will not destroy you but plant your seeds > > that you may come again and yield fourfold more." After harvesting the > > plants, he would break off the seed stalks, drop the pods into a hole and > > cover them with leaf mold. Then he would speak these words: "The plant will > > come again, and I have not destroyed life but helped to increase it." > > > > In addition to reseeding rituals of this sort, the Indian would often take > > less when more seemed readily available. The Cahuilla tribe had an edict > > that no plants should be harvested unless there was proof that they existed > > elsewhere. Cherokee herb gatherers had to pass up the first three plants > > they found, but when they encountered a fourth, it was permissible to pluck > > it and any others. Their wisdom told them that they should preserve
Re: M-I: Ecology and the American Indian
Well, this is now the third list I am replying to Louis P. on this on. Don't disagree fundamentally, but find this generalized romanticization of "Indians" a bit much. There is and was a lot of diversity among tribes on many grounds. Many fit this idealized view that Louis presents, but not all did. An extreme example is the self-destroying Mayans, but there are plenty of other examples. This is not as simple as it seems. Note that I am not defending European technologies or approaches here. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 26 Jan 1998 14:03:20 -0500 Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Indian religious beliefs are intrinsically ecological since they regard > nature as sacred. The various tribes who inhabited North America before the > European invasion had been here for tens of thousands of years, where they > developed economically sustainable hunting-and-gathering economies that > were respectful of the environment. They did not consider themselves ruling > over nature, but as part of nature. Humanity was sacred, but so were the > animals and vegetation that sustained it. Even the soil, the minerals and > the rest of the material world were part of a great chain of being. An > assault on a single element of this living fabric was an assault on the > whole. They had a radical interpretation of the old labor movement slogan, > "An injury to one was an injury to all." > > The Indian draws upon ritual to maintain a sustainable relationship with > nature. These rituals functioned as a surrogate for ecological science. > Instead of measuring soil acidity in a test-tube or attaching > radio-transmitters to bears, they simply relied on empirical observation of > their environment that they had mastered. For example, the Hopi Indians had > identified 150 different plant types in their ecosphere and knew the role > of each. There is even evidence that had learned from mistakes in their > past. If overfishing or hunting had punished a tribe with famine, then it > developed a myth to explain the dangers of such practices. Our modern, > "scientific" society has no myths that function in this manner. We will > simply exhaust all fishing stock in the oceans, because there is profit in > it for some. > > The Indian thought that waste of natural resources was insane, especially > for profit. The Paiute of Nevada tell a story of a trapper who has caught a > coyote. When the trapper was about to shoot the animal, it told him, "My > friend, we as people have found it necessary to warn you against trapping > us, taking from our bodies our skins, and selling them for your happiness." > > In essence, the attitude Indians took toward the environment was one of > restraint. The role of religion was to reinforce this behavior. When the > Menominee of Wisconsin gathered wild rice, they made sure that some of the > rice fell back into the water the next year so that there would be future > crops. In other instances, reseeding was the subject of special prayers. > For example, whenever a Seneca located medicinal herbs, he would build a > small ceremonial fire. After the flames died, he would throw a pinch of > tobacco on the ashes and pray, "I will not destroy you but plant your seeds > that you may come again and yield fourfold more." After harvesting the > plants, he would break off the seed stalks, drop the pods into a hole and > cover them with leaf mold. Then he would speak these words: "The plant will > come again, and I have not destroyed life but helped to increase it." > > In addition to reseeding rituals of this sort, the Indian would often take > less when more seemed readily available. The Cahuilla tribe had an edict > that no plants should be harvested unless there was proof that they existed > elsewhere. Cherokee herb gatherers had to pass up the first three plants > they found, but when they encountered a fourth, it was permissible to pluck > it and any others. Their wisdom told them that they should preserve three > specimens for future growth. When the Navajo herbalist is out collecting > "deer-plant medicine", a member of the parsnip family, he first approaches > a large specimen and prays, "I have come for you, to take you from the > ground..." However, at this point he takes a smaller specimen since his > faith instructs him that "you never take the plant to whom you pray." > > The same kind of restraint applies to animal husbandry as well. The Hopi > have a custom of releasing one male and female mountain sheep when they had > surrounded a pack. "So as to make more sheep for the next hunting" was the > reason they gave. When a tribe failed to observe these types of > environmental measures, it could actually provoke war. Iroquois legend > states that they once made war against the Illinois and Miami tribes when > they were killing female as well as male beavers. Sparing females is a > cardinal rule of these hunters. A spirit fawn tells the Navajo, "If you are > walking on an unused
Re: M-TH: Ecology and the American Indian
Louis, This largely reasonable posting would be more accurate if "Indian" was modified by "many" or "most". This generalizing about all Native American Indians is a bit much. They identified themselves by tribes which varied substantially from one to another in language, ethnicity, and culture. Not all followed this European romantic view of them. An example is the Mayans who probably destroyed their civilization by resource overexploitation as well as exploiting each other. Barkley Rosser (back from Paris) On Mon, 26 Jan 1998 14:03:20 -0500 Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Indian religious beliefs are intrinsically ecological since they regard > nature as sacred. The various tribes who inhabited North America before the > European invasion had been here for tens of thousands of years, where they > developed economically sustainable hunting-and-gathering economies that > were respectful of the environment. They did not consider themselves ruling > over nature, but as part of nature. Humanity was sacred, but so were the > animals and vegetation that sustained it. Even the soil, the minerals and > the rest of the material world were part of a great chain of being. An > assault on a single element of this living fabric was an assault on the > whole. They had a radical interpretation of the old labor movement slogan, > "An injury to one was an injury to all." > > The Indian draws upon ritual to maintain a sustainable relationship with > nature. These rituals functioned as a surrogate for ecological science. > Instead of measuring soil acidity in a test-tube or attaching > radio-transmitters to bears, they simply relied on empirical observation of > their environment that they had mastered. For example, the Hopi Indians had > identified 150 different plant types in their ecosphere and knew the role > of each. There is even evidence that had learned from mistakes in their > past. If overfishing or hunting had punished a tribe with famine, then it > developed a myth to explain the dangers of such practices. Our modern, > "scientific" society has no myths that function in this manner. We will > simply exhaust all fishing stock in the oceans, because there is profit in > it for some. > > The Indian thought that waste of natural resources was insane, especially > for profit. The Paiute of Nevada tell a story of a trapper who has caught a > coyote. When the trapper was about to shoot the animal, it told him, "My > friend, we as people have found it necessary to warn you against trapping > us, taking from our bodies our skins, and selling them for your happiness." > > In essence, the attitude Indians took toward the environment was one of > restraint. The role of religion was to reinforce this behavior. When the > Menominee of Wisconsin gathered wild rice, they made sure that some of the > rice fell back into the water the next year so that there would be future > crops. In other instances, reseeding was the subject of special prayers. > For example, whenever a Seneca located medicinal herbs, he would build a > small ceremonial fire. After the flames died, he would throw a pinch of > tobacco on the ashes and pray, "I will not destroy you but plant your seeds > that you may come again and yield fourfold more." After harvesting the > plants, he would break off the seed stalks, drop the pods into a hole and > cover them with leaf mold. Then he would speak these words: "The plant will > come again, and I have not destroyed life but helped to increase it." > > In addition to reseeding rituals of this sort, the Indian would often take > less when more seemed readily available. The Cahuilla tribe had an edict > that no plants should be harvested unless there was proof that they existed > elsewhere. Cherokee herb gatherers had to pass up the first three plants > they found, but when they encountered a fourth, it was permissible to pluck > it and any others. Their wisdom told them that they should preserve three > specimens for future growth. When the Navajo herbalist is out collecting > "deer-plant medicine", a member of the parsnip family, he first approaches > a large specimen and prays, "I have come for you, to take you from the > ground..." However, at this point he takes a smaller specimen since his > faith instructs him that "you never take the plant to whom you pray." > > The same kind of restraint applies to animal husbandry as well. The Hopi > have a custom of releasing one male and female mountain sheep when they had > surrounded a pack. "So as to make more sheep for the next hunting" was the > reason they gave. When a tribe failed to observe these types of > environmental measures, it could actually provoke war. Iroquois legend > states that they once made war against the Illinois and Miami tribes when > they were killing female as well as male beavers. Sparing females is a > cardinal rule of these hunters. A spirit fawn tells the Navajo, "If you are > walking on an unused road an
Selective responses
Having broken his own vow not to engage in discussion about Cuba with unworthy opponents, Louis then makes the comparison between events in Cuba and those in Leningrad during the Nazi seige. So far, so good. But what about the actions of the Cuban government, mentioned in Green's posting, including changes to the Cuban labour code? Just because we sympathize with the victimÞ<´…
Re: Ecology and the American Indian
My impression from reading various anthropological works is that the American Indians initially were far from in "harmony with nature" when they first came to what we call the "New World." Thus various species of animals became extinct, though it's quite possible that other animals (including bacteria) came over the Bering Straits that contributed to the extinctions (the extinction of almost all marsupials, for example). But the tribal-subsistence mode of production that prevailed in most of the Americas allowed a certain kind of "equilibrium" to prevail between Indians and their natural environments. I think Barkley is right, however, to point to the variation amongst tribes: the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayas instituted tributary modes of production which allowed not only abuse of the subordinated peoples but the natural environment. The view that the Mayan civilization fell because of environmental degredation is not totally off base and cannot be rejected out of hand. (Just because they destroyed the environment (if they did) is no justification for the even more destructive Conquest, which led to massive erosion in Peru, etc.) However, both the tribal-subsistence and tributary modes of production lack the "accumulate, accumulate" drive of capitalism and thus lack the latter's ability to threaten the environment on a global scale. I am far from being an expert on this stuff. I would appreciate factual evidence for and against -- plus logical criticisms of the theory above. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
Re: Iraq crisis
Doug Henwood wrote, >Oh, there's no guarantee it will, I wasn't saying that. I was just saying >that as it stands, the U.S. propaganda apparatus can deal with it easily >within its conventional paradigm. Russia hasn't worked very smoothly, but >they still blame Communism. Latin America hasn't worked too smoothly, >except for the billionaires, but it doesn't matter on the U.S. ideological >radar. Asia's a bit of a problem, but there's always that fallback position >- they're just not lucky enough to be Americans! Oh, I get it, you were replying to conspiracy theories about the Bubba troubles. I agree the scandal isn't a ruling class/media plot to "cover up Asia". Shit happens. But, seriously, the Asia crisis is coming in under the ideological radar. As you and Max pointed out earlier, the IMF appropriation could be in for a rough time in Congress. That's not to say the money won't be got somehow, only that it might cost three or four times it's price in pork. I hear a lot of people don't even read the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post. Heck, a lot of people don't even read. The fire next time might come in Bellevue, Wash. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ Know Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: Pope Scolds Capitalist Neoliberalism & Embargo
At 02:08 PM 1/26/98 -0500, Louis Proyect wrote: >Capitalism does not improve the material living conditions of the people. >It reduces it, except in imperialist nations. The improvements there are a >function of worsening conditions in places like Cuba, the former Soviet >Union and elsewhere. The notion that capitalism is beneficial is false and >owes much to a vulgar reading of Marxism that the Second International and >the analytical Marxists have helped to propagate. I do not think that rising living standards (as compared, say , to feudalism) under capitalism is incompatible with the theory of value. The point is not whether they are rising, but whether they are rising proportionally to productivity. Workers today are clearly better off than their counterparts some 150 years ago. However, today's workers would have been much better off, had they received (individually or collectively) all the surplus their labor produced. As far as low wages/standards of living in the Third world are concerned, again, that is not the effect of capitalism. In most such countries the value of labour is low due to the low social cost of reproduction of the labour supply (consistently with the theory of value). The only difference capitalism makes is undercutting the marginal subsistence of those people, pushing them to pursue non-existent employment -- thus making the problem visible. wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233
Re: Lewis & Clark
OK, OK. Let's get the ground rules down. First comes complete immunity then comes the good stuff. I figure you could build a football team, or you can have a riot, or then well there are lots of way to boost the name recognition of a college. I wonder if I can leverage this into a bigger salary. And no, I never had her in class, never knew anyone who did, and ... Marty Professor of Economics at THAT WELL KNOWN LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE--LEWIS AND CLARK COLLEGE On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Doug Henwood wrote: > Hey Marty Hart-Landsberg, you out there? Forget all this Asia crisis stuff > and answer the really important question: did you know Monica Lewinsky when > she was at Lewis & Clark? > > Doug > > >
Re: Iraq crisis
At 02:01 PM 1/26/98 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote: >A simple challenge for the propaganda apparatus to deal with: Asia's >problems were caused by the very lack of neoliberalism, not its >application. A restructuring, which may come with a bit of transitional >pain, along American lines is just what the doctor ordered. Because as >everyone knows, loose financial markets guarantee optimum investment >levels, and the best assurance of a healthy labor market is the freedom to Perhaps, but that sounds like preaching the neoliberal choir. I think, however, that for the general public the discourse is much simpler: if something is visibly wrong with a nation, that must be the result of that nation's salient feature (at least as perceived from the US). The Soviet economy went bust, well, that must have been that Marxist-Leninist socialism they embraced. Ditto for Asia, that is generally seen as frewheeling market capitalism. But again, this is just a speculation to find a motive behing the Lewinsky affair brouhaha. A bunch of right wing lunatics digging for dirt to spite Bubba Clinton is one thing, but the mainstream media picking that dirt up and spreading it all over the country is something much different. At best, the Levinsky's affair is a human interest story, much more trivial than the Paula Jones affair (because Ms. Jones' law suit is a fact, whereas Ms. Levinsky's story is nothing but allegations, at least thus far). Yet the attention given by the media to the latter is much much higher than the former has ever received. I am not trying to argue here about the actual causes, severity, and implications of the Asian crisis simply because I do not have suffcient knowledge to do so. What I am trying to argue is the public perception of that crisis. I am also quite open to the possibility that the mainstream media have their own ulterior motives other than the suggested coverup to blow the Lewinsky affair out of proportion. >fire. Don't you read the papers? What for? I would not believe their lies anyway :) wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233
Re: Pope Scolds Capitalist Neoliberalism & Embargo
On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: > What I am arguing is that Cuba, as well as most other Soviet block > countries did not create internationalist momentum other than ideological > appeals and political organizations. What they were really after, however, > was a protection of their budding economies from foreign competition. In > that respect, the Soviet-style revolution was merely an effort to catch up > with capitalist advances elsewhere, not to transcend those advances. Cuba is different than the Soviet block countries were. The CPC program states that the interests of of the Cuban revolution are subordinate to the world revolution (or words to that effect). They "risked everything" (Castro) to turn back the South African invasion of Angola - AGAINST the policy of the USSR, including its condition that Soviet supplied weapons NOT be used outside Cuba. Nelson Mandela has said the that Cuban role in Angola is what made the liberation of Namibia and South Africa possible.. My first cab driver in Cuba was a Black vetran of Angola, who expressed incredible pride for having helped defeat the South African racist army, and was very clear he _volunteered_ to go. "[Protect their budding economies from competition"? Yes, from the London sugar cartel and the IMF. But Cuba genuinely wants to trade with the US and other capitalist countries. X-Albanian and n.Korean-style isolationism are not socialist virtues. Bill Burgess
Re: Ecology and the American Indian
I am generally in sympathy with Louis Proyect's posting on ecological attitudes/practices of American Native Indians in contrast with the European invaders/settlers. But I fear that he overdoes both the unity of views among Indian tribes and the universality of these views among them. The idea of them as "Indians" is really a European abstraction imposed on people who viewed themselves according to tribal identities and who had and have very distinct languages, ethnic histories, and cultures. One famous counerexample to the view that Indians were always "in harmony with nature" is the high probability that the extinction of the sabre-tooth tiger and several other large mammals in North America probably resulted from overhunting arising from the initial invasion of the continent by the human species, the first Native American Indians to be precise. This does not say that many tribes later adopted highly ecologically sound approaches. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 26 Jan 1998 14:03:20 -0500 Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Indian religious beliefs are intrinsically ecological since they regard > nature as sacred. The various tribes who inhabited North America before the > European invasion had been here for tens of thousands of years, where they > developed economically sustainable hunting-and-gathering economies that > were respectful of the environment. They did not consider themselves ruling > over nature, but as part of nature. Humanity was sacred, but so were the > animals and vegetation that sustained it. Even the soil, the minerals and > the rest of the material world were part of a great chain of being. An > assault on a single element of this living fabric was an assault on the > whole. They had a radical interpretation of the old labor movement slogan, > "An injury to one was an injury to all." > > The Indian draws upon ritual to maintain a sustainable relationship with > nature. These rituals functioned as a surrogate for ecological science. > Instead of measuring soil acidity in a test-tube or attaching > radio-transmitters to bears, they simply relied on empirical observation of > their environment that they had mastered. For example, the Hopi Indians had > identified 150 different plant types in their ecosphere and knew the role > of each. There is even evidence that had learned from mistakes in their > past. If overfishing or hunting had punished a tribe with famine, then it > developed a myth to explain the dangers of such practices. Our modern, > "scientific" society has no myths that function in this manner. We will > simply exhaust all fishing stock in the oceans, because there is profit in > it for some. > > The Indian thought that waste of natural resources was insane, especially > for profit. The Paiute of Nevada tell a story of a trapper who has caught a > coyote. When the trapper was about to shoot the animal, it told him, "My > friend, we as people have found it necessary to warn you against trapping > us, taking from our bodies our skins, and selling them for your happiness." > > In essence, the attitude Indians took toward the environment was one of > restraint. The role of religion was to reinforce this behavior. When the > Menominee of Wisconsin gathered wild rice, they made sure that some of the > rice fell back into the water the next year so that there would be future > crops. In other instances, reseeding was the subject of special prayers. > For example, whenever a Seneca located medicinal herbs, he would build a > small ceremonial fire. After the flames died, he would throw a pinch of > tobacco on the ashes and pray, "I will not destroy you but plant your seeds > that you may come again and yield fourfold more." After harvesting the > plants, he would break off the seed stalks, drop the pods into a hole and > cover them with leaf mold. Then he would speak these words: "The plant will > come again, and I have not destroyed life but helped to increase it." > > In addition to reseeding rituals of this sort, the Indian would often take > less when more seemed readily available. The Cahuilla tribe had an edict > that no plants should be harvested unless there was proof that they existed > elsewhere. Cherokee herb gatherers had to pass up the first three plants > they found, but when they encountered a fourth, it was permissible to pluck > it and any others. Their wisdom told them that they should preserve three > specimens for future growth. When the Navajo herbalist is out collecting > "deer-plant medicine", a member of the parsnip family, he first approaches > a large specimen and prays, "I have come for you, to take you from the > ground..." However, at this point he takes a smaller specimen since his > faith instructs him that "you never take the plant to whom you pray." > > The same kind of restraint applies to animal husbandry as well. The Hopi > have a custom of releasing one male and female mountain sheep when they had > surrounded
Re: Ecology and the American Indian
A visit to Cahokia (across the river from St. Louis) is fascinating in and of itself and also for the evidence it provides that the large number of residents there overused the local resources, which then led to its decline. There may have been other factors, such as climate, but the decline took place sufficiently recently -- i.e. just before contact -- that climate records should be sufficiently revealing to decide whether this was a factor. Just as it's wrong to assume that an Indian is an Indian with no variations, it is also wrong to assume that all there is to the Judaeo-Christian tradition can be summed up in one sentence of Genesis. Other parts of the bible make it clear that parts of a field had to remain unharvested and that every seventh year the land had to be allowed to rest. It was forbidden to cut down fruit trees in time of war, for example. Not paying workers on a daily basis was a crime against the community because it could lead to poverty and anti-social behaviour. There were lots of rabbinic exegeses on these and other points which expanded the protections. There is a whole line of analysis on baalei chayot - the pain of living things - and of the demand that humans not cause pain to animals or other living things. How much or how little individuals observed these is open to debate, just as it seems likely that not all Indians, even members of a very ecologically oriented tribe, likely behaved in a fully reverent way towards nature. Ellen J. Dannin California Western School of Law 225 Cedar Street San Diego, CA 92101 Phone: 619-525-1449 Fax:619-696-
Re: Lewis & Clark [resending from earlier today]
Academe Today's DAILY REPORT (1/26/98) _ * LEWIS & CLARK COLLEGE, the alma mater of Monica Lewinsky, has encouraged one of its employees to come forward with a document that may have bearing on the investigation into her relationship with President Clinton, officials at the college in Portland, Ore., said Sunday. Copyright (c) 1998 The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc. *** Paul Zarembka, using OS/2 and supporting RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka *** On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Doug Henwood wrote: > Hey Marty Hart-Landsberg, you out there? Forget all this Asia crisis stuff > and answer the really important question: did you know Monica Lewinsky when > she was at Lewis & Clark? > > Doug
Re: Pope Scolds Capitalist Neoliberalism & Embargo
wojtek sokolowski: >I am not trying to deny, in any way, the progress revolutionary changes in >Eastern Europe or Cuba brought to improve the general human conditions in >those backward and exploited countries. But improving the material living >conditions of the people, a noble end in itself, is not the same as >breaking away with capitalism; for capitalism also does that. Capitalism does not improve the material living conditions of the people. It reduces it, except in imperialist nations. The improvements there are a function of worsening conditions in places like Cuba, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere. The notion that capitalism is beneficial is false and owes much to a vulgar reading of Marxism that the Second International and the analytical Marxists have helped to propagate. Louis Proyect
Ecology and the American Indian
Indian religious beliefs are intrinsically ecological since they regard nature as sacred. The various tribes who inhabited North America before the European invasion had been here for tens of thousands of years, where they developed economically sustainable hunting-and-gathering economies that were respectful of the environment. They did not consider themselves ruling over nature, but as part of nature. Humanity was sacred, but so were the animals and vegetation that sustained it. Even the soil, the minerals and the rest of the material world were part of a great chain of being. An assault on a single element of this living fabric was an assault on the whole. They had a radical interpretation of the old labor movement slogan, "An injury to one was an injury to all." The Indian draws upon ritual to maintain a sustainable relationship with nature. These rituals functioned as a surrogate for ecological science. Instead of measuring soil acidity in a test-tube or attaching radio-transmitters to bears, they simply relied on empirical observation of their environment that they had mastered. For example, the Hopi Indians had identified 150 different plant types in their ecosphere and knew the role of each. There is even evidence that had learned from mistakes in their past. If overfishing or hunting had punished a tribe with famine, then it developed a myth to explain the dangers of such practices. Our modern, "scientific" society has no myths that function in this manner. We will simply exhaust all fishing stock in the oceans, because there is profit in it for some. The Indian thought that waste of natural resources was insane, especially for profit. The Paiute of Nevada tell a story of a trapper who has caught a coyote. When the trapper was about to shoot the animal, it told him, "My friend, we as people have found it necessary to warn you against trapping us, taking from our bodies our skins, and selling them for your happiness." In essence, the attitude Indians took toward the environment was one of restraint. The role of religion was to reinforce this behavior. When the Menominee of Wisconsin gathered wild rice, they made sure that some of the rice fell back into the water the next year so that there would be future crops. In other instances, reseeding was the subject of special prayers. For example, whenever a Seneca located medicinal herbs, he would build a small ceremonial fire. After the flames died, he would throw a pinch of tobacco on the ashes and pray, "I will not destroy you but plant your seeds that you may come again and yield fourfold more." After harvesting the plants, he would break off the seed stalks, drop the pods into a hole and cover them with leaf mold. Then he would speak these words: "The plant will come again, and I have not destroyed life but helped to increase it." In addition to reseeding rituals of this sort, the Indian would often take less when more seemed readily available. The Cahuilla tribe had an edict that no plants should be harvested unless there was proof that they existed elsewhere. Cherokee herb gatherers had to pass up the first three plants they found, but when they encountered a fourth, it was permissible to pluck it and any others. Their wisdom told them that they should preserve three specimens for future growth. When the Navajo herbalist is out collecting "deer-plant medicine", a member of the parsnip family, he first approaches a large specimen and prays, "I have come for you, to take you from the ground..." However, at this point he takes a smaller specimen since his faith instructs him that "you never take the plant to whom you pray." The same kind of restraint applies to animal husbandry as well. The Hopi have a custom of releasing one male and female mountain sheep when they had surrounded a pack. "So as to make more sheep for the next hunting" was the reason they gave. When a tribe failed to observe these types of environmental measures, it could actually provoke war. Iroquois legend states that they once made war against the Illinois and Miami tribes when they were killing female as well as male beavers. Sparing females is a cardinal rule of these hunters. A spirit fawn tells the Navajo, "If you are walking on an unused road and see the tracks of a doe, or if a doe catches up with you from behind, that is I. And knowing this you will not bother me." Another key element of Indian ecological behavior was game "fallowing." Although this term originates in agriculture and refers to the practice of leaving portions of field to rest, the tribes followed a similar practice in hunting. The Cree and other Algonkian tribes worked only a portion of their hunting grounds in a given year and let the fallow areas recover. The Ojibwa of Parry Island in southeastern Ontario invoked their spirits to give legitimacy to this practice. The "shadows" of slain animals would cause living animals to grow wary in a certain area. Hence, they took care not to produce too many
Re: Iraq crisis
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: >Asia, mostly. I think the Asian crisis goes well beyond the bailout issue. > If the presss gave it enough attention, as it normally would, that could >undermine the popular faith in the neoliberal ideology. A simple challenge for the propaganda apparatus to deal with: Asia's problems were caused by the very lack of neoliberalism, not its application. A restructuring, which may come with a bit of transitional pain, along American lines is just what the doctor ordered. Because as everyone knows, loose financial markets guarantee optimum investment levels, and the best assurance of a healthy labor market is the freedom to fire. Don't you read the papers? Doug
Response to John G.
John Gulick: "What do pen-l'ers make of the argument propounded by pro-EMU social democrats that w/o EMU global financial markets will discipline expansionary/welfare initiatives, and at the very least w/EMU some weak version of EC-wide expansionary/welfare initiatives can be achieved, as long as the EC central bank does not resemble the Bundesbank ? I don't necessarily agree with this line of thought, but I do think that simply arguing that social democrats are collaborating with globalization and flexibilization and austerity and so on via the EMU is insufficient. "Marxists" such Germany's Altvater and Spain's Alier have endorsed EMU in accord with the above logic (see upcoming edition of _Capitalism, Nature, Socialism_)." Carl Sandburg who supply the following political insight: "If we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs." The monetarist terms of the Bundesbank were directly integrated into Maastricht and the EMU, weren't they? Sid
Re: Iraq crisis
The Financial Times of London is calling it "Naughtygate." How British of them. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 26 Jan 1998 09:41:57 -0800 Tom Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >As for ForniGate (as it showed up in the L.A. TIMES this a.m., proving once > >again pen-l's, or at least Tom's, absolute ability to predict the future) > > Tomorrow it will rain. Somewhere. > > > > Regards, > > Tom Walker > ^^^ > Know Ware Communications > Vancouver, B.C., CANADA > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > (604) 688-8296 > ^^^ > The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/ > -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Flat earth (was French unemployed movement)
Michael Perelman wrote, >Doug wrote: >> Why then is the U.S. capital/output ratio in a downtrend (I know, I know, >> this is by bourgeois measures) and the employment/population ratio in an >> uptrend? > >1. Labor is cheap compared to capital. High wages will move this ratio >over time. > >2. Computers and other investment have lower durability than fixed >structures. The composition of capital has changed. We interrupt the digression in progress to bring you a special bulletin. John Gulick, Andy Pollack, and Rakesh Bhandari all pondered the relationship between shorter hours of work and productivity. Underlying their questions was an unspoken assumption of a direct proportion -- undoubtedly mediated by the mysterious productivity -- between units of output and hours of work. They say productivity. I say phlogiston. For the benefit of non-chemists, let me use another term -- flat earth. Let's try a couple of exercises: Doug Henwood takes 6,000 hours to write a book with 300 pages that sells 20,000 copies. Doug's next book takes him 9,000 hours to write, has 400 pages but sells only 15,000 copies. By what percentage has Doug's "productivity" fallen (or risen)? Michael Perelman takes 5 hours to prepare a lecture for a class of 200 students. At the same level of productivity, how many hours should it take him to prepare a lecture for a class of 40 students? Both of the questions are absurd. But that doesn't prevent Doug's publisher or Michael's university administration from drawing up a contract that imposes some definition of productivity. In fact, it would be surprising if they didn't try. In one respect, Doug's and Michael's working circumstances aren't as radically different from those of the ordinary 'worker' as romantic socialist realism iconography would imply. Productivity has become largely a managerial afterthought. It is more a way of retroactively matching outlays to output than it is a way of adjusting output. I used to work in a small consulting firm whose principal (a red diaper baby) imbibed the latest management speak like ambrosia. It was "adding value" if you could repackage a stale piece of boiler plate for a client instead of actually doing any research. Because a lot of what gets bought and sold is strictly symbolic anyway, it's hard to argue with that kind of reasoning. The symbolic economy is extremely elastic but it isn't unlimited as, say, a Baudrillard might argue. Ultimately, a whole flock of those counterfeit chickens come home to roost. Challengers implode. Chernobyls meltdown. Albanian pyramids crumble. Bre-X engineers leap from helicopters. >> Why then is the U.S. capital/output ratio in a downtrend (I know, I know, >> this is by bourgeois measures) and the employment/population ratio in an >> uptrend? Back in the 1970s, Juergen Habermas wrote about the possibility that the modern capitalist welfare state could tame economic crises but that it might be at the cost of fuelling other crisis forms: legitimation, motivational and rationality. By elevating the market as a symbol of legitimation, late capitalism seems to have deflected those other crises for a while. But with the routinization of IMF bailouts, LC has now come full circle. Massive state intervention to prevent a market collapse comes with a price, too. Given the immense transformations of capitalism since the late 18th century -- that is, transformations of the *capitalist labour process* -- can anyone seriously argue that units of output are directly proportional to hours of labour in any but the most peripheral and inconsequential niches of production? Talk about the tail wagging the dog. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ Know Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: Iraq crisis
Doug Henwood wrote, >A simple challenge for the propaganda apparatus to deal with: Asia's >problems were caused by the very lack of neoliberalism, not its >application. A restructuring, which may come with a bit of transitional >pain, along American lines is just what the doctor ordered. Because as >everyone knows, loose financial markets guarantee optimum investment >levels, and the best assurance of a healthy labor market is the freedom to >fire. Don't you read the papers? What makes you think the restructuring will work so smoothly, Doug? Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ Know Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: Iraq crisis
At 01:18 PM 1/26/98 -0500, Doug Henwood wrote: >What political-economic crisis? Clinton was sailing high in the polls and >the U.S. was (and still is) awash in official self-satisfaction. If Clinton >wanted to kill a few Iraqis, all he had to do was unleash some cruises and >his approval rating would probably have risen. The only real candidate for >crisis right now is Asia, and getting an IMF funding increase through >Congress is now a lot more difficult this week than it was last week. I >don't think the U.S. ruling class wants anything like a legitimation >crisis, which is one reason the Republicans may be hanging fire. What ever >are you talking about? Asia, mostly. I think the Asian crisis goes well beyond the bailout issue. If the presss gave it enough attention, as it normally would, that could undermine the popular faith in the neoliberal ideology. With the current "development," the Asia news slips to section D of the NYT, while the front page is all about the (alleged) Clinton-Lewinsky affair. The affair in itself is so inconsequential, since having extramarital affairs is not even a criminal offence, let alone a reason for impeachment, that the whole brouhaha in the media makes one wonder what is really behind it. wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233
Daily Illini on Nike code
http://www.illinimedia.com/di/jan_98/jan26/opinions/edit2.html _ Monday, 26 January 1998 The Daily Illini(student newspaper at the U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) EDITORIAL Nike code won't effect change - Our campus administration is inching closer to getting Nike to sign a Code of Conduct driven forward predominantly by the Student Labor Support Network and Students for Real Democracy -- a goal toward which the University and SLSN have been striving for months. However, the question remains: Will a signed piece of paper actually force Nike to change its ways? Although there is no proof against Nike, human rights activist groups have accused Nike of exploiting poor Southeast Asian workers -- forcing them to work in unsanitary, unsafe factories and paying them pennies an hour. But what effect will forcing Nike to sign a new Code of Conduct have when they already have one? The University is in no position to be telling Nike what to do; this deal brings the University thousands of dollars worth of Nike merchandise and millions in revenue. To Nike, however, this deal is just a small part of an extensive marketing scheme. In addition, the University is bound to abide by a ten-year contract it signed with Nike in 1994. There is no way for the University to control Nike. Even if the agreement were to include a provision for an independent agency to monitor the working conditions in NikeMs Southeast Asia factories, it would be impossible to ensure the integrity of this monitor. The outcome of this issue has already been decided by necessity. The basketball team will always need new pairs of shoes, and right now the University has a guarantee that all of its athletes will have comfortable feet for years to come. The University undoubtedly realizes that even the most Herculean effort will not help anyone. Most likely the University is simply trying to portray itself as morally conscious and is attempting to show the SLSN and SRD that it too cares about the plight of the factory workers. Meanwhile, SLSN does not want to lose face by backing off of its crusade and have to go to the trouble of finding a new one. There are four billion impoverished people in the world, and to fight on their behalf is certainly noble. However, it is anything but noble for the administration to use their cause as window dressing on a multi-million dollar deal. - Copyright (c) 1998 Illini Media Company, all rights reserved
Re: Iraq crisis
Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: >That is why I think that the whole brouhaha is invented - a sort of "Wag >the Dog" in reverse. in the movie, the political crisis was invented to >cover up a sex scandal, in the Lewinsky affair, the sex scandal is invented >to cover up a political-economic crisis. What political-economic crisis? Clinton was sailing high in the polls and the U.S. was (and still is) awash in official self-satisfaction. If Clinton wanted to kill a few Iraqis, all he had to do was unleash some cruises and his approval rating would probably have risen. The only real candidate for crisis right now is Asia, and getting an IMF funding increase through Congress is now a lot more difficult this week than it was last week. I don't think the U.S. ruling class wants anything like a legitimation crisis, which is one reason the Republicans may be hanging fire. What ever are you talking about? Doug
RE: Lewis & Clark
Too bad Mz. Lewinsky was not a former student of mine while I was an adjunct for L&C. I might have been able to get ABC News to pay off my student loans. Jeff Fellows -- From: Doug Henwood To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Lewis & Clark Date: Monday, January 26, 1998 10:30AM Hey Marty Hart-Landsberg, you out there? Forget all this Asia crisis stuff and answer the really important question: did you know Monica Lewinsky when she was at Lewis & Clark? Doug
Jesuit schools
> By the way, I find it ironic that the jesuit schools in the U.S. are among > the most open in the country. They even employ a Jim Devine -- or maybe > Jim just spelt his name wrong to slip in. Also, Terry McDonough earlier at Canisius College, Buffalo, NY. Right, Terry?! Paul
Re: dinosaurs and pancakes
On Mon, 26 Jan 1998 09:41:32 -0600 (CST) valis said: >Does anyone know of some biographical material on Pannekoek? I don't >think his life has been formally done. > There is a brief biographical introduction, in French, in Serge Bricanier's book, Pannekoek et les conseils ouvriers, 1969. Walter Daum
Re: Doug's Really "In Style" @ the NYT!!!!!!!
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > "These people (Wall Street traders) spend a lot of time on the phone with >each other, which creates a culture of gossip," he said. "If you accept >the classical Freudian analysis that making jokes is all about releasing >tension, well, these are extremely aggressive people under a lot of >stress, so its no surprise that their jokes are aggressive and hostile." Weird context, eh? I never think of myself as a paragon of Style. Bastards don't review the book, but... Either the reporter, Alex Kuczynski, or her editor (yes, a female Alex), didn't approve of the first part of my analysis, which was that Wall Streeters are "the most cynical and alienated people on earth." She got a big laugh out of that, as she did with "It's a frat-boy, testosterone-rich environment," which did make it into the article. Doug
Re: Baffling indeed
I read a news item yesterday that the right-wing is hesitate to jump on an impeachment and/or demand-for-resignation of Clinton since it helps Gore AND ALSO because of "concern for the country". This latter has a ring of truth to it because a basic institution of the United States ruling machinery is weakened somewhat thereby and that weakening is not only with respect to internal legitimacy but also and, maybe more importantly, internationally. Of course, another hesitation is that they don't wanted to get snookered through reacting too quickly to that which they don't know enough about (and I don't mean mainly what did or did not happen between Lewinsky and Clinton, but rather the whole dynamic which can unfold, legally and politically). Paul Z. *** Paul Zarembka, using OS/2 and supporting RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY at http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka *** On Mon, 26 Jan 1998, Tom Walker wrote: > >"He noted that year after year we [in the US] invent a new pattern" > >of ethics. > > The pattern of ethics in US public life is remarkably stable -- little or > none. It's the pattern of moral posturing that is ephemeral. > > Regards, > > Tom Walker > ^^^ > Know Ware Communications > Vancouver, B.C., CANADA > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > (604) 688-8296 > ^^^ > The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/ >
Re: Iraq crisis
At 08:06 AM 1/26/98 -0800, Jim Devine wrote: >perjury. It's only HRC who should care about the adultery issue. Though I >do wonder why the Pres. should engage in hanky-panky when he knows that the >highly-paid dogs of Starr are panting outside the White House gate looking >to dig up the slightest bone of impropriety. That is why I think that the whole brouhaha is invented - a sort of "Wag the Dog" in reverse. in the movie, the political crisis was invented to cover up a sex scandal, in the Lewinsky affair, the sex scandal is invented to cover up a political-economic crisis. I sincerely doubt that anyone in Clinton's position would chase after female staffers instead of using much more reliable and discreet professional services. Regards, wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233
Re: Pope Scolds Capitalist Neoliberalism & Embargo
At 10:57 AM 1/26/98 -0500, Louis Proyect wrote in response to my posting: >Marx would embrace Castro as the most genuine representative of his thought >in the world today. Cuba has been devoted to attacking the world capitalist >system through action rather than idle chatter: > >1) creation of OLAS, the Latin American network of revolutionary >organizations. >2) participation in OSPAAL, the solidarity network of third-world etc. I reply (WS): I am not so sure, based on the following quote: "In fact, the internationalism of the programme stands even infinitely below that of the Free Trade party. The latter also asserts that the result of its efforts will be 'the internationl brotherhood of peoples.' But it also _does_ (emphasis original) something to make trade international and by no means contents itself woth the consciousness - that all peoples are carrying on trade at home. The international activity of the workingh class does not in any way depend on the existence of the _International Working Men's Association_. This was only the first attempt to create a central organ for that activity..." (Marx, _Critique..._). What I am arguing is that Cuba, as well as most other Soviet block countries did not create internationalist momentum other than ideological appeals and political organizations. What they were really after, however, was a protection of their budding economies from foreign competition. In that respect, the Soviet-style revolution was merely an effort to catch up with capitalist advances elsewhere, not to transcend those advances. On the other hand, it is the capitalist class that actually "does something to make trade international." That "something" might be reprehensible, but pushes internationalization well above the level the x-USSR and its allies could even dream of accomplishing. I am not trying to deny, in any way, the progress revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe or Cuba brought to improve the general human conditions in those backward and exploited countries. But improving the material living conditions of the people, a noble end in itself, is not the same as breaking away with capitalism; for capitalism also does that. Regards, wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233
Re: Why won't they let Slick Willie womanize in peace?
> A posting from another list FYI. Any comments? Uh, yes, maybe one or two. > >From: Steve Rosenthal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Who is this nitwit? > >In short, the Clintonites have failed to address the two most life > >and death problems currently facing U.S. imperialism: The widening > >and deepening global crisis of overproduction, and Iraq's growing > >ability to thumb its nose at the U.S. with the backing of Russia, > >China, and France, imperialist rivals of the U.S. > > > >This line of attack against the Clintonites is being led by Dick > >Gephardt and the business and big labor forces behind him. The > >Economic Policy Institute (EPI), whose funding comes from the > >Rockefeller Foundation, C.S. Mott (GM), Russell Sage (Cabot gas and > >banking money), sets forth the line Gephardt has been offering: That > >workers through the main unions must be won to support U.S. > >imperialism's foreign adventures, that U.S. banks and brokerage firms That's an EPI report I must have missed, "Why we must support U.S. imperialism's foreign adventures." (sic) We don't even write about defense policy, except to suggest reductions in the defense budget. > >exposed in Asia should absorb some of the losses themselves, So by this logic, we should support government subsidies for U.S. financial interests who are exposed to risk coming out of the Asian crisis? Even the Heritage Foundation is against bailing out the banks. Is this a left critique? > >otherwise, U.S. capitalists will face a deep political crisis because > >they have no working class support for the wars that must ultimately > >be the capitalists' only solution to their crisis of overproduction. I've always heard the old marijuana is no comparison to current stuff, and now we have proof. > >Gephardt stands to be the main political beneficiary of the > >withdrawal of tolerance for Slick Willie's womanizing. Lauren is No, Al Gore is the main beneficiary. Little thing called the line of succession. > >right, the rulers of other countries do it, and Kennedy, Eisenhower, > >etc., did it. Political divisions determine whether something will > >be made of it. Gephardt's capitalist backers will either politically > >weaken Clinton (and Gore) or dump him altogether. > > > >Kenneth Starr, by the way, has an endowed chair waiting for him at > >Pepperdine funded by Richard Scaife, a Mellon family descendant and > >financier of various conservative causes. Starr's D.C. law firm > >defends GM among others. So this is not a "hard right" attempt to > >"get" Clinton. After all, the last time a hard right New Money plot I'm missing the logical argument here, from Scaife (a major funder of the hard right) to GM (cause Starr's firm has GM as a client) . . . ? > >was hatched to get rid of an Eastern Establishment President, they > >didn't hire a prosecutor; they hired some killers and JFK got > >assassinated. So this is probably an Old Establishment notice to > >Clinton (and Gore) to "shape up or ship out." No, it wasn't the Eastern Establishment, it was Cancer Man. > >As the crisis of capitalism deepens, fights and splits within the > >capitalist class will grow and take many bizarre and entertaining > >forms. It's important for us to figure them out; otherwise we will > >get tricked into supporting one bunch of corrupt hypocrites against > >another, instead of organizing to get rid of the whole lot. Yes, please do try to figure them out. Let us know when you come up with something. MBS === Max B. SawickyEconomic Policy Institute [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1660 L Street, NW 202-775-8810 (voice) Ste. 1200 202-775-0819 (fax)Washington, DC 20036 http://tap.epn.org/sawicky Opinions above do not necessarily reflect the views of anyone associated with the Economic Policy Institute other than this writer. ===
Re: Baffling indeed
> Received: from MAILQUEUE by OOI (Mercury 1.21); 26 Jan 98 08:29:15 +800 > Return-path: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > 26 Jan 98 08:29:14 +800 > Received: from host (localhost [127.0.0.1]) > Mon, 26 Jan 1998 08:26:55 -0800 (PST) > Received: from mail1.toronto.istar.net (mail1.toronto.istar.net [209.89.75.17]) > Received: from ts34-01.vcr.istar.ca [204.191.153.144] > by mail1.toronto.istar.net with smtp (Exim 1.80 #5) > id 0xwrOU-0003oe-00; Mon, 26 Jan 1998 11:28:18 -0500 > Message-Id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 09:26:53 -0800 > Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Tom Walker) > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Baffling indeed > Mime-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.1 -- ListProcessor(tm) by CREN > X-PMFLAGS: 34078848 > > >"He noted that year after year we [in the US] invent a new pattern" > >of ethics. > > The pattern of ethics in US public life is remarkably stable -- little or > none. It's the pattern of moral posturing that is ephemeral. > > Regards, > > Tom Walker > ^^^ > Know Ware Communications > Vancouver, B.C., CANADA > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > (604) 688-8296 > ^^^ > The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/ > Response: All of this is indeed baffling. Watch any press conference and you will see virtually all of the press corps on their knees asking superficial and softball questions (metaphorical blow job) to ensure their continued inside access for the next "scoop". So what is the big deal about some entrepreneural networking Aide/Intern (If the allegations have any merit)? Or, if the allegations turn out to have some merit, perhaps Monica Lewinsky could be seen as a sort of "liberated sex worker" operating on a different kind of pay scale and on a different strata of the business. In which case, we simply have a "free and voluntary exchange" (positions for which she is unsuited/unqualified in return for assuming another kind of position in the anteroom of the Oval Office). Jim Craven *---* * "Who controls the past, * * James Craven controls the future. * * Dept of Economics Who controls the present,* * Clark College controls the past." (George Orwell)* * 1800 E. Mc Loughlin Blvd.* * Vancouver, Wa. 98663 (360) 992-2283 FAX: (360)992-2863* * [EMAIL PROTECTED]* * MY EMPLOYER HAS NO ASSOCIATION WITH MY PRIVATE/PROTECTED OPINION *
FWD: Pope Scolds Capitalism in Cuba
> Pope Scolds Capitalism in Cuba > > (January 25, AAS) > > HAVANA (AP) - This communist island is not exactly on the verge of a > free-market explosion, but there was Pope John Paul II, warning > against "capitalist neoliberalism" and "blind market forces." > > The pope - best-known as a critic of communism, but long wary of > unfettered capitalism - chose his final Mass in Cuba on Sunday to > issue one of his harshest attacks yet on Western market economies and > their influence worldwide. > > President Fidel Castro, who views the pope as sympathetic to the Cuban > revolution's socialist agenda, sat in the front row, just 20 yards > from the papal altar. > > Since arriving in Cuba, John Paul has prodded the Cuban government on > its human rights record, but has also cautioned Cubans against Western > lifestyles and consumer tastes, and issued a series of attacks on the > 36-year U.S. economic embargo and on Western aid policies. > > "From its centers of power, such neoliberalism often places unbearable > burdens upon less-favored countries," the pope said to ringing > applause. "Hence, at times, unsustainable economic programs are > imposed on nations as a condition for further assistance." > > The pope lamented that a small number of countries were growing > "exceedingly rich at the cost of the increasing impoverishment of a > great number of other countries." > > While Cuba has made a limited opening to private enterprise over the > past five years, permitting about 160,000 self-employed workers, > Castro has kept a tight leash on all private economic activity. > > Since the early days of his papacy, John Paul has warned against what > he has called "savage" capitalism and has lately expressed worry about > what globalization means to developing countries. > > He also has been prodding Western countries to help ease the debts of > poor nations. > > John Paul's attacks on the U.S. embargo have come as no surprise - he > fiercely opposes such methods on the grounds that they punish only the > poorest. > > President Clinton said this past week that Washington would maintain > the embargo, and it was up to Castro to open Cuban society before the > U.S. will change its stance. > > Clinton acknowledged that the issue divided the United States from > most other countries and said "only time will tell whether they were > right or we were." > > In welcoming the pope Wednesday, Castro said the pontiff's calls for > an equitable distribution of wealth were "so similar to what we > preach."
Iraq: Apocalypse Now
Downloaded from WWW, January 1997 Apocalypse Now by Edward Said It would be a mistake, I think, to reduce what is happening between Iraq and the United States simply to an assertion of Arab will and sovereignty on the one hand versus American imperialism, which undoubtedly plays a central role in all this. However misguided, Saddam Hussein's cleverness is not that he is splitting America from its allies (which he has not really succeeded in doing for any practical purpose) but that he is exploiting the astonishing clumsiness and failures of US foreign policy. Very few people, least of all Saddam himself, can be fooled into believing him to be the innocent victim of American bullying; most of what is happening to his unfortunate people who are undergoing the most dreadful and unacknowledged suffering is due in considerable degree to his callous cynicism -- first of all, his indefensible and ruinous invasion of Kuwait, his persecution of the Kurds, his cruel egoism and pompous self-regard which persists in aggrandizing himself and his regime at exorbitant and, in my opinion, totally unwarranted cost. It is impossible for him to plead the case for national security and sovereignty now given his abysmal disregard of it in the case of Kuwait and Iran. Be that as it may, US vindictiveness, whose sources I shall look at in a moment, has exacerbated the situation by imposing a regime of sanctions which, as Sandy Berger, the American National Security adviser has just said proudly, is unprecedented for its severity in the whole of world history. 567,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the Gulf War, mostly as a result of disease, malnutrition and deplorably poor medical care. Agriculture and industry are at a total standstill. This is unconscionable of course, and for this the brazen inhumanity of American policy-makers is also very largely to blame. But we must not forget that Saddam is feeding that inhumanity quite deliberately in order to dramatize the opposition between the US and the rest of the Arab world; having provoked a crisis with the US (or the UN dominated by the US) he at first dramatised the unfairness of the sanctions. But by continuing it as he is now doing, the issue has changed and has become his non-compliance, and the terrible effects of the sanctions have been marginalised. Still the underlying causes of an Arab/US crisis remain. A careful analysis of that crisis is imperative. The US has always opposed any sign of Arab nationalism or independence, partly for its own imperial reasons and partly because its unconditional support for Israel requires it to do so. Since the l973 war, and despite the brief oil embargo, Arab policy up to and including the peace process has tried to circumvent or mitigate that hostility by appealing to the US for help, by "good" behavior, by willingness to make peace with Israel. Yet mere compliance with the US's wishes can produce nothing except occasional words of American approbation for leaders who appear "moderate": Arab policy was never backed up with coordination, or collective pressure, or fully agreed upon goals. Instead each leader tried to make separate arrangements both with the US and with Israel, none of which produced very much except escalating demands and a constant refusal by the US to exert any meaningful pressure on Israel. The more extreme Israeli policy becomes the more likely the US has been to support it. And the less respect it has for the large mass of Arab peoples whose future and well-being are mortgaged to illusory hopes embodied, for instance, in the Oslo accords. Moreover, a deep gulf separates Arab culture and civilization on the one hand, from the United States on the other, and in the absence of any collective Arab information and cultural policy, the notion of an Arab people with traditions, cultures and identities of their own is simply inadmissible in the US. Arabs are dehumanized, they are seen as violent irrational terrorists always on the lookout for murder and bombing outrages. The only Arabs worth doing business with for the US are compliant leaders, businessmen, military people whose arms purchases (the highest per capita in the world) are helping the American economy keep afloat. Beyond that there is no feeling at all, for instance, for the dreadful suffering of the Iraqi people whose identity and existence have simply been lost sight of in the present situation. This morbid, obsessional fear and hatred of the Arabs has been a constant theme in US foreign policy since World War Two. In some way also, anything positive about the Arabs is seen in the US as a threat to Israel. In this respect pro-Israeli American Jews, traditional Orientalists, and military hawks have played a devastating role. Moral opprobrium is heaped on Arab states as it is on no others. Turkey, for example, has been conducting a campaign against the Kurds for several years,
Re: Pope Scolds Capitalist Neoliberalism & Embargo
Wojtek Sokolowski: >I was reviewing the _Critique of the Gotha Programme_ over the weekend and >I realised how much different the Left's attitude is today. Back then, >Marx trashed the liberal reformers for their sentimentalist vision of the >economy instead of accepting the historical role of capitalism and >transcending it. Marx never expected that revolutions would take place in places like Cuba and Vietnam in isolation from a socialist Europe. Even when he discussed the possibility of revolution in Russia, he thought that it would be necessary for a socialist Europe to come to the aid of a peasant-led revolution there. Lenin and the Bolsheviks inherited this viewpoint and always held conflicted notions of the role of socialist Russia, at times thinking of it as a highly perishable beachhead and at other times as a self-sufficient socialist bastion. Stalin "resolved" this conflict with predictable results. The only equivalent of liberal reformers today are the people on PEN-L whose understanding of socialism seems to be untroubled by the historical reality of the relationship of class forces which successful revolutions inherit. They view socialism as something to be discussed, rather than acted upon. The virtue of the Cuban revolution was that it reduced this sort of chitchat to rubble. Castro and Guevara did not wait for the "productive forces" to mature before they challenged the Batista dictatorship. If much of what I hear on PEN-L was the guiding philosophy of the Cuban left in the 1950s, there never would have been a revolution, but endless coffee shop bull sessions about how terrible neocolonialism was. > >Today, the Left is happy if _any_ critique, even that from the mainstay of >reactionism such as the Vatican, is publically uttered. > Well, this is progress. Now at least Wojtek has begun to read a newspaper and discover that the papal visit has a completely different dynamic than the one that existed in his imagination. >What would Marx said about the Cuban problem today? He would probably >scoff at the attempt to build a sheltered island isolated form the sea of >capitalist globalization (there is no such a thing as socialism in one >country only). Marx would embrace Castro as the most genuine representative of his thought in the world today. Cuba has been devoted to attacking the world capitalist system through action rather than idle chatter: 1) creation of OLAS, the Latin American network of revolutionary organizations. 2) participation in OSPAAL, the solidarity network of third-world governments and movements dedicated to challenging capitalism. 3) Che Guevara's attempt to create a second front in Bolivia to relieve pressure on Vietnam. 4) Sending troops to confront the apartheid state attack on Angola. 5) Support of the ANC, which Mandela--to his credit--has always spoken warmly of, no matter how close he has veered to American interests lately. 6) Outspoken support of the black struggle in the USA. 7) Hosting a trade union conference in Havana last year for the purpose of defeating globalization and neoliberalism. 8) Calling for the renunciation of debts to imperialist banks. 9) Helping the Central American revolutionary forces in the 1980s overcome sectarian divisions. 10) many other concrete examples that I could provide with small effort, the above items are off the top of my head. >From that perspective, Castro' mustering papal support for his holdout >against being swallowed by neoliberal globalism is as, if not more, >retrograde than Lasalleanism chastised by marx in the Critique. > This is ridiculous. Lasalleanism is a detour from class struggle. It prefigures social democracy, since it envisions emancipation taking place within the framework of the bourgeois state. Castro is within the Marxist tradition, which views the state in class terms. Lenin's "State and Revolution" is simply an extension of ideas that are contained in Marx. See Hal Draper's "The 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' from Marx to Lenin" for a full discussion of this. The Cuban state, like all others that are in the tradition of the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution, is a product of the abolition of capitalist property relations. While I said that I would not discuss Cuba any longer, what we are discussing now is Marxism and Wotjek's post is such a violation of it in its own name, that I must protest. Bill Burgess is doing a good job of correcting misunderstandings about the current situation in Cuba today, but I feel obligated to correct misunderstandings about what Marx wrote. Louis Proyect
Jesuit schools
Michael P. writes: >By the way, I find it ironic that the jesuit schools in the U.S. are among the most open in the country. They even employ a Jim Devine -- or maybe Jim just spelt his name wrong to slip in.< I was originally hired partly because the chair didn't know the difference between the history of economic ideas (what the department needed) and economic history (what I know a little about and sometimes teach). I has helped me that the Jesuits are the Pope's think-tank (a step beyond their original status as il Papa's army): they value diversity of ideas, while some of them are Marxist or Marxoid. The dean at the the time I got hired full-time was some sort of a closet Marxoid (and also had the worst social skills I've encountered, but that's another issue). The Roman Catholic Church also has one foot in feudalism, which gives it a certain perspective on capitalism that organizations such as the California State University system (for which Michael works) don't have. But then again, CSU hired and gave tenure to Michael, so they must be doing something right. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "Dear, you increase the dopamine in my accumbens." -- words of love for the 1990s.
Different priorities
"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today. Not one of them is Cuban." (A sign in Havana, photographed March 1997.)
Re: The situation in Cuba
>Specifics, please on the "anti-popular and anti-worker legislation"! Or at >least some reference so we know what you are talking about. There are many. I'll list just a few in point form: - 1990, law promulgated for the tourist sector (Cuba's fastest-growing) releasing management from the requirement to follow the Labour Code; workers in tourism could be made to work overtime, and country-wide grievance procedures were not available to tourist sector workers. - 1992, law passes allowing foriegn individuals and enterprises to buy property and housing in Cuba, despite chronic shortage of housing for Cubans - indeed, a few years later Cuba actually had to open homeless shelters - also 1992, a constitutional ammendment allowing for privatization of state property - free trade zones were established; these are open to 100% foreign-owned enterprises, and wages and conditions are set by 'competitive market standards' rather than Cuban laws and regulations (what is more, the foreign companies themselves are responsible for determining those 'competitive market standards'. - Cuban government has helped Plyaboy seek models for a 'Girls of Cuba' pictorial - austerity has been imposed in areas of basic subsistence -- food, medicine, gasoline -- while all of these are avaialable in abundance to tourists, visiting business people etc. - unemployment has become a reality; what is more, unemploymt benefits have been capped and time-restrictions applied - the state has blamed its crisis on 'excessive egalitarianism' of socialism ; such egalitarianism has had an 'anti-economic and anti-efficient connotation' - these are our revolutionary heroes?? - the state has actually advertised its "labour discipline" as a selling point to potential foriegn investors >Increasing yields is the ONLY way to overcome material poverty in >Cuba. And the accounts of the recent union congresses and CPC convention >are dominated by discussion of how workers can better organize to do this >- themselves, in their own organizations, not waiting for some state >bureaucrat to tell them what to do. Lest we forget, the Cuba Workers Confederation is not an autonomous workers organization - it is a state body! It's newspaper, Trabajadores, is a state paper! Throughout the crisis, the Union position has been indistinguishable from other state bodies. Indeed, the union has demanded that workers develop 'discipline, efficiency and a new mentality', as this is what is required in the new partnership with global capital. So what the Union Congress says is one thing; what you will hear speaking with displaced workers on the street corner is something very different. .. Some state farms >have been turned into co-ops in order to get rid of a layer of >functionaries who were unproductive, and to promote more control by and >higher incomes for the actual producers. This is a good thing, not bad. State farms were officially named co-ops, yes. You are referring here to the 'basic units of cooperative production'. Here's the deal with these. Workers collectively 'own' the machinery and the harvest; land, however, remains in state hands, production quotas are set by the state, and the coop can only sell its produce to the state, at government-set prices. The country's established pay scales do not apply, but rather wages vary according to productivity, a measure intended to establish a subsistence-based incentive to labour - sounds alot like pieve-work/ commission to me! The state privatizes machinery, so workers now have to pay for repairs and replacements themselves; the state privatizes the harvest, so a bad year is the responsibility of the workers, and so that workers are responsible for their own subsistence. But the state retains control over land, and over the price produce will be sold at? Over all, the state has simply renounced its responsibility for the subsistence needs of farmers without surrendering its control over production quotas, market prices, and land use. >the inevitable NEP-type stages necessary to overcome economic crises, but >it is no solution to ignore the crisis, which is what it seems to me you >are arguing. I'm not arguing that crises don't exist. I'm arguing for 'a critique which doesn't shirk', and which challenges us to find solutions to crisis which do not rely on a retreat into capital. > >> >Fidel Castro says this in EVERY speach he gives. I'm not concerned with what he says, but what he does. And I think all the above is too much to ignore in good conscience. - Brian Green| [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Lewis & Clark
Hey Marty Hart-Landsberg, you out there? Forget all this Asia crisis stuff and answer the really important question: did you know Monica Lewinsky when she was at Lewis & Clark? Doug
Re: Pope Scolds Capitalist Neoliberalism & Embargo
At 09:39 PM 1/25/98 -0800, you wrote: >Pope Scolds Capitalism in Cuba > >By Victor L. Simpson >Associated Press Writer >Sunday, January 25, 1998; 2:29 p.m. EST > >HAVANA (AP) -- This communist island is not exactly on >the verge of a free-market explosion, but there was Pope >John Paul II, warning against ``capitalist neoliberalism'' and >``blind market forces.'' etc. My comment (WS): I was reviewing the _Critique of the Gotha Programme_ over the weekend and I realised how much different the Left's attitude is today. Back then, Marx trashed the liberal reformers for their sentimentalist vision of the economy instead of accepting the historical role of capitalism and transcending it. Today, the Left is happy if _any_ critique, even that from the mainstay of reactionism such as the Vatican, is publically uttered. What would Marx said about the Cuban problem today? He would probably scoff at the attempt to build a sheltered island isolated form the sea of capitalist globalization (there is no such a thing as socialism in one country only). Globalization, like industruialization, creates objective conditions to transcend national protectionism (which the Soviet style "communism" was in disguise) and for the first time provide basis for a truly universal (as opposed to national) working class. >From that perspective, Castro' mustering papal support for his holdout against being swallowed by neoliberal globalism is as, if not more, retrograde than Lasalleanism chastised by marx in the Critique. wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233
Re: Pope Scolds Capitalist Neoliberalism & Embargo
I think that what Castro has accomplished is remarkable. How could a small island continue to defy the U.S. without any superpower to prop it up? To survive, Castro has had to make some very hard choices. I doubt that any committed revolutionary would like to see the rise of the dollar economy. Yet the same forces that are causing the corruption of the dollar economy are also providing the basis for the creation of a system of organic agriculture and the replacement of the internal combustion engine by bicycles and oxen. To some extent, the green economy might seem to be a setback, but the experiments in this real will probably lead to invaluable results. Given the box that Castro is in, I am surprised that he has not been much more repressive. Think of the extent of the threat that led the U.S. to intern the Japanese citizens of this country. Did Japan seem as likely to overwhelm the U.S. as the U.S. would seem to Cuba. I don't like the pope. He seems to represent the worst in the Catholic religion. Roy Bourgeois, protesting the school of the Americas, is tried again about the same time that the pope was in Cuba. His statement -- going to jail for the umteenth time, and not just as a misdemeanor -- was much more powerful than the pope's. Yet the pope did give some lip service to some of the more valuable parts of the religious heritage. By the way, I find it ironic that the jesuit schools in the U.S. are among the most open in the country. They even employ a Jim Devine -- or maybe Jim just spelt his name wrong to slip in. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Iraq crisis
>As for ForniGate (as it showed up in the L.A. TIMES this a.m., proving once >again pen-l's, or at least Tom's, absolute ability to predict the future) Tomorrow it will rain. Somewhere. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ Know Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: dinosaurs and pancakes
On Sunday Max, repeating Rakesh in an imbroglio I take no side in, "said": > > as for politics, you may want to check out Herman Gorter's and Anton > > Pannekoek's anti-parliamentary communism (ed. DA Smart), Hal Draper's first Now there's a name I hadn't come across in ages! I have a fascination with people like "Dr Pancake," who came to Marxism from hard science. (Alas, the terms of his persuasion were rather expensive: WW1 broke out, from which event he concluded that the analysis of then-current events by the Dutch CP must have been on the beam.) Does anyone know of some biographical material on Pannekoek? I don't think his life has been formally done. valis
Re: Lewis & Clark
The real question: does Lewis & Clark play an allegorical East/West role orthogonal to Mason & Dixon's North/South? Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ Know Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: Baffling indeed
>"He noted that year after year we [in the US] invent a new pattern" >of ethics. The pattern of ethics in US public life is remarkably stable -- little or none. It's the pattern of moral posturing that is ephemeral. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ Know Ware Communications Vancouver, B.C., CANADA [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 688-8296 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Re: Baffling indeed
At 11:47 AM 1/26/98 -0500, Paul Zarembka wrote: >Of course, another hesitation is that they don't wanted to get snookered >through reacting too quickly to that which they don't know enough about >(and I don't mean mainly what did or did not happen between Lewinsky and >Clinton, but rather the whole dynamic which can unfold, legally and >politically). Alternative Explanation: Most of the leading GOP wags are as guilty as Clinton; just not as aggressive or obvious. Someone reminded them of the "glass house" principle. While the media has a field day because the Prez is found (again) to be screwing an intern, the Administration gets a free ride while it is screwing the rest of the working class. Go figure! Michael E.
Why won't they let Slick Willie womanize in peace?
A posting from another list FYI. Any comments? Wojtek >Return-path: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 17:41:31 + >From: Steve Rosenthal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Subject: Why won't they let Slick Willie womanize in peace? >Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >To: PSN-CAFE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >X-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >X-Listprocessor-version: 8.0 -- ListProcessor(tm) by CREN > >Thanks, Lauren, for opening up discussion on "As the White House >Turns." You are right that there are important sociological >questions here. Your analysis of "puritanism and politics as >entertainment" was both funny and insightful. However, I think there >are additional reasons why Clinton may finally be in deep doodoo. > >Business Week's cover story this week is "What To Do About Asia." >Writing for the business community, they say that "a seemingly >isolated financial bust that started last summer in Bangkok has >escalated into the biggest threat to global prosperity since the oil >shocks of the 1970s." > >Japan's vice minister for international finance has stated bluntly, >"This isn't an Asian crisis. It's a crisis of global capitalism." >Business Week is angry that "no Western leader has spoken openly and >publicly about the gravity of the crisis and how it could endanger >global prosperity." In their view, "the Clintonites...haven't made any >effort to build public support for the rescue plan." > >Much of the main Old Money sector of the ruling class is also very >dissatisfied with the Clintonites about other important matters as >well. The Brookings Institution wrote in 1996 that "the U.S. will >only have a limited number of occasions to use force against Iraq, >and it must make the most of them...U.S. diplomacy can succeed only >against a backdrop of the availability of military forces and the >will to use them." (Richard Haas, Brookings Policy Brief No. 7) > >In short, the Clintonites have failed to address the two most life >and death problems currently facing U.S. imperialism: The widening >and deepening global crisis of overproduction, and Iraq's growing >ability to thumb its nose at the U.S. with the backing of Russia, >China, and France, imperialist rivals of the U.S. > >This line of attack against the Clintonites is being led by Dick >Gephardt and the business and big labor forces behind him. The >Economic Policy Institute (EPI), whose funding comes from the >Rockefeller Foundation, C.S. Mott (GM), Russell Sage (Cabot gas and >banking money), sets forth the line Gephardt has been offering: That >workers through the main unions must be won to support U.S. >imperialism's foreign adventures, that U.S. banks and brokerage firms >exposed in Asia should absorb some of the losses themselves, >otherwise, U.S. capitalists will face a deep political crisis because >they have no working class support for the wars that must ultimately >be the capitalists' only solution to their crisis of overproduction. > >Gephardt stands to be the main political beneficiary of the >withdrawal of tolerance for Slick Willie's womanizing. Lauren is >right, the rulers of other countries do it, and Kennedy, Eisenhower, >etc., did it. Political divisions determine whether something will >be made of it. Gephardt's capitalist backers will either politically >weaken Clinton (and Gore) or dump him altogether. > >Kenneth Starr, by the way, has an endowed chair waiting for him at >Pepperdine funded by Richard Scaife, a Mellon family descendant and >financier of various conservative causes. Starr's D.C. law firm >defends GM among others. So this is not a "hard right" attempt to >"get" Clinton. After all, the last time a hard right New Money plot >was hatched to get rid of an Eastern Establishment President, they >didn't hire a prosecutor; they hired some killers and JFK got >assassinated. So this is probably an Old Establishment notice to >Clinton (and Gore) to "shape up or ship out." > >As the crisis of capitalism deepens, fights and splits within the >capitalist class will grow and take many bizarre and entertaining >forms. It's important for us to figure them out; otherwise we will >get tricked into supporting one bunch of corrupt hypocrites against >another, instead of organizing to get rid of the whole lot. > >Steve Rosenthal > wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233
Re: Baffling indeed
Someone asked me over the weekend for the "Marxist-historical" analysis of all this, with a wink. I said, half-facetiously, anything that discredits the antidemocratic institution of the presidency and paves the way for a parliamentary system is good. In Canada or UK Bill would be out on his butt by now and we all could get on with it. At another level, some of the distress being uttered now about the affair shows how deeply both media elite and public are wedded to the idea of the existing institutions--"the presidency". No one says "what's so great about the presidency?" when some senator expresses grave concern for how the office is being trampled. thad > From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mon Jan 26 08:31:09 1998 > Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Tom Walker) > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Baffling indeed > X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.1 -- ListProcessor(tm) by CREN > > >"He noted that year after year we [in the US] invent a new pattern" > >of ethics. > > The pattern of ethics in US public life is remarkably stable -- little or > none. It's the pattern of moral posturing that is ephemeral. > > Regards, > > Tom Walker > ^^^ > Know Ware Communications > Vancouver, B.C., CANADA > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > (604) 688-8296 > ^^^ > The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
Baffling indeed
Castro Disconcerted with Clinton Havana, 24 January 1998 (AP). The senstaionalism of the US press concerning the sexual scandals surrounding US president Bill Clinton have disconcerted [desconcertado: embarrased or puzzled by, concernd or baffled with] president Fidel Castro, according to a US legislator who met with him here today. In a meeting last night, Castro "criticized the US press for the form in which it treats US functionaries. He seemed completely baffled," said the democratic representative Richeard Neal. "He was conpletey consternated," by the scandal around Clinton, said Neal. "He noted that year after year we [in the US] invent a new pattern" of ethics. [...] The details of Castro's private life are a jealously guarded state secret. (Appeard in Los Tiempos of Cochabamba, 25 Jan 1998, p. B1; tranlation is mine.) Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-42) 48242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Iraq crisis
There's a dimension of the current fight between the US and Iraq that many forget: back in 1992, when the Bush League launched its war against the oft-misprounounced Saddam, the war was totally paid for by Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, Kuwait. 9Look at the US balance on the current account for those years: "unilateral transfers" from the US, usually billions of dollars of outflow, suddenly become billions of dollars of inflow in 1992, an event soon to be reversed.) Anyway, is Saudi Arabia and/or Kuwait likely to shell out big bucks again? (It's not just the UN's lack of support.) I doubt it, so that if Clinton goes unilateral (following the lead of the flick WAG THE DOG), it will have to be very low-budget. This is in a context where the official military budget is down quite a bit as a percentage of GDP. As for ForniGate (as it showed up in the L.A. TIMES this a.m., proving once again pen-l's, or at least Tom's, absolute ability to predict the future), the only issue that should concern us is Clinton's alleged encouragement of perjury. It's only HRC who should care about the adultery issue. Though I do wonder why the Pres. should engage in hanky-panky when he knows that the highly-paid dogs of Starr are panting outside the White House gate looking to dig up the slightest bone of impropriety. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html "It takes a busload of faith to get by." -- Lou Reed.
tip offs
>On the totally separate subject of satire and the need (?) to label it, >I'm bewildered about this request. Have we entered an age when it's >necessary to tell people "Don't take this seriously" or "You can laugh >now"? I find that an integral part of satire and parody is getting part >way into it before you realize it IS parody or satire. >Sid I agree with Sid on this one. But then, I'm one of those mean teachers who gives students Horace Miner's 1950s ethnography "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" (American Antrhopologist (58)3:503-507, 1958) each semester without warning. The impact of this gem is the shock of recognition of the object of concern. If you don't know it, run and get a copy. Tom Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-42) 48242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: French unemployed movement
Recently I have read criticism's of the business and mainstream press's triumphalism about the state of the American vs. European economies with regards to unemployment rates. The criticism points out that factoring in prison populations into the unemployment rates creates a much smaller gap. I am new on the list, so this may have been discussed to death already but I would be interested on any sources for the debate on US compared to the EU (and any comments of course). -Paul Meyer
Re: Fidel & religion, capital & embargo
In a message dated 98-01-23 16:56:15 EST, you write: << actually-existing socialism >> actually inexisting socialism
Re: French unemployed movement
There is more to the drive for the euro than just elites squashing labor in Europe, although that is certainly a good part of it. Another is the rivalry with the US dollar and by extension US capitalists. I was struck by this very forcibly while in France when I would raise questions about details of the plan. A point would be reached where suddenly I would get told that "all you Americans are against the euro because you are afraid of what it will mean for the dollar" or something along those lines. This is all the more hilarious given that the US economists most vocal in opposition to the euro have been Milton Friedman and Martin Feldstein. Barkley Rosser On Sun, 25 Jan 1998 12:36:17 -0500 Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > john gulick wrote: > > >What do pen-l'ers make of the argument propounded by pro-EMU social democrats > >that w/o EMU global financial markets will discipline expansionary/welfare > >initiatives, and at the very least w/EMU some weak version of EC-wide > >expansionary/welfare initiatives can be achieved, as long as the EC central > >bank does not resemble the Bundesbank? > > But don't the Maastricht critera just about accomplish the task on their > own? The strictures of EMU have led to fairly extreme fiscal and monetary > tightening, and it's doubtful the Germans would accept any Euro-CB that > wasn't Buba-like in its austerity. Who's behind EMU, after all? It's a > project of the corporate and financial elite. Maastricht gives national > governments the political cover for cutting their welfare states, and with > unemployment rates as high as they are, labor market "flexiblization" is at > least partly legitimated. > > Doug > > > -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
