Re: In Defense of Latin
In a message dated 98-02-07 14:58:21 EST, you write: But what about the reputation of mathematicians and computer whizzes as emotion-free nerds? Seriously, though, do you have a reference for this research? Walter Daum CCNY/Math Sorry Walter, these both came from news programs I was only paying half attention to. However, I have a good friend who is a psychiatrist -- I'll try and remember to call her and ask her if she has references. maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Henwood Review, Communist Manifesto, more
Today, 2/8/98, the Sunday L.A. TIMES book review section has a review of Doug Henwood's WALL STREET, a symposium on the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO with the lead essay by Eric Hobsbawm, a review of David Noble's THE RELIGION OF TECHNOLOGY by David S. Landes, reviews by Robert Heilbroner Christopher Hitchens, etc. It is probably all at http://www.latimes.com/ somewhere or will be soon (I couldn't find it, but I didn't try hard since I have a hard copy, something called a "newspaper," delivered to my door everyday). The review of Doug's book by John Micklewait of the ECONOMIST magazine says that Doug writes well and with a sense of humor but "He is just, well, wrong. All the evidence seems to point to the fact that good old red-blooded Anglo-Saxon capitalism, for all its excesses and inefficiencies, actually seems to work much better than any of the alternatives." For an anti-Henwood statement, this is pretty weak, since it includes the word "seems" twice, along with weaselish phrasing in general. Micklewait then goes on to stress a point of Doug's book: increasing inequality. The review, however, is mostly of a book also titled WALL STREET by Charles Geisst. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine
Reflections on the death of a cult leader
Since it is quite likely that the Workers World Party is the largest
"Marxist-Leninist" group in the USA today, it is of some consequence that
its founder Sam Marcy died last week at the age of 86. Marcy's childhood
was spent in a Russian shtetl, where extreme poverty forced his parents to
dress their infant son in potato sacks. He came to the United States in his
youth and became a good student. He entered law school, passed the bar, and
began a career as a labor lawyer. As with so many of this generation, Marcy
became a revolutionary. Unlike others, he joined the dissident Trotskyist
movement during the 1930s instead of the Communist Party.
The world Trotskyist movement had a major faction fight in the 1950s.
Michel Raptis ("Pablo"), the nominal leader of the movement, speculated
that the cold war would drive the Communist Parties to the left. He urged
the Trotskyist parties to enter them en masse to help accelerate the
left-wing tendency. The Socialist Workers Party of the United States
thought this was liquidationism and split with Pablo. About 40% of the
party supported Pablo's orientation and withdrew from the SWP.
The American Pabloite leader was Bert Cochrane, who had led UAW sit-down
strikes in Flint, Michigan in the 1930s. He was also an important Marxist
thinker who understood American society better than any of the "orthodox"
Trotskyists. Shortly after leaving the SWP, he launched what is very likely
the first new left publication in the 1950s. He posited the rise of new
social movements in the absence of a working-class radicalization. He also
urged Marxism to adopt the American vernacular and eschew symbols of the
Russian revolution. Other Pabloites joined the Monthly Review and the
Guardian newspaper and help strengthen the voice of non-sectarian Marxism
in the 1950s.
Marcy, a leader of the Buffalo branch of the SWP, was also a Pabloite, but
had no interest in moving away from sectarianism. Differences with the SWP
over the Hungarian uprising of 1956 led him to split. Following Pablo's
logic to its full conclusion, Marcy argued that if the Communist Parties
were moving in a leftward direction, then the Hungarian revolt could only
serve imperialism.
We should understand that Trotskyist groups often split over how to
interpret events in distant countries, especially all the "betrayals" that
occur with dismaying frequency. Since frequent splits tend to keep
Trotskyist parties small and powerless, it inoculates them against
betrayal. Small propaganda groups tend to betray nobody except their own
members, who, like myself, often leave in disgust after many years spent in
futility.
When I joined the SWP in 1967, I received a crash course in "opponents."
The CP was Stalinist; the Progressive Labor Party was Maoist and the
Workers World Party was a "cult around Sam Marcy." I had never heard the
term cult applied to socialist groups before and tried to imagine what this
meant. Did WWP members keep portraits of Marcy on their living-room wall? I
only discovered years later that nearly all Trotskyist groups were cults.
The explanation for this is not in the psychology of the leaders, but in
the methodology of the groups which they have inherited from Zinoviev's
Comintern. There is a revolutionary program which the party leadership,
especially the supreme leader, has to defend from petty-bourgeois
challenges. There is enormous peer pressure to internalize and agree with
the party line at all times, since nobody wants to be an instrument of
"alien class influences." Thus, the party becomes a cult around the leader,
who is "the Trotsky of today," and can be trusted to keep the purity of the
program intact Trotsky himself allowed cult tendencies to develop while he
was alive and his disciples merely followed his example.
My first encounter with WWP members was at the mass Vietnam antiwar
demonstrations. My own group was in a coalition with the CPUSA and radical
pacifists, which the WWP viewed as "reformist." They regarded mass
demonstrations around the slogan "Out Now" as a betrayal. They brought
their own banners to the march and often forced their way to the front
ranks. The banners had a day-glo orange background you could spot a mile
away, upon which slogans like "Victory to the Vietcong" were printed in
huge block letters. They often sought out confrontations with the cops,
using their banner poles as clubs. Film footage of these provocations often
became the lead-in to the evening television coverage. There is little
doubt that the FBI encouraged such behavior since it made the antiwar
movement look like a bunch of lunatics.
Marcy would need no encouragement from the FBI to stage such
confrontations, since it was an integral part of his ultraleft approach to
politics. The 1960s radicalization had disoriented many Marxists into
thinking that revolution was on the agenda. Many, including Marcy, had
adopted a variation of the "spark" theory. They theorized that bold, even
violent, action by
Re: Henwood Review, Communist Manifesto, more
friends, I just read the last issue of Left Business Observer. There are excellent articles on the Asian crisis, the U.S. economy, and much more. Worth a look and a subscription! Before Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy got so old, Monthly Review used to feature such articles in the "Review of the Month," but they don't have so many such articles these days. So LBO is a great addition and required reading along, of course, with Monthly Review. Michael Yates James Devine wrote: Today, 2/8/98, the Sunday L.A. TIMES book review section has a review of Doug Henwood's WALL STREET, a symposium on the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO with the lead essay by Eric Hobsbawm, a review of David Noble's THE RELIGION OF TECHNOLOGY by David S. Landes, reviews by Robert Heilbroner Christopher Hitchens, etc. It is probably all at http://www.latimes.com/ somewhere or will be soon (I couldn't find it, but I didn't try hard since I have a hard copy, something called a "newspaper," delivered to my door everyday). The review of Doug's book by John Micklewait of the ECONOMIST magazine says that Doug writes well and with a sense of humor but "He is just, well, wrong. All the evidence seems to point to the fact that good old red-blooded Anglo-Saxon capitalism, for all its excesses and inefficiencies, actually seems to work much better than any of the alternatives." For an anti-Henwood statement, this is pretty weak, since it includes the word "seems" twice, along with weaselish phrasing in general. Micklewait then goes on to stress a point of Doug's book: increasing inequality. The review, however, is mostly of a book also titled WALL STREET by Charles Geisst. in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine
Re: Henwood Review, Communist Manifesto, more
James Devine wrote: a symposium on the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO with the lead essay by Eric Hobsbawm A good day for Verso in LA, evidently. This no doubt is a spinoff from the 150th Anniversary edition of the CM that Verso's publishing in the spring, with an intro by Hobsbawm. I haven't seen the Hobsbawm piece yet, but I have seen mock-ups of the book, and it's a snazzy looking commodity, featuring a painting of a red flag by artists/pollsters Komar Melamid. Barnes Noble has placed a big order for them for use as cash register impulse temptations, and the NY Times may do a piece on the ironies of "marketing Marx." If this all pans out, it will eclipse Verso's 1997 triumph of having a model in Marie Claire holding a copy of Che's Motorcycle Diaries. Doug
That LA Times review...
mentioned by Jim Devine is reachable at the extension /HOME/NEWS/BOOKS/. Here are a few choice pieces. Sunday, February 8, 1998 Bull and Bear WALL STREET: A History. By Charles R. Geisst . Oxford University Press: 404 pp., $30 ; WALL STREET: How It Works and for Whom. By Doug Henwood . Verso: 372 pp., $25 ; By JOHN MICKLETHWAIT Indeed, in many ways, Wall Street is entering uncharted waters where its history is only a partial guide to its future. From this point of view, there is an argument for reading no more than the first two-thirds of "Wall Street" and then turning to Doug Henwood's book, which has the same title but is a theoretical broadside, not a history. Henwood, the editor of Left Business Observer, would seem to be a living oxymoron: a socialist who is fascinated by finance. In fact, the same could be said of Karl Marx. I always knew there was something strange about Doug; he's a socialist fascinated by finance, hence a "living oxymoron," and Papa Karl exhibited the same grotesque contradiction. Is this guy for real? The main difference is that Henwood has a sense of humor (one has to admire anybody who includes, among the various blurbs on the back of his book, the following comment from Norman Pearlstine, the former executive editor of the Wall Street Journal: "You are scum. . . . [I]t's tragic that you exist.") Was there some old personal score being settled thus, Doug? Wow, if anyone told me that, he'd be well advised to carefully guard the future of his own existence. Dismissing Henwood as an amusing irritant will doubtless comfort the partners at Goldman, Sachs. Yet they would do well to consider one recurring theme of his book and Geisst's: Wall Street tends to go too far. Inequality in America is on the increase. The downsizing that Wall Street has so applauded over the last decade has created a much wider class of malcontents than did previous waves of restructuring. Yes, and if they end up riding the rods like in the '30s, they'll at least take their laptops along; this army will stay in touch with itself. The middle managers who lost their jobs bitterly resent the huge pay packets being given out to those who orchestrated their downfall. As this generation of Daniel Drews is "limoed" back home to their penthouses on Fifth Avenue, they should wonder how the next generation will cope with the bitter harvest that they have sown. Not likely: that's way too far past the next quarterly statement. Surprisingly few Peter Druckers in that crowd. John Micklethwait Is the New York Bureau Chief of the Economist. he Is the Co-author With Adrian Wooldridge of "The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus" (Times Business) There's also a mini-symposium of 6 notables on the Manifesto, the optimal downer being - Who else? - David "There and Back" Horowitz, that established paragon of living oxymoronhood. valis
Re: Santa Fe-Krugman-Arthur
Doug, I think that you are overreacting here to phraseology. Yes, I realize that "interacting particles" can sound pretty awful, miniscule even. But as noted these agents react to each other and learn from and about each other. There is nothing in the approach that says the agents have to be identical or that they may not be in conflict. Indeed, in most of these models what is interesting is that the agents are different and evolve differently. One can even set it up to have them conflict in an organized fashion. This is not the agenda of the SFI itself, but even within its agenda there is often an effective conflict between different agents. This goes on in their stock market model, not a class conflict model, but one in which heterogeneous agents are behaving differently from each other and in response to each other and the market. Barkley Rosser On Sun, 8 Feb 1998 17:03:10 -0500 Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: Doug, You are interested in analyzing capitalism aren't you? It's a system isn't it? Also, you are one of the most intrepid and capable data wonks in cyberspace. Why the sudden horror of data? Look, I have nothing against analyzing society systematically, or I wouldn't admire Marx so much. I have nothing against using numbers to analyze social reality either, or I wouldn't make so many charts. Nor do I have any objection to using chaos theory to talk to math-heads to argue that simple systems can go wild or that models are exquisitely sensitive to assumptions. What I object to in the Santa Fe research program, which has a lot in common with a whole lot of neoclassicals and even some radicals, is the impulse to view society as something that can or should be thought of as something that can be represented using the same kinds of models used to represent the physical world. As the Santa Fe statement puts it: "Much of the work envisions the economy as composed of large numbers of interacting agents, mutually adjusting to each other as time passes. The agents in this economy - the 'interacting particles' of economics - decide their actions consciously, with a view to the possible future actions and reactions of other agents. That is, they formulate strategy and expectations, they learn and adapt. As this learning and mutual adaptation take place, new economic structures or patterns may emerge, and there is a continual formation and reformation of the institutions, behaviors, and technologies that comprise the economy." Maybe I'm exhibiting the unsteeled romanticism of a former English major in finding "interacting particles" a repulsive way to think about human beings and their institutions. No longer even appendages of flesh attached to machines, we're machines ourselves, or virtual representations of machines. I suppose it's not far from Homo economicus to the rational calculating machine, but it is a step. Or should I go all Donna Haraway now and embrace the cyborg as our future? It's not just alienation that's missing from Santa Fe picture - it's any notion of conflict, struggle, or politics. Joan Robinson said that the neoclassicals wanted to replace history with equilibrium; now we're replacing it with "adaptation," which may or may not lead to equilibrium, but which ain't no improvement. Doug -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Santa Fe-Krugman-Arthur
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: Doug, You are interested in analyzing capitalism aren't you? It's a system isn't it? Also, you are one of the most intrepid and capable data wonks in cyberspace. Why the sudden horror of data? Look, I have nothing against analyzing society systematically, or I wouldn't admire Marx so much. I have nothing against using numbers to analyze social reality either, or I wouldn't make so many charts. Nor do I have any objection to using chaos theory to talk to math-heads to argue that simple systems can go wild or that models are exquisitely sensitive to assumptions. What I object to in the Santa Fe research program, which has a lot in common with a whole lot of neoclassicals and even some radicals, is the impulse to view society as something that can or should be thought of as something that can be represented using the same kinds of models used to represent the physical world. As the Santa Fe statement puts it: "Much of the work envisions the economy as composed of large numbers of interacting agents, mutually adjusting to each other as time passes. The agents in this economy - the 'interacting particles' of economics - decide their actions consciously, with a view to the possible future actions and reactions of other agents. That is, they formulate strategy and expectations, they learn and adapt. As this learning and mutual adaptation take place, new economic structures or patterns may emerge, and there is a continual formation and reformation of the institutions, behaviors, and technologies that comprise the economy." Maybe I'm exhibiting the unsteeled romanticism of a former English major in finding "interacting particles" a repulsive way to think about human beings and their institutions. No longer even appendages of flesh attached to machines, we're machines ourselves, or virtual representations of machines. I suppose it's not far from Homo economicus to the rational calculating machine, but it is a step. Or should I go all Donna Haraway now and embrace the cyborg as our future? It's not just alienation that's missing from Santa Fe picture - it's any notion of conflict, struggle, or politics. Joan Robinson said that the neoclassicals wanted to replace history with equilibrium; now we're replacing it with "adaptation," which may or may not lead to equilibrium, but which ain't no improvement. Doug
Re: Latin? With prose like this who needs it?
Rob Schaap wrote, And anyway, am I right in thinking the whole notion of the accelerator (or has this notion too been consigned to the dustbin of history in academic economics?) inextricably links the two (for however one might wish to link them, linked they most certainly must be)? The author of the sentence in question was so wrapped up in overstating his case that he neglected to specify how capital could augment itself without passing through an earthly circuit of production and consumption. The notion of dual circuits -- one for spiritual investment and compound interest; another for carnal production and consumption -- is straight out of gnostic antinomianism. It would be funny if it wasn't policy creed. 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: Latin? With prose like this who needs it?
Lovely post as usual, Tom, On one point though: 4. In what sense are "creating wealth" and "creating jobs" alternative foci for government? And anyway, am I right in thinking the whole notion of the accelerator (or has this notion too been consigned to the dustbin of history in academic economics?) inextricably links the two (for however one might wish to link them, linked they most certainly must be)? Just wondering, Rob. Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia. Phone: 02-6201 2194 (BH) Fax:02-6201 5119 'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.'(John Stuart Mill) "The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital."(Karl Marx)
