[PEN-L:2109] Now for Something Completely Different

[Ken Hanly]

A letter to the editor of the Winnipeg Sun maintains that the
millenium doesn't begin until
Jan 1, 2001. Is that right? Bill Hamm, the author, claims that
the first year AD was year 1. AD did not begin with year 0.
Therefore, it will be on Jan 1, 2001 that a thousand years will
have elapsed. Is that correct? Shouldn't it be the the Y2K minus
1 problem?
   Cheers, Ken Hanly

[PEN-L:2107] Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode of discourse

[Tom Walker]

Bad "writing" might even be overstating Butler's accomplishment. It looks to
me more like a mere agglomeration of trendy nominalizations.



Tom Walker
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/

[PEN-L:2106] Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode of discourse

[Louis Proyect]

>Who the hell ever said they were an embryonic form of American fascism? Not
>me. 

Adolph Reed said that NOI security guards were incipient fascist
formations. I guess you just brought them up because they popped into your
head. Sorry for the confusion.

>You accused Judith Butler of being a theorist of identity; I tried to
>show how that wasn't the case. 

I have no idea what Judith Butler stands for. Everything you've posted from
her leaves me feeling like I've drunk a fifth of cheap wine on an empty
stomach.

>You responded to a catalogue of unpleasant
>aspects of NOI ideology with a clip about a housing project in Coney
>Island. Really, this is getting nowhere, so I am going to stop.

It was getting somewhere. That is why you are ducking out.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2104] Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode of discourse

[Louis Proyect]

Ken Hanly wrote:
>Doug. Did you really mean to post this to Pen-L? Isn't it an entry for the
bad
>writing contest?

To give credit where it is due, Doug first called LBO-Talk's attention to
the fact that Judith Butler was indeed the winner of first prize in the
1998 Bad Writing Contest:

> Judith Butler
> has won this year's Bad Writing Contest, sponsored by the journal
> Philosophy and Literature ...
> 
> Here's the winning sentence, from her essay "Further Reflections on the
> Conversations of Our Time," in Diacritics:
> 
>   The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood
>   to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view
>   of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
>   convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality
>   into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of
>   Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical
>   objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility
>   of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up
>   with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of
>   power.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2103] Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode of discourse

[Louis Proyect]

Doug quoting Judith Butler:
>If the phallus is that which is excommunicated from the feminist orthodoxy
>on lesbian sexuality as well as the "missing part," the sign of an
>inevitable dissatisfaction that is lesbianism in homophobic and misogynist
>constructions, then the admission of the phallus into that exchange faces
>two convergent prohibitions: first, the phallus signifies the persistence of
>the "straight mind," a masculine or heterosexist identification and, hence,
>the defilement or betrayal of lesbian specificity; secondly, the phallus
>signifies the insuperability of heterosexuality and constitutes lesbianism
>as a vain and/or pathetic effort to mime the real thing. 

Doug, we are trying to establish whether Nation of Islam security guards
are embryonic forms of American fascism or something more akin to bean pie
salesmen. The answer to these sorts of questions resides in such mundane
places as Lexis-Nexis or articles in the left press, not in the
"insuperability of heterosexuality". (I wish my heterosexuality were a
little bit more insuperable. My social life is the pits right now.)


Daily News (New York) 

September 14, 1996, Saturday 

SECTION: News; Pg. 7 

HEADLINE: CONEY RESIDENTS BLAST FIRING OF MUSLIM GUARDS 

BYLINE: By AUSTIN EVANS FENNER 

Angry residents of a Coney Island apartment complex yesterday vowed to
fight Gov. Pataki's order banning a security force linked to the Nation of
Islam from patrolling their buildings. 

Pataki earlier this week ordered BSR Management to terminate its $ 360,000
yearly contract with X-Men Security to patrol Ocean Towers, a
state-subsidized housing complex, as of Oct. 10. 

Sheila Boyd, president of the tenant association in the 360-unit
development, said residents have signed petitions demanding that X-Men
Security be retained, and are planning a meeting to discuss their options. 

"People are really upset," said Boyd. She said several petitions are
circulating around the complex. 

Pataki spokeswoman Zenia Mucha said the order was issued because the X-Men
"are followers of [Nation of Islam leader] Louis Farrakhan . . . They
practice racism and anti-Semitism, given their leader's statements on
occasion." 

Mucha said X-Men Security personnel have "repeatedly" ignored warnings to
stop distributing racist literature on Ocean Towers premises, although she
did not specify who issued those warnings. 

Pataki was able to terminate the contract because Ocean Towers receives
some state subsidies. 

But several Ocean Towers residents, declaring that they never felt safer
than in the three years the X-Men have been on the job, said they feared
drug dealers and petty crooks would return to the complex once the security
force is ousted. 

"There have been at least five different security organizations here, but
these guys have been the only ones to put their lives on the line rather
than let the drug dealers take over," said Stanley Primus, a 20-year Ocean
Towers resident. "The governor's stance will . . . put more people in
jeopardy." 

Resident Allen Pearson, a father of two, said Pataki "doesn't understand
what it means to be safe in Coney Island. [With the X-Men on duty] I don't
have to worry about rushing my kids into the building now because of
gunfire." 

racist or anti-Semitic literature were "absurd." 

"We are here to do a job, we have done that," said Muhammad. "We have
cleaned up the area, and that should be the genuine concern." 

State Division of Housing and Community Renewal spokesman Harry Ryttenberg
said yesterday the firm Taskforce Security has been chosen to replace the
EVANS FENNER 

Angry residents of a Coney Island apartment complex yesterday vowed to
fight Gov. Pataki's order banning a security force linked to the Nation of
Islam from patrolling their buildings. 

Pataki earlier this week ordered BSR Management to terminate its $ 360,000
yearly contract with X-Men Security to patrol Ocean Towers, a
state-subsidized housing complex, as of Oct. 10. 

Sheila Boyd, president of the tenant association in the 360-unit
development, said residents have signed petitions demanding that X-Men
Security be retained, and are planning a meeting to discuss their options. 

"People are really upset," said Boyd. She said several petitions are
circulating around the complex. 

Pataki spokeswoman Zenia Mucha said the order was issued because the X-Men
"are followers of [Nation of Islam leader] Louis Farrakhan . . . They
practice racism and anti-Semitism, given their leader's statements on
occasion." 

Mucha said X-Men Security personnel have "repeatedly" ignored warnings to
stop distributing racist literature on Ocean Towers premises, although she
did not specify who issued those warnings. 

Pataki was able to terminate the contract because Ocean Towers receives
some state subsidies. 

But several Ocean Towers residents, declaring that they never felt safer
than in the three years the X-Men have been on the job, said they feared
drug dealers and petty 

[PEN-L:2102] Re: Re: Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode of discourse<199901122102.QAA02365@bonjour.cc.columbia.edu>

[Ken Hanly]

Doug. Did you really mean to post this to Pen-L? Isn't it an entry for the bad
writing contest?
Freud and Jung read like Dick and Jane primary texts compared to this monstrous
pile of pompous sludge.

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Doug Henwood wrote:

> . From Bodies That Matter, pp. 85-87: (Judith Butler)
>
> If the phallus is that which is excommunicated from the feminist orthodoxy
> on lesbian sexuality as well as the "missing part," the sign of an
> inevitable dissatisfaction that is lesbianism in homophobic and misogynist
> constructions, then the admission of the phallus into that exchange faces
> two convergent prohibitions: first, the phallus signifies the persistence of
> the "straight mind," a masculine or heterosexist identification and, hence,
> the defilement or betrayal of lesbian specificity; secondly, the phallus
> signifies the insuperability of heterosexuality and constitutes lesbianism
> as a vain and/or pathetic effort to mime the real thing. Thus, the phallus
> enters lesbian sexual discourse in the mode of a transgressive "confession"
> conditioned and confronted by both the feminist and misogynist forms of
> repudiation: it's not the real thing (the lesbian thing) or it's not the
> real thing (the straight thing). What is "unveiled" is precisely the
> repudiated desire, that which is abjected by heterosexist logic and that
> which is defensively foreclosed through the effort to circumscribe a
> specifically feminine morphology for lesbianism. In a sense, what is
> unveiled or exposed is a desire that is produced through a prohibition.
>
> And yet, the phantasmatic structure of this desire will operate as a "veil"
> precisely at the moment in which it is "revealed." That phantasmatic
> transfiguration of bodily boundaries will not only expose its own
> tenuousness, but will turn out to depend on that tenuousness and transience
> in order to signify at all. The phallus as signifier within lesbian
> sexuality will engage the spectre of shame and repudiation delivered by
> that feminist theory which would secure a feminine morphology in its
> radical distinctness from the masculine (a binarism that is secured through
> heterosexual presumption), a spectre delivered in a more pervasive way by
> the masculinist theory which would insist on the male morphology as the
> only possible figure for the human body. Traversing those divisions, the
> lesbian phallus signifies a desire that is produced historically at the
> crossroads of these prohibitions, and is never fully free of the normative
> demands that condition its possibility and that it nevertheless seeks to
> subvert. Insofar as the phallus is an idealization of morphology, it
> produces a necessary effect of inadequation, one which, in the cultural
> context of lesbian relations, can be quickly assimilated to the sense of an
> inadequate derivation from the supposedly real thing, and, hence, a source
> of shame.
>
> But precisely because it is an idealization, one which no body can
> adequately approximate, the phallus is a transferable phantasm, and its
> naturalized link to masculine morphology can be called into question
> through an aggressive reterritorialization. That complex identificatory
> fantasies inform morphogenesis, and that they cannot be fully predicted,
> suggests that morphological idealization is both a necessary and
> unpredictable ingredient in the constitution of both the bodily ego and the
> dispositions of desire.
>
> It also means that there is not necessarily one imaginary schema for the
> bodily ego, and that cultural conflicts over the idealization and
> degradation of specific masculine and feminine morphologies will be played
> out at the site of the morphological imaginary in complex and conflicted
> ways. It may well be through a degradation of a feminine morphology, an
> imaginary and cathected degrading of the feminine, that the lesbian phallus
> comes into play, or it may be through a castrating occupation of that
> central masculine trope, fueled by the kind of defiance which seeks to
> overturn that very degradation of the feminine.
>
> It is important to underscore, however, the way in which the stability of
> both "masculine" and "feminine" morphologies is called into question by a
> lesbian resignification of the phallus which depends on the crossings of
> phantasmatic identification. If the morphological distinctness of "the
> feminine" depends on its purification of all masculinity, and if this
> bodily boundary and distinctness is instituted in the service of the laws
> of a heterosexual symbolic, then that repudiated masculinity is presumed by
> the feminized morphology, and will emerge either as an impossible ideal
> that shadows and thwarts the feminine or as a disparaged signifier of a
> patriarchal order against which a specific lesbian-feminism defines itself.
> In either case, the relation to the phallus is constitutive - an
> identification is made which is at once disavowed.
>
> Indeed, it is 

[PEN-L:2098] Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode of discourse

[Louis Proyect]

>Oh no, not that! I prefer to take dictation from my icons.
>
>Doug

Please, Doug. I am trying to have a serious discussion with you. I have
never heard you say anything about black politics that differs from Adolph
Reed. I am trying to tell you that you are making a big mistake by doing
so. This is like basing your ideas on feminism from Camile Paglia or Katie
Roiphe. If anything, there is a strange disjunction in your thinking on
so-called identity politics, where you are an enthusiastic supporter of
Judith Butler but turn around and get apoplectic on similar trends in the
black movement. Cornel West endorsed the NOI Million Man March and sent
Adoph Reed into the stratosphere. I don't think its a stretch to see West
as the black movement's Judith Butler. Your friends at Rethinking Marxism
seemed to think so, as they put the two of them on the same plenary at the
Amherst gathering.
 

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2096] Fw: OWC URGENT APPEAL: LANDLESS PEASANTS BRAZIL

[Frank Durgin]

--
> From: Western Hemisphere Conference <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: undisclosed-recipients:;@mail-atm.maine.rr.com
> Subject: OWC URGENT APPEAL: LANDLESS PEASANTS BRAZIL
> Date: Tuesday, January 12, 1999 6:35 AM
> 
> OWC URGENT APPEAL: LANDLESS PEASANTS BRAZIL
> 
> *
> 
> To All Supporters of Labor and Democratic Rights
> 
> Dear Friends:
> 
> We just received the following appeal from Brazil. We urge
> you to add your name (and that of your organization) in
> support of this appeal. We will gather all the names and
> send them collectively to the authorities in Brazil, with
> an e-mail copy to the Brazilian Justice Committee (c/o State
> Deputy Renato Simoes).
> 
> Bringing to justice the assassins of the leaders of Brazil's 
> peasant and rural workers' movements is a central task facing
> supporters of labor and democratic rights worldwide.
> 
> As you know, the assassins of Chico Mendes, the legendary leader
> of the Rubber Workers Union in the state of Acre, were openly
> allowed to escape from jail after serving only a brief sentence.
> 
> Today Darcy Alves and his son, the men convicted in the assassination
> of Chico Mendes, are scot-free. They have a large estate and even a
> family store in the city of Rio Branco (Acre). The Brazilian 
> authorities have done nothing to apprehend Alves and his son and
> return them to prison.
> 
> Moreover, the Brazilian government has refused to lift a finger to
> detain and bring to justice the assassins of countless other leaders 
> of the workers' and peasants' movement of Brazil.
> 
> Now is the time to put an end to the killings. We must build a
> mass-based international campaign to demand that those responsible
> for the assassinations of Jurandir dos Santos and Roberto Duarte de
> Oliveira be brought to justice.
> 
> Please send your endorsement to:
> 
> Open World Conference, c/o San Francisco L
abor Council, 1188 Franklin
St. 
> #203, San Francisco CA 94109. Fax: (415) 440-9297, or e-mail:
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
> 
> In Solidarity,
> 
> Ed Rosario and Mya Shone,
> co-coordinators,
> Open World Conference in Defense of the Independence
> of the Trade Unions and Democratic Rights
> 
> **
> 
> 
> INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR JUSTICE 
> FOR JURANDIR DOS SANTOS & ROBERTO DUARTE DE OLIVEIRA
> 
> Open Letter to the Brazilian Authorities
> 
> To the attention of:
> 
> Mr. Renan Calheiros
> Minister of Justice of Brazil 
> Esplanada dos Ministérios; Bloco T; 
> CEP 700064-900; Brasília; DF
> Fax: 061-322-6817
> 
> Mr. Jose Afonso da Silva, 
> Minister of Public Security of Sao Paulo state
> Av. Higienópolis 758
> CEP 12380-000; São Paulo; SP
> Fax: 011-3823-5708
> 
> 
> Dear Messrs. Calheiros and Da Silva:
> 
> We the undersigned have been informed of a motion adopted 
> unanimously by the 96 families of the Santa Rita Encampment on 
> Jan. 5, 1999 that calls for:
> 
> "- a prompt investigation into the assassinations of Jurandir dos 
> Santos and Roberto Duarte de Oliveira, and
> 
> "- the immediate punishment of those responsible for these 
> assassinations."
> 
> What are the facts?
> 
> The motion adopted by the Santa Rita Encampment states the 
> following:
> 
> "Jurandir dos Santos and Roberto Duarte de Oliveira, both members 
> of the Movement of Landless Peasants of Brazil (MST), were last 
> seen the night of December 19, 1998, at the MST encampment of 
> Nova Esperança (New Hope) on the Santa Rita estate in the 
> township of Sao Jose dos Campos (state of Sao Paulo).
> 
> "They had taken off by foot to the closest town to do some shopping 
> for the upcoming Christmas holiday. En route they were 
> assassinated. Their bodies were found December 23. They had been 
> shot in the head at close range. Jurandir had been brutally tortured; 
> his body was severely slashed and several limbs were fractured. 
> 
> "These crimes cannot go unpunished. The assassins seek to 
> intimidate the 96 families in the encampment [land occupation]. 
> These are rural workers who are simply fighting for a small plot of 
> land so they can have the right to a future. The assassins wish to 
> silence the MST and prevent it from expanding its struggle for 
> agrarian reform in Brazil.
> 
> "We accuse:
> 
> "- the Federal Government of Brazil is responsible for these deaths 
> insofar it continues to refuse to implement an agrarian reform 
> program, thereby denying millions of rural Brazilians the most 
> elementary means of subsistence.
> 
> "- the large landowners (fazendeiros) are responsible for these 
> deaths, as they systematically hire armed goons (jagunços) who then 
> carry out the threats and ultimately the assassinations. The 
> landowners¹ association -- UDR -- was formed to prevent the 
> landless peasants from having access to the land. The UDR¹s 
> methods include the most heinous forms of terror and murder.
> 
> "We demand that the Br

[PEN-L:2095] Re: Re: Re: Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode ofdiscourse

[Louis Proyect]

>Damn it, this is just preposterous. The KKK killed and terrorized lots of
>people, complicit with the state, and is one of the great horrors of U.S.
>history. (The White Aryan Resistance, though, has killed no more than 5
>people and are frequently prosecuted.) The NOI is nothing like the Klan. I
>think it's a bad political strategy for black liberation, but it's not a
>semi-official terrorist organization. Stop attributing vile things to me,
>it's really pissing me off.
>
>Doug

What will you do? Stop having me over for dinner?

How did this question of whether the NOI is "fascist" come up? I said that
they never harmed a soul. Their ideology is filled with bizarre elements
including numerology and Yakub creating a "white devil race", etc. But what
does this have to do with beating people up or destroying the progressive
movement? I said all of this is merely ideology and has nothing to do with
their practice.

And you replied, "And militias and public housing patrols are practices,
not mere ideologies." What did you want to say, Doug? What are those
militas and patrols all about?

In case you lack the appetite to pursue the debate any further, let me
answer the question for you. The housing patrols were Adolph Reed's proof
of the fascist character around the time of the NOI Million Man March.  He
claimed that such patrols could lead to armed attacks on progressives in
the black community. It turns out that he was wrong. Dead wrong.

If you could think for yourself on these questions, you'd be better off.
Reed is an interesting thinker, but wrong most of the time. He just wrote a
highly controversial book on WEB DuBois that claims the "petty-bourgeois"
character of black politics is DuBois's fault. Reed's workerism will never
make any headway in the black community because it is based on a totally
false notion of how socialist consciousness develops. In actuality,
socialist consciousness has developed because black people's DEMOCRATIC
aspirations have been thwarted, just as much as their aspirations as
working people. Reed wants a pure working-class black struggle that is
untainted by all these "identity" issues. What he doesn't get is that the
real issues are over democratic rights, not "identity". In his obsession
with black academia, he has created a false dichotomy between identity
politics on one hand, and class politics on the other. In reality, identity
is something that is of more concern to tenured professors in the cultural
studies field than the average black person. Black people want full
equality and will use various fights around either desegregation or black
control to achieve equality. The most far-sighted sector of the community
will figure out that capitalism prevents full equality and they become
Marxists, like those around the BRC. I have been on the Black Radical
Congress mailing-list for 24 hours and I am very impressed with the level
of discussion going on there. It is really too bad that Reed has
bad-mouthed the BRC, because it is the one of the most important things
happening in the US today.


 

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2094] Re: Malcolm X

[Charles Brown]

How about _The Autobiography of
Malcolm X_ and _Malcolm X Speaks_.
Malcolm X was an eye witness to
his life. He tells of the meeting
with the KKK himself, as well
as discussing his period as a criminal.
Another thing about Malcolm Little (X)was 
his frankness, including about his
own failures and shortcomings.

Charles Brown

>>> Bill Burgess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 01/12 3:15 PM >>>
At 01:57 PM 12/01/99 -0500, Doug H. wrote:

I just haven't read enough on my own to know how much Malcolm X turned on
the NOI... 

I am no expert on this topic, but George Breitman's _The Last Year of
Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary_ (New York: Pathfinder, 1967;
1992) is pretty convincing, on all the topics raised - meeting the KKK, his
break with the NOI, about women, relations with whites, Jews, socialism, etc. 

Even if you don't accept all of Breitman's interpretations regarding
context, etc., the quotes from Malcolm X on these points deserve at least
the same consideration as other, usually better publicized statements. 

Bill Burgess

[PEN-L:2092] Re: Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode of discourse

[Louis Proyect]

>Who, however, decides
>   whether a question is genuine or a disguised
>   thesis?... 
>
>Brad DeLong

But this exactly what Rakesh and Doug have been doing all along. Maybe Ken
Lawrence just decided to give them a taste of their own medicine. When Doug
raises questions about the NOI "militia" and housing project patrols, he is
not under any obligation to defend the thesis outright that these are the
equivalent of the KKK night-riders or the White Aryan Resistance. He is
just "raising questions." As far as Brad DeLong is concerned, he is very
good at this himself, if not a master:

"For most of this century, the left has severely diminished its chances of
doing anything constructive by virtue of its attachment to--and eagerness
to explain away the devastation wrought by--a bunch of very nasty dictators.

"Why does my heart sink at the thought of the left thinking that the way to
start a crusade to add flesh to the dry bones of international law by
taking up the cause of bin Laden, the Taliban, the Iraqi dictatorship, and
the Sudanese government?"

No need to defend the idea that the left defends "the Iraqi dictatorship".
Just raise the question.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2091] Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode of discourse

[Brad De Long]

Re:
>
>Recirculating the charge that Rakesh Bhandari is a Nazi, however buffered
>it is with a question mark, is pretty offensive to me, and I hope it is to
>other people too.
>
>Doug

Charles Maier has a couple of nice paragraphs on what he calls
"pseudo-interrogative" rhetoric in his book _The Unmasterable Past_:

"What [Ernst] Nolte actually proposes... is
often unclear. Is he offering the historian's
judgment, or just a possible reconstruction of
how the National Socialist leadership may have
viewed the world?... Implications take refuge
in question marks, hypotheses, and subjunctives.
For this prose we need to invent a new grammatical
mode: the pseudo-interrogative." (p. 67).

"[S]ome inquiries are... disguised theses,
proposed in a pseudo-interrogative mode. If
that is the case, then proofs and argumentation
must be produced to substantiate them; they
cannot just be thrown out as open-ended
hypotheses. Otherwise they travel under
false passports Who, however, decides
whether a question is genuine or a disguised
thesis?... There is a test. A genuine historical
question will not influence opinion unless
it is actually answered. A spurious one is
designed to sway opinion by virtue of its
just being asked..."


Brad DeLong

[PEN-L:2087] Re: Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>I find Doug's reply very interesting. It reduces the problem of fascism to
>ideology.

What I said:

>I wouldn't use the word fascist, because I
>don't think an oppressed group can be meaningfully fascist, but there's a
>lot of common ground in NOI and fascist ideology isn't there?

And militias and public housing patrols are practices, not mere ideologies.

Doug

[PEN-L:2085] Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Charles Brown]

To me fascism is the open, terrorist rule
of the most reactionary sector of monopoly
capital. The Italian Fascist Party was
obviously the prototype. The Nazis
were its nadir.
There are other forms of
tyranny which must be 
opposed, but I would reserve
the word "fascist" for this
phenomenon.

On Malcolm X ,this issue can be
got beyond, because part of the
point that Louis Pro, others and
I make is that Malcolm X was
a self-described street criminal at one
stage in his life, which is pretty
bad politically; but what is 
important about him in that
regard is that after that 
he shows a model
for ,for example, current Black
gangster rappers, to move from
horrible politics to progressively
more and more progressive
politics. He is a model for
misguided rebellion to
change for the better.

If we are going to have
a revolution in our lifetime,
it will not be carried out
by some "entirely new"
bunch of people. The people
who are now in various ways 
unprogressive or apolitical
are going to have to change.
So, in various ways, many
people will have to go through
a transformation that is in
one sense
comparable to that of Malcolm
X ( though obviously very
different for most people. I
don't mean that everybody
is a criminal or the like)

MAYBE (!) Kurt whats his name,
(Waldheim)
president of Austria and 
UN official is a rough comparable.

Charles Brown

>>> Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 01/12 12:20 PM >>>
I don't want to get into ad hominems, so I won't mention the names of any
of the participants in this "debate" or even the debate itself. 

But isn't it possible that someone (Malcolm X) could have been a "fascist"
(very broadly defined) at one point in his life (e.g., when he was heir
apparent to the leadership of what was then termed the "Black Muslims" and
toed Elijah Mohammed's line) and then learned that he was wrong and move on
to a better political vision? After all, the story of Malcolm's life is
very protean. His visit to Mecca changed his life dramatically, for
example. And it's possible that Mattick could have had a "youthful
indiscretion" of supporting "left-wing" Nazis and then could have moved on
to a more sane and mature view. [*]

For both of these thinkers, I think the question is whether or not they
contributed to the struggle for justice when they went away from their
early views. In general, what we need is facts about these guys, not insults. 

Also, the word "fascist" is over-used and should be used only gingerly.
Please define the term! Does it refer to Mussolini types? to Nazis? or to
people with "authoritarian personalities" (who score high on the Frankfurt
School's F-scale)? 

[*] Schiess, I was once a member of both the Democratic Socialist
Organizing Committee and the New American Movement, which were the
organizations that merged to produce the Democratic Socialists of America
(DSA). I hope that no-one ever holds those youthful indiscretions against
_me_. ;-)

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html 

[PEN-L:2084] Re: Re: Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>Do you think that a left can be built that includes toleration for charges
>that Malcolm X was a fascist?

It'd be nice if Rakesh could speak for himself, but Rakesh said the NOI is
fascist, and that Malcolm X never fully broke from them, though . That's a
little different, but I know distinctions are best ignored when you've
grabbed truth by the essence. I wouldn't use the word fascist, because I
don't think an oppressed group can be meaningfully fascist, but there's a
lot of common ground in NOI and fascist ideology isn't there? A
race-essentialist and -separatist view of history, law-and-order rhetoric
backed with a paramilitary organization, a homophobic and patriarchial
reverence for traditional family structures, an offering to the state to do
the dirty work of disciplining the race. I just haven't read enough on my
own to know how much Malcolm X turned on the NOI, but I think the NOI
itself deserves plenty of criticism. I don't think a left can be built that
shies away from it.

Doug

[PEN-L:2083] Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Louis Proyect]

>Readers can decide whether that is fascist or not. I don't want to revive a
>flamewar here that's died down in its original forum, but I also don't want
>to see Rakesh - someone I disagree with on lots of things, but whose
>intelligence I admire a great deal - villified.
>
>Doug

Doug, you don't get it. Fascism is not "hate speech". It is a mass movement
that is generated in a period of capitalist crisis, such as during the
1930s or in places in Eastern Europe today. Furthermore, the NOI has been
around for half-a-century at least and it has never organized violent
attacks on its enemies, except for the assassination of Malcolm X, which is
clouded by suspicions that the FBI incited the NOI.

My beef with Rakesh was about his refusal to acknowledge that Malcolm X had
ever really broken with NOI racial chauvinism. This is a blatant lie that
you seemed to accept.

Rakesh said the following:

"I also think Malcolm X's radical anti white speeches were actually
intended for whites. Or perhaps to get a rise out of them in order to
entertain blacks. But in so far as his attacks on whites--as evil because
of their race, genes, Ice Age Ancestry--implies the deep difference of
blacks due to their race, genes, Sun Land Ancestry, I think this kind of
anti white mythology (or essentialism!) is quite disturbing both in the
attitude towards truth it encourages and in the psychological games it
plays with black people."

This is what Malcolm X really said:

"It is only being a Muslim which keeps me from seeing people by the color
of their skin. This religion teaches brotherhood, but I have to be a
realist--I live in America, a society which does not believe in brotherhood
in any sense of the term. Brute force is used by white racists to suppress
nonwhites. It is a racist society ruled by segregationists.

"We are not for violence in any shape or form, but believe that the people
who have violence committed against them should be able to defend
themselves. By what they are doing to me they arouse me to violence. People
should only be nonviolent as long as they are dealing with a nonviolent
person. Intelligence demands the return of violence with violence. Every
time you let someone stand on your head and you don't do anything about it,
you are not acting with intelligence and should not be on this earth--you
won't be on this earth very long either.

"I have never said that Negroes should initiate acts of aggression against
whites, but where the government fails to protect the Negro he is entitled
to do it himself. He is within his rights. I have found the only white
elements who do not want this advice given to undefensive Blacks are the
racist liberals. They use the press to project us in the image of violence. 

"There is an element of whites who are nothing but cold, animalistic
racists. That element is the one that controls or has strong influence in
the power structure. It uses the press skillfully to feed statistics to the
public to make it appear that the rate of crime in the Black community, or
community of nonwhite people, is at such a high level. It gives the
impression or the image that everyone in that community is criminal. 

"And as soon as the public accepts the fact that the dark-skinned community
consists largely of criminals or people who are dirty, then it makes it
possible for the power structure to set up a police-state system. 'Which
will make it permissible in the minds of even the well-meaning white public
for them to come in and use all kinds of police methods to brutally
suppress the struggle on the part of these people against segregation,
discrimination, and other acts that are unleashed against them that are
absolutely unjust."


Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2081] Re: Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Henry C.K. Liu]

Doug Henwood wrote:

> I am utterly ### sick of the left's inability to disagree without
> resorting either to nuclear exchange or to walking away in a huff. It's no
> wonder we're so weak and marginal.
>
> Doug

I feel strongly enough to use 2 of my daily posting limit in this.
I feel Louis should not unsub from LBO-talk.
Also, I would like to add to Doug's plea that we try to focus on constructive
proposals, theories, analyses, programs, etc. rather than attacks.  The enemy
is getting stronger.  If neo-liberals, monetarist and post-keynesian can unite
to save capitalism, why can't the left get together to save socialism?

Henry

[PEN-L:2080] Re: Re: Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>>Could you provide us with the cite for the text in which this label
>>was explicitly given by Rakesh?
>
>Louis P is correct that I think this NOI vision which Malcolm X accepted
>and never fully broke from is accurately characterized as black fascism.

Please note that this followed:


Ah, so my memory is not as bad as I feared. For some bizarre reason, Louis
P didn't type in the whole FBI file on Malcolm Little from  5/17/61. Here
it is (some standard abbreviations are used; what is below is de facto
verbatim):

[Bureau Deletion] advised on Jan 30, 1961, that certain Klan officials met
with leaders of the NOI on the night of Jan 28, 1961, in Atlanta, GA. One
of these NOI identified himself as Malcolm X of New York, and it was the
source's understanding that Malcolm X cliamed to have hundred seventy give
thousand followers who were complete separationists, were interested in
land and were soliciting the aid of the Klan to obtain land. During this
meeting subject stated that his people wanted complete segregation from
the white race, and that land obtained would be occupied by them and they
would maintain their own businesses and government. Subject further stated
that the Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a
tool. Subject was further quoted as stating that his people would do
anything to defend their beliefs and promote their cause and in his
opinion there would be violence some day. Subject was further quoted as
saying at this meeting that if one of his people went against their
teachings, he would be destroyed. Subject also stated that if his people
were faced with the situation that the white people of Georgia now face,
that traitors, meaning those who assisted the integration leaders, would
be eliminated."

In Clayborne Carson, Malcolm X: The FBI File. Intro by Spike Lee. NY:
Carrol and Graf Publishers, 1991.

In the next entry from which Louis P also selectively quoted, we find:

"He explained that LENIN was of the yellow race descending from the
Mongols and STALIN descending from Semitic Arabs and a Muslim mixture with
dark skin. The Americans who are white will fight the Russians because
they are non white; it will be race against race and we American black men
will support the Russians. We will kill all the white men in the United
States."


Readers can decide whether that is fascist or not. I don't want to revive a
flamewar here that's died down in its original forum, but I also don't want
to see Rakesh - someone I disagree with on lots of things, but whose
intelligence I admire a great deal - villified.

Doug

[PEN-L:2076] Re: Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Louis Proyect]

>Could you provide us with the cite for the text in which this label
>was explicitly given by Rakesh?

Louis P is correct that I think this NOI vision which Malcolm X accepted
and never fully broke from is accurately characterized as black fascism.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2074] An LBO-Talk exchange

[Jim Devine]

I don't want to get into ad hominems, so I won't mention the names of any
of the participants in this "debate" or even the debate itself. 

But isn't it possible that someone (Malcolm X) could have been a "fascist"
(very broadly defined) at one point in his life (e.g., when he was heir
apparent to the leadership of what was then termed the "Black Muslims" and
toed Elijah Mohammed's line) and then learned that he was wrong and move on
to a better political vision? After all, the story of Malcolm's life is
very protean. His visit to Mecca changed his life dramatically, for
example. And it's possible that Mattick could have had a "youthful
indiscretion" of supporting "left-wing" Nazis and then could have moved on
to a more sane and mature view. [*]

For both of these thinkers, I think the question is whether or not they
contributed to the struggle for justice when they went away from their
early views. In general, what we need is facts about these guys, not insults. 

Also, the word "fascist" is over-used and should be used only gingerly.
Please define the term! Does it refer to Mussolini types? to Nazis? or to
people with "authoritarian personalities" (who score high on the Frankfurt
School's F-scale)? 

[*] Schiess, I was once a member of both the Democratic Socialist
Organizing Committee and the New American Movement, which were the
organizations that merged to produce the Democratic Socialists of America
(DSA). I hope that no-one ever holds those youthful indiscretions against
_me_. ;-)

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html

[PEN-L:2073] Re: Re: Social Security Redux

[Ellen T. Frank]

At 11:00 AM 1/12/99 -0800, you wrote:
>While you are at it, any rebutal to Milton Friedman's Social Security
>Chimeras on the WSJ op-ed page (11/11/99)?
>
>Henry C.K. Liu
>
Friedman's editorial (in yesterday's NYT, by the way), points out,
correctly, that the SS trust funds and projected shortfalls and all the
sturm and drang surrounding them are, in fact, mere accounting issues. He
points out that, in real economic terms, it doesn't matter whether we save
or not, whether there's a shortfall or not -- points that many of us on
this list have made.  He argues that gradual, partial privatization of SS
is unnecessary, since gradualist solutions are premised on attempts to
"preserve" what amount to fictional balances anyway.   Why not, he
concludes, go all the way?  Full, complete privatization right now.  What
about today's SS recipients?  Give them a check representing the present
value of their promised benefits and wash our hands of them!  

My (obvious) rebuttal is that, if the shortfall and trust fund and all that
jazz are mere accounting problems (which they are) then SS has no problem
in the first place.  Why not drop the whole argument and affirm our
committment to a decent public pension system for all Americans?

Ellen Frank

 

[PEN-L:2072] Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Charles Brown]

The following is a comment
on the dispute that
Louis Pro mentions below


I have been mostly on the
sidelines of this thread.
However, when a similar
dispute arose regarding
the Black Radical Congress
a while ago, I was in the 
thick of it. Rakesh and
I really butted heads then.

Since then Rakesh and I
have become friends, though
we still disagree on the issues
common to the earlier dispute
and the current one.

Rakesh, of course, has
the right to say what he
has on this thread. However,
I noticed in reading this
thread that Rakesh is
casted to an extent
as representing "the" or
"a" Black point of view
in the dispute. This
is a substantially false
representation.

I feel responsible as
a Black LBOer to say
emphatically to those
LBOers who do not have
a lot of communication
with Black people that
the overwhelming majority
of Black people, in fact,
would disagree with what
Rakesh is saying on this
thread. No, not all Black
people are Black nationalists
 or Malcolm X enthusiasts. 
But many are and of the 
remaining they have varying
degrees of sympathy for
some dimension of Black
nationalism and self-determination,
without using that terminology.
Very, very, very, few have
an attitude like Rakesh's.
And of those who do,
a large percentage are 
the new black conservatives,
like Clarence Thomas.

It is important for white leftists
to know this. We cannot
make the changes we must
make in our society and world
without white/black unity. But,
the path to that unity will have
to go through several steps.
And a first step will have to
be white people, ESPECIALLY
white leftists demonstrating
respect for the self-determination
of Black people. The first step 
toward this unity will not be
that Black people assimilate
or "integrate" with whites,
abandoning black history and
culture. This is basically what
Rakesh is advocating by his
extreme anti-nationalism and
socalled radical integrationism.
Any white leftists who think
that is his effective strategy
are not living in the real 
world.

I might add it is not
a Marxist strategy either.

In this vein, the issue arises:
but even if this is a fact, is it
good for the struggle and
the revolution ? I think that
is a way of saying it. But for
a white person or a non-Black
person to ask this is an 
extraordinary disrespect and
disregard for the definite
conclusion of the overwhelming
majority of Black left and
radical leaders, intellectuals
and activists as to the
correct and most effective
strategy for radicals and
the masses. It is to 
substitute one's judgement
for that of  
of virtually all who have
any reasonable claim to being
spokespeople for Black people.
It would be an incredibly 
arrogant disregard for
a people's self-determination,
not to mention the vast
majority of white radicals,
as represented by Louis Pro
and Ken Lawrence , et al.
here.

Some of the proof of what I am
saying is Rakesh's assessment of
the Black Radical Congress as
a bad strategy for the movement.
 The
BRC is clearly representative of
left black leadership as a whole. 
Its occurrence and continuing
existence represents the thinking
judgement of literally thousands
of Black left activists. There is
no countercurrent comparable
to it in the Black community.

Similarly with the political
and cultural icon Malcolm X:
Frankly, any white person who
thinks they are going to act
in unity with any significant
number of Black leftists
(or people for that matter) ,
and do so with the ideas
and attitudes described by
Rakesh and those supporting
him here , anyone who thinks
that is (I am sorry) daft.

It really
wouldn't be such a big deal
in a way. You would be just
considered another typical
arrogant, racist white person. Black
people won't necessarily
tell you so to your face. But
you can be sure they will
be calling you a racist among
themselves. But it won't
be a big deal because that
is typical of their experiences
with white people. You
shouldn't think your being
left will get you some
special dispensation.

I am not saying this to call
white people on this list
names. I am saying this 
because it is so true it
is not funny, and the only
hope I see for fighting
racism is unity with white
leftists in the first place. I 
need you. I don't want you to
go into the black community
with such an off the wall
position, or we don't have
a chance.

I don't want to dis Rakesh
personally, but I would
do a disservice to this
list to not advise everyone
in this way.

Charles Brown



>>> Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 01/12 11:17 AM >>>
(I recently unsubbed from LBO-Talk because Doug objected to my "tone". A
sectarian named Rakesh had gotten my dander up by labeling Malcolm X a
"fascist" and asserting that Malcolm had cut a deal with the KKK in 1961 to
call off protection of civil rights activists. As if Elijah Muhammed had
the slightest interest in promoting integration! Malcolm was there strictly
as Elijah's lieutenant. When I pressed Rakesh to prove this allegation, he
came up with nothing. One of th

[PEN-L:2070] Re: Social Security Redux

[Doug Henwood]

William S. Lear wrote:

>[Note to gurus: I need to find out what the current system typically
>pays back, as a percentage of final wages --- and shouldn't this
>calculation also be "capped" since those earning $500K pay as much
>as those earning $80K?]

There are tables on this, and many other things, in the annual report of
the Social Security trustees, at .

LBO #87, now in the mail, has an article on Social Security and a companion
piece on just how well real people do in the stock market.

Doug

[PEN-L:2069] An LBO-Talk exchange

[Louis Proyect]

(I recently unsubbed from LBO-Talk because Doug objected to my "tone". A
sectarian named Rakesh had gotten my dander up by labeling Malcolm X a
"fascist" and asserting that Malcolm had cut a deal with the KKK in 1961 to
call off protection of civil rights activists. As if Elijah Muhammed had
the slightest interest in promoting integration! Malcolm was there strictly
as Elijah's lieutenant. When I pressed Rakesh to prove this allegation, he
came up with nothing. One of the problems with the Internet is that false
allegations can be transmitted electronically. The idea that this kind of
irresponsible charge could be made with impunity is objectionable to me.
Not too long ago I was in a month long fight with a "Marxist" holocaust
denier on the Trotsky newsgroup. He was using all sorts of "facts" from the
Zundel neo-Nazi website to prove that there were no gas-chambers at
Auschwitz. I was joined in the fight by people from Nizkor, who despite
their softness on Zionism, are quite strong on holocaust denial. I had
never give too much thought on Rakesh's outrageous attacks on Malcolm
except as typical sectarian workerist bullshit, but Ken Lawrence's reply on
LBO-Talk gives me pause to think. It appears below.)

I have no dispute with Doug's ruling [that people avoid personal attacks,
etc.]. Indeed, my posts have remained true to his spirit in the face of
mighty provocation from Rakesh.

However, I want to register in the strongest terms my disagreement with
Nathan Newman's off-list protest, which prompted Doug to act and Louis to
depart. (It is noteworthy that Nathan and the other touchingly tender,
easily offended complainers were scrupulously silent a few months back
while Louis hammered me with much harsher words than he has ever applied to
Rakesh. Not all of them, though; some of today's civility gang directed
their own colorful insults my way.)

The kernel of my viewpoint is this: If white supremacy in the United States
does not offend you sufficiently to bring forth intemperate words (at
minimum), who could ever rely on you as a comrade in struggle?  If the
exemplar of courage in opposing white supremacy will not bestir you to
stand and be counted, who ever will?

In this context the demand for civility is a reactionary academic fraud, to
anesthetize political debate so that all issues, from the momentous to the
trivial, are regarded (equally and) dispassionately. That's step one on the
road to abstention from militant struggle and, as Nathan would prefer, into
the Democratic Party (where incivility is never tolerated and young people
are never alienated, as we recognize).

Aside from the hypocrisy of selective distress mentioned earlier, there is
another. Most participants on the LBO list take a favorable view of
intramural insult on the left as sport, alternately praising Christopher
Hitchens or Alexander Cockburn as the most skillful player in that league.
[Ken called me LBO-Talk's Alexander Cockburn. I never told him that
flattery would get him nowhere.]You can't have it both ways, folks.

Finally, the civility police face one direction only (to their left).
Rakesh has been handy with offensive taunts throughout. When he libeled
Malcolm X as a Nazi, and slurred his [Rakesh's] critics with racial taunts,
his words drew no objection from Angela and but a flaccid disquisition from
Nathan.

Rakesh himself whined about ad hominems, though his every allegation had
been soundly trounced directly in rebuttal, yet he has not answered my
political points except with white-baiting slurs and a plea for indulgence
while he ponders a response.  So I begin to wonder, when Rakesh slags
"whiteys," what word does he really have in mind?

Let us direct a bit more light toward that thought. Is Rakesh a Nazi? He
has declared himself a disciple of Paul Mattick, the council communist. As
I reported several months ago, Mattick was an admirer of the "left" Nazi
leader Otto Strasser. This was no youthful indiscretion on Mattick's part,
nor does it reflect political immaturity of the stripe that Rakesh exploits
as he combs Malcolm's early texts for examples. Mattick organized
Strasser's speaking tour of North America in the postwar 1940s, after the
full force of the Nazi Holocaust was well known. Strasser and his plebeian
followers were as obsessive Jew-haters as Hitler.  "Otto Strasser
proclaimed that it was a German duty to develop 'unique racial
individuality' and resist the 'cultural predominance of alien Jewry',"
[Who's Who in Nazi Germany, page 248.] Before the war, Mattick's journal
Living Marxism had proclaimed, "The Struggle Against Fascism Begins with
the Struggle against Bolshevism," an unusual slogan for a united front, but
one that has provided a useful precedent for Rakesh, merely substituting
"Black nationalism" for "Bolshevism."

Perhaps Rakesh can excavate an apology from Mattick's later texts. I never
found one, but I never regarded Mattick's works as sufficiently worthy to
spend a great deal of time wading thr

[PEN-L:2065] Social Security Redux

[William S. Lear]

I have appreciated greatly the contributions of several on this list
(Gerald Friedman, Frank Durgin, Jim Devine, Max Sawicky, Ellen Frank,
others I'm certainly forgetting) to my understanding of the Social
Security debate.  My brother, who has somehow become enamored of
Republican ideas on economics, has sent me a list of objections he has
to the current system.

Below I have reproduced his points, and responded to them.  If you
Social Security gurus could look things over and comment, I would
sincerely appreciate it.

>1) If the 12% Social Security Tax was invested (in some conservative
>investment) by the individual over their lifetime, they could retire
>quite nicely on it.  I don't know the exact number, but they could
>probably replace 50% of their income with their investments.

It is true that the 12% could be invested "conservatively" by
individuals.  It is dubious that "they" in the aggregate could retire
any more comfortably than "they" do now.  First: by investing
individually rather than collectively, the investors *each* will incur
various transaction fees and overheads, not to mention their own time
necessary to evaluate "conservative" investments and to track them,
etc.  Second, the stock market is a zero-sum game, essentially a
casino that has very little to do with raising new monies for business
(new or old).  With each person untethered from the other, there would
be inevitable winners and losers.

The current system *guarantees* benefits to everyone.  What would you
do if there were 60% winners and 40% losers?  What program would you
put in place for the 40%?  What even if it were 10%?  Unless you can
guarantee that *all* of these new investors are more savvy than other
players in the market, including professional individual and
institutional investors, you guarantee that huge chunks of the
population will be become destitute.  Herbert Stein, former chief
economic advisor to Richard Nixon, alluded to this (albeit in an
inverted way) in his piece "Social Security and the Single Investor"
(*Wall Street Journal*, 02/05/97, p. A18) by saying that one possible
argument for privatization was that it might produce "a redistribution
of income from other savers and taxpayers to workers" but hastens to
add that "one should not think that there is any free lunch here".

Stein is quite correct.  There is no free lunch.  But Stein fails to
directly pursue whose lunch will be eaten.  There is no reason to
believe that the average worker, whose hours of work has been
increasing, can compete with the upper-class and institutional
investor who has the resources and the time to "invest in investing".
So, Stein's example would be better worded as: "there is a good chance
that privatization might very well produce a redistribution of income
from workers to other savers such as the wealthy and Wall Street
institutions generally".  With the savage cuts in welfare and public
assistance, and legal protection for employers who pay sub-poverty
wages, along with the general slide in real wages since the mid-70s,
more and more of the population is harder-pressed to spend time away
from work, let alone spend hours sifting through investment
portfolios, monitoring investments, reading the business press, etc.,
and they are too poor individually to purchase sufficient professional
aid as they might need in order to "compete" with other investors who
have the resources to do so.

[Note to gurus: I need to find out what the current system typically
pays back, as a percentage of final wages --- and shouldn't this
calculation also be "capped" since those earning $500K pay as much
as those earning $80K?]

Stein does however pursue the general logic of a casino versus a
collective insurance system:

 Suppose there are two kinds of investment. One will yield at
 retirement a certain 50% of the retiree's final salary. The other
 will yield a probable 60%, with a 50-50 chance of yielding zero
 and a 50-50 chance of yielding 120% of the final salary. Which of
 these is suitable for the Social Security system? The example, to
 be sure, is extreme. But even if on the average over long periods
 of time investments will all yield a specific return, the returns
 earned by particular investors in particular portfolios over
 particular periods differ enormously.

 One can say that workers are consenting adults and if they choose
 investments that will make some of them very rich and some very
 poor, that is up to them. But if you say that, you have to ask
 why we have a Social Security system, with mandatory
 contributions, at all.

 Why not just leave the workers free to save or not and to invest
 whatever they save in the way they like? If there is no social
 interest in the income people have at retirement, there is no
 justification for the Social Security tax. If there is such an
 interest, there is a need for policies that will assure that the
 in

[PEN-L:2066] Mark Twain

[Louis Proyect]

>From _Notes From the Earth_ by Mark Twain.
"In the course of my reading I had come across a case, where many years
ago some hunters on the Great Plains organized a buffalo hunt for the
entertainment of a British earl--that, and to provide some fresh meat
for his larder. They had charming sport. They killed seventy-two of
those great animals; and ate part of one of them and left the
seventy-one to rot. In order to determine the difference between an
anaconda and an earl--if any-- I caused seven young calves to be turned
into the anaconda's cage. The grateful reptile immediately crushed one
of them and swallowed it whole, then lay back satisfied. It showed no
further interest in the calves, and no disposition to harm them. I tried
this experiment with other anaconda's; always the same result. The fact
stood proven that the difference between an earl and an anaconda is that
the earl is cruel and the anaconda isn't; and that the earl wantonly
destroys what he has not use for, but the anaconda doesn't. This seems
to suggest that the anaconda is not descended from t he earl. It also
seemed to suggest that the earl was descended from the anaconda, and has
lost a good deal in the transition"

and

"Now as to cruelty, savagery and the spirit of massacre. They grow
naturally out of the social system; the system could not be perfect
without them. It must be in candor admitted that in one point the
Comanches rank higher than the French, in that they do not fight amongst
themselves, whereas a favorite pastime with the French from time
immemorial, has been the burning and slaughtering of each other...I very
much doubt that the French are more cruel than the Comanches; I think
they are only more ingenious in their methods."
---1879.


Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2067] BLS Daily Report

[Richardson_D]

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_01BE3E39.10239030

BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, JANUARY 11, 1999

__The nation's nonfarm payroll catapulted to a seasonally adjusted gain of
378,000 in December, as the construction industry hired more workers to take
advantage of mild winter days, according to BLS.  The agency reports the
unemployment rate in December edged down to 4.3 percent from 4.4 percent in
November. ...  The services sector posted 111,000 new jobs in December.
Business services added 49,000 jobs in December, boosted by gains in
personnel supply services, up 27,000, and computer and data processing
services, up 14,000.  Employment in retail trade rose by 53,000 in December.
The manufacturing industry shed 13,000 jobs in December. ...  At a press
briefing, BLS Commissioner Katharine G. Abraham said the agency in December
revised the factors with which it seasonally adjusted data for 1998, using
updated employment patterns.  This revision resulted in a jobless rate in
the 4.3 percent to 4.5 percent range since April, slightly lower than
originally reported. ...  (Victoria Roberts in Daily Labor Report, pages
D-1, E-3).
__American consumers have been spending money like there's no tomorrow.  And
why not?  The Labor Department reported yesterday that more people have jobs
than ever, as businesses created 378,000 new jobs in December, nearly double
what analysts had anticipated.  Last month's unemployment rate was equal to
that of April, which was the lowest since 1970, during the Vietnam War.
About 64.2 percent of the population had jobs last month, an all-time high.
  (Tim Smart in Washington Post, Jan. 9, page G1).
__Despite an unsettled global economy, lower corporate profits, and a new
round of layoffs, the American economy keeps creating jobs at an astonishing
pace.  In December, the number of workers on payrolls made the biggest gain
in more than a year. ...  Signs of strength in the economy were impressive
and widespread, showing healthy gains in employment and wages among
disadvantaged demographic groups. ...  For 1998 as a whole, net job growth
was nearly 3 million, and unemployment hovered between 4.3 and 4.5 percent.
Except for a period at the height of the Vietnam War, the last time
unemployment was this low for any significant length of time was in 1957.
  (Sylvia Nasar in New York Times, Jan. 9, page A1).
__So where's the slowdown?  The government's surprisingly robust report on
employment growth in December shows that the economy is roaring ahead,
despite some weakness in the manufacturing sector.  Construction and retail
trade gains more than offset losses in manufacturing jobs. ...  (Alejandro
Bodipo-Memba in Wall Street Journal, page A2).

A new study of census data shows that the number of immigrants living in the
United States has almost tripled since 1970, rising from 9.6 million to 26.3
million today, and far outpacing the growth of the native-born population.
The new figures dramatically affirm that the country is going through a
remarkable transformation in just a generation's time, one that will reshape
the nation's demographics and social landscape for years to come.  As a
percentage of the population, immigrants account for nearly one in 10
residents, the highest proportion in 7 decades. ...  The great tide of
immigration over the past 3 decades has disproportionately affected certain
areas. ...  The new figures are included in a study conducted by the Center
for Immigration Studies and are based on the Census Bureau's Current
Population Survey for March 1998. ...  (Washington Post, Jan. 9, page A4). 

Employees in most organizations must report to work on Martin Luther King
Jr. Day, according to a Bureau of National Affairs survey of 364 employers
nationwide.  Only one out of four respondents will provide a paid holiday
for all or most workers on the third Monday in January. ...  (Daily Labor
Report, page A-11).

Silicon Valley added 19,400 jobs last year,  compared with 62,000 in 1997,
and exports from the region declined for the first time in 8 years,
according to the 1999 Index of Silicon Valley.  The report, which is
compiled by Joint Venture:  Silicon Valley Network Inc., a coalition of
corporate and civic organizations, shows that the region has continued to
grow but that some of the remarkable start-up fever, a trademark of the
area, has ratcheted back. ...  For the first time, the report included data
that compare the region's productivity in specific industries with the rest
of the country.  Measured in terms of value added per employee, Silicon
Valley workers in the computer and communications industries generated
$250,000 for each employee, compared with slightly less than $100,000 for
the average United States worker. Valley workers also sharply outpaced
average rates in the semiconductor industry and in software. ... (New York
Times, 

[PEN-L:2068] Re: Social Security Redux

[Henry C.K. Liu]

While you are at it, any rebutal to Milton Friedman's Social Security
Chimeras on the WSJ op-ed page (11/11/99)?

Henry C.K. Liu

"William S. Lear" wrote:

> I have appreciated greatly the contributions of several on this list
> (Gerald Friedman, Frank Durgin, Jim Devine, Max Sawicky, Ellen Frank,
> others I'm certainly forgetting) to my understanding of the Social
> Security debate.  My brother, who has somehow become enamored of
> Republican ideas on economics, has sent me a list of objections he has
> to the current system.
>
> Below I have reproduced his points, and responded to them.  If you
> Social Security gurus could look things over and comment, I would
> sincerely appreciate it.
>
> >1) If the 12% Social Security Tax was invested (in some conservative
> >investment) by the individual over their lifetime, they could retire
> >quite nicely on it.  I don't know the exact number, but they could
> >probably replace 50% of their income with their investments.
>
> It is true that the 12% could be invested "conservatively" by
> individuals.  It is dubious that "they" in the aggregate could retire
> any more comfortably than "they" do now.  First: by investing
> individually rather than collectively, the investors *each* will incur
> various transaction fees and overheads, not to mention their own time
> necessary to evaluate "conservative" investments and to track them,
> etc.  Second, the stock market is a zero-sum game, essentially a
> casino that has very little to do with raising new monies for business
> (new or old).  With each person untethered from the other, there would
> be inevitable winners and losers.
>
> The current system *guarantees* benefits to everyone.  What would you
> do if there were 60% winners and 40% losers?  What program would you
> put in place for the 40%?  What even if it were 10%?  Unless you can
> guarantee that *all* of these new investors are more savvy than other
> players in the market, including professional individual and
> institutional investors, you guarantee that huge chunks of the
> population will be become destitute.  Herbert Stein, former chief
> economic advisor to Richard Nixon, alluded to this (albeit in an
> inverted way) in his piece "Social Security and the Single Investor"
> (*Wall Street Journal*, 02/05/97, p. A18) by saying that one possible
> argument for privatization was that it might produce "a redistribution
> of income from other savers and taxpayers to workers" but hastens to
> add that "one should not think that there is any free lunch here".
>
> Stein is quite correct.  There is no free lunch.  But Stein fails to
> directly pursue whose lunch will be eaten.  There is no reason to
> believe that the average worker, whose hours of work has been
> increasing, can compete with the upper-class and institutional
> investor who has the resources and the time to "invest in investing".
> So, Stein's example would be better worded as: "there is a good chance
> that privatization might very well produce a redistribution of income
> from workers to other savers such as the wealthy and Wall Street
> institutions generally".  With the savage cuts in welfare and public
> assistance, and legal protection for employers who pay sub-poverty
> wages, along with the general slide in real wages since the mid-70s,
> more and more of the population is harder-pressed to spend time away
> from work, let alone spend hours sifting through investment
> portfolios, monitoring investments, reading the business press, etc.,
> and they are too poor individually to purchase sufficient professional
> aid as they might need in order to "compete" with other investors who
> have the resources to do so.
>
> [Note to gurus: I need to find out what the current system typically
> pays back, as a percentage of final wages --- and shouldn't this
> calculation also be "capped" since those earning $500K pay as much
> as those earning $80K?]
>
> Stein does however pursue the general logic of a casino versus a
> collective insurance system:
>
>  Suppose there are two kinds of investment. One will yield at
>  retirement a certain 50% of the retiree's final salary. The other
>  will yield a probable 60%, with a 50-50 chance of yielding zero
>  and a 50-50 chance of yielding 120% of the final salary. Which of
>  these is suitable for the Social Security system? The example, to
>  be sure, is extreme. But even if on the average over long periods
>  of time investments will all yield a specific return, the returns
>  earned by particular investors in particular portfolios over
>  particular periods differ enormously.
>
>  One can say that workers are consenting adults and if they choose
>  investments that will make some of them very rich and some very
>  poor, that is up to them. But if you say that, you have to ask
>  why we have a Social Security system, with mandatory
>  contributions, at all.
>
>  Why not just leave the workers 

[PEN-L:2071] Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[William S. Lear]

On Tue, January 12, 1999 at 11:17:45 (-0500) Louis Proyect writes:
>... Rakesh had gotten my dander up by labeling Malcolm X a
>"fascist" ...

Could you provide us with the cite for the text in which this label
was explicitly given by Rakesh?

>[Ken Lawrence writes]:
>...
>In this context the demand for civility is a reactionary academic fraud, to
>anesthetize political debate so that all issues, from the momentous to the
>trivial, are regarded (equally and) dispassionately. ...

This is the same Ken Lawrence who, disregarding civility, claimed that
Noam Chomsky "lent political and legal advice to [holocaust denier
Robert Faurrison's] defense", that Chomsky had "political solidarity
with a Nazi" (Faurrison) among other false claims.  These were posted
to the LBO list on October 24, 1998 by you, when you called Lawrence a
"nut" and a "fucking idiot".  Later, on October 26, 1998 Lawrence
claimed on LBO that Chomsky had provided "Aid and comfort to Nazis and
Klansmen".  I for one am a bit tired of Lawrence's LBO ad-hominems and
slimy techniques of debate (he asks, "Is Rakesh a Nazi?" --- how cute)
and am not eager to see them here.


Bill

[PEN-L:2075] Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>I recently unsubbed from LBO-Talk because Doug objected to my "tone".

That's a very selective rendition of what happened. What I said was that
I'd gotten email from people who felt inhibited from posting because they
feared being abused by you. That's not good for free discussion, and I said
I wouldn't put up with it on a list I moderated. I seriously regret your
departure, because I think you're a talented and interesting writer. I just
wish you could disagree with people without flaming them as hellspawn.

Recirculating the charge that Rakesh Bhandari is a Nazi, however buffered
it is with a question mark, is pretty offensive to me, and I hope it is to
other people too.

I am utterly fucking sick of the left's inability to disagree without
resorting either to nuclear exchange or to walking away in a huff. It's no
wonder we're so weak and marginal.

Doug

[PEN-L:2077] Re: Re: Re: Social Security Redux

[Henry C.K. Liu]

Ellen Frank:

Excellent rebuttal.

Much of economics theory on the right assumes an anti social programs ideology
as economic truth and then constructs mechanical rationale to dismantle social
programs in the name of efficiency.

In 1935, Congress passed the Social Security Act as part of the New Deal.  The
benefits not only help the recipients, but also contributed as a counterbalance
to economic cycles.  Starting in 1937, government receipts into the SS trust
funds have repeatedly contributed to the reduction of the Federal deficit, with
substantial economic benefits to the whole system.

The Social Security program, by its very name, is not an investment program.
Rates of return in a market economy are a direct reflection of the level of
risk.  The entire purpose of SS is to eliminate risk for those citizens least
able to afford to take risk relating to their well-being in retirement.

The fact that SS payments have now fallen into a mere supplemental function in
term of meeting the real need of retirees does not argue for taking higher
market risks.  It argues for increasing government contribution.

It is useful to remember that SS is not an economic issue, although it has an
economic dimension.
It is primarily a political posture that government should assume
responsibility for providing institutional guarantee for its citizens financial
need after retirement
In a sense Social Security is similar to national security.
If SS is viewed as part and partial of national security, then privatization
becomes a ridiculous notion.

Henry C.K. Liu


"Ellen T. Frank" wrote:

> At 11:00 AM 1/12/99 -0800, you wrote:
> >While you are at it, any rebutal to Milton Friedman's Social Security
> >Chimeras on the WSJ op-ed page (11/11/99)?
> >
> >Henry C.K. Liu
> >
> Friedman's editorial (in yesterday's NYT, by the way), points out,
> correctly, that the SS trust funds and projected shortfalls and all the
> sturm and drang surrounding them are, in fact, mere accounting issues. He
> points out that, in real economic terms, it doesn't matter whether we save
> or not, whether there's a shortfall or not -- points that many of us on
> this list have made.  He argues that gradual, partial privatization of SS
> is unnecessary, since gradualist solutions are premised on attempts to
> "preserve" what amount to fictional balances anyway.   Why not, he
> concludes, go all the way?  Full, complete privatization right now.  What
> about today's SS recipients?  Give them a check representing the present
> value of their promised benefits and wash our hands of them!
>
> My (obvious) rebuttal is that, if the shortfall and trust fund and all that
> jazz are mere accounting problems (which they are) then SS has no problem
> in the first place.  Why not drop the whole argument and affirm our
> committment to a decent public pension system for all Americans?
>
> Ellen Frank
>
>

[PEN-L:2078] Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Doug Henwood]

Carrol Cox wrote:

>You've got cause and effect reversed, Doug. The inability comes from the
>weakness, which comes from capital's strength.

Of course capital is strong, but as the old song goes, we are many and they
are few. Why are we unable to translate that numerical strength into
political strength? Sure the odds are against us, for all the familiar
reasons, but I think factionalism has to count for some nontrivial nonzero
amount.

Doug

[PEN-L:2079] Re: Re: Re: Re: Social Security Redux

[Jim Devine]

>The Social Security program, by its very name, is not an investment program.
>Rates of return in a market economy are a direct reflection of the level of
>risk.  The entire purpose of SS is to eliminate risk for those citizens least
>able to afford to take risk relating to their well-being in retirement.

As Doug Orr pointed out at the recent URPE@ASSA convention, social security
should be seen as akin to fire insurance. No-one expects a positive return
from fire insurance. (But then again, no-one expects the Spanish
Inquisition! ;-))

Doug sees SS as akin to fire insurance because it promises benefits _no
matter how long one lives_. It prevents an increase in the individual
demand for dog food in the later years... 

>It is useful to remember that SS is not an economic issue, although it has
an economic dimension. It is primarily a political posture that government
should assume responsibility for providing institutional guarantee for its
citizens financial need after retirement In a sense Social Security is
similar to national security. If SS is viewed as part and partial of
national security, then privatization becomes a ridiculous notion.<

As Doug pointed out, SS inolves a _social contract_. 

But I like the idea of privatizing the Pentagon. The ancient Romans did
something like that, hiring the so-called "barbarians" to defend the
Empire. It worked for awhile. But better would be to finance the Pentagon
with voluntary contributions. I think that a lot of people would decide
they could get better rates of return by putting their money into the stock
market than into war futures. Then the Pentagon would have to hold bake
sales and the like...

I bring up Doug's comments not because I disagree with Henry but because I
think it's important to have these rhetorical points for verbal combat with
the privatizers.

Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html

[PEN-L:2082] Re: Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Louis Proyect]

Doug Henwood:
>Recirculating the charge that Rakesh Bhandari is a Nazi, however buffered
>it is with a question mark, is pretty offensive to me, and I hope it is to
>other people too.

That's exactly the way I felt when Rakesh made this charge against Malcolm
X, although you never spoke up about that.

>I am utterly fucking sick of the left's inability to disagree without
>resorting either to nuclear exchange or to walking away in a huff. It's no
>wonder we're so weak and marginal.

Do you think that a left can be built that includes toleration for charges
that Malcolm X was a fascist? The CP in Germany was fond of making loose
charges like this in the 1920s and it was its undoing. There is a need for
a revolution in the United States. Unless there is one, we surely are fated
for destruction. I watched a PBS documentary on the making of the H-Bomb
last night. The people who run this country are completely sick. The bomb
would not only destroy the "enemy" but us as well. Suicidal tendencies are
the sign of a sick mind. To save ourselves, we need to build a strong
united left.

But this broad, united left should not include retrograde ideas such as
"gay liberation is a bourgeois sickness" or that women do not have the
right to an abortion, or that American Indians deserved to be forcibly
assimilated because of what Lewis Henry Morgan wrote, etc. Similarly,
labeling Malcom X as a fascist or lying about his "deals" with the KKK step
over the borderline of what should constitute a progressive movement. And
to answer Jim Devine's question: Rakesh does not think that Malcom X ever
transcended the NOI "fascist" stage (Fascism does not do justice to the
NOI. Booker T. Washington self-help describes it more accurately).

The reason that Doug is particularly sensitive around these questions and
less so on others is that he shares Adolph Reed's and the Spartacist
League's hostility to black nationalism. If somebody came on LBO and
started raising the possibility that gay liberation was reactionary because
Goering was gay, he would take a different stance. It all depends on whose
ox is being gored.

I got into radical politics because I heard Malcolm X speak in 1965. When I
was in Houston, Texas in 1974 I was with a group of SWP'ers who were
surrounded by Klansmen in sheets toting M-16s. They had destroyed our
bookstore with a pipe-bomb only a couple of months before I arrived, and
the year earlier had fired machine guns into the kitchen window of one of
our branch members. They put sandbags around his windows the next day. One
of my best friends walks with a cane because the KKK beat him with lead
pipes and baseball bats in the early 1980s in Birmingham, Alabama and did
permanent damage to his hip.

I simply can not get into a discussion where the "fascist" Malcolm X is
accused of making deals with the KKK, as if we were talking about Judith
Butler's views on cross-dressing. If I ever behaved myself "civilly" when
this type of hateful charge was being made, that would be a sure sign that
it was time to retire from politics.



Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2086] Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Louis Proyect]

Doug:
>It'd be nice if Rakesh could speak for himself, but Rakesh said the NOI is
>fascist, and that Malcolm X never fully broke from them, though . That's a
>little different, but I know distinctions are best ignored when you've
>grabbed truth by the essence. 

I find Doug's reply very interesting. It reduces the problem of fascism to
ideology. I prefer to understand it from a Marxist standpoint, which
prioritizes material, social, class elements. The colonial revolution of
the past 80 years has often included superficially racialist or xenophobic
themes. I remember hearing how awful the Mau-Mau were when I was in
high-school, since they wanted to kill all whites. The big knock against
the Palestinians was the strong chauvinstic streak among some of the
traditional leaders, who saw the problem of one of "Jewish" settlers rather
than imperialism. The Northern Irish have taken a beating for being
papists. The Boxer and Sepoy Rebellions of the 19th century did not
distinguish between "good" and "bad" Englishmen. They wanted to kill them
all. Let me recommend a couple of titles, Doug:

1) Leon Trotsky, "The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany"

2) Daniel Guerin, "Fascism and Big Business"

3) Felix Morrow, "The Spanish Civil War"




Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2088] Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Louis Proyect]

Doug:
>It'd be nice if Rakesh could speak for himself, but Rakesh said the NOI is
>fascist, and that Malcolm X never fully broke from them, though . That's a
>little different, but I know distinctions are best ignored when you've
>grabbed truth by the essence.

Oh yeah, one other thing. Doug, you should declare a moratorium on
journalistic flourishes like "best ignored when you've grabbed truth by the
essence" until you you've learned to pass judgement on lies such as
"Malcolm X never fully broke from them." Are you so innocent of the facts
in this matter that you can give credence to this disgusting lie? Not only
is there evidence that Malcom X was murdered by the Nation of Islam BECAUSE
of his COMPLETE BREAK with them, his speeches and autobiography are replete
with denunciations of Elijah Muhammed and everything he stood for. Ken
Lawrence is right about one thing. We are dealing with a problem of a lack
of knowledge of this period. I am afraid you are seeing this period through
the prism of Adolph Reed and your ten-year long subscription to the Workers
Vanguard. You should find the time to read Malcolm X and not rely solely on
the people who despise him.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2089] Re: Re: Re: An LBO-Talk exchange

[Louis Proyect]

>And militias and public housing patrols are practices, not mere ideologies.
>
>Doug

This is a load of garbage, Doug, and a sign of your inability to see this
questions objectively. The Fruit of the Nation of Islam is a self-defense
unit that has never stormed into opponents headquarters to beat them up.
Fascists attack progressive movements, trade unionists, oppressed
nationalities, etc. The NOI ignores them. As far as patrolling housing
projects is concerned, there is nothing particularly sinister about this.
Although I don't think that the BRC is about to get into something like
this, it is completely consistent with the NOI's "self-help" agenda to rent
out security guards in high-crime neighborhoods. When these patrols start
attacking rival political groups, then I'd worry. In the meantime, you
should open your eyes to the bigger picture. The Million Man March in
Washington has not unleashed fascist tendencies, but in fact served to
inspire people to form the Black Radical Congress.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:2090] Re: Malcolm X

[Bill Burgess]

At 01:57 PM 12/01/99 -0500, Doug H. wrote:

I just haven't read enough on my own to know how much Malcolm X turned on
the NOI... 

I am no expert on this topic, but George Breitman's _The Last Year of
Malcolm X: The Evolution of a Revolutionary_ (New York: Pathfinder, 1967;
1992) is pretty convincing, on all the topics raised - meeting the KKK, his
break with the NOI, about women, relations with whites, Jews, socialism, etc. 

Even if you don't accept all of Breitman's interpretations regarding
context, etc., the quotes from Malcolm X on these points deserve at least
the same consideration as other, usually better publicized statements. 

Bill Burgess

[PEN-L:2093] Re: Re: Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode ofdiscourse

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>But this exactly what Rakesh and Doug have been doing all along. Maybe Ken
>Lawrence just decided to give them a taste of their own medicine. When Doug
>raises questions about the NOI "militia" and housing project patrols, he is
>not under any obligation to defend the thesis outright that these are the
>equivalent of the KKK night-riders or the White Aryan Resistance.

Damn it, this is just preposterous. The KKK killed and terrorized lots of
people, complicit with the state, and is one of the great horrors of U.S.
history. (The White Aryan Resistance, though, has killed no more than 5
people and are frequently prosecuted.) The NOI is nothing like the Klan. I
think it's a bad political strategy for black liberation, but it's not a
semi-official terrorist organization. Stop attributing vile things to me,
it's really pissing me off.

Doug

[PEN-L:2097] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode ofdiscourse

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>If you could think for yourself on these questions, you'd be better off.

Oh no, not that! I prefer to take dictation from my icons.

Doug

[PEN-L:2099] Re: Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode of discourse

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>If anything, there is a strange disjunction in your thinking on
>so-called identity politics, where you are an enthusiastic supporter of
>Judith Butler but turn around and get apoplectic on similar trends in the
>black movement.

Actually, Butler's writing destabilizes identity, which is what queer
theory is about - blurring boundaries. Some people don't like her for that,
in fact. From Bodies That Matter, pp. 85-87:

If the phallus is that which is excommunicated from the feminist orthodoxy
on lesbian sexuality as well as the "missing part," the sign of an
inevitable dissatisfaction that is lesbianism in homophobic and misogynist
constructions, then the admission of the phallus into that exchange faces
two convergent prohibitions: first, the phallus signifies the persistence of
the "straight mind," a masculine or heterosexist identification and, hence,
the defilement or betrayal of lesbian specificity; secondly, the phallus
signifies the insuperability of heterosexuality and constitutes lesbianism
as a vain and/or pathetic effort to mime the real thing. Thus, the phallus
enters lesbian sexual discourse in the mode of a transgressive "confession"
conditioned and confronted by both the feminist and misogynist forms of
repudiation: it's not the real thing (the lesbian thing) or it's not the
real thing (the straight thing). What is "unveiled" is precisely the
repudiated desire, that which is abjected by heterosexist logic and that
which is defensively foreclosed through the effort to circumscribe a
specifically feminine morphology for lesbianism. In a sense, what is
unveiled or exposed is a desire that is produced through a prohibition.

And yet, the phantasmatic structure of this desire will operate as a "veil"
precisely at the moment in which it is "revealed." That phantasmatic
transfiguration of bodily boundaries will not only expose its own
tenuousness, but will turn out to depend on that tenuousness and transience
in order to signify at all. The phallus as signifier within lesbian
sexuality will engage the spectre of shame and repudiation delivered by
that feminist theory which would secure a feminine morphology in its
radical distinctness from the masculine (a binarism that is secured through
heterosexual presumption), a spectre delivered in a more pervasive way by
the masculinist theory which would insist on the male morphology as the
only possible figure for the human body. Traversing those divisions, the
lesbian phallus signifies a desire that is produced historically at the
crossroads of these prohibitions, and is never fully free of the normative
demands that condition its possibility and that it nevertheless seeks to
subvert. Insofar as the phallus is an idealization of morphology, it
produces a necessary effect of inadequation, one which, in the cultural
context of lesbian relations, can be quickly assimilated to the sense of an
inadequate derivation from the supposedly real thing, and, hence, a source
of shame.

But precisely because it is an idealization, one which no body can
adequately approximate, the phallus is a transferable phantasm, and its
naturalized link to masculine morphology can be called into question
through an aggressive reterritorialization. That complex identificatory
fantasies inform morphogenesis, and that they cannot be fully predicted,
suggests that morphological idealization is both a necessary and
unpredictable ingredient in the constitution of both the bodily ego and the
dispositions of desire.

It also means that there is not necessarily one imaginary schema for the
bodily ego, and that cultural conflicts over the idealization and
degradation of specific masculine and feminine morphologies will be played
out at the site of the morphological imaginary in complex and conflicted
ways. It may well be through a degradation of a feminine morphology, an
imaginary and cathected degrading of the feminine, that the lesbian phallus
comes into play, or it may be through a castrating occupation of that
central masculine trope, fueled by the kind of defiance which seeks to
overturn that very degradation of the feminine.

It is important to underscore, however, the way in which the stability of
both "masculine" and "feminine" morphologies is called into question by a
lesbian resignification of the phallus which depends on the crossings of
phantasmatic identification. If the morphological distinctness of "the
feminine" depends on its purification of all masculinity, and if this
bodily boundary and distinctness is instituted in the service of the laws
of a heterosexual symbolic, then that repudiated masculinity is presumed by
the feminized morphology, and will emerge either as an impossible ideal
that shadows and thwarts the feminine or as a disparaged signifier of a
patriarchal order against which a specific lesbian-feminism defines itself.
In either case, the relation to the phallus is constitutive - an
identification is made which is at once disavowed.

Indee

[PEN-L:2100] Afro-Americans and radical politics

[Louis Proyect]

(From "Richard B. Moore: Caribbean Militant in Harlem," edited by W.
Burghadt Turner and Joyce Moore Turner)

AFRO-AMERICANS AND RADICAL POLITICS

WCBS-TV broadcast, Black Heritage Series, March 19, 1969. Manuscript,
Richard B. Moore

The term "radical," as qualifying "politics," has been too often
misunderstood to mean a horrible and violent extremism, or an extremist who
menaces everything good and decent in human life, and therefore a dangerous
"ism" or creature who ought to be put out of the way by any and force
possible. As here used, however, the term "radical" means its original
signification, i.e. "of or pertaining to the root," as derived from the
Latin radix meaning root. Hence "radical" here refers to a program, or an
advocate of a program, which proposes basic change in the economic, social,
and political order.

A "radical" in relation to chattel slavery, for example, was one who
advocated, not partial measures to limit the slaveholders' punishment, or
to require an increase in the food and clothing of the slave, but who
demanded abolition of the system of chattel slavery and its replacement by
system such as the free wage labor system.

In respect to the system of capitalism or the private ownership of the
basic economic and productive forces of society and their operation for the
profit of the owners, a "radical" is one who advocates the replacement of
the capitalist system by a socialist order of society, which is generally
held to mean common ownership and management by the people of the socially
necessary means of production and their operation for human use an for
private profit.

In this sense, then, the Messenger magazine and the group of Afro-American
socialists, who conducted and supported it in Harlem, were called
"radical." Indeed, in its prospectus of 1917 the Messenger declared itself
"the only magazine of Scientific Radicalism in the world published by
Negroes." Its basic position was set forth in an editorial "The Cause and
Remedy for Race Riots" which stated:

"Revolution must come. By that we mean a complete change in the
organization of society. Just as absence of industrial democracy is
productive of riots and race clashes, so the introduction of industrial
democracy will be the longest step toward removing that cause. When no
profits are to be made from race friction, no one will longer be interested
in stirring up race prejudice. The quickest way to stop a thing or to
destroy an institution is to destroy the profitableness of that
institution. The capitalist system must go and its going must be hastened
by the workers themselves."

"Radical politics," then, has to do with the thorough-going nature of the
ends sought and the means used to achieve these basic ends. . .

In Harlem from about 1917 on a branch of the Socialist Party, the 21st
Assembly District, composed almost wholly of Afro-Americans, functioned
vigorously. Prior to this there had been such able, eloquent, and singular
pioneer Afro-American advocates of Socialism as Helen Holman and Hubert H.
Harrison.

Hubert H. Harrison, who had come from the Virgin Islands, was a man of
exceptional intellect and wide knowledge. Studies in economics and
sociology had led him to socialism and he soon became a leader in the
socialist movement. Along with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bill Haywood, and
Morris Hillquit, Harrison was active in organizing silk workers in
Patterson, N.J., and he was an instructor at the Modern School. But
becoming dissatisfied with some of the socialists' attitude on the "race"
question, Harrison left them for the Harlem scene. From 1917 on Harrison
conducted a "university outdoors," speaking evening after evening on
various subjects, particularly aspects of "race" in its world context and
the history and achievements of people of African origin and descent
everywhere.

Hubert Harrison organized the Liberty League of Afro-Americans and
published The Voice as the organ of this movement. More than any other man
of his time, he inspired and educated the masses of Afro-Americans then
flocking into Harlem. It was Harrison, too, who gave Marcus Garvey his
first significant introduction to the people of Harlem at the Liberty
League mass meeting held in Bethel A.M.E. Church. In the foreword to his
booklet When Africa Awakes, Harrison later spoke with truth of the period
before Garvey "when the foundations were laid."

While Hubert Harrison moved more and more toward the position of "race
first," a score of young, militant, and studious Afro-Americans were
actively propagating Socialism, while at the same time examining its
philosophy and possible practical application for the removal of the ills
which they suffered along with their people. These youthful Afro American
seekers after knowledge and power studied diligently together on Sunday
mornings The Communist Manifesto, Socialism Utopian and Scientific, and
other writings of Marx and Engels. Through the People's Educational Forum
on Sunday afternoons, they d

[PEN-L:2101] Re: Re: Malcolm X

[Bill Burgess]

On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, Charles Brown wrote:

> How about _The Autobiography of
> Malcolm X_ and _Malcolm X Speaks_.
> Malcolm X was an eye witness to
> his life. He tells of the meeting
> with the KKK himself...

These are the better-known books I was referring to. I never took
from them the views that some critics of Malcolm X ascribe to him. In any 
case, however, they do not reflect what Breitman argues was a
significant evolution in Malcolm X's views in the year or so before he
was assassinated, and which Breitman tries to document. IMHO they
provide a strong antidote to sectarianism.   

Bill Burgess

> 

[PEN-L:2105] Re: Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode of discourse

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>Doug, we are trying to establish whether Nation of Islam security guards
>are embryonic forms of American fascism or something more akin to bean pie
>salesmen.

Who the hell ever said they were an embryonic form of American fascism? Not
me. You accused Judith Butler of being a theorist of identity; I tried to
show how that wasn't the case. You responded to a catalogue of unpleasant
aspects of NOI ideology with a clip about a housing project in Coney
Island. Really, this is getting nowhere, so I am going to stop.

Doug

[PEN-L:2108] Re: Re: Re: The pseudo-interrogative mode ofdiscourse

[Brad De Long]

Louis Proyect wrote:
>
>As far as Brad DeLong is concerned, he is very
>good at this himself, if not a master:
>
>"For most of this century, the left has severely diminished its chances of
>doing anything constructive by virtue of its attachment to--and eagerness
>to explain away the devastation wrought by--a bunch of very nasty dictators.
>

No.

You don't get it.

the pseudo-interrogative mode would entail me writing something like:

"Has the left severely diminished its chances of doing
anything constructive by virtue of its attachment to--
and eagerness to explain away the devastation wrought
by--a bunch of very nasty dictators?"

and then when challenged responding by pointing out that I wasn't making
judgments, I was just asking questions.

Brad DeLong

[PEN-L:2110] Enough<199901122102.QAA02365@bonjour.cc.columbia.edu>

[Michael Perelman]

I have been travelling and have not been able to pay much attention to my
e-mail.  I am sorry to see the NOI thread here on pen-l.

This thread began on LBO.  Doug asked for it to stop and now it is migrating
here.

Look, like Henry said, the world is filled with a lot of bad SOB's.  Why do
people I respect insist on behaving in ways that do not merit respect?

--

Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901

[PEN-L:2111] CANADA IS A CARING SOCIETY. NOT. (fwd)

[michael]

Forwarded message:
Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 16:01:59 -0800
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: CANADA IS A CARING SOCIETY. NOT.
X-UID: 3044

Editorial in the TWU Transmitter, December 1998:

CANADA IS A CARING SOCIETY. NOT.

By Sid Shniad
Research Director
Telecommunications Workers Union

Canadians pride ourselves on being fundamentally=20
different from our neighbours to the south. Whenever talks=20
turns to the States, we puff up our chests and talk about=20
how ours is a more caring society, with government-funded=20
health care and a superior social safety net. But a couple=20
of recently-released studies indicate that Canadians should=20
think twice before bragging about our social superiority.=20
Indications are that we're not as different from the States=20
as we would like to believe.
What we're talking about here is described a recently=20
released report entitled The Growing Gap, published by the=20
Toronto-based Centre for Social Justice. That report shows=20
the gap between the rich and poor in Canada growing at an=20
alarming rate: in 1973, the richest 10 per cent of families=20
with children made 21 times more than the poorest 10 per=20
cent; by 1996, the gap had mushroomed, with the richest 10=20
per cent making 314 times more than the poorest.
Armine Yalnizyan, one of the report's authors,=20
explains that the poor keep tightening their belts and=20
working harder. But "the dynamic is ... sucking more people=20
into poverty and allowing a few people to win." As a result,=20
"We're living in a society of two different Canadas..."
Funded by the Atkinson Foundation, the report argues=20
that "The current dynamic ... is both unsustainable and=20
immoral."
Canadian families are increasingly being forced to=20
rely on more than one income just to get by. The fact is=20
that two-thirds of Canadian mothers with children under=20
three are in the labour force today, compared with one-third=20
a generation ago. In Canada most families are being forced=20
to rely on two full-time jobs to survive.
"Getting more hours of paid work out of the family=20
unit has been the chief way families have stabilized their=20
family income," the report says. But people are reaching=20
their saturation point. They simply aren't capable of=20
working more.
In the past, governments intervened in the economy to=20
keep a lid on disparities. But the increasing influence of=20
corporations and right wing political ideology have=20
convinced our politicians to adopt a hands off attitude, the=20
report says.
Its authors argue that "Our governments have abandoned=20
the post-war social contract and embarked on a risky=20
experiment that leaves our destiny in the hands of the=20
market." Here are some of the effects:
=09
*  Even though the majority of women are now working=20
outside the home, 60% of families with children are=20
earning less today than they did in 1981.
=20
*  The number of families with no wage earner at all=20
increased from 3.7% in 1973 to 8.4% in 1996. Meanwhile,=20
government income supports for those without work have=20
been cut and fewer people are receiving them.
=20
*  In the same 23 year period, the proportion of families=20
with children earning between $24,500 and $65,000=20
(measured in constant dollars) fell from 60% of the=20
population to 44%.
=20
*  In the three years from 1994 to 1996, the average=20
Canadian corporate chief executive officer pocketed=20
salary increases of 39%. By 1996 the average CEO salary=20
was $862,000. By comparison, workers' average wages=20
increased by 2% or less in the same three years _ less=20
than the rate of inflation.
=20
*  The proportion of full-time workers in the Canadian=20
labour force has fallen from two-thirds a generation=20
ago to half today. One in five jobs is part time _=20
double the rate 20 years ago. Meanwhile, one in five=20
workers is working overtime.
=20
*  The fastest growing segments of the labour force are=20
generating a disproportionate number of temporary jobs,=20
which now make up 15% of all employment.
=20
*  Self-employment accounted for half of all jobs created=20
in the 1990s.

In short, despite the widespread belief that economic=20
growth would make everyone better off, the growth that took=20
place over the last decade has been accompanied by larger=20
and larger disparities.=20
The biggest losers have been single men. "Men under=20
the age of 35 have seen a remarkable, perhaps unprecedented,=20
erosion in what their work is worth compared to older age=20
groups and compared to what under 35-ers were worth in=20
1980," the report says. "There is an emerging fault line=20
between those under and those over the age of 35."
Governments could act to reduce the gap, but Yalnizyan=20
points out that that's not likely to happen until the public=20
realizes wh