[PEN-L:3293] Re: Re: Re: Biker buddy... sorta...

[Ken Hanly]

Actually the data show that wearing helmets actually increases costs in
health care.. The reason is easy to
see. Helmets save lives.The number of serious head injuries actually
increase.People who would have died of head injuries live when helmets are
introduced.. Anti-helmet groups often bring this data forth in support of
their position- to show it doesnt impose costs on othersof course it
may  impose costs on
widows, etc. but perhaps they are better off without people like that
anyway. Of course there are arguments about vision etc. and  some people
have medical conditions that make it
 difficult to wear helmets. I don't know why leftists think this is a big
issue anyway.
Its neither here nor there when people are starving to death all over the
world.It has bugger all to do with the worldwide ravages of capitalism..It
seems
perfectly reasonable that people should be concerned about paternalism and
forcing them
to do things..By the way, Im in favor of helmet laws with medical
exemptions but I cant see why I should be sad or think it odd that
leftists are on the other side of the issue. What is your position on gun
control :)
I fail to appreciate the force of your argument re drunk drivers.
Drunk drivers kill innocent
people and maim them. Helmetless drivers hurt only themselves
directly..They may indeed pass on some
insurance costs to others who do not wear helmets but surely this is not a
sufficient reason to disallow helmetless riders.
Maybe we should outlaw drivers under 21 or let them drive only with
another driver etc. this would no doubt make our insurance costs lower
since as a group these drivers increase our insurance costs. And we must
require people to eat properly because eating improperly imposes costs on
all those healthy eaters
out there.in a universal health care system... Maybe you could introduce
more sin taxes too.
Lets tax the hell out of the working classes' cigs and booze...All of
these measures would compensate us healthy nonsmoking nondrinking types
for the costs working class and other slobs impose upon us..I mean all
these sinners imposing costs on the virtuous, its just not
fair :). It probably is not  a Pareto improvement to allow these things .
The ultimate sin...
   Cheers, Ken Hanly

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Bill Lear writes:
>
> > I don't have too much of a problem arguing against helmet laws.  My
> > take is that if a person does not hurt another person, then they are
> > free to hurt themselves and the state should not regulate that
> > behavior --- if it can be shown that not wearing helmets poses a
> > threat to others, no red-blooded American should protest efforts to
> > curb the harm.  My guess is that helmet laws and seat-belt laws were
> > done at the behest of insurance companies, not a cadre of
> > pajama-wearing socialists.
> >
> Well I do have a problem.  We have banned helmetless riders
> because of the selfish cost they impose upon others.  Cyclists
> without  helmets cause an enourmous extra cost to the insurance
> system that is passed on to other sensible drivers/riders.  It is the
> equivalent of arguing for the elimination of laws against drunk
> driving because the cost such idiots cause end up being passed on
> to others and, in our case, to the health system which must be
> paid by everyone.  I am all in favour of individual freedom -- up to
> the point that it begins to destroy other, innocent people's freedom.
>  Helmet and seatbelt laws are the beginning of freedom for others
> on the road.
>
> It is sentiments like that of BigWayne that makes me question the
> rationality of American discourse.  That Bill Lear supports it makes
> me sad and despondent!
>
> Paul
> Paul Phillips,
> Economics,
> University of Manitoba

[PEN-L:3292] Re: Re: Biker buddy... sorta...

[William S. Lear]

On Thu, February 11, 1999 at 20:47:00 (-0600) [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>Bill Lear writes:
>
>> I don't have too much of a problem arguing against helmet laws.  My
>> take is that if a person does not hurt another person, then they are
>> free to hurt themselves and the state should not regulate that
>> behavior --- if it can be shown that not wearing helmets poses a
>> threat to others, no red-blooded American should protest efforts to
>> curb the harm.  My guess is that helmet laws and seat-belt laws were
>> done at the behest of insurance companies, not a cadre of
>> pajama-wearing socialists.
>> 
>Well I do have a problem.  We have banned helmetless riders 
>because of the selfish cost they impose upon others.  Cyclists 
>without  helmets cause an enourmous extra cost to the insurance 
>system that is passed on to other sensible drivers/riders.  It is the 
>equivalent of arguing for the elimination of laws against drunk 
>driving because the cost such idiots cause end up being passed on 
>to others and, in our case, to the health system which must be 
>paid by everyone.  I am all in favour of individual freedom -- up to
>the point that it begins to destroy other, innocent people's freedom.
>Helmet and seatbelt laws are the beginning of freedom for others 
>on the road.
>
>It is sentiments like that of BigWayne that makes me question the 
>rationality of American discourse.  That Bill Lear supports it makes 
>me sad and despondent!

Criminy Paul, I said, if you read what I wrote, that I don't have "a
problem *arguing* against helmet laws" (added emphasis), and "if it
can be shown that not wearing helmets poses a threat to others" such
laws should be supported.  Just where in this do I "support" the
sentiments (*not* of BigWayne I should point out) of his BigWayne's
biker friend?

I could end this by saying: "It is sentiments like that of Paul,
derived from skewed readings of plain English, that make me question
the reading skills of certain Canadian economics professors!", but I
wouldn't do that.

See, I used to ride a motorcycle in college and I always wore my
helmet. I always wear a seatbelt when I drive (won't drive if
passengers in my car aren't buckled in), and support laws for both
helmet use and seatbelts.  I don't think arguing against them,
however, is in the same league of insanity as the rest of Biker Boy's
twisted notions.


Bill

[PEN-L:3284] Re: Re: Nicaragua

[Michael Hoover]

according to Sandinista Orlando Nunez Soto, a new 'democratic
vanguard' is in the offing in Nicaragua via peasant associations, 
worker-owned factories, and individual farms...freed from party 
control since 1990, they have fought for their members' interests 
and sometimes won...despite nearly a decade of 'neoliberalism',
together they own nearly half of the country's farmland, agro-
industrial processing plants, and 25% of other industries...
any listers with more info?  Michael Hoover

[PEN-L:3288] Re: Re: Biker buddy... sorta...

[ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224]]

Bill Lear writes:

> I don't have too much of a problem arguing against helmet laws.  My
> take is that if a person does not hurt another person, then they are
> free to hurt themselves and the state should not regulate that
> behavior --- if it can be shown that not wearing helmets poses a
> threat to others, no red-blooded American should protest efforts to
> curb the harm.  My guess is that helmet laws and seat-belt laws were
> done at the behest of insurance companies, not a cadre of
> pajama-wearing socialists.
> 
Well I do have a problem.  We have banned helmetless riders 
because of the selfish cost they impose upon others.  Cyclists 
without  helmets cause an enourmous extra cost to the insurance 
system that is passed on to other sensible drivers/riders.  It is the 
equivalent of arguing for the elimination of laws against drunk 
driving because the cost such idiots cause end up being passed on 
to others and, in our case, to the health system which must be 
paid by everyone.  I am all in favour of individual freedom -- up to 
the point that it begins to destroy other, innocent people's freedom. 
 Helmet and seatbelt laws are the beginning of freedom for others 
on the road.

It is sentiments like that of BigWayne that makes me question the 
rationality of American discourse.  That Bill Lear supports it makes 
me sad and despondent!

Paul
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba

[PEN-L:3287] Re: Re: Ernest Mandel on long waves

[ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224]]

Jim writes: 
> It doesn't negate the swing interpretation as much as provide and apply an
> alternative framework. (To recap: I interpret the history of the 20th
> century -- including the 1930s Collapse -- in terms of aggressive
> accumulation causing overinvestment crises that appear in different forms
> depending on the institutional framework that exists at the time.

Aha!  I agree  and this is the point of the SSA/RT approach

Some of
> institutional framework part gets close to long-wave thinking, in that one
> can point to alternation of labor-abundant and labor-scarce periods, but I
> don't see how bringing in "swings" helps in any way. On the other hand, I
> can't see the international environment of capitalist nations struggling
> for (and sometimes winning) hegemony as behaving in a swing-like manner.

I have never seen this as part of the long wave approach.

> Goldstein's book on long cycles treats the hegemony stages as complementary
> to long swings, rather than reducing those stages to those swings.) 
> 
> >Nor am I convinced by 
> >the Glick/Brenner criticism though I haven't looked at that stuff 
> >recently.  Further, the French Regulation school involves a number 
> >of writers, all of whom are not on the same wave length.  
> 
> ... as it were. 
> 
> >But what I 
> >appreciate is their dialectic approach between accumulation 
> >variables and institutional and power variables, something which is 
> >also core to the SSA approach.  
> 
> I also apply a dialectical perspective on these issues, though I put a much
> larger emphasis on the aggressiveness of capitalist accumulation, and how
> it progressively undermines even its own status quo. I think that its
> theoretical absence of this aggressiveness is a problem for both Regulation
> and SSA thought.
> 

Why?  I see it as part.

> >Boyer has some very interesting 
> >and complex analysis that is very useful for heuristic purposes -- 
> >students find it extremely interesting as a way of seeing the 
> >processes of capitalism.  I find it particularly useful in teaching 
> >economic history because students can understand a 'system' of 
> >accumulation and the  relation with the state, labour, the farmers' 
> >movement, imperialism, etc.  And, they can also understand the 
> >contradictions that produce the depression, war and the rise of 
> >Fordism etc.  In short, long swings give structure to periods of 
> >economic history, periods of capitalist development.  
> 
> I have used various stage and swing frameworks in teaching, including Louis
> Hacker's (not Proyect's) scheme from his TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM. As
> far as pedagogy is concerned, I usually don't concentrate on debates among
> leftists, so that most schemata will do, especially as I reinterpret them. 
> 
> But in terms of understanding the world, however, I have problems with much
> that has come out of the Regulation approach. Glick and Brenner's critique,
> which is empirical, is relevant here. Also, Regulation-influenced books
> like WHO BUILT AMERICA? volume II of the American Social History Project
> overemphasize ideas such as "welfare capitalism" in the 1920s, where the
> bosses controlled labor in a paternalistic way but provided all sorts of
> non-wage benefits. The research I've seen indicates that this was true of a
> relatively small percentage of corporations. Most companies took advantage
> of labor's weakness to drive workers to produce surplus-value in the
> old-fashioned way, with none of the paternalism.

Yea but I don't think this is representative of RT/SSA thinking -- at 
least not my thinking on the subject.  I think if you look at the 
literature on it, this period was one of experimenting with different 
ways of controlling labour, the fruit of which did not mature until the 
post-war period.  That, certainly is my understanding of G,E&R and 
of my own research on the subject.  Of course, as a control 
strategy it could not prevail until war brought a new 'swing' of 
capital accumulation.
> 
> >And, despite 
> >all, the swings are there in the statistics so how else do you 
> >interpret them?
> 
> I've found that if one starts with the prior conviction that swings appear
> in the data, one finds them. If one doesn't, one doesn't find them.
> Further, the main evidence for K-waves concerns prices, not real variables. 
> 
I disagree.  For Kondratieff, yes prices.  For Shaik, profits.  For 
G,E&R growth rates.  For my own research on Canadian data, 
growth rates are the best indicator though obvious discontinuities in 
institutional structure supplement.  (and which are significant in 
time series regressions.)

Paul
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba

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

[PEN-L:3283] City on Fire: Hong Kong Cinema

[Michael Hoover]

Thanks to Louis P for posting below (which I've taken liberty of 
reposting)...I only sub to a few lists and would appreciate folks
forwarding to other lists and people who might be interested...
btw: description should read 'John Woo's martial arts with 
automatic weapons flicks'...

Verso spring '99 catalogue is at http://www.verso.com
Michael Hoover


> CITY ON FIRE: Hong Kong Cinema
> 
> MICHAEL HOOVER AND LISA STOKES
> 
> Hong Kong's film industry gained global attention in the 1980s, at the time
> of negotiations over Great Britain's return of the colony to China.
> Uncertainty about the post-handover era accelerated Hong Kong's race for
> economic growth, and found expression in cinema's depictions of a "city on
> fire." 
> 
> In this accessible introduction to the extraordinary cinematic output of
> the colony, Michael Hoover and Lisa Stokes review the directors and films
> that have established Hong Kong cinema internationally: John Woo's martial
> arts flicks, Tsui Hark's wire-worked fantasies, Ann Hui's exile melodramas,
> Stanley Kwan's limpid romances, and Wong Kar-wai's stylish art films. 
> 
> Michael Hoover teaches political science and Lisa Stokes teaches humanities
> at Seminole Community College in Central Florida. 
> 
> "A tour-de-force analysis of Hong Kong's film genres, which profiles a city
> with no time to recover from its own high-speed car chase through late
> capitalist development." -- Andrew Ross, American Studies, NYU
> 
> "Well-researched and documented, City on Fire does a fantastic job of
> mixing the historical, political, socio-economic factors of Hong Kong and
> its cinema with critical treatments of film texts and directorial motives
> and styles." -- John A. Lent, Editor, Asian Cinema
> 
> "Informative yet admirably unsnobbish, Hoover and Stokes never lose sight
> of the movies' rib-sticking goodness. City on Fire is the closest you can
> get to pre-hand-over Hong Kong without a passport and a time machine." --
> Betsy Sherman, film critic for the Boston Globe
> 
> Publication
> April
> 
> Paperback
> 1-85984-203-8
> $19US/£13/$26CAN
> 
> Hardback
> 1-85984-716-1
> $60US/£40/$85CAN
> 
> 256 pages
> 20 b/w photographs
> 
> Cinema
> 
> Translation rights
> Verso

[PEN-L:3285] Re: Re: Back to the land<000301be54ae$5eddf600$44e13ecb@rcollins> <3.0.1.32.19990210125427.00d9c5f0@popserver.panix.com> <36C3602E.28EDC13B@uniserve.com>

[Ken Hanly]

Just a few additions to Sam's excellent post.

Pol Pot's background was in the peasantry. Although his parents were better off
peasants, without a
government scholarship Pol Pot would not have been able to go to Paris to study and
eventually teach.
While in France he was active within French Communist Party Circles from about
1949-1952. In 1953
he returned to  Phnom Penh to teach there and found a Communist Party in Cambodia. He
fled the capital in 1963 to escape police repression and sought sanctuary in remote
rural areas. It was here that
he devised an ultimately successful revolutionary strategy that was derived from
Stalinism, nationalism, and peasant radicalism. In effect his strategy was a
variation of that of Mao.

Whatever the crimes of Pol Pot---and Louis and Angela seem to buy into the view
promoted by the
CIA  and the film  the Killing Fields--his Khmer Rouge were a popular and ultimately
successful
revolutionary movement.
In 1970 a CIA directed military coup ousted Prince Sihanouk and installed General
Lon Nol. The
country's population was subjected to the most intensive saturation bombing in
history. From 1969 to
1973, 532,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia, more than three times the
tonnage dropped on Japan in World War II.
By 1974, 95 percent of Cambodia's income came from US aid much of it being
siphoned off by corrupt officials. Two million of 7 million were homeless. Rice
production plunged from 3.8 million tons to
655,000 tons. It was American intervention that enabled the Khmer Rouge to thrive and
ultimately
throw out Lon Nol in April 1975. Sam tells much of the rest of the story.

It should be noted though that the US supported Pol Pot after the Khmer Rouge
were defeated by a
Vietnamese invasion in 1978. As per usual, the US used Pol Pot as a pawn in the Cold
War against
the Soviet Union with whom Vietnam was allied. Not only did the US send arms to
enable Pol Pot's armed struggle to continue, it recognised the Khmer Rouge as the
legitimate UN representative for almost a decade. This shows how much concern there
was over the killing fields.

CHeers, Ken Hanly

PS. MOst of this information comes from the World SOcialist Web Site. The piece is
quite hostile
to Pol Pot by the way.



Sam Pawlett wrote:

> Back to the land was actually carried out after the successful revolutions in
> Cambodia in 1975 and to a much lesser extent in Vietnam. Starting on April 17, 75
> the CPK(Khmer Rouge) evacuated 90% of the population of Phnem Penh to the
> countryside.  I would argue that this was the only option the CPK had at the
> time. The population of Phnom Penh had increased by 2 million duting the war
> years out of a total population of 7-8 million. Phnom PEnh was and always had
> been an unproductive center that siphoned off the wealth produced in the
> countryside. The U.S. State Department claimed in early 1975 that at least 1
> million would starve to death if present conditions remained the same. Phnom Penh
> at the time of its liberation by the CPK had 2 months supply of food. Everyone in
> the country had to be put to productive work immediately to prevent mass famine.
> MOst of the people who were evacuated (or depositees as the CPK called them) were
> returned to the villages where they came from. The new people or former permanent
> urban residents were singled out for punishment as a class by the CPK. It is
> important to remember that the CPK and DK were not homogenous and monolithic
> entities. Factions existed right up until the Vietnamese took Phnom Penh. Faction
> fights and purges cost the lives of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people.
> Conditions and governance in he country varied from region to region and village
> to village and changed over timeWas the CPK Marxist? They certainly has a
> class analysis; only the poorest and lower middle layers of the peasantry were
> considered revolutionary. They were granted considerable leeway, freedom and
> privilege relative to the rest of the population. The CPK forced everyone to live
> like poor peasants--barracks socialism. The CPK tried to eliminate the
> rural-urban divide by suppressing it...The term "intellectual" had a different
> meaning in the Cambodian of the time. Often people with only primary schooling
> considered themselves intellectuals. MOst of the CPK lower and middle level cadre
> were completely illiterate. The CPK collectivization effort, initially raised
> productivity in some areas, but ultimately failed when the Pol Pot faction gained
> control of most of the country and implemented extreme measures like communal
> cooking and dining and the abolishment of all personal property which alienated
> the people and thus lowered productivity. Poor nutrition and disease also
> contributed to the failure of the communes.
>
> I/m doing a lot of research on Cambodia right now and plan to post a longer
> article when I'm finished.
>
> Sam Pawlett
>
> Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> > Doug:
>

[PEN-L:3290] French conflict over hours

[Eugene Coyle]

PARIS, Jan. 14 (UPI) _ With the legal workweek in France soon to be 35
hours, a Versailles court case beginning in March has suddenly taken on
significance.
At issue is the French job inspectorate, whose huge staff is using a law

originally framed to close sweatshops employing illegal workers to crack

down on workaholics.
For several months, France has been enforcing the law against executives

who
work beyond the legal weekly limit of 39 hours, not including overtime.

In the new era of the single European currency and the burgeoning global

economy, the French enforcement drive is being challenged.

The Versailles case involves the company Thomson Radars and its
director,
Bernard Rocquemont, who faces prosecution after inspectors found he and
senior employees working longer than legally allowed.
Rocquemont and his colleagues are charged with doing "clandestine work"
at
the company's electronics factory in Elancourt, just outside Paris.

If found guilty, Rocquemont faces a $34,000 fine and a possible prison
sentence.
Inspectors who staked out the factory claim 1,300 engineers and managers

posted an average 46-hour work week. None received overtime pay.
The case has provoked widespread publicity, since it clashes with the
traditional view that France's skilled, salaried professionals are
exempt
from laws that apply to factory workers and other low-wage earners.

Last year, the courts decreed work-limit laws apply to all. That's when
the
executive suite inspections started.

Director Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe of the regional labor inspection
office
in
Paris says: "When we talk to these executives privately, they tell us
they
are glad not to have to work hard and long any longer."

Paul-Louis Betrois, who heads his own mid-size electronics firm,
Basictel
in
Paris, disagrees.

He says: "Look, in this day of the global economy and faster, quicker
communications, billing, investment and filling orders, if you don't
work
long hours, you're dead. And that is what enforcement of the new law
is
going to do. It is going to kill us."
News reports depict zealous government inspectors pursuing overworked
executives, whose faces are blurred as they talk on camera about
smuggling
their laptop computers home to finish the job, or confess to sneaking
around
with mobile phones to take care of business.

Inspectors count cars in parking lots after business hours, scrutinize
office entry and computer records, and grill employees about their
schedules.

Some higher-salaried employees can be declared exempt, but only with
certain
waivers, and even they are mostly limited to a 42-hour work week. Key
executives may occasionally work 46 hours if specific government
permission
is obtained. Even the most powerful top executive   is barred from
working
more than 48 hours a week _ and never on Sundays,   unless operating a
restaurant, delicatessen or the like.
A researcher at the Center for the Study of Labor in Paris, Pierre
Boisard,
says the reasoning behind the structure is rooted in 19th-century labor
law
thinking.

He says, "Back then, and still today, it was and is believed that it is
in
the interests of social order and our general well-being to have a limit
on
the length of time we work."

The government has already fined several large companies for allowing
employees to work longer than France permits. A group recently sought to

force the giant company Alcatel to pay 3,000 fines, each more than $700,

after noting every daily and weekly infraction for several months. They
lost
the case on a technicality.

This week's Thomson RCM case has commanded so much attention that even
Employment Minister Martine Aubrey worries publicly it may be
counterproductive by fostering antagonism to the 35-hour week.
Aubrey has tried four times since October to direct the job inspectorate

to be less severe, urging negotiation and not prosecution.
"What's needed here is some understanding," she says. "But make no
mistake: The policy is for individuals to work fewer hours."
In the Rocquemont case, the office of the Versailles public prosecutor
indicates there will be no compromise. Carla Llautine, a prosecutor
there, says, "The point is, we think people are working too long, and
we're going to stop them." _-

[PEN-L:3289] Re: Re: Schooling: Montessori and Dewey

[Ellen Dannin]

>"William S. Lear" wrote:
>>
>> I was told that John Dewey was a harsh critic of Maria Montessori, I
>> think during the 50s or thereabouts.  Anyone know of this?  Anyone
>> have opinions on Montessori schools (I went to one when I was young,
>> and my wife and I are considering putting our son in one).


This is probably off-topic, but my daughter attended a Montessori preschool.
It was a good choice for her, and she loved it. Sometimes I thought it was a
little rigid, but anyone who's been around pre-schoolers knows they can be
obsessively orderly -- they are busy trying to divide the world up into
categories, and they like certainty. So it basically fit her needs. The one
really positive thing was that the school pushed her to do things it never
would have occurred to me as a parent that she was ready for. I tended to
see her as a baby still.

And my symphathies to Michael Yates on the student situation. I have the
best employment law class I've ever had at the moment. They make teaching at
8 am worth it.

Ellen Dannin
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:3286] Jim O' Connor on AGF's World Economy 1400-1800

[Barbara Laurence]

Between 1400-1800 the major nations/regions (and some minor ones)
diversified their peoples' consumption basket via foreign trade. At the end
of the mercantilist/absolutist era in the West, each major nation-state
followed an import substitute industrialization (ISI) foreign
trade/investment policy. The South did the same when they could (1930s,
WWII, through the early-late 1960's, in India's case later). Then
neo-liberalism and all that stopped this process (e.g., in Latin America
after the coups of 1962-64) and the South was forced into an export-led
industrialization strategy, which does not diversify the means of
production in the full sense that ISI did and does. Now each Western major
nation-state has acquired the diversified production base needed to produce
diversity in consumption. (Hence, foreign trade to a very large degree has
nothing to do with consumer wants but only the imperatives of capital
accumulation.) This is a hugely important change, not only in capitalist
history but also human history, and deserves its own dates (1800-present).
Asia, of course, was largely left out of this diversification process
mainly because of the absence of Western style nation-states, which after
all were the main causes of said deversification. Now Asia is trying to
catch up, but its export-led industrialization policies inhibit the
catching up process, so does Western imperialism, ecological
considerations, and other factors.

History is not without its ironies. The irony here being that France,
Germany, the U.S., Japan, etc., have become more and more alike, i.e., more
homogenous, precisely because they all became more diversified along the
same lines, i.e., wage labor, big corporations, commodity form of need
satisfaction, welfare state, the auto, etc.
Cheers,
Jim O'Connor

[PEN-L:3226] Re: Back to the land

[rc-am]

-Original Message-
From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


>Back to the land? Absolutely. 
>...The name of this appropriate policy is
>called socialist revolution. ...

or another version of 'go back to where you came from'?

I also wonder how those in Cambodia would view such a policy?

angela

[PEN-L:3276] Re: Re: BLS Daily Report

[Doug Henwood]

William S. Lear wrote:

>Dave, any way you can turn off the Microsoft crud that always follows
>the text?

I don't get any Microsoft crud at the bottom of mine. Maybe Eudora's smart
enough to repress it.

Doug

[PEN-L:3274] 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_01BE55FF.086894D0

BLS DAILY REPORT, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1999:
Today's News Release:  "Multifactor Productivity Trends, 1997:  Private
Business, Private Nonfarm Business, and Manufacturing" indicates that
multifactor productivity data -output per unit of combined labor and capital
inputs - changed over the period 1996-1997 (the most recent year available)
0.7 percent in private business and 0.4 percent in private nonfarm business.
Multifactor productivity differs from the labor productivity (output per
hour) measures that are published quarterly by BLS.  Multifactor
productivity, unlike labor productivity, requires information on capital
services and other data that are not available on a quarterly basis.
The number of work stoppages rose in 1998, but remained near the all time
low recorded in 1997.  Thirty-four major work stoppages began during 1998,
idling 387,000 employees and resulting in 5.1 million days of lost work.
This compares with the record low level of work stoppages in 1997, when 29
stoppages idled 339,000 workers for 4.5 million lost workdays (Daily Labor
Report, page D-1).
About 3.7 percent of federal employees fail to meet minimum performance
objectives.  Ten percent of these poor performers are supervisors, and the
average length of service for this group  is 14 years, an Office of
Personnel Management study shows.  The OPM study "Poor Performers in
Government:  A Quest for the True Study" was based on face-to-face
interviews with 200 supervisors who directly managed the work of 3,114
employees. The interviews took place in March and April of 1998 (Daily Labor
Report, page A-7).
Average hourly pay of production workers in the private business sector rose
in January to $13.04 from $12.98 the preceding month, the Labor Department
reports (The Wall Street Journal, page A1).


--_=_NextPart_000_01BE55FF.086894D0

b3NvZnQgTWFpbC5Ob3RlADEIAQWAAwAOzwcCAAsADwAqACgABABIAQEggAMADgAAAM8HAgAL
gAEAEQAAAEJMUyBEYWlseSBSZXBvcnQAkAUBDYAEAAICAAIAAQOQBgDoBwAAHEAAOQAQ
KEcR/1W+AR4AcAABEQAAAEJMUyBEYWlseSBSZXBvcnQAAgFxAAEWAb5V/xAy
smIK1MGlEdKIjgDAT4x4MQAAHgAxQAENUklDSEFSRFNPTl9EAAMAGkAAHgAw
QAENUklDSEFSRFNPTl9EAAMAGUAAAgEJEAEnBQAAIwUAABIIAABMWkZ1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ADxFMTZFRUE0Q0U5QzdEMDExOUFFNDAwNjA5NzA1Q0Q4OEJCNEU1OUBkY3Bjc21haWwxLlBTQi5C
TFMuR09WPgALACkAAAsAIwAAAwAGELeZ4XIDAAcQ3gUAAAMAEBAAAwAREAEe
AAgQAQAAAGUAAABCTFNEQUlMWVJFUE9SVCxUSFVSU0RBWSxGRUJSVUFSWTExLDE5OTk6VE9EQVlT
TkVXU1JFTEVBU0U6Ik1VTFRJRkFDVE9SUFJPRFVDVElWSVRZVFJFTkRTLDE5OTc6UFJJVkFU
AAIBfwABQDxFMTZFRUE0Q0U5QzdEMDExOUFFNDAwNjA5NzA1Q0Q4OEJCNEU1OUBkY3Bj
c21haWwxLlBTQi5CTFMuR09WPgB7Vg==

--_=_NextPart_000_01BE55FF.086894D0--

[PEN-L:3278] Re: fwd: [HAYEK-L:] H-WEB: R Hahnel on Roemer, Socialism & Hayek

[Ken Hanly]

So what is left, or I mean what remains, of analytical marxism..?
And is this the future of "socialism"? Why is that word still  used at all to
describe
such a travesty of anything remotely resembling socialism?

Cheers, Ken Hanly

Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:

> --- Begin Forwarded Message ---
> Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 13:05:57 EST
> From: Hayek-L List Host <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: [HAYEK-L:] H-WEB: R Hahnel on Roemer, Socialism &
> Hayek
> Sender: Hayek Related Research
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> Reply-To: Hayek Related Research
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>   >>   Hayek On The Web  <<--   Socialism  /  Roemer
>
> Robin Hahnel, "A Review of _A Future For Socialism_
> by John Roemer", on the web at:
>
>   http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hahnel.htm
>
> Hyperlink: http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hahnel.htm">A Review of
> A Future For Socialism
>
> >From the review:
>
> "In the introduction, Roemer graciously surrenders, posthumously, for Oscar
> Lange, the original proponent of managerial market socialism, to Friedreich
> Hayek, the arch-conservative critic of market socialism: "Lange argued that
> what economists now call neoclassical price theory showed the possibility of
> combining central planning and the market, and Hayek retorted that planning
> would subvert at its heart the mechanism that gave capitalism its vitality.
> Hayek's criticisms of market socialism, and more recently those of Janos
> Kornai, are for the most part on the mark."  No matter that Lange's model was,
> essentially, a pure market model without anything resembling planning, much
> less central planning.  No matter that Roemer's own model reduces to a minor
> variation on Lange's model. I'm sure Lange along with Abba Lerner, Frederick
> Taylor, and other proponents of managerial market socialism -- as well as all
> who have objected to the tautological equation of efficiency and freedom with
> free market exchange and private ownership preached by Hayek's disciples in
> the ultra-conservative Austrian school of economics -- will appreciate that
> Roemer has spared them the trouble and embarrassment of running up their own
> white flag ,,,
>
> It is fascinating how fast a tactical retreat urged on us by our academic
> fellow travelers turns into a complete rout. In response to the collapse of
> communism some self-styled radical economists at the Socialist Scholars
> Conference in New York five years ago argued that market "rejectionism" should
> be reconsidered, and perhaps markets could be a useful part of a socialist
> economy provided they were properly "socialized," to use a phrase coined by
> Diane Elson.  Now Roemer is congratulated by the likes of Samuel Bowles and
> Erik Olin Wright for admitting that Lange was wrong and Hayek was right, for
> pointing out that the only corrective needed to free market allocations is
> indicative planning modeled on Japanese Keiretsu and MITI, German investment
> banks, and investment planning in Taiwan, for over throwing capitalism by
> making every citizen a capitalist -- everyone must play the coupon market
> poker game and you can't even cash out--and for chastising socialists for
> demonizing private ownership and fetishizing public ownership. Market
> socialists have, indeed, "come a long way, baby."
>
> Robin Hahnel, "A Review of _A Future For Socialism_ by John Roemer".
>  _Z Magazine_.  http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hahnel.htm
>
> Hayek On The Web is a regular feature of the Hayek-L list.
> --- End Forwarded Message ---

[PEN-L:3282] Timor.

[Sam Pawlett]

Jakarta has been making noises recently about granting E.Timor autonomy
or even independance and freeing Xanana Gusmao. Their have been
contradictory reports coming over the CBC and the BBC. A faction of
Timorese have armed themselves or have been armed and are planning to
fight the pro-independance majority in Timor. Any one know what's going
on? Also, how has the major depression in Indonesia affected the
Timorese economy?

Sam Pawlett

[PEN-L:3281] Re: Back to the land<000301be54ae$5eddf600$44e13ecb@rcollins> <3.0.1.32.19990210125427.00d9c5f0@popserver.panix.com>

[Sam Pawlett]

Back to the land was actually carried out after the successful revolutions in
Cambodia in 1975 and to a much lesser extent in Vietnam. Starting on April 17, 75
the CPK(Khmer Rouge) evacuated 90% of the population of Phnem Penh to the
countryside.  I would argue that this was the only option the CPK had at the
time. The population of Phnom Penh had increased by 2 million duting the war
years out of a total population of 7-8 million. Phnom PEnh was and always had
been an unproductive center that siphoned off the wealth produced in the
countryside. The U.S. State Department claimed in early 1975 that at least 1
million would starve to death if present conditions remained the same. Phnom Penh
at the time of its liberation by the CPK had 2 months supply of food. Everyone in
the country had to be put to productive work immediately to prevent mass famine.
MOst of the people who were evacuated (or depositees as the CPK called them) were
returned to the villages where they came from. The new people or former permanent
urban residents were singled out for punishment as a class by the CPK. It is
important to remember that the CPK and DK were not homogenous and monolithic
entities. Factions existed right up until the Vietnamese took Phnom Penh. Faction
fights and purges cost the lives of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people.
Conditions and governance in he country varied from region to region and village
to village and changed over timeWas the CPK Marxist? They certainly has a
class analysis; only the poorest and lower middle layers of the peasantry were
considered revolutionary. They were granted considerable leeway, freedom and
privilege relative to the rest of the population. The CPK forced everyone to live
like poor peasants--barracks socialism. The CPK tried to eliminate the
rural-urban divide by suppressing it...The term "intellectual" had a different
meaning in the Cambodian of the time. Often people with only primary schooling
considered themselves intellectuals. MOst of the CPK lower and middle level cadre
were completely illiterate. The CPK collectivization effort, initially raised
productivity in some areas, but ultimately failed when the Pol Pot faction gained
control of most of the country and implemented extreme measures like communal
cooking and dining and the abolishment of all personal property which alienated
the people and thus lowered productivity. Poor nutrition and disease also
contributed to the failure of the communes.

I/m doing a lot of research on Cambodia right now and plan to post a longer
article when I'm finished.

Sam Pawlett

Louis Proyect wrote:

> Doug:
> >The WB says 53% of the population was urban in 1980. Of course the urban
> >population is swelled by dispossession (just like England a couple of
> >centuries ago), and in the case of Central America, by war. But they're
> >there in cities now. What would an appropriate policy be? Back to the land?
>
> Back to the land? Absolutely. That was what the FSLN and FMLN and the
> Guerrilla Army of the Poor in Guatemala fought for. These were basically
> peasant struggles for land reform, which was also at the heart of the
> Chinese and Cuban revolutions. The name of this appropriate policy is
> called socialist revolution. Its appeal should be obvious from Cuba's
> ability to withstand imperialist blockade, chemical and biological warfare,
> and nonstop propaganda barrages.
>
> >In China, the communes are gone, all broken up. Hundreds of millions of un-
> >and semiemployed people are in China's cities now. Should Mexico City and
> >Managua be depopulated?
>
> Depopulated? You have a way of phrasing questions that reflect your own
> political bias. Socialists advocate the expropriation of agribusiness.
> Period. When there are landless peasants in Central America, while land is
> being used for exports such as flowers, tomatos, mangos, tobacco, coffee
> for the imperialist markets, a revolutionary government should proclaim
> "Food First." Land should be used to produce rice, beans, corn and
> vegetables. If the country needs foreign exchange, it should reserve a
> certain percentage of land for cash crops. I worked with the Nicaraguan
> Central Bank to automate foreign exchange calculations for just this purpose.
>
> >There's no question that great crimes have been
> >committed against peasants everywhere over the last few centuries; the
> >question is what to do about the world around us. I think the reason Lou
> >spends so much time in the 17th century is that he doesn't know what to do
> >about the 21st.
>
> "I" don't matter. Unless there is a socialist movement to tackle these
> problems, we are doomed. I am trying to pull together people
> internationally to apply Marxism creatively. I regret that you no longer
> find socialism attractive.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)

[PEN-L:3275] Re: BLS Daily Report

[William S. Lear]

Dave, any way you can turn off the Microsoft crud that always follows
the text?


Bill
On Thu, February 11, 1999 at 15:42:40 (-0500) Richardson_D writes:
>BLS DAILY REPORT, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1999:
>...

[PEN-L:3270] Back to the land

[Louis Proyect]

>great, then again we are in agreement. so why did you insist however
>many posts ago that the socialist revolution is about getting back to
>the land?   

Why did I write that socialist revolution is about getting back to the
land? Because in the countries I was writing about that was the key demand.
In France in 1968 and in Portugal during the anti-Salazarist revolt, the
issues were different. Marxism relates to objective conditions.

>when did you write this piece, btw?

Last year around this time. It was part of a series of articles on Marxism
and the American Indian that are on my webpage.

Louis Proyect

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

[PEN-L:3269] Back to the land

[Louis Proyect]

>no, not interested in discussing marxism?   didn't think so.  {{answer
>me this then: why are you moderating a marxism list?
>
>angela

There are many places where Marxism can be discussed, such as Doug's
LBO-Talk. The Marxism list is designed to facilitate Marxist analysis. This
is a sample of what people are discussing right now. I admit it is not
everbody's cup of tea, but we gobble it up.

=
Andy wrote,

"To take two examples. The creation of the proletariat in Europe, their
transformation to this from peasantry, is the moment of primitive
accumulation; they are driven from off the land and into the urban centers,
etc. Once the proletariat is formed, then they fall under the logic of
surplus-value. Same it true with the creation of chattel slavery  in the
Southern US and South America. The removal of people from Africa constitutes a
moment of primitive accumulation. Once chattel slavery is formed, Africans in
the Americas become labor under capitalism, and thus fall under logic of
surplus-value. Marx explains all of this in Capital; I have added nothing new
to his account."

In Europe, it was not just the removal of (many) peasants from land and
herding them into cities. Also required was the expropriation of tools
(capital), destroying the power of guilds. Journeymen may have been the
embryonic labor aristocracy, their expropriation and absorption having been
substantially less radical (because crafts had never been the independent
basis of class society) than the peasantry's. Then followed the political
revolutions that crushed the power of feudal rulers, while leaving their
relations of production intact in agriculture for additional centuries.

Ken Lawrence

Louis Proyect

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

[PEN-L:3273] Re: Biker buddy... sorta...

[William S. Lear]

On Thu, February 11, 1999 at 14:39:28 (EST) [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>[Biker buddy:]
>Marxism is nanny government at its worst. The individual freedoms we value so
>highly are not tolerated under Marxism, which is what compels so many people
>to want to live here rather than in Marxist (communist) countries such as
>Cuba, Red China and the former Soviet Union. Yet despite the obvious examples
>of the unworkability of socialism, there are still far too many advocates of
>that very system in positions of power and influence in this country today,
>and they are edging us ever closer to socialism with each legislative session.
>California has more than its share of them, as demonstrated by its two
>senators, Boxer and Feinstein, and too many members of its State Legislature,
>who continue to advocate helmet laws and gun bans along with the rest of the
>socialist agenda, irrespective of the U.S. Constitution and the principles
>upon which this country was founded. 

The "principles upon which this country was founded" were clearly
expressed by John Jay, one of the "Founding Fathers", who believed
"Those who own the country ought to govern it".  I presume your friend
thinks speed limits are also a socialist plot to rob our "individual
freedoms".

I don't have too much of a problem arguing against helmet laws.  My
take is that if a person does not hurt another person, then they are
free to hurt themselves and the state should not regulate that
behavior --- if it can be shown that not wearing helmets poses a
threat to others, no red-blooded American should protest efforts to
curb the harm.  My guess is that helmet laws and seat-belt laws were
done at the behest of insurance companies, not a cadre of
pajama-wearing socialists.

Your friend expresses an amazing amount of ignorance about US history.
Have him look into what laws were actually in place restricting our
freedoms, back in times of yore when the country was founded, and how
many of those laws were torn apart by those committed to progressive
ideals (which he seems to blithely confuse with socialism).

In any case, it's clear that to your friend "Marxism" and "socialism"
are merely imprecations, and we might as well substitute "Goat
Fucking" for the terms throughout his ignorant rant.

>I find it ironic that so many advocates of socialism, i.e., liberals, are
>themselves quite well off financially, having benefitted in major ways from
>opportunities for advancement which would not have existed had this been a
>socialist country. 

I find it ironic that so many advocates of capitalism can't be
bothered to read beyond their third-grade handouts, and can't see how
huge corporations guide the hand of government in this country, not
socialists --- if he can be bothered, have him read Tom Ferguson's
*Golden Rule*.  Last I checked, the majority of contributions to the
Feinstein campaign were not from the DSA or CPA, but from major
business firms.  If your friend wants to throw dirt, he better start
aiming some of it at Monsanto, Aetna, Disney, Boeing, Exxon-Mobil,
ADM, and others, who long ago abandoned the market and use the
protective arm of the nanny state to do their business for them.


Bill

[PEN-L:3280] Re: Biker buddy... sorta...

[Jim Devine]

Saith "Biker Buddy":>Marxism is nanny government at its worst. <

"Marxism" is not a form of government at all. It's a view (based on what
Marx wrote) of how history works under capitalism, a critique of that
system, and a tool for figuring out what to do about it. There are a lot of
different interpretations of what these three mean, so debates among
Marxists can be lively (or deadly). 

To the extent Marx wrote about what government should be, he was extremely
critical about autocracy and favored democratic government. He discussed
the possible "withering away of the state," which to me means that the
government would be totally subordinated to control by the people, so that
the current situation of government standing above people would be
abolished. The split between the people and the government would be abolished.

In his writings on the Paris Commune (more than 125 years ago), Marx gave
some indication of what kind of government he favored even before the
withering away happened. He developed these ideas not out of his head but
from workers' actual practice. There would be a single legislature that had
executive functions (a unicameral parliament), with all delegates being
subject to recall by their constituents. The pay of the delegates would be
limited, relative to that of the average worker. It should also be stressed
that this legislature would be dealing with "econonomic" issues, not simply
"political" issues. This would mean some sort of industrial democracy, as
with worker-controlled firms co-operating as part of a democratically
agreed-upon plan. 

But in the end, how the "Marxist" society would be organized would depend
on the democratic decisions of the working class and other oppressed groups
involved in the revolution (if and when it happens). Marxism is philosophy
of the collective self-liberation of the working classes. It does not
advocate the imposition of  preconceived notions of what socialism would be
onto people. 

>The individual freedoms we value so highly are not tolerated under
Marxism, which is what compels so many people to want to live here rather
than in Marxist (communist) countries such as Cuba, Red China and the
former Soviet Union. <

In the 20th century, some governments used "Marxist" language and slogans
as part of their efforts to get their countries out of poverty. Though
these societies were relatively egalitarian in terms of the distribution of
material goods to people, democracy was never their emphasis. Marx would
probably not recognize or approve of most of what has been done in his name
(just as Jesus wouldn't approve of most of what's been done in the name of
Christianity). 

These countries differed a lot from each other. China and the former USSR
were more authoritarian than Cuba, which is smaller and had greater popular
participation in the revolution. The small size of Cuba has also made it
hard to resist the constant attacks (including biological warfare) by the
US. Though many people left Cuba in the early 1960s simply because they
disagreed with the goals of the revolution there, the more recent exodus
has been the result of US attacks and the end of support from the USSR
(which US attacks had forced Cuba to rely on). 

To distinguish these societies from the kind of society that Marx
advocated, I would call them "bureaucratic socialist" (BS) because of the
importance of government and political-party bureaucracies in those
countries (and because it has a cute abbreviation). 

>Yet despite the obvious examples of the unworkability of socialism, there
are still far too many advocates of that very system in positions of power
and influence in this country today, and they are edging us ever closer to
socialism with each legislative session. <

As far as I know there is only one self-avowed socialist in the US congress
(Bernie Sanders). 

Biker Buddy is confusing "socialism" with "statism." Statism is the idea
that the state should play a larger role in running society. Statism can be
"conservative," as with those bluenoses who want to tell us what we can and
cannot do in our beds (and with whom). (That's the statism of the war
against drugs, too.) It can also be "liberal," as with technocrats who are
always proposing ways to promote or stabilize capitalism using government
programs. It is these statists that Biker Buddy seems to be talking about. 

Socialism can also be statist, as with the bureaucratic socialist societies
mentioned above. It can also be anti-statist and democratic, as with Marx. 

>California has more than its share of them, as demonstrated by its two
senators, Boxer and Feinstein, and too many members of its State
Legislature, who continue to advocate helmet laws and gun bans along with
the rest of the socialist agenda, irrespective of the U.S. Constitution and
the principles upon which this country was founded. < 

I read through the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO and couldn't find anything about
helmet laws. 

But seriously, folks, socialism

[PEN-L:3279] Re: fwd: Keynes queer birthing...

[Tom Walker]

This story isn't complete without mention of Ellsberg's "outing" of
subjective probability. Daniel Ellsberg (yes, that Daniel Ellsberg) wrote
his Harvard PhD dissertation on this question, of which a key section can be
found in the 1961 Quarterly Journal of Economics, "Risk, ambiguity and the
Savage axioms" (also anthologized in _Decision, Probability and Utility_,
Gardenfors and Sahlin, Cambridge, 1988.)

Since 1988, I have been announcing to the wind and anyone else who wanted to
listen that one can make a direct connection between Ellsberg's paradox of
decision making -- roughly the bureaucrats' creed that a conventional
failure is better than an unconventional success -- and his outing of the
closeted Pentagon Papers. Maybe formation of the "plumbers" to dig up dirt
on Ellsberg takes on a new dimension in light of the Keynes angle.


>--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
>Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 19:19:21 -0500
>From: Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Keynes queer birthing...
>Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Message-ID: 
>
>
>Anyone seen this before
>?
>
>Keynes' Queer Birthing of Bayesian Analysis
>
>As outlined by Dennis Lindley [1968], a genealogy of Bayesian analysis can
>be traced from Leonard Savage [1972, originally 1954] back to the notion of
>subjective probability developed by Frank Ramsey [1960, written 1926] who
>developed the intimate connection between subjective probability and
>preferences [see Anscombe and Aumann, 1963]. Ramsey was responding to and
>sharpening the initial formulation by Maynard Keynes [1943, originally
>1921]. A useful overview of literature on Keynes' work on subjective
>probability and of its broader implications in economics is given by
>Moggridge [1992, ch. 6], Blaug [1994, esp. p. 1208] and Bateman [1987].
>
>We see a close connection between Keynes' birthing of macroeconomics and of
>Bayesian analysis, following Jack Amariglio [1990, pp. 30-31], in noting
>Keynes' comment [1937, pp. 213-214] :
>
>By "uncertain" knowledge ... I do not mean merely to distinguish what is
>known for certain from what is only probable. ... The sense in which I am
>using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is
>uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest ... About these
>matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable
>probability whatever. We simply do not know. Nevertheless, the necessity
>for action and for decision compels us as practical men to do our best to
>overlook this awkward fact and to behave exactly as we should if we had
>behind us a good Benthamite calculation of a series of prospective
>advantages and disadvantages, each multiplied by its appropriate
>probability, waiting to be summed.
>
>This "awkward fact" that "there is no scientific basis on which to form any
>calculable probability" combined with "the necessity for action and for
>decision" can, I have argued [Cornwall, 1997], be resolved socially through
>the use of subjective probabilities which embody cognitive codes or
>languages and which are social - rather than individual -
>entities/constructions. This type of social evolution of codes for thinking
>and perceiving, cognitive codes, can also be related to Michel Foucault's
>épistémè [1972], Barbara Ponse's principle of consistency [1978], Jeffrey
>Escoffier's master code [1985], Sandra Bem's schema [1981], John R.
>Searle's Background [1990, 1992, 1995] and Judith Butler's linguistic norms
>[1993].
>
>Jeffrey Escoffier [1995] has argued that this heretical breach of the
>modernist credo can plausibly be argued to have been made by Keynes because
>he was attempting to create an ethical space for buggery in post religious
>ethics; i.e., to articulate an alternative to the then dominant modernist -
>and implicitly heterosexist - philosophical vogue which had been offered by
>his teacher and a leading English philosopher at that time, G. E. Moore,
>which, itself, was an attempt to find a nonreligious basis for ethics.
>
>Keynes [1921, pp. 309-310] is explicit in making the connection of his
>innovation of subjective probability to G. E. Moore and Moggridge [1992,
>ch. 5, esp. pp. 112-119] adds details for this claim. Escoffier [1995, p.
>28-34] notes that Moore's Principia Ethica "was implicitly based on a
>frequency interpretation of probability ... [and] [i]n his chapter on
>conduct Moore treated the statistical norms of social behavior as the basis
>of ethical norms. Keynes was intrigued by this 'curious connexion between
>'probable' and 'ought'.' Keynes's work on probability was an original
>exploration of the logic of making judgments about the probable
>consequences of human actions." Escoffier conjectures that "Keynes and
>[Lytton] Strachey were unable to accept Moore's reliance on customary
>morals and conventions because it would have led to the disapproval of
>t

[PEN-L:3265] fwd: [HAYEK-L:] H-WEB: R Hahnel on Roemer, Socialism & Hayek

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 13:05:57 EST
From: Hayek-L List Host <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [HAYEK-L:] H-WEB: R Hahnel on Roemer, Socialism & 
Hayek
Sender: Hayek Related Research 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply-To: Hayek Related Research 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


  >>   Hayek On The Web  <<--   Socialism  /  Roemer


Robin Hahnel, "A Review of _A Future For Socialism_
by John Roemer", on the web at:

  http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hahnel.htm

Hyperlink: http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hahnel.htm">A Review of
A Future For Socialism

>From the review:

"In the introduction, Roemer graciously surrenders, posthumously, for Oscar
Lange, the original proponent of managerial market socialism, to Friedreich
Hayek, the arch-conservative critic of market socialism: "Lange argued that
what economists now call neoclassical price theory showed the possibility of
combining central planning and the market, and Hayek retorted that planning
would subvert at its heart the mechanism that gave capitalism its vitality.
Hayek's criticisms of market socialism, and more recently those of Janos
Kornai, are for the most part on the mark."  No matter that Lange's model was,
essentially, a pure market model without anything resembling planning, much
less central planning.  No matter that Roemer's own model reduces to a minor
variation on Lange's model. I'm sure Lange along with Abba Lerner, Frederick
Taylor, and other proponents of managerial market socialism -- as well as all
who have objected to the tautological equation of efficiency and freedom with
free market exchange and private ownership preached by Hayek's disciples in
the ultra-conservative Austrian school of economics -- will appreciate that
Roemer has spared them the trouble and embarrassment of running up their own
white flag ,,,

It is fascinating how fast a tactical retreat urged on us by our academic
fellow travelers turns into a complete rout. In response to the collapse of
communism some self-styled radical economists at the Socialist Scholars
Conference in New York five years ago argued that market "rejectionism" should
be reconsidered, and perhaps markets could be a useful part of a socialist
economy provided they were properly "socialized," to use a phrase coined by
Diane Elson.  Now Roemer is congratulated by the likes of Samuel Bowles and
Erik Olin Wright for admitting that Lange was wrong and Hayek was right, for
pointing out that the only corrective needed to free market allocations is
indicative planning modeled on Japanese Keiretsu and MITI, German investment
banks, and investment planning in Taiwan, for over throwing capitalism by
making every citizen a capitalist -- everyone must play the coupon market
poker game and you can't even cash out--and for chastising socialists for
demonizing private ownership and fetishizing public ownership. Market
socialists have, indeed, "come a long way, baby."


Robin Hahnel, "A Review of _A Future For Socialism_ by John Roemer".
 _Z Magazine_.  http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hahnel.htm



Hayek On The Web is a regular feature of the Hayek-L list.
--- End Forwarded Message ---

[PEN-L:3264] fwd: [HAYEK-L:] H-WEB: R Hahnel on Publishing Under Participatory Democracy

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 13:11:34 EST
From: Hayek-L List Host <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [HAYEK-L:] H-WEB: R Hahnel on Publishing Under 
Participatory  Democracy
Sender: Hayek Related Research 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Reply-To: Hayek Related Research 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


>>  Hayek On The Web  <<--  Publishing Under Participatory Democracy


Robin Hahnel Answers Various Criticisms
of Participatory Economics relayed
to him from the LBO listserv by William S. Lear
on the web at:

  http://www.zmag.org/hahnelanwers.htm

>From the Answers:

"Justin Schwartz, discussing consumption requests, apparently believes that
all requests must be approved at a local level before being sent "upward" (my
term).  He seems to believe that if a person desires a good that others at the
local level do not want, it will be impossible for the person to purchase the
good.  He says "decisions about what is made have to be approved at the lower
levels before being aggregated and sent on several times  If my
preferences for the works of Hayek never get past the local level, they will
[not] be printed, and I will be unable to buy them with what I earn."  This
seems, to me, to confuse how consumption requests are made.  I was not aware
that particular consumption requests were approved, just the amount of
"effort-money" that you had earned.  Whether or not you get what you want
depends only on your request being within the limits of your effort and a
producer of the good you want able to supply it.

Bill correctly understands how consumption works.  One's local consumption
council [neighborhood or anonymous] can only disapprove a consumption request
if its social cost is greater than that warranted by the individual's effort
rating.  They cannot disapprove particular items.  If the request is not
anonymous they can provide feed back and advice about particular items, but
that is all.  But once individual request are approved via this process, it is
true that the local consumption council then sums the requests into an
aggregate request for individual consumption from all those in the council,
and forwards that aggregate on along with the average effort work effort
rating of the members of the local council.

Whether Hayek will get published in a participatory economy depends on whether
or not his work is approved for publication by the councils of writers and/or
university councils.  Of course they have to deal with consumer federations
who provide information on what and who people want to read.  Since this is an
issue that transcends economics, I also would recommend special provisions to
guarantee access to expression in the form of publication, radio, TV etc. for
new and minority views.  But once Hayek is in print, no council can keep
someone from ordering copies."


Robin Hahnel is co-author, with Michael Albert of the books, _Looking Forward:
Participatory Economics For The Twenty First Century_ and _The Political
Economy Of Participatory Economics_.


Hayek On The Web is a regular feature of the Hayek-L list.
--- End Forwarded Message ---

[PEN-L:3263] Back to the land

[Louis Proyect]

>how about this for a deal: you address your comments to my claims,
>like that marxism is neither a one-sided celebration of progress nor a
>demand for a retreat to the past, and then we can have a conversation.
>i know you don't want to be troubled with all that pomo rubbish, but
>waht about all that marxist rubbish?
>
>angela

You just don't seem to get it. I am not interested in philosophizing about
Marxism. That just goes around in circles and is a waste of my time.

As far as my attitude toward progress is concerned, I spent the better part
of five years recruiting engineers and programmers to work in Nicaragua and
Africa. The project that Ben Linder started, a small-scale hydroelectric
dam to supply elecricity to campesinos in northern Nicaragua, was completed
by Tecnica volunteers, the organization I was President of. I have been
trying, despite all sorts of odds, to launch a technical aid project for
American Indians, which would use the Blackfoot reservation as a pilot
project. I am not a neo-Luddite, nor a "back to nature" ideologist. I am a
Marxist, as this reply to Jerry Mander, Vandana Shiva's colleague, should
indicate:

In the chapter "Seven Negative Points About Computers," in "Absence of the
Sacred," Jerry Mander takes exception to the Canadian government's attempt
to provide computer training to Indians for the purpose of resource
management. Mander challenges the notion that trees, grizzly bears, water,
etc., are "resources." They are rather part of mother nature and Indians
should use traditional methods of keeping track of them, which is much more
intuitive than a computer can hope to achieve.

This is bad advice. The Indians of the United States are facing a
fundamental challenge with respect to resources like oil, coal, gas and
uranium. There is no "traditional" way of keeping track of them since
traditional society had no particular use for them. Meanwhile, there are
vicious, greedy corporations who want to avoid paying royalties to the
tribes, while polluting the water and soil on their land. How can one
prevent this? Clearly, this involves keeping accurate records of the
quantity of such resources and accounting exactly for royalties. There are
estimates that billions of dollars have been stolen from the Indian because
of shady bookkeeping practices by the government and the corporations. The
only way that this can be prevented is if Indians develop their own
expertise and know for sure what they own and how much it is worth.

Mander cites an article in the October 1984 issue of "Development Forum"
titled "Worshipping a False God," by Ken Darrow and Michael Saxenian. The
authors, who have been involved in developing small-scale technology in
third world countries, reject the use of computers. They do not think that
computers can provide low-cost communications and information processing
needs to primarily agrarian societies. This is "dangerous nonsense" and
Mander agrees with them. They say, "In a poor country, using a
microcomputer linked by satellite to an information system half-way round
the world...is absurd."

To the contrary, it is "dangerous nonsense" for indigenous peoples to avoid
using computers in this manner. Anybody who has been following the
Zapatista struggle for the past few years understands how crucial the
Internet has been. Not only has it served to educate people all around the
world about what these Mayan peoples are fighting for, it has also provided
an emergency response mechanism when the Mexican government has attempted
to repress the movement. Immediately after the massacre in Chiapas last
month that took the lives of 44 people, the Internet became a beehive of
activity as word circulated. Demonstrations, picket-lines and other forms
of protest forced the Mexican government to open up an investigation and
public awareness will surely make it more difficult to repress the movement
in the future.

Furthermore, the World Wide Web is replete with pages devoted to struggles
of land-based peoples all around the world, including the American Indian.
The information originates with the tribes themselves and provides an
accurate source of information in contrast to the misinformation contained
in the daily newspaper or television and radio. For somebody to tell
Indians not to use computers is not only arrogant, it is stupid.

Another big problem is that Mander oversimplifies the fight between the
Indian and the forces arrayed against him. The only sort of Indians that
Mander seems interested in are those who are completely untainted by the
outside world. If an Indian lives in a city or makes a living as a miner on
the reservation, Mander ignores him. He only pays attention to the "pure"
Indian who survives by hunting or fishing the way that he did a hundred or
a thousand years ago. Hence, he devotes an entire chapter to the Dene
Indians in Canada, who live in the Northwest Territories where the
traditional economy revolves around caribou hunting and ice fishing.

[PEN-L:3225] Re: students

[Hinrich Kuhls]

Michael Yates writes

>But it seems to me that capitalism has succeeded 
>rather well in preparing young people to believe just 
>about anything and not to know how to analyze anything.

and triggers a most interesting debate. It shows that the revolution in the
industrial methods of the society (gesellschaftliche Betriebsweise) which
is the necessary result of the revolution in the instruments of production
and which today is commonly known as the crisis of the post-Fordist society
does not leave out such "derived" sectors of the society as the educational
system.

I wonder whether there is any comprehensive book of relevance on the
Political Economy of Education in the US which combines studies on national
accounts, class analysis, economic and technological developments of the
last decades, and on the legislative and fiscal situation of the
educational system with more current results of research in the cognitive
process in the interacting system of learning and teaching.

Hinrich Kuhls

>>>

Marx on education (Capital volume 1, chapter 15, section 9 passim):

Factory legislation, that first conscious and methodical reaction of
society against the spontaneously developed form of the process of
production, is, as we have seen, just as much the necessary product of
modern industry as cotton yam, self-actors, and the electric telegraph.  (...)

Paltry as the education clauses of the Act appear on the whole, yet they
proclaim elementary education to be an indispensable condition to the
employment of children. [*] The success of those clauses proved for the
first time the possibility of combining education and gymnastics [**] with
manual labour, and, consequently, of combining manual labour with education
and gymnastics. The factory inspectors soon found out by questioning the
schoolmasters, that the factory children, although receiving only one half
the education of the regular day scholars, yet learnt quite as much and
often more. 

"This can be accounted for by the simple fact that, with only being at
school for one half of the day, they are always fresh, and nearly always
ready and willing to receive instruction. The system on which they work,
half manual labour, and half school, renders each employment a rest and a
relief to the other; consequently, both are far more congenial to the
child, than would be the case were he kept constantly at one. It is quite
clear that a boy who has been at school all the morning, cannot (in hot
weather particularly) cope with one who comes fresh and bright from his
work." [***] 

Further information on this point will be found in Senior's speech at the
Social Science Congress at Edinburgh in 1863. He there shows, amongst other
things, how the monotonous and uselessly long school hours of the children
of the upper and middle classes, uselessly add to the labour of the
teacher, "while he not only fruitlessly but absolutely injuriously, wastes
the time, health, and energy of the children." []

>From the Factory system budded, as Robert Owen has shown us in detail, the
germ of the education of the future, an education that will, in the case of
every child over a given age, combine productive labour with instruction
and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency
of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human
beings. (...)

One step already spontaneously taken towards effecting this revolution is
the establishment of technical and agricultural schools, and of "écoles
d'enseignement professionnel," in which the children of the working-men
receive some little instruction in technology and in the practical handling
of the various implements of labour. Though the Factory Act, that first and
meagre concession wrung from capital, is limited to combining elementary
education with work in the factory, there can be no doubt that when the
working-class comes into power, as inevitably it must, technical
instruction, both theoretical and practical, will take its proper place in
the working-class schools. There is also no doubt that such revolutionary
regents, the final result of which is the abolition of the old division of
labour, are diametrically opposed to the capitalistic form of production,
and to the economic status of the labourer corresponding to that form. But
the historical development of the antagonisms, immanent in a given form of
production, is the only way in which that form of production can be
dissolved and a new form established.  (...)

-

[*] According to the English Factory Act, parents cannot send their
children under 14 years of age into Factories under the control of the Act,
unless at the same time they allow them to receive elementary education.
The manufacturer is responsible for compliance with the Act. "Factory
education is compulsory, and it is a condition of labour." ("Rep. Insp.
Fact., 31st Oct., 1865," p. 111.)

[**] On the very advantageous results of combining gymnastics (and dril

[PEN-L:3260] fwd: Keynes queer birthing...

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 19:19:21 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Keynes queer birthing...
Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: POST-KEYNESIAN THOUGHT <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Anyone seen this before
?

Keynes' Queer Birthing of Bayesian Analysis

As outlined by Dennis Lindley [1968], a genealogy of Bayesian analysis can
be traced from Leonard Savage [1972, originally 1954] back to the notion of
subjective probability developed by Frank Ramsey [1960, written 1926] who
developed the intimate connection between subjective probability and
preferences [see Anscombe and Aumann, 1963]. Ramsey was responding to and
sharpening the initial formulation by Maynard Keynes [1943, originally
1921]. A useful overview of literature on Keynes' work on subjective
probability and of its broader implications in economics is given by
Moggridge [1992, ch. 6], Blaug [1994, esp. p. 1208] and Bateman [1987].

We see a close connection between Keynes' birthing of macroeconomics and of
Bayesian analysis, following Jack Amariglio [1990, pp. 30-31], in noting
Keynes' comment [1937, pp. 213-214] :

By "uncertain" knowledge ... I do not mean merely to distinguish what is
known for certain from what is only probable. ... The sense in which I am
using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is
uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest ... About these
matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable
probability whatever. We simply do not know. Nevertheless, the necessity
for action and for decision compels us as practical men to do our best to
overlook this awkward fact and to behave exactly as we should if we had
behind us a good Benthamite calculation of a series of prospective
advantages and disadvantages, each multiplied by its appropriate
probability, waiting to be summed.

This "awkward fact" that "there is no scientific basis on which to form any
calculable probability" combined with "the necessity for action and for
decision" can, I have argued [Cornwall, 1997], be resolved socially through
the use of subjective probabilities which embody cognitive codes or
languages and which are social - rather than individual -
entities/constructions. This type of social evolution of codes for thinking
and perceiving, cognitive codes, can also be related to Michel Foucault's
épistémè [1972], Barbara Ponse's principle of consistency [1978], Jeffrey
Escoffier's master code [1985], Sandra Bem's schema [1981], John R.
Searle's Background [1990, 1992, 1995] and Judith Butler's linguistic norms
[1993].

Jeffrey Escoffier [1995] has argued that this heretical breach of the
modernist credo can plausibly be argued to have been made by Keynes because
he was attempting to create an ethical space for buggery in post religious
ethics; i.e., to articulate an alternative to the then dominant modernist -
and implicitly heterosexist - philosophical vogue which had been offered by
his teacher and a leading English philosopher at that time, G. E. Moore,
which, itself, was an attempt to find a nonreligious basis for ethics.

Keynes [1921, pp. 309-310] is explicit in making the connection of his
innovation of subjective probability to G. E. Moore and Moggridge [1992,
ch. 5, esp. pp. 112-119] adds details for this claim. Escoffier [1995, p.
28-34] notes that Moore's Principia Ethica "was implicitly based on a
frequency interpretation of probability ... [and] [i]n his chapter on
conduct Moore treated the statistical norms of social behavior as the basis
of ethical norms. Keynes was intrigued by this 'curious connexion between
'probable' and 'ought'.' Keynes's work on probability was an original
exploration of the logic of making judgments about the probable
consequences of human actions." Escoffier conjectures that "Keynes and
[Lytton] Strachey were unable to accept Moore's reliance on customary
morals and conventions because it would have led to the disapproval of
their homosexuality".

Keynes as a student lecturing other students, members of the Apostles, at
Cambridge University shortly after the turn of the century in the midst of
the queer panic which dominated thinking in Britain following the trial of
Oscar Wilde, "repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and
traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the
term, immoralists." André Gide's elevation of this term had been printed 17
years before Keynes presented his autobiographical essay, "My early
beliefs," at the Memoir Club from which the preceding quote is taken
[Keynes, 1972]. Some sense of the intensity of the homophobia - the queer
panic - which grew out of the trial of Oscar Wilde and which dominated the
thinking of leading people like Bertrand Russell and D. H. Lawrence can be
gotten from Moggridge's [1992] Appendix 2 to ch. 5, pp. 136-140, especially
where Lawrence writes about a meeting w

Re: [PEN-L:3152] Aztecs or migration

[Anthony D'Costa]

There are all sorts of reasons for migration, not simply the lure of the
cities not simply to get away from oppressive rural conditions.
Capitalist agriculture is perhaps the most important factor for migration
in a typical developing country.  Population pressure, access to
education, rising incomes, industrialization are also contributory
factors.  Different parts of the world exhibit different rates of
migration and the pull and push factors vary as well.  South Asia remains
rural mostly compared to Lat Am.  Migrants in S Asia are mainly males
compared to Lat Am or parts of Africa.  Caste oppression could be evaded
by migration from a village but it is no guarantee that the urban
environment is any better.  The structure of domination for migrants is
often reproduced in the cities.  However, social mobility is relatively
greater with greater "freedom" from the rural oppression exercised by
landlord class and their political clients in the state apparatus.
Peasant societies still exist in the twenty-first century, different in
form because of capitalist agriculture, but many are outside the orbit of
capitalism.

For references:

SEE:  Gugler and Gilbert; Jeremy Seabrook.

Anthony P. D'Costa
Associate Professor
Comparative International Development
University of Washington
1900 Commerce Street
Tacoma, WA 98402, USA

Phone: (253) 692-4462
Fax :  (253) 692-5612

[PEN-L:3277] stop waiting

[Colin Danby]

Jerry:

Your solution exists at

http://csf.Colorado.EDU/mail/pen-l/feb99/date.html#start

where you can read Pen-L like a newspaper, picking out
the people you like and threads you find engaging.  Set
your mail to postpone.

Re "non-economists:" the participation of people unwarped
by professional training who post with seriousness &
thought is what makes the list interesting.

Best, Colin

[PEN-L:3258] Zizek

[Louis Proyect]

The Independent (London) 

June 21, 1998, Sunday 

Interview: Terrible old Stalinist with the answer to life, the universe and
everything; Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek is a darling of the intellectual
left and a brilliant commentator on pop culture. But the really important
thing about him is that he is terrifyingly hip in the way only a bearded
Eastern European intellectual can be. Prepare to name drop 

by Jenny Madden /Ben Seymour 

"GOD IS THE ultimate tamagochi!" Gleeful but sexy-sounding obscurity is
part of the job description for philosophers, especially ones with beards
who lecture on cinema and contemporary culture, so this and similarly
provocative pronouncements can have come as no surprise to Slavoj Zizek's
audience at the National Film Theatre last week. And since Britain is a bit
short on fashionable intellectuals, the black polo-neck wearing classes
were there in force to drink in the bearded Balkan's genre-scrambling
discussions. 

Not since post-modernism reached saturation point in the Eighties has
theory (as opposed to the practice of tunnel-digging and tree-house
building) been so fashionable. Youth and style magazines like Dazed and
Confused and The Idler are stuffed with lengthy interviews with
contemporary thinkers. But Zizek, recently voted "most entertaining
speaker" by London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, is a rather different
experience from the laid-back and frankly impenetrable intellectual stars
of the Seventies and Eighties like Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida.
His manic monologues, drawing on all aspects of culture from the operas of
Wagner to the films of Jim Carrey, leave his fans in a state of excitement
rarely associated with the world of philosophy. With his thick Slovenian
accent and wonderfully Freudian speech impediment he sounds like a
turbocharged Eastern European vacuum cleaner, sucking the debris of modern
life into his hyperactive brain. 

Finding "Adorno" next to "Alvin Stardust" in the index of yet another
trendy treatise from post-modern academia has long provided students with
harmless pleasure. The difference with Zizek is that his cultural
ecleticism is bent to serious political purpose. Colin McCabe, head of
research at the British Film Institute in London and himself one of the
most influential writers on film and theory in this country, is overflowing
with enthusiasm for the radical Slovenian philosopher: "What makes him so
important is his ability to relate the most abstract theoretical language
to the most concrete political facts. He uses contemporary films like
Breaking the Waves and Leaving Las Vegas as a way of meditating on
contemporary emotional and sexual relationships and manages to decode Lacan
in the process. With his specific East European perspective, and
unapologetic development of the ideas of Freud and Marx, Zizek is doing
what no one else has done. He makes theory interesting and important again." 

Born in 1949, Zizek studied philosophy at the University of Ljubljana
during the years of Communism and then immersed himself in the teachings of
the infamous and influential psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in Paris. Back in
Slovenia he was politically active in the alternative movement during the
Eighties, and later ran for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia in
the country's first multi-party elections. His English language conquest of
the realms of film, politics and popular culture really began in the early
Nineties, when he edited the seminal Everything You Always Wanted to Know
About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Since then, he has produced
eight more books, dozens of articles and been translated into twelve
languages - all while holding down his day job as senior researcher at the
Institute of Social Studies in his home town. His next, The Ticklish
Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, will consolidate his
assault on the foundations of contemporary political thought. 

Urgency, bordering on emergency, best describes Zizek's approach to
philosophising. After a three-hour phone interview he is willing to talk in
stream of consciousness mode for another two hours, "as long as I don't
collapse". It's no surprise to find the superheated Zizek has recently been
the victim of panic attacks. De Beauvoir to his Sartre, Zizek's wife Renata
Salecl (herself an impressively eclectic cultural theorist) recently stood
in for her beleaguered husband at a conference on feminism and
psychoanalysis. While they have collaborated on the cosy-sounding title
Gaze and Voice as Love Object, being married to Zizek could be a full-time
job in its own right. 

Impatient of his own frailty, Zizek rages against the trend to medicalise
complex human emotions and is one of the few intellectuals prepared to
speak out against the reduction of the psychological to the biological. On
the delicate subject of the new impotence- curing wonder drug, Zizek (who
habitually speaks in lecture-room mode) declares: "Does not changing
erect

[PEN-L:3256] re: Jerry Levy

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

michael,
 re: Jerry Levy.
 Give the pathetic sucker another chance.
Barkley Rosser

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:3255] Re: Re: Re: Back to the land

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

 Uh oh.  I never thought that I would say that we would 
need that Sendero spokesman, Adolpho Olaechea on pen-l.  
But, speaking for him in his absence, I would note that 
there is a large difference between what they propose and 
what was carried out by the Khmer Rouge.  Conflating the 
two in such a manner is quite misleading.
Barkley Rosser
On Fri, 12 Feb 1999 02:50:37 +1100 rc-am 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> 
> 
> This is a gross distortion of what Marxism stands for. The Khmer
> >Rouge were not Marxists, they were a virulent strain of middle-class
> >radicalism that turned against its own social roots. They wanted to
> "purge"
> >Cambodian society and took people like Doug Henwood and forced them
> to
> >leave Pnomh Penh at the point of a gun. It was a nightmare version of
> the
> >Cultural Revolution.
> 
> absolutely the case.  so we agree.
> 
> 
> 
> >To frame this in terms of the Khmer Rouge is completely outrageous
> and stupid.
> 
> 
> but, i did not frame this as such.  it has already been framed as such
> by the khmer rouge and by shining path.  my comments go to the
> question of how exactly you would distinguish your version of 'back to
> the land' from these historical experiences of it.  that is to say,
> how exactly can you be sure that this is not simply a version of a
> middle-class radicalism turned against its roots through the longing
> for an idealised version of what 'the land' (or at least peasant
> cultures) are?
> 
> angela
> 

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:3262] Schooling: Montessori and Dewey

[William S. Lear]

I was told that John Dewey was a harsh critic of Maria Montessori, I
think during the 50s or thereabouts.  Anyone know of this?  Anyone
have opinions on Montessori schools (I went to one when I was young,
and my wife and I are considering putting our son in one).


Bill

[PEN-L:3254] Re: Back to the land

[Rosser Jr, John Barkley]

Louis,
 Yeah, but does Betty Boop have a lesbian phallus?
Barkley Rosser
On Thu, 11 Feb 1999 12:06:49 -0500 Louis Proyect 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Angela:
> >not at all.  i was asking how you would distinguish your yearning from
> >their's.  both of which, as zizek notes, echoing marx, are dreams of
> >the past from the position of the present.  idealisations - in short,
> >a kind of reverse utopianism, in the sense in which marx spoke of it:
> >as idealisation, one-sided dreaming.  
> 
> I haven't yearned for anything since a new Scwinn bicycle, which was back
> in 1957. For christs sake, can't you and Doug stop thinking in
> philosophical/psychological terms for five minutes? I am a prosaic,
> plodding, history-oriented moldy old Marxist fig who sees things in terms
> that can be quantified. Like how many acres a peasant got. Like how many
> children die of malnutrition. Like the literacy rate. Why don't we strike a
> compromise. You lace your posts with some historical or economic facts and
> I'll try to throw in some empty rhetoric in mine. How's this:
> 
> The bifurcation of the subject in post-Fordist society reflects the
> Lacanian dispostion toward a quasi-material psychoanalytic rebellion
> against the reconstituted ego. The penile rejection of virtual commodities,
> by the same token, is the dialectical obverse of the uterine search for the
> Holderlin.
> 
> Louis Proyect
> 
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
> 

-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:3272] Re: re: Jerry Levy

[Michael Perelman]

Please, I do not think that we need to dump on Jerry.  Hopefully, he
will decide to come back and participate constructively.

Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote:

> michael,
>  re: Jerry Levy.
>  Give the pathetic sucker another chance.
> Barkley Rosser
>
> --
> Rosser Jr, John Barkley
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]



--

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

[PEN-L:3251] Back to the land

[Louis Proyect]

Angela:
>not at all.  i was asking how you would distinguish your yearning from
>their's.  both of which, as zizek notes, echoing marx, are dreams of
>the past from the position of the present.  idealisations - in short,
>a kind of reverse utopianism, in the sense in which marx spoke of it:
>as idealisation, one-sided dreaming.  

I haven't yearned for anything since a new Scwinn bicycle, which was back
in 1957. For christs sake, can't you and Doug stop thinking in
philosophical/psychological terms for five minutes? I am a prosaic,
plodding, history-oriented moldy old Marxist fig who sees things in terms
that can be quantified. Like how many acres a peasant got. Like how many
children die of malnutrition. Like the literacy rate. Why don't we strike a
compromise. You lace your posts with some historical or economic facts and
I'll try to throw in some empty rhetoric in mine. How's this:

The bifurcation of the subject in post-Fordist society reflects the
Lacanian dispostion toward a quasi-material psychoanalytic rebellion
against the reconstituted ego. The penile rejection of virtual commodities,
by the same token, is the dialectical obverse of the uterine search for the
Holderlin.

Louis Proyect

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

[PEN-L:3249] Re: Back to the land

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>It depresses me to see Doug citing such overinflated, academic jargon. It
>would be the same thing as seeing Jeff St. Clair quoting  Heidegger in
>order to explain deforestration in the Pacific Northwest.

Oh, right, I meant to say this: Jeff tells me he's bored & frustrated with
politics and he's mainly been reading Elizabethan poetry.

And that's all for now. Really.

Doug

[PEN-L:3247] Re: Back to the land

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>This epitomizes the difference between Doug and me. He cites Zizek the
>philosopher, whose prose is devoid of the all-important "who", "what",
>"where", "when" and "how". It is utterly sterile.

Sterile? I read it as going a long way towards explaining the appeal of
idealized peasant revolutions to alienated intellectuals living in the
First World. And on that note, I'm going to retreat from this battle and go
silent for a while.

Doug

[PEN-L:3246] Back to the land

[Louis Proyect]

>from Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With The Negative:
>
>This antagonistic splitting opens up the field for the Khmer Rouge, Sendero
>Luminoso, and other similar movements which seem to personify radical Evil"
>in today's politics: if "fundamentalism" functions as a kind of negative
>judgment" on liberal capitalism, as an inherent negation of the
>universalist claim of liberal capitalism, then movements such as Sendero
>Luminoso enact an "infinite judgment" on it. In his Philosophy of Right,
>Hegel conceives of the "rabble" (Pöbel) as a necessary product of the
>modern society: a nonintegrated segment in the legal order, prevented from
>partaking of its benefits, and for this very reason delivered from any
>responsibilities toward it -a necessary structural surplus excluded from
>the closed circuit of social edifice.

This epitomizes the difference between Doug and me. He cites Zizek the
philosopher, whose prose is devoid of the all-important "who", "what",
"where", "when" and "how". It is utterly sterile. The only approach to
understanding what happened in Cambodia or Peru is one rooted in history.
As I already pointed out to Angela, postmodernism's worst sin is that it
subverts all attempts to put things into some kind of historical context.
It depresses me to see Doug citing such overinflated, academic jargon. It
would be the same thing as seeing Jeff St. Clair quoting  Heidegger in
order to explain deforestration in the Pacific Northwest.

Louis Proyect

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

[PEN-L:3268] Re: Schooling: Montessori and Dewey

[Peter Dorman]

I know only the brief discussion in Alan Ryan's biography of Dewey. 
Dewey regarded the Montessori approach as authoritarian and limiting. 
They had fundamentally different notions of what "socialization" ought
to mean.  For Montessori it meant (and here I'm getting this from Dewey
via Ryan) the inculcation of cooperative and self-constrained behaviors,
for Dewey the ability to create and explore collectively via play and
sympathetic communication.  Another way of putting it is that Dewey felt
that Montessori was preparing working class kids for a successful
working class future, whereas Dewey thought that all children should be
educated to thrive in the radically democratic world he envisioned. The
big selling point of Montessori schools has always been how picked up
they are; I would imagine that Dewey would tolerate a lot more
messiness.  (But I'm biased because I don't pick up after myself very
well either.)

Peter Dorman

"William S. Lear" wrote:
> 
> I was told that John Dewey was a harsh critic of Maria Montessori, I
> think during the 50s or thereabouts.  Anyone know of this?  Anyone
> have opinions on Montessori schools (I went to one when I was young,
> and my wife and I are considering putting our son in one).
> 
> Bill

[PEN-L:3245] Re: Marx and imperialism

[PJM0930]

In a message dated 2/11/1999 9:16:19 AM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
writes:

<< Paul Meyer:
 >This is a fairly selective rendering of history. By the 1870's was up to his
 >neck in involvement with mass worker's movements and parties in the
 >industrializing
 >world.
 
 No, it is not a "fairly selective" rendering of history. Teodor Shanin
 characterizes Marx's interest in Russia as directly related to his
 pessimism about near or intermediate term possibilities for revolution in
 Western Europe, which was already in the opening stages of imperialism.
 >From Lenin's "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism," written in 1916:
  >>
 
Alright, it is not a selective interpretation of Marx, but rather an
ideological one.
Marx's despair about the coming revolution in Europe was not a rejection of
the important
role capitalist modernization would play so much as a recognition that many
parts of
Europe, including Germany, were not modernizing quickly enough.

In any case,  the issue of scarcity can't be overlooked, no matter how many
quotations
one wants to marshall for evidence. Lenin recognized the problem himself and
thought
that it was a European-wide revolution that would save Russia from its
poverty.  

Marx's entire intellectual legacy comes tumbling down if something as central
as the
relation between material advancement and the prospect for socialism is so
easily ignored.  At that point he has no value as a social scientist, only as
a cult leader.

-Paul Meyer


come

[PEN-L:3241] Re: Back to the land

[Doug Henwood]

Louis Proyect wrote:

>>  Agree for the most part, Lou, but what do you think of the Shining
>>Path?
>>
>>  John Lacny
>
>There has been an abysmal failure on the part of mainstream Marxism in the
>United States to engage with Peruvian Maoism on its own terms.

from Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With The Negative:

This antagonistic splitting opens up the field for the Khmer Rouge, Sendero
Luminoso, and other similar movements which seem to personify radical Evil"
in today's politics: if "fundamentalism" functions as a kind of negative
judgment" on liberal capitalism, as an inherent negation of the
universalist claim of liberal capitalism, then movements such as Sendero
Luminoso enact an "infinite judgment" on it. In his Philosophy of Right,
Hegel conceives of the "rabble" (Pöbel) as a necessary product of the
modern society: a nonintegrated segment in the legal order, prevented from
partaking of its benefits, and for this very reason delivered from any
responsibilities toward it -a necessary structural surplus excluded from
the closed circuit of social edifice. It seems that only today, with the
advent of late capitalism, has this notion of "rabble" achieved its
adequate realization in social reality, through political forces which
paradoxically unite the most radical indigenist antimodernism (the refusal
of everything that defines modernity: market, money, individualism ... )
with the eminently modern project of effacing the entire symbolic tradition
and beginning from a zeropoint (in the case of Khmer Rouge, this meant
abolishing the entire system of education and killing intellectuals). What,
precisely, constitutes the "shining path" of the Senderistas if not the
idea to reinscribe the construction of socialism within the frame of the
return to the ancient Inca empire? The result of this desperate endeavor to
surmount the antagonism between tradition and modernity is a double
negation: a radically anticapitalist movement (the refusal of integration
into the world market) coupled with a systematic dissolution of all
traditional hierarchical social links, beginning with the family (at the
level of "micro-power," the Khmer Rouge regime functioned as an
"anti-Oedipal" regime in its purest, i.e., as the "dictature of
adolescents," instigating them to denounce their parents). The truth
articulated in the paradox of this double negation is that capitalism
cannot reproduce itself without the support of precapitalist forms of
social links. in other words, far from presenting a case of exotic
barbarism, the "radical Evil" of the Khmer Rouge and the Senderistas is
conceivable only against the background of the constitutive antagonism of
today's capitalism. There is more than a contingent idiosyncrasy in the
fact that, in both cases, the leader of the movement is an intellectual
well skilled in the subtleties of Western culture. (Prior to becoming a
revolutionary, Pol Pot was a professor at a French lycée in Phnom Penh,
known for his subtle readings of Rimbaud and Mallarmé Abimael Guzman,
"presidente Gonzalo," the leader of the Senderistas, is a philosophy
professor whose preferred authors are Hegel and Heidegger and whose
doctoral thesis was on Kant's theory of space.) For this reason, it is too
simple to conceive of these movements as the last embodiment of the
millenarist radicalism which structures social space as the exclusive
antagonism between "us" and "them," allowing for no possible forms of
mediation; instead, these movements represent a desperate attempt to avoid
the imbalance constitutive of capitalism without seeking support in some
previous tradition supposed to enable us mastery of this imbalance (the
Islamic fundamentalism which remains within this logic is for that reason
ultimately a perverted instrument of modernization). in other words, behind
Sendero Luminoso's endeavor to erase an entire tradition and to begin from
the zero-point in an act of creative sublimation, there is the correct
insight into the complementary relationship of modernity and tradition: any
true return to tradition is today a priori impossible, its role is simply
to serve as a shock-absorber for the process of modernization.

The Khmer Rouge and the Senderistas therefore function as a kind of
"infinite judgment" on late capitalism in the precise Kantian sense of the
term: they are to be located in a third domain beyond the inherent
antagonism that defines the late-capitalist dynamic (the antagonism between
the modernist drive and the fundamentalist backlash), since they radically
reject both poles of the opposition. As such, they are-to put it in
Hegelese an integral part of the notion of late capitalism: if one wants to
comprise capitalism as a world-system, one must take into account its
inherent negation, the "fundamentalism," as well as its absolute negation,
the infinite judgment on it.

[PEN-L:3242] 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_01BE55D9.E4E4A7B0

BLS DAILY REPORT, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10,1999

RELEASED TODAY:  All measures of major work stoppage activity rose in 1998,
although they were low by historical standards, BLS reported. Thirty-four
major work stoppages began during 1998, idling 387,000 workers and resulting
in 5.1 million work days of idleness (about 2 out of every 10,000 available
work days). Comparable figures for 1997 were 29 stoppages, 339,000 workers
idled, and 4.5 million days of idleness. The data, which date back to 1947,
covers strikes and lockouts involving 1,000 workers or more and lasting at
least one shift. ...  

__Productivity in the nation's nonfarm business sector surged by 3.7 percent
in the fourth quarter, bringing 1998's gain to 2.2 percent, BLS reported.
Output grew a rapid 6.8 percent in the quarter, while hours worked increased
3 percent. The unusually large output advance caused unit labor costs to
decline 0.2 percent. For 1998, output rose 4.6 percent and hours increased
2.4 percent. ...  Hourly compensation rose 3.5 percent in the nonfarm
business sector in the fourth quarter.  Real, or inflation adjusted, hourly
compensation rose 1.5 percent in the quarter, after a 2.1 percent increase
in the third.  For 1998, hourly compensation rose 4.2 percent, compared with
a 3.5 percent increase in 1997.  Real hourly compensation advanced 2.6
percent in 1998, after a 1.2 percent 1997 gain. ...  (Daily Labor Report,
page D-1).
__Productivity of American workers surged in 1998, offering another hint
that the U.S. may be breaking out of a 25-year slump. ...  (Alejandro
Bodipo-Memba in Wall Street Journal, page A2).
__The nation's productivity rose in the fourth quarter at an annual rate of
3.7 percent, giving the United States three years of robust improvement in
labor efficiency, and suggesting that corporate America might indeed have
become slightly more efficient after years of trying unsuccessfully to
improve. ...  Some economists say that computers are finally producing their
promised efficiencies.  But most experts say that strong demand in a
prosperous economy has forced companies to squeeze more production from
their workers, often by running equipment at full capacity.  Chance also
plays a role.  Productivity is really the dollar value of all merchandise
and services produced, divided by the number of worker hours needed to
produce it.  The dollar value is adjusted for inflation, and since 1995
changes made by the Labor Department to render the CPI more accurate have
automatically increased the dollar value of merchandise and services, thus
helping to raise the productivity rate. ...  "It is not clear whether we are
experiencing a long-lasting structural improvement," said Edwin Dean, chief
of productivity data at BLS, "or simply an increase in productivity that
could disappear when the economy slows down." ...  (Louis Uchitelle in New
York Times, page C1).
__Strong economic growth last year gave a healthy boost to labor
productivity, allowing firms to give their workers solid pay increases while
raising the prices of what they produced only slightly, BLS reported
yesterday. Gains in productivity--the amount of goods and services produced
for each hour worked-- are a key ingredient in raising the nation's living
standards. For example, last year businesses other than farms increased
their workers' compensation 4.2 percent while raising the prices they
charged only 0.7 percent. The companies could do that without clobbering
their profits because productivity gains offset 2.2 percentage points of
that difference. And other cost-saving actions reduced non-labor costs by
1.4 percent on each unit of output. The overall result was a combination
that's hard to beat. The firms eked out a small increase in profit on each
unit sold, workers' real pay went up 2.6 percent faster than consumer
prices, and inflation went down. ...  (John M. Berry in "Trendlines,"
Washington Post, page E1).

The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond posted its monthly survey of regional
manufacturing on its Web site about half an hour before the scheduled 10
a.m. release time.  It was the third time in three months a sensitive piece
of economic data was prematurely released on the Internet ("Digest,"
Washington Post, page E3).

Health care costs across all plan types are on the upswing, fueled by the
significant, double-digit increases in prescription drug costs, but
employers have not started en masse to monitor health plan performance as a
means to control costs, new surveys suggest.  Respondents to the 1998
Employer Survey on Managed Care, conducted by the Integrated Health Group of
Deloitte & Touche LLP, said they expected premiums to increase by 8.7
percent in 1999, up from the average 7 percent increase they saw in 1998.
  Prescription drug costs are expected to increase

[PEN-L:3243] Back to the land

[Louis Proyect]

Angela:
>but, i did not frame this as such.  it has already been framed as such
>by the khmer rouge and by shining path. 

Please don't confuse these 2 groups.

> my comments go to the
>question of how exactly you would distinguish your version of 'back to
>the land' from these historical experiences of it.  that is to say,
>how exactly can you be sure that this is not simply a version of a
>middle-class radicalism turned against its roots through the longing
>for an idealised version of what 'the land' (or at least peasant
>cultures) are?

Do you want a detailed plan of not only how socialist revolutions will take
place, but a guarantee that they will not turn sour? You will not get this
from me or any other Marxist. I urge you to spend less time immersed in all
that trendy cultural studies nonsense and read some history. The Cuban and
Nicaraguan revolutions did not turn sour. What happened in Nicaragua is
that US imperialism did not allow it to become another Cuba. If Nicaragua
had been left in peace, it would have improved the FMLN and Guerrilla Army
of the Poor's chances to succeed in El Salvador and Guatemala. Three
developing socialist republics in Central America would have had a
destabilizing influence on Mexico to the north and Colombia to the south.
Falling dominos Central America style. That is why Reagan fought so hard
against the "Vietnam syndrome."

One of the biggest problems with viewing things ahistorically--which is the
most bitter fruit that postmodernism has bestowed upon us--is that the
revolutionary project is not seen through a Marxist prism, but through a
Nietzschean or Foucauldian one. The problem becomes one of how power
corrupts in a philosophical sense, rather than one of how particular
revolutions fell victim to historical conjunctural relationships of forces
between the workers and the ruling class. That is why some analysts
describe postmodernism as a retooled version of the anticommunist critique
first developed by Daniel Bell in the "End of Ideology".

Although this passage has been quoted a million times to illustrate the
problem revolutionaries face, it is always good to hear it one more time:

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they
do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances
existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all
dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living. And just
as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things,
creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of
revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to
their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in
order to present this new scene in world history in this time-honored
disguise and this borrowed language." 

Karl Marx, 18th Brumaire

Louis Proyect

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

[PEN-L:3261] Re: Ernest Mandel on long waves

[Jim Devine]

Paul Phillips writes:
>I too have great reservations about the technology theories -- in part 
>because the attempts to test them empirically have not proven very 
>successful, and, in the case of Schumpeter, there is no concept of 
>swings or stages and the initial innovation is exogenous to the 
>system. 

right.

>I have a copy of your depression paper and have used it but I don't 
>see that it negates the swing interpretation.  

It doesn't negate the swing interpretation as much as provide and apply an
alternative framework. (To recap: I interpret the history of the 20th
century -- including the 1930s Collapse -- in terms of aggressive
accumulation causing overinvestment crises that appear in different forms
depending on the institutional framework that exists at the time. Some of
institutional framework part gets close to long-wave thinking, in that one
can point to alternation of labor-abundant and labor-scarce periods, but I
don't see how bringing in "swings" helps in any way. On the other hand, I
can't see the international environment of capitalist nations struggling
for (and sometimes winning) hegemony as behaving in a swing-like manner.
Goldstein's book on long cycles treats the hegemony stages as complementary
to long swings, rather than reducing those stages to those swings.) 

>Nor am I convinced by 
>the Glick/Brenner criticism though I haven't looked at that stuff 
>recently.  Further, the French Regulation school involves a number 
>of writers, all of whom are not on the same wave length.  

 as it were. 

>But what I 
>appreciate is their dialectic approach between accumulation 
>variables and institutional and power variables, something which is 
>also core to the SSA approach.  

I also apply a dialectical perspective on these issues, though I put a much
larger emphasis on the aggressiveness of capitalist accumulation, and how
it progressively undermines even its own status quo. I think that its
theoretical absence of this aggressiveness is a problem for both Regulation
and SSA thought.

>Boyer has some very interesting 
>and complex analysis that is very useful for heuristic purposes -- 
>students find it extremely interesting as a way of seeing the 
>processes of capitalism.  I find it particularly useful in teaching 
>economic history because students can understand a 'system' of 
>accumulation and the  relation with the state, labour, the farmers' 
>movement, imperialism, etc.  And, they can also understand the 
>contradictions that produce the depression, war and the rise of 
>Fordism etc.  In short, long swings give structure to periods of 
>economic history, periods of capitalist development.  

I have used various stage and swing frameworks in teaching, including Louis
Hacker's (not Proyect's) scheme from his TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM. As
far as pedagogy is concerned, I usually don't concentrate on debates among
leftists, so that most schemata will do, especially as I reinterpret them. 

But in terms of understanding the world, however, I have problems with much
that has come out of the Regulation approach. Glick and Brenner's critique,
which is empirical, is relevant here. Also, Regulation-influenced books
like WHO BUILT AMERICA? volume II of the American Social History Project
overemphasize ideas such as "welfare capitalism" in the 1920s, where the
bosses controlled labor in a paternalistic way but provided all sorts of
non-wage benefits. The research I've seen indicates that this was true of a
relatively small percentage of corporations. Most companies took advantage
of labor's weakness to drive workers to produce surplus-value in the
old-fashioned way, with none of the paternalism.

>And, despite 
>all, the swings are there in the statistics so how else do you 
>interpret them?

I've found that if one starts with the prior conviction that swings appear
in the data, one finds them. If one doesn't, one doesn't find them.
Further, the main evidence for K-waves concerns prices, not real variables. 

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

[PEN-L:3237] Re: Re: students

[Michael Yates]

Ellen,

Thanks for the comments.  In a poll I saw in USA Today (I don't buy this
paper because of the strike, but it was on a table in the coffee shop),
teenagers in 7th through 12th grade gave these answers to the question:
what societal groups are most responsible for today's problems?:

Girls: federal gov't leaders: 56%
   entertainment media: 51%
   news media: 49%
   racial minorities: 36%

Boys:  federal gov't leaders: 59%
   news media: 49%
   gays/lesbians: 43%
   racial minorities: 40%

A little frightening?

michael yates 

Ellen Frank wrote:
> 
> Until recently, I taught at a community college just outside of Boston,
> where I encountered much of the same frustrations as Michael Yates.
> I, and all my colleagues, tried every sort of pedagogical innovation that
> came down the
> pike -- daily quizzes, group-based learning, discovery learning, field
> trips, movies, guest
> lectures.  I gave only take-home assignments, encouraged study groups and
> spent a considerable portion
> of class time having students work in groups.
> 
> Nevertheless, we encountered a hard-core of young recent high-school grads
> - probably a third of
> our student body - whose ignorance and alienation were profound.  They
> knew nothing about
> current events, save what they picked up from Howard Stern, Jerry Springer
> and the 30-seconds-on-the-half-hour
> news updates on KISS 107.  Teachers, no matter how cool, hip or caring,
> intimidated them, and they fought back with pointless and self-defeating
> acts of mini-rebellion, like giggling over last night's debauchery when
> they were supposed to be figuring out how a new construction ban would
> impact rents.  Many of them could barely write and had great difficulty
> reading anything more challenging than a junk-novel, a fact of which they
> were ashamed.
> 
> I have to say that I hated teaching these students.  I was also shocked
> that people, apparently, can make it through 12 years of public schooling
> with no knowledge of the world, no experience of abstract critical
> thought, not to mention limited skills in basic math and english.  The
> good news, however, is that these students were, in our college,
> surrounded by people just like themselves, only 10-20 years older and
> wiser.  Its amazing what lessons one learns after 10 years of shit jobs in
> dead-end industries.  I often advised the young students against
> continuing college.  I suggested they drop out, work for a while and come
> back when life had knocked them around a bit.  Then they'd be ready to get
> serious.
> 
> Ellen Frank
> 
>

[PEN-L:3236] Back to the land

[Louis Proyect]

>   Agree for the most part, Lou, but what do you think of the Shining
>Path?
>
>   John Lacny

There has been an abysmal failure on the part of mainstream Marxism in the
United States to engage with Peruvian Maoism on its own terms. Journals
like the Monthly Review and NACLA have written about the human rights
aspect of the struggle, while paying scant attention to the underlying
theoretical issues. We sometimes forget that the Shining Path is in a war
with the Peruvian state and not the American left and its allies in Peru.
We should not sweep these issues under the rug, but neither should we
neglect the Maoist analysis of the Peruvian class struggle. Since these
ideas have won the allegiance of massive numbers of the most exploited and
oppressed peoples on the continent, they are certainly worth a closer look.
It is my goal in this post to do exactly that.

The social base of the guerrillas is primarily Quechuan Indian, but the
Maoist leadership of the Peruvian Communist Party has tended to discount
this aspect of the struggle. It does, however, identify the agrarian crisis
as key to the Peruvian revolution. This problem implicitly addresses Indian
needs, since land hunger has been the primary social contradiction of
Peruvian society for the past 400 years.

The Communist Party of Peru--dubbed the "Shining Path" (Sendero Luminoso)
by the bourgeois press and its leftist opponents--got its start in the
1960s. Anibal Guzman, a philosophy professor at the University of Ayacucho,
decided to construct a new revolutionary movement in Peru, one that
combined the ideas of Mao Tse-tung and José Carlos Mariátegui. From Maoism
it would draw upon the strategy of "People's War," that envisioned
encircling the cities from the countryside. From Mariátegui it adopted the
analysis of Peru as a country that was in the grips of semi-feudal
relations. While it was nominally a modern bourgeois democracy, it still
had failed to achieve genuine national independence and land reform, the
hallmarks of the class bourgeois-democratic revolution.

The leftist opponents of the PCP accused it of being trapped in a
time-warp. While it was true that Peru had suffered from latifundism in the
1920s, there had been significant changes over the half-century. Most
importantly, the leftist military dictatorship of General Velasco had
pushed through an ambitious land reform program in the 1960s that seemed to
have broken the back of the old landed estates.

We find such support of the Velasco reforms in the preface to "The Break-up
of the Old Order." This is a section in the "Peru Reader." Orin Starn,
Carlos Iván Degregori and Robin Kirk, three leading "Senderologists," put
together this very worthwhile collection of articles. A Senderologist is an
academic expert on the Shining Path insurgency, who is also a political
opponent. Such experts have largely shaped our understanding of the
Peruvian insurgency in the pages of NACLA. This would be analogous to
understanding the Sandinista movement from the hostile articles written by
people like Paul Berman in the 1980s. If you read Berman's articles in the
Village Voice, you would get the impression that the FSLN had no other
agenda except to censor La Prensa and harass Cardinal Obando Y Bravo.

That the title of the section is "The Break-up of the Old Order" should
give you some sense of the critical support the "Senderologists" had toward
Velasco. In 1963 a coalition of Popular Action and Christian Democrats won
the election in Peru. The social base of this coalition was urban
professionals who had a strong affinity with the USA and the Alliance for
Progress, which would supposedly modernize Peru. The losers in the election
were the old-line Creole elites who were the main target of Mariátegui's
attacks. This section of the ruling class had roots in the guano and
nitrates fortunes made in the 18th and 19th centuries, and also in the
latifundios. Certainly we could describe this section of the ruling class
as semi-feudal. Was its loss of power a "break-up of the old order?"

Social tensions unleashed by the new government's first attempts at reform
prompted a military coup led by General Juan Velasco. To everybody's
surprise the Velasco government threw its weight behind the new reforms. It
nationalized the oil wells of the International Petroleum Company, a
subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Most importantly, it enacted a
sweeping agrarian reform, which abolished the old Andean estates as well as
newer coastal plantations.

While Velasco was overthrown by another military coup that implemented some
counter-reforms, the general direction of Peruvian politics took a sharp
left turn in this period. Eventually Alan Garcia became president. He was
the candidate of the APRA party, a left-wing nationalist formation that
rejected socialism. Mariátegui had engaged in sharp polemics with Hay de la
Torre, the founder of APRA, in the 1920s. Against the radical nationalism
of APRA, Mariátegui

[PEN-L:3235] Re: Re: students

[Michael Yates]

Peter,

This is useful advice.  No point to worry about being condescending.

michael

Peter Dorman wrote:
> 
> I know there's a political side to this issue, but I would like to
> mention a useful technocratic device: fairly continuous classroom
> assessment.  I was converted to this approach many years ago, and I
> think it makes a huge difference.  The basic idea is not to wait until
> exams and term papers to find out *exactly* what students are getting
> from the course.  Every day or so there should be some sort of
> information-gathering device: quick-writes in class, mini-papers, small
> group discussions that you listen in on as you circulate.  The idea is
> to know as much as possible about what the students (all of them) are
> learning (or think they're learning) and how they're responding to
> it--in real time.  This won't eliminate appalling instances of
> ignorance, but it will bring them to the surface in time for you to
> address them in your teaching.  For me it's like I had been driving in
> the dark for years, and had just been introduced to headlights.
> 
> I don't mean this to be condescending.  You may be a veteran of these
> techniques, but there may be other teachers out there unfamiliar with
> them, as I was.
> 
> Peter Dorman
> 
> Michael Yates wrote:
> >
> > Friends,
> >
> > I have been a teacher for 30 years and by most accounts a good one. In
> > teaching economics and labor-oriented subjects I have developed hundreds
> > of concrete analyses, stories, etc. to make the material clear.  Now I
> > know we have discussed on these lists the state of education, the nature
> > of today's students, etc.  But I have to say that the level of
> > illiteracy and general stupidity seems to be rising among students. the
> > most basic words are unknown to them, and they never bother to look them
> > up.  I have to continually check myself when I am about to use a word I
> > know that they should understand but do not.
> >
> > On a recent quiz someone said that the name of Adam Smith's famous book
> > was "Rivethead."!!  this after at least a dozen mentions of "The Wealth
> > of Nations."  They hear a word or remember a snippet of something I said
> > and put this down as an answer, no matter how preposterous.  Last year I
> > had a simple fill-in on a quiz:_!,___!,___!, That is Moses
> > and the Prophets.  I had said the correct answer at least 20 times in
> > the preceding two weeks and explained why Marx said it and how neat of a
> > statement it is.  However, because I have arthritic hands, it is hard
> > for me to write on the board. So to save effort, after I had written out
> > the word "accumulation" several times, I started just writing
> > A_,A,A and saying the word "accumulation."  Sure enough on
> > the quiz at least a half dozen persons put "A,A,A" as the answer. One
> > student said that that is what she had in her notes!!!  Today a friend
> > told me that a student in an anthropology class had written the
> > following on an exam,"The Africans used Native American slaves to build
> > their railraod system."  Another, after reading the book about Guatemala
> > by the Rigoberto Menchu wrote in a paper about the "Finca" tribe of
> > Indians.
> >
> > I really can't take too much more of this.  I mean I still take this
> > stuff seriously.  Any advice?  My advice to myself is to retire, and
> > soon.  If it were not for the working people I teach, I do believe that
> > I would have an emotional collapse more serious than the ones I  have
> > already had.  To make matters worse, students without a clue or any
> > desire to learn whatever will be bitching about their grades.
> >
> > I have always tried not to an elitist academic.  I seldom lose my temper
> > and I always treat students with respect.  I am not telling you these
> > things as a joke or to  make fun of students.  But it seems to me that
> > capitalism has succeeded rather well in preparing young people to
> > believe just about anything and not to know how to analyze anything.
> >
> > michael yates

[PEN-L:3234] Re: Re: Re: students<14018.11435.938600.895526@lisa.zopyra.com><36C241B1.6E2D8247@pitt.edu> <14018.25990.738244.103348@lisa.zopyra.com>

[Michael Yates]

Friends,

Yes, I do know that people are often affected by your teaching in ways
you do not know.  I have experienced this many times.

In connection with Bill's comments about the origins of our school
system and a focus on encouraging loyalty to the state, here is a story
I wrote which may be of interest.  comments welcome.

michael yates

III.  Taking the Pledge

In 1991, nearly 30 years after I had graduated from high school, my
twin sons, then 12 years old and seventh graders at a Pittsburgh public
school, read an interesting story in their language arts class. A young
teacher, admired and respected by her students, refused to stand for the
pledge of allegiance to the flag.  For this act of conscience she was
fired by the local school board.  She filed suit, charging a violation
of her First Amendment right of free speech.  The court ordered her
reinstatement, but in the end she decided not to return to her old job. 
After reading the story, the class discussed it with their teacher.  He
was of the view that it was wrong for the teacher not to stand because
this was disrespectful to the beliefs of others.  One of my sons agreed
with the teacher in the story, arguing that no one should have to
stand.  Besides, he said, there was not "liberty and justice for all" in
the United States, so the pledge was a lie.  My son's comments were met
with stern criticism by his teacher who quickly shut off further
discussion.

A few days later, my wife and I met with our son's team of teachers. 
We mentioned the flag salute story to the language arts teacher and
expressed our disappointment with his reaction to it.  Wouldn't this
have been a great opportunity to strengthen the students' understanding
of the importance of free speech in a democracy?  The teacher, bearded
and casually dressed, tried to disarm us.  He was a product of the
sixties, he said, and did not personally care if the students said the
pledge or not.  But out of respect for the beliefs of others, the
students had to stand.  My wife disagreed; standing was the same thing
as saying the words.  She told him that our son had, in fact, been
refusing to stand for the pledge in his home room and that we had sent
the required note to the school stating that we did not object to his
actions.  The teacher said that this would be unacceptable in his home
room; had our son been his charge, he would have had to stand in the
hall during the pledge.  My wife told him that if that had happened, the
teacher would have faced a lawsuit, at which point the conversation
ended.

For two weeks our son sat quietly at his desk during the pledge.  Then
we received a phone call from his teacher-team leader who left a message
for us to contact her about a problem with our son.  We could not reach
her that day, and she did not return our calls.  We worried about what
our son had done.  When he came home, he told us that his team leader
was angry that he would not stand for the pledge.  She had walked by his
home room, seen that he was not standing, marched in and confronted
him.  When he refused to stand, she grabbed him by the arm and pulled
him out of the room.  I was so incensed that I ranted for three days,
but we let it go because she did not do it again.  Then, she called a
second time.  Could I speak with my son about his refusal to stand?  He
was setting a bad example for the other students.  I asked her if maybe
my son wasn't setting a good example by showing his classmates that we
live in a free country, where people must respect differences.  I told
her that one of the reasons that we sent our children to the urban
public schools was so that they would get to know children of different
racial and cultural backgrounds and respect differences.  If the
teachers themselves did not respect differences among their students,
then weren't we all in a lot of trouble?  Finally, I reminded her that
my son could not be legally required to stand for the pledge.  In a
distant voice, she said, Okay, she'd let it drop.  I said goodbye, and
she said, "Have a nice day."

Our other son, then fifteen, was a sophomore in a city high school.  He
wouldn't stand for the pledge either, and he too was hassled by his
teachers.  During his freshman year, his home room teacher insisted that
he stand and when he refused, we got a phone call.  After some
discussion, his teacher said that we would have to write a letter giving
our approval for our son's behavior.  We refused to do this; our son
continued to sit, and nothing happened.  Until, that is, a substitute
teacher confronted him and publicly berated him for insulting his
country.  Didn't he realize that the city's taxpayers were paying for
his education?  He told her that he had a job and paid taxes too.  She
persisted.  Why wouldn't he stand?  He just did not want to.  Eventually
he explained that he had moral reasons for not standing, and she gave
up.  But during the next year, this substitute became his 

[PEN-L:3233] Re: Re: Re: Back to the land

[John P. Lacny]

On Thu, 11 Feb 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> To frame this in terms of the Khmer Rouge is completely outrageous and stupid.
> 

Agree for the most part, Lou, but what do you think of the Shining
Path?

John Lacny

[PEN-L:3232] Re: Re: students

[Michael Yates]

Tom,

You're a sick guy!!!

michael

Tom Walker wrote:
> 
> michael,
> 
> Maybe that prescription robot attendent job isn't as bad as it seemed, after
> all?
> 
> regards,
> 
> Tom Walker

[PEN-L:3231] Re: Re: Re: Re: students

[Michael Yates]

Paul,

thanks for the ideas.  perhaps I'l try something with tv.

michael

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 
> Michael,
> 
> I have found the most successful way of 'forcing' students to
> prepare and think is to give them all their exam questions ahead of
> the exam (by a few weeks), questions which cover the whole
> course, with the promise that a selection of the questions will be
> selected by a random method (I use the dart and phonebook
> method myself) and there will be no choice.
> 
> Students who don't study and organize their material -- and know it
> well enough to write a 4 to 6 page exam in 1 hour -- get lousy
> marks or fail.  Good students band together to prepare, often good
> essay quality exams.  Many of them have told me that they have
> learned more from studying for my exams than they have in any
> other course they have ever taken.
> 
> I also, of course, do the song and dance routines to try to excite
> their curiosity -- e.g. in my Women and the Canadian Economy
> class I had an ex-prostitute come in and talk about the economics
> of street prostitution, and it blew their middle-class minds.  They
> had no difficulty remembering it.
> 
> The problem I have had in this TV age is that they can't read and
> have difficulty writing coherently.  That is difficult but I have tried to
> handle that this term by requiring them to watch TV for a couple of
> weeks keeping a diary of the programs and advertisements with
> their assignment to analyse the ads/programs for class and gender
> discrimination/stereotyping.  I think it is working by the number of
> questions I get from the students as they work through the project.
> I will know better when I see the results.
> 
> Paul
> Paul Phillips,
> Economics,
> University of Manitoba
> 
> > Bill,
> >
> > the problem is that many of my students do seem interested.  and i do
> > agree that the quiz is pretty pathetic.  but i used to read 2000 papers
> > a term, with rewrites and lots more interest on my part.  it did not
> > seem to make much difference, and i just cannot physically do this
> > anymore.  beleive me over the years i have used films, games, speakers,
> > you name it.
> >
> > michael
> >
> > William S. Lear wrote:
> > >
> > > On Wed, February 10, 1999 at 19:14:12 (-0500) Michael Yates writes:
> > > >   ... I have to say that the level of
> > > >illiteracy and general stupidity seems to be rising among students. the
> > > >most basic words are unknown to them, and they never bother to look them
> > > >up.  I have to continually check myself when I am about to use a word I
> > > >know that they should understand but do not.
> > >
> > > Solution?: write up a dictionary of all the terms that you will use.
> > > Give it to them on the first day.
> > >
> > > >   On a recent quiz someone said that the name of Adam Smith's famous book
> > > >was "Rivethead."!!  this after at least a dozen mentions of "The Wealth
> > > >of Nations." ...
> > >
> > > Not to be too critical, especially at a distance, but perhaps you
> > > should take part of the blame.  This at least has the virtue of
> > > providing an avenue from the despair you seem to be drifting towards,
> > > because you can then work on something close to fix, rather than
> > > trying to fix the students' problems, which are more remote.
> > >
> > > It sounds to me as if your examples are a bit on the rote-ish side of
> > > things.  If the students fill in "Rivethead" for "Wealth of Nations",
> > > that's pretty sad, but why are you asking them this?  This sounds like
> > > a very good measure of how much interest the kids have in the subject,
> > > not how stupid they are.  Perhaps you could alter your teaching a bit
> > > --- I mean if today's kids are even less prepared, perhaps traditional
> > > methods, or whatever elements of traditional methods you use, could be
> > > rethought.  Perhaps try making economics fun, or meaningful, on their
> > > terms --- I mean, who cares if Adam Smith wrote "Wealth of Nations" or
> > > "Rivethead" or "Gunga Din"?  Perhaps try interviewing some of the kids
> > > to find out why they wrote some of these outrageous things (Did you
> > > just not care?  Were you bored?).
> > >
> > > The most important thing for a teacher is to develop the natural
> > > curiosity of the students.  You have to reach deep for this one,
> > > especially in a subject as potentially boring as economics.  I have
> > > always thought that having the students act out, in a sort of play,
> > > different types of roles that illustrate what you are talking about,
> > > would be a good learning mechanism for economics.  Take, say, the
> > > creation of money.  You could have students form different entities:
> > > The Treasury, Banks, Farmers, Consumers, etc.  Then, the directions of
> > > the play would have the Farmer go for a loan to the bank, etc.
> > > Someone could be in charge of counting all the money that exists (you
> > > could give stop/start direc

[PEN-L:3252] Education and Students

[Michael Perelman]

I wrote this last night, but it bounced.

150 years ago school children were generally elites who memorize Latin
and
Greek.  In the interim, we have been moving more toward changing
universities into trade schools.  The sort of experience that Bill Lear
described about learning about Chomsky was more common in the 60s and
70s
than at any time in history.

Because of the turmoil in society and because the trade school system
had
not become so firmly implanted yet, we got to teach courses like ethnic
studies, Marx .  Today, such course appear as absurdities to the
general
public.  Some schools still tolerate them, but fewer and fewer do so.

Today, my students work around 15 hours per week to support themselves.
They have poor preparation, and they realize what lies ahead for them.
Even
if they were be able to memorize all the information we feed them, the
recruiters that go to Stanford will still not come up to visit my
students.

My job is comparable to a USDA beef inspector.  If I get to make a
couple of
students excited each semester, I consider that to be a sucess.



--

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

[PEN-L:3253] Re: Marx and imperialism

[Jim Devine]

Paul Meyer writes: >In any case,  the issue of scarcity can't be
overlooked, no matter how many quotations one wants to marshall for
evidence. Lenin recognized the problem himself and thought that it was a
European-wide revolution that would save Russia from its poverty.  <

I heard one response to the scarcity issue (i.e., the inability of a poor
country to produce enough to provide for people's basic needs) from the
Sandinistas: production can be boosted by unleashing the inherent
creativity of workers and peasants that is suppressed by the hierarchies
inherent in capitalism and imperialism.

The problem is that this solution to the extent that the revolutionaries in
the poor country are forced to employ military/hierarchical organization
(so-called democratic centralism) by the violent opposition from capital
(or to the extent that these revolutionaries do not favor democracy). The
outpourings of popular creativity can easily turn into a grinding cynicism
if the revolution persists in being a top-down affair.

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

[PEN-L:3230] Re: Re: Back to the land

[Louis Proyect]

>or another version of 'go back to where you came from'?
>
>I also wonder how those in Cambodia would view such a policy?
>
>angela

I am glad you brought up the question of Cambodia, since there was a veiled
reference to it in Doug's quip about "depopulating" Managua and Mexico
City. This is a gross distortion of what Marxism stands for. The Khmer
Rouge were not Marxists, they were a virulent strain of middle-class
radicalism that turned against its own social roots. They wanted to "purge"
Cambodian society and took people like Doug Henwood and forced them to
leave Pnomh Penh at the point of a gun. It was a nightmare version of the
Cultural Revolution.

What Marxists in Latin America are dealing with is immense suffering of
dispossessed peasants who have crowded into the favelas and barrios of
dozens of cities. They become prostitutes, sell chewing gum, drugs if they
are not lucky enough to get a job in a horrendous factory where low wages
and unsafe conditions are the norm.

The reason they are there is that their land was stolen from them. These
are the facts. In Latin and Central America, export agriculture leaves
millions of peasants without land while the agrarian bourgeoisie gets rich
off the sale of products to the northern industrialized countries. This
agrarian bourgeoisie employs death squads to stay in power. The army and
cops are its servants and it has close ties to the US through the embassies
and CIA.

To frame this in terms of the Khmer Rouge is completely outrageous and stupid.

Louis Proyect

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

[PEN-L:3229] Re: students

[Ellen Frank]

Until recently, I taught at a community college just outside of Boston, 
where I encountered much of the same frustrations as Michael Yates.
I, and all my colleagues, tried every sort of pedagogical innovation that
came down the 
pike -- daily quizzes, group-based learning, discovery learning, field
trips, movies, guest
lectures.  I gave only take-home assignments, encouraged study groups and
spent a considerable portion 
of class time having students work in groups.  

Nevertheless, we encountered a hard-core of young recent high-school grads
- probably a third of
our student body - whose ignorance and alienation were profound.  They
knew nothing about 
current events, save what they picked up from Howard Stern, Jerry Springer
and the 30-seconds-on-the-half-hour
news updates on KISS 107.  Teachers, no matter how cool, hip or caring,
intimidated them, and they fought back with pointless and self-defeating
acts of mini-rebellion, like giggling over last night's debauchery when
they were supposed to be figuring out how a new construction ban would
impact rents.  Many of them could barely write and had great difficulty
reading anything more challenging than a junk-novel, a fact of which they
were ashamed.

I have to say that I hated teaching these students.  I was also shocked
that people, apparently, can make it through 12 years of public schooling
with no knowledge of the world, no experience of abstract critical
thought, not to mention limited skills in basic math and english.  The
good news, however, is that these students were, in our college,
surrounded by people just like themselves, only 10-20 years older and
wiser.  Its amazing what lessons one learns after 10 years of shit jobs in
dead-end industries.  I often advised the young students against
continuing college.  I suggested they drop out, work for a while and come
back when life had knocked them around a bit.  Then they'd be ready to get
serious.  


Ellen Frank
 

[PEN-L:3228] Marx and imperialism

[Louis Proyect]

Paul Meyer:
>This is a fairly selective rendering of history. By the 1870's was up to his
>neck in involvement with mass worker's movements and parties in the
>industrializing
>world.

No, it is not a "fairly selective" rendering of history. Teodor Shanin
characterizes Marx's interest in Russia as directly related to his
pessimism about near or intermediate term possibilities for revolution in
Western Europe, which was already in the opening stages of imperialism.
>From Lenin's "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism," written in 1916:


In a letter to Marx, dated October 7, 1858, Engels wrote: "...The English
proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most
bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession
of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the
bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course
to a certain extent justifiable." In a letter to Sorge, dated September 21,
1872, Engels informs him that Hales kicked up a big row in the Federal
Council of the International and secured a vote of censure on Marx for
saying that "the English labour leaders had sold themselves". Marx wrote to
Sorge on August 4, 1874: "As to the urban workers here [in England], it is
a pity that the whole pack of leaders did not get into Parliament. This
would be the surest way of getting rid of the whole lot." In a letter to
Marx, dated August 11, 1881, Engels speaks about "those very worst English
trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least
paid by, the bourgeoisie." In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12,
1882, Engels wrote: "You ask me what the English workers think about
colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in
general. There is no workers' party here, there are only Conservatives and
Liberal-Radicals. and the workers gaily share the feast of England's
monopoly of the world market and the colonies." 

Louis Proyect

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

[PEN-L:3250] Re: Re: students

[Jim Devine]

On the political economy of schooling, I can't think of any book since
Bowles & Gintis' SCHOOLING IN CAPITALIST AMERICA, which was published more
than 20 years ago. But I'm sure that others on pen-l can remember other books.

B&G (who later changed their opinions on a lot) analyze schooling in terms
of the posited contradiction between aggressive capitalist accumulation and
the requirements for societal reproduction. I think that that's a good way
to look at a lot of questions, but at least in California it's too abstract. 

Here in the "Golden State," the contradiction that shapes schools seems to
be between (1) the need to produce students who are obedient and have
sufficient "human capital" to serve business; and (2) the fiscal
restrictions imposed by Proposition 13 and its kin. 

The former is what I've seen emphasized in pen-l, but since it is endorsed
by most parents, I wouldn't say that it's just a matter of "capital" doing
getting its way. Universal public education was in many ways a creation of
the grass-roots efforts by the working class, middle class, and farmers.
And the need to teach children to obey (emphasized by B&G) is something
that parents want, too. So the first prong of the contradiction seems a
matter of an uneasy alliance between business and the community.

The second prong is a hangover of the 1970s stagflation crisis. Homeowners,
especially the aged, suffered from the way in which the paper value of
their houses soared, causing them to pay higher and higher property taxes
even though they hadn't realized the paper gains. Many workers were
suffering (and still are) from stagnant or falling real wages, so that they
voted for limits on taxes as a way to raise take-home pay. Then along come
the demagogues and we get Prop. 13 and its kin, which put the state in a
fiscal strait-jacket. (Then-Gov. Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown, Jr. inadvertently
encouraged this by running budget surpluses.) Business, especially Big
Business, opposed this trend, though maybe without enough enthusiasm. It
seemed that those folks who didn't have school-age children (or weren't
going to have them) or already planning to send them to non-public schools
were more likely to support Prop. 13 and the like. 

Here in Los Angeles, the bungling (and perhaps pernicious) way in which
bussing to create racial integration was organized encouraged "white
flight," which helped to create a burgeoning private school sector
(something that has existed for decades in NYC, I believe). This has
encouraged greater support for defunding the public schools via such
methods as vouchers good at parochial and private schools. 

The bottom line is that we have a lot of public schools that are
underfunded but emphasize discipline. A lot of the educational functions
have been slighted. Some of this has been encouraged by faddism among the
education experts, who impose one-size-fits-all educational techniques on
the schools (as with "whole language" reading methods, which aren't all
bad, but just don't fit all student's needs). The faddism has encouraged an
antagonism toward the schools. Strangely enough, the only really positive
thing to happen in public schools in recent years has been the work of
ex-Gov. "Pete" Wilson, who in general is a bad guy. He pushed the schools
to radically reduce class size. I think that's not only good for students,
but for teachers. 

The above is impressionistic and I would appreciate any corrections or
amendments.

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

[PEN-L:3244] pledge of allegiance

[Alex Campbell]

Michael Yates wrote:

>Would it been too much to expect her to
>have seen the hypocrisy of the pledge of allegiance with its propaganda
>of "liberty and justice for all"?  How could any black person believe
>this, let alone pledge allegiance to it?

Jennifer Hochschild, in _Facing up to the American Dream_, poses some
interesting answers to this question.  Through quite extensive survery data,
she shows a _stronger_ faith in the American Dream (her operationalization
of the dominant ideology) among the impoverished black community than among
middle class black folk.

She explains this seeming contradiction as due, in part, to the
psychological needs of people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale:

The relative invisibility of white domination compared with the constant
pressure of poverty, danger, and degrading surroundings works in an
odd way to 
reinforce poor African Americans' belief in the American dream. The
United States
has never had a robust socialist tradition that teaches people to
understand
poverty as a structural phenomenon in which they happen to be
caught. ...

Thus someone for whom poverty fells like a more severe day-to-day
problem
than racism has almost no ideological choices boeyond the American dream
that plausibly offer a way our of immediate grinding necessity. And the
paucity of extant ideological alternatives is reinforced by the lack of
enough money, organizational connections, and emotional space to develop
an alternative of one's own. 

In such a context, faith in the American dream is intelligible, even
wise.
After all, the dream does have some real virtues. Its commitment to
individual
autonomy, equality, and rights has pushed our nation far from the
slavery 
and serfdom of a century ago, and its emphasis on hope has deep 
psychological resonance.  Furthermore, many African Americans have
succeeded
according to its precepts -- certainly more than have succeeded by
the precepts
of nationalism, republicanism, or socialism. 

...

Even the internal contradictions of the American dream can make it
easier 
rather than harder for poor African Americans to believe in it. By
submerging
structural reasons for failure ... makes it appear that the reasons
for failure
really are individual, and thus subject to conquest by any one
individual, or 
even all individuals. ... Thus even if (or because) the American
dream fails
as a description of American society, it is a highly seductive
prescription
for succeeding in that society to those who cannot see the
underlying flaw. 
(pp. 216-18)


She argues that along with schools, the major institutions helping to
sustain faith in the dominant system, are: churches, community groups,
television, family, ... and "sheer stubborn determination."

Now, Prof. Yates points out these teachers have clearly won real gains and
entry into the middle class. But entry into the middle class is not what
Hochschild finds really turns the middle class against the dominant system,
but the persistent racism that they continue to encounter after they reach it.




Alex Campbell
Assistant to the President, National Center
for Economic and Security Alternatives

2000 P Street, NW
Suite 330
Washington, DC 20036
202 986 1373 (voice)/ 202 986 7938 (fax)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:3238] Re: students

[Tom Walker]

>Tom,
>
>You're a sick guy!!!
>
>michael

Yeah you're right, just a touch of the flu though, nothing life threatening.
Thanks for asking.

But, seriously, I think it does help to put the very real *pain* of your
heart-breaking encounters with students in perspective of the equally real
*privilege* that you enjoy as a university teacher. The terms and conditions
of that privilege are becoming less and less legitimate to your students and
part of what you're getting from students is completely understandable
resignation and unchannelled resentment. Nothing personal. There's a dirty
trick that decent folks play on themselves called "what did _I_ do to
deserve this?" When in many cases the answer is que sera, sera. 

I do have a suggestion for all the economics teachers on the list. Throw it
all out. All of it. The classics, the textbooks, the reading lists, the
quizzes, the blackboard, the audio-visual aids. All of it.

INVEST everything in one four-page interview from the October 1926, _World's
Work_: "Henry Ford: Why I Favor Five Days' Work With Six Days' Pay." (the
interview with Ford was reprinted in the December 1926 Monthly Labor Review).

ASK your students to examine the question, in every way conceivable, "Is
there a Ford in YOUR future?"

>Tom Walker wrote:
>> 
>> michael,
>> 
>> Maybe that prescription robot attendent job isn't as bad as it seemed, after
>> all?

regards,

Tom Walker 

[PEN-L:3224] Re: Re: Re: Nigeria

[PJM0930]

<< By the 1870s, he had become thoroughly disgusted with
 capitalism and wrote to the Russian populist movement that they were
 correct in fighting to defend the rural communes against capitalism. He
 said that the accumulation model set forward in V. 1 of Capital was not
 meant to be a universal model. >>
This is a fairly selective rendering of history. By the 1870's was up to his
neck in involvement with mass worker's movements and parties in the
industrializing
world.  Marx's take on the question of how and when the revolution would
arrive
is contradictory at best.  If Marx indeed had given up hopes for the
revolutionary
potential of capitalism (which is not, as you imply, the same the disgust for
the German
bourgeiosie),  he had much more to question in his own theories and
prognositications.
His projective sociology of progressively increasing class polarization, the
an immense
proletarian majority would face off an embattled bourgeois, was already
beginning to look fishy.

As I have posted before, Marx was always suspicious of revolution in the
backwards
countries because of the scarcity problem which had a long pedigree in
political philosophy.
It is not a problem he could (or should have) have ignored easily, to some
extent
it is by the recognition of the scarcity problem in Marx's thought, that he
can call himself
a "materialist" rather than a "utopian".  And to the extent he believed that
you can't socialize poverty (without producing dictatorship), the evidence
turned out NOT to be on Lenin's side. 

-Paul Meyer

"Russia is a peasant country, one of the most backwards of European countries.
Socialism
cannot triumph there directly and immediately.  But the peasant character of
the country,
the vast reserves in the hands of the nobility, may, to judge from the
experience of 1905,
give tremendous sweep to the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia and may
make our revolution the prologue to the world socialist revolution, a step
toward it."

- Lenin, 1917

[PEN-L:3227] Judith Butler Redux

[Thad Williamson]

For those interested, there is a fine and devastating essay by Martha
Nussbaum on Judith Butler in Feb 22 The New Republic (of all places.) Solid
humanist argument..says Butler belongs with the sophists, not philosophers,
by refusing to frame arguments in ways that encourage transparence and
respect readers' intelligence.

Thad


Thad Williamson
National Center for Economic and Security Alternatives (Washington)/
Dept. of Government, Harvard University (Cambridge)
617-876-5672

[PEN-L:3163] Japan can't get out from under?

[Rob Schaap]

Okay, I'll try another scenario (I shouldn't listen to the BBC finance
programmes, they're beginning to sound .. well, so millenial):

Japan's government is issuing record debt.  Long term interest rates are
gonna have to keep going up as a consequence.  Makes the Yen stronger.
Japanese business depends an awful lot on exports (its domestic market
suddenly choc-a-bloc with non-consuming savers), but money's getting dearer
for it and a strong yen makes their exports dearer while the Yanqui CAD
blows out even further and people dump the greenback to follow the Yen and
the Euro to artificial highs.

Greenspan ups the interest rate there to protect said greenback.
Debt-financed stock speculators start shuffling out, mebbe with Japanese
government paper in mind.

And then Y2K kicks in - not necessarily as a technical problem, but as a
sociological phenomenon.  Better to have real greenbacks sitting idle under
the bed than trying to accumulate in unreliably digital form - and isn't so
much of that high-tech stock on the Nasdaq more likely than most to cop the
slings and arrows of outdated fortunes - what with possible liability for
whatever technical problems do arise?  And the possible tank on the Nasdaq
is huge - there's just no comforting reference point, is there?

Does any of this hold up?

Cheers,
Rob.

[PEN-L:3223] Students and reality

[valis]

Quoth Michael Yates, in part:
> Now I know we have discussed on these lists the state of education, 
> the nature of today's students, etc.  But I have to say that the level of
> illiteracy and general stupidity seems to be rising among students. the
> most basic words are unknown to them, and they never bother to look them
> up.  I have to continually check myself when I am about to use a word I
> know that they should understand but do not.
> 
>   On a recent quiz someone said that the name of Adam Smith's famous book
> was "Rivethead."!!  this after at least a dozen mentions of "The Wealth
> of Nations."  They hear a word or remember a snippet of something I said
> and put this down as an answer, no matter how preposterous.  Last year I
> had a simple fill-in on a quiz:_!,___!,___!, That is Moses
> and the Prophets.  I had said the correct answer at least 20 times in
> the preceding two weeks and explained why Marx said it and how neat of a
> statement it is.  However, because I have arthritic hands, it is hard
> for me to write on the board. So to save effort, after I had written out
> the word "accumulation" several times, I started just writing
> A_,A,A and saying the word "accumulation."  Sure enough on
> the quiz at least a half dozen persons put "A,A,A" as the answer. One
> student said that that is what she had in her notes!!!  Today a friend
> told me that a student in an anthropology class had written the
> following on an exam, "The Africans used Native American slaves to build
> their railroad system."  Another, after reading the book about Guatemala
> by Rigoberto Menchu wrote in a paper about the "Finca" tribe of Indians.

> I really can't take too much more of this.  I mean I still take this
> stuff seriously.  Any advice?  My advice to myself is to retire, and
> soon.  

I'd like to suggest an obvious likelihood to Michael Y, and to everyone
who feels s/he could just as easily write this as read it (and I hope
General DeCaf isn't lurking): quite aside from every other negative factor 
competing with you for the attention of your students, they are coming in
fisheye shitbrain stoned, period, and otherwise you probably wouldn't be 
seeing them at all.  How come you don't remember what it was like in the 
dear dead '60s, when sometimes just getting home was a handicapped 
adventure, like climbing Everest without bottled oxygen.  And who could
be bothered to process a sentence with more than 2 clauses?

Yes, you want to teach them, equip them to comprehend the world's
structural viciousness, hopefully to change it, but start with what is:
they already are aware to some degree, and are reacting with the simple
expedient of self-medication.  Do your strategic huddling with radical
shrinks of the James Hillman school, before fellow economists.
If it's really true that the personal is political, you can get anywhere
you want to go by starting right in the suffering guts of your students:
"OK, quite a few of you are stoned right now, just all fucked up.  
Couldn't find your way to the bathroom without a road map.
I'd like us to talk about what makes this necessary."

  valis

[PEN-L:3155] Re: Aztecs

[rc-am]

-Original Message-
From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
..>I have no idea what you base these comments on. Is this something
you read
>somewhere or is it based on first hand experience. You are posting
from
>Australia, a modern industrial country with modern farming.
..

yes, louis. everyone living in australia was born there.

angela

[PEN-L:3150] Re: Re: We are waiting

[Rob Schaap]

G'day Jerry,

I never get anywhere when I argue with you, but this latest needs addressing.

I.Traffic is a sign of list health, imho;

II.   Some of us don't have a life, you unfeeling brute!

You popular social lions shouldn't be so smugly exclusive around us
detrited social cripples - just as the net offers us a glimmer of existence
beyond the shadows, you callously bring all your practiced wit and
sophistication down on our faltering supplications.

Beware, well-rounded one.  We are many ...

III.  Just about every post I read on PEN-L is profoundly
political-economic in content.  Except yours.  And, er, this one.  So I'd
better stop.

BTW, A 3-per-day limit allows each of us 93 posts per January - and no-one
posted that many, did they?

Cheers,
Rob.