Technology will Improve Rural Economies?
Do we believe the below? The centripetal effects of capitalism have become extremely powerful. It is apparent on a world scale. In England the economy around London is seriously overheated while the periphery struggles. A house in London costs three times that of a comparable house in the Midlands of England. Will the free market address these discrepancies in any socially rational way? Probably not. If reforms are needed for social foresight in planning economies, how about 1) a differential tax on petrol on a sliding scale so that it is progressively cheaper in rural areas. (eg making the tax a inverse function of the distance from the nearest next filling station) 2) the socialisation of land so that the licence to use land for any purpose is open to competitive bidding but within a socially controlled development plan? Chris Burford London. The technology boom that has left many rural communities behind in recent years also has the power to rapidly improve the economic conditions in rural America, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said in a speech Thursday. "Although dislocations are bound to accompany economic growth, we should not shrink from accepting the changes that technology will bring but rather should rise to its challenges and look forward to the great benefits that it can provide over time to all our people, whether they live in congested urban areas or in the still-open spaces of rural America," Greenspan said in prepared remarks. Speaking via video link to a conference on rural America in Kansas City, Greenspan trumpeted the value of the Internet in linking rural citizens with companies eager to tap new sources of workers. "With communications linkages tightening, businesses that are seeking a location in which a supply of dependable workers is readily available can more easily gather information about distant rural locations than in the past, and energetic rural communities with access to the Internet should find it easier to make themselves known to firms that are seeking a place," he said. In addition to bringing new job and economic opportunities to rural America, the Internet and other telecommunications advances are also helping to raise the basic quality of life in those communities, Greenspan contended. "The standard of living in rural places also is being enhanced by technological changes that are expanding the menu of consumption possibilities," Greenspan said. "Rural citizens are gaining access to a broader range of goods and services, and the already existing goods and services are available more expeditiously and at lower cost." Greenspan's comments follow close on the heels of President Clinton's cross-country digital divide junket during which the president visited both rural and inner-city communities to call attention to the so-called "digital divide" between information technology haves and have-nots.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Samir Amin: Not a Happy Ending
On Fri, 28 Apr 2000, M A Jones wrote: Hey, Russia posted a whacking bal of payments surplus last year and has done almost every year since 1991. Is it also a no-brainer to buy up some roubles right now? That sounds like a challenge to me. Only trouble is I'm not a Malt Man. But I'm willing to stake a case of 1995 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese (JJ Pruem) on an appreciating euro. The spread is a EUR/USD rate of 1.00 or higher by May 2001. Since I'm going to be in hiding next year, running from Sallie Mae's creditors, my broker will be in contact with your broker. -- Dennis
The reality of German involvement in central Europe [was Re: Samir Amin: Not a Happy Ending (fwd)
Dennis R Redmond wrote: The Opposing Team is Daimler, Sony, Mitsubishi, Nokia, etc. and not just Microsoft and Intel. We've got to think *past* the Wall Street Bubble, not just against it. Germans flock East for cheap sex and petrol FROM ALLAN HALL IN CHEB, CZECH REPUBLIC AS a boom town Cheb has little to say for itself. Years of communist neglect coupled with the birthing pains of rampant capitalism have left buildings and streets in a decrepit state. Neglect hangs in the air like noxious gases from the defunct chemical plants that once spewed poison into the atmosphere with abandon. Yet this Czech Republic town and others like it are El Dorados for wealthy Germans who break for the border each day to carpetbag the spoils of consumerism with a vengeance. Berlin is painfully aware that billions of marks that should be heading into its cash-strapped exchequer are being lost annually in the bazaars of its not-so exotic eastern neighbour. Everything is cheaper in these frontier towns. Petrol costs 70 pfennigs (about 22p) a litre less; excellent Czech beer is 28p a half-litre in bars or £4 for a takeaway case of 24 bottles. Entire outfits of brand-name Neoprene sportswear, training shoes and counterfeit fashion wear - Versace, Calvin Klein, Louis Vuitton to name a few - are available for a pittance. They are hawked, curiously, by Vietnamese traders; once fighters for North Vietnam's liberation, welcomed as heroes by the commisars of the former communist Czechoslovakia and now exiles from their homeland. They have found a new life and, relatively speaking, new riches in the Czech Republic. Other items they sell in sprawling market stalls housed beneath plastic sheets are cartons of Western cigarettes, at £10 less per 200 than their retail price in Germany, bottles of high-grade spirit for £3 each, and neo-Nazi "white power" CDs that are forbidden across the border. Authorities refer to the hordes of visitors - an estimated 750,000 a month to Cheb alone - as the "TBZ Touristen"; T for tanken, or filling up the car; B for bümsen, a coarse German word for sex; and Z for zigaretten. This week saw the German equivalent of the CBI arguing against drawing the Czech Republic and its other eastern neighbour, Poland, into the European Union club too quickly. While the official line is that they are not "ready" to play at capitalism on a level field, the fear of German businesses, particularly small ones, is that manufacturing will be contracted out to them at bargain-basement rates. Besides the loss of revenue, German authorities are also deeply concerned about the B-word. Prostitutes line the boulevards in these seedy, border towns, wearing little more than scraps of clothing and offering cheap sex - mostly without condoms. "Mother comes here to get her hair done and father goes off to the brothel," Brigitte Valoweka, a waitress in a Cheb restaurant, said. "A lot of these girls are Roma, Gypsies. They are dirty and have no idea of staying healthy. They just want a few marks to take home. It seems that everyone is on the game. But they only want to do it with rich Schnitzels - Germans." On the outskirts of Karlovy Vary - the Sudeten spa town of Karlsbad to Germans - there is the undignified sight each day of hundreds of scantily clad prostitutes lining the pavement near Theresienstadt, the former Nazi concentration camp that is now a memorial to Holocaust victims. Every day 25,000 German cars pour into Cheb, with a similar number of vehicles crossing into Varnsdorf, heading for the sights and the bargains of such former Sudeten German towns as Liberec and Brux. Czech authorities like the hard currency - an industrial wage in the Czech Republic is a fraction of what it is in Germany - but bemoan the proliferation of the mafia that has muscled in to control the sex, booze, drugs and illegal weapons sold in the markets. Russian Makarov pistols and Kalashnikov rifles can be purchased for a few marks. A deranged imam, who killed his family of six before turning the gun on himself in Bielefeld last year, bought his KAL Czech pistol for £10 in a bazaar on the border. "They may be old but they are in good condition and you certainly can't get them as easily in Germany," Dieter Brandl, a civilian employee with the German Army, said. He travels twice a month from Hof, Bavaria, to practise shooting at a club outside Cheb. "The ammunition is half price and the weapons I am able to use much better. Everyone comes here looking for a bargain and this is mine." Although the locals deride the Germans and are contemptuous of their big cars, big waistlines and swaggering manner, they cannot allow personal feelings to get in the way of commerce. They are dependent on the hard currency as their jobless queues get longer and the economic outlook remains bleak. Max Sommerer, German customs chief at one of the border crossings, said: "There would be more crossing each day were it not for the traffic jams. It's like the
Re: Regulation Theory
There's an article in the Braudel Center journal I referred to yesterday (in reference to Frank and his critics )dealing with Maori capitalism in New Zealand, which is apparently influenced by regulation theory. Wallerstein also refers to it in his article as one of among different contending interpretations of why capitalism arose in the west. (As opposed to Marxism, world systems theory and one or two others.) With all the brilliant people on PEN-L, can somebody provide a 2 or 3 paragraph explanation? I am just not motivated to read a whole book with everything else I am involved with right now. Louis Proyect my less than brilliant two cents... So-called 'Regulation School' grew out of attempts by French theorists such as Michel Aglietta (_A Theory of Capitalist Regulation_ is probably best known in US), Robert Boyer, Alain Lipeitz to explain capitalist restructuring that accompanied end of post-WW2 boom. These, and other, writers have tried to identify forms of competititon, capital-labor relations, technical production, money, state intervention, international arrangements that contributed to *specific* periods of long-term capitalist grow. Differing forms of above are 'regulatory' mechanisms that constitute 'regimes of accumulation.' Regulationists focus their attention on 'Fordism' (David Harvey's _The Condition of Postmodernity_ is regulationist work offering good summary of theory, Fordism, flexible accumulation, transition from one to other, see Part 2 of book). One theorist I'm familiar with who attempted larger historical regulation analysis relevant is Michel Beaud whose _History of Capitalism_ asserts that 'long journey' toward capitalism's initial 'accumulation regime' was predicated on conquest and pillage of western hemisphere's resources and various structural changes brought about by rising bourgeoisie. Specifically, Beaud cites creation of mills as point of departure for capitalist production mode (Excellent work but I don't think one has to be regulationist to arrive at B's conclusions). Analysis similar to regulation,, associated with Sam Bowles, late David Gordon, Tom Weisskopf, among others, and known as 'social structure of accumulation' (SSA) school has existed in US. Stavros Mavroudeas has interesting critique of regulation theory in Fall 1999 issue of *Science and Society* entitled 'Regulation Theory: Creative Marxism to Postmodern Disintegration.'Michael Hoover
The music has stopped but people are still dancing
New York Times, April 29, 2000 Huge Losses Move Soros to Revamp Empire By DANNY HAKIM After absorbing huge losses in recent weeks, the financier George Soros said yesterday that he was reorganizing his investment empire and would abandon many of the high-risk investment techniques that made him a billionaire many times over and rewarded his wealthy investors handsomely. He also warned investors who stick with him to expect lower returns. With bets that went sour on technology stocks and on Europe's new currency, the five funds run by Soros Fund Management have suffered a 20 percent decline this year and, at $14.4 billion, are down roughly a third from a peak of $22 billion in August 1998. In a letter sent yesterday to shareholders and at a news conference, Mr. Soros said that his two top money managers would leave their posts shortly. Stanley F. Druckenmiller, the manager of Mr. Soros's flagship $8.2 billion Quantum Fund since 1989, will retire, as will S. Nicholas Roditi, manager of the $1.3 billion Quota Fund. Mr. Soros, who is 69, also said he would reorganize Quantum into a group of smaller funds and change his investment style to eliminate some of the risk and reduce the potential for reward. "Maybe I don't understand the market," Mr. Soros said at the news conference. "Maybe the music has stopped but people are still dancing." For his own part, he said: "I am anxious to reduce my market exposure and be more conservative. We will accept lower returns because we will cut the risk profile." The moves were further signs of the turmoil affecting financial markets and the inability of once-storied money managers to prosper amid the volatility. At the end of March, Julian H. Robertson Jr., 67, chairman of the Tiger Management investment company, railed that "we are in a market where reason does not prevail" and announced that he was dismantling his fund group after eschewing technology stocks and sustaining significant losses. Unlike Mr. Robertson, Mr. Druckenmiller, 46, made an aggressive move into technology stocks in mid-1999 after facing a decline of about 20 percent early last year. But in the sharp slide of the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index this month, Mr. Druckenmiller still had many of those bets in place. "I screwed up; I overplayed my hand," said Mr. Druckenmiller, whose Quantum Fund has fallen 22 percent this year, through Wednesday. "I should have sold in February." In addition to the damage from technology bets, which included Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Qualcomm among others, the Quantum Fund was wounded by currency bets, Mr. Druckenmiller said. The bets, according to one expert, essentially took the view that the euro would perform well against the dollar, an assumption that proved wrong. Mr. Druckenmiller said he had been jettisoning his positions over the last three to four weeks, and one top money manager, Lawrence A. Bowman, who runs the $5 billion Bowman Capital Management, said that such selling of Quantum's technology positions contributed to the recent slide of technology stocks. "You can't sell a couple billion dollars' worth of tech stocks without impacting the market," Mr. Bowman said. "We've heard that they have liquidated 80 percent of their positions." (clip) Yesterday, Mr. Soros was questioning whether the vicissitudes of the modern market were transforming the hedge fund industry in ways that made it less practical to run a so-called macro fund, which is free to use a wide variety of financial instruments in any area of the world. "A large hedge fund like Quantum Fund is no longer the best way to manage money," Mr. Soros wrote in his letter to shareholders. "Quantum is far too big and its activities too closely watched by the market to be able to operate successfully." Still, do not expect Mr. Soros's Quantum Endowment to be a so-called widows-and-orphans fund that caters to risk-averse investors. One reporter at the news conference asked if the tamer Quantum Endowment would function more like an annuity, a low-risk investment sold by the insurance industry. The idea elicited a laugh from the otherwise sober Mr. Druckenmiller. "For God's sake," he said, pointing to his boss. "This is George Soros." Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Samir Amin: Not a Happy Ending
Jim Devine wrote: Eventually (in 1985-7), the dollar fell (in inflation-adjusted terms, using the trade-weighted measure), due to the large trade deficits (which had not yet turned into current-account deficits) and due to a convergence of US interest rates with those of the rest of the world. This is helpful but the real point is that previous dollar crashes (even Nixon taking it off the gold standard) have not affecetd the fundamentals of US hegemony. Why will it be any different now? If Wall Street goes, so will the world's other bourses; and when the world recovers, other things being eual, the US will lead the take-off. Plus ca change. Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList
RE: William Appleman Williams
. . . Among them was William Appleman Williams who contributed an article to the July 1957 American Socialist titled "The Choice Before Us". The article stakes out a position which breaks definitively with the FDR as friend of peace and democracy paradigm promoted by Earl Browder during the war years. . . . Rutgers history department from '65-'75 was a hotbed of these types. Included Eugene Genovese, Lloyd Gardner, and Warren Susman, who provided a foundation of intellectual authority for the campus anti-war left, not to mention the wider audience for their writings. I only raise this to point out that their criticism was almost entirely on foreign policy, not neglecting its domestic economic roots, but seldom expanding to the wide range of issues on the 'domestic' front. They had little of special note to say about race or poverty, the two other big concerns of the time. As such, they reflected an anti-chauvinist strain of what could be called isolationism. Susman was more or less an ADA-type liberal, while Gardner could have been mistaken for a Taft- type isolationist(albeit a very enlightened and cosmopolitan one). Genovese's subsequent erratic path is well known. mbs
Re: RE: William Appleman Williams
Max B. Sawicky wrote: Genovese's subsequent erratic path is well known. I have a dim childhood memory of Genovese becoming an issue in the NJ gubernatorial campaign, after he said he would welcome a Vietcong victory. As I recall, the issue was whether he should be fired or not. Back in '92, though, a friend of mine had dinner with him and he sounded off about how he was going to vote for Bush, his only regret being that Bush stopped Powell Schwarzkopf from going onto Baghdad. He also denounced the abortion clinic defenses that were big at the time. A couple of years ago, Genovese had offered some effusive remarks to the neo-confederate journal Southern Partisan on the death of the reactionary literary scholar M.E. Bradford. Is that "erratic"? Doug
RE: Re: RE: William Appleman Williams
Max B. Sawicky wrote: Genovese's subsequent erratic path is well known. I have a dim childhood memory of Genovese becoming an issue in the NJ gubernatorial campaign, after he said he would welcome a Vietcong victory. As I recall, the issue was whether he should be fired or not. Right. He gave a speech where he said that, tho he had said as much before, but it became a media event. His last year at Rutgers was 66-67, right before I arrived, so all my info on him is second hand from radical grad students in the history dept. I was told he was not fired outright, just made to feel extremely unwanted. I believe his next stop was Yale, so one could imagine worse forms of punishment. Back in '92, though, a friend of mine had dinner with him and he sounded off about how he was going to vote for Bush, his only regret being that Bush stopped Powell Schwarzkopf from going onto Baghdad. He also denounced the abortion clinic defenses that were big at the time. A couple of years ago, Genovese had offered some effusive remarks to the neo-confederate journal Southern Partisan on the death of the reactionary literary scholar M.E. Bradford. Is that "erratic"? Doug Seeing as how he had been a CPer, then a PLer, then an independent Stalinist who started and crashed a number of projects, yes I would say erratic is a reasonable summary of his trajectory. His wife -- Elizabeth Fox Genovese -- has had an equally fascinating intellectual journey.On the plus side, I am told he was very generous and non-elitist with young profs. I met him briefly after a talk he gave at the American Enterprise Institute. Told him I knew some marxists he had nurtured back in the day. He was amiable enough and seemed to balance the positives of his own brand of marxism and conservatism more or less equally. How he rationalized it is beyond my powers of comprehension. The best I can say is that there were some things he hated so much about some or maybe most of the left that it drove him all the way to the other side. My best only Genovese story. After he had launched and then blew up another organizing project of some sort, his wife was quoted as saying, "Well, Gene wrapped up another one." mbs
Re: RE: Re: RE: William Appleman Williams
you wrote that Eugene Genovese ... was amiable enough and seemed to balance the positives of his own brand of marxism and conservatism more or less equally. How he rationalized it is beyond my powers of comprehension. The best I can say is that there were some things he hated so much about some or maybe most of the left that it drove him all the way to the other side. this is a problem. Sometimes when people start "falling away" from the left, the rest of the Left start calling them names, while shunning them socially. (This is worse if they belonged to sectarian organizations.) For many, that encourages them to surge farther to the right. Right-wingers sometimes welcome them with open arms, encouraging that trend. Of course, it's not just the Left's fault. There's at least one case of someone who took this trajectory (e.g., David Horowitz of RAMPARTS fame) where the individual in question should have never been part of the Left. And there are jerks distributed randomly across the political spectrum, so there's no reason for the Left to beat itself up about this phenomenon. But I think we can at least try to avoid pushing people to the right. In the specific case of Genovese, there's more than just pressure from fellow leftists or hatred of sectarians. He also became attached to the notion that the antebellum South presented a certain kind of natural order without all the chaos and individualism that characterizes capitalism. That weird idea helped him along. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: William Appleman Williams
Jim Devine wrote: In the specific case of Genovese, there's more than just pressure from fellow leftists or hatred of sectarians. He also became attached to the notion that the antebellum South presented a certain kind of natural order without all the chaos and individualism that characterizes capitalism. That weird idea helped him along. He's hardly alone in that, or a version of that. There are plenty of leftish folks who revere "traditional" societies, either in our own past or somewhere else in space, as being more organic and gentle than the USA in the year 2000. I think this is a kind of exoticism, but I don't feel like having that fight right now. Doug
Eugene Genovese and traditional societies
One of these days, when I have the time, I'd like to delve into the question of Genovese's intellectual evolution. You should remember that in his Marxist prime, he was linked with Robert Brenner as adhering to a hard-nosed vision of Marxism that ran counter to the mushy "third worldism" of the Monthly Review. While Brenner's focus was on rural England of the 16th century, Genovese sought to explain the rise of modern capitalism in the United States as a class struggle against the feudal south. Since the system was "feudal", it obviously incorporated aspects of an organic society based on noblesse oblige mixed with outright repression. This led Genovese to the controversial conclusion that resistance to slavery was fairly minimal. At some point, he lost interest in the underclass apparently and became much more interested in the life-style and values of the ruling class. I tend to agree with Jim Blaut that the slavocracy was based on capitalist rather than feudal property relations, just as I believe contra Brenner that capitalism describes the class relations that existed in 16th and 17th century Latin America. As to the suggestion that the ante-bellum south had anything in common with the ways in which the Arawak, Hawaiians or Inuit lived because they are all "precapitalist" or "traditional", I can only suggest that PEN-L'ers read "Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State" where Engels writes of the constitution that governed the Iroquois confederacy: "And a wonderful constitution it is, this gentile constitution, in all its childlike simplicity! No soldiers, no gendarmes or police, no nobles, kings, regents, prefects, or judges, no prisons, no lawsuits-and everything takes its orderly course. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the whole of the community affected, by the gens or the tribe, or by the gentes among themselves; only as an extreme and exceptional measure is blood revenge threatened-and our capital punishment is nothing but blood revenge in a civilized form, with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilization. Although there were many more matters to be settled in common than today-the household is maintained by a number of families in common, and is communistic, the land belongs to the tribe, only the small gardens are allotted provisionally to the households -- yet there is no need for even a trace of our complicated administrative apparatus with all its ramifications. The decisions are taken by those concerned, and in most cases everything has been already settled by the custom of centuries. There cannot be any poor or needy-the communal household and the gens know their responsibilities towards the old, the sick, and those disabled in war. All are equal and free-the women included. There is no place yet for slaves, nor, as a rule, for the subjugation of other tribes." If you want to know what Marx and Engels thought of the plantation system in the south by contrast, I refer PEN-L'ers to Marx's Herald Tribune articles that called for smashing the system into the ground. As far as I know, Engels agreed with him. Neither really called for smashing the American Indians into the ground as far as I know. That's the position of dogmatic Marxists like Bob Avakian who don't really understand Marx. The last time I heard American Indian society and the slavocracy conflated on PEN-L was the time Jim Heartfield was around. Not only do Marx and Engels' writings militate against that view, it should be obvious from the vast evidence of anthropological research from Franz Boas to Marshall Sahlins that communal societies, despite their sometimes desperate connections to available resources, were a lot freer than any society that has followed them in the "evolutionary chain", which of course has nothing to do with Marxism to begin with. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
Re: RE: William Appleman Williams
In a message dated 00-04-29 13:33:05 EDT, you write: Rutgers history department from '65-'75 was a hotbed of these types. Included Eugene Genovese, Lloyd Gardner, and Warren Susman, . . . . They had little of special note to say about race or poverty, the two other big concerns of the time.. . . Genovese's subsequent erratic path is well known. Genovese had little to say about race? What planet are you from? Never mind hsi subsequenr path; he's a major analyst of the roots of race relations in this country, and hsi work through the late 70s or early 80s is of lasting value. --jks
RE: Re: RE: William Appleman Williams
Rutgers history department from '65-'75 was a hotbed of these types. Included Eugene Genovese, Lloyd Gardner, and Warren Susman, . . . . They had little of special note to say about race or poverty, the two other big concerns of the time.. . . Genovese's subsequent erratic path is well known. Genovese had little to say about race? What planet are you from? Klendathu, but let me qualify. I was speaking from my personal experience w/the profs, and EG had left by the time I arrived, as I noted. Of course EG had a lot to say about race. My point was those remaining did not, as I recollect. Their main contribution was in re: the war. mbs
