Re: Re: Henry Wallace
Michael Hoover [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/26/00 09:01PM CB: Yes, I often think that the Wallace would have been president without the switch. Was Wallace for real ? A red ? Well, he would have been prez if he'd still been vice-prez when FDR died at beginning of fourth term in 1945... ___ CB: Yea, that's what I was thinking. Somebody (powerful) probably thought, hey, FDR might die , and then Wallace would be pres. We better get him out of there. _ Wallace came from Iowa Republican family, father was agriculture secretary under Harding Coolidge (recall Harding died in '23) from 1921 until his death in 1924. Educated as plant geneticist - he developed first high- yield hybrid corn - HW took over family newspaper after dad died. Running paper with farming focus led Wallace to break with Reps over party's inattention to plight of rural farming families. Wallace used newspaper to promote farm price supports which he proceeded to implement as FDR's first agricultural secretary. In 1950, HW broke with supporters and people he was close to on political left over their refusal to support US in Korean War. He would also become public critic of Soviet Union. He wasn't red... _ CB: Thanks. Seems like he would have been a barrier to whipping up the Cold War and McCarthyism. CB
Frankfurters, fascism and ecology
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/26/00 06:22PM At 03:15 PM 5/26/00 -0700, you wrote: The Institute was originally financed by a wealthy Dutch rentier, proving that one should never be afraid of reappropriating The Man's capital flow to fight oppression. for better or for worse, almost all leftist organizations have relied on funds from rich "angels." ___ CB: How about filthy lucre from Red Devils , like Moscow gold ? CB
Re: Anthropology Question: Bounced from C. Moore
Here's a quote from Will Durant's _The Story of Civilization_ Vol I, "Our Oriental Heritage": p.105. (chapter VI The beginnings of civilization. 2. writing.) ... The linear script of Sumeria, on its first appearance (ca. 3600 B.C.) is apparently an abbreviated form of the signs and pictures painted or impressed upon the primitive pottery of lower Mesopotamia and Elam.6oa (Cambridge Ancient History i,376.) ... From such a beginning to the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia would be an intelligible and logical development. The oldest graphic symbols known to us are those found by Flinders Petrie on shards, vases and stones discovered in the prehistoric tombs of Egypt, Spain and the Near East, to which, with his usual generosity, he attributes an age of seven thousand years. This "Mediterranean Signary" numbered some three hundred signs; most of them were the same in all localities, indicating commercial bonds from one end of the Mediterranean to the other as far back as 5000 B.C. They were not pictures but chiefly mercantile symbols -- marks of property, quantity, or other business memoranda; the berated bourgeoisie may take consolation in the thought that literature originated in bills of lading. The signs were not letters, since they represented entire words or ideas; but many of them were astonishingly like letters of the "Phoenician" alphabet. Petrie concludes that "a wide body of signs had been gradually brought into use in primitive times for various purposes. These were interchanged by trade, and spread from land to land, ... until a couple of dozen signs triumphed and became common property to a group of trading communities, while the local survivals of other forms were gradually extinguished in isolated seclusion." 61 That this signary was the source of the alphabet is an interesting theory, which Professor Petrie has the distinction of holding alone.62 (On page 228 Durant describes the commercial transactions of the ancient commercial civilization par excellence: Babylonia, ... beginning even before the time of Hammurabi, ca 2100 B.C.) Returning to page 105 of Durant: Whatever may have been the development of these early commercial symbols, there grew up alongside them a form of writing which was a branch of drawing and painting, and conveyed connnected thought by pictures. ... Certainly by 3600 B.C., and probably long before that, Elam, Sumeria and Egypt had developed a system of thought-pictures called _hieroglyphics_ because practiced chiefly by the priests.64 If the above is true, then that 800 year gap quoted by your authority gets called into question, at least requires further amplification. (This Durant reference that I am quoting from was written in 1935 ... soo take it with the proverbial grain of salt. It's the book I've got.) Curtis Moore At 03:04 PM 5/26/00 -0700, you wrote: I have a question for anyone with a passing knowledge of anthropology. The speaker on our campus made these two statements that some very interesting. Are they true? cuneiform was only used for business transactions 800 years before people realized that it could be used for other purposes. Early humans only sharpened one side of a stone by chipping it for 800,000 years before they began to chip the other side. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Anthropology Question: Bounced from C. Moore
Actually Athenian culture was pretty thoroughly oral. In the 5th century oral contracts only were binding, written contracts having no force of law. Plato says somewhere that his central doctrines cannot be expressed in writing but only in speech. Scholars still debate whether Homer even knew how to read or write, and in any case writing would only be used as a sort of aid, with major "composition" probably going on orally. If you consider the writing technology available even into the 19th century you can see why writers would have to do a lot of the work in their head or by mumbling to themselves rather than by writing. Carrol
Re: anthropology question
Title: [PEN-L:19706] Re: anthropology question Greetings Economists, Charles Brown wrote briefly responding to Michael Perelman concerning writing systems this way, Charles, CB: Yes, on the Marxism list I once pointed out this archeological example of the origin of writing in economic trade as a deep example of vulgar economic determinism, infra-structure determines superstructure. Recently in the media , it was reported that they had some Egyptian alphabetical writing in trade earlier than the above cuneiform. Alphabetical writing is more abstract than picture wriiting. Doyle While I don't want to nitpick here about things, this is not a criticism of Charles at all, but a riff off the line he writes here. I do have a different perspective on picture writing. Incidently before I start, I want to praise the many things that Charles has written in the past on a wide range of subjects. In thinking about what it means to communicate with pictures some twenty five years ago, I kept thinking to myself about the goal of what writing and language is. I was thinking like many people who grew up with television about using motion pictures to express my life. There is a sense that picture writing, and perhaps edited movies have some aspect like writing is less abstract than is writing. The word abstract I think is quite old as a means of describing something as abstract. Abstrahere is a Latin word in the sense of the word abstract and picture writing. To draw upon a surface in such a way to suggest a form (as geometry does by drawing in the dirt to lay out the plans for building or land assessment). The word origin of abstraction actually is in drawing and pictures. Writing systems and the Egyptian system in particular has a very clear component of picture like images, are capable of transmitting words that mean motion, and states of being. A drawing that represents motion for example by definition only shows a stillness. So what I think Charles is referring to is the sense that still pictures only vaguely carry the meaning of seeing motion when he brings up the issue of abstraction. This is critical core point within language. I will expand a little. The central issue in writing is the ability to convey clearly what speech is able to, that is the verb structure of language. Now I want to point out here very clearly what Carrol Cox has raised repeatedly elsewhere that human thinking is not language. I want to be clear about this distinction because the tendency within at least English culture to attribute to writing and speech thought-like qualities. Conversely one avenue of exploration into the reality of human thought is considering how do we think about seeing motion. For example in mathematics, the calculus is a method for articulating motion. Or in Picasso, and Duchampisn cubism explores expressing motion through alterations of views in a surface depiction. In each case a tool of production gives us various methods in order to be able to express what it means to see motion. Especially with Picasso and Duchamp we might think of their work as abstract because the sense they wanted to convey of seeing motion through their methods of painting was little like the average human experience of seeing motion with their eyes. With writing though, words that stand in for motion are actually less abstract than for example the calculus. The reason for this is that human thought as spoken from an experienced talker is more familiar than are methods invented like the calculus. Mathematics is not so thought like as words are. I mean this statement in the sense of ease of use, not property components of speech or writing. Getting back to Charles' original point, let us consider motion pictures now. Normally the commercial cinema requires a script in order to get the project going. Over the century of the industry some commercial directors have tried to simply shoot the story without a script. While feasible, it has proven to be more expensive. What this tells me, is the difficulty of using a picture in a language like way in the sense that one might assume Charles' remark communicates. A movie obviously depicts motion more realistically than does words, cannot match the economy of writing for doing approximately the same story line. We are missing something. That missing element in story telling with just a move camera is why abstraction is important as a concept. Hence why words remain so important to us as a means of conveying structure in language. Abstraction as Charles uses the word is about the difficulty of pictures to adequately convey how human beings think. Technically we can show motion in movies and the ancients who first invented writing systems could not hope to do that with pictures, but there is still the problem with movies, that writing is more supple and powerful at expressing human thoughts. Again I remind everyone of the point that Carrol Cox has driven home about this point, that writing is
Bard College
I just returned from Bard College, where graduation ceremonies for the class of 2000 and a reunion for my graduating class of 1965 were held. Bard is an interesting institution. Along with Black Mountain College, Bennington, Antioch and Goddard, the school was seen as an experiment in progressive educational philosophy. These schools either involved ambitious, but largely unsuccessful, work-study programs or in the case of Black Mountain expected students to work on the upkeep of the college itself, through gardening for food served in the cafeteria, etc. John Dewey's progressivism was a strong element mixed with New Deal idealism. All of these schools went through big financial crises at one point or another and one, Black Mountain-- the eagle of the lot--succumbed in the 1950s. Even in its grave, the school was seen as one of the great cultural influences of the 20th century, either through the literary journal edited by faculty member and dean Charles Olsen, or through art classes taught by well-known modernists such as Joseph Albers. The others hit a brick wall in the 1960s and 70s as American society entered a post-affluence period when the realities of the job market militated against the kind of intellectual hothouse atmosphere of a place like Bard or Bennington. The schools were forced to become more competitive and the financial and curricular restructuring was often quite painful, as indicated in an article about Bennington in today's NY Times: "Founded in 1932 as a women's college challenging educational orthodoxy, the upstart developed a history of innovation, a tradition of teacher-practitioners -- often cutting-edge figures in art, drama, dance and literature -- working in close relationship with their student-apprentices and, in recent decades, academic politics of exceeding viciousness. "But with the college having fallen on hard times by 1994, its niche nibbled away by changes in the Ivy League and other institutions, its student body reduced in quantity and quality, some of its faculty lapsing toward mediocrity and its finances in peril, the trustees, the administration and the faculty came up with a restructuring plan called the Symposium after a two-year agonizing reappraisal. "A third of the faculty -- 26 of 79 professors -- was fired in a single stroke in 1994." Bard solved its financial crisis in a less extreme fashion. When Leon Botstein assumed the presidency of the college in 1975 at the age of 28, the youngest such office-holder in the United States, he elected to curb the "excesses" of the old Bard and to restyle the school as a competitive liberal arts college in the mode of Swarthmore, Haverford or Reed. He has been eminently successful. One out of 10 applications are approved today, while back in 1961, when I was a freshman, the ratio was something like 1 out of 3. Despite Bard's mediocre reputation, it was an important institution. From 1933-44, it added distinguished European emigres, in flight from fascist Europe, to the faculty. Among them were painter Stefan Hirsch, political editor Felix Hirsch, violinist Emil Hauser of the Budapest String Quartet, philosopher Heinrich Bluecher, economist Adolf Sturmthal, and philosopher Werner Wolff. Botstein is a well-respected public figure, whose musings appear regularly on the NY Times op-ed page, including a piece on standardized testing today (5/28), to which he is opposed. He is also a mediocre symphony orchestra conductor, who compensates for lackluster performances with his dedication to neglected composers, including Schoenberg about whom Botstein has recently edited a collection of essays. But Botstein's real gift is for fund-raising, about whose propriety I have had occasion to take exception to. Botstein has a tremendous affinity for hooking up with very wealthy but very compromised figures, a failing that remains lost on most Bard graduates except the occasionally disgruntled Marxist like myself. In 1987 I received a mailing from the alumnus office crowing about Botstein's new appointees to the Board of Trustees. One was Asher Edelman, a leveraged buyout artist and Bard Graduate, whose sleazy behavior served as the inspiration for the Gordon Gecko character in "Wall Street". Edelman's takeovers often resulted in the permanent unemployment of "excess" workers. The other appointee was Martin Peretz, the editor of New Republic who used the formerly liberal magazine to stump for contra funding. Since I was heavily involved with sending volunteers to Nicaragua, I blew my stack and wrote Botstein a heavily sarcastic letter congratulating him for sniffing out rich scumbags who would help him balance the school's books. Apparently Botstein doesn't enjoy being criticized in this fashion. He sent me a long angry reply defending his actions. In a way it is easy to understand Botstein's self-righteousness. In his own eyes, he must appear practically a Bolshevik. After all, didn't he set up an Alger Hiss chair at Bard
Rakesh on Behemoth
Dear Brad, On PEN-L you mentioned that Neumann's Behemoth is fundamentally wrong. Your only criticism is his inability to have understood the real threat of genocide, yet you fail to note that by 1944 Neumann had already corrected himself and offered what he called the spearhead theory of anti-semitism, which is included as an appendix to the later edition of this book. Moreover, you don't discuss mention the theory of anti-semitism, grounded in money fetishism, that he did develop in the first volume. There is more than one theory of anti semitism in even the first edition. We have the political theory to which you refer, we have a Marxian theory of anti-semitism which is traced to money fetishism. And we have the spearhead theory by 1944. The book is complex, and contradictory. But I think few thought then there was a better effort available, and to suppress its re-publication for 30 years is inexcusable. Yours, Rakesh -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dialectics and Nonlinear Dynamics
At 11:27 25/05/00 -0400, you wrote: For those who are curious, I have a recently published paper on these issues. "Aspects of dialectics and non-linear dynamics," _Cambridge Journal of Economics_, May 2000, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 311-324. It is also available on my website without the figures at http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb. Barkley Rosser Congratulations on getting published in this journal. This is an important area of left political economy. I will copy the abstract and then comment on extracts. Abstract Three principles of dialectical analysis are examined in terms of nonlinear dynamics models. The three principles are the transformation of quantity into quality, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation. The first two of these especially are interpreted within the frameworks of catastrophe, chaos, and emergent dynamics complexity theoretic models, with the concept of bifurcation playing a central role. Problems with this viewpoint are also discussed. I. Introduction Among the deepest problems in political economy is that of the qualitative transformation of economic systems from one mode to another. A long tradition, based on Marx, argues that this can be explained by a materialist interpretation of the dialectical method of analysis as developed by Hegel. Although Marx can be argued to have been the first clear and rigorous mathematical economist (Mirowski, 1986), this aspect of his analysis generally eschewed mathematics. Indeed some (Georgescu-Roegen, 1971) argue that the dialectical method is in deep conflict with arithmomorphism, or a precisely quantitative mathematical approach, that its very essence involves the unavoidable invocation of a penumbral fuzziness that defies and defeats using most forms of mathematics in political economy. Do you know the book by Moshe Machover which was the first to analyse Marx's economic theories with probalistic maths? The Laws of Chaos, A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy by Emmanuel Farjoun and Moshe Machover VVerso Editions London. ISBN 086091 768 1 Machover is a very reasonable marxist, and has an e-mail address. The only qualification is that the publishers chose the title for him rather than himself and he is not interested in chaos theory. The exercise stands on its ground as a probabilistic working of a marxian political economy. However, this paper will argue that nonlinear dynamics offers a way in which a mathematical analogue to certain aspects of the dialectical approach can be modelled, in particular, that of the difficult problem of qualitative transformation alluded to above. In particular, we shall discuss certain elements of catastrophe theory, chaos theory, and complex emergent dynamics theory models that allow for a mathematical modelling of quantitative change leading to qualitative change, one of the widely claimed foundational concepts of the dialectical approach, and a key to its analysis of systemic political economic transformation. In most linear models, continuous changes in inputs do not lead to discontinuous changes in outputs, which will be our mathematical interpretation of the famous quantitative change leading to qualitative change formulation. Part II of this paper briefly reviews basic dialectical concepts. Part III discusses how catastrophe theory can imply dialectical results. Part IV considers chaos theory from a dialectical perspective. Part V examines some emergent complexity concepts along similar lines, culminating in a broader synthesis. Part VI will present conclusions. II. Basic Dialectical Concepts In a famous formulation, Engels (1940, p. 26) identifies the laws of dialectics as being reducible to three basic concepts: 1) the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa, 2) the interpenetration of opposites, and 3) the negation of the negation, although Engels's approach differs from that of many others on many grounds For both Marx and Engels (1848), the first of these was the central key to the change from one mode of production to another, their historical materialist approach seeing history unfolding in qualitatively distinct stages such as ancient slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. Engels (1954, p. 67) would later identify this with Hegel's (1842, p. 217) example of the boiling or freezing of water at specific temperatures, qualitative (discontinuous) leaps arising from quantitative (continuous) changes. In modern physics this is a phase transition and can be analyzed using spin glass or other complexity type models (Kac, 1968). In modern evolutionary theory this idea has shown up in the concept of punctuated equilibria (Eldredge and Gould, 1972), which Mokyr (1990) and Rosser (1991, Chap. 12) link with the Schumpeterian (1934) theory of
Re: Dialectics and Nonlinear Dynamics
Chris, I got you wrong. From this post, I learned much, and I am not joking. All these years I tried to conceptualise the world in terms of forests, a handy analogue for space/time continua. You showed a better way. Here in England for example we have Epping Forest. This is a small woody area in North London full of things like Queen Elizabeth I's hunting lodge, pubs selling Thai food amid Ye Olde settings, with Great Oak swings in the garden which demented kids who hate to be torn from their playstations try to demolish, etc. In Germany OTOH they have the Black Forest. It is bigger, enough even for people to feel OK wearing lederhosen in. In Russia, it is all the opposite way round, as you'd expect being a cognescento of Russian philosophy: there they have these simply ginormous forests all over the place, interspersed with small beleaguered settlements of melancholic drunken Russians pretending this is part of Europe and lying amid the meadows while trying to speculate about the nature of the cosmos beyond the treetops. In the Black Forest, Wandervogel wander and think about knightly tasks. After a very long while they get lost and the problem then is to work out where the fuck they are. This is why Germans have so many parts of speech related to 'here' type questions. In Epping it's all 'now' type questions. Here in Epping, people decide to try Nature on Sunday afternoons. Mostly they hope to avoid each other, and to avoid deranged geese in the meres, crashed world war two warplanes complete with handlebar-moustached corpses of English heroic fighter pilots with skulls locked in a grinning rictus which seems to shout 'Tally-Ho!' at one, etc, before staggering back to the hypo and condom-littered carpark where they must decide time-questions like is there enough time for a swift half, enough time to catch the tube before closing time, etc. and then they rush to consult the timetables and work out that only a frenzied jog will get them to Epping tube station before the last train which has any hope of conveying them to the West End, civilisation etc. Meanwhile, in Russia the melancholics continue to stand motionless at bus stops where buses never stop, pointing three fingers at their necks (Barkley knows why). These woody metaphors were how I circumnavigated around philosophy. Barkley + his very clever Russian wife found a way of sublating the problems of space, time, trees, undergowth, cut shins, absence of bus stops etc, into a book about Marxism and non-linear dynamics. I am absolutely sure that Barkley like me has been involved in non-linear attempts to get out of intractable forest. This is why I relate to him and him to me. I'm about to post a big piece on oil. It may not be such of a yawn any more to anyone who just had to fill up their tank at a gas station. This is my direct route to the non-linear dynamics of capitalist crash. I drive a Fiesta, a brand new one admittedly, but even so I have no regrets. I get 60 non-linear miles to the gallon out of it. Soon I'll be foraging for firewood in Epping Forest though. I'll be thinking about you. Mark Jones http://www.egroups.com/group/CrashList PS I meant what I said. This was a good post. - Original Message - From: "Chris Burford" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2000 12:11 PM Subject: [PEN-L:19691] Dialectics and Nonlinear Dynamics At 11:27 25/05/00 -0400, you wrote: For those who are curious, I have a recently published paper on these issues. "Aspects of dialectics and non-linear dynamics," _Cambridge Journal of Economics_, May 2000, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 311-324. It is also available on my website without the figures at http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb. Barkley Rosser Congratulations on getting published in this journal. This is an important area of left political economy. I will copy the abstract and then comment on extracts.
the US Mafioso racket (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 23:04:48 -0700 From: "Boles (office)" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: "Savage, Dan" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: the US Mafioso racket Here's a block from an article in today's IHT (originally from the W. Post) on the shift of US forces to East Asia as a conscious following of the center of the world-economy to there. In light of the planned attack on N. Korea as pointed out by Spectors (a country of starving people! Good God these fugn elites are heinous!), this chunk of the article, especially the discussion of military "games," seems again to support the idea of the US focusing on areas where disturbances will drive financial flows to US markets. The scenario that would most upset this strategy, would be peace with China or N. Korea. And that is the opposite of what the Pentagon foresees. According to the article, US leaders seem desperate in trying to find excuses to keep US troops in Japan and S. Korea if N. Korea "collapses peacefully." Gee, how odd it is that it is the US planning to start a war there. Obviously, peace is not in the Pentagon's interest or that of the Industrial Military Complex, which is, of course, the most competitive industry that the US has outside of banking and software. I've bolded parts and added comments in brackets which I thought interesting. Paris, Saturday, May 27, 2000 Changing Winds of U.S. Defense Strategy Pentagon Is Shifting Attention to Asia By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Service It is now a common assumption among national security thinkers that the area from Baghdad to Tokyo will be the main location of U.S. military competition for the next several decades. ''The center of gravity of the world economy has shifted to Asia, and U.S. interests flow with that,'' said James Bodner, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. When General Anthony Zinni, one of the most thoughtful senior officers in the military, met with the Army Science Board earlier this spring, he commented offhandedly that America's ''long-standing Europe-centric focus'' probably would shift in coming decades as policymakers ''pay more attention to the Pacific Rim, and especially to China.'' This is partly because of trade and economics, he indicated, and partly because of the changing ethnic makeup of the U.S. population. Just 10 years ago, said Major General Robert Scales Jr., commandant of the Army War College, roughly 90 percent of U.S. military thinking about future warfare centered on head-on clashes of armies in Europe. ''Today,'' he said, ''it's probably 50-50, or even more'' tilted toward warfare using characteristic Asian tactics, such as deception and indirection. [Good grief the racism here is nauseating! Bhuaaah.] The U.S. military's favorite way of testing its assumptions and ideas is to run a war game. Increasingly, the major games played by the Pentagon - except for the army - take place in Asia, on an arc from Tehran to Tokyo. The games are used to ask how the U.S. military might respond to some of the biggest questions it faces: Will Iran go nuclear, or become more aggressive with an array of hard-to-stop cruise missiles? Will Pakistan and India engage in nuclear war - or, perhaps even worse, will Pakistan break up, with its nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Afghan mujahidin? Will Indonesia fall apart? Will North Korea collapse peacefully? [Note this for later] And what may be the biggest question of all: Will the United States and China avoid military confrontation? One Pentagon official estimated that about two-thirds of the forward-looking games staged by the Pentagon over the last eight years have taken place partly or wholly in Asia. Last year, the U.S. Air Force's biggest annual war game looked at the Middle East and Korea. [Obviously because that's where the Pentagon and Clinton's team planned to attack!] The games planned this summer, ''Global Engagement Five,'' to be played over more than a week at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, will posit ''a rising large East Asian nation'' that is attempting to wrest control of Siberia, with all its oil and other natural resources, from a weak Russia. At one point, the United States winds up basing warplanes in Siberia to defend Russian interests. [But of course, not US interests] Because of the sensitivity of talking about fighting China, ''What everybody's trying to do is come up with games that are kind of China, but not China by name,'' said an air force strategist. ''I think that, however reluctantly, we are beginning to face up to the fact that we are likely over the next few years to be engaged in an ongoing military competition with China,'' noted Aaron Friedberg, a Princeton political scientist. ''Indeed, in certain respects, we already are.'' The new attention to Asia is
Whitehead on Dialectics and Mathematics
Whitehead's treatment of logic and mathematics is closely connected to the idea of "internal relations", the idea I identify with "dialectics". An important instance of the connection is found in his examination of the role of deduction (of "formal logic") in reason. Here he makes the same point as Hegel, deduction cannot be the only or the main method of "reason". Hegel puts this in terms of the relation of "reason" to the "understanding" (meaning by the latter term Kant's idea of reason, an idea limited by Kant's insufficiently critical approach to Newtonian ontological categories i.e. to scientific materialism). As Whitehead indicates at the end of the passage below, Internal relations limit the applicability of mathematical methods which make use of the concept of the "variable". This is because these methods presuppose that the "identity" of the variable remains unchanged as the mathematical reasoning elaborates "novel compositions" i.e. changed relations. Identity may not be preserved to the degree required for the valid use of the method. One example Whitehead offers is from arithmetic. One thing plus another thing doesn't always make two things e.g. a spark plus gunpowder. In Marx's value formula the requisite degree of identity of such variables as S, V, C etc. is maintained by assuming "labour" is made relatively homogeneous by the alienating effect on workers of the internal relations of the capitalist labour process. This makes their labour "abstract" labour. What follows is taken from a post I sent some time ago to the Post Keynesian list. I argue Whitehead was an important influence on Keynes. The point he makes in the quoted passage is, I suggest, the basis of Keynes's criticism of the "Ricardian vice". Here is another passage from Whitehead (this time from *Modes of Thought*) relevant to the discussion of Keynes's view of the logic of the social sciences. In it, Whitehead explains not only why "deduction" cannot be the main method of "philosophy" but also why one must be very careful in using it in a "special science" such a economics. At the end he also explains what is meant by the claim that certain forms of deductive reasoning presuppose that interdependence is "atomic". In particular, this is true of any form of deductive reasoning, e.g. algebra, that makes use of the idea of the "variable". It follows that such forms cannot be validly (i.e. "rigorously") employed where relations are internal in a way relevant to the argument. The discussion employs the distinction I earlier pointed to in Ramsey between "human logic or the logic of truth" and "formal logic" and makes claims about human logic similar though not identical to Ramsey's. In particular, Whitehead identifies "human logic" with a notion of "pragmatism" wider than the notion (taken from Charles Peirce) with which Ramsey identifies it. In his review of Ramsey's *Foundations of Mathematics* (X, pp. 338-9), Keynes embraces Ramsey's distinction between human and formal logic (and in doing so abandons key foundational aspects of the argument he had made in A Treatise on Probability). The distinction, Keynes notes, was Ramsey's response to the fact that "the gradual perfection of the formal treatment [of logic] at the hands of himself [Russell], of Wittgenstein and of Ramsey had been ... gradually to empty it of content and to reduce it more and more to mere dry bones, until finally it seemed to exclude not only all experience, but most of the principles, usually reckoned logical, of reasonable thought." Though embracing Ramsey's idea of "human logic" as the answer to how to deal with "everything" that could not be handled with formal logic, Keynes dissented from Ramsey's attempt to elaborate the idea in terms of Peirce's pragmatism. Though not much attention is paid to the fact in interpretive writing on Keynes, Keynes was a student of Whitehead. Whatever the nature of this relation, however, the following passage and much else (including the chapter [chap.VI "Foresight"] in *Adventures of Ideas* to which I recently pointed) demonstrate, in my judgment, that Keynes's ideas on these matters are very like Whitehead's. I should also say, by way of introduction, that Whitehead, in sharp contrast to much contemporary writing on epistemology and the philosophy of science, took Hume's radical skepticism to be a reductio ad absurdum of the premises about experience from which it had been deduced. In fact, he claims, Hume himself did not carry his skepticism far enough. The final reductio ad absurdum of Hume's starting point is "solipsism of the present moment" (*Symbolism*, p. 38). Whitehead's answer to Hume is to take issue with his premises about experience and to argue that direct experience shows that Hume's conception of experience as a flux of atomically conceived "sense data" is mistaken. (A summary of the argument can be found in *Symbolism*.) "In
More on GM Foods
Strange that the British papers have so much more information than those in the U.S. Published on Sunday, MAy 28, 2000 in the London Observer New Research Shows Genetically Modified Genes Are Jumping Species Barrier by Antony Barnett A leading zoologist has found evidence that genes used to modify crops can jump the species barrier and cause bacteria to mutate, prompting fears that GM technology could pose serious health risks. A four-year study by Professor Hans-Hinrich Kaatz, a respected German zoologist, found that the alien gene used to modify oilseed rape had transferred to bacteria living inside the guts of honey bees. The research - which has yet to be published and has not been reviewed by fellow scientists - is highly significant because it suggests that all types of bacteria could become contaminated by genes used in genetically modified technology, including those that live inside the human digestive system. If this happened, it could have an impact on the bacteria's vital role in helping the human body fight disease, aid digestion and facilitate blood clotting. Agriculture Minister Nick Brown, who was yesterday advising farmers who have accidentally grown contaminated GM oilseed rape in Britain to rip up their crops, confirmed the potential significance of Kaatz's research. He said: 'If this is true, then it would be very serious.' The 47-year-old Kaatz has been reluctant to talk about his research until it has been published in a scientific journal, because he fears a backlash from the scientific community similar to that faced by Dr Arpad Pustzai, who claimed that genetically modified potatoes damaged the stomach lining of rats. Pustzai was sacked and had his work discredited. But in his first newspaper interview, Kaatz told The Observer: 'It is true, I have found the herbicide-resistant genes in the rapeseed transferred across to the bacteria and yeast inside the intestines of young bees. This happened rarely, but it did happen.' Although Kaatz realised the potential 'significance' of his findings, he said he 'was not surprised' at the results. Asked if this had implications for the bacteria inside the human gut, he said: 'Maybe, but I am not an expert on this.' Dr Mae-Wan Ho, geneticist at Open University and a critic of GM technology, has no doubts about the dangers. She said: 'These findings are very worrying and provide the first real evidence of what many have feared. Everybody is keen to exploit GM technology, but nobody is looking at the risk of horizontal gene transfer. 'We are playing about with genetic structures that existed for millions of years and the experiment is running out of control.' One of the biggest concerns is if the anti-biotic resistant gene used in some GM crops crossed over to bacteria. 'If this happened it would leave us unable to treat major illnesses like meningitis and E coli .' Kaatz, who works at the respected Institute for Bee Research at the University of Jena in Germany, built nets in a field planted with genetically modified rapeseed produced by AgrEvo. He let the bees fly freely within the net. At the beehives, he installed pollen traps in order to sample the pollen from the bees' hindlegs when entering the hive. This pollen was fed to young honey bees in the laboratory. Pollen is the natural diet of young bees, which need a high protein diet. Kaatz then extracted the intestine of the young bees and discovered that the gene from the GM rape-seed had been transferred in the bee gut to the microbes. Professor Robert Pickard, director-general of the Institute of the British Nutrition Foundation, is a bee expert as well as being a biologist and has visited the institute where Kaatz works. He said: 'There is no doubt that, if Kaatz's research is
Re: More on GM Foods
Thanks for that, Michael. A proper little worry-guts you make of me as I make for my bed ... One paranoid thought that struck as I read the Observer piece was that government and medical authority campaigns here have been in full swing on the matter of the gradual decline in various bacterias' vulnerability to antibiotic treatment. The cause has always been unproblematically asserted as over-medicating (something for which the patient gets the blame, incidentally - they wouldn't feel like they got good service unless they come away with a prescription, apparently). Anyway, in that light, the paragraph "One of the biggest concerns is if the anti-biotic resistant gene used in some GM crops crossed over to bacteria. 'If this happened it would leave us unable to treat major illnesses like meningitis and E coli ,'" brings this claim " ... we also know many people have been eating GM products for years without showing any signs of ill health," into question, no? I mean, who's to say the recent failures of regular antibiotic treatments of, say, tuberculosis (a leading problem area in this respect, I'm told), are down to overmedication at all? Maybe the poor sod's a soy-milk drinker and has been unwittingly pouring antibiotic resistant shite down his neck for a decade! All based on pure ignorance, of course, but who's to blame for my ignorance here? I mean, where the hell would I go for information I'm entitled to trust on this stuff? Mr Angry of Sutton
Re: Whitehead on Dialectics and Mathematics
I should have mentioned that the "laws of dialectics" can be interpreted as expressions of internal relations. Where relations are internal, A is not-A because the being of A is internally related to what is not-A. Changes in quantity lead to discontinuous changes in quality because as relations change the identity of the related things changes. This idea of discontinuity differs from the conventional mathematical idea and from the idea of "punctuated equilibrium". Where relations are internal, all being is "process". An internally related set of processes (e.g. the capitalist labour process) will be "contradictory" where the internal relation defining a process (the capital/wage labour relation in the case of the capitalist labour process) works to transform identities and relations in a way inconsistent with its own continued existence (according to Marx, e.g. in the passage from The Holy Family, the capitalist labour process transforms the identity of the proletariat in this way). "Negation" is a characteristic of relations between developmental stages where these relations are internal in the way just specified. Each stage emerges from "negation" of the relations defining the preceding stage. This "negation" is an aspect of an internal relation of "sublation". Ted -- Ted WinslowE-MAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York UniversityFAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario CANADA M3J 1P3
Re: anthropology question
charlie [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/27/00 07:17PM Michael Perelman asks if this is true: Early humans only sharpened one side of a stone by chipping it for 800,000 years before they began to chip the other side. Yes, it is. The earliest stone tools, associated with "Lucy," date about 2.5 million years ago. The two-sided tool is dated somewhere between 2 to 1.5 million years ago. There is a species change, too, and whether you want to call Homo erectus (a maker of two-sideds) "human" is up to you. )) CB: When you say a species change , do you mean that homo sapiens and homo erectus could not mate and produce fertile offspring ? CB
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Dialectical materialismandecology
Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/26/00 03:14PM Jim Devine wrote: but what is "thaxis"? I know what "praxis" is. Theory + practice = thaxis. No relation to Thurn und Thaxis, or whatever that thing from Pynchon's Lot 49 is. ___ CB: Yea, if praxis is practical-critical activity, as in the First Thesis on Feuerbach, then thaxis might be critical-activity, as on an e-mail list where you can't really do full practice, so praxis minus practice is thaxis , critical-activity. CB
Dialectical materialism and historicalmaterialism (fwd)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/27/00 10:03PM Charles: So, Marx says in the Preface to to the Contribution to the Critique of Polit Economy that economics can be done almost with the exactness of a natural science, unlike art, etc I don't exactly think so, Charles. Last semester, we discussed this text in my Gramsci class and came up with a slightly different interpretation. The same Marx in the same text says that a social phenomenon can not be understood with the "exact" precision of natural sciences: "In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic, in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out" (Tucker, p.5). good night! ___ CB: Comrade, elsewhere on this thread , I just cited the exact words you quote above as SUPPORTING what I am saying. What gives ? CB
Re: Re: Re: Dialectical materialismandhistorical materialism
Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/27/00 06:58PM Charles: So, Marx says in the Preface to to the Contribution to the Critique of Polit Economy that economics can be done almost with the exactness of a natural science, unlike art, etc Chris: Could you give the quote as I would like to consider the argument? At 12:32 25/05/00 -0400, Charles wrote: Charles: It is pretty famous. Just a minute. ." In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic -- in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out." (From Karl Marx's A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY Preface) Apologies for not coming back earlier, but I wanted time to consider your post. Obviously I welcome the points where we are thinking in parallel. On the passage above the issue if how precise is the precision of a natural science? I have to agree that Marx is saying it is more precise in the realm of economics than in the realm of the superstructure. Presumably he considered that pretty precise. However I do not think we have to read him to mean dogmatically and simplistically prescriptive. ))) CB: Well sure, we don't have to do that. (Nor do you imply this, but I think it is worth saying in our efforts to see the current relevance of the marxist method). In Capital Volume 3 Ch48, he says "all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided." About scientific laws, in Volume 1 of Capital, after stating the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation, he says, "Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances". In Chapter 14 Section 4, he qualifies the workings of the law of value with the word "ultimately": "the law of value ultimately determines how much of its disposable working time society can spend on each particular class of commodities." This usage of "ultimately" is echoed in the famous letter of Engels to Bloch of Sept 1990. I cannot claim that this is all proof that Marx's approach was a probabilistic one, but that it is compatible with a probabilistic view of science, or at least of the manifestation of scientific laws. __ CB: I'm down with all that. The famous Engels letter to Bloch in which he says we are not that vulgar. But natural science has probabilistic models too. Physicist Erwin Marquit says that this is why quantum mechanics is not such a big deal in physics, as far as its inability to be as exact as other physics now. I think Marx is referring to something different. The structure of class society creates a kind of artificial mechanicism in human relations, an artificial "naturalness" , if that is not too self-contradictory. It is not just that people think of capitalism as "natural", in the sense that there is no other way, but that production becomes so mechanical that people act as robots, as things, rather than humans, emergent humans. This mechanicalism can be measured exactly as physics' mechanics is. Marx measures it exactly or precisely in _Capital_. This is a different phenomenon than the precision and naturalness of our physiology, for example, our authentic naturalness. snip By the way, the issue we are discussing here ( the nature-LIKE, but not authentic natural, motions of class society) first occurred to me out of our researches in that debate. In that afterword, Marx says his process in economics is to treat economic history like a natural history. This is a somewhat different issue than Marx claiming dialectical materialism ( although the historicism in both is a dialectical aspect). I'd have to categorize what I am saying here ( and with which I believe Jim D. agrees) as a hypothesis. I would be more definite that Marx was a founder of dialectical materialism. It is an interesting hypothesis. I am not quite sure I have got the point or would agree with it, but I do not want to criticise it. It is too subtle to be resolved in that way. I suppose I have reservations about the word "artificial". The historical devolpment of commodity exchange in a sense *naturally* led to the point at which the mode of production became predomately capitalist. Certain laws are conscious and support this mode of production but I am not sure they are any more artificial than those of the feudal system or the slave system. Perhaps though we cannot really pursue this issue unless we can see some important implications of the hypothesis. _ CB: No the idea is not that they are more artificial than those in feudalism and slavery. Those systems had aritificalities too. The artificial naturalist is in all class exploitative
Re: Dialectics
Ted wrote: I should have mentioned that the "laws of dialectics" can be interpreted as expressions of internal relations. I should mention that it's possible to state valid propositions in more than one language. Here, I'll use a Althusserian structuralist language. Where relations are internal, A is not-A because the being of A is internally related to what is not-A. To be more concrete, the bourgeoisie (A) and the proletariat (not-A) are defined relative to each other within the structural of the mode of production. (The Althusserian tradition has the additional point that the actual empirical social formation is more complex (has a more complex class structure) than does the mode of production. It is considered at a lower level of abstraction.) Changes in quantity lead to discontinuous changes in quality because as relations change the identity of the related things changes. This idea of discontinuity differs from the conventional mathematical idea and from the idea of "punctuated equilibrium". The distinction between qualitative and quantitative change would be defined in terms of the structure of the mode of production. (The distinction would be different from that defined within the context of the more-complex social formation.) Quantitative changes within the context of the mode of production would be such things as a higher rate of exploitation, a lower rate of profit, a larger exploitable wage-labor force, or a larger stock of fixed capital. Qualitative change would be a crumbling or changing of the basic structure of the mode of production, i.e., the end of the capitalist ability to hold onto their property. (Qualitative change in the social formation is less radical, e.g., the end of some pre-capitalist mode of production such as the independent mode of production (very small business, family farms). Where relations are internal, all being is "process". Because the Althusserian structuralist tradition tends to treat people as simply being results of the ensemble of social relations (the social structure) while ignoring the way in which the active practice of these people either lead to changes in or reproduce the social relations over time, this tradition usually ends up being static, not seeing time-bound processes as crucial. (History, if not irrelevant, is a series of structures in this view.) So here we have to go beyond the Althusserian tradition. It seems obvious that one could add the process of class struggle and the process of aggressive capitalist accumulation to the A tradition's vision of the capitalist mode of production (and yet other processes to the vision of a social formation). I would add the process of competition (perhaps turning to unity) within the working class. (Mike Lebowitz' book, BEYOND CAPITAL, is instructive here, from a roughly Hegelian Marxist perspective.) Much of the Althusserian literature presumes that there's a steady "progress" of the forces of production, but that doesn't follow from their analysis. An internally related set of processes (e.g. the capitalist labour process) will be "contradictory" where the internal relation defining a process (the capital/wage labour relation in the case of the capitalist labour process) works to transform identities and relations in a way inconsistent with its own continued existence (according to Marx, e.g. in the passage from The Holy Family, the capitalist labour process transforms the identity of the proletariat in this way). In the modified Althusserian vision, the structure of the mode of production (exploitation, the way in which capitalist competition encourages greater exploitation, the way in which workers resist) tends to undermine the structure of that mode of production. (A more complex story could be told for the social formation.) "Negation" is a characteristic of relations between developmental stages where these relations are internal in the way just specified. Each stage emerges from "negation" of the relations defining the preceding stage. This "negation" is an aspect of an internal relation of "sublation". Negation of the capitalist mode of production would mean the end of capitalist monopolization of the means of production and the accumulation process. Some aspects of the mode of production would be preserved, i.e., those aspects of "production in general" (an even higher level of abstraction than the mode of production). The Althusserians are more ambiguous about what would arise from the collapse of capitalism (though the hope is that it would be socialism). There's no concept of "developmental stages," if by that Ted means stages that develop inevitably from each other. Socialism is one possible result of the collapse of capitalism, but the history of the old USSR suggests that "something else" might result (what I call "bureaucratic socialism"). I have probably misstated the Althusserian perspective (since though
Re: anthropology question
Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] 05/26/00 06:46PM Michael Perelman wrote: I have a question for anyone with a passing knowledge of anthropology. The speaker on our campus made these two statements that some very interesting. Are they true? cuneiform was only used for business transactions 800 years before people realized that it could be used for other purposes. I don't know about the exact number of years, but writing was certainly first used for "commercial" purposes. Linea A and Linear B (the scripts of the Minoan-Mycenean civilization were similarly used. (Some of this I think you can get from Finley's *The Ancient Economy*.) _ CB: Yes, on the Marxism list I once pointed out this archeological example of the origin of writing in economic trade as a deep example of vulgar economic determinism, infra-structure determines superstructure. Recently in the media , it was reported that they had some Egyptian alphabetical writing in trade earlier than the above cuneiform. Alphabetical writing is more abstract than picture wriiting. __ The reason we have those two scripts is interesting. Mycenae was one of a number of ancient economies which are called "Palace Economies." They were operated with an immense bureaucracy. Everything flowed into the palace, where detailed records were kept. Since they were only for ongoing accounting (had local bureaucrat X forwarded the proper amount of tribute in grain for his locale), they needed not be permanent. Hence they were kept on clay tablets *which were not fired* but simply allowed to dry. After a few months they were simply soaked with water and formed into fresh tablets. When that civilization collapsed suddently (around the 11th century if I remember correctly) the collapse was accomanied by immense fires (invaders, earthquake, peasant insurrection -- no one knows). So the tablets then in use got fired and were left for archaeologists to dig up and (finally around 1950) decipher. It was a great disappointment when the knowledge thus unearthed consisted mostly in how many bushels of barley had been receeive from a given locality. May I say in general that Finley's works on ancient Greece are most readable and vastly informative. __ CB: Dissappointing , but an amazing example of vulgar economic determinism. Writing, the scholar's definitive characterisitic , originates in filthy, boring commerce ! CB
