Re: The rate of profit and recession
Charles, I do not know whether science has ethical implications but the practice of science and rational argument depends on ethical commitments--good faith attempts to understand the other side, to consider and carefully engage counter-criticism before launching the same criticism in the same unmodified form again, to recognize the strongest counter-evidence against you (for example, I have openly admitted that I do not have good or any direct evidence that the rise in the s/v no longer neutralized rise in vcc and u/p labor ratio, and I have hurt my brain working through neo Ricardian critiques such as Catephores' and Robert Paul Wolff's--do you understand even one problem in the crude underconsumptionist theory to which you are committed?), and to read the works of your opponents (for example, I have re-read Perlo and Fichtenbaum whom you do not in fact understand, so in your case it first has to be a matter of reading the very theorists whom you think you are defending). Now of course Jim Devine has reached the conclusion that I have not operated ethically in my criticisms of him, and I openly admit to being very confused by what he is saying. I for example don't understand whether his or any overinvestment/modified unconsumption theory can specify a growth rate that would make accumulation somewhat less vulnerable to collapse like a house of cards. I truly don't understand this. But then neither does Shaikh. Fred also read the same unconsumptionism into Jim's theory that I understood it to imply. Jim denies both that his theory his vulgar underconsumption or fosters reformist illusions. Well, you can draw succor from many others who have also read underconsumptionism into Marx as the last word in crisis theory. But I have no interest in an exchange of slogans And that is what I will get with you, not a scientific or even rational argument. I wish you luck in finding other interlocutors. Rakesh
Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
I do remember reading a particularly eloquent paper a few years back
('In Defence of Exploitation' I think it was called)
Oops - I see Justin has told you about it already.
MetLife set to kick off China operations
Business Standard Last updated 1630 Hrs IST, Friday, January 25, 2002 MetLife set to kick off China operations Debjoy Sengupta in Kolkata The US-based Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (MetLife) is all set to commence its business in China as part of its expansion in Asia. India is another country where the company is developing its business and has opened an office in Kolkata recently. The company has procured a license from the China Insurance Regulatory Commission for floating a subsidiary in the country last month and has entered into talks with financial companies in China. MetLife sources said they expected talks to be concluded in around 60 days. MetLife will initially focus on individual insurance policies through career agency system. Although the company has received an in-principle approval from the Chinese authorities for a single region, it is yet to receive approval for a specific area where it will commence its operations. In China foreign players need to procure licences for every area they want to operate in. MetLife will apply for a region specific license only after it has completed negotiations with the domestic player. At present Met Life is engaged in talks with three private corporate in China. The business model and other details will be finalised only after it has struck a deal with the domestic player. The rule in China requires Met Life to float a subsidiary along with a domestic player with a minimum equity capital of $100 million that needs to be brought in by the partners in equal proportion. Initial investment in China has to be around $100 million which needs to be enhanced as when the company procures licenses for other cities. The Chinese government opened up insurance for foreign private players lately and a number of companies including, Sunlife Assurance, Max Life Insurance, have made a foray. The environment in China is very different from what it worldwide, and operations there need to be region specific. Authorities in China along with the government are very cautious about foreign companies setting up insurance business there, and as such the foreign players need to work under a set of stringent norms. Further, licenses for other region will also depend upon its performance in its initial years. MetLife has a presence in Beijing and Shanghai. Since establishing its first representative office in 1995, MetLife has served as advisors on a number of projects with government agencies and sponsoring several major seminars. MetLife also played a role in supporting the passage of Permanent Normal Trade Relations status for China with the US Congress and Executive Branch. This 133-year old company is a major life insurance player in the US and has a total $2 trillion life insurance in force. The company serves approximately nine million individual households in the US. It covers approximately 33 million employees and members. MetLife also has international insurance operations in 15 countries including China. Business Standard Ltd. 5, Pratap Bhavan, Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi - 110002. INDIA Ph: +91-11-3720202, 3739840. Fax: 011 - 3720201 Copyright Disclaimer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Krugman re: phantom profits
New York Times February 1, 2002 Two, Three, Many? By PAUL KRUGMAN H ere's a scary question: How many more Enrons are out there? Even now the conventional wisdom is that Enron was uniquely crooked. O.K., other companies have engaged in aggressive accounting, the art form formerly known as fraud. But how likely is it that other major companies will turn out, behind their imposing facades, to be little more than pyramid schemes? Alas, it's all too likely. I can't tell you which corporate icons will turn out to be made of papier-mâché, but I'd be very surprised if we don't have two, three, even many Enrons in our future. Why do I say this? Like any crime, a pyramid scheme requires means, motive and opportunity. Lately all three have been there in abundance. Means: We now know how easily a company that earns a modest profit, or even loses money, can dress itself up to create the appearance of high profitability. Just the simple trick of paying employees not with straight salary, which counts as an expense, but with stock options, which don't, can have a startling effect on a company's reported profits. According to the British economist Andrew Smithers, in 1998 Cisco reported a profit of $1.35 billion; if it had counted the market value of the stock options it issued as an expense, it would have reported a loss of $4.9 billion. And stock options are only one of a panoply of techniques available to make the bottom line look artificially good. Motive: The purpose of inflating earnings is, of course, to drive up the price of the stock. But why do companies want to do that? One answer is that a high stock price helps a company grow; it makes it easier to raise money, to acquire other companies, to attract employees and so on. And no doubt most managers have puffed up their stock out of a genuine desire to make their companies grow. But as we watch top executives walk away rich while the companies they ran collapse (there are cases worse than Enron; the founder of Global Crossing has apparently walked away from bankruptcy with $750 million), it's clear that we should also think about the incentives of the managers themselves. Ask not what a high stock price can do for your company; ask what it can do for your personal bottom line. Not incidentally, a high stock price facilitates the very accounting tricks that companies use to create phantom profits, further driving up the stock price. It's Ponzi time! But what about opportunity? A confluence of three factors in the late 1990's opened the door for financial scams on a scale unseen for generations. First was the rise of the new economy. New technologies have, without question, created new opportunities and shaken up the industrial order. But that creates the kind of confusion in which scams flourish. How do you know whether a company has really found a highly profitable new-economy niche or is just faking it? Second was the stock market bubble. As Robert Shiller pointed out in his book Irrational Exuberance, a rising market is like a natural Ponzi scheme, in which each successive wave of investors generates gains for the last wave, making everything look great until you run out of suckers. What he didn't point out, but now seems obvious, is that in such an environment it's also easy to run deliberate pyramid schemes. When the public believes in magic, it's springtime for charlatans. And finally, there was (and is) a permissive legal environment. Once upon a time, the threat of lawsuits hung over companies and auditors that engaged in sharp accounting practices. But in 1995 Congress, overriding a veto by Bill Clinton, passed the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, which made such suits far more difficult. Soon accounting firms, the companies they audited and the investment banks that sold their stock got very cozy indeed. And here too one must look not only at the motives of corporations, but at the personal motives of executives. We now know that Enron managers gave their investment bankers not their investment banks but the individual bankers an opportunity to invest in the shell companies they used to hide debt and siphon off money. Wanna bet that similar deals didn't take place at many other firms? I hope that Enron turns out to be unique. But I'll be very surprised. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information
Re: Krugman re: phantom profits
From: Michael Pollak [EMAIL PROTECTED] New York Times February 1, 2002 Two, Three, Many? By PAUL KRUGMAN ... When the public believes in magic, it's springtime for charlatans. Which helps explain the popularity of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and the War on Terrorism. Carl _ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
I have had an extensive argument with someone influenced by Roemer, though he criticizes Roemer for not appreciating the distinction between labor power and labor. But I'll ask you a question: how do you understand the logic by which Marx discovered the distinction between labor power and labor or--to put it another way--that what Mr Moneybags pays for in what is indeed a fair exchange is labor power, not labor time itself? Or do you think said distinction is as superfluous as the so called labor theory of value? Or do you think Marx's understanding of that distinction has to be modified? This I take up in another paper, In defense of Exploittaion, Econ Phil 1995, also available on the net in the old marxism spoons archive. I think that the distinction is valid and it is a very serious flaw in Roemer's critique of Marxian exploitation theory that he misses the significancxe of it. That is something quite independent of Roemer's positive theory of exploitation, the possibility of a better alternative, which independent of his critique of Marxian exploitaion, and (I argue in IDoE) both a necessary complement to Marx's theory and valid in its own right. As to the this positive theory, it is crucial to emphasize that it's not morally or otherwise culpable for people to have to work for others, etc., if there is no credible alternative to this situation where the exploited would also be at least as well if not better off by some measure. So the explication of feasible alternatives to exploitative relations is a necessary part of the charge that those relations are exploitative at all. So, to bring in another bomb into this discussion, not only was Marx wrong on practical grounds to disclaim writing recipes for the cookshops of the future, he was wrong on theoretical grounds: he can't even say that capitalsim is exploitative unless there is a better alternative. Unless there is a better alterntive, it ios not exploitative. I think that Roemer's version loses a lot of the point of Marx's socological analysis, which, as I say, can be maintained without holding that labor creates all value Justin, Marx does not say that. He says that *abstract, general social* labor creates all value. No, he doesn't. You confuse the strict version of the LTV, SNALT (socially necessary abstract labor time) as a mesure of value, with the vulgar version, labor as the source of value. Marx accepts both. He accepts no other source of value but labor. But value lacks a measure or real significance outside market relations in which it comes to dominate society. Anyway, the vuklgar formulation is widely held by Marxists, whether or not Marx holds it, which hedoes. or that price is proportional to value understood as socially necessary abstract labor time. Marx did not think price is proportional to value; contra Bohm Bawerk, he did not come around in vol 3 to implicitly recognizing the productivity of capital. Vol 3 was written before vol 1. Sure he did--not simply directly proportional, but there's a relation. Unless you think Engels and almost the entire tradition of Marxist economics was wrong about the existence of the transformation problem--yeah, I know Foley and those types do. But I disagree with them. I also find it puzzling--as did even Amartya Sen who is by no means a Marxist--that self proclaimed sympathetic critics would find value--abstract, general social labor time--of little descriptive interest in in itself merely because it is not a convenient way of calculating prices with given physical data. I can understand how Samuelson would embrace the redundancy charge and the eraser theorem but the alacrity with which academic sympathizers accepted such criticism is little short of astonishing, I must say. Why? The question is, what work does this alleged quantity do? I agree that LTV talk is useful heuristic way to saying that there's exploitation. But we can say that without LTV talk, that is, without denying that there are other sources of value than labor or that SNALT does not provide a useful measure of a significant quantity. Or should we say socialists of the chair rather analytical Marxists? Say what you like. Have you got out of your chair and organized anything lately? I thought Cohen's theory of history was a a more rigorous version of Plekhanov's classic texts? I must say that I found Brenner's criticism of Cohen rather persuasive. Agreed on both counts. B is an AM too. I am not convinced that Marx was given a fair hearing. By the AMs? Not by Elster. But even if you disagree with Cohen, you cannot deny that he was scuruposlous and careful, fairer you could not ask. Roemer's critique isa lso deep. See Gil Skillman's essays in Eecon Phil (same issue that my IDoE was in) and Sci Soc, arguing that Roemer's critique of Marx can be made to work. Anyway, whatever the AMs have said, any hearing MArx get must now match the standards of rigora nd
RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
What's the best book for an introduction/overview/tour d'horizon of analytical marxism? One citation only, please. mbs It's analytical Marxist. Most AMs, like me, do not believe that Marx's value theory is more than a heuristic, and think that the important and true insights in Marx can be stated without the labor theory of value. jks _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
RE: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
Why? The question is, what work does this alleged quantity do? I agree that LTV talk is useful heuristic way to saying that there's exploitation. But we can say that without LTV talk, that is, without denying that there are other sources of value than labor or that SNALT does not provide a useful measure of a significant quantity. I would have thought that a more important reason for trying to hang onto the LTV is that it embodies a fundamental egalitarian principle; if we believe that my life is equally as valuable as your life, then an hour of my life must be worth the same as an hour of your life, and I think that this ends up implying something like the LTV. dd ___ Email Disclaimer This communication is for the attention of the named recipient only and should not be passed on to any other person. Information relating to any company or security, is for information purposes only and should not be interpreted as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any security. The information on which this communication is based has been obtained from sources we believe to be reliable, but we do not guarantee its accuracy or completeness. All expressions of opinion are subject to change without notice. All e-mail messages, and associated attachments, are subject to interception and monitoring for lawful business purposes. ___
Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
jks Out of interest, what's wrong with the labour theory of value? Do the AMs have an alternative theory of value, or do you try to get along without one? Feel free to not answer if it would take more labour than is worth bothering with. cheers dd I don't want to get into this in great detail, but here's the short version. What's called the LTV has two meanings. The lose meaning, intended by most people, is the vulgar version, that labor is the only source of value, which Marx accepts, but not in the sense used by most of its adherents, who think that the vulgar version implies taht workers are entitled, morally, to the value that their labor is the source of. Marx was not interested in claims of justice and would have regarded the labor theory of property underlying this argument as so much ideology. The vulgar version is wrong in any case because there is no reason to deny that there may be many factors, including subjective ones (demand) that go into value. The strict version, used by Marx, holds that price is roughly proportional to socially necessary abstract labor time. This faces the famous transformation problem, roughly that there is no nice way to turn labor values into prices. Marx's own solution is fatally falwed,a s is universally acknowledged. Borktiwiesz developed a mathemaeticall adequate solution (expalined simply by Sweezy in The Theory of Cap Dev.), but the conditions under which it holds are so special and unrealistic taht it is doubtful that the model has much applicability--you have to assume constant returns to scale, no alternative production methods, etc. In addition there is the neoRicardan critique (Sraffa and Steedman, arrived at independently by Samuelson) onw hich labor valuesa rea fifth wheel: we can compute them from wages and technical input, and under especial conditions establish a proportionality to prices, but you can get the prices directly from the other factors, so why bother with the labor values? Finally, there's the point that is key to my mind, which is that the theory have proved fruitless. There is a minor industry of defending the LTV, but the fact is that no one has done any interesting work using the theory for over 100 years. what you have is a case of a situation where Marx used the usual bourgeois theory of his day, which he improved, and shortly thereafter the bourgeois economists developed the subjectivist value theory that had been sort of kicking around quietly (Marx sneers at it offhand in various places), but the Marxists stuck with the old theory because it was in the sacred text, even if after it was clear that it faced insuperable logical problems and was doing no work. There is no interesting proposition of Marxist economics or sociology that cannot besatted better without it. It's fucking time to let go, use the damn thing as a heiristic to explain exploitation,a nd stop pretending that it is true,w hich even Marx didn't think. For more detail, read Howard King, The Political Economy of Marx, 2d ed, and A history of Marxian Economics (selected chapters). jks _ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
value and morality
Why? The question is, what work does this alleged quantity do? I agree that LTV talk is useful heuristic way to saying that there's exploitation. But we can say that without LTV talk, that is, without denying that there are other sources of value than labor or that SNALT does not provide a useful measure of a significant quantity. I would have thought that a more important reason for trying to hang onto the LTV is that it embodies a fundamental egalitarian principle; if we believe that my life is equally as valuable as your life, then an hour of my life must be worth the same as an hour of your life, and I think that this ends up implying something like the LTV. This confused. First of all, Marx adamantlt, savagely, and ruthlessly rejects egalitarianism and any appeal to to principles of justice. He is not an egalitarian. He also rejects justice as shit. He mocks those who proceed from moralism to economics. His use of the LTV derives from the fact that it was the standard theory of his day, used by Smith, Ricardo, Mill, etc.; he used ita s Roemer uses Walrasian economics, it was jsut the place to start. It had no, zero, zip, moral implications. Neither has it any moral basis, since brutal inegalitarians like Ricardo embraced it. If you want the moral point, you don't need the LTV,a nd the idea that morally, an hour of my time is jsuta s importanta s an hour of yours, though defensible, perhaps, on Kantian grounds of justice, is without economic implications, or sociological ones either.jks _ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
What's the best book for an introduction/overview/tour d'horizon of analytical marxism? One citation only, please. mbs John Roemer, ed. Analytical Marxism (Cambs UP 1986). Good essays by Roemer, Elster, Brenner, Allan Wood, Adam Pzrezworski, etc. jks _ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
This I take up in another paper, In defense of Exploittaion, Econ Phil 1995, also available on the net in the old marxism spoons archive. Could you provide the URL to your paper? I did a google search but it didn't show up Thanks, Alan _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
Rational Choice Marxism edited by Terrell Carver Paul Thomas. Jargon free, very clear. - Original Message - From: Max Sawicky [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 7:51 AM Subject: [PEN-L:22150] RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism What's the best book for an introduction/overview/tour d'horizon of analytical marxism? One citation only, please. mbs It's analytical Marxist. Most AMs, like me, do not believe that Marx's value theory is more than a heuristic, and think that the important and true insights in Marx can be stated without the labor theory of value. jks _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
From: Alan Cibils [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:22155] Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism Date: Fri, 01 Feb 2002 13:54:07 -0400 This I take up in another paper, In defense of Exploittaion, Econ Phil 1995, also available on the net in the old marxism spoons archive. Could you provide the URL to your paper? I did a google search but it didn't show up Thanks, Alan http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/marxism/DefenseE.htm jks _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
Jks writes: I don't want to get into this in great detail, but here's the short version. What's called the LTV has two meanings. The lose meaning, intended by most people, is the vulgar version, that labor is the only source of value, which Marx accepts, but not in the sense used by most of its adherents, who think that the vulgar version implies taht workers are entitled, morally, to the value that their labor is the source of. But the argument that workers contribute more to the value of output than they receive in compensation does not necessarily imply that either: a) labor is the only source of value or b) that workers are entitled morally to a wage equal to the value of their contribution right?
Re: value and morality
From: Justin Schwartz [EMAIL PROTECTED] This confused. First of all, Marx adamantlt, savagely, and ruthlessly rejects egalitarianism and any appeal to to principles of justice. He is not an egalitarian. He also rejects justice as shit. He mocks those who proceed from moralism to economics. And he did so, it seems clear, so he could scare the bejeebers out of capitalists, clobbering them with a materialistic dynamic of doom every bit as ineluctable as the march of science and technology. Ultimately, though, Marxism is the morality that dare not speak its name. I believe Marx falls squarely within the rabbinic tradition he was heir to -- a tradition he superficially spurned, being determined not to waste his time wringing his hands and delivering pious sermons that could be easily ignored. To me, Marx makes no sense unless he is seen a prophet in the Old Testament mold: a real wild man, issuing savage, truly moralistic indictments of the corrupt society in which he lived. Carl _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
RE: Re: value and morality
Justin Schwartz writes: This confused. First of all, Marx adamantlt, savagely, and ruthlessly rejects egalitarianism and any appeal to to principles of justice. He is not an egalitarian. He also rejects justice as shit. He mocks those who proceed from moralism to economics. Carl writes: And he did so, it seems clear, so he could scare the bejeebers out of capitalists, clobbering them with a materialistic dynamic of doom every bit as ineluctable as the march of science and technology. Ultimately, though, Marxism is the morality that dare not speak its name. I believe Marx falls squarely within the rabbinic tradition he was heir to -- a tradition he superficially spurned, being determined not to waste his time wringing his hands and delivering pious sermons that could be easily ignored. To me, Marx makes no sense unless he is seen a prophet in the Old Testament mold: a real wild man, issuing savage, truly moralistic indictments of the corrupt society in which he lived. there's a lot of truth to this, but it's important to remember the era in which Marx wrote. At the time, it was normal to throw aroung moral terms like liberty, equality, fraternity and then violate freedom, equality, and solidarity in practice. Marx trashed this kind of hypocrisy. According to Cornel West's dissertation (published by Monthly Review), Marx's mature vision of morality centered on this theory/practice distinction: he uses capitalist moral standards (such as equal exchange in volume I of CAPITAL, where values are assumed equal to prices) to show that behind the seeming realm of equality, freedom, and Bentham, there's quite the opposite. BTW, I didn't find West's argument convincing, but his conclusion sure fits what I've read by Marx. I think Marx didn't oppose morality as much as moralism (the positing of moral ideals without reference to the real world constraints that people live under). So Justin and Carl aren't really disagreeing. Jim Devine
anti-trust issues
The Onion, 1/30/2002 Judge Orders God To Break Up Into Smaller Deities WASHINGTON, DC-Calling the theological giant's stranglehold on the religion industry blatantly anti-competitive, a U.S. district judge ruled Monday that God is in violation of anti-monopoly laws and ordered Him to be broken up into several less powerful deities. The evidence introduced in this trial has convinced me that the deity known as God has willfully and actively thwarted competition from other deities and demigods, promoting His worship with such unfair scare tactics as threatening non-believers with eternal damnation, wrote District Judge Charles Elliot Schofield in his decision. In the process, He has carved out for Himself an illegal monotheopoly. The suit, brought against God by the Justice Department on behalf of a coalition of lesser deities and polytheistic mortals, alleged that He violated antitrust laws by claiming in the Holy Bible that He was the sole creator of the universe, and by strictly prohibiting the worship of what He termed false idols. God clearly commands that there shall be no other gods before Him, and He frequently employs the phrase 'I AM the Lord' to intimidate potential deserters, prosecuting attorney Geoffrey Albert said. God uses other questionable strongarm tactics to secure and maintain humanity's devotion, demanding, among other things, that people sanctify their firstborn to Him and obtain circumcisions as a show of faith. There have also been documented examples of Him smiting those caught worshipping graven images. Attorneys for God did not deny such charges. They did, however, note that God offers followers unbeatable incentives in return for their loyalty, including eternal salvation, protection from harm, and fruitfulness. God was the first to approach the Jewish people with a 'covenant' contract that guaranteed they would be the most favored in His eyes, and He handed down standards of morality, cleanliness, and personal conduct that exceeded anything else practiced at the time, lead defense attorney Patrick Childers said. He readily admits to being a 'jealous' God, not because He is threatened by the prospect of competition from other gods, but because He is utterly convinced of the righteousness of His cause and that He is the best choice for mortals. Many of these so-called gods could care less if somebody bears false witness or covets thy neighbor's wife. Our client, on the other hand, is truly a 'People's God.' In the end, however, God was unable to convince Schofield that He did not deliberately create a marketplace hostile to rival deities. God's attorneys attempted to convince the judge of His openness to rivals, pointing to His longtime participation in the Holy Trinity, but the effort failed when Schofield determined that Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost are more God subsidiaries than competitors. To comply with federal antitrust statutes, God will be required to divide Himself into a pantheon of specialized gods, each representing a force of nature or a specific human custom, occupation, or state of mind. There will most likely be a sun god, a moon god, sea god, and rain god, said religion-industry watcher Catherine Bailey. Then there will be some second-tier deities, like a god of wine, a goddess of the harvest, and perhaps a few who symbolize human love and/or blacksmithing. Leading theologians are applauding the God breakup, saying that it will usher in a new era of greater worshipping options, increased efficiency, and more personalized service. God's prayer-response system has been plagued by massive, chronic backlogs, and many prayers have gone unanswered in the process, said Gene Suozzi, a Phoenix-area Wiccan. With polytheism, you pray to the deity specifically devoted to your concern. If you wish to have children, you pray to the fertility goddess. If you want to do well on an exam, you pray to the god of wisdom, and so on. This decentralization will result in more individualized service and swifter response times. Other religious experts are not so confident that the breakup is for the best, pointing to the chaotic nature of polytheistic worship and noting that multiple gods demand an elaborate regimen of devotion that today's average worshipper may find arduous and inconvenient. If people want a world in which they must lay burnt offerings before an earthenware household god to ensure that their car will start on a cold winter morning, I suppose they can have it, said Father Thomas Reinholdt, theology professor at Chicago's Loyola University. What's more, lesser deities are infamous for their mercurial nature. They often meddle directly in diplomatic affairs, abduct comely young mortal women for their concubines, and are not above demanding an infant or two for sacrifice. Monotheism, for all its faults, at least means convenience, stability, and a consistent moral code. One deity who is welcoming the verdict is the ancient Greek god Zeus, who described
Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
But the argument that workers contribute more to the value of output than they receive in compensation does not necessarily imply that either: a) labor is the only source of value or b) that workers are entitled morally to a wage equal to the value of their contribution right? Right. Moreover the proposition that you state is obviously true, and will be accepted by any sentient being who thinks about the matter for a second. jks _ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
Bush asks Daschle to limit Sept. 11 probes (CNN)
Bush asks Daschle to limit Sept. 11 probes January 29, 2002 Posted: 9:26 PM EST (0226 GMT) WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN. The request was made at a private meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday morning. Sources said Bush initiated the conversation. He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry that some lawmakers have proposed, the sources said Tuesday's discussion followed a rare call to Daschle from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the same request. The vice president expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism, Daschle told reporters. But, Daschle said, he has not agreed to limit the investigation. I acknowledged that concern, and it is for that reason that the Intelligence Committee is going to begin this effort, trying to limit the scope and the overall review of what happened, said Daschle, D-South Dakota. But clearly, I think the American people are entitled to know what happened and why, he said. Cheney met last week in the Capitol with the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees and, according to a spokesman for Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham, D-Florida, agreed to cooperate with their effort. The heads of both intelligence committees have been meeting to map out a way to hold a bipartisan House-Senate investigation and hearings. They were discussing how the inquiry would proceed, including what would be made public, what would remain classified, and how broad the probe would be. Graham's spokesman said the committees will review intelligence matters only. How ill prepared were we and why? We are looking towards the possibility of addressing systemic problems through legislation, said spokesman Paul Anderson. Some Democrats, such as Sens. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, have been calling for a broad inquiry looking at various federal government agencies beyond the intelligence community. We do not meet our responsibilities to the American people if we do not take an honest look at the federal government and all of its agencies and let the country know what went wrong, Torricelli said. The best assurance that there's not another terrorist attack on the United States is not simply to hire more federal agents or spend more money. It's to take an honest look at what went wrong. Who or what failed? There's an explanation owed to the American people, he said. Although the president and vice president told Daschle they were worried a wide-reaching inquiry could distract from the government's war on terrorism, privately Democrats questioned why the White House feared a broader investigation to determine possible culpability. We will take a look at the allocation of resources. Ten thousand federal agents-where were they? How many assets were used, and what signals were missed? a Democratic senator told CNN. · CNN Capitol Hill Producer Dana Bash and CNN Correspondents Jon Karl and John King contributed to this report. -- Regards Karl Carlile (Communist Global Group) Be free to join our communism mailing list at http://homepage.eircom.net/~kampf/
Castro
Is it true that Castro has said that if any of the prisoners escape they will be handed back to the US by him? Regards Karl Carlile (Communist Global Group) Be free to join our communism mailing list at http://homepage.eircom.net/~kampf/
Re: RE: Re: value and morality
Marx seemed to try to avoid moralism in Capital, but sometimes he let his moral outrage creep in even though that violated his methodological principles. I alway found his notion that capitalist were merely the charactermasks of capital very attractive. Very much like Bertold Brecht, he felt that they were just adopting a role that capitalism gave them. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: HistoricalMaterialism
Hi Justin: I think that the distinction is valid and it is a very serious flaw in Roemer's critique of Marxian exploitation theory that he misses the significancxe of it. OK, good. That is something quite independent of Roemer's positive theory of exploitation, the possibility of a better alternative, which independent of his critique of Marxian exploitaion, and (I argue in IDoE) both a necessary complement to Marx's theory and valid in its own right. we'll have to work through his theory based on differential ownership of assets but let's be clear that even Roemer is ultimately interested in the appropriation of labor by one class of another. As to the this positive theory, it is crucial to emphasize that it's not morally or otherwise culpable for people to have to work for others, etc., if there is no credible alternative to this situation where the exploited would also be at least as well if not better off by some measure. So the explication of feasible alternatives to exploitative relations is a necessary part of the charge that those relations are exploitative at all. So, to bring in another bomb into this discussion, not only was Marx wrong on practical grounds to disclaim writing recipes for the cookshops of the future, he was wrong on theoretical grounds: he can't even say that capitalsim is exploitative unless there is a better alternative. Unless there is a better alterntive, it ios not exploitative. the better alternative is an unwritten book, a book that can only be written by a revolutionary working class in the act of creating a socialist society in order overcome the immiseration, degradation and slavery visited by this one on them. I think that Roemer's version loses a lot of the point of Marx's socological analysis, which, as I say, can be maintained without holding that labor creates all value Justin, Marx does not say that. He says that *abstract, general social* labor creates all value. No, he doesn't. You confuse the strict version of the LTV, SNALT (socially necessary abstract labor time) as a mesure of value, with the vulgar version, labor as the source of value. Marx could not be clearer that the distinction between abstract and concrete labor is one of the great accomplishments of his book, and the key to the critical conception. One simply cannot be making an interpretation of Marx in good faith without trying to understand what he meant by this distinction. Which of course is to say that there is a lot of shoddy interpretation of Marx. Marx accepts both. He accepts no other source of value but labor. But value lacks a measure or real significance outside market relations in which it comes to dominate society. Do you mean that value only exists (and potentially at that) as labor objectified in a commodity? Anyway, the vuklgar formulation is widely held by Marxists, whether or not Marx holds it, which hedoes. We are now in a position to read Marx above and beyond Marxism, Leninism, Social Democracy and Stalinism. or that price is proportional to value understood as socially necessary abstract labor time. Marx did not think price is proportional to value; contra Bohm Bawerk, he did not come around in vol 3 to implicitly recognizing the productivity of capital. Vol 3 was written before vol 1. Sure he did--not simply directly proportional, but there's a relation. Yes there is a relation. Drawing from Ricardo, Marx says that changes in value is the best explanation for changes in relative prices over time; however he does not say that price is proportional to value at any one time. Unless you think Engels and almost the entire tradition of Marxist economics was wrong about the existence of the transformation problem--yeah, I know Foley and those types do. But I disagree with them. That's not the point. Foley's taking the money wage instead of the real wage as given sure seems right to me. The idea of a uniform real wage in terms of an identical basket of commodities for all workers seems a very questionable assumption to make. And no neo Ricardian has ever responded carefully to Shaikh and the others in the Freeman and Mandel volume. I think Shaikh's response to the redundancy charge is marvelous as is Amartya Sen's. Again there has never been a formal response as far as I know. Now Howard and King say that Shaikh's iterative solution is the worst of all, but their response is almost purely vituperative. The point remains that in Shaikh's iteration (as well as Jacques Gouverneur's) the mass of surplus value value remains equal to capitalists' income as composed of profit and revenue, and the proof of this is that the capitalists gain or lose nothing in real terms as a result of a complete transformation which as Fred Mosely and Alejandro Ramos Martinez argue is not needed anyway as the inputs in Marx's own transformation tables are not in the form of values or direct prices
Value talk
This is partial; I actually do have have wage labor to perfoem here. let's be clear that even Roemer is ultimately interested in the appropriation of labor by one class of another. At least5 he used to be. Though he'dsay he was interested in unjust inequality between the classes. I said: not only was Marx wrong on practical grounds to disclaim writing recipes for the cookshops of the future, he was wrong on theoretical grounds: he can't even say that capitalsim is exploitative unless there is a better alternative. Unless there is a better alterntive, it ios not exploitative. the better alternative is an unwritten book, a book that can only be written by a revolutionary working class in the act of creating a socialist society in order overcome the immiseration, degradation and slavery visited by this one on them. Ultimately, yes, but if we can't sketch a plausible model now, we cannot be justified in saying that the misery and degradation we see are anything but necesasry and not exploitative. Marx could not be clearer that the distinction between abstract and concrete labor is one of the great accomplishments of his book, and the key to the critical conception. One simply cannot be making an interpretation of Marx in good faith without trying to understand what he meant by this distinction. Which of course is to say that there is a lot of shoddy interpretation of Marx. No doubt, but I understand the point. I believe, However, the point about abstract labor applies to the measure of value, not its source. Do you mean that value only exists (and potentially at that) as labor objectified in a commodity? Yes. Yes there is a relation. Drawing from Ricardo, Marx says that changes in value is the best explanation for changes in relative prices over time; however he does not say that price is proportional to value at any one time. This is what I was trying to say to Jim, but you put it better. The idea of a uniform real wage in terms of an identical basket of commodities for all workers seems a very questionable assumption to make. Less so than, say, constant returns to scale and noalternative production methods, assumptions you need to get the Bortk-Sweezy reply to the transformation problem off the ground. And no neo Ricardian has ever responded carefully to Shaikh and the others in the Freeman and Mandel volume. I think Shaikh's response to the redundancy charge is marvelous as is Amartya Sen's. Can't recall it. Why? The question is, what work does this alleged quantity do? Are you saying social labor time is alleged quantity like centaurs? Or are you asking me what does labor in fact do? No, the quantity exists, but so does the quantity that consists of the average ifference between the heights of all red haired malew orkers and all blue eyed women bosses. The latter quantity is not theoretically interesting. It does no real theoretical work. Whatw ork does labor value do, if virtualy the entire apparatus ofg Marxism theory can be restated without it? Moreover, and more crucially, whatw ork has it done? People haves pent overa century trying topatch up the theory. But there have been no interesting developments or applications, just ways of saving the true religion as stated in die heilige Schrift. I do not share this estimation of analytical Marxists who have dropped the ball in responding to many of their critics, and now seem to have walked away from the debate. Well, maybe they are creeps or turncoats, although Wright has stayed and fought, and even Cohen; and there's Brenner and Carling, and the people who published in Hist Mat, etc. But suppose they are utter vile dreck, Reagab-Buhsie apologists for evil now, does taht mean that the standards of their earlier wotk were lacking? So you do agree that even if scientifically true, historical material is not guaranteed survival in some strong healthy form? Yes. I actually rather doubt that it will survive. It will probably wither as Marxism has, and have to be rediscovered under another name. jks _ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
Re: RE: Re: value and morality
Marx seemed to try to avoid moralism in Capital, but sometimes he let his moral outrage creep in even though that violated his methodological principles. I alway found his notion that capitalist were merely the charactermasks of capital very attractive. Very much like Bertold Brecht, he felt that they were just adopting a role that capitalism gave them. In an article entitled How did Marx invent the symptom? in Mapping Ideology, Zizek qoutes Marx's phrase from Capital: They do not know it, but they are doing it and then goes into discussing Sloterdijk's thesis: They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it. However attractive Marx's notion is, what I observe both here in the US and back home makes me agree with Sloterdijk. It appears to me that they know what they are doing very well. On another note, thanks to all who participated in this discussion. It has been most useful, at least to me, and I wish that it doesn't stop here. Best, Sabri
Re: Re: RE: Re: value and morality
Marx seemed to try to avoid moralism in Capital, but sometimes he let his moral outrage creep in even though that violated his methodological principles. Yes and no. Marx has a certain official critique id all morality as ideology. He also hasa certain moral relativism, actually two, one based on modes of production, the other class-based which is consistent with taking a moral position, though notw ith assuming that it universally true. It's also perfectly obvious that he has a very string ethic that he does hold to be universally true, and he is a subtle and powerful theorist of normative ethics in the eudaimonistic and Hegelian self-realization tradition, although worse than sloppy in meta-ethics. None of this bears in the slightest on his use of the notion of value in his political economy, and it's very big mistake, and common too, to assume that his moral views, whatever they may be, have any relation whatsoever to the categories he thinks are helpful in understanding capitalism. jks jks I alway found his notion that capitalist were merely the charactermasks of capital very attractive. Very much like Bertold Brecht, he felt that they were just adopting a role that capitalism gave them. In an article entitled How did Marx invent the symptom? in Mapping Ideology, Zizek qoutes Marx's phrase from Capital: They do not know it, but they are doing it and then On another note, thanks to all who participated in this discussion. It has been most useful, at least to me, and I wish that it doesn't stop here. Best, Sabri _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
Re: What is profit?
Can you please tell me the source of this? Ellen Frank [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Friends, I cannot help but share this monumental work of political economy as well as history with my fellow Penners. Best, Sabri
RE: Castro
http://www.economist.com/World/la/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=954692 --- Original Message --- From: Karl Carlile [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Communism List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 2/1/02 10:01:22 AM Is it true that Castro has said that if any of the prisoners escape they will be handed back to the US by him? Regards Karl Carlile (Communist Global Group) Be free to join our communism mailing list at http://homepage.eircom.net/~kampf/
Historical Materialism
Historical Materialism by Justin Schwartz 01 February 2002 03:05 UTC I have defended that formulation in What's Wrong with Exploitation?, Nous 1995, availabkle on the net in the old marxism spoons archive. However, I argued that it did not require the labor theory of value in Marx's canonical formulation to state it. ^^^ CB: What would be the advantage of formulating this without Marx's way of formulating it , or Engels' way ? ^ More generally, the point is that capitalism is exploitative, a point that _can_ be put without reference to any theory of value at all--Roemer has an argument to this effect. I think that Roemer's version loses a lot of the point of Marx's socological analysis, which, as I say, can be maintained without holding that labor creates all value or that price is proportional to value understood as socially necessary abstract labor time. I will add that Jim and Chris B have cast amniadversions on the reductionism of classical analytical Marxism, which has largely been abandoned by its founders (Erik Olin Wright excepted, also Alan Carling). But the points I am making do not require reductionism of any sort. What remains of AM--and it does survive in places like the journal Historical Materialism--is an emphasis on clarity, precision, explicitness, and rigorous standardss of argument, along with a totally unworshipful attitude towards traditional formulations or classic texts. These are worth preserving. Because AM as a movement has evaporated, it is not worth beating up on or defending. What is worth defending is what has always mattered--intellectual honesty and care, the pessimism of the mind that must accompany optimism of the will. Leave fundamentalism to the religious. If there is a scientific dimension to historical materialism, it will survive. But it requires a skeptical temperment. jks ^^ CB: The discussion of AM has gone on often on this group of related lists. I think that discussion and the discussion of the law of value are worthwhile - what is wrong with a theoretical or abstract discussion on a theoretical email list ? I want to say this respectfully, but I think it is slanderous or insult without foundation to characterize those who adhere more strictly to Marx and Engels position in the law of value debate with AM as religiously fundamentalist . The claim is never substantiated with demonstrating that someone is not thinking or not arguing rigorously and with a lively and critical mind on an issue at hand. It's a sort general declaration that we think ,but you worship. This is a self-serving, gratuitous slander , at least it is as far as it is applied to me, I'll tell you that,. AM has no monopoly on clarity, precision, explicitness, and rigorous standards of argument in comparison with standard Marxists. Don't even try it. It's like declaring yourself the winner before you even have the argument. So, if we are going to have the Marx/Engels vs AM debate, please drop all gratuitous insults and self-serving claims that you think critically and we don't because we think that Marx and Engels got it better in the 1800's than AM got it today. As far as I am concerned it is like claiming that any physicist or biologist who adhere's closely to Einstein or Darwin's positions is being worshipfully religious. Horseshit !
WHY WE ARE NOT MAKING DEMANDS OF THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
WHY WE ARE NOT MAKING DEMANDS OF THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM Anti-Capitalist Convergence - New York City Some might find it strange that the ACC is not making any demands of the politicians, bankers and CEOs gathering for the World Economic Forum in New York. What, precisely, are we protesting, then? In fact, we not 'protesting' at all. The Anti-Capitalist Convergence is a gathering of collectives, affinity groups, and individuals inspired by the principle of direct action. Direct action means that if there are problems in the world, one does not go appealing to the authorities to solve them for us, one does not go begging - or even demanding - that those in power stop doing things that create those problems. Because those who believe in direct action do not recognize that authority, and wish to put an end to that power. Direct action means taking action for ourselves, either to create our own solutions - acting as if that power does not exist - or, if we must confront our rulers, by putting our bodies on the line to stop them from doing what they're doing. It is, at the same time, a form of action and a form of education, because we are acting in the world, but by doing so, we are also showing people everywhere that there is an alternative to passive acquiescence - that it is possible for communities to take power over their own lives, to intervene in history, and to do it in a form which itself provides a vision of the kind of world in which we would really like to live. Therefore we are not even saying we demand the right to live in freedom and dignity, because freedom and dignity is not something our rulers can ever grant us. It is their very existence, as rulers, that makes freedom and dignity impossible. All this is only possible if we refuse to live in fear. As anarchists, we recognize that the power of our rulers can only be maintained by terror; both governments and terrorists are ultimately playing the same game: the manipulation of ordinary people's sense of fear and insecurity for political gain. We, on the other hand, stand in absolute rejection of any politics of terror. That is why we are taking action now, in New York City, despite the obvious risks. The WEF's choice to relocate to Manhattan is a blatant example of just this sort of cynicical exploitation of grief, fear, and terror - they know they are bringing disruption and probably violence into the lives of an already frightened and traumatized population, but they hope to exploit those emotions to make it easier for them to crush us. By standing up and taking action anyway, despite all the police and military force and manipulation of the press and public opinion we know are being marshalled against us, we are sending a message to the world that it is not necessary to be ruled by fear: we refuse to bow down to terror, just as we refuse to terrorize anyone else. What, then, do we want? We are anarchists because we believe it would be possible to have a society without rulers; one based on principles of self-organization, voluntary association, and mutual aid. We believe that capitalism cannot be reformed, and no system built on marshalling the powers of greed and fear to drive people to organize their lives around the endless production and accumulation of commodities, no society which measures its success by the total amount of merchandise it manages produce, could ever lead to human happiness - in fact, could ever lead to anything other than a world in which even the most successful are mired in loneliness and alienation and the vast majority of our fellow humans, destroyed by terror and despair. We believe it is possible, instead, for communities and individuals to take control over their own lives, and create a new world in which the desire for the endless maximization of profit could be replaced by a desire for the full self-realization of human beings: a world in which everyone can have the security of knowing their basic needs will be met, and therefore will be free to contribute to society as they see fit, in sustainable harmony with the earth and natural world; a world which would involve pleasures, challenges, and forms of joy and fulfilment that at present we could hardly imagine. And if that it is possible - (and can anyone say with certainty that it is not?) - could there be anything more important than working to bring that world in to being? Therefore we ask nothing more of the junketeers in the Waldorf than we would of anyone else. As individuals, they are of course invited to join us in the pursuit of a better world; if they are willing to abandoning their power and privilege we will be happy to treat them as equals. Or, if they are not willing to do that yet, we can, perhaps, provide one other suggestion. If those who have gathered to celebrate their wealth and power at the Waldorf would really like to make a gesture of solidarity with New Yorkers, as they claim, we can suggest one thing they might do. These
Cui bono ?
Who Benefits From War? When George II (or is it III?) was enthroned in the White House by the Gang of Five of the Supreme Court, as a kind of American Emperor, a thought came to mind, chillingly: There will be a war. It came with such a clarity that it was surprising. Why? A couple of reasons. First, because George II was a man who was a darling of big corporate interests, and such interests are always able to profit from war. For if there are armed conflicts in Sierra Leone, or in Kashmir, or in Colombia, you can bet your bottom dollar that 70 percent of the weapons used in these struggles are American-manufactured. How could it be otherwise, when the U.S. is the world's largest arms merchant? Second, because George II learned an important lesson from his father: that nothing spurs a president's popularity like war. Now, one wonders, what's this got to do with the World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organization, or the growing specter of globalism? The globalist economic structure is undergirded by the globalist, capitalist, military structure. They are interconnected. Indeed, one cannot exist without the other. Consider the words of New York Times writer Thomas Friedman, who wrote back in early 1999: The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist-McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. (New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999) And what could be more secret, more hidden than the WTO, a powerful, undemocratic international multi-state, corporate entity that sets the rules governing the lives of billions? How about the World Economic Forum, the body that claims it brought the WTO into existence, and one of the world's engines of the corporate globalist movement? These are the forces behind the war, the vicious attacks on anti-globalists in Genoa, and the equally vicious slurs in the corporate media against the anti-globalist movement. War, ultimately, is fought for the wealthy, the well-to-do, the established, with the working class and poor doing the lion's share of the fighting and dying. It has nothing to do with patriotism, for the rich and super-rich know no nationality higher than capital. Think of these things when you hear the siren's song of globalism; it is but a call for more war, more poverty, more exploitation and more death. I urge you to resist it. Ona Move, Long Live John Africa! Down with corporate globalism! Mumia Abu Jamal- Innocently On Death Row Since 1983
Historical Materialism
Historical Materialism by Davies, Daniel 01 February 2002 16:01 UTC Why? The question is, what work does this alleged quantity do? I agree that LTV talk is useful heuristic way to saying that there's exploitation. But we can say that without LTV talk, that is, without denying that there are other sources of value than labor or that SNALT does not provide a useful measure of a significant quantity. I would have thought that a more important reason for trying to hang onto the LTV is that it embodies a fundamental egalitarian principle; if we believe that my life is equally as valuable as your life, then an hour of my life must be worth the same as an hour of your life, and I think that this ends up implying something like the LTV. dd ^^^ CB: Yes, and in a related idea, there is a principle of seeming inherent human sense of equality underlying Engels and Marx historical materialist first principle that the history of exploitative class society is the history of exploited and oppressed classes struggling against their oppression and exploitation.
Re: Historical Materialism
CB: What would be the advantage of formulating [exploitation theory] without Marx's way of formulating it , or Engels' way ? ^ Making it clearer, getting it right, avoiding ambiguities, problems, and objections with their versions. I want to say this respectfully, but I think it is slanderous or insult without foundation to characterize those who adhere more strictly to Marx and Engels position in the law of value debate with AM as religiously fundamentalist . I didn't do that, but there are those who think that Marx wrote it, I believe it, and that settles it! I'm sure you've met some. Louis' Marxism list is full of 'em. As far as I am concerned it is like claiming that any physicist or biologist who adhere's closely to Einstein or Darwin's positions is being worshipfully religious. Horseshit ! Fundamentalism is an attitude. A biologist or physicist may be F about Darwin or Einstein if she insista on using the original texts (most biologists have physicists have never read Origin of Species or the 1905, etc. papers on relativity theory), reject any variation from those formulae, treat any objections as wrong in advance, hand on the the ideas even in the face of severe predictive and explanatory failures and the degenerating utility of certain approaches . . . . Einstein was a fundamentalist about determinism, he didn't care hwo good quantum theory looked; Mach about atomism. Anyway, me, I'm not an AM, I don't even call myself a Marxist. But I do think the AMs had the right attitude of total irreverence towards classics. Marx deserves our respectful attention, and should get the scientific criticism he said he welcomed. jks _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
Re: value and morality
Justin Schwartz wrote: He mocks those who proceed from moralism to economics. And you fully believe him? Isn't a lot of the scientific stuff just a mask for what is, at base, a moral/ethical stance. But being too hardheaded, and a good 19th century thinker, Marx didn't want to appear that way? Doug
Historical Materialism
Justin: clip...The vulgar version is wrong in any case because there is no reason to deny that there may be many factors, including subjective ones (demand) that go into value. ^^ CB: This suggests lack of understanding of Marx's analytical distinction between use-value and exchange-value ( value). Demand or want and its subjective source compose use-value, which does not impact the labor theory of value, or law of value. ^^^ Justin: Finally, there's the point that is key to my mind, which is that the theory have proved fruitless. CB: Says you. The LTV is a key component of the science founded in _Capital_. It seems an analyticist style error to detach the LTV from the entire ( whole) theory of Marx.. _Capital_ has born much fruit in theoretical political economy. Some of the better known works are by Lenin, Luxemburg, Sweezy, Perlo, Perelman..etc., etc.,etc. And of course _Capital_ has proved extraordinarily more fruitful in practice, in actually changing the world, than most theories ( any other theories ). and shortly thereafter the bourgeois economists developed the subjectivist value theory that had been sort of kicking around quietly (Marx sneers at it offhand in various places), but the Marxists stuck with the old theory because it was in the sacred text, even if after it was clear that it faced insuperable logical problems and was doing no work. ^^^ CB: This implies that neo-classical subjectivist theory has proven fruitful in a way that Marx's theory hasn't. You haven't adduced evidence of that here.
Re: What is profit?
I received this from a friend who scanned it from his highschool english book entitled Reader's Digest. We both graduated from highschool in 1979 so the book must have been published before that. This story is from the 6th and last volume of that book. The book was nothing but a collection of essays and stories from the Reader's Digest magazine. He also doesn't know who wrote this as the writer was not indicated. If you need further information just let me know. I can try to get more information from him. Sabri -Original Message- From: Ellen Frank [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 11:21 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L:22137] What is profit? Can you please tell me the source of this? Ellen Frank [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Friends, I cannot help but share this monumental work of political economy as well as history with my fellow Penners. Best, Sabri
re: Historical Materialism
[I sent this to Justin -- and not the list as a whole -- by mistake. The e-mail program at my office works one way and the one at home another!] Justin writes: However, I argued that it [Marx's theory of exploitation] did not require the labor theory of value in Marx's canonical formulation to state it. More generally, the point is that capitalism is exploitative, a point that _can_ be put without reference to any theory of value at all--Roemer has an argument to this effect. I think that Roemer's version loses a lot of the point of Marx's socological analysis, which, as I say, can be maintained without holding that labor creates all value or that price is proportional to value understood as socially necessary abstract labor time. Marx didn't say that price is proportional to value. As is pretty clear if you read all three volumes of the damn book, in volume I of CAPITAL, he _assumed_ such proportionality in order to break through the fetishism of commodities, to reveal the macro- and micro-sociology of exploitation. (Trading at value is a standard of equal exchange, in some ways like an assumption of perfect competition for modern orthodox economists (MOEs).) Marx did this without assuming that sociology can be separated from economics the way orthodox social science assumes; to think that one can dump Marx's economics without his sociology seems naive at best. In fact one of his major points is that the economy is one part of society, so that economics is a form of sociology (i.e., social relations). That's what all that stuff in volumes I and III about commodity fetishism and the illusions created by competition -- to my mind the heart of Marx's law of value -- is about. As for labor creating all value, that's a matter of definition. There's some tautology in the theory, akin the tautology that Roemer embraces from orthodox economics, i.e., individuals are rational utility maximizers. As Sweezy said in his commentary on the Bohm-Bawerk/Hilferding debate, the difference is that by using value, Marx starts with the notion that people live in a society, working together in an interconnected whole, whereas B-W, the Austrian school, and the MOEs (not to mention the LARRYs and CURLYs) start with the notion that people are isolated individuals and don't get further than that, getting stuck in Thatcher-land. I spent a lot of time reading and struggling to understand Roemer's theory of exploitation, BTW. As far as I could tell, it was Henry George's or George Bernard Shaw's theory of scarcity rent as exploitation, duded up with math so that people thought it was more profound than it was. And it's not true that he didn't use a theory of value: Roemer used the Walrasian theory of value in most of his work, along with some silly game theory. (The Walrasian theory, for those who don't know, assumes that the totality of society is held together by a god-like Auctioneer, or some equally silly assumption.) It's possible that the theory of capitalist exploitation could be done without reference to value (I did something like this in a book that Bill Dugger edited, called INEQUALITY or something like that), but value is in the background. (People use philosophy, methodology, etc. without knowing it.) Marx was speaking the language of the time, working with Ricardian-classical economics (and criticizing it). (Unfortunately, this led all sorts of people to mistakenly think that Marx was a Ricardian.) If he had started with neoclassical economics (like Roemer), I'm afraid, he would have had a much much harder time understanding the world. Roemer, as far as I can tell, was able to develop a theory of exploitation only because he knew that Marx had done so -- and then only did a half-assed job, because he was blinded by the institutional power of neoclassical economics (it's the MOEs that grant tenure promotion) and the romance of mathematical rigor. He misses the social relations of capitalist domination, both in society and in the workplace. I will add that Jim and Chris B have cast amniadversions on the reductionism of classical analytical Marxism, which has largely been abandoned by its founders (Erik Olin Wright excepted, also Alan Carling). As far as I could tell from previous debates on the subject, the only way to define analytical Marxism without it being simply all Marxism that makes sense is to have it be reductionist _by definition_, so that by rejecting reductionism they were rejecting analytical Marxism. But the points I am making do not require reductionism of any sort. What remains of AM--and it does survive in places like the journal Historical Materialism--is an emphasis on clarity, precision, explicitness, and rigorous standardss of argument, along with a totally unworshipful attitude towards traditional formulations or classic texts. These are worth preserving. Of course, all of these nice adjectives also apply to Rudolph Hilferding, Harry Braverman, Paul Sweezy, Louis Althusser, and
re: re: Historical Materialism
The following is (1) Justin's reply to what I said in the message I just forwarded to pen-l, plus (2) my reply to him. -- Jim Devine I originally said: Marx didn't say that price is proportional to value. As is pretty clear if you read all three volumes of the damn book, (1) Justin responded: Uh, Jim, you suggesting that I haven't? (2) no: I never aim messages simply at the person to whom I am responding. It's aimed at all of the pen-l list. (Even when I'm coresponding with another individual, I ask what would a third observer say?) BTW, I wish everyone on pen-l would follow this practice, because it helps avoid personal insults. in volume I of CAPITAL, he _assumed_ such proportionality in order to break through the fetishism of commodities, to reveal the macro- and micro-sociology of exploitation. (Trading at value is a standard of equal exchange, in some ways like an assumption of perfect competition for modern orthodox economists (MOEs).) (1) Maybe we are not talking the same language. I do not mean by saying that Marx holds that prices are prop, to value that commodities trade at value, just that there is a function that takes you from value to prices, and that this function is statistically true, that is--that over the long run he thinks prices will tend to fluctuate around values, moreover, that values explain price levels. Surely he believed that! (2) no, Marx shows convincingly in volume III of CAPITAL that as long as (1) the rate of surplus-value is constant and uncorrelated with the OCC; (2) the OCC differs between industries; and (3) the rate of profit tends toward equality between sectors, prices gravitate toward prices of production (POPs) that differ from values. Maybe you're thinking of Ricardo, who saw exactly this kind of result from his analysis but assumed that the value/POP correlation was good enough for early 19th century British political economy work (embracing what historians of economic thought call the 98% labor theory of value [i.e., of price]). For Marx, the connection between prices and values is macroeconomic in nature, with total value = total price and total surplus-value = total property income, with the macro structure of accumulation limiting and shaping the microprocesses that make up that totality. (Charlie Andrews' recent book, FROM CAPITALISM TO EQUALITY, is good on this.) BTW, later on in volume III, Marx is very clear that individual participants in the capitalist system don't give a shite about values or surplus-value. They see prices, profits, interest, rent, etc., what he sees as superficial representations of value and surplus-value. As for labor creating all value, that's a matter of definition. (1) Agreed, but definitions can be better or worse. (2) Definitions are always part and parcel of a theory, defined relative to other parts of the theory, as with the Newtonian force equation of physics: force = mass*acceleration. Each of the terms is defined by the other two. This says that better or worse have to be seen in terms of the theory as a whole. I spent a lot of time reading and struggling to understand Roemer's theory of exploitation, BTW. As far as I could tell, it was Henry George's or George Bernard Shaw's theory of scarcity rent as exploitation, duded up with math so that people thought it was more profound than it was. (1) I also spent a lot of time on it, learned from your work too. (2) Good. Do you agree that Roemer attempts a shot-gun marriage between neoclassical orthodoxy and Marxian theory, one that ultimately fails? And it's not true that he didn't use a theory of value: Roemer used the Walrasian theory of value in most of his work, along with some silly game theory. (1) I didn't say R didn't use a theory of value. In this context value theory is the LTV. (2) why is that? who sets the context? the long tradition of writings on the so-called labor theory of value (what I would call the law of value following Marx or the labor theory of property for clarity's sake) has contrasted the objective theory of value of Ricardo and Marx with the subjective theory of value of the neoclassicals, Austrians, etc. (cf., e.g., John Strachey's THEORY OF CAPITALIST CRISIS, 1935). I don't really like that distinction, so I would differentiate labor theories of property (Locke, Marx) from labor theories of price (Smith, Ricardo) and scarcity theories of price (the MOEs). But I think that the old tradition of seeing a theory of value as the philosophical/methodological moment or means of analytical entry makes a lot of sense. The MOE theory of value that Roemer embraces -- or embraced, since he's retreated into purely normative analysis -- is that prices _are_ values, so that only what Marx called the surface of society (supply, demand, non-market institutions, property rights, and the like) counts. It's possible that the theory of capitalist exploitation could be done without reference to value (I did something like this...), but
Re: Re: Krugman re: phantom profits
Krugman's remarks would have been useful to the public two or three years ago. Now it is just newspaper filler. Gene Coyle Carl Remick wrote: From: Michael Pollak [EMAIL PROTECTED] New York Times February 1, 2002 Two, Three, Many? By PAUL KRUGMAN ... When the public believes in magic, it's springtime for charlatans. Which helps explain the popularity of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and the War on Terrorism. Carl _ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
RE: Re: Re: Historical Materialism
dd writes: Out of interest, what's wrong with the labour theory of value [LTV]? Do the AMs [analytical Marxists] have an alternative theory of value, or do you try to get along without one? Feel free to not answer if it would take more labour than is worth bothering with. A central question is: what in heck do we mean by a labor theory of value? by a theory of value? If those terms are clearly defined, a lot of silly debating disappears. To my mind, Marx did not have a labor theory of value the way Ricardo did, i.e., a theory aimed at explaining prices by reference to assumedly pre-existing values. Marx was not a price theorist but a political economist. Rather, with John Locke, Marx had what I call a labor theory of property (though obviously, Locke's theory is different from Marx's). Modern orthodox economics -- embraced by folks such as Roemer and some or all AMs -- embrace a scarcity theory of price, based on a philosophical/methodological basis of individualism. Crucial to their theory of value is the assumption that the word value can only be interpreted as meaning price. jks writes: I don't want to get into this in great detail, but here's the short version. What's called the LTV has two meanings. The [loose] meaning, intended by most people, is the vulgar version, that labor is the only source of value, which Marx accepts, this ignores the issue of what's meant by value. I believe that for Marx, it has the following kind of meaning: since he views all societies as essentially communities of workers (and perhaps non-workers), the value of a product represents the contribution of its producer to the community as a whole, from the perspective of the community. (Price would be from the perspective of individual participants in the system.) In this perspective, labor is value, as judged from the perspective of the society (that's the socially-necessary part of SNALT). (The term SNALT should not evoke Gesundheit! it refers to socially-necessary abstract labor time.) but not in the sense used by most of its adherents, who think that the vulgar version implies taht workers are entitled, morally, to the value that their labor is the source of. Marx was not interested in claims of justice and would have regarded the labor theory of property underlying this argument as so much ideology. The vulgar version is wrong in any case because there is no reason to deny that there may be many factors, including subjective ones (demand) that go into value. Marx is pretty clear at the beginning of volume I of CAPITAL that if there's no demand for a commodity, the labor that goes into it doesn't produce value. The strict version, used by Marx, holds that price is roughly proportional to socially necessary abstract labor time. This faces the famous transformation problem, roughly that there is no nice way to [mathematically] turn labor values into prices. Marx's own solution is fatally falwed,a s is universally acknowledged. Borktiwiesz developed a mathemaeticall adequate solution (expalined simply by Sweezy in The Theory of Cap Dev.), but the conditions under which it holds are so special and unrealistic taht it is doubtful that the model has much applicability--you have to assume constant returns to scale, no alternative production methods, etc. In addition there is the neoRicardan critique (Sraffa and Steedman, arrived at independently by Samuelson) onw hich labor valuesa rea fifth wheel: we can compute them from wages and technical input, and under especial conditions establish a proportionality to prices, but you can get the prices directly from the other factors, so why bother with the labor values? As I said before, Marx did not believe that price is roughly proportional to socially abstract labor time. In terms of the idea posited above that value is the contribution of an individual producer to the community as a whole (as evaluated by that community), it's important to remember that for Marx, capitalism is an alienated community. Thus, there is no presumption on his part (except as a simplifying assumption in volume I of CAPITAL and under that mythical system called simple commodity production) that individual contributions to the whole (values) are always proportional to the society's rewards to an individual (exchange-values, prices). Further, if values were always (or always tended toward being) proportional to exchange-values or prices, the nature of the economic system would be much more transparent: neither commodity fetishism nor the illusions created by competition would be important. Finally, there's the point that is key to my mind, which is that the theory have proved fruitless. There is a minor industry of defending the LTV, but the fact is that no one has done any interesting work using the theory for over 100 years. Of course, there's a minor industry _debunking_ the so-called LTV, so that the two industries form a predator/prey relationship. In many ways, both sides of
Re: Re: Re: Krugman re: phantom profits
Eugene Coyle wrote: Krugman's remarks would have been useful to the public two or three years ago. Now it is just newspaper filler. Not in the context of politics today. He's the sharpest critic of Bush on the NYT's op-ed page - a mostly dull and conventional venue that nonetheless has enormous influence on other journalists and opinion leaders - and one of the sharpest in the mainstream. Compare his stuff to the diluted critiques that Bob Herbert, the supposed house liberal, has been emitting. Doug
Re: re: re: Historical Materialism
- Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] (1) Maybe we are not talking the same language. I do not mean by saying that Marx holds that prices are prop, to value that commodities trade at value, just that there is a function that takes you from value to prices, and that this function is statistically true, that is--that over the long run he thinks prices will tend to fluctuate around values, moreover, that values explain price levels. Surely he believed that! (2) no, Marx shows convincingly in volume III of CAPITAL that as long as (1) the rate of surplus-value is constant and uncorrelated with the OCC; (2) the OCC differs between industries; and (3) the rate of profit tends toward equality between sectors, prices gravitate toward prices of production (POPs) that differ from values. Maybe you're thinking of Ricardo, who saw exactly this kind of result from his analysis but assumed that the value/POP correlation was good enough for early 19th century British political economy work (embracing what historians of economic thought call the 98% labor theory of value [i.e., of price]). For Marx, the connection between prices and values is macroeconomic in nature, with total value = total price and total surplus-value = total property income, with the macro structure of accumulation limiting and shaping the microprocesses that make up that totality. (Charlie Andrews' recent book, FROM CAPITALISM TO EQUALITY, is good on this.) BTW, later on in volume III, Marx is very clear that individual participants in the capitalist system don't give a shite about values or surplus-value. They see prices, profits, interest, rent, etc., what he sees as superficial representations of value and surplus-value. = The awkwardness of reckoning in terms of values, while commodities and labor power are constantly changing in values, accounts for much of the obscurity of Marx's exposition, and none of the important ideas he expresses in terms of the conceptof value cannot be better expressed without it. As a logical process, the ratio of profits to wages for each individual commodity, can be calculated when the rate of profit is known. The transformation is from prices into values, not the other way. Joan Robinson Comments? Ian
BLS Daily Report
BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, DAILY REPORT, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2002 RELEASED TODAY: Employment continued to decline in January, and the unemployment rate decreased to 5.6 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Nonfarm payroll employment declined by 89,000 over the month, as job losses continued in manufacturing and construction employment also fell. Consumer and government spending helped the U.S. economy grow slightly during the final quarter of 2001, and several other government indicators released in January were stronger than analysts had predicted, providing hints of a recovery in the near future, economists said (Daily Labor Report, page D-1). New claims for unemployment insurance benefits for the week ending January 26 increased by 30,000 to 390,000, up from the previous week's revised figure of 360,000, according to figures released January 31 by the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration (Daily Labor Report, page D-16). Consumer spending fell back slightly in December from strong activity inspired by auto sales in October and November, while personal income posted its first gain since before September 11, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis reported January 31 (Daily Labor Report, page D-19) Reversing a four-month downward trend, demand for labor rose slightly in December, up one point to 46, according to the Conference Board's help-wanted index (Daily Labor Report, page A-3). Unemployment insurance funds in Texas and New York will be depleted in the next few weeks unless the federal government provides more than $1.5 billion in loans, state officials said yesterday (The Washington Post, page E1). American cut back on their spending a bit in December as free-financing offers for cars and other incentives began to wane. But incomes rose for the first time in four months, putting consumers in a better position to spend in the months ahead, economists said (The Washington Post, page E3). Jobless claims last week rose for the first time in a month suggesting an uneven economic recovery. Other economic data released yesterday showed strong growth in personal income and a modest deceleration in the growth of labor costs (The Wall Street Journal, page A2). The construction industry slipped back during the first half of 2001, but then proved to be one of the more resilient sectors of the economy as the year progressed, said a vice president of F.W. Dodge. The Dodge Index, a measure of national construction value that uses 1996 as a base year of 100, was at 145 for December, up from 144 in November (The Wall Street Journal, page B2). application/ms-tnef
Re: Re: Krugman Re: phantom profits
On Friday, February 1, 2002 at 15:51:54 (-0500) Doug Henwood writes: Eugene Coyle wrote: Krugman's remarks would have been useful to the public two or three years ago. Now it is just newspaper filler. Not in the context of politics today. He's the sharpest critic of Bush on the NYT's op-ed page - a mostly dull and conventional venue that nonetheless has enormous influence on other journalists and opinion leaders - and one of the sharpest in the mainstream. Compare his stuff to the diluted critiques that Bob Herbert, the supposed house liberal, has been emitting. I have to agree with Doug. As much as I dislike Krugman's free market liberal pose, and often horrendously shallow thinking, he's one of the best in the mainstream. Bill
Palast on Energy markets
[from the Guardian] Comment Enron: not the only bad apple The deregulation of the energy industry is rotten to the core, writes Greg Palast Friday February 1, 2002 I guess I'm not a nice guy. But when I heard that Enron's former vice-chairman Cliff Baxter had shunted his mortal coil, I shed no tears. One tabloid even called Baxter a hero who courageously raised the alarm about his company's fantasy financials. Maybe I'm missing something here, but this is the Baxter who last year quietly crawled out of Enron like a cockroach from a rotting log - then dumped his stock on unsuspecting buyers, thereby pocketing a reported $35m (£25m). You can just imagine Baxter chuckling to himself in January last year as Enron's office staff gathered their pennies for his retirement gift while he's thinking, So long, suckers! - knowing they are about to lose their jobs and life savings. There have been a lot of misplaced tears in the Affair Enron. The employees were shafted, no doubt about it. But the shareholders? I didn't hear any of them moan when Enron stock shot up through the roof when the company, joined by a half dozen other power pirates, manipulated, monopolised and muscled the California electricity market a year ago. All together, Enron and half a dozen others skinned purchasers for more than $12bn in excess charges. That's the calculation of Calfornia's utility watchdog as presented to federal regulators in a damning petition for refunds. Here's an example of how Enron's po' widdle stockholders, hero Baxter and chairman Ken Lay made their loot. Soon after California dumbly deregulated its power markets, Enron sold 500 megawatts of power to the state for delivery over a 15-megawatt line. Very cute, that: the company knew darn well the juice couldn't make it over the line, causing panic in the state - customers would then pay 10 times the normal cost to keep the lights on and traders could cash in. The federal regulator caught that one. Within weeks of taking office, George Bush demoted the troublesome official. Lay boasted to one candidate expected to replace the sacked regulator that President Bush had given Enron veto over the government appointment. Nor did Enron's stockholders object to their profitable business of trading politicians like bags of sugar. From Texas to Argentina to Britain, Enron used legal but sick-making use of political donations, consultancies and lobbying to twist contracts, rules and regulations to their liking. You want to cry for a power industry exec who came to an early, violent, end? Then let me suggest to you Jake Horton, late senior vice-president of Gulf power, a subsidiary of Southern Company. (Southern is one of Enron's cohort in that fixed casino called the US electricity market.) Horton apparently knew about some of his company's less-than-kosher accounting practices; and he had no doubt about its illegal campaign contributions to Florida politicans - he'd made the payments himself. But unlike Baxter, who took the money and ran, in April 1989, Horton decided to blow the whistle, confront his bosses and go to state officials. He demanded and received use of the company's jet to go and confront Southern's board of directors. Ten minutes after take-off, the jet exploded. While the investigation into the plane crash was inconclusive, the company's CEO believed his death was suicide. He told the BBC: I guess poor Jake saw no other way out. Ultimately, Southern pleaded guilty to the charges related to the illegal payments. Jake and Baxter are the beginning and end of the story of deregulation. I was part of a team investigating Southern's finances after Jake's plane went down, just after a grand jury voted to charge his company with criminal racketeering for manipulating its accounts. Millions of dollars were charged to customers of Southern's subsidiary, Georgia Power, for spare parts that were not used. The internal revenue service recommended indictment, but George Bush Sr's justice department put the kibosh on the prosecution (their legal prerogative) - in great part because the fancy financials had been blessed by the company's auditor: Arthur Andersen. The company denied any wrongdoing. But while Southern Company didn't face criminal charges, regulators ordered it to pay back millions to its customers. And that's the big connection to Enron. Because it was in those years of investigation that Southern Company led the fight to deregulate the power industry. Rather than conform to the rules, they lobbied to get rid of the rules. Southern and its buddies in the power industry were successful beyond imagination. Industry lobbyists and lawyers eviscerated America's Public Utilities Holding Company's Act, and made mincemeat of the rules which once barred power companies from making donations to political campaigns. Crucially, in the newly deregulated power markets, the companies were relieved of the requirement to follow the strict government-designed
Intervention In Iraq?
' Intervention In Iraq ' Claims Of New York Times ANKARA, Feb 1 (A.A) - National Defense Minister Sabahattin Cakmakoglu, speaking about the allegations of New York Times journalist William Safire that the Turkish tanks would intervene in Iraq together with the U.S. special teams, said, ''I don't have such an information. I also read it in the newspaper today.'' When a journalist recalled that, ''according to the news reports which appeared in the U.S. media, an agreement was reached pertaining to intervention in Iraq during the visit of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit to the U.S. There are news reports that the Turkish tanks would also enter Iraq,'' and asked if this was right, Cakmakoglu said, ''I don't have such an information. I also read it in the newspaper. We don't have any further information apart from the statements of Prime Minister.'' When journalists said, ''it was reported that some Belgian parliamentarians talked with terrorists in Northern Iraq. Turkey has been launching initiatives in this respect for a long time,'' and asked about his views, Cakmakoglu said he did not have any information on the issue. Anadolu Agency 2/1/2002 11:07:26 AM This is the relevant excerpt from Safire' s article from yesterday: If Bush follows words with deeds, he will avert that disaster. Instead he will apply his Afghan template: Supply arms and money to 70,000 Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq and a lesser Shiite force in the south, covering both with Predator surveillance and tactical U.S. air support. In Phase II, I'll bet it was recently agreed in Washington that Turkish tank brigades and U.S. Special Ops troops will together thrust down to Baghdad. Saddam will join Osama and Mullah Omar in hiding. Iraqis, cheering their liberators, will lead the Arab world toward democracy. It's not a pipe dream. It's the action implicit in the Bush doctrine enunciated this week. The gun laid on the table by this political dramatist will go off in the next act. Full at: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/31/opinion/31SAFI.html
RE: Re: re: re: Historical Materialism
Ian quotes Joan Robinson: The awkwardness of reckoning in terms of values, while commodities and labor power are constantly changing in values, accounts for much of the obscurity of Marx's exposition, and none of the important ideas he expresses in terms of the conceptof value cannot be better expressed without it. I don't think the obscurity of Marx's writing (which is supposed to be pretty easy to read as German theoretical writing goes) is due to his use of values. Instead it's because he doesn't do what modern writers do, i.e., say this is what I'm going to say first; then I'll talk about this, etc., explaining the level of abstraction and stuff like that (i.e. assumptions) at each stage. Instead he plays at being Hegel and starts out very abstract (the Commodity in General) and becomes progressively more concrete without explaining the logic of his presentation (even though his analysis does make sense). (Charlie Andrews' recent book follows Marx on value theory, but has a much better presentation.) As a logical process, the ratio of profits to wages for each individual commodity, can be calculated when the rate of profit is known. The transformation is from prices into values, not the other way. this is what's been called the Steedman critique, though obviously Robinson thought of it first. It's at the center of Analytic Marxism. I think it's based on a misunderstanding of Marx's project, the facile assumption that Marx was a minor post-Ricardian who was first and foremost interested in price theory and distribution theory. Jim Devine
Re: RE: Re: re: re: Historical Materialism
- Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 2:11 PM Subject: [PEN-L:22191] RE: Re: re: re: Historical Materialism Ian quotes Joan Robinson: The awkwardness of reckoning in terms of values, while commodities and labor power are constantly changing in values, accounts for much of the obscurity of Marx's exposition, and none of the important ideas he expresses in terms of the conceptof value cannot be better expressed without it. I don't think the obscurity of Marx's writing (which is supposed to be pretty easy to read as German theoretical writing goes) is due to his use of values. Instead it's because he doesn't do what modern writers do, i.e., say this is what I'm going to say first; then I'll talk about this, etc., explaining the level of abstraction and stuff like that (i.e. assumptions) at each stage. Instead he plays at being Hegel and starts out very abstract (the Commodity in General) and becomes progressively more concrete without explaining the logic of his presentation (even though his analysis does make sense). (Charlie Andrews' recent book follows Marx on value theory, but has a much better presentation.) As a logical process, the ratio of profits to wages for each individual commodity, can be calculated when the rate of profit is known. The transformation is from prices into values, not the other way. this is what's been called the Steedman critique, though obviously Robinson thought of it first. It's at the center of Analytic Marxism. I think it's based on a misunderstanding of Marx's project, the facile assumption that Marx was a minor post-Ricardian who was first and foremost interested in price theory and distribution theory. Jim Devine Ok, but given the Quine-Duhem underdetermination problem-link below-is not the burden of proof for the indispensability of Marx's value theory on those who wish to retain it? Steve Fleetwood has an essay on this in a recent issue of Capital Class. Ian ** UNDERDETERMINATION Empirical equivalence Two theories T1 and T2 are empirically equivalent if every observational consequence of T1 is also an observational consequence of T2. e.g. curved space-time vs. flat space-time plus forces solar system at rest vs. solar system moves with uniform rectilinear velocity v Underdetermination and Scepticism If T1 and T2 are empirically equivalent, every possible piece of evidence that supports T1 will also support T2. The evidence underdetermines our choice between T1 or T2. How do we decide which of T1 and T2 is true? Note This problem only arises where there are empirically equivalent theories. http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dfl0www/modules/scikandr/ROHP.HTM
Re: Historical Materialism
Justin: clip...The vulgar version is wrong in any case because there is no reason to deny that there may be many factors, including subjective ones (demand) that go into value. ^^ CB: This suggests lack of understanding of Marx's analytical distinction between use-value and exchange-value ( value). Demand or want and its subjective source compose use-value, which does not impact the labor theory of value, or law of value. As MArx exaplins it himself in CI, value is whatever it is about useful things that enables them to explain at more or less stable ratios. That might be lots of things--he says, what else could it be but labor (time)? But in fact desirability is another feature, and there may be others. Obviously a two factor theory is not the tradituonal LTV, but I reject the traditional LTV. That is a disagreement, not a lack of undferstanding. ^^^ Justin: Finally, there's the point that is key to my mind, which is that the theory have proved fruitless. CB: Says you. The LTV is a key component of the science founded in _Capital_. It seems an analyticist style error to detach the LTV from the entire ( whole) theory of Marx.. _Capital_ has born much fruit in theoretical political economy. Some of the better known works are by Lenin, Luxemburg, Sweezy, Perlo, Perelman..etc., etc.,etc. And of course _Capital_ has proved extraordinarily more fruitful in practice, in actually changing the world, than most theories ( any other theories ). I think that every important proposition of Marx, including the theory of commodity fetishism, the fact of exploitation, the allegedfalling rate of profit, the recurrence of crisis, etc. can be stated without the LTV. I was in the business of explaining Marx to student sfor 15 years, and I found I had to translate it out of LTVese and into English to get the ideas across. So, I embrace this analyticist error with fervor. The LTV is obsolete obscurantism,a nd moreover I think that Mrx doesn't even hold it--i explain why (briefly), in What's Wrong With Exploitation, Nous 1995, on the net also,w hich reconstructs exploitation theory without the LTV. As to the practical successes you attribute to Capital, insofaras the experience of fomerly existing communsim can bea ttributed to Capital, it wasn't a great success--but we have been through that recently; and I actually agree with Gramsci who called the Russian Revolution the Revolution Against Capitsl, he meant in a double sense, because it wasa aginst capitalism and against the traditional idea in Capital that revolution required a high level of development. I think that formeraly existing communsim has not much to do with Capital. CB: This implies that neo-classical subjectivist theory has proven fruitful in a way that Marx's theory hasn't. You haven't adduced evidence of that here. Oskar Lange used say that Marxian economics is the economics of capitalism and neoclassical economics is the economics of socialism. If you want to do monetary and fiscal policy, design an antitrust regime, figure out the impact of opening new oilfields on existing transportation options, make a plan for your own enterprise, you use subjectivist theory. They teach it in B school cause it works in short and medium term. I don't have to prove it: the proof is in the practice. jks _ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
RE: Intervention In Iraq?
Short of reading Patrick Cockburn's book on the Ba'athist regime from a few yrs. ago, for a good run-down on the Iraqi National Congress, see the Federation of American Scientists website here for a Congressional Research Service history of the INC. http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/inc.htm The best writer on the Kurds is G. Chaliand, author of, Revolution in the Third World, The Peasants of North Vietnam, and a U.C. Press anthology on guerilla strategies. The last includes an essay of his on the Afghan mujahdeen from the NYRB around 1990 or so. Michael Pugliese P.S. The belly of the best here, INC, 209.50.252.70/index.shtml Also see the Iraqi Communist Party website and for historical narrative, Republic of Fear, by Samir al-Khalil aka Kanan Makiya. --- Original Message --- From: Sabri Oncu [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: PEN-L [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 2/1/02 2:02:40 PM ' Intervention In Iraq ' Claims Of New York Times ANKARA, Feb 1 (A.A) - National Defense Minister Sabahattin Cakmakoglu, speaking about the allegations of New York Times journalist William Safire that the Turkish tanks would intervene in Iraq together with the U.S. special teams, said, ''I don't have such an information. I also read it in the newspaper today.'' When a journalist recalled that, ''according to the news reports which appeared in the U.S. media, an agreement was reached pertaining to intervention in Iraq during the visit of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit to the U.S. There are news reports that the Turkish tanks would also enter Iraq,'' and asked if this was right, Cakmakoglu said, ''I don't have such an information. I also read it in the newspaper. We don't have any further information apart from the statements of Prime Minister.'' When journalists said, ''it was reported that some Belgian parliamentarians talked with terrorists in Northern Iraq. Turkey has been launching initiatives in this respect for a long time,'' and asked about his views, Cakmakoglu said he did not have any information on the issue. Anadolu Agency 2/1/2002 11:07:26 AM This is the relevant excerpt from Safire' s article from yesterday: If Bush follows words with deeds, he will avert that disaster. Instead he will apply his Afghan template: Supply arms and money to 70,000 Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq and a lesser Shiite force in the south, covering both with Predator surveillance and tactical U.S. air support. In Phase II, I'll bet it was recently agreed in Washington that Turkish tank brigades and U.S. Special Ops troops will together thrust down to Baghdad. Saddam will join Osama and Mullah Omar in hiding. Iraqis, cheering their liberators, will lead the Arab world toward democracy. It's not a pipe dream. It's the action implicit in the Bush doctrine enunciated this week. The gun laid on the table by this political dramatist will go off in the next act. Full at: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/31/opinion/31SAFI.html
RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
[odd numbers of bracket Justin's writing; even numbers are for mine.] I wrote:Marx didn't say that price is proportional to value. in volume I of CAPITAL, he _assumed_ such proportionality in order to break through the fetishism of commodities, to reveal the macro- and micro-sociology of exploitation. (Trading at value is a standard of equal exchange, in some ways like an assumption of perfect competition for modern orthodox economists (MOEs).) Justin responded: Maybe we are not talking the same language. I do not mean by saying that Marx holds that prices are prop, to value that commodities trade at value, just that there is a function that takes you from value to prices, and that this function is statistically true, that is--that over the long run he thinks prices will tend to fluctuate around values, moreover, that values explain price levels. Surely he believed that! I riposted:no, Marx shows convincingly in volume III of CAPITAL that as long as (1) the rate of surplus-value is constant and uncorrelated with the OCC; (2) the OCC differs between industries; and (3) the rate of profit tends toward equality between sectors, prices gravitate toward prices of production (POPs) that differ from values. He now says: I don't see an inconsistency between the claim I am making and the you you correctly attribute to Marx. Let me clarify by saying that Marx did not believe that labor values were a ladder you could kick away once you had climed them, that all you needed, once yoy understood the whole story, was prices of production; rather, value exerts a pull on price; in fact; there is a systematic relation between value and price that can be at least statistically speaking represented, as we would say now, by a function establishing a proportionality: P=mV, where m is some complex function that takes into account the deviations of P from V due to various disturbances. The business of the complex function comes from Bortkewicz, who came from what is now called the neo-Ricardian tradition. Crucially, he assumed that the rate of surplus-value and the rate of profit were equalized between sectors, an equilibrium that's unlikely to be attained given the way capitalism continually generates endogenous shocks (Enron, etc.) This kind of functional relationship is so restricted in its real-world applicability that we should ignore it, except as a very special case. The pull is macrosocietal: ignoring inflation, individual participants in the capitalist system can't receive incomes (in price terms) unless someone produces products that are sold, so that total incomes (total prices, corrected to avoid double-counting) = total value. A person can get income without doing work (as every professor knows) but someone has to produce the basis for that income. Second, no individual in society can earn profits (interest, or rent) unless someone produces more than is necessary to cover his or her costs of survival. Thus total property income = total surplus-value. I wrote:Maybe you're thinking of Ricardo, who saw exactly this kind of result from his analysis but assumed that the value/POP correlation was good enough for early 19th century British political economy work (embracing what historians of economic thought call the 98% labor theory of value [i.e., of price]). For Marx, the connection between prices and values is macroeconomic in nature, with total value = total price and total surplus-value = total property income, with the macro structure of accumulation limiting and shaping the microprocesses that make up that totality. JKS:Right, but there's a proportionality. I'm not saying that Marx think that each price tends to converge on its value. I don't think he thought that would make sense, though he does seem to have thought you could talk about sectoral value, not just at the level of the whole economy. he thought you could talk about sectoral value -- at a high level of abstraction. It's a mistake to equate different levels of abstraction. Unfortunately, due to reasons that aren't entirely Marx's fault (i.e., he died before he finished), he's not as clear as he should be about the level of abstraction. (BTW, later on in volume III, Marx is very clear that individual participants in the capitalist system don't give a shite about values or surplus-value. They see prices, profits, interest, rent, etc., what he sees as superficial representations of value and surplus-value. As Sraffa, Steedman, and Samuelson would predict. Of course this is true! what they don't understand is that Marx saw prices (etc.) as not only the determinants of the behavior of capitalists but also that he saw them as an incomplete (partial) vision of the totality of capitalism. It's also true that individual atoms don't know the laws of statistical mechanics and individual electrons don't know the laws of quantum mechanics. Does that imply that Sraffa, Steedman, Samuelson, and you would throw out those laws? should we
value vs. price
[was: RE: [PEN-L:22192] Re: RE: Re: re: re: Historical Materialism] Ian asks: If one can do the quantitative side of Marx without the value theory and achieve the same results as those who use the value theory, which side is being redundant with regards to that aspect of Marx's corpus? One way of summarizing this whole issue is as follows: (1) the distinction between value and price roughly corresponds to the orthodox distinction between social opportunity cost and opportunity cost to an individual. Both of these are quantitative. (2) the social opportunity cost and value are defined from the perspective of the society as a whole, though of course we can't assume that society gets what it wants all the time. Since its perspective is human society, value is in terms of human effort rather than subjective wants (though those wants play a role). (Social opportunity cost has to be defined in terms of some sort of social welfare function.) (3) it's important to utilize both value and price (social opportunity cost and individual opportunity cost). Otherwise, we fall into the fallacy of composition or into the sterility of methodological individualism. (4) there are contrasts between the two levels. MOE is aware that social opportunity cost and individual opportunity cost don't always coincide (so that there's market failure). Modern Marxist theory should be aware of the distinction between a worker's contribution to the societal pool of value (value) and what he or she is able to claim from that pool (exchange-value). Societal rationality isn't the same as individual rationality (however that word is defined). (5) But there's unity at the societal level: in the end, the social costs (value) constrain the individuals in the system, even though it's individual costs (prices) that are crucial in determining behavior. A capitalist can't get a profit as a free lunch. Jim Devine
Re: Re: RE: Re: value and morality
on 2/2/02 04:01 AM, Sabri Oncu at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Marx seemed to try to avoid moralism in Capital, but sometimes he let his moral outrage creep in even though that violated his methodological principles. I alway found his notion that capitalist were merely the charactermasks of capital very attractive. Very much like Bertold Brecht, he felt that they were just adopting a role that capitalism gave them. In an article entitled "How did Marx invent the symptom?" in "Mapping Ideology", Zizek qoutes Marx's phrase from Capital: "They do not know it, but they are doing it" and then goes into discussing Sloterdijk's thesis: "They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it." However attractive Marx's notion is, what I observe both here in the US and back home makes me agree with Sloterdijk. It appears to me that they know what they are doing very well. On another note, thanks to all who participated in this discussion. It has been most useful, at least to me, and I wish that it doesn't stop here. Best, Sabri Sir Sabri Oncu MIYACHI TATSUO PSYCHIATRIC DEPARTMENT KOMAKI MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL KOMAKI CITY AICHI Pre. JAPAN [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marx argued critique of civil society, not on basis of some morality Below is my critique on Zizek,etc. based on Marx's critique of fetishism Marx$B!G(Js critique of the fetishism $B!!(J In Theory Psychology, Volume 9, Number 3 June 1999, the commodity fetishism, the ideology, the false consciousness, and the theory of need are separately argued. But these categories have a common cause and an inner connection. I begin with analyzing the value-form, especially the equivalent form of value, show the mysterious character of commodity-form, and finally show the critique of the fetishism of the commodity. As for the fetishism of the capital, and interest-bearing capital, I only point out the basic mechanism different from that of the commodity. But since some articles analyze the fetishism incorrectly, I reply these arguments. They are swayed by the sphere of the exchange and the circulation, and ignore the critique of the immediate production process and the fetishism of the capital, as a result, They legitimize the capitalist mode of production. 1. On the equivalent form of value In the value-form in Capital, Marx wrote about the equivalent form: The relative value-form of a commodity, the linen for example, express its value-existence as something wholly different from its substance and properties, as the quality of being comparable with a coat for example; this expression itself therefore indicates that it conceals a social relation. With the equivalent form the reverse is true. The equivalent form consists precisely in this, that the material commodity itself, the coat for instance, express value just as it is in everyday life, and is therefore endowed with the form of value by nature itself. Admittedly this hold good only within the value-relation, in which the commodity linen is related to the commodity coat as its equivalent. However, the properties of a thing do not arise from its relation to other things, they are, on the contrary, merely activated by such relations. The coat, therefore, seems to be endowed with its equivalent form its property of direct exchangeability, by nature,.just as its property of being heavy or its ability to keep us warm. Hence the mysteriousness (Ra$B!/(Jtesellhafte-quoter) of equivalent form(Caipital,1,p.149) This is the first peculiarity of equivalent form from which use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value.(First substitution-Quidproquo) About the second peculiarity of equivalent form, Marx wrote: In order to express the fact that, for instance, weaving creates the value of linen through its general property of being human labour rather than in its concrete form as weaving, we contrast it with the concrete labour which produces the equivalent of linen, namely tailoring. Tailoring is now seen as the tangible form of realization of abstract human labour(Capital,1,p.150). In this substitution concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour. In this form, the relation of the abstract and the concrete is reverse. This is the second substitution(Quidproquo-quoter) . And the third peculiarity of equivalent form is that private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely labour in its directly social form: Because this concrete labour, tailoring, counts exclusively as the expression of undifferentiated human labour, it possesses the characteristic of being identical with other kinds of labour, such as the labour embodied in the linen. Consequently, although, like all other commodity-producing labour, it is the labour of private individuals, it is nevertheless labour in its directly social form. It is precisely for this reason that it presents itself to us in the shape of
Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: query:Historical Materialism
on 2/2/02 02:55 AM, Justin Schwartz at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But the argument that workers contribute more to the value of output than they receive in compensation does not necessarily imply that either: a) labor is the only source of value or b) that workers are entitled morally to a wage equal to the value of their contribution right? Right. Moreover the proposition that you state is obviously true, and will be accepted by any sentient being who thinks about the matter for a second. jks _ Join the world$BCT(J largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com Sir Justin Scywartz your argument on value is incorrect. Marx analyzed how does surplus- value make. Below is Marx's piece of description on surplus-value "Every condition of the problem is satisfied, while the laws that regulate the exchange of commodities, have been in no way violated. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. For the capitalist as buyer paid for each commodity, for the cotton, the spindle and the labour-power, its full value. He then did what is done by every purchaser of commodities; he consumed their use-value. The consumption of the labour-power, which was also the process of producing commodities, resulted in 20 lbs. of yarn, having a value of 30 shillings. The capitalist, formerly a buyer, now returns to market as a seller, of commodities. He sells his yarn at eighteenpence a pound, which is its exact value. Yet for all that he withdraws 3 shillings more from circulation than he originally threw into it. This metamorphosis, this conversion of money into capital, takes place both within the sphere of circulation and also outside it; within the circulation, because conditioned by the purchase of the labour-power in the market; outside the circulation, because what is done within it is only a stepping-stone to the production of surplus-value, a process which is entirely confined to the sphere of production. Thus "tout est pour le mieux dans le meflleur des mondes possibles." By turning his money into commodities that serve as the material elements of a new product, and as factors in the labour-process, by incorporating living labour with their dead substance, the capitalist at the same time converts value, i.e., past, materialised, and dead labour into capital, into value big with value, a live monster that is fruitful and multiplies. If we now compare the two processes of producing value and of creating surplus-value, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point. If on the one hand the process be not carried beyond the point, where the value paid by the capitalist for the labour-power is replaced by an exact equivalent, it is simply a process of producing value; if, on the other hand, it be continued beyond that point, it becomes a process of creating surplus-value. " MIYACHI TATSUO PSYCHIATRIC DEPARTMENT KOMAKI MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL KOMAKI CITY AICHI Pre. JAPAN [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Action required
Solidarity Action required. Solidaritätsaktionen werden von kolumbianischen Menschenrechtlern erbeten. Infos leider nur in Englisch sorry.. +++ Link below / Link steht unten +++ PARAMILITARY OFFENSIVE AGAINST CIVIL POPULATION Nizkor Int. Human Rights Team - Derechos Human Rights - Serpaj Europe Urgent Solidarity - 31.Jan.02 PARAMILITARY OFFENSIVE AGAINST CIVIL POPULATION IN THE REGION OF CATATUMBO CONTINUES DESPITE MULTIPLE APPEALS FOR PROTECTION DIRECTED AT THE GOVERNMENT AND THE MILITARY FORCES. The International Secretariat of OMCT requests your URGENT intervention in the following situation in Colombia. New information: The International Secretariat of OMCT has received new information from a reliable source surrounding recent human rights violations by paramilitaries in the region of Catatumbo, North Santander. According to the information received, despite multiple appeals at the end of December, 2001 on behalf of local authorities and NGOs directed at the government and military forces asking that they take control of this zone and protect the local population, grave acts of violence continue to occur. The following incidents are the most recent acts of human rights violence inflicted upon the civil population: Please find all information under this URL - Alle Infos gibt es hier: http://www.placerouge.info/article.php?sid=31mode=threadorder=0thold=0 Martin Timm Red Globe
Re: value vs. price
- Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] One way of summarizing this whole issue is as follows: (1) the distinction between value and price roughly corresponds to the orthodox distinction between social opportunity cost and opportunity cost to an individual. Both of these are quantitative. = How do we get from *soc* to *ioc* without a fallacy of division and, vice versa, from *ioc* to *soc* and avert fallacies of composition? I know the / dividing the quantitative/qualitative drives methodologists nuts, but I'm very interested in your take on this especially as the issue of value, it seems to me, can't be separated from issues of norms and how differing norms are resolved or not in societies--keep in mind I come at this from philosophy-ethical theory with all it's limitations. In that sense I've found so much of Marx and his interpreters on the role of value to be very problematic and by default I opt for a those who take a parsimonious approach because it gives greater room for normative critique and ties Marx into substantive issues in philosophy that I think we can't avoid no matter how many times Marxists try to tame philosophers! :-). In that sense I'm quite sympathetic to what Cohen is trying to do in Self Ownership, Freedom and Equality because he uses Marx to go after the libertarians and by chapter 8 lands very close to Robert Hale who helped found the Left approach to law and economics which we need to revive if, over the medium term, we hope to put property rights--not just the current infatuation with intellectual property, crucial as that is-- issues back on the map (2) the social opportunity cost and value are defined from the perspective of the society as a whole, though of course we can't assume that society gets what it wants all the time. Since its perspective is human society, value is in terms of human effort rather than subjective wants (though those wants play a role). (Social opportunity cost has to be defined in terms of some sort of social welfare function.) Doesn't this raise the issue of 'we can't get outside of society' and look at it sub specie aeternitie and the slippery slope to reification? (3) it's important to utilize both value and price (social opportunity cost and individual opportunity cost). Otherwise, we fall into the fallacy of composition or into the sterility of methodological individualism. === See above. (4) there are contrasts between the two levels. MOE is aware that social opportunity cost and individual opportunity cost don't always coincide (so that there's market failure). Modern Marxist theory should be aware of the distinction between a worker's contribution to the societal pool of value (value) and what he or she is able to claim from that pool (exchange-value). Societal rationality isn't the same as individual rationality (however that word is defined). === Ok so we have Chris Burford's emergent properties issue coming to the fore with all it's entailments of class struggle. I take it that when class societies disappear there will be no more fallacies of division or composition in the causal dynamics of determining the distribution of the social surplus? Are not heterogeneous preferences and wants a big barrier irrespective of class? (5) But there's unity at the societal level: in the end, the social costs (value) constrain the individuals in the system, even though it's individual costs (prices) that are crucial in determining behavior. A capitalist can't get a profit as a free lunch. Jim Devine === Ok but don't we fall into the issue of whether profit *is* a just reward, even as ownership itself is not productive? I take it the unity is there despite the conflict or is the result of the conflict or both? Ian
Re: Re: RE: Re: value and morality
Sir Sabri Oncu [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marx argued critique of civil society, not on basis of some morality. Below is my critique on Zizek,etc. based on Marx's critique of fetishism Miyachi San, Thank you very much for sharing your critique on Zizek with me. I have not read it as yet but will do so as soon as possible. The only thing I would like to note at this time is that I could have said what I said without making any reference to Zizek or to Sloterdijk. Making references to others is just a bad habit I picked up while writing academic papers in mechanics. I just don't feel comfortable with saying things as if they are mine when I know that others have said them earlier. I look forward to reading your critique. Best regards, Sabri
Argentina: capital controls illegal
[FT] Argentina thrown into fresh chaos By Thomas Catán in Buenos Aires Published: February 1 2002 23:18 | Last Updated: February 2 2002 00:17 Argentina was thrown into fresh chaos on Friday when the supreme court declared emergency financial controls to be unconstitutional, raising the prospect that the country's banks will collapse. The central bank said it was declaring Monday and Tuesday bank holidays to stop Argentines withdrawing their deposits en masse and toppling the largely foreign-owned banking system. Foreign banks - including the UK's HSBC, and BBVA and BCH of Spain - were on Friday night trying to decide whether to pull out entirely from the crisis-torn country. This decision by the supreme court looks very much like the final shot to the heart for Argentine banks, said Alberto Bernal, Latin America economist at IdeaGlobal in New York. The unexpected ruling came as the government prepared to announce a new economic plan to restart the economy, which is at a standstill after the imposition of bank controls on December 1, as well as last month's government's default on $141bn in debt and currency devaluation. The court decision has thrown the government's plans into disarray. An International Monetary Fund mission was in Argentina this week to pave the way for negotiations for fresh aid to help rebuild the shattered banking system. Government lawyers were on Friday night struggling to interpret the ruling, which could trigger a new constitutional crisis in Argentina even as its economy is imploding. Some legal analysts speculated that the government might be forced to impeach the entire supreme court and replace it with new appointees, although that seemed unlikely. Others said the ruling currently applied to a single case. It was not clear whether the presidential decree imposing bank controls had itself been nullified. Jorge Remes Lenicov, the economy minister, cancelled his visit to the World Economic Forum in New York on Saturday. His announcement of a new economic plan, also due on Saturday, may be postponed. The Argentine peso fell below 2 to the dollar on Friday - less than half its value at New Year - as thousands of Argentines queued for hours to buy dollars. The government has said it will scrap its current dual exchange rate, as the IMF demands, but has not yet given a date for the peso's full flotation.
Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: query: Historical Materialism
Surely Marx did not say either what Justin or Rakesh claim. Rakesh' claim (re Marx) is correct about value in EXCHANGE but does not apply to use value. Air and sunlight etc. are valuable even if not involved in any exchange relationship and their use value is quite independent of labor. Cheers, Ken Hanly Marx's understanding of that distinction has to be modified? I think that Roemer's version loses a lot of the point of Marx's socological analysis, which, as I say, can be maintained without holding that labor creates all value Justin, Marx does not say that. He says that *abstract, general social* labor creates all value. Value as expressed in the exchange value of a commodity does not derive from the subjective or *personal* estimation of the toil and trouble involved in its production. Value does not derive from the useful qualities of the commodity that derive from the *concrete* labor that went into its making. The value of the commodity is not related to the time individual producers put into their making but rather the time socially necessary to reproduce that commodity. The value of a commodity is a represenation of some aliquot of the social labor time upon which divided in some form any and all societies depend. It is not personal, subjective and concrete labor time that is connected with the value of a commodity.
regaining street cred
[FT] A new era of protest Rallies in New York and Porto Alegre are giving the anti-globalisation movement a chance to re-establish its credentials in the post-September 11 world, writes James Harding Published: February 1 2002 19:41 | Last Updated: February 1 2002 22:46 In Porto Alegre this weekend, the critics of global capitalism will set out to show they are recovering their voice. More than 40,000 people are expected to gather at a conference-cum-carnival at the southern end of Brazil dedicated to the idea that another world is possible. The World Social Forum, a sprawling summit of non-governmental organisations, protest groups and activists stretching across 28 separate conferences and 700 workshops, is meeting for the second year to develop an alternative agenda for the world. In New York, meanwhile, thousands of demonstrators plan to protest against the World Economic Forum meeting of chief executives and political leaders - the movement's first large-scale US march against corporate-led globalisation. Both events are intended to mark the anti-globalisation activists' return to form. In New York, David Levy, a Washington-based campaigner, says: The real question is going to be whether activists can take their message and present it in a militant and non-submissive manner. In Brazil, Njoki Njoroge Njehu, the Kenyan executive director of the 50 Years is Enough Network, which is seeking to bring down the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, says: The great news here is that it is a larger event. More people. More diversity. People are excited about the opportunities to share strategies and consider what our struggle is all about. With more than double the number of delegates making the trip to Porto Alegre this year and the summit attracting people from across Africa, Asia, Europe and the US, Ms Njehu says, perhaps as much to anti-globalisation's supporters as its enemies: The movement is alive and well. Reports of the death of the global justice movement have been greatly exaggerated. And yet, if the regrouping of the movement shows that the anger at free-market liberalism has not dimmed, the events in New York and Porto Alegre also highlight two challenges facing the anti-globalisation movement since the September 11 attacks on America. First, how much public support will there be in New York for the street demonstrations? Today's march is expected to be big, as the anti-war coalition has called its supporters to rally just an hour before the anti-globalisation camp has arranged to mobilise its people. And, while this is not the first anti-globalisation protest in North America since September 11 - there was a voluble one in Ottawa - the highly conspicuous demonstration will test the public's appetite for the anti- globalisation message and its messengers. Not that the demonstration is likely to trouble delegates to the World Economic Forum, which has moved for the first time to the Waldorf- Astoria hotel from the concrete nuclear bunker that serves as the conference centre in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos. The police have arranged for the rally to start at the corner of 5th Avenue and 59th Street, a fair way from the Waldorf. (For the activists, the only real landmark on the march route is the office building of Citigroup, the giant American bank that finances targeted logging companies and hydroelectric dam projects, among other things.) In anticipation of a scarred New York's wariness of any kind of protest similar to the battles seen on the streets of Seattle in late 1999 or the riots around the Group of Seven summit in Genoa last summer, the organisers have sought to tread carefully. Some groups that help organise non-violent direct actions have chosen to stay away. There may be some isolated civil disobedience, organisers expect, but not a return of the Black Bloc tactics of arson and property damage. As one protest organiser acknowledges: It is easier for our opponents to lump us into the same camp as people who fly airplanes into buildings. Even though that is absurd, we are fighting a massive public relations machine now. The movement has to change its strategies in the post-September 11 world. In the seminars, workshops and informal sessions in Porto Alegre, the activists are facing up to precisely this, their second post-September 11 challenge: the need to articulate a manifesto and methodology of protest that distinguishes them from terrorists, bloody revolutionaries and bomb-throwing malcontents. Candido Grzybowsky, the director of the Brazil Institute for Social and Economic Analysis and one of the organisers of the World Social Forum, cautions that the summit is about a process, not a single end-product. We are a fragmented movement, maybe a disunited movement, and here we are trying to build a dialogue between ourselves and our networks, he says. We are a big bunch of different groups with different tactics, different pressures, different passions.
Evil Competition
ANGERED BY SNUBBING, LIBYA, CHINA SYRIA FORM AXIS OF JUST AS EVIL Cuba, Sudan, Serbia Form Axis of Somewhat Evil; Other Nations Start Own Clubs Beijing (SatireWire.com) - Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the Axis of Evil, Libya, China, and Syria today announced they had formed the Axis of Just as Evil, which they said would be way eviler than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of his State of the Union address. Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new axis as having, for starters, a really dumb name. Right. They are Just as Evil... in their dreams! declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Everybody knows we're the best evils... best at being evil... we're the best. Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil. They told us it was full, said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. An Axis can't have more than three countries, explained Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. This is not my rule, it's tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So you can only have three. And a secret handshake. Ours is wicked cool. THE AXIS PANDEMIC International reaction to Bush's Axis of Evil declaration was swift, as within minutes, France surrendered. Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what became a game of geopolitical chairs. Cuba, Sudan, and Serbia said they had formed the Axis of Somewhat Evil, forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the Axis of Occasionally Evil, while Bulgaria, Indonesia and Russia established the Axis of Not So Much Evil Really As Just Generally Disagreeable. With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the Axis of Countries That Aren't the Worst But Certainly Won't Be Asked to Host the Olympics; Canada, Mexico, and Australia formed the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America, while Spain, Scotland, and New Zealand established the Axis of Countries That Be Allowed to Ask Sheep to Wear Lipstick. That's not a threat, really, just something we like to do, said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell. While wondering if the other nations of the world weren't perhaps making fun of him, a cautious Bush granted approval for most axes, although he rejected the establishment of the Axis of Countries Whose Names End in Guay, accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chadguay denied the charges. Israel, meanwhile, insisted it didn't want to join any Axis, but privately, world leaders said that's only because no one asked them. Copyright © 2002, SatireWire.
An error?
I have been keeping a file on the earliet convoy stories. Some Afghan sources claimed the convoy was going to Kabul to be present at Karzai's installation. Reporters on the scene give eye witness accounts at variance with the official US version of events. US sources claimed that they would investigate but never have admitted any error. Are the results of all these investigations actually posted somewhere. They never seem to appear in the news media. Cheers, Ken Hanly U.S. troops likely killed anti-Taliban forces by mistake, sources say Copyright © 2002 AP Online By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer WASHINGTON (February 1, 2002 12:16 p.m. EST) - It now appears highly likely that U.S. soldiers who raided two compounds in Afghanistan on Jan. 23 mistakenly captured or killed people loyal to the new Afghan government, American military officials said Friday The Pentagon announced on Wednesday that U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for U.S. military operations in the Afghanistan area, is attempting to verify its original claim that all of the estimated 15 people killed and the 27 taken prisoner were either al-Qaida or Taliban fighters. Local Afghans say some of those killed were anti-Taliban forces loyal to Hamid Karzai, the head of the interim Afghan government, and that among those arrested were a police chief, his deputy and members of a district council. They labeled the raid a tragic case of mistaken identities. Two U.S. senior military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that while it does not look like all of those killed and captured were friendly to the new government, some probably were. One official said it seemed likely that the killed and captured were a mixture of Afghans loyal to Karzai, criminals not necessarily associated with the Taliban or al-Qaida, and some Taliban fighters. One U.S. soldier suffered a bullet wound in the ankle during the raid, which was carried out under the cover of darkness. U.S. officials said in the raid's immediate aftermath that it was carried out on the basis of intelligence information that indicated the compounds were an al-Qaida hide-out. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday that basic facts about the raid - including who shot first - had yet to be verified. He was unwilling to say U.S. forces misidentified the targeted compounds as hide-outs for al-Qaida or Taliban fighters. I don't think it was any sense on our part that we've done something wrong, Myers said. Gen. Tommy Franks, commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, ordered the investigation because when there are allegations, you've got to go run them to ground, Myers said. Myers said it was too early to conclude that the wrong people had been killed or captured. But he acknowledged that it is difficult in some cases for the American military to distinguish friend from foe. The situation over there can be very, very complex, with allegiances changing depending on the situation, he said. Appearing with Myers, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Franks ordered the investigation after hearing from Afghan officials. In their view, there were some people involved in that shooting that were killed who were not Taliban or al-Qaida, Rumsfeld said. Thus, Franks considered it appropriate to open a formal investigation, he said
Re: RE: Castro
Actually the terms of the lease require that criminals who escape to Cuba will be returned and vice versa should Cuban criminals flee to Guantanamo. Of course Castro no doubt would question the legality of the lease agreement. Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: michael pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 1:22 PM Subject: [PEN-L:22171] RE: Castro http://www.economist.com/World/la/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=954692 --- Original Message --- From: Karl Carlile [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Communism List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 2/1/02 10:01:22 AM Is it true that Castro has said that if any of the prisoners escape they will be handed back to the US by him? Regards Karl Carlile (Communist Global Group) Be free to join our communism mailing list at http://homepage.eircom.net/~kampf/
Re: Historical Materialism
But SNALT implies that an hour of A's labor may not at all produce the same exchange value as an hour of B's labor. If the SN labor time to produce X widgets is one hour and A's labor does that but B's labor only produces half that number then in this context an hour of A's labor and of B's are not equal. No? The labor theory of value implies that the same hour of labor of different people is unequal qua its exchange value creation, not that each person's hour of labor produces equal value. Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 1:30 PM Subject: [PEN-L:22176] Historical Materialism Historical Materialism by Davies, Daniel 01 February 2002 16:01 UTC Why? The question is, what work does this alleged quantity do? I agree that LTV talk is useful heuristic way to saying that there's exploitation. But we can say that without LTV talk, that is, without denying that there are other sources of value than labor or that SNALT does not provide a useful measure of a significant quantity. I would have thought that a more important reason for trying to hang onto the LTV is that it embodies a fundamental egalitarian principle; if we believe that my life is equally as valuable as your life, then an hour of my life must be worth the same as an hour of your life, and I think that this ends up implying something like the LTV. dd ^^^ CB: Yes, and in a related idea, there is a principle of seeming inherent human sense of equality underlying Engels and Marx historical materialist first principle that the history of exploitative class society is the history of exploited and oppressed classes struggling against their oppression and exploitation.
Re: Re: value and morality
Justin Schwartz wrote: [Marx] mocks those who proceed from moralism to economics. Doug says: And you fully believe him? Isn't a lot of the scientific stuff just a mask for what is, at base, a moral/ethical stance. You know I don't. Not only have I said here, in this discussion, that Marx has a strong normative ethical view, I'll add that it informs his research program, structures the questions he asks--like everyone else. But he correctly thinks that the truth of his positive conclusions does not depend on his value orientation; and this rebukes those who, like DD, suggest that the point of the LTV is to express some some of fundamntal human equality, or those who maintain that the point of the LTV is to show thatw orkers are entitled to the value they, allegedly, alone produce, as in the canonical version (not Marx's) of the Marxist theory of exploitation, via some labor theory of properyt entitlements. Also, Marx's antimoralism (though inconsistently held) rebukes those who purport to adhere to Marx's own views more religiously than I. But being too hardheaded, and a good 19th century thinker, Marx didn't want to appear that way? Well, he didn't want to appear to bea mere moralist. Nothing wrong with that. jks _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
Re: Re: Historical Materialism
But SNALT implies that an hour of A's labor may not at all produce the same exchange value as an hour of B's labor. If the SN labor time to produce X widgets is one hour and A's labor does that but B's labor only produces half that number then in this context an hour of A's labor and of B's are not equal. No? The labor theory of value implies that the same hour of labor of different people is unequal qua its exchange value creation, not that each person's hour of labor produces equal value. Ken, you are leaving the abstractness and the social necessity of the labor out of SNALT. A hand-built Toyota contains excatly the same amount of ABSTRACT labor time that is socially necessary as a factory built one, although it takes much longer to make it, because from a social pov theextr atime is socially unnecessay and the labor involved is abstract or simple, unskilled labor. jks _ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
Take the Money Enron.
Take the Money Enron: America's really existing capitalism By Stephen F. Diamond* January 29, 2002 As the Enron debacle is dissected by almost a dozen Congressional committees, we are in the midst of one of the biggest scandals in American history. How could our system of corporate governance and finance have broken down to such an extent? Republicans hope to paint the collapse of the giant energy trading company as a failed business model so that they can extol the genius of American capitalism, in the words of Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, which allows businesses to fail as well as succeed. Meanwhile the Democrats are looking for someone on Wall Street to blame. There is certainly enough blame to go around. There are the analysts who notoriously pump up stocks so that their investment banking clients can dump them on an unsuspecting public. And there are the accountants who indeed have grown so entangled with their clients that they can no longer be relied upon to provide objective audits of the actual financial condition of America's public companies. Scandal and fraud are certainly present, but they are not the real problem. In response to the demands of today's brutally competitive global economy, conscious political and legal changes, not criminal behavior, shaped and enabled this crisis. Consider two obscure but crucial changes in our securities laws that helped facilitate the Enron collapse. In 1995 pressure from corporate America, particularly Silicon Valley, led to a limit on the damages paid to investors who successfully sue companies, accountants, lawyers and banks for their role in selling stock to the public at inflated prices. Prior to 1995, accountants, for example, were liable for the entire amount of damages that might be imposed on the players in this process. That was a strong incentive for auditors to be very careful about the information they certified in a company's public documents and equally cautious about the financial structures they might recommend through their consulting arms. If a company fails, investors look for deep pockets and a multi-billion dollar accounting company looks like a much more attractive target than a failed dot-com. But after the 1995 law was passed, the accountants were only on the hook for that percentage of the verdict or settlement that they directly and willingly caused. Investors had lost a powerful source of leverage over the auditors, who were now encouraged to take greater risks in their work. This change came at the same time that corporate America and Wall Street were taking increasing advantage of a 1990 change in the law that provided a safe harbor for private placements to large institutions of a wide range of financial instruments. That meant that offerings of these securities no longer required disclosure of key information to the public or to the Securities and Exchange Commission. In fact, that is one important reason it is so difficult to understand what Enron was doing with other people's money, in Justice Brandeis' famous phrase. Many of those hidden partnerships and off balance sheet vehicles used these so-called private placements, hidden from the view of public shareholders. There is no publicly available disclosure of the details of these transactions. Unless the FBI is able to reconstruct the shredded documents now being recovered from Enron and Arthur Anderson we may never fully understand what was going on inside the company. Unfortunately, hundreds of companies now rely on this explosive combination of private placements and off balance sheet entities. The last decade has seen the American economy create a massive amount of new paper financial obligations using these structures that cannot possibly be supported by the productive base of the economy. In fact, little attention is being paid to what is happening in this real economy, made up of steel mills, auto assembly plants, health care services, and our physical infrastructure, which turn out the products and services that a society truly needs to eventually pay off all of these fictitious claims to society' s wealth. To remedy this situation we must make significant institutional and structural changes in the way that we conduct economic activity. As a first step, we must close these loopholes to rein in the unscrupulous behavior of private actors. But we must go beyond that. We should no more leave auditing in the hands of the private sector than we now leave airport security - it is every bit as important as airport x-ray machines to our survival. Auditing should be conducted under the direct supervision of the federal government. Further, public corporations should indeed be public corporations, committing themselves to greater transparency and accountability. This should mean that representatives of the public and large institutional investors like public employee pension funds should sit on the boards of major public
Re: Re: RE: Re: re: re: Historical Materialism
I don't understand this stuff about the observational consequences of theories at the level of generality of the theory of value. What if the labor theory of value is part of the central core of Marxism ? If that is so then in itself it does not have any specific empirical implications period. Jim Devine seems to take a position of this sort in a piece on the web: Marx's goals for the LoV were to analyze the societal nature and laws of motion of the capitalism; another way of saying this is that the LoV summarizes the method of analysis that Marx applies in Capital. The LoV is part of what Imre Lakatos [1970] terms the hard core of tautologies and simplifying assumptions that is a necessary part of any research program.1 The quantitative aspect of value should be seen as a true-by-definition accounting framework to be used to break through the fetishism of commodities -- allowing the analysis of capitalism as a social system. Prices, the accounting framework most used by economists, both reflect existing social relations and distort their appearance. It is necessary to have an alternative to prices if one wants to understand what is going on behind the level of appearances: looking at what people do in production (i.e., labor, value) helps reveal the social relations between them. If this interpretation is correct then Quine-Duhem's stuff is irrelevant not that it makes much sense to me anyway. Seems like a neanderthal idea to speak of theories implying empirical consequences just like that without assumptions conditions etc. assumed: or of evidence straightforwardly supporting a theory. So the Quine-Duhem stuff is not relevant and even if it were why should it be given any particular weight? Is it any less dubious than the Marxian theory of value? Cheers, Ken Hanly - Original Message - From: Ian Murray [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 4:27 PM Subject: [PEN-L:22192] Re: RE: Re: re: re: Historical Materialism - Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 01, 2002 2:11 PM Subject: [PEN-L:22191] RE: Re: re: re: Historical Materialism Ian quotes Joan Robinson: The awkwardness of reckoning in terms of values, while commodities and labor power are constantly changing in values, accounts for much of the obscurity of Marx's exposition, and none of the important ideas he expresses in terms of the conceptof value cannot be better expressed without it. I don't think the obscurity of Marx's writing (which is supposed to be pretty easy to read as German theoretical writing goes) is due to his use of values. Instead it's because he doesn't do what modern writers do, i.e., say this is what I'm going to say first; then I'll talk about this, etc., explaining the level of abstraction and stuff like that (i.e. assumptions) at each stage. Instead he plays at being Hegel and starts out very abstract (the Commodity in General) and becomes progressively more concrete without explaining the logic of his presentation (even though his analysis does make sense). (Charlie Andrews' recent book follows Marx on value theory, but has a much better presentation.) As a logical process, the ratio of profits to wages for each individual commodity, can be calculated when the rate of profit is known. The transformation is from prices into values, not the other way. this is what's been called the Steedman critique, though obviously Robinson thought of it first. It's at the center of Analytic Marxism. I think it's based on a misunderstanding of Marx's project, the facile assumption that Marx was a minor post-Ricardian who was first and foremost interested in price theory and distribution theory. Jim Devine Ok, but given the Quine-Duhem underdetermination problem-link below-is not the burden of proof for the indispensability of Marx's value theory on those who wish to retain it? Steve Fleetwood has an essay on this in a recent issue of Capital Class. Ian ** UNDERDETERMINATION Empirical equivalence Two theories T1 and T2 are empirically equivalent if every observational consequence of T1 is also an observational consequence of T2. e.g. curved space-time vs. flat space-time plus forces solar system at rest vs. solar system moves with uniform rectilinear velocity v Underdetermination and Scepticism If T1 and T2 are empirically equivalent, every possible piece of evidence that supports T1 will also support T2. The evidence underdetermines our choice between T1 or T2. How do we decide which of T1 and T2 is true? Note This problem only arises where there are empirically equivalent theories. http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dfl0www/modules/scikandr/ROHP.HTM
Fictitious Capital and Enron
From Doug Noland's Credit Bubble Bulletin: Reading through Frank Partnoy's (attorney, law professor, former Morgan Stanley derivative salesman, and author of F.I.A.S.C.O) candid and informative testimony (http://www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/012402partnoy.htm) presented this week before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, I could not help but ponder to what extent Enron exemplifies a microcosm of the contemporary U.S. Credit system. We can only hope that fraudulent activities have not risen to epidemic proportions but, regrettably, we just have no way of knowing. Fraud and malfeasance have a way of only making their way to the surface after a particular asset class falters (like energy and Enron!). We are today forced to wait for the protracted boom in mortgage finance and asset-backed securities to run its course. Yet the profound shift to off-balance sheet entities and vehicles, derivative contracts, and other sophisticated instruments, certainly makes any discussion of transparency or accurate risk assessment a bad joke. It is surely not comforting to learn how entangled our nation's largest accounting firm and bank, not to mention Wall Street and Washington, were in the Enron sham. I remember back to early 1998 when I read in the Financial Times of the explosion in ruble derivative hedging contracts throughout the Russian banking system. This piece of information, along with the knowledge that the global leveraged speculating community had been aggressively accumulating large holdings of high-yielding Russian government bonds, was sufficient to appreciate that the Russian financial system had drunk the poison. There was, nonetheless, no way of knowing when crisis would erupt - in fact, the boom survived for many months - only that when the speculative flows eventually reversed this Bubble would quickly implode into illiquidity, dislocation and financial collapse. The structure of the debts and degree of systemic leverage, the nature of the hedging instruments, and the character of the financial players involved ensured it. The day the foreign speculators began any meaningful attempted to liquidate holdings (get their money back!), the Russian debt market and ruble would tank. The Russian banks would then be called upon to pay against their derivative insurance, although they would by then be hopelessly insolvent. The ruble and government bond market would swiftly collapse and this sordid financial scheme would be over. The Russian debacle offered a potent mixture of fraud and wild speculative excess (wrapped in the presentable garb of contemporary finance), with the critical assumption that Western policymakers would not tolerate a market collapse. It is worth noting how the most spectacular Bubbles and consequent devastating busts occur to markets holding the most faith in the muscle of authority. Ignoring the fraud, it was at best a complex contemporary financial scheme with the age-old problem that foreign players would have no opportunity to exit the Bubble quietly. The idea that legitimate insurance protection could be purchased from highly leveraged and exposed financial players was similarly ridiculous, in an intriguing contemporary twist to traditional schemes. It is unfortunate that there has been little appreciation for the critical role the availability of such insurance played in fostering the speculative Bubble. It was a key enticement that altered risk perceptions for the leveraged speculators, while presenting irresistible opportunities to Russian bankers and fraudsters alike. This insurance thus guaranteed the degree of interrelated market excess and malfeasance that would end in spectacular simultaneous collapse in the bond, currency, and insurance markets - Russian financial collapse. There were critical pertinent lessons from the Russian experience that were not learned. A sense of déjà vu all over again came over me this week when I read David Gonzales' article, Enron Footprints Revive Old Image of Caymans, in Monday 's New York Times: Today, there are more than 400 banks and 47,000 partnerships registered or licensed in the Cayman Islands. The banks include about a dozen full-service institutions, with the rest being offshore banks that by law must be affiliated with either a local or overseas bank. By some estimates, Cayman banks hold $800 billion in American money - a figure that last year led Robert M. Morgenthau, the district attorney in Manhattan, and others investigating tax cases to question how much of it was there to keep it from the reach of tax collectors. But Cayman bankers and officials, long accustomed to these criticisms, said that most of that figure represents money from major American banks that has been booked in Cayman accounts in order to gain interest, among other advantages. 'Those $800 billion are not physically in the Cayman Island, it is all in New York,' said Conor O'Dea, managing director of Bank of Butterfield. ' It is booked
