Re: Isaac Deutscher's anecdote about the readership of Marx's Capital in the ...
Hi Melvin, You wrote: This is why I take what you write with a grain of salt. Prove that the main source of difference was over democracy or shut up. I will and prepared to prove exactly what the main source of difference was based on the literature. Prove the difference based on democracy, which is what you state. You seem to be trying out your little Marxist Hitler style again ! "Prove that the main source of difference was over democracy or shut up." What sort of language is this ? How can you expect people to debate with you on this basis ? Don't be so dense, nobody is saying that "the main source of difference was over democracy" and nobody is arguing that. I am talking about Kautsky's overall perspective about the meaning of Marxism and the labour movement, versus Lenin's, and indicating how one important dimension of difference originated specifically from the very different political situations pertaining in Germany and Poland and Russia respectively. Your interest in genuine historical research is zero, you are just interested in revolutionary propaganda on the basis of a few holy texts read outside of historical context. I have no intention of debating with you, because I am a heterodox socialist and you are an orthodox believer. From a heterodox socialist perspective, the orthodox believers should be left to run and play, in a space where they do no harm. There is no point in debating with them, because you already know what they will say before they even open up their mouths, blah blah blah "the proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky" blah blah blah. This never solves any problems. Incidentally, Lenin had a lot of respect for Kautsky, despite deep and irreconcilable political differences. This is however very different from Melvin P. hanging out the village idiot and telling other socialists to "shut up". That political culture is more a Stalin/Hitler culture, based on emotionalism and power-seeking, repressing the worker if the worker dissents from what the politbureau dictates. Jurriaan
NYTimes.com Article: Surge in Rates May Hurt Pillar of the Economy
This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ouch! Talk about kicking yourself in the head. Anders [EMAIL PROTECTED] / advertisement ---\ Explore more of Starbucks at Starbucks.com. http://www.starbucks.com/default.asp?ci=1015 \--/ Surge in Rates May Hurt Pillar of the Economy August 5, 2003 By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 - If cheap mortgages have kept the economy afloat, the economy may have just sprung a leak. A little more than a month after the Federal Reserve reduced its overnight lending rate to just 1 percent, mortgage rates have shot up as investors have soured on the bond market - in part because of confusion about the Fed's intentions in managing the economy. This has abruptly stalled plans by thousands of homeowners to refinance their houses at even lower rates than they already enjoy. The pace of home loan refinancing has fallen by half the last several weeks, according to bankers and analysts. If the higher rates persist, they will make it more expensive for people to buy houses or to borrow money against their houses to pay for renovations, furniture and even cars. That would damp a principal source of consumer demand over the last two years, a period when consumer spending has been one of the few sources of economic growth. Higher rates could also lead to more expensive loans for automobiles; robust car sales have been another pillar of the economy the last few years. Businesses, meanwhile, still gun shy about spending money on new factories and equipment, may have to contend with higher borrowing costs as well. So will the federal government itself, just as tax cuts and spending increases are forcing it to borrow huge sums to cover the largest deficits in history. It remains to be seen whether last week's surge in longer-term interest rates is just a blip or the start of a trend. Either way, however, it is remarkable as a demonstration of the limits of the Fed and its chairman, Alan Greenspan, to force the hand of the nation's financial markets. The Fed may have lowered its federal funds rate, the rate it charges on overnight loans, but investors have ignored the move and pushed up interest rates on longer-term Treasury bonds. Analysts say a big reason investors are marching in the opposite direction is that they have new doubts about both the Fed's ability and willingness to take drastic steps if the United States slips into the kind of price deflation that plagues Japan. "It looks to some people now as if the emperor has no clothes," said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo, referring to Mr. Greenspan. "The Fed doesn't have much ammunition left, and if they use it, the markets will just demand more." The astonishing divergence of Fed policy and the reaction of financial markets poses a challenge to Mr. Greenspan, who has until now enjoyed a nearly mythic reputation for his power to make the enormous American economy move to his tune. Analysts say the Fed's sudden loss of influence stems from several factors. The first is a sudden reappraisal of the Fed's intention; after having fretted for months about the dangers of deflation, suggesting that it would use highly unconventional techniques to flood the markets with money to fight it, Mr. Greenspan backtracked last month to the disappointment of many bond investors. The Fed also disappointed many investors by cutting the overnight federal funds rate by only a quarter- point on June 25. On a more positive note, investors are also reacting to new data suggesting the economy may be strengthening after all. If that proves to be true, the Fed would be expected to raise rates at some point in the not too distant future. Higher interest rates would make bonds, with their fixed interest rates, less appealing to investors. Bond prices would fall to compensate for the decline in demand. But analysts say there is also an important new technical issue at play, one that may have caught Fed officials by surprise. That issue has to do with the nation's mortgage lenders, who are responsible for more than $5 trillion in home loans. To protect themselves from borrowers' paying back their loans early, mortgage lenders hedge their loan portfolios in part by buying up Treasury bonds. But as interest rates began to creep up, the nation's biggest players abruptly adjusted their strategy and started selling bonds or derivative securities tied to them. Lower prices for Treasury bonds translate directly to higher interest rates earned on those bonds. Since mid-June, yields on 10-year Treasury notes, which move in the opposite direction from the prices, have climbed from about 3.3 percent to 4.28 percent today. That affects the rates financial institutions charge for countless other kinds of long-term loans, from mortgages to car loans. Rates on mortgages have shot up more than one percentage po
Re: Isaac Deutscher's anecdote about the readership of Marx's Capital in the glory days of "Classical marxism"
> what's the name of Kautsky's summary of the first volume of CAPITAL?
>
>
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Well I couldn't remember the title off the top of my head. It's "The
economic doctrines of Karl Marx", written 1887 and revised in 1903 when
Luxemburg wrote her piece to which I referred. This was a standard
popularisation of Das Kapital which was widely read, focusing basically on
Marx's Capital volume 1. See:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/works/1880s/economic/index.htm
When the first known New Zealand Marxist, Westcoaster Tom Feary, worked his
way on a ship to San Fransisco to get some Marxist literature there, mainly
in Charles Kerr editions, from the IWW bookshop, in order to smuggle it back
into New Zealand in a trunk (the sedition laws made this literature
illegal), Kautsky's "Economic Doctrines" would have been one of the books he
bought. He would later be found sitting on the hillside by the coast in the
weekends, overlooking the coalmines, reading "Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific" as well as "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy". A "Marxian Association" had been founded during the first world
war, a war in which, from memory, 1 in 11 adult males in New Zealand lost
their lives.
The New Zealand sedition laws led to quite a number of arrests and fines,
and Hetty Weitzel (If I remember correctly), a bright young woman from
German background, university educated and aiming to teach, who had
associated with the new Communist Party founded in 1921, five years after
the Labour Party was founded, was left without job prospects and forced by
circumstances to emigrate to Australia. She had had a Comintern journal or
pamphlet in her possession and was caught with it.
Lateron, Harry Holland MP, the honorary Marxist in the Labour Party (who had
read Das Kapital and published a pamphlet on theories of value), would read
the titles of banned literature into the Parliamentary Hansard (= the
official record of parliamentary proceedings, accessible to the general
public), so that at least the comrades would know what literature they had
to get, or were missing out on. And they did get it, because the New Zealand
Seamen's Union was very strong and militant, containing many Wobblies and
socialists of one stripe or another, and a lot of socialist literature was
imported by them.
As regards Karl Kautsky, he was reviled among revolutionaries ever since
Lenin's polemics, but as his articles in Die Neue Zeit show, he was actually
a quite sophisticated Marxist thinker and not merely a populariser. Among
other things, he wrote some thoughtful articles about the political economy
of gold ("Gold und Teuerung"). One of the main sources of difference between
Kautsky and Lenin was Kautsky's strong commitment to democracy, which of
course did not exist in Russia beyond the consultative Duma permitted by the
Czar after 1905 for some time. In Russia and Poland, the workers movement
had to break the law, or at any rate undertake very radical actions, in
order to win even bread-and-butter issues, whereas in post-Bismarck Germany,
a popular democracy existed, such that the social democrats could operate
legally "within the system" and indeed gain parliamentary representation in
elections; trade unions could generally operate freely and expand. The more
radical, revolutionary stance of Polish and Russian Marxism is in good part
explained by this fact alone. If you read Salvatori's biography of Kautsky
(which is in some respects a bit superficial and tedious) you will be amazed
at Kautsky's vision, despite his relative incomprehension of the politics of
imperialism (having ruled out the possibility of a new cycle of world wars
in 1906, he wrote an article on "ultra-imperialism" on the very eve of world
war 1).
Jurriaan
> two comments on Kautsky:
>
> 1) despite the antagonism of self-styled "Leninists" toward him, Lenin's
WHAT IS TO BE DONE? is based largely on Kautsky's work.
>
> 2) His notions of ultra-imperialism aren't so far off today. It wouldn't
be the first time that Marxist predictions came true long after they were
made.
>
> Jim
I believe you are correct - certainly, the concept of "democratic
centralism" was already mooted by Kautsky. Lenin merely reinterpreted the
concept in his own situation. I think from memory David Lane also mentioned
this fact in his sociology of bolshevism. I have some reservations about the
concept of ultra-imperialism since I feel it doesn't really do justice to
the reality of inter-capitalist competition, and the fact that most
corporations are still nationally based.
J.
> yes, but the concept applies _better_ now than any time since its
invention.
> Jim
Correction - Rosa Luxemburg and bookreading
In a previous mail about the use of books, I wrote: "Rosa Luxemburg, Isaac Deutscher and Ernest Mandel all remarked upon the fact, that even among selfstyled Marxists in the 1920s, Marx's magnum opus had mostly not been read beyond the first volume or extracts thereof." In fact, Rosa lived from 1871 to January 15, 1919, when she was murdered by the Freikorps. Therefore she could not have commented on Marxist intellectual activity in the 1920s, and I was wrong there. Nevertheless, she did make a point along these lines. See for instance her essay "Stagnation and Progress of Marxism" (1903), first published in 1927 by David Riazanov, the original director of the Marx-Engels Institute founded in 1920 in Moscow. Specifically, Rosa says: "The third volume of Capital, with its solution of the problem of the rate of profit (the basic problem of Marxist economics), did not appear till 1894. But in Germany, as in all other lands, agitation had been carried on with the aid of the unfinished material contained in the first volume; the Marxist doctrine had been popularised and had found acceptance upon the basis of this first volume alone; the success of the incomplete Marxist theory had been phenomenal; and no one had been aware that there was any gap in the teaching. Furthermore, when the third volume finally saw the light, whilst to begin with it attracted some attention in the restricted circles of the experts, and aroused here a certain amount of comment - as far as the socialist movement as a whole was concerned, the new volume made practically no impression in the wide regions where the ideas expounded in the original book had become dominant. The theoretical conclusions of volume 3 have not hitherto evoked any attempt at popularisation, nor have they secured wide diffusion. On the contrary, even among the social democrats we sometimes hear, nowadays, re-echoes of the "disappointment" with the third volume of Capital which is so frequently voiced by bourgeois economists - and thus these social democrats merely show how fully they had accepted the "incomplete" exposition of the theory of value presented in the first volume. How can we account for so remarkable a phenomenon? Shaw, who (to quote his own expression) is fond of "sniggering" at others, may have good reasons here, for making fun of the whole socialist movement, insofar as it is grounded upon Marx! But if he were to do this, he would be "sniggering" at a very serious manifestation of our social life. The strange fate of the second and third volumes of Capital is conclusive evidence as to the general destiny of theoretical research in our movement. From the scientific standpoint, the third volume of Capital must, no doubt, be primarily regarded as the completion of Marx's critique of capitalism.Without this third volume, we cannot understand, either the actually dominant law of the rate of profit; or the splitting up of surplus value into profit, interest, and rent; or the working of the law of value within the field of competition. But, and this is the main point, all these problems, however important from the outlook of the pure theory, are comparatively unimportant from the practical outlook of the class war. As far as the class war is concerned, the fundamental theoretical problem is the origin of surplus value, that is, the scientific explanation of exploitation; together with the elucidation of the tendencies toward the socialisation of the process of production, that is, the scientific explanation of the objective groundwork of the socialist revolution. Both these problems are solved in the first volume of Capital, which deduces the "expropriation of the expropriators" as the inevitable and ultimate result of the production of surplus value and of the progressive concentration of capital. Therewith, as far as theory is concerned, the essential need of the labour movement is satisfied. The workers, being actively engaged in the class war, have no direct interest in the question of how surplus value is distributed among the respective groups of exploiters; or in the question of how, in the course of this distribution, competition brings about rearrangements of production. That is why, for socialists in general, the third volume of Capital remains an unread book. But, in our movement, what applies to Marx's economic doctrines applies to theoretical research in general. It is pure illusion to suppose that the working class, in its upward striving, can of its own accord become immeasurably creative in the theoretical domain." Source: http://www.redflag.org.uk/frontline/one/rosa.html
Re: Bank credit rationing
> I was thinking of credit rationing as the denial of credit to those who are willing to pay the offered interest rate (an excess demand for loans). It's very hard to pin down empirically, but someone may have done so. I doubt whether you can get data that measures this directly, in the first instance because from what I know about it, almost no data is directly collected on the "total demand" for credit. It may be that some data is compiled on credit requests from banks, and possibly even the total amount of credit requests. Banks would normally record this in some way. But generally the data concerns "actual credit approved and extended", not anything like "credit requested" or credit requests refused. The utility of this latter data would only be to indicate the potential market for customer-credit, an input into marketing strategy by the banks indicating the potential credit market. I.e. a bank may wish to compare credit requests with credit actually approved, and make explicit the discrepancy. Therefore, I suspect that you could only get indirect measures, such as e.g. the number of applications for credit cards which are refused by banks and finance companies, or the number of credit requests refused by banks. But like I say, I am not aware of a statutory obligation to make this information public, other than in occasional research papers of the banks themselves. However, such information would presumably be regarded as confidential operating data by the banks, and not usually released publicly, and to my knowledge no US statute exists, which requires such information to be made public anyhow, beyond general statutory limits in the extension of credit. This is logical, because the banks want to come across as customer-friendly services, and would therefore not be likely to publish data on the loans they refuse to extend, categorised by type of ground, unless there was some specific legal requirement to do so. At most they would specify the conditions for extending credit, from which you may infer something. In which case you are left with anecdotal evidence, as reported by frustrated would-be borrowers, or possibly episodic information statements released by banks in specifying their actual lending policy (e.g. in annual reports or research papers). In other words, you would need to look at statements by specific banks concerning the current principles of their credit regime. If a would-be borrower is refused credit, he may however lodge a compliant with another authority, perhaps an ombudsman-type authority, and therefore such authorities may record appeals against the refusal by banks of credit applications. Another indirect source might be the amount of credit extended which is dishonored by borrowers, and collected by incasso enforcement agencies. Probably the best way to answer your query would be to construct a clear definition of the measure you want, on the basis of Stigler's concepts, and approach the research department of a large US bank, asking if they do actually collect data on this side of their operations, and whether they would release it for research purposes. It may be that the Federal Reserve Bank collects data of this type, which you might have access to under legislation specifying citizens rights to information from official sources. Another possibility is to approach the NBER people. Another indirect approach might be to look at where borrowers prefer to get their credit from, what the main institutional sources of credit are. If for example it is difficult to obtain credit from ordinary banks for a group of people, then they would go to other lending institutions such as finance companies taking a looser approach to credit provision. And so by looking at the trends in lending by different categories of lending institutions, you may be able to identity a shift from lending institutions with a tight credit regime to those with a looser credit regime, and compare the lending rates they offer in this regard over a period of time. Hope this helps. Jurriaan
Re: Background of David Kay
Kay made some published statements of optimism concerning the imminent finding of evidence concerning the WMDs, along with statements that his group had already found evidence of a cover-up. His "background" tells us how much credence we should put in those statements. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine > -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 10:21 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [PEN-L] Background of David Kay > > > On 8/5/03, k hanly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > Interesting that when it was announced that > > David Kay . . . was hired . . . to look for weapons > > in Iraq there is zilch about questionable parts > > of his background . . . . [that] he has . . . no > > training as a scientist . . . [and] admitted in > > effect making a Faustian bargain with US > > intelligence sources. He was fired by Blix and > > consequently vilified him. > > http://www.wanniski.com/showarticle.asp?articleid= > 2728 > > If he verifiably finds or meaningfully helps find > whatever it is that also verifiably is confirmed to be > "WMD" (however defined), what difference will his > "backgound" have made? And to whatever if any exent > that he will not have done this, why is it "[i]nteresting" > what his "background" may be (WHATEVER his > "background" is)? >
RES: [PEN-L] Mad Mel
-Mensagem original- De: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] nome de Yoshie Furuhashi Enviada em: terça-feira, 5 de agosto de 2003 00:25 Para: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Assunto: Re: [PEN-L] Mad Mel There was in the sixties e very good Polish film called (I am translating literally) "Mother Joanna of the Angels". Renato Pompeu
