capitalists shed crocodile tears?

[Blair Sandler]

I seem to recall in Kapital I a line about capitalists shedding
crocodile tears.  As I remember, this occurs in a discussion of
capitalist resistance to limitations on the length of the working
day and related regulations of labor.  Marx points out that
although capitalists cried out that regulations would ruin them,
in fact, their profits increased (through relative surplus value
production).

However, I may have made this up (about the crocodile tears), or
perhaps it occurs in the course of an entirely different
discussion, for I am unable to find it.

Can anyone help with a specific reference in this regard?

Much obliged.

Blair Sandler 80 Duncan St. #1 San Francisco, CA  94110
415.282.2163 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

re: SEC'S EDGAR DATABASE

[Blair Sandler]

Well, I hate to display my ignorance, but... what can one do with
the kind of data in the EDGAR database? Or rather, what kind of
data is in the EDGAR database? I can see that if someone is doing
a company investigation this would be helpful.  I suppose I could
just download some files and see what kind of data they contain,
but that seems inefficient. I'm hoping someone or ones in the know
can easily give me a sense of what's available within.

For instance, I'm writing a dissertation on the economics of
corporate responses to environmentalism. But I'm looking at
general patterns, rather than focusing on a particular company or
industry. What might I find of use in EDGAR?

Thanks in advance to any and all who answer.

Blair

distribution and equilibrium

[Blair Sandler]

Please excuse me if I'm bringing up subjects already discussed
The Coasian argument claims that assignment of rights is
irrelevant; in any case (leaving aside technical details such as
transactions costs) the same allocation of resources is the
equilibrium (efficient) solution.

Now Coase's article focused on value of production, but he
explicitly acknowledged that the efficient solution required
taking into account the total effect in all social spheres. The
efficient outcome therefore depends on people's (excuse me, I mean
consumers) utility functions. But as I understand it, people's
willingness to pay to avoid harm is different from their
willingness to be paid to accept harm. This means that the
original assignment of property rights will change the effective
set of utility functions and therefore the social welfare function
(what's that? you say), and therefore the efficient solution.

Am I on track here? If so, then this is just a particular instance
of the general argument that equilibrium depends on the
distribution of wealth, right?

If I'm wildly off the mark, please let me know. If my
understanding is basically left (ok, "correct"), then I would like
references for:

*  studies that show willingness to pay and willingness to accept
are not equal

*  papers that show equilibrium can vary with different
distributions of wealth.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Blair Sandler 80 Duncan St. #1 San Francisco, CA  94110
415.282.2163 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

looking for Woodwards

[Blair Sandler]

I don't exactly know if this is appropriate on PEN-L, but a friend
is looking for former friends of her, the brothers Ken and Doug
Woodward, who, I am given to understand, are both economists.
Perhaps if anyone knows either of them, they could pass this
message on to them. My friend's name is Andrea. Thanks in
advance.

Blair [EMAIL PROTECTED]

re: Karl on Krisis

[Blair Sandler]

Doug Henwood wrote,

"Somewhere - I think it was the Grundrisse - Marx said there is no
such thing as permanent crisis. Now I can't locate the quote. Can
anyone help me out?"

Please post to pen-l; I'm interested too.  Thanks.

Blair Sandler

re: comments on shoes and class from Jim D.

[Blair Sandler]

Jim: responding to David Brennan, you refer to "subsumed class
processes" and then say you don't see the point of calling them
"non-class" processes. But they're *not* non-class, they're
subsumed class. What they're *not* is exploitation. For me, the
point here is that if we just talk about class, then conceptually
all the stuff in "class" moves together. It's perhaps more
difficult to conceive the overdetermined effects (in the words of
Laclau and Mouffe) of changes in the relationships between
different kinds of class processes. It's like looking at details
through a finer lens.

Secondly: you ask whether the ethical consumer must go shoeless.
I'm all for ethical consuming, but most of the time it's
impossible, in the sense that we face a set of choices all of
which bear unpleasant consequences for some humans somewhere.
Perhaps you read Mark Dowie's critique of "socially responsible
investing" in the Nation, a while back? He argued that buying
stock from one company rather than another based on "ethics" was
probably irrelevant compared to the power of organized boycotts
and other social movements. Pressures from shareholders may have
been more effective than sales of stock by shareholders.
Analogously, perhaps instead of worrying so much about where we
buy our shoes, we should organize protests against TNCs, form
worker collectives, attempt to influence organized government to
regulate TNCs, etc.

Regards,

Blair Sandler

economics of sustainable development

[Blair Sandler]

A friend working at EDGE: The Alliance of Ethnic and Environmental
Organizations is looking for a "progressive" economist in the
Southern California area, to talk about sustainable development at
a small planning conference on population and immigration,
Saturday, April 30, at University of Southern California.

If you are interested yourself or can suggest appropriate folks,
please email me at my address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

and/or give my address to anyone who might be interested in
participating

and/or have them call Andrea directly at EDGE: 415-421-6891.

Thanks.

Blair Sandler

reference requres re: satisficing behavior

[Blair Sandler]

I do not have easy access to a real library. Perhaps some of you
with excess time on your hands (that's a joke) can assist me with
a reference question. You will earn my undying gratitude and (in
the spirit of commodity exchange) a return favor once I'm done
with my dissertation.

Was it Herb Stein who proposed that enterprises "satisfice" rather
than "maximize" certain measures? I'd appreciate the citation.

Blair Sandler [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: reference required re: satisficing behavior

[Blair Sandler]

"Simon," not "Stein." Right. Maybe that's why I could never get
anywhere on that one?!

Thanks to John Buttrick, Sandy Thompson, and anyone else who
replies, for the info on Herb *Simon*. John spells it satisfying
(I know that's the usual word) and Sandy "satisficing" (but maybe
s/he was just being agreeable?).

And did I really spell that... "requres?"  I must be really tired
of this dissertation.

Blair Sandler

re: prices of computers

[Blair Sandler]

Paul Cockshott writes,

"the Babbage/Marx/Braverman analysis of the labour process is
unable to account for how the labour content can have been so
dramatically reduced. To focus on price competition is to pick on
a trivial question in comparison."

I agree with the comment on price competition, but disagree that
Marx's analysis is unable to account for the decline in labor
content. On the contrary, I think Marx explicitly addresses just
this point: in the Grundrisse, Marx notes that the relationship
between material wealth and labor time depends on cultural
processes:  "to the degree that large industry develops, the
creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on
the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies
set in motion during labour time, whose "powerful effectiveness"
is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time
spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state
of science and on the progress of technology, or the application
of this science to production" (1973, 704-5).

Isn't this exactly what has taken place in the computer industry
(as well as elsewhere)?

Regards,

Blair Sandler [EMAIL PROTECTED]

RACHEL's Hazardous Waste News

[Blair Sandler]

RACHEl is, in my opinion, a great newsletter, one of the best. It
is good to see it here on PEN-L. But just so folks know, anyone
with email can send a message to ERD (Environmental Research
Foundation) and ask them to email it directly to your address.

Perhaps a note to that effect each week with the forward of
RACHEL, and in a few weeks we could stop posting it to PEN-L, and
let those who want it seek it directly. Perhaps every few months
or so it could be posted with a note about how to get it, for new
PEN-L subscribers or those newly interested.

ERF's address:

[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Blair

toma

[Blair Sandler]

Well, folks, it's official. Today's Wall Street Journal reports on
a Harvard School of Public Health's Center for Risk Analysis that
concludes it's cheaper to let people get sick and then save them
medically than it is to prevent the disease in the first place
through workplace-safety or environmental measures.

For an antidote to the idiocy of risk assessment and cost-benefit
analysis, see various issues of RACHEL's Hazardous Waste News:

Environmental Research Foundation P.O. Box 5036,
   Annapolis, MD  21403
  Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
   ==
  Back issues available via anonymous ftp from
  ftp.std.com/periodicals/rachel and via gopher server
   at gopher.std.com and at envirolink.org and at igc.apc.org.

Regards to all.

Blair Sandler

re: race, morals, and welfare

[Blair Sandler]

Doug Henwood wrote about today's WSJ article on the Christian
Coalition.

"They want to become, says organizer Ralph Reed, a true rainbow
coalition. This means that the easy equivalences of right=racist
and multiculti=progressive must be rethought"

But the article also notes that they're not really getting
anywhere with their outreach to African Americans. Furthermore,
the right has long included (in uneasy alliance, perhaps),
especially but not exclusively in Florida, "hispanics," and I
would argue that it has not diminished the ferocious racism of the
right.

One more thing: their idea of a "true rainbow coalition" is
multiethnic but not multicultural. On the contrary, the goal is
that everybody should share 1950s middle America nuclear family
white bread culture. Multicultural is anti-assimiliationist.

Blair Sandler

WSJ: "Marxists thrive in academia"

[Blair Sandler]

Well, once again UMass economics is in the news as a center of
Marxism. Today's Wall Street Journal article mentions a number of
University of Massachusetts, Amherst faculty -- Rick Wolff, Steve
Resnick, Sam Bowles -- and graduates -- Randy Albelda, Antonio
Callari. The article also mentions Arthur MacEwan, Julie Matthaei,
and John Roemer.

The article also mentioned the huge conference sponsored by
RETHINKING MARXISM a couple of years ago, "Marxism in the New
World Order," which took place at UMass Amherst.

Rick Wolff had the best quote: "It's fun," he says of Marxism.

Blair Sandler

re: liberals and reactionaries are not alternatives

[Blair Sandler]

Hello, Mary Engelmeyer. I agree with your statement that:

"I'm not convinced that a system with a 'ruling class with liberal
tendencies' and ones with 'more reactionary, violent...' are
alternatives.  Perhaps, one creates the conditions out of which
the other arises."

"swings between liberal and reactionary may be an alternative to a
real assault on capitalism."

In my thesis I'm arguing that attempts to control TNCs not part of
an assault on capitalism merely reshape the conditions of
existence of exploitation without putting an end to it. Some TNCs
fight to preserve existing conditions of existence of
exploitation; others see opportunities to gain competitive
advantage by helping to shape new conditions of existence of
exploitation under a "green" environmental regime. Some times TNCs
accept unions or environmental regulations; other times they hire
unionbusters and lobbyists to oppose "state intervention in the
economy." We seem to swing back and forth between reform and
reaction as each creates conditions for the other, as you said.

Blair

re: The Ecologist

[Blair Sandler]

I second Trond's recommendation of the ECOLOGIST's article on the
European Round Table of Industrialists. In fact, I heartily
recommend the ECOLOGIST, and not just for environmentalists or
environmental economists. The journal is full of excellent
articles on political economy, like why TNCs are so supportive of
recycling, the political economy of tourism, the development of
market economies in eastern Europe, and especially the devastating
critique of "development" in 1992, "Whose Common Future," now a
book from, I believe, New Society Publishers.

Official Disclaimer: My only association with the ECOLOGIST is as
subscriber.

Blair

one hand clapping

[Blair Sandler]

I've got one hand clapping for Doug Henwood, too. (The other hand
is typing....)

Blair Sandler

re: Marxian theory of the firm

[Blair Sandler]

Simplistic Marxist theory (by this I mean that I am representing
the theory crudely): the firm maximizes rate of surplus value. The
logic of capital is to maximize surplus appropriation.

Alternative theory of the firm: enterprises seek to secure access
to the conditions of existence of exploitation. (The capitalist
fundamental class process, in the language of Resnick and Wolff.
See their 1987 book _Knowledge and Class_.) Securing access to the
conditions of existence of exploitation typically though not
always requires distributing portions of already appropriated
surplus. For example, access to land requires rent; access to
credit requires interest payments, access to technology may
require royalties, access to monopolized services may require an
additional payment to induce the monopolist to sell Resnick
and Wolff call these subsumed class payments; the subsumed class
process is the distribution of surplus value for the purpose of
securing the conditions of existence of the fundamental class
process (surplus labor production: in the capitalist fundamental
class process this is always associated with exploitation).

(Of course, there is always the possibility of a Rrevolutionary
ruptureS in which the enterprise ceases to earn fundamental class
revenues, seeking instead to secure a substantially different set
of conditions of existence of different goals, say subsumed class
or non-class revenues. (e.g. if the enterprise liquidates its
productive capital and goes entirely into finance. For a while
back there, I believe, GM lost money on auto production but earned
positive net income on its finance division.)

As natural and social conditions change, so do the distributions
of surplus the enterprise must make to secure its conditions of
existence. For instance, in the past water was free, but now
requires distributions of surplus to acquire it and/or clean it
before release back into the environment. Thus, the "firm" is
essentially a set of strategies for securing access to the
conditions of existence of surplus appropriation. The stock of
capital goods; ownership of patents and licenses; relationships
with creditors (bondholders, stockowners, banks, etc.), employees,
customers, suppliers, government officials and the like; all that
we usually think of as the "firm," are nothing but the
manifestation of past chosen strategies. In part, of course, this
determines present strategies open or closed to the firm, thus
shaping future possibilities. This is how a firm can have
historical existence through changes of ownership, management,
physical location, complete turnover of employees and capital
stock, even corporate name and more.

Returning to the second paragraph, above, if the logic of capital
is profit maximization, then social movements "constrain" capital,
or seek to do so. But if the logic of capital is (say aggregated
over all enterprises) a particular set of strategies enterprises
adopt to secure the conditions of existence of surplus
appropriation, then social movements alter the logic of capital.

(The above is basically from my dissertation in progress, although
the focus of the thesis is not on the theory of the firm.)

Blair [EMAIL PROTECTED]

re: Marxian theory of the firm

[Blair Sandler]

Jim: yes, I've read vols II and III of _Capital_.  I said,
"simplistic Marxist theory" because I figured most of us would be
familiar with the details. The difference between the value profit
rate and the money profit rate (if I've got the terms right here)
is irrelevant to the point I'm making. Firms don't maximize
anything at all -- not surplus value, not profit, not
accumulation, not revenues, not market shares, not That is, at
one moment or another they may do any or none of this things, but
there is no law that they must ever do any one in particular.

Over what time horizon would the maximization take place?
Practically *any* activity can be argued to maximize [variable]
over some time period, including purchasing luxury yachts or
corporate airplanes or fancy office equipment or valuable art or
comprehensive health plans for workers or retaining expensive law
services or installing safety and health equipment not required by
regulation, etc.

Enterprises are run by collective capitalists in the form of a
board (and then by their flunkies in management). So there are
conflicts of interest within the board (after all, some board
members are directors of the enterprise's bank; others have larger
or smaller shareholdings; still others could increase their
personal incomes by increasing their salaries, benefits, perks and
bonuses -- at the expense of "profits"; other board members are
also on the boards of suppliers or customers, and on on.

There are always struggles -- class struggles -- over the size and
destination of subsumed class payments. There is no a priori
reason to assume the enterprise will maximize retained earnings,
dividends, interest payments, executive salaries, rent, or any
other particular allocation of surplus. But neither can we assume
they maximize surplus itself. Because the profits of some
capitalists are "deductions" from the profits of other, especially
industrial capitalists, I thought I would make a stronger
statement to say that capitalists (and there was an implied
"industrial" there, since it is industrial capitalists that
directly exploit labor and appropriate the surplus labor that is
eventually shared in some way by all capitalists) don't maximize
surplus labor appropriation. For they may lay off thousands of
workers and reduce exploitation, they may deaccumulate and cut C
and V, they may increase wages or cut productive labor time and
reduce the rate of exploitation now in hopes of gaining additional
surplus later (through improved employee morale or as a result of
training that increases productivity, etc.).

Jim wants to distinguish between "appropriation of surplus value"
and "exploitation," because he considers appropriation of surplus
value something that finance capitalists or landlords or merchant
capitalists also do (that is, grab -- "appropriate" -- part of the
total social surplus value). In the Resnick and Wolff framework,
appropriating surplus value is something that only exploiters --
industrial capitalists -- do. What the other capitalists (and some
other social positions as well) do is then receive distributions
of this already appropriated surplus in return for providing
conditions of existence of the appropriation of surplus labor (the
fundamental class process) -- exploitation.  This issue, I think,
regards terminology.

I know the above is somewhat informal, perhaps even sloppy. I'm
trying to do this fast because I have to finish my dissertation in
two months. My original post on this subject was part of a private
conversation I was having with someone. I figured I might as well
post it to PEN-L, after Doug's question came up, and now I feel
responsible to clarify given Jim's comment. I may be making
fundamental errors of some sort or other, but the implication of
my argument is to turn analysis from presuming maximization (or
satificing or whatever) to a very different perspective, outlined
in my earlier post. (This is such a large subject that I'm trying
to make a few suggestive comments to illustrate a general
perspective.)

Of course I welcome feedback, positive or negative, so I hope this
doesn't come across as harsh or defensive.

Regards,

Blair [EMAIL PROTECTED]

LBO on Money & Death

[Blair Sandler]

Doug, nice piece on Money & Death. Remember a few years back when
the Bush administration OMB proposed that OSHA consider the effect
of regulations on employment and wages because poorer workers have
worse health? The left was up in arms trashing the proposal. Yet
there is no question that the basic principle of the proposal was
absolutely correct, as your article demonstrates.

A more effective response (in terms of education), in my opinion,
would have been to affirm that principle, and insist that
regulations should not be held accountable for the actions of
capitalist enterprises. In other words, the OMB assumed a
necessary link between the regulations and e.g. layoffs. But no
regulation forces an enterprise to reduce wages or employment. We
could have pointed out that what applies to the state should
certainly apply as well to enterprises. We could impose
regulations, and then hold enterprises accountable for their
responses to it. If the state imposes regulations to improve
safety and health, and an enterprise responds by harming workers
health (by laying them off), then the enterprise should be
punished, forced to compensate, or whatever.

Just thinking about things....

Blair Sandler

email address

[Blair Sandler]

Sorry to bother people with this, but I am wondering if anyone has
an email address for Joachim Silvestre at UC Davis.

Thanks.

Blair Sandler

[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Doug Henwood

[Blair Sandler]

Doug, I got your message so I gather you're still subscribed.

Blair

Re: Help in Interdisciplinary Science/Environmental Studies

[Blair Sandler]

Anthony: I will forward your message for help to the Ecol-Econ
list.

Blair Sandler

[EMAIL PROTECTED]

capitalists shed crocodile tears?

[Blair Sandler]

I seem to recall in Kapital I a line about capitalists shedding
crocodile tears.  As I remember, this occurs in a discussion of
capitalist resistance to limitations on the length of the working
day and related regulations of labor.  Marx points out that
although capitalists cried out that regulations would ruin them,
in fact, their profits increased (through relative surplus value
production).

However, I may have made this up (about the crocodile tears), or
perhaps it occurs in the course of an entirely different
discussion, for I am unable to find it.

Can anyone help with a specific reference in this regard?

Much obliged.

Blair Sandler 80 Duncan St. #1 San Francisco, CA  94110
415.282.2163 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

re: SEC'S EDGAR DATABASE

[Blair Sandler]

Well, I hate to display my ignorance, but... what can one do with
the kind of data in the EDGAR database? Or rather, what kind of
data is in the EDGAR database? I can see that if someone is doing
a company investigation this would be helpful.  I suppose I could
just download some files and see what kind of data they contain,
but that seems inefficient. I'm hoping someone or ones in the know
can easily give me a sense of what's available within.

For instance, I'm writing a dissertation on the economics of
corporate responses to environmentalism. But I'm looking at
general patterns, rather than focusing on a particular company or
industry. What might I find of use in EDGAR?

Thanks in advance to any and all who answer.

Blair

distribution and equilibrium

[Blair Sandler]

Please excuse me if I'm bringing up subjects already discussed
The Coasian argument claims that assignment of rights is
irrelevant; in any case (leaving aside technical details such as
transactions costs) the same allocation of resources is the
equilibrium (efficient) solution.

Now Coase's article focused on value of production, but he
explicitly acknowledged that the efficient solution required
taking into account the total effect in all social spheres. The
efficient outcome therefore depends on people's (excuse me, I mean
consumers) utility functions. But as I understand it, people's
willingness to pay to avoid harm is different from their
willingness to be paid to accept harm. This means that the
original assignment of property rights will change the effective
set of utility functions and therefore the social welfare function
(what's that? you say), and therefore the efficient solution.

Am I on track here? If so, then this is just a particular instance
of the general argument that equilibrium depends on the
distribution of wealth, right?

If I'm wildly off the mark, please let me know. If my
understanding is basically left (ok, "correct"), then I would like
references for:

*  studies that show willingness to pay and willingness to accept
are not equal

*  papers that show equilibrium can vary with different
distributions of wealth.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Blair Sandler 80 Duncan St. #1 San Francisco, CA  94110
415.282.2163 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

looking for Woodwards

[Blair Sandler]

I don't exactly know if this is appropriate on PEN-L, but a friend
is looking for former friends of her, the brothers Ken and Doug
Woodward, who, I am given to understand, are both economists.
Perhaps if anyone knows either of them, they could pass this
message on to them. My friend's name is Andrea. Thanks in
advance.

Blair [EMAIL PROTECTED]

re: Karl on Krisis

[Blair Sandler]

Doug Henwood wrote,

"Somewhere - I think it was the Grundrisse - Marx said there is no
such thing as permanent crisis. Now I can't locate the quote. Can
anyone help me out?"

Please post to pen-l; I'm interested too.  Thanks.

Blair Sandler

re: comments on shoes and class from Jim D.

[Blair Sandler]

Jim: responding to David Brennan, you refer to "subsumed class
processes" and then say you don't see the point of calling them
"non-class" processes. But they're *not* non-class, they're
subsumed class. What they're *not* is exploitation. For me, the
point here is that if we just talk about class, then conceptually
all the stuff in "class" moves together. It's perhaps more
difficult to conceive the overdetermined effects (in the words of
Laclau and Mouffe) of changes in the relationships between
different kinds of class processes. It's like looking at details
through a finer lens.

Secondly: you ask whether the ethical consumer must go shoeless.
I'm all for ethical consuming, but most of the time it's
impossible, in the sense that we face a set of choices all of
which bear unpleasant consequences for some humans somewhere.
Perhaps you read Mark Dowie's critique of "socially responsible
investing" in the Nation, a while back? He argued that buying
stock from one company rather than another based on "ethics" was
probably irrelevant compared to the power of organized boycotts
and other social movements. Pressures from shareholders may have
been more effective than sales of stock by shareholders.
Analogously, perhaps instead of worrying so much about where we
buy our shoes, we should organize protests against TNCs, form
worker collectives, attempt to influence organized government to
regulate TNCs, etc.

Regards,

Blair Sandler

economics of sustainable development

[Blair Sandler]

A friend working at EDGE: The Alliance of Ethnic and Environmental
Organizations is looking for a "progressive" economist in the
Southern California area, to talk about sustainable development at
a small planning conference on population and immigration,
Saturday, April 30, at University of Southern California.

If you are interested yourself or can suggest appropriate folks,
please email me at my address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

and/or give my address to anyone who might be interested in
participating

and/or have them call Andrea directly at EDGE: 415-421-6891.

Thanks.

Blair Sandler

[PEN-L:3720] re: cba and war

[Blair Sandler]

Eban Goodstein writes,

"Now, here's a case where paralysis-by-analysis might prove
useful:

To require that any request by the President for a declaration of
war include a cost/benefit statement, and to require that any
declaration of war by the Congress include such a statement."

I must say I don't exactly see how this would prove particularly
useful. When was the last time the President requested a
declaration of war? When was the last time Congress declared war?
Did the U.S. declare war on Vietnam? Nicaragua?  Grenada? Haiti?
Somalia? Iraq? Panama?

Blair Sandler

[PEN-L:4065] re: chomsky page

[Blair Sandler]

Institute for Global Communications also has a "progressive
directory" web page.  IGC runs Peacenet, Labornet, and Econet.
Their URL is: (I think)

http://www.igc.apc.org

There you'll find links to all kinds of progressive (if not
necessarily "left") net resources

Blair

[PEN-L:4136] re: NYT article on prison & unemployment

[Blair Sandler]

Roger McCain writes,

"A few months ago there was a write-up in the New York Times (I
think) about the contrasts between US and European unemployment.
The theme was that whereas Europe has put its structurally
unemployed low-skill on the dole, in the US we are supporting them
in prisons, so that they don't show up on our unemployment roles;
but that the contrast in _employment_ by demographic category is
much less.

I used that as a reading in a freshman seminar, but then I let it
get away.  Did anyone by chance see it and keep the reference? If
so, please help by sending it to me."

I would also be interested in that article, so please post to the
list. Thanks

Blair Sandler

[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5457] Re: a slogan for the Next Millenium!

[Blair Sandler]

>Blair Sandler wrote:
>
>> >"NO FOOD ALLOWED: Keep the Germs Out
>> >and the Ideas In!"
>> The silly part, of course, is the idea that prohibiting food will keep the
>> germs out -- as if people weren't crawling with the things!
>
>No, Blair: the silly part is the assumption implied in both the slogan and
>your response that "germs" in general are injurious.
>
>Didn't your parents or teachers ever tell you that there are "good" germs
>and "bad" germs?
>
>Jerry

Hey, not fair. Nothing in my message implies *I* think germs are bad. Only
that the French colonial military officers (and people with really short
hair who mow their lawns three times a week like they do in Hadley MA)
think so.




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5492] Re: Gintis and all that

[Blair Sandler]

>>my dissertation under Sam and not once did I ever hear him
>>make reference to the work of R&W. Yet, the students of R&W
>>seemed to constantly make reference to the "errors" of B&G.
>>
>>Eric
>>.
>>Eric Nilsson
>>Department of Economics
>>California State University
>>San Bernardino, CA 92407
>>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>>
>Rich Parkin,
>Economics Dept.,
>400 Wickenden Building,
>10,900 Euclid Ave.,
>Case Western Reserve University,
>Cleveland, OH 44106-7206
>(216) 368-4294 (w)
>(216) 368-5039 (fax)




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5501] Re: gintis and all that

[Blair Sandler]

Of course, the "Science Wars" are all the rage right now, with "real"
scientists disagreeing precisely over the points in contention here (as
below). So saying that economists have to be "scientists" or that "a
scientific approach is needed" is to say exactly nothing, since all agree
that science is needed and the question is, "what is science?" or, "How do
we do science?" or, "What does it mean 'do do science?' "

Jim does not exactly say but comes very close to saying that Wolff and
Resnick (and by implication other people in the Amherst School) reject any
effort "to say anything about the real world." Anyone who could think so
has clearly not read or understood the work coming out of the Amherst
School over the past bunch of years.

Of course, I'm just an "airheaded pomo," so what would I know?  ;-)

Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

>Eric N writes:>>My sense is that Herb's current line of
>thinking is not influenced much at all by the "Wolfnick"
>crowd at UMass, Amherst. <<
>
>He probably hasn't been influenced by much of the
>details of Wolf/Resnick research. But when he came on with
>guns shooting on both pen-l and the Post-Keynesian thought
>list, a major part of his message was that economists have
>to be "scientists" and to "say something" about the real
>world. The point is that one standard view of Wolf and
>Resnick, one which I think Herb agreed, is that they are
>epistemological nihilists who reject any effort to be
>objective (and thus scientific) or to say anything about
>the real world.
>
>(With very broad strokes, I happen to agree with
>Herb's view that a scientific approach is needed, though I
>am sure my vision of what "science" is differs
>radically from Herb's current view.)
>
>--
>Jim Devine   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
><72467,[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>"A society is rich when material goods, including capital,
>are cheap, and human beings dear."  -- R.H. Tawney.




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5500] Re: Gintis and all that

[Blair Sandler]

>in reply to robert pollin, of course i did not mean to criticize the
>many good people at umass/amherst.  still, though, amherst struck me
>as an awfully "precious" little place.  in any event, i do apologize
>for perhaps implying what Pollin suggests I did.
>
>in solidarity,
>
>michael yates

Amherst may be precious but some of the folks there *are* engaged in
political work/education outside the University and outside the Amherst
area.

For example, to take just two, Rick Wolff has been active in political
(including labor) struggles against Yale University in New Haven, and Julie
Graham has, I believe, been part of the Center for Popular Education in
Amherst.

Personally, I, too, found Amherst *awfully* precious and left as soon as I
could. I prefer the Mission District of San Francisco. But that's purely a
matter of personal esthetics, and not a political judgement about people
who live or work in Western Massachusetts.

Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5508] Re: Clinton Does Suck-- Will Sign Welfare Bill

[Blair Sandler]

>I think what motivates Clinton is both fear from having lost his election
>in 1980 and an egoistic desire for a landslide "mandate" much as Reagan
>had in 1984.  No big issues, just a personal stamp of approval by the
>populace.
>
>In terms of psychobabble, it's the child of an alcoholic looking for
>approval.  Sad and opportunistic to work out one's self-esteem problems by
>butchering the lives of innocent children.
>
>--Nathan
>
>On Thu, 1 Aug 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> Someone (sorry, I forget who) mentioned that Clinton did not need to
>>sign the
>> welfare bill because he does not have to worry about being re-elected.  I
>> agree.  The question then becomes, why did he sign the bill?  ALSO, Clinton
>> attracts many conservative democrats who are pro-choice.  If Dole takes a
>> neutral stand on choice, I wonder if the closeness of the position of both
>> democrats and republicans on welfare will chase conservative democrats into
>> the republican camp and strengthen the dole campaign?
>>
>> maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>
>>


I think it's interesting that people are explaining Clinton's political
choices on the basis of personal character structure and the like. While
these factors are undoubtedly important, I'd think that on a forum like
PEN-L people would at least also mention Clinton's theoretical committment
to NC theory, methodological individualism, etc., etc. Like Becker,
Friedman and all the rest, Clinton, too, wants to make a better world,
perhaps especially for the poor and downtrodden. The problem is that the
theoretical apparatus he consciously or unconsciously applies to the
problem leads (inevitably) to certain kinds of political solutions. This is
certainly not the only factor, but is equally certainly one among them.

He wasn't voted "best presidential friend of Wall St. ever" because of his
commitment to the poor or his alcoholic parents.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5533] Re: We MUST be essentialists

[Blair Sandler]

Eric raises entirely reasonable questions that deserve an answer. Of
course, I can only answer for myself, not for "the world of Wolff/Resnick."
I seem to detect (not just from Eric) the sense that people around
RETHINKING MARXISM form some monolithic camp reminiscent of the government
of the Soviet Union. Not so. Disagreements are rife on all sorts of issues,
theoretical, political, rhetorical, and cultural.

I do not have time to discuss the entire project of the Amherst School. I
will just point out that Eric's comments in the last paragraph do not
resolve the issue of aesthetics: what he calls "positive" consequences are
a matter precisely of aesthetics -- the sort of statement NC theory refers
to as "normative." However, when Eric says that his theories must be "a
bit" essentialist and economistic I think he is getting at the question of
how a theory of overdetermination can say anything about "the real world"
if it can't claim "necessary" consequences.

I will only say that it is possible to consider the likely bundles of
processes (I'm just making up this phrase now) and likely consequences as
reason to prefer one over another class process, while recognizing that we
cannot in truth say we know the consequences will be such and such. I would
be surprised if Eric really believes that "socialism" will *necessarily*
have certain consequences in other realms of society. Of course, it might
depend on one's definition of socialism.

Blair
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

>The ideas below are distinct from those expressed in my
>previous message. (Question: should we start a new list
>called Herb-l?)
>
>Let me hit the ball in Blair's side of the court for a second. I'm an
>agnostic humanist: I THINK (but I'm not entirely sure) that capitalism
>fails to permit people to fully develop their potential and, so, I
>desire a switch to a different type of economy.
>
>Why exactly, in the world of Wolff/Resnick, does one desire a
>transformation to socialism/communism? I understand that in such
>a theory one is not permitted to invoke anything like "human essences"
>or unfulfilled human essences; why then desire socialism? I've heard it
>claimed by some within the Wolff/Resnick camp that they once played
>around with the idea that the move to socialism was motivated by
>"aesthetic" reasons.
>
>But this was many years ago and I imagine they now have a
>more fully realized idea of their motivation. This is particularly
>important because their rejection of essentialism also led them to
>reject the idea that various social processes that we might dislike
>(say, gender discrimination) were not CAUSED by capitalism (why?:
>simply invoke the notion of overdetermination). Therefore, it is
>theoretically possible that a transformation to socialism might MAKE
>WORSE bad things like gender/racial/ethnic discrimination. "Our theory
>does not permit us to make the claim that a transformation to
>socialism will have NECESSARY consequences on other rhelms of society"
>it might be said.
>
>I long ago reached the conclusion that my theories MUST BE
>a bit essentialist AND economistic. A change in the way things
>are produced and distributed will have NECESSARY (and positive)
>consequences on the achievement of human potential and on other
>rhelms of society. Otherwise, why care about a transformation to
>socialism?
>
>Eric
>.
>Eric Nilsson
>Department of Economics
>California State University
>San Bernardino, CA 92407
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5554] Re: We MUST be essentialists

[Blair Sandler]

At 2:25 PM -0700 8/5/96, Eric Nilsson wrote:
>
>I'll be unfair to Blair and assume that he is willing to act
>as the representative of the RM crowd.

Fairness is not particularly relevant. It's just a bad assumption. As I
indicated, I don't have the time or energy to get into what are necessarily
long involved discussions on this matter. I'm broke, unemployed,
job-searching, paper-writing, and leaving in a week on a trip for a week.

Sorry, Eric.




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5557] Re: science & essentialism

[Blair Sandler]

>1. "science" means among other things trying to understand what
>in heck is going on in the real, empirical, world. This
>involves, if possible, positing "essentialist" theories and
>hypotheses, that say what is going on beneath the surface
>appearances. (E.g., there Marx's laws of motion of capitalism
>give us understanding about how capitalism works and can suggest
>conditional predictions about the future.)

Understanding does not necessarily mean positing essentialist theories. I
think essentialist theoretical moves can hinder understanding.

>2. It also means that no hypothesis is the final word on the
>subject. Any hypothesis is subject to logical, empirical, or
>methodological criticism. Of course, criticism alone does not
>trump a theory. An alternative theory is needed to do that.
>(E.g., Marxian political economy can incoporate the valid claims
>of the neoclassical school and then add more.) Sometimes the
>alternative is that no theory is possible, as when most reasonable
>people conclude that no reasonable theory can exist about the
>connection between astrological signs and human life, contrary to
>astrological "theory."
>
>3. Science should make no claim about objectivity or
>value-freeness. (Even Newtonian physics recognizes the role of
>frames of reference; nowadways it also recognizes that Newtonian
>physics is a special case, based on restrictive assumptions.)
>Maybe something like that might arise if enough people look at an
>issue from different perspectives, but that's hardly guaranteed.
>
>4. Just because scientific progress _is possible_ (point 2)
>doesn't mean that it will happen. Wrong theories have
>replaced right ones, due to the factors of point 3. (The
>rise in the belief in the aggregate production function is
>an example; that theory still lingers.)
>
>5. The Wolfnick theory, as I understand it, argues that no
>scientific knowledge is possible, i.e., that it's all subjective.
>Their epistemology suggests that emprical reality is all in our
>perceptions; they reject the "realist" view that even though
>empirical reality is damn difficult to see and understand, we can
>get some insights by studying, thinking, and/or experimenting.

You don't seem to understand "Wolfnick theory." I certainly don't think
empirical reality is all in my perceptions; I don't know anyone around RM
who thinks it does. Nor does anyone I know think we cannot get some
insights by studying, thinking,...

>6. Further, efforts to understand what's going on are denounced as
>"essentialist" and thus dismissed. The basic Wolfnick insight is that
>everything depends on (i.e., is overdetermined by) everything
>else. That doesn't really say anything substantive or help us
>understand the world; it makes no effort to say which factors are
>more important than others. Hearing Wolfnick talk about these
>matters at an ASSA confab awhile back, it was clear that there is
>no reason for them to decide to write books rather than crossword
>puzzles, no reason for them to be Marxist rather than neoclassical
>-- except personal preference. It's all subjective.

Only certain efforts -- essentialist efforts -- to understand what's going
on are denounced as essentialist. Jim, your parody of the Amherst School is
little more than slurs.
>
>7. Blair, you once sent me a copy of an article you wrote,
>criticizing Jim O'Connor's ecological theory. It showed that some
>effort is being made to break the confines of Wolfnickism. After a
>quick recap of criticism slapping O'Connor for essentialism and
>the like, the rest of the paper provided some substanitive
>criticism and a broader, more general perspective than O'Connor.
>It was clear that criticism was not enough. That goes beyond
>Wolfnickism as I understand it.

I repeat, you don't seem to understand it. (Hey, thanks for reading my
paper! Feedback always welcome.) "Essentialist" is shorthand -- a
designation -- for certain kinds of theoretical moves. In my paper I argue
that it is precisely those moves that get O'Connor into trouble, and that
my perception of his making those moves is what enables me to see what I
see as trouble (he obviously doesn't see it that way) and how to make some
different moves. The critique of essentialism is not just some irrelevant
high-falutin rhetoric, and it's not separate from what you call "some
substantive criticism and a broader, more general perspective than
O'Connor."

Jim, as I've made clear to you, I appreciate your contributions to PEN-L
and respect your work (not to mention your sense of humor). But I really
think your understanding of the Amherst School is extremely deficient, and
I wonder when you last gave it any serious consideration. The body of work
being produced by the Amherst School has grown and developed tremendously
over the past 10 or more years and particularly so in the last half of that
period.

Regards,

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5570] Re: We MUST be essentialists

[Blair Sandler]

>Unfortunately, Blair leaves the impression that the Wolff/Resnick
>crowd has no (public) answer to the question, "Why desire socialism"?
>
>Eric
>.
>
>Eric Nilsson
>Department of Economics
>California State University
>San Bernardino, CA 92407
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]


That's right, Eric, the Wolff/Resnick crowd has no public answer to the
question, "why desire socialism?" [You have to use your imagination now to
hear the sarcasm, folks.]

Think what you like Eric. I made clear to you I'm overwhelmed with work and
haven't time to get into a long and complicated discussion.

I also made clear that I am not willing nor have I been authorized to act
as spokesperson for any "crowd."

Frankly, the tone of your posts makes it sound to me much more like you're
trying to win points in some perceived battle than desirous of learning
something new (and this is surprising to me because it's not how I remember
you). If you're genuinely interested, look at the literature of the Amherst
School over the past 4 years to see a significant number of people thinking
creatively about socialism. (And if I've misread your tone, my apologies.)

Sincerely,

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5575] Re: We MUST be essentialists

[Blair Sandler]

>Blair wrote,
>> . . . I'm overwhelmed with work and haven't time . . .
>I apologize for suggesting that Blair should discuss the various issues
>I've raised when he clearly is pressured by job market concerns.
>
>As thoughtless as I've been along the lines above, I  DON'T think
>I've been merely,
>> . . . trying to win points in some perceived battle . . .
>The questions I've asked are fundamental and not nit-picking just
>to score points. The questions I've raised (e.g., "why desire
>socialism in the W/R world?") go to the heart of key issues.
>
>In deference to the wishes of Blair--and as no one else is contributing
>to this thread--, I won't respond to any of the other parts of his last
>posting.
>
>But I can't help myself:
>Q: How many Wolfnicks does it take to change a light bulb?
>A: That's an essentialist question: let me tell you about
>overdetermination and how changing lightbulbs, in my
>theory, is no more important than dancing in the streets
>or  . . . ;-)

I always appreciate a good joke, Eric,... or even a bad one.  :)

Thanks for your gracious response. I agree that the issues you raise are
key ones (as I already acknowledged). It's a long and broad-ranging
discussion (been going on for 15 years already and still going strong,
no?). Perhaps sometime we can get into it and give it the attention it
deserves (maybe you could do that now but I can't).

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5590] Info request from Susan Feiner

[Blair Sandler]

>Hi Folks:  I'm teaching a course next term which will begin with a couple
>of weeks taking a look at the "privatization/deregulation debates."  I want
>to give the students articles expressing the range of policy/theoretical
>views which are at play.  Do you have any suggestions?  My strongest
>preference is for material from journals like The Nation, Commentary and so
>forth (non-technical, but fairly high reading level).  Thanks in advance,
>and PLEASE respond privately (I am not on PenL).  Susan Feiner
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>PLEASE NOTE NEW SUMMER ADDRESS & Phone Number
>Susan F. Feiner
>603 374 9263 (ph)
>603 374 6509 (fax) Assoc. Prof./Economics & Women's Studies
>
>GENERAL DELIVERYUniversity of Southern Maine
>Bartlett, NH  03812Portland, Me  04103




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5905] Re: Korea

[Blair Sandler]

>At issue is how to build a
>more democratic Korea, one that draws from the best in both parts of the
>country while building something new.

Martin: thanks for your helpful analysis of the current situation in Korea.
You referred to "the best in both parts of the country." Obviously in the
mainstream press North Korea is described as near-Gulag, not to mention
desperately poor, etc. Could you say briefly what you see as "the best" of
the North?

Thanks in advance.

In ignorance,

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5910] Police repression of Demo convention counter media

[Blair Sandler]

e vehicle over, an officer responded that those inside were not
>wearing their seatbelts.  As one officer exposed film from a CounterMedia
>photographer=EDs still camera, others claimed that they could arrest the
>collective members for having an unsafe vehicle; the police only fell back
>when nine other media collective members arrived on the scene and began
>filming the incident. CounterMedia has placed image captures from the
>incident onto the CounterMedia web site at
>"http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/cpsr/countermedia".
>
>This incident is only the most recent in a string of confrontations the
>Chicago Police Department, supposedly "kinder and gentler" at this Democrat=
ic
>National Convention, have forced with CounterMedia.  Yesterday morning the
>CPD arrested a CounterMedia videographer during a tension-filled
>pro-choice/Operation Rescue clinic defense demonstration.  The videographer=
,
>Eddy Nix of Wisconsin, was taping pro-lifers (in the immediate vicinity of
>other members of the media) when they, sensing that Nix was not with the
>mainstream press, motioned to the police that he should be removed.  Police
>checked Nix=EDs press pass and deemed it insufficient to prove that he was =
a
>member of the "official" media.  They carried him forcefully into the paddy
>wagon and charged him with disorderly conduct.  Other CounterMedia
>videographers documented Nix=EDs arrest as well and have placed image captu=
res
>from the incident onto the CounterMedia web site at
>"http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/cpsr/countermedia".
>
>Last night, as ConterMedia videographer Jeff Perlstein waited for the "Not =
on
>the Guest List" march/rally to arrive at the heavily secure United Center,
>home to the Democratic National Convention, he interviewed two
>African-American youth from the Henry Horner Homes.  (The Homes are a publi=
c
>housing project located directly across the street from the Center.)  As
>Perlstein was asking the youth what they thought about Democratic delegates
>invading their neighborhood, police ordered the youth off the sidewalk.  Wh=
en
>Perlstein questioned why the police specifically demanded the youth off the
>sidewalk and not him, a white videographer, officers took him into custody
>and charged him with disorderly conduct.  Other CounterMedia videographers
>documented his arrest.
>
>Though the mainstream media have lauded the Chicago Police for their
>hands-off treatment of protesters at the DNC, the CPD=EDs harassment of
>CounterMedia is part of a pattern of untoward "attention" police have paid =
to
>those obviously unwanted here.  Members of the CPD have been consistently
>intimidating participants of Active Resistance, a national convention of
>anarchists that has been occurring here since August 21.  Police have visit=
ed
>the site of the convention workshops several times and have held the buildi=
ng
>under regular surveillance, occasionally photographing participants as they
>pass to and from the site.  Also, the Chicago Housing Authority has imposed=
 a
>10pm curfew on residents at the Henry Horner Homes for the duration of the
>convention and has subjected residents to sweeps and arrests for questionab=
le
>conduct.  CounterMedia is closely connected with Active Resistance and has
>been actively reporting the truth about the increased security at Horner.
>
>Tomorrow morning at 10am (Chicago time), at its office at 1638 Van Buren
>Street (just four blocks from the United Center), CounterMedia will be
>holding a press conference with Active Reistance and residents of the Horne=
r
>homes.  Please spread word of these incidents as quickly as possible and
>certainly alert any contacts you have in Chicago that CounterMedia, Active
>Resistance and the Horner residents need their support.
>
>For more information contact CounterMedia at (312) 243-8342 and/or check ou=
t
>the web site at "http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/cpsr/countermedia".
>



Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5605] Re: Evaluating and grading critical thinking skills

[Blair Sandler]

>   Hello.
>I'm an old, lapsed PEN-L member. I am back on to ask for advice: I want to
>include a lot more writing and team assignments in both introductory
>macroeconomics and upper level courses (this year on gender &
>discrimination). I would even like to dispense with multiple choice tests.
>However large cl asses, no teaching assistants etc prevent me from taking
>on eg sic written essay assignments from each student each term. I would
>love to hear from people who have structured their courses innovatively to
>help their students develop analytic skills AND HAVE DEVISED EVALUATION
>PROCEDURES AND STRAIGHTFORWARD WAYS TO GRADE that work. Please send me
>notes at my email, send your syllabus and even copies of assignments as
>soon as possible (by fax (207) 780 5507), email or snail mail. Thanks very
>much in advance.
>
>Nance Goldstein nance @usm.maine.edu

I too would be extremely interested in such information. Please copy any
email notes to me. Thanks.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5635] Re: Rethinking Overdetemination

[Blair Sandler]

>Further, the notion of overdetermination has a second side: it
>posits that all aspects of society have "equal" weight in that all
>processes play a part in constituting all other processes. This
>claim of "equal weight" also has no clear justification. We
>certainly could have an essentialist version of overdetermination
>in which all things affect everything else, but some things are
>"more important."

I have just a moment to respond to Eric's statement above (I admit I have
not even read his entire post; I'm leaving town for a week and rushing to
get some things done).

The notion of overdetermination definitely does *not* posit "that all
aspects of society have 'equal' weight... in constituting all other
processes. The point (or a point) of overdetermination is precisely to
theorize the specific, unique effectivity of each different process. It
would be contrary to the spirit of overdetermination (as I understand it)
to suggest that distinct processes were in some sense commensurable (a
necessary condition for the comparision of "weight"). Obviously, in every
theory there are certain things that are "more important" than others, but
the question is, on what basis are these things considered more important?
If the theorist believes that experience shows it, this is simple
empiricism. On the other hand, if it is true because theory tells us so,
then we have simple rationalism.

If I have misunderstood or misstated, I await correction.

Regards,

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5667] Re: welfare

[Blair Sandler]

Peter Burns wrote:

>  I've read in several places that the real value of AFDC
>  payments has declined by 46 percent since 1970, and that
>  even when food stamps are added, the combined real value
>  has gone down 26 percent.  Since 1970 out-of-wedlock
>  births have increased by over 75 percent.
>
>  The obvious conclusions are that welfare benefits were
>  astonishingly high to begin with, and that the recipients
>  are slow learners.
>
>  Peter

You, Sir, have a dry and acerbic sense of humor I rather like.  :)

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5805] Re: Crack Intelligence Agency

[Blair Sandler]

I haven't seen them in the WSJ or NYT.

Blair

Shocked and dismayed.

> --
>From: pen-l
>Subject: [PEN-L:5791] Crack Intelligence Agency
>Date: Thursday, August 22, 1996 7:54AM
>
>Have Gary Webb's stories from the San Jose Mercury News showing the CIA's
>heavy involvement in bringing crack to the U.S. gotten wide play? I guess
>that's a way asking how many people have heard about it who don't read the
>SJMN?
>
>The stories can be gotten, for now, at www.sjmercury.com/drugs/.
>
>Doug
>
> --
>
>Doug Henwood
>Left Business Observer
>250 W 85 St
>New York NY 10024-3217
>USA
>+1-212-874-4020 voice
>+1-212-874-3137 fax
>email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5864] Crack and CIA

[Blair Sandler]

:  cocaine; crack; drugs; crime; violence; race;
african americans; criminal justice; prisons; gangs; california;
nicaragua; los angeles; miami; florida; contras; anastasio
somoza; cia; dea; drug enforcement administration; inner cities;
urban life; hispanics; statistics; central intelligence agency;
colombia; sandanistas;


 NOTICE
Environmental Research Foundation provides this electronic
version of RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY free of charge
even though it costs our organization considerable time and
money to produce it.  We would like to continue to provide this
service free.  You could help by making a tax-deductible
contribution (anything you can afford, whether $5.00 or
$500.00).  Please send your contribution to: Environmental
Research Foundation, P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403-7036.
--Peter Montague, Editor





Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5943] First Internet Union Born

[Blair Sandler]

>Date: Mon, 02 Sep 1996 19:04:23 -0700 (PDT)
>Reply-To: Conference "env.justice" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>From: EcoNet Environmental Justice Desk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: First Internet Union Born
>To: Recipients of conference <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>X-Gateway: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Precedence: bulk
>Lines: 48
>
>From: EcoNet Environmental Justice Desk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>NEWS RELEASE
>
>FIRST INTERNET UNION BORN
>
>San Francisco, California
>August 29, 1996
>
>Contact:  Jim Philliou, SEIU Local 790 415/575-1740 x131
>  Alair MacLean, IGC 415/561-6100
>
>Employees of the Institute for Global Communications (IGC) voted
>today 18 to 7 to be represented as a union of the Service
>Employees International Union Local 790.  This historic vote
>represents the creation of the first unionized Internet Service
>Provider.
>
>IGC is a non-profit organization that was formed in 1987 to
>assist progressives, activists, and grassroots organizations to
>use the newly evolving medium of the Internet.  IGC has 15,000
>subscribers across the country.  IGC operates five Internet
>computer networks: LaborNet, EcoNet, PeaceNet, ConflictNet and
>WomensNet.
>
>IGC and LaborNet have pioneered the use of the Internet among
>unions, labor activists, and labor researchers.  LaborNet
>Steering Committee member Steven Hill says: "Finally, the labor
>movement has a home on the Internet that is pro- union and
>organized."  LaborNet and IGC provide full Internet access and
>World Wide Web publishing services to union locals,
>internationals and rank and file members.  LaborNet's Web page is
>http://www.igc.org/labornet.
>
>"The emergence of the Internet has raised new issues in
>workplaces that we have sought to address," says Alair MacLean, a
>member of the union organizing committee, and Director of IGC's
>Environmental Justice Networking Project.  "We are delighted
>about the result, and hope it will inspire other Internet workers
>to examine issues about pay, working conditions, diversity and
>workplace hazards related to keyboard use and repetitive strain
>injury."
>
>IGC is a project of the Tides Center and is based in the Thoreau
>Center for Sustainability in the Presidio of San Francisco.
>
>-30-
>



Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:5974] Re: overdetermination redux: come on, Jim, at least hit the

[Blair Sandler]

This is a response to Jim Devine's message, copied below.


I frankly did not understood what Steve meant by his off-the-cuff,
tongue-in-cheek (?) comment about "what you see is what you get." I didn't
think it helped explain anything, and I don't think your snide (so it seems
to me) response below is helpful either. Your whole post below appears to
be a critique of empiricism, which anyone even vaguely familiar with the
work of the Amherst School would have to acknowledge misses the target
entirely. In this sense your post *is* irrelevant. Herb Gintis once said
something which struck me as valid (gasp!  :)  ): it's easy, he noted, to
criticize something by attacking its weakest points. A strong critique
first builds the strongest case for its target and then attacks that
strongest target.

Jim, I really get the impression from you that you are not interested in
understanding overdetermination, or what people in the Amherst School are
doing, but rather simply in defending a more "traditional" (admittedly
intelligent and sophisticated) variant of Marxism. If you really are
interested, instead of spending your time attacking poor
metaphors/analogies/tongue-in-cheek characterizations, why not *read* the
works of people in the school. For one thing, your continued reference to
"Wolff/Resnick overdetermination" is disrespectful of the many people who
have contributed to the Amherst School's work, going beyond and in many
cases against Wolff and Resnick's original thinking. Jack Amariglio, David
Ruccio, Bruce Norton, J.K. Gibson-Graham (a.k.a. Julie Gibson and Katherine
Graham), Jonathan Diskin, Antonio Callari, John Roche, Carole Biewener,
Steve Cullenberg, Ric McIntyre, Jenny Cameron, Ulla Grapard, Andriana
Vlachou, Claire Sproul, are just a few of the many people who have
developed and applied the insights that spring from overdetermination in
interesting and productive ways on a wide range of topics, from gender to
race to ecology to culture to economics, as well as, of course,
specifically class. (These names are just those that spring to mind
immediately and I apologize for omitting other productive members of the
Amherst School.)

If anyone is interested in finding out for themselves what people around
the Amherst School are doing, I suggest you visit their  web site at
. (This is actually the web page for
the journal RETHINKING MARXISM, which contains links to an extensive
bibliography of Amherst School members' work, to books by AS folks, and to
the upcoming international gala conference to be held this December, "The
Politics and Language of Marxism."

Regards,

Blair
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


Jim Devine wrote,

>sorry if you think this irrelevant, but it's easy to erase. It's
>also short...
>
>If I understand him correctly, Steve Cullenberg summarized the
>main message for research of the Wolf/Resnick overdetermination
>theory (i.e., that all entities in society determine the
>character of all other entities, just as the characters of all
>entities are determined by all other entities) as the
>methodological principle that "what you see is what you get."
>(This imples a critique of the efforts of benighted people like
>myself who want to figure what's really going on. We're mere
>"essentialists" and should stop.)
>
>Okay, I decided to apply the axiom that "what you see is what you
>get" in practice. So I looked at the world for awhile. As far as
>I could tell, I didn't see any overdetermination going on. I saw
>cars hitting telephone poles and cruise missiles hitting Iraq.
>But I didn't see any overdetermination. I saw the movie
>"Independence Day" but I didn't see any overdetermination, in or
>out of the theater, not even at the popcorn stand. I realized
>that _not_once_ in my entire life had I ever seen overdeter-
>mination.
>
>So based on my empirical investigation, I concluded that since I
>didn't see any overdetermination, and because "what you see is
>what you get," it could not exist. The concept of overdetermin-
>ation should be rejected.
>
>But if overdetermination -- the very essence of the Wolf/Resnick
>theory as presented by Steve -- doesn't exist, then the principle
>that "what you see is what you get" could not apply.
>
>On the other hand, if I go beyond just seeing, to interpret
>what's going on, to find out what's _really_ going on (as is my
>usual wont), then I might decide that overdetermination is an
>aspect of reality, or even the most important aspect of reality,
>the essence of social reality, as in Wolf/Resnick. But then I
>would be violating the principle of "what you see is what you
>get."
>
>It seems to me that the methodological principle of "what you see
>is what you get" embodies a commandment: thou shalt not think
>rationally.
>
>BTW, how does the "what you see is what you get" principle or
>overdetermination help us answer the question of whether or not
>the aliens and flying saucers in "Independence Day" are real? and
>whether or not the 

[PEN-L:6019] re: re: overdetermination redux

[Blair Sandler]

Jim Devine,

You seem to have lots of time to argue about this question, but I don't, or
perhaps I just don't have time to argue with someone whose mind is
obviously already quite made up.

You're welcome to interpret a lack of response from me to your posts as a
victory in argumentation. However, I'm not clear why this should cause you
any "ire."

I did not use any of the names you refer to: "petty bourgeois,"
"essentialist," or "merely traditional."

Yes, I could try to "sketch" the broad conclusions of the AS to guide you
through such reading as I mentioned, but you are obviously determined
(overdetermined?  :)  ) to understand what you want to understand, so I
don't think that would be a very productive use of my time. Yes, of course
suggesting that you read certain books is no kind of argument. It's not
intended to be one. It's intended to signal that I am not particularly
interested in continuing the argument, as I do not believe it is increasing
my understanding and I doubt it is helping yours either (though that's for
you to say).

The fact that everyone on PEN-L is busy is no argument for me to engage
with you if I don't think it's productive. I am not of a mind to let you or
PEN-L rule my life. I have other commitments. If you or other PEN-L
subscribers choose to engage on PEN-L that's your decision. Obviously, I
choose to engage on a limited basis, depending on my interest, the value I
think I obtain from any particular engagement, and my level of energy at
various moments. I don't have to answer to you about my level of
engagement. PEN-L is about discussions, but why have useless discussions?

I agree with you that Cullenberg's response is more substantive. So are
Antonio Callari's. Again, I was signalling my disengagement by that list of
authors. (This post, like my last, is not intended to be substantive but
rather mostly about process.) Even now I am tempted to indicate my various
points of agreement and disagreement with you and suggest alternative
understandings on the latter. But I won't, because I am convinced that
nothing I could say would change your understanding (though it *might*
change others less committed one way or the other, and this too has been
part of my interest in dialogue). This is precisely because, in my view, as
Antonio said of Eric, your comments seem "to insist on sifting
statements... through the lenses of the very different positivist...
perspective." For example, you repeatedly make the mistake that Laclau and
Mouffe call an "essentialism of the elements," which presupposes that
things are in effect preconstituted in themselves and only then understood
in interaction with other similarly constituted elements.* It is this
sifting, as it seems to me, that makes it unlikely in my opinion that I
will be convinced by anything you are likely to say, as I continually see
you mischaracterizing overdetermination in the same way and therefore, in
my eyes, "misunderstanding."

Thus: you are convinced and I am convinced and there is little purpose in
dialogue on this question. (As I have indicated previously, on many other
issues I find your posts interesting, thoughtful, helpful and, perhaps best
of all, often very funny.

Regards,

Blair


* "The abstract laws of motion... say one thing. But in interaction with
pre-capitalist modes of production, racial/ethnic domination, patriarchy,
and resistence from oppressed groups, we may see different results in some
cases." -- J.D.


P.S. One other thing: Steve Cullenberg said that for him, "things are all
of equal importance, but... they are differentially important"

I disagree with Steve on this point (as on so many others :)  ). I don't
even think it makes sense to say that different things are "equally"
important, precisely because the effectivity of a "thing" is just what the
thing is. Since things are all different, so is their effectivity, and thus
it doesn't make sense to say they are "equally" effective (important). For
a concrete argument of this point, see THE ECOLOGIST 26/3, May/June 1996,
pp. 98-103, for John O'Neill's short but excellent critique of cost-benefit
analysis on just these lines.



Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6018] Re: property and ownership

[Blair Sandler]

Frank F. Klink wrote a piece which discussed property and ownership. I
thought this was interesting for the following reason:

In San Francisco, Blue Shield of California has billboard signs for their
Access HMO. Two I have seen are as follows:

You've lived in your body since day one. That makes you the boss.

You've lived in your body since you were born. That makes you the landlord.


I thought:

So suppose I'd lived in a rented house since the day I was born. Would that
make me the landlord? Or if I'd given my whole working life to one company,
would that make me the boss?

If I'm the landlord of my body, does that mean I can rent it out? Is this
billboard not really about health care but about legitimizing wage labor?

What does it do to us to think that our body is something we "own?"

Does anyone else think these messages are weird? Politically/culturally
significant? Is this old territory, written about and discussed ad nauseum
already?

Blair



Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6071] Re: Clinton and Blair NOT! on same wavelength

[Blair Sandler]

Just so there is absolutely no mistake:

I am NOT! on the same wavelength as Clinton. I'm only sorry we're even on
the same planet. I am one of those folks who does *not* believe in
lesserevilism, so I will not be voting for Clinton and I will be telling
stories everywhere I get the opportunity about what a sleezy slimy slug he
is.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6073] Re: Rethinking Overdetemination

[Blair Sandler]

Antonio wrote,

>I hope I am not irking any Hegelians out there

Oh come now, Antonio: you *like* irking Hegelians!   :)

Blair





Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6074] Re: Fwd: re: rethinking overdetermination

[Blair Sandler]

I'm listening to a very cool CD of Thelonious Monk (advanced jazz?) as I
write this. But he's African American, so it's okay, right?

Blair (who is NOT on the same wavelength as Clinton) Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



>Oh shit, I better turn in my union card, I listen to classical music
>  (rgh)
>
>maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>-
>Forwarded message:
>From:  [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Doug Henwood)
>Sender:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Reply-to:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>To:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Multiple recipients of list)
>Date: 96-09-09 13:15:21 EDT
>
>At 9:27 AM 9/9/96, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>>This is especially so since people can
>>often use "ruling class music" for purposes for which it was not
>>designed.
>
>Classical music has become upscale muzak for sensitive yuppies, an aural
>marker of "sophisticiation" popular in cafes, boutiques, and Jeep
>Explorers. Most of the classical canon is a relic of when the bourgeoisie
>was vital - Adorno said that the Beethoven concerto, with the soloist
>interplaying with the orchestra, but not dominant as in later Romantic
>concerti, was the high point of bourgeois individualism. Now products of
>that high bourgeois moment entertains the higher salariat, but I doubt
>their minds are much on the subtleties of the sonata form, or
>soloist-orchestra relations.
>
>Doug
>
>--
>
>Doug Henwood
>Left Business Observer
>250 W 85 St
>New York NY 10024-3217
>USA
>+1-212-874-4020 voice
>+1-212-874-3137 fax
>email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>web: 

[PEN-L:6077] Re: Clinton and Blair NOT! on same wavelength

[Blair Sandler]

Okay, perhaps I was unnecessarily insulting. Maybe Clinton is *not* a
sleazy slimey slug. Let's say he's a sleazy slimy scumbag. After all, while
I don't like slugs in my garden, sea slugs are very cool beings.

:)

Blair

P.S. sorry about the sleezy spelling error.



I wrote,

>>Just so there is absolutely no mistake:
>>
>>I am NOT! on the same wavelength as Clinton. I'm only sorry we're even on
>>the same planet. I am one of those folks who does *not* believe in
>>lesserevilism, so I will not be voting for Clinton and I will be telling
>>stories everywhere I get the opportunity about what a sleezy slimy slug
>>he is.>>




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6089] Re: What did Herb say?

[Blair Sandler]

>   I didn't say history is made by elites. I said that revolutionary
>movements are spearheaded by relatively well-off, well-educated people.
>This is why dictators always close down the universities, and why education
>and communication are so important. Of course, all the great historical
>struggles have be mass struggles by brave, valiant, and resourceful people
>from the oppressed and dominated classes.

Actually, Herb, I stand by my statement. My notes from your European
History Class (Fall 1982), indicate that you said, "History is made by
elites." [or perhaps "the elite"]

Furthermore, the larger context was precisely your point that, contrary to
lefty presumptions, history is not made by mass struggle but by maneuvers,
negotiations, struggles, etc., among the elite. Your argument made mass
struggles an appendage to struggles among the elite. We were not talking
about the importance of education among the masses, nor about the
leadership of mass struggles, but about the relative historical importance
of mass struggles vs. conflicts within the ruling class.

I distinctly remember talking after that class with a number of students
who were also struck and dismayed by your comments.


>   I am on cordial terms with Wolff and Resnick, but our intellectual
>projects are almost wholly disjoint. There was a time when we both read
>Althusser, but we took different things from it, radically different
>things, I believe (Sam and I took the notion of practices and sites, which
>we used in our book Democracy and Capitalism, whereas Resnick and Wolff
>took epistimological notions).

In my opinion Bowles and Gintis on the one hand and Wolff and Resnick on
the other took some different and some of the same things from Althusser. I
think those of us who studied with both pairs of teachers were the
beneficiaries of their mutual interest in Althusser, sometimes
complementary, sometimes at odds and sometimes quite compatible. Wolff and
Resnick, for instance, also talk about sites and practices, if, for sure,
not in exactly the same way as Bowles and Gintis. For the first two years I
studied at UMass I was in strong sympathy with the projects and
perspectives of Bowles and Gintis, which is why I find it interesting now
that I am close to Wolff and Resnick's work and not that of Bowles and
Gintis. However, I would never deny that I learned a great deal of
important and interesting social theory from Bowles and Gintis. (This
statement, of course, is not intended to make them responsible for my
limited understanding.) Indeed, with only a few exceptions, I felt that the
vast majority of the courses I took at UMass, almost everything I read for
my courses,  and most of the class and extra-curricular discussions with
professors and students, were extremely valuable. I do not regret for a
moment having obtained my Ph.D. from there.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6122] NAFTA strikes again

[Blair Sandler]

WSJ, 9/11/96, p. A10: "Ethyl Acts to Avert Losses If Canada Bans Fuel
Additive."

"Ethyl Corp. announced a US$201 million damage action against the Canadian
government to recover estimated losses from a proposed Canadian ban of an
octane-boosting fuel additive produced by the Richmond, VA., company.

...

"Ethyl served notice with the Canadian government yesterday that it intends
to make its claim against Canada under a seldom-used arbitration provision
of the North American Free Trade Agreement The NAFTA Provision allows a
company to bring before an arbitration panel claims against NAFTA
governments for alleged violations of their obligations toward investors.
[!!!]

...

"A spokesman for Canadian Environment Minister Sergio Marchi said the
government intends to proceed with legislation to stop the sale of MMT
[methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl] in Canada, because of
lingering health concerns about the product and because of the auto
industry's warnings that the aditive would hamper the operation of auto
computer systems which monitor tailpipe emissions. The government's
legislation is expected to be approved by Parliament"


*

Under NAFTA, governments have obligations to investors, but not to
environment or public health.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6206] Re: nonmarket enviromentalism

[Blair Sandler]

>Well, this is one way to look at it...
>
>>A CLEAR View
>>Volume 3 Number 14
>>September 16, 1996
>>
>>NOTABLE QUOTE
>>
>>"Every time a species goes extinct, we're bouncing
>>a check in the trust fund that God called us to
>>manage."
>>-- Peter Illyan of Christians for Environmental
>>Stewardship, a group protesting at the GOP
>>convention in San Diego.
>
>Doug

This is literally wrong even if the underlying assumption is accepted.
Species go extinct all the time. It is not the case that all extinctions
are due to human activities. What is reasonable is that the current
historically high rate of extinctions manifests poor management on our part.

Perhaps a better metaphor would be not bouncing checks but managing a stock
portfolio. Of course in any portfolio some stock prices will sometimes
decline, but if the value of the portfolio as a whole declines continually
then it would indeed be appropriate to question management.

Blair



Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6253] Re: value of labor power and wage

[Blair Sandler]

>How do you explain relative surplus value when the money wage is
>constant? Does the constancy of money wages imply that the adjustment of
>wages to the value of labor power can only occur periodically, through
>crisis for instance? Or should we conceive this adjustment as a process
>happening as a result of several small actions of laying-off and
>recontracting for less. I particularly do not like Foley story on the
>value of labor power because all you are left with is the wage share. I
>hope to get some inspiring responses on how to go about teaching this
>story to undergraduate students withou sounding silly. Paulo.

My answer to this is so basic that I wonder if I'm misunderstanding the
question or simply wrong

If either productiveness or intensiveness of labor or both increase,
relative surplus labor and real wages (never mind money wages) can both
increase simultaneously.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6434] Re: S. Tell

[Blair Sandler]

>It seems that the Middle East doesn't command much attention on this
>list as other regions.  Is that because it is a very touchy and
>emotional issue for some on the list or what?  It certainly is for me,
>but am just curious as to what is pen-lers' take on what is going on
>and on the whole 'peace process'!  People on this list don't seem to
>shy away from controversy.  Otherwise they wouldn't be on the list.
>So I am very curious.  Or am I wrong?!?
>
>Thanks in advance.
>Anwar

I hate to be pedantic (okay, maybe I don't really hate it  :)  but I don't
appreciate the geographical locator, "Middle East." Afro-Asia and Western
Asia are both identifiers I've heard that locate according to widely
accepted regional names, rather than in relationship to England. England is
not (!) the center of the globe. And even if it were this would be weird,
for e.g. Palestine is as much to the West as to the East of England. So
"Middle East" is completely unhelpful in terms of locating anything. It has
come to be accepted as a name only because of the history of English (and
now U.S.) imperialism. Can't we give this one up?

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6439] Re: institutionalism & the Greater Levant

[Blair Sandler]

>BTW, the reason why pen-l doesn't discuss what's happening in
>the Greater Levant (is that a good term, Blair?)

Hey, Jimmy D., I should have guessed you'd pick up on this. :)

Actually, I consulted my dictionaries (electronic and paper) on this.
Here's what I found:

"The countries bordering on the eastern Mediterranean Sea from Turkey to
Egypt."

As an intransitive verb, levant means, "To leave hurriedly or in secret to
avoid unpaid debts."

Now, given the history of British colonialism, I wondered where the name
"Levant" came from, and whether it had anything to do with unpaid debts of
the British to that area -- which would, in my mind, render this name
problematic also. Could it be from earlier European interventions in the
area, i.e. the Crusades? I don't know (and would like to).

Notice also that this name ("Levant") would exclude the Persian Gulf
countries as they do not border the Mediterranean. Even Jordan would
technically be excluded. Perhaps "Greater Levant" is intended to solve this
problem.

I actually *like* "Afro-Asia." "Western Asia," of course, does not include
Egypt, so that's a problem with *that* name.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6440] Re: S. Tell

[Blair Sandler]

>Blair,
> You've got the concept right but the facts wrong.  It
>is the US that calls it the "Middle East."  The British
>called it the "Near East."  I think that you can figure out
>why and the significance of the shift in terminology.
>Barkley Rosser

Right. I've been careless. My apologies. It should be obvious that my
question/criticism refers equally to the "Far East" or "the Orient."
Actually, from the point of view of England, I'd think that Ireland is the
Far East.

And for the U.S. the Far East would be California. Hey, that's me! :)

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6443] UAW job guarantees

[Blair Sandler]

I read in the WSJ that the guarantees Ford and Chrysler made to keep
employment at 95% of current levels have some escape clauses:

1. The companies can cut jobs if there's an economic downturn (okay, we
knew this already);

2. They can eliminate jobs if they become more efficient at producing cars
(so there are no obstacles to replacing labor with capital);

3. They can cut jobs at specific plants deemed "troubled or uncompetitive"; and

4. they can eliminate jobs if "workers who have become redundant due to
productivity gains at certain plants turn down transfers" (did I hear
someone say bye-bye community?).

It seems that the only circumstance in which the job guarantee will take
effect is if a company wants to produce fewer cars because it loses market
share.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but what exactly did the UAW gain with this
contract?

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6449] Re: railing on dole

[Blair Sandler]

Robert Naiman writes,

>"we're tired, we're cranky, we don't like the government"

How about,

"we're sick, the earth is sick, we're pissed, we hate big business"

??

:)

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6803] Re: Shawgi Tell's low signal to noise ratio

[Blair Sandler]

It has been written:

>I hit the delete key every time I see Shawgi's messages, primarily because I
>hate being preached to -- even if there is a vague chance I might agree with
>the message.  However, It is getting very, very tiring having to monitor my
>entire message list for possible shawgi's before reading said list,  This is
>especially true since my time is incredibly limited right now.  How about, we
>all tie up Shawgi's mail box with static?  Make this problem a two way
>street?



I, too, delete most of Shawgi's messages without reading. I occasionally
read or skim Shawgi's posts for reasons similar to those mentioned by Susan
Fleck, Bill Mitchell, Bill the Cat, Paul Zarembka, and Walter Daum (did I
miss anyone?). My personal opinion is that there is a higher signal to
noise ratio in Schniad's and Bond's posts then there is in Shawgi's (though
I by no means read all of their posts either). The few Shawgi posts I look
at are mostly unobjectionable, but rarely new or interesting, at least to
anyone who's studied any Marxism at all. So, Shawgi, you're mostly
preaching to the converted, and as others have noted, we mostly hate
preaching.

Actually, I should be more precise: some of Shawgi's posts are purely
ideology; others contain information about current events, as list members
have pointed out.

Susan: I don't believe one must be an anarchist to oppose posting limits.
I'm not and I do.

Shawgi: Marxism is about social relations, but with only one exception I
can think of (prior to this current flap, and contrary to the statements in
your responses to Michael and others about your presence on the list), you
seem averse to relating socially to anyone else on the list. It's kinda
weird, don't you think? I mean, people even talk about you in the third
person, as if you're not on the list, because you never respond. What
gives? (I'm not convinced by your comments about your willingness to
participate in discussion.)

Michael: I would have first asked Shawgi to reduce the number of posts, to
use more discretion, and to engage in discussion, rather than not to post
at all. This I think at least partly addresses Sandy and Doug's important
distinction between discussion and broadcasting. (And by the way, I am one
of those who does pay for net time.)

On the one hand you say you "do not want to get us tied up in endless
debates about who [should] and should not be here and whom we will and will
not tolerate"; on the other hand isn't it important for people to weigh in
on this matter in order for us to get a sense of the sense of the list?

All: For those of you who really never read any of Shawgi's posts, and who
use Eudora, it is easy enough to filter any message with "Shawgi Tell" (or
any other text, for that matter) in the "From" header directly to the
trash. You need not even ever see the header, let alone the message text.
(If you do this, the first action performed by the filter should be to mark
the post as "read"; then transfer to trash. This avoids a dialog box if you
manually empty Eudora's trash.)

On a Mac, if you're not using Eudora, it's pretty easy to write an
AppleScript (or QuicKeys macro) to do the same thing.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6804] revolutionary ecological fiction

[Blair Sandler]

Anyone else red I mean read the sci-fi trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, RED
MARS, GREEN MARS, BLUE MARS? I just finished the first book, RED MARS, and
it's very good: politics, economics, ecology, and revolution. Here are a
couple of brief passages folks might find interesting, all excerpted from
one large discussion occupying a few pages sequentially:

[DISCLAIMER: the following excerpts represent passages I thought of
interest, but not necessarily my opinions.]


"This usually led to considerations of ecology, and its deformed offshoot
economics"

"Anyway that's a large part of what economics is -- people arbitrarily, or
as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things.
And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they
have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics
serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of
fervent believers among the powerful."

"Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of
their real contribution to the human ecoloyg. Everyone can increase their
ecological efficiency by efforts to reduce how many kilocalories they use
-- this is the old Southern argument against the energy consumption of the
Northern industrial nations. There was a real ecologic basis to that
objection, because no matter how much the industrial nations produced, in
the larger equation they could not be as efficient as the South."

"They were predators on the South And like all predators their
efficiency is low."

"It should be the law that people are rewarded in proportion to their
contribution to the system."

Dmitri, coming in the lab, said, "From each according to his capacities, to
each according to his needs!"

"No, that's not the same," Vlad said. "What it means is, You get what you
pay for!"

"But that's already true," John said. "How is this different from the
economics that already exists?"

They all scoffed at once "There's all kinds of phantom work! Unreal
values assigned to most of the jobs on Earth! The entire transnational
executive class does nothing a computer couldn't do, and there are whole
categories of parasitical jobs that add nothing to the system by an
ecologic accounting. Advertising, stock brokerage, the whole apparatus for
making money only from the manipulation of money -- that is not only
wasteful but corrupting, as all meaningful money values get distorted in
such manipulation."

"But all of these are subjective judgement!" John exclaimed. "How have you
actually assigned caloric values to such a variety of activities?"

"Well, we have done our best to calculate what they contribute back to the
system in terms of well-being measured as a physical thing. What does the
activity equal in terms of food, or water, or shelter, or clothing, or
medical aid, or education, or free time?"


Later, there is a separate discussion with Sufis (on Mars: this is sci-fi,
remember  :)

"Whole cultures were built around the idea of the gift Whatever you
were given, you did not expect to keep, but gave it back again in your
turn, hopefully with interest. You worked to be able to give more than you
received. Now we think that this can be the basis for a reverent economics."


Separate passage:

"He gave them advice in media relations and arbitration technique, he told
them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so
ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to
be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the
hands of their rulers, just like always."


And one more, in the heat of the insurrection:

"Horrible how the revolution was being portrayed on Earth: extremists,
communists, vandals, saboteurs, reds, terrorists. Never the words *rebel*
or *revolutionary*, words of which half the Earth (at least) might approve.
No, they were isolated groups of insane, destructive terrorists."


Okay, that's all. I'm interested in comments from others who have (or
haven't) read this work.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6810] Re: Cap's fantasy

[Blair Sandler]

I think this is the best part, Doug:


>>The American-educated economist was...
>>unblemished by the venality and incompetence that had characterized so many
>>previous regimes.

:)

Blair



Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6818] Re: revolutionary ecological fiction

[Blair Sandler]

There's a ton of feminist stuff in the utopian fiction, including several
works by Marge Piercy, among others. Don't have time now but could be more
specific at some later time if necessary.

Blair


>Thanks for this post Blair. I've been compiling an annotated bibliography of
>recent proposed alternatives to capitalism; chapter headings include "market
>socialism", "ecological alternatives", "utopian fiction", and "everything
>else" (i.e. political scientists, self-published folks, theologians, etc.)
>While I'm eager for new references in all these areas, the "utopian fiction"
>part probably could use the most improvement so if you or anyone else has
>suggested refs please pass 'em on!
>
>Thad



Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6865] Re:

[Blair Sandler]

>Someone mentioned that Eudora can filter out mail, though perhaps the
>shareware version I use is not up to this task.

Sandy, I believe this is the case, though as I don't use the shareware
version I'm not sure.

Blair



Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6867] reform or revolution? revisited

[Blair Sandler]

Okay, folks: here's a question that in various forms has been debated
(including on this list) over and over and over and

Suppose one is teaching intro econ to "typical" (?) university students,
which means mainstream range of conservative, and some liberal ideas,
including many who will either in school or later go into "business."

Do you (I'm asking for your personal opinions here) teach that corporations
*must* e.g. open non-union shops, invest abroad where labor is cheaper,
skimp on quality, etc., in order to compete in capitalist markets, thereby
reinforcing those tendencies in those who are or will be in business; or

do you teach that unions can increase productivity; "environmentally
friendly commodities" can be profitable, and the like, thereby reinforcing
liberal tendencies at the cost of pushing "socialism" away?

Eagerly awaiting your responses.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6869] Re: revolutionary ecological fiction

[Blair Sandler]

Thad wrote,

>Because, I would argue, if you're a firm operating in a market system on a
>for-profit basis, you'll be under pressure to either grow or die in most
>instances. You'll also have strong incentive to pass of ecological costs on
>to the community. And unless you radically undercut the economic insecurity
>characteristic of present-day capitalism, there'll be pressure to grow
>politically simply to provide enough jobs, etc. I agree theoretically there
>are vast ecological gains that reform-under-capitalism might accomplish, but
>don't think that's a very plausible scenario given the way existing power
>interests can block meaningful reform.

This is certainly the standard eco-Marxist argument (see any of numerous
issues of CAPITALISM, NATURE, SOCIALISM, the great journal from Jim
O'Connor and Guilford Press). However, for a counter perspective, see my
article, "Grow or Die: Marxist Theories of Capitalism and the Environment,"
in RETHINKING MARXISM 7.2 (Summer 1994), where I argue that the
relationship between capitalism and the environment depends upon the
"environmental regime," the "complex of natural, cultural, political and
economic processes relating to environmentalism that overdetermines class"
[class in the sense of surplus labor production, appropriation and
distribution]. Better yet, see my Ph.D. dissertation, "Enterprise, Value,
Environment: The Economics of Corporate Responses to Environmentalism"
(UMI, 1995), which was written after the article and which elaborates the
argument in more detail and I think much more persuasively.

The argument in my article is contrasted with O'Connor's in the guest
introduction to the current special issue of SCIENCE AND SOCIETY on Marxism
and Ecology. However, I have to say I don't think the guest editor, David
Schwartzman understood the argument as I intended (perhaps the fault of my
exposition rather than his reading?): I would by no means say, for example,
as he does, that I am "optimistic!" In any case, as Schwartzman does note,
like O'Connor, my argument, based on Marxian class analysis, suggests we'll
be much better off when communist or communal class processes, rather than
capitalist ones, are dominant. While there is no utopianism in my argument
(to say the least); it is perhaps a possible basis for a socialist,
ecologically sustainable utopian fiction, and maybe even reality. :)

>Thanks for some of these refs! In general I don't think ecological writers
>are very strong in facing up to power issues and often act as if you can
>wish away corporate structures. My preliminary judgement is that serious
>thought about what a sustainable society would like institutionally is
>underdeveloped but far from nonexistent.

On this point, again, I suggest you look at CNS. Lots of great articles
about political economy and political ecology (where in my mind politics is
about power).

Regards,

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6871] "The Politics and Languages of Contemporary Marxism" (conference

[Blair Sandler]

RETHINKING MARXISM is sponsoring a gala conference this December (12/5
Thursday afternoon to 12/8 Sunday mid-day) as titled above in the subject
header. It's been announced on this list previously, but the web site now
has the full schedule and I thought folks might be interested in taking a
look. There are some 180 panels, on the broadest range of topics
imaginable. Plenaries are:

Knowledge, Science, Marxism (Rick Wolff, Jack Amariglio, Sandra Harding,
Vandana Shiva);

Race and Class: A Dialogue (Antonio Callari, Etienne Balibar, Cornel West);

Locations of Power (Andrew Parker, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Wahneema
Lubiano);

Postmodern Socialism(s) and the Zapatista Struggle (Carmen Diana Deere,
Roger Burbach, Arturo Escobar, Fernando Navarro)

In case anyone wants to check it out, the URL is
<http://www.nd.edu:80/~plofmarx/RM-Home.html>

The conference also includes a very full program of art and cultural
activities. The full schedule of art, panels and plenaries, along with
information about registration, travel instructions, accomodations,
daycare, and publishers' exhibitions is available on the web site.

Hope to see you there!

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6872] GM-CAW agreement

[Blair Sandler]

I'm having a deja vu: in their "job security" agreement with GM, the CAW
agree to let GM cut jobs if (1) productivity increases; (2) technology
changes; (3) market share declines; or (4) a product line is discontinued.
It's not clear to me what the CAW gained, especially since GM is also
allowed to get rid oftwo parts plants they wanted to sell.

Maybe I just don't get this process, but time and time again I see unions
making various sorts of concessions in exchange for "job security" promises
of one sort or another that, as far as I can tell, don't amount to a hill
of beans. It seems as if, no less than corporations are alleged to do,
unions take a very short-term view, protecting temporarily the status of
existing workers at the cost of the union and workers' long-term power. Am
I just wrong about this and in fact unions are winning significant
concessions from corporations regarding long term job security for workers,
or are these various promises on the part of the corporations little more
than rhetorical dressing so the unions can save face?

On the other hand, CAW workers got health and some other benefits for
same-sex partners.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6874] Re: rising rate of profit?

[Blair Sandler]

Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>RATES OF RETURN ON CAPITAL IN THE BUSINESS SECTOR
>from OECD Economic Outlook, June 1996, table A25
>
>197919891995
>U.S.16.017.318.3
>Japan   14.415.813.3
>Germany 11.712.513.8
>
>G7 average  14.315.716.2
>
>12 smaller
>  countries 13.214.614.9
>
>OECD-Europe 12.113.614.6
>
>all OECD14.215.616.0


And you a Marxist! Doug, theory tells us that the rate of profit falls over
time. These data must be incorrect!  ;-)

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6880] typo

[Blair Sandler]

I wrote,

Tom: I'm not clear if you missed the all-important "wink" at the end of my
comments to Doug. Marx spent twice as many pages (K, vol. III, chs. 14 and
15) elaborating the "countertendencies" as he did the tendency itself (ch.
13). In my reading of CAPITAL, Marx was arguing not *for* but *against* the
Ricardian notion that the rate of capital falls.


Of course in the last sentence I meant that the rate of *profit* falls, not
the rate of *capital*. Sorry for the typo. It was 5:00 AM when I wrote that.

Blair



Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6881] Re: rising rate of profit?

[Blair Sandler]

>Blair wrote
>
>>And you a Marxist! Doug, theory tells us that the rate of profit falls over
>>time. These data must be incorrect!  ;-)
>
>Tsk, tsk, Blair! You left out the crucial term "tendency". Virtually all of
>Das Kapital is an exercise in explaining what the capitalists do to _resist_
>this tendency (including lengthening the working day and introducing new
>technology) and how that ultimately reinforces the tendency.
>
>There's a world of difference between a tendency and a trend.
>Regards,
>
>Tom Walker, [EMAIL PROTECTED], (604) 669-3286
>The TimeWork Web: http://mindlink.net/knowware/worksite.htm

Tom: I'm not clear if you missed the all-important "wink" at the end of my
comments to Doug. Marx spent twice as many pages (K, vol. III, chs. 14 and
15) elaborating the "countertendencies" as he did the tendency itself (ch.
13). In my reading of CAPITAL, Marx was arguing not *for* but *against* the
Ricardian notion that the rate of capital falls. Also, see Steve
Cullenberg's book, THE FALLING RATE OF PROFIT: RECASTING THE MARXIAN
DEBATE, Pluto Press, 1994.

Regards,

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6895] Re: rising rate of profit?

[Blair Sandler]

Jerry commented on Steve's book:

>> Also, see Steve
>> Cullenberg's book, THE FALLING RATE OF PROFIT: RECASTING THE MARXIAN
>> DEBATE, Pluto Press, 1994.
>
>Steve's book is an interpretation of debates _among Marxists_ concerning
>the FRP rather than an interpretation of Marx _per se_.  He makes this
>point very explicitly in his book.

Yes, but it should be obvious that in interpreting debates on a subject
one's own interpretation on the subject is revealed as well. And I know
Steve would agree with this.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6897] Re: GM-CAW agreement

[Blair Sandler]

I wrote,

>> On the other hand, CAW workers got health and some other benefits for
>> same-sex partners.


And Rudy replied,

>Although I haven't seen the details of the CAW agreement I would tend to
>agree with your first assessment.  Giving health and other benefits for same
>sex partners is probably not that costly for GM because 1) all Canadians are
>covered by Medicare and 2) there probably are not that many people who
>will use >the benefits.


Absolutely. I didn't mention this as a counter to my argument but simply as
an aside. I think it's significant and positive on the cultural front but
irrelevant to the question I posed about concessions, rhetoric and saving
face.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6901] intro macro textbook?

[Blair Sandler]

Hi, folks:

Next spring I'll be teaching intro macro at UC extension (evening class)
and I get to choose the textbook! I've been working as contract labor, and
this is the first time I get to choose my own textbook. My excitement at
this FREEDOM OF CHOICE :) is tempered only by the accompanying realization
of my ignorance. I've not taught intro macro previously, only intro micro
and intermediate micro and macro (of the "core curriculum"). So...

I would really appreciate it if people would offer their opinions about
what textbooks they've used that have worked well. More generally, I would
be entirely grateful if people wanted to share course syllabi with me, or
even ideas and general perspectives about teaching intro macro.

In light of the pending blackout on US PENLers, perhaps people would be so
kind as to email directly to me. I would then be happy to share these posts
or a summary with anyone else who requested it of me.

Thanks in advance.

Blair





Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6902] Re: teaching reform and revolution? revisited

[Blair Sandler]

Helene Jorgensen counterposed exploitation with labor-management
cooperation. But there is no necessary contradiction here: exploitation is
all too compatible with labor-management cooperation ("jointness"). In
liberal North America people tend to use the word exploitation to indicate
situations where workers are *really* badly treated (e.g. garment industry
sweatshops). In Marxism, of course, exploitation has a different meaning.
Workers with flex time and quality control circles and decent benefits and
even some job security are still exploited if they work for capitalist
enterprises.

I don't want to encourage my students to think that capitalism can solve
all its contradictions, that if capitalist bosses are just nicer or more
concerned about their workers, then we will live in the best of all
possible worlds. Exploitation will inevitably produce a continuing stream
of miseries, or at least it would seem so judging by history.

Shawgi, on the other hand, writes that "monopoly capitalists are not
interested in the well-being of workers.  Their aim is maximum capitalist
profits." This may be so, but I don't want to teach my students that the
only way to be successful in business is to squeeze the workers dry and
suck the marrow out of their bones by any means possible. If one of my
students ever reaches a position of some authority, I'd like to think that,
perhaps in part due to my influence, s/he might be inclined to adopt
strategies that exploit by producing environmentally-friendly rather than
exploit by producing environmentally destructive commodities; strategies
that exploit by increasing real wages rather than decreasing them (it is
elementary Marxian theory how real wages and exploitation can increase
apace, no?), and so on.

Furthermore, while I agree with Shawgi's statement on an emotional level,
theoretically I think it does an injustice to Marxian theory. First of all,
as Doug Henwood has argued compelling and succinctly in LBO 71, *monopoly*
capitalists are not the only problem. I hate capitalism whether it is
monopolistic or not (and yes I understand the dynamic relationship between
small and large capital). More to the point, capitalists are human beings,
that is, their subjectivity is fragmented and contradictory, the product of
*all* the social relations in which they participate, and not determined
solely by their relationship to the means of production or more generally
their role in social production. (Just as workers' consciousness is not
determined solely by their relationship to capitalist production.) The
capitalist *qua capitalist* may not care about workers, but real
capitalists are overdetermined by the social totality, and not determined
just by capital. Marx himself was very clear about this and stated so at
least several times in CAPITAL. (e.g. see the Preface to the First German
Edition, p. 10, International Publishers: 1967: "here individuals are dealt
with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic
categories"

I don't think that heightening the contradictions by itself will lead to
revolution so I'm not interested simply in making things as bad as possible.

In truth I think these questions are extremely complex and difficult even
in discussion with sophisticated Marxists and radicals; I am at a loss how
to present these complexities at an intro level to students who know
neither NC theory (except unconsciously) or Marxism (at all). Perhaps the
fault is mine: instead of titling my post "reform or revolution?" maybe I
should have used the subject header "teaching reform and revolution?"

Appreciating all the replies so far; keep 'em coming, folks!

Thanks.

Blair







Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6932] Re: I'm afraid to say this...

[Blair Sandler]

>At 9:01 PM 10/24/96, bill mitchell wrote:
>
>> 4. why censoring the USA for the whole world is a breakthrough.
>
>Though of course we wouldn't even be talking to each other like this if it
>weren't for the Pentagon.
>
>Doug


Yeah: the other day there was an opinion piece in the WSJ that actually had
the nerve to argue that the Internet was the proof that government can't
pick research and should stay out of the way and let private capital decide
what to do. It even acknowledged (in one sentence) that the Pentagon
started the Internet. Sheesh!

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6952] would that it would happen here

[Blair Sandler]

>From the WSJ, 10/25/96:

"Employees of Victor Co. of Japan in France locked their Japanese and
French managers in a room at the stereo plant to protest its planned
closure. The electronics group said earlier this month it would move the
operation to Scotland, where labor costs and taxes are lower. Earlier this
week, workers at a French state-owned weapons maker, also frustrated by job
cuts in France with 12.5% unemployment, held 11 executives hostage for a
day to protest defense cutbacks."

Of course, in the U.S., under Ol' Bill, we don't even have the opportunity
to protest defense cutbacks, because there aren't any!

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6972] re: Krugman

[Blair Sandler]

The first economics class I took as an undergraduate at Yale, where I
eventually got a B.A. in economics, was intermediate macro, with yours
truly [unless my mind is playing tricks on me, I'm sure it was Krugman].
All semester I did fine on homeworks and the mid-term, and basically kept
my mouth shut in class, as I was at that time *just* beginning to read
lefty and Marxist material. On the last day of class, Krugman explicitly
asked for our opinions about what we'd been learning. I had just read
Seymour Melman, so I very respectfully pointed out that Krugman himself had
noted several unresolved problems with the theory he'd taught us, and that
Melman's work seemed to resolve those problems. I asked Krugman to comment.
His response?

"I'm not going to answer that question except to say that Melman's theory
is stupid and wrong." [This is perhaps not an exact quote, but damn close.]
Never mind whether Krugman was right or wrong about this; pedagogically his
response is inappropriate and unacceptable. Of course he gave me no
opportunity to respond, but immediately called on another student.

A week or so later was the final exam, four questions of detailed macro
analysis. I answered the first two questions perfectly (I got all possible
25 points on each), and then, tired of the exercise, rather than continuing
on to deal with the third and fourth questions, spent the following hour
explaining why I thought the whole theoretical framework of the first two
answers was problematic. I figured that I had demonstrated my understanding
of the theory by my answers to those first two questions. Uh-uh. Krugman
gave me a 50 for the final, an F, and an F for the course.

I went to talk with him about it afterwards, explaining why I thought I had
sufficiently demonstrated my understanding of the course material and more,
and when he wouldn't raise my grade, requested another opportunity to take
a test. Nope. The only F I got at Yale. I wasn't an econ major at that
point; I'm not quite sure why that didn't stop me from switching my major
to economics later.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6974] Re: AI unionbuster?

[Blair Sandler]

Max Sawicky responds to Maggie's stories about "progressive," "lefty"
organizations turning reactionary when unionization approaches:

>I've been hearing stores like this for 25 years.
>
>I mention this not to air pessimism but because I
>think there's a moral:  it pays to be cognizant
>of the limits of collective political action,
>including the capacity of the working class or
>their representatives (much less anyone else)
>to make virtuous, disinterested decisions when
>given the power to do so.  In other words, there
>are proper limits to government.  Obviously what
>that means in practice leaves a lot to the imagina-
>tion.  For me it reinforces the premise that the
>US public sector should be larger than it is now,
>but not as large as, say, Sweden's.

I think Max's response is interesting. I have a very different response. I
don't think these stories say anything in particular about the "limits of
collective political action." Or, for that matter, about the proper size of
the public sector. [Technically speaking, non-profits are neither more nor
less public than capitalist enterprises: a board of directors runs the
organization.]

On the contrary, it seems to me to indicate the necessity of *greater*
collective political action, specifically of communal or communist class
processes, wherein workers collectively appropriate their own surplus labor
and decide what to do with it (and thus how to organize their work, etc.).

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:6980] Re: pol econ PhD programs

[Blair Sandler]

>I've been looking for a PhD program with an interdisiplinary approach,
>combining (radical/intl/comparative) political economy, gender and labor
>studies.The New School's economics program looks great, but I've heard they
>can't offer much financial support. What advice does PEN-L have on the
>subject?

I hate to say it but UMass Amherst is the obvious place to go, with Rick
Wolff, Steve Resnick, Sam Bowles, Nancy Folbre (and Ann Ferguson down the
hall), Julie Graham in geography, David Kotz, Jim Crotty, Jim Boyce, even
(shudder) Herb Gintis.  :)  Whatever anyone thinks of any of these
individuals or their work, UMass offers a broad range of different
heterodox perspectives on social theory.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7088] Re: White collar/unproductive worker?

[Blair Sandler]

>Hi Folks!
>
>
>The other day I was at my dentist's office for checkup and
>cleaning. As the dental assistant was scraping my teeth I was thinking: is
>she blue collar or white collar worker? I know she is "unproductive"
>worker. Can someone care to comment?
>
>Fikret

I don't understand why you think someone providing health care is an
unproductive worker (assuming she's working for a capitalist enterprise,
that is, the business is incorporated -- which is likely): she's an
employee and wage laborer and the health care she provides is part of a
service sold as a commodity by the dental corporation.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7092] post-modern wars

[Blair Sandler]

Anders, I think it was, asks for someone to discuss the advantages of
post-modern conceptual frameworks. My ignorance is boundless and my time
limited (gotta go teach intro micro to business students -- not what I call
high theory  :)  though my critique of NC theory, which highlights all the
"standard" lefty/Marxist critiques, is basically a critique of NC theory as
modernist) but let me try briefly to suggest a few post-modernish efforts
to intervene in important and concrete political struggles.

Part of the problem here is that people are using words loosely.
Post-modern means a lot of different things to different people. Folks
around Rethinking Marxism, for example, which I basically consider a kind
of post-modern Marxism, do not all consider themselves post-modernists.
One, in particular, said that, for him, overdetermination as a conceptual
tool and post-modernism as a social phenomenon are distinct. So let's just
be clear that we have not been clear about this. That is why it is a good
idea, if we are serious about having a productive discussion and not just
beating our chests and seeing who can thump louder (alpha male, alpha
male!), to discuss specific ideas, as both Steve Cullenberg and Anders (?)
have suggested in slightly different ways.

That said, I want to refer to three relatively recent works:

BREAKFAST OF BIODIVERSITY, by John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto, from
Food First, 1995

DEVELOPMENT BETRAYED, by Richard Norgaard, Routledge, 1994

THE COMING PLAGUE, by Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett, 1994


All of these books are written in a thoroughly accessible manner, all of
them engage in important current political struggles, and all of them are
more or less explicitly arguments based on post-modern concepts and logical
relations. BREAKFAST OF BIODIVERSITY is a great, short, very readable book
about rainforest destruction. THE COMING PLAGUE is "one of the best science
studies books I have ever read, and one of the most radical," according to
a friend who is competent to judge these things (and decidedly
anti-post-modern), about the political economy/ecology of public health.
And DEVELOPMENT BETRAYED is a book-length critique of modernism (NC theory
comes in for repeated attacks on just that basis) in the form of
development theory and practice, and a post-modern analysis of the need for
and possibilty of sustainable development.

I have to go now but I'm going to send this out now as a teaser. I'll be
back later this weekend with more about my take on post-modernism and
what's valuable about these three books.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7126] Re: post-modern wars

[Blair Sandler]

>At 8:39 AM 11/1/96, Blair Sandler wrote:
>
>>And DEVELOPMENT BETRAYED is a book-length critique of modernism (NC theory
>>comes in for repeated attacks on just that basis) in the form of
>>development theory and practice, and a post-modern analysis of the need for
>>and possibilty of sustainable development.
>
>Well aren't we using modernism rather sloppily now too? There's the
>modernism of Marx and Freud, and the modernism of Pound and Eliot.
>
>What is distinctly modern about the idea of sustainable development?
>There's the famous bit in Capital, beloved of all red-greens, about how
>progress in capitalist production jointly robs the worker and the soil. Was
>Marx thereby a proto-postie?
>
>Doug

Doug, if you're asking me, of *course* Marx was a a "proto-postie!" I would
say he was one of the earliest inventors (and in that lonely situation,
inevitably his development of it was partial, contradictory and uneven).

I didn't say "sustainable development" was modern. But read the book for
yourself. I'll be back later, as I said, with more about this. Saturday or
Sunday. Only snippets 'til then.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7127] Re: nattering nabob

[Blair Sandler]

>For the same reason I spend so much time studying Wall Street, even though
>I despise it - because it is profoundly influential. Because a whole
>generation of intellectuals - not only in the First World but increasingly
>in the Third - have embraced it, with disastrous political results.
>
>When Habermas said that "technology and science become a leading productive
>force, rendering inoperative the condition for Marx's labor theory of
>value" and "scientific-technical progress has become an independent source
>of surplus value" he contributes to an erasure of the working class from
>political life, and allies himself with George Gilder and Wired magazine.
>Ditto Manuel Castels, with his vision of "information" as a directly
>productive force. When Donna Haraway celebrates "otherness, difference, and
>specificity," she is making more difficult any intellectual contribution to
>the development of solidarity and collectivity.

Doug, I disagree with you about both points: or rather, the political
results of modernism have been at least as disastrous (and more so if
ecology is considered) as post-modernism.

Celebrating difference is absolute requirement for creating unity and
solidarity, otherwise there's just repression ("ranking oppressions") and
as we have seen, that does not work. Unity through diversity.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7128] Re: post-modern wars

[Blair Sandler]

>Most postmodern writing doesn't sufficiently appreciate the treachery of its
>own ground (or "ungroundedness"). For example, it's easy to sneer at Marx's
>"essentialism" as Laclau and Mouffe did; it's much harder to establish a
>unequivocal position from which to do the sneering. To continue with Laclau
>and Mouffe as an example of bad postmodernism, the unparralled ugliness of
>their prose can easily be understood in terms of the contortions they had to
>go through to hurl critical rocks without shattering the fragile walls of
>their own glass house.

For a post-modern Marxist critique of Laclau and Mouffe that a former
assistant director of education for SEIU (I think was the title) once
called "accessible," see Diskin and Sandler's article in RETHINKING MARXISM
6.3, Fall 1993.
>
>The relationship between modernism and postmodernism has to be more subtle
>than this. Postmodernism *needs* the modernist grand narrative as a foil.
>Postmodernism is a crack in the smooth surface of the modernist urn. Yes,
>the urn leaks, but don't throw it out, yet. The crack, by itself, doesn't
>carry any water at all.

Agreed. Post-modernism developed in the soil of modernism. Read Rob
Garnett's work (RM, forthcoming or recent) on the modern and post-modern
"moments" in Marx.


>I have a surprise. I think postmodernism makes a worthwhile contribution to
>analysis of political and economic issues and it makes this contribution
>best when it doesn't bother to flamboyantly announce and tediously insist
>upon its supposed postmodern credentials.

Agreed again. Garrett, for example, makes no big deal about
"constructionism," "post-modernism," or the like (though she does
explicitly critique reductionism), but simply goes about elaborating her
argument, which is nonetheless fundamentally post-modern. (THE COMING
PLAGUE).

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7135] Re: PoMoTown

[Blair Sandler]

>Blair presents a
>bibliography, without a clear summary of the content of the books.
>For example, Laurie Garrett's book seems more an example of
>left-inflenced science journalism than of postmodernism.

As I said, Jim, more will be coming later (I'm working under multiple
rapidly approaching deadlines). Sheesh!




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7136] Re: pomo communication: spider net approach

[Blair Sandler]

I don't know why people think pomo is so difficult. Here's a young twenties
non-native English speaker expressing his understanding of my classroom
discussions of Neoclassical reductionism and Marxian overdetermination:

Blair


>>Thanks Blair
>>
>>Your answers were helpful. What I'm trying to find out is where exactly
>>these two theories start arguing about.
>>
>>Currently my image is the following:
>>
>>Marxists see society as a spider net with economics embedded. All parts,
>>strings, are interrelated and processes define the entity; a soft wind blow
>>and the whole net starts wobbling.
>>
>>Neoclassical theorists select the economic part out of the spider net and
>>therefore have only some strings left. The problem now with the Neoclassical
>>approach is, that the content gets lost to a high degree. In other words,
>>the spider net floats in the air with an unknown off-set. Also, for the sake
>>of simplicities, the strings lack of elasticity when talking about basic
>>Neoclassical economics, the remaining strings are assumed to be stiff.
>>
>>My interpretation is, that here with the spider net is the initial
>>connection and simultaneously starts the divergence.
>>
>>What do you think about that?




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7156] Re: obnoxious personal attacks

[Blair Sandler]

>On Mon, 28 Oct 1996, Blair Sandler wrote:
>
>>
>> I hate to say it but UMass Amherst is the obvious place to go, with Rick
>> Wolff, Steve Resnick, Sam Bowles, Nancy Folbre (and Ann Ferguson down the
>> hall), Julie Graham in geography, David Kotz, Jim Crotty, Jim Boyce, even
>> (shudder) Herb Gintis.  :)  Whatever anyone thinks of any of these
>> individuals or their work, UMass offers a broad range of different
>> heterodox perspectives on social theory.


And Ron Baiman responded:

>Jen, Blair,
>
>   As someone who was
>suspended  from Steve Resnick's class for daring to disagree with him
>(in a non-disruptive  academic way - Eric Neilson , Gary Dymsky, and others
>who were in t hat class are my witnesses) , I would not put him on this
>list.  I found the essentially dogmatic view of Marxism espoused by
>Resnick and
>Wolf (in 1981 - I havn't bothered to keep up with their stuff since for
>obvious reasons) to be profoundly disturbing and distressing.
>   I know this debate has been had (p-robably many times) on Pen-L,
>but I thought my experience might be of interest (Jen, if you go to U
>Mass which does have some excellent people , I would advise that you
>steer clear - as much as possible of R&W).


And I reply

Ron: I would think that since you haven't kept up with their work (or
obviously them) for the last 15 years, perhaps a more appropriate warning
to Jen might be to keep her eyes open at UMass and watch out for herself,
or something along those lines, rather than to "steer clear" of them.

Separately: I was totally screwed by certain faculty at UMass (graduate
econ) for absolutely no good reason, so much so that none of the students
were ever able even to find out from the faculty member in question (the
chair at that time) or any of his comrades why I was being screwed. The
faculty in question were not Wolff and Resnick but from "the other camp."

Nonetheless, the grounding in mainstream and a variety of radical economics
theories I received there was in my opinion top notch. [In my original post
on the program I mentioned a number of faculty with whom I have significant
theoretical and other issues but whose work I respect. (The one who fucked
me over is no longer there, though colleagues who colluded still are).]
Furthermore, though I initially had serious reservations about working with
Resnick and Wolff, as dissertation committee members they were absolutely
stellar. I was able to have a completely free rein about what I studied,
yet they were both emotionally (!) and concretely extremely supportive
through the entire process, truly my allies through the dissertation itself
and all the bureaucratic relations with the dept. and the school. Over and
over Wolff turned around work I did for him in record quick time. If I had
to do it again (ugh!) I couldn't think of better advisors.

Before I went to Wolff, I tried to work with Sam Bowles. For half a year I
wrote pieces for him more or less weekly, trying to construct a
dissertation prospectus. He never actually responded to anything I wrote
but simply and continually suggested I do work that *he* thought
interesting. I got nowhere.

I would prefer not to discuss these things on PEN-L, but frankly personal
attacks combined with closed-mindedness really pisses me off.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7164] Re: Pomo and U. Mass. Economics department

[Blair Sandler]

I strongly doubt there is *anyone* on this list who considers Rick Wolff to
be "an infallible god and guru." Perhaps your difficulties with him have to
do with the fact that your expectations along these lines were
disappointed? The rest of your post expressing your experience at UMass was
unobjectionable, but this kind of patronizing remark is completely
unproductive.

Blair

>Finally, I expect the people on this list who consider Rick Wolff to be an
>infallible god and guru to be incensed by my criticisms of him and respond
>with a lot of verbiage. Given the priorities in my life, I am unlikely to
>respond.
>
>Pete Bohmer




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7179] Re: Pomo and U. Mass. Economics department

[Blair Sandler]

>I can certainly appreciate that some former students can have [legitimate
>or illegitimate] grievances against individual faculty members. But ... I
>would strongly prefer that those grievances not be aired on PEN-L.
>Moreover, demands that individuals apologize would only mean that this
>rather fruitless [and flame-intense] thread will continue. I strongly
>suggest that we move on to other topics for discussion.
>
>Jerry

I completely agree with Jerry. I couldn't care less whether Ron and Peter
apologize (it would be a mark of maturity if they did, but that's their
business). The thing that gets me about both their criticisms of Wolff and
Resnick is that they concern events that took place fifteen or so years
ago. It's appropriate to criticize (even personal) behavior that impinges
on political work (and education obviously has important political
ramifications) if it's still going on, but Ron in particular emphasized
that he knows neither the people he criticized nor their work. What's to be
gained by this? For all he knows Steve occasionally recalls the events in
question with a certain embarrassed or rueful self-criticism. (Maybe he
doesn't recall at all; maybe if it's brought to his attention he thinks it
was the right thing to do. But Ron obviously has no idea.) I would ask
Peter and Ron if they have lived "infallible" lives, if they have never
committed actions that they later regretted, or wished they could do over
differently or simply recognized that other people might view differently.
I certainly can't say this about myself.

Blair




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[PEN-L:7180] Re: post modern wars

[Blair Sandler]

>Correlation is not causation, fer sure, but I notice that the assertion of
>all these new ways of knowing and doing have coincided with the rise of the
>right. If these new modes were of such great practical utility, why aren't
>we seeing some results? And why is it that in the U.S. at least the right
>has been the great beneficary of class resentments?
>
>Doug

Doug, of course you are absolutely right about the importance of class
processes and class struggles. But attacking people associated with
RETHINKING MARXISM on this point has got to be a losing proposition. Recall
that just yesterday Ron was accusing Wolff and Resnick of being dogmatic
traditional Marxists. People around RM are the ones *most consistently*
raising issues of class, insisting on the necessity of integrating class
concepts into social analyses, asserting that class has its own,
independent (overdetermined) effects, and that left, radical, and
democratic analyses and strategies that don't take class into account are
likely to be weaker and less successful, that even if successful on their
own terms they are likely to produce continuing difficulties associated
with continued exploitation, etc.

Diskin and I, for example, in our critique of Laclau and Mouffe, showed
that their rejection of the "basic economic categories" or Marxism is the
result of *insufficient committment*, one might say, to their post-modern
insights. We demonstrated clearly the hollowness of their economic analysis
due precisely to the rejection and consequent absence of class concepts,
and showed how their own post-modern ideas implied, contrary to their
stated positions, precisely the *need* to retain a Marxian concept of class.

Similarly, my own work on environmental economics argues that the
Eco-Marxism of Jim O'Connor (who, no doubt about it has done great work
around ecology and whose journal, _Capitalism, Nature, Socialism_, is an
oasis in a desert of environmental garbage) is fundamentally based on
neo-classical externality theory. I elaborate, on the other hand, an
understanding of the relationship between capital and environment based not
primarily on relationship to the market but on surplus labor.

Perhaps part of the problem in this discussion on PEN-L is that while many
post-modernists (like most modernists) are indeed anti-Marxist (the correct
term for which post-Marxism is just an excuse), the people on *this* list
most closely associated with post-modernism are confirmed and committed
Marxists who have nonetheless been able to garner from post-modernism
certain insights we feel helpful to our understanding and application of
Marxism in our political and theoretical work.

To answer your immediate question, I would think that someone of your
persuasion (hell, and mine: I read the WSJ every day, too. Far and away the
best writing of any mainstream rag  :)  would want to focus on the
differential access to wealth and power held by the right and the left.
Brief historical perspective: in the post-war (WWII) era, the right crushed
the left (McCarthyism). Resistance springs eternal, and in the space
created perhaps by a certain complaisance on the part of the right, a new
left arose during the 60s. Taken by surprise, the right was slow to
respond, but respond they eventually did, and their superior resources
(among other things, like our own mistakes) enabled them to reassert their
power during the course of the latter 70s and 80s and into the present. If
I'm not mistaken, you recently agreed with something very much like just
this characterization in a recent (private) post, Doug. In other words, I
think blaming the current counterrevolution (of the past 20 some odd years)
on post-modernism is according to post-modernism much more power than it
actually has in academia, on the left, or among the massess.

Much regards,

Blair

P.S. Still planning to write some of my own perspectives on pomo (those
three books), but keep wanting to respond to specific things that come up
and I'm already stealing time from other deadline things I need to do.




Blair Sandler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]