Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "The Upheavals of June, 2000"

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, Michael Perelman wrote:

> Would it be better to provide for the corn farmers with credit, with the
> same access to water that the large farmers get, and with the same sort of
> cultural amenities available in cities -- maybe by setting up colleges in
> the countryside instead of in cities?

And then co-finance local industries producing farm tools and processing
machinery, and then an industrial sector to service the farm tools, and
then computer plants to service the industrial sector. If China can do it
with a little help from Li Ka-shing, why can't Mexico do it? C'mon, Brad,
after all *your people* were and are in charge of Mexico (I'm just 
kidding, but you know what I mean). What went wrong? 

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:"The Rise and Future Demise of World-Systems Analys...

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Brad De Long wrote:

> There's your answer: 40-year long dictatorship as the *model* we are 
> supposed to aim for...

It worked for that icon of global competitiveness otherwise known as
Singapore, didn't it? 

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "The Upheavals of June, 2000"

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, Mine Aysen Doyran wrote:

> My question is that "are *geo-politics* and *geo-economics* separate" in
> the way that you imply above? 

Of course they are; the dialectic of capital is that politics drives
economics which in turn drives politics ad infinitum. The poles of the
contradiction don't meet in some definitive medium, nor does one hold
eternal sway over the other; rather each pole is mediated via its antipode
(I'm paraphrasing Adorno, who would also insist that these mediations are
the sites of the most violent social struggles). The US owes Japan and the
EU lots of money, but there's no state agency capable of hauling the US in
front of a global bankruptcy court. At least, not yet (give the ECB time). 
The point is that our models of hegemony are mostly drawn from the Pax
Americana; we don't really have good models of the 21st-century
keiretsu/euro-capitalisms blossoming all around us, though there's good
work being done on the developmental state (Bruce Cumings, Peter
Katzenstein, etc.). My nit-picking critique of world-systems theory is
that it's not world-systemic enough -- it should push still further, to
the infrastructures of late capitalism which suffuse its superstructures.

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: "The Upheavals of June, 2000"

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Mine Aysen Doyran wrote:

> there are also conference papers by Arrighi and Wallerstein (His article on
> _Rise and Demise of World System Theory_ is pretty useful in outlining some of
> the features of the world system theory. http://fbc.binghamton.edu/). 

Sure, but here's Wallerstein writing in 1997 on the potential conflict
between Japan, the US and the EU in the 21st century (full text available
at http://fbc.binghamton.edu/iwrise.htm), where he bets the farm on Japan:

"4) Since a triad in ferocious mutual competition usually reduces to a
duo, the most likely combination is Japan plus the U.S.A. versus the E.U.,
a combination that is undergirded both by economic and paradoxically
cultural considerations. 

5) This pairing would return us to the classical situation of a sea-air
power supported by the ex-hegemonic power versus a land-based power, and
suggests for both geopolitical and economic reasons the eventual success
of Japan."

Sea power versus land power -- in the era of GSM and bullet trains? I
mean, come *on*. This isn't to bash Wallerstein, who's written some neat
things, but he does seem to focus on the geopolitics and not the
geo-economics. But then, I'm just one of those carping, post-American
litcritters, so what do I know.

-- Dennis

Re: "The Upheavals of June, 2000"

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Mine Aysen Doyran crossposted:

> "The Upheavals of June, 2000"
> 
> Europe was born in June 2000. Of course, we have been talking about
> Europe for 50-odd years now. But heretofore Europe has meant western
> Europe, not Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, dear to both Charles
> de Gaulle and Mikhail Gorbachev. Hitherto, the Germans would not really
> hear of it because of their post-1945 fidelity to the United States. 

For someone who invented world-systems theory, I always
wondered why Wallerstein's vision of the EU is so, well, national
(talking about "the Germans", "the French", "the Americans", as if there
were still national capitalisms which corresponded to the term). The EU
was born in 1990 when Eastern Europe finally put Marxism into practice,
tossed out their one-party states, and forced the doors of Fortress Europe
open for good, the general idea being, "Pay now for a Continental
welfare state, or pay later for 40 million refugees". It's true the new
metropoles are consolidating rapidly, but we need more in-depth analysis
of why and how this is happening. Anyone know if the Binghamton folks are
working on this?

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Re: Sudan

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Mine Aysen Doyran wrote:

> with religion? I do *not* believe in religion. Your attempt to associate my
> identity with religion reflects your desire to portray middle eastern people
> as religious and middle eastern women as traditional. When I said "I am known
> to be a muslim", I said this to criticize how people generally _perceive_ me,
> not to support what I beleive, because I am not a *muslim*.

I have not the slightest desire to portray anyone as anything.  I'm asking
how postmodern politics works in Turkey, i.e. how local, national and
religious identities are mobilized by (or clash with) the rule of the
neoliberals. Turkey has been the lucky recipient of 17 IMF packages,
according to the Financial Times, and remains a deeply polarized,
impoverished neocolony of the EU. Was the (currently waning) popularity of
the fundamentalists due to the fact that they were the only folks willing
to criticize the neolib consensus, albeit indirectly? Why hasn't the Left
been able to make hay out of this situation? 

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Sudan

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Mine Aysen Doyran wrote:

> ARABS!); plus not all arabs or muslims are even religious. As a turkish,
> I am known to be a muslim, but I am an atheist, feminist and marxist. We
> have Samins, we have Nawal El Sadawis, we have Nazim Hikmets!! 

"Woman at Point Zero" is amazing, a blowtorch of a book. How does one
manage the religion thing, though? Or is this like the American fetish for
"Judeo-Christian values", an ideological code word one professes in
Turkey to be taken seriously in the political realm?

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Re- Naderism-Green party

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 4 Jul 2000, Rob Schaap wrote:

> Would I be wrong in suspecting that Asia's Tigers are just making up some of
> the ground they lost in '98, have lost many of the stabilising mechanisms
> that afforded them the sustained growth of the three decades leading up to
> '97, are having their surpluses expropriated by foreigners at unprecedented
> rates, and are generally still producing stuff with dodgy prospects (eg
> cars, of which we already have more than we can buy - textiles/manufactured
> goodies, in which a low-wage WTO-tied China presents a real over-capacity
> threat - and computer parts, in which industry I thought effective demand
> has been flattening for two years now)?  

Don't know about cars, but the chip industry has been very kind to
Asia.  Place is hopping, orders are backlogged for months, and DRAM prices
are actually rising again -- a product of healthy demand for computers in
Japan (40% increases, year-on-year) plus the high yen, trends which seem
likely to continue.

The real question is whether the skyscraper-sized Lizard of the
Developmental State, recently spotted estivating in Chiang Mai, has been
crushed for once and for all. I wouldn't bet money (you know, a real
currency, like yen or euros) on it. If anything, re-regulation of capital
flows, currency markets and the credit structure is back in style. 

-- Dennis

Re: Re- Naderism-Green party

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Mon, 3 Jul 2000, neil wrote:

> The problem is for these reformers of capitalism , the overall 
>  economic crisis is deepning on the world scale and also in the USA. 

Really? So why has world economic growth accelerated in the late Nineties?
Asia is growing again, the EU is picking up steam, and even Japan is
rising from its torpor. 

> Look at Germany -- today the 'empowered' Greens support more austerity
> for workers --less regulation on profit making-- health-educ cuts, and a
> new revamped - professionalized -independent German Army --

Examples, please? I'm talking specific legislation which the Greens
authored, not stuff they were forced to sign because they're a small party
in a coalition with the much larger, neoliberalized SPD. From what I've
read in the German press, the Greens have been striving mightily to tax
fossil fuels and fund renewable energy, to reform Germany's archaic
citizenship laws, to provide same-sex couples with domestic partner
status, etc. The Red-Green tax reforms lowered taxes on the poorest
citizens and slashed a number of the tax loopholes of the rich. 

-- Dennis

Bringing the US to Heel

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:

> How do you propose Japan would collect on this demand? They may be 
> the creditor, but the U.S. has all the bombs.

That's what all those Chinese and French missile systems are for. If the
new metropoles find the political will, there's plenty of offshore
financing centers to fund a way. 

-- Dennis

Re: Socialism & Ecology in Japan (was Re: Reply toCarrol Cox)

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 28 Jun 2000, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> Let's suppose an unlikely event: the Japanese working class rise up &
> make a socialist revolution (of some kind).  The rest of the imperial
> world, condemning the expropriation of Japanese & other expropriators,
> swiftly puts an embargo on Japan to restore freedom and democracy.

An embargo which is lifted approximately one millisecond after Japan
threatens to call in the 150 billion euros of the US current account
deficit it's been funding for well over a decade, thus pulling the plug on
the Wall Street Bubble. The rest of Asia quickly falls into line, after
being offered low-interest aid packages worth 3-5% of GDP over the next
twenty years, guaranteed. Finally, Japan and the EU sign a mutual defense
and security pact to prevent those rascal Americans from defaulting on
their 2 trillion euro debt. Southeast Asia booms; the EU shifts to solar
energy; proletarians everywhere begin to throw out neocolonial elites.

Bring on that embargo, I say!

-- Dennis

Re: Re: My Take on Competition

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Michael Perelman wrote:

> DRAM is not protected by IP.  It is regarded as a commodity, like wheat or
> soybeans.  A processor chip is protected.

This may be changing, though -- new and more complex types of DRAM, like
Rambus' RDRAM, are indeed protected by IP agreements. Toshiba just
paid through the nose to license design tech from Rambus, and
Rambus is also suing Hitachi over IP violations.

All of which has thoroughly pissed off the biggest DRAM producers around,
namely the Taiwanese foundry firms, who are pushing commodity-based SDRAM
instead. So maybe there's a kind of, well, dialectic between IP and non-IP
here.

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Frankfurters, fascism and ecology

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 26 May 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Dennis, what do you make of the post-WW II Adorno, who took CIA money 
> to rebuild the Frankfurt School, and refused to republish Neumann's 
> Behemoth because it was too Marxist?

The Institute was originally financed by a wealthy Dutch rentier, proving
that one should never be afraid of reappropriating The Man's capital flow
to fight oppression. Realistically, Max Horkheimer was the one making the
financial decisions, and I seriously doubt he knew where the money was
coming from. Adorno was a totally unpractical person, very spacy, who
never did any hands-on organizing (the Institute didn't publish Benjamin's
stuff, for example, someone whose sympathies cannot be doubted, more for
personal-picayune reasons that ideological differences). This says nothing
about the worth of his theories or conceptual innovations, though.
Writing off Adorno for working in West Germany would be as false as 
writing off Brecht because he worked for the Ulbricht regime.

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Lukacs versus Frankfurt School (fwd)

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 26 May 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> "high" art and "low" art, Wagner versus "mass music". I
> never see jazz in the way that Adorno sees. What about the aesthetic
> beauty of Moroccon jazz? or Cuban jazz? or Jamaican jazz?

Adorno is useless vis-a-vis jazz. He didn't know the great jazz modernisms
and never bothered to learn. Nor did he know zip about cinema or the
cartoon or Third World revolutions. For those genres, you need folks like
Sartre and Jameson, Spivak and Ngugi. 

What Adorno does give us, though, is an unparalleled set of tools to
analyze the Second World, the border-zone between the metropole and
periphery. Put another way, he wrote operating system kernel for
the global Left, rather than end-user applications or middleware.

-- Dennis

Re: Frankfurters, fascism and ecology

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 25 May 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Jay points out that the Frankfurters reject the notion that class conflict
> is the locomotive of history, a basic Marxist theory. 

Nonsense. Walter Benjamin once wrote that the Revolution is really the
emergency handbrake on Progress. The greatness of the Frankfurt School is
that they insist that the objective tide of history is catastrophic, an
outrageous violence done to vulnerable bodies, and that we must think this
catastrophe through, understand how it is that the total system works, if
we're going to fight it properly (meaning, we have to stop the violence,
even the kind we do to ourselves). Here's Adorno on how even the most
ethereal theory relates to the dignity of the body: 

"Both, body and mind, are abstractions of their experience, their radical
difference a decree. They reflect the historically-achieved
'self-consciousness' of the mind and the casting off of that which it
negated, due to its own identity. Everything spiritual is modified
corporeal impulse, and such modification qualitatively redounds into what
is not merely such. Compulsion is, according to Schelling's insight, the
forerunner of mind. 

The presumed essential facts of consciousness are anything but. In the
dimension of pleasure and displeasure, the bodily reaches deep into them.
All pain and all negativity, the motor of dialectical thought, are the
ceaselessly mediated, occasionally unconscious shape of the physical,
which like all happiness aims at sensual fulfillment and garners its
objectivity by it. If any aspect of happiness is frustrated, then it is
none whatsoever." Negative Dialectics:202 (my translation)

What the IMF/WB bean-counters and Wall Street punters do not wish to see
is precisely this negativity: the economy ought to be an instrument of
human happiness, not an engine of inhuman, murderous accumulation. But the
Frankfurters give us the tools to look at it, and draw strength from that
knowledge.

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Lukacs versus Frankfurt School (fwd)

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 24 May 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> culture with formal capitalist rationality. Whenever folks talk about
> culture, it is always the monolithic instrumental rationality that they
> see, whereas culture is a more dynamic and complex phenomenon. 

Which folks are these? Surely not Adorno & Co., who constantly stress the
redemptive, praxis-making side of radical art. Their point is that the
Enlightenment must consider *itself* (the Ur-form of Bourdieu's
consciousness-producing reflexivity).

> view, to perceive formal reason (which they automatically equate with
> enlightenment reasoning) in the pre-capitalist history of subjectivity
> (Oddysus) as they do in the second chapter of the _Dialectic of
> Engligtenment_. 

Indeed, but this was written in 1944 as one of the first serious attempts
to grapple with Fascism, Stalinism, and the recharged state-monopoly
capitalism of the New Deal. Adorno's later stuff is much more subtle and
interesting.  Still, it's worth noting that what Adorno and Horkheimer
describe as mythos and the role of ideology are still surprisingly
relevant to the process of postcolonial state formation. Spivak does a
nice job of untangling the threads here in her really excellent "Critique
of Postcolonial Reason", even going so far as to bring up the topic of the
micrology (a favorite Adorno trope) but she doesn't provide a single
reference to Adorno, which is just nuts. No offence to Gayatri, but the
Left has got to know its theoretical history. 

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Lukacs versus Frankfurt School

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 24 May 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:

> of Hegel's philosophy. But in the Frankfurt School the task of revolution
> is dumped overboard and the problematic of alienation remains, only to be
> solved within the context of what ultimately will prove to be the modern
> liberal state, as evidenced by Adorno's friendliness to the post-WWII
> German republic.

Ye Gods. Adorno worked for the Institute of Social Research; no German
university would have hired him in the Fifties (the Ulbrecht regime, on
the other hand, would've had him shot). Marcuse mixed it up with the New
Left activists and students, Adorno and Horkheimer created the world's
first coherent theory of mass culture, and Adorno's conceptual
masterpieces are magnificent expositions of multinational Marxism, which
predicted the total system (global capitalism) decades before the thing
became a stark reality. You can't find a thinker more antagonistic to the
rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal, xenophobic Central Europe of the
mid-20th century than Teddy. The 1966 "Negative Dialectics" is a veritable
casebook of the human rights, labor rights, and ecological struggles of
our own era. I even wrote an itty bitty little dissertation on the
subject:

http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dredmond/slrgdenk.html

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Sowing Dragons (fwd)

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 12 May 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> moreover, how would US develop its own capitalism without slave labor (
> especially agricultural production in the South)?

Ah, but Marx would insist on the relative antagonisms between rival modes
of production: it's not that capitalism is identical to slavery, rather
you had a slave mode of production coexisting side-by-side with textile
capitalism (i.e. unequal exchange between manufactured goods and agrarian
goods). US capitalism didn't really challenge Britain's hegemony until
after the Civil War, when huge masses of ex-slaves were proletarianized
and vast new sources of cheap raw materials were made available via
railroads and the monstrous slaughter of indigenous Americans. Thus the
contradiction of Lincoln and the Republicans -- scions of Northern finance
capital -- underwriting the defeat of slavery (the 20th century equivalent
would be, US monopoly capital gearing up to fight against German and
Japanese fascism). 

> wither away. So are you telling me that Vietnam is still patriarchal
> because it is not capitalist enough? 

Nope, just that "capitalism" and "patriarchy" are not unhistorical
signifiers which mean the same thing to every era. There's local
capitalism, regional, urban, national, international, multinational,
financial, industrial, etc. and these modes of production are themselves
saturated by the relics and survivals of previous modes of production
(feudal, clan, familial etc.). By all accounts, Vietnam is in the throes
of agarian/simple manufacturing accumulation, i.e. clan capitalisms are
facing off against a limited nomenklatura socialism. What that means is
that the women workers in the export processing zones are on the front
lines of the class struggle. The struggle against patriarchal modes of
domination over women's bodies merges, at its outer limit, with the
struggle against capital's dominion over laboring bodies. 

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Sowing Dragons (fwd)

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 12 May 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:

> very often of a seasonal nature. If you read Juliette Schor's "The
> Overworked American", you will discover that the average peasant worked
> half as many hours as the average proletarian during the rise of the
> industrial revolution. That is the reason resistance to the Enclosure Acts
> and bans on hunting was so fierce.

But didn't this have to do with limited food sources and chronic disease
and malnutrition? Peasant societies couldn't sustain year-round work
efforts simply because most folks were hungry most of the time (no
refrigeration, few reserves, salt was a luxury, etc.), right?

-- Dennis

Re: RE: EPI Paper on U.S. FDI in China

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 12 May 2000, Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:

> Lets see, US firms make the stuff in China then send it back duty free to
> sell to US consumers [or anywhere else]; just what does trade deficit mean
> in this circumstance?  My guess is zilch.

Well, it does mean something in the comparative sense that Japan and the
EU run big trade surpluses in their good sectors vis-a-vis the US, and
they're just as globalized as we are. This suggests, in turn, that the
mighty US economy is far less mighty than Wall Street would like us to
believe, that deep structural problems are being papered over by a
financial bubble. Usually, peripheries run huge deficits with metropoles,
not the other way around.

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Re: Sowing Dragons

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 12 May 2000, Carrol Cox wrote:

> The original question, incidentally, was offensively arrogant. "What
> has the left to offer as a model for Vietnam?" This is to view "The
> Left" as the friendly neighborhood pharmacist offering kindly
> advice to the mother of a child with a cold.

No remedies here, just questions. "The Left" means dissidents, activists
and honest cadres in Vietnam as well as those in the American one-party
state (it has two branches, but we know who pays the piper). Nike has
45,000 workers in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands more will soon be working
for GE, GM, Sony, Daimler and many others. In a real sense, if the Left
does not come up with alternatives, then there really will be no
alternative for Vietnam but to hitch their train to keiretsu capitalism,
now will there?

-- Dennis

Re: Sowing Dragons (fwd)

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 12 May 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> market econmy do not seem to benefit these people. In fact, what is going
> on in Vietnam is a sign of peripherilization in a country charecterized by
> devestating poverty and inequalities.It is generally the most vulnerable
> sectors such as women, workers, and small peasent farmers who have been
> hurt by the declining standarts of living and economic restructuring,
> followed by 1) elimination of subsistence production 2) massive shifts
> from agrarian to industrial activities 3)transformation of rural social
> relations towards capitalist forms of wage labor--slave labor (as we see
> in the case of Nike example)

Nike's workers aren't slaves. They're proletarians. Do you have any idea
of what rice farming without modern machinery is like? You wade around in
a field all day, hunched over, getting sunburnt to a crisp, attacked by
mosquitoes, flies, and leeches, and have to put up with endemic malaria
and other gruesome diseases. At home, you have to cook meals with
firewood, take care of umpteen kids, and obey your elders, even if they're
incompetent or cruel. Compared to this, life in the city is a definite if
contradictory step forwards.

> You should not take culture at face value. It is a culturalist assumption
> to argue that patriarchy or authoritarianism are "internal" to so and so
> societies (who is buying Talcott Parsons or _Samuel Huntington_ type
> semi-fascist arguments nowadays? except US foreing policy makers).
> Violence is a commonly accepted norm here too (motherhood, rape, domestic
> violence, compulsory heterosexuality, etc..). Avarege american man beats
> his partner almost everday.

Violence is NOT ok in America, not anymore, thanks to Third Wave feminism,
"Take Back the Night" marches, campus activism, etc. Statistics say that
one third of all women will experience some sort of psychological or
physical assault from a partner during their entire life, but this isn't
the same as continuous violence. Traditional patriarchal cultures really
are brutal -- kids get beaten, husbands slap around wives, power-relations
throughout the whole society are settled in a very violent way, etc. All
this preceded the rise of global capitalism, it wasn't caused or produced
by such. By casting women as helpless, lurid victims of global
techno-conspiratorial males, we're really feeding into a moralizing
agenda, which takes the unsullied female body as this ahistorical
starting-point: the photographic inverse of the neoliberal ideology of
self-perpetuating, frictionless markets.  

-- Dennis

Sowing Dragons

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 9 May 2000, Louis Proyect crossposted from the Baltimore Sun:

> MALNUTRITION IS EPIDEMIC: ROUGHLY HALF OF ALL CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF 5
> ARE STUNTED FOR LACK OF FOOD. HUNGER AND A GROSSLY INEFFICIENT AID SYSTEM
> HAVE KEPT VIETNAM'S POVERTY RATE THE HIGHEST IN THE REGION: THE WORLD BANK
> ESTIMATING THAT 51 PERCENT OF PEOPLE IN VIETNAM ARE IMPOVERISHED, COMPARED
> WITH 16 PERCENT IN THAILAND. 

Yes, but things were much worse in the pre Doi Moi period, when the
Government simply lied about malnutrition and poverty and pretended
economic problems didn't exist. The economic growth since 1985 is real
enough. 

> In Hanoi, the prostitutes work under cover of the city's many parks; in Ho
> Chi Minh City, it's a different story: The prostitutes, driving up and down
> the main drag between the Saigon River and the old cathedral, call out to
> customers from their mopeds. 

So you have working women, earning money for themselves, on mopeds -- a
mobile proletariat, as it were. Horrors! As opposed to us brain-workers
on the Net, who are lucky enough to be able to retail our neurons instead
of our reproductive systems. Vietnam remains an intensely patriarchal
society, where violence against women is normal and accepted; many of
those prostitutes were horrifically abused by family members, and going
back to the village, where brutally authoritarian family traditions are
still the norm, is not an option. 

The more serious question is this: what *can* the Left offer as a
developmental model to Vietnam? And no, telling them to dye their hair
blond and learn Swedish won't cut it, Sweden had 150 years to assimilate
primitive accumulation and another 100 years to export its way to
metropole status. Vietnam is up against the heavy artillery of Athlons and
Pentiums, Toyotas and Mercedes right here and now: how do they fight
the neocolonial beast? 

-- Dennis

Re: The Vietnamese countryside

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 9 May 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:

> About 4 million hectares of land were scheduled for reallocation after
> 1988. After the transition, the social bonds in the countryside were
> profoundly shattered. The basic structure of the nation was placed under
> severe stress and dispossessed peasants flooded into the cities to eke out
> an existence. Those that remained in the countryside and who lost out in
> the Darwinian struggle for survival were forced to labor twice as long and
> twice as hard on impoverished small plots. 

But how do explain the fact that living standards have risen dramatically
in the countryside side during doi moi? Vietnam is now a net rice
exporter, industrial production has boomed, and ordinary folks are
starting to buy fans, appliances, VCRs and stuff. The one-party-state is
pretty repressive, but invests a fair amount in education and has done a
good job of keeping overseas capital firmly reined in. The conflict
between a nascent urban proletariat and global big biz is mediated by 
all sorts of complex structures, ranging from the local developmental
state and global finance capital to the East Asian keiretsu, which we
ought to be investigating and analyzing (Japan's ADB, for example, is
loaning gobs of cash to Vietnam these days).

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Samir Amin: "Not a Happy Ending"

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 28 Apr 2000, M A Jones wrote:

> Hey, Russia posted a whacking bal of payments surplus last year and has done
> almost every year since 1991. Is it also a no-brainer to buy up some roubles
> right now?

That sounds like a challenge to me. Only trouble is I'm not a Malt Man.
But I'm willing to stake a case of 1995 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese (JJ
Pruem) on an appreciating euro. The spread is a EUR/USD rate of 1.00 or
higher by May 2001. Since I'm going to be in hiding next year, running 
from Sallie Mae's creditors, my broker will be in contact with your
broker.

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Samir Amin: "Not a Happy Ending" (fwd)

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 27 Apr 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> >Dennis R Redmond wrote:
> >>There
> >> probably will be a tomorrow for this world-system, but it'll be
> >> transacted in euros.
> 
> so should we give up the struggle? i don't see the point..

No, you take the struggle global. The euro, yen and dollar are all
battling it out, like giant monsters in a Toho flick, which should open up
some interesting spaces for praxis. But denouncing the US hegemony, as if
we still lived in the world-system of 1960, won't cut the mustard. The
Opposing Team is Daimler, Sony, Mitsubishi, Nokia, etc. and not just
Microsoft and Intel. We've got to think *past* the Wall Street Bubble, not
just against it.

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Samir Amin: "Not a Happy Ending"

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 28 Apr 2000, M A Jones crossposted:

> Mark Milner, deputy financial editor  The Guardian
> Thursday April 27, 2000
> 
> How low can the euro go? ... Today the currency slumped to fresh lows on the
> foreign exchanges despite a rise in interest rates by the ECB.

This is known as a buying opportunity of historic proportions. Some future
George Soros out there is going to make an unholy killing by snapping up
EUR and dumping USD. Exchange rates bounce all over the place -- the yen
was as low as 85 to the dollar in 1995, then zoomed to 142 to the dollar
quite recently, now it's around 106 (long-term averages put the yen at 110
to the dollar). The euro could go as low as 80 to the dollar and as high
as 130, but as long as the EU keeps running big trade and current account
surpluses vis-a-vis the US, investing in its currency is a no-brainer. 

As someone said, somewhere, one should not mistake a data point for an
inflection point.

-- Dennis

Re: Samir Amin: "Not a Happy Ending"

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 27 Apr 2000, Louis Proyect crossposted:

> Conclusion to "Not A Happy Ending" by Samir Amin, published in Al-Ahram.
> http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/1999/462/samir.htm
> 
> US HEGEMONY ATTACKS --THE 21ST CENTURY WILL NOT BE AMERICAN: 
> There are no European TNCs: only British, German, or French TNCs. Capital
> interpenetration is no denser in inter-European relations that in the
> bilateral relations between each European nation and the US or Japan. 

Nokia, Daimler, Renault, SAP, Deutsche Bank, BNP etc. all went global
decades ago. Eurocapital has been merging like there's no tomorrow. There
probably will be a tomorrow for this world-system, but it'll be
transacted in euros.

-- Dennis

Re: on the "anti-globalization" movement (fwd)

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] crossposted:

> UNDERSTANDING THE BATTLES OF SEATTLE AND WASHINGTON
> By Dick Platkin and Chuck O'Connell*

Lemme see if I get this right: they're arguing that the anti-WTO and
anti-IMF protests are financed by nationalist bourgeois pig foundations,
organized by nationalist bourgeois pig unions and staffed by nationalist
bourgeois piglets -- we'll call 'em NBPs for short. 

> anti-globalization groups.  They are (unknowingly) recycling Kautsky's 
> argument when they claim that the WTO, IMF, and World Bank represent a new 
> capitalist consensus to override national sovereignty and democracy when they 
> impinge upon profitability. 

Not only are NBPs nationalistic and vaguely porcine, they're also
revisionist Kautskyites. 

> FAIR TRADE ARGUMENT 3:  THE TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DEMONSTRATORS ON THE 
> STREETS OF SEATTLE CAUSED THE FAILURE OF THE WTO MEETING.   The Battle of 
> Seattle was moving, it was exciting, it was headline grabbing, it was 
> revealing of fascist police violence, but it did not sink the WTO.

NBPs failed in Seattle, anyway, so we don't need to bother with the
historically new linkages forged there between labor, enviros,
culture-workers and micropolitical groups. Nor do we need to rethink what
global capitalism is, what the keiretsu are doing in East Asia, how the
relations of production are being restructured in the EU, or concretely
organizing the global proletariat in this informatic culture of ours. Why
think through the year 2000 when you can recycle polemics from the 1920s! 

-- Dennis

Re: South Korean fire sale

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sat, 22 Apr 2000, Louis Proyect crossposted

> New York Times, April 22, 2000
> Renault Agrees to Buy Troubled Samsung Motors 
[text deleted]

Actually, a fine example of the new hegemons at work. Samsung got into the
auto biz way late, I think in 1995 or so, and has pretty limited
industrial facilities, plus debts of $5 billion. You could think of
Renault-Nissan as the mutant product of the Mizuho super-keiretsu (IBJ
plus Fuji plus Dai-ichi Kangyo) and that other keiretsu... oh, what's the
name again.. ah, of course: *France* (Renault is 44% state-owned). R-N
will take a bath, of course, but South Korea's industrial base will remain
largely intact. 

Round 2 of the post-Cold War East Asian-EU slugfest goes to the EU on
points.

-- Dennis

Re: Anti-Eurocentrism: Idealist Diversion from An

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 12 Apr 2000, Ricardo Duchesne wrote:

> Spivak should just settle down and stop feeling guilty about her big
> western salary; I mean, at least she uses some of it for her two per
> year trips to India in her struggle against eurocentrism.

And wrote some classic books on neocolonialism. And translated Derrida as
well as indigenous authors. And trained lots of rowdy Leftie litcrit
theorists. And still had time to get in the World Bank's face. Worth every
penny, I'd say.

-- Dennis

Been There, Done That

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 19 Mar 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> trying to do political organizing and no less dim years teaching. But Jim D's 
> comment about Antioch students being sheep with respect to each other even if 
> they diverege from the national consensus is about right. I always fely sorry 
> for them: they were going to have such an awful shock when they came out in 
> the world. --jks

Au contraire, I'm an Antioch grad myself (class of '91). Antioch is a
work-study college: you spend half your time out in the Real World,
earning a living, then half your time studying. I worked for big
corporations, small corporations, human rights groups, slogged on assembly
lines, was editor of the student newspaper, etc. It doesn't get more
realistic than that. 

-- Dennis

Red Guards

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 15 Mar 2000, Max Sawicky wrote:

> We do.  They're [Red Guards] all English professors.
> They bludgeon us with idealist notions.

No, no, they're the English departments themselves, who are run by a scary
bunch, who subject their hired serfs -- er, grad students -- to the Iron
Thesis Bowl of non-imaginative thinking, clueless apostrophes, and
shocking Angloid provincialism. The most shell-shocked survivors of this
nightmare then go out and get hired by their abusers and make sure that
yet another generation of undergrads hates literature and the arts with a
vengeance.

"In English departmental meetings, noone can hear you scream..."

-- Dennis (Comparative Lit Guerilla)

Re: Re: Weber Help

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Brad De Long wrote:

> I think that Weber is arguing for parliamentary democracy by saying 
> that only if each individual is a co-ruler--a Herr--can the nation's 
> people be a master race--a Herrenvolk.

"Herr" means, literally, "Mister", and also "Master" and "Lord", in the
British sense of a squire ("Ah, here comes young Master James...").
"Herrlich" means "splendid". The term has a bourgeois ring to it, all in
all.

So what's your angle on your talk on the US decline? Does, like, the EU
get to repossess New York if things go sour on Wall Street, or
something like that?

-- Dennis

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Bill of Gates fallacy

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2000, Brad De Long wrote:

> Neoliberals hope that multinational corporations, financial analysts, 
> bond-fund managers, and bond raters will in the end be able to apply 
> some constructive pressure to improve the situation: better the 
> discipline of the world market than no discipline on 
> less-than-fully-democratic governments at all.
> This neoliberal line may sound a little too pat. But it is virtually 
> the only game in town. Critics try to poke holes in it, but the 
> neoliberal stance has no serious challengers these days in 
> policy-making.

This may be true in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. But what are we
to make of the East Asian core countries or Central Europe, or countries
like China which are learning the lessons being forgotten by Western
Europe? Isn't it true that we can't really speak of a single model of
neoliberalism -- free trade in everything -- but instead of a set of
competing *neoliberalisms* -- East Asian trade policies, which are
coordinated through the keiretsu, chaebol, and still-powerful
developmental states; EU-style integration, which involves social
democratic income transfers from Germany to Spain via the EIB; and finally
US-style Bubble neoliberalism, or wild financial speculations on other
peoples' industrial bases? 

> Rodrik fears that developing economy governments taht do not 
> carefully manage international economic integration will wind up 
> without the ability to achieve anything like what was achieved in the 
> post-World War II industrial core: the good society (not the great 
> society) and the mixed economy.
> He also throws down the gauntlet. He claims that globalization cannot 
> be a replacement for (failed) social democracy in the developing 
> periphery. Instead, he believes that globalization must be assisted 
> by (successful) social democracy if it is to produce a world with a 
> human face.

Rodrik has a point, but misses a little thing called the American Empire,
which ruled the world-economy for fifty years or so, and trashed countless
attempts by countries to institute autonomous or social democratic
development policies (treating Latin America just like the Soviet Union
treated Eastern Europe). Don't you think it's just the slightest bit
interesting that the most innovative and successful models of social and
economic development -- East Asian keiretsu, EU social democracy --
emerged at the global interzones *between* the battling Cold War powers? 
Castro's nationalization of the sugar industry wasn't all that much more
radical than land reform in South Korea or nationalization of the
industrial base and financial system in Taiwan, was it? If this is even
halfway to the mark, maybe one of the most important contributions we can
make as First Worlders is to fight our own elites, and give the rest of
the planet the breathing room they need to get their act together. As
usual, the Euroleft seems to be leading the way here.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:12989] Re: the origins of dogmatism

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, John Bellamy Foster wrote:

> criticisms that such and such views are "dogmatic." And one should avoid
> making such a charge oneself.  It falls short of critique, and simply relies
> on the ("dogmatic"?) 0notion that indeterminacy (or philosophical
> scepticism) is always a superior point of view.  (A very comforting view for
> apologists of the existing order who prefer the absolute negative to the
> negation of the negation--that is a determinate negation.)  

So you're saying that we live in a dogma-eat-dogma world, right? One of my
favorite bumper stickers reads, "My karma ran over my dogma".  

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:12701] Re: Where's the Beef?

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Max Sawicky wrote:

> And if the doom foretold of ecological disaster some
> 50 years away is the last straw supporting 'socialism
> or barbarism' . . . well, that's rather pathetic,
> isn't it?  Even worse, it suggests the right politics
> is to urge abstention from struggles in the present
> (especially in the U.S./EU/Japan/NICs) and organize
> red-green nursery schools.

You do both -- plant seeds for the future, while struggling for the
present.  The socialism vs. barbarism rhetoric is often miscast as a
question of the future, when it's really a question of the present: there
are socialist elements in the world-system all around us (just ask LTCM,
bailed out by their fellow rentiers), and decidedly barbaric elements,
too (the immiseration of entire Continents, ecocide, etc.). One is the
index of the other: you have to critique the notion of the civilized
in order to critique the notion of the non-civilized.

Doom is just a videogame. There are no words for the real catastrophes.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:12160] Re: RE: Some sponsors of Johns Hopkins Institute forPolicy Studies

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Max Sawicky wrote:

> More secret sponsors:
> OU/Dennis Redmond-- Id Software

Shocked, I am shocked at these baseless, groundless, modemless and
probably ISP-less accusations. These proletarian hands would never soil
themselves with the ill-gotten lucre of evil running dog pig bourgeois
capitalists. Mostly thanks to these nifty force-feedback gloves. Hey, 
it was either that or an option on a Ferrari.

This is almost as bad as the time I learned Opposing Force isn't supposed
to be out until November, but not quite as bad as the time I realized I
had come to the end of Neil Manke's Halflife mod and there were no amazing
groundbreaking new levels to explore (*Pow*. Medic!) Now if you'll excuse
me, I must return to the Cult of the Carmack. 

-- Ping Boy

[PEN-L:11383] Re: Re: "How US Trained Butchers of Timor"

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Mon, 20 Sep 1999, Brad De Long wrote:

> landlords. In Asia these days this argument easily turns into an 
> argument against democracy. And for this reason I have always feared 
> it: the argument that technocracy needs to be *completely* insulated 
> from politics has seemed to me to be a leftover from the days of 
> Lenin and Bismarck, and to push the debate in the wrong 
> direction--the question is not whether, but how institutions of 
> economic regulation and policy making should be accountable to 
> voters...

Which is, in itself, an outrageously Marxist position, right? After all,
the whole point of neoliberalism is to convince people that markets don't
need controls (only bailouts for wealthy plungers). Once you acknowledge
that markets ought to have some sort of democratic supervision, you're on
the road to world revolution.

I'm still amazed that the Central European developmental states get almost
no press at all. Of course, now that they're inheriting the mantle of
Empire from the USA, maybe this'll change. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:9564] Re: Re: Re: My Ideologies

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Doug Henwood wrote:

> tried to smother it in its crib? Who knows what would have happened 
> elsewhere in Latin America & the Caribbean if the Cubans had been 
> allowed to go their way? What would have happened in Nicaragua if 
> Reagan hadn't unleashed the contras? What would have happened in the 
> USSR had the "West" not been hostile for 75 years? What would 
> have.?

They'd become rich, successful semi-peripheries, just like Spain,
Portugal, Ireland, and the Visegrad countries, and a lucky few -- like
Finland and Italy -- would have joined the core. Eurocapitalism has its
faults, but carpet-bombing its main export markets is not among them.

But pay me no mind, I'm just another reedy ideological flack for Mephisto
Mitteleuropa Holdings Gmbh. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:9085] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hanns Eisler

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Peter Dorman wrote:

> well known for it.  But viewing the strings as the proletarians of the
> ensemble is just strange.  The violin, after all, was seen as the most
> expressive of all instruments with the longest history of virtuoso
> performance.  

Eh? Class identity isn't necessarily tied to a specific instrument, it's
the thematic material which determines the thing. The violin can represent
the subject, but it can also be massed together to form this thunderous
roar of collective affirmation or negation. My point is that the
development of the musical material is itself historical: e.g. where the
equilibriating horns in Mozart's Emperor Symphony, for example, are
distinct and separate from the strings, Beethoven combines them together,
creating unheard-of tone-complexes which shimmer with the might and power
of the Napoleonic levee en masse. By Wagner's era, of course, the musical
organization takes a more ominous cast, and the subtleties of Beethoven's
themes get lost amidst ever more arrogant, brazenly imperialistic
sound-palettes, which dispose over their musical material like the Iron
Chancellor over the Prussian burueacracy. Adorno's point would be that you
need to keep both levels in mind, the social and the musical, before we
can say we're really saying anything about the work of art (possibly in
the same way that, say, the economics discussed on this list needs the
spur of the social and political, in order to say anything significant;
the reverse is also true, of course).

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:9084] Re: Kant on Pain & Moral Worth

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> *Pain* is the one feeling that confirms morality for Kant; other feelings,
> especially pleasures, negate it. 

Though Kant also has a subterranean utopian side, e.g. the theme of
Glueckseligkeit (bliss) in Critique of Practical Reason, which keeps
sneaking back in (kind of like the servants in Shakespeare's plays) no
matter how many times he tries to write it out. Still, one shouldn't
forget that the substance of Kant's argument -- that Reason ought to be
reasonable, that it ought to be prepared to defend its logic before a
collective jury -- contains a powerfully progressive element, i.e. the
notion of equality before the law, that we're all potential lawmakers and
not merely obedient subjects.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:9067] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Hanns Eisler

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 9 Jul 1999, Peter Dorman wrote:

> open-ended science of musical development.  He takes his themes apart,
> works with just a few notes ("cells") or just the rhythm and dazzles the
> listener with the complexity he is able to achieve.  The formalistic
> impulse that had always been present in European music was released from
> its conventions and permitted to flourish according to its own logic. 
> This aspect of Beethoven went into abeyance after his death, but was
> resurrected by the great formalists of the 20th century -- Schoenberg,
> Hindemith, Bartok, etc.  

But you're assuming that our sense of hearing is a historical invariant,
i.e. stays the same, whereas it's the composers who change their
techniques and styles. This isn't so: Jameson's point (he's really just
quoting Adorno) is that music (the formal aesthetics of sound) is
historical through and through, that our very capacity to hear is
historical. What kind of complexity did Beethoven create, precisely? A
complexity based on motivic composition: you have a basic theme, it gets
turned upside down, rightside up, etc. Put bluntly, Beethoven's themes are
the functional equivalent of the national anthem: they organize their
material into a musical marketplace, with clearly-defined classes and
castes (peasant rhythms for the agrarian producers, the violins for the
bourgeoisie, the trumpets for the nobilitarian armies, etc.). After
Beethoven's era, you simply could not do this anymore: industrial
capitalism began to level societies down into the owners of capital and
the industrial workingclass -- and so for the 2nd Viennese school, each
instrumental voice would become the equivalent, thanks to atonality, of
every other one. The autonomous tone-row becomes the fundamental unit of
musical time, rather than the cadence. The gainer in this was, of course,
an increase in orchestration, or the sheer ability to produce a wider and
wider array of sounds. Nowadays this dialectic has continued in the form
of studio music, or what's better known as hip hop -- essentially a
multinational art form, capable of accessing sonic materials undreamt-of
by the 19th century. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:7995] Re: Japan and the Global economy.

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Henry C.K. Liu wrote:

> job insecurity prevents spending in favor of savings.  Worse, Japan is
> falling victim to capital spending recession. No one is expecting the
> latest round of fiscal stimulus to revive sustainable growth in Japan.

Well, the OECD says Japanese investment levels are still running at 27% of
GDP, way above comparable US and even EU levels, so the keiretsu are
obviously still banking on growth. My own feeling is that superlow
interest rates, plus massive public spending, plus bank bailouts, plus the
refinancing of Asia will eventually bestir the slumbering Godzilla of
Japanese consumer demand (good news for China, certainly). 

> The weak global economy is depressing EU exports and their economies,
> which are entering a phase of deflation despite the last two years' G7
> coordinated interest rate cuts.

Except that Germany does appear to be responding nicely to the ECB's rate
cut; growth and domestic demand were above expectations in the first
quarter, thanks also in part to the installation of Soc Dem governments,
which have stopped the trend towards Maastricht monetarism and are now
slouching towards Eurosocialism. Green and Left parties seem to have
done well in the European Parliament elections, a good sign. Also, the
relative weakness of the euro has given the EU a huge boost vis-a-vis the
US (the EU's trade surplus with the US collectively approaches that of
Japan). 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:7739] Re: Sado-imperialism

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 4 Jun 1999, Tom Walker wrote:

> >The Guardian, London Tuesday June 1, 1999 
> >The penthouse office of Romero's Ion Storm is an astonishing place, like
> >something out of a Jetsons cartoon with walkways suspended above a maze of
> >stainless steel cubicles, wall lighting embedded in marble sconces, glass
> >cases filled with models of one-eyed monsters, the whole enterprise wrapped
> >in clouds and sky. 

For those who don't know the skinny here, it's important to note that John
Romero, though one of the great designers of 3D games in the early
Nineties, has been kinda going off the deep end as of late. Ion Storm has
been just an unprecedented disaster, chewing up programmers, designers,
careers and funding at an unbelievable pace. "Daikatana" was supposed to
be done literally years ago (Quake 2 took 18 months, I think) and has
staggered from crisis to crisis like some mortally wounded brontosaurus:
too big to die, too dysfunctional to succeed, but too stupid to quit, as
one observer put it. There are websites literally devoted to chronicling
Ion Storm's latest management crisis, it's one of the longest-running and
most colorful soap operas in one of the most colorful industries around.
Great fun to watch, but just bear in mind that the software in question is
bubbleware, Romero is living off his Doom-rents, and the real action is in
Black Mesa Labs (Half-Life) and John Carmack's upcoming Quake 3, which
from all accounts will be mind-blowing.

-- Dennis 

[PEN-L:5523] Re: Re: Re: Re: Wall St running out of steam?

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 20 Apr 1999, Rob Schaap wrote:

> I see Wall St is another 2.6% up on the morning alone.  That's about 17% so
> far this year, right?  And on its way to gaining a full thousand in about a
> month.  Either we're talking tulips, or we're talking something brand new.  

We're talking the Virtual Tulip, a photophase biotech aromatic dispenser
with adjustable optic constants. It does give new meaning to the term
"Say it with flowers". Look at it this way: since just 5% of the
households in the USA own 95% of all the stock held by individuals, the
Big Burst will hammer the truly deserving.

At least, that's what I told my class today. Let's hear it for the young
and the stockless!

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:5308] Re: CITY ON FIRE: HONG KONG CINEMA

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 14 Apr 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> Here's a book for Dennis Redmond. Will the Asian economic crisis spell the
> end of Hong Kong cinema and the beginning of brain drains? Yoshie

My impression is that the film industry is turning into the video biz, is
all. And then there's Wong Kar-wai, proof that some angels fall into
Heaven and not Hell. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:5162] Re: heroic bombers?

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Mon, 12 Apr 1999, Michael Perelman wrote:

> Or is bombing just an extension of video games?  I understand the video
> games are at the core of Marine recruiting today.

This is unlikely. Videogames may be superficially violent, but they're not
at all like modern combat. From personal experience, Quake and Halflife
are basically games of dodgeball, where you have to tag the opponent
before the opponent tags you, combined with lots of pyrotechnics.
You'll find more aggression on an NBA court than on the average Quake
server.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:5161] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: random thoughts on the slaughter

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Mon, 12 Apr 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> It doesn't seem to do so, in the post-socialist Eastern Europe. (In fact,
> just the opposite.) The Balkan civil wars illustrate why capitalism is not
> at all 'progressive' there.

Then what about the Visegrad countries, with their still-extensive welfare
states, civil rights protections, and fairly high trade union density? My
point is, we've got to somehow grasp all these things in a larger context:
Visegrad is where Eurocapital is seeing decent returns, so obviously it'll
be rewarded with loan writeoffs and fresh credit, while the Balkans is
obviously being consigned to the Europeriphery, along with Russia.
Thinking this stuff through is crucial for any long-term Left strategy in
the East, not to mention the project of a Euroleft. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:5126] Re: Re: Re: random thoughts on the slaughter

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> Wrong reasons: removing any existing or potential obstacles for capitalism
> all over the world.

But capitalism civilizes, right? It's too simple to abstract global
accumulation into a simple case of butchery. I myself am troubled by the
fact that when a few thousand white Europeans get slaughtered, suddenly
it's a world-historic crisis. Millions of Third Worlders routinely die
from IMF structural adjustment policies, as we know, but even we radicals
don't react in the same way, now do we? Somehow the barbarism is rooted
much, much deeper than NATO airstrikes or Serbian counter-insurgency
campaigns. The Left has somehow got to address these deeper issues on a
meaningful level, or we'll always be attacking tiny pieces of a system
which just keeps on growing and growing all around us.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:5125] Re: RE: Re: NATO & Milosevich: Lovers' Quarrel?

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, Max Sawicky wrote:

> So until I hear a better explanation, the simple one of suppressing
> nationalism that might by example destabilize Europe, but forestalling
> massacres that diminish the political credibility of NATO and the EU (or
> U.S. imperialism, if you like) explains almost everything that has happened.

Hmm, that's pretty much what I'm thinking. The calculus on this would go,
better 500,000 civilian refugees for a few years than 50,000 civil war
dead forever. One could argue that such a calculus is itself a
piece of barbarism, which is true enough, but I'd want to ask the Kosovar
refugees themselves as to what they think should be done, before jumping
to conclusions.

I find it fascinating that this entire Kosovariad has become a kind
of psychological cathexis, as it were, for Cold War ideologies which have
no place in the world of the EU-East Asian hegemony. Raging
denunciations of US imperialism -- as if we weren't 1.8 trillion euros in
debt to the new metropoles -- show up right next to equally raging
denunciations of the Balkan gangsteriat -- as if Milo wasn't the epitome
of the nomenklatura-turned-comprador bourgeoisie. Behind it all lurks the
familiar refrain of Russia-will-turn-its-nukes-on-us. Somehow, it's
easier for us to imagine a world still governed by Cold War verities than
accepting the fact that the EU and East Asia are divvying up the
world-system with the help of their American mercs. It must be galling for
us Americans, even us radical social critics, to contemplate giving up
those unconscious Imperial privileges...

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:4846] Re: Re: Why the US and Nato are in Yugoslavia, part two

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Mon, 5 Apr 1999, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Of course, they'll have to rebuild bombed-out refineries, power plants,
> factories, railroads So the World Bank and the European Bank for
> Reconstruction and Development can make high-minded noises about
> war-recovery "aid," lend the devastated countries lots of money, 

Plus the European Investment Bank (www.eib.org). They already have a bunch
of tentacles -- er, investments -- in Visegrad. Today Prague, tomorrow
Belgrade!

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:4462] Re: Re: Mad Dow Disease

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 21 Mar 1999, Rob Schaap wrote:

> And how is Japan's billion-dollar pump-prime beginning to look to you lot?

Well, check out this recent article in Semiconductor News, by Anthony
Cataldo , dated
March 11, 1999:

--

"Intel has made investment proposals to several DRAM suppliers in Japan, 
including Toshiba, NEC and Mitsubishi. Industry sources here refer to the
investment pool as the Intel Monetary Fund. And just as the International
Monetary Fund lends money to recession-plagued countries that follow a
strict set of guidelines, Intel is promising a windfall to
those companies in Japan that are willing to play by its rules. Indeed,
concern about how far Intel may seek to stretch its reach across the
Pacific could be behind the lack of agreements with Japanese companies
thus far, observers said. 
   
"Although Mitsubishi Electric was approached by Intel
with regard to possible financing measures for production-related
investments, we declined [because we] are able to achieve our current
production plan with our present capital-investment levels. No decisions
have been made regarding the possibility of entering such arrangements in
the future," Koichi Nagasawa, general manager of Mitsubishi Electric's
Semiconductor Group, said in a prepared statement. 

"It can be quite dangerous for a company like Toshiba
or NEC to allow Intel to be a shareholder," said Rick Oyama, an analyst
with ABN Ambro [sic] Securities. "They need the money, but they don't want
to give political power to a big U.S. company like Intel." 

---

Like most press releases, you have to read between the lines carefully.
First of all, the US is *not* a threat to the Japanese in DRAMs, the
Koreans are. Second, a big Eurobank, ABN Amro (Dutch), gets quoted as
saying this is just fine with them. The Nippomultis know that the EU banks
are loaning all kinds of money to SE Asia, including their competitors,but
figure they can cooperate with them easier, thanks to their keiretsu
structure, than dealing with the rapacious Americans. 
Finally, note the astonishing eloquence of that single line: 
"we are able to achieve our current production plan with our present
capital-investment levels". Mitsubishi Electric can call upon the
resources of BTM's $700 billion balance-sheet, of course, and the other
electromultis are similarly well-protected. My conclusion is that the
Japanese recession has bottomed out, that an upturn is on the way, and
that the Nippomultis are gearing up to get into the microprocessor market.
This would explain the recent surge in the Nikkei, too -- Japanese capital
is regaining its confidence.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:4453] Re: Becker Letter to President Clinton

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 19 Mar 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Check out the article in the latest Economist on Germany
> (www.economist.com). Here's the conclusion:
> Above all, Mr Schröder must find the determination to mend a broken
> economy. Germany has become the sick man of Europe: growth
> is slowing, exports, the traditional motor of the economy, have
> dipped. Unemployment remains high (10.5%) and Mr Schröder’s “alliance for
> jobs”, embracin government, unions and employers, is unlikely to help
> much, not least because businesses remain suspicious of centralised plans
> for creating work. 

Ha, ha, ha! I love it when the Economist tries to think. When the US
stagnates for a quarter, it's a "growth pause"; when Germany stagnates for
a quarter, it's a terminal illness. Total external trade is only 10% of
the EU economy; Germany's biggest problem is lack of internal EU
demand, nothing more. But interest rates are 3% and heading lower still,
meaning a refinancing boom in Spain, Italy and Scandinavia (as well as
Eastern Europe, where the EIB is propping up demand via low-interest
loans). Meanwhile that mighty British economy is... sinking, I believe. 

Maybe they're just mad because BMW owns Rover or something. A bad case of
euro-envy.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:4437] Re: Becker Letter to President Clinton

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 18 Mar 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> The Euro has been in a funk because the European economies can't compete
> with America's.

What's the evidence for this? Sure, if the EU borrowed $400 billion a year
from other countries, it could grow 4% a year, like the be-bubbled US,
instead of 3% a year. But per capita growth in the EU has been faster than
US per capita growth over the Nineties (shocking, but true), and this, in
an environment of fairly high interest rates, which has held back
growth in Italy and Spain. 

If you're talking the Dow Jones vs. the Dax, well then that's another
story entirely.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:4260] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Slovakia and the Czech Republic

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:

> Czech Republic, $7,550
> Slovak Republic, $ 6,290
> Hungary, $ 6,050
> Russia, $ 5,050
> Latvia, $ 5,010
> Poland, $ 5,000
> Ukraine, $ 4,450
> Bulgaria, $ 4,100.

Suspiciously high numbers, those. The OECD says that the 1997 per
capita figures, based on then-current exchange rates, gave you a Czech
Republic at $5050, Hungary at $4461, and Poland at $3509 (quoted from
www.oecd.org/std/gdpperca.htm). Since then, their currencies have swooned
a bit, of course.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:4241] Re: Re: Re: Slovakia and the Czech Republic

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Mon, 8 Mar 1999, J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:

>  According to my handy dandy 1997 CIA World Factbook, the PPP per capita
> incomes in 1996 of the leading transition economies (in per capita income
> terms were as follows: Slovenia, $12,300, Czech Republic, $11,100, Slovakia,
> $8,000, Hungary, $7,500, Poland, $6,400, and Estonia, $5,560.

Yes, these are the PPP figures, which are notorious for making the poor
seem richer and the rich less rich than hard currency values per se. Even
if the Czech Rep. is in a recession, they're still at least twice as rich
as the other Central European countries. And of course Slovenia remains a
shining model of the industrial policies the Visegrad countries ought
to be implementing.

> CR.  Indeed, it may well be that the current difficulties there will move it
> more in a social democratic direction.  

There's an interesting article in a book called "Paying the Price: The
Wage Crisis in Central and Eastern Europe", a collection of in-depth
articles about Eastern Europe in the Nineties put out by the folks at the 
ILO, by Jiri Rusnok and Martin Fassman, called "The True Effects of Wage
Regulations in the Czech Republic" (pg. 140-181). It seems union density
is fairly high (around 30%) and that collective bargaining institutions
mostly modeled after Germany are beginning to take off, despite the
Gov't's superficial monetarist mania. Real wages crashed hard in 1991-93,
but began to recover thereafter. Obviously, any boom will have to be
supported by the EU externally *and* Keynesian policies internally.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:4233] Re: Slovakia and the Czech Republic

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 7 Mar 1999, Peter Dorman wrote:

> The Czech Republic, on the other hand, is a disaster zone. 
> Pseudo-privatization has given the cronyklatura a corrupt grip on
> enterprises, few of which have even begun to transform themselves. 

Well... not quite. The Czech Republic also had one of the lowest
unemployment rates in the former COMECON zone for awhile, is extremely
rich compared to Poland and Slovakia (per cap GDP of maybe $6000, compared
to $2000-3000 elsewhere), and has a fair amount of nascent social
democracy bubbling about it -- the unions are still fairly strong there.
You have all the ingredients for a Finnish-style success story, the main
problem is the EU has been dragging its feet on funding its Eastern
peripheries.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3926] Why Read Butler?

[Dennis R Redmond]

Barkley -- I know you asked for the lowdown on Butler, I can't speak on
her newest stuff, not having access to the texts (the library here has
ordered them), but here're some brief pointers:

"Gender Trouble" (1990) Does the tour through Beauvoir and structuralism
through psychoanalysis and Foucault, Kristeva and Wittig; best part is pp.
128-141, where she talks about bodily inscriptions being subverted by the
performative. She's starting to ask the right questions here, but doesn't
get very far.

"Bodies That Matter" (1993) Goes through post-structuralism in some
detail, and is pretty critical of the thing; check out pp. 124-140, which
deal with "Paris is Burning", an interesting documentary on gay African
American streetgangs and their fight for their own cultural identity. The
conclusion, pp. 223-242 is also intriguing, she starts to theorize the
whole "queer theory" movement.

It's all interesting stuff, at least to me (but then, I'm into the
literary thing). She's asking some important, powerful questions about
our assumptions about gender, bodies, history etc. Her main problem is
that she never really gets into the problem of class identity; but she
*does* acknowledge the thing, especially in her analysis of "Paris" and
her insistence that the documentary is indeed limited by the class
perspective of the filmmaker (who is a white, educated lesbian
professional, like Butler herself). 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3874] Braindead In Britannia

[Dennis R Redmond]

So there I was, contemplating the savagely-deindustrialized wasteland of
the Pax Post-Britannia, when a line in the Economist's February country
survey of Germany caught my eye. Amidst the usual loathesome bleatings 
about how the second-richest industrial country in the world (behind
Japan) just can't afford its poor people anymore, the article said: "It
all [the pension funds scare, the European equivalent of our own
Rightwing's assault on Social Security] sounds pretty disastrous... And
yet, and yet. This is Germany, and Germany is rich." (pg 9, Germany
survey)

Ye Gods -- could the Economist be finally *growing a brain*? But I scanned
further, and the breathless promise of cool britannia, where everything is
lower-case but not lower-class, evaporated faster than the words on
Blair's Teleprompter:

"And even Bavaria, which sees itself as the land of laptops and
Lederhosen, has yet to produce a Bill Gates." (pg 11, Germany survey)

That's because Dr. Klaus Tschira, doyen of SAP, the Godzilla of ERP
software, is in Walldorf, not Munich. Nah, it's the same old bunch of
idiots running Ukania into the ground as ever. Let's just hope Ireland,
Wales and Scotland secede completely before the wreckage really starts to
burn.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3822] Re: Sociological terrorism?

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 24 Feb 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> ...Bourdieu's prose reeks of intellectual pretentiousness and
> name-dropping. 

Gee, Lou, now you've cast Fred Jameson *and* Bourdieu from the Paradise of
of Approved Marxists down into the Hades of Evil Running Dog Intellectual
Pig Allies of the Bourgeoisie -- and all without reading a word of what
they wrote. But reading is just one of those bourgeois pleasures
serious revolutionaries have no time for, right?

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3644] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: [Fwd: BANK OF JAPAN PUSHES SHORT-TERMRATESNEAR ZERO]

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Henry C.K. Liu wrote:

> Hyperinflation will not help Japan. Krugman is wrong. Because both the 
> debtors and creditors in Japan are Japanese and they both use yens.  

The secret of Keynesianism is that you don't just print money, you use it
to *buy stuff*. That means changing the relations of production, which of
course scares hell out of our elites, which is why they hate Keynesianism,
even though they benefit from the thing (ah, the contradictions of
Capital). What Japan needs is a nice dose of inflation,
plus inflationary bailouts of its banking system and of its Southeast
Asian semi-peripheries -- economics-talk for soaking the Asian rich
and giving all those Malaysian electronics workers and Japanese retail
clerks a raise. Soak Mitsubishi, spend on the Mitsubishi-ariat!

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3614] Re: Re: Re: [Fwd: BANK OF JAPAN PUSHES SHORT-TERM RATESNEAR ZERO]

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 19 Feb 1999, Henry C.K. Liu wrote:

> Where is the party? Who is celebrating and celebrating what?  A lot of working
> people in America are finally going to lose their jobs and companies are going
> to go under.

The US owes Japan $1 trillion. Lessening the interest burden on that debt
is a Good Thing. More to the point, someone, somewhere in the world
economy is going to have to start printing money, and lots of it, or this
global recession is indeed going to turn into something too hideous to
contemplate. I personally owe $71,000 in student loans, so I'm praying for
global inflation, every day. Fire up those printing presses!

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3587] Re: [Fwd: BANK OF JAPAN PUSHES SHORT-TERM RATES NEAR ZERO]

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, michael perelman crossposted:

> > The Globe and Mail  Report on Business  February 18, 1999
> > BANK OF JAPAN PUSHES SHORT-TERM RATES NEAR ZERO
> > Bill Spindle, Jathon Sapsford
> > The Wall Street Journal, Tokyo
> >
> > The central bank's decision to push the interest rate it most
> > directly controls to 0.08 per cent from 0.15 per cent — and central
> > bank Governor Masaru Hayami's comments this week that even a
> > rate of zero would be acceptable — may be one of the first steps in
> > a policy shift toward more aggressively printing money to break a
> > deflationary spiral, according to analysts and financial industry
> > officials.

Hooray! It's time to party! Japan is going to fuel a massive reflation and
finally kick in the Long Boom of 2000-2025. Not that the East Asian
metropole had any other choice, of course; it was either that, or knuckle
under to the EU. If the EU has any brain cells, it'll return the favor 
by cutting its short rates 0.5% in the next couple of months, keeping the 
euro nice and low against the dollar and allowing the EU export machine
to rack up 90 billion EUR annual surpluses. All this will do unspeakable
things, of course, to the looming US trade deficit, but that's our
problem, not theirs, now isn't it?

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3410] Re: Psychoanalysis

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> It is not a great mystery why people act against their own material
> self-interest.

Oh yes it is. For one thing, the fact that this happens over and over
again totally negates one of the fundamental tenets of neoclassical
economics: that we're all just little commodity-traders, maximizing our
input-output schemas via rational means. Or, to be Adornic, you could say
that individual rationality, taken to its competitive limit, rebounds into
systemic irrationality. One of the most important tasks facing any
progressive economic vision is getting across the idea that the economic
field is not governed by a set of iron laws, it's a social construct which
can be changed by collective action (a la Max's email appeal for folks to
protest the increasingly hideous contours of the Clinton budget).

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3409] Re: Re: Re: Re: The Phallus

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 14 Feb 1999, Ken Hanly wrote:

> You say that the Phallus is the symbol of authority not the authority itself
> You then say that this is analogous to bank credit. But how is bank
> credit symbolic? Bank credit is a reality.

A *mediated* reality. It's a claim on some future profit or revenue,
somewhere. That's why debts can be bought and sold, like most anything
else; the identity of a given amount of debt isn't a use-value, like the
way gold is shiny and metallic, it's based on *other* identities (that of
the credit markets, stock markets, etc.). 

> And what is resisting identity? Or
> resisting Capital through resisting it? 

Not believing anything you see on CNN. It works for me.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3363] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Back to the land

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 14 Feb 1999, Rob Schaap wrote:

> How does this *polarise* our identities?  Doesn't it sorta *merge* 'em?

Yep. That's the scary part of it: capital isn't just this external thing,
it gets into our skulls. We're all part of The Beast.

> their identity?  Or is identity not about exclusion?  Or is liberation the
> process of universal identity-dissipation?  If so, late capitalism is doing
> it nicely, no?  No need for us to lift a finger then , I'da thought.

Naw, Capital is destroying the older, national identities, is all. But
it's also reconstructing/reproducing spanking new, globalized ones. Just
think of the politics of the euro, or the yenification of East Asia, or
the Microsoftization of virtually everything. 

> it?  If so, does phallus-dissipation constitute revolutionary practice?  

It can, at times; but it can also be a convenient cover for
restorationist, conservative agendas (i.e. the Rightwing attack on the
welfare state, which becomes this evil symbolic Phallus doing violence to
poor helpless welfare mothers etc., when in fact it's the market itself
which is doing the real violence). Neoliberalism and a certain
multinational corporate multiculturalism are good examples of this.
Critical theory has to be careful about hoisting its flag too quickly to
the dominant tendencies of the age.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3360] Re: Re: The Phallus

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 14 Feb 1999, Ken Hanly wrote:

> However, I would like to know how this (Butler type) analysis is of
> practical use.

It's quite simple: we all agree that late capitalism sucks, that the
System is oppressive and evil, and that ordinary folks are being screwed.
So why don't those people rebel? Why don't we have three, four, ten
different Left parties out there canvassing for change? How does Capital
rule and why does it rule so damn effectively? The phallus is the symbol
of authority, not the authority itself; it's like bank credit, a claim on
some future exchange-value not yet in existence. As Marxists we can assume
*nothing* about identity -- the people will *not necessarily* rise in the
streets once they know The Truth, or hear a few radical comments, or read
a pamphlet. We have to work with identity, tussle with it, analyze it,
resist it (and resist Capital through it). 

> As I understand it, Lacan interprets Freud's concepts of psychic 
> "condensation" and "displacement" in terms of  linguisitic concepts of
> metaphor and metonymy. This provides a niche market for academics
> to get into the psychoanalytical business even though they are in literature or
> critical theory or communications theory. 

And how is political discourse itself *not* a niche market? That's why the
bourgeois parties do fundraising, hire flacks, and get their PR
salespeople on cable TV, right? Lacan is also talking about this shift
away from direct power-relations and towards more mediated ones -- he
talks a lot about the Symbolic and the Real, which are deeply politicized
things (just ask Time-Warner and Disney). A Left politics worthy of the
name can't avoid these contradictions, it must think them through.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3345] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Back to the land

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 14 Feb 1999, Rob Schaap wrote:

> I don't know what the phallus is, but I know it's not supposed to be
> reducible to the penis.  So what is it?  How do we deploy the concept?  Is
> it important for lesbianism (or feminism-in-general?) to incorporate into
> its identity (as Ange implies above), is it a phobic phenomenon we use in
> critique (as I thought it used to be), is it neither, or is it both?

It's the symbolic or mass-cultural ideology of state-monopoly authority,
basically. Just as ownership and control become sundered in late
capitalism, via stock markets and hired managers, so too does the internal
identity of the subject polarize into owners (what Freud called the ego)
and the owned (Freud's Id). This is important, because it gives us a
powerful set of tools to explain why it is that the masses get bamboozled
so effectively by elites -- the deception of, say, the JFK ideology is
also and everywhere a self-deception (the technocracy of Camelot as
local exemplar of the Pax Americana). Identity becomes one the key places
where political and economic battles are fought. You could think of the
phallus as the micropolitical-subjective version of the objective
role of consumer credit in late capitalism: you get to access identities
and subjectivities which you wouldn't ordinarily be able to afford (via
the culture-industry, identity politics, etc.). Of course, then the bill
comes due...

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3199] Re: Peasant unemployment

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 10 Feb 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> This happened all the time in Cuba, except they didn' t have unemployment
> like in Jamaica or the Dominican Republic. 

Incidentally, I was just in Jamaica thanks to a family reunion. The
poverty there is something ferocious to behold -- the thing is, all the
violence is internalized. I saw two fights break out between street
vendors, arguing over turf while trying to sell knickknacks to a bunch of
us white First World tourists, and suddenly, all of Bob Marley's songs
just made so much sense: the system rules because it gets us all to fight
one another. Jah Love is the mightiest weapon against the powers of
Babylon -- and isn't that what most ordinary Cubans feel towards Fidel,
and why the Cuban Revolution keeps on keeping on?

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:3198] Re: Nicaragua

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 10 Feb 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> The simple reality was that the Sandinistas could not find a solution to
> Nicaragua's economic problems within Nicaragua itself. Facing a US trade
> embargo, it grew to depend heavily on outside assistance. The story of
> outside assistance was not one to bolster revolutionary morale. From July
> 1979 through December 1987, the nation received almost $6 billion in
> credits and outright donations. The US pressured other Western nations to
> cut back aid, but Soviet aid increased steadily from 1979 to 1987 until it
> amounted to $3.3 billion. Soviet aid was at a high point in 1985 when it
> gave Nicaragua $1 billion in assistance, but it dropped by 60% from 1985 to
> 1986, and declined further in 1987. 

Yes, this is absolutely true. Nicaragua's only hope amidst a vicious
world-system was to use its limited export earnings for a domestic
industrialization drive, a la Hong Kong or South Korea; but of course you
can't do this when your biggest market is mining your harbors and blowing
up rural hospitals and schools. The Pax Americana's crimes in Central
America are mind-boggling: 70,000 murdered by US-trained death squads in
El Salvador, hundreds of thousands exterminated in Guatemala with US
connivance, the rape of Panama, the strangulation of Nicaragua, the
criminal blockade of Cuba, and of course a brutish neoliberalism pretty
much everywhere. Compare that record to the EU's nascent reign in Eastern
Europe, where the EIB has written off part of their debt and is beginning
to finance an economic recovery.

Instead of just mourning the past, we should also be fighting like hell
for the future: the USA owes Central America war reparations, just like
the Axis powers after WW II. Today Pinochet, tomorrow the entire US
national security state!

-- Dennis 

[PEN-L:3143] Report from Black Mesa Labs

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 9 Feb 1999, Max Sawicky wrote:

> Actually this pales next to the comprehensive discussion
> of Lesbian phalluses on Henwood's 'Libidinous-Business
> Observer' list.

That ain't the half of it. Wild whipping sessions, the crossing of 
the intergalactic divide from Starcluster Spandex to Planet Latex, and
other tales too ticklish to tell on this sober venue. Which explains why 
the Right hates the Left so much -- they have the funds, and we have the
fun. Of course, things got a little out of hand when they brought in the
cactus for the acupunture intermission. But I thought the videowall
running Gamespy sessions of Halflife was a nice touch.

-- The Saguaro Kid

[PEN-L:2954] Re: Re: long wave recovery

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Tom Walker wrote:

> of surplus value in order to maintain political hegemony. Think of the
> stop/go monetary/fiscal policies in which "overheating" of the economy
> remains a constant worry. In terms of "this depression", we're not out of
> the woods yet. And, like the last episode, the direction that capital is
> marching toward is war.

But is this really true? What on earth would Japan and the EU have to gain
from confronting the US with military means? Sure, the US keeps bombing
the hell out of 3rd World nations, which is horrendous and criminal, but
how do you whip the masses up for WW II-style slaughters in the age of
easy global credit, Sony Vaios and a social democratic Europe?

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2951] Re: Re: Bounced from Anwar Shaikh

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 5 Feb 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> If Great Britain had resisted the Monroe
> Doctrine, would there have been a "long wave" or would the US economy have
> stagnated? Perhaps the long waves are nothing but a barometer of the
> imperialist lurches forward of the Yankee republic.

I always thought of long-wave theory as the diachronic or long-term
version of the whole Marxian mode-of-production debate; it needs
the corrective of short-term analyses, focused on specific
periods, for the thing to say anything meaningful. Otherwise, long-wave
theory ends up being a recycled "great nations" theory, about how specific
countries rise to hegemony, or stumble to ignominious defeat. I'm not sure
if Shaikh is correct, though, about dating the turning of the crisis in
the early Eighties -- it's true that in the mid-Eighties everything
changed, the US became a major debtor and East Asia and the EU became
major creditors. My own suspicion is that the mid-Nineties marks the real
turnaround, when the EU and Japan began pumping gargantuan amounts of
liquidity into the system via superlow interest rates and bailouts of
their semiperipheries (but then, I haven't done the math, so maybe Anwar
is right after all).

My own feeling is that we are indeed due for a long boom, but that the
new metropoles will have to finance the thing, just like the US
financed the 1945-75 boom. And that means politics will play a big
role here -- Japan in particular is going to have to play catch-up to the
EU, which is way ahead of East Asia in terms of long-term strategy and
political organization. If they twiddle their thumbs for much longer, the
EU is going to own them, but from Sakakibara's remarks it sounds like
they're finally beginning to realize this and take counter-measures.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2813] Re: virtuous circles

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, Doug Henwood wrote:

> So today's WSJ article on Keynes says:
> 
> The [IMF] study concluded that the 14 cases where governments had been
> the most draconian -- notably Denmark and Ireland in the mid-1980s --
> resulted in the fastest growth. 

Ho ho ho. The IMF has outdone itself: this is Bubble-thought at its
finest! Ireland was a ravaged neocolony in the early Eighties; the boom
was a result of extensive EC subsidies (amounting to 1-2% of GDP in the
mid-Eighties, and steadily rising to 5% of GDP today), which funded
infrastructure, education, etc. As a result, Ireland has pulled very close
to the UK in per capita income terms. Denmark piggybacked onto what we
might call "OPK" (Other People's Keynesianisms), namely the vast Central
European credit expansion of the mid-Eighties. Denmark also avoided huge
budget deficits in the early Nineties because it never deregulated its
economy the way the Swedes and Norwegians did, nor suffered from
collapsing Soviet markets, the way Finland did. 

But expecting the truth from the IMF, that vicious gang of monetarist
vampires criminally responsible for so much of the economic and social
carnage afflicting Africa, Latin America, and now much of Southeast Asia, 
is a stretch, now isn't it.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2601] Re: Re: Re: 1998 Bad Writing Contest

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sat, 23 Jan 1999, William S. Lear wrote:

> OK, so what is an example of "cultural models of reasoning"?

Introspection; nostalgia; childhood memories; angst; affection; love, etc.
All these things are ways of thinking, and not just of feeling. But they
can't be subordinated to mechanical Laws of Nature. 

> She assumes that it (subjection) exists within the subject itself:
> power --- as subjection --- is "what we harbor and preserve in the
> beings that we are".  At the same time she claims that it exists
> outside the subject (power is "external to oneself" and "what we
> oppose").  Butler's paradox arises when she simply assumes an identity
> between these two forms; thus the "paradox" that subjection depends
> upon subjection. 

The paradox is that of our own social reality, where people without power
labor for those who do, and only the ones freed from labor have the free
time, as a rule, to develop their subjectivities via education, art
collections, etc. Butler is trying to trace out the dialectic or
transmutation between these two things; she doesn't always succeed, but
she does come surprisingly close at times.

> Ok, a very good start.  1) What is "performativity"?  2) what does
> "linked to" mean?  Is this a causal relationship or mere coincidence?

Performativity is a kind of politics in its own right. E.g. media
activism, which involves not just getting stories on the air, but the
politics of the performative -- the editorial process, who gets to be a
pundit and who not, access to the news, the absorption of newspapers by
gigantic media conglomerates, etc.

> Which group of idiots assumes "subjects are immutable"?  Why does
> anybody pay any attention to them? 

Most economists do, with their neoclassical models and schemes of
rationality. And the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and every major
multinational have vast stacks of files on their personnel, detailing
their reliability, abilities, scope for advancement, etc. All that implies
plannability and a fixation of the subject within certain
(profitable/functional) bounds. If all that isn't a bid for an immutable
subject, then I'm a quark-sniffing Qualanthus from Arcturus.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2511] Re: Re: Re: 1998 Bad Writing Contest

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sat, 23 Jan 1999, William S. Lear wrote:

> Why is it I can pick up books on quantum physics and understand them?

Because some folks can learn some things easier than others. I'm
hopeless, myself, at physics; all those vectors and abstractions make my
brain shut down. Others are terrific at social psychology, or
anthropology, or whatever. Why are we supposed to be all alike? I watched
a Richard Feynman lecture on tape, and the man was obviously stunningly
brilliant, but I still can't tell a boson from a quark. 

> I don't get this from Butler, or any of her supporters, despite
> repeated requests.  The books on quantum mechanics also haven't got
> glaring problems with their reasoning, as does Butler's book.

Quantum mechanics operates with mathematical and physical models of
reasoning. Works of theory operate with cultural models of reasoning.
They are not identical. Listening to a concert is not like decoding a
C++ program or balancing a checkbook etc. If you're baffled by specific
texts, quote a specific passage and we can talk about that.

Butler's main points are that (1) performativity is a social, not a
natural, category, that (2) the way we dress, act, relate to others is
always linked to a certain politics, and that (3) most accounts of The Way
Things Work totally forget this and assume that subjects are immutable,
statuesque abstractions which are stable and permanent over time. She's on
to something, for sure.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2510] Re: re Dennis re Butler

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sat, 23 Jan 1999, valis wrote:

> OK, Dennis, this is at least the second time you've drawn Ms Butler as
> an epistemological Magellan not yet arrived back to accolades in Spain,
> so why not enlighten us further by concretely parsing the thicket?

No, no, I'm no font of received wisdom. Read Butler and then ask the rest
of us questions. Everyone has to think for themselves. I will say, though,
that Butler is a gender-inflected radical, not a conquistador/freebooter.
Columbus was lost, right?

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2498] Re: Re: Re: 1998 Bad Writing Contest

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, William S. Lear wrote:

> where it might be dense.  Michael Perelman wrote an entire book on
> Marx and I can't think of prose more lucid and intelligent.  Where are
> these people for Butler?  Will they only come along 150 years later?
> Is there no one capable today of expressing what she says in plain
> English?  

Universal communicability is not, as Adorno put it, a criterion of
truth; multinational capitalism is without question the most complicated,
thorniest, damnably confusing society the human race has ever experienced.
We don't expect the natural scientists to be instantly understandeable, do
we? So why should social scientists and intellectuals be any different? Or
is it just that we've all been conditioned by the system to denigrate any
attempt at thinking for ourselves -- men in white suits building bombs,
that's fine, but how dare heretics stop and think about the
military-industrial complex, etc. It may seem like jargon, but it's
really specialization: Butler is talking about some extremely complicated
ideas involving identity, the capitalist subject, the consumer culture,
gender ideologies etc. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2476] Re: Re: Judith Butler, etc.

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> The main thing I got out of Epstein's remarks is that graduate students
> imbued with the postmodernist zeitgeist are more interested in fighting
> with other graduate students than with institutionalized racism and sexism.

Ever talked to any real grad students, Lou? All the grad students I know
are (1) deeply in debt, (2) deeply overworked, (3) know the job market
sucks but bust their ass anyway for what they love to do. The pressure of
the marketplace is not some ideological fixation; the system really does
grind you down in the most personal, direct kind of way. Let's not blame
the temp workers of academe for the (innumerable) sins of the tenured.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2475] Re: Re: Judith Butler, etc.

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Dennis Redmond:
> > If Butler
> >claimed to speak for the people on the Rez, then you could slam her for
> >yakking away. But she's not. 
> 
> Dennis, but she does so implicitly. 

Ah. You are, then, blessed with powers of clairvoyance? Can you tell us
what Alan Greenspan is thinking? Or is there just this thick grey
miasmatic fog of dourness around the man, like one of E.E. Doc Smith's
thought-screens?

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2375] Re: Re: Re: Judith Butler, etc.

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, James Michael Craven wrote:

> I wonder how many working class women or women on Reservations could 
> relate to or understand the rhetoric in the example of Butler's 
> writings given in the Doublespeak award? I suspect few if any.

So what? Are all those scientists who use mathematical tools
noone else understands just wasting their time? Are people who read
foreign languages we can't read indulging in nonsense? If Butler
claimed to speak for the people on the Rez, then you could slam her for
yakking away. But she's not. Writers don't just write to be understood;
they write for the future readers who may someday understand what they
were trying to say. Adorno said somewhere that the only thoughts worth
thinking are those which do not fully understand themselves, i.e. do
something new and unexpected, which hasn't yet fully emerged into its
content, and is therefore open to history and dialectics. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2150] Re: Re: Re: Re: was 'discourse' now identity politics

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 13 Jan 1999, Louis Proyect wrote:

> I don't mean that she is for "identity". All I am saying is that she is an
> academic theorist who makes her living participating in sterile debates
> around such questions. I think you are misunderstanding the entire context
> of the term "self-determination". The question of "self" occupies a very
> small place in Marxist politics, which is my speciality. It is of major
> concern to bourgeois ideologists, who inherit this from Enlightenment
> philosophy. 

But Lou, academia nowadays is just another extension of the factory
system, and the whole question of the self and subjectivity is the
*essence* of Marxism. Identity, as Adorno said, is the ur-form of
ideology; it's the raw material which gets processed into culture,
art, politics, consciousness, and all that other good stuff. Radicals who
can't talk about subjectivity are like economists who can't talk about the
concept of capital, or culture theorists who don't want to acknowledge 
the contemporary culture industry. Butler at least raises some thorny,
vexing, complicated issues involving culture and identity, which any 
progressive movement worth its salt has to think through and
critique. There'd be no Marx without Hegel, right?

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2039] Re: Global Depression

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sat, 9 Jan 1999, Nathan Newman wrote:

> You can call this what you will, but there is a fundamental collapse of
> employment and production capacity around the world. 

Yes, but your list from the Economist includes only one First World
country, or rather, region: Hong Kong. Finland took a -10% walloping from
1991-93, if I recall aright, but that didn't signify a global Depression,
either, just another set of state bailouts of the system. When you look at
the extensive interest rate cuts, bank bailouts, loan renegotiations and
whatnot of 1998, it's hard to imagine that our ruling classes would ever
allow a 1929-style meltdown to happen (which doesn't preclude a gradual,
Japanese-style deflation of the American bubble, of course). They'd have
to raise interest rates and totally cut off the semiperipheries from fresh
credit, and not even the maniacs at the IMF are loony enough to peddle
anything like that.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:2028] Re: Re: profits

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, Nathan Newman wrote:

> But isn't looking at profits as a share of US GDP besides the point?  The
> real measure should be percentage of the global capitalist economy's GDP.
> That US corporate profits are holding even during a global depression
> seems to be a rather strong indicator of expanding profit margins.

Except that we're not in a global depression, at least not yet. Sure, Asia
is in the tank, but Japan is undergoing a steep recession, not an
Indonesian-style collapse, and the US and the EU are still growing, albeit
sluggishly. Of course, if Japan and the EU turned off the credit spigot to
our economy, the possibilities for mayhem are legion, but I can't see them
doing that just yet. They own too much stuff over here to want to do that,
right?

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:1510] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Enlightenment insight

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sat, 12 Dec 1998, Doug Henwood cross-posted:

> Duccio Trombadori: Probably the difference rests in the refusal or
> impossibility for the Frankfurt School to think of the "origin" of man in
> the historical-genealogical sense, rather than in "metaphysical" terms. It
> is the theme or the metaphor of the "death of man" that is in question.

Ho ho. If I had a nickel for every time someone said "The F-school is too
metaphysical/abstract/neo-Hegelian" I'd be richer than Bill Gates. Fact
is, they haven't read the shit, or didn't get what Adorno was saying about
the culture industry molding and dehistoricizing people. Adorno's stuff
overflows with historical-genealogical thinking, he's constantly relating
early liberal capitalism to late monopoly capitalism, brushing metaphysics
against the grain, etc.

> Michel Foucault: ...The second aspect that
> I mixed up and confused with the first is that in the course of their
> history, men had never ceased constructing themselves, that is, to shift
> continuously the level of their subjectivity, to constitute themselves in
> an infinite and multiple series of different subjectivities that would
> never reach an end and would never place us in the presence of something
> that would be "man." Man is an animal of experience, he is involved ad
> infinitum within a process that, by defining a field of objects, at the
> same time changes him, deforms him, transforms him and transfigures him as
> a subject. 

Yes, this is just the thing, Foucault is reinventing Sartrean
existentialism's notion of the infinity of human projects, of this
blooming, buzzing confusion of riches of subjectivity. Too bad Adorno beat
him to the punch, in his famous saying that people are always better than
their system. Foucault just isn't thinking through his own insight here:
if the potential for subjectivity out there is so vast, what prevents its
realization? Well, the subjects are hardly created equal, they're
antagonistic and fight for scarce resources. It's the basic foundation of
all capitalist ideology: because everyone supposedly has a chance to be
the next Bill Gates, capital's ideologues proclaim that all is well, let
the market forces rip, and excellence shall flourish. In reality this
dooms us all to McDonald's-world and crashing Win 95 servers. Put simply,
Foucault has a great sense of how individual subjects are controlled by
institutions, but he doesn't quite grasp that institutions (corporations!)
are themselves in an equally conflict with one another.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:1496] Re: Re: Re: Re: Enlightenment insight

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sat, 12 Dec 1998, Rob Schaap wrote:

> they can not be synonymous.  There is discourse that is not power and/or
> there is power that is not discourse.  Power, we are regularly told, is
> what constructs/legitimises discourse.  Obviously, power must be
> communicated.  Communication is what discourse is, no?  So discourse, I
> conclude, constructs/legitimises power.  Which means the subject is agentic
> in the construction of power relations!  Allow me to go another step, power
> does not 'mean' to me but that it relates to interests - INTERESTS is the
> category outside power that power needs if it is to mean.

Foucault already takes that step, though: it's the *institution* which is
the true subject in repressive societies. The prison-cell is the monad, as
it were, in the totally administered society. This is where all his stuff
about prisons comes in, he's very insistent that this power is a power
over real people: the power to discipline, punish, and ultimately to
produce subjects who enjoy (or at least don't rebel against) their
confinement. He doesn't lack a theory of class interests in that sense,
rather, it's just that he died before he could make the thing explicit,
i.e. read enough of the Frankfurt School to figure out that Adorno was
talking about the totally administered society back in the 1940s and start
talking, as Bourdieu does, about symbolic capital instead of capitalist
power. Foucault and Bourdieu would've been one hell of a tag team
in the Europe of the euro, but it was not to be, alas...

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:1442] Re: Re: Enlightenment insight

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Postmodernism is a philosophical current that emerged as a reaction to
> structuralism. Hence, it sometimes called poststructuralism. 

Mm, it's a bit more complicated than that. Postmodernism is/was primarily
about the *aesthetics* of global finance capitalism, in its intermediary
phase between rabid Thatcherism and mature neoliberalism;
post-structuralism is/was about social theories of global finance
capitalism. Thus all the talk about the *postmodern sublime* of
data-processing, cyberpunk, etc., as opposed to the post-struc stuff about
archeologies of power, desire, etc. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:1251] Clipping Hedges

[Dennis R Redmond]

The November issue of Euromoney has a fairly scathing (for Euromoney)
review of the sordid LTCM bailout. One article describes the genesis of 
the Fed intervention as follows: "Peter Fisher, executive vice-president
at the NY Fed, had heard enough in daily chats with bankers to know they
were all concerned about Long-Term Capital Management. He also sensed
there was too much rivalry between the main players for them to get round
a table and sort this out [LTCM's meltdown] by themselves. On Sunday
September 20 Fisher went to LTCM in Connecticut in Greenwich with
assistant treasury secretary Gary Gensler and two other NY Fed colleagues.
Having looked through LTCM's books, they were all staggered at the sheer
volume of trades." (pg 35) Bankers evidently must have amazing
conversational powers, to get a whole mission team from the Fed to
investigate the books *themselves*.

One question: at one point, columnist Michelle Celarier 
quotes House Rep. James Leach, chair of the House Banking and
Finance Committee, to the effect that "a third of hedge funds are highly
leveraged." (pg 39). Does anyone know if this is true, and how high that
leverage might be? Do we have any idea how horrible a bubble bust could
get?

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:1249] Re: New from Chossudovsky

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 4 Dec 1998, valis crossposted from Michel Chossudovsky:

> The formation of new "global alliances" between European and American
> capital has rapidly changed the balance of power in the World market. With
> the merger boom, British and German banking interests have (inter alia)
> joined hands with Wall Street leading to the formation of powerful
> financial giants.

What British banks? HSBC made its mint in Hong Kong, not London; the rest
of the UK banks are pretty small beer compared to the Continental giants
of France, Switzerland and Germany. The EU isn't joining forces with Wall
Street, so much as buying them out, one by one. Today Banker's Trust,
tomorrow Merrill Lynch... Wall Street can crow all it likes, 
but the credit which is financing the Bubble comes from Europe
and Japan. 

> Whereas the former Soviet Union has been defeated
> as a superpower, the onslaught of the Asian currency crisis has
> significantly undermined the economic dominion of Japan in the Asia-Pacific
> region.

Japan is mightier than ever, with unbelievable market share in
everything from robotics to autos to lithosteppers, and they're sitting on
$3 trillion in liquidity. Despite the Asian crisis, they're piling on
humongous trade surpluses and are magnanimously loaning the US enough
money to keep us purchasing Japanese exports. Sure, SE Asia has gotten
stomped, but they were never core economies to begin with, and are now
even more dependent on the technology and goodwill of Japanese creditors
than ever before. 

> In turn, the Euro-American banking conglomerates are shareholders in the
> World's largest industrial corporations (eg. Deutsche Bank has a sizeable
> stake in Daimler-Chrysler)

The EU has around $12 trillion in total assets; the US banking system,
around $4 trillion; EU banks have long-term holdings of industrial
enterprises, US banks have short-term holdings in equities or other
marvels of speculation.  

> Of crucial importance is the concurrent "democratisation of central banks."
> Under the present setup, creditors and speculators control money creation
> including the financing of State economic and social programmes, the
> payment of wages, etc. In other words, what is at stake is not only the
> cancellation of enormous public debts held by private financial
> institutions but also the "re-appropriation" by society of monetary policy,
> --ie. the democratic control by society of money creation and the process
> of financing economic and social development.

Yes, OK, this is fine as a moral position, but what does this mean in
practice? How do you cancel the public debt without rupturing the
entire economic system? Why not just issue a hell of a lot of more
debt, and then tax the daylights out of the rich?

-- Dennis  

[PEN-L:1118] Re: Re: Re: Re: union democracy

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Michael Eisenscher wrote:

> A transformational or empowerment model of unionism has to break with this
> service concept of unionism.  Stewards must perfect their skills as organizers,
> educators, and facilitators of actions conceived and executed by groups of
> workers around their common concerns.  This is no less demanding, but is far
> more rewarding for all involved. 

Which implies lots of steward-officer solidarity, regular contacts, etc.
There's a whole cultural dimension of organizing which I think the US Left
has stumbled badly on -- we have the Michael Moore thing, of a radical,
resistence-filled mass culture, but not the powerful socialist traditions
and subversive currents of the EU and, increasingly, East Asia. What
most grad worker unions do to resolve this is to hook people up to the
University culture, which provides this bubbling cauldron of issues and
other things going on and allows a certain kind of social movement
unionism to happen. Because we're mostly young professionals, it's not
really a question of training people, because folks can generally "learn
to learn" in their own way, it's this professional-class habitus which
inhibits people from speaking out (the professors one has to deal with,
the sizeable amount of knowledge you're trying to process while attempting
to retain your sanity, the pressure of that future job market, etc.). But
of course, we're being paid peanuts to teach these classes, so there's
this contradiction which people have to face. We're also a very mobile
workforce, with enormous regular turnover, so we're organizing constantly,
all the time in fact (otherwise we wouldn't even exist).

Hopefully the kind of things which grad worker unions are doing --
very savvy cultural and workplace kind of stuff, and the
organizing-to-exist, as opposed to organizing-to-bureaucratize -- will
someday begin to migrate to the world of the high-tech office, programmers
and related Microserfs. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:1108] Re: Re: union democracy

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, Michael Eisenscher wrote:

> Democracy is not a spectator sport; it requires active participation.  Active
> participation by members is best assured where there is an organizational
> “engine” created by rank and file caucuses or other formations in which the
> Left participates and plays a leading role.  This becomes the most conscious
> expression of rank & file activism (but by no means the only one, nor always
> necessarily the most important at any given juncture).

But it sure ain't easy to do this. The GTFF here at the University of
Oregon has been trying to push local empowerment of our stewards, for
example, and shifting responsibility away from officers/staff and towards
rank and file. It's tough, though, because the division of labor means
that most folks work themselves to the bone just teaching their classes;
few have time for permanent activism. 

Our response, and this isn't something which can be generalized for every
workforce, has been to try to turn our workforce diversity into our
greatest strength, by networking with the University/Eugene/undergrad
activists, and encouraging our members to sign on to specific, small-scale
things they can jump aboard on (like childcare activism or whatever). The
small-scale actions lead to bigger commitments later on, etc. 

Alas, I've got papers to grade, so I gotta sign off, but more on this
tomorrow.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:1106] Re: Re: union democracy II

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, valis wrote:

> Who's SAP?

Not a who, a what: a German intranet software maker, world
leader in enterprise systems, and not coincidentally Microsoft's worst
nightmare. See http://www.sap.com for the glorious details.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:1077] Re: union democracy

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sat, 31 Oct 1998, Mike Yates wrote:

> I
> thought that if two people who I respected and who were strong champions
> of the unions could have this perspective, we were really in a lot of
> trouble.  Now Fraser's arguments tell me that we are in deep shit.

Of course we're in deep shit. Up to our eyeballs in it, actually, and have
been since 1973, when Capital went on the global counter-offensive which
continues to this day (I use Frankfurt School scuba-gear, myself, I don't
know how other people manage). As for the decay of the USA, I'm afraid such
Soviet-style contradictions -- otherwise intelligent, educated people
supporting a vicious, bankrupt one-party state and its
attendant power-hierarchies just like the trained lapdogs they secretly
are (and, deep down, they wouldn't respond so heatedly if they didn't
realize, on some level, that the system is playing them for chumps)
-- are the norm for the land of Silicon feudalism. 

But look on the bright side: thanks to our decline, Japan and the EU will
run things from now on, which means union democracy and keiretsu
socialism have the brightest of futures. Today DaimlerChrysler, tomorrow
SAP-Microsoft!

-- Dennis 

[PEN-L:987] Re: Re: Althusser as Stalinist

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Tue, 10 Nov 1998, Brad De Long wrote:

> The European communists did something that led the societies they ruled a 
> lot further away from utopia than were the social democracies of western 
> Europe... or even the not-very-social democracy that is the United States. 

Those societies were never exactly utopias to begin with, Brad. Eastern
Europe was ruled over by twisted, anti-Semitic, clerical-fascist regimes,
ruling over unindustrialized agrarian societies (the Czechs were maybe the
one exception here, but even they were a semiperipheral economy in 1938)
so Stalinism's breakneck industrialization, horrible as it sounds, was
actually an improvement over what they had. The Western CP's were always
pretty democratic and fought for some basic social and economic rights for
workers, whatever their ideological take on the East. 

This is not an excuse for bloodshed and repression, of course. But the
true horror is that Stalinism did to the Eastern bloc pretty much what the
US did to Latin America or what France did to Algeria or the ci-devant
Indochina or Britain did to Ireland etc. etc. ad horribilis. To their
credit, the E-Europeans resisted guerilla-style and managed to turn many
of the tools of the oppressor against them -- which is maybe why they're
preparing to join the EU while Latin America languishes in neocolonial
bondage.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:936] Re: Re: Re: Re: unemployed Ph.D.'s

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Mark laffey wrote:

> institutions.  Pointing out that 'it's different in economics' or asking 'why
> didn't you organize the clerical staff?' makes it sound as though, darnit, she
> was just a victim of self-delusion, and now self-pity.  I can't help but feel
> that there is a gendered element to these responses. 

*Class* element, not gender -- the latter is the operating code or set of
narratives, the former is the content of such, in the same way that
ethnicity serves to denote deeper anxieties about who gets what in this
society. I've had exactly the same feelings she had when I've gotten
canned from various temp jobs -- you feel miserable, humiliated, deeply
insecure; the marketplace shows what Heiner Mueller called the "iron face
of its freedom" to you, and it hurts. Which is why it's important to bring
that theory in, instead of talking about how the university is seductive
but frustrating. It's not a question of organizing others, it's all about
organizing ourselves in whatever workplace we happen to be, academic or
otherwise.

Her articles, though, are pretty cool, so she probably knows this stuff
already, and was just putting on a show for Salon.

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:935] Re: Re: Re: unemployed Ph.D.'s

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Annalee disrupted
> Judith Butler's class at Berkeley with complaints about the
> universalization of discourse & the political overvaluation of the
> genderfuck. Butler's exasperated response before Annalee dropped the class
> was "If that's what you want, go take a course on Marxism."

Really? Hmm, maybe I jumped the gun on this one. BS is the mosh tip,
for sure. Maybe some overzealous editors at Salon took out all the
cool references to Che and dildoes and stuff in her article. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:928] Re: unemployed Ph.D.'s

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 6 Nov 1998, Louis Proyect cross-posted:

> Surviving and finishing the Ph.D.
> BY ANNALEE NEWITZ  
> What I want, finally, is for Ph.D.s to be proud of what they've learned,
> not because they've been granted the title of professor, but because
> they've done something useful with their minds. Likewise, I hope that
> professors will come to appreciate that all teaching does not have to end
> in the production of more professors. We should not be wringing our hands
> over the loss of tenure-track jobs, but trying instead to build an
> honorable tradition for thinkers who work outside the university system.

I'm afraid I don't feel her pain. There is no "outside" in the postmodern
university, we're all run by budgetary hardliners nowadays, even state
schools, and the pitch is "market share", "student retention", "customer
service" etc. She seems pissed at the University for not recognizing her
infallible brilliance as a writer, like this overdue father-figure or
something. Adorno said somewhere that rebellions against the family which
don't take a political form often lead only to deeper entanglement in the
family. Not a word is said about the vicious savaging of the public sector
which stomped all those jobs, the privatization of everything under the
sun, the naked immiseration of professional-class workers by a rapacious
system. I suspect she's someone from a lower middle-class or even
working-class upbringing, who was taught to have an inordinate respect for
authority and teaching; it's an interesting contradiction in late
capitalism, that the ruling ideologies are often most strongly innervated
by those who have the least to gain from them.

> I'm still infatuated with
> research, still solicit the occasional teaching position. I'll even confess
> to being on the market again this year, looking for academic jobs. This
> time I'm seeking many other types of employment, too: I know my
> intellectual dignity does not rest on being called professor. And yet no
> matter what happens, I suppose I will always foolishly, perhaps even
> self-destructively, adore the university like a first lover, who broke my
> heart but taught me the true meaning of seduction.  
> SALON | Nov. 6, 1998 

Academia as the ultimate genderfuck, eh? So this is where
post-structuralism ultimately leads us -- don't rebel against Capital,
fellow gradgrinds; don't even think about signing that union petition or
organizing 3rd parties or solidarizing with the janitors, staff and
ordinary folks who do the housekeeping and maintenance for the University. 
But it's not seduction; it's rape. Capital beats you with a stick and then
tries to steal your self-dignity by saying, well, it's not the market,
it's that you're unmarketable. 

-- Dennis

[PEN-L:814] Re: re striking UC TAs

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Mon, 2 Nov 1998, valis wrote:

> And, speaking of incongruities, why is it the UAW that's going to
> give the TAs material strike support?  Is this not very much like 
> the corporate practice of entering totally unrelated market areas?

No, it's because grad unions are generally pretty radical and went out
there and organized themselves, no thanks to the UAW or anyone
else, so the UAW is just making a very safe bet that the grads
will get what they're after, namely recognition from the Cal system.
The GTFF here in Oregon has the same deal vis-a-vis the AFT folks; we
don't depend on them, we have our own thriving local democracy action
going on -- which is really the only way to run a union, come to think of
it.

-- Dennis (GTFF activist, in case you hadn't noticed)

[PEN-L:655] Re: The political devolution of Alexander Cockburn

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Louis Proyect wrote:

> Of course, there were some things about Cockburn's politics back then that
> I always found a bit troubling. He supported the Soviet intervention in
> Afghanistan on the basis that it was a lesser evil to the misogynist
> fundamentalism of the village chieftains. 

Specifically, he wrote that if a country ever deserved to be raped,
Afghanistan qualified. It was a jackass thing to say, of course, but Alex
is always frothing at the bit at something or other. In the article
about indigenous Americans, Alex is coming from the perspective of the
Irish, who experience a 1 million+ genocide in the 19th century at the
hands of those arch-civilized Brits; you reach a point where the usual "My
people have suffered X casualties" runs a bit thin. He's not talking to
whitefolk who don't know diddley about the history, he's talking to a
younger generation of activists who are demanding their cultural rights,
and saying, look, this Spielberg-style cinematization of the past is not a
solution, it's part of the problem. When history is nothing but a
spectacle, that's when barbarism not only happens, but is legitimized and
perpetuated in new, horrible ways.

> Actually, Cockburn's not the journalistic superstar he once was. The Wall
> Street Journal dropped him, and the Nation Magazine cut him back to a
> single page.

He never was a superstar and never wanted to be. The Wall Street Urinal
mostly wanted to discredit the Left, a bear-baiting thing, I think, but no
way would they let Alex spill all about the CIA's cocaine wars in public. 
More to the point Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are putting out
"Counterpunch", which remains one of the finest, most stylish and simply
best radical newsletters out there today -- totally worth the price of the
subscription. 

-- Dennis