Re: RE: Religing Marxism, was AM Histor ical Mat eriali sm 3
Devine, James wrote: BTW, I find religious attitudes all the time in economics. For example, there's the worship of the market (the U of Chicago) or the worship of mathematics for its own sake (UC-Berkeley). But I think it's best to attack these faiths on the basis of facts, logic, and methodology (the unholy trinity) instead of simply insulting them. Does the unfortunate, and often destructive, worship of abstract constructs by people you disagree with, make more pallatable the worship of the words of a 19th century social scientist by comrades you're engaged in debate with? there are few people like this on pen-l (the relevant venue). However, it does make sense to quote the so-called Master: Marx's theory forms a unified whole that differs from the standard academic orthodoxy and is often misinterpreted. The belief that Marx's theory forms a unified whole is exactly the problem. It is, like the theory of anybody interesting, full of both detritus from other theories and false starts. The LOV/LTV is arguably and example of both. I think that a lot of people, including some on this list, wish Marx's theory formed a unified whole, and try to treat it that way. It doesn't. That's not a bad thing. If it did form a unified whole I think it would be an inert relic, a perfect museum piece from a past master. As it is, it's just one person's contribution to an ongoing conversation. I fact, a lot of people misrepresent Marx. I have poormemory for quotes, so I don't do it, especially since it's quite easy for someone to quote like crazy and still misinterpret Marx (as Jon Elster, among others, does so often). (As my old friend Steve Zeluck used to say, the devil can quote scipture. Elster is much better when he does micro-theory than when he writes about Marx.) I hesitate to ask this question, because I do not believe that you, Jim, are a fundamentalist. But is not an abiding concern with the correct representation of a particular text (especially given that we're not dealing with a living author or a legal document or the dignity of some people's history, and that our interest is primarily as students of and actors in the contemporary world) a symptom of fundamentalism / literalism? BTW, as Lakatos and Kuhn and others have pointed out, it is quite reasonable for scientists to cling to core propositions even in the face of overwhelming contrary argument and experience. And economists do this: for example, orthodox economists continue to talk about rational utility-maximizing consumers even though these don't exist and don't make sense except in a very limited way (i.e., as tautologically true). This is a core proposition used to understand a more complicated world. Similarly, Marxian economics can use the true-by-definition law of value to understand the world. Yeah, but that's not a good reason to hang onto a useless core proposition. The idea of the rational utility maximizing consumer, although often seriously wrong and arguably a poisoner of young minds, does give us tractable models which are useful for many purposes. (It is my belief that almost all economists, including those who despise formalism and/or neoclassical assumptions, carry in their heads and frequently use some nice little models of monopoly pricing, prisoner's dilemmas, and so on.) And, although the rational actor assumption it is often treated as true-by-definition, it also produces testable propositions, as a growing body of experimental economics shows. In contrast, almost all modern work on classical value theory is inward looking, asking whether the idea is, or can be made, intellectually coherent. Beyond that, it's no use. Its main function today is to anchor a certain subset of Marxist discourse in a distinct and oppositionist location. Fred _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: LOV and LTV
Devine, James wrote: I wrote: Marx uses the word law differently than Justin does. Marx's laws are dialectical, non-deterministic. But many interpret his ideas in Justin's terms, proving that Marx was a determinist. Justin writes: How do you get deterministic out of precisely formulated relatoon among variables? The laws of quantum mechanics are as precisely formulated as could be, and nondeterministic too. they are deterministic in that they make very specific predictions. Wow. That's a broad definition of deterministic. Are bookies determinists? Fred _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: the philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways
Michael Hoover wrote: the point is to change it... analytical marxists attempt to explain collective action in terms of rational calculations of self-interested individuals rather than understanding that history is shaped by social classes (collective entities in parlance of rational choice/public choice/social choice/game theorists)... towards an orthodox marxism emphasizing importance of exploitation and class struggle and dead-end (nay, silliness) of academic attempts to merge marxism with methodological individualism associated with liberalism...michael hoover Does one have to be a methodological individualist to believe that individuals do make choices, and that theories which assume that they act simply as classes (whether in their common class interest or as a result of some common false consciousness) are missing something? Understanding the reproduction and the change of social structures requires an understanding of how structure and individual interact. Fred _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: A project for Pen-L
This is a whole article, but as it's a critical survey of many such it may serve your purpose: S. Deraniyagala and B. Fine New trade theory versus old trade policy: a continuing enigma Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol 25 No 6 Nov 2001 Fred [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am not suggesting whole articles. Indeed that would make the project useless -- but rather short 500-1000 word summaries of a group of empirical and/or theoretical literature. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Re: Re: Re: General thoughts
I don't see it as a serious problem. Speculation about the effect of a central bank's interest rate policies and the likely timing of the next Minsky crisis and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and most other such questions, all gets boring pretty quickly. It's hard to have an ongoing conversation about it, and those who post to this list most do enjoy talking to each other, I think. This is a pub without the beer, with war and empire, without football. What I find most useful about this list is the links people post to articles - not the Guardian, Nation and NYT which I see anyway (though fine, go ahead, post them), but sources I don't have bookmarked, and often have never heard of. I read a lot of these, and often pass the articles or links on to my students. I also find interesting specific requests people have for information or advice, announcements of conferences etc, and things participants have to say on topics about which they have some in-depth knowledge (such as, whether you agree with him or not, Mark Jones on oil). Most of this stuff comes sporadically, but that's fine. Such is the good service this list provides behind the shouting. Fred Doug Henwood wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: I have neither the authority nor the charisma to enforce my preferences. Also, I think that people must enjoy getting involved in catfights. I don't mean you personally. Why is it that several hundred progressive economists and quasi-economists have so little to say about The Economy? It's a serious problem, no? Doug -- Frederick Guy Department of Management School of Management and Organizational Psychology Birkbeck College Malet St. London WC1E 7HX +44 [0] 20 7631 6773 +44 [0] 20 7631 6769 (fax) _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Re: Re: Socialism Now
I would find it helpful if you specified what you mean by 'socialism' and 'socialisied'. I am skeptical because some of the past uses of 'socialised' in this context do not seem applicable today. There was an argument based on certain isomorphisms of socialist and capitalist production and administrative systems in the heyday of mass production. Hence the convergence literature of the sixties, and some of the arguments advanced by Harrington and Galbraith in the seventies. Since then, the state socialist half of this isomorphism has collapsed, and the capitalist half has moved on. But maybe I'm just out of date. So please expand. Fred Guy Greg Schofield wrote: My point is that historically this is not so, that the level of socialisation already established by the bourgeoisie, effectively means there is no great day when leading elements of capital must be socialisied, as this is already achieved. _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Class Struggles vs. Redistribution (was Re: More on E-MailRhetoric)
Am I missing something coded in the language here? Would anyone on this list expect redistribution to happen without struggle? Those sorts are all on Santa Claus-L. And, putting what was a discussion of world living standards and carrying capacity into terms of class struggle simplifies the question so much that I no longer understand it. Mark was talking about the material impossibility of the rest of the world consuming in the manner of the average American. Yoshie responds with class struggle. I don't see how that addresses the question Mark is raising. Even allowing that a stronger, organized working class in the US would lead to better collective services (such as public transport), energy conservation and sensible land use planning, I can't see it producing a substantial reduction in automobile or air conditioning use in the near future. The US is simply another planet (but sadly only in a figurative sense) where resource use is concerned, and the US working class participates enthusiastically in that. That's why Kyoto is politically impossible for the US. Don't blame Dubya: carbon emission increases under Clinton/Gore had already rendered Kyoto impossible by the time Bush took office. Fred Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: I'm afraid it is not me but you who are thinking in terms of redistribution and 'social justice' -- hence your suggestion that *before* there could be a rise in living standards in the periphery, there would have to be the abandonment of the towns and suburbs of America by their multimillioned inhabitants. We must, instead, begin to think in terms of class struggle between capital labor, rather than trying to figure out a way to redistribute energy from the working class in rich nations to the working class in poor ones in today's world, because any *major* global redistribution of wealth to the periphery is *impossible* unless until the working class in rich nations overthrow their ruling class. That means, first of all, the working class in rich nations, be they in cities, suburbs, or rural areas, have to learn to get better organized *extract more from capital* -- higher wages, more free time, better working conditions, more social services, more environmental clean-ups, and so on -- in order to build their collective strength. The same goes for the working class in poor nations. As long as the working class are resigned to *neoliberal belt-tightening* demanded by capital, as they have been for the last couple of decades, they are far from taking even the first step toward social revolution. Yoshie -- Frederick Guy School of Management and Organizational Psychology Birkbeck College Malet St. London WC1E 7HX +44 [0] 20 7631 6773 +44 [0] 20 7631 6769 (fax) _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Re: Class Struggles vs. Redistribution (was Re: More on E-MailRhetoric)
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Class struggle won't solve the problem of global warming in the near future (supposing the near future to be the next couple of decades), nothing else will for that matter. However, without class struggle, the working class won't be *even* in a position to seriously consider changing its pattern of consumption (unless change in consumption Mark is asking for can be achieved by merely individual belt-tightening, which I doubt). Take cars for example. The way the USA's social geography is organized today, cars are *necessities* for most Americans -- necessary to go to work, shop, etc. This social geography won't change (and we are talking about *large-scale* transformation, reversing suburbanization repopulating cities) as long as the collective power of the working class is weaker than that of the auto related industries. Yoshie I agree that individual belt tightening won't do it. As you say, the US is built for cars. Taking away somebody's car there is like kneecapping them, which is why I don't expect that it is something that would be done by an empowered working class. Reversing suburbanization would be a truly massive project, in so many senses (material, social, and not trivially the structure of government which gives jealously guarded land use planning powers to local government). I think that it is a tremendously optimistic view that the collective power of the American working class would be used to do this. I gather that the climate change models are predicting that the US will be one of the last to feel real damage from global warming. This being the case the only things I can see threatening the US's high consumption status quo are a sustained rise in the price of oil, and/or something that produces a collapse of the US's ability to harvest income from intellectual property and arms. But if that happens, the change will not be happy, since the same circumstances that put the US high consumption system under pressure would also lead to a severe capital shortage there (because the crisis would be caused by what are essentially high operating costs for the existing system), while measures to substantially cut US carbon emissions without a big drop in the material standard of living, would require massive capital investment. Fred _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Re: Class Struggles vs. Redistribution (was Re: More on E-MailRhetoric)
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: *Who else* do you think have the *potential* to become a collective historical agent to transform the structures of production, distribution, consumption in an ecologically sustainable direction, if not the working class? Surely not the bourgeoisie. Nor do scientists alarmed by global warming, in isolation from the rest of the working class. I'm not optimistic about anything. I'm simply saying that there is *no* collective historical agent who can even potentially hope to become equal to the task *other than* the working class. I don't see any reason to single out the US working class as having this potential, other than a theory which says history is a story of class struggles and now it's the working class's turn. That's not to knock theory, but I don't see any empirical basis for saying that the theory in question has any predictive power in the US today, and especially not when it comes to the consumption end of the American Way of Life. What sort of struggles might happen if and when the American empire collapses is a bit far into the fried-eggs-on-the-sidewalk future for me. But I think the list has probably been over this, to judge from a message here from Carrol (I haven't been following the thread). Fred _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: RE: Re: over- or under-accumulation? typo alert
Mark Jones wrote: As for K-waves in general, Trotsky's criticism of Kondratiev was right (altho clearly there are some periodicities involved with infrastructure investment for example, as I mentioned earlier in connection with Kuznets). Trotsky said: One can reject in advance the attempts by Professor Kondratiev to assign to the epochs that he calls long cycles the same strict rhythm that is observed in short [business] cycles. This attempt is a clearly mistaken generalization based on a formal analogy. The periodicity of short cycles is conditioned by the internal dynamic of capitalist forces, which manifests itself whenever and wherever there is a market. As for these long (fifty-year) intervals that Professor Kondratiev hastily proposes also to call cycles, their character and duration is determined not by the internal play of capitalist forces, but by the external conditions in which capitalist development occurs. The absorption by capitalism of new countries and continents, the discovery of new natural resources, and, in addition, significant factors of a superstructural order, such as wars and revolutions, determine the character and alteration of expansive, stagnating, or declining epochs in capitalist development. I'm an agnostic on Kondratiev waves, but will note that what's missing from Trotsky's picture (at least as quoted) is changes in production technology. Most recent long wave work starts with these. See for instance Chris Freeman and Luc Soete, The Economics of Technological Change. Fred _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Re: IMF
I don't know that I'd bother following this list if Brad weren't on it. Not becuase I enjoy the fights, but because he offers an informed and vigorous response to the knee-jerk statisim that otherwise dominates the list. I call it statism rather than Marxism because I know of no other forum where the policies of Juan Peron, the South Korean government and state media monopolies (monopolies, not the Beeb) could all get such sympathetic hearings. I know that not everybody shares these views, but I do think that the overall tone of this list is as reflexively statist as Schleifer is anti-state. In both cases that reflex leaves a lot of good insight as roadkill. I do agree that Brad can be condescending at times, and also that tit-for-tat may not be the most constructive response. However, I think there's an unwillingness on this list to face the issue of civility. Jim can, in the same message, rubbish tit-for-tat and ridicule Brad's appeal to the rules of the US Congress, the latter on grounds entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand (courtesy). So what's your solution, Jim? Michael K. says he's not attacking Brad personally, but attacking the economics profession. That misses the point. Many comments in response to Brad (not just by Michael K) take the following form: neo-liberal economists condone starving people to death in the name of the market Brad is a neo liberal economist (but nothing personal) When the argument is being put in terms as serious and emotive as those reflected in the first line, the second line is not an innocuous judgement. It is also entirely unnecessary to the argument at hand, unless what you want is the opportunity to beat up a representative of the neo-liberal establishment. And the sequence I've given here is, I think, understated compared to what goes on: much of the response to Brad is about Brad, not about his arguments. About where he works, where he used to work, what he edits, who his friends are, what sort of profits he might make on his textbook. Almost everybody else on the list is allowed to state their views as views, while Brad gets constructed as a representative of something, and abused for it. I don't enjoy reading that, I think it's a style that has probably driven most dissenting voices either into lurking or off the list entirely, and I wish it would stop. Fred Guy _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Re: Re: Re: IMF
Jim Devine wrote: There's a big difference between _attacking an individual_ (ad hominem) and _attacking an argument_. The rules of Congress may encourage politeness, but that's a democracy of the few, of the elite and powerful. We need to put said democracy into context, which is what I did. I was NOT attacking Brad personally. However, Brad engages in personal attacks regularly. (or is my perception wrong? he's the one who throws words like bullsh*t around.) Some may be offended by the language, but what is it about the word 'bullshit', when applied to an argument or contention, that makes it personal? Not that I would recommend the use of such words on the net, since this is a medium in which it is easy to take offense. But the equation of 'bullshit' and ad hominem is ... bullshit. After Jim's clarification, I am none the wiser as to how the US Congress's rules of civility are somehow made less relevant by the nature of its membership. Fred, you have to remember that Brad is a big boy who can deal with debate and acrimony. After all, he worked in the Clinton administration. He hasn't been sequestered in the allegedly calm groves of academe. He doesn't seem like a shrinking violet at all. I don't see why an attack on an abstraction -- neoliberal economists -- is emotive. It's attacks on _people_ that are emotive. In the last part of my message which you neither quote nor reply to, I think I answered this. I'm not worried about Brad: *he's* stayed around and, like yourself Jim, probably enjoys the tussle or he would have left long since. [Or have I strayed into ad hominem analysis? Sorry.] My concern is the style of argument which greets him - the use of lots of personal details, such as those you mention above but in different contexts, with the implication that these details undermine his credibility (and this comes damned close to speaking to the motives or character of the person, i.e. ad hominem). I think that he is greeted that way because of the views he espouses, and I think that this raises the temperature in a way that deters others from jumping in. Fred Guy _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: models
Jim Devine writes: I'm not convinced. The Fordist production techniques that prevailed before the neoliberal or Post-Fordist era involved large economies of scale. Though the companies benefited from protection (and it seems to be true that international direct investment used to be mostly behind tariff and non-tariff barriers), this meant that they suffered from relatively high costs, because of the limited markets behind the barriers. In some ways, the new flexible technology of the neoliberal era fits with these barriers _better_, because economies of scale aren't as important. ### That's so if you accept the old Piore/Sabel view that flexible technologies would obviate economies of scale. I don't think there's much evidence that they have. If you want a touching account of Piore's fruitless search for such evidence, see: Piore, Michael J, Corporate Reform in American Manufacturing and the Challenge to Economic Theory, in (T. J. Allen and M. S. Scott Morton, eds.) Information Technology and the Corporation of the 1990s: Research Studies . New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. What he found, interviewing executives of a number of companies undergoing 'restructuring', was that they were incurring huge new fixed costs in the form of software to manage their new flexible systems. Flexible, yes; small and specialized, no. He tries hard to get them to talk flexible specialization, and they won't go there. Jim continues: I would guess that the fall of the ISI model had a lot to do with the the internal limits of that model, e.g., the inability to take advantage of economies of scale and the encouragement of X inefficiency by limits on competition, and also the governments' usual unwillingness to complete the model by widening internal markets via land reform and the like. The popular discontent that motivated bourgeois governments to engage in such populist policies also faded, at least in its ability to shake up the incumbent political class. ### My point is that this sort of analysis is ahistorical. The 'model' was not a piece of clockwork that wound down, but something specific to a system of production. It's easy in retrospect to think of ISI (or any defunct system) as one with great internal weaknesses, but it actually worked reasonably well in a number of countries, and now it's virtually and rather suddenly gone. -Fred -- Frederick Guy Department of Management School of Management and Organizational Psychology Birkbeck College Malet St. London WC1E 7HX +44 [0] 20 7631 6773 +44 [0] 20 7631 6769 (fax) _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
models
I'm an occasional lurker on this list. I can see that the discussion of models of socialism is not terribly popular, not surprisingly, since it is contentious and speculative. To say nothing of raising the very tough problem of the lacunae in Engels' blithe reference to "the administration of things", such as substantial problems of both information and accountability. Discussion of national development models seems to be more popular. I know it's asking for trouble to characterize the views of a list, but I'll say there is a general bias in favor of state led capitalist development, whether inward (Argentina, India) or outward (Korea, Taiwan) looking. Protection and state leadership are seen as facilitating more equitable distribution within the country in question. Plus other virtues, given the right conditions. What I have missed (and this may be because I am a very *occasional* lurker: I have to admit that most days I don't take the time to read my summary) is an analysis of why those models aren't working today. I mean, excuse me, if the era of Peronist redistribution (and managed decline) is our model, I'll stick to dreams of cruising Route 66 in a large Detroit convertible: the period is right, and that road doesn't exist any more either. The prospects for generalizing the Japan/Korea/Taiwan strategy are not quite so remote, but still it's not an active thread. The tendency on the list seems to be to blame the IMF/WTO/USA for forcing markets open and requiring one-size-fits-all neo-liberal policies. Which is true as far as it goes, but why has national resistance crumbled almost everywhere? Let me suggest (and here I may be on well trod ground: it is hard to come into the middle of this discussion) that changes in the organization of production (roughly speaking, flexible network production as opposed to vertically integrated mass production) worsen the bargaining position of those in the lower 70% of the income distribution vis a vis capital. For instance, it used to be that multi-national manufacturing companies had more to gain than to lose by cooperating with import substitution policies: the mass production model was amenable to establishing dwarf clones of the parent firm (whether by direct operation, partnership, selling turnkey factories, or licensing technology, depending on the national model in question) in protected markets, and the protected markets were ... protected. So a national government could make a deal with capital that sheltered the country from world markets. ISI doesn't fit with today's production methods (an elaborate international division of labor, technological, supply and marketing partnerships between firms, and so on), however, and as far as capital is concerned that deal is off. If I may anticipate one obvious response, the new production model is about more than simply outsourcing for cheap labor (though that's part of it); if that were the only change, the national option would still be on offer. But this comes back to models (socialist or otherwise): if that deal isn't working, what comes next? If I want a return to the 1950s, I can watch movies. -- Fred Guy Department of Management School of Management and Organizational Psychology Birkbeck College Malet St. London WC1E 7HX _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: National sovereignity and environment
Trond Andresen writes that California's pioneering work on clean air standards is an example of the benefits of national sovereignty. Am I mistaken then in believing that the technical emissions standards adopted by California for automobiles and other air pollution sources, are in response to Federal air quality standards? (Different technical standards are necessary to meet the same air quality standards due to California's climate topography). If my memory is not failing me here, then, we don't have such a clear-cut case of local virtue vs. federal bungling, and it's not at all clear that California would have been so resolute about technical standards if not for the federal air quality standards. (In fact, California's technical standards *are* federal standards: federal law allows states to choose between two sets of auto emissions standards, one designated by California and on by the Federal government.) If the same sort of solution can't happen in the E.U., it seems to me that the problem is the particular set of rules adopted by the E.U., not the concept of European union. For instance, Trond notes that Britain vetoed tougher clean air standards for Europe (thus maintaining its sovereign right to send acid rain to Norway). He should at least acknowledge that such a veto would be impossible if those supporting a federal Europe had their way. The fact that local technical standards are illegal trade barriers while regional (i.e., European) air quality standards can be vetoed by one country simply shows that the E.U. has not progressed beyond the Thatcherite vision of a free trade area. Fred Guy [EMAIL PROTECTED]
