Re: ILL Request - Socialist Register 1992 (fwd)
Socialist Register is an annual, now edited by Leo Panitch. It has had various co-editors, formerly Miliband was one of them. Lately they have been thematically organized. I had an article on Soviet socialism in the 1991 Socialist Reg, which had a title something like, In the Aftermath. I don't know how SR is listed in a library, but it is available from Monthly Review Press. --Justin Schwartz In a message dated Thu, 30 Mar 2000 10:44:49 AM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << can i ask a question? Is "Socialist Register 1992" a collection of essays or a special volume of socialist register magazine? I saw a reference in someone else's paper to "Socialist Register 1992" edited by Miliband. there are articles by Wallerstein and Cox. I can not figure out if this is a book or special volume since my library does not seem to know. does any body know what "Socialist register 1992" is? I mean, is this a book other than the _Socialist Register_ magazine? I appreciate any help if possible.. Mine Aysen Doyran Phd Student Political Science SUNY/Albany Albany/NY >>
Re: religion
In a message dated Thu, 30 Mar 2000 11:30:31 AM Eastern Standard Time, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << Actually I'm a bit mystified by the notion that religious people have no theoretical reasons for objecting to sweatshops. If you think God made us all equal (I don't - I don't know if there's a god, much less what s/he intended), then exploitation is morally wrong and the existence of poverty amidst plenty is a sin. It's harder for us seculars to come up with airtight theoretical reasons to condemn exploitation and polarization, though we can try to appeal to "science" or some such. *** This is a bad argument for a reason that Plato remarked on some time ago. The good (or bad) is not good or bad because God so pronounces: if God existed and said, destroying the lives of others for your personal profit and enjoyment is morally OK, we would conclude that God had gone off his rails and did not deserve our reverence. There is the story of Abraham and Isaac, which represents the contrary view as presented by the Hebrews, but as Kierkegaard,a defender of the Hebew view, admitted, it makes no sense. --jks
Re: [Fwd: [BRC-ANN] The Right to Freedom of AssemblyUnder Atta...
In a message dated 00-03-30 19:00:37 EST, you write: << I have not found info on the the racial, ethnic and gender composition of people being sterilized. Do you know what happened to those people? were they killed? Is anybody aware of any opposition to it? >> Dan Kevles has a book on the history of eugenics. I ahve not read it, but he is a goiod scholar, also a leftist. The people who were sterilized in this country were not killed. Was that a serious question? If it is any comfort to you, the 1910s-20s Supreme Court cases on sterilization are almost certainly no longer good law, reproductive rights being pretty firmly entrenched as due process rights at this point. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Notes on a talk I will give on Wed.
Michael, I expect better from you. << Ken, If the production of knowledge is left to the profit maximizing corporations, then they probably need something like a patent in order to induce them to do anything. Patents are a lot older than that, of course, and are protected in the Constitution. > However, knowledge and information are inappropriate candidates for commodity status because of the difficulty of enforcing profit rights. Oh, yeah? Let me introduce you to some patent lawyers I know. The standards are no fuzzier than those that establish property rights in real estate or tangible personal property. >As Kenneth Arrow, among others, has shown, the idea of markets implies some rationality, but rationality implies that consumers are informed. But to be informed about information is equivalent to owning that information. So, if I am informed that Microsoft has a program that will do, which I want to do, I own the program? --jks
Re: Re: Notes on a talk I will give on Wed.
In a message dated Mon, 3 Apr 2000 1:53:34 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Michael Perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << Perhaps you expect too much. The history is interesting, and no doubt the extent to which ideas are treated as property varies withthe political winds, like everything else. > Oh, yeah? Let me introduce you to some patent lawyers I know. The standards are no >fuzzier than those that establish property rights in real estate or tangible personal >property. > Oh, but they are. I covered this in my Class Warfare in the Information Age book. >They certainly are fuzzy and billions of dollars are being expended in litigating >this stuff. > I didn't say they were not fuzzy, just that they were not fuzzier than a lot of law. Billions of dollars may be spent on litigation, but billions are also spend on litigating contracts and for that matter, in state court, plain old tangible property claims. > So, if I am informed that Microsoft has a program that will do, which I want to do, >I own the program? >No. You do not own the program. You have a license to use it. Just as farmers do >not own Monsanto seeds. They have a license to use it. I am not expressing myself clearly. I only have a license if I buy a license. But I do not need to have ownership or a license or knowledge of how Microsoft's program does what I want, and the "how" is the property, to know _that_ MS has a program that somehow or another does what I want. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: genome news (fwd)
In a message dated 00-04-09 00:04:25 EDT, you write: << the socio-biological claim that people differ because they differ genetically is called RACISM, >> No it's not. It would be racist (and genetically illiterate, for the most part) to say that some groups of people are inferior to another because of their genes, but it is not racist to say, for example, that Black people are different in the color of their skin from whites in large part because of their genes. That is just true. Genes are causally efficaous; they do account for some of the variation in differences between groups and individuals, and anyone who denies that has no idea what he is talking about. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: genome news (fwd)
In a message dated 00-04-09 12:38:32 EDT, you write: << the sentence that includes the categories "Black people" and "whites" uncritically assumes that these term themselves are unproblematic with regard to the very issues the sentence is discussing. which individuals end up in the "Black" category and the "white" category depends. so it is true that the shade of one's skin is biological but the categories that are mediated by this are not, and either is the social meaning assigned to them. >> Don't assume any such thing. Of course I am aware of the social contruction of race, and I don't uncritically assume anything. I also don't need to do the dance every time I use a loaded word,a t least, I hope, in this context. Among people to whom the social construction of race might bea new thought, I'd emphasize it. Here, I might have hoped that I could take it for granted. How very foolish of me. I might have said, I briefly contemplated it, that malinin content avrirs with geographic origin; that genetics explains why people from subSaharan Africa have darker skins, because of higher melanin content, on average, than people fron Northern Europe. But it is tiresome, particularly when one is talking about race, to pretend that one is not. Political correctness is very boring. Incidentally, when I use the word "group" or "race"; I am not implying anything about a class of persons constututed by some feature entirely apart from human choice and conventions. I am not, in other words, being "essentialist." (Boo, hiss.) Racism is not a matter of talking as if people are divided into differenbt groups,a nymore than it is natioanlsit of me to talk about Americans, Sudanese, French. It is a matter of buying into certain assumptions abour superiority, inferiority, entitlement, etc. These assumptions need not be tied to any beliefs about genetics or "blood"--cultural racism is pretty common. --jks
Re: janitor's strike
In a message dated 00-04-10 10:17:29 EDT, you write: << Of course, it is hard to move the janitorial jobs abroad. >> Right, if that is the way you feel about it, you're fired. We will hire people to take out the trash in our Djakarta offices. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Anti-Eurocentrism: IdealistDiversionfromAnti-r...
In a message dated 4/12/00 7:50:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << Much better to have neo-Nazis channeling their energies into drink, soccer games and dance than into murdering members of visible minorities. >> As someone who has seen a Brit football riot from a uncomfortably close perspectives--if you are close enough to see it. you are too close--I wonder if there is that much of a difference. The football match is often as not an excuse to murder members of visible minorities. --jks
Re: RE: William Appleman Williams
In a message dated 00-04-29 13:33:05 EDT, you write: << Rutgers history department from '65-'75 was a hotbed of these types. Included Eugene Genovese, Lloyd Gardner, and Warren Susman, . . . . They had little of special note to say about race or poverty, the two other big concerns of the time.. . . Genovese's subsequent erratic path is well known. >> Genovese had little to say about race? What planet are you from? Never mind hsi subsequenr path; he's a major analyst of the roots of race relations in this country, and hsi work through the late 70s or early 80s is of lasting value. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Darwin's dilemma (fwd)
Has anyone else here read R.P. Wolff's lovely litearry appreciation of Capital, Moneybags Should be So Lucky? Also, SS Prawer has a nice book on Karl Marx and World Literature, which is an old-fashioned (i.e. pre-Theory) lit critter's approach to Cpitala nd a lot more. As someone who has worked on translating Marx (never published) and in fact on translating Capital, I think i am qualified to say that Marx writes really fine German philosophical prose. He's not a writer of the caliber of Heine or Nietzsche--that is, of the very highest rank--, but his literary accompliahment would win him a place in German literature even if none of his views could be supported. Isaiah Berlin has a nice literary appreciation of the Manifesto in his little bio of Marx. All that said, I can imagine that Darwin, presented with any part of Capital, would have found it uninteresting, and if he had found it interesting, would have been horrified. Darwin was desperately respectable. Wallace, as LP pointed out a while back, was another story. --jks In a message dated Mon, 8 May 2000 11:40:40 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << At 09:57 AM 5/8/00 -0500, you wrote: > > > As one of the most boring books ever written, one which 99% of > > Marxist do not have the patience or even temper to read, should we > > not but sympathize with poor Darwin's rejection of this offer? since when do we let mere boredom stand in our way? Boredom seems part of life and work, something that everybody (except the very rich and some dilettantes, that is) cannot avoid. Boredom seems part and parcel of necessary labor, something that won't be abolished for a long time. Some might say that without boredom, we couldn't appreciate non-boredom, but I wouldn't go that far. I don't find CAPITAL to be boring at all, especially because I read the footnotes, where Marx lets down his hair (i.e., his scientific pretensions) and lets his venom and wit flow. In any event, the boredom involved in CAPITAL should be compared to the boredom of the normal academic treatise with its excessive pedantry and caution. In terms of the benefits received from digging through its tedium, CAPITAL wins hands down. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine >>
Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: [weisbrot-columns] Not Exactly FreeTrade
In a message dated 00-05-08 18:36:14 EDT, you write: << No more unknown governors from small southern states... >> What about relatively well known ex-Senators from small Southern states, Brad? --jks
Re: contradictions of capitalism
Clothes? We will clothes under socialism? Count me out. --jks In a message dated Tue, 9 May 2000 1:16:36 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << Wait a second. I didn't know this at all. My understanding of socialism is that we'd all go live in the country and make our own clothes from hemp fiber, eat tofu, shoot squirrels with bows and arrows and walk around buck naked. >Charles Brown wrote: > >>CB: It is the classically Marxist view of capitalism as far as you >>take it. But the classically Marxist view of capitalism goes beyond >>seeing the life of a proletarian as an improvement over the life of >>a peasant , in general, to the position that capitalism must be >>overthrown because of its impact on proletarians too > >Gee, I didn't know that. The things you learn on PEN-L! I'm just in >awe of this Internet thing. > >Doug > Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/ >>
Re: Re: RE: American looneyism
> They would call it "War Between The States" history. You mean, "War of Northern Invasion" History. --jks (who grew up in VA)
Re: Re: Sowing Dragons (fwd)
In a message dated 00-05-14 00:02:44 EDT, you write: << Ransom, Roger L. and Richard Sutch. 1977. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge University Press). show that leisure increased immediately after the Civil War, however, that phenomenon was short lived after the Southern planters regrouped. >> Thanks. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Sowing Dragons (fwd)
In a message dated Mon, 15 May 2000 3:07:35 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << Charles Brown wrote: >Even if the olden days were not the good olden days, this literature >may reflect the enormous pain suffered by the English peasants who >were brutalized in the primitive accumulation. I don't think peasants made a large contribution to canonical English poetry, except as exotic subjects for middle- and upper-class poets. Doug * * * And this from a former lit grad student! I think they need less Theory and more literature in those classes. My old Oxford Anthology of English poetry has not insubstantial chunks of material that we would call folk poetry, medieval and Renaissance, not all of it is court song, and much that is is obviously taken over from popular song. There is a huge collection ballads--I think the Child ballads is many volumes. Ewam McColl and Peggy Seeger had a lot records singing them and Scots ballads as well. Burns, also, collected a lot of Scots folk song that he wrote down as poetry, ang was not the only one. Jean Redpath has at least seven discs of this material, almost all of it transcriptions. Please, Doug! Less Butler and more Burns. --ks >>
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Sowing Dragons (fwd)
The edition of the Oxford Anthology I have at work is dated 1935. Maybe they dumped the folk poetry and ballads by the 70s, and reinstated them later? --jks In a message dated Mon, 15 May 2000 4:10:37 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >And this from a former lit grad student! I think they need less >Theory and more literature in those classes. My old Oxford Anthology >of English poetry has not insubstantial chunks of material that we >would call folk poetry, medieval and Renaissance, not all of it is >court song, and much that is is obviously taken over from popular >song. There is a huge collection ballads--I think the Child ballads >is many volumes. Ewam McColl and Peggy Seeger had a lot records >singing them and Scots ballads as well. Burns, also, collected a lot >of Scots folk song that he wrote down as poetry, ang was not the >only one. Jean Redpath has at least seven discs of this material, >almost all of it transcriptions. Please, Doug! Less Butler and more >Burns. --ks "Not insubstantial"? The literature I was fed in college & grad school (between 1971 and 1979), and that about which Williams mainly wrote in The Country & The City, was not folk poetry, but formal stuff written by highly literate, and mostly formally educated, writers. I said "canonical," after all. It was only after the "Theory" revolution that you decry that people in lit departments began reading lots of working class literature, i.e., when the canon came under challenge. A friend of mine from grad school, Donna Landry (co-editor of The Spivak Reader), has been studying peasant and working class women poets of the 17th & 18th centuries. I asked her if she likes reading the stuff, which from what I've seen, looks pretty awful. She said no, but that she doesn't like poetry much anyway; she'd rather read detective novels. Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's gotta go, Doug >>
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Sowing Dragons (fwd)
In a message dated 00-05-15 18:09:36 EDT, you write: << A friend of mine from grad school, Donna Landry (co-editor of The Spivak Reader), has been studying peasant and working class women poets of the 17th & 18th centuries. I asked her if she likes reading the stuff, which from what I've seen, looks pretty awful. She said no, but that she doesn't like poetry much anyway; she'd rather read detective novels. Sigh. You know, this confirms my worst suspicions about those philosophers manque who do Theory. They don't like literature, and they lack the discipline or training to do real philosophy, so they generate esxciting-sounding but essentially meaningless social theory ungrounded in either rigorous argument or empirical fact. Spivak, pah. Here we have a literature prof who doesn't like poetry, who would rather read detective novels, but who studies bad "subaltern subject perspective" women poets because that is a PC thing to do. The stuff is (I wil take her word) of no literary value, and should be studied by someone with training as a historian or historical sociologist, who might be able to teach us something about it. EP Thompson did this some in Customs in Common; but he loved poetry, and knew it. high and low, as an able literary critic--not a Theorist, but as someone who knew the period(s) and loved the language. Oh, well, I am a boring old reactionary who loves poetry, so what do I know. However, my gripe with Theory aside, there was in the literary canon that _I_ was taught a lot of really good folk song and poetry by Anonymous; and you can find a lot of it in the ballads. My wife, same vintage as me, five tears later than you,a nd like me an amateur historian of medieval and Rennaisance England,a hs the asme recollection. Course we listen to a lot of thsi music in song all the time, too. > Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture's gotta go, >> Right, teach 'em Spivak instead of Milton, it's great as an emetic. --jks
Re: Re: Re: RE: Genderization (fwd)
Maybe you better read some Marge Piercy and cure your ignorance of her work.
She is one of the premier literary figures on the left, tio whose novels and
poetry,a nd, yes, political writing, several generations of leftists owe a
lot. I also get tired of line-drawing ("She's not an Marxist Feminist," so
not on ythe left, so beyond the pale). It's one reason I gave up on labels of
thsi sort. Does P hold the views you ascribe to her? I don't thonk so. Has
she fought the good fight for almost 40 years? You better believe it. --jks
In a message dated 5/16/00 5:18:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< Marge Piercy is not a Marxist feminist. Thus, it is
difficult for me to understand what her relevance to leftism is, because
she evidently suffers from biological essentialism. Feminists like Marge
Piercy belongs to what we know as radical feminist tradition. The big
problem with her argument is that she assumes "gender inequality" stems
from "biological inequality", the type of argument proposed by Schulamit
Firestone in the 70s in the _Dialectics of Sex_. Since she sees the
problem in the biology, but not in the gendered system, she offers
"biological alteration" as a form of "cultural solution" to inequality
problem--the problem which does not originate in biology to begin with
(men and women may be biologically different but not unequal!!!). so she
effectively perpetuates the sexist biological discourses.. Piercy is also
naive to expect technology to liberate women or socialize men into
feminine practices.
We (socialist feminists) want MEN to feed babies not because they should
be "biologically recreated" to do so (since the problem is NOT in the
biology), but because it is "desirable" that men and women share mothering
equally!! Mothering is a social function, it does not lie in women's
biological disposition. I refuse Marge Piercy type of feminist
discource that idealizes and radicalizes motherhood as a form of new
intimacy!! >>
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Genderization (fwd)
Carroll, I do not label Mine a Marxist, nor do I think that if I or anyone did so
characterize her that that would mean that her views did not matter. Whether or not
Mine or Piercy or you or I adopts a certain label is not the issue. The issue is
whether our views are credible, defenisble, and useful. Carroll apparently has
concluded that I am not a Marxist, and therefore my views are of no account. Please
note that I do not subscribe to this characterization either. I do not think that
labelling oneself in this manner serves any useful function. It would not tell Carroll
anything concrete if I said I was a Marxist, because it would not tell him whether I
believed the things he things are most important.
Now, as to the question whether Piercy holds the view that biological characteristics
determine gender behavior without social intermedaition, or however Mine wanted to
characterize the view she ascibed to P. Since Mine offers no poarticular evidence that
P holds such a view, it is hard to know on what basis she thinks P holds it. it is
somewhat hard to tell anyway. P is a novelist and poet. She has written some political
theory, or polemics along time ago, mainly against male exploitation of women during
the antiwar movement, including the classic essay the grand Coolie Damn, but unlike
you or me, she does not normally write her views down as political propositions
intended to be directly evaluated.
I have, however, read virtually all of P's novels and most of her poetry. I see
nothing in her works that would tend to support an attribution of any sort of
biological determinism to P. She does portray women and womemn as different in various
ways, but she is careful to show some women as socialized into subordinate roles, as
she shows other breaking free of them in various ways. The book on the French
revolution is a lovely exploration of a whole range of behavior from utterly absed to
very radical. She also portrays men in a similar range. She shows lesbian
relationships as positive, for eaxmple in her WWII book, but has favorable portraits
of heterosexual relations, such as that in He She & It of the matriach of her New
England kibbutz or commune with Yod, the very male animotronic robot hero. On my
reading, i conclude taht she does not accept the view Mine says she holds.
--jks
In a message dated Tue, 16 May 2000 10:13:36 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Carrol Cox
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
<< I agree that labels are the question. But the label "labels" is
not the question either. That is, labelling Piercy "non-marxist"
does not prove her wrong. Equally, labelling Mine a labeller
does not prove her wrong. For example, Mine writes, "The big
problem with her argument is that she assumes "gender inequality"
stems from "biological inequality." Question: Is that a false
interpretation of Piercy? If it is a correct interpretation, then we
don't need any "label" of Piercy to believe that she is wrong.
Justin then asserts, "Does P hold the views you ascribe to her?
I don't thonk so." Well, why? Mine has offered her interpretation,
and that interpretation stands until someone who has read
Piercy can offer another one. Justin doesn't do that. He just
labels Mine a Marxist, meaning someone whose opinions
don't matter.
To repeat: I agree with Justin that labels should be kept out of
it -- and Mine's argument would have been better had she left
out the labels. But then Justin labels Mine, but unlike her he
doesn't offer any other arguments except a label.
So far the score is Justin -1 + 0. Mine's score is -1 + 1. She
wins, zero to minus 1.
Carrol
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Maybe you better read some Marge Piercy and cure your ignorance of her work.
> She is one of the premier literary figures on the left, tio whose novels and
> poetry,a nd, yes, political writing, several generations of leftists owe a
> lot. I also get tired of line-drawing ("She's not an Marxist Feminist," so
> not on ythe left, so beyond the pale). It's one reason I gave up on labels of
> thsi sort. Does P hold the views you ascribe to her? I don't thonk so. Has
> she fought the good fight for almost 40 years? You better believe it. --jks
>
> In a message dated 5/16/00 5:18:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
> << Marge Piercy is not a Marxist feminist. Thus, it is
> difficult for me to understand what her relevance to leftism is, because
> she evidently suffers from biological essentialism. Feminists like Marge
> Piercy belongs to what we know as radical feminist tradition. The big
> problem with her argument is that she assumes "gender inequality" stems
> from "biological inequality", the type of argument proposed by Schulamit
> Firestone in the 70s in the _Dialectics of Sex_. Since she sees the
> problem in the biology, but not in the gendered system, she offers
> "biological alteration" as a form of "cultural solution" to inequality
> problem--the problem which does not or
Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: Genderization (fwd)
OK, fair enough. I would not focus too much on P's early Women at the Edge of
Time--she has written a lot of books since--and I would not necessarily try to read a
novelist's own opinions off the surface of her novels. just because P wrote a book
about the Weather Underground doesn't mean she advocates bombing. I think P would
agree with you about why we on the left want men to share childraising; she needn't
think that we men can't do it unless we have our works fixed. P imagines a utopia, but
it is not a perfect world; one of her string suits is to write utopian fiction that
does not depicta n ideal state. Ursula K. LeGuin did that in The Dispossessed too. As
for Firestone, I think she's great, bit primitive as a theorist, but I learned a lot
from her work. Perhaps I should say that I am from that period myself, which may be
why I reacted that way to what I took to be an ignorant slam at one of the people
important to forming my own (very unbiologically determist) sensibilit!
!
y. --jks
In a message dated Tue, 16 May 2000 10:50:33 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<<
from my reading of her, she was making a radical feminist case
(radical alteration of biological identity as to make men feed babies).she
might be a figure on the left, which i am not denying. in the begining of
the second wave feminist movement, socialist and radical feminists were in
the same camp, and then they departed for several reasons. but in
so far as her "biological idealism" is concerned,I would not "typically"
charecterize Marge Piercy as a marxist feminist. it is not my purpose to
bash her, so I don't understand why you get emotionally offensive. we are
discussing the "nature" of her argument here.. I did *not* say she is
"beyond the pale" because she is not a Marxist..You had better read my
post once again..
Schulamit was a figure on the left too. so what? are we not gonna
say something about her work?
let's drop off this dogmatic way of thinking..
Mine
>Maybe you better read some Marge Piercy and cure your ignorance of her
work. She is one of the premier literary figures on the left, tio whose
novels and poetry,a nd, yes, political writing, several generations of
leftists owe a lot. I also get tired of line-drawing ("She's not an
Marxist Feminist," so not on ythe left, so beyond the pale). It's one
reason I gave up on labels of thsi sort. Does P hold the views you ascribe
to her? I don't thonk so. Has she fought the good fight for almost 40
years? You better believe it. --jks
In a message dated 5/16/00 5:18:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< Marge Piercy is not a Marxist feminist. Thus, it is
difficult for me to understand what her relevance to leftism is, because
she evidently suffers from biological essentialism. Feminists like Marge
Piercy belongs to what we know as radical feminist tradition. The big
problem with her argument is that she assumes "gender inequality" stems
from "biological inequality", the type of argument proposed by Schulamit
Firestone in the 70s in the _Dialectics of Sex_. Since she sees the
problem in the biology, but not in the gendered system, she offers
"biological alteration" as a form of "cultural solution" to inequality
problem--the problem which does not originate in biology to begin with
(men and women may be biologically different but not unequal!!!). so she
effectively perpetuates the sexist biological discourses.. Piercy is also
naive to expect technology to liberate women or socialize men into
feminine practices.
We (socialist feminists) want MEN to feed babies not because they should
be "biologically recreated" to do so (since the problem is NOT in the
biology), but because it is "desirable" that men and women share mothering
equally!! Mothering is a social function, it does not lie in women's
biological disposition. I refuse Marge Piercy type of feminist
discource that idealizes and radicalizes motherhood as a form of new
intimacy!! >>
>>
Marx and Malleability
I am surprised to find the canard popping up on thsi list that Marx thought people utterly malleable and therefore (!) supported undemocratic "re-education" to make them they way theu should be. This is an old right-wing misunderstanding, but it has no basis in Marx's own writing. First, Marx did not think people were utterly malleable. His theory of alienation and free labor depends on the idea that it is human nature to want to exercise your creative powers in a productive way, and that you will be frustrated and unhappy in any society that denies that need. Second, the claim that forcing people to be free is OK does not follow from malleability, if if Marx held the malleability thesis. Third, the one dominant theme in Marx's ethics is freedom. In the Manifesto, the free develpment of each is the condition for the free development of all. In Capital, the transcendence of necesasry labor is the enrtryway to the realm of freedom. Nor does Marx hold a Rousseauan view about freedom being attained by "totalitarian" means (if R holds such a view,w hich I do not say). In the Manifesto, the first task of the proletarit is to win the battle of democracy. In the Rules of the First International, the fundamental prewmise is that the emancipation of the working class can only be accomplished by thew orking classes themselves. In the Civil War in France, Marx approves the Commune's removing a political functions from the police. Etc. So, I hope this silliness does not come back. It has not merit. Carroll, is that red enough for you? --jks In a message dated Wed, 17 May 2000 9:49:49 AM Eastern Daylight Time, "Ricardo Duchesne" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << On 16 May 00, at 17:30, Ted Winslow wrote: > How about including as categories to be used in understanding these aspects > of ourselves the categories of self-determination and of a capacity for full > self-determination of thought, desire and action as the "idea" of humanity? Marx seems a lot closer to the social constructivism that dominates much of undergraduate sociology today than Hegel. The Kantian/Hegelian concept of self-determination was transformed in his hands into a practical-laboring actitivity. He also thought that humans are constructed by a determinate set of social relations, and that humans can be re-constructed, which was taken to mean by many followers that those who know what is good for everyone else have the right to reconstruct the deceived "masses". Che called this reconstructed self the "new man". But if Hegel was right, modern humans will never tolerate any such constructions except under terms which they have set for themselves (in a democratic setting). >>
Re: Re: essentialism
OK, my essentialism story. I was at a philosophy conference in NYC in maybe 1992 or 3, and I thought I would try to learn something about French feminism, which I had tried to read but found opaque (impenetrable, ha!). So I went to a panel where three prominent pomo-type feminist theorists, all women, if it's relevant, were discoursing on Irigaray, Krestiva, and Spivak, mainly. The chair was a friend, Douglas Kellner of Texas, who has coauthored several good books on pomo theory. I did not find the discussion enlightening, but I had the same question Rod had about the use of the term "essentialism." So I asked, "You all have said that various claims are 'essentialist' and apparently, for this reason, bad; but I don't know exactly what that means. Is it being essentialist about women, for example, to say that all women have some property P in virtue of which they are female and that is manifested in the same way in all circumstances regardless of the social environment?" This charcterization was violently disclaimed by all three participants, and I was regarded with scorn and contempt for my naive question. Afterwards, Kellner came to me, and said, 'That's _exactly_ what it means, but you lost them when you said "property P."' --jks In a message dated Wed, 17 May 2000 1:28:53 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << Rod Hay wrote: >Carroll, Doug and Mine have all used the word "essentialism" in a sense >that I do not understand. Nope, not me. Haven't used the word since March 23. Doug >>
Re: Re: Re: Re: Marx and Malleability
I think Brad is right that Marx didn't think much about political sociology from the perspective of institutional design, or about how group dynamics might work in a postrevolutionary society. I do not think that supportds the "two Marx" thesis, one democratic and one dictatorisl. Marx was entirely democratic, but he was also pretty naive in a sort of willfull way about practical postrevolutionary politics. See his marginal comments on Bakunin's prescient criticisms of Marxism. I do not think that much can be read into the "dictatorship of the proletariat," and certainly not that it is a temporary "dictatorship" in the modern sense of unrestrained lawless repressive rule. I think Marx meant something like temporary class rule, in the sense that a postrevolutionary state would be, he thought, a worker's state. I think it is clear that he did not conceive it as a rule of force unrestrained by law, as Lenin put it--L was advocating this. It is stuff like this that makes me a liberal democrat in politics. I am aware, of course, a transition to a noncapiatlist society is not likely to bea ccomplished through the ordinary process of voting and campaigning, and that if it is ever established over probable violent resistance by procapitalist forces, the rule of law is likely to be a bit dicey for a bit, as it has been with every major social transformation. The loyalists were brutalized after the American Revolution, for example. However, if we are to think about a society worth fighting for having, there are norms it is essential to uphold and maintain,a nd these are, for the most part, embodied in liberal democratic values: equal citizenship, universal suffrage, competitive elections, extensive civil and political liberties, and the rule of law. These were things we might liearn something about from Tocqueville, as Brad says. ANd from Rousseau, who thougtht about them deeply. --jks * * * Michael Perlman writes: << Not contradictory. As Draper has shown, the Dictatorship of the P. is a temporary waystation to allow the future free development. Brad De Long wrote: > >yea, and why do you stop the citation in the comma? I am well > >aware that there are two Marxes, the one who tends to be > >democratic and the one who tends to be dictatorial. > > A kinder, gentler way to put it is that there are two Marxes, the one > who believes in the free development of each and the one who believes > that when they fight their oppressors the people have one single > general will that the dictatorship of the proletariat expresses... > > Ole Charlie didn't understand much about political organization, or > tyranny of the majority, or bureaucratic process, or separation of > powers, or rights that people should be able to exercise against > every form of state. In many ways Tocqueville thought deeper and saw > further as far as political sociology is concerned... > > Brad DeLong -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Marx and Malleability
In a message dated 5/17/00 5:34:16 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << But he did at certain points issue some rather sulphurous diatribes about the wretchedness of bourgeois democracy and also painted a not so nice picture of the dictatorship of the proletariat as well in certain passages, these getting picked up by good old Lenin to justify some of his more unpleasant Bolshevik excesses (See _The State and Revolution_ for example). >> Hi, Barklay, glad to have you back. As is well known in the environs hereabouts, I am a great fan of bourgeois democracy, and I am happy to say that every sulpherous thing Marx had to say about it is true in spades. It is rule by the rich that ignores the real differences in power created by wealth; its virtues evaporate quickly under the heat of class warfare; and it helps to stabilize and legitimate an indefensile system. Do you deny these (obviously true) propositions? And in asserting them, am I subscribing to any sort of antidemocratic politics? As for the dictatorship of the proletariat, what is the not-nice stuff you have in mind? But I will agree, without myself adopting the expression, that any sort of large-scale systematic political change is goiung to involve some not-nice stuff. To get rid of slavery, we had a not-nice civil war. Marx was a political realist, and knew that the properties were not going to lie down and roll over even a proletarian majority democratically voted away their property rights in a peaceful manner, as he imagined might happen in the 19th century US. So, does it make him undemocratic to recognize this reality? Now, I agree that Marx is not a liberal democrat. But there is nothing in what little he says about politics to suggest that he would have been anything but horrified at the perversions of Leninism--rule by one party, political police, censorship, repression of independent unions and worker's organizations, etc.--never mind Stalinism. Btw, these perversions are not advocated in The State and Revolution, which seem to envision a weak state based in a worker's militia with functioning soviets operating a relatively direct democracy. This vision is close of Marx's, attracted the anarchists, and didn't last a week in the hurricane of the Russian civil war. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Marx and Malleability
In a message dated 5/17/00 10:02:03 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << So why, then, is the first Marx so weak in post-Marxian Marxism? I suspect that there is more to it than Marx's lack of thought about how systems of self-rule and people-power could actually work. I suspect it was his refusal to imagine his version of socialism that has made the currents of thought that flowed from him in many cases positively hostile to forms of free development that they do not like... >> This is an important question. Hal Draper thought about it a lot and addressed it in The two Souls of Socialism, and elsewhere. Draper's theory was that institutional Marxism reflected the undemocratic interests of bureaucracies in the workers' movement, in trade unions and mass parties, ultimately in the postrevolutioanry states: the functionaries in these bureaucracies are opposed in their interests to capital to a greater or lesser degrewe, insofar as their success depends on a strong workers' movement, but also to worker self rule that might limit their prerogatives. The "new class" theory of Djilas is obvious;y related to this sort of view. Draper thought that the democratic Marx who advocated worker self-emanicipation could only catch on when workers became mobilized, activized, and capable of self rule through a process of struggle against their own bureaucratic leadership as well as against the domination of capital. I would add to this analysis that I think the democratic Marx was a lot more popular until the rise of the USSR; you see this in people like Rosa Luxemburg and, in his own way (Draperw ould kill me for saying this) Erduard Bernstein. But the Soviet Unuion claimed the mantle of Marx and squelched democracy, So in the shadow of its prestige, the democratic Marx went rather by the wayside, to be salavged in margins by people like Draper. I agree with Brad, too, that Marx's refusal to think about recipes for the cookshops of the future didn't hepp. --jks
Re: substitute for Draper
In a message dated 5/17/00 10:21:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << I cite Hal Draper's magisterial books on Marx's politics too often. >> Impossible. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Marx and Malleability
In a message dated 5/17/00 11:28:27 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << I might be wrong, but I always thought that it was because he was a democrat. People would decide for themselves what they wanted. People freed from the constraints of a society of scarcity, and class divisions, might decide things that he could not imagine. Rod >> Marx's antiutopianism has a number of sources: 1. Democracy, or anyway the commitment to the self-emancipation of the working class, in contrast to the top-down schemes of utopian socialists like Fourier and Owen, who planned out the lives of the peopled in their ideal societies in excessive detail; 2. Science, the recognition that he didn't then have much concrete knowledge of how people might arrange matters. Note tahtw hen he got some data, he discussed it, as in the Paris Commune, 3. Hegelianism: the Owl of Minerva flies only at twilight; we can theorize adequately only what is in some sense actual; But the anti-utopianism is not wholly consistent. Marx purports to know that the people in a postrevolutionary society will not have a society organized around markets, or anything that amounts, in the end, to a state. Be that as it may. Whatever excuses Marx had for not writing recipes for the cookshops of the future, we have no such excuses. No one will believe us if we don't have a credible alternative that at least starts to answer many questions people actually and reasonably have about why we think a big and dangerous change will be an improvement. We also know a lot more than he did, after a century of experiments, about what doesn't work. The democracy point is valid, but we are not in a position to impose our conceptions on future cooks in any event. Writing recipes just gives them more choices about the menues they might want to make up. --jks
Re: Re: Marx and Dictatorship
I agree that Marx's reply to (really comments on) Bakunin, although plausible sounding at the time, turned out to be wrong and B to be right. However, they do show M's own commitment to democracy. He dismisses B's charge that he wants dictatorship instead of embracing it, as Lenin did after taking power, as I said before; see also, The Immediate Taks of the Soviet Government 1918 (thanks, Barklay). I do not see why Marx's mild program in the Manifesto shows that his stuff "practically leads" to totalitarianism. Much of that program has been realized in democratic societies. Maybe you don't like the suggestion of force in implementing the program. But If laws are passed democratically and some people (the rich) refuse to go along, why is it dictatorial to enforce them by coercion, any more than against the poor or the workers? Do you think the rich get a pass on laws that deprive them of their property if they don't like that and refuse to obey? Of course they will yelp, "dictatorship! slavery!" But a democrtaic society has the right to send in the cops to enforce its laws. Write me down in favor of that sort of dictatorship. Even if the textual evidence says that Marx fits only the first tradition, one could still argue that the practical implications of his ideas are dictatorial. Look at what he says in the Manifesto: "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State...1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes...3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5.Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State6. Centralisation of the means of communication..." > Draper also argues that during the period that Marx wrote, the word > "dictatorship" had a different meaning than it does today. Meanings change > over time, just as the phrase "the dictatorship of the proletariat" has > taken on the meaning of "the dictatorship for, or in the name of, the > proletariat" or "the dictatorship over the proletariat" (as a result of the > Soviet and Chinese experiences). No, it took that meaning precisely because the practical consequences of a "dictatorship *of* the proletariat" are "dictatorship *over* the proletariat". As Bakunin correctly said "of the dictatorship", it is "a lie which covers up a despotism of a governing minority, all the more dangerous in that it is an expression of a supposed people's will" "government of the great majority of popular masses by a privileged minority. But this minority will be composed of workers, say the Marxists" Marx's responses to Bakunin are utopian through and through, simply show how naive he was when it came to real politics. >>
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Marx and Malleability
In The Closing of the American Mind, of course. ;) --jks In a message dated Thu, 18 May 2000 12:16:52 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << Brad De Long wrote: >So why, then, is the first Marx so weak in post-Marxian Marxism? Why >was the world afflicted with, say, Paul Sweezy's claim that "One >need not have a specific idea of a... beautiful musical composition, >to recognize that the... the rock-and-roll that blares at us >exemplify a pattern of utilization of human and material resources >which is inimical to human welfare"? My god. Where did he say that? Doug >>
Re: Re: Re: substitute for Draper
> CB: Does Draper recognize the centrality of popular sovereignty in Marx's theory of >democracy ? Yes, and not in a way that allows for single party dictatorship. > On what specific issues does he claim to have a more accurate understanding of >Marx's theory of democracy than Lenin ? The father, the son, and who's the holy ghost, Charles? You M-Lists are so Catholic. --jks CB >>
Re: Re: Re: Marx and Dictatorship
Ideas have consequences, but not mechanical ones. You cannot conclude from the lack of democracy attendent in 20th century efforts to implement Marxist in undemocratic countries that any attempt will enbd up that way. But you seem to think taht any attenmpt at revolution is doomed to lead to dictatorship. This is a conservative article of faith, but not one that has any rational basis. I would say rather that the only way we can extend democracy is to get rid of class society--the technical meaning of "revolution" in Marxist theory. And, I will add, I was not subscribin to the "after Pinochet, back to Lenin," line. I was subsribing to the orthodoc bourgeois democratic view that legitimate laws can be enforced by coercion. If you disagree with that, you are an anarchist--right, ChuckO? --jks In a message dated 5/18/00 2:33:36 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << The point is that if we go by the actual implications of the ideas - as Bakunin was trying to argue - and their actual historical consequences - as the Soviet experience shows - as opposed to relying on what the texts say only (doesn't Smith sound beautiful too?), you cannot but conclude that Marx was dictatorial. I am sure Marx would have admired Lenin like no one else, especially after he succeeded in taking power (except for the possible jealousy he might have felt). Marx wanted a revolution. > Write me down in favor of that sort of dictatorship. Yes, I know; how many Western Marxists were not reading Lenin again after Pinochet overthrew Allende in 1973? >>
Re: Re: Re: : withering away of the state
In a message dated 5/18/00 9:19:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << Interesting musings Carrol, but words have meanings, and what most people mean by the word socialism is not what was seen in the USSR. You can call it what you want, but I don't call it socialism. >> Actually, isn't it a big part of our problem that what _most people_ DO mean by "socialism" what they had in the USSR? --jks
Re: Marx and Malleability
What do you have against cars with big fins? --jks >My god. Where did he say that? > >Doug _Monopoly Capital_, pp. 138-9. He also takes after slums and cars with big fins, where he has more of a point... >>
Re: Re: : withering away of the state
Charles says: Claims such as Justin's that my approach to Lenin and Marx is like that of an approach to the Father , Son and Holy Ghost, are, ironically, themselves, liberal dogma, unfounded selfcongratulation that Justin or someone thinks more critically and undogmatically than I. This is false. Justin's thinking is not more critical, non-dogmatic than mine, as demonstrated constantly on these lists. * * People can and will draw their own conclusions about that. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Marx and Malleability
Yeah, I know, those old cars are fragile. I would never let a horse fall on mine. --jks << At 10:43 AM 5/19/00 -0400, you wrote: >What do you have against cars with big fins? --jks if a horse falls against a 1959 Cadillac, it can die. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine >>
Re: Re: Marx and Malleability
Brad raises an important question about the cultural development of Soviet-style socialism. It has been noted that there are parallels between "socialist realism" and the sort of art promoted under Nazism. This suggests that there is something in the way totalitarian, or would-be totalitarian, stystems regard art. A crude first approximation might be that these enshrine the cultural values of people with middlebrow artistic taste, due to their, typically, non-elite education and background in the old society, and create an apparatus for enforcing that taste by coercion, an well, of course, in the choice of what to spend public mony on. That does not explain thea ttitude of someone like Sweezy, who was not a bureaucrat from a lower class background in a Stalinist state, but a person of highly elite education. However, at the time he wrote the sentence in question, he was even more enamored of Stalinism than he is now, and may have adopted its tastes by analogy; at the very least, he had the reaction of someone of his education and generation to music that was loud, fast, abrasive, and obnoxious, and didn't even have positive political content, and confused that reaction with an insult to the human spirit. For me, if socialism hasn't got a place for low and vulgar rock n roll, I don't want it. --jks * * 8 how it came to be that people who claimed to be committed to a tradition that extolled human freedom, potential, and development could be so hostile to... ..jazz ..modern art ..rock and roll That is an interesting historical puzzle; I would like to have a sense of why it happened. Brad DeLong >>
Re: Marx and Malleability
CB: So many here are holier than them Soviets. >> Sure, we have no right to condemn people who send artists whose work they didn't like to die in labor camps, or, in palmier days, to have their thoughts corrected in psychiatric hospitals. Now, why didn't that occur to me? --jks
Re: Marx and Weber
What's misleading about a definition of the state that is wider than the
capitalist state? Weber would not regard tht as a criticism. Neither would
Marx regard it asa criticism to say that his approximation to a definition
of the state, an instrument of one class for oppressing another,is wider than
capitalism. Gramsci's notion of hegemony, which you praise, is also very
general.
You are quite correct that Weber thought that fascism could be legitimate,
but that's not because he was a fascist. He was a bourgeois democrat,
himself. W's notion of legitimacy corresponds to Gramsci's notion of consent.
For W, a state is legitimate if it is acquiesed to by people who broadly
accept the norms it upholds. A fascist population will regard a fascist state
as legitimate. Likewise Gramsci knew from personal experience that facism
could win the consent of a population. As to ultimate values, Weber was a
sort of Nietzschean who thought that there was no neutral justification for
choice among fascist ot bourgeois or communist values. But of course Marx, a
class relativist, agreed with that.
--jks
In a message dated 5/19/00 8:28:43 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< I would add one more thing.Weber's definition of state is quite
misleading. If state is defined in terms of monopolization of power,I
don't think this is unique to capitalist state. If you carefully read
Weber's _Sociology of Ancient Civilizations_, where he analyzes
pre-capitalist states, you will see that Roman empire was monopolizing
power in a given territory too, but Roman empire was not necesarily
capitalist, as Weber admits. In _Economy and Society_ Weber adds one
more dimension to his theory of the modern state: "legitimate right to
have a monopoly of violence in a given territory".He does not use
legitimacy in the sense of consent formation (contractual). He uses it to
describe how rulers receive legitimacy ("beleif" in legality, p.37)
regardless of whether or not rulers are themselves are legitimate
(following his logic faschism is legitemate too! geez!).
So Weber is interested in how the ruling autority is "legitimized". In
that respect, the capitalist state doees not simply use coercion but also
seek consent to make people beleive that its very existence is legimate
Weber was a bourgeois thinker.I prefer Gramsci's concept of hegemony to
Weber's concept of domination, since he has a more dynamic
vision of the state. Gramsci argues that the very definition of
the capitalist modern state is based two charecteristics: consent and
coercion. Politics is a power struggle of trying to gain hegemony over the
state (war of position),and of converting spontaneous mass movements to
long term organic developments. Once a dominant groups establishes her
hegemony, then they automatically resort to consent formation by
effectively using the ideological appratuses in society: civil society,
business groups, education, family, church.. >>
Re: genderization (fwd)
In a message dated 00-05-13 17:00:18 EDT, you write: << Many women are grown up with social values that contradict the conventional female wisdom. Some parents, but still few, choose not to give their daughters dolls or son gun toys, or even not vice versa >> Yeah, this is a lot easier said than done. We won't let guns (toy or real) in the house, but my son has always played with anything that looks gunlike (sticks), and his fantasy life is mosty childish dreams of slaughter. He also dances ballet, out of choice, but he is a very boyische boy. I should add that we have no TV. My daughter never showed interest in toy tools, and has always played with dolls. She went throw a stage from 3 to 6 or so when she would wear nothing but dresses, the frillier the better. I am not saying that this shows anything about an affinity between boy genes and guns or girl genes and dolls, but anyone who thinks that it is a simple matter to go against the stereotypes has no children. --jks
Sowing Dragons (fwd)
In a message dated 00-05-13 23:18:59 EDT, you write: << The ex-slaves weren't really "proletarianized" until the early 20th century, because immediately after the Civil War most of them became debt peons (though they did gain a lot in terms of leisure time and the like). It's only when they were no longer needed in cotton that they moved North (or to New South places like Atlanta) and became proletarianized. >> Having just finished Leon Litwack's Trouble in Mind, a terrifying, beatifullly written, though not terribly analytical account of bacl life under Jim Crow from the end of Reconstruction through the 20s-, I think I can report that Jim is flat wrong to say that the ex-slaves gained in "leisure time" or indeed in much else, except formal freedom, and by that I mean just that they were not technically chattel property. Otherwise they had no freedom. These were people who so so poor that it took them working can't see to can't see to subsist. I thought I knew a fair amount about black life in that era, but Litwack's book, despite its lack of materialist analysis, is brilliant phenomenology, and it really highlights the almost unimaginable extent to which blacks were sabagely oppressed and degraded under Jim Crow. It was worse than you can imagine. I remarked to a friend that it makes you wonder why they didn't just kill all the whites in their sleep. L does not discuss any deep economic explanation of the Northern migration, and it would be useful to know if the demand for agricultural labor in the South really fell in the 20s and 40s or what. Just now, however, I am worthing through Litwack's earlier book, Been In The Storm So Long, about the period from 1980 through the start of Reconstriction. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Sowing Dragons (fwd)
In a message dated 00-05-13 17:05:51 EDT, you write: << Either that or people actually *liked* having their teeth fall out... Brad DeLong >> Hey, Brad, revealed preferences, right? --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Marx's life and theory (fwd)
In a message dated 5/23/00 9:56:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << I blow hot and cold on the usefulness of the term "dialectical materialism," but even when I warm to it I don't like to see it posited as *the* philosophical basis for "historical materialism." Even apart from the specific expressions, I'm with Carrol on this one. (Not quite a first, but close, eh, Carrol?) A credible case can be made that Marx consciously rehjected philosophy and philosophical bases, regarding them as mere ideology, and saw the materialist concetion of history as a partial substitute, preserving what might be valuable in philosophy while explaining why it was ideology. See Daniel Brudney's excellent recent book, Marx's Attempt to Escape Philosophy. One might debate, of courese, how successful was Marx's attempt to escape philosophy. Btw Engels, who is also responsible to a lot of what is called materialist dialectics as philosophy, with a certain degree of approval by and even participation from Marx, who contributed a chapter to Anti-Duehring, takes the Brudney line in a manner os speaking in his piece Ludwif Fuerback and the End of Classical German Philosophy. >Of the latter: (a) independently of its origins, it has achieved a respectable pedigree and I think a useful and essentially accurate label for the mode of thought which I see first developed with any precision in *Poverty of Philosophy*; and (b) most of what I would think of as historical materialism can be defended independently of any particular view (pro or con or neutral) of the "dialectics of nature." Quite right. historical materialism, construed as a view about the centrality of class and the economy in social explanation, is consistent with any ontological view--including Machean or Berkeleyan idealism, as the Empiocritics pilloried by Lenin argued--are none. > (Stephen Gould, hardly a "dogmatic Marxist," has however written favorably of the influence of conscious dialectics, even of the Soviet type, on biological thinking.) >> Right, but he is not talking about historical materialism, rather more a diamat sort of thing. See here also Lewontin, Rose, & Kaim, The Dialectical Biologist, my least favorite Lewontin book. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Withering away of the state
Tocquville and Rousseau offer a "new" language? I don't deny we have lots to learn from them, but if "new" is what we need, they don't qualify. --jks I think it is worth while to rescue the language of >socialism and Marxism from the Leninist distortions, but perhaps it is not. >Perhaps we have to invent a new political language. > >Rod Yep. Back to Tocqueville and Rousseau... >>
Re: Re: Zizek, Stalin and Bukharin
I, personally, was delighted and amazed by Zizek's article, rather to my own astonishment, as I have never been able to read anything else he had written. You wouldn't knbwo it from Lou's comment, but the article is a review essay of J. Arch Getty's The Road to Terror, which I have not read yet, but which promises to be the standard work on the Stalin Terror of the '30s for the next 20 years. I read Getty's other work on the Terror, and he is excellent, a reallys olid historian. He's probably the first person to being real historical methodology to the study of the Terror, certainly the only one in English, including (as far as I know) translations. Lou may be shocked to hear that during the Stalin Terror, people really did confess to crimes they did not commit, and some of them did it, albeit under impossible duress, with the belief that it aws for the good of the Party. Bukharin was an exceptionally complicated case, since it seems very likely from his stubborn and intransigent refusal to say just anything Vyshinsky (the lead prosecutor at the purge trials) and his torturers put in his mouth, but only the things that he had in mind to confess to, that he was trying to subvert the message of the trials and leave a word to posterity through his ltortured (literally and figuratively) testimony. Zizket's main focus, however, and more importantly Getty's, is not on the psychodynamics of false confession but on the system of the Terror. Neither of them are recycling God That Failed anticommunism. I have always used "tendentiously" to mean "speciously" myself--and "speciously" used to mean "plausibly"--Hume so uses it. In a message dated 00-01-30 19:22:12 EST, you write: << >The last place I expected to read such nonsense was in the pages of the New >>Left Review. In the latest issue #238, an article by Slavoj Zizek titled >>"Suicide of the Party," recycles this cold war mythology but under a heavy >>coating of postmodernist babble. Sort of like seeing Arthur Schlesinger Jr. >>with a nose-ring. > >I urge people to read the article for themselves rather than relying >on this tendentious account of it. > >For what it's worth, Zizek told me he considered the point of view he >wrote it from to be "Leninist." Evidently one person's Leninism isn't >always compatible with another's. > >Doug The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word "tendentious" means "having a purposed tendency; composed or written with such a tendency or aim." Given this meaning, why should the word "tendentious" be used as if it meant something (vaguely) bad? >>
Re: Zizek, Stalin and Bukharin
In a message dated 00-01-30 20:51:25 EST, you write: << You are a supporter of Sam Farber's approach, who argues that there's a dotted line between Lenin and Stalin. Zizek's arguments would appeal to somebody whose understanding of the Russian Revolution is consistent with Robert Conquest's and Richard Pipes's. Meanwhile, the issues are clear. Bukharin confessed because Stalin threatened his wife and baby. You, Doug and Zizek would prefer to sweep this under the rug. I would not. >> I presume that "dotted line" here means that Lenin was practically as bad as Stalin, since what follows is a suggestion that if someone likes Farber's critique of Leninism before Stalinism then one's view of the Russian Revolution must be consistent with Pipes' and Conquest's. OK, if Lou wants to think of me as an anticommunist cold-warrior in the neighorhood of the Reaganites, that is his right. It shows he's as much of bloody idiot as he ever was, but I guess that is his right too, and can't be fixed. I certainly don't want to debate the Russian Question all over again just now. I would have thought, however, that I couldn't have been clearer in saying that Bukharin's confessions were coerced. Perhaps I should say a feww words about Getty's approach for those who might be interested in learning from his book. In his previous work, Getty pioneered an instritutionalist approach to the Terror that focuses on the group dynamics of the activity from "below." He relies on archival material rather than mainly on literary memoirs of survivors (unlike Conquest, say, whose pioneering work in this area is not to be disparared despite its polemical purposes, and also unlike Medvedev). Roughly speaking his argument in the earlier works was that it was not mainly or whollya top-down operation centrally directed by an all-knowing Stalin who had total control over his puppetlike minons. On Getty's account, Stalin broadly okayed ithe Terror and set the main themes: the assualt on the Party, the decimation of the Army, etc. But just as there was relatively little accurate information or easy communication in the economic planning system, there wasn't much in the terror system, and there was a lot of out-of-control activity from "below" by enthusiastic or terrified cadres, as well as really immense amount of nonpolitical score-settling done under political guises. In short, Getty's Satlin Terror was a lot more like Mao's Cultural Revolution than Conquest or Medvedev would allow. Getty's body count is a lot lower than Conquest's 20 million, too, although Getty is no apologist for Stalin. I presume the new book develops these themes further. I look forward to reading it. --Justin
Re: on how economists publish
OK, but consider that among the most important works of economics of the last century are Mises' article from 1920 on socialist calculation, Lange's "reply" and Hayek's response, all journal articles, and Coase's paper on the theory of the firm, perhaps THE most important work in 20th century economics. Wasn't Arrow and Debreu originally a journal article, too? Sure, there's also the Theory of the Leisure Calss and the General Theory, etc. But the point si taht you don't have to writea book to think a different thought. You just need vision and economy of style,w hich of coursea re hard commodities to come by. --jks In a message dated 00-01-31 19:35:24 EST, you write: << The contemporary economics profession emphasizes the journal article as the vehicle for developing new knowledge claims in economics. In important and poorly understood respects, this practice has changed the ways in which knowledge claims are developed. More importantly, it has also affected the type of knowledge claims that _can_ be developed. This is because the space limitations imposed by the journal format encourage the adoption of formalized thinking that economizes on space by making use of conventional assumptions and frameworks. In doing so, it places a huge handicap on those trying to develop new visions that embody both new sets of assumptions and new sets of economic relations. This is because such projects require enormously more space in which to justify assumptions, and to develop the particulars governing the framework of analysis. Contrastingly, scholarship that proceeds within the convention is free of these burdens, since the underlying assumptions and framework are taken for granted. >>
Re: Coase, the myth; was, RE: Re: on how economistspublish
In a message dated 00-01-31 23:14:51 EST, you write: << You need to go and work in a large corporation for about 10 years; Coase' work is just so much phlogiston theory. >> Unlike the rest of economics? I mean, you aren't go to see general equilibrium being attained or labor markets clearing. You won't see profit maximization or factors of production being priced at their marginal contribution. That's not news in these circles. You wil also not see labor being exchanged for its value equivalent or commodities exchanging for equal labor values generally. You will, however, encounter real transactions costs and see executives struggling, often in a half-assed and incompetent way to define the firm-market boundry in ways that minimize these. Coase is probably more like real world business than msot economics. Btw the phlogiston theory was a very good theory until Laviosier and Priestly showed it was wrong by explaining combustion with something better. What have you got that is better? Anyway. I wasn't saying that the stuff I listed as significant was right (Mises, Hayek, and Lange can't all be right together!), although I think that Coase is on to something, but that it was deepky imporatnt work published at journal length. Doug sneered at Coase. No, the reason Coase is important is not because a future Nobel Memorial Prize winner briefly and cryptically noted nonmarket phenomena. It's because Coase asked a number of very simple but quite deep questions that no one had ever quite put that way before and suggested an answer that got people thinking in a productive way--beyond the market, as Doug mentioned. Coase is the progenitor of transactions cost analysis, law & economics, contested exchange theory, and all the good post-NC stuff that is best of modern economics. He is also a person who writes with elegance and vision and can say important things without a whoile lot of mathematical trappings. Oh, while we are are short and elegant and important, Sraffa's Production of Commodities isn't a journal article, but it might be. It's a very short book. --jks
Re: Re: Coase, the myth; was, RE: Re: on howeconomistspublish
In a message dated 00-02-01 00:04:31 EST, you write: << sn't that what you academics are for? Hell I work two jobs, do I have to solve the theory of the firm problem too...don't tell me to unionize the folks where I work; already tried that and the owner of my company went to Congress, shelled out 863K$ in one day and got the law changed to kill the drive [which was succeeding quite well, thank you]. >> I'm a practicing lawyer, Ian, I do this stuff in my spare time, too. Realize I talk a bit like professor and used to be one, but that was years ago. --jks
Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: RE: Journal of EconomicPerspectives
In a message dated 00-02-02 19:42:25 EST, you write: << We wouldn't want to pillory the economics profession simply because Summers wants to dump effluents on Africa. >> Why not? --jks
How to characterize Haider
In a message dated 00-02-06 18:23:59 EST, you write: << someone who spent a lot of political energy fighting Prop 187 and its aftereffects, there is no question I see the Buchanites-Haider folks as a far greater enemy than the Bill Clinton-Tony Blair center-left opportunists. >> Nathan has set himself as the official right wing pro-Democratic Party hack (hsi word) on these lists, and for some reason thinks it worth his while to bwlabor the infinitemsal number of su who reject lesser evil politics in favor of movement building and occasional Third Party efdforts--I can't imagine why he does this. Even if we all pitched in it wouldn't make any difference to the Dems, and it would have no effect except to wipe out much of whatever support exists for movement based as opposed to partisan politics. Anyway, I have long since ceased to argue with him about this, since neither he nor I nor anyone else is enlightened or likely to change his mind. However, I cannot resist with this Haider/Clinton-Blair analogy. Who is the greater threat depends on what they are likely to do. On one hand, we have the Third Way types in Europe, Balir in the lead, who have all but destroyed the classical social democratic parties. In Blair's case, there is no "all but" about it, the Labour Party is gone and has been replaced by another Thatcherite Conservative Party. In this country, although we never had a Labor Party, we did have a liberal Democratic one, until Clinton and Gore and their DLC pals got through with it (center-left opportunists, Nathan calls them--what's left about them?). In fact, if the Third Way had got throttled the Austrian SDP, it's doubtful that we would be dealing with Haider now.. Or at least uncertain. So that is the evil of the lesser evil, the Third Way. Then we have Haider,a dispicable peace of pro-fascist trash. Loathsome, likrely to do all sorts of right wing things. Worse, however, than the things that Clinton and Blair have done? It's hard to say. Would Haider like to round up the remaining Jews and gas them? Possibly. Will he? Not a chance. Will he press for anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-working class policies? You bet. Will these be distinguishable except in degree from the policies of Nathan's center-left opportunists? Don't bet on it--less because Haider is lefter than folks might think than because the Third Way is righter than Natahn will admit. Anyway, its' time to stop the 1930s analogies. Haider is not Hitler, Austria is not Germany, and we don't have the Comintern to kick around any more. Let's get serious. Nathan isn't going to fess up--when the Democarts nominate Pat Buchanan and David Duke, he will be talking about how they are center-right opportunists, but consider the alternative--the rest of us, however, should be clear about about bad the Third Way is and why. Disgusted in Chicago, Justin
Re: Drazen's new book?
In a message dated 00-02-09 16:37:16 EST, you write: << In the new Princeton University Press economics catalogue, they are featuring a new book by Allan Drazen entitled Political Economy in Macroeconomics. Does anyone know anything about this book? Does it represent an attempt to reclaim "political economy" from the left? Joel Blau >> Oh, the term "political economy" is not trademarked. I can think of a half dpzen squarely liberal. nonradical books in political science that have it in their titles. --jks
Re: Re: executive committee
Yeah, all the AMs are lefty pub choicers. See also Pzrzworski on social democracy. I am having been developing a version of the argument that Marx's state theory is a pub choice view for a paper I am working on about Marx and the rule of law, although admittedly my motive is partly to annoy the Chicago Econ & Law crowd that proliferates around here. --jks In a message dated Thu, 10 Feb 2000 1:02:40 PM Eastern Standard Time, Peter Dorman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Actually, John Roemer's argument about the political-economic effects of > concentrated wealth is the sort of Marxoid public choice theory Max is talking > about. (See: A Future for Socialism.) > > Peter > > Jim Devine wrote: > > > Max writes: >If you think the state is the executive committee of the > > bourgeoisie, than you are a public choice theorist too.< > > > > The Virginia public choice school would not agree (even though they share > > the view that politics is endogenous with Marxian political economy). > > > > The Virginia school assumes that each voter's impact in the election is the > > same as each of the other voters (and emphasize how this process is less > > rational than a market). The "executive committee" theory, on the other > > hand, would be based on a one dollar/one vote theory (as a first > > approximation), so that those who have the bucks have more impact than > > those without. This recognizes that "voting" (in the sense of people having > > an impact on political decisions) takes place all the time, through > > lobbying, etc. Also, there are all sorts of government agencies -- notably > > the Federal Reserve in the US -- which are largely independent of control > > by democratically-elected officials, so that they can easily be "captured" > > by the industries they regulate (in the case of the Fed, banking and finance). > > > > BTW, when people, especially anti-Marxists, use the phrase "executive > > committee of the bourgeoisie," they often forget that such committees can > > make errors (from the point of view of the long-term class interests of the > > bourgeoisie), be indecisive, represent special interests within the > > bourgeoisie (or among state managers), etc. (Similarly, the boards of > > directors of corporations make mistakes, fiddle while the bottom line > > burns, represent special interests among stock-holders or managers...) > > > > In addition to the exec committee, we should remember that the state as > > such (in all class societies) is a coercive institution that maintains the > > class system. The executive committee theory is only one part of Marx's > > complete theory of the state (see, for example, Hal Draper's multi-volume > > book). > > > > Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: reparations
> So much of what we enjoy is built upon destruction of other people and the environment, I wonder what the concept of accumulation really means. Mind you, I'm writing this on a Pentium notebook computer. I live a comfortable life on land that was stolen . . . * * * In _To Those Born Later_, Brecht writes (I paraphrase): The bread that I eat was taken from the mouth of a man who is starving. The water I drink belongs to one dying of thirst. And yet, I eat and drink. It's good to recall this, and advisable not to agnize about it. As to reparations, to make sense of the notion, if you are seriously advocating it, you have to decide what your theory of justice is. We might not agree with all these theories. Thus the theory underlying reparations to slave laborers in Nazi work camps seems to be that workers should be paid wages. Socialists can only approve this relatively, in comparison to slavery. After all, we think that workers should share in the fruit of their collective labors, and not, ideally, be paid wages. The theory underlying the return of socialized property in the ex-Bloc countries is that it was wrong of the communists to take private property. Although we cannot approve of Stalinism, we reject the principle. A lot of theories of justice in this connection have a strong historical element which often leads to unfortunate discussions about which peoples did what to whom back when. After all, the Mexicans from whom the Americans stole CAlifornia itself stole it from the Indians who stole pieces of it from each other. Maybe it would be best to think about how to make things fair looking forward. Or you might not be seriously advocating reparations in any practical sense but just using the demand to highlight a history of oppression. I suspect that Vincenne Verdun, whom I somehow missed as a law prof when I was at OSU, is doing just this. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: reparations
>But you are living in the USA not in Central Asia. You have benefited from slavery and exploitation of black persons as have I and every other white person. This is our history and it is we who have to confront it. * * * True enough. But I, at least, am living in AMerica because my Jewish ancestors were oppressed in Russia, Poland, and Hungary, and not so long ago--my father's mother was born in Russian Poland. That is also part of my history. In fact, most white Americans can say something similar. Ask anyone of Irish descent, etc. That doesn't mean we don't have to come to accounts with the central question for America of the last two centuries, the color line. But it does suggest we might find a more productive approach than reparations or even suggesting that anyone with light skin in America is specially indebted to Black Americans because of slavery. As someone suggested, you want a diviusive strategy, a political loser, guaranteed to promote resentment and divisions, even if the underlying premise has truth to it, then white guilt is that approach. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: reparations
I don't get it. The history of Jews doesn't matter (Irish, whatever), what matters is that white people who wouldn't have regarded my ancestors as white kept slaves. The history doesn't matter that immediate descendents hated my ancestors almost as much as they hated blacks, passed effective immigration laws to keep Jews and other Eastern Europeans out--what matters is that those same bigots who hated Jews and other immigrants also instituted lynch law (applied, now and then, against Jews--see Leo Frank) and Jim Crow oppressed blacks. Or maybe, since Jews are pretty much accepted now, and are not oppressed, it doesn't matter what happened to them, but since Blacks are nota ccepted and are oppressed, it does matter to them. Look, I don't dispute that Blacks were subject to horrible injustice and that we have to be clear on our history as part of doing justice. For what it's worth, I spend a lot of time with my kids making sure they know about slavery, Jim Crow, etc. I am not religious or heavily in things Judaic, I don't think the world or even the Germans or the Poles owe the Jews an apology or a special break because of the Holocaust. I don't disagree that people now regarded as white have a great advantage because of it. I would be more than delighted if they didn't. But I don't think it will get us in that direction to talk in the way you propose. Yes, we need to be divisive. yes, we need to polaruze society. yes, we need to anathematize racism and bigotry. But no, we do not need to divide Blacks from whites by adopting a strategy that is guaranteed to create the wrong sort of divisions. Do you _want_ the Jews to feel "white"? Then, by God, they'll act like it, And no better way to make them feel "white" than to try to demand that they apologize for things done by Jew-haters. --jks In a message dated Fri, 11 Feb 2000 1:56:48 PM Eastern Standard Time, Michael Yates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > It does not matter that your ancestors suffered in Europe. They, and especially >their children, still gained here from being white. And I haven't noticed that >concern for whites has ever benefited black people much. For me it's not a matter of >white guilt but of elemental justice. Why is it a problem that asking whites to >confront their history is divisive. Maybe divisiveness is a prerequsitie to >ultimately getting justice. > > Michael Yates > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > >But you are living in the USA not in Central Asia. You have benefited from > > slavery and exploitation of black persons as have I and every other white > > person. This is our history and it is we who have to confront it. > > > > * * * > > > > True enough. But I, at least, am living in AMerica because my Jewish ancestors >were oppressed in Russia, Poland, and Hungary, and not so long ago--my father's >mother was born in Russian Poland. That is also part of my history. In fact, most >white Americans can say something similar. Ask anyone of Irish descent, etc. That >doesn't mean we don't have to come to accounts with the central question for America >of the last two centuries, the color line. But it does suggest we might find a more >productive approach than reparations or even suggesting that anyone with light skin >in America is specially indebted to Black Americans because of slavery. As someone >suggested, you want a diviusive strategy, a political loser, guaranteed to promote >resentment and divisions, even if the underlying premise has truth to it, then white >guilt is that approach. > > > > --jks
Re: Re: reparations
In a message dated 2/11/00 4:20:39 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << Defining a Black person would be something like whether they have held themselves out as Black or been officially considered Black in the various places where race has been required to be chosen on forms and the like. If a person has identified as Black , then they have been Black , for purposes of compensation for racism, which is basically how the slavery has impacted people today ( that is through the impact of racism). >> Pardon me for having the creeps, but I not so long ago read Ingo Mueller's account of the Nazi jurists struggled with the definition of who is a Jew, the results of which they codified in the Nuremberg laws. I don't think we ought to have a legal definition of who is Black beyond the rough-and-ready criteria we now have in place for limited purposes. Self identification obviously wouldn't do, btw, if you were to be handing out large chunks of change. Anyway, all this is academic in bad sense. --jks
Re: reparations
In a message dated 2/11/00 5:47:01 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << No, it is not within the Marxian tradition to say that "capitalism has brought with it certain social benefits." This is instead a typical bromide of the Second International of the late 19th century. >> "The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all succeeding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground--what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?" Typical 2d International Kautskyite rubbish. Louis should stick to his genuinely charming reminiscences about his Trotskyist youth. --jks
Re: Re: Re: reparations
In a message dated 2/11/00 11:29:26 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Typical 2d International Kautskyite rubbish. >> Comrade, this is irony, not provocation. The quote is from the Manifesto, so Marx & not Kautsky--a thinker whom I hold in high regard, btw, though not as high as Marx. I was making fun of people who think that the Marxian tradition has no place for saying that capitalism has not brought great social benefits. Marx thought it had done so. I am sorry that this needs explanation and regret any provocation from my mode of expression --jks
Re: reparations
In a message dated 00-02-12 07:27:37 EST, you write: << It is understandable that Justin would embrace the "stagist" orthodoxies of a Marxism wrenched out of context. This, after all, is the lynchpin of the Analytical Marxism school >> How any could get this out my my quoting Marx's encominium to the way the bourgeoisie have unleashed the forces of prodiction, I do not know. I was not, in doing so, endorsing the view that capitalism was progressive, but pointing out that Marx endorsed it. However, I agree with him in the respect he meant it. That says nothing about stages, however. I have defended "a kind of directionality in history towards emancipation, a long run tendancy towards a state of affairs without domination," based howver, on a class struggle account rather than on a Cohenist technologogical determinist account. I have said the thesis about a tendenct towards emancipation "must be qualified to avoid any discussion that complete emancipation is inevitable, that history has any necessary sequence of stages, or that reversions to previously abolished kinds or degrees of domination are impossible." (Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, and Justice, Legal Studies 17 (1997), p.p. 166-65. ). That is about as stagist as I get. Louis expresses satisfaction that the intellectual tendency with which I formerly identified, the analytical Marxists, has largely collapsed. I would have thought that regret would be more in order than satisfaction; we could surely use people like Cohen, Elster, Roemer, etc. If I were not on good behavior I would be inclined, moreover, to respond tartly that an ex-Trotskyist is in no position to talk about the fate of other people's former identifications, glass-house-dwellers and stones and all, but I will refrain. That sort of nyah-nyah-nyah-ism is not constructive. I myself wish that Trotskyism were the lively and exciting force it was of old. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Reparations and capitalist progress.
In a message dated 00-02-12 21:52:16 EST, you write: << > How much "progress" occurs >because of science? Do we attribute science to capitalism or can we >consider the scientific process to be "non-capitalist?" Good and hard questions. I think that you would have to distinguish between "science", "research", and "development" in order to answer them. And think hard about the fact that it was not in producing the heavy industrial goods of the second industrial revolution but in developing and producing twentieth century technologies and the goods they made possible that really existing socialism fell down. And you have to think about Lysenko... >> * * * Lysenko was hardly "science" any more than the reserach by the Tobacco Institute or Hernnstein & Murray is science. I think the development of science and its application to industry has largely been "capitalist." Capitalist markets provide a ruthless incentive for firms to understand the natural world for purposes of manipulating it, which means that it must be understoiod correctly. So, too, does international military competition and imperialism. (Recall that Gailileo and Leonardo workled for the arsenals of Florence and Milan respectivelly.) Capitalism also provides more limited incentives for understanding the social world, as long as this knowledge does not cut to the quick of class domination. That is why there is real bourgeois social science and not mere bourgeois ideology and vulgar apologetics. But scientific knowledge and methods are not bound to capitalism and imperialism. Once the sciertific approach, the emphasies on empirically restible formulation of precise quantitative hypothesis about (mainly) unobservable regularities has been created in the crucible of capitalism, it can be cut free from that origin. There is no reason why science under socialism should not be as good, and in the case of social science, better, than under capitalism. We have some basis for thinking so in light of the experience of the excellent natural science produced in nonmarket conditions in the West in universities and in the ex-Bloc under planning. If, however, the question was whether the progress in reducing human suffering and expanding human possibilities that we have seen under capitalism has been due to capitalist science, surely the answer is yes. Apart from the science of the ex-Bloc countries, that is the main forma natural science has taken--not, necesasrily, in direct work for corporations, or capitalist firms, but under an ethos largely foremed ata high level by the interests of the capitalsit class and its imperial servants in the state. This isn't to say that we should say, in that case, let's leave well enough alone. For one thing, what we have is not well enough. Capitalist science and even more imperialist science has also produced immense suffering and oppression. We have polio vaccine and computers and pastuerized milk but we also have biological warfare, the "green revolution" and the Bomb. These latter contributions give us reason to see whether we can abolsih the incentives that create them as quickly as possible. --jks
Re: Re: shirtless helots & neo-asceticism
In a message dated 00-02-13 00:28:27 EST, you write: << What matters for Kant is Law, not pleasures; and if the happiness (= pleasures) of the people come into contradiction with Law, it is Law that takes precedence. What philosophy can be more ascetic - and more anti-revolutionary - than Kant's? >> No one would mistake Kant for a hedonist. In his essay on "occupation," he says that "the pleasures of life do not fill our time but leave it empty" and he recommends activity as opposed to mere enjoyment. However, he is a fan of happiness. "Without occupation a man cannot live happily." His view is that a life of productive activity that engages the mind and body is better than one of passive enjoyment; play is better than idleness, for in play "we at least sustain our energies." The real enemy is laziness, not pleasure. He thinks that the businessman who goes to theater after a hard day's work is more pleased and contented than if he had nothing to do but to go to the theater. He does not say that we should not go to the theater. His view here sounds a great ldeal like Marx's, or perhaps rather vice versa. In his essay on the sexual impulse, Kant sounds startlingly feminist. "When a person loves another purely from sexual desire," then "good will, affection, promoting the happiness of others, and finding joy in their happiness" does not enter into it, "sexual love makes the loved on an object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon that has been sucked dry." But sexual love, he says, "can be combined with human love." IHe rejects the attitude a man has towardsa woman as a mere sexual object, from that perspective, "the fact taht she is a human being is of no concern to the man, only her sex is the object of his desires." This is not the voice of a joyless prig who renounces pleasure and delight or would subordinate us all to a grim law. It sounds like the voice of a sensible, decent person who acknowledges the proper place of pleasure, including sexual desire. Antirevolutionary? I think not. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Reparations andcapitalist pr...
I am surprised that YOU are surprised by the former USSR's failure in the environmentr, etc. Perhaps this comes from having an economist's perception of the world. My social science training was in political science, so it seems quite natural to me. The USSR did badly in the environmental area beacuse it lacked any democracy. People whose communities were being poisoned could not effectively organize for reforms. Moreover, political decisionmaking was very centralizeded, so that the real decisionmakers in Moscow ere not being harmed themselves by environmental disaster in Magnetigorsk or whereever. Finally, the closed society meant that the information was not there to embarass the authorities when conditions became bad. In the US, regulation was more effective because, imperfect as US democracy is, people could organize more or less effectively, pressure Congress, harass the federal buraeucracy, get information from the news and get it out, and there awes some accountability in Congressa nd in the state legislatures to people on the ground. The Clean Air and Water Acts, etc. are great victories. I will add that as far as I know, the better environmental situation here is largely due to legislation and reguiation. The unfettered market does just what you think it would. Externalize, externalize, that is Mosesa nd the Prophets. --jks In a message dated 00-02-13 10:58:26 EST, you write: << It is odd, and I do not understand, just why it was that really-existing-socialism was so *lousy* at those parts of economic activity where externalities are rampant and decentralized atomistic decision making works worst. In technological development and in pollution control all of our--at least my--theories predict that a centralized bureaucracy should do a better job than a market in which the key outputs--low pollution, big externalities from other people's innovations--aren't priced. Yet the really-existing-socialist economies fell down most not at the deadweight-loss-triangle-reducing activities of matching marginal private cost to marginal private demand, but in these two essentially collective aspects of economic life. Makes me think we need much better theories of government failure than we have... >>
Re: "government failure"
In a message dated 00-02-13 14:45:30 EST, you write: << What orthodox economists may see as "failure" is success to the capitalists or the Stalinist bureaucrats. However, we should keep in mind what "success" is from the point of the working classes. >> Well, I doubt whether either capitalists or bureaucrats see or saw pollution as a success. It's a negative all around, for the bosses as wella s the workers. But they will not clean it up unless they are forced to--capitalists, if they are required by by law, lawsuits, and regulation to internalize their costs, bureaucrats, unless they can be brought to deal by democratic process that puts their jobs at risk. --jks
Re: demography explained
In a message dated 00-02-15 12:08:20 EST, you write: << Today's L.A. TIMES explains the phenomenon of the "baby boom" and its contribution to history by listing the following individuals: Bill Clinton, Cher, Reggie Jackson, Donald Trump and Pat Sajak (and that's the complete list). >> T-t-t-t-alking ab-b--b-b-out m-m-m-m-y g-g-g-g--eration. Ug. If that's them, I hope I do die before I get old. Apologies to the women for the old music allusion. --jks
Re: Re: Protest Yahoo Sponsorship of Racist/FascistGroups
In a message dated 00-02-16 23:15:01 EST, you write: << On the Yahoo issue. I don't want the state to come down on thought crimes, but that shouldn't stop tallpaul and his comrades from harassing any fascists they find. >> Why does it get the state involved, esxcept in the most attenuated way, to ask that Yahoo live up to its (private) contractual obligations? We can't even sue on the contract, since we are not parties or third party beneficiaries. --jks
Re: Lochner v. New York
In a message dated 00-02-17 09:30:05 EST, you write: << "With the Lochner decision, the Supreme Court did more than reject an economic and social policy. It tabled consideration of the lines of moral reasoning advanced by reformers. . . ." "A major impact of the Lochner case was that to the extent of the Court's influence on public opinion and the machinations of legistative bodies, laissez faire-social Darwinism would not need to depend entirely upon the strength of its reasoning in its competition with other theories. Instead it would be propped up by the exaggerated status that had been created for it by the Court." >> You are telling this because . . . . ? --jks
Re: Re: Protest Yahoo Sponsorship of Racist/FascistGroups
In a message dated 00-02-17 13:16:10 EST, you write: << I think that the problem for many (some?) (one?) of us is that we tend to view Yahoo not as a private firm but as a creator and maintainer of public space in which _Areopagitica_ should rule. Thus "abusive... vulgar, obscene... invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable" has no rightful place in Yahoo's terms of service (although the "unlawful, harmful, threatening... tortious, defamatory... libelous" does). >> Why not? I mean, why can't Yahoo set any terms it likes, including _only_ promoting abuse (we'd do well there), vulgarity, etc. (Btw. "obscene" is legally unprotected speech, in the same class as libelous, if you want to be legalsitic about it.) If Yahoo wants to be the Hatenet provider, that is its business, but since it has said it won't be, why not hold it to that? --jks --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Protest Yahoo Sponsorship ofRacist/Fascist Gr...
In a message dated 00-02-17 16:27:31 EST, you write: << >Why not? I mean, why can't Yahoo set any terms it likes, including _only_ >promoting abuse (we'd do well there), vulgarity, etc. ... >--jks Because free speech is a public right, and Yahoo is in the business of creating a public space... For the same reason that one should be able to hand out petitions in shopping malls. >> Well, as you know, the S.Ct has rejected the argument for shopping malls. I think they were wrong there, but at least at present I think that an ISP is not the same. You may have no choice but to go the mall if you want to leaflet, but there are a lot of ISPs. Surely they aren't all public forums? --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: capitalist versus socialist progress
In a message dated 00-02-23 19:23:56 EST, you write: << It's been a long time since I looked at Cumings and I can't say that I read it completely. But my impression was that he was arguing that there had been a civil war happening on the entire Korean peninsula in which there was a somewhat fluid boundary between the two sides, with attacks going both ways across that boundary, along with attacks on landlords in the northern part (along with counterattacks) and attacks on peasants in the southern part (along with counterattacks). The beginning of the officially-designated "Korean War" was when the northern armies launched what would have been a successful offensive if not for US intervention. I think the point was that it really wasn't a matter of the north crossing international boundaries, since the boundaries hadn't been truly settled. Is my impression correct? >> Yes. --jks
Re: What IS wealth?
In a message dated 00-03-11 15:02:24 EST, you write: << Labour-power can only create _value_ when consumed -- as a means to an end -- in a process of production. However, labour-power can also be immediately consumed as disposable time -- an end in itself -- independently of any process of production. Any comments? Questions? Criticisms? >> In Marx's value theory, value is created when labor is embodied in commodities, that is, when commoditiesa re produced in a generalized commodity exchange system. Perhaps that is what you mean by labor being consumed, although Marx does not talk this way. However, the value in the commodities may not be realized if they are not sold--this gap between value and its realiztion opens up the gap that isd the condition for the possibilities of crises. The consumption (by actual sale) of embodied labor (on capital's side, realization) is not a condition for the creation of value. Your last sentence is a confusion. Time, the average time socially necessary for the creation of a commodity in a market seconomy, is a measure of valuie. But labor power, the ability to work, is not time, but someone the value of which, in the technical sense, is measured by time--the average time necessary for its production, something that can be operationalized by the value of the subsistence bundle of commodities necessary to keepo workers going at the socially acceptable level. If you talk about people "consuming" free time outside the market, you are outside the realm of value altogether. --jks
The ten most important events in American industrial history
I have been asked by a documentary filmmaker who is doing a short (12 min.?) film on US industrial history for a pretty mainstream context what are the 10 absolutely must-include events, preferably with a bias towards stuff for which there exists film. Given the context and the buyer it cannot be all militant/labor radical stuff. The call is for stuff related to industry, not just radical labor. The following list occurs to me. I am not trying at this point to limit it to 10. Please add, cut, rank. Thanks. The discovery of the steam engine and/or cotton gin The completion of the transcontinental railroad/Chinese immigration to build it The formation of the great Trusts: Standard Oil, US Steel The Haymarket rally/8 hour day The ARU strike and/or the Homestead strike (a Penna event) Ford's Model T assembly line, Blacks move north to get factory jobs The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire/ILGWU The Lawrence Strike/IWW Something about the CIO--the UMW battles (very important in Penna), maybe the Ford Hunger Strikers? The signing of the NLRA Industry/labor in WWII: women in the industrial workforce, Rosie the Riveter The Treaty of Detroit The civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Something about the computer industry, what? IBM, Microsoft Something about deindustrialization, moving offshore, maybe US Steel gets out of the steel biz?, becomes USX The breaking of the PATCO strike Something about the service economy, what? Founding of McDonalds? ??? --jks
Re: school vouchers
I am not involved in the issue, but I think it is good news. The right wingers have been undermining funding for and public commitment to the public schools with voucher programs. These have been upheld, e.g., in Cleveland and Milwaukee. They are attacked on 1st amend., establishment clause grounds, which is right, because they provide an excuse to channel lots of government money mainly to Catholic schools--which are, incidentally, in big financial trouble. However, the real problem with these programs is that they are bad on policy rather than constitutional grounds. They suggest that the solution to the problem sof inner city schools ius to write off those schools, privatize the system, and give poor kids money to go to Catholic school. Also connected with vouchers is the charter school movement, if possible an even worse idea, but one giving no purchase for constitutional attack. There have been a few setbacks for vouchers, mostly on establishment clause grounds. What is surprising here is that this setback came from a presumably elected state court judge. We will see if he is affirmed or reversed on appeal. --jks > Any one involved in this issue that can give a overview of what this > means? > > > A Florida judge has ruled that it is a violation of the state's > constitution for students to use taxpayer money for private school > tuition, curtailing the nation's boldest experiment at using market > pressure > to improve failing schools. > > The decision, which the state says it will appeal, is the second major > legal > setback for voucher proponents in recent months, following a federal > judge's ruling that Cleveland's voucher program contravenes the First > Amendment's separation of church and state, > > Florida's was the first statewide voucher program and the first to tie > voucher eligibility to schools' performance on standardized tests. It > serves > as a model for a national voucher plan proposed by Gov. George W. > Bush of Texas, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and has > > been copied by several of the 25 state legislatures currently > considering > new voucher initiatives. > > rest of article at > > http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/late/14cnd-vouchers.html > > -- > Rod Hay > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > The History of Economic Thought Archive > http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html > Batoche Books > http://Batoche.co-ltd.net/ > 52 Eby Street South > Kitchener, Ontario > N2G 3L1 > Canada
Re: Re: Re: school vouchers
What's wrong with charter schools? No standards, no unions, no minimal safeguards of educational quality. A private charter school in Chi-town, nonunion of course, failed, hadn't kept adequate records for several years. the kids in it lost two years. How many of the minority youth there do you think were happy to do an extra two years of HS? --jks > The voucher idea is bad for economic reasons: it allows private schools to > "cream skim," i.e., to attract the best students, leaving the problem kids > to the public school system to handle (which then gets blamed for failing > them). (There's adverse selection in that market.) Also, there are a lot of > rules that public schools have to live under (such as rules for those with > learning disabilities) that private schools can and do ignore. Either the > private schools will ignore them (so that the rules won't be applied) or > they will end up as rule-bound as the public schools, so that the "small > bureaucracy" argument in favor of private schools would go away. > > I don't get the judge's argument against vouchers, BTW. My son goes to a > non-profit "non-public school" because of his learning disability (mild > autism) and it's paid for by the public school system. It seems to me that > the judge is knocking down that kind of deal. > > What's wrong with charter schools? > > At 10:42 AM 3/15/00 -0500, you wrote: > >I am not involved in the issue, but I think it is good news. The right > >wingers have been undermining funding for and public commitment to the > >public schools with voucher programs. These have been upheld, e.g., in > >Cleveland and Milwaukee. They are attacked on 1st amend., establishment > >clause grounds, which is right, because they provide an excuse to channel > >lots of government money mainly to Catholic schools--which are, > >incidentally, in big financial trouble. > > > >However, the real problem with these programs is that they are bad on > >policy rather than constitutional grounds. They suggest that the solution > >to the problem sof inner city schools ius to write off those schools, > >privatize the system, and give poor kids money to go to Catholic school. > >Also connected with vouchers is the charter school movement, if possible > >an even worse idea, but one giving no purchase for constitutional attack. > > > >There have been a few setbacks for vouchers, mostly on establishment > >clause grounds. What is surprising here is that this setback came from a > >presumably elected state court judge. We will see if he is affirmed or > >reversed on appeal. > > > >--jks > > > > > Any one involved in this issue that can give a overview of what this > > > means? > > > > > > > > > A Florida judge has ruled that it is a violation of the state's > > > constitution for students to use taxpayer money for private school > > > tuition, curtailing the nation's boldest experiment at using market > > > pressure > > > to improve failing schools. > > > > > > The decision, which the state says it will appeal, is the second major > > > legal > > > setback for voucher proponents in recent months, following a federal > > > judge's ruling that Cleveland's voucher program contravenes the First > > > Amendment's separation of church and state, > > > > > > Florida's was the first statewide voucher program and the first to tie > > > voucher eligibility to schools' performance on standardized tests. It > > > serves > > > as a model for a national voucher plan proposed by Gov. George W. > > > Bush of Texas, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and has > > > > > > been copied by several of the 25 state legislatures currently > > > considering > > > new voucher initiatives. > > > > > > rest of article at > > > > > > http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/late/14cnd-vouchers.html > > > > > > -- > > > Rod Hay > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > The History of Economic Thought Archive > > > http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html > > > Batoche Books > > > http://Batoche.co-ltd.net/ > > > 52 Eby Street South > > > Kitchener, Ontario > > > N2G 3L1 > > > Canada > > Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: school vouchers
In a message dated 00-03-15 19:48:58 EST, you write: << t is my opinion that one of the most important tasks for socialists is the protection of the public education system. A defeat of any attempt to undermine it is an important victory. Jim D. could you or any one explain what a "charter school" is? >> * * * In Chicago, charter schools are publically funded, privately run schools that are basically contracted with by the school board to provide education without having to meet the normal standards or submit to the union contracts required by the regular public schools. It's contracting out of public education. --jks
Re: Re: Kosova/o
In a message dated 00-03-16 18:44:34 EST, you write: << >On Thursday, March 16, 2000 at 14:32:47 (-0600) Carrol Cox writes: >> Perhaps it can't be >>done, but I am willing to argue that so far as possible in all left >>forums (marxist or non-marxist) it should be made as embarassing >>as possible for anyone to speak up *in principle* for the freedom >>of racist speech. > >I'm 100% in favor *in principle* for the freedom of racist speech. Are you sure that you are "100% in favor *in principle* for the freedom of racist speech"? Kindergarten teachers shouldn't be fired even if they called kids "niggers," "pickaninnies," "towel heads," "wetbacks," and so on? What about laws against racial & sexual harassment at work and in school? Are you against them? >> I don't mean to be glib, and it is a hard question, but no one who, like Bill & I, supports the principle of freedom of speech, including racist speech, thinks that this means the right to say anything at any time regardless of its effects. There is a large body of First Amendment doctrine thata ddresses what the limits are, not all of which is satisfactory, but the existence of which suggest that us reflexive ALCU types have not overlooked some obvious point. For example, kindergartem teachers. We are talking public K teachers here, since private ones are not covered by the 1A at work. The line would be that public employees have a right to free speech at work on matters of public concern as long the exercise of their right is not disruptive to the performance of their duties. Your example would fail because of the last clause, and we could fire the bigoted K teacher. Racial etc. harassment laws only implicate the 1A if directed against public employees, and actionable harassment is disruptive bur definition, so proscribable. There is no such thing, however,a s freedom of racisist speech. There is only freedom of speech, and if it does not include freedom for racists, then it is not the real thing. As Ros L warened Lenin, freedom is always and everywhere freedom for those who think differently. Yours in wimpy liberalism --jks
Re: Free Speach
In a message dated 00-03-16 23:36:15 EST, you write: << Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. presented a "clear and present danger" as the only basis for curtailing the right of freedom of speech, without too much discussion of what constituted a clear and present danger. I think that many of Yoshi's examples could be considered as "clear and present dangers" to do irrepairable harm, and thus should be prevented, certainly in public institutions. >> No. The CPD standard was Holmes' standard for allowing the state state to proscribe advocacy of illegal conduct. There are other bases on which speech can be curtailed--the standard list is obscenity, libel, and (rarely used) fighting words. In addition there are kinds of speech that get lowered protection--commercial speech, for instance. ANd there are restrictions that are not content based on the time place and mannin which protected speech may be uttered. (I can lawfully call for viting for Alan Keyes, but not at three AM on a bullhorn in your neighborhood). BTW the CPD standard was more articulated even by Holmes, and particularly by Brandeis, than you suggest, and it has been developed in the contremporary Brandenburg standard of the Warren Court, the current advocacy of illegfal conduct standard. The examples of the K teachers would probably fall under time place and manner restrictions--they are permitted to engage in racist speech, but not at work and to their charges. The harassment examples are more like engaging in illegal conduct--a category not officiall onl the list, but speech that constitutes commission of a crime, such as, "I'll pay you to murder her," is unprotected; I would surmise that harassing speech directed at coworkers bya public employee would constitute a sort of statutory tort under Title VII, and would be similarly unprotected. --jks (being legalistic, as usual)
Re: "Free" Speech & Democratic Anti-Racist Discipline(was Re: ...
In a message dated 00-03-19 04:38:25 EST, you write: << The poor Antioch students were made fun of in the mass media during the anti-"PC" hysteria, but in fact you'll find them to be among the most left-wing, free-thinking, & politically active students in Ohio (and probably in the USA). >> "Free thinking" is the last way I'd describe Antioch students as a group. My experience of them is that of a fairly uniform PC party line. Frankly I thought that my students at OSU were more open minded. --jks
Re: Re: "Free" Speech & Democratic Anti-RacistDiscipline (was ...
In a message dated 00-03-19 13:31:46 EST, you write: << I meant "free-thinking" in three senses: (a) secular, (b) self-governing, & (c) freer from the ruling ideas. >> I was using it in the sense of "able to think for oneself." And I won't overstate how much that was true of OSU students, where I spent dim years 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
Re: CP's Anti-Racist Discipline (was "Free" Speech &Democratic Anti-Racist Discipline)
> The Comintern resolution on the "Negro Question" helped to firm up their political backbones. Judging by his comments on Antioch students, I doubt that Justin would have survived in the CP in the 30s. :) Probably I would not have survived in the CPUSA in the 1930s, I'm terrible about thought control. No doubt I would have been shot in the CPSU as toon as they noticed me. This is a criticism? However, I don't understand the last point: is the notion that it is somehow racist of me to be disgusted and disappointed with the terrifying degree of reflex conformity among (mostly white, if that's relevant) Antioch students? -jks
Re: RE: Re: Re: CP's Anti-Racist Discipline
In a message dated 00-03-21 18:47:13 EST, you write: << he International Socialists -- which was taken over by the folks at the top, who decided to send the rank-and-file members to "colonize" blue-collar factories, etc. powered by excessive, triumphalist, rhetoric. ( >> My outfit, Solidarity, is the heir to this "colonization"--althgough we don'trequire folks to go into the factories (or do anything else), many in the group still encourage it. The people in Soli who did this are probably the most successful examples of the potentials and limits of the strategy. They have been the backbone of a lot of the union democracy movement, TDU, New Directions in Auto, Labor Notes, that sort of thing. They have become union local presidents and officers and led militant struggles and become respected activists. They have recruited practically no workers. In fact, I can't even be real specific about who they are because their work does not permit them--so they think, or many of them--to have an open socialist identification because of fear that red-baiting will compromsie their effectiveness. I respect them immensely, and when I decided to switch careers out of academics, I went to law school. I have also seen lots of friends in other contexts who went to colonize and got lost, particularly when their left organizations faded or folded or even just switched strategies. Would "colonization": be what "communist militants" do in an upsurge? I dunno and neither does anyone else. We have had only one cycle where we saw sucha things, when the CP, mainly, organized the CIO unions. I don't mean it was mainly the CP that did that, I mean among left outfits, it was the most successful in that line of work. But then it was drawing on a mainly working class base to start with, not radical college students, unlike my Soli comrades who were in the IS in the 70s. And that base no longer exists. So where does that leave us? I dunno. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: kBureaucracy, et centera, wasRe: CP's ...
In a message dated 00-03-22 13:34:56 EST, you write: << but what do they have to do with the SD part, doesn't that stand for social democrats? are they former social dems who became neocons, or is it just another one of these cases where words don't mean what they usually do?? >> People might look here at Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals (Chapel Hill 198?), the best book on the people who became the neocons, from their Trot roots through the 80s. Sidney Hook, who was one of America's almost-great Marxist theorists in the 30s, then an apologist for witch-hunting and an ardent cold warrior, he ended up a Reagn supporter--and he said almost to the end of his life that he was a real Marxist, everyone else misunderstood old Karl. Now he was a lot more reflective than most of the SDUSA-ers, but I think their roots come out as much of anything of the Lovestonites. Jay Lovestone was a leading figure in the CPUSA in the 20 who was disillusioned by a visit to Moscow and ended up constructing the infamous AFL-CIO International Dept, the social as opposed to the intellectual power vase of the SDUSA. The "SD" part reflected their labor connection, I think. The "USA" was more important to them. --jks
Re: Re: Have You Read All These Books?
Of course I think philosophers (of all people) ought to be cultured people of wide curiosity. However, it's a fact that in high-powered reserach institutions and places that aspire to be like those places, they are mostly not. I don't think philosophers are unique here: we see a general pattern of the effects of professionalization on higher ed. Didn't someone post a reference to a nice chapter of a book what happens to physics students? Jim asks whether the "method" of analytical philosophy is to blame. I am not sure there is a "method": but this goes back to Jim's and my disagreement about method in lots of contexts. AP emphasizes logic, but logic doesn't necessarily make you a narrow technician. Russell was a logician and a highly cultivated man. I do think the culture of AP is partly to blame. This discourages scholarship in the sense of knowing a lot of what Aquinas or Descartes or Hegel really said, their times and lives and contexts; it denigrates history, even intellectual history; it despises "soft" stuff like art and literature and looks to "hard" science as a paradigm of knowledge; it involves an internal and very macho professional culkture of intense competition. But you have to look at the problem in a wider context. Few academics are intellectuals. Moreover the kind of humanistic education all good scientists, philosophers, and scholars used to get is lost foreover, an artifact of a lost world. A dimly recalled story: von Neumann, a logician's logician and a founder of game theory, honored the nuclear physicist Fermi for something brilliant he'd done, maybe it was getting the first reactor to work at Chicago, at a Manhattan Project dinner, by standing up and announing in Latin, "We have a Pope," a reference to what the cardinals say when a new Pope is announced. He knew the expression, probably knew Latin; made a joke about Fermi's Italian background, and could safely assume that at least the Europeans present (which many Manhattan project scientists were) and Oppenheimer would get it, although it would be lost on the Americans, thus reinforcing the European exile sense of superiority over the barbarians like young Feynman. Today, they are all barbarians, European and American alike; and no one would be capable of making such a joke. Alas. --jks << >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12/11/00 02:03PM >>> Justin writes: >My experience of academia is that philosophy professors are not . . . readers or >people of wide culture, or even much curiosity. Jim: Maybe I'm naive, but I can't understand this. Shouldn't philosophers, of all people, be experts on a wide variety of philosophical thought CB: They should be, but I think Justin is telling us they are not the way they should be. Speak on , Justin. Jim: , going back to the ancient Greeks and nowadays stuff from non-"Western" cultures? After all, don't we build on the foundations created by Aristotle and all those old guys? Does this ignorance -- and non-intellectualism -- have anything to do with the method of "analytical philosophy"? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine >>
Re: Time for agile leftists to shift and support Gore.
What made you think I think that big bourgeois judges are OK? Actually, elections are exactly where I think that liberal political values belong--not "liberal" in the sense of Democratic party, which isn't even liberal in the New Deal-Great Society sense anymore, but in the sense of acknowledging the diversity of conceptions of the good, the priority of justice over anyone's particular conception of the good, the centrality of democracy in public decisionmaking, and the importance of liberal rights to free speech, assembly, and the like. Judges who do not honor these values, like five I can think of right off, are decidedly not OK. --jks CB: What circumstances are those ? Ones in which you are pushing liberal political values in everyplace except the elections ? How is it the big bourgeois judges are ok, but the big bourgeois politicians are absolutely untouchable ? >>
Re: Question for the Lefties
>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12/11/00 08:19PM >>> In reply to Jim and anybody else: Before I ask other questions, please provide me with a brief answer to the following very basic question. We all apparently agree that "markets" exist since the beginning of recorded history. But marxists distinguish "capitalism" as something historically unique. If the defining characteristic of "capitalism" is not markets, what is it? >> Marx defines the differentia of capitalism among modes of production by reference to three features: 1. Private property in productive assets 2. Production by means of wage labor (as opposed to slave, serf, individual, or cooperative labor), 3. Generalized commodity production, or meeting most needs by markers. Thus, markets antedate capitalism, but markers did not become the way most people met most of their needs until capitalism. Until recently, most people were subsistance farmers. Moreover, most producers until recently (the last 500 years, less in most places) were slaves or serfs, and did not work for wages. Productive property has only been partially private: in the idealized model of feudalism, for example, land was relatively inalienable. Obviously the existence of capitalsim is a matter of degree: the features Marx identified as peculiarly capiatlsist came together and developed raidly in the last few centuries, but had been present to some degree in earlier societies. --jks
Re: human behavior
Well, the point of the pop sociobiological claim is to legitimate nasty behaviors and unjust social arrangements by reference to the principle "ought implies can": because we can't do anything about our propensity towards hierarchy and competitiveness (so it's said), we just have to live with it. Therefore there is no naturalistic fallacy in pointing out that "is" doesn't imply "ought" here; murder is bad even if we are programmed for it. In any case, my point was just that we can affect the incentives for bad behavior by legal sanctions, among other things; or redirect aggressive behavior into harmless channels, which is an "is" point. The consistency of hardwiring with various behaviors is not the same as multiple realizability of the mental unless you are a behaviorist who thinks all there is to mental states is behavior or propensities to behave.. --jks In a message dated Tue, 12 Dec 2000 1:58:32 PM Eastern Standard Time, Sam Pawlett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << Justin Schwartz wrote: > > Oh, Norm, stop the silly bad sociobiology. Competitive behavior is > "programmed" into us, but it is triggered only in certain circumstances. > Violent behavior is likewise "programmed: into us, but we don't say, well in > that case, let's legalize assault and murder! But sociobiologists and its new and improved version, evolutionary psychology, would say you are committing the naturalistic fallacy here. SOB's are only trying to give causal explanations of behavior and pass no judgement on it morally. Because males are adapted for rape and murder doesn't make it morally right.Indeed, recent authors on the ev-psych of rape like Thornhill/Palmer explicitly say they are trying to explain violence in order to help eliminate it. Or so they say. > Besides, suppose you are right > that we are hard wired for dominance. Do we want to allow ourselves to > indulge in this sort of behavior? We are probablya s hard wired for violence > (in a wide variety of circumstances) as we are for anything: so we should > indulge this bad propensity? If humans are hard wired for violence it is only among males. Sexual selection confers advantage on males who sire more offspring no matter how it is done. Better fighters have more opportunities for reproductive success. If I can beat the shit out of you then I get the girl, no matter what the girl thinks. That's the argument and I think it is wrong. I'll post on this stuff later. Saying that males should practice violence because we are hard wired for it, confuses "is" and "ought". It's the "is" claim I want to refute and not the normative claim (the latter being so absurd it doesn't merit comment.) Hard wiring doesn't mean "can't': it just means > "harder". Yes, and hard wiring is consistent with any number of behaviors (multiple realizability of brain states.) Sam Pawlett >>
Re: Have You Read All These Books?
> Okay, we agree in practice. _In practice_, AP's method involves discouragement of scholarship as Justin defines it here. [BTW, I like the typo, the spelling of "culkture," though maybe "kultur" would be more appropriate.] Of course we could drop the "method involves" and have a sentence that means almost the same thing, which undermines the point of talking about "method." However, there is no point in raking this over again. >The _official_ or desired method of AP is logic? then what distinguished it from Aristotle? of from any other school of philosophy (except maybe post modernism)? haven't almost all philosophers since Aristotle thought that formal logic was extremely revealing if not absolutely necessary to clear thinking? Does AP add anything to logic that previous philosophers didn't know about? Analytical philosophy is the heir of logical positivism, which gave modern logical, as developed by Frege, Russell and Whitehead, et al. an absolutely central place in doin philosophy. Modern mathematical logic is a quantum jump over the Aristotlean logic that preceded it in power and flexibility; there's no comparison. Frege antedates analytical philosophy, but AP added much that was important--Russell is a founder of AP and a foundational figure in modern logic as well; Wittgenstein made important contributions in the Tractatus; Goedel was a member of the Vienna Circle; Church and Turching were in the loop; Frank Ramsey, the inventor of decision theory, was a logician at Cambridge, etc. So, yes, I think you can say that analytical philosophy has advanced the study of logic a bit--more than anyone had since Aristotle, truth be told. Russell's analutical philosophy, the early Wittgenstein, and logical positivism (the Vienna Circle) made the use of this logic basic to the doing of philosophy; problems were formulated in terms of it, and those that couldn't be were dismissed. The only previous philosophical movement that made logic so central was scholasticism, where philosophers were likewise expected to be fluent in formalism and able to think that way as part of professional competence. Of course the logic was much more primitive. Analytical philosophy has discarded most of the tents of logical positivism--the verification principle, etc.--but it has retained the emphasis on logic. At Michigan grad school in philosophy, you had to pass the math logic course with a high grade, and it also fulfilled the language requirement, on the grounds taht it was a "formal language." That shows the attitude AP takes towards scholarship better than anything else I know. Louis Loeb, Michigan's leading expert in early modern philosophy when I was there, did not know Latin, Greek, French, or Italian, i.e., he could not read the works he was writing about in the original, But he still got tenure. After I left, they hired E.M. Curley, who is a genuine scholar and knows the languages. --jks
Re: needs
I can't hear the difference between a clean vinyl recording and a good CD remaster. Some people talk about a "warmer" sound--it doesn't register with me. --jks << The reason music used to sound like vinyl is that it was on vinyl, pops, > scratches, and all. Only because the old LP's and SP's were mono and not stereo recordings. Analogue is superior to digital because the digitial coding process loses sound that doesn't fall into the 01-01-01 pattern. >>
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Have You Read All These Books?
"Ken Hanly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << There are different types of analytical philosophy. . . . Sure, but, I wasn't trying to give a history or a typology. I was just trying to explain why the culture of APis anti-intellectual and hostile to humanistic cultivation. Also, incidentally, to wave at the contributions of AP to logic. The hostility to culture ersal, of course: I did not say that every analytical philosopher is a narrow technician. By some accounts _I_ am an AP, and I hope I am not a narrow technician. I have also studied with some APs who are humanistically educated--Rorty, for one; when I studied with him, he was still an AP. It's rare, though: none of my other AP teachers strikes me as fitting the bill, on reflection. Maybe Nick Jardine. Nor did I say that humanistic cultivation is necessary or sufficient to be a good philosopher. (Wittgenstein, btw, certainly did have a humanistic education; he just didn't do much with that side.) What I said was that a humanistic education was a good thing and it's a shame that it's largely vanished and its values are not ! ! promoted among analytical philos ophers. Also, if Ken wants logical positivistic type contempt for postmodernism, there's a lot of it goinga roung among APs. Some would say, gain, that I manifest it. --jks
Re: Re: '"market socialism"
This snipe is unfair. i have been (alsmost single handedly) giving detailed, lengthy, precise, and extensive arguments. I do now and then make a suggestion for reading an original source, but if you wanted an account of the calculation debate, you have a moderately good introduction to the main argument solely from my posts. As for Neil, why bother responding. Nothing you say can make any difference to someone who has got religion. He knows all the answers. --jks In a message dated Mon, 17 Jul 2000 1:25:01 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Ken Hanly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << To use Justin's technique. Go read the Regina Manifesto. Cheers, Ken Hanly neil wrote: . > > Capitals rule cannot be mended, it must be ended! > > Neil > >.
Re: Harry Magdoff on market socialism
So the argument is meaningless if it does not estabalish a priori that markets are better than any kind of planning anywhere? Rubbish. Nonsense. That is a fast way of not having to try to answer a very strong, empirically supported, theoretically deep critique of a nonmarket economy. To see this, consider the answer: you say, the only way to see if nonmarket alternatives will work is to try. But try what? You say, planning. I say, look at the USSR. You say, but our planning will be democratic! I say, that wpn't help (see what I have argued above). At this point you say, that's meaningless, because otherwise planning would never work. No, say I, and Hayek: the problem is that planning won't work outside a market framework, to give us the information we need. An starting to feel like a proken record. I really do appreciate Jim Divine's contribution, whicha t least comes to grips with real issues and offers real arguments. --jks In a message dated Mon, 17 Jul 2000 8:15:23 AM Eastern Daylight Time, Rod Hay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << In that case, the argument is meaningless. We can only know if alternatives to markets can work if we try. Even then we can only know that that particular experiment did not work, not that no institutional arrangement can work. If the proposition is not general, it is merely an empirical hypothesis. Rod [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > Hayek had a deep insight, and, like many peop;le with such an insight, went > overboard with it. We might take it for what it is worth, while correcting > for its overstatement. However, his main point was not that _nothing_ could > be planned, but that _not everything_ could be planned. He was in fact a lot > less ferocious about markets than a lot of his followers, A big U of Chicago > Law School libertarian, Richard Epstein, recently took him to task for that > in a piece in the U Md. L. Rev. My poiint too is that planning cannot > tiotally or largely displace markets, not that it cannot be used where > experience shows it works. --jks -- Rod Hay [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archive http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://Batoche.co-ltd.net/ 52 Eby Street South Kitchener, Ontario N2G 3L1 Canada >>
Re: Re: Re: Harry Magdoff on market socialism
I don't have a spell-checker on my systerm, which should be obvious. Sorry. Also don't have time to write this stuff and copyedit. Sorry. --jks In a message dated Mon, 17 Jul 2000 12:06:11 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << At 10:33 AM 7/17/00 -0400, you wrote: > I really do appreciate Jim Divine's contribution, whicha t least comes > to grips with real issues and offers real arguments. thanks, but check your spell-checker. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine >>
Re: Market socialism -- summing up?
Well, the impasse was something we reached while ago. Much of the shapre of it involves misunderstanding. There is a deep, underlying aspect to--many socialists thinks that markets and competition areevil, and would think they were evil even if they could do everything I say, and plans couldn't. There is a deep ascetic ideal running among the support many people who still support socialism have for the ideal: the basic motivation is not that socialism will make us rich or happy or free, but that it will transform us and make us good. In short, this is a sort of Rousseauean socialism--something with a legitimate root in Marx, who answered to some of Rousseau's call in various ways. On this worry, the concrn with markets is that they do not ake us good, but set us against one another. I think the Rousseauean impulse is attractive but quite futile. As a liberal, I would be satisfied if socialism made us rich, happy, and free, and I think market socialism can do that, but planned! ! socialism cannot. I quite disagree that it has been shown that market socialism would suffer from the problems of capitalist markets, at least setting aside whether they would not make us better. Virtually every claim to that effect that has be raised in this discussion is based on a misunderstanding. The basic reason I have been urging is the calculation problem, which Rob dismisses as "not theoretically deep" because it is "merely empirical." I guess this shows a divide so great between our conceptions of theoretical explanation that I do not think it can be bridged. I am a pragmatist, and think all our theories are empirical and revisable, provisional and practically tested. Rob complains that Hayek didn't back up his theory with empirical studies. Well, he wasn't that sort of economist. But thetheory is powerfully confirmed empirically: the Soviet Union is now 'former" and it failed on its own terms for more or less the reasons Hayek said it would. So far, Hayek 1, Marx O--not that the fSU embodied Marx's ideals, but (as a number of people here have said), nothing has so far. Hayek might suggest that there is an explantion for that. Btw, someone carped at my reference to Marx's ideals of planning. Of course Marx though that the socialist society would have a planned, nonmarket economy. He says so repeatedly, for eaxmple, in the section on the fetishim of commodities in Capital I, in the Critique of the Gotha Program, and elsewhere. He does not explain how it would work, but he sketches its outline and makes claims about it. And his reluctance to get more specific is not one of his strong points. This leads me to say, in response to Michael's claim here, that I do not envisage the project to building models here and now to be part of a project of laying down a blueprint for future generations of socialists to follow. thst is not the point of the exercise. If it were, it would be futile, because we could not bind them if we wanted to. The point is rather to have an answer, here and now, to the question we must encounter in our practical organizing work every day, So what have you got that's better? If we cannot answer that question even in theory, in the face of hard, deep, important, and theoretically deep and empirically supported objections, we have no business asking othersto take the risks we would have to asks them to take. Moreover, we would be crazy to waste on our time on the project ourselves, instead of (merely) working for reforms that we know will improve people's lives. I do not understand how any rational person can seriously justify to himself or others the claim that we need to overturn the whole structure of society, but we have nothing better to say about what will replace it that (a) it won't be markets, and beyond that (b) people will work it out somehow. No wonder we have such a pathetic following. I would be sorry if the discussion ended just as Jim made his important substantive contribution in which he actually comes to grips ina really constructive way with how nonmarket institutions might address the calculation problem. This is very close to the first time I have encountered that sort of behavior from a critic of markets, at least least in a way carried out with the thoughtfulness and seriousness the project deserves. However, if people want to retreat back into their shells, I certainly have other things to do. --jks In a message dated Mon, 17 Jul 2000 12:41:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Michael Perelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << I think that we have reached an impasse here. We all agree that both Soviet-style central planning and the market are both flawed. Neither market socialism nor (what we might call, for want of a better word) real socialism have ever been tried. Market socialism is susceptible to outside pressures, just as European style social democracy is acquiesced in becoming more like U.S. style raw capitalism. As Jim
Re: Re: Market socialism -- summing up?
I guess I am a fan of the work ethic, but I thought that was actually a Marxist ideal, self-realization through productive labor. But the reason I push markets in their place is not that I think they will promote such self-realization, but because they help us avoid waste. Even a LaFargian advocate of laziness ought to be against waste, if only beacuse it means we would have to work harder and longer for less. --jks In a message dated Mon, 17 Jul 2000 3:55:16 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: << Justin wrote: >Well, the impasse was something we reached while ago. Much of the >shapre of it involves misunderstanding. There is a deep, underlying >aspect to--many socialists thinks that markets and competition >areevil, and would think they were evil even if they could do >everything I say, and plans couldn't. There is a deep ascetic ideal >running among the support many people who still support socialism >have for the ideal: the basic motivation is not that socialism will >make us rich or happy or free, but that it will transform us and >make us good. In short, this is a sort of Rousseauean >socialism--something with a legitimate root in Marx, who answered >to some of Rousseau's call in various ways. On this worry, the >concrn with markets is that they do not ake us good, but set us >against one another. I think the Rousseauean impulse is attractive >but quite futile. As a liberal, I would be satisfied if socialism >made us rich, happy, and free, and I think market socialism can do >that, but planned socialism cannot. I don't think that folks here are critical of the idea of market socialism because they are "ascetic." In fact, one might say that an obsession with "efficiency" (as defined by the market) is a kind of asceticism. The competitive market, when it becomes _the_ mode of production & gains power of compulsion over us, makes human beings work harder than otherwise -- an unpleasing prospect unless you are a fan of "work ethic"! Yoshie >>
Re: Re: Hayek's Conception of Knowledge (was Re: Harry Magdoff on market socialism)
Nice, can I use this? I'll credit you with it. Of course i don't think the IH is God. The IH obviates the need for God. You don't need one entity that smart who knows everything if you have a lot of little entities not so smart who know a little bit and a means of coordinating their knowledge. --jks I meantto say in a message that got scrambled that it was not you but others whom I meant in my swipe at Rousseaeanism. I don't think attcaking an ideal that may actually motivate people is an ad homimem. I didn't say, You only say that because you are jealous or bitter. I said, the idea to which you aspire is superficially attractive but flawed. And if you don't stop sniping at me for being an analytical philosopher, or trained as one, I'll start snipinga t you for being an economist, which,a s far as I can tell, is an even lower form if life than my current incarnation as a lawyer. --jks * * * Hayek's position -- so ably put forth by Justin -- seems to be (a) in order to avoid market rule, there needs to be a God; but (b) God does not exist; so (c) market rule is inevitable. But then he assumes that God exists in the form of the Invisible Hand. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine >>
Re: Re: Hayek's Conception of Knowledge (was Re: Harry Magdoff ...
In a message dated 7/17/00 5:00:03 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << The critique makes no sense to me at all. Would von Mises or Hayek really claim that we do not know our needs and desires without participating in a market? I know that I want to have fresh mashed potatoes out of my garden without participating in a market. Of course we know our own needs--right now, though not necessarily very far in the future. That is, each of us knows his or her own needs. But we don't know others', or what resources are available to meet them, or what production techniques are the best way to use those resources to satisfy those needs. Thise we have to find out. > Planners will screw up because of lack of information. Consumers will scream bloody murder. Poor supply, poor quality, poor choice. So the planners modify the plan and production. So that is wasteful. But how do you determine if that is any more wasteful then having entrepreneurs guess what might sell, competing and going bankrupt, or advertisers spending milliions trying to ensure there is a preference >> This "ratcheting" was Lange's solution back in the 30s, his reply to Hayek. But Lange assumed that accurate info was available costlessly--he had a neoclassical planned socialism. In fact, it's not costless. And, as I have been arguing, a nonmarket system gives people an incentive to lie, to exaggerate needs or understate capacities. Moreover, it does not give anone in particualr the incentive to investigate what needs there are or might be--it has managers, but noyt entrepreneurs. ANd it stilfes innovation, because innovation disrupts the plan. Lange never addressed these in his early reply to Hayek, and when hje did, after practical experience in the Polish Central Planning Agency, he became a market socialist. --jks
Re: Re: Market socialism -- summing up?
In a message dated 7/17/00 5:01:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << The disagreement is that I think the Hayekian critique doesn't prove -- except by fiat of Hayek's assumption that divinely perfect knowledge is necessary for successful planning -- that planned economy can never make us enjoy freedom & pleasure & abundance. >> Hayekl doesn't really demand God's knowledge, except for God's plan. But he does argue that the knowledge that is available in a nonmarket system is so inferior to what the market provides as to be unacceptably wasteful and inefficient in a modern society. The Soviet experience bears this out. Maybe id there was no contrast class, if all life was at that level, people would be less discontent because they wouldn't know what they were missing. But surely that can't be your point. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Market socialism -- summing up?
In a message dated 7/17/00 6:02:18 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << It appears Justin that you don't have time to read as well as to check your spelling. >> Sorry if I offended you. I have no idea what you want out of an argument. Hayek presents an argument about the incentive structure of planning and its likely effedts. In his early formulations, it is an abstract economic model, like many, although without the burden of formalization: hayek is a political economist, like Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Keynes, not a mathematical economist. The model has testible implications. The FSU provided a crucial test case, and bore out the predictions quite well. Virtually everyone who has written about Soviet planning, including the people who tried to do it and solve its problems, fiound the problems that Hayek predicted: lack of accurate information, systemativ lying, waste, bottlenecks and shortages. The list isn't the place to discuss that evidence: this medium isn't conducive to it. You might look at Michael Ellman's Socialist Planning, 2d ed., for a useful summary. --jks
Re: Re: Re: Hayek's Conception of Knowledge (was Re: Harry Mag...
In a message dated 7/17/00 6:35:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << Just a few additional points for Justin to address: 1) In describing Schweicart's market socialism you included markets as one of the socialist parts. Markets per se are not socialist. The system is socialist because of the other features you picked out. No? Either I mispoke or you misread me. I included self-managed enterprises as noth a market bit anda socialist bit. The competitive market between them is a market bit, not, on its own, a socialsit bit. >2) Unlike idolators of the free market you are very much in favor of regulation of markets and having public goods produced via planning and distributed on the basis of need. As I understand it, market defenders would claim that regulation would skew the supposed signals that are to provide the information that is to make the system work efficiently. No? Yes. However, unlike the market idolators, I follow Karl Polyani and others (including Smith) in thinking that markets areenabled by networks of social, legal, and regulatory institutions without which they would not function. Whta I want out of markers is not theoretical equilibrium, but incentives to seek accurate information, and I do not think that would be much distorted by regulation. > 3) To ensure that markets take into account environmental costs prices must reflect those costs. How do you ensure this? Do you use the typical nc how much people would be willing to pay technique? But won't this be wholly unjust? Rich are typically willing to pay more for unpolluted air etc. than the poor. How do you avoid what might be called the Summers' effect! If you don't do this then won't you resort to some political technique. Public hearings etc. when prices are to be changed? But then this is a non-market methodology. >> We will, of course, pay for unpolluted air. The only question is how. But unlike free market environmentalists, I would prefer that externalities be addressed through regulation, taxation, and the costs shared by all the public. Somwe regularatory mechanisms might contain a market component; that is not the sort of thing that can be decideda priori. --jks
Re: Re: Hayek's Conception of Knowledge (was Re: Harry Magdoff ...
In a message dated 7/17/00 6:58:39 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: << Hayek doesn't have an answer, and as many noted he was uninterested in empirical work of actually comparing the cost of information gathering for a planned economy with transaction costs & externalities in a market economy. A Ronald Coase he wasn't. >> Habe you read Coase's austere, abstract, unempirical papers? Maybe you are thinking about his follower Oliver Williamsom. --jks
