Re: What is the total wealth ?
Carrol Cox wrote: I don't think estimates of total wealth tell one much. What counts for your purposes is the flow of material goods and services available at any given moment. Or perhaps the productive capacity if everyone were employed, but I doubt anyone could make even a wild estimate of that. I'm not sure I understand your points, but estimating the value of (global) aggregate wealth or what Marx called (global) social capital shouldn't be a challenge to make us feel nihilistic. Next I'll make a wild estimate of the value of world's capital. Well-informed people could correct it or refine it further. Today, with access to markets, accumulated wealth is capital in some phase of the canonical cycle (M-C... P... C'-M'). Sure there's some wealth already at the brink of being consumed, but neglect that. So, for our purpose, global wealth = global capital. Using Doug's figures, last year, global capital generated a *gross* income of USD 7,867.94 per capita. Since global population is, say, 6.3 billion, then we're talking about a gross income of 50 trillion USD, plus or minus change. That and a few other pieces of information (under some roughly plausible assumptions) should suffice to make an estimate. We're just trying to price an (aggregate) asset. How much of this gross income would be required for the simple reproduction of the economy? In other words, how much is it *net* global income, income that we could dissipate without jeopardizing the ability of global capital to generate the same net income every future year? Deduct depreciation and also the fraction of consumption that just replenishes the labor force at its current skill level. So, there's no labor force growth, no accumulation of human capital, and no addition to the capital stock. Assume there's no uncertainty or sustainability issues, so we're certain that global capital will re-generate the same net income forever. Hence, risk = 0. In other words, we are assuming perfect foresight, rational expectations, whatever. (Risk would lower the estimate a bit. But note that, after a few years, sustainability doesn't really matter, because we're going to discount net income and what comes in the far future will be worth little in terms of present value. So I'm making these assumptions to simplify matters only. For instance, if we know or suspect that the world will end by 2050, the calculation would only get more complicated, but the result would not be that different.) I cannot make an educated guess about net global income, so I'll just say it's 30 trillion USD. Global capital can be now treated as an annuity, which is very convenient because its present value formula is net income flow/r. To calculate the present value, we discount net income using its opportunity cost. And what would that be? The value of the next best alternative to dissipating the net global income back into the universe. Say, what we people are actually doing right now, using current net income to expand future income. How? By adding to current consumption (to expand the labor force and to expand its skill) and by adding to the stock of global capital. Say, the labor force will grow at 4% per year in the future and per-capita income at 1%. Then, the next best alternative is expanding global net income at a rate of 5% per year. This growth rate is assumed constant (since there's no risk, no volatility). So that's the global discount rate we should use to price our annuity. Thus, the discounted present value of global capital is: K = 30 trillion USD/0.05 = 600 trillion USD That's close to 100 thousand USD per person. Very roughly. Julio _ De todo para la Mujer Latina http://latino.msn.com/mujer/
Re: What is the total wealth ?
In one of the last paragraphs of my previous posting, I wrote: Say, the labor force will grow at 4% per year in the future and per-capita income at 1%. I meant: Say, the POPULATION will grow at 4% per year in the future and per-capita income at 1%. Doug's figure is per capita, not per worker. Not that it makes much of a difference. Julio _ Visita MSN Latino Noticias: Todo lo que pasa en el mundo y en tu paín, ¡en tu idioma! http://latino.msn.com/noticias/
Re: What is the total wealth ?
Daniel Davies wrote: Surely this is the entire problem at the heart of the Cambridge Capital Controversy; you can't work out what the total amount of capital is without making an assumption about the rate of profit and vice versa. You caught me! Yes, you're absolutely right. My exercise is formally flawed. Yet, Marx would pull a trick out of his dialectic hat and say: In practice, the markets solve the paradox all the time. We'd look around and note that -- after all -- marketable assets do get priced. So, at a point in time, the sum of their values must be some definite number. How flimsy will that number be if it is based on circular reasoning? As flimsy as the human condition is. If we think about it, this paradox is at the heart of any theory of value. What's the measure of all things? For all we know, other things, the neoclassical would claim. The claim of the humanist (the Marxist included) would be: For all we know, we humans are the measure of all things. How can humans measure their humanity using their humanity as the standard? Well, we can -- we do it somehow as we proceed to live our lives. And we won't be able to move beyond that point... Julio _ De todo para la Mujer Latina http://latino.msn.com/mujer/
Re: Deflation?
Doug Henwood wrote: H, I think it's worth testing the hypothesis that when PEN-L gets a thread going on economic vulnerability, the economy is about to accelerate. This is a good real-time test. Good point. There's an upswing. Some financials will get fixed and debts will be rolled over. But, as David says, that doesn't make the elements of vulnerability go way. The dollar has been sliding down and the current account deficit is still growing. In the 1990s, that wasn't a problem. But the world is different now. The conditions that fed the boom are not here anymore: the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialism (with or without quotes) cannot collapse again, the sense of stability and triumphant capitalist euphoria is gone. That was a one-shot event in history. A whole new geopolitical game may be starting, with China, India, Russia, and Japan positioning themselves. Still, no match for the U.S., but getting there. (And the war on terrorism has no end.) The relaxed military budgets that allowed for deficit reduction are gone, stable and low oil prices are here no more, technological innovation may or may not be what it once was (there's debate, e.g., Stiglitz points to years of no investment in science and education; Stiroh believes innovation is just beginning, there's a self-reinforcing cycle, and a recovery will create the incentives for another round). The threat of terrorism inside the U.S. and conditions for a needed cycle of class warfare are here. On the other hand, in spite of restrictions to the immigration of skilled workers (and grad school applications), there's plenty of slack in the skilled labor market for now. But let's not get too complicated here. Take the IS equation. Assume all you need to assume. Make the world real simple. In its simplest form, growth in real output is the negative of the autonomous spending multiplier times the i-elasticity of the demand function times the growth in i times investment/output (actually, the portion of demand not autonomous to i). No? Back of the envelope, plug a multiplier of 1.4, an i-elasticity of aggregate demand of -0.025, an (big-item-consumption + investment)/gdp = 0.3. (If you don't like my numbers, use your own.) Armed with this powerful weapons, I solemnly predict a contraction 0.01% for every 1% increase in the interest rate. In an 11 trillion USD economy, it's a decline in 1.5 billion USD, or how many jobs? Wanna bet? Julio _ Latinos en EE.UU: noticias y artículos de interés para ti http://latino.msn.com/noticias/latinoseneeuu
Deflation?
Michael Perelman wrote: how much of an interest rate hit, can the economy take without reeling. I looked at the Flow of Funds. From 2001Q1 to 2004Q1, total outstanding debt in the U.S. grew at 1.8% quarterly. I suppose debt tends to grow faster than the GDP, but isn't this too brisk a pace considering how slow the economy has been? Compare to rates of broken-down sectors for same period (in parenthesis the % of total outstanding debt held by sector): Federal gov't (18.2)1.9% State local gov'ts (7) 2.3% Businesses (32.9) 0.9% Households (41.8) 2.4% Clearly, businesses have been purging their financials since the boom ended. State local gov'ts as well as households have become more vulnerable to shocks, which can reverberate on the financial sector (domestic and foreign) that has the asset side of these liabilities. Julio _ ¿Cuánto vale tu auto? Tips para mantener tu carro. ¡De todo en MSN Latino Autos! http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: Hubbert's peak
Let's be clear: Louis Proyect and I are the only list members who can legitimately claim expertise in oil forecasting. The rest of you are just a bunch of amateurs. But that's okay. Louis will continue sharing his wisdom by Lexis-Nexing an endless stream of well selected journalistic articles, and forwarding them to the list under soothing thread names like The End is Near, See? I told ya this is it!, Me and my friends have been right since we were born, etc. And I'll continue educating the patient readers with long tirades where paragraph (b) refutes paragraph (a). Read on and learn. #1 At this point in time, is there an absolute amount of oil in the depths of our planet, say, the absolute reserve? Yes, of course. There must be. If we had an infinity ability to MRI-scan our planet, we would know it for sure. #2 Is global oil production near, at, or beyond its peak level already? Is the known oil reserve about to be exhausted? Who the hell knows? Michael Perelman, of course, but who else? Questions #2 are very tricky, but their answers do NOT depend on the answer to #1. Forecasting oil reserves and oil production (and consumption) is NOT the same as trying to figure out the absolute amount of oil on earth as of today. In fact, the latter has little if any relevance to the former. This is why. The known oil reserve at a point in time is a variable -- NOT a constant. In fact, it is the point estimate of a random variable based on assumptions about some imputed probability distribution. The assumptions depend on the current state of the art in prospection, production, consumption, technology, science, etc. Whenever any of these assumptions changes (and they change all at once and all the time), whenever new information pops up, the estimates are subject to revision and updating. Forecasting oil reserves and production/consumption is NOT a purely technical-geological exercise. In fact, for the time being, forecasting oil production and consumption is tantamount to forecasting oil *supply and demand*: the path of the oil market. Nothing less. Because, for the time being, oil production and consumption is regulated by market incentives. The path of the known reserves depends on the path of the market. For a given state of technology, geological prospection depends on the size of the oil rents that can be secured by prospecting. At the margin, changes in geological prospection (like changes in supply) depend on expected excess demand. The current state of the oil market depends somehow on expectations about the future path of the market -- sometimes very flimsy expectations that add noise. No wonder forecasting the path of the oil market (quantities and prices) is a very tricky thing. The oil market is global in scope. If we are to believe the Oil Gas Journal or World Oil (as reported at the U.S. EIA's web site), then the known reserves of crude oil as of 1/1/2003 were between 1 and 1.2 trillion barrels, which at the going market price should be valued between 40 and 50 trillion USD, 4 or 5 times the U.S. annual economy. Given the rents at stake, the oil market is competitive in a very complex way. The big guys play a game of strategy that involves not only bluffs, negotiation, and short-run manipulation of quantities and prices, but also the deployment of substantial amounts of other resources, including those of a political and military nature. Markets of this kind are highly self-referential, which is to say, very hard to figure out. (See Keynes's General Theory, chapter 12.) Moreover, since the oil market is closely linked to all other markets, oil forecasting is premised on a broader forecast of the global economy, which is also a pretty wild animal. Even though aggregates tend to be more stable than dis-aggregates (somebody here mentioned the law of large numbers or the central limit theorem), the world economy is not ergodic. Economic forecasts tend to fail when they are most needed -- i.e., when they are supposed to anticipate sudden changes in the direction of the economy. We see the failures of economic forecasting all the time. Serious economists know that long-run forecasts of the economy (like those at the base of the 10- or 15-year budget projections politicians use) are full of shit. Forecasting how the economy will do in the next quarter or next year is hard enough to do. That said, as devastating as the non-ergodic argument is, we shouldn't be entirely nihilist about predicting. Pinning down the *precise* path of the oil market (conditional on current information blah blah) may be beyond human ability, because the market is self-referential or whatever. But, even under capitalism, social life has some measure of stability. In a loose ballpark sense, things can be and are anticipated. But by whom? Well, by people who are highly motivated to know and have the resources to enter the serious guessing game. (Politically, the left should be very motivated to know,
money, sex, happiness
pooled cross-section equations in which it is not possible to correct for the endogeneity of sexual activity. The statistical results should be treated cautiously Right, chicken and egg... because we happy people tend to attract and have significantly more sex than the grumpy ones. :-) _ De todo para la Mujer Latina http://latino.msn.com/mujer/
Re: a non-Jones theory of oil prices
Michael Perelman wrote: Of course, Mark Jones is ultimately correct. At some point natural conditions will drive up the price of hydrocarbons. The only question is about timing. My impression is that Mark Jones' argument was about the timing of the event. Who would deny that as a resource is depleted, the labor time required to extract it goes up and that -- one way or another -- that is reflected on the market price? Mark's thesis was that we were at the brink of a Hubbert's precipice. That this prompted a struggle for control of oil resources and that this was the best way to understand global politics in our times. If he's correct except for the timing, then he's not correct. Moreover, Mark ruled out a gradual increase in the price. He emphasized the steepness of the curve's downward slope, which would lead to a sudden and devastating rise in the price of oil. And he claimed that the world economy would be unable to substitute away from oil via technological change or input substitution. He rejected the concepts of demand-and-supply elasticity and input substitutability as bourgeois ideology. The only type of adjustment he envisioned was a sudden and apocalyptic decline in oil consumption. It was a doomsday scenario. This thing about timing reminds me of an awful metaphor used by Gramsci to characterize Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution: Bronstein [Trotsky] in his memoirs recalls being told that his theory had been proved true... fifteen years later, and replying to the epigram with another epigram. In reality his theory, as such, was good neither fifteen years earlier nor fifteen years later. [...] It is as if one was to prophesy that a little four-year-old girl would become a mother, and when at twenty she did so one said: 'I guessed that she would' -- overlooking the fact, however, that when she was four years old he had tried to rape the girl in the belief that she would become a mother even then. (Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks) Julio _ ¿Cuánto vale tu auto? Tips para mantener tu carro. ¡De todo en MSN Latino Autos! http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: High tech is skin-deep in India
Michael Perelman wrote: Sometime ago, I believe on pen-l, I questioned Brad DeLong's insistence that increasing aggregate income meant that the people were doing better, whether in India or China. I had not seen an indication that the BJP was in trouble before the election. India was, by all media accounts, an economic miracle -- even more so than China, but then the United States has always presented India as the anti-China. I don't see a necessary contradiction between a rapidly growing average income and a political backlash. First, we know that average income is not the best conceivable measure of average well-being (although there's some correlation). Second, distribution matters a lot, in part because of what Sen calls positional goods -- namely that people's individual sense of well-being depends not only on the average but also on where they are in the distributions -- plural because they take into account not only how wealth or income is distributed vis-a-vis their relatives, friends, or immediate neighborhood, but also in the larger community. Third, the change in these variables matters a lot -- and so does the speed of change. Fourth, the political cycle matters because people may time their actions to enhance impact. (Note that I'm not saying that we can find a nice function relating political backlash to all of these variables. Obviously, political dynamics is complex.) Rapid growth under capitalism shakes off all of these variables in complicated ways and leads to surprising dynamics. In Mexico, for instance, the Zapatista rebellion took place in early 1994, not in 1986 or 1987, when the country was at the bottom of its long debt crisis. In 1994, the economy was growing at a brisky pace. Of course, the military readiness of the EZLN was crucial in the decision, but -- that aside -- the Zapatistas timed the uprising to coincide with the implementation of NAFTA because of its symbolism. Marcos has made remarks where he frames the Zapatista rebellion as a reaction against richer areas of the country trying to pull way ahead of the poorest areas. In an interview given to Cristián Calónico (a UNAM sociologist) in 2001, drawing an analogy between nation and guerrilla, Marcos quotes Ernesto Che Guevara's famous phrase that the guerrilla moves at the pace of its slowest member. This is very telling. IMO, this operates not only for those on the boats that sink, but also for those on the boats the tide rises. It gives a good hint about the way the poorest and the not-so-poor in a community (and a nation is supposed to be a community) feel when some pull ahead without concern for the rest. I can think of many other examples. For example, the 1968 student movement in Mexico happened after Mexico's per-capita GNP had grown rapidly and with little interruption for 35 years. Consciously or unconsciously, the movement was timed to coincide with the preparations for the Olympic Games in Mexico City, which were meant to showcase Mexico's economic miracle. The students protested against practices of police arbitrariness and government unaccountability that had been in place for decades -- and people had more or less accepted them as a matter of fact in previous decades because those generations had witnessed the Mexican Revolution (1910-1918). The huge demonstrations led to mass repression. Those who protested, high-school and college students from public high schools, colleges, and universities were being groomed at public expense to thicken Mexico's middle class. This was possible because, at the time, government finances were in good shape thanks to the economic miracle. Charles Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that we get easily used to a better life but, by some ratchet effect, the alternative we don't take nicely. Long periods of stagnation make people more accepting of misery, but when the economy grows -- even if only on average -- then suddenly more people are in a position to expand their needs further and demand more. In a completely different context, I think that the speed with which the anti-war movement grew in the U.S., even prior to the invasion of Iraq, was related, not only to the shock of 9/11 (when people face death, they question themselves more deeply), but also -- to a very significant extent -- to the 1990s boom. The poor in the U.S. benefited from the 1990s boom, particularly in the 1998-2001 period. Higher employment among African-Americans led to a thickening of the so-called black middle class, etc. IMO, the boom had the unintended effect of making people more demanding about the kind of foreign policy they can or cannot accept. The boom made people more assertive politically. That's one of the reasons why the worse-is-better school has it all wrong. Julio _ MSN Latino: el sitio MSN para los hispanos en EE.UU. http://latino.msn.com/
Oil shock? - a thought
Paul Krugman has been worried lately about a possible oil shortage: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/14/opinion/14KRUG.html?th. He focuses on the recessionary and inflationary impact on the U.S. But China should be a bigger concern (I mean, under the radical assumption that one Chinese is just as much a human being as an American). Their development plan would be under tremendous stress with widespread regional reverberations. If something like this happens, it'll of course be temporary. Over time, painful adjustments will be made to absorb the shock. There'll be some political turmoil, but if the world doesn't break into little pieces and even if it does, the proverbial elasticity of long-run supply and demand will kick in. It'd redound in a temporary boost for Russia, Mexico, and Venezuela. Talking about Mexico, they should take to heart the lessons of the 1976-1982 oil boom. Back then, the country leveraged its oil resources in the markets like there was no tomorrow and pushed import substitution a notch up (trying to build a large petrochemical industry, with tremendous mismanagement and plunder by government top, PEMEX bureaucracy, and union leaders). They forgot to hedge against a drop in the oil price and/or (like the banks) against an interest rate hike. When Mr. Volcker came in 1979 with his big, fat inflation-buster Dan Aykroyd kind of gun and began to increase the rate, they thought everything was under control. Then in 1982 the oil price dropped and so much for the binge. Joseph Stiglitz claimed (in his 2002 ECLAC lecture) that the main responsibility for the lost decade in Latin America falls on the banks (pushers of abundant loans without proper risk assessment) and the Fed's anti-inflation therapy. He suggests that, although the Fed had no formal mandate to ponder the effects of its policies on the rest of the world, it should have been common sense... because those effects backfire on the U.S. (I guess, Volcker was teaching the banks a lesson on moral hazard. Except that U.S. taxpayers and Latin Americans ended up paying it.) Stiglitzian Monday-morning quarterbacking perhaps, but I liked his little mental exercise: Imagine -- he says -- that the balance sheets of Latin American firms had been dandy, including those of state-owned firms, circa 1979 or 1980. Now there's this hike in the interest rate induced by the Fed. What would have happened to Latin America as a result of just that? Hard to do the econometrics (he didn't even try), but he suggests that it would have been enough to devastate Latin America just by itself. The idea is that import substitution strategies were flawed, but not to the extent Krueger, Bhagwati, and others have claimed to justify dismantling them. All that is fine as ammo to denounce the unfairness of the international system, blah, blah, blah... but from their standpoint, Latin Americans have to operate under the assumption that they don't control those variables. I know that PEN-L will soon become a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party, and will lead a successful revolution in the U.S. in the near future, but meanwhile -- it just rains, you either bring an umbrella or get soaked. Julio _ ¿Cuánto vale tu auto? Tips para mantener tu carro. ¡De todo en MSN Latino Autos! http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: imperalist booty
Tom Walker wrote: We need to be careful about three distinct relationships here that tend to get confused one for another: wealth, value and capital. Perhaps the confusion results from the fact that they can be readily exchanged for each other. Perhaps capitalism results from the fact that they can be confused with one another. If there is confusion, let's clarify it. IMO, the distinctions are straightforward. Wealth is a set of use values that can be used or consumed directly or productively (or wasted). By value we usually mean the amount of social labor time required to reproduce wealth. Less frequently, we spell out the whole definition by saying that value is a social relation, and by that we mean that only under specific social conditions the social labor required to reproduce wealth is value (or the substance thereof), namely when producers are private and independent owners and interact via markets. By capital we usually mean value that valorizes itself, that is to say, value that replicates and augments itself. How does value valorizes itself thus becoming capital proper? Is it a mystical process? No, value valorizes itself by the repeated exploitation of fresh labor. How else can it do it if the ultimate resource there is is human labor time? Less frequently, we say that capital is a social relation, and by that we mean that only under specific social conditions the labor power of direct producers becomes a commodity and is thus subject to economic coercion and exploitation; namely social conditions such that labor and wealth ownership are divorced. Capital is value that grows continuously by recurrently exploiting labor. Underlying the continuity of capital is the ever renewed, discrete exploitation of labor, which recurrently replaces the value of c altogether and produces value anew (v + s). Without it, the continuity of capital is not there. The continuity of capital is phenomenic. The recurrence of surplus value production out of fresh labor is essential. But let me go back to the original issue, and I'll comment below on the rest of your posting. In ancient societies, huge lumps of wealth were accumulated by extra-economic means. They did not lead to the remarkable wealth expansion the Western world witnessed from the 16th century on. Why? Karl Marx located the essential difference in the peculiar *economic* form in which labor is exploited under capitalism. Louis Proyect locates it in the accumulation of capital by extra-economic means, in colonial plunder, in imperialism. Louis believes this idea is needed to justify serious anti-imperialist views. I don't think so. Even Adam Smith was seriously and consistently anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist, yet he believed colonial exploitation, imperialism, etc. where in the way of capitalism proper. IMO, people have a hard time with this because profit-making does push people to break all codes of conduct, legal or ethical. So it'd seem that imperialism and abuse arise from the nature of capital. Marx on the other hand took pains to show that extra-economic trickery and abuse were not the essential characteristics of capital, they are in fact common to most human history. The implication is that capital is more formidable the better it keeps its base instincts in check. The essence of capitalist production does not lie in violating legal and ethical codes, but in abiding by them, sticking to the rules of private ownership and voluntary commerce. But isn't the sheer force of the state in the background making sure these rules are enforced? Yes, absolutely. But being in the background enforcing rules and being in the forefront violating rules is an entirely different thing. Marx's insight is illuminating, because we can really understand real tensions going on in the world today by taking this distinction seriously (instead of erasing it by conflating imperialism and capitalism). Consider the following op-ed piece by Anthony Lewis in today's NY Times: But commitment to law is not a weakness. It has been the great strength of the United States from the beginning. Our leaders depart from that commitment at their peril, and ours, for a reason that Justice Louis D. Brandeis memorably expressed 75 years ago. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher, he wrote. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself. I'll leave it at that. Tom Walker continued: Or, to say the same a bit differently, capital is able to continually overcome an otherwise operative tendency for a fall in the rate of profit because of shape shifting between wealth, value and capital. I don't understand. What do you mean by overcoming the fall in the rate of profit by shape shifting between wealth, value and capital? A fall in the average rate of profit is offset by a lower value
Re: imperalist booty
Tom Walker wrote: But capital is all about the past: dead labour. Or so the Germans would have us believe. Those who appropriated the most dead labour in the past are entitled to appropriate more dead labour, compounded, in the future. Doesn't matter if you appropriated it there then and here now. Joan Robinson quipped the only thing worse than having one's labour power exploited is not having one's labour power exploited. Considered as wealth, the colonial booty was already consumed, directly or productively. Or it was wasted. Therefore, its value is gone to never return. The value of wealth, productive or not, the value of any non-directly-human input of production, once consumed, is gone as well. If a society is to be reproduced, then entirely new value needs to replace it, because the only way value can be preserved beyond its existing use value form is to be replaced altogether by newly created value. Even ancient old gold coins, to the extent they were found in the sea bottom or preserved in coffers or museums, ongoing labor allows their preservation. Stealing doesn't produce value and, therefore, doesn't produce surplus value. So, the question is: What pre- or co-existing social conditions in the West allowed for the value of the colonial booty to be replaced over and over again by ever-expanding newly created value in the West? The answer is in Marx's Capital, volume I, parts III-VII and it has a name: capitalist production proper, not primitive accumulation or imperialism. That is why colonial plunder gave the West an advantage. Stealing a car or killing the driver doesn't make anyone a Toyota engineer. Now, if you're a struggling engineering student and cant pay your tuition and expenses, please stay away from my neighborhood. In the framework of conventional economics, sitting on wealth entitles the owner to at least the compounding risk-free return rate. But somewhere in the hidden assumptions (and revealing these assumptions is in part what Marx set out to do) is the fact that, without ongoing capitalist production ready to consume such wealth productively and replace its value, it's like going to a potluck dinner where every guest assumes someone else will bring the food. For years and every which way, I've been telling this story to Louis Proyect and others who haven't been able to read Capital yet. Nothing suggests to me that this time they'll see my point, but I keep trying. Because the old man from Trier persuaded me, I cling to the silly idea that he will persuade them as well... :-) Max B. Sawicky wrote: This is germane to the reparations question. The value of wealth in modern capitalist societies exists because of the labor of modern direct producers as we speak. To the extent this labor is highly socialized (i.e., interdependent), communism becomes a necessity. Communism is not about re-distributing ownership, but about changing the way we engage with nature its about socializing this ownership of nature on the basis of the increasing socialization of modern production and life. That said, we don't know whether the reparations movement will take off. It depends on how the struggle evolves in the poor countries. It's good to try, like demanding that banks erase the Third World's debt. It's not to repair the damage done. The directly injured are not around anymore. It's to fix the present and create a better future. If the idea is adopted by masses of people, then it'll be a real movement (for a reform nothing necessarily wrong with reforms). My point is that there's no theoretical justification for the reparations, neither in the framework of conventional economics nor in the Marxist critique like there was no theoretical justification for primitive accumulation. It's just class struggle. Julio _ De todo para la Mujer Latina http://latino.msn.com/mujer/
Getting out every vote
My note in brackets. Let's carpet-bag this summer in the swing states. Florida has nice beaches and people who could get Bush out of the White House. - Julio The Nation Getting Out Every Vote by JEFF BLUM [posted online on April 8, 2004] How can progressives substantially increase the number of low-income [and young] voters in 2004--and why does it matter? Increasing voting by the traditionally disenfranchised, especially people of color, will revitalize our democracy. Millions of new voters can exert a powerful demand for economic fairness, healthcare, good public schools, civil rights and global cooperation. This year progressives are getting smarter and committing to working together at unprecedented levels to register and mobilize members of disenfranchised communities. Here are three lessons we're applying: The rest is here: http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040426s=blum _ Las mejores tiendas, los precios mas bajos y las mejores ofertas en MSN Latino. http://latino.msn.com/compras
Re: Profit making under capitalism
MICHAEL YATES wrote: What exactly about capitalism today is progressive? Progress under capitalism is not tidy, but we can tell grain from hay. The most significant, in-the-face progressive happening that comes to my mind is that, in the last 2-3 decades, *capitalist production* in central India and coastal China has thrusted (and continues to do so) large masses of humanity into modern socialized work and life. Capitalist production has drastically transformed their working and living conditions and continues to transform them. It has educated them, connected them, provided them with elements that -- given time and effort -- they will use for their own collective emancipation. This is progress in and by itself. If we're too scared about the extra mouths, while ignoring the extra brains and hands, then we won't notice. Wasn't working class struggle necessary for whatever progressive capitalism did make possible a reality? The progress described above is real enough as it is. At the same time, it contains the seeds of future progress, of encouraging future developments in our planet. On the other hand, the risks of nuclear war, conventional wars, environmental decay, etc. are real too. Noting that progress exists under capitalism doesn't imply waiting for things to evolve spontaneously, but to shape their evolution. Still, the pre-requisite of fruitful action is to know what the change is about. IMO, first and foremost, communism is not about consumption possibilities, but about *productive* capabilities -- i.e., productive force. It is about the self-transformation of women and men -- as producers and through production. This transformation is about *their* building their individual power and becoming increasingly interdependent. Individual power is a premise of genuine cooperation with others. The key is not to rely on the goodness or selflessness or weakness of others, but on our own robust *individual* clout. The issues Marxists have always emphasized are exploitation, oppression, and alienation. The true safeguard against any form of them is a collective solidarity built upon the premise of individual freedom (i.e., individual power). Primarily, the free development of individuals (i.e., the development of the individual as a productive force) is the premise for, not the consequence of, the free development of a true collective productive force. This is the foundation of communism: the self-transformation of men and women as producers and through production. This is the historical task -- and justification (Marx) -- of the capitalist mode of production. Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Reply to ravi
ravi wrote on another thread: being opposed to a notion means that you think the notion is incorrect. that statement has meaning (in discourse) irrespective of how one expresses one's opposition. of course, i could continue in your style and list the positions or responses i wish to restrict you to, by starting out with the question on whether you accept the stated proposition or not. and until you, and others, answer that question, i could refuse to proceed, with reason, with further analysis. Precisely, I was questioning how Louis expressed his opposition to the NJ suburban lifestyle. Thinking that a notion is incorrect doesn't clarify its implications. And I was trying to clarify its implications because, politically, they can be very different. Now, I didn't claim that the options I listed were exhaustive (or even mutually exclusive) -- although they kind of were. To the best of my skill, I'm trying to make an argument that has large political implications. It's not a logical trick. So relax. Louis and you are welcome to extend the list of options and show the validity of the option(s) of your choosing. Now, if you're reacting to the way I communicate with Louis Proyect, let me tell you that over time people evolve certain patterns of communication. Sometimes first impressions make a big difference. That's why the first times we engage someone, we need to be careful in our tone. I've debated with Luis Proyect for many years and, although I've taken some polemical abuse from him, I try to deal with his ideas fairly and respectfully. Sometimes I may indulge in a bit of irony, but never personal insult. I respect and admire Louis for many reasons. Julio _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.latino.msn.com/
Reply to Charles Brown
Charles Brown wrote on a retired thread: CB: Fossil fuels are such a strategic resource in the world's technological regime, that even if their depletion will occur in 2115, humanity might start to modify radically our mode of production now in order to deal with the loss over one hundred years from now. Yes, ultimately, we need to radically modify the mode of production. No disagreement here. The question is how. I claim that we need to advance tactically, which is read as reformist by the radicals. The plan cannot rely on the expectation of an imminent revolutionary explosion in the U.S., particularly if environmental threats are of such urgency. There are people who claim both that an environmental disaster is near, yet they reject any tactical alliance with the DP to evict Bush, who stopped the use of U.S. money to fund abortions or buy condoms abroad, pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto Agreement, ignored the science of global warming, removed pesky environmental regulations to favor his campaign donors, pushed the drilling of Alaska, etc. -- not to mention the environmental disaster that the ongoing killing and crippling of Iraqis and non-Iraqis in Iraq represents (given that we humans are a humble part of the environment as well). The gravity of the potential harm is so great that with the uncertainty of the resource total we should err on the side of caution, assume the worst case scenario or contingency, and prepare for that worst case. Worst case scenario preparation is a fundamentally prudent approach in general in dealing with real world, serious problems. This issue is a million times more serious than a stock market bubble. Seriously, how can we be cautious and make a difference when we don't rule the country and/or refuse to have a meaningful reformist influence on public affairs except via mass demonstrations? Modifying our lifestyles individually? Considering the system of incentives currently in place in, say, the U.S., I doubt a lot of people will follow unless there's serious (even if gradual, reformist) political change. Or perhaps the higher price of oil will do? If our urgency about the environment is because we want to use the issue as a mere slogan against capitalism and to invoke the need for a radical revolution, first, it will be irrelevant because people are not moved to a revolution by invocations of this kind and, second, it'll show its fakeness and discredit itself as a cause. Julio _ Consigue aquí las mejores y mas recientes ofertas de trabajo en América Latina y USA: http://latino.msn.com/empleos
Re: capitalism's laws of motion
(My last posting for a while, Mike.) James Devine wrote: Capitalism always involves a contradiction between capital's interest (the long-term interest of the capitalist class as a whole) and those of competing individual capitalists. (One might liken this contradiction to the public goods problem of orthodox economics, though of course there's another contradiction that's more important, that between classes. So it's a collective goods problem for the capitalists.) I fully agree. My only point here is that contradictions end up resolving themselves -- in this case, politically. As Marx says in Hegelian jargon, given the conditions, a difference evolves into a contradiction, which in turn evolves into an antagonism, which bursts and thus reestablishes the unity (Grundrisse). So I just tried to imagine what the end of the sequence would be. The interests of individual capitalists are tied to their collective interest and, of course, vice versa. It's a chicken and egg question or -- as we used to say -- dialectics. If something makes sense for the class as a whole, some individual capitalist mind comes up with the idea. The idea takes a while to be pondered, it is assaulted by the conventional wisdom, impeded by hardened conditions, etc., but eventually -- if it keeps making sense -- more capitalists adopt it and set to remove the conditions that restrain its realization. Making sense in individual capitalist minds and in their aggregate or collective consciousness is a matter of crass cost-benefit analysis. At the end of the day, it'll be the concrete, contingent political battle which will decide what course the U.S. capitalists will end up choosing and, as a result of the clash of their choice against those of others, something will happen (always constrained by the laws of nature and inherited history). What Marx's method does is give us a way to sort this messy process out -- roughly. Because some broad tendencies are implied as Hegelian necessities by the logic of the present conditions. Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: Profit making under capitalism
k hanly wrote: Marx's hypothesis is surely not that it is a voluntary market transaction but a forced transaction because the capitalists own the means of production and the workers do not and have no means of access except through wage slavery. They cannot themselves produce and support themselves.Workers are forced into the transaction to keep themselves alive. The theory that it is a voluntary transaction is part of the capitalist ideology. A voluntary market transaction doesn't mean that the will of those who enter it is absolutely free, unencumbered. Not even if you're very rich. Again, form is not irrelevant. The form is of the essence. And ideologies don't hang in the air. They have social roots. Let me say in passing that there are passages in Grundrisse where Marx emphasizes the *progressive* effect of this legal form on concrete people. Communism is not built from scratch. And one of the progressive results of capitalist development is that it forces people to take personal responsibility for their individual and collective lives, as opposed to relying on mystical forces or luck. That is progress, because without this individual sense of responsibility communism cannot be built. But more relevant to our present, the conditions that impose unemployment on people are socially made and the acquisition of a class consciousness entails understanding the social source of this apparently natural event. For some reason, some leftists in the U.S. seem to believe that anything said about the progressive features of capitalist production amounts to bourgeois propaganda. Marx viewed alienation (the victimization of people by the social conditions of their own making) as the problem, not as the solution. The solution was overcoming alienation in the only way it can be overcome, collectively, by people transforming themselves into agents of history. Some radicals nowadays seem to think that alienation from public life is a virtue, as if public life were an illusion. It is not assymmetry of wealth that makes the voluntary part a sham it is that the workers havent access to the means of production themselves. Marx says explicitly that what's essential here is the separation between the direct producers and their objective or material conditions of production and living. In Marx's terms, means of production are use values used to produce other use values. Use values are the material content of wealth (Marx). With markets, one form of wealth can be transformed into other forms of wealth. If you have sufficient oranges, with an orange market plus a labor market (provided they are deep and efficient), you have money or means of production ipso facto. With markets you can turn use values that are not fit to be used as means of production into means of production. So you're not saying anything different than I'm saying. While we sometimes talk about capitalists and workers as if there were a clear line of separation between them, in real life the distribution of wealth is like a continuous curve and where precisely the line is drawn is not hard science, but an empirical and political exercise. Bottom line, it is wealth inequality (or, as I put it, wealth asymmetry) what turns the market transaction between capital and labor into an exploitive sham. It is not the market that explains the form of abusing it is the mode of production. The mode of production involves the capitalist class owning the means of production and producing for profit not on the basis of need--except of course need backed by consumers willing to part with bucks. It is because of the ownership of the means of production that the capitalist can appropriate surplus value. It is a function of ownership not of the market. The capitalist mode of production is generalized market production (Marx). Generalized because inter alia the markets now include a labor market. Capitalist production is not the only conceivable or historical form of labor exploitation. The essential distinction with other modes of production is the widespread existence of markets, so that even the labor power of workers is bought and sold in markets. What underlies the existence of a labor market is the dispossession and legal freedom of the worker. So the separation of workers from the objective conditions of production is a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for capitalist production. You can have a lot of poor proletarians (like in ancient Rome) and not have capitalist production. You still need generalized markets. It is the market (or commodity) form that makes the difference. And what is ownership of the means of production if not wealth ownership? But markets require only private ownership of goods to be traded. Capitalism requires private ownership of the menas of production. And what are the means of production? Non-goods? Non-use values? And functional capitalist markets do not require voluntary trades and competition. Halliburton can
Re: Mark Jones Was Right
k hanly wrote: The Japanese know that access to energy resources is essential for their capitalists and the US knows the same. Access to food is essential for people in Brooklyn. There's some food stored in supermarkets, grocery stores, etc. But usually we don't steal it. We buy it at the going prices. Were some individuals to steal food, some nasty consequences would follow. Somehow, people here evolved laws that roughly speaking preserve and enforce private ownership -- and that works out for them, especially for the very wealthy. I imagine that whenever the wealthy indulge in violating these laws overtly, systematically, and with impunity (and this of course happens as the recent corporate scandals show), the poor would feel less compelled to take them seriously and the wealthy would end up regretting it most. Marx's hypothesis is that profit making under capitalism is essentially the appropriation of someone else's unpaid labor by means of a kosher, voluntary market transaction. It's not outright theft. It is disguised theft, because the initial asymmetry of wealth between the parties turns the voluntary part of the transaction into a sham. With initial wealth asymmetry, any process by which people negotiate their interests (say, a democracy or a market) will in effect be a form for the rich to abuse the poor. In this case, we're talking about the market being the form of abusing, but *the form* (as Marx insisted) is what makes here the essential difference. After all, the wealthy had been stealing labor from direct producers since the onset of history, but no form of theft has been as effective and dynamic -- as able to revolutionize production, consumption, and life in general -- as capitalism. Marx's hypothesis is that the normal mode of accumulation under capitalism is by the reinvestment of profits. Primitive accumulation, characteristic of a period when capitalist production is young, is expected to play a decreasing role as capitalism develops. Profit making and accumulation entail a functional market setting, which in turn entails private ownership and its enforcement. Of course, that's in the abstract. Historically, these forms don't pop up in a pure form, they struggle against a bunch of contrary historical influences, but Marx's hypothesis is that, as capitalism evolves, its laws of motion defeat the countertendencies and end up asserting themselves in an increasingly pure form. In any case, for the capitalists, nation (i.e., the national state) was never an end in itself. It was a means to reproducing the conditions that enabled them to make a profit. Only in the most backward case, the national state was a direct vehicle to make profits (e.g., by protection, subsidies, corruption, imperialism, etc.), but when capitalists used the state this way they were eroding their legitimacy and compromising their collective wealth. Many Marxists, from Lenin to Sweezy to Miliband, believed that Marx's biggest omission was a theory of the state under capitalism. In spite of Marx's warnings on method, they couldn't understand why he would leave the topic of the state to a latter stage of his theoretical work. They thought that the reversion in late 19th century capitalist Europe to extra-economic tricks of accumulation similar to those practiced in the early stages of bourgeois history had set capitalism on a track different from that hypothesized by Marx in Capital. IMO, with the hindsight of 21st century capitalism, Marx's hypothesized laws of motion stand to reason. They were not meant as iron laws of history. They were meant as tendencies, subject to contrary influences, which -- even during entire historical periods -- could be reversed or slowed down significantly. Yet, overall, if the system was to retain its vitality and dynamism, these laws of motion would have to assert themselves in an increasingly pure form. Why is this necessary to understand the current juncture in the Middle East? I'd think it is. In Marx's hypothesis, the drive to *control* Arab oil by using the U.S. state cannot be essential to U.S. capitalists. No matter how dependent the industrial apparatus of the rich countries is on oil. Whoever owns the oil, self-interest would drive him to sell it to the highest bidder. Appropriating someone else's resources by force can only backfire on the essential logic of capitalist production and accumulation. And it is in this essential logic -- rather than in imperialist parasitism -- where it lies the remarkable ability of capitalist economies to return more wealth to the wealthy. Of course, Marx knew that -- if a venture was sufficiently profitable -- capitalists would gladly break any law or ethical code. But if all were to systematically violate the laws of voluntary commerce on which surplus value production was based, then they would regress to the old times. Collectively, capitalists had to overcome a myriad of prisoner dilemmas. A legitimate legal
Re: Mark Jones Was Right (Paul Phillips)
I'd love to reply to Paul's detailed argument. I regret that he decides not to engage. Hopefully we'll continue the conversation at another time. Julio _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.latino.msn.com/
Re: Mark Jones Was Right
soula avramidis wrote: it is like when it becomes more expensive to draw oil out of the ground, going for control of high reserves of cheaply mined Arab oil (1 dollar per barrel) makes for a hell business, both in itself and insofar as you strangle others with it. Given what they know now, is it really a good idea for the U.S. bourgeoisie to go for control of high reserves of cheaply mined Arab oil? Is it better than, say, accepting Arab control and dealing with Arab oil owners in accordance with the rules of voluntary commerce? Taking over Arab oil is desirable in the abstract for any group of capitalist-minded people. Of course it is, if they are in a position to do it at a reasonable cost. For the rest of the bourgeoisie, who-controls-the-oil only makes a difference to the extent it affects their profits. Increasing instability in the Middle East and threats within the U.S. significantly raise the cost of this strategy for the rich bourgeoisies. There's nothing inexorably capitalist about taking over Arab oil. And U.S. capitalism will not collapse (it may even be saved) if the strategy (assuming that it is currently in place) is revised or abandoned. Also, if under capitalism oil becomes increasingly expensive to produce because of its ultimate finite availability, doesn't that make the economics of other energy sources increasingly feasible? Doesn't that lead to shifts in technology and consumption patterns? There is some degree of input substitutability, is there not? Oil demand has some degree of price (opportunity cost) elasticity, does it not? For example, if the American people end up paying for their oil with lots of dollars and blood, won't they seek a different approach? Aren't we witnessing exactly this? If the Arabs control the oil in their soil, they still need to sell it at a price the buyers can accept. Oil suppliers being what they are (a diverse bunch), the oil price would not be arbitrarily set by a very tight monopoly. Whatever arrangement the suppliers may come up with is not likely to be very stable. So ultimately, the best fight for the U.S. bourgeoisie may be not over control, but over the distribution of oil rents. The method will not be extra-economic, forceful expropriation or appropriation, but regular capitalist accumulation. Paraphrasing David Schanoes and Bill Clinton, it's the profitability stupid! If some powerful sector of the U.S. bourgeoisie is bent on controlling Arab oil, but that leads to endless regional and global instability and mutual destruction, why would the rich bourgeoisies (not to mention the people of the world) go along with this strategy in the long run? Isn't this what we're witnessing/participating in? Point is, if we believe that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East cannot be dissociated from the goal of controlling the Arab oil, then we're setting ourselves up for a lot of nasty political surprises. Julio _ Consigue aquí las mejores y mas recientes ofertas de trabajo en América Latina y USA: http://latino.msn.com/empleos
Re: Mark Jones Was Right
Louis Proyect: I am simply opposed to the notion that the Earth can sustain the life-style of a New Jersey suburbanite. Just project 10 billion people with Jeep V8s, central air conditioning, lawns, a TV in every room, beef 5 times a week, etc. Simply can't be accomplished under any social system. What do you mean by being opposed? That (1) you will choose not to live in NJ and live that lifestyle? (2) you will liquidate NJ suburbia, destroy SUVs, AC equipment, TV sets, computers, devolve the cows to their natural habitat (?), etc.? (3) you'll do your part to make sure the economy is re-organized in such a way that the direct producers set the production and consumption priorities of society (subject to natural laws, etc.)? If it is (1), then you're entitled to your own individual choices. Go right ahead and live your green lifestyle. If you mean (2), then you disagree with Marx, David, Melvin, and me. That's okay... except that (IMO) we're right and you're wrong. If it is (3), *that* is exactly what David Schanoes -- obviously based on Karl Marx -- is implying. Then (although I find your way of posing the question very vague and inadequate) you agree with Marx, David, Melvin, and me. Glad we all agree. Why is it primitive communism to urge the abolition of private automobiles? I wouldn't call it primitive communism. In and by itself I'd call it a diversion of political resources. That said, it doesn't necessarily clash with the agenda of socialists or communist. You can urge as much as you wish on abolishing cars, TVs, computers, etc. -- urge people to be more rational producers and consumers, change their diets, etc. That's all nice by me. But Marxists tend to believe that, in the last analysis, the irrationality of production and consumption under capitalism stems from the economic structure (relations of production), which is safeguarded by a whole legal and political superstructure. So political activists inspired in the Marxist tradition would not spend much time preaching about lifestyles, vegetarianism, and greener technologies in the abstract. They'd rather concentrate on changing the legal and political superstructure so that they're in a position to alter the economic structure. The economic struggle of the direct producers is about enhancing their well-being, which entails higher wages (or income, in the case of small owners), better working conditions, and better living conditions. Better living conditions imply a healthier environment. So there's no denial of the sound science of global warming, etc. On the contrary. But how exactly should the producers conduct their struggle to advance their economic and political agenda? Forget about the Third World following your advice anytime soon. Those masses are going to reproduce more slowly but consume more rather than less in the coming decades. If somebody needs to adjust production and consumption pronto to reduce ecological threats, that's the rich countries. And that's where the effort should be focused on. Remember that you're anti-imperialist. So even if you took power in the U.S. you'd not use the U.S. state to force people in the Third World to limit births or reduce CO2 emissions. People in China, Brazil, etc., who read about the same literature on global warming as we do, will do something when and if they're ready. And, if they are fair, they'll presumably operate under the principle that one Chinese or Brazilian has a similar entitlement to a decent standard of living and over the natural resources of the earth as any other person in the world. In any case, they have their own set of economic priorities and political conflicts, and the most a Louis Proyect-led U.S. can do is cooperate with them on the basis of mutual respect. If global warming and other environmental threats are real and urgent, then -- short of revolutions in the rich countries falling on the lap of workers -- we will need reforms, which require the kind of tactical politicking that you usually reject on maximalist and other (IMO) confused grounds. (The same argument applies to urgent military threats, nuclear proliferation, etc.) If you claim that a global ecological catastrophe is impending and a revolution in the U.S. is not, how are you going to handle the tradeoffs between standard of living and CO2 emissions, etc. (and help the people in the Third World cooperate in facing the global environmental threats). Keep in mind that you also want the U.S. workers to enhance their well-being and that, sometimes, well-being requires consumption. I'm afraid that even in the U.S., cold-turkey agitation aimed to convince workers that they should reduce their well-being won't go far. In any case, again, you will need reforms, compromise with lesser evils. You will need compromises with the hated liberals. You will need to *seriously* work on compromises and tactical moves. Then and only then your frequent announcements that the end is near,
Re: Dollars Per Vote: Green vs. Democratic (Historical accuracy)
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: It costs a left-wing candidate more to run in the Democratic presidential caucuses and primaries than to run as a Green candidate in the general election. Howard Dean spent over $40 million, did not win a single primary, and got forced out on February 18, 2004 [etc.] I like Yoshie's reply. It meets high standards of concretion. But if we're going to do cost-benefit analysis in presidential elections, then we should include the expected *benefits* as well. And we need to discount future benefits by the time preference regular people -- e.g., workers -- have. That is, short-run benefits outweigh long-run benefits. Past a decade horizon, large benefits mean next to nothing. And that's assuming the benefits are certain. If they are only likely, the long-run benefits will be more uncertain so, if people are not risk-loving (and risk lovers tend to die sooner), long-run benefits will weigh little on the expectation. People expect some short-run benefits from policy changes when they vote for the DP whereas those expected by voting Green are, er, next to zero. By a big factor, a Dem vote means significantly higher expected benefits than a Green vote. Expected benefits of policy changes are harder to add up than campaign spending receipts, but some things are clear. Just limiting Bush's tax giveaways for the rich could make some difference in the lives of workers in the near future. Also in the near future, slightly deflecting the course of U.S. foreign policy would pay off handsomely in U.S. and foreign lives, not to mention the pecuniary gains. Etc. On the other hand, Helping Nader build the Green party (so that, God helping, by the middle of the century it is in a position to challenge the two-party system) doesn't seem to make sense to large masses of people. I understand the volatility of political life can make a big difference down the road, but with volatility things can go either way. IMO, radical changes that may come as a result of chance not preceded by a large effort of grassroots organizing are very unlikely to be good. And history seems clear in showing that much. Shane Mage suggests an interesting argument to justify supporting Nader now, namely, that it'd allow for the left to better negotiate with the DP as the elections near. I can't reply to Shane in categorical terms, but my impression is that the asymmetry between the left and the DP is much bigger than we need to assume in pulling off the stunt. It's not only that the corporate interests that rely on the DP don't trust the left. It's that the bulk of U.S. workers and middle classers don't take it seriously either. That means that the left must start from a lower point and build up on the basis of a lot of grassroots organizing and humiliating tactical compromises. It is these conditions -- and not the spinelessness of leftists -- that impose compromises in the left's electoral politics. But they don't necessarily tie the hands of Marxists and socialists willing to agitate and propagandize their radical ideas, and organize at the grassroots. What it does is discipline their tactical moves. And good tactical moves is what it takes for them to advance and materialize their radical ideas. So, we don't need dollars spent per vote. We need dollars spent per unit of short-run political benefit. I bet that'd flip Yoshie's figures altogether. Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: Historical accuracy
Louis Proyect cites Marx: Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organization to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power, of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against this power and by a hostile attitude toward the policies of the ruling classes. Otherwise it remains a plaything in their hands. Today in the U.S., continual agitation of the sort described by Marx can and must be conducted (not only but also) within the DP. At issue here is whether or not it is in the interest of the working class today, in the U.S. and internationally, to kick Bush out of the White House and whether that priority trumps leftist grandstanding. This requires a tactical decision, a compromise, which doesn't stop anyone from agitating as radically as they may wish against the state, capitalist exploitation, commodity production, etc. In a Nov. 9, 1912, article on the U.S. elections Lenin wrote, This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party. In this article Lenin is not discussing how to dismantle the bipartisan system. He's just agitating against it, which we should all do in the proper context. Again, this has nothing to do with what to do next -- as you often say. Just because we agitate against the evils of private health-care, commodity fetishism, etc. doesn't mean we're ready to dismantle the markets tomorrow. For a discussion of what to do next in political conditions similar to the U.S. nowadays, we should read Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. On anti- stagism, an experienced, victorious Lenin cited Engels: What childish innocence it is to present ones own impatience as a theoretically convincing argument! Frederick Engels, Programme of the Blanquist Communards, [30] from the German Social-Democratic newspaper Volksstaat, 1874, No. 73, given in the Russian translation of Articles, 1871-1875, Petrograd, 1919, pp. 52-53). Lenin then went on to write things like: Prior to the downfall of tsarism, the Russian revolutionary Social-Democrats made repeated use of the services of the bourgeois liberals, i.e., they concluded numerous practical compromises with the latter. In 1901-02, even prior to the appearance of Bolshevism, the old editorial board of Iskra (consisting of Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich Martov, Potresov and myself) concluded (not for long, it is true) a formal political alliance with Strove, the political leader of bourgeois liberalism, while at the same time being able to wage an unremitting and most merciless ideological and political struggle against bourgeois liberalism and against the slightest manifestation of its influence in the working-class movement. The Bolsheviks have always adhered to this policy. A formal political alliance with the representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie -- a quid pro quo! At the same time, they fought the bourgeois liberals ideologically and politically, and rejected their influence in the working-class movement. That sounds smart to me. Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: Observations on the Socialist Scholars Conference
Louis Proyect wrote: To begin with, there was absolutely nothing about Venezuela or Haiti--two of the more important hot spots in the world today. I'd have loved to hear the discussion on Organizing in the U.S. South, but I wasn't able to. Did anybody on the list go to this meeting yesterday (Room: 343 - Engineering)? Would you share your impressions? Thank you. Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: Corporations
You guys are too quick. I'll be repeating points others made while I was typing or sleeping. Here it is anyway. * * * David B. Shemano wrote: What is that word Marxists like to use to describe unreal objects that people think are real? Fetish? You see a bogeyman called a corporation. You are fetishing the corporation. I see tens, hundreds, thousands of contracts between real people intended to actualize a real end. The entity is an acknowledged legal fiction that minimizes transaction costs. That is all. Exxon is simply a shorthand way to describe thousands of real people acting in a united way, and the corporate form provides an expedient way of organizing those real people. In my reading of Marx, when people produce things that take an objective existence separate from them (the producers), that's objectification. When the objects take an autonomous life of their own, get out of the control of their individual producers, and even turn against them, that's fetishization or -- more generally -- alienation. Objectification can't be avoided, because we humans live through our engagement with the objective world. But alienation can be undone if individuals change the social conditions in which they produce and live. Since these conditions are social, they need to change them collectively. There are different levels of alienation, depending on how hardened the underlying level of objectification is. For example, we collectively create fashions. We may ignore them at a cost. But it's relatively harmless for individuals to ignore fashions. Michael does it all the time. :-) But money or the state are forms of alienation on steroids. We ignore them at our peril. The fetishization of corporations is not an optical illusion, the mere result of our inability to see the legal contracts that underlie it. They are a hardened objective reality because they are backed up by laws, i.e., by the power of the state, which is to say the power of individuals out of their immediate control. (Similarly, marriages -- even without children -- often spin out of the control of the partners, and yet people are trying to extend marriages rather than ban them.) These contracts are binding for individuals. We cannot close our eyes and dispel them, but -- if we were to marshal enough power against them -- we could certainly change the law that makes them possible. With corporations, there are several layers of alienation overlapping. Under certain social conditions (Engels: class divisions), people produce and reproduce a state. Again, the power of the state is the productive force of the individuals, but alienated from them. The state enacts and enforces a law that allows for individuals to form corporations, where these are legal entities invested with certain rights above and beyond those recognized to their individual stockholders (e.g., limited liability). In Marx, ownership is effective control over the utilization of an object. That's the content of the legal fiction. To the extent creditors, workers, communities, consumers, etc. have some influence on a corporation behavior, then they are in a small way co-owners of the corporation. Individuals or the citizens of a state (particularly workers) have an infinitesimally small amount of control over a corporation, unless they are organized and militant. Jim Devine says that, if corporate liabilities are limited, then the rest of the liability is imposed on others. David's reply, that those who could be harmed by the legal re-distribution of liabilities can choose not to enter a contract with the corporation, ignores the fact that it all depends on the underlying social conditions. Entering a legal transaction (e.g., trading in a market, which entails the enforcement of an implicit contract) with the parties having roughly equal power ab initio cannot fall far from a win-win outcome. However, if the initial power is unequally distributed between the parties, the transaction will tend to be a thinly disguised mechanism for the strong to abuse the weak. Perhaps a big bank can deal with a big corporation on a fair basis, but workers are not equally poised as the corporation to walk away from an employment contract. Workers are at a disadvantage because they need their jobs. The rights of corporations impinge upon the rights of individuals. Individuals can try to shape laws encroaching on private ownership (on whose basis corporations exist) and/or directly on the laws that regulate the existence and life of the corporation. But individual stockholders (somewhat in proportion to their stock) are in much better position to undo or alter their corporation. The corporation is alienated from them (the individual stockholders) as well, but they are in a much better -- privileged -- position to control it than regular citizens or workers. We need to change the law, they just need to vote their directors out, fire their CEO, change the bylaws. IMO, the real
Re: Marx and the Civil War
Professor Michael Perelman wrote: While I'm replying, I meant to tell Professor Perelman [MY GOD! EVEN MY STUDENTS DON'T CALL ME THAT!!!] :-) Julio _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.latino.msn.com/
Re: Third Time is the Charm
Louis Proyect wrote: This is now the 3rd list that DMS has departed from. [Etc.] It's not appropriate to say things about David now that he has left the list and cannot defend himself on it. It's Michael's prerogative to ask us to follow certain guidelines and exclude us from the list if he so decides, but that doesn't say *anything* about the character of the people expelled or the quality of their contributions. I do appreciate David Schanoes and his views, but I'd say exactly the same thing about Louis Proyect or anyone who were not present to reply. Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Black's efficient market
dd wrote: Fischer Black used to call the stock market efficient because in his view it was almost always between 50% and 200% of fair value (he wasn't joking either; this was seriously his view and he nevertheless believed that the stock market was informative and regarded himself as an efficient markets/rational expectations believer). A range of 10-30 would be small compared to this and if one took the view, one wouldn't need a model of the fluctuation other than an anchor price around $20 plus noise. Depending on the probability distribution (fat tails?) and speed of adjustment he had in mind, swings in the value of social wealth within his range could be pretty wild. Considering the welfare loses that would result, Black's efficient stock market could be terribly inefficient from an economic point of view (economic efficiency = maximal welfare). This sounds to me like a very nonchalant view of market efficiency. Julio _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.latino.msn.com/
Re: Comments on an Amy Wilentz column
Louis Proyect's comments on Wilentz's article in the Nation are very persuasive. However, I do disagree with Louis on the following: When you accept Bill Clinton's right to interfere in Haiti's internal affairs on a good will basis, the door is also opened to George W. Bush's more openly hostile meddling. Thus, humanitarian interventions become the soft cop brother to the hard cop regime changes. It matters how Bill Clinton got involved in Haiti's internal affairs. Whatever we may think of Aristide, he was a democratically elected president. And he was asking for help from the UN and the U.S., and help is never disinterested (even in a hypothetical communist society). From the standpoint of international law, Clinton's intervention may have been legit. While I don't argue that we should take Bill Clinton's justification at face value, we do need to take into account whether his intervention conformed to international law. That makes some difference. The portion of Patrick Cockburn's article that Louis cites implies that the problem with the U.S. intervention in Haiti is that it was *insufficient* to ensure Aristide's success in stabilizing the country and tackling its economic problems, because what was given with one hand was taken away with the other. To equate U.S. legal interventions to its illegal interventions does a disservice to poor countries, which do not have the power to defend themselves against U.S. abuse and whose most effective defense -- besides their national unity and defensive readiness -- lies in the rule of law in the international arena. This is clear in the case of Cuba. If the U.S. were to abide fully by international law -- an apparently irrelevant progress if we ignore the distinction between lawful and unlawful actions -- then the blockade would not exist, the U.S. taxpayers would not be funding subversion in Cuba, Cuba could divert less resources to national defense, etc. In contrast, we can only imagine the vicious consequences that would follow if the U.S. were to feel legally unrestrained in its actions against Cuba. While Marxists are correct in emphasizing the ultimate class content of U.S. interventions, we should not forget that legal form can have huge material consequences. Julio _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.latino.msn.com/
Re: the poverty of pundits
James Devine wrote: I wonder if Paul Krugman is embarrassed to appear on the same op-ed page as this fellow: He should... the same way we all should feel embarrassed for sharing the same federal administration with David Brooks. It may be as hard for us to alter the White House's policies as for Krugman to alter the New York Times' editorial policy, which seems to me like a very tight (and uptight) family-controlled public company. Mostly, I'd think that David Brooks should be held personally responsible for the crap he writes. To defend Bush, Brooks twists his sentences and arguments like Moebius strips of the kind Escher would have drawn when drunk. Instead of linking Brooks to Krugman, I would associate his garbage with those articles by Tom Friedman defending the invasion of Iraq. Recently, in the same op-ed pages where Will Safire and Tom Friedman justify it, Noam Chomsky blasted Ariel Sharon's Wall. Good for Noam! Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
[no subject]
Gassler Robert wrote: The problem is that concepts like heteroskedasticity refer to samples and how well they reflect the total population. Here we have the total population of US presidential elections, so we do not need statistical inference. Actually we do need statistical inference. We do not have the total population. In the context of this discussion, the total population is the voters in recent U.S. electoral history *and* in the coming elections. So these voters include people who voted, people who may vote in November (including those who will actually vote), *and* people who *might have* voted (had some chance of voting) in previous elections but who actually didn't vote. That would be the total population and we don't have it. David was using samples of this population (the voting frequencies in previous elections) to draw inferences about the likely behavior of voters in 2004. Every time there's a presidential election (or every time there's a poll) the random variable (voting choice of an individual voter) takes one and one value only. It's like drawing a sample from the population. The voting results in previous elections are samples of this population. The tricky part in David's exercise is that he was implicitly assuming that the probability distribution of voting behavior was stationary or -- more generally, if you forgive me for using this term -- ergodic, which is not. Stationarity means that some characteristics of the probability distribution remain fixed. (What Sabri would call homoskedasticity or same-variance is a strict case of variance-covariance-stationarity... ooph!) In plain words, we don't have one and the same bucket with marbles of different colors from which we draw samples every time there's a presidential election. No. The bucket changes, the marbles change, the colors change -- many things change in ways that we cannot easily pin down. Julio _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.latino.msn.com/
Re: Simple Question please.
Hari Kumar wrote: gini I understand as a coefficient allowing some guess at level of equality. What is a Hefindahl please? Thanks, Hari The Herfindahl is the sum of the squared market shares. H = 1 means monopoly. H = 1/n (for n very large) means a perfectly competitive market. Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: Bhagwati's defense of Mankiw
Ahmet Tonak wrote: Any reaction to the following op-ed defense of Mankiw by Bhagwati. I observe two flaws: 1) a complete misunderstanding of competition; Bhagwati attacks Kerry because, Bhagwati thinks, Kerry is unable to see the connection between outsourcing of jobs and the improve[ment of] the competitiveness of American companies. And then he goes and says this: jobs disappear in America ...because technical change has destroyed them, not because they have gone anywhere as if this technical change a God-given or conspiratorial phenomenon rather than the very imposition of improved (I would say, intensified) global competition. IMO, Bhagwati is just stating the final conclusions he and others draw from the debate on whether stagnation and increased dispersion in U.S. manufacturing wages in the last decades were *mostly* due to trade or to skilled-biased technological change. For a summary of this literature, see the papers compiled by Robert Feenstra in the NBER book, The Impact of Trade on U.S. Wages. However, it is not fair to say that these people -- to whom Bhagwati seems to be alluding (Krugman included by the way) -- have not been aware of the link between neoliberal globalization and technological change. Much of the econometric paraphernalia in their papers is designed to get around the problem of collinearity between trade and technological change (and other data problems). So, they don't ignore that trade -- as trade policy has evolved during the years of neoliberal globalization -- is linked to technological change. That is implicit in the exercise. What they are trying to do is disentangle effects that appear mixed up together. I think this is a legitimate attempt. But Bhagwati may be relying a bit too much on ideology and old empirical work in making his assertion. He says that there is little evidence of a major push by American companies to set up research operations in the developing world, but it seems to me that he's talking about studies done in the late 1990s. I'd be much more cautious because, understandably, there's little work on what happened to U.S. labor markets during the recession and the (so-called) recovery. Steve Roach seems to believe that there's an ongoing wave of international labor arbitrage, intensified by the recession, but these are things that need to be measured first and disputed on later. 2) a racist blindfoldedness and arrogance in his unsolicited advice to Craig Barrett, chief executive of Intel; I would argue that Barrett's perception has a quality of superior understanding and realism of a functioning capitalist regarding the high quality of researchers in the South. Arrogant, perhaps, but I don't think there's any basis to say that Bhagwati's remarks are racist. He's just saying that Barrett's claims about the availability of labor abroad ready to replace U.S. skilled workers are exaggerated. And he may be right. Barrett and, more generally, U.S. CEOs with an eye on foreign outsourcing are not unbiased on this. They want to weaken the hand of the U.S. workers with the scare of people out there willing and able to do the same at much lower rates. Whether Barrett's claims are exaggerated or not is something to be shown empirically, but I don't think it's fair to label Bhagwati's remarks as racist. I have sat in Bhagwati's classes and believe he is honest. Indeed, he's impatient with people who are unwilling to follow his arguments, and his arguments are not always easy to follow, but radical economists (and the anti-globalization radicals who have harassed Bhagwati) are not always prototypes of intellectual tolerance either. The guy just happens to think that the best way to deal with poverty in the Third World is through free trade and his argument is not absurd, as it's been around since Adam Smith. And his free trade advocacy is much more nuanced that we care to acknowledge. We may have forgotten, but Bhagwati has been just as opposed to the U.S. agenda on the WTO under Bush as he's now jumping on Kerry. A few months ago, during the Cancún WTO meeting, the left was using Bhagwati's remarks in the Financial Times about how the U.S. special interests had come to gut the WTO negotiations out of any meaningful content and how the Bush administration was not really committed to trade. There was little echo of Bhagwati's complaints in the NY Times. The problem is that the U.S. media that amplify his anti-Kerry remarks tend to ignore his criticism of the U.S. trade agenda under Bush. It is anathema to some people on these lists, but in my view Marx's emphasis on the progressive character of capitalist production in certain settings is not that far from Bhagwati's insisting that capitalism in the Third World is a dissolvent of reactionary forms of privilege. As Ahmet knows, among conventional economists, Bhagwati has been one of the few who have worked seriously on the political economy of profit seeking, something that -- in spite of
Re: Bhagwati's defense of Mankiw
Doug Henwood wrote: He's also very critical of the U.S. use of the WTO to tighten intellectual property restrictions and of the confusion of capital account liberalization with trade liberalization. He's not a wind-up free-trader. Jagdish Bhagwati wrote [my remarks in brackets]: The starvation of the WTO and the financial indulgence of the Bretton Woods institutions are not fortuitous. The influential Quad powers -- the EU, the United States, Japan, and Canada -- will resolutely not augment the absurdly lean WTO budget. This, of course, reflects the cynical business of voting. At Bretton Woods institutions, it is weighted. At the WTO, things work by consensus. You do not need to be a profound observer to predict that resources and action will go then to the Bretton Woods institutions. We therefore have the supreme incoherence, some would call it even hypocrisy, of the richest nations asking the WTO to undertake sophisticated studies and to manage a Social Clause while denying the WTO resources to do this or pretty much anything else. Evidently, the WTO then must take on these agendas but rely for their management (under the high-sounding rubric of policy coordination) on the foreign legion of a (G7-dominated and hence reliable) leadership and staff at the World Bank and the IMF. If you think that I am exaggerating, let me cite you just one telling example. As regards intellectual property protection (IPP), demanded insistently by the United States and then by other rich countries, most economists believe that having patents at twenty-year length (as put into the WTO) is, from the viewpoint of worldwide efficiency, suboptimal, just as having no patents almost certainly is also. Many also consider it to be a transfer from most of the poor countries to the rich ones and hence as an item that does not belong to the WTO, whose organizing principle should be the inclusion of mutually gainful transactions, as indeed noncoercive trade is. But the only institution whose staff was allowed to write clearly and skeptically about it at the time of the Uruguay Round was the GATT, whereas the World Bank played along with IPP, even trying to produce reasons why it was good for the poor countries. Even now, despite all the talk about poverty alleviation, the World Bank's staff, research, and aid are being used, I suspect, in a way that, instead of calling into serious doubt the economic logic of IPP, can be interpreted as contributing to the know-how that will eventually enable rich countries to get poor countries to set up administrative machinery to enforce intellectual property rights for the benefit of the rich countries. Julio _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.latino.msn.com/
Re: The economy - a new era?
Michael Perelman wrote: That was the big fight during the New Deal. One wing of the Democratic Party called for trust busting; the other, for organizing the potential of larger economic formations. Both sides have anti-progressive consequences. Of course they do, without progressive intervention. But which environment is more target-rich for progressive intervention? I'm guessing the more concentrated. Doug Can you guys elaborate on this? Why would concentration be more propitious for progressive politics? What's in my mind is the idea floated in the growth literature in the last 10 years that initial inequality sabotages subsequent growth. (See, for example, Person and Tabelini, Dani Rodrik, Will Easterly, etc. There's a brief survey of the material by Francisco Ferreira, World Bank at www.worldbank.org/poverty/inequal/econ/ferreira.pdf.) I know there's no necessary link between industrial concentration and inequality, but -- at least in the development literature -- economies (e.g., Southeast Asia versus, say, Latin America) with relatively less industrial concentration have lower Ginis and are more robust in dealing with external shocks. I'd argue that progressive politics has been much more effective in Southeast Asia, where millions of people have lifted themselves out of poverty in the last 20 years. I was just reading this morning a posting by Henry Liu in the Post-Keynesian list on China's re-distributive rural subsidies. Maybe I'm naive, but just as progressive politics doesn't necessarily require deficit financing (it may, because politics is decisive, but it doesn't appear to me as a technical necessity in spite of what Post-Keynesians argue), I'd think that the only acceptable basis for concentration is technical (e.g., natural monopoly), and such technical basis is continuously shifted by technological change. (Again, this could also be overruled by political necessity.) No? Julio _ Las mejores tiendas, los precios mas bajos y las mejores ofertas en MSN Latino. http://latino.msn.com/compras
The left in the presidential election
The last few weeks haven't been nice to me. A gut infection landed me in hospitals, once in the Midwest and once in Mexico. So I've been unable to follow the discussions in the lists. These are my belated views on the electoral strategy of the U.S. left recently discussed here: We need to remove Bush from the White House not because he is the worst president ever or even in recent history, but because -- given the alternatives and by far -- four more years of Bush in the White House are NOT the most desirable option for people in the U.S. and the world NOW. Let's leave off the table whether the threat of fascism is real or exaggerated. Here are some crucial, undeniable reasons why Bush needs to be removed from office right away: Internationally, under Bush the U.S. claims an exclusive right to unilateral, preemptive aggression against whatever it defines as a threat. In other words, it is no exaggeration to say that the U.S. proclaims itself the *world dictator*, breaching the UN charter -- the formal framework of international coexistence adopted after WW2. Beyond mere declarations, the U.S. has already acted according to its new doctrine. Domestically, the Bush administration has pushed a vast program of wealth redistribution in favor of the rich and especially in favor of his sponsors. It is no exaggeration to say that Bush's economic policy is subordinated to this goal. Some of the measures (tax cuts, accumulated deficits) are clearly intended to sabotage social programs and hardwire high degrees of wealth inequality in the country for years to come. That will have (if it is not having already) lasting, devastating effects on the living and working conditions of people. The foreign and economic policy of the U.S. imposes a tremendous human cost on people, both domestically and in the rest of the world. A second Bush term is not unlikely to make things worse. Left to themselves, things can always get worse. In a general sense, the productive and *destructive* forces of the humankind are today more powerful than ever -- and their control is highly concentrated on the U.S. bourgeoisie. The White House is the most powerful office in the world today and in history. The U.S. people has a disproportionate influence on the decisions that shape policies that seriously affect the whole world. With this influence comes a responsibility, especially to those who advocate the international cooperation of workers. If we cannot have immediate direct access to the immense power concentrated in the White House -- the ultimate basis of which is our surplus labor -- we need to at least try and limit its immediate worst uses. A further question is whether, given the alternatives, we should replace Bush with -- say -- a Democrat, a Green, or a radical Marxist. The answer doesn't depend on our wishes -- it depends on our actual power. We may wish to have Jesus or Buda or Lenin in the White House, but our wishes won't make that happen. The best course of action depends on our strength. Some people (e.g., José Pérez) appear to question the assertion that the left in the U.S. is ideologically and politically weak. Perhaps we should be more precise and say that the workers' movement in the U.S. is weak to accomplish radical goals immediately, but it is in a position to make a clear difference in more immediate goals. Workers may not in the short run end capitalism, take power, or even lead the government, but they can help remove Bush from office and push (foreign and economic) policy reform. To the extent these reforms amount to progress in the workers' agenda, this struggle strengthens the independent political organization of the workers. Some people (e.g., Jim Devine) argue that the movement has limited resources and it needs to focus on the strategic task of organizing workers independently -- presumably building a new political formation with an unmistakable workers' agenda. In this view, participating in the electoral process or supporting a DP candidate is a waste of political energy. This is wrong. Removing Bush from office and pushing for a change in foreign and economic policy don't exclude helping workers educate themselves politically and build an independent political movement. In fact, we won't be able to build an independent political movement any time soon if we don't act seriously to stop Bush's reelection. We need to participate effectively even if we look at the election in its own narrow political logic -- if the race gets tight, for that very reason, to avoid helping Bush get reelected, and if Bush is to unravel, to bury him and his policies under the landslide. We cannot shun the direct effects of the current presidential election. If we agitate and organize exclusively on the basis of long-term narrowly-conceived class goals -- overthrowing the two-party system, ending racism, abolishing capitalism, etc. -- that is, pretending that the immediate consequences of a crucial
Re: Mexico sees modest gains from Nafta
Doug wrote: You average leftist would say that this is too sunny a view - that NAFTA has been destructive. Any comments on the report from people familiar with Mexico? I read the summary. I'll try to comment on it soon. I'd be interested to know Valle's take as well. Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: Unsubscribing---thanks...
Joanna, Hope I didn't make things worse with my silly posting on Monday. I read PEN-L mail on the archives, from new to old. That's not good -- I know. I replied to your note on Question re basics without knowing the context or what the thread was about. Sorry. No wonder Ralph felt disappointed. Best, Julio _ Consigue aquí las mejores y mas recientes ofertas de trabajo en América Latina y USA: http://latino.msn.com/empleos
Re: Question re basics
Joanna Bujes wrote: What's tougher than that is to be able to stop thinking while remaining conscious and highly sensitive. (not claiming to have achieved that myself...) I once heard a sport psychologist calling this state of mental awareness being uptime. I would call it being outside -- i.e., having a wide open sensorial perception with least self-consciousness. It's the optimal state to react efficiently to external changes. By the by, seen that TV commercial where Sammy Sosa sees the ball moving to him as in slow motion and he has plenty time to weave a long thread of thoughts before deciding how to hit it? (Apologies to those who can't stand TV commercials.) I believe successful communicators -- say Oprah Winfrey or Bill Clinton -- have refined the zen-like art of being outside. Sometimes they seem to be immersed in reflection or trying to remember things before making a point. But they are not. They are outside instead -- sensing the reactions of their audiences and adjusting words, tone, body language, etc. to these reactions. That's obviously the result of careful preparation and the robust, reinforced neural wiring that comes from repeated experiences -- so called self confidence. We lazy people can't do that. But even this vague understanding of the phenomenon would have come in handy when I was a teenager trying to pick up girls Julio _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.latino.msn.com/
Re: Estimating the surplus - Turkey (Cem Somel)
Doug Henwood wrote: I don't see how the intelligent use of bourgeois stats and categories doesn't accomplish the same task. With a suitable definition of intelligent use, it must accomplish the same task. But then we cannot easily communicate the results to orthodox Marxists with no or little training in standard economics. And, yes, there's a (growing?) group of Marxists that don't have (don't want to have?) training in standard economics. Perhaps they've decided a priori that -- after David Ricardo -- there's nothing in bourgeois economics worthy of study. I don't know if this belief underlies it, but there is a recent posting on PEN-L about advising students to avoid graduate economics programs. If this is a broader trend, then Marxists are increasingly moving to history, geography, sociology, political science, literature, gender studies, cultural studies, etc. -- running away from economics. This creates a real rift -- at first academic, but potentially political. If we don't speak the same language, we are more likely to misunderstand each other. However, at the end of the day, it's the broader public that we want to engage with. So, I really don't know what the best answer is -- except that it is a good idea to try and be conversant in orthodox Marxism, modern economics, etc., and not to reject others on the basis of terminological preference. Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Rumsfeld
The New York Times December 2, 2003 U.S. Sees Lesson for Insurgents in an Iraq Battle By DEXTER FILKINS and IAN FISHER SAMARRA, Iraq, Dec. 1 American commanders vowed Monday [clip] Speaking at the same meeting, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said such attacks were being mounted by a limited number of people who are determined to kill innocent men, women and children. They are being rounded up, captured, killed, wounded and interrogated, he said. In that precise order... _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: Krugman on good news
Paul Krugman wrote: And there are signs of an economic takeoff in at least parts of India [...] every one of those development success stories was based on export-led growth. Then Michael Pollak made the following remark: India wasn't. Exports are 10% of its economy, like the US. India is a big country. Those parts of India where there are signs of an economic takeoff, aren't they export zones? I'd bet they are. Julio _ MSN Amor: busca tu ½ naranja http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: Winners and losers
In his column, Paul Krugman deals with the alternatives facing the Third World. Louis Proyect attacks him (and others) on the grounds that they cannot accept [...] the proposition of an alternative to capitalism. I wish Louis gave us a clearer idea of what he means by this. The fact is that no political proposal will fly in the Third World if it is not based on their fundamental problems -- the way they themselves perceive them. People cannot tackle problems they don't see. And they can only see problems whose solutions appear viable to them. The tasks they see are the ones that will be attempted. On www.marxmail.org, I replied recently to a note that assumed that ours is the age of decaying capitalism in the world. As far as the masses in the Third World are concerned, I said, the opposite is true. From their point of view, this still looks like the epoch of rising capitalism. For how long, I don't know. I said, take the people in China, India, and the countries in southeastern Asia -- where the bulk of the Third World people live... Ask people in these countries whether capitalism as a mode of production (a generalized market economy) is in decline -- or something to that effect. Frame it as you may, they will overwhelmingly say no. Even people in Africa or Latin America, in highly populated countries like South Africa, Nigeria, or Brazil, will give a similar answer. Specific reactions will vary from country to country, but most people in most poor nations will basically say that they want economic progress -- meaning a decent occupation and standard of living, individual and collective respect. Most people in most poor nations also believe that *capitalism* leads to economic progress, that markets are progressive, that unregulated or mis-regulated capitalism worsens people's lives unnecessarily, and that publicly-funded measures are required to protect them from frequent market turmoil. The economists have a formula that encapsulates the agenda of people in the Third World: economic development. In our times, economic development is the name of the game in the Third World. It basically means markets, capitalist production, with public institutions that guarantee the formal rule of law and a reasonable protection for the disadvantaged, the displaced, the poor. The people in the Third World will experiment politically in order to attain economic development. And they will move on to higher or different goals and question the structure of capitalist production only after economic development is attained or is proved to their satisfaction to be an impossible chimera. As a rule, the left in the Third World will be marginalized if it doesn't offer concrete ways to achieve economic development. That economic development -- if attained -- will in fact turn out to be the development of new social conflicts and antagonisms should be obvious to all Marxists. But, to use Marx's formulation, the Third World masses suffer nowadays not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, they are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. A common fallacy is to say that, because production in the Third World is -- one way or another -- linked to the world market and the world market is dominated by capitalist production, then the Third World is already fully capitalist. That is not how things look locally in the Third World. These beliefs are not fads. They are epochal. They are deep in the mass consciousness in the Third World. I added: In Russia in the 1920s, this reality led Lenin -- against the wills of radicals in his party -- to enact the NEP. In the 1930s, it turned Stalin's collectivization into a disaster. As we speak, it underlies the push towards industrial modernization in China. After fifty years of misguided industrialization strategies and catastrophic economic crises that Marxists have attributed to the structural contradictions of capitalism, it made possible the neoliberal reforms in Latin America. Even now, with enormous mass discontent against the economic performance of neoliberalism, this *is* still the social geology of Latin America. As they perceive it in the Third World, the task of direct producers in our epoch is to remove the obstacles that hinder economic development (i.e., the capitalist mode of production). The obstacles to the development of capitalist production in the Third World are many and they feed back into one another. But the problems that cut to the chase are political in nature -- primarily the lack of a political leadership that recognizes the tasks of the times and acts accordingly. The immediate goal in the Third World is the advancement of the workers' interest as these nations build the legal and
Re: the Clinton years
Kenneth Campbell wrote: But this is lousy style: I wouldn't mind his style. What is unhelpful is his tactical misfiring. At this juncture, you have an administration whose policies, domestic and foreign, are exactly what the left is supposed to be against. Yet, Cockburn is busy criticizing Bill Clinton and Paul Krugman! Clinton, well, he's pretty much flying under the radar nowadays. But Krugman is the leading voice in the mainstream media against Bush's current policies. Julio _ ¿Estás buscando un auto nuevo? http://latino.msn.com/autos/
[no subject]
Louis Proyect wrote: Well, who else is supposed to criticize the Democrats? Salon.com? The Nation Magazine? Bill Moyers? [clip] I think that the point of Counterpunch (and PEN-L) is to address the necessity of transforming the system. We are facing a downward spiral in bourgeois politics that has been going on for decades. Richard Nixon's domestic policies were far more liberal than either Clinton's or Dean's. Yeah, everybody should slap the Democrats when they're screwing things up in the relevant issue of the day. How's Krugman doing? Learn from him -- he's trying to drive a wedge between the army (and their families) and the administration. That's trying to get the biggest bang for your buck. To draw the proper economic and political lessons from the Clinton years is an important strategic task. But it's not the burning issue of the day. You can seriously do it now without shooting yourself in the foot. How about picking on Greenspan? He's the one who gave a free pass to the tax cuts for the rich. So, what's Counterpunch? I suppose the name says it all -- it's definitely not the Journal of Recent Economic History. Only children and junkies need not care about context. As for PEN-L, I don't know, but it seems to me like a group of professional conspirators bent on taking over the galaxy -- just look at the e-mail address of their leader: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Weird... Julio _ Las mejores tiendas, los precios mas bajos y las mejores ofertas en MSN Latino. http://latino.msn.com/compras
Re: the Clinton years
Yoshie wrote: Barring another terrorist attack to the magnitude of 9.11.01, Bush is finished [clip] The Democratic victory in the 2004 presidential election is virtually certain. What are socialists to do, now that George W. Bush is losing the war and will be losing the election in 2004? Remind all who are active in social movements -- especially those who are active in the anti-occupation movements -- that what Democrats in the White House have and will do again to American workers, as well as to Iraqis, Palestinians, and other peoples. I'll chill the champagne in case you're right. But what socialists should not do is base their moves on speculation about what might happen one year from now. One year is a long time in electoral politics. More importantly, no matter how hard we try on the left, we're not entirely irrelevant politically. When a contest is tight, small groups can have a disproportionate influence. So, what if the election turns very competitive, as it usually does as we approach election day? Should we be acting now in such a way as to sabotage our own prophecy and help Bush get re-elected? The main strategic task of the socialists now is to build a robust media infrastructure to wage and win the battle of ideas (Fidel Castro's phrase recently appropriated by Donald Rumsfeld) and shift the ideological center of gravity of this country to the left. Tactically, the task is to strengthen the movements against (1) the occupation, (2) the Bush/Ashcroft's assault on the Bill of Rights, (3) wealth re-distribution in favor of the rich, and any other flank the administration may leave exposed. In all cases, the way we strengthen the movement is not through attacks, purges, and expulsion of non radicals, but by uniting people regardless of motivation. The better we do our tactical homework, the greater our influence on the coming election and its aftermath. Vigorous movements against the occupation, Big Brother, and Starving the Beast will be factors that whoever wins will not be able to easily disregard. All the tactical tasks require unity against Bush's policies. I'm willing to bet that way over fifty percent of the adults marching against the invasion/occupation voted for Clinton at least once. Furthermore, I also bet that they now have a much warmer, brighter, appreciative view of the Clinton years than just before Bill left office. For one, they had jobs back then. Those were the years, my friend... So, go ahead, remind all these people how stupid they were by voting for Clinton in the past, tell them how ashamed they should feel now, tell them that you're an activist and influential decision maker in an anti-occupation coalition, and then watch what happens. What we should not do is weaken the movement with friendly or unfriendly snipping against those now on our side on the grounds of what they thought or did in the past, because with a fragmented movement whoever wins will have it easier to push the left aside. (When I say we should not reproach people for past views or deeds, I'm of course excluding Ken Lay suddenly turning into an anti-war activist and volunteering to manage the finances of the movement.) Looking forward, our task is to shift the ideological gravity center of the country to the left. That entails dealing with issues such as the recent one that got Howard Dean in trouble: our attitude towards white workers in the south. How do we win the battle of ideas? We need a media infrastructure. In Louis' list (www.marxmail.org), I've been arguing that we need a daily, national newspaper both partisan (pro workers) and objective: http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2003w45/msg00328.htm I haven't gotten a rousing response (yet), but I frankly believe this is the way to go. Energized by the anti-invasion and anti-occupation movement, the left can tackle this task now. If we let the energy dissipate, we might regret it later. Anyways, only by taking up tasks of this sort we'll be able to get out of this less-evilistic historical trap we bitch about. We cannot get out of a trap just by closing our eyes and pretending it doesn't restrict us. Julio _ Las mejores tiendas, los precios mas bajos y las mejores ofertas en MSN Latino. http://latino.msn.com/compras
My kind of woman
A friend of mine says this is an obituary published in The Times-Picayune, New Orleans on 10/2/2003: Word has been received that Gertrude M. Jones, 81, passed away on August 25, 2003, under the loving care of the nursing aides of Heritage Manor of Mandeville, Louisiana. She was a native of Lebanon, KY. She was a retired Vice President of Georgia International Life Insurance Company of Atlanta, GA. Her husband, Warren K. Jones predeceased her. Two daughters survive her: Dawn Hunt and her live-in boyfriend, Roland, of Mandeville,LA; and Melba Kovalak and her husband, Drew Kovalak, of Woodbury, MN. Three sisters, four grandchildren and three great grandchildren, also survive her. Funeral services were held in Louisville, KY. Memorial gifts may be made to any organization that seeks the removal of President George Bush from office. Julio _ Las mejores tiendas, los precios mas bajos y las mejores ofertas en MSN Latino. http://latino.msn.com/compras
Marx abstraction II [Was: Query: critique of production functions -clarificati
Dear Matías: Nowhere did I say that the production function describes the value equation. I said instead that it refers to the material substratum of the capitalist value equation. The material substratum of value is use value. By physical inputs I mean concrete labor power and means of production: ability to work and accumulated wealth ready to produce new use values. By physical outputs, I mean use values. The production function refers to use-value production. Exercised labor power here is obviously concrete useful labor. By itself, the production function is a description of the physical process of use-value production. It is not, as such, *economic* analysis. It's a description of technical production possibilities. Such description is a necessary starting point for economic analysis proper. Whatever our assessment of its scientific standing, theoretical microeconomics clearly distinguishes between production possibilities (the use-value side) and cost (the value side). But we cannot really understand the concept of a production function without getting duly acquainted with its specific uses in theoretical economics. There is no way to understand it without picking at least one field of applications (e.g., trade theory) and seriously working through the models. There is no royal road to science. In principle, there's nothing that prevents you from dealing with the heterogeneity of labour in a production function. You can plug as many arguments as you can handle. You resist to call concrete labor a physical 'input'. That's of course your prerogative. IMO, it matters little what terms we prefer -- unless we think that we live in a niche detached from the world other economists inhabit. Terms have a degree of social objectivity. There are terms they use and terms they don't use. Of course, we may try and propose new terms and new meaning for old terms, but it's not up to us whether they'll catch. Marx did not invent all the terms he used (e.g., value, price, profit, cost, rent, etc.). He took them as he found them. He scrutinized them and interpreted them in the context they were used. He explained their substantive content -- thus telling apart the rational kernel from the irrational shell. You ask how to deal with nature in the production function. Nature is a means of production to the extent it is the spatial locus of production, supplies some production branches with raw subjects and instruments of labor, and provides geological, biological, etc. basis for certain types of production (farming, fishing, mining, etc.). (Marx, Capital, vol. I, part 4, chapter 7.) It is thus a physical input or, if you prefer, a set of physical inputs. There is nothing stupid or absurd about this. Capital exists as productive capital, in the form of means of production and labor power. (Capital, vol. II, part I). That is what underlies the conflation of capital and its productive form (means of production). That's not Schumpeter. That goes as far back as -- at least -- Colonel Torrens. Capital does belong to the worlds of Nature, concrete labor or both. In its irrational, superficial aspect, it does: the trinity formula. (Capital, vol. III, part 7, chapter 48.) But, to be fair, the production function does not imply a confusion between capital as self-expanding value and its form as means of production. Just because economists use the customary term capital to refer to means of production doesn't mean that the term denotes values as opposed to use values. In the context of the analysis, that is clear enough for anyone who cares to note. Again, the production function is clearly about use-value production. Therefore, the notions of productivity (total, marginal, average) derived from it are all technical (as opposed to social) -- they are use-value to use-value ratios. In the absence of externalities in production, the economic element enters the analysis only when the prices of inputs and outputs are introduced. We cannot *assume* that Marx anticipated everything, that his critique refutes what economists have done or are doing after him. We need to *prove* it. You say: I think that if we accept the Marxian concept of value, and therefore the reduction of concrete labor to abstract labor and so on, the very concept of production function is at risk. What do you mean? Jim Devine recently mentioned Hal Varian's book. Varian's micro theory book, first chapter, provides a description of production possibilities (the production function is just one way of presenting the production possibilities). Another good reference is Andreu Mas Colell's micro theory book, chapter 5. Julio _ ¿Estás buscando un auto nuevo? http://latino.msn.com/autos/
Re: Query: critique of production functions -clarification-
What production function do we reject? And on what grounds? IMO, Anwar Shaikh's claim is that fitting an homothetic production function on aggregate data is arbitrary. As they'd say in econometrics, there's an identification problem because such data don't allow to single out the parameters. The information in the data doesn't sufficiently tie the structure imposed on the data. But that's a critique of econometrics, a critique of an estimation method, or a critique of the particular conclusions drawn by Solow from his estimation exercises. IMHO, that is not a critique of the concept of a production function. IMO, Shaikh does not claim otherwise. In general, irrespective of its applications, the underlying idea of a production function (or, more generally, a transformation function) is that there is a definite relationship between the physical inputs and outputs of production. In its more general sense, the concept includes a definite relationship among the physical inputs (substitutability). As Jim Devine wrote, Marx's description of the process of production in Capital (vol. I, part III) is akin to this idea. After all, the material substratum of the capitalist value equation, w = c + v + s, is precisely some relationship between physical outputs and physical inputs. Without a physical link between inputs and outputs, how do we tie the value of outputs to the value of inputs (rates of exploitation, profit rates) or the values of inputs to each other (capital composition)? That this relationship between physical inputs and outputs is modeled as a convex mapping, a twice-differentiable function, etc. is just convenient abstraction. Unless we are against economic analysis in general, we don't reject abstraction in general. We reject specific cases of abstraction because of specific reasons. Again, as Jim Devine says, Marx talks about labor power and other use values in general as if aggregation posed no problem. E.g., in Capital (vol. II), he has two departments -- one producing means of production and the other means of consumption. The uses of the production function in economic analysis are many. To name a few: firm theory, general equilibrium theory, growth theory, and empirical applications of growth theory. Perhaps I don't understand the essence of the Cambridge (UK) critique of aggregate capital, but if by that they mean that it is not possible to aggregate different types of means of production because different physical qualities are irreducible, then I say like Marx: you and I may not be able to aggregate them, but the market does it all the time -- and so do the BEA, the BLS, etc. Do the statistical agencies have a problem keeping track of weights and changes in input and output quality? They sure do. But they manage. If the argument is that the implicit weights (prices) entail smuggling a particular social structure (capitalism) in the guise of the technical conditions of production, then we reply that they fail to distinguish between what Marx called the ground-work for the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour and the form of commodity assumed by the product of labor. Prices are social expressions of labor time. In all states of society, the labour-time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development. (Capital, vol. I, part 1, chapter 4.) Whether the loss of information that results from aggregation is too much to bear is something that depends on the problem one is trying to solve. For instance, Marx sets to pin down the general laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production. Does the aggregation problem entail so high a distortion as to render his main conclusions invalid? I doubt that. It seems to me that the reason why the Cambridge critique has been ignored is not only that the establishment is unresponsive to criticism, but also (mainly) that the capital critique does not really address the problem that growth theorists are trying to solve. To prove that the production function, as a concept, doesn't fit economic analysis as one thinks it should be conducted is not hard to do. The challenge is to show that one's type of economic analysis is superior to theirs' and that it can give more meaningful results at the same or lower analytical cost. In the context of growth *theory*, the production function is simply a transformation from stocks (capital or the capital-labor ratio) into flows (saving, output, etc.). For the most part, the concern of growth theory is to supply testable propositions for empirical work on long-run cross-sectional international comparisons of economic performance. There have been very few (and judged by the attention paid to them, not very successful) attempts to calibrate growth models to simulate the long-run performance of a specific economy,
Re: Cancun
In his reply to Doug Henwood's article in the Nation, Peter Bohmer makes points that are thought provoking. Confined to my bedroom due to a bad flu, I will share with you some of my misery in the form of lengthy comments on Peter's remarks. Forgive me. I won't happen again anytime soon. Peter writes: I believe it is a positive value for people to be able to stay on the land, as is production for local markets. This has been a central value to the majority of the world's population or close to a majority for a very long time including the present. This is a strong argument. I'll frame it differently: There are almost 3 billion people in the developing countries considered as rural population (FAO). That is about half of all humans. If the principle of democracy amounts to anything, then the desires of these people must be taken into account insofar as their living conditions are affected not by chance or natural factors, but by what the rest of the human race does. I live in a large city so I'll speak of *we* (the urban and rural dwellers in rich countries plus the urban dwellers in the poor countries) versus *they* (the rural dwellers in the poor countries) to whom Peter obviously refers. Conceivably, they would want to exercise control over the evolution of their lives. Forceful expulsion from the land, sudden changes in their lives, and calamities unleashed by human forces beyond their control (e.g., global markets, capitalism, etc.) would be unacceptable. My first thought here is that, even among us, there's no individual control over those human forces. They are human. And if there's anybody who can control them such people would be among us. But most of us are also under their spell. There are some among us who are under the impression (illusion?) that they benefit more from these forces than others. Some of us resist the forces and would like to turn things around. But, we haven't managed to do it yet. So, against our deepest wishes, those among us who benefit from the status quo are stealing resources from them and dumping on them our garbage. But, I don't want to leave any of us (the progressives among us) off the hook, because we also share a bit of the benefit that comes from abusing them. So think of us as a homogenous mass facing them -- in fact, threatening them. Our lives are a mess. But theirs are a bit complicated too. Regarding their lives, there is a host of factors -- of a more local character -- that affect them as well and don't let them fully control the changes in their living conditions: relations of personal and direct political subordination less common in our environs, oppressive traditions peculiar to their rural life, etc. These institutions tend to be closely associated with their connection to the land. (I know because I was born and grew up in a rural, isolated, impoverished area of south-western Mexico: the Tierra Caliente of Guerrero. I wonder where Peter was born and grew up.) Because of these local factors, the idea that by staying on the land, staying small, and producing for local markets, they will necessarily be more able to control change in their social environment is far from obvious. But I won't dwell on this argument anymore. What matters most is the implicit idea that by staying on the land, etc. they can participate on similar footing in the conduction of global affairs. And that implicit idea is not persuasive. When I say similar footing, I mean similar footing. I'm not talking of a balance that results from our compassion or generosity towards them, but from a true balance of power and a mutual interdependence between us and them -- such that we respect them because we have to. Otherwise, the balance would be fragile and subject to our whims. We'd always be the grownups. And they would always be the minors. The problem here is, how do they enforce their desires -- especially if we are not cooperating with them at all or sufficiently? This is a huge chicken and egg problem. Key to this is the fact that we are more productive. I mean, I'm aware of the fact that along with the massive stuff that we produce, we also produce a lot of garbage, and a lifestyle that drives us nuts and pits us against each other and against them. I know. So, let me assume that, although they produce less stuff, with less technological sophistication, they produce more human-scale common sense, and a much more sane, cleaner, healthy lifestyle. I'll assume such thing because deep down I don't believe it is accurate. But, let's say they can produce more good life. Still, we can easily destroy their good life and we tend to do it as we speak. They obviously cannot protect their good life from us. They can also destroy or seriously threaten our (less impressive) good life, but to do it they need to acquire at least a part of what we have -- they have to become a bit like us. If they stay like they are, stick to their land, stay small, mind their own
Re: Cancun
[Part II] Peter Bohmer continues: To this end, I support protectionism and subsidies, particularly in the global south to support this type of rural production. I think similarly protecting small farmers and particularly those producing for the local and the national market should be supported in France, U.S., South Korea as well as of course in Mexico. I believe the global justice movement should favor policies, including subsidies, protectionism, etc. that advance these values and goals. The impact of protectionism on the global south is not clear cut. A human being is a human being. A landless rural worker is just as worthy as a landholder. The landless worker will directly benefit from lower farm prices and be directly hurt by the protection of local farmers. (He may benefit indirectly to the extent the farmer may be able to hire her if the alternative is to be landless and unemployed.) There are countries where the number of landless workers (or semi-landless workers whose main sources of income are not farm revenues but wages, etc.) outnumber the landowners. It is clear to me that Mexico is one of these cases. Protection of agriculture under such conditions amounts to favoring the landowners by taking away resources from other uses that could be more effective in helping the rural working poor: health services, basic education, public infrastructure, utilities, environmental preservation, etc. Frankly, I'm against this kind of protectionism in the global south. In the U.S., we, the global justice movement, should totally oppose subsidies to agriculture that benefit agribusiness as well as those that make it possible to dump U.S. agricultural production in other countries, particularly in the south. I totally agree. With regards to food and agricultural exports by third world countries, I believe the global justice movement should ally, primarily, with movements who instead favor production for local markets and also movements of small farmers, cooperatives and policies that favor them. For the reasons above, I don't agree on this in general. I'd look at each case separately and avoid a general rule like Peter's. With regards to the G-22 proposals and actions in Cancun, their challenging the G-7 is exciting, especially in terms of their opposing the attempt by the G7 to get the MAI in the back door. On the other hand and as implied by the previous paragraph, we should strongly oppose subsidies for agribusiness but not necessarily ones in the North tailored to help the family farm and the small farmer. I realize care will have to be given in tailoring the policies. to further these objectives. I don't really object to this, except -- as I said -- when helping the family farm and the small farmer goes against the interest of the landless rural- and urban working poor. In such case, I take view that one human being is as worthy as any other human being. Julio Huato _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.yupimsn.com/
Re: Leftists and Electoral Politics Re: California recall results
Jim Devine wrote: the real action has to involve the development of a mass movement of the left, something that will never come from the DP. Only when there's a working-class movement outside of the electoral arena will the political balance shift back in the human direction. ... which leads to the question of how to build a mass workers' movement outside of the DP. In other words, how to build it without an immediate vehicle to *potentially* influence legislation and policies via the electoral process. Whether the *potential* is real or just perceived by workers doesn't change much. We can only change the big things by taking action on the small ones. Frontally clashing with the two-party system seems to me like an unnecessarily uphill proposition. It is of course possible to influence legislation and government decisions from outside the electoral process. But why should regular workers follow the outside path while the inside path is available, appears to be direct, and doesn't seem to preclude the former? That it is corrupted and tainted -- sure. But is it so beyond self-correction? Judged by their actions, regular people presume that the inside path is more effective. As shown in California, it is obvious that people respond to electoral politics. Even on the Left one hears people complaining about how unresponsive the White House has been to anti-war protests -- domestic and international. Could a larger congressional opposition accomplish more? The task is to shift to the left the political mindset of millions of Americans. And that can only happen after gradual, molecular changes accumulate -- as people process their experiences, victories and defeats, large and small, in ways that leads to motion. Such changes will be facilitated if we start where people actually stand now. I think the emphasis should be on: (1) organizing -- mostly around immediate goals with no doctrinary pre-requisites, but also on the basis of longer-range programmatic agreements, and in-between, and (2) waging the the ideological struggle (Lenin), the battle of ideas (Fidel Castro), or -- if you allow me -- the culture war (Bill O'Reilly). Since I'm at it I'll say that the movement needs less leftwing self-righteousness, less second-guessing in building up the cultural infrastructure and more trying. Power is the application of resources (ultimately human labor) to the construction or dismantling of social structures. We need to gather the resources and apply them as required. That's a trial and error process. Electoral work inside and outside the DP is part of the project. Without electoral work, the organizational leap required from workers is much more dramatic. Mobilizations for concrete goals (jobs, revival of public services, end of the occupation of Iraq, regularization of migrant workers, etc.) are another part. One part supporting the other. No mutual exclusion. We are in no position to predict whether the DP will collapse, transfigure itself, or some combination of both as workers find independent voice and political action. We don't know yet whether it'll go through the Green party or through some other emergent alternatives. As things are now, it's best to spread the bets widely and focus on (1) and (2). We shouldn't close doors based on some speculation. It doesn't matter whether we have already transcended the DP in our heads. What is required is for the actual workers' movement to transcend it in practice. That's a long way to go. Just a reflection. _ Las mejores tiendas, los precios mas bajos, entregas en todo el mundo, YupiMSN Compras: www.yupimsn.com/compras
Book this
Oct 2, 2003: - National Call-In Day: Urge President Bush and members of Congress to support immigrants' rights. Make your toll-free calls any time on October 2 to the White House at 1-800-321-8268 and to Congress at 1-888-355-3588. - Meet with Congress - Rally and Picket. 2:30 pm. Join a UNITE picket line with UNITE President Bruce Raynor, supporting workers at Sterling Laundry at the Churchill Hotel, 1914 Connecticut Ave., NW. - OR join the Laborers' rally for ACECO workers with Laborers President Terry O'Sullivan at the US Treasury Department at 15th St and Pennsylvania Ave., NW. - March to Support Parking Lot Attendants. 7 pm. Farragut Square (K St., NW between 17th St. and Connecticut Ave., NW). Freedom Riders and community and labor partners will march to support members of HERE Local 27. HERE President John Wilhelm, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson will speak. October 3, 2003 - Liberty State Park, NJ 1:30-3:30. Call 609-989-8730 for more information October 4, 2003 - Flushing Meadows Park, Queens, New York. Freedom Ride Culminating Event For more on the latter, visit: http://www.iwfr.org/ny.asp _ Charla con tus amigos en línea mediante MSN Messenger: http://messenger.yupimsn.com/
[ Imperialism and Environment
Charles Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED]: CB: Wouldn't the WTO, IMF, World Bank, U.S. Treasury, NAFTA, NATO, US war machine, et al, combine to be this organ ? I can't respond to Charles Brown's posting right now. But I'd like to submit a note I sent to marxmail where I address issues that are very closely related to this discussion. Hope that's proper. *** The mischaracterization of Vicente Fox is a corollary of the leftist mischaracterization of the social formation in Mexico, Latin America, and the Third World. The confusion arises from a misunderstanding of the prospects of capitalist development in the world and our reliance on the old dogmas of the Left. The theoretical arsenal of the Left in Latin America continues to be based on (1) the fruitless attempt to force Lenin's analysis of imperialism into the framework set by Marx in Capital, (2) the recycling of the ideas of Sismondi, Malthus, and the Russian populists as dependency theories, etc., and (3) the misunderstanding of the trends and prospects of today's international capitalism. In the view of the historical circumstances that led to WWI, Hilferding, Hobson, Bukharin, and Lenin viewed protectionism, colonialism, and militarism as manifestations of the increasing power of large companies and 'finance capital', who could obtain systematic super-profits, superseding de facto the laws of exchange of the old 'competitive capitalism'. Marx was fully aware of the tendency of capitalist production to overflow its self-imposed boundaries, to break all rules and codes of conduct including those of its own making. But he was clear that the main dynamics of capitalist reproduction was to be pin down as M-C-M' proper, value that expands itself via surplus production and exploitation based on an unswerving compliance with the laws of legally voluntary exchange. The new views came to regard the repeated violation of M-C-M' proper as the natural, 'dialectical' result of the process itself in the conditions of the new capitalism. While Marx stated that as capitalism evolved, its historical configuration would approach more closely the 'pure' economic logic of M-C-M', increasingly weeding out or getting around its external hurdles, the new views regarded extra-economic forms of competition and super-exploitation of foreign workers (using state power as a systematic weapon), in one word, imperialism, as natural and growing expressions of mature and even agonizing capitalism. In this light, the old ways of mercantilism, which played a key role in mustering the historical premises of capitalist reproduction in Europe, were now refurbished at a larger scale, more intensely, as the inexorable methods of choice of rich and mature capitalism. Marx praised political economists who, like Ricardo, pinned down the fundamental dynamic thrust of capitalist production (M-C-M' proper) and viewed its main sources of trouble as arising from the internal process itself in the form of a tendential decline in profitability and, ultimately, the growing rebelliousness of the direct producers. The political economy compatible with the new views would have to be a re-edition of the ideas of Sismondi, Malthus, and the Russian populists, pointing one way or another outside of the M-C-M' process to find the main sources of trouble (and even denying the mere possibility) of capitalist expansion. These ideas, and not the ideas of Marx, were the ones attuned to the belief of 'the development of underdevelopment' in Third World capitalism, as a result of reduced domestic markets and effective demand traps (breakable by state sponsored industrialization), and foreign exchange gaps (breakable by protectionism and import substitution), etc. While the ascent of Keynesianism in the rich capitalist countries is to be pondered in its own specificity, it is partially the result of the same tendencies. The rapid ascent, in both the theoretical and policy realms, of the doctrines of the so-called 'neoliberalism' (frequently mocked and underrated by Keynesian economists who had the ear of Leftist thinkers) came as a shock in the Keynesian-dominated economics establishment. While Marx showed in Capital that, as a result of relative surplus value production, without resort to government deficit spending, seigniorage, or protectionism, it was possible for workers to systematically improve their standard of living under capitalism, the Left seems almost unanimously unable to even consider it. In fact, a great deal of what the Left in Latin America calls 'neoliberalism' is not an expression of imperialism but of its exact capitalistic opposite. To a large extent, 'neoliberalism' is a forceful ideological rationalization of M-C-M' proper. If we fail to see this, we mischaracterize the WTO, the EU, the NAFTA, the FTTA initiative, etc. To the extent that international agencies sponsored by national states, and the national states
Re: Re: [ Imperialism and Environment
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Marx praised Ricardo for seeing how capitalism is expansionist (M - C - M'). But the latter, unlike Marx, saw the problem -- including the falling rate of profit -- as arising due to external processes (scarcity of land raw materials). You are right about Ricardo's theory of rent. I wanted to refer to Marx's praising of Ricardo for his better understanding of the pervasiveness of M-C-M' as compared to those who looked at the external hurdles or the recessionary (or stagnationist) spells in capitalist history. And you're also right about underconsumption playing a role in Marx's theory of crisis. But, IMO, its role is secondary. In principle, the effective demand necessary to close the M-C-M' circuit can be generated by the process itself. I don't think that's controversial, but I may be wrong. Now, what I stated about the contrast between Marx and Ricardo/Malthus/etc. is not meant to be a denial of the theoretical problems of Marx's analysis of capitalism. So, yes, Marx's thesis of the rising composition of capital is problematic. But whether it has been due to a persistent increase in the real income of workers and not strictly to a rising value composition of capital, profitability has exhibited a tendency to decline in the documented history of capitalism. To me that's a partial validation of Marx. In any case, the increase in the real income of workers is internal to M-C-M'. _ Descargue GRATUITAMENTE MSN Explorer en http://explorer.msn.es/intl.asp
Fwd: How to Stop Bush Amnesty of 3 Million Illegal Aliens
This was sent to me off list by Michael Pugliese: From: Michael Pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Fw: How to Stop Bush Amnesty of 3 Million Illegal Aliens Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 07:29:11 -0700 Julio Huato, I lurk on alot of Right-Wing lists. Give these nativists a piece of your mind. The reactionaries are going nuts! Michael Howlin' Wolf Pugliese from pen-l - Original Message - From: CitizensLobby.com To: Recipient list suppressed Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2001 6:41 AM Subject: How to Stop Bush Amnesty of 3 Million Illegal Aliens == AN URGENT MESSAGE from www.CitizensLobby.com http://www.CitizensLobby.com July 17, 2001 == (Washington, DC) President Bush is considering to grant amnesty to over 3 million illegal criminal aliens. A recent report by Mr. Bush's own officials at the State and Justice Departments has recommended that he circumvent U.S. laws and approve eventual citizenship to millions of mostly Mexican illegal immigrants. Where is the compassionate conservatism for American citizens whose tax dollars line the pocket of these border-runners, lawbreakers and thieves? After 8 years of Clintonism, Bush may seem right on many issues, but he is wrong on immigration! Our President is about to squash our dignity and rights as American citizens in order to pander to the anti-American agenda of Mexican President Vicente Fox, and to the liberal Democrats in Congress. Did the President and his strategists forget that Al Gore's and Bill Clinton's Citizenship USA program in 1996, which registered over 1.2 million illegal aliens to vote, allowed the vast majority of their fraudulent ballots in 2000 to be cast for liberal Democrats? Help stop this amnesty, and help President Bush understand the virtues of American citizenship. Please join CitizensLobby.com in taking the following grass-roots action: #1 Tell President Bush to reject this illegal alien scheme. Call (800) 303-8332 or (202) 456-1414; Fax: (202) 456-2461; Write: 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20500 E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can also call Timothy Goeglein, WH Public Liaison, at (202) 456-2930, and Karl Rove, chief strategist, at (202) 456-5587. These gentlemen give Bush pillow talk on this issue. #2 Tell Congress to oppose this measure. The Bush plan may eventually encompass an even more radical amnesty proposed by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (H.R. 500), which could grant amnesty to as many as 10 million illegal aliens! Contact your Congressman and tell him to oppose the Bush plan and H.R. 500. Call the congressional switchboard at (800) 648-3516 or (877) 762-8762 or go to http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html . In the Senate, lackey Phil Gramm is pushing for an expansion of a guest worker program, an equally miserable measure that will still grant amnesty to millions of illegal criminal aliens. Contact your Senators at http://www.senate.gov/senators/index.cfm . #3 Visit http://www.CitizensLobby.com and sign our Petition on immigration http://www.citizenslobby.com/petitions.htm#immigration . We will make your voice heard on Capitol Hill and deliver your petition to the House and Senate Judiciary subcommittees on immigration. Help take America back. This is our country. Our rights should not be trampled and demeaned by illegal aliens. Our tax dollars should not fund criminal lawbreaking. If an amnesty does take hold, this will only lead to a greater invasion of illegal immigrants. Please take a stand today. I thank you for your time and consideration. Best regards, Scott A. Lauf Executive Director, CitizensLobby.com # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # [NOTE: If this e-mail is in error, please disregard and/or send message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to be removed from our lists. We apologize for the inconvenience. CitizensLobby.com is a non-partisan, grass-roots organization. CitizensLobby.com does not endorse or support political candidates or parties.] _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Imperialism and Environment
Sam Pawlett [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Because it isn't happening [as they grow, poor countries are not showing will or mechanisms to improve the enviroment]. The most industrialized of the poor countries (S.Korea, Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia) are environmental disasters. I've seen it first hand. There is a strong incentive to dump the costs of industrialization onto the environment. They--as some rich countries are doing-- might try and clean up their act but the environmental damage is in many cases irreversible (e.g. Lake Erie and Ontario). The incentive to pollute is built into capitalism. Even many neoclassical economists would agree. First, let me admit something. I may have misread your first e-mail on this thread. When you said that poor countries will not industrialize the way rich countries have, I thought you meant they could industrialize in a different way, but still capitalistic. But, after reading your responses, it may well be that you think they won't industrialize under capitalism at all. To respond to this, it seems to me that this is yet to be decided. IMO, if there's a socialist transformation in the rich countries within a few decades, then poor countries may be spared a 'regular' capitalist industrialization. But, short of a global military or environmental catastrophe, I think poor countries will more likely get industrialized the capitalist way. Of course, there's also the possibility of a Soviet or Chinese type of industrialization. But, with regards to Latin America, I doubt it. Now, let me address your first paragraph. First, production and consumption (i.e., human life) entail pollution. That's thermodynamics. So, capitalist production can't escape that either. But here we're talking about pollution above and beyond what a historically conceivable superior set of social needs and system of allocation of labor would have to tolerate. That said, yes, under capitalism, if there are no laws to protect the environment or mechanisms to internalize the benefits of using it (or the cost of polluting it), there will be pollution. Even if there are strict laws, if they are not enforced or only partially enforced, there will be pollution. Capital is prone to break laws and moral codes in its pursuit of profit. I agree with you somehow: There's a built-in incentive for capitalists to pollute (profit making). My point is, under laws that -- roughly speaking -- protect private ownership, capital is perfectly capable of abiding by the environmental laws. This leads to what's badly missing in poor countries: growth, laws, and law enforcement. Finally, conventional economists may have different views. For example, (if my recollection is correct) Nancy Stokey (Chicago) suggests in a recent paper that as poor countries industrialize, there may exist at first a positive correlation between their economic level and the rate of pollution but that the sign might reverse as the country reaches a certain point. (International Economic Review?) Whoa, a real Kautskyite. But no, the rate of exploitation rises as productivity (surplus value) increases. For example, auto workers in Mexico work at close to the same level of productivity as Canadians or Americans but are only paid a fraction. They are more exploited and most of that surplus value ends up in the rich countries. A Marxist economist named Geoffrey Kay once suggested that the problem with Africa was that it wasn't exploited enough i.e. there was too little investment and productivity was too low. You seem to agree with him. Lenin was a Kautskyite for quite a while. But I won't get into that. Marx, when he tries to pin down the main thrust of capitalist production, looks at it as value that expands itself through the production and appropriation of surplus value. The 'internal' conditions of the reproduction of capital are that there be means of production and free wage labor available at the right quantities and of the right qualities. But there are also 'external' conditions (such as laws and their enforcement, attitudes, etc.) to capitalist reproduction and these are assumed to exist and be perfectly aligned with the process. This is a bold abstraction of a messy historical reality (that has only turned messier with time), but well worth undertaking. Marx does not consider that underpaying workers or submitting them to abuses is sine-qua-non conditio for capitalist exploitation. He clearly tries to keep the 'logic' of capital clean of abuses and focus on a process that, even if respectful of all the laws of commodity exchange (which entail that people don't take extra-economic advantage of each other when they exchange commodities), is exploitative. Using this same approach to dealing with the environment, I conclude that it is not in the 'nature' of capital to overpollute. By the way, Marx also believed that as capitalism evolved, the historical reality of capitalism
Re: Re: Re: Imperialism and Environment
Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The Nancy Stukey paper seems like another statement of the environmental Kuznets curve. Alan Krueger once presented this idea to the URPE meetings at the economics meetings. It was far from convincing. Some types of polluting behavior will indeed by cut back -- such as burning firewood for cooking -- but other types will increase. I'm raising a question rather than trying to make a case. And I was responding to a statement about the views of neoclassical economists. Not that she needs me to, but I don't endorse Ms. Stokey's views. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Imperialism and Environment
Yoshie: The essence of imperialism may be best understood as what is necessary to ensure the global reproduction of social relations of capitalism, for which a variety of means -- including embargoes -- are used, depending on what changing circumstances demand. [Etc.] I find this posting very interesting. It goes without saying that I agree with a lot of what is said in it. :-) My discomfort with Yoshie's take on the essence of imperialism is that it suggests the existence of some supra-national capitalist organ aware of the needs of global capitalist reproduction and acting accordingly and even flexibly (depending on what changing circumstances demand). But what is such an organ? All one sees is heterogeneous and even conflicting policies implemented by different states (and even the same one) and their international agencies -- even if (and when) under the hegemony of the richest state. In what sense are these policies 'necessary' for the global reproduction of capitalism? Does the global reproduction of capitalism has ever really required much coherence of this sort? How come the national states from the rich countries, following imperialistic policies, led themselves into the first world war? How was the early-20th-century imperialism designed to ensure the global reproduction of capitalism? Isn't that the Leninist prototype of what imperialism is about? _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Imperialism and Environment
Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Julio, I do not have any absolute proof, but I feel fairly confident that most of the pollution caused by consumption in the United States occurs offshore. The extractive industries are terribly destructive. Toxic wastes are shipped abroad. Ugly industries, such as the recycling of lead batteries, go abroad. In the end, perhaps the whole country can sit in air conditioned offices giving orders to the rest of the world on what to do -- except that the US will still need a lot of domestic workers to make life comfortable for the rest. I yield to your opinion, as I don't really have a reason (or factual information) to claim otherwise. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Re: : Yet another take on Hubbert's peak
Sam Pawlett [EMAIL PROTECTED]: How are they [poor countries as they develop] to pay for it [limiting environmental damage]? World Bank loans? I try not to assume anything, but it's safe to say that LDC countries will follow the path of least resistance (i.e. the cheapest) towards industrialization. That's what has and is happening. I mean, why import natural gas for 'clean' power boilers when you have lots of domestic coal? Most LDC's are already heavily in debt to the North and will (and should) try to keep an independent energy policy. The premise is that they will grow and become richer countries. By definition, richer countries have more opportunities and resources to, among other things, limit environmental damage. Of course, wealth is not a sufficient condition. But my question was, why should we think that poor countries -- as they grow -- won't develop the will and mechanisms to use these additional opportunities and resources in a way that limits environmental damage? Ha. Maybe in the 19th century [Marx's dictum that undeveloped capitalist countries will tend to develop capitalistically], but it will not happen as long as imperialism and capitalism are hegemonic in the world system. Imperialism (extra-economic forms of exploitation of workers in poor countries by capitalists from rich countries) certainly has a negative influence on the development of capitalism in the poor countries. To put it mildly, colonial plunder didn't help the poor countries to grow. But, important as it is, the relative role of imperialist exploitation in the overall exploitation of workers in the Third World tends to decline as capitalist production proper expands. And I'm talking about capitalist development in the Third World. IMO, the main obstacle to the development of capitalism in the Third World is not imperialism. We would expect the poor countries to pollute like hell as the rich countries have done. Why would that be the case? Why should we not believe in the great wisdom of the old man: One nation can and should learn from others? Not that the learning process is smooth and straightforward. Some leftists (Bello,Martin K.K.Peng) argue that rich countries setting environmental standards for poor ones constitutes a form of imperialism since env. standards are a barrier to economic growth. Northern environmentalism is just another means of keeping the South under the boot. I am sensitive to that argument. If higher environmental (and labor) standards are the weapon of choice of capitalists from rich countries to compete against capitalists in poor countries, why should we oppose them? I'd let the capitalists in the poor countries take care of themselves. Higher environmental and labor costs imposed on capitals that operate in poor countries put these capitals at a disadvantage, but they are not -- by far -- the main obstacles to capitalist growth in these countries. If you imply that, in the long run, capitalist growth is a necessary condition for the living and working conditions of workers in the Third World to improve, I agree. Of course, things would change if a union of rich socialist countries showed up to assist the poor ones. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: : Yet another take on Hubbert's peak
Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Rich countries reduce pollution, in part, by exporting it to poor countries. If Third World countries get to grow, they are likely to be in a position to limit or negotiate this in better terms. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: : Yet another take on Hubbert's peak
Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Julio Huato wrote: IMO, the main obstacle to the development of capitalism in the Third World is not imperialism. What is? Doug To state it in general may not be particularly helpful. But here it goes. In my opinion, the main obstacle to the development of capitalism in the Third World is not imperialism, but (1) the persistence of pre-capitalist or semi-capitalist forms of production and (2) 'superstructural' constraints, such as laws, lack thereof, etc. Furthermore, these conditions allow for the imperialist proclivity of the rich countries to take easy advantage. Just like capitalist industrial production in the north of the US and in England benefited temporarily from (and reinforced) slave production in the south, imperialism uses and reinforces traditional forms of production, weak legal systems, corruption, etc. in the poor countries. Over time, the benefits dwindle as does the commitment of the capitalists in the rich countries to their old allies. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: : Yet another take on Hubbert's peak
michael pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED]: This sounds like the articulation of modes of production approach reviewed back in the late 70's in NLR by Aidan-Foster-Carter. Another part of what Julio says sounds like to me like the Peruvian economist touted by Mario Vargas Llosa, and the late Richard Milhous Nixon, whose name I'm blanking on. Hernando de Soto? BTW, the son of Mario, has a newish book, I just saw with two other co-authors, newly issued by the libertoons at Madison Books, Guide To The Perfect Latin American Idiot, by Plineo A. Mendoza, Mario's son and another author. Blurb on back claims it is funny and was a bestseller in S. America. Looks like on a quick look see a polemic against dependency theory and Fidelismo. Less scholarly than say, The Dependency Moment, by Robert Packenheim published by Princeton Univ. Press a few yrs. back. Comments, please on Packenheim or this idiot book. Michael Pugliese I hope that doesn't make me guilty by association. To be fair with these authors, I haven't read any of the materials referenced above. In my own silly mind, what I said follows from Marx. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Re: RE: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: : Yet another take on Hubbert's peak
Michael Pugliese [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I knew I should have phrased that differently! No. It's fair, Michael. And thank you for all the URLs. I have heard of de Soto before. Louis Proyect already honored me by associating me with him. But I haven't read him directly. Now I should. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: : Yet another take on Hubbert's peak
Sam Pawlett [EMAIL PROTECTED]: At best, costlier energy means that less developed countries will not be able to industrialize the way the North has: through cheap energy. The only way will be for the North to decrease consumption. Because of acute capital shortage, countries of the South will follow the cheapest energy supply for their industrialization efforts and the subsequent bid to raise their standards of living to Northern levels. This means burning coal and biomass (there are new coal-fired boilers coming online almost daily in places like Indonesia.) This will (and is) wreaking havoc on the global ecology and environment. Why should we assume that Third World countries, as they industrialize, will not act to limit environmental damage? The population of the now rich countries may not have a monopoly over environmental concerns. If the infamous statement that, under capitalism, the country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed the image of its own future (Marx) has any bit of validity, then we'd expect the newly industrialized countries to take some action -- set environmental standards, and try to enforce them. After all, the core of the environmental movement is located, well, in the core countries. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: RE: Re: Re: US Crude Oil Reserves for Selected States/Regions
Mark Jones [EMAIL PROTECTED]: elsewhere. In 1999 Mexico downgraded its official reserve estimates by 20 Gigabarrels. The Mexican government, especially since Zedillo, has been claiming that the state monopoly, PEMEX, is in deep trouble. Fox has adopted a similar position. It is somewhat likely that the purpose is to alarm the public re. the state of the oil industry in Mexico, in order to open prospection, extraction, refining, petrochemical production, wholesale and retail distribution to private companies (particularly US companies, which -- under NAFTA -- have an advantage), and privatize PEMEX. This is the argument: Government revenues are highly dependent on oil revenues (and foreign currency) from the state monopoly, the fiscal reform is stuck in Congress, and the government cannot undertake the large investments required to modernize PEMEX. The only way out -- they claim -- is privatization of the industry. I'm no expert and have no way to assess to what extent this distorts the picture. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Analytical Marxism
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
very good as a basis of historical analysis? Perhaps it is the productivity
that comes from contradiction and ambiguity which gave Marxism its
conceptual
power.
That'd be a dubious productivity. On the premise of logical contradiction
and ambiguity anything can be concluded ('explained'). That can't be
serious conceptual power.
_
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Re: Analytical Marxism
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED]: The holy trinity of Roemer, Elster, and Cohen seem quite reductionist (back when they were doing Marxist stuff). The first two got into methodological individualism, reducing all social phenomena to individual decisions, while Cohen embraced another kind of reductionism, the reduction of superstructural phenomena to being mere epiphenomena of the base, which itself basically reflects the progress of the forces of production. (Brenner never went so far, since the discipline of being an historian and/or involvement in political action keeps one away from that kind of abstraction.) I'm not very familiar with their work, but the little I've read from them (Roemer's Analytical Foundations, Cohen's book on Marx's theory of history, and Elster some book on technology), I fail to see their commonalities. IMO, Cohen's book is solid and I don't think it reduces superstructural phenomena to being mere epiphenomena of the 'base'. With regards to a good, old-style presentation of Marx's method, I like the first chapter of Evgueni Preobrazhensky's New Economics. In the rest of the book, Preobrazhensky shows how Marx's methodological insights are useful in understanding a concrete transitional social formation (although he left his study at a fairly high level of abstraction -- I don't even know whether the second part he promised was ever published). Another work I like is Rosdolsky's book on the Grundrisse. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Re: The Vulnerable Planet (was Re: suburbia)
Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hernando Cortés on Mexico City in 1527: This noble city contains many fine and magnificent houses; [etc.] Tenochtitlán was the impressive center of the Aztec Empire, a despotism with a steep social structure. At the top, there was a military, religious, and bureaucratic class that appropriated the surplus product of direct producers via a bit of trade and a lot of forceful tribute extraction. The Aztecs exploited over 400 states on +200,000 km2 at the time of the Spanish invasion. Perhaps over 5 million direct producers at the time Spaniards invaded Mexico -- serfs, indentured servants, and slaves. In part, Cortés' victory was eased by a skillful exploitation of the resentment and rivalries of neighboring states against the Aztecs. Pre-Hispanic Mexico was not a harmonious, paradisiac society. The surface of Tenochtitlán was only 5 square miles -- very small compared to today's metropolitan Mexico City. It only covered what is now called the Historical Center. With some surplus product to spare, it's not difficult to build little ecologically-friendly paradises for the ruling classes. Today's Tecamachalco, only one of the anti-Chimalhuacáns on the west side of Mexico City, is larger than that. People in Tecamachalco, Lomas de Chapultepec, etc. enjoy relatively low levels of air pollution (not much worse than people in Beverly Hills or Brooklyn Heights), excellent urban services, and the lavish (and tacky) lifestyles of the 'First-World' rich. Cortés' description of Tenochtitlán was self-serving. Most likely, it was intended to impress the Spanish Crown and ensure a firmer financial and military support to his plundering adventure. He needed to ensure it, as the support wavered a lot. There was a time when the Spanish Capitanía General in Cuba ordered Cortés to stop and return to Cuba. There was even a (failed) attempt to arrest him. In any case, Cortés needed to embellish things somewhat in his letters simply because investment follows expected profitability. IMO, Marx's emphasis on material premises, as a pre-requisite to do away with class societies and exploitation, is as adequate today as it was in his time. IMO, in spite of the environmental challenges facing us all, Mexican direct producers are now in a much better position to contribute to human progress and emancipation than ever before. IMO, concern for the environment is only meaningful in humanist terms, that is, as it affects us humans -- and I include here, not only concern for 'natural resources' in the usual sense, but also moral considerations towards animals and life in general, aesthetic enjoyment of natural scenery, etc. (If this sounds obvious, I'm glad.) IMO, at least to the extent that it affects most directly the lives of people in Mexico, the worst environmental conditions are associated not with modern capitalist production but with backward, transitional forms of capitalist production and even pre-capitalist production. (I mean 'pre-' in a logical, not only in a historical sense -- absence of a market of free laborers, production not yet organized by capitalist entrepreneurs who under competitive pressure tend to revolutionize the technical conditions of production.) To mention a fact, the life expectancy of POOR people (not to mention 'quality of life' and opportunities for their children) in Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Puebla (the largest cities in Mexico) is higher than in vast rural areas of Mexico. Poverty is directly an 'environmental' disaster, insofar as it reduces the lifetime, and limits in many other ways, the lives of concrete people. And, in Mexico, IMO, the dependence on nature tied to pre-capitalist structures and backward technical conditions supplies the worst, hopeless cases of poverty. As I see it, even in its capitalist alienated form, wealth production is immediately an expansion of opportunities for human improvement. It is so just by reducing (or, if you prefer, modifying) our dependence (or, if you wish, our primitive forms of dependence) on nature. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Vulnerable Planet (was Re: suburbia)
Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Mexico's border, 'prosperity' has an ugly side By Diego Ribadeneira, Globe Staff NOGALES, Mexico -- Paradise lost. Those are the words many here use to describe this remote and beautiful corner where Mexico meets Arizona. A once-pristine region of deep blue skies, soaring cactus-dotted mountains and spectacular sunsets has been laid waste by industrialization run amok, many residents say. The villains, they charge, are the maquiladoras, the Spanish word for the US assembly plants that have set up shop in Mexico within eyesight of the United States. Not to be denied. But, as people say, at least there are jobs. A good deal of the people who work in the maquiladora zones by the border are from the southern and central states. They left their paradises because there were no jobs -- not even maquiladora jobs. Marxists and environmentalists don't provide them with jobs -- capitalists do. Down in the south, there were no clinics for pregnant women and babies, no schools for the children, no paved roads to get their ill out on time, no potable water, no drainage systems, no bridges to cross a stream in the rain season. If there's a storm, some people lose their huts, belongings, harvest, and even lives. Infections that can be easily subdued with a penicillin shot are still killing people. Child mortality is high. Life expectancy is low. In 2001. Nature (i.e., rain, lightening, rivers, fire, animals, bacteria, viruses, human births) doesn't appear so nice under such circumstances. The 'pristine' water in streams and rivers in poor rural areas is likely to be very contaminated, not by industrial pollutants or chemical fertilizers, but by human, dog, and pig organic waste. People (women, first and foremost) burn wood to cook and, since sometimes ventilation is not good or kitchen and house are one and the same thing, they breathe this romantic form of carbon monoxide routinely. With no electricity, there are no fridges, and food poisoning is common. There are vast rural areas in Mexico where the people who stay -- mainly women, elder, and children -- depend, not even on seasonal agriculture, but on hunting and gathering. They depend on luck with the odds against them. In other words, they depend on nature. No wonder the young and able abandon their natural paradises. Maybe Mexican workers don't realize the full magnitude of global warming and other global ecological threats, but the local and simple way they look at the problem is not completely senseless. They know they are taking chances. But life is full of dilemmas. There is a twofold threat: (1) starvation, deep poverty, joblessness -- perceived as an assault at gunpoint -- and (2) lost natural scenery, environmental pollution, and more 'normal' capitalist exploitation -- drops of poison that will kill you eventually. But getting rid of the first threat appears much more urgent. Other factual references seem to support their priority rankings. For instance, Mexico City is heavily polluted, but at least there are environmental laws and -- with some luck -- they get enforced. People think there has been a modest but tangible improvement in environmental law enforcement in the last few years. In part, at least, as a result of the Left's struggles and political advances in Mexico City. A good deal of the technical difficulty in reducing pollution in Mexico City has to do with its relentless growth under the pressure of migratory waves of rural poor. In the rural areas of the south (but not only on the south, also on the Pacific and Gulf coasts and on the central 'altiplano'), there's lawlessness, tragedy of the commons, hopeless poverty. That's hopeless environmental degradation -- one where a modest part of nature is degraded, i.e., human beings. In today's Mexico, the ability to lift the environmental standards (or simply to keep them as they are) and enforce them seems to depend on more, not less, capitalist production. Nogales, Cananea, and some other towns in the Sonora desert that now have maquiladoras used to be mining towns, and environmental problems there have a long history. With all due respect to the journalists of the Boston Globe, I'm not sure they do justice to the complexity of the social problems in that region. Maybe we shouldn't demand more from a brief newspaper article. I'd even say that, to an extent, the spoiled landscapes by the border lamented by the Boston Globe were nice for relatively privileged US (and a few Mexican) tourists who could enjoy them. The Mexican poor benefited little from them. On the other hand, once workers have maquiladora jobs, they want more things -- not less. And people have the good sense to use the foreign media to voice their dissatisfaction with social problems that are lower in the list of priorities. (Mexican government officers seem to react more briskly to what's published
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Vulnerable Planet (was Re: suburbia)
Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Actually, Cardenas's party--which your interviewee tonight described as moribund--is very much in sync with Julio Huato. One supposes that its embrace of NAFTA, as opposed to the romantic Chiapas unabomber-type resistance to the imperialist penetration of Mexico, might have something to do with its fortunes. If you are going to back neoliberalism, you might as well not fool around with half-assed measures but go for the real thing: Vicente Fox. Unfortunately, the PRD may be more in sync with Louis Proyect than with me. In any case, I am not a member of the PRD. I have never been. I have been critical of the PRD and its political ancestry throughout my conscious political life. I just don't deny what I think they do right. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Steel query
Seth Sandronsky [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Can anybody direct me to cites and sources concerning the nominal and/or real wages of South Korean steelworkers versus U.S. steelworkers, and the most recent global rankings for steel exports to the U.S.? Check the US Bureau of Labor Statistics web site (www.bls.gov). Look for International Labor Statistics. If the databases are not available (they took them off recently), send me an e-mail offlist. I may have the relevant file somewhere in my computer (1980's and 1990's data, up to 1997 or so). For US steel exports, you need to check on the US Department of Commerce web site (www.doc.gov). Good luck. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Calling an end to S. Africa thread?
Louis makes assertions of fact as if he really knew: The SACP and the Mexican CP are [!] basically reformist outfits and if fundamental change comes to those countries, it will linked to forces to the left like the Zapatista movement or the constellation of left intellectuals and trade unionists Patrick Bond is involved with. There's no CP in Mexico since the early 1980's. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: query
Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Does anybody know of a single source for these kinds of statistics on a country-by-country basis? Basically, I am looking for wage earners share of GDP or National Income, whichever is more useful (if they are not in fact the same thing.) Yes. Look them up in the Yearbook of National Accounts Statistics, United Nations: New York. Several issues. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Calling an end to S. Africa thread?
Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Please, we are trying to avoid this sort of communication. On Thu, Jun 21, 2001 at 10:00:07AM -0400, Julio Huato wrote: Louis makes assertions of fact as if he really knew: The SACP and the Mexican CP are [!] basically reformist outfits and if fundamental change comes to those countries, it will linked to forces to the left like the Zapatista movement or the constellation of left intellectuals and trade unionists Patrick Bond is involved with. There's no CP in Mexico since the early 1980's. Okay. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: query
Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
In the July-August 1999 MR, a special issue on the state of the world,
there are articles by James Petras on Latin America and Stanislav Menshikov
on Russia that include interesting statistics on the wage share of national
income and GDP respectively (might be the same thing?). In Latin America,
the percentages are striking:
WAGES AS A PERCENTAGE SHARE OF NATIONAL INCOME
19701980198519891992
Argentina 40.931.531.924.9--
Chile 47.743.437.819.0--
Ecuador34.434.823.616.015.8
Mexico 37.539.031.628.427.3
Peru 40.032.830.525.516.8
[...]
I find this breakdown very useful since it helps to provide another
dimension to the whole question of rising GDP at the basis of World Bank
and HDI statistics. Unfortunately, both sets of statistics seem to derive
from local sources. Does anybody know of a single source for these kinds of
statistics on a country-by-country basis? Basically, I am looking for wage
earners share of GDP or National Income, whichever is more useful (if they
are not in fact the same thing.)
The figures, as far as Mexico is concerned, are highly disputed. The claim
is that they are too low to be true. (They are based on INEGI's raw data.)
If you're a bit open to what conventional economists do, you may want to
take a look at the 'adjustments' to the raw data introduced by those who
have been doing the Solowian 'growth accounting' exercise on Latin America.
For instance, Victor Elias wrote a book in the early 1990's ('Sources of
Growth: A Study of Seven Latin American Economies') where he adjusted the
figures up. I don't remember his reasoning to justify it. But to learn, in
general, about the concerns of conventional economists regarding labor-share
data, look up 'Douglas Collin' (from Williams College) on the net. He wrote
a recent paper titled, 'Getting Income Shares Right'. It must be online or
you may request it.
I wish I could type here what the official Marxist view on this issue should
be, but I'll leave that up to you.
_
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Re: Re: Dependency theory debate in Latin America
Louis' note on the dependency theory was also published on his list (marxmail.org). I've been debating this issue with Louis and others on his list. The note below is the response I posted on Louis' list. Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]: As I have mentioned previously, the two countries in the third world that never bought into the dependency school were Mexico and India. About India, I have no explanation. With respect to Mexico, it appears to be the result of the intellectual hegemony of exiles from Spain, who brought with them the kind of Kautskyism that had characterized the Comintern of the Popular Front era. I think Louis is on the wrong track. This is based on my personal impressions. Not on research, but (IMO) the influence of Spanish Marxists in Mexico was felt mostly in the 1950's and 1960's. As a rule, I'd think, the Spanish Marxists were not directly involved in Left politics in Mexico (to be fair, some of them did support the students' movement in 1968). Wenceslao Roses, who lived in Mexico, was the translator of Capital into Spanish. (There was probably another translation before that one, but very defective.) Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (whom I mentioned in a recent posting) was a very important influence on aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy in general. Now, the debate against the dependency theory was carried out not by Mexican Marxists inspired by the Spaniards. It was instead the exiles from South America who brought both the theory of dependency and its critique to Mexico in the 1970's. (Curiously, Argentinians undertook another Spanish translation of Marx's Capital and showed that Roses' translation was also deficient.) The Marxists who criticized the theory of dependency from a Marxist angle on what I consider the solid grounds of Marx's method and theory of capitalist production were Jorge Dabat and Alberto Spagnolo (I may be wrong on the first names), economists from Argentina, and Agustín Cueva, a sociologist from Ecuador. There was also a Peruvian Marxist economist who was very effective in verbal polemics against the dependency theory, but who didn't write much (as far as I know): José Izquierdo Márquez. Izquierdo had been the leader of a trade-union of bank employees in Lima and was a professor of political economy in the Universidad Michoacana (Morelia, Mexico) in the late 1970's. In UNAM, there was a Bolivian Marxist who was also well versed in Capital and critical of the dependency theory: Carlos Toranzo Roca. Gilly (Argentinian-Mexican) wrote some very interesting articles influenced by José Valenzuela Feijoó (from Chile) against the characterizations of the Mexican 1980's crisis based on the theory of dependency. The defenders of the dependency-theory approach to Mexico's economic affairs, the object of this critique, were people like Carlos Tello Macías (president of Mexico's central bank during the bank nationalization) and Rolando Cordera (Mexican, from the UNAM). Tello and Cordera published a book in the 1980's: La disputa por la nación, based squarely on the dependency theory. IMO, Valenzuela Feijoó's book on the crisis and re-structuring of Mexican capitalism in the 1980's was very influential because, thanks to South American Marxists, there was a readership in Mexico who had actually studied Marx's Capital. Even if Valenzuela's book had some philo-Kaleckian incrustations, the foundation of his critique of the dependency's view of the crisis was (IMO) solidly based on Marxism. Unlike the Spaniards, these South American Marxists did not shy from debating issues that were burning in Mexico's daily politics. IMO, Louis misses the point because he believes that the Marxist critique of the dependency theory glorifies capitalist development. In fact, by making true, organic, cannonical capitalist development so hard to emulate in Latin America, he's the one who glorifies capitalism. He cannot think of a Marxist way to critique the dependency theory, one that doesn't fall back into developmentalism. Since a town like Mexico City doesn't look like New York City or London because of its shanties, etc., then the mode of production there cannot meet his high criteria of capitalism should be. His idea of capitalist development is something more harmonious and orderly, I guess. His template of capitalist production is one that can only be applicable to the rich countries. IMO, instead of Louis', we should use the theory of the capitalist mode of production as in Marx, unless we come up with something better. Louis' approach doesn't help us understand the historical differences. _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Dependency theory debate in Latin America
Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]: the scholarly references are extremely useful. I knew that was going to please Louis. By the way, the name is Alejandro Dabat. Not Jorge Dabat. going back 500 years, the position one takes on them often define one's attitude toward contemporary questions such as NAFTA--a trade agreement that Julio endorses along with much of the Mexican left. Except, of course, for the Zapatistas. I do not endorse NAFTA. For good or ill, my view on NAFTA is a little bit more subtle than that. The reader may check what I have said on NAFTA on Louis' own site. Here's one posting: http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism%40lists.panix.com/msg22424.html _ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
