Re: [PEN-L] Moral hazard: USSR
Jim Devine as I said before, during the Stalin period, the negative impact of true full employment on work effort (when it occurred) was dealt with using terror. Ea ^^^ CB: At gun point: This anti-Soviet stereotype may be exaggerated. It is quite likely that the vast majority of Soviet workers worked as hard or harder, had higher productivity in several periods than workers subject to unemployment threat. Much of Soviet work was based on moral incentive, fellow workers' peer pressure, sense of duty to themselves and others, and knowing that the imperialist armies were mounting again. The terror that pushed them to work was more from imperialism than from the red repressive apparatus. I am open to a sort of opposite notion , that you may not agree with, that the slower work pace was evidence that the workers _did_ have significant power in the work situation, in that people supervising themselves are not going to be as hard on themselves as capitalist supervisors would be. So, contradictory thoughts, faster pace, harder work than workers under capitalism when they were industrializing and recovering from WWII. Slower pace as they we move into the 60's , 70's. These are rough indirect inferences. ^^^ Of course, there were exceptions, as when people still were willing to work hard for the revolution (late 1910s, early 1920s, fading) or when they were subject to direct coercion (later on, on and off). If so, little work was done, how come so many use-values were produced ? Repeating what I said: even if effort per worker-hour is low, it can be compensated for (raising the amount of use-values produced) by raising the number of hours actually worked by each worker. Or by bringing in lots of workers from the countryside. Repeating what I said: in general, the _quality_ of Soviet use-values was low. They produced shoddy goods. ^ CB: Machines are use-values too. Subways and buses are use-values. Not all Soviet use-values were shoddy. I'm not quite sure that this well known claim is as thoroughly true as most are in the habit of thinking. I'm one of those anti-consumerists, who feels a bit uncomfortable with so many gadgets and giszmos. Of course, even more so with global warming and the oil problem. The level of production of socalled consumer goods in the SU may be closer to what the world standard will have to be. Also, compared with most countries beyond the most advanced capitalist countries, their goods were good quality, i.e relative to most production in the world. ^ The fundamental reason is due to class antagonism: there was not enough harmony between workers and their state-appointed supervisors and managers to motivate workers to produce high-quality products. This meant that the reserve army of the unemployed was sorely missed -- that is, if your only goal is to produce high-quality use-values. -- ^^^ CB: high quality is a relative term. The goods were high quality compared to most places and most of history. They worked in many and most ways. Maybe the goods were good enough for people. They didn't have exploding Pintos ? asbestos all over the place did they There is a lot of problematic quality in goods here. Also, there isn't quite a clearcut correlation between better quality of life and socalled higher quality good ,in my opinion, living in the locus of production of higher quality goods. All these consumer goods, whatever quality are not all they are cranked up to be, a mon avis. I'd take job security , free health care, free college, free rent etc. over lots of consumer goods, myself I'm not sure the stereotype of low quality there, high quality here is as clearcut true as we have been brainwashed to believe. -- Jim Devine / The radios blare muzak and newzak, diseases are cured every day / the worst disease is to be unwanted, to be used up, and cast away. -- Peter Case (Poor Old Tom).
[PEN-L] Moral Hazard: Soviet Union
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] After mistakenly erasing the entire reply I wrote yesterday, I tried again. This time, I pushed the wrong button and sent it before I finished! Okay, try again. Once more into the breach, dear friends. As I said before, during the Stalin period, the negative impact of true full employment on work effort (when it occurred) was dealt with using terror (on and off). Earlier, workers' identification with the goals of the revolution encouraged hard work for many. ^ CB: Oh, I see. The previous, accidently sent message that I replied to was a scrivener's error. I can go with your statement with the (on and off) added in, and the sentence that follows that ^^^ CB: I am open to a sort of opposite notion , that you may not agree with, that the slower work pace was evidence that the workers _did_ have significant power in the work situation, in that people supervising themselves are not going to be as hard on themselves as capitalist supervisors would be. This is right. Just because the official labor unions were generally under the government's thumb does not mean that workers did not have some say a lot of control over their work-effort. People can't be turned into robots. The Good Solider Schweik springs to mind: you can order people around, but they always have a lot of options about how to follow orders. (And sometimes official unions can be used against the state, as under Franco in Spain toward the end of his reign.) CB: We are on the same page here. The problem is that the effort to restrict work was, as I understand it, generally in the economistic direction. The USSR didn't see workers working hard to produce high-quality goods (balanced by respect for the human need for free time) in the name of what's good for society, including the workers themselves. Instead, it was a more of a matter of workers taking advantage of the labor shortages, etc., to defy the bosses by goofing off (or by sneaking off to wait in line for commodities that were in short supply). ^ CB: Had to be some of that, no doubt. I don't know that that dominated. We can find much purposeful messing up in the US production, but we wouldn't use those examples to characterize the whole process. I think something similar would be true of SU production. It should be stressed that the problems in the micro-level production process were compounded with the inadequate planning system, which created an incentive for factory managers to emphasize quantity of production over quality, while hoarding labor and other inputs into production. They never got the planning system right. Nor did the plans reflect popular will, except in the vague sense that people like Khrushchev understood that the Soviet people were calling for more production of consumer goods and that he should heed that message or the USSR would suffer from Hungary-style (1956) revolts. ^ CB: However, the failures in planning do not teach us that planning is the best way. What we should learn it planning better by correcting the mistakes made in planning in the history of the SU. Trial and error. That's how scientific progress works. Practice, then new theory, based on experience. The problem with most left discussion of the SU is that one would conclude that planning doesn't work. Working is a relative thing. It did work enormously well in many ways. The ways in which it failed should be modified, while keeping planning. The history of the SU 's economy stands for yes, we should plan, but better. I'd say critical factor in fewer so-called consumer was that 1) They had to rebuild from scratch after WWII after capitalist invaders destroyed most of the infrastructure built during the early period. If they hadn't had to do this, they probably could have had a lot, lot more consumer goods; 2) They _had_ to put a lot of production into the military _after_ WWII because their treacherous , betraying ally from WWII refused to ban nuclear weapons, as the Soviets proposed to the US; the US also invaded Korea _as a Communist country_ thus indirectly threatening the SU. The SU leaders couldn't allow their population that had just suffered the loss of 27 million suffer another mass slaughter at the hands of the US. So , billions of work hours had to go into matching the US military industrial complex ( and that of Britain, France, Italy; not to mention supply Korea, China, Vietnam) These work hours would have produced quite a few consumer goods, if they could have gone into civilian production. 3) a third point is the numbers of young people lost in WWII to the Nazi invasion was on a scale that it reduced production because of a lack of labor power, humans, the main source of use-values. If all those people hadn't been dead or wounded , they would have produced quite a few more consumer goods and higher quality consumer goods. It's not just the quantity , but the quality that you refer to that was impacted by
Re: [PEN-L] Moral Hazard: Soviet Union
I think this has gone on long enough. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu michaelperelman.wordpress.com
[PEN-L] Language was And where do babies come from?
Sandwichman wrote: Or, think of the evolution of language. Does anyone believe that language -- and the physiological capabilities that enable speech -- evolved for the purpose of communicating information or ideas? Yet that is what we typically, perhaps unreflectively, assume that language is for. I would rather view language as the pure expression of certain human characteristics with meaning occuring as a side effect of the expressive impulse. This seems overwhelmingly obvious to me. I would assume the capabilities were spandrels, accidents attached to other traits. But the _invention_ of speech, once the capabilities were there, must have been as an accompaniment non-productive purposes: games, ritual, dancing, with the rational babble gradually and, as you say, producing intentional communication as a side effect. And actually, _even today_, I would say the chief use of language is phatic -- i.e. babble merely to recocgnize the humanity of those addressed rather than to communicate anything. Communication will always remain secondary. Carrol
Re: [PEN-L] Language was And where do babies come from?
Greetings Economists, On Dec 10, 2007, at 1:57 PM, Carrol Cox wrote: I would rather view language as the pure expression of certain human characteristics with meaning occuring as a side effect of the expressive impulse. This seems overwhelmingly obvious to me. I would assume the capabilities were spandrels, accidents attached to other traits. Doyle; I think communication came first before language. Further this connection by communication is a work process that has definite products with important results for animal well being. Social animals develop ways to communicate attachments. So too language is a social connecting process. To say it's mere 'babble' recognizing humanity ignores the nature of social groups that require the animals to know who is their friend, or family, and who is not. Hence primates will have a theory of mind as the social group gets more complex. A theory of mind refers to knowing another animal thinks so one is trying to understand what the other animal is communicating (of their mind) mainly by facial expression. The reason why mirror neurons are thought to be important is the ability to copy other behavior mentally in a cultural (the precursors of language) sense so that one can internalize a social connection architecture built by that group. Primitive accumulation. And language further refines what those minds do by reflecting thoughts more directly than facial expression can do. Especially I would caution against thinking language emerges as a spandrel (a Chomsky like claim). The chain of thinking processes that are part of language do seem to go back toward our ancestors before language emerged some millions of years ago. What I think is confusing here in the current debates is the concept of cultural explosion that happened some time ago 50 to 150 thousand BCE. The sense that we can externally communicate (paint pictures) like what language does, use a culture to speak (an external record of speech) as it were about social meaning probably comes long after language began possibly three millions BCE. The ability to understand language externally recorded to speech acts is the part that culture production adds value to groups over time that language cannot do without some recording techniques. To understand stone tools, and develop tools over the generations probably provided a long stable foundation for language to be developed from repeating how an object carries speech information before the cultural externals of language separating language from human vocal performance to symbolic representation in tools. This late 'cultural' economy of information is language like up to writing script which is obviously language like. We don't have good means to analyze that information economy because the brain operations have been more or less inaccessible up to recently. One might now establish some aspects of that information economy, first only language as connection (tool building and it's limits in language needs), then culture as language like information, and so on. To repeat my thesis, language emerges from mental guesses about another animals thoughts of connection to the observing animal, to language that directly reflects thoughts externally, to culture which records language onto the world. thanks, Doyle Saylor
[PEN-L] “If he were anyone else, he’d (Dick Cheney) probably be dead by now”. - Nurse Union Wields A Wicked Scalpel
Nurses Union Defends Cheney Dead By Now Ad IMG dick bot Some might view it as distasteful - Vice President Dick Cheney's office calls it outrageous - but a nurses union is sticking by its eye-popping ad running in 10 different Iowa newspapers today. The ad features a cut-out newspaper article about Cheney's latest hospitalization for heart treatment with the boldface words: If he were anyone else, he'd probably be dead by now. In Full: http://leighm.net/wp/2007/12/10/deadeyedickorjustdead_wapo/
[PEN-L] Special Report: Egypt - financial times
in 2007 http://www.ft.com/reports/egyptdec2007 “There’s a vicious circle of the small clique getting filthy rich and the rest getting impoverished,” says Nader Fergany, a former economics professor and author of the Arab Human Development Report from 2002 to 2005. “We have returned this country to what it used to be called before the 1952 revolution: the 1 per cent society. One per cent controls almost all the wealth of the country.” here's what braverman says about this turnabout in 1959 Harry Braverman The Nasser Revolution (January 1959) Nasser’s regime is certainly a dictatorship masquerading as a revolution, but it is also a dictatorship fulfilling some of the obligations of a revolution, and initiating the trends and processes which will make for more revolution in Egypt. So long as the military can effectively substitute itself for the social struggle, keep the pot boiling, and give at least the impression of forward motion, it can hold sway. If it falters, the dispossessed nobles and landowners are on hand to take over again, with imperialist help, unless the Egyptian working class and peasantry have in the meantime so matured as to be able to make the Nile Valley the scene of Africa’s first experiment in socialism. Inside this issue • Succession to Hosni Mubarak is dominating debate to the exclusion of all else • Economic headline numbers are much improved • The government is preparing to privatise a second large state-owned bank - - Content Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
