The age of money
Ours is an age of money. If human society has any unity at this time it
is as a world 'market'. There is nothing wrong with people exchanging
goods and services as equals. Markets are indispensable to the extension
of society. The problem is that they use money: some people hav
Ben,
Thanks for your immediate and detailed response. The issues you raise go
to the heart of what I was exploring and I could reply at greater
length, but I will restrict myself here to some headlines.
> What you seem to be getting at here is that in order to "assume
> responsibility for life
face of a cumulative transfer of economic power from West
to East. It may be that the American public needs educating about its
own passive role in generating this nightmare. The rest of us had better
figure out where to take cover -- perhaps in cyberspace, on a mailing
list like this one or,
Ben,
>How could a society (or, say, a social movement or group of social
movements) support secondary knowledge production so that people can get
the information they need, from credible sources, in a form they can
understand, in time to act on it?<
Thanks for this interesting reflection on B
Swift's original 'modest proposal' was to get rid of excess Irish
children by eating them. Similarly Bruce's suggestion to replace people
with machines...
Keith Hart
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Hi Brian,
Jackie Dugard did a Cambridge University PhD on informal economy
and violence in post-apartheid South Africa a few years back. It
was specifically about the 'taxi wars' in Johannesburg/Pretoria
and Cape Town, armed conflict between gangs for control of the
minibus passenger transport ind
>On her anonymous blog, Séverine, a 28-year-old Parisian graduate,
>posted this: "I'm from the intellectual underclass. One of those who fry
>their brains, read megabytes of books, magazines, web pages, political
>pamphlets and petitions, and never get anything out of it. I'm like an
>engine gu
Smith of Finsbury,
UK MP and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in Tony
Blair's cabinet; Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle; Roger
Osborne, author of Civilization: A New History of the Western World and
Jeremy Stangroom, co-founder, The Philosophers' Magazine.
W
slippery slope? The depiction of city life there in stereotypically
negative terms is precisely what you would expect from people in denial
about this momentous historical transition. Extermninate all the brutes,
I say.(See Sven Lindqvist).
Keith Hart
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fort was often sabotaged by an alliance of the Irish
Free State (de Valeira), South Africa (Malan) and Canada (Mackenzie
King), all of whom wanted to get out, but found it practical to stay in
and make trouble. Imagine the Canadians in such company, but they wanted
their independence too -- and got it
The link to Kushner on Miller should be
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050613&s=kushner
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oney is the most universal means of communication we have.
We should be seeking ways of buying and selling that conform to the
standards of a truer economic democracy. This involves learning to
combine the two sides of money in new ways--the hope and the reality of
it, the personal as well as the imp
Bas,
>The Dutch, however, live in their own moral, not political, universe and
>increasingly so since the Pim Fortuyn murder and and neoconservatist rule
>Balkenende-style. In this small little world, there is a general fear of
>looking outwards.
One way of expressing the alienation of most peop
ory has been pronounced out-of-date by the
sources they cite -- for its assumptions of stasis, randomness and
atomism which can't make sense of network growth with preferences.
Keith Hart
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I have completed my longish essay, The Hit Man's Dilemma: on business,
personal and impersonal. Even if it is not obvious, it was written in
some sort of dialogue with members of this list. It can be found at
http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/publications/thmd
and will be published shortly by Prick
ing so, we will encounter immense
social forces bent on denying the drive for a genuine democracy. My
essay has aimed to clarify who the sides and what the stakes are in this
struggle for world society. "
Keith Hart
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on in law. That might
be a worthwhile political campaign and it has already begun in a small
way. But the GPL is more or less irrelevant to it.
Keith Hart
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es and Saudi Arabia is a very=20
complicated country to invade right now.
Anyway, read on, nettimers, and contemplate the end of the world as we=20
know it. Or at least get out while you can.
Keith Hart
The dollar=92s demise
Nov 23rd 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda
http://www.econom
g this and another book in the works, T/he African Revolution
/(Polity Press).
http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/blog/simpleblog_view
But first I thought I would solicit feedback from the nettime list which
has provided me with much nourishment of the ideas I explore here.
Keith Hart
1. '
Thatcher relied on to break up social democracy in
Britain.
Yes, there is some mileage to the car park theory. Indeed it is
irrefutable, since it could never be put to the test of empirical
evidence.
Keith Hart
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and expensive
it will accelerate the transfer of production elsewhere. The case is also
made forcefully by, of all people, Pat Buchanan in Where the right went
wrong. But he too misses the global character of the problem.
Keith Hart
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t for
more protectionism at home. Maybe artists are not immune to this tendency.
Keith Hart
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portant to have a
concrete scenario for the revolution. Any suggestions welcome.
Keith Hart
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Dan,
Thanks for the moving and eloquent confession of an American activist. I
don't doubt your honesty for a moment. But there is a blinkered aspect to
the way you represent yourself and others like you. It seems as if you are
trapped inside an insular American nationalism that your ancestors and
"It is these places [some universities] that are the guardians of
intellectual lifeThey cannot teach the qualities that people need in
politics and business. Nor can they teach culture and wisdom, any more
than theologians teach holiness, or philosophers goodness or sociologists
a blueprint fo
er: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: Keith Hart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
An example. A fifteen-year-old boy goes to a party, tries to kiss a girl,
is slapped in the face and retires humiliated from the party. What happens
next? If he is of the unreflective persuasion, he may decide to go off s
ou can be in my dream if I can be in yours.
And I said that.
Talking World War III Blues
Bob Dylan
There is no need to feel guilty just because they only hand out brains one
at a time.And my friend Jim Murray said that.
Keith Hart
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essarily on his audience's sensibilities. This contradictory
rule of style is hard to follow in practice and may account for the lapse
of judgment at the end of my previous post.
Keith Hart
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ded in their social practice. Strauusian enough for you, Kermit?
Keith Hart
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on in this paragraph being taken
from Kelly's enthralling book.
So what's the point for nettimers or wikipedia? I have several in mind, but
I prefer for now to ask you, dear reader, what you think it might be.
Keith Hart
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estions in an age when most authors
would do anything to get their name on the cover.
Keith Hart
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Felix,
You have opened up a can of worms with these definitions which seem to
float between universal usage and specific application to information.
I have always found the introductory chapter of C.B. Macpherson ed
Property (U. of Toronto Press, 1978), "The meaning of property", useful
and enlig
raised in the heyday of British social democracy,
only to face the new liberalism now, I feel like I have had to undergo
several radical paradigm shifts. The models of statistical distribution I
have discussed briefly here serve as one way of talking about this
momentous transition in society and it
has been a revolution
in the organization of production during the last two decades, mainly but
not exclusively in America. This has in turn been shaped by developments in
information technology and money markets, as well of course as by the
emancipation of women since the 1960s. So, if capitalism
Thanks, Brian, for that forceful restatement. It seems that the form of
the exchange suggested that everything I wrote was directed against you.
Far from it.
>Keith's main point is that we should get working on the nitty-gritty of
actual cooperative production. Strangely, he doesn't see that I am
talism, since it does seem to me that in any
future version of civilisation most people will want to carry out their
necessary daily transactions with the minimum of fuss and that will
normally involve buying and selling with money. But that does not rule out
innovative practices based on giving and sha
.<
Amen to that. So let's get on with making the economic forms we need, not
just protesting against them.
Keith Hart
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anti-market ideology, that we would be
well-advised to try to correct. Have we learned nothing from 20th century
experience? At the very least, read Mauss's essay and ask yourself what you
think he is trying to say.
Keith Hart
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ame for
Stalinism) has revived some of the cultural features of old civilizations
(ethnicity, for example), maintained others (including racism as a
principle of world society) and introduced new class configurations. We
all have our takes on the last century and a half of national ec
Felix,
I am not suggesting that Manhattan in 2000 is the same as Constantinople
in 1000. Obviously two centuries of machine revolution have made a big
difference to the way we live. I was just trying to correct a myopic
tendency to think of change as whatever is considered new by a
self-selected m
There is more than one strand to this conversation, but I am having fun, so
here goes again. I have learned a lot from Ken Wark's ruminations on the
specificity of the communications revolution today. How can I deny that it
is the most significant aspect of our moment in history? I wrote a book
abo
s hold one
key to the mobilisation of social interests able to do something about it.
But such a mobilisation would be selectively pro- as well as
anti-capitalist and the left would find it hard to swallow that.
Keith Hart
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This short essay was written as an epilogue for The anthropology of
transnational flows: methodological issues, Thomas Hylland Eriksen
(editor), forthcoming. I share it with nettimers because I would like to
develop it further.
Keith Hart
Studying world society
Cosmopolitan Right shall be
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