http://cura.free.fr/xv/13ellis2.html -The Fabrication of 'Celtic' Astrology by Peter Berresford Ellis -- found via the forum at shee-eire.com (doesn't display in netscape) --------http://zeropaid.com/ p2p and filesharing revolution -------- crggallery.com/artist_press/ stark_frances/2001_afterall _issue 4_pp102_120.html --- Laurence A. Rickels, theorist/therapist You own W is for Werther. Why did you buy it? -------http://www.indymedia.org /front.php3?article_id=145553 +5 New Research Indicates Native Americans Are Part Of Larger Indo-European Family ---------------- The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege by Kevin A. Carson --------------- fisk on US morality --------- The Fabrication of 'Celtic' Astrology by Peter Berresford Ellis Ed. N.: This article, previously published in The Astrological Journal (vol 39. n. 4, 1997), completes the first one, published in Réalta and then by C.U.R.A. My thanks to Maurice McCann for his kind help. The Celtic 'tree zodiac' fabrications, the direct result of Robert Graves' invention of a tree calendar', have become an almost insurmountable barrier to any serious study of the forms of astrology that were practised by pre-Christian Celtic society. For fifty years, from the time Graves' published his book The White Goddess (1946), a veritable industry has been built up among his acolytes, which preach artificial astrological ideas based on Graves' spurious arguments. Some have even published books on what they fondly term 'Celtic Astrology', manufacturing a completely artificial 'astrological system'. It has hitherto not been my practice to directly criticise Graves nor his acolytes. As a novelist and poet, Graves' work is much to be admired and his two-volume study of The Greek Myths (1955) is highly regarded. There is even much in The White Goddess that is praiseworthy. It can be said that Graves' work is a fascinating attempt at an anthropological and mythological study which, had he had some scholastic advice, might have resulted in an interesting contribution in the mould of Joseph Campbell's work. However, when he asked for advice from a reputable scholar in the field of Celtic Studies and specifically Ogham research, he rejected it because it did not support his prefixed notions. As I have often pointed out, the old Irish proverb runs Oscar cách i gceird araile - in free translation, everyone is a beginner at another's trade or craft. Graves, as someone who studied Classics for one year at St. John's College, Oxford, 1913, before enlisting in the army (on his return to university he switched from Classics and took his degree in English Language and Literature), should have been the first to realise that to write a study on Greek mythology and its early linguistic expression without knowing a word of Greek was not only an impertinence but would lead one into all sorts of errors. Why did Robert Graves feel he was thus able to write such a study on Celtic mythology with a heavy reliance on linguistic interpretation when he lacked a linguistic knowledge to do so? In fairness to Graves, he was not the first nor the last person to take the view that they can intrude into the field of Celtic culture, interpret it and pontificate on its philosophies without any knowledge of the Celtic languages in Old, Middle or Modern forms. Hundreds of books are written on Celtic mythology, culture and history by people who have not studied one word of a Celtic language. Of all the civilisations in the world, the Celts alone appear to have become fair game for anyone setting themselves up as experts but who wouldn't recognise a Celt if one greeted them on an Irish or Cornish road with 'Conas tá tú?' or Dêth da dhys!'. There is an irony that, in the very year that Robert Graves published his work, Professor Thomas Francis O'Rahilly (1883-1953), one of the most erudite Celtic scholars of the age, published his monumental Early Irish history and Mythology. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studied, 1946. This work is one of real Celtic scholarship, which, I am afraid, makes Robert Graves appear as the untutored dabbler in an alien field that he unarguably was. Yet it is Graves who gets an international reputation for his fantasies while Professor O'Rahilly receives his accolades only in the world of Celtic scholarship. In two recent lectures, given to the British AA Conference at Exeter University, in 1996, and to the Irish AA Conference, Co. Meath, in 1997, as well as an article in Réalta, August 1996, I simply demonstrated the astrological practices the Celts really used. I hoped this would be enough to show people how bogus the 'tree zodiac' idea was. However, old myths die hard and many people are still reluctant to admit that Robert Graves has misled them. Robert Graves relied on 19th Century translations, and often very bad translations as well as texts that were quite counterfeit. Indeed, texts which were simply mere inventions. He was inclined to late 18th and 19th Century Welsh romantics ('gentlemen antiquarians)' rather than reliable scholars. One of Robert's main sources was Edward Williams (1747-I826) who named himself Iolo Morganwg. Now a lot of positives things can be said for Williams as a poet but little for his scholarship. In furtherance of his claims Williams was prepared to exercise a fertile imagination and considerable literary gifts, even to the point of falsifying the sources of Welsh history and misleading his contemporaries about the nature of Welsh literary traditions. This had the result that many serious students laboured throughout the 19th Century under misapprehensions for which he, and he alone, had been responsible. Only when Celtic Studies began to be properly organized at university level, when serious scholars such as Sir John Rhys (1840-1915) become the first Professor of Celtic Studies at Jesus College, Oxford, in 1877, were the fabrications of Williams and his comrades identified and dismissed. Like Robert Graves, Williams or Iolo Morganwg, to give him the name he chose was a poet and should have stuck to his craft. Another Welsh writer whom Robert Graves placed a great deal of faith in was Edward Davies (1756-1831) known as 'Celtic' Davies. He, too, was a poet, dramatist and collector of manuscripts who, with Iolo Morganwg, was an inventor of the 'druidic revival'. Robert Graves borrowed freely from Celtic Researches (1804) and The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (1809). But Edward Davies clearly had only an imperfect knowledge of Welsh and certainly was not qualified for the task of interpreting modern Welsh materials let alone Middle Welsh texts. Again, his work has not been taken seriously by Welsh or Celtic scholars since the mid 19th Century. However, the person whom Robert Graves placed all his reliance on for the invention of his 'tree calendar' and the subsequent 'tree zodiac’ was an Irishman. Ruairí Ó Flaitheartaigh or, in Anglicized form, Roderic O'Flaherty (1629-1718). He was born in Co Galway and inherited Magh Cuilinn (Moycullen) Castle and estate. He did study under Dubhaltach Mac Firbisigh, one of Ireland's great scholars who was killed at the age of 85 years by an English soldier when he was returning to Galway from Dublin. O'Flaherty himself also became a victim of the Cromwellian confiscations being driven out of his home. He decided to write a history of Ireland in Latin which he called Ogygia: seu Rerum Hibernicarum Chronologia & etc. (later translated as Ogygia, or a Chronological account of Irish Events (collected from Very Ancient Documents faithfully compared with each other & supported by the Genealogical & Chronological Aid of the Sacred and Profane Writings of the Globe). This was published in Latin in 1685. The English translation came out in 1793, translated by Rev. James Hely in 2 vols. One presumes that Robert Graves read the text in Latin. Before coming to this work in detail, we should took at the title Ogygia because I have seen a recent book purporting to be on ‘Celtic astrology’ in which the author seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that Ogygia was a synonym for Ogham, the earliest form of Irish writing. They had not only failed to read this book but did not know their Homer. In the Odyssey Ogygia is the island of Calypso vaguely thought of as being an island to the west. It was O'Flaherty's cypher for Ireland. In 17th Century Ireland, no Irish person could hope to circulate a book on the history of the country from an Irish point of view without incurring the wrath of the English conquerors. The 17th Century was the period when an all out attempt was made by the English administration to finally reduce the Irish nation, eliminating the ruling class, the intelligentsia and destroying the native law system. All books in Irish were to be destroyed and all native centres of learning were closed. The Irish exiles resorted to publishing books in Irish during the 17th Century and 18th Century on the Continent in places such as Louvain, Paris, Rome and Antwerp. These books were then smuggled back into the country. Other writers, using Latin as a literary vehicle, had to use cyphers if they were speaking of Ireland. When Colonel Cathal O' Kelly wrote an account of the Williamite conquest of Ireland in 1691 he had to call it Macariae Excidum, or the Destruction of Cyprus - using Cyprus as the cypher for Ireland. The title Ogygia, therefore, was O'Flaherty's cypher for Ireland and has nothing to do with Ogham. It should be pointed out that O'Flaherty's Ogygia was immediately criticised for its scholarship by such worthies as the Scottish Gael Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh (1636-91), Dean of Faculty (1682) at Aberdeen, who established the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, which, in 1925, became the National Library of Scotland. By coincidence, the library contained a 16th Century text in Irish called ‘Ranna na Aeir’ (On the Constellations) which shows some of the realities of Irish cosmology. The arguments about O'Flaherty's claims became a running controversy into the 18th century, ending with a book published in 1775 entitled The Ogygia Vindicated by C. O'Connor of Dublin. None of these arguments seem to have been known by Robert. O'Flaherty had included in his history what purported to be an essay on the understanding of the ancient Ogham alphabet, the earliest known form of Irish writing. The alphabet glyphs are represented by a varying number of strokes and notches marked along the edge of stone monuments. Nothing survives of Ogham beyond the inscriptions on stones, although we have references to it being written on wands of wood, much like the ancient Chinese recorded their earlier written works. The great bulk of inscriptions belong to the 5th and 6th Centuries. Of the 369 known inscriptions by far the highest number occur in the southwestern Irish province of Munster. One third of the total are found in Co Kerry alone. O'Flaherty, in listing the Ogham characters, stated that each letter was supposedly named after a tree. This concept had been generally accepted by 17th Century Ireland and, as an authority, an early work entitled Auraicept na nÉces (The Scholar's Primer), claimed as a 7th Century Irish grammar written by a scholar named Longarad, was cited. The earliest surviving copy of the Auraicept is one in the 14th Century Book of Ballymote. This was compiled by Maghnus Ó Duibhgeánáin of Co Sligo in 1390 and therefore seven centuries after the Auraicept was said to have been originally composed. Now Robert Graves, in looking at O'Flaherty's essay, saw that he had rendered the Ogham letters, with their so-called tree names, as 13 consonants and 5 vowels. However, the Book of Ballymote original, which he did not look at (even though it had been published by the Royal Irish Academy in 1887), actually carried a total of 25 letters. True, of course, five of these letters were called forfeda 'extra letters' invented at a later stage and not occurring in early Ogham. But this still left a total of 20 letters, 5 vowels and 15 consonants. However, Robert was quite happy with O’ Flaherty's 5 vowels and 13 consonants because he could allow his poetic imagination to come into play. Wasn't there a reference that the ancient Celts reckoned their year by lunar months? That would make 13 months. He ignored that this would mean the addition of a small fraction as well. He went further. Weren’t there, in reality, 13 constellations in the zodiac? Surely the 13 consonants meant not only 13 months but also 13 constellations? The tree names must logically be the ancient Irish names for the months and for the constellations, mustn't they? If Robert could find a means of placing his 13 chosen trees in some sort of seasonal order, he could have a tree calendar'. It was that simple. Soon the tree names, according to Graves’s acolytes, became the names of the constellations of the zodiac signs, corresponding to the names of the months. Once he had made this curious leap' into the linguistic darkness, everything followed. 'I noticed almost at once,' boasts Robert proudly, 'that the consonants of the alphabet form a calendar of seasonal tree magic ...' (p165). I would add - not without an incredible bending of reality. Robert was so overcome by his own erudition that he immediately wrote off to the then greatest living authority on Ogham, Professor Robert MacAlister of Dublin (1870-1950). Among his works is the monumental Corpus Inscriptionem Insularum Celticarum, Stationery Office, Dublin, 2 vols, 1945 and 1949, his classic study on Ogham. This still has a pride of place on my bookshelf. On p.117 of The White Goddess Graves actually admits to the following: 'When recently I wrote on this subject to Dr MacAlister, as the best living authority on Oghams, he replied that I must not take O'Flaherty's alphabets seriously: 'they all seem to me to be late artificialities, or rather pedantries of little more importance than the affectations of Sir Pierce Shafton and his kind.' I pass on this caution in all fairness, for my argument depends on O' Flaherty's alphabet... I feel justified in supposing that O'Flaherty was recording a genuine tradition at least as old as the thirteenth century AD.' (My italics are placed in the passage to underline the enormity of what Robert Graves has done.) A Celtic scholar is stunned, not only by his arrogant dismissal of the world's leading authority, but his last sentence. If Robert Graves thought the tree alphabet tradition only went back to the thirteenth century AD (the Book of Ballymote is actually late 14th Century), and that is precisely what MacAlister was warning him about, for we cannot trace it back beyond that time, how is he conjuring its use and claiming it as a mystical druidic calendar used in pre-Christian times? Presumably Dr MacAlister must also have been surprised at Robert Graves' argument' because Robert Graves' own grandfather, when President of the Royal Irish Academy, was leading authority on Ogham. Charles Graves had already dismissed the 'tree alphabet' an entirely spurious. MacAlister, like all Celtic scholars who had ventured into the field Ogham, was well aware of Charles Graves' work and, indeed, MacAlister cites it in his own study. At this point, to understand the paradox, we have to look at Robert Graves' background. While Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon, London, in 1895, he was the son of an eminent Irish writer and poet, Alfred Perceval Graves (1846-1931). Robert had a relating problem with his father and was rather churlish about his Irish paternal family in his biographical work Good-Bye to All That (Jonathan Cape, 1929). On the other hand, he was proud that his mother was a von Ranke, of a Saxon noble family. One can perhaps read something into the line: 'My mother married my father it seems, to help him with his five motherless children.' A.P. Graves was a widower when he married Robert's mother and already had a large family. Robert felt a neglected son of the second marriage. Robert's father was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, with a brilliant academic career. A Doctor of Literature and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He joined the civil service in the inspectorate of education. He had a reputation as a poet and published forty books, mostly on Irish and Celtic folklore and mythology. The entire Graves family was one of the major literary and medical families of Dublin. Grandfather Charles Graves (1812-1899) was also a graduate and a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. He became Anglican Bishop of Limerick but had pursued his academic endeavours as a professor at Trinity and become President of the Royal Irish Academy in 1861 as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1880. He was both Professor of Mathematics at TCD, and a leading authority on Ogham. He was an expert on the ancient law system of Ireland, the Brehon Law, and convinced the London Government to establish a Royal Commission to rescue, edit and translate the surviving texts, which was done through 1865-1901. Because Robert was so dismissive of his Irish family in Good-Bye to All That, his father felt moved to write a rebuttal, in the form of his own autobiography, entitled To Return to All That which the same publishers, Jonathan Cape, published in 1930. In his book A.P. Graves said of his son's work 'Good-Bye to All That' calls for more corrections than I can enumerate Perhaps, if Robert had had a better relationship with his father and paternal family, he might have avoided the gross errors of The White Goddess, for he might have been more conversant with his grandfather's academic work on Ogham. In 1876, Dr Charles Graves contributed a paper to the academic journal Hermathena (published by Trinity College, Dublin) on 'The Ogam Alphabet'. For the first time, he pointed out that surviving Ogham inscriptions had been written at the beginning of the Christian period and 'the extreme pagan theory could no longer be maintained'. He examined the claims made about Ogham in the Auraicept and the allied tracts on Ogham (not noted by O'Flaherty) such as Duil Feda ind Ogaim (Book of Ogham Letters) and a second text Duil Feda na Forfid (Book of Extra Letters). These texts did appear in George Calder's edition of Auraicept na nÉces (Edinburgh, 1917), which Robert had supposedly read and quoted from. In the 'Ogham Craobh', as Dr Graves observes the 'Book of Ogham Letters' to be, he pointed out that it is claimed that the writing system was named after Ogma, the god of learning and literacy. In this tract the name of the twenty-five Ogham letters are listed. But the text disagrees on the origins of the names. This text says the letters were named after twenty-five distinguished students of Fenius Fearsaidh, the mythical king of Scythia who, in one tale, was the ancestor of the Gaels. The second texts says the twenty-five letters were named after trees. Dr Graves pointed out that the alphabet in these tracts was named after the first two letters (like the Greek alphabet) Bethluis and argues that Bethluisnin was a later assertion and he points out that the word nin was an artificial addition to the list. We have already observed that the letters of the Bethluisnin were all called trees; and not only so, but the names of the respective letters are said to be the names of real trees and plants. We meet with this statement in all accounts of the Bethluisnin, whether ancient or modern. It will be found however, to be incorrect. It holds good only with respect to the name of some of the letters. Of several others it can be shown with certainty that they are not the names of trees or plants; whilst the remainder we can only say that it is possible that they have had such a significance.' We shall come to what these artificial ‘tree names’ mean in a moment. In the 1879 edition of Hermathena, Dr Graves returned with an even lengthier paper on the Ogam Beithluisnin, amplifying his arguments. His final paper on the subject was in the 1888 edition of Hermathena 'On the Ogam Inscriptions'. Robert Graves certainly knew his grandfather was an authority on Ogham. In a reference in Good-Bye to All That, he says (p20) 'he was also an antiquary and discovered the key to ancient Irish Ogham script.’ Of course this was not actually true for the key to the script is contained the Book of Ballymote. It did not have to be 'discovered'. O'Flaherty had, by either mistranscription, misinterpretation or other means, added his own distortions, to the fourteenth century text with its linguistic mistakes. How he arrived at a form of Ogham with five vowels and only thirteen consonants is open to question. But it was these thirteen constants, which were the central plank of Robert's theory. As he openly admitted in his book, without O’Flaherty’s rendering of Ogham, he would have no case at all. More recently Professor Howard Meroney of Temple University, writing in Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studied (Vol XXIV, 1949) contributed a paper on 'Early Irish Letter-Names' in which he takes the scholastic arguments about the tree names for Ogham a step further. Professor Meroney observes 'there has prevailed for hundreds of years a strangely erroneous opinion' that the letters were all named after trees. This strangely erroneous opinion was, he points out, perpetuated by the Rev. Patrick S. Dineen, in compiling his modern Irish dictionary Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla in 1927. Thankfully, this was not repealed by Niall 0 Dónaill when compiling the modem standard dictionary Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla in 1977. Professor Meroney pointed out that it was Charles Graves who had begun to attack the tree name interpretation and was later supported by Helmut Arntz in 'Das Ogam', in Beitrage zur Gesgichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur (1935). Professor Meroney reexamines the evidence of Calder's version of Auraicept na nÉces, which actually lists ninety such alphabets most of them simple rearrangements of the standard Ogham form called certogam - correct Ogham (Auraicept 6033). He analyses the tree names and shows most to be nonsensical renderings as Charles Graves had first claimed. In 1991 the latest work in the field, A Guide to Ogam by Dr Damian McManus, was published in the Maynooth Monographs series No 4. (212 pages). This has now become the standard work. McManus reemphasises that earliest form of Ogam script comprises a total of twenty characters (not eighteen as given Robert Graves from O'Flaherty). They were placed in four groups of five. A later fifth group of five was included in manuscript tradition but did not form part of the original nucleus and these forfeda 'extra characters' were designed to accommodate Greek and Latin characters not already accommodated by the existing twenty characters. The characters were probably given names in the 14th Century AD (no earlier) for teaching purposes so that children could recognise them. I will not follow Messrs Charles Graves, Arntz, Thurneysen, Meroney and McManus in their detailed refutations of the 'tree alphabet' but I will merely content myself to a brief look at O'Flaherty's alphabet which Robert Graves was so enthralled with because of its thirteen consonants and thenceforth cleaved to this version as if it were writ in stone, ignoring the simple fact that all other sources give 15 consonants and five vowels. Firstly, let us examine the 13 consonants, which modern 'tree zodiac' astrologers have taken from Robert Graves' interpretation. Three of O'Flaherty's consonants are not found in Old Irish or in original Ogham inscriptions. These are F, P and H. F is of comparatively late formation. It is commonly prosthetic. B interchanges with M, P and F, later F is introduced to replace some of the Bh and Chw sounds. P is not an Old Irish letter and comes in with Latin in late Middle forms. H was only introduced as an auxiliary letter to express aspiration, prevent hiatus and denote lenition; a dot was used in writing Irish script to denote it. Only in Latin loan words does H appear. Of the names as given by O'Flaherty to the letters, and accepted by Graves without question, or even being knowledgeable enough to question them, only seven correctly correspond to Old Irish tree names. We should ask ourselves why a 17th Century Irish gentleman, who was not a linguistic scholar, should be considered as an infallible source simply because he was Irish? Dr McManus echoes other scholars when he points out that the basic twenty characters of Ogham were not all named after trees. I'll confine the meanings given by Dr McManus to the letters Graves' actually uses, which are not tree names. L = Luis (claimed as a rowan) either comes from luise (flame, blaze) or lus (plant, herb). It is not placed in a context that makes either derivation reliable. N = Nion or nin (claimed as ash) is a fork or loft. H = Uath (claimed as hawthorn) means horror or fear. T = Tinne (claimed as ash and sometimes holly) means a bar, rod of metal, ingot etc. M = Muin (claimed as vine) means neck or throat. G = Gort (claimed as ivy) means a field. R = Ruis (claimed as elder) is from the word for red. As for the consonant: M = muin, the vine was not native to Ireland anyway, and when it was introduced, the Old Irish was finchí, a loan word from the Latin vin. The word muin was, as stated, neck or throat, which is still found in modern Irish muineál. The letter 'P' does not appear in Irish until the early Middle Irish period, being adopted from Latin, and is given by O'Flaherty as P Pethboc, claimed as a dwarf elder. Of course, pethboc occurs neither in Old nor early Middle Irish. Peith-bhóg occurs in Early Modern Irish, either as a corruption of a Latin loan word or, as Professor O'Rahilly contends the 'p' might be an early modern softening of 'b' perhaps from beithe (birch). At least Robert Graves realised the fact that a 'P' could not possibly exist in the early Q-Celtic Goidelic form. The famous identification of the two forms of Celtic is P in Brythonic and Q in Goidelic. At least Graves was mindful of his Ps and Qs! But how could he fit P = Pethoc into his thesis? Admitting that it was not an original Irish letter he says (p184) that he believes it simply stood for the Irish NG and arbitrarily substitutes the form nGetal claimed as a name of the dwarf elder. Curiouser and curiouser! This is a negative, dative and vocative form. According to Professor Meroney: The spelling nGetal points to an original getal, but no such word survives otherwise in Irish.' Dr McManus however thinks getal was a verbal noun of gonid wounds or slays'. I am of the opinion that this spelling getal, however, points to an original cetal. Already in Old Irish an eclipsed c-appears as g-, compare nach gein [-- nach n-cein]. And here 1 will disagree with my learned colleague Dr McManus because he overlooks a word in Old Irish gedal (if the dental d is rendered t) then we do have a word for the broom plant. In gedal, however, Robert has to loose his 'reed' and winds up with broom. The Old Irish for a reed is cuisle. It is from this word for reed that we get the word for a pipe and cuisleoir a piper because the reed is the basic component of the pipes. I think even those who are not linguistically minded are wondering why Robert Graves could assert this linguistic conjuring act, changing the spurious P = Pethoc = dwarf elder, to the equally spurious Ng = nGetal = which he claims as 'reed'? Your guess is probably as good as mine. We can go on and point to the G whose tree name' given by O'Flaherty is supposed to be gort = ivy. but the Old Irish word for ivy is eidnen and the word gort actually means a field, as given above. There are also inaccuracies with the 5 vowels. O'Flaherty and Graves comes out with: A = AiIm (claimed as pine or silver fir). It is not attested in any form. The word for a pine is actually G = Giúis. 0 = Onn (claimed as furze) is actually the ash tree while furze is A = Aiteann. U = Ur (claimed as heather or even blackthorn) means earth, clay or soil and sometimes as a green branch. The Old Irish for blackthorn is D = Draogean (incidentally a popular girl's name at that time). While the U = fráech is our word for heather. E = Eadha (claimed white poplar) and I = Idho (claimed as yew) are unattested although E = Edad would give us aspen but the word for yew is L = Lúr. So, we see, that 'tree alphabet' is hopelessly confused and at odds with itself. Among Celtic scholars, the evidence has been clear since the time of Charles Graves' pioneering work, that the 'tree alphabet' is a nonsense. Here is one of those situations where a lack of knowledge of the language Robert Graves was dealing with was fatal to his argument. Had he known some Irish, or, indeed, known about his own grandfather's work in the field, which any scholar would have been able to point out to him had he taken the trouble to ask, he would have realised the confusion. He blundered blithely on. He was unaware or, worse, ignored, the fact that there is clear and ample written evidence of how the Irish from the 7th century really viewed the cosmos, made their astronomical observations and undertook astrological interpretation. I have pointed this out in Réalta. As the surviving Celtic calendar dated from the 1st century BC. found at Coligny in France in 1897, did not accord with his theories, Robert airily dismissed it as a Roman invention, asserts (p166/167): 'The Coligny system probably brought into Britain by the Romans the Claudian conquest ... The Coligny system had nothing to do with Roman calendrical methods and since its first examination in 1897, scholars have demonstrated its European origins and fascinating connections with the Vedic calendrical methods of India. Of all Robert's assertions and statements, what I find the most worrying is misquotations in his work. Probably he merely 'lifted' these quotations from his questionable translators, but - perhaps egocentricity gets the better of him - for he implies that examining the originals or scholastic translations. For example, p.195, he quotes Sanas Chormaic, Cormac's Glossary, the 10th Century Irish/Latin dictionary of Cormac MacCuileannain (AD 836-908). The two essential renditions of the text are the 1868 Calcutta edition, translated and annotated by John O'Donovan and edited by Whitley Stokes (from Mss Codex A in TCD), and the 1913 edited version of it from the c. 14th Century Leabhar Buidhe Lecain (Yellow Book of Lecan) by Professor Kuno Meyer. I have both on my bookshelf. I checked Robert Graves’s four lines of explanation for Dichetal do Chennaib, used to support one of his claims. I did not find this quotation in either edition of Sanas Chormaic. The quotation did not exist at all in Cormac. This leaves one pondering what other misquotations have been made. When the 1961 edition of The White Goddess came out (I have used that edition for my page references), Robert Graves seemed rather peeved: 'Yet since the first edition appeared in 1946 no expert in ancient Irish or Welsh has offered me the least help in refining my arguments, or pointed out any of the errors which are bound to have crept into the text, or even acknowledged my letters.' Well, after Professor MacAlister’s experience in trying to save Robert from making a scholastic ass of himself, why should any Celtic scholar waste their time further? In ignoring Professor MacAlister’s sound advice, Robert had demonstrated sadly, that he was not interested in truth, only in getting support for his mythological concoction. It would take a small volume to enumerate all the errors, in terms of Celtic scholarship, that Robert Graves made. Yet The White Goddess still retains an extraordinary hold on many people. More incredible is the rise of those claiming to practice a ‘Celtic astrology’ based on his false assumptions. There are too many modern myths about the Celts without this perversion of their astrological ideas and systems. Critical negativity is never the best way for scholarship to proceed but I do think it is necessary, at least at this point in time, for the modern astrological world to be warned against the proponents of the 'tree zodiac' myth. The realities are far more exciting. Native Celtic cosmology and astrological forms were related to Vedic forms by virtue of the common Indo-European origin of the two civilisations. But at the beginning of the Christian epoch, the Celtic world quickly converted to the practise of Greco-Romano forms of astrology. The literary evidence is incontrovertible. In the 12th Century, Arabic learning and astrology swept into the Celtic countries, as it did with most other European cultures, and the Celts continued as part of mainstream western European astrological practice. Had Robert Graves truly been interested in the realities of Celtic cosmology and paid heed to Celtic scholars, such as MacAlister, before he began to pontificate on his theories, then he would have seen an incredible wealth of available material dating back over 1500 years before his 'tree alphabet' reference came into being. There is an irony that Robert Graves placed such reliance on Welsh romantics who overlooked that the earliest surviving text in Old Welsh, dating to the 10th century, is an astronomical text in which the zodiac is discussed - and even the Welsh of the 10th Century were not talking about trees! Our earliest surviving Irish zodiacal chart dates to the 8th Century AD. Our earliest surviving texts on astrology and astronomy in Irish and Hiberno-Latin date back to the 7th Century. Gaulish Celts, writing in Latin as a lingua franca, were writing about astrology far earlier. Repositories, such as Trinity College, Dublin, are replete with astrological charts, texts and materials, and this is just the tip of a large linguistic iceberg for many such texts also survive throughout repositories in Europe where the Irish from the 7th Century established monastic sites and churches and carried their vast literary endeavours with them. Why is there a need to invent an astrological system for the ancient Celts when there is such ample evidence of a real one? The answer, I fear, lays in the stigma placed upon the Celtic languages by their conquerors; for the key to opening the door to this knowledge lies through the Celtic languages, particularly Irish which houses the biggest repository of material in the field. Most people, even those now setting themselves up as 'experts', are not willing to spend the time learning the Celtic languages with their Old and Middle forms. People always want a painless way to gather esoteric fruit and The White Goddess (perhaps unintentionally) supplied them with such a means; a quick fix, albeit presenting them with a fruit not merely flawed but which was a complete fabrication. A group of Celtic scholars have now been working in the cosmological and astrological areas accumulating and assessing the substantial literary evidence, of which I have given some indication during the last year. This will soon be published. It is now time to put the dead wood of Graves' tree zodiac' into the fire where it belongs. A Note on Ogham Script Ogham inscriptions are not found outside the British Isles, and are predominantly found on carved ceremonial stones in west Wales and the southwest of Ireland. There are certain resemblances between Ogham and Runic alphabets, both having letters made with straight strokes branching out of a stem line. and both being divided up into groups or classes of letters. The Ogham alphabet is termed 'Beth-Luis Nion', from the name of the first, second and last letters of the first group. It basically consists of twenty letters divided into four groups of five each (the 5 forfeda letters were a later addition). Biographical note: Peter Berresford Ellis BA (Hons) MA. NN. FRES is, according to the Times Higher Education Supplement 'the preeminent Celtic scholar now writing'. He is the author of thirty books on various aspects of Celtic culture and history. The recipient of many honours for his work, he has lectured on both sides of the Atlantic and is and has held prominent positions in many Celtic educational bodies. To cite this page: Peter B. Ellis: The Fabrication of 'Celtic' Astrology http://cura.free.fr/xv/13ellis2.html ----------------------- All rights reserved © 1997-2001 Peter Berresford Ellis ------------------- KaZaA Owners Respond to Morpheus Attack posted by wiggum on March 03, 2002 @ 03:57pm Sharman Network/Brilliant Digital/KaZaA have finally responded to accusations that they were behind the attack on Morpheus. In an interview with the LA Times a spokeswomen for KaZaA, Kelly Larabee, said the company had nothing to do with Morpheus' network problems adding that we have no reason to have them go away. We'd rather them stay on FastTrack . Read the full story here. KaZaA are lying right? or do you think someone else was behind the attacks? 6 comments | Read More ---------------- Grokster without Spyware posted by wiggum on March 03, 2002 @ 07:32am With Morpheus no longer connecting to Fasttrack many people having been thinking about converting to another fasttrack client. Grokster connects to Fasttrack but has spyware installed with it. Running Ad-ware in the usual way after installing Grokster will not let most people run Grokster. Project Insomnia have published a way of getting around this: follow their steps here to run Grokster without Cydoor Spyware. 47 comments | Read More ------------------ Morpheus Preview Released posted by Anonymous on March 01, 2002 @ 08:46pm Disappointing news for us all. Morpheus Preview Edition is simply Gnucleus with an M instead of a G. Hover over the system tray icon and you'll see what I mean. Download it here. Zeropaid Note: More to come on Morpheus Preview so stay tuned to Zeropaid.com There is also a nice article with some quotes on News.com 271 comments | Read More ------------------ BearShare 2.5.0 Alpha 6 Released posted by Sephiroth on March 02, 2002 @ 09:21am The latest BearShare Beta which includes swarming and the ability to search for new sources is out. You can download it here. Be warned that downloads are NOT backwards-compatible with previous 2.5.0 betas. So if you are using a previous beta finish your downloads before getting the latest beta or else they will be lost. 2.4.x users are not affected. The changes are really long so you can see the changelog at this link. If you have any problems or bug reports please post them in the BearShare Labs Forum. 21 comments | Read More ------------------ Zeropaid Rumor: Morpheus isn't the probem, KaZaA is posted by Jorge on March 01, 2002 @ 08:40pm More Zeropaid user insight to the KaZaA/Morpheus/Grokster. The frustration of many of us who use Morpheus when, beginning Monday night, increasing numbers were unable to log in, has mostly been viewed as a mess-up by MusicCity/StreamCast Networks, the parent website/company of Morpheus. This is not the case. To understand what is going on, it is important to realize that there really aren't three different programs (Morpheus, KaZaA, Grokster) but one core program from a Dutch company. To this core, different "skins" and different pointers to ad servers and the home page of the sponsoring group have been added. Largely decorative elements not essential at all to core functionality is what differentiates one from the other. Read the story Here, its very long. :) 41 comments | Read More ------------------ Grammy Awards & File Sharing posted by Jorge on March 01, 2002 @ 09:03am At the 44th annual Grammy Awards this past Wednesday, an association leader dived into how illegal music downloading was the greatest threat to the record label industry and its artists. I wonder if this person works for the RIAA on the side, because the RIAA is back to its propaganda of misinformation again and with the same message. The latest was a press release about a supposed survey the RIAA conducted. The results supposedly show that the recording industry had an almost 11% decline in product shipments within the U.S. at a cost of over $1 billion. So, who's to blame? Well, of course, according to the major record labels, their right arm (the RIAA), and major newswires like Reuters who believe anything big business tells them ... it's all the fault of online music piracy, or what they are now referring to as "home piracy." (Yawn!) The interesting thing is that the RIAA's survey or report failed to mention Sept. 11th, the economic recession, increased independent artist or small label sales, and the fact that there is a coalition of artists that oppose the RIAA's point of view and the way the major record labels treat their bread and butter. Oh, and what about the who, when and where's of the survey participants? Truth be told, it's about time the major record labels starting losing money so that they are finally forced to restructure their ancient business practices. Too bad federal and state governments, along with judges, are just as slow at recognizing the need for change is this incredibly rich industry. The major record labels are notorious for embracing new technologies too late. The entire entertainment industry is notorious for doing everything it possibly can to fill its wallets with no regard for the customer's opinion. Name me another industry that so disregards its customers. Do you run out of fingers to count with? I'd doubt it, personally. What meaning of the words "cartel" or "monopoly" does today's government subscribe to? Obviously not the meanings set forth in antitrust laws that same government is supposed to follow. And in that lies the ultimate irony: antitrust laws (and copyright laws) are so outdated for current society, yet, our current government switches between following these laws to the teeth or paving a new, dirty road altogether. Depends entirely on the lobbying group and the big business "gifts" politicians receive that determine when our own legal system follows the letter of the law. In the end, it really doesn't matter if downloading music becomes as illegal as stealing a car, because the RIAA is fighting a losing battle. You hear me RIAA officials? You cannot win this fight. In fact, you already lost it. The dynamics of the situation are of such grandiose proportions, any efforts to stop even an increase in music downloading is fruitless and a waste of your money. The major record labels need to stop paying for more lawyers and lobbyists, and start paying for new marketing and IT personnel, not to mention better management. But while the record labels continue their reckless business practices and continue to ignore the needs of their customers, the true supporters of music and the arts (the fans) will continue to turn up our speakers, both on our stereos and our computers. latimes.com/business/la-000015607 mar02.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dbusiness March 2, 2002 Talk about it E-mail story Print File-Sharing Firms Feud Over Users Internet: Kazaa.com recruits from Morpheus' network after glitch prevents some from using the service. By JON HEALEY, TIMES STAFF WRITER A range war has broken out in the wild, wild West of online file-swapping, with two of the most popular--and arguably illegal--services battling publicly over users. The battle pits StreamCast Networks' Morpheus, the leading file-sharing system, against Sharman Networks' Kazaa.com, No. 2 but gaining. Once joined by a common software, they're now in splitsville, with Kazaa.com trying to grab Morpheus' users before the latter runs off to another network. Laced with intrigue and finger-pointing, the dispute comes as both services are trying to defend themselves against a copyright infringement lawsuit by the music and movie industries. A preliminary hearing in the case is scheduled Monday in federal court in Los Angeles. At stake is the devotion of millions of consumers who use Morpheus and Kazaa.com to download MP3s, movies, software and other files for free. Users have downloaded versions of Morpheus' software more than 53 million times from CNet's Downloads.com Web site, while Kazaa.com's software has been downloaded almost 39 million times, according to Downloads.com. The dispute bubbled to the surface after Morpheus' network crashed Tuesday. Morpheus' users couldn't connect to the FastTrack network that united Morpheus, Kazaa.com and a third file-sharing service, Grokster Ltd. Steve Griffin, chief executive of Nashville-based StreamCast, said the company supplying the FastTrack software--Kazaa, a Dutch firm and former owner of Kazaa.com--made a new version available to Sharman, which is based in Australia, and Grokster, which is based in the West Indies, but not to Morpheus. Although Morpheus' users didn't lose their connection to Kazaa.com and Grokster immediately, they found themselves cut off from the other services and each other Tuesday. Derek Broes, chief executive of the Vidius Inc. Internet security firm and an expert on peer-to-peer networks, speculated that computers running the new version of the FastTrack software simply refuse to connect to computers running the old version. That refusal would have a trickle-down effect, effectively preventing Morpheus' users with the old software from forming their own network, he said. Not long after Morpheus crashed, Kazaa.com started trying to convert Morpheus' users. On Friday, Sharman announced the "Kazaa media desktop migration tool" to let Morpheus' users transfer their user name and settings to Kazaa.com. "Many users have already transferred from Morpheus to Kazaa," Chief Executive Nicola Hemming said in a news release, in part because "they have quickly realized that Kazaa media desktop gives them all Morpheus did and much more." Kazaa.com and Morpheus are supported by advertising revenue, which rises or falls with the number of users and the amount of time they spend on the services. And both rely on the "network effect": the more people who run their software, the more files there are to download and the more attractive they become to new users. Later on Friday, Morpheus was expected to release a new version of the software that would connect its users to Gnutella, a rival file-sharing network. Created three years ago by software engineers at an AOL Time Warner Inc. affiliate, the Gnutella approach has fewer adherents because it's harder to use and much slower than the FastTrack-based systems. Griffin said Morpheus had planned to let users connect to the millions of file-sharing computers on both FastTrack and Gnutella. "Our goal was to let Morpheus be a unification tool," he said. "It would appear to me that someone doesn't like that objective." Another possibility is that the separation of U.S.-based Morpheus may give overseas-based Kazaa.com and Grokster some legal advantage in the music and movie industries' lawsuit, which names all three as defendants. Grokster executives couldn't be reached, but Kelly Larabee, a spokeswoman for Kazaa.com, said her company had nothing to do with Morpheus' network problems. She added, "We have no reason to have them go away. We'd rather them stay on FastTrack." If they left, all their shared files would be lost to Kazaa.com and Grokster users, making those services less attractive. But analyst P.J. McNealy said it wouldn't matter in the long run because none of the services were likely to survive the copyright lawsuit. "I think all these folks are playing in a temporary world because they're all building their businesses on someone else's intellectual property. The nuances aren't that important," McNealy said. "They've all been sued. And none of the file-sharing services have won because the courts have come down on the side of intellectual property." Lawyers for Morpheus and Kazaa.com have argued that they aren't violating copyright law because there are many legitimate uses for a file-sharing network. Griffin also argues that Morpheus has no control over the network, which he said sustains itself--unless it's under attack. ------------ p://www.crggallery.com/artist_press/ stark_frances/2001_afterall_issue4 _pp102_120.html.htm Laurence A. Rickels, theorist/therapist You own W is for Werther. Why did you buy it? Sometimes an author’s great notion and commotion will exchange a thousand words for the fitting pictogram. What saw me coming was the WordPerfect symbol for ‘file’, emptied of former contents, forming a return-carriage repetition column (the stencil effect doubles the computing still or overkill back onto the typewriter, a doubling that’s right on the mark also in the genealogy of these media). The Sorrows of Young Werther has served a mascot text in all my books beginning with Aberrations of Mourning (1988) and continuing through Nazi Psychoanalysis (to appear in Spring 2002). Goethe’s best-seller, which doubled on contact with reception as its own copy-cat suicidal following, internally staged Werther’s own reduction through his thoughts and his art — the ‘thought dashes’ and his silhouettes — down to the typeface of his text. It is a reducing plan that suggests a merger going through, a replicational text-act caught up in the act of ‘suicitation’, at the same time as the hero’s self murder. The closing line of the book, the reference to Werther’s improper burial as suicide, could be the opening line of a vampire fiction. And through the outer-corpus experience of this Werther effect, the suicide epidemic infecting his close readership, Goethe acclaimed to be afflicted by the haunting of a brother’s improperly buried ghost. And thus I have relied for some time to come on The Sorrows of Young Werther for what I have seen it to be: the owner’s manual of what I like to refer to as the ‘Teen Age’. it is 60K altogether and starts thus: FRANCES STARK The housewife in public written by Martin Prinzhorn Normally, the treatment of literary or theoretical texts relies on some kind of configuration of a text’s content and the formal patterns put together within an already established context. Although the organizing principles may vary considerably, the technique always comes down to a set of connections that are held together by the text. These connections can be explicitly causal, building up the narrative, or associative not following a linear logic so that the only way to make the connection is to follow the intentions of the author. Our world or culture happens to organize things in a way that means that explicitly causal arguments are evidence of scientific, critical or documentary writings, while intentional, associative and often-fragmented connections are understood as signs of artistic literature. Pursuing these stereotypical assumptions, one finds that criticism, science and documentation are linked to an external public while the literary artistic text is associated — at least since the 19th century — with an internalized, private subjectivity. To write an ‘objective’, ‘distant’ and therefore ‘cold’ poetic text is still perceived as a somewhat transgressive act, just as criteria like ‘taste’ or similar seemingly subjective terms provoke confusion when used in scientific analysis. While today, in the field of writing, those borders are still amazingly intact; in the visual field there has been a much stronger amalgamation, at least on the artistic side. Conceptual and installation art have steadily eroded the division between ‘subjective’ art and ‘objective’ science and in many current forms of ‘Kontextkunst’ it seems to have disappeared entirely. Another indication of developments in the visual arts is the role of critics and curators, who, for many conservatives, is simply not distinguished enough from the role of the artist him or herself, while at the same time artists are pilloried for writing theoretical and critical texts. Many of Francis Stark’s essays are uncertainly located between cultural criticism and poetry, placing her within an established tradition of other visual artists such as the Danish Cobra member Asger Jorn or Franz West. Jorn defined his own form of science in his writings, doing so in order to turn it into a publicly accessible concept. Franz West took apart texts by Lacan and Wittgenstein in order to re-examine the individual parts in terms of both their content and formal qualities. Such texts by visual artists often appear hybridized or as samples that avoid classification as one particular genre of writing. One reason for the ease with which artists can mix genres might relate to the way collage and over-painting are already taken for granted in modernist art. However, an individual like Frances Stark is not simply a visual artist who writes, everything we know makes it clear that her writing is of equal value to her visual production. In conversations with the artist I noticed very early on her particular habit of continuously reading other writers. While the process of reading a literary or scientific text would normally come to some kind of end or even a final ‘over and done with’, for Stark reading is just the beginning of further re-readings and re-contextualizations to be repeated over and over again. These readings create a permanent new language, a fusion between her text and the other that becomes impossible to separate because both are parts of the same architecture. In one of her columns in Artext titled ‘Knowledge Evanescent’ it first seems possible to identify a line of thought leading from one quote to the other, from Rudolf Steiner to J.D. Salinger, and all the way to Gurdjieff. However, this quotational level of the text is regularly interrupted by various biographical reflections mixing her own thoughts on various literary figures with reactions to her students and her own personal story. It becomes less and less clear if one level determines the other or if everything has already flowed together. A footnote becomes a reminder to the author herself to read a text, while her situation as a teacher overlaps with a TV series about an art student. She first hears the art student in the background of a phone conversation with her gallerist and later learns about her progress from her real art students. On points like this fiction and theory intertwine with her biography to such an extent that it is impossible to identify a beginning or end anymore. Nevertheless the title of the essay can’t just be taken literally — knowledge rather manifests itself in fleeting’ disappearances between all the different levels. These various levels become even more obvious in the book The Architect & The Housewife where they are located in the dichotomies between public and private, outside and inside, male and female. This is a book about the essential questions of modernism. In the beginning, it quotes Oscar WiIde’s The Artist as a Critic: ‘If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism’ — private differentiation as a pre-condition for an outside understanding in public. Before that we find another line of association, to do housework with a kitchen cloth means a housewife, while the term housewife in the public realm of the internet means porn. Then we jump from Weininger’s definition of the female between (private) mother and (public) prostitute to Wittgenstein and then quickly back to Weininger and his definition of genius as resistance against the female. In between there is a short consideration of the home of the housewife, a building that would not be possible without an architect. This short staccato somehow fails to make it clear whether the private is developed as a public concept or the public as a private concept. It only points out the impossibility of separating them out. The home and its interiors feature in the first part of the book, but mainly it is about fear and its connection to the home, its privacy and loneliness. The genius of Stark’s text is again this interweaving of a personal situation with reflections about art, as, for instance, when installation art is defined in terms of the relationship between inside and outside, or between the architect and the housewife. There are certainly plenty of other essays that deal with these spaces and their context as a central motif for cultural analysis, but Francis Stark develops this subject out of her own dialectic, allowing endless reversals if not total oppositions to emerge. By locating the effect of literature as an internal process, she allows it to unfold first in the spirit. This spirit, bound by the limitation of our intellect and perceptual possibilities, stands in contrast to the infinity of our thoughts. One thing becomes clear in The Architect & The Housewife, writing about public and private is in itself thinking in a public space. This becomes apparent in the text because there is no theoretical reference or consideration that is not already imbedded in a private context. At one point Stark deals with a text by Daniel Buren where he talks about the studio and ‘the unspeakable compromise of the portable work of art’. Buren, speaking as a modernist and, even more so, a minimalist discusses the impossibility of transporting an artwork into a ‘neutral’ exhibition space when it is always united with a particular location. In quoting this, Stark also contextualizes it — a couple having to enter into compromises in order to resolve differences. This passage is then followed by a short paragraph about couples leading up to the quote by Adolf Loos ‘all art is erotic’ and thus returning again to architecture. -- --------------- First Native Americans Came From Europe, Not Asia (english) by Bill White 12:08pm Wed Mar 6 '02 (Modified on 2:26pm Wed Mar 6 '02) As predicted by Julius Evola, Native Americans are a part of the larger Indo-European family. First Native Americans Came From Europe, Not Asia New Research Indicates Native Americans Are Part Of Larger Indo-European Family Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- [LSN: As predicted by Traditionalism:] Kenosha dig points to Europe as origin of first Americans By JOHN FAUBER of the [Milwaukee, Wisconsin] Journal Sentinel staff Last Updated: March 3, 2002 A contentious theory that the first Americans came here from Europe - not Asia - is challenging a century-old consensus among archaeologists, and a dig in Kenosha County is part of the evidence. The two leading proponents of the Europe theory admit that many scientists reject their contention, instead holding fast to the long-established belief that the first Americans arrived from Siberia via a now-submerged land bridge across the Bering Sea to Alaska. The first of the Europe-to-North America treks probably took place at the height of the last Ice Age more than 18,000 years ago, said Dennis Stanford, curator of archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, and Milwaukee native Bruce Bradley, an independent archaeological consultant and research associate of the Carnegie Museum. [Note: Ignatius Donnely's Atlantic places the time of major European settlement of the Americas at being circa 12000 BC -- though colonies are presume to have already existed.] Stanford and Bradley contend that if the original migration came from Europe, it would be logical to find more older sites in the eastern United States, as has been the case in recent years. The Kenosha County digs show that woolly mammoths were butchered by humans here more than 13,000 years ago - at least 2,000 years older than what was once thought to be the oldest site in the U.S. Stanford and Bradley also point to recent DNA analysis involving a particular genetic marker known as haplogroup X. The marker is found in a minority of American Indians, including some in the Great Lakes region, and Europeans, but is not found in Asians, suggesting an ancestral link between Europe and North America. The two plan to publish a book laying out their findings in about a year, they said. They believe evidence in the book will win converts to their theory. "There are several competing theories," said Milwaukee archaeologist David Overstreet. "All I know is people were here (in southeastern Wisconsin) several thousands of years earlier than previously thought." Overstreet, director of the Marquette University-affiliated Center for Archaeological Research, has analyzed several southeastern Wisconsin sites where piles of bones of mammoths that had been butchered by people date back as far as 13,500 years ago. The Kenosha County sites are among several eastern U.S. Ice Age sites that have fueled the growing controversy over whether North America's first people came from the Iberian Peninsula of Europe or from Asia. "Whatever their source, Paleoindians appear to have reached the mid-continent by 13,500 (years ago) and successfully exploited the Pleistocene biomass (animals and plants) there for at least a millennium," Overstreet writes in a paper soon to be published in the international journal Geoarchaeology. It was a time when the inhabitants of the Northern Hemisphere lived in an icy environment of vast glaciers, boreal forests, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers and 1,000-pound cave bears. In the more-accepted Asia theory, people migrated across a land bridge over the Bering Sea and down an ice-free corridor to the American Southwest, where they established a culture known as Clovis. However, while artifacts unearthed near Clovis, N.M., date to more than 11,000 years ago, several sites in the eastern U.S., including the Kenosha County sites, date to between 13,000 and 19,000 years, long before Clovis. "In the last half-dozen years, all this stuff is popping up in the eastern U.S.," Overstreet said. "There is no question that somebody was in this area (southeastern Wisconsin) mucking around with mammoths 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. The question is, where did they come from?" Prehistoric travelers In separate interviews, Stanford and Bradley offered some of the strongest arguments: With much of the world's water having been evaporated and converted to ice, sea levels during the last Ice Age were as much as 400 feet below today's levels. An expanded coastal region probably extended from the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern France and northern Spain to the southern tip of Ireland. In addition, the Grand Banks, a series of submerged plateaus extending several hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland, probably were above water. [LSN: Note that parts of the Arctic were once above water too, and formed the ancient Hyperborean homeland of the Aryans.] The geological conditions meant the prehistoric travelers would have needed to pull off only a 1,500-mile Atlantic Ocean crossing along sheltered ice sheets teeming with easily hunted marine mammals and fish, Bradley and Stanford said. Stanford noted that 50,000 years ago or more, humans had become skilled enough at open sea travel that they were able to arrive on the continent of Australia. They most likely used small, animal-skin boats, taking advantage of favorable sea currents. "There would have been huge reserves of food," Bradley said. The food, which probably included fish, seals, walruses and the now-extinct great auk, actually may have been the motivation for their wanderlust. Overstreet added that the European glacier may have been cutting off hunting areas, forcing those inhabitants to find new food sources. "They certainly were on the move," he said. "These people were capable of making that trip if they needed to." 'Completely crazy' While Overstreet said he still has not completely accepted the new theory, others flatly reject it. "It is a highly improbable theory," said James Stoltman, a professor emeritus of North American archaeology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Stoltman said he did not think Stanford and Bradley presented credible evidence to support their hypothesis. Stanford and Bradley also point to the similarity between the bifaced stone spear points found in the U.S. and the Solutrean area off the north coast of Spain and dating to between 16,500 and 22,000 years ago. However, while Solutrean and Clovis points are both bifaced, there are major differences, said Thomas Pleger, who teaches Great Lakes archaeology at UW-Fox Valley. Pleger said there just is no credible evidence to support a theory of an Ice Age migration from Europe. "It is a completely crazy and unsupported hypothesis," said Lawrence Guy Straus, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of New Mexico and an expert on the Upper Paleolithic period in Western Europe. He also serves as editor of the Journal of Anthropological Research. Straus said there are major differences between bone and stone technology used by Solutrean people and the Clovis culture of North America. In addition, he said most of the British Isles, the supposed jumping-off point for the migration, was covered with ice between 13,000 and 27,000 years ago. There also is no evidence that the Solutrean people had acquired skills, such as navigation, deep-sea fishing and marine mammal hunting, that would have been needed to pull off such a migration, he said. Ancestry in question Straus also said the Stanford/Bradley theory has angered some American Indian groups whose ancestry has been tied to Asia, not Europe. "It is basically saying they weren't here first," Straus said. However, at the same time traditional religious beliefs of many American Indians fail to acknowledge any migration from another part of the world, said John Norder, an assistant professor of anthropology who specializes in American Indian matters. Norder, who also is a member of the Dakota Sioux, said a common religious belief among many American Indians is that their ancestors' land was either created for them or that they came to it from an underworld. Recently, some American Indians have incorporated the idea of their ancestors crossing a Bering Sea land bridge, he said. In the meantime, the theory of Stone Age Europeans discovering America dominates the debate. "People discuss it as being crazy and wish it would go away," said Straus. "I'm amazed at the amount of attention." Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 4, 2002. Libertarian Socialist News Post Office Box 12244 Silver Spring, MD 20908 http://www.overthrow.com (check out our messageboards -- discuss this story on-line!) --------------- Interesting, but . . . (english) by J. 12:35pm Wed Mar 6 '02 I don't see how the evidence proves the new theory. At best it may prove that SOME Native Americans are descended from European ancestors. The 13,000 year figure is of interest. However, I believe the figure for the cross over from Siberia to the Americas was about 80,000 BC. The cultural, racial, and religious links between the curren inhabitants of Northern Siberia are too striking to ignore the theory that MOST, OR MANY Northern American tribes came over the Bering Straits. There is even some evidence that the Incan civilization may have absorbed the blood of Japanese or Chinese who crossed from East Asia to South America many thousands of years ago. I don't think it unreasonable to theorize that SOME Europeans came to the Americas long before Lief Ericsen, and that the Amerindian Race of North America has some European ancestry. This is certainly possible. But does this evidence support the notion that ALL Amerindians are originally European in origin? I don't think so. I have traveled WIDELY throughout Latin America, and I notice that in regions where the Indian peoples have NOT mixed with Whites, the physical features of the Amerindians appear distinctly Asian. Has widespread DNA typing been done, linking large groups of Amerindians with either European and/or Asian ethnic groups? That might shed more light on the issue. ------------- The whole hemisphere is in doubt (english) by Anthro 1:07pm Wed Mar 6 '02 The 13,000 figure is interesting but actually unsupprising in some ways. There were two periods one around 14,000-12,000 years ago, and one previous to that when the bering land bridge was usable. Many have argued that Humans arrived during the more recent date. However that has not necessarily been bourne out. The oldest agreed upon (see below) human traces in the western Hemisphere are in Tierra Del Fuego at the bottom tip of south America. These date to around the same time. This has always cast doubt onto the later migration theories. The dispute about dates is also unsupprising. The exisitng techniques such as Carbon dating vary widely in their results and are not always accepted as fact without some corroborating evidence. There is an island site in Northern California that some Anthropologists have dated to 36,000 years ago and others to much much less. Both sides have Carbon tests that "prove" their point. At this point I think these people have what might be a viable theory but, as with many other fields, the evidence is scant and allows for a great deal of debate. --------------- Wishful thinking for "Whites" (english) by Gabriel 2:12pm Wed Mar 6 '02 As has been the case in the past, historians and archeologists (as most scientists) are always biased toward their own race and culture. The idea behind a migration to the American continent supports the agenda that the native inhabitants of these lands were immigrants as well, and therefore cannot claim ownership of the land and call the Europeans invaders. In other words, since the land didn't really belong to the American Indians in the first place then the Europeans (with the British in North America) were as much entitled to populate these lands as the natives. Notice how their "evidence" claims this applies to North American Indians and not Amerindians as a whole. And from where did they come from? British islands! LOL It is true that Amerindians including Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas have many similarities to East Asian peoples. They also share many, if not more, with Pacific Islanders of Southeast Asia. We all now by now that the skin color of a particular individual, or pigmentation, is a function of geographical and environmental effects. The hotter the climate, the stronger the pigmentation (i.e. darker the complexion). We also know that race boundaries are not absolute. In general, as you go South people get darker having more Black features than White, and as you go West people have less Asian features and more Mediterranean. The lines blur often. For example, judging from the news, Afghans sometimes look more European, or Asian, or Indian with a healthy mix of the three. What could all this mean? Well, it could mean (first theory) that native people sprung all over the world at around the same time frame. We don't know for sure as the theory of Evolution is still an incomplete theory. Of course there were migrations as well as inter-breeding on a constant basis specially in accessible territories as in the Middle East region. The other possibility (second theory) is that all of humanity sprang from one central location: the far North, Africa, or the Middle East, and migrated from there elsewhere. If humanity came from at least two different sources then it gives support to the first theory. Then there is no good reason why Amerindians had to migrate from somewhere else whether Asia or Europe. Some, for a variety of reasons mostly to do with personal egos, will want to believe Europeans were the original settlers of the American continent. Since the official vesion of history states that America was "discovered" we cling on to that belief --maybe even subconsciously. America was NOT discovered, it was already inhabited and had been for many thousands of years. Could it be that the Amerindians were the settlers of Europe instead? Why not? Oh, how prepostreous to think such a thing!! (could there be some racism lurking here? ;) In any case, there is no theory (as of yet) that states Europe was the original location where humanity began. There is the Aryan theory which has to do more with Persians (Iran and Iraq, "Iran" comes from the word "Aryan") than with Europeans anyway. Oh, well. This new theory, with little scientific support, is as baseless and... could we say it --racist, as any theory can be. It only has gained attention for this very reason: European and White ego, which incidentally is where the "scientists" are from. Remember: the world is flat, the Jews are the chosen people, Jesus saved humanity, Whites are superior to Blacks and "colored" people, and George Bush is a born-again Christian. LOL -G --------------- multiple arrivals (english) by asdf 2:15pm Wed Mar 6 '02 campfire from 30,000 BP on South American coast. Kenewick (sp?) man. Etc. Is it so difficult to believe that there were multiple, successive arrivals? Sheesh. Another great book about east coast and pre-American colonial knowledges of extensive urbanization all over the eastern 'U.S.' Hidden Cities http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/  ASIN/0140255273/qid=1015452910/sr=1-1/ref  =sr_1_1/102-4592493-9601747 --------------- I believe an old new englender saying is... (english) by Steven James Blake 2:26pm Wed Mar 6 '02 Steveb@nspi-inc.com I believe an old New Englander saying is appropriate here... "Take it from whence it comes" Or for those who need a more national translation: "consider the source" Bill white of the libertarian Socialist News ? hello! What was that that bush said about "shakey" scientists? sjb Besides, who cares. --------------- 144705 SEARCH select medium: select language: search for: (leave blank if you wish to browse all entries) try another search INDY-NEWS UPDATES Subscribe to regular news updates: PARTICIPATE newswire international coverage of life, politics and protest. post your news instantly upload your audio, video, photo or text directly from your browser background in-depth analysis on capitalism and global economics from znet features: archive 9-11: peace & justice links about contact support us get involved volunteer up coming events imc video projects IMC Channel MEDIA CENTERS www.indymedia.org Pacific adelaide aotearoa melbourne sydney Africa nigeria south africa Europe austria athens barcelona belgium bristol finland france germany czech republic ireland italy netherland norway portugal russia sweden switzerland thessaloniki united kingdom Canada alberta hamilton maritimes montreal ontario québec vancouver victoria windsor Latin America argentina brasil chiapas colombia mexico uruguay India india Israel israel United States arizona atlanta austin baltimore boston buffalo chicago cleveland danbury, ct dc hawaii houston la madison maine milwaukee minneapolis/st. paul new jersey new mexico nyc new york capitol philadelphia portland richmond rocky mountain san diego san francisco bay area santa cruz, ca seattle st louis urbana-champaign utah vermont western mass IMC Projects satellite tv news print radio climate IMC IMC Process process discussion tech volunteer mailinglists fbi/legal updates indymedia faq IMC technlogy by cat@lyst and IMC Geeks Get involved with the indymedia revolution at process.indymedia.org webcast news contribute an article | administration | This is an OPEN PUBLISHING newswire email this story | download as PDF | print article The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand (english) by Kevin A. Carson 8:10am Tue Mar 5 '02 From RED LION PRESS The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand Corporate Capitalism as a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege by Kevin A. Carson ------------------------- INTRODUCTION Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation,including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable. The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline. Most such intervention is tacitly assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a "market" system. Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess were willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism, the Chicago school and Randoids take existing property relations and class power as a given. Their ideal "free market" is merely the current system minus the progressive regulatory and welfare state--i.e., nineteenth century robber baron capitalism. But genuine markets have a value for the libertarian left, and we shouldn't concede the term to our enemies. In fact, capitalism--a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor--could not survive in a free market. As a mutualist anarchist, I believe that expropriation of surplus value--i.e., capitalism--cannot occur without state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist. It was for this reason that the free market mutualist Benjamin Tucker--from whom right-libertarians selectively borrow--regarded himself as a libertarian socialist. It is beyond my ability or purpose here to describe a world where a true market system could have developed without such state intervention. A world in which peasants had held onto their land and property was widely distributed, capital was freely available to laborers through mutual banks, productive technology was freely available in every country without patents, and every people was free to develop locally without colonial robbery, is beyond our imagination. But it would have been a world of decentralized, small-scale production for local use, owned and controlled by those who did the work--as different from our world as day from night, or freedom from slavery. THE SUBSIDY OF HISTORY Accordingly, the single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer's terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries. For capitalism as we know it to come about, it was essential first of all for labor to be separated from property. Marxians and other radical economists commonly refer to the process as "primitive accumulation." "What the capitalist system demanded was... a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labor into capital." That meant expropriating the land, "to which the [peasantry] has the same feudal rights as the lord himself." [Marx, "Chapter 27: The Expropriation," Capital vol. 1] To grasp the enormity of the process, we must understand that the nobility's rights in land under the manorial economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650 were descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any standard of morality, it was their property in every sense of the word. The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had compelled these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land. J. L. and Barbara Hammond treated the sixteenth century village and open field system as a survival of the free peasant society of Anglo-Saxon times, with landlordism superimposed on it. The gentry saw surviving peasant rights as a hindrance to progress and efficient farming; a revolution in their own power was a way of breaking peasant resistance. Hence the agricultural community was "taken to pieces ... and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator reconstructs a free government." [The Village Labourer 27-28, 35-36]. When the Tudors gave expropriated monastic lands to the nobility, the latter "drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub tenants and threw their holdings into one." [Marx, "The Expropriation"]. This stolen land, about a fifth of the arable land of England, was the first large-scale expropriation of the peasantry. Another major theft of peasant land was the "reform" of land law by the seventeenth century Restoration Parliament.

The aristocracy abolished feudal tenures and converted their own estate in the land, until then "only a feudal title," into "rights of modern private property." In the process, they abolished the tenure rights of copyholders. Copyholders were de jure tenants under feudal law, but once they paid a negligible quit-rent fixed by custom, the land was theirs to sell or bequeath. In substance copyhold tenure was a manorial equivalent of freehold; but since it derived from custom it was enforceable only in the manor courts. Under the "reform," tenants in copyhold became tenants at-will, who could be evicted or charged whatever rent their lord saw fit [Marx, "The Expropriation..."]. Another form of expropriation, which began in late medieval times and increased drastically in the eighteenth century, was the enclosure of commons--in which, again, the peasants communally had as absolute a right of property as any defended by today's "property rights" advocates. Not counting enclosures before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at a sixth or a fifth of the arable land in England [Village Labourer 42]. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude estimated enclosures between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming "something like one quarter of the cultivated acreage from open field, common land, meadow or waste into private fields...." [Captain Swing 27]. The ruling classes saw the peasants' right in commons as a source of economic independence from capitalist and landlord, and thus a threat to be destroyed. Enclosure eliminated "a dangerous centre of indiscipline" and compelled workers to sell their labor on the masters' terms. Arthur Young, a Lincolnshire gentleman, described the commons as "a breeding-ground for 'barbarians,' 'nursing up a mischievous race of people'." "[E]very one but an idiot knows," he wrote, "that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious." The Commercial and Agricultural Magazine warned in 1800 that leaving the laborer "possessed of more land than his family can cultivate in the evenings" meant that "the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work." [Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 219-220, 358]. Sir Richard Price commented on the conversion of self-sufficient proprietors into "a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others." There would, "perhaps, be more labour, because there will be more compulsion to it." [Marx, "The Expropriation...."]. Marx cited parliamentary "acts of enclosure" as evidence that the commons, far from being the "private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords," actually required "a parliamentary coup d'etat... for its transformation into private property." ["The Expropriation...."]. The process of primitive accumulation, in all its brutality, was summed up by the same author: these new freedmen [i.e. former serfs] became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire ["Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation," Capital Vol. 1]. Even then, the working class was not sufficiently powerless. The state had to regulate the movement of labor, serve as a labor exchange on behalf of capitalists, and maintain order. The system of parish regulation of the movement of people, under the poor laws and vagrancy laws, resembled the internal passport system of South Africa, or the reconstruction era Black Codes. It "had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer," Marx wrote, "as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunov on the Russian peasantry." ["The Expropriation..."] Adam Smith ventured that there was "scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age... who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlements [Wealth of Nations 61]. The state maintained work discipline by keeping laborers from voting with their feet. It was hard to persuade parish authorities to grant a man a certificate entitling him to move to another parish to seek work. Workers were forced to stay put and bargain for work in a buyer's market [Smith 60-61]. At first glance this would seem to be inconvenient for parishes with a labor shortage [Smith 60]. Factories were built at sources of water power, generally removed from centers of population. Thousands of workers were needed to be imported from far away. But the state saved the day by setting itself up as a middleman in providing labor-poor parishes with cheap surplus labor from elsewhere, depriving workers of the ability to bargain for better terms. A considerable trade arose in child laborers who were in no position to bargain in any case [the Hammonds, The Town Labourer 1:146]. Relief "was seldom bestowed without the parish claiming the exclusive right of disposing, at their pleasure, of all the children of the person receiving relief," in the words of the Committee on Parish Apprentices, 1815 [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:44, 147]. Even when Poor Law commissioners encouraged migration to labor-poor parishes, they discouraged adult men and "Preference was given to 'widows with large families of children or handicraftsmen... with large families.'" In addition, the availability of cheap labor from the poor-law commissioners was deliberately used to drive down wages; farmers would discharge their own day-laborers and instead apply to the overseer for help [Thompson 223-224]. Although the Combination Laws theoretically applied to masters as well as workmen, in practice they were not enforced against the latter [Smith 61; the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:74]. "A Journeyman Cotton Spinner"--a pamphleteer quoted by E. P. Thompson [pp. 199-202]--described "an abominable combination existing amongst the masters," in which workers who had left their masters because of disagreement over wages were effectively blacklisted. The Combination Laws required suspects to answer interrogations on oath, empowered magistrates to give summary judgment, and allowed summary forfeiture of funds accumulated to aid the families of strikers [Town Labourer 123-127]. And the laws setting maximum rates of pay amounted to a state enforced system of combination for the masters. As Adam Smith put it, "[w]henever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between the masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters." [p. 61]. The working class lifestyle under the factory system, with its new forms of social control, was a radical break with the past. It involved drastic loss of control over their own work. The seventeenth century work calendar was still heavily influenced by medieval custom. Although there were long days in spurts between planting and harvest, intermittent periods of light work and the proliferation of saints days combined to reduce average work-time well below our own. And the pace of work was generally determined by the sun or the biological rhythms of the laborer, who got up after a decent night's sleep, and sat down to rest when he felt like it. The cottager who had access to common land, even when he wanted extra income from wage labor, could take work on a casual basis and then return to working for himself. This was an unacceptable degree of independence from a capitalist standpoint. In the modern world most people have to adapt themselves to some kind of discipline, and to observe other' people's timetables, ...or work under other people's orders, but we have to remember that the population that was flung into the brutal rhythm of the factory had earned its living in relative freedom, and that the discipline of the early factory was particularly savage.... No economist of the day, in estimating the gains or losses of factory employment, ever allowed for the strain and violence that a man suffered in his feelings when he passed from a life in which he could smoke or eat, or dig or sleep as he pleased, to one in which somebody turned the key on him, and for fourteen hours he had not even the right to whistle. It was like entering the airless and laughterless life of a prison [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:33-34]. The factory system could not have been imposed on workers without first depriving them of alternatives, and forcibly denying access to any source of economic independence. No unbroken human being, with a sense of freedom or dignity, would have submitted to factory discipline. Stephen Marglin compared the nineteenth century textile factory, staffed by pauper children bought at the workhouse slave market, to Roman brick and pottery factories which were manned by slaves. In Rome, factory production was exceptional in manufactures dominated by freemen. The factory system, throughout history, has been possible only with a work force deprived of any viable alternative. The surviving facts... strongly suggest that whether work was organized along factory lines was in Roman times determined, not by technological considerations, but by the relative power of the two producing classes. Freedmen and citizens had sufficient power to maintain a guild organization. Slaves had no power--and ended up in factories ["What Do Bosses Do?"]. The problem with the old "putting out" system, in which cottage workers produced textiles on a contractual basis, was that it only eliminated worker control of the product. The factory system, by eliminating worker control of the production process, had the advantage of discipline and supervision, with workers organized under an overseer. the origin and success of the factory lay not in technological superiority, but in the substitution of the capitalist's for the worker's control of the work process and the quantity of output, in the change in the workman's choice from one of how much to work and produce, based on his preferences for leisure and goods, to one of whether or not to work at all, which of course is hardly much of a choice. Marglin took Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor in pin-making, and stood it on its head. The increased efficiency resulted, not from the division of labor as such, but from dividing and sequencing the process into separate tasks in order to reduce set-up time. This could have been accomplished by a single cottage workman separating the various tasks and then performing them sequentially (i.e., drawing out the wire for an entire run of production, then straightening it, then cutting it, etc.). without specialization, the capitalist had no essential role to play in the production process. If each producer could himself integrate the component tasks of pin manufacture into a marketable product, he would soon discover that he had no need to deal with the market for pins through the intermediation of the putter-outer. He could sell directly and appropriate to himself the profit that the capitalist derived from mediating between the producer and the market. This principle is at the center of the history of industrial technology for the last two hundred years. Even given the necessity of factories for some forms of large-scale, capital-intensive manufacturing, there is usually a choice between alternate productive technologies within the factory. Industry has consistently chosen technologies which de-skill workers and shift decision-making upward into the managerial hierarchy. As long ago as 1835, Dr. Andrew Ure (the ideological grandfather of Taylorism and Fordism), argued that the more skilled the workman, "the more self-willed and... the less fit a component of a mechanical system" he became. The solution was to eliminate processes which required "peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand... from the cunning workman" and replace them by a "mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it." [Philosophy of Manufactures, in Thompson 360]. And the principle has been followed throughout the twentieth century. William Lazonick, David Montgomery, David Noble, and Katherine Stone have produced an excellent body of work on this theme. Even though corporate experiments in worker self-management increase morale and productivity, and reduce injuries and absenteeism, beyond the hopes of management, they are usually abandoned out of fear of loss of control. Christopher Lasch, in his foreword to Noble's America by Design, characterized the process of de-skilling in this way: The capitalist, having expropriated the worker's property, gradually expropriated his technical knowledge as well, asserting his own mastery over production.... The expropriation of the worker's technical knowledge had as a logical consequence the growth of modern management, in which technical knowledge came to be concentrated. As the scientific management movement split up production into its component procedures, reducing the worker to an appendage of the machine, a great expansion of technical and supervisory personnel took place in order to oversee the productive process as a whole [pp. xi-xii]. The expropriation of the peasantry and imposition of the factory labor system was not accomplished without resistance; the workers knew exactly what was being done to them and what they had lost. During the 1790s, when rhetoric from the Jacobins and Tom Paine were widespread among the radicalized working class, the rulers of "the cradle of liberty" lived in terror that the country would be swept by revolution. The system of police state controls over the population resembled an alien occupation regime. The Hammonds referred to correspondence between north-country magistrates and the Home Office, in which the law was frankly treated "as an instrument not of justice but of repression," and the working classes "appear[ed]... conspicuously as a helot population [Town Labourer 72]." ... in the light of the Home Office papers, ...none of the personal rights attaching to Englishmen possessed any reality for the working classes. The magistrates and their clerks recognized no limit to their powers over the freedom and the movements of working men. The Vagrancy Laws seemed to supercede the entire charter of an Englishman's liberties. They were used to put into prison any man or woman of the working class who seemed to the magistrate an inconvenient or disturbing character. They offered the easiest and most expeditious way of proceeding against any one who tried to collect money for the families of locked-out workmen, or to disseminate literature that the magistrates thought undesirable [Ibid. 80]. Peel's "bobbies"--professional law enforcement--replaced the posse comitatus system because the latter was inadequate to control a population of increasingly disaffected workmen. In the time of the Luddite and other disturbances, crown officials warned that "to apply the Watch and Ward Act would be to put arms into the hands of the most powerfully disaffected." At the outset of the wars with France, Pitt ended the practice of quartering the army in alehouses, mixed with the general population. Instead, the manufacturing districts were covered with barracks, as "purely a matter of police." The manufacturing areas "came to resemble a country under military occupation." [Ibid. 91-92]. Pitt's police state was supplemented by quasi-private vigilantism, in the time-honored tradition of blackshirts and death squads ever since. For example the "Association for the Protection of Property against Republicans and Levellers"--an anti-Jacobin association of gentry and mill-owners conducted house-to-house searches and organized Guy Fawkes-style effigy burnings against Paine; "Church and King" mobs terrorised suspected radicals [Chapter Five, "Planting the Liberty Tree," in Thompson]. Thompson characterized this system of control as "political and social apartheid," and argued that "the revolution which did not happen in England was fully as devastating" as the one that did happen in France [pp. 197-198]. Finally, the state aided the growth of manufactures through mercantilism. Modern exponents of the "free market" generally treat mercantilism as a "misguided" attempt to promote some unified national interest, adopted out of sincere ignorance of economic principles. In fact, the architects of mercantilism knew exactly what they were doing. Mercantilism was extremetly efficient for its real purpose: making wealthy manufacturing interests rich at the expense of everyone else. Adam Smith consistently attacked mercantilism, not as a product of economic error, but as a quite intelligent attempt by powerful interests to enrich themselves through the coercive power of the state. British manufacturing was created by state intervention to shut out foreign goods, give British shipping a monopoly of foreign commerce, and stamp out foreign competition by force. As an example of the latter, British authorities in India destroyed the Bengalese textile industry, makers of the highest quality fabric in the world. Although they had not adopted steam-driven methods of production, there is a real possibility that they would have done so, had India remained politically and economically independent. The once prosperous territory of Bengal is today occupied by Bangladesh and the Calcutta area [Chomsky, World Orders Old and New]. The American, German and Japanese industrial systems were created by the same mercantilist policies, with massive tariffs on industrial goods. "Free trade" was adopted by safely established industrial powers, who used "laissez-faire" as an ideological weapon to prevent potential rivals from following the same path of industrialization. Capitalism has never been established by means of the free market, or even by the primary action of the bourgeoisie. It has always been established by a revolution from above, imposed by a pre-capitalist ruling class. In England, it was the landed aristocracy; in France, Napoleon II's bureaucracy; in Germany, the Junkers; in Japan, the Meiji. In America, the closest approach to a "natural" bourgeois evolution, industrialization was carried out by a mercantilist aristocracy of Federalist shipping magnates and landlords [Harrington, Twilight of Capitalism]. Romantic medievalists like Chesterton and Belloc described the process in the high middle ages by which serfdom had gradually withered away, and the peasants had transformed themselves into de facto freeholders who paid a nominal quit-rent. The feudal class system was disintegrating and being replaced by a much more libertarian and less exploitative one. Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the likely outcome would have been "a system of relatively equal small-scale producers, further flattening out the aristocracies and decentralizing the political structures." By 1650 the trend had been reversed, and there was "a reasonably high level of continuity between the families that had been high strata" in 1450 and 1650. Capitalism, far from being "the overthrow of a backward aristocracy by a progressive bourgeoisie," "was brought into existence by a landed aristocracy which transformed itself into a bourgeoisie because the old system was disintegrating." [Historical Capitalism 41-42, 105-106]. This is echoed in part by Arno Mayer [The Persistence of the Old Regime], who argued for continuity between the landed aristocracy and the capitalist ruling class. The process by which the high medieval civilization of peasant proprietors, craft guilds and free cities was overthrown, was vividly described by Kropotkin [Mutual Aid 225]. Before the invention of gunpowder, the free cities repelled royal armies more often than not, and won their independence from feudal dues. And these cities often made common cause with peasants in their struggles to control the land. The absolutist state and the capitalist revolution it imposed became possible only when artillery could reduce fortified cities with a high degree of efficiency, and the king could make war on his own people. And in the aftermath of this conquest, the Europe of William Morris was left devastated, depopulated, and miserable. Peter Tosh had a song called "Four Hundred Years." Although the white working class has suffered nothing like the brutality of black slavery, there has nevertheless been a "four hundred years" of oppression for all of us under the system of state capitalism established in the seventeenth century. Ever since the birth of the first states six thousand years ago, political coercion has allowed one ruling class or another to live off other people's labor. But since the seventeenth century the system of power has become increasingly conscious, unified, and global in scale. The current system of transnational state capitalism, without rival since the collapse of the soviet bureaucratic class system, is a direct outgrowth of the seizure of power "four hundred years" ago. Orwell had it backwards. The past is a "boot smashing a human face." Whether the future is more of the same depends on what we do now. IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY Ideological hegemony is the process by which the exploited come to view the world through a conceptual framework provided to them by their exploiters. It acts first of all to conceal class conflict and exploitation behind a smokescreen of "national unity" or "general welfare." Those who point to the role of the state as guarantor of class privilege are denounced, in theatrical tones of moral outrage, for "class warfare." If anyone is so unpardonably "extremist" as to describe the massive foundation of state intervention and subsidy upon which corporate capitalism rests, he is sure to be rebuked for "Marxist class war rhetoric" (Bob Novak), or "robber baron rhetoric" (Treasury Secretary O'Neill). The ideological framework of "national unity" is taken to the point that "this country," "society," or "our system of government" is set up as an object of gratitude for "the freedoms we enjoy." Only the most unpatriotic notice that our liberties, far from being granted to us by a generous and benevolent government, were won by past resistance against the state. Charters and bills of rights were not grants from the state, but were forced on the state from below. If our liberties belong to us by right of birth, as a moral fact of nature, it follows that we owe the state no debt of gratitude for not violating them, any more than we owe our thanks to another individual for refraining from robbing or killing us. Simple logic implies that, rather than being grateful to "the freest country on earth," we should raise hell every time it infringes on our liberty. After all, that's how we got our liberty in the first place. When another individual puts his hand in our pocket to enrich himself at our expense, our natural instinct is to resist. But thanks to patriotism, the ruling class is able to transform their hand in our pocket into "society" or "our country." The religion of national unity is most pathological in regard to "defense" and foreign policy. The manufacture of foreign crisis and war hysteria has been used since the beginning of history to suppress threats to class rule. The crooked politicians may work for the "special interests" domestically, but when those same politicians engineer a war it is a matter of loyalty to "our country." The Chairman of the JCS, in discussing the "defense" posture, will refer with a straight face to "national security threats" faced by the U. S., and describe the armed forces of some official enemy like China as far beyond "legitimate defensive requirements." The quickest way to put oneself beyond the pale is to point out that all these "threats" involve what some country on the other side of the world is doing within a hundred miles of its own border. Another offense against fatherland worship is to judge the actions of the United States, in its global operations to keep the Third World safe for ITT and United Fruit Company, by the same standard of "legitimate defensive requirements" applied to China. In the official ideology, America's wars by definition are always fought "for our liberties," to "defend our country," or in the smarmy world of Maudlin Albright, a selfless desire to promote "peace and freedom" in the world. To suggest that the -real defenders of our liberties took up arms against the government, or that the national security state is a greater threat to our liberties than any foreign enemy we have ever faced, is unforgiveable. Above all, good Americans don't notice all those military advisers teaching death squads how to hack off the faces of union organizers and leave them in ditches, or to properly use pliers on a dissident's testicles. War crimes are only committed by defeated powers. (But as the Nazis learned in 1945, unemployed war criminals can usually find work with the new hegemonic power.) After a century and a half of patriotic indoctrination by the statist education system, Americans have thoroughly internalized the "little red schoolhouse" version of American history. This authoritarian piety is so diametrically opposed to the beliefs of those who took up arms in the Revolution that the citizenry has largely forgotten what it means to be American. In fact, the authentic principles of Americanism have been stood on their head. Two hundred years ago, standing armies were feared as a threat to liberty and a breeding ground for authoritarian personalities; conscription was associated with the tyranny of Cromwell; wage labor was thought to be inconsistent with the independent spirit of a free citizen. Today, two hundred years later, Americans have been so Prussianized by sixty years of a garrison state and "wars" against one internal enemy or another, that they are conditioned to genuflect at the sight of a uniform. Draft dodgers are equivalent to child molesters. Most people work for some centralized corporate or state bureaucracy, where as a matter of course they are expected to obey orders from superiors, work under constant surveillance, and even piss in a cup on command. During wartime, it becomes unpatriotic to criticize or question the government and dissent is identified with disloyalty. Absolute faith and obedience to authority is a litmus test of "Americanism." Foreign war is a very useful tool for manipulating the popular mind and keeping the domestic population under control. War is the easiest way to shift vast, unaccountable new powers to the State. People are most uncritically obedient at the very time they need to be most vigilant. The greatest irony is that, in a country founded by revolution, "Americanism" is defined as respecting authority and resisting "subversion." The Revolution was a revolution indeed, in which the domestic political institutions of the colonies were forcibly overthrown. It was, in many times and places, a civil war between classes. But as Voltairine de Cleyre wrote a century ago in "Anarchism and American Traditions," the version in the history books is a patriotic conflict between our "Founding Fathers" and a foreign enemy. Those who can still quote Jefferson on the right of revolution are relegated to the "extremist" fringe, to be rounded up in the next war hysteria or red scare. This ideological construct of a unified "national interest" includes the fiction of a "neutral" set of laws, which conceals the exploitative nature of the system of power we live under. Under corporate capitalism the relationships of exploitation are mediated by the political system to an extent unknown under previous class systems. Under chattel slavery and feudalism, exploitation was concrete and personalized in the producer's relationship with his master. The slave and peasant knew exactly who was screwing them. The modern worker, on the other hand, feels a painful pounding sensation, but has only a vague idea where it is coming from. Besides its function of masking the ruling class interests behind a facade of "general welfare," ideological hegemony also manufactures divisions between the ruled. Through campaigns against "welfare cheats" and "deadbeats," and demands to "get tough on crime," the ruling class is able to channel the hostility of the middle and working classes against the underclass. Especially nauseating is the phenomenon of "billionaire populism." Calls for bankruptcy and welfare "reform," and for wars on crime, are dressed up in pseudo-populist rhetoric, identifying the underclass as the chief parasites who feed off the producers' labor. In their "aw, shucks" symbolic universe, you'd think America was a Readers Digest/Norman Rockwell world with nothing but hard-working small businessmen and family farmers, on the one hand, and welfare cheats, deadbeats, union bosses and bureaucrats on the other. From listening to them, you'd never suspect that multi-billionaires or global corporations even exist, let alone that they might stand to benefit from such "populism." In the real world, corporations are the biggest clients of the welfare state, the biggest bankruptcies are corporate chapter eleven filings, and the worst crimes are committed in corporate suites rather than on the streets. The real robbery of the average producer consists of profit and usury, extorted only with the help of the state--the real "big government" on our backs. But as long as the working class and the underclass are busy fighting each other, they won't notice who is really robbing them. "The oppressor's most powerful weapon is the mind of the oppressed." ---------------- the monopoly money part sits in the previous issue (subst 2 for 3 in URL) ------------ PATENTS The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of western corporations. It is hard even to imagine how much more decentralized the economy would be without it. Right-libertarian Murray Rothbard considered patents a fundamental violation of free market principles. The man who has not bought a machine and who arrives at the same invention independently, will, on the free market, be perfectly able to use and sell his invention. Patents prevent a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the invention, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor. Patents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the State and are invasions of property rights on the market. [Man, Economy, and State vol. 2 p. 655] Patents make an astronomical price difference. Until the early 1970s, for example, Italy did not recognize drug patents. As a result, Roche Products charged the British national health a price over 40 times greater for patented components of Librium and Valium than charged by competitors in Italy [Raghavan, Recolonization p. 124]. Patents suppress innovation as much as they encourage it. Chakravarthi Raghavan pointed out that research scientists who actually do the work of inventing are required to sign over patent rights as a condition of employment, while patents and industrial security programs prevent sharing of information, and suppress competition in further improvement of patented inventions. [op. cit. p. 118] Rothbard likewise argued that patents eliminate "the competitive spur for further research" because incremental innovation based on others' patents is prohibited, and because the holder can "rest on his laurels for the entire period of the patent," with no fear of a competitor improving his invention." And they hamper technical progress because "mechanical inventions are discoveries of natural law rather than individual creations, and hence similar independent inventions occur all the time. The simultaneity of inventions is a familiar historical fact." [op. cit. pp. 655, 658-659]. The intellectual property regime under the Uruguay Round of GATT goes far beyond traditional patent law in suppressing innovation. One benefit of traditional patent law, at least, was that it required an invention under patent to be published. Under U.S. pressure, however, "trade secrets" were included in GATT. As a result, governments will be required to help suppress information not formally protected by patents [Raghavan, op. cit. p. 122]. And patents are not necessary as an incentive to innovate. According to Rothbard, invention is rewarded by the competitive advantage accruing to the first developer of an idea. This is borne out by F. M. Scherer's testimony before the FTC in 1995 [Hearings on Global and Innovation-Based Competition]. Scherer spoke of a survey of 91 companies in which only seven "accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R & D investments." Most of them described patents as "the least important of considerations." Most companies considered their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be "the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales." In another study, Scherer found no negative effect on R & D spending as a result of compulsory licensing of patents. A survey of U.S. firms found that 86% of inventions would have been developed without patents. In the case of automobiles, office equipment, rubber products, and textiles, the figure was 100%. The one exception was drugs, in which 60% supposedly would not have been invented. I suspect disingenuousness on the part of the respondants, however. For one thing, drug companies get an unusually high portion of their R & D funding from the government, and many of their most lucrative products were developed entirely at government expense. And Scherer himself cited evidence to the contrary. The reputation advantage for being the first into a market is considerable. For example in the late 1970s, the structure of the industry and pricing behavior was found to be very similar between drugs with and those without patents. Being the first mover with a non-patented drug allowed a company to maintain a 30% market share and to charge premium prices. The injustice of patent monopolies is exacerbated by government funding of research and innovation, with private industry reaping monopoly profits from technology it didn't spend a penny to develop. In 1999, extending the research and experimentation tax credit was, along with extensions of a number of other corporate tax preferences, considered the most urgent business of the Congressional leadership. Hastert, when asked if any elements of the tax bill were essential, said: "I think the [tax preference] extenders are something we're going to have to work on. Ways and Means Chair Bill Archer added, "before the year is out... we will do the extenders in a very stripped down bill that doesn't include anything else." A five-year extension of the research and experimentation credit (retroactive to 1 July 1999) was expected to cost $13.1 billion. (That credit makes the effective tax rate on R & D spending less than zero.) [Citizens for Tax Justice, GOP Leaders Distill Essence of Tax Plan]. The Government Patent Policy Act of 1980, with 1984 and 1986 amendments, allowed private industry to keep patents on products developed with government R & D money--and then to charge ten, twenty, or forty times the cost of production. For example, AZT was developed with government money and in the public domain since 1964. The patent was given away to Burroughs Wellcome Corp. [Chris Lewis, "Public Assets, Private Profits]. As if the deck were not sufficiently stacked already, the pharmaceutical companies in 1999 actually lobbied Congress to extend certain patents by two years by a special act of private law [Benjamin Grove, "Gibbons backs drug-monopoly bill"]. Patents have been used throughout the twentieth century "to circumvent antitrutst laws," according to David Noble. They were "bought up in large numbers to suppress competition," which also resulted in "the suppression of invention itself." [America by Design, pp. 84-109]. Edwin Prindle, a corporate patent lawyer, wrote in 1906: Patents are the best and most effective means of controlling competition. They occasionally give absolute command of the market, enabling their owner to name the price without regard to the cost of production.... Patents are the only legal form of absolute monopoly [America by Design p. 90]. Patents played a key role in the formation of the electrical appliance, communications, and chemical industries. G. E. and Westinghouse expanded to dominate the electrical manufacturing market at the turn of the century largely through patent control. In 1906 they curtailed the patent litigation between them by pooling their patents. AT&T also expanded "primarily through strategies of patent monopoly." The American chemical industry was marginal until 1917, when Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer seized German patents and distributed them among the major American chemical companies. DuPont got licenses on 300 of the 735 patents [America by Design pp. 10, 16]. Patents are also being used on a global scale to lock the transnational corporations into a permanent monopoly of productive technology. The single most totalitarian provision of the Uruguay Round is probably its "intellectual property" provisions. GATT has extended both the scope and duration of patents far beyond anything ever envisioned in original patent law. In England, patents were originally for fourteen years--the time needed to train two journeymen in succession (and by analogy, the time necessary to go into production and reap the initial profit for originality). By that standard, given the shorter training times required today, and the shorter lifespan of technology, the period of monopoly should be shorter. Instead, the U.S. seeks to extend them to fifty years [Raghavan, Recolonization pp. 119-120]. According to Martin Khor Kok Peng, the U.S. is by far the most absolutist of the participants in the Uruguay Round. Unlike the European Community, it would require patent protection for plant and animal varieties, and for biological processes for animal and plant protection [The Uruguay Round and Third World Sovereignty p. 28]. The provisions for biotech are really a way of increasing trade barriers, and forcing consumers to subsidize the TNCs engaged in agribusiness. The U.S. seeks to apply patents to genetically-modified organisms, effectively pirating the work of generations of Third World breeders by isolating beneficial genes in traditonal varieties and incorporating them in new GMOs--and maybe even enforcing patent rights against the traditional variety which was the source of the genetic material. For example Monsanto has attempted to use the presence of their DNA in a crop as prima facie evidence of pirating--when it is much more likely that their variety cross-pollinated and contaminated the farmer's crop against his will. The Pinkerton agency, by the way, plays a leading role in investigating such charges--that's right, the same folks who have been breaking strikes and kicking organizers down stairs for the past century. Even jack-booted thugs have to diversify to make it in the global economy. The developed world has pushed particularly hard to protect industries relying on or producing "generic technologies," and to restrict diffusion of "dual use" technologies. The U. S.-Japanese trade agreement on semi-conductors, for example, is a "cartel-like, 'managed trade' agreement." So much for "free trade." [Dieter Ernst, "Technology, Economic Security and Latecomer Idustrialization," in Raghavan Pp. 39-40]. Patent law traditionally required a holder to work the invention in a country in order to receive patent protection. U.K. law allowed compulsory licensing after three years if an invention was not being worked, or being worked fully, and demand was being met "to a substantial extent" by importation; or where the export market was not being supplied because of the patentee's refusal to grant licenses on reasonable terms [Raghavan pp. 120, 138]. The central motivation in the GATT intellectual property regime, however, is to permanently lock in the collective monopoly of advanced technology by TNCs, and prevent independent competition from ever arising in the Third World. It would, as Martin Khor Kok Peng writes, "effectively prevent the diffusion of technology to the Third World, and would tremendously increase monopoly royalties of the TNCs whilst curbing the potential development of Third World technology." Only one percent of patents worldwide are owned in the Third World. Of patents granted in the 1970s by Third World countries, 84% were foreign-owned. But fewer than 5% of foreign-owned patents were actually used in production. As we saw before, the purpose of owning a patent is not necessarily to use it, but to prevent anyone else from using it [op. cit. pp. 29-30]. Raghavan summed up nicely the effect on the Third World: Given the vast outlays in R and D and investments, as well as the short life cycle of some of these products, the leading Industrial Nations are trying to prevent emergence of competition by controlling... the flows of technology to others. The Uruguay round is being sought to be used to create export monopolies for the products of Industrial Nations, and block or slow down the rise of competitive rivals, particularly in the newly industrializing Third World countries. At the same time the technologies of senescent industries of the north are sought to be exported to the South under conditions of assured rentier income [op. cit. p. 96]. Corporate propagandists piously denounce anti-globalists as enemies of the Third World, seeking to use trade barriers to maintain an affluent Western lifestyle at the expense of the poor nations. The above measures--trade barriers--to permanently suppress Third World technology and keep the South as a big sweatshop, give the lie to this "humanitarian" concern. This is not a case of differing opinions, or of sincerely mistaken understanding of the facts. Setting aside false subtleties, what we see here is pure evil at work--Orwell's "boot stamping on a human face forever." If any architects of this policy believe it to be for general human well-being, it only shows the capacity of ideology to justify the oppressor to himself and enable him to sleep at night. Infrastructure. Spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to "externalize its costs" on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses. Chomsky described this state capitalist underwriting of shipping costs quite accurately: One well-known fact about trade is that it's highly subsidized with huge market-distorting factors.... The most obvious is that every form of transport is highly subsidized.... Since trade naturally requires transport, the costs of transport enter into the calculation of the efficiency of trade. But there are huge subsidies to reduce the costs of transport, through manipulation of energy costs and all sorts of market-distorting functions ["How Free is the Free Market?"]. Every wave of concentration of capital has followed a publicly subsidized infrastructure system of some sort. The national railroad system, built largely on free or below-cost land donated by the government, was followed by concentration in heavy industry, petrochemicals, and finance. The next major infrastructure projects were the national highway system, starting with the system of designated national highways in the 1920s and culminating with Eisenhower's interstate system; and the civil aviation system, built almost entirely with federal money. The result was massive concentration in retail, agriculture, and food processing. The third such project was the infrastructure of the worldwide web, originally built by the Pentagon. It permits, for the first time, direction of global operations in real time from a single corporate headquarters, and is accelerating the concentration of capital on a global scale. To quote Chomsky again, "The telecommunications revolution... is... another state component of the international economy that didn't develop through private capital, but through the public paying to destroy themselves...." [Class Warfare p. 40]. The centralized corporate economy depends for its existence on a shipping price system which is artificially distorted by government intervention. To fully grasp how dependent the corporate economy is on socializing transportation and communications costs, imagine what would happen if truck and aircraft fuel were taxed enough to pay the full cost of maintenance and new building costs on highways and airports; and if fossil fuels depletion allowances were removed. The result would be a massive increase in shipping costs. Does anyone seriously believe that Wal-Mart could continue to undersell local retailers, or corporate agribusiness could destroy the family farm? Intellectually honest right libertarians freely admit as much. For example, Tiber Machan wrote in The Freeman that Some people will say that stringent protection of rights [against eminent domain] would lead to small airports, at best, and many constraints on construction. Of course--but what's so wrong with that? Perhaps the worst thing about modern industrial life has been the power of political authorities to grant special privileges to some enterprises to violate the rights of third parties whose permission would be too expensive to obtain. The need to obtain that permission would indeed seriously impede what most environmentalists see as rampant--indeed reckless--industrialization. The system of private property rights--in which... all... kinds of... human activity must be conducted within one's own realm except where cooperation from others has been gained voluntarily--is the greatest moderator of human aspirations.... In short, people may reach goals they aren't able to reach with their own resources only by convincing others, through arguments and fair exchanges, to cooperate ["On Airports and Individual Rights"]. The logjams and bottlenecks in the transportation system are an inevitable result of subsidies. Those who debate the reason for planes stacked up at O'Hare airport, or decry the fact that highways and bridges are deteriorating several times faster than repairs are being budgeted, need only read an economics 101 text. Market prices are signals that relate supply to demand. When subsidies distort these signals, the consumer does not perceive the real cost of producing the goods he consumes. The "feedback loop" is broken, and demands on the system overwhelm it beyond its ability to respond. When people don't have to pay the real cost of something they consume, they aren't very careful about only using what they need. It is interesting that every major antitrust action in this century has involved either some basic energy resource, or some form of infrastructure, on which the overall economy depends. Standard Oil, AT&T, and Microsoft were all cases in which monopoly price gouging was a danger to the economy as a whole. This brings to mind Engels' observation that advanced capitalism would reach a stage where the state--"the official representative of capitalist society"--would have to convert "the great institutions for intercourse and communication" into state property. Engels did not foresee the use of antitrust actions to achieve the same end [Anti-Duhring]. "MILITARY KEYNESIANISM" The leading sectors of the economy, including cybernetics, communications, and military industry, have their sales and profits virtually guaranteed by the state. The entire manufacturing sector, as a whole, was permanently expanded beyond recognition by an infusion of federal money during World War II. In 1939 the entire manufacturing plant of the U.S. was valued at $40 billion. By 1945, another $26 billion worth of plant and equipment had been built, "two thirds of it paid for directly from government funds." The top 250 corporations in 1939 owned 65% of plant and equipment, but during the war operated 79% of all new facilities built with government funds [Mills, The Power Elite P. 101]. Machine tools were vastly expanded by the war. In 1940, 23% of machine tools in use were less than 10 years old. By 1945, the figure had grown to 62%. The industry contracted rapidly after 1945, and would probably have gone into a depression, had it not returned to wartime levels of output during Korea and remained that way throughout the Cold War. The R & D complex, likewise, was a creation of the war. Between 1939 and 1945, the share of AT&T research expenditures made up of government contracts expanded from 1% to 83%. Over 90% of the patents resulting from government-funded wartime research were given away to industry. The modern electronics industry was largely a product of World War II and Cold War spending (e.g., miniaturization of circuits for bomb proximity fuses, high capacity computers for command and control, etc.) [Noble, Forces of Production pp. 8-16]. The jumbo jet industry would never have come about without continuous Cold War levels of military spending. The machine tools needed for producing large aircraft were so complex and expensive that no "small peacetime orders" would have provided a sufficient production run to pay for them. Without large military orders, they would simply not have existed. The aircraft industry quickly spiraled into red ink after 1945, and was near bankruptcy at the beginning of the 1948 war scare, after which Truman restored it to life with massive spending. By 1964, 90% of aerospace R & D was funded by the government, with massive spillover into the electronics, machine tool, and other industries [Noble, Forces of Production pp. 6-7; Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948]. OTHER SUBSIDIES Infrastructure and military spending are not the only examples of the process by which cost and risk are socialized, and profit is privatized--or, as Rothbard put it, by which "our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs." ["Confessions of a Right-Wing Liberal"]. Some of these government assumptions of risk and cost are ad hoc and targeted toward specific industries. Among the greatest beneficiaries of such underwriting are electrical utilities. Close to 100% of all research and development for nuclear power is either performed by the government itself, in its military reactor program, or by lump-sum R & D grants; the government waives use-charges for nuclear fuels, subsidizes uranium production, provides access to government land below market price (and builds hundreds of miles of access roads at taxpayer expense), enriches uranium, and disposes of waste at sweetheart prices. The Price-Anderson Act of 1957 limited the liability of the nuclear power industry, and assumed government liability above that level [Adams and Brock pp. 279-281]. A Westinghouse official admitted in 1953, If you were to inquire whether Westinghouse might consider putting up its own money.., we would have to say "No." The cost of the plant would be a question mark until after we built it and, by that sole means, found out the answer. We would not be sure of successful plant operation until after we had done all the work and operated successfully.... This is still a situation of pyramiding uncertainties.... There is a distinction between risk-taking and recklessness [Ibid. pp. 278-279]. So much for profit as a reward for the entrepreneur's risk. These "entrepreneurs" make their profits in the same way as a seventeenth-century courtier, by obtaining the favor of the king. To quote Chomsky, the sectors of the economy that remain competitive are those that feed from the public trough.... The glories of Free Enterprise provide a useful weapon against government policies that might benefit the general population.... But the rich and powerful... have long appreciated the need to protect themselves from the destructive forces of free-market capitalism, which may provide suitable themes for rousing oratory, but only so long as the public handout and the regulatory and protectionist apparatus are secure, and state power is on call when needed (Chomsky, Deterring Democracy p. 144]. Dwayne Andreas, the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, admitted that "[t]here is not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. Not one. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians." [Don Carney, "Dwayne's World"]. Big business also enjoys financial support through the tax code. It is likely that most of the Fortune 500 would go bankrupt without corporate welfare. Direct federal tax breaks to business in 1996 were close to $350 billion [Based on my crunching on numbers in Zepezauer and Naiman, Take the Rich Off Welfare]. This figure, for federal corporate welfare alone, is over two-thirds of annual corporate profits for 1996 ($460 billion) [Statistical Abstract of the United States 1996]. Estimates of state and local tax breaks is fairly impressionistic, since they vary not only with each critic's subjective definition of "corporate welfare," but involve the tax codes of fifty states and the public records of thousands of municipalities. Besides money pimps in the state and local governments are embarassed by the sweet deals they give their corporate johns. In my own state of Arkansas, the incorruptible Baptist preacher who serves as governor opposed a bill to require quarterly public reports from the Department of Economic Development on its special tax breaks to businesses. "[K]eeping incentive records from public scrutiny is important in attracting business," and releasing "proprietary information" could have a "chilling effect." [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 3 Feb. 2001]. But state and local corporate welfare could easily amount to a figure comparable to federal. Taken as a whole, direct tax breaks to business at all levels of government are probably on the same order of magnitude as corporate profits. And this understates the effect of corporate welfare, since it disproportionately goes to a handful of giant firms in each industry. For example, accelerated depreciation favors expansion by existing firms. New firms find it of little benefit, since they are likely to lose money their first few years. An established firm, however, can run a loss in a new venture and charge the accelerated depreciation against its profits on old facilities [Baratz, "Corporate Giants and the Power Structure"]. The most outrageous of these tax expenditures is the subsidy to the actual financial transactions by which capital is concentrated. The interest deduction on corporate debt, most of which was run up on leveraged buyouts and acquisitions, costs the treasury over $200 billion a year [Zepezauer p. 122-123]. Without this deduction, the wave of mergers in the 1980s, or the megamergers of the 1990s, could never have taken place. On top of everything else, this acts as a massive direct subsidy to banking, increasing the power of finance capital in the corporate economy to a level greater than it has been since the Age of Morgan. A closely related subsidy is the exemption from capital gains of securities transactions involved in corporate mergers (i.e. "stock swaps")--even though premiums are usually paid well over the market value of the stock [Green p. 11]. The 1986 tax reform included a provision which prevented corporations from deducting fees for investment 'banks and advisers involved in leveraged buyouts. The 1996 minimum wage increase repealed this provision, with one exception: interest deductions were removed for employee buyouts [Judis, "Bare Minimum"]. Right libertarians like Rothbard object to classifying tax expenditures as subsidies. It presumes that tax money rightfully belongs to the government, when in fact the government is only letting them keep what is rightfully theirs. The tax code is indeed unfair, but the solution is to eliminate the taxes for everyone, not to level the code up [Rothbard, Power and Market p. 104]. This is a very shaky argument. Supporters of tax code reform in the 1980s insisted that the sole legitimate purpose of taxation was to raise revenue, not to provide carrots and sticks for social engineering purposes. And, semantic quibbling aside, the current tax system would be exactly the same if we started out with zero tax rates and then imposed a punitive tax only on those not engaged in favored activities. Either way, the uneven tax policy gives a competitive advantage to privileged industries. POLITICAL REPRESSION In times of unusual popular consciousness and mobilization, when the capitalist system faces grave political threats, the state resorts to repression until the danger is past. The major such waves in this country--the Haymarket reaction, and the red scares after the world wars--are recounted by Goldstein [Political Repression in Modern America]. But the wave of repression which began in the 1970s, though less intense, has been permanently institutionalized to a unique extent. Until the late 1960s, elite perspective was governed by the New Deal social contract. The corporate state would buy stability and popular acquiescence in imperialist exploitation abroad by guaranteeing a level of prosperity and security to the middle class. In return for higher wages, unions would enforce management control of the workplace. But starting during the Vietnam era, the elite's thinking underwent a profound change. They concluded from the 1960s experience that the social contract had failed. In response to the antiwar protests and race riots, LBJ and Nixon began to create an institutional framework for martial law, to make sure that any such disorder in the future could be dealt with differently. Johnson's operation GARDEN PLOT involved domestic surveillance by the military, contingency plans for military cooperation with local police in supressing disorder in all fifty states, plans for mass preventive detention, and joint exercises of police and the regular military [Morales, U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning]. Governor Reagan and his National Guard chief Louis Giuffrida were enthusiastic supporters of GARDEN PLOT exercises in California. Reagan was also a pioneer in creating quasi-military SWAT teams, which now exist in every major town. The wave of wildcat strikes in the early 1970s showed that organized labor could no longer keep its part of the bargain, and that the social contract should be reasessed. At the same time, the business press was flooded with articles on the impending "capital shortage," and calls for shifting resources from consumption to capital accumulation. They predicted frankly that a cap on real wages would be hard to force on the public in the existing political environment [Boyte, Backyard Revolution pp. 13-16]. This sentiment was expressed by Huntington et al. in The Crisis of Democracy (a paper for the Trilateral Institution--a good proxy for elite thinking); they argued that the system was collapsing from demand overload, because of an excess of democracy. Corporations embraced the full range of union-busting posibilities in Taft-Hartley, risking only token fines from the NLRB. They drastically increased management resources devoted to workplace surveillance and control, a necessity because of discontent from stagnant wages and mounting workloads [Fat and Mean]. Wages as a percentage of value added have declined drastically since the 1970s; all increases in labor productivity have been channelled into profit and investment, rather than wages. A new Cold War military buildup further transferred public resources to industry. A series of events like the fall of Saigon, the nonaligned movement, and the New International Economic Order were taken as signs that the trans-national corporate empire was losing control. Reagan's escalating intervention in Central America was a partial response to this perception. But more importantly the Uruguay Round of GATT snatched total victory from the jaws of defeat; it ended all barriers to TNCs buying up entire economies, locked the west into monopoly control of modern technology, and created a world government on behalf of global corporations. In the meantime the U.S. was, in the words of Richard K. Moore, importing techniques of social control from the imperial periphery to the core area. With the help of the Drug War and the National Security State, the apparatus of repression continued to grow. The Drug War has turned the Fourth Amendment into toilet paper; civil forfeiture, with the aid of jailhouse snitches, gives police the power to steal property without ever filing charges--a lucrative source of funds for helicopters and kevlar vests. SWAT teams have led to the militarization of local police forces, and cross-training with the military has led many urban police departments to view the local population as an occupied enemy [Weber, Warrior Cops]. Reagan's crony Giuffrida resurfaced as head of FEMA, where he worked with Oliver North to fine-tune GARDEN PLOT. North, as the NSC liaison with FEMA from 1982-84, developed a plan "to supend the constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." [Chardy, "Reagan Aides and the 'Secret' Government"]. GARDEN PLOT, interestingly, was implemented during the Rodney King Riots and in recent anti-globalization protests. Delta Force provided intelligence and advice in those places and at Waco [Rosenberg, The Empire Strikes Back; Cockburn, The Jackboot State]. Another innnovation is to turn everyone we deal with into a police agent. Banks routinely report "suspicious" movements of cash; under "know your customer" programs, retailers report purchases of items which can conceivably be used in combination to manufacture drugs; libraries come under pressure to report on readers of "subversive" material; DARE programs turn kids into police informers. Computer technology has increased the potential for surveillance to Orwellian levels. Pentium III processors were revealed to embed identity codes in every document written on them. Police forces are experimenting with combinations of public cameras, digital face-recognition technology, and databases of digital photos. Image Data LLC, a company in the process of buying digital drivers licence photos from all fifty states, was exposed as a front for the Secret Service. CONCLUSION It is almost too easy to bring back Bob Novak and Secretary O'Neill for another kick--but I can't resist. "Marxist class warfare?" "Robber baron rhetoric?" Well, the pages above recount the "class warfare" waged by the robber barons themselves. If their kind tend to squeal like pigs when we talk about class, it's because they've been stuck. But all the squealing in the world won't change the facts. But what are the implications of the above facts for our movement? It is commonly acknowledged that the manorial economy was founded on force. Although you will never see the issue addressed by Milton Friedman, intellectually honest right libertarians like Rothbard acknowledge the role of the state in creating European feudalism and Amerian slavery. Rothbard, drawing the obvious conclusion from this fact, acknowledged the right of peasants or freed slaves to take over their "forty acres and a mule" without compensation to the landlord. But we have seen that industrial capitalism, to the same extent as manorialism or slavery, was founded on force. Like its predecessors, capitalism could not have survived at any point in its history without state intervention. Coercive state measures at every step have denied workers access to capital, forced them to sell their labor in a buyer's market, and protected the centers of economic power from the dangers of the free market. To quote Benjamin Tucker again, landlords and capitalists cannot extract surplus value from labor without the help of the state. The modern worker, like the slave or the serf, is the victim of ongoing robbery; he works in an enterprise built from past stolen labor. By the same principles that Rothbard recognized in the agrarian realm, the modern worker is justified in taking direct control of production, and keeping the entire product of his labor. In a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege described above is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else's labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery. All these forms of slavery together probably amount to half our working hours. If we kept the full value of our labor, we could probably maintain current levels of consumption with a work-week of twenty hours. As Bill Haywood said, for every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, someone else sweated to produce a dollar he never received. Our survey also casts doubt on the position of "anarchist" social democrat Noam Chomsky, who is notorious for his distinction between "visions" and "goals." His long-term vision is a decentralized society of self-governing communities and workplaces, loosely federated together--the traditional anarchist vision. His immediate goal, however, is to strengthen the regulatory state in order to break up "private concentrations of power," before anarchism can be achieved. But if , as we have seen, capitalism is dependent on the state to guarantee it survival, it follows that it is sufficient to eliminate the statist props to capitalism. In a letter of 4 September 1867, Engels aptly summed up the difference between anarchists and state socialists: "They say 'abolish the state and capital will go to the devil.' We propose the reverse." Exactly. SOURCES Morton S. Baratz. "Corporate Giants and the Power Structure," in Richard Gillam, ed., Power in Postwar America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1971). Harry C. Boyte. The Backyard Revolution: Understanding the New Citizen Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980). Don Carney. "Dwayne's World," at http://www.motherjones.com/ mother_jones/JA95/carney.html Alfonso Chardy. 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RED LION PRESS, 2001 Revised January 2002 add your own comments ------------------ Robert Fisk: America's morality has been distorted by 11 September (english) by The Independent 3:42am Thu Mar 7 '02 (Modified on 6:46am Thu Mar 7 '02) 'It's as if all the lessons of history, in Afghanistan and the Middle East, have been tossed into a bin' Robert Fisk: America's morality has been distorted by 11 September 'It's as if all the lessons of history, in Afghanistan and the Middle East, have been tossed into a bin' The Independent - 07 March 2002 In Afghan fields, the poppies blow. Yes, even as the Americans are moving deeper into the Afghan trap, the warlords and gangsters running much of the western-supported Afghan government are ensuring a bumper new crop of heroin for the world's markets. The UN have warned of this, of course, but nothing is being done. The "war against terror" comes first. The broken roads and highways of Afghanistan are now ribbons of anarchy and brigandage and murder across the country. The pathetic little force of peace-keepers in Kabul cannot control all of the capital, let alone the rest of the country. The Interim President, Hamid Karzai, can scarcely control the street outside his office. But the "war against terror" comes first. Locked into their "war against terror" – and now discovering that their enemies want to fight them – the Americans remain equally indolent when confronted by the infinitely more dangerous conflict 2,000 miles to the west of Kabul, in the streets of Jerusalem, Ramallah, Tel Aviv, Nablus, Jenin and Gaza. When the Israeli army goes on a shooting spree in the refugee camps and kills 16 Palestinians, among them two children, the US calls for "restraint". When a Palestinian suicide bomber murders a crowd of Israelis in Jerusalem, including two babies and a 10-year old, the US boldly blames Yasser Arafat for not "stopping terrorism" by locking up the bad guys. And Ariel Sharon? Why, he's busy destroying the police stations and prisons to make sure Mr Arafat can't do what he's been ordered to do. And when Mr Sharon actually announces that Israel must "inflict greater losses" – in other words, kill more Palestinians – Washington is silent. Maybe it's not indolence. Maybe the Bush administration actually believes that the man held "personally responsible" by an Israeli commission of inquiry for the murder of 1,700 Palestinian civilians in Beirut in 1982 really is fighting America's "war on terror". Maybe America's moral compass has become so skewed by the crimes against humanity on 11 September that President Bush simply no longer cares what Mr Sharon does. It's as if all the lessons of history – in Afghanistan as well as the Middle East – have been tossed into a bin. Take ex-President Clinton. He arrives in Israel and what does he do? He blames Mr Arafat. And what does his preposterous wife say when she does the same thing? "Yasser Arafat bears the responsibility for the violence that has occurred; it rests on his shoulders ..." She says that her role as a US Senator is "to support the Israeli people". Really? What's wrong with supporting innocent Palestinians as well? Wrong religion? Back-to-front writing? Wrong eye colour? So a war against colonial occupation has been transformed into an offshoot of the "war on terror", the language of this war ever more infantile. We now have to learn by rote the following words: tit-for-tat, cycle-of-violence, axis of evil, bunker-buster, daisy-cutter ... Is there no end to this childishness? No, there is not. For the latest little killer is the word "transfer" or "resettlement". As in "the simple answer... would be to create a vast separation from Israel, resettling the Palestinians in Jordan, where 80 per cent of the population is Palestinian." This comes from an article published in USA Today. In Israel itself, an opinion poll asks Israelis how many of them would support "transfer" – of Arabs out of their homes, of course, not Jewish settlers off Arab land – as a solution to the war. This is incredible. "Transfer" is ethnic cleansing and ethnic cleansing is a war crime. If American newspapers are prepared to print such an option and if Israelis are asked to give their opinion on it, what is Mr Milosevic doing in The Hague? The moral collapse is already underway. Take the watering down of the US government's latest report on human rights. In 2000, it said that Egypt's hopelessly unfair military courts "do not ensure civilian defendants due process before an independent tribunal". In the 2001 report, however, that sentence has been censored out. It has to be, of course, because Mr Bush is now setting up his own military courts to try his prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without due process. And while the Americans are distorting the nature of the war between Israel and the Palestinians, they are lying about Afghanistan. General Tommy Franks, the head of the US Central Command, refers in the following words to the mistaken killing of 16 innocent Afghans at Hazar Qadam: "I will not characterise it as a failure of any type." Sorry? Either General Franks – who on Tuesday managed to refer to his newly killed soldiers as dying "in Vietnam" – didn't read the facts or he is a very disreputable man. His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, refuses to use the word "mistake" or even "investigation" after thousands of innocent Afghans died under US bombs because the word "sometimes has the implication of more formality or a disciplinary action". When Washington's top military men are so dishonest, is it any surprise that Israeli tanks can open fire on refugee camps without any serious response from the US or blast cars carrying children because they want to kill their father? It is surely time that Europe became involved. It is surely time that the EU held a summit about these terrible conflicts and involved itself directly. We should be expanding the peace force in Kabul to remove the weapons of Afghanistan and let America move into the swamp of semi- occupation and guerrilla warfare if that is what it wishes. We should be asking Israel to repay the €17.29m (£10.5m) of European taxpayers' money that has been destroyed by the Israeli army in its vandalisation of EU-funded Palestinian infrastructure. Since the Americans won't talk to Yasser Arafat, we should take over from them. If Washington is too slovenly to halt this terrible war between Arab and Israeli, we must try to do so. We're asked to fund America's bankrupt policies with our euros. So now it's time to demand that we have a say in them. Instead of that, Downing Street, which over Christmas castigated those journalists who predicted chaos and blood in Afghanistan – myself included, I'm glad to say – feeds Mr Bush's fantasies by supporting yet another war with Iraq. I'm beginning to suspect that 11 September is turning into a curse far greater than the original bloodbath of that day, that America's absorption with that terrible event is in danger of distorting our morality. Is the anarchy of Afghanistan and the continuing slaughter in the Middle East really to be the memorial for the thousands who died on 11 September? http://argument.independent.co.uk/ commentators/story.jsp?story=271647 add your own comments --------------- If only... (english) by fraise 4:33am Thu Mar 7 '02 EU journalists were as prevalent in the US as they are in the EU. Why is it that I'm always sure to be sickened by mainstream US media, and always certain to be relieved by Europe's clear view of the situation? Will the US ever awake from its Orwellian nightmare? Getting more and more cynical about the future of the US as the days go by... like most everyone else here, I'm sure... ------------- I liked Mr. Fisk better (english) by Pat Kincaid 4:42am Thu Mar 7 '02 laughter@aol.com I liked Fisk better when he was being pummeled by Afghan civilians. PK ------------ Americans are Totally Useless (english) by throw the bums out 6:46am Thu Mar 7 '02 It's good to see people like Fisk way superior in spirit and soul than this Pat person who likes to be a mouthpiece for the subhuman race of people.