| ----------- Michael Perelman wrote, >Bush is bringing back everybody except Fawn Hall. Maybe she is next. Not likely. Fawn ratted, however reluctantly. I've been poindering the Pondexter appointment all day and I think I've solved the riddle. The Bush II admin needn't have appointed Abrams, Reich, Poindexter to avail itself of their wisdom or talents. The appointments were clearly meant to be symbolic. But what do they symbolize? They symbolize exactly the reverse of Poindexter's resignation in 1986. They celebrate the well-known but officially denied fact that Reagan ordered the specific violation of laws and that Bush the senior (along with the entire R. cabinet, the congress, the media & the public) knew damn well that was the case. The appointment of Poindexter officially retracts the denials now that it is "too late" to do anything about the impeachable offenses. As Lawrence Walsh wrote: "Regan, Meese, and Casey then embarked on a desperate gambit, which Regan laid out that day [November 24, 1986] in a memorandum entitled 'Plan of Action.' 'Tough as it seem,' he wrote, 'blame must be put at NSC's door -- rogue operation, going on without president's knowledge or sanction.' The goal would be to 'try to make the best of a sensational story.' "The authors of the plan concluded that it would not be enough to fire North. They needed more than a scapegoat; they needed a firewall. Poindexter had to go. The next day he resigned at a meeting in which Reagan and Bush expressed their regrets." Tom Walker --------------- Tom, I think it's more than symbolism, though that plays a role. The Bush League is a bunch of cronies who support each other all the time. They punish their enemies and reward their friends. Poindexter took the heat, so he's given a reward. -- Jim D. ------------------------------- MIYACHI TATSUO Psychiatric Department KOMAKI MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL JOHBUSHI,1-20 KOMAKI CITY AICHI Pre JAPAN 0568-76-4131 miyachi9@gctv.ne.jp There is not "necessity of socialism" Rather, there is only possibility of socialism. Marx firstly expected revolution when economic panic happened, but later In Capital, Marx depended upon growing social movements themselves. <<marx quote deleted>> ." Thus, Marx abandoned economic or political crisis as a base of revolutionary movement and became to expect emerging international movement from within as the base of revolution. But Lenin adopted political crisis as chance of revolution and later his judgment became dogma as " crisis theory". So Stalin's strategy focused how and when economic&political crisis happened. Now we has large number of social movements, such as anti-globalizaition, anti-racism, feminism, left-ecology, worker's & consumers cooperatives, local community using LETS and local banking which does not create fictitious capital(For example Mondragon) . If crisis theory can't explain these movements, it is simply because these movements occurs from contradictory capitalist society. Most important is that Marx tried firstly to prove ability of working class to destroy civil society, not tried to explain economical phenomena from without. In Japan, from pre-war to 1960', Marxists focused mainly market analysis modeled after Stalin's dogma. Its objectivist tendency was destroyed by new left movement. ---------------- Socialism is necessary in the sense in which food is necessary: not as something which will be but as something that must be if we are to survive. It is pure religiosity to claim that socialism _will_ come; it is close to self-evident that unless it comes we will plunge ever deeper into the barbarism RL predicted. Doug doesn't like quotes, but no one has ever said it better than Mao: If you don't hit it, it won't fall. Carrol -------------------- on the necessity of god, goddess, gods, goddesses, or a combination of the above by Devine, James 22 February 2002 17:46 UTC < < < Thread Index > > > [was: RE: [PEN-L:23057] Re: On the necessity of socialism and grammar] Rev. Tom writes: >Sabri has framed the issue correctly. Both are beliefs. For the same reason as Sabri, I believe in God but not in a God or gods.< I was raised as a Unitarian, a "faith" that believes that there exists at most one god (and argues about whether or not to capitalize). So my question: is why believe in the existence or non-existence of "god"?[*] why not simply express ignorance on this question? As far as I can tell, there's no logical argument either for or against the existence of "god." Similarly, all the empirical evidence can be interpreted in more than one way. People have religious experiences in which they encounter supernatural entities who they interpret as good. But looking at the so-called "Holy" Land suggests that there ain't anything holy in this world of ours. But we'll never know. (BTW, the issue of the so-called "transformation problem" isn't analogous to that of the existence of supernatural entities. It's a standard scholastic trap that ensnares the left the way other scholastic traps that keep non-leftists out of trouble. If it didn't exist, the Mandarin-minded Marxists (MMMs) would think up some other problem to keep themselves occupied. Besides, there's an easy solution...) ;-) [*]Economic theory suggests that we shouldn't be concerned only with the existence of "god" but also its stability and uniqueness. As is the "god" of 2002 the same as the one of 1999? Just as the "real GDP" of 2002 isn't strictly speaking comparable to that of 1999, perhaps there are index-number problems... Jim Devine jdevine@lmu.edu & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine > -----Original Message----- > From: timework@vcn.bc.ca [mailto:timework@vcn.bc.ca] > Sent: Friday, February 22, 2002 6:24 AM > To: pen-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu > Subject: [PEN-L:23057] Re: On the necessity of socialism and grammar > > > Sabri Oncu wrote, > > >> Um, as soon as we can figure out whether > >> God does or does not exist........... > >> > >> Ian > > > >My dear Ian, > > > >This problem is not that difficult. I solved it when I was 14. I > >realized that there was no difference between believing in the > >existence or non-existence of God. > > Sabri has framed the issue correctly. Both are beliefs. For > the same reason > as Sabri, I believe in God but not in a God or gods. The > distinction is > crucial. There IS a difference between believing in God and > believing in "a" > God or "the" God. God is a unique part of speech that cannot > be a noun. The > article makes God into a noun, which is grammatically absurd. > It is like > saying, in English, "I the go to store" or "She a eat apple." > It is clearly, > obviously ungrammatical. God is also not a verb, an > adjective, an adverb, a > preposition or any other common part of speech. In fact, one > might say that > the linguistic function of God is precisely to stand as other > to all the > common parts of speech and thus to remind us of the > incompleteness, the > inadequacy of any conceivable utterance. God is the unique > grammatical term > for the ultimate unutterableness of being. > > Tom Walker --------------- > Jim Devine jdevine@lmu.edu & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine Actually, neoclassical general equilibrium economists have proved that God exists. The tatonnement auctioneer! All knowing, capable of millions of decisions instantaniously, does not need to be paid to exist, and able to determine the future in perpetuity. Sounds like God to me. Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba ---------------- The presumption is always that X doesn't exist; hence the absence of convincing arguments against the existence of X is in no way evidence that X exists. The premise must be the non-existence of god, and so far as I know there are not only no argumenents against that premise, there are no arguments of any weight to the effect that one should even consider the arguments for the existence. Just because there is a tradition that a one-ton invisible green frog crouches in my living room is no sign I should bother to listen to arguments that such does exist. The only acceptable premise for any argument as to the existence of god is the non-existence of god; hence all arguments for god are incoherent. :-) Carrol ----------- I agree absolutely there's no logical argument for or against. My own position is based entirely and radically on grammar. Tom Walker --------------- Greetings Economists, Tom writes about the value of knowing one way (believing in religion) or the other (being an atheist not believing there is a god) about God. ----------------------- Tom 22 February 2002 21:19 UTC quotes, Jim Devine wrote, As far as I can tell, there's no logical argument either for or against the existence of "god." Tom replies to the above, I agree absolutely there's no logical argument for or against. My own position is based entirely and radically on grammar. Tom Walker --------------------- Doyle The basic argument for religious belief is that one is aware of the 'spirit' in being, or 'like' descriptions of a mind outside human beings. An atheist says there was no soul there in the first place to situate the argument about how a human being really thinks. The atheist seeks to understand what happens when someone really dies. If it were entirely un-important to not know the difference and that one belief is the same as the other, then neuroscience would be cluttered with various attempts to find the soul. Perhaps George W (the Christian) will tell us why U.S. science is so un-Christian to not be focused on the search for a soul. Tom may argue that 'believing' is the issue as a formula like activity resembling a grammar. The word, God, in Tom's view is a peculiarly empty word. For Tom God appears as just a place holder in a grammatical structure that describes an arbitrary belief. While the emptiness of the concept comes through from Tom's remark, that also misses some important elements in religion. Religion is not just belief, Religion is an explanation. An explanation is a product of an activity of the mind in which one person tells another person what they think is the meaning of something. As I am saying above god is a mind which someone tells another person they know about as god. That mind (god) is some place besides in a human head. Or if in an human head, the "immortal" non material aspect of the person God/King God/head. For an atheist in this contemporary time, I can't see a lot of difference between the religious explanation (as a human being conveys it to another) and having an avatar (a figure representing a human face) pop up when the atheist comes to the rock on the hill, and give the atheist an explanation of the rock. See "The Dream Drugstore, Chemically Altered States of Consciousness", J. Allan Hobson, MIT Press, 2001 The difference between my proposal and Tom's theory is that Tom asserts grammar is a meaningful way to convey belief in god (the word being empty), and I say explanation is. Explanation while not well understood in a scientific sense offers better grounds for understanding the mental processes underlying religion. Hence if one must feel there are parallels between two opposed belief systems, Atheist as true believers similar to the religious believers, then understanding how the mind produces explanation provides a more practical route to understanding the truth of the assertion. thanks, Doyle Saylor PS Tom is a wiseacre in starting this thread, and I recognize the difference in seriousness of his message and my own. Still the point he made is worthy of my attention in a serious manner anyway. -------------- Why not indeed! One of the things I find most annoying about religion is each faith's insistence: (a) that G/god is ultimately unknowable, and (b) that it, as a particular faith, knows perfectly well what G/god is and what G/god wants. So much avoidable agony has resulted throughout history because of these preposterous claims to certain knowledge of a subject that is, by definition, beyond understanding. Carl -------------- Lest we forget, science inherited this notion and has gotten one hell of a lot mileage out of it. G/god as ultimate guarantor of the intelligibility/knowability of the world. Schrodinger, Einstein, Whitehead, Cantor and Godel made the issues involved over the signifier damn complicated . ---------------- Ian I too am a Unitarian Universalist, and my answer is that we believe in God, but we refuse to speculate in detail on what She's like. This invariably draws an interesting reaction whenever I say it. Scott Gassler ------------------- Like if She's a sexually reproduced being (else, whence Her sex?), why don't Mum or Dad get any kudos or divine authority, may we expect the pitter-patter of little divine feet at some stage, and who would Dad then be? God 'explains' the unexplained with the inexplicable, I reckon, and I wield Occam's razor very much in the Carrol-Coxian manner on this. 'God' mystifies and misdirects (especially interpellating our moot afterlife-selves at the expense of our being/agency in the world) more than is economically efficient. Cheers, Rob. ------ Hey!!!!!! Rob's turned hissself into 'bantam'. sure enough he is still active as such thankgod -- this one belongs in the socialism and grammar thread but pen-l frequently drops thread stitches: ---------------G'day Tom'n'Sabri, > Sabri has framed the issue correctly. Both are beliefs. For the same > reason > as Sabri, I believe in God but not in a God or gods. The distinction > is > crucial. There IS a difference between believing in God and believing > in "a" > God or "the" God. God is a unique part of speech that cannot be a > noun. The > article makes God into a noun, which is grammatically absurd. It is > like > saying, in English, "I the go to store" or "She a eat apple." It is > clearly, > obviously ungrammatical. God is also not a verb, an adjective, an > adverb, a > preposition or any other common part of speech. In fact, one might say > that > the linguistic function of God is precisely to stand as other to all > the > common parts of speech and thus to remind us of the incompleteness, > the > inadequacy of any conceivable utterance. God is the unique grammatical > term > for the ultimate unutterableness of being. I know where you're coming from, Tom, or at least I know there's a big unutterable there somewhere that we all come from and dwell in (I have only recently allowed myself to let the prepositions hang; wow, it's like peeing outadoors!). To avoid confusion, though, I'd not call it God - admit rather, and often, that whereof we cannot speak we must pass over in silence. Apropos of which, I append this, a favourite (necessarily longish) quote, by Pommie composer Anthony Powers (which can be had in full at http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/ politicsphilosophyandsociety/ story/0,6000,563387,00.html : "I came back to the Tractatus after reading Ray Monk's life of Wittgenstein and Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher," says Powers. "What became clear to me was how misinterpreted the Tractatus had been by mid-20th- century linguistic philosophers, and how what it was really about was the importance of recognising non- linguistic reality. The logical positivists and linguistic analysts thought everything could be said if it was said in the right kind of controlled and logical way. But the Tractatus is saying almost the opposite - that there are so many dimensions of life and experience that are beyond the capability of language to explain or even adequately express." The famous last sentence of the Tractatus - "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" - is, according to Powers, meant as an injunction to philosophers "to put up or shut up", and certainly not as a discouragement to musicians. "According to Wittgenstein, there are huge things - the whole areas of moral and religious philosophy and aesthetics - that cannot be 'said' but can be 'shown'," says Powers. "The honest thing philosophically is to be silent about those things. What I'm trying to do is to show in the piece that music is a way of reaching into that silence." Cheers, Rob. ------------------ I thought "Time" played that role in the Timeworks philosophy. By the way "God" is a noun-- sharing this grammatical feature with "Time" But perhaps this is part of your humor or animal spirits. I dont know. Where is the commandment laid down that a noun must have a definite or indefinite article accompanying it? I assume you mean to be goofy. While it is ungrammatical to put a definite article with a pronoun even if before the pronoun rather than after it as you do, but on the contrary it is not ungrammatical to place definite articles before abstract nouns such as "truth" "goodness", "virtue" etc even though they can stand on their own without articles. So what on earth is ungrammatical about putting "a" or "the" before God. A he is usually male by the way... Cheers, Ken Hanly ---------------- Greider from the nation 'reformer from Goldman Sachs' http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/ pen-l/2002I/msg01942.html --------------- Doyle Saylor wrote, >PS Tom is a wiseacre in starting this thread, and I recognize the >difference >in seriousness of his message and my own. Still the point he made is >worthy >of my attention in a serious manner anyway. [1585-95; < MD wijssager prophet, trans. of MHG wissage, late OHG wissago, earlier wizzago wise person, c. OE witega; akin to WIT 2] Greetings Economists, I characterized Tom's thoughts as a wiseacre, and the truth in that is that Tom has a light heartedness, and wit, not wiseacre about him. I enjoy Tom's comments. Secondly I acknowledge the seriousness of his comment, Tom, [1585-95; < MD wijssager prophet, trans. of MHG wissage, late OHG wissago, earlier wizzago wise person, c. OE witega; akin to WIT 2] Verily my tongue hath worn a hole in my cheek. But I am also dead serious. I would just add that the emptiness of the God term is potentially a productive emptiness, although it is also potentially deadening. How can there be different kinds of emptiness? Think of "aporia" and "hollowed out". Aporia carries thought forward with an expectation, hollowness arrests action with disappointment. Fortunately, hollowness can be transformed to aporia, which is the method of Negative Dialectic. =========== Doyle My response would parallel the remarks that John Searle makes about Chomsky's UG (Universal Grammar) in the New York Review of Books, February 28, 2002, to Tom's comments about God in a grammatical sense. in particular Searle writes on page 34, Searle characterizing Chomsky's theory, The overall conception of language that emerges is this: a language consists of a lexicon (a list of elements such as words) and a set of computational procedures. The computational procedures map strings of lexical elements onto a sound system at one end and a meaning system at the other. But the procedures themselves don't represent anything; they are purely formal and syntactical. As Chomsky says, "The computational procedure maps an array of lexical choices into a pair of symbolic objects...The elements of these symbolic objects can be called "phonetic" and "semantic" features, respectively, but we should bear in mind that all of this is pure syntax and completely internalist." ========= Doyle Which characterize grammar in a computational sense. And that is what Tom is saying about the word, God, that it is a place holder in a grammar, that has a null meaning, or to quote Tom from the thread origin, ======== Tom 22 February 2002 14:29 UTC, Sabri has framed the issue correctly. Both are beliefs. For the same reason as Sabri, I believe in God but not in a God or gods. The distinction is crucial. There IS a difference between believing in God and believing in "a" God or "the" God. God is a unique part of speech that cannot be a noun. The article makes God into a noun, which is grammatically absurd. It is like saying, in English, "I the go to store" or "She a eat apple." It is clearly, obviously ungrammatical. God is also not a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition or any other common part of speech. In fact, one might say that the linguistic function of God is precisely to stand as other to all the common parts of speech and thus to remind us of the incompleteness, the inadequacy of any conceivable utterance. God is the unique grammatical term for the ultimate unutterableness of being. ========== Doyle, To which in the above cited article Searle remarks about Chomsky's theories in parallel to Tom's assertion, Searle page 34, ..."Of course, Chomsky is right to insist that "English" is not a well-defined notion, that the word has all sorts of looseness both now and historically. I am a native English speaker, yet I cannot understand some currently spoken dialects of English. All the same, the point remains: a group of letters or sounds is a sentence, or a word, or other element of a language only relative to some set of users of the language. The point has to be stated precisely. There is indeed an object of study for natural science, the human brain with its specific language components. but the actual languages that humans learn and speak are not in that way natural objects. They are creations of human beings. Analogously humans have a natural capacity to socialize and form social groups with other humans. But the actual social organizations they create, such as governments and corporations, are not natural, observer-independent phenomena, they are human creations and have an observer-dependent existence. As their speakers develop or disappear, languages change or die out." ======== Doyle God is a social construct hence my assertion about god being an explanation. One cannot expect that god has a grammatical role. Grammar being the division of speech into apparent parts related to human experience and habitual routines of expression. The meaning of god may fit what Tom says, but the grammatical structure does not call for a hole or null place as Tom would like to assert. Inventing such a null place grammatical structure akin to constructing a new mathematical theorem might have value if it can be shown to have practical utility. So I would ask what is the utility? thanks, Doyle Saylor Tom's remaining remarks are pasted below for easy reference. ======= Tom A 17th century German dramatist wrote: "Whosoever would grace this frail cottage, in which poverty adorns every corner, with a rational summing up, would be making no inapt statement nor overstepping the mark of well-founded truth if he called the world a general store, a customs-house of death, in which man is the merchandise, death the wondrous merchant, God the most conscientious book-keeper, but the grave the bonded drapers' hall and ware house." Walter Benjamin used the passage as a motto for his chapter on Allegory and Trauerspiel in _The Origin of German Tragic Drama_. I cited it last week in connection with the Georgia crematorium. God as a book-keeper seems at first a peculiarly inapt metaphor, inasmuch as book-keeping is a matter of reducing all activity to monetary value. But God is *the most conscientious* book-keeper, which is to say there are no off-balance sheet transactions. Mere money cannot be God's unit of account. Compare this book-keeper God to the neo-classical "tatonnement auctioneer" for whom vain money is the sole unit of account. One might say the only difference is their unit of account. But that difference makes all the difference in the world. The auctioneer is thus revealed as an imposter, a huckster, a fraud, a false prophet (false profit). "What if the most important questions about the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center as historical Events transcend the terms of the current debate and the underlying framework it serves?" http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2002I/msg01951.html Tom Walker ------------- All I know is that if one dwells on the topic too long the grammar begins to look wrong. For example what is the relationship between the preposition "in", the verb believe and the term God? In this context, the utility may well be reminding us not to go on at length about the ineffable. Speaking of which, the ineffable is one of those negatives for which there is no positive, isn't it? ---------------- It's been a long time since I 'studied' this (the scare quotes reflect the lightness of that study at the time), but I believe in such cases the "in" should be considered a part of the verb (as in the german separable verbs) rather than a preposition. In any case, prepositions are wildcards in any language: you must remember memorizing "idioms" in any foreign language you studied: i.e. phrases that cannot be construed by looking up the definitions of their individual words. Carrol ----------------differetn thread ------- - G'day Carrol, > > Sabri, Marx's theory in question here is about value -- a form of > social > > relations peculiar to capitalism. As such, it would not have > relevance > > under socialism. > > ------------ > Sweezy saw the premise that "economic science" would exist under > socialism as the ideological basis of authoritarian socialism. > Supposedly production will be for use, and productive choices will be > made politically. That can't be reduced to a science. (I think I've > botched up the argument some.) >------------ Any social formation faces the need to allocate resources (including labour) here rather than there. We've tried command economies and found that, sans market signals, it couldn't be done where and when it was tried - or at least, that it was so wasteful and inequitable that it couldn't survive as a system in the world of the time. If we take away the hostile external environment, WW2 (which wiped out a generation in the SU), and poor calculation technology (computing power exists today that did not exist then), we're still left with one of the central planks of economic science: the balance of incentives. As I see it, the misprojections, untrue inventory reports, uncoordinated transport systems, ridiculous quotas etc were a function of poorly coordinated incentive systems (there was fear, currying of favour and such). The only way to rid ourselves of that is to avoid centralised authority and its attendent stratification (and what we've hitherto called 'politics' would go with it). Which leaves commies with the job of construcing a democratic mode of resourse allocation. I imagine some balance between limited markets and something like Trotskiy's workers' councils or Shliapnikov's trades union management (if there's a real difference there) would provide an answer, but I've never quite managed to satisfy myself on the issue. I know you've often argued we shouldn't be in the business of writing recipes for the future's kitchens, but it's a problem, as Justin has argued, any commie who wants to sound convincing should have thought about a lot, I think. Anyway, I imagine lots of technical knowledge would have to be available to the democratically determining body if the job is to be done well enough to make life universally worth living. The thing is to have technicians and not have technocrats, I think - else, no democracy -> no socialism. Cheers, Rob. ---------------------G'day Jim, > where can I find the article -- by Terry Gilliam or one of the other > Monty > Python alumni -- about applying Bush's war-on-terrorism strategy to > deal > with the Irish Republican Army? Here 'tis: Monty Python on "Bombing for Peace" OK, George, make with the friendly bombs Terry Jones Sunday February 17, 2002 The Observer <<snip>> Of course, it goes without saying that we would also have had to bomb various parts of London such as Camden Town, Lewisham and bits of Hammersmith and we should certainly have had to obliterate, if not the whole of Liverpool, at least the Scotland Road area. And that would be it really, as far as exterminating the IRA and its supporters. Easy. The War on Terrorism provides a solution so uncomplicated, so straightforward and so gloriously simple that it baffles me why it has taken a man with the brains of George W. Bush to think of it. So, sock it to Iraq, George. Let's make the world a safer place. ------------------- G'day Peter, You write: > Right. I argued in "Actually Existing Globalization" (published in a > collection a > few years ago) that industrial policy is ultimately understandable > only as > technology policy, but that the era of national technology (or > innovation) systems > is largely over. At the time I reviewed some of the literature pro > and con; I > think there are some references in my article. I'll be glad to send > an electronic > copy to anyone interested. > > Peter > ----------------- I've not seen the paper (and I'd really like to ... ), but I'd argue the US has exhibited many signs of an almost mercantilist corporatist policy approach to optimising intial advantage in IT - pushing TRIPs into the Uruguay Round, allowing anti-competitive mergers and such to ensure world-beating economies of scope and scale, pressuring the rest of the world into abandoning public telecommunications backbones - in fact - policy timing, from the AT&T transformation, to fighting off Japanese HDTV standards, to the shift of the public/private internet debate in the early nineties, to letting the money-rich but opportunity-poor BabyBells off the leash in '96, to allowing media monoliths to consolidate across media in '02 - well, it all looks like a technology policy of sorts - perhaps at a structural (diffusion and control) rather than technical (invention and innovation) level (the DoD drove a lot of the latter before the end of the space race and Vietnam War occasioned a need for civvie market opportunities, in the context of the post '73 dip in national competitiveness and national accounts all 'round), but arguably a technology policy nevertheless. Or not? Cheers, Rob. ------------------- Sut Jhally sounds like my kind of fellow alumnus. Unfortunately his lecture is on a Friday afternoon, one of my most congested. I'll see what I can do. I disagree with one claim in the article. Dallas Smythe wasn't the first to look at media as economic institutions. I wouldn't claim Walter Benjamin as first because absolute priority is difficult to establish. But he was certainly | looking at the media as economic institutions long before Smythe. While were on the theme of advertising and the apocalypse, I've dusted off my sandwich boards and have begun flaneuring around again in earnest. The rationale and highlights will unfold serially on sandwichman.blogspot.com. Tom Walker ----------- is kind of hijacking selected words out of context and insinuating that they mean something else is pointless. I would say juvenile, but would be insulting to children. The context was the role of advertising in the media and culture. The point is about advertisers promising people things they can't deliver. Perhaps advertisements have improved Doug's sex life. If so, perhaps he could tell us how. ------------- Doug Henwood wrote, >Gadzooks! Sex!! Triviality!!! Band together and protect the youth >from these threats!!!! >Remind me what's progressive about this? It sounds like Donald Wildmon. ------------------ And my juvenile point was that a lot of this critique is a rather undigested rehash of a lot of Puritan hair-shirt crap. You may think the quote is out of context - I think it's a revealing expression of anxiety over pleasure and sensuality. It is also likely to have little political appeal beyond a rather affluent gang of PC lefties (or the voluntarily poor). I'm with Mandel on this one. Doug ---- Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp. 394-396: >6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards) of the >wage-earner, which represents a raising of his level of culture and >civilization. In the end this can be traced back virtually >completely to the conquest of longer time for recreation, both >quantitatively (a shorter working week, free weekends, paid >holidays, earlier pensionable age, and longer education) and >qualitatively (the actual extension of cultural needs, to the extent >to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human content >by capitalist commercialization). This genuine extension of needs is >a corollary of the necessary civilizing function of capital. Any >rejection of the so-called 'consumer society' which moves beyond >justified condemnation of the commercialization and dehumanization >of consumption by capitalism to attack the historical extension of >needs and consumption in general (i.e., moves from social criticism >to a critique of civilization), turns back the clock from scientific >to utopian socialism and from historical materialism to idealism. >Marx fully appreciated and stressed the civilizing function of >capital, which he saw as the necessary preparation of the material >basis for a 'rich individuality'. The following passage from the >Grundrisse makes this view very clear: 'Capital's ceaseless striving >towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits >of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements >for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided >in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also >therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development >of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form >has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the >place of the natural one.' > >For socialists, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can >therefore never imply rejection of the extension and differentiation >of needs as a whole, or any return to the primitive natural state of >these needs; their aim is necessarily the development of a 'rich >individuality' for the whole of mankind. In this rational Marxist >sense, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can only mean: >rejection of all those forms of consumption and of production which >continue to restrict man's development, making it narrow and >one-sided. This rational rejection seeks to reverse the relationship >between the production of goods and human labour, which is >determined by the commodity form under capitalism, so that >henceforth the main goal of economic activity is not the maximum >production of things and the maximum private profit for each >individual unit of production (factory or company), but the optimum >self-activity of the individual person. The production of goods must >be subordinated to this goal, which means the elimination of forms >of production and labour which damage human health and man's natural >environment, even if they are 'profitable' in isolation. At the same >time, it must be remembered that man as a material being with >material needs cannot achieve the full development of a 'rich >individuality' through asceticism, self-castigation and artificial >self-limitation, but only through the rational development of his >consumption, consciously controlled and consciously (i.e., >democratically) subordinated to his collective interests. > >Marx himself deliberately pointed out the need to work out a system >of needs, which has nothing to do with the neo-asceticism peddled in >some circles as Marxist orthodoxy. In the Grundrisse Marx says: 'The >exploration of the earth in all directions, to discover new things >of use as well as new useful qualities of the old; such as new >qualities of them as raw materials; the development, hence, of the >natural sciences to their highest point; likewise the discovery, >creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself; >the cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, >production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, >because rich in qualities and relations - production of this being >as the most total and universal possible social product, for, in >order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable >of many pleasures, hence cultured to a high degree - is likewise a >condition of production founded on capital.... ------------------- Doug, From reading your position on consumption over some time, and Mandel below, I believe Mandel is not with you, nor you with him. Mandel opens with <<<<=>>>> which is hardly about moving up to designer sheets. Why you always react with your "hair shirt" response to any criticism of consumption which does NOT raise living standards is beyond me. Do you skip Mandel's parenthetical " (the actual extension of cultural needs, to the extent >to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human content >by capitalist commercialization)."? --------------- Not being a mind reader, I haven't the slightest idea what Doug's "a lot of this critique" refers to. Sut Jhally? The Media Education Foundation? Dallas Smythe? The critique of consumerism in general? (and here we could branch off into other specifics, Marcuse's repressive sublimation? the voluntary simplicity movement? Juliet Schor? etc. etc. etc.). Your juvenile "point", Doug, is too vague to be a point and so sweeping as to be every bit as reactionary as the "Puritan hair-shirt crap" you conjure up. Fascinating passage from Mandel and a paradoxical pledge of allegiance to, presumably, Mandel's first sentence -- but not his second. Mandel's SECOND sentence begins with a catalogue of and homage to precisely those conquests that have been arrested in North America during the quarter century since the source text, _Late Capitalism_, was translated into English: the shorter work week, the weekend, paid holidays, politically sacrosanct pension universality, affordable post secondary education. That same sentence concludes with the qualification, "to the extent to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human content by capitalist commercialization." Pardon my slow, deliberate reading but *trivialization* is precisely what Jhally's comment referred to and what you, Doug, lampooned as puritanical crap. The anxiety isn't over pleasure and sensuality per se, but over the commodification of pleasure and sensuality -- a process that is no doubt so far advanced that it becomes hard to conceive of pleasure and sensuality in any other terms. Hard? Conceive? Ha ha. Perhaps I should have said something about penetration, too. It's an anxiety that you obviously share, Doug. Otherwise, how to account for the compulsive eroto-detective work, the discovery of "revealing" expressions (what one might decades ago have referred to as Freudian slips). Fear not, Doug, your anxiety is my own. I have no wish to renounce pleasure in the name of an abstract critical purity. But as for having little political appeal, consider that the unabashedly anti-pleasure fundamentalist right gets an incredible amount of political mileage out of the anxiety that, presumably, no one but affluent PC lefties and the voluntary poor share (not to mention you and I, Doug). Doug Henwood wrote, >And my juvenile point was that a lot of this critique is a rather >undigested rehash of a lot of Puritan hair-shirt crap. You may think >the quote is out of context - I think it's a revealing expression of >anxiety over pleasure and sensuality. It is also likely to have >little political appeal beyond a rather affluent gang of PC lefties >(or the voluntarily poor). > >I'm with Mandel on this one. > >Doug > >---- > >Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp. 394-396: > >>6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards) of the >>wage-earner, which represents a raising of his level of culture and >>civilization. In the end this can be traced back virtually >>completely to the conquest of longer time for recreation, both >>quantitatively (a shorter working week, free weekends, paid >>holidays, earlier pensionable age, and longer education) and >>qualitatively (the actual extension of cultural needs, to the extent >>to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human content >>by capitalist commercialization). Tom Walker ------------------- Non-commodified pleasure and sensuality under pre-capitalism and much of capitalism are, more often than not, provided by unpaid women's labor, e.g., Mom's Home-cooked Meals. Commodified pleasure and sensuality under capitalism affordable to the working class are, more often than not, provided by low-paid labor of men and women of color in sweatshops, e.g., mass produced and yet stylish Kenneth Cole goods. But for commodification of pleasure and sensuality, women today would be still spending all day carrying water, preparing food, sewing clothes, and so on (poor women in poor nations still in fact spend much of their time carrying water, etc.!). But for commodification and urbanization, which have come to allow human beings to live independently of the pre-capitalist duty to marry and procreate (or else), we wouldn't know such identities as gay men and lesbians (pre-capitalist male-male same-sex desire appears mainly to have been channeled through hierarchical relations between men and boys, as among ancient Greeks and monks and samurais in pre-modern Japan, without becoming a fixed sexual orientation -- women's same-sex desire generally went unsanctioned even in pre-modern societies that celebrated certain forms of male-male love). Just as wage labor is a necessary stage through which production must pass to become socialized enough for socialism, commodification of pleasure and sensuality is a necessary stage through which (broadly defined) reproduction gets socialized enough for socialism. -- Yoshie --------------- Mine too. But in all the analyses of this genre I've seen - and along with Jhally, I'm thinking of things like Adbusters, the Rev Billy, a lot of the Pacifica audience - I don't see anything like the careful distinctions that Mandel makes. What I see in the anti-commercial gang is just the kind of asceticism that Mandel criticized in orthodox Marxists, though without the class angle. My friend Carrie McLaren, who publishes the 'zine StayFree , isn't quite out there with the hair-shirters, but she does have a streak of it. She was alarmed to hear that a mutual friend had dyed her hair. I think dyeing hair is just fine (though I haven't taken it up yet). I'll bet a lot of the Buy Nothing people don't like makeup either. I'll bet a lot of PEN-Lers don't approve of makeup or stylish clothes either. Doug -------------------- Hey, I got my hair streaked gold last week! It doesn 't show up much on white though. And the stylist assured me it would wash out, which it did. But I still don't understand why ANY criticism of consumption makes the critic a hair-shirter. --------------------- CB: I certainly agree that Marx and Engels spoke against "barracks socialism". But on the other hand I've always thought that Marx's notion of commodity fetishism implied that consumer tastes under capitalism would be inevitably contaminated in some sense by that "fetish". Wouldn't we expect some significant portion of commodities in capitalism to be "use-"values that would disappear with the "clearer" state of mind in socialism/communism ? ------------ Hey! What is this Yoshie? Theory of inevitable progress? Let me assure Yoshie and Daniel that I am not a woozy pre-capitalist romantic. But I will continue to wonder why such assurances are necessary at all. Look at my primitive tools, youse guys: notebook computers, scanners, printers, spreadsheet programs, web sites, etc. I hope no one is offended when I confess that I actually derive sensual pleasure from using these running-dog bourgeois instruments of oppression and exploitation. HORRORS! But my pleasure doesn't prevent me from bearing witness to the violence that takes place every day in the name of my sovereign right to possess a separate notebook computer for each colour in the rainbow. Let's simplify this discussion: undialectical critique of capitalism: bad undialectical apology for capitalism: bad dialectical critique of capitalism: good dialectical apology for capitalism: intellectually dishonest The latter proceeds by mistaking a dialectical critique for an undialectical critique and "correcting" it where it needs no correcting. ---------------- This thread had (mostly) developed in terms of characterizations of either the participants in the thread or of "leftists-in-general." (Tom mostly avoided this trap, since his posts mostly focused on or attempted to define the issues involved independently of who believed what, but Doug's whole concern seemed to be not the issues but a moral characterization of those who disagreed with him. My own 'contribution' to the thread was also on character rather than substance -- I apologize.) If we let Yoshie's post and Tom's response control the discussion, we might say something useful. Carrol P.S. An empirical point. I believe a poll of "leftists" today whould reveal that Doug's position is that of the overwhelming majority. "I believe" -- I don't know, and neither does anyone else on this list. ----------------- Tom, we can't "focus on the individual's role when discussing solutions to the planet's problems" (as Shawna Richer says Sut Jhally does) such as the individual's consumer choices. That's not a dialectical critique of capitalism. That's more like a program of Global Exchange, Oxfam, Simply Living, and so on. All staffed and supported by well-intentioned people, I'm sure, but that's ultimately a liberal dead end. Socialism's point is not so much to oppose commodification as to take collective control of _what has already been socialized through commodification_ by abolishing the private ownership of the means of production. Criticisms of commmodification make sense mainly when what's being commodified, that is privatized, is _already explicitly publicly owned or customarily in the public domain_, like air, water, electric power, public education, public transportation, public broadcasting, and so on. When a housewife becomes _a wage laborer_, her labor power becomes, well, _commodified_, but socialists don't object to that, do we? When what used to be provided by unpaid women's labor becomes _commodified_ -- for instance, care of the old, now often provided by nursing homes -- should socialists bitch and mourn commodification as such? Or should we rather seek to turn a commodified service provided by capitalists into a social program provided by the government, raise wages and benefits for workers, etc.? -- Yoshie ------------------ May we allow for the possibility of more than one dead end? I agree that individual consumer choices, no matter how well-intentioned do not "add up" to social transformation. However, "taking collective control" and "abolishing private ownership" are actions. As verbs they demand nouns. Who is the we to do the doing? The party? The state? The masses? Organized labour? A bunch of folks who show up at demos and read theory? The p-p-p-proletariat? I ran into a former colleague this morning on his way to deliver a talk about his organization's "Community Development Institute", a high-minded enterprise that teaches folks social skills for the world of the 1970s. I admire such dogged . . . well doggedness. I guess. Organized labour? Don't get me started. Unions are my bread and butter (not to mention rent and all the rest). Despite occasional rhetorical flourishes, they are not in the business of fundamental social transformation. If Doug can be cynical about anti-consumer hairshirts, allow me my reservations about the class in itself, of itself and for itself. Funny you should mention the individual (or the Individual). My sandwichman project and my graphic dwell on the mythos of the self-made man. Can't get more individual than that. Note I said _mythos_ not myth. The OS is crucial and conveniently suggests precisely an operating system. That operating system can perhaps be better understood through a series of thought experiments: 1. Take simple living for example. Read Benjamin Franklin's prescription for self-sufficiency, the locus classicus of the self-made man genre. What you will see is that voluntary simplicity is pure, unadulterated Ben Franklin. Those other guys, Horatio Alger, Andrew Carnegie and a host of 19th century success touts represent a digression. 2. Take Aunt Jemima. Now think of Oprah Winfrey. What do they have in common? How are they different? In what sense could one imagine Jemima morphing into Oprah? I'm not the first to make the connection. See http://www.cegur.com/html/oprahimage.html. What's the point? Oprah shows that even a woman -- EVEN a woman of colour can become a "self-made man," provided she's willing to lose enough weight. That is to say to renounce that which, by its excess, signifies her otherness -- her "mammytude", shall we say. No personal offense intended to Ms. Winfrey, but her celebrity in racist America (like pre-Bronco O.J.'s celebrity) rests on her being the "exception that proves the rule". 3. Do a google search on "self-made man"; next do a google search on "autonomous subject"; finally do a combined search. With only a very few exceptions, there isn't an overlap between texts that use the terms. Why is this so when the pair of terms is virtually synonymous (leaving aside connotations)? Isn't it, then, precisely the relationship between the individual and the collective that remains the problem? If that's so isn't it begging the question to pre-emptively reject individual solutions and posit a collective revolutionary subject to do all the abolishing, socializing and taking control? Doesn't even the possibility of a collective revolutionary subject come down to a matter of individual commitments to build such a collective? Aren't these all rhetorical questions? >Criticisms of commmodification make sense mainly when what's being >commodified, that is privatized, is _already explicitly publicly >owned or customarily in the public domain_, like air, water, electric >power, public education, public transportation, public broadcasting, >and so on. > >When a housewife becomes _a wage laborer_, her labor power becomes, >well, _commodified_, but socialists don't object to that, do we? I don't know where to begin to respond to a question that assumes socialists don't object to the commodification of labour power. It was not Marx's position that wage labour represents the pinnacle of human emancipation. I'm inclined to agree. And it is not the case that the commodification of women's labour is a recent innovation. It also is not the case that "socialists" (including women) have always, unequivocally supported full participation of women in the labour force. Nor can such positions be dismissed on purely ideological grounds (against patriarchy) without also taking into account the strategic and tactical considerations behind claims about the unique "delicacy" of women with respect to certain kinds and conditions of labour. This is not to say that the strategy and tactics *justified* discrimination against women any more than racism against chinese immigrants at the turn of the century was *justified* by employers use of immigrant labour to undercut wage rates. It is to point out that one dismisses such pragmatic consideration at the risk of discounting the integrity of "the collective subject". And that places us right back in the puzzle of the relationship between individual and collective action. To conclude, IMHO wage labour long ago served its historical purpose and has only one thing positive left to offer to humanity: the struggle to overthrow it. It makes little sense to disparage the effectiveness of individual consumer choice while extolling the emancipatory virtues of the individual sale of wage labour. Tom Walker -------------------------- ay Doug, > michael perelman wrote: > > >Sabri, please be more respectful of Dr. Rushton. He will probably > win > >the Nobel Prize or even imortatlity, I believe, for having discovered > > >the inverse relation between IQ and penis size. > > I know this is a joke, Michael, but the bourgeois science thinks > Rushton is a fraud and an embarrassment. Before Hitler, racist > science got plenty of respect, but it doesn't really anymore. The > Bell Curve, despite its popularity, isn't mainstream science - though > it might be the hidden underside of liberal bourgeois tolerance (as > Zizek said of the relations among Laibach, nationalism, and fascism). > Racism doesn't have much scientific prestige - except maybe in some > economic models, where the entry of black workers is treated as a > decline in labor force quality. It's trickier to deal with bourgeois > ideology than it used to be. And the staff of the IMF is more > "diverse" than most First World left organizations. I realise that by the projected Rushton logic I should be endowed with a short fat one a foot long, but one thing that occurs to even me is that an IQ test is a cultural product with questionable cross-cultural applicability (and I'd LOVE to see how one arrives at the average IQ for Sierra Leone, for that matter). It also occurs that one criticism that can still be made of liberal bourgeois scientism (as manifest in neoliberalism in general and the IMF record in particular) is that it ethnocentrically universalises the particular with blithe abandon (eg stuff that has worked for a while in or for the hegemon will work for the minor dependent economy). So on that scientism criterion, I think there's a definitive parallel to be drawn (and, yes, I agree a few Marxists we both know - elsewhere - falter at that hurdle, too). I do reckon you've a point about diversity, even heterodoxy, in today's establishment, but aver it might be better made with reference to Wolfenson's World Bank. Waddyareckon? Cheers, Rob. ---------------- Migration of Muslims to West will continue Chicago Tribune; Chicago, Ill.; Feb 28, 2002; Behzad Yaghmaian, Associate professor of Economics, Ramapo College of New Jersey; Abstract: The Sept. 11 tragedy changed the world of migration. Combating terrorism and halting illegal migration coincided. A new enemy was created--Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. They were potential terrorists. They had to be kept out. Borders were closed. New walls were erected. The West closed its gates to migrants from the region. But the underlying causes of the migration of Muslims to the West persist. Thousands continue to venture into the dangerous journey of migration with the hope of finding salvation in the West. They flee war, political conflict, poverty and the hellish life under Islamic fundamentalism. Full Text: (Copyright 2002 by the Chicago Tribune) The Sept. 11 tragedy changed the world of migration. Combating terrorism and halting illegal migration coincided. A new enemy was created--Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. They were potential terrorists. They had to be kept out. Borders were closed. New walls were erected. The West closed its gates to migrants from the region. But the underlying causes of the migration of Muslims to the West persist. Thousands continue to venture into the dangerous journey of migration with the hope of finding salvation in the West. They flee war, political conflict, poverty and the hellish life under Islamic fundamentalism. For many, international migration is the only escape from the cultural and political violence of fundamentalism. Plagued by unending wars and sociopolitical instability, and driven away from the possibility of a life of peace at home, many have become voyagers in search of survival in faraway lands. This seems to be the story of most Iraqi, Afghani and Kurdish migrants caught behind borders in the West. Devastated by war and political violence, millions have also been subject to destructive economic changes beyond their control: the globalization of economics and culture. Displacement and migration have been the result. The introduction of market relations and the transformation of subsistence economies have changed the nature of work in many countries. Millions have joined the ranks of wage laborers, swelling the labor force in most urban areas. In the past 30 years, the labor force increased by 176 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. The unprecedented increase in the labor force has not been matched by a growth in job creation and improvement in the standard of living. High unemployment rates persist in most countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Poverty has been on the rise in many countries in the region. Intoxicated by the flashy images of the West, a large number of socially aspiring and culturally adventurous young men and women have joined the ranks of migrants in recent years. They, too, flee home for a better world. The recent migratory movement of young Iranians is a telling example of this development. The Iranian youth echo the inner aspirations of millions of young people across the Muslim world--a desire for life with dignity, freedom and the possibility of work with livable pay. There seems to be no reversal of the existing migration flow to the West from the Middle East and North Africa in the near future. A growing number of displaced Muslim men, women and children will be facing closed borders in Europe. The result will be increased clandestine border crossings, desperate use of more dangerous routes and methods of migration, exploitation and abuse by smugglers and human traffickers, and death. A policy revision is necessary to stop this human drama. ----------------- ttp://www.michaelkelly.fsnet.co.uk/exis.htm French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan To Convince Taleban of Non-Existence of God The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taleban zealots by proving the non-existence of God. Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris's Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines. There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man's lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers' ears every five minutes and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else. Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his confidence in the success of their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very intense and unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, "The Taleban are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous. There is no God and I can prove it. Take your tongue out of my ear, Juliet, I am talking." Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man's nauseating freedom of action with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive smoking from the Frenchmens' endless Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area. Speculation was mounting last night that Britain may also contribute to the effort by dropping Professor Stephen Hawking into Afghanistan to propagate his non-deistic theory of the creation of the universe. Other tactics to demonstrate the non-existence of God will include the dropping of leaflets pointing out the fact that Michael Jackson has a new album out and Oprah Winfrey has not died yet. This is only one of several Psy-Ops operations mounted by the Allies to undermine the unswerving religious fanaticism that fuels the Taleban's fighting spirit. Pentagon sources have recently confirmed rumours that America has already sent in a 200-foot-tall robot Jesus, which roams the Taleban front lines glowing eerily and shooting flames out of its fingers while saying, 'I am the way, the truth and the life, follow me or die.' However, plans to have the giant Christ kick the crap out of a slightly effeminate 80-foot Mohammed in central Kabul were discarded as insensitive to Muslim allies. Gene Coyle ----------------- |