From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 1 10:55:00 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:55:00 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] AUGUST IS NUCLEAR-FREE FUTURE MONTH! Message-ID: <489307A5.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> CALL TO ACTION! AUGUST IS NUCLEAR-FREE FUTURE MONTH! STOP NUCLEAR MADNESS! United for Peace and Justice has declared August "Nuclear-Free Future Month". The specter of nuclear weapons in the hands of "rogue" states has become one of the top US excuses for waging war, yet the United States continues to rely on the threatened first use of nuclear weapons as the cornerstone of its national security policy. Now is the time to take action and raise awareness about the ever-increasing threat from nuclear weapons and the environmental and proliferation dangers posed by the global nuclear power "renaissance". August 6th and 9th mark the 63rd anniversaries of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Through popular education, video screenings, art exhibitions, protests, vigils and more, we are working to build stronger ties between the nuclear abolition, antiwar, and climate justice movements. We are working in solidarity with these fundamentally connected movements to create a safe, just future. We encourage you to organize and participate in a variety of anti-nuclear activities this month, including efforts to encourage the Presidential and Congressional candidates to make both the abolition of nuclear weapons, and immediate steps to achieve that goal a central campaign priority, as we demand clean, sustainable, non-nuclear energy alternatives. Visit http://www.nuclearfreefuture.org to find information and analysis about nuclear issues, action plans, ideas and tools to organize your own events during Nuclear-Free Future Month! Learn more about Nuclear-Free Future Month and download our two page background information here: http://www.nuclearfreefuture.org/sites/nuclearfreefuture.org/files/nff_backgrounder.pdf Find or Post Events: http://www.nuclearfreefuture.org/event Endorse the Campaign: http://www.nuclearfreefuture.org/endorse Find or Post Resources: http://www.nuclearfreefuture.org/resources Seek peace, be part of the solution! No nukes! No war! Make a Donation or Volunteer Your Time Please consider making a donation of $25, $50, or $100 to support the www.nuclearfreefuture.org website and related resources. Or volunteer your time. Make your check payable to United for Peace and Justice and mail it to PO Box 607, Times Square Station, New York, NY 10017. Be sure to note the memo line: "Nuclear-Free Future Month". This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 1 12:36:23 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:36:23 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Solar Revolution ? Message-ID: <48931F68.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> "Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution Thursday 31 July 2008 by: Anne Trafton, MIT News <_http://www.truthout.org/article/major-discovery-from-mit-primed-unleash-sola r-revolution_ (http://www.truthout.org/article/major-discovery-from-mit-primed-unleash-solar-revolution) > Scientists mimic essence of plants' energy storage system. In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine. Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today's announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy. Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said MIT's Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon." Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night. The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity - whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source - runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced. Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis. The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to work. It's so easy to implement," he said. "Giant Leap" for Clean Energy Sunlight has the greatest potential of any power source to solve the world's energy problems, said Nocera. In one hour, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet's energy needs for one year. James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a "giant leap" toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale. "This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of Biochemistry at Imperial College London. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem." "Just the Beginning" Currently available electrolyzers, which split water with electricity and are often used industrially, are not suited for artificial photosynthesis because they are very expensive and require a highly basic (non-benign) environment that has little to do with the conditions under which photosynthesis operates. More engineering work needs to be done to integrate the new scientific discovery into existing photovoltaic systems, but Nocera said he is confident that such systems will become a reality. "This is just the beginning," said Nocera, principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. "The scientific community is really going to run with this." Nocera hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past. The project is part of the MIT Energy Initiative, a program designed to help transform the global energy system to meet the needs of the future and to help build a bridge to that future by improving today's energy systems. MITEI Director Ernest Moniz, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, noted that "this discovery in the Nocera lab demonstrates that moving up the transformation of our energy supply system to one based on renewables will depend heavily on frontier basic science." The success of the Nocera lab shows the impact of a mixture of funding sources - governments, philanthropy, and industry. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Chesonis Family Foundation, which gave MIT $10 million this spring to launch the Solar Revolution Project, with a goal to make the large scale deployment of solar energy within 10 years. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Aug 1 19:11:25 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2008 10:11:25 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Bushwa will getcha like a case of anthrax! Message-ID: Excellent piece at Salon, analyzing how the 'unsolved' anthrax cases were used to ramp up the fear in order to justify attacking Afghanistan, and then, conveniently enough, the attack on Iraq. The FBI couldn't just very well say, that some of the anthrax used in the poisoned letters matches the weaponized strains used to test military vaccines and antidotes (or is part of a covert biological weapons program)--and then put the entire bioweapons research groups at Ft. Dietrich, MD under arrest until the case is solved. Could it? Back in 2002 some of--well two of us--did try to have a discussion and analysis of this on that most lamed-assed of psuedoleft lists, LBO Talk, moderated by the often immoderate Doug Henwood. You don't know what aggravating is until you have to put up with his 'friends', miscreants like Chip Berlet and Dennis Perrin or some entity known as Girrrlpower. And before you say, well, don't over-react, just take a look at some of Doug's regularly abusive comments to some of his regulars like Carrol Cox (all over the archives if you search). No, Duff is as vain and obscene and unfair as it gets--but that's his right, it is his lameass list and he has a right to be as lameassed as he wants to be there. Especially with people like Carrol lining up to indulge him. Ditto the died-in-his-wool (misspelling intended) something or other Louis Proyect (though if he is a computer expert, I'm a right wing libertarian with a Ron Paul tattoo on my ass). Being such egomaniacs is ultimately irresponsible, as the overall importance of something like the anthrax case relative to events of 2001-3, put into a bit of historical perspective, now shows. Just by way of , I told you so so so: http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-March/007635.html >>And what will the FBI be allowed to reveal? Is it the lone wolf or small group at a lab like at Ft. Detrick, or is it more blowback from US military and intelligence ties with Saudi Arabia (with the UK being the source for the Ames strain )? I believe the US regime wants us to believe the lone wolf theory but doesn't want to solve it. And since this would make them look as incompetent as the idea that Al Qaeda got US anthrax from the Saudi military, it now wants us to believe OBL spontaneously produced it in Afghanistan. How very convenient.<< http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-March/007642.html >>Let me chime in here with the theory about the Detrick pathology head. If the theory that it is the one guy or small group in the US, then the very nature of the stuff used means it has to be someone able to get it from a place like Ft. Detrick.<< And then the Salon article link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/index.html CJ From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Fri Aug 1 21:32:17 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 23:32:17 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Bushwa will getcha like a case of anthrax! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Several years ago I resigned from all marxists lists, and I am only on two now, my own being the other one. And while I remember a few of the personalities you mentioned--some not fondly at all--your post is not terribly helpful. Why would nobody want to hear about the anthrax case in 2002? It seems obviously more substantial a question than the bullshit paranoia about the US govt. blowing up the Twin Towers itself. Obviously, the govt. would open up a real can of worms investigating and publicizing its own germ warfare program. What is your grudge against Chip Berlet, for example? And what qualifies as pseudo-left; how is it distinguished from the genuine left, and does it even make any fucking difference at this point in time? Perhaps you could point us to an alternative to lame-ass discussions? At 09:11 PM 8/1/2008, CeJ wrote: >Excellent piece at Salon, analyzing how the 'unsolved' anthrax cases >were used to ramp up the fear in order to justify attacking >Afghanistan, and then, conveniently enough, the attack on Iraq. > >The FBI couldn't just very well say, that some of the anthrax used in >the poisoned letters matches the weaponized strains used to test >military vaccines and antidotes (or is part of a covert biological >weapons program)--and then put the entire bioweapons research groups >at Ft. Dietrich, MD under arrest until the case is solved. Could it? > >Back in 2002 some of--well two of us--did try to have a discussion and >analysis of this on that most lamed-assed of psuedoleft lists, LBO >Talk, moderated by the often immoderate Doug Henwood. You don't know >what aggravating is until you have to put up with his 'friends', >miscreants like Chip Berlet and Dennis Perrin or some entity known as >Girrrlpower. And before you say, well, don't over-react, just take a >look at some of Doug's regularly abusive comments to some of his >regulars like Carrol Cox (all over the archives if you search). No, >Duff is as vain and obscene and unfair as it gets--but that's his >right, it is his lameass list and he has a right to be as lameassed as >he wants to be there. Especially with people like Carrol lining up to >indulge him. Ditto the died-in-his-wool (misspelling intended) >something or other Louis Proyect (though if he is a computer expert, >I'm a right wing libertarian with a Ron Paul tattoo on my ass). Being >such egomaniacs is ultimately irresponsible, as the overall importance >of something like the anthrax case relative to events of 2001-3, put >into a bit of historical perspective, now shows. > >Just by way of , I told you so so so: > >http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-March/007635.html > > >>And what will the FBI be allowed to reveal? Is it the lone wolf or small >group at a lab like at Ft. Detrick, or is it more blowback from US military >and intelligence ties with Saudi Arabia (with the UK being the source for >the Ames strain )? I believe the US regime wants us to believe the lone wolf >theory but doesn't want to solve it. And since this would make them look as >incompetent as the idea that Al Qaeda got US anthrax from the Saudi >military, it now wants us to believe OBL spontaneously produced it in >Afghanistan. How very convenient.<< > >http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2002/2002-March/007642.html > > >>Let me chime in here with the theory about the Detrick pathology head. If >the theory that it is the one guy or small group in the US, then the very >nature of the stuff used means it has to be someone able to get it from a >place like Ft. Detrick.<< > >And then the Salon article link: > >http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/index.html > >CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Aug 1 22:20:24 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2008 13:20:24 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Bushwa will getcha like a case of anthrax! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: RD:>>Why would nobody want to hear about the anthrax case in 2002? It seems obviously more substantial a question than the bullshit paranoia about the US govt. blowing up the Twin Towers itself. Obviously, the govt. would open up a real can of worms investigating and publicizing its own germ warfare program. >> Well Ralph, you don't strike me as the most helpful of discussants most of the time either. But note, no where did I say that the online presences that dominate LBO were not interested in the anthrax case. How the hell would I know what they were interested in? A few posts off the list indicated there were some interested, but not really interested in discussing it in a poorly moderated forum, such as LBO Talk. The one on-list response I remember was Chip Berlet taking me to task for citing a news article that had appeared in what he identified as a right-wing newspaper (for me it was simply a source 'lost in syndication). >>What is your grudge against Chip Berlet, for example? << His pretense to be able to tell us what 'fascism' and 'clerical fascism' are and especially his totally unhelpful contributions to any discussions of that term, including the idea that, for example, in order to understand fascism, we have to dwell on the most obscure historic precedents and antecedants that most people know nothing whatsoever about. >>And what qualifies as pseudo-left; how is it distinguished from the genuine left, and does it even make any fucking difference at this point in time?>> Oh it was just a joke. I think you are intellectual enough to deal with it. No, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. >>Perhaps you could point us to an alternative to lame-ass discussions?>> No, but I think you are missing the point. One reason why politicians can use things like anthrax incidents (whether or not they are behind them) to start wars and enrich themselves is the lack of alternatives--in communications and in politics. I would call a real left entity something that had mass membership and at least the potential for developing a path to political power. That doesn't exist in the US and many other countries. Most likely intellectuals would find such a party uninteresting. BTW, it looks like Henwood is interested in the anthrax case now--no anthrax-related traffic on this list til I posted, but some his LBO. That is what I don't love about online lists. Just when you think they won't require any work, you find yourself responding to something from the most unexpected quarter. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Aug 2 08:38:04 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 2 Aug 2008 23:38:04 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Bushwa will getcha like a case of anthrax! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Here by the way is the original story run at ABC to which Greenwald and Salon readers (and bloggers) refer. But first an aside. I'd bet if Atta were ever in Prague, he was more likely meeting with the US-sponsored anti-Saddam plotters who hung out there in droves (for one, their radio propaganda front was grafted on to Radio Free Europe, which was moved there at the end of the Cold War. And if the samples tested at Dietrich contained bentonite, it was because one of the anthrax plotters put them in the samples. Back in 2001-2 I speculated that it wasn't just the criminal act of some right-wing nut job trying to alert the country to the dangers of anthrax and biological weapons (the media picked up on that one and ran with it). Rather I speculated that it had something to do with the people who would make lots of money off federal contracts awarded for things like anthrax vaccines. Well, the major contracts went to a west coast rival of BioPort and DynPort (part of Dyncorp, also known as Pimpcorp), VaxGen (which has that totally fake look of a Darpanet company you might expect), whose efforts at producing an anthrax vaccine were as duff as their anti-AIDS vaccine. Now the bulk of the federal bucks have reverted to the latest, publicly listed version of establishment favorite, BioPort, now known as Emergent BioSolutions (HQd in Rockville, MD). Ivin's patents, which the LA Times is reporting on partially, seem to have gone from VaxGen back to Emergent in the past year. Also, his patents have the names of other researchers at Dietrick on them. Moreover, some of his patents include squalene, which is an oil-based ingredient that many consider dangerous and the possible cause of the reactions to anthrax vaccines given to troops (though the military has denied that squalene is in the one vaccine that they have approved for use with the troops--a vaccine which is ineffective against the Ames strain of anthrax, and, according to research with Ivin's name on it, simply ineffective against most strains of anthrax). Also, some have pointed out that Ivins was by no means actually qualified to be working on vaccines. That's an interesting pattern because even if Hatfill wasn't guilty of anything in the anthrax poisoning, his re'sume' for being assigned work at Dietrick sure looked suspect--I would say it looks mostly fake. Also, it's interesting to note, this is not the first anthrax research suicide with links to Iraq (with links to the US-UK war against Iraq that is) . The first accused/person of interest, who worked at Dietrick and for SAIC (still yet another federal parasite contractor), Hatfill was a weapons inspector sent to Iraq to help trump up charges against Saddam's government. He didn't kill himself, instead he sued the government and media for damages. However, Dr. Kelly, another weapons inspector hatchet man, this time for the British, committed suicide (or so the coroner ruled) after he accidentally spilled the beans to a reporter on Blair's government's lies about WMD in Iraq (remember the portable bioweapons vans that WEREN'T). Interestingly enough, both suicides (Kelly's, Ivin's) are supposed to have been carried out with painkillers, though Kelly was said to have slit one artery in one wrist as well. http://abcnews.go.com/story?id=92270 Troubling Anthrax Additive Found; Atta Met Iraqi Tests Find Laced Anthrax; Atta Met Iraqi W A S H I N G T O N, Oct. 29 A second test of the anthrax-laced letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle points to the presence of a troubling chemical additive, sources tell ABCNEWS. MORE INVESTIGATIVE NEWS: ? Atta Met Iraqi Official in Prague Four well-placed and separate sources told ABCNEWS that initial tests detected bentonite, though the White House initially said the chemical was not found. The first battery of tests, conducted at Ft. Detrick, Md., and elsewhere, discovered the anthrax spores were treated with the substance, which keeps the tiny particles floating in the air by preventing them from sticking together ? making it more likely that they could be inhaled. The inhaled form on anthrax is far more deadly than the skin form. As far as is known, only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons, but officials caution that the presence of the chemical alone does not constitute firm evidence of Iraqi involvement. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer had denied that bentonite was found on the letters, but another senior White House official backed off Fleischer's comments, saying "at this point" there does not appear to be bentonite. The official said the Ft. Detrick findings represented an "opinionated analysis," that three other labs are conducting tests, and that one of those labs had contradicted the bentonite finding. But, the official added, "tests continue." Fleischer added that no test or analysis has concluded that bentonite is present in the Daschle anthrax, and "no other finding contradicts or calls into question" that conclusion. Reading from what he said was a sentence from the report prepared by scientists at Fort Detrick, he told ABCNEWS, "It is interesting to note there is no evidence of aluminum in the sample." Aluminum, Fleischer said, would also be present if bentonite was. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that the anthrax letters were being carefully investigated, but did not confirm or deny the presence of bentonite in the Daschle letter. Trademark Additive While it's possible countries other than Iraq may be using the additive, it is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program. "It means to me that Iraq becomes the prime suspect as the source of the anthrax used in these letters," former U.N. weapons inspector Timothy Trevan told ABCNEWS. In the process of destroying much of Iraq's biological arsenal, U.N. teams first discovered Iraq was using bentonite, which is found in soil around the world, including the United States and Iraq. "That discovery was proof positive of how they were using bentonite to make small particles," former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Spertzel told ABCNEWS. But officials cautioned that even if Iraq or renegade Iraqi scientists prove to be the source, it's a separate issue from who actually sent the anthrax through the mail. "What you have to keep in mind is the difference between knowledge about what type of information you have to have to produce it, and who could have sent it," Fleischer said. "They are totally separate topics that could involve totally separate people. It could be the same person or people. It could be totally different people. The information does not apply to who sent it." Experts say the bentonite discovery doesn't rule out a very well-equipped lab using the Iraqi technique. In fact, commercial spray dryers that Iraq used to produce its biological weapons were bought on the open market from the Danish subsidiary of a U.S. company for about $100,000 a piece. Starting Thursday, FBI agents began asking company officials in Columbia, Md., if anyone suspicious in this country had recently acquired one of them. ? Brian Ross, Christopher Isham, Chris Vlasto and Gary Matsumoto Atta Met Iraqi Spy Raising new questions about whether Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, officials in the Czech Republic now confirm for the first time that a key hijacker met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross said Mohamed Atta, believed by U.S. investigators to be a ringleader of the hijackers, met an Iraqi diplomat shortly before the consul was expelled. Czech intelligence officials were troubled by Al-Ani's photographing of the Radio Free Europe building in the city. "At this point we can confirm," Gross said, "Mohamed Atta made contact with Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani, who was expelled from the Czech Republic for conduct incompatible with his diplomatic status on April 22, 2001." "The details of this contact are under investigation," Gross said. The meeting took place on Atta's second known visit to Prague. A year earlier, on June 2, 2000, he had came to Prague from Germany by bus in the morning hours. The next day, Gross said, Atta left for the United States. Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz had previously denied Al-Ani had any contact with Atta in Prague. In recent weeks, Minister Gross also had said there was no evidence to support Prague media reports citing Czech intelligence officials who said Atta had met Al-Ani. The meeting, along with Iraq's stockpiles of biological weapons, have led some to question whether Atta ? and Hussein ? were not somehow behind the anthrax attacks in the United States. "There are reports that one of the things that may have happened at that meeting was that [Atta] was given by the Iraqi some sample of anthrax," former U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler told ABCNEWS. "We do not know if that is true. I believe it is something that should be investigated." For his part, Gross would not give further details on the Atta meeting. "At this point, neither I nor anyone else from the police or Czech intelligence services will provide any further information concerning this contact and [Atta's] stay and movement on the territory of the Czech Republic until the investigation is finished," he said. This weekend, FBI agents in Florida were conducting anthrax tests on two cars Atta had owned. From Waistline2 at aol.com Sun Aug 3 17:42:12 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2008 19:42:12 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Bushwa will getcha like a case of anthrax! Message-ID: In a message dated 8/1/2008 9:20:43 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, jannuzi at gmail.com writes: >> No, but I think you are missing the point. One reason why politicians can use things like anthrax incidents (whether or not they are behind them) to start wars and enrich themselves is the lack of alternatives--in communications and in politics. I would call a real left entity something that had mass membership and at least the potential for developing a path to political power. That doesn't exist in the US and many other countries. Most likely intellectuals would find such a party uninteresting.<< Comment "A path to power." "A real left entity." As a force of explanation and clarity, I have come to trust nothing in the institutional bourgeois ideological sphere. Allow me to dodge the anthrax discussion, although I recall the cowardly conduct of our Congress, when these distinguished members thought - or were lead to believe, they were under an anthrax attack. This matter of a "path to power" is something that many of us, including yourself and Ralph have thought about and tried to think out for at least a couple of decades if not 40 years. Many of us have approached the matter from some side or form of insurgent Marxism. In the mid 1990's, I began a sober assessment of what I understand to be the course of American history and general world history on the basis of Marx method of inquiry, leaning heavily on how I understood the current qualitative changes underway in the productive forces. This lead to a rejection of the historic Leninist form, as it has been passed down to my generation. This rejection of the Leninist form did not demand the rejection of political Leninism, which can be summarized as the collective actions of insurrectionaries to seize political power and hold onto it. Stated another way, the question of the "path to power" had to be thought out based on American society and the world at the approach of the 21st century. This rejection of the historic Leninist form was not an easy thing for me because the early part of my life - roughly from age 17 - 40, was lived in factory circles organized on the basis of the Leninist concept of party organization (I will be 56 next month). "A path to power." I have thought about this question all of my adult life. My conclusion is that it is time for us to move on and say goodbye to the Leninist form. Political Leninism or the art of insurrection lives, but we must first admit that "art" is a living things composed of all the subjective equations in the minds of the individual and the mass. Art in the sense of insurrection is the study and application of how one understands the context of will in the battle to take political power and implement a program - series of actions, on behalf of a class, knowing full well that concession always have to be granted to preserve a coherent mass base of support that allows one to rule and govern. I believe Ralph and yourself will agree with this proposition. My principled disagreement with comrade Ralph is . . . . nothing. A principled disagreement for instance cannot be based on Ralph assessment of say, a James Baldwin versus my assessment. The same applies to CB and Jim F. I do not know or at this point in time possess a coherent view of the "path to power" of the communist revolution in America, but something different is coming into view. The industrial proletariat as the child of large scale industry, as it arose and evolved against a feudal backdrop and manifested the various boundaries of the industrial revolution or capitalist development, and its alleged leading role as the revolutionary agent of change in the context of wills between bourgeoisie and proletarian, seems to me to be a issue demanding historical summation. Was the physical gravity - weight, and political will of the industrial proletariat sufficient to overthrown the bourgeois property relations in one or any of the more advanced capitalist countries? Was all the revolutionary forces in the more industrial/capitalist countries scoundrels and fools tied to capital and by one way or another comprised with the bourgeoisie and prevented the overthrow of the power of capital? I believe in retrospect that no combination of subjective and objective factors of the social equation would have allowed us to overthrow the power of capital in the advanced capitalist countries for several reasons. Sorry, but I have thought this matter out for the better part of 40 years and cannot tell anyone or write about a concrete path to insurrection - power on behalf of the tolling and oppressed masses in America. And this drives me and everyone else up the wall. Does this not mean that we are in a period of transition? What is "left" today? Something different is evolving on a planetary basis and we have to guess the probable path forward based on trying to abstract the facts. The facts deal with economic logic and insights into on what basis the masses are being improvised and how they think thinks out. The bourgeois intelligentsia and their leaders and spokespersons in government are not smarter than us. Really. The underlying issue is that as long as the bourgeois mode of production was undergoing quantitative expansion of the productive forces, the character of all of our battles, no matter how noble, were geared to and drawn into the gravity to reform the system and created the political basis for the next period of quantitative expansion. Today. we look at a different path to power. Wl **************Looking for a car that's sporty, fun and fits in your budget? Read reviews on AOL Autos. (http://autos.aol.com/cars-BMW-128-2008/expert-review?ncid=aolaut00050000000017 ) From Waistline2 at aol.com Sun Aug 3 17:46:25 2008 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2008 19:46:25 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] State, Local and Private Pensions Message-ID: State, Local and Private Pensions by Michael Hudson _www.counterpunch.com_ (http://www.counterpunch.com) (July 31 2008) The great economic fight of our epoch is being waged by the FIRE sector - Finance, Insurance and Real Estate - against the industrial economy and consumers. Its objective is to maximize property prices and the volume of debt relative to what labor and industry are able to earn. Rising debts and real estate prices go together, because asset prices depend on how much banks will lend. For creditors, the dream is to obtain an ultimate backup at public expense: government insurance that they will not lose when debtors are unable to pay. The political problem is how to get the government to insure and protect bankers rather than debtors, given that debtors are much more numerous when it comes to the voting booth. In such cases campaign contributions are the balancing factor. Governments are "privatized" and "financialized", that is, turned from democracies into oligarchies. The banking system aims to make sure that the only losers are the customers it is supposed to serve: debtors, homeowners and employees of companies being "financialized" as the economy is de-industrialized. Indeed, financialization and de-industrialization are becoming almost synonymous. The trick is to get voters to think they are getting rich while actually they are being painted into a debt corner, along with their employers, local government and the federal government too. For a while the bad-debt overhead can be bailed out by creating yet more debt, backed by public guarantees in what even the Wall Street Journal acknowledges is "socialism for the rich", that is, privatizing the profit and socializing the losses. But when has government been anything else, for thousands of years before anyone coined the term "socialism"? The so-called July 30 "housing bill" supports the price of mortgages that are the major asset base of most banks and other financial institutions today. What ultimately supports the price of these mortgage packages is the price of the real estate pledged as collateral. And despite Mr Greenspan's celebration of soaring housing prices as "wealth creation", it really was debt creation. As housing prices plunge, the debts remain in place. The question is, whose balance sheets are to plunge into negative equity territory - those of indebted homeowners, or those of banks that have made the bad loans and the financial institutions (largely pension funds, I'm sorry to say) that have bought "toxic mortgages"? Financial bubbles in their early phase inflate asset prices more rapidly than debts rise. This helps the financial sector encourage a belief that debt pollution is a quick way to make the economy rich - as long as one looks at financial balance sheets rather than tracing growth in the actual means of production and living standards. Living in the short run, most people do not see the financial war going on, and imagine that finance and industry, labor and capital are fighting for the same kind of economic growth and wealth. The reality is a conflict between financial and industrial growth objectives, subject to the adage that the solution to every problem tends to create yet new, unforeseen problems - ones often are larger in scale, requiring yet new solutions that cause yet larger and even more unforeseen. This is how societies transform themselves for better or for worse, crisis by crisis. Usually each side fights for its economic interests. But it is best not to crow too loudly over victory. The financial bailout is depicted as a housing bill, not as a giveaway to financial interests. And it is best not to acknowledge that the financial system's victory now threatens to push the economy further down the road to insolvency, headed by a squeeze on state and local finances, and pension funding public and private. Problems threaten to arise when creditors win too one-sided a victory. Here's what has happened so far. Early on the morning of July 30, President Bush signed the law that the Senate had passed at a special session the previous Saturday. Its aim was to restore US housing prices to unaffordably high levels, requiring new buyers to run even deeper into debts to obtain housing. Rather than rolling debts back to more affordable levels, the government now will use its own credit to guarantee payment on whatever portion of the unpayable exponential growth in debt cannot be sustained by the economy at large. The new "housing law" (a more honest title would have been the "financial bailout and giveaway act of 2008") authorizes the Treasury and Federal Reserve Board to provide unlimited credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and infuse new lending power to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and localities to support the "real estate market". This is a euphemism for saving mortgage lenders from the traditional response to falling property prices - defaults and walk-aways. The idea is for government loans to replace the bad loans that existing mortgage holders are stuck with, and to do so before property prices sink by another 25 percent. The cover story highlighted in the first line of the press release was that the new act was "intended to provide mortgage relief for 400,000 struggling US homeowners and to stabilize financial markets". The real aim is to help struggling banks and institutional investors, with little likely aid for homeowners. Mortgage defaults and foreclosures were threatening to wipe out the collateral valuations for the loans packaged and sold to US pension funds, other institutional investors and foreign banks - including the $1 trillion in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities to foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds. Piercing the cloud of public relations rhetoric, the actual impact on strapped mortgage debtors is that the increased funding for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA are part of a $1.4 trillion emergency supply of government credit intended to keep housing prices from falling back to more affordable levels. An alternative use of this funding would have been to save individual debtors from foreclosure and re-set their mortgages at more realistic levels. But the constituency of the Treasury and Federal Reserve is Wall Street, not homeowners. This is not a constituency whose interests reflect those of the economy as a whole over the long run. Finance and real estate extract interest and rents from the rest of the economy, shrinking rather than expanding it. This causes property prices to fall. Speculators (who have made up about fifteen percent of the housing market in recent years - one out of every six buyers) stop buying, while an over-supply of foreclosed or abandoned properties come onto the market. Falling prices push debt-leveraged homeowners into negative equity, followed by banks and the hapless buyers of the mortgages they have sold off. During the real estate bubble homeowners, commercial speculators and corporate raiders were able to borrow the interest charges by refinancing their properties at higher and higher appraisals. But banks now are pulling back from mortgage lending, largely because buyers of packaged mortgages find themselves stuck with paper that is a far cry from the security its AAA bond ratings implied. Companies that have insured these mortgages are far undercapitalized to sustain the risks, and themselves are threatened with bankruptcy. So the mortgage packagers and insurers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are being kept in business to "save the real estate market", by which is meant the exponential growth of debt. The parties being bailed out are the large institutions that hold the bad mortgages extended and packaged in recent years, and companies on the hook for having insured the face value of these mortgages. The growth of real estate debt has been achieved by the semi-public Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac providing "liquidity" not just by buying up and packaging mortgages in bulk, but by insuring their income streams. As William Poole, head of the Saint Louis Federal Reserve Bank from 1998 to 2008, points out: "Fannie and Freddie exist to provide guarantees for mortgage-backed securities trading in the market. The business is simply insurance." This insurance against mortgagees defaulting (and ultimately against banks and mortgage brokers making bad loans beyond the home buyer's ability to pay) is what has made their sale so irresponsibly liquid. And matters have reached the point where between two and three million US homeowners are still expected to default this year, leading to foreclosures. Mr Poole adds that the government's assumption of the mortgages underwritten and guaranteed by these two public agencies technically doubles the federal debt, from five to ten trillion dollars. The asset side of the government balance sheet also rises, but there may be a substantial shortfall. Private bondholders and stockholders of Fannie and Freddie also have claims on these assets, so any attempt at real-world accounting becomes thoroughly tangled. A deeper problem is that Fannie and Freddie underwrote and insured a debt increase whose continued exponential growth is unsustainable, because it causes domestic debt deflation. What Mr Greenspan called "wealth creation" - pumping up housing and stock market prices on credit - was actually debt creation. Asset prices are a function of how much banks will lend. If they lend more money on easier and easier terms, property prices will continue to soar. This is why the economy is facing debt deflation. More and more money will be diverted from being spent on consumption and paying taxes, in order to pay creditors. This will shrink the domestic market, squeezing profits, and also will squeeze state and local finances. The government will not solve this problem by providing yet more loans for stronger parties to buy the existing supply of homes otherwise in foreclosure. The dream is to keep housing high-priced to support the mortgage lenders, not for prices to fall so that new buyers do not need to run so heavily into debt to afford housing. Supporting real estate prices thus entails keeping the existing volume of debt on the books, and indeed running up even more debt. This levies an enormous charge on the economy to pay interest and amortization. These payments leave less available to be spent on goods and services or paid in taxes. The economy shrinks, leaving it even less able to carry its debt burden. Many individuals no doubt will default on their credit card debt, auto debt and other debts, but the largest remaining debt consists of pension and health care obligations to the private and public sector work force. This problem has been growing beneath the view of most public media. Private-sector pensions are insured by the federal Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC), which is substantially undercapitalized. A much larger problem is state and local pension programs. not only are underfunded; they have no insurance at all. The expectation was that public-sector pensions would be paid out of rising property tax revenues and capital gains. But taxing property now threatens to cause defaults on mortgage payments. This is the corner into which the economy has painted itself by trying to preserve the exponential growth of mortgage debt. To cap matters, this threatens to push state and local budgets into deficit at a time when their pension and medical insurance payments are soaring. On the expense side of their balance sheet, localities must spend more money to cope with the consequences of empty houses being stripped of building materials, occupied by squatters, burned down and generally becoming a source of blight. On the fiscal income side, states and localities are facing populist political pressure crafted by large real estate interests and promoted with the usual flow of crocodile tears on behalf of retirees and other homeowners whose debt squeeze prompts them to support politicians promising to reduce property taxes. At first glance the connection between bailing out Fannie Mae and, behind it, the real estate market to keep prices high for American homeowners might not seem closely linked to corporate, state and local pension plans. So let us trace the linkage. Bailing out mortgage lenders ultimately must be achieved at the expense of state and local property tax revenues. Revenue that is used to pay interest is not available to pay taxes. If debts are to continue to grow exponentially and extract more carrying charges, this forces a tax shift onto labor and industry. For the past century the financial sector has made steady incursions to take over what used to be the role of government. Today's libertarian anti-tax "free market" rhetoric is simply a cover for the financial sector's replacement of elected democratic government. Forward planning is being distorted to serve the financial sector, not aiming to promote long-term growth and raise living standards, and certainly not to protect the public sector's fiscal position. One of the lesser-known features of this week's real estate bailout is the endorsement of "negative mortgages". These debt agreements add the accrual of interest onto the principal. The cover story is that this enables low-income homeowners to keep their houses with a lower carrying charge, borrowing the interest rather than paying it. But this means that what used to accrue to homeowners or their heirs as a "capital" (land-price) gain henceforth will accrue to the mortgage lender. For over a century, the main way that most American families have become rich has been by the free lunch of exponentially rising land prices. What is to rise exponentially in years to come is now their debt overhead. It is the financial sector that will get the free lunch of land-price gains. Adding the interest charge onto the principal is how Ponzi schemes work. They cannot work for long, because no real economy can keep up with "the magic of compound interest". The Bush-Paulson bailout plan calls for mortgages to become larger and larger, regardless of whether property prices keep pace. The interest is to accrue to the federal government as mortgagee at first, but this innovation is really a test run. It is the path of least resistance for private banks to start making mortgage loans that give them a return in the form of "capital" gains as well as interest. These gains consist of the inflation of land prices in cases where state, local and federal government fails to capture this gain for the economy at large. So the scheme obliged the public sector to turn elsewhere than property for its revenues - namely, to consumers and industry. Who is not going to get paid: bankers and bondholders, or pensioners? From farmelantj at juno.com Sun Aug 3 18:25:54 2008 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2008 20:25:54 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89 (NY Times) Message-ID: <20080803.202555.188.0.farmelantj@juno.com> www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/books/04solzhenitsyn.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin August 4, 2008 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89 By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of fiction and history written in the 20th century, died late Sunday in Russia, his son Yermolai said early Monday in Moscow. He said the cause was a heart condition. He was 89. He outlived by nearly 17 years the state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile. Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with ?A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.? The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly, he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekov. Over the next four decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyn?s fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like ?The First Circle? and ?The Cancer Ward? and historical works like ?The Gulag Archipelago.? ?Gulag? was a monumental account and analysis of the Soviet labor camp system, a chain of prisons that by Mr. Solzhenitsyn?s calculation some 60 million people had entered during the 20th century. The book led to his expulsion from his native land. George F. Kennan, the American diplomat, described it as ?the greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be leveled in modern times.? Mr. Solzhenitsyn was heir to a morally focused and often prophetic Russian literary tradition, and he looked the part. With his stern visage, lofty brow and full, Old Testament beard, he recalled Tolstoy while suggesting a modern-day Jeremiah, denouncing the evils of the Kremlin and later the mores of the West. In almost half a century, more than 30 million of his books have been sold worldwide and translated into some 40 languages. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Mr. Solzhenitsyn owed his initial success to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev?s decision to allow ?Ivan Denisovich? to be published in a popular journal. Khrushchev believed its publication would advance the liberal line he had promoted since his secret speech in 1956 on the crimes of Stalin. Soon after the story appeared, however, Khrushchev was replaced by hard-liners, and they began a campaign to silence its author. They stopped publication of his new works, denounced him as ?a hooligan? and ?a traitor,? confiscated his manuscripts, and interrogated his friends. But their iron grip could not contain Mr. Solzhenitsyn?s reach. By then his works were appearing outside the Soviet Union, in many languages, and he was being compared not only to Russia?s literary giants but also to Stalin?s literary victims, writers like Anna Akhmatova, Iosip Mandleshtam and Boris Pasternak. At home, the Kremlin stepped up its campaign by expelling Mr. Solzhenitsyn from the Writer?s Union. He fought back. He succeeded in having microfilms of his banned manuscripts smuggled out of the Soviet Union. He addressed petitions to government organs, wrote open letters, rallied support among friends and artists, and corresponded with people abroad. They turned his struggles into one of the most celebrated cases of the cold war period. Hundreds of well-known intellectuals signed petitions against his silencing; the names of left-leaning figures like Jean-Paul Sartre carried particular weight with Moscow. Other supporters included Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, W.H. Auden, Gunther Grass, Heinrich Boll, Yukio Mishima, Carlos Fuentes and, from the United States, Arthur Miller, John Updike, Truman Capote and Kurt Vonnegut. All joined a call for an international cultural boycott of the Soviet Union. By the late 1960s, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had become one of the most prominent and recognizable symbols of Soviet and Communist repression. That position was confirmed when he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in the face of Moscow?s protests. The Nobel jurists cited him for ?the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.? Mr. Solzhenitsyn dared not travel to Stockholm to accept the prize for fear that the Soviet authorities would prevent him from returning. But his acceptance address was circulated widely. He recalled a time when ?in the midst of exhausting prison camp relocations, marching in a column of prisoners in the gloom of bitterly cold evenings, with strings of camp lights glimmering through the darkness, we would often feel rising in our breast what we would have wanted to shout out to the whole world ? if only the whole world could have heard us.? He wrote that while an ordinary brave man was obliged ?not to participate in lies,? artists had greater responsibilities. ?It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and shall always triumph! Visibly, irrefutably for all! Lies can prevail against much in this world, but never against art.? He quoted a Russian proverb: ?One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.? By this time, Mr. Solzhenitsyn had completed his own huge attempt at truthfulness, ?The Gulag Archipelago.? In more than 300,000 words, he told the history of the Gulag prison camps, whose operations and rationale and even existence were subjects long considered taboo. Publishers in Paris and New York had secretly received the manuscript on microfilm. But wanting the book to appear first in the Soviet Union, Mr. Solzhenitsyn asked them to put off publishing it. Then, in September 1973, he changed his mind. He had learned that the Soviet spy agency, the KGB, had unearthed a buried copy of the book after interrogating his typist, Elizaveta Voronyanskaya, and that she had died soon afterward in an apparent suicide by hanging. He went on the offensive. With his approval, the book was speedily published in Paris, in Russian, just after Christmas. The Soviet government counterattacked with a spate of articles, including one in Pravda, the state-run newspaper, headlined ?The Path of a Traitor.? He and his family were followed, openly, and he received death threats by mail and telephone. On Feb. 12, 1974, he was arrested. The next day, he was notified that by decree of Soviet leaders he was being deprived of his citizenship and deported. On his arrest, he had been careful to take with him a threadbare cap and a shabby sheepskin coat that he had saved from his years in exile. He wore them both as he was marched onto an Aeroflot flight to Frankfurt. It was the most notorious forced expulsion from the Soviet Union since Leon Trotsky was deported in 1929. Mr. Solzhenitsyn was welcomed by the German novelist Heinrich B?ll. Six weeks after his expulsion, Mr. Solzhenitsyn was joined by his wife, Natalia Svetlova, and three sons. She had played a critical role in organizing his notes and transmitting his manuscripts. After a short stay in Switzerland, the family moved to the United States, settling in the hamlet of Cavendish, Vt. The setting, bristling with birch trees, reminded him of Russia. There he kept mostly to himself, for some 18 years, working as ascetically as ever, protected from sightseers by neighbors, who posted a sign saying, ?No Directions to the Solzhenitsyns.? He kept writing and thinking a great deal about Russia and hardly at all about his new environment, so certain was he that he would return to his homeland one day. But when Americans did catch a glimpse of him, he appeared to them as a querulous figure with a patriarch?s beard and a critical scowl. His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its ?hasty? capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country?s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of aggressive violations of privacy. Many in the West didn?t know what to make of the man. He was perceived as an undeniably great writer and hero who had been willing to stand up to the leadership of a totalitarian state. Yet he seemed willing to stand up and lash out at everyone else as well ? democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union and visited Mr. Solzhenitsyn in Vermont, wrote in 2001: ?In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been.? In the 1970s, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned President Gerald R. Ford to avoid seeing Mr. Solzhenitsyn. ?Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents,? Mr. Kissinger wrote in a memo. ?Not only would a meeting with the president offend the Soviets, but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn?s views of the United States and its allies.? Mr. Ford followed the advice. The writer Susan Sontag recalled a conversation about Mr. Solzhenitsyn between her and Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet who had followed Mr. Solzhenitsyn into forced exile and who would also become a Nobel laureate. ?We were laughing and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn?s views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were deeply wrong, and on and on,? she said. ?And then Joseph said: ?But you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really, all those numbers ? 60 million victims ? it?s all true.? ? Mr. Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia on May 27, 1994, first landing in the Siberian northeast, in Magadan, the former heart of the Gulag. On arrival, he bent down to touch the soil in memory of the victims. He flew on to Vladivastok, where he and his family began a two-month journey by private railroad car across Russia, to see what his post-Communist country now looked like. The BBC was on hand to film the entire passage and pay for it. On the first of 17 stops, his judgment was already clear. His homeland, he said, was ?tortured, stunned, altered beyond recognition.? As he traveled on, encountering hearty crowds, signing books and meeting dignitaries as well as ordinary people, his gloom deepened. And after settling into a new home on the edge of Moscow, he began to voice his pessimism, deploring the crime, corruption, collapsing services, faltering democracy and what he felt to be the spiritual decline of Russia. In Vermont, he had never warmed to Mikhail Gorbachev and his reform policies known as perestroika. He thought they were the last-ditch tactics of a leader defending a system that Mr. Solzhenitsyn had long known to be doomed. For a while he was impressed by Boris Yeltsin, Russia?s first freely elected leader, but then turned against him. Mr. Yeltsin, he said, had failed to defend the interests of ethnic Russians, who had become vulnerable foreign minorities in the newly independent countries that had so suddenly been sheared off from the Soviet Union. Later, he criticized the rise of Vladimir V. Putin as antidemocratic. Russians initially greeted Mr. Solzhenitsyn with high hopes. On the eve of his return, a poll in St. Petersburg showed him to be the favorite choice for president. But he soon made it clear that he had no wish to take on a political role in influencing Russian society, and his reception soon turned tepid. Few Russians were reading ?The Red Wheel.? The books were said to be too long for young readers. Nationalists, who had once hoped for his blessing, were alienated by his rejection. Democratic reformers, who wanted his backing, were offended by his aloofness and criticism of them. Old Communists reviled him as they always had. In October 1994, Mr. Solzhenitsyn addressed Russia?s Parliament. His complaints and condemnations had not abated. ?This is not a democracy, but an oligarchy,? he declared. ?Rule by the few.? He spoke for an hour, and when he finished, there was only a smattering of applause. Mr. Solzhenitsyn started appearing on television twice a week as the host of a 15-minute show called ?A Meeting With Solzhenitsyn.? Most times he veered into condemnatory monologues that left his less outspoken guests with little to do but look on. Alessandra Stanley, writing about the program for The Times, said Mr. Solzhenitsyn came across ?as a combination of Charlie Rose and Moses.? After receiving poor ratings, the program was canceled a year after it was launched. As the century turned, Mr. Solzhenitsyn continued to write. In one book, he confronted the relationship of Russians and Jews, a subject that some critics had long contended he had ignored or belittled in his fiction. A few accused him of anti-Semitism. Irving Howe, the literary critic, did not go that far but maintained that in ?August 1914,? Mr. Solzhenitsyn was dismissive of Jewish concerns and gave insufficient weight to pogroms and other persecution of the Jews. Others noted that none of the prisoners in ?Ivan Denisovich? was definitively identified as a Jew, and the one whose Jewish identity was subtly hinted at was the one who had the most privileges and was protected from the greatest rigors. Mr. Remnick of The New Yorker defended Mr. Solzhenitsyn, saying he, ?in fact, is not anti-Semitic; his books are not anti-Semitic, and he is not, in his personal relations, anti-Jewish; Natalia?s mother is Jewish, and not a few of his friends are, too.? Mr. Remnick visited him in 2001 after Mr. Solzhenitsyn?s book ?Two Hundred Years Together, a history of Russian Jewish Relations,? appeared to little critical notice and indifferent sales. He wrote that Mr. Solzhenitsyn had also written a prose poem called ?Growing Old.? He quoted the writer as having told him, ?I?m not working with the old speed. In the evening I feel tired and go to bed fairly early. In the morning, I feel strong, but this strength doesn?t last as long as it used to.? Anne Barnard contributed reporting from Moscow, and Ellen Barry from New York. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company ____________________________________________________________ Play it loud with a new car stereo! Click here! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3n6nDOisrC41CvgHBKKWp6G3lcY38mV3v1ulXh5tzqCE7HFH/ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 07:14:51 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:14:51 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Royalty Message-ID: <48981A0E.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> The King of Thailand's Birthplace Go to page Thai His Majesty King Bhumipol Adulyadej of Thailand was born on December 5, 1927 at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His Royal Highness Prince Mahidol of Songkla carrying His Majesty the King, photographed in Massachusetts, U.S.A. in 1928. The Memory: The Exibition to Commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of His Royal Highness Prince Mahidol of Songkla at the Atrium, The Havard Medical School 200 Longwood Avenue, in Boston - Cambridge, Massashusetts On November 12-14, 1992, 10.00 A.M. - 05.30 P.M. The Royal Father of His Majesty the King His Royal Highness Prince Mahidol of Songkla Thailand His Royal Highness Prince Mahidol of Songkla, the Royal Father of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, was born on January 1, 1892 to Their Majesties King Chulalongkorn (King Rama V) and Queen Savang Vadhana of Thailand. The Prince was an alumnus of Harvard School of Public Health, and Harvard Medical School, as well as member of the Alpha Omega Alpha. His wife: Her Royal Highness Somdej Phra Sri Nakarindra Boromrajajonnani (Princess Mother of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej ofThailand) was an alumna of Simmons College. (His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej himself was born at Mount Auburn Hospital in the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts.) The significance of Prince Mahidol of Songkla's life lies not only in his contribution to medical education and public health in Thailand, but in his example to all mankind of selflessness and dedication to the welfare of human beings. In 1992 Thailand commemorated the 100th anniversary of his birth. The honour and deep regard in which the Thai people hold this "Father of Thai Medicine" should not remain isolated to one country, for His Royal Highness was dedicated to life Itself, affording all men equal dignity and the right to health and happiness. Sacrificing his own health, finances, and privileged position, to upholding his strong belief in the right of all men to medical care, he dedicated himself to his countrymen primarily because it was they who were in greatest need. Never one to seek publicity, but always mindful of the dignity of those with whom he came into contact, it is doubtful that, were he alive today, he would see himself in so noble a light. For His Royal Highness, to serve his King and humanity was reward enough, and in this he amply succeeded. The commemorative Event in 1992 was an invitation to the world to come to know the man, an eminent educator, scientist and humanist, who would dutifully serve without asking for anything in return. Her Royal Highness the Princess Mother Her Royal Highness Somdej Phra Sri Nakarindra Baromraj Chonni Their Majesties the King and Queen to host state dinner banquet to Royal guests BANGKOK, June 13 (TNA) -- Their Majesties King Bhumibol Adulyadej and Queen Sirikit, together with all other members of the Royal Thai Family, will Tuesday evening host a state dinner banquet for world royalty who are visiting the Thai kingdom to join state and Royal ceremonies marking the auspicious occasion of the 60th anniversary of His Majesty the King's accession to the throne this year. The honorary dinner banquet for the visiting Monarchs and Royal representatives from 25 countries across the world will be held at Chakri Maha Prasat Throne Hall within the Grand Palace here. The menu of the Royal banquet, prepared by the chef of the world's famous and luxurious Oriental Hotel here, is selected by Her Majesty the Queen herself with about half of materials coming from Royal-initiated projects, according to Thailand's TV pool. His Majesty the King will deliver a Royal speech, expressing his gratefulness to all the world royalty who came to join the nationwide Diamond Jubilee celebrations in honour of him. His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Muizzaddin Waddaulah of Brunei Darussalam, who is the most senior Monarch among the visiting Royal guests, will represent the gathering in giving a Royal speech offering felicitations to His Majesty the King, who is now Thailand and the world's longest-reigning monarch. Although Thailand's grand celebrations of His Majesty the King's accession to the throne is being organized throughout this year, the highlights are on June 12 and 13 when state and Royal ceremonies are held marking the auspicious occasion and members of the world royalty were invited to join. According to the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the world royalty joining the kingdom's Diamond Jubilee celebrations include 13 Monarches and 12 Royal representatives as the following: * His Majesty Preach Bat Samdech Preah Baromneath Norodom Sihamoni of Cambodia * His Highness Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani of Qatar * His Highness Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah of Kuwait * His Majesty King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein of Jordan * His Majesty Emperor Akihito of Japan * His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Muizzaddin Waddaulah of Brunei Darussalam * His Majesty Tuanku Syed Sirajuddin Ibni Al-Marhum Tuanku Syed Putra Jamalullail, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong XII of Malaysia * His Serene Highness Prince Albert II of Monaco * His Royal Highness Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg * His Majesty King Letsie III of Lesotho * His Majesty King Mswati of Swaziland * His Majesty King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden * His Serene Highness Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein * His Royal Highness Prince Henrik, the Prince Consort of Denmark * His Royal Highness Crown Prince Tupouto?a of Tonga * His Royal Highness Crown Prince Haakon of Norway * His Royal Highness Prince Willem-Alexander, the Prince of Orange of The Netherlands * His Highness Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman al Khalifa of Bahrain * His Royal Highness Crown Prince Philippe of Belgium * His Royal Highness Crown Prince Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck of Bhutan * Her Royal Highness Princess Lalla Salma Bennani of Morocco * Her Majesty Queen Sofia of Spain * His Highness Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates * His Royal Highness the Duke of York of the United Kingdom * His Highness Sayyid Shihab bin Tariq Taimour Al Said of Oman Before the state dinner banquet, the world royalty are scheduled to separately pay their private visits to significant places in Bangkok and surrounding provinces. (TNA)--E002 >> ?? VDO Clip ??????????????????? << Updated : 13 June 2006 Other News This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 10:37:19 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:37:19 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?utf-8?q?Obama_vows_to_be_=E2=80=98champion_of_?= =?utf-8?q?working_people=E2=80=99?= Message-ID: <48984983.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.uft.org/news/champion_working_people/ Obama vows to be ?champion of working people? Aug 4, 2008 4:05 PM Speaking to hundreds of union leaders and activists on a July 31 conference call, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama vowed to be ?a champion of working people.? Specifically, Obama said, that means signing the Employee Free Choice Act, making sure the U.S. Department of Labor actually looks out for working people, and returning the National Labor Relations Board to a body that?s not stacked against workers trying to organize unions. ?We need a strong labor movement in this country,? he said. In introducing Obama, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said the Illinois senator ?has a deep understanding of the problems faced by working families in our country.? Sweeney was part of an economic roundtable discussion ? featuring a diverse collection of economists and other experts ? that Obama recently held. Obama outlined a number of issues where his approach to the economy will be ?fundamentally different? from that of President Bush and Republican candidate John McCain. These include negotiating trade agreements that are fair to workers, ending tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, creating 5 million new ?green? jobs that can?t be outsourced as well as 2 million additional jobs focused on rebuilding the country?s infrastructure, and improving healthcare coverage and retirement security. His days as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama said, showed him the importance of working with unions to get things done in the community. And in the current presidential campaign, he continued, unions will play a central role in communicating to their members about issues and candidates. ?When the labor movement decides to endorse a candidate and really work it, I know what a difference it can make,? he said, adding that he knows the home visits, phone calls and literature workers receive from the unions are the most important communications they receive during a campaign. ?If I have your help, we?re going to win in November.? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From dhenwood at panix.com Tue Aug 5 10:40:07 2008 From: dhenwood at panix.com (Doug Henwood) Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2008 12:40:07 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?windows-1252?q?Obama_vows_to_be_=91champion_of?= =?windows-1252?q?_working_people=92?= In-Reply-To: <48984983.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48984983.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <29C7CD4B-9033-4536-B5A5-8DD51BD8B415@panix.com> On Aug 5, 2008, at 12:37 PM, Charles Brown wrote: > http://www.uft.org/news/champion_working_people/ > Obama vows to be ?champion of working people? > Aug 4, 2008 4:05 PM How funny to see a press release from a deeply anti-Communist union on a Marxism list. Doug From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 11:35:33 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:35:33 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama: I'd guarantee $4 billion to retool auto industry Message-ID: <48985728.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Obama: I'd guarantee $4 billion to retool auto industry A safety net for automakers picks up steam BY CHRIS CHRISTOFF ? FREE PRESS LANSING BUREAU CHIEF ? August 5, 2008 LANSING -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama put the energy debate into high gear Monday with a forceful pitch to wean the United States from foreign oil and help auto companies produce fuel-efficient vehicles, while he labeled Republican opponent John McCain a cozy friend of oil company profits. With Michigan emerging as a true battleground state -- and McCain gaining support with his call for more offshore drilling -- Obama pledged direct financial support for Michigan's bedrock auto industry and urged changes in the way the country creates and consumes energy. He called for $4 billion in guaranteed loans and tax credits to help U.S. automakers retool for more fuel-efficient cars and to develop batteries for plug-in hybrids that get up to 150 m.p.g. The new breed of automobiles would fetch a $7,000 federal tax credit for buyers. He predicted that 1 million plug-in hybrids -- such as the Chevrolet Volt set to debut in 2010 -- would be produced within six years. In March, Morgan Stanley estimated that U.S. plug-in hybrid sales would not top 1 million annually before 2020. Obama said the auto industry would benefit from his $150-billion, 10-year plan to develop alternative energy sources, including fuel cells to power vehicles. "I know how much the auto industry and the autoworkers of this state have struggled over the last decade or so," Obama told about 1,000 supporters at the Lansing Center who sang him "Happy Birthday" on his 47th. "But I also know where I want the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow to be built -- not in Japan, not in China, but right here in the United States of America. Right here in the state of Michigan." Obama also called again for an immediate $1,000 "energy rebate" to U.S. families, paid for with higher taxes on oil company profits. Obama's speech offered little new, repackaging his ideas to seize the offensive on the energy issue, which has become dominant in the face of $4-a-gallon gas and dismal domestic auto sales. McCain is scheduled to tour DTE Energy's Fermi II nuclear power plant near Monroe today to show his support for the development of nuclear energy. Obama labeled McCain a political captive of oil companies and said he has done nothing during his 26 years in Congress to reduce U.S. oil dependency. Obama said oil company executives donated $1 million to McCain's campaign this year, and that McCain supports $4 billion in tax breaks for those companies. McCain's campaign rebutted Obama's attack, saying Obama's campaign has taken nearly $400,000 from oil company employees and executives, and that McCain's tax cut would apply to all corporations, not just oil companies. David Newbury, 39, of Lansing, who attended Obama's event Monday, said he supports higher taxes on oil companies. "It seems like the oil companies are price-fixing to avoid national competition, and they shouldn't," he said. "We should tax them a little bit." But John Lee, 40, of DeWitt, who hadn't made up his mind in the presidential race, opposes a windfall oil profits tax because he said it makes scapegoats out of large companies and will not solve the nation's energy issues. McCain strongly supports expanded offshore drilling in the United States and more nuclear power plants. That has gained him more voter support, according to recent polls. On Monday, McCain supporters handed out free tire pressure gauges to the Obama crowd at the Lansing Center, mocking Obama's comments that Americans can reduce gas consumption by keeping their car tires properly inflated. Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis said Obama's insistence on higher mandated fuel mileage standards would cost the auto industry more jobs. "That shows how out of touch he is with Michigan voters," Anuzis told reporters. "He's pandering to San Francisco liberals and environmentalists who would just as soon we not have cars." Anuzis said that whereas Obama opposes offshore drilling and nuclear power, McCain offers a balanced approach that includes growth of all energy sources. U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a regular critic of higher mandated fuel standards, was at Monday's event and defended Obama, saying demand for high-mileage cars is driving up fuel efficiency without government intervention. "The market will spur the drive to more fuel-efficient cars," said Levin, who called Obama's speech inspired. Obama appeared Monday to reject offshore drilling, which he said would not produce more oil for another seven years. In the past week, he appeared to soften his no-drill stance in return for a more aggressive strategy to develop alternative energy. He said oil companies should first drill in the 68 million U.S. acres they lease but have not yet developed. He also proposed selling 70 million barrels of oil from the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve, which he said could cut oil prices quickly but for a short period. Obama promised to convert 10% of U.S. energy use to renewable sources by the end of his first term as president, and cited Michigan State University's research into wind power and solar cells. He said the country should use 15% less electricity within 10 years. To achieve those goals will require sacrifice by U.S. consumers, Obama said, but eventually his changes would save the equivalent of all the oil the U.S. now imports from the Middle East and Venezuela. Obama said energy needs, global warming and the need to keep U.S. auto manufacturing have converged to create the most pressing issue facing the nation. He compared his call for revamping the way we consume energy to the United States retooling its manufacturing economy for World War II and the U.S. effort to land a man on the moon. "This is the opportunity we must seize, and it may be our last opportunity to seize it," he said. Contact CHRIS CHRISTOFF at 517-372-8660 or christoff at freepress.com. Staff writer Justin Hyde contributed to this report. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 11:45:16 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:45:16 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] McCain Rapid Action in Michigan Message-ID: <48985970.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> n solidarity jim ____________________________________ From: miaflcio at miaflcio.org Reply-to: notice-reply-87igkk3ra7j8newe at unionvoice.org To: Sent: 8/4/2008 3:54:03 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time Subj: CORRECTION McCain Rapid Action in Michigan Greetings, CORRECTION ! Earlier today you should have received an email asking you to join your labor brothers and sisters tomorrow for a rapid action protest of John McCain's visit to the Fermi II Nuclear Plant. Unfortunately, there was some incorrect information relating to the time and location contained in the email. Below is the correct information WHEN: Tuesday August 5th, 2008 WHERE: Fermi II Nuclear Plant 6400 N. Dixie Hwy., Newport, MI TIME: We are asking members to begin gathering at the Fermi II Nuclear Plant at 11:00 AM. John McCain is scheduled to visit between 12:00 PM and 3:00 PM so lets make sure we are there in force in time for him to see us as he arrives. WHO: If you have any questions please feel free to contact Brent Gillette at 517.487.5966 ____________________________________ Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this. _Tell-a-friend!_ (http://www.unionvoice.org/join-forward.html?domain=miaflcio&r=QdxKY94qaj-J) If you received this message from a friend, you can _sign up for Michigan State AFL-CIO E-Activist Network_ (http://www.unionvoice.org/miaflcio/join.html?r=QdxKY94qaj-JE) . This message was sent to pitairis at aol.com. Visit your _subscription management page_ (http://www.unionvoice.org/miaflcio/smp.tcl?nkey=87igkk3ra7j8newe&) to modify your email communication preferences or update your personal profile. To stop ALL email from Michigan State AFL-CIO E-Activist Network, click to _remove_ (http://www.unionvoice.org/miaflcio/remove-domain-direct.tcl?ctx=center&nkey=87igkk3ra7j8newe&) yourself from our lists (or reply via email with "remove or unsubscribe" in the subject line). (http://www.unionvoice.org/) This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 12:24:40 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:24:40 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Discussion of recent solar storage discovery Message-ID: <489862AB.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> [Marxism] "Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution II Les Schaffer schaffer at optonline.net Fri Aug 1 13:56:44 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism] "Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution II Next message: [Marxism] "Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution II Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- David Walters, et al.: for what its worth, i am currently consulting on a concentrating solar power system (CSP) design ... but CSP simply delivers high temperature steam to run a turbine to produce electricity to do XXXX. How CSP would relate to this new electrolysis is unclear, no? you claim the breakthrough is in storage. but storage is only needed if you want to make some fraction of electric users fully dependent on solar. otherwise its simply another source of power. and if you store, you have to reconvert and transmit later, and we know our transmission infrastructure is creaky. now a global transmission system, powering the shadow while while the other side sunbathes, that would be something, eh? but lets grant this breakthrough storage scheme and see what kind of area is needed so that solar could fill the tank, so to speak. how many square meters of sunny area would be needed, in the US for example, to power itself, assuming you *could store* and re-transmit through the remaining say 16 hours of dawn, dusk, and night? well, whats our latest power usage, averaged over 24 hours? from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_United_States i get about 1,000,000 MW for the electric production rate in 2006. (nameplate capacity) so, lets say we can collect solar energy at 100% efficiency over a third of the day and store for the other two thirds of the day. then we need 3,000,000 MW of instantaneous production. 3,000,000 MW / (1.4 kW / m^2) = 3,000,000 / .0014 (m^2) = 2,142,857,143 (m^2) = 825 sq miles (= 530,000 acres) this sets the *scale* for solar-electric production without revolution in the way we live. that is 825 square miles of the earth's brightest surface blanketed with solar collectors, connected to electrolysis or energy storage of your choice and re-transmitted now or later. interesting number. not quite as fearsome as i first guessed, but plenty big... everything 100% efficient, nothing but the best for us .... ;-) you can play with the numbers. you want to promise us some clean/safe nuclear, take some fraction of 824. want to keep burning coal but at a reduced rate? reduce it some more. and so forth. want to reduce electric consumption by half? want to leave the others forms of production and just eliminate coal-fired, thats 400 sq miles then. you think we can collect for 12 hours of the day in New Mexico?: 500 sq miles. etc etc etc ... for the quibblers amongst us: when i say that 825 sq miles sets the scale for solar-electric production, it means its an order of magnitude estimate. if the wikipedia #s are wrong or misleading, the point is to set the gross scale at which one would need area for solar power collection at the 1.4 kW/m^2 intensity. if you come up with 325 sq miles or 1600 sq miles, its only incidental. andy pollack: did this answer your question, or do we need more details on collectors and efficiencies and all that? can someone like the railroad man make an estimate of the cost (materials, labor, environmental) to produce say 100 square miles of x% efficient collectors? by the ways: 1. someone pointed out on a blog that the water usage for this new conversion scheme would be large. 2. the wikipedia #s give us (potential) electric production as of two years ago, not total energy use. 3. that wikipedia article above states there is about 400 MW of solar electric generation in the US in 2006. i don't know if that is daily average or what. but that requires about 0.1 sq miles of existing collector surface area. so we have at least three orders of magnitude to go. 4. Rhode Island has 1545 sq miles. so half of Rhode Island. to sum up, storage of solar energy is a piece of the puzzle, but only a piece, and not the most important piece. to keep things as they are (consumption-wise), supply must equal demand. in power this is true. storage is a detail. so the MIT claim is hype, though the prof has come up with an interesting and potentially useful technology. Les This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 12:28:15 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:28:15 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School Message-ID: <48986382.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> [Marxism] Studying philosophy at the New School Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com Fri Aug 1 14:15:29 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism] Paul Le Blanc on the Trotsky Legacy conference Next message: [Marxism] Studying philosophy at the New School Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A couple of items that I stumbled across on the net lately have gotten me thinking about time spent as a graduate student in the philosophy department of the New School back in 1965 to 1967. The first was an article titled ?Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines?? that appeared in the July 25th Chronicle of Higher Education (unfortunately limited to subscribers or some university employees like myself). Written by UCLA professor and long-time semi-Marxist social commentator Russell Jacoby, it called attention to the disappearance of Freud, Marx and Hegel from academia: "How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past." I was fortunate to study at the New School from 1965-1967 long before this trend set in. But I am afraid that Jacoby is not that well tuned in to the philosophy scene on campus if he thought that Hegel was ever some hot commodity for the sad fact is that philosophy departments have been Hegel-free (and Descarte-free, etc.) for an entire generation except as examples of how not to ?do? philosophy. The so-called Continental philosophy that traces its lineage back to Descartes is for the most part not practiced nowadays. And if it is taught, it is taught as a part of true philosophy?s prehistory. This school, descended from Logical Positivism, has also been described as linguistic analysis. Much of its effort was directed at debunking the classic ?problems? of Continental philosophy in the style of A.J. Ayer, one of the leading figures who focused on the ?verification principle?, which means that a proposition can only be true if it can stand up to empirical testing. As such, all philosophy that derives from Descartes cannot be ?verified?. Parenthetically, I must admit a certain admiration for Ayer based on a wiki article that reveals among other things that he put in a stint at Bard College in 1987, my alma mater. That year, he had a run-in with boxer Mike Tyson that ended well apparently: "At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing the (then little-known) model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: 'Do you know who the fuck I am? I?m the heavyweight champion of the world,' to which Ayer replied: 'And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.' Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out." full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/studying-philosophy-at-the-new-school/ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 12:45:41 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:45:41 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fidel Castro on Czechoslovakia in 1968: Message-ID: <48986798.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Fidel Castro on Czechoslovakia in 1968: (Excerpts from two speeches by Fidel Castro on August 23rd and 24th 1968, attacking the "counter-revolutionary" anti-Stalinist movement in Czechoslovakia and supporting the USSR's invasion. ) August 23, 1968 Fidel Castro Ruz Right here, I wish to make the first important affirmation: we considered that Czechoslovakia was moving toward a counter-revolutionary situation. Toward capitalism and into the arms of imperialism. So this defines our first position in relation to the specific fact of the action taken by a group of socialist countries. That is, we consider that it was absolutely necessary, at all cost, in one way or another, to prevent this eventuality from taking place. ... Discussion of the form is not, in the final analysis, the most fundamental factor. The essential point to be accepted, or not accepted, is whether or not the socialist camp could allow a political situation to develop which would lead to the breaking away of a socialist country, to its falling into the arms of imperialism. And our point of view is that it is not permissible and that the socialist camp has a right to prevent this in one way or another. I would like to begin by making it clear that we look upon this fact as an essential one. ... A real liberal fury was unleashed; a whole series of political slogans in favor of the formation of opposition parties began to develop, in favor of open anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist theses, such as the thesis that the Party should cease to play the role which the Party plays within socialist society and begin to play the role there of a guide, supervising some things but, above all, exerting a sort of spiritual leadership. In short, that the reins of power should cease to be in the hands of the Communist Party. The revision of certain fundamental postulates to the effect that a socialist regime is a transition regime from socialism to communism, a governmental form known as the dictatorship of the proletariat. This means a government where power is wielded in behalf of one class and against the former exploiting classes by virtue of which in a revolutionary process political rights, the right to carry on political activities -- whose objective is precisely to struggle against the essence and the raison d'etre of socialism - cannot be granted to the former exploiters. A series of slogans began to be put forward and in fact certain measures were taken such as the establishment of the bourgeois "freedom" of the press. This means that the counter-revolution and the exploiters, the very enemies of socialism, were granted the right to speak and write freely against socialism. As a matter of fact, a process of seizure of the principal information media by the reactionary elements began to develop. As regards foreign policy, a whole series of slogans of open rapprochement toward capitalist concepts and theses and of rapprochement towards the West appeared... On many occasions the imperialists have publicly stated what their policy is in relation to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. And in Congress, in the press, they always talk about encouraging the liberal tendencies and even about promoting, of making available, some selective economic aid and of using every means of contributing to creating an opposition to socialism there. The imperialists are carrying out a campaign, not only in Czechoslovakia, but in all the countries of Eastern Europe, even in the Soviet Union. Opinion on Intervention August 24, 1968 Fidel Castro Ruz I wish to quickly make the first important statement that we considered Czechoslovakia to be heading toward a counterrevolutionary situation, toward capitalism and into the arms of imperialism. This is the operative concept in our first position toward the specific fact of the action taken by a group of socialist countries. That is, we consider that it was unavoidable to prevent this from happening - at any cost, in one way or another. Of course, let us not become impatient, because we propose to analyze this in line with our ideas. Discussing the form is not really the most fundamental thing. The essential thing, whether we accept it or not, is whether the socialist bloc could permit the development of a political situation which lead to the breakdown of a socialist country and its fall into the arms of imperialism. From our viewpoint, it is not permissible and the socialist bloc has the right to prevent it in one way or another. We first wish to begin by establishing what our opinion is about this essential matter. Now, it is not enough to explain simply that Czechoslovakia was heading toward a counterevolutionary situation and that it had to be stopped. It is not enough to conclude simply that the only alternative was to prevent it and nothing more. We must analyze the causes and determine the factors which made possible and necessary such a dramatic, drastic, and painful remedy. What are the factors which required a step unquestionably involving a violation of legal principles and of international standards, which have often served as shields for peoples against injustices and are so highly regarded in the world? What is not appropriate here is to say that the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak state was not violated. That would be fiction and a lie. The violation was flagrant, and on this we are going to talk about the effect on sovereignty, and on legal and political principles. From the legal viewpoint, it cannot be justified. This is quite clear. In our judgment, the decision on Czechoslovakia can be explained only from the political viewpoint and not from a legal viewpoint. Frankly, it has absolutely no legality. What are the circumstances that have permitted a remedy of this nature, a remedy which places in a difficult situation the entire world revolutionary movement, a remedy which constitutes a really traumatic situation for an entire people - as is the present case in Czechoslovakia - a remedy which implies that an entire nation has to pass through the most unpleasant circumstances of seeing the country occupied by armies of other countries, although they are armies of the socialist countries. A situation in which millions of beings of a country have to see themselves today in the tragic circumstance of electing and choosing either to be passive toward these circumstances and this event--which so much brings to mind previous episodes - or to struggle in comradeship with pro-Yankee agents and spies, the enemies of socialism, the agents of West Germany, and all that fascist and reactionary rabble that in the heat of these circumstances will try to present itself as champions of the sovereignty, patriotism, and freedom of Czechoslovakia? Logically, for the Czechoslovak people this experience and this fact constitute a better and tragic situation. Therefore, it is not enough simply to conclude that it has arisen as an inexorable necessity and even, if you wish, as an unquestionable obligation of the socialist countries to prevent such events from happening. [One must inquire] what are the cases, the factors, and the circumstances that brought forth - after 20 years of communism in Czechoslovakia - a group of persons whose names do not even appear anywhere, and this petition directed to other countries of the socialist camp, asking them to send their armies to prevent the triumph of the counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia and the triumph of the intrigues and conspiracies of the imperialist countries interested in breaking Czechoslovakia from the community of socialist countries? Could it be imagined, gentlemen, that at the end of 20 years of communism in our country - of communist revolution, of socialist revolution--that under any circumstances it could happen that a group of honest revolutionaries in this country, terrified at the prospects of an advance or, better said, of a retrogression toward counterrevolutionary positions and imperialism, would see the need of asking the aid of friendly armies to prevent such a situation from occurring? What would have remained of the communist consciousness of this people? What would have remained of the revolutionary consciousness of this people, of the dignity of this people, of the revolutionary morale of this people? What would have remained of all those things that mean for us essentially the revolution if such circumstances should one day arise? But no circumstances of that kind will ever occur in our country. First, because we believe that it is a duty and fundamental responsibility of those who direct a revolution to prevent deformations of such a nature that might make possible such circumstances. Secondly, gentlemen, for an unquestionably practical reason and not only a moral elemental reason, because we could ask if it would be worth the trouble if, after 20 years, to survive a revolution one had to resort to such procedures. And also, for a very simple practical reason: who would false personalities of this country ask to send armies? The only armies that we have in our vicinity are the Yankee army and the armies of the puppets allied with the Yankee imperialists, the because we are too alone in this part of the world for there ever to exist the most remote possibility of saving this revolution by asking aid of allied armies. And it must be said that I do not know anyone capable of having enough shame to do such a thing if they had the need and opportunity to do it, because what kind of communists would we be and what kind of communist revolution would this be if at the end of 20 years we found ourselves having to do such a thing to save it? Always, when we have thought about foreign aid, we have never had the idea of foreign aid to fight against the imperialist soldiers and against the imperialist armies. I simply analyze these facts because I know that, legally, our people are concerned with an explanation of these concepts. Such things are not in our idea of the revolution. I do not think that a person can justify the appeal of high-ranking persons, because the justification can only be the political fact in itself - that Czechoslovakia was marching toward a counterrevolutionary situation and this was seriously affecting the entire socialist community. And besides, there is no lack of figleaves of any kind. It is the political fact in itself, with all its consequences and all its importance. As we were saying, recognizing that and nothing else is simply enough. Or if it is obligatory, it is elementary to draw from this most bitter experience all the political conclusions. And as it is possible, we repeat: In these circumstances, an analysis must be made of all the factors. For the communist movement, there is the unavoidable duty of investigating deeply the causes leading to such a situation, a situation inconceivable for us, the Cuban revolutionaries. If such action is impossible for us Cuban revolutionaries - we who saw the necessity for carrying out this revolution 90 miles from imperialism - we also know that we cannot fall into these circumstances because it would mean the very end of the revolution and falling into the worst situation, provoked by our enemies, full of hatred. But this is not the reason for making or trying to make this profound analysis. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Tue Aug 5 12:49:39 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:49:39 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fidel Castro on Czechoslovakia in 1968: In-Reply-To: <48986798.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48986798.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: And this is the greatest indictment of Castro possible. You'll swallow anything, won't you Charles? The USSR, China, Obama . . . You're more talented than Linda Lovelace. At 02:45 PM 8/5/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >Fidel Castro on Czechoslovakia in 1968: > >(Excerpts from two speeches by Fidel Castro on August 23rd and 24th >1968, attacking the "counter-revolutionary" anti-Stalinist movement in >Czechoslovakia and supporting the USSR's invasion. ) From billyoc at gmail.com Tue Aug 5 12:52:35 2008 From: billyoc at gmail.com (Bill O'Connor) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:52:35 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?utf-8?q?Obama_vows_to_be_=E2=80=98champion_of_?= =?utf-8?q?working_people=E2=80=99?= In-Reply-To: <29C7CD4B-9033-4536-B5A5-8DD51BD8B415@panix.com> (Doug Henwood's message of "Tue, 5 Aug 2008 12:40:07 -0400") References: <48984983.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <29C7CD4B-9033-4536-B5A5-8DD51BD8B415@panix.com> Message-ID: <87zlnr9tvw.fsf@t22.Belkin> Doug Henwood writes: > On Aug 5, 2008, at 12:37 PM, Charles Brown wrote: > >> http://www.uft.org/news/champion_working_people/ >> Obama vows to be ?champion of working people? >> Aug 4, 2008 4:05 PM > > How funny to see a press release from a deeply anti-Communist union on > a Marxism list. That *is* funny. I never wanted much to do with the AFL-CIO beyond paying my own union dues until, 50 years after expelling them, they resolved to allow communists again in '05. I wonder how many unions have embraced anything like Marxism since '05. From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 13:05:08 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:05:08 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?utf-8?q?Obama_vows_to_be_=E2=80=98champion_of_?= =?utf-8?q?working_people=E2=80=99?= In-Reply-To: <29C7CD4B-9033-4536-B5A5-8DD51BD8B415@panix.com> References: <48984983.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <29C7CD4B-9033-4536-B5A5-8DD51BD8B415@panix.com> Message-ID: <48986C27.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> How funny to see a press release from a deeply anti-Communist union on a Marxism list. Doug ^^^ CB: Yes, it's hilarious. Maybe you don't have the stomach for this revolution stuff. Life is just so unfair for Commies. Marxists have continued to work in AFL-CIO unions despite the treachery of the Reutherites, 'cause real commies got to get with the working class where ever they are at by all means necessary. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 13:11:34 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:11:34 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fidel Castro on Czechoslovakia in 1968: In-Reply-To: References: <48986798.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48986DAA.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> >>> Ralph Dumain And this is the greatest indictment of Castro possible. You'll swallow anything, won't you Charles? The USSR, China, Obama . . . You're more talented than Linda Lovelace. ^^^ CB: I'm smart enough not to swallow imperialist lies about Czechoslovakia 1968. You don't believe the anti-Soviet slanders do you , Ralph ? I didn't know you was such a sucker. At 02:45 PM 8/5/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >Fidel Castro on Czechoslovakia in 1968: > >(Excerpts from two speeches by Fidel Castro on August 23rd and 24th >1968, attacking the "counter-revolutionary" anti-Stalinist movement in >Czechoslovakia and supporting the USSR's invasion. ) _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 13:29:22 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:29:22 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Solar discovery (more) Message-ID: <489871D6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution II Paddy Apling e.c.apling at btinternet.com Fri Aug 1 16:30:18 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism] "Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution II Next message: [Marxism] "Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution II Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Walters" To: Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 4:42 PM Subject: Re: [Marxism] "Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution II > Les, the issue of 'storage' is *as important* as production of power. > Literally 50% of the issues...the problems we have today. David is absolutely right there Les - electricity is the main power usage for everything apart from transport. which for the immediate future is necessarily oil-based. But electricity is required on demand 24/7. It is the problem of electricity storage which really stymies all the ideas of "renewable" or "alternative" energy sources. Wind power - only available when the wind is blowing within a range of sttrenths. Solar power - only available during daylight hours Tidal energy - not available for periods at high and low tide. etc etc Consequently ALL these alternative sources are of necessity backed up by traditional power sources (based on either coal, gas, oil, or nuclear) - and because demand is to a certin extent unpredictable the backup has to be sufficient to cope with demand when the "alternative" sources are unavailable, which to all intents and purposes means that the alternative sources in practice replace very little of the necessary available power supply. If only a reliable (and efficient) source of electricity store was available then power based on "renewable" energy would be a really viable alternative - as it is we cannot do without coal, oil or nuclear.... Paddy http://apling.freeservers.com This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 13:38:15 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:38:15 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Solar energy discussion Message-ID: <489873EA.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> > demand 24/7. It is > the problem of electricity storage which really stymies all > the ideas of > "renewable" or "alternative" energy > sources. > > Wind power - only available when the wind is blowing within > a range of > sttrenths. > Solar power - only available during daylight hours > Tidal energy - not available for periods at high and low > tide. etc etc > I think there are some obvious flaws to this argument. For example, solar concentrators are a simple way to accumulate heat. Scale it up enough, and you can have a heat store in the form of molten salt, for example, that can power steam turbines for producing electricity day or night. Electricity produced by photovoltaics or wind turbines can be used to run compressors to store energy in compressed air, e.g. in abandoned mines. Again, you have 24/7 electricity on demand. There are some losses, but this is hardly impractical. There's even the possibility of excess heat from solar thermal being used for thermal depolymerization, in which garbage, farm waste, sewage, etc. is transformed into water, hydrogen, methane and oil. This is less immediately practical than simple storage through heat or air compression, but has obvious long-term potential. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 5 13:45:04 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:45:04 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Solar discussion Message-ID: <48987584.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> I tried to find more info on the web about this, and the best I could come across was the video at . Cutting through the enormous amount of hype, it seems that what these MIT scientists may have done is come up with a better, more efficient way to use electrolysis to produce hydrogen from water.* They have not, apparently, come up with any improvement in the generation of electricity for this process and they certainly haven't found a way to imitate photosynthesis, which would make it possible to produce carbohydrates, and thus fuels like ethanol, directly from sunlight without having to generate electricity. What they have actually done, despite the hype, may be a step in making solar power and hydrogen fuel cells more practical, but it's not, apparently, a leap. - Aaron * (The inevitable production of oxygen at the same time is of little significance, since the hydrogen can be re-combined with the oxygen in the atmosphere to produce almost as much energy as is produced by combining it with pure oxygen. Unless the hydrogen is going to be used at the same location where it is generated, the oxygen produced by the process will be released into the atmosphere and certainly not shipped along with the hydrogen!) >Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:10:41 -0400 >From: Les Schaffer >Subject: Re: [Marxism] "Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar > Revolution > >Dbachmozart at aol.com wrote: >> "Major Discovery" From MIT Primed to Unleash Solar Revolution >> > >god, i love MIT ... > >the galaxy-shaking discovery is related to *storage* of energy. you >still have to collect that energy at the energy densities available here >on our earth... > >makes nice newsprint though... > >Les This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Tue Aug 5 14:39:01 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2008 13:39:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: <48986382.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <440844.72445.qm@web50411.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Jacoby is really out of touch here. "Linguistic analysis" is at least a generation dead. We are at least two generations from the last of the LPs; I had the honor of being taught briefly by Carl Hempel, one of the last of and greatest of the lot. Hegel is off the untouchables list, at least since Charles Taylor's big book, itself a generation old now, although you wouldn't do Hegelian philosophy using Hegel's jargon. I have a huge shelf of recent Hegel scholarship, much done by people at mainstream institutions, that I cannot keep up with. Decartes is certainly not out and has ever been in my recollection. When I was at Tigertown on the mid 70s Margaret Wilson was teaching Descartes to crowded classrooms and Bernard Williams had just published. Marx of course enjoyed a renaissance at the prestige schools under the Analytical Marxists in 1975-1995 until they collapsed, along with the rest of Marxism, with the fall of Communism. History and scholarship was and probably is somewhat disfavored as a general rule over "original" work in metaphysics, normative ethics, philosophy of mind, and other areas that ther logical positivists thought they'd put an end to, and continental history and scholarship, but even that is changing, I think, as the originality of original work is in sharp and visible decline and logical positivism a d analytical philosophy themselves become subjects for history of philosophy, and are being treated historically by philosophers who formerly did "original" work. --- On Tue, 8/5/08, Charles Brown wrote: > From: Charles Brown > Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Date: Tuesday, August 5, 2008, 1:28 PM > [Marxism] Studying philosophy at the New School > Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com > Fri Aug 1 14:15:29 MDT 2008 > > Previous message: [Marxism] Paul Le Blanc on the Trotsky > Legacy conference > Next message: [Marxism] Studying philosophy at the New > School > Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ > author ] > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > A couple of items that I stumbled across on the net lately > have gotten > me thinking about time spent as a graduate student in the > philosophy > department of the New School back in 1965 to 1967. > > The first was an article titled ?Why are some of the > greatest thinkers > being expelled from their disciplines?? that appeared in > the July 25th > Chronicle of Higher Education (unfortunately limited to > subscribers or > some university employees like myself). Written by UCLA > professor and > long-time semi-Marxist social commentator Russell Jacoby, > it called > attention to the disappearance of Freud, Marx and Hegel > from academia: > > "How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology > departments, Marx is > not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in > philosophy? > Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in > fields far from > their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature > departments, Marx in > film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, > or have they > been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and > Hegel have > turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a > scientistic > ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they > simply progress by > sloughing off the past." > > I was fortunate to study at the New School from 1965-1967 > long before > this trend set in. But I am afraid that Jacoby is not that > well tuned in > to the philosophy scene on campus if he thought that Hegel > was ever some > hot commodity for the sad fact is that philosophy > departments have been > Hegel-free (and Descarte-free, etc.) for an entire > generation except as > examples of how not to ?do? philosophy. The so-called > Continental > philosophy that traces its lineage back to Descartes is for > the most > part not practiced nowadays. And if it is taught, it is > taught as a part > of true philosophy?s prehistory. This school, descended > from Logical > Positivism, has also been described as linguistic analysis. > Much of its > effort was directed at debunking the classic ?problems? > of Continental > philosophy in the style of A.J. Ayer, one of the leading > figures who > focused on the ?verification principle?, which means > that a proposition > can only be true if it can stand up to empirical testing. > As such, all > philosophy that derives from Descartes cannot be > ?verified?. > > Parenthetically, I must admit a certain admiration for Ayer > based on a > wiki article that reveals among other things that he put in > a stint at > Bard College in 1987, my alma mater. That year, he had a > run-in with > boxer Mike Tyson that ended well apparently: > > "At a party that same year held by fashion designer > Fernando Sanchez, > Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing the (then > little-known) > model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, > the boxer > said: 'Do you know who the fuck I am? I?m the > heavyweight champion of > the world,' to which Ayer replied: 'And I am the > former Wykeham > Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I > suggest that > we talk about this like rational men.' Ayer and Tyson > then began to > talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out." > > full: > http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/08/01/studying-philosophy-at-the-new-school/ > > > > > > > > > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl > plc. www.surfcontrol.com > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 6 14:27:57 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:27:57 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] From Feral Scholar Message-ID: <4899D10D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/07/31/switching-the-formulae-hiding-stagflation/#comments Lisa: Shifting China?s Export towards the Domestic Market By Henry C. K. Liu Part I: Breaking Free from Dollar Hegemony This article appeared in AToL on July 29, 2008 The vast expansion of US-led globalized trade since the Cold War ended in 1991 had been fueled by unsustainable serial debt bubbles built on dollar hegemony, which came into existence on a global scale with the emergence of deregulated global financial markets that made cross-border flow of funds routine since the 1990s. Dollar hegemony is a geopolitically-constructed peculiarity through which critical commodities, the most notable being oil, are denominated in fiat dollars, not backed by gold or other species since President Nixon took the dollar off gold in 1971. The recycling of petro-dollars into other dollar assets is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance for the oil-exporting cartel since 1973. After that, everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil, and every economy needs oil. Dollar hegemony separates the trade value of every currency from direct connection to the productivity of the issuing economy to link it directly to the size of dollar reserves held by the issuing central bank. Dollar hegemony enables the US to own indirectly but essentially the entire global economy by requiring its wealth to be denominated in fiat dollars that the US can print at will with little monetary penalties. World trade is now a game in which the US produces fiat dollars of uncertain exchange value and zero intrinsic value, and the rest of the world produces goods and services that fiat dollars can buy at ?market prices? quoted in dollars. Such market prices are no longer based on mark-ups over production costs set by socio-economic conditions in the producing countries. They are kept artificially low to compensate for the effect of overcapacity in the global economy created by a combination of overinvestment and weak demand due to low wages in every economy. Such low market prices in turn push further down already low wages to further cut cost in an unending race to the bottom. The higher the production volume above market demand, the lower the unit market price of a product must go in order to increase sales volume to keep revenue from falling. Lower market prices require lower production costs which in turn push wages lower. Lower wages in turn further reduces demand. To prevent loss of revenue from falling prices, producers must produce at still higher volume, thus lowering still market prices and wages in a downward spiral. Export economies are forced to compete for market share in the global market by lowering both domestic wages and the exchange rate of their currencies. Lower exchange rates push up the market price of commodities which must be compensated by even lower wages. The adverse effects of dollar hegemony on wages apply not only to the emerging export economies, but also to the importing US economy. Workers all over the world are oppressed victims of dollar hegemony which turns the labor theory of value up-side-down.. Full article: http://henryckliu.com/page165.html 2 August 2008, 4:34 pm Franklin: Lisa, I printed W. F. Engdahl?s article yesterday and made copies, distributing them to friends without computers. Highlighting the various stores and companies closing and or going bankrupt is, I think, an effective way of showing how bad the situation really is. But getting back to Michael Hudson, he is one smart economics professor who explains things clearly and without pompous terminology. It seems like the ruling class has a grand plan to turn the world back into a feudal state. More and more are joining the military for a steady paycheck with benefits and will justify carrying out the orders of the Bush Crime Family. And todays headlines read, The US blames China and India for the failed WTO meeting. We have no real leadership in Congress, and it is overdue for an overhaul. Professor Hudson was Dennis Kucinich?s economic adviser, but was marginalized by the corporate MSM. His own party hasn?t been nice to him either. Everything Michael Hudson writes or speaks about is worth reading and hearing. 3 August 2008, 5:32 pm Lisa: Inflation and the New World Order by Richard C. Cook ?So again, who exactly are these ?wealthy people, or funds, or other entities? that may be manipulating the market of the world?s most important substance? Surely government regulators must know. Aren?t they able to trace market activity to the players involved? The answer, Johnson said, is no, they can?t: ?The situation now is that the CFTC is sitting there looking at one screen, one piece of the picture, which is whatever is happening on the exchanges. Meanwhile, an increasing volume in dollars is taking place in the form of over-the-counter activity where no one can see it? there is still a blind spot with respect to the true over-the-counter activity that is going on, which represents billions and billions of dollars.? This trading in what the industry calls ?dark pools? amounts to a third of all commodities activity, easily enough for the manipulators to remain hidden. It takes place outside the regular commodities exchanges, where trading activity is relatively transparent. And it applies not only to trading in petroleum futures but also food crops and other vital commodities. And who is it that has allowed this secret trading to take place? Johnson: ?In 2000 Congress decided that there were certain kinds of high-end investors that were big enough and smart enough that they shouldn?t be constrained to do all their business on the exchanges.? Full article: http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/08/03/inflation-and-the-new-world-order-by-richard-c-cook/ 3 August 2008, 8:36 pm Lisa: MORTGAGE MARKET MUSINGS: BUYING THE COUNTRY FOR NO MONEY DOWN, Catherine Austin Fitts Friday, 25 July 2008 Tracking the mortgage mafia? ORIGINAL BLOGPOST Sometimes, it helps to step back and see the big picture. Let?s say that I serve as the depository for a large government and I also own the central bank. I get my partners appointed to run the government?s treasury and key funds on a regular basis so I can also control financial system policies and regulation that help me finance what I want to do and mess up my competitors. Even that is getting cumbersome so I am arranging to move most of the regulatory control over to my central bank because I can control all of it privately. Frustrated with having to deal with democratic processes, I decide to move a significant amount of money out of the government between 1997 and 2001 for reinvestment abroad. I and my partners and our syndicates engineer a serious of steps to bubble the economy so that when I move the money out the currency is high and because everyone was making money they did not notice that lots of capital was leaving. To ensure no one notices, I suppress the gold price which turns off the financial burglar alarm and shifts gold out of the government into my private control at below market prices. Full article: http://www.solari.com/blog/?p=1232 3 August 2008, 9:03 pm Lisa: Banking: Going Local How to Find and Evaluate a Local Bank http://www.solari.com/archive/bank_locally/find_local_banks/ 3 August 2008, 9:14 pm Lisa: US Blackmailed By China? Bloomberg is reporting Fannie?s Mudd Soothed Asian Investors as Bonds Rose. Concerns about the financial health of the biggest U.S. mortgage finance company had driven Fannie Mae?s borrowing costs to the highest since March the previous week and its shares had tumbled 45 percent on the New York Stock Exchange. Investors in Asia, the biggest foreign owners of Fannie Mae?s $3 trillion of bonds, were asking the Treasury to bolster the government- sponsored company and its smaller competitor, Freddie Mac, said three people with knowledge of the talks? The next afternoon, before financial markets opened Monday in Asia, Paulson announced the rescue plan, saying he would seek authority to buy unlimited equity stakes in the companies and their bonds if needed, while the Federal Reserve would lend directly to Fannie and Freddie? Asian investors were among the most important groups to soothe because central banks, financial institutions and funds in the region own $800 billion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?s $5.2 trillion in debt, according to data compiled by the Treasury? Karl Denninger wrote a scathing attack of Paulson?s maneuver in Now We Know - There WAS A Threat. My thoughts on the so-called ?confidence building measures? of this scheme follow? Fannie Mae Chief Executive Officer Daniel Mudd called Paulson?s move a ?confidence building measure?. Mudd cannot possibly be further from the truth. Full article: http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/ 5 August 2008, 12:25 pm This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 6 14:31:49 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:31:49 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Column by Grace Lee Boggs Message-ID: <4899D1F5.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> The Worst and Best of Times By Grace Lee Boggs Special to The Michigan Citizen https://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=77&twindow=Default&mad=No&sdetail=6343&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com My first column with this title appeared in the December 31-January 6, 2007 issue of the Citizen. We were living in the worst of times, I wrote, because of the Iraq war, the planetary emergency, the growing gulf between rich and poor, corporate takeover of the media, and a president who was acting like a king and losing all connection with reality. But it was also the best of times, I said, because Americans were beginning to create new forms of community-based economic institutions that are less vulnerable to globalization, like coops and ESOPs (employee stock ownership enterprises). Local and state governments were assuming the responsibility, abdicated by the federal government, to reduce global warming. The urban gardening movement was growing by leaps and bounds. Also, in the 1999 ?Battle of Seattle,? tens of thousands of individuals and groups, representing very diverse sections of society, had closed down the WTO. Since then hundreds of thousands of individuals and groups from around the world had gathered at World Social Forums to proclaim that ?Another World is possible.? In the process of convening these global demonstrations and gatherings and in these local initiatives, I said, a new form of Democracy was being created which was much more participatory, cooperative, consensual, more rooted in community and more horizontal than the representative democracies that were struggled for and achieved within 19th and 20th century nation-states. What I wrote then was all very general and seemed remote, except for the urban gardening movement, that was 19 months ago. Now, the worst has gotten much worse and like high gas prices, this much worse is very close to home. Now, it is floods in Midwest states like Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin. Now, it is the U.S. economy melting down. Car sales are plummeting. Factories are closing, layoffs are increasing. Chrysler has stopped leasing. GM has unilaterally eliminated health insurance for its salaried retirees. On Wall Street there?s talk of GM, the symbol of this country?s industrial might, going bankrupt. The value of the U.S. dollar has sunk so low that foreign companies are buying up American ones (like Anheuser-Busch) at bargain prices. Every time we spend our hard-earned pay or dwindling savings to buy something, we?re using money we borrowed from China to buy goods that we should be producing here at home. All across the country, on block after block, homes sit empty, boarded up, stripped bare. Modest neighborhoods like Ohio?s Slivac Village , where low-income Americans took pride in their little detached houses, now resemble Detroit after decades of de-industrialization. Their former owners, if they?re lucky, are being put up by relatives. But millions have ended up in homeless shelters, fathers in one, mothers in another and the children going to school only episodically. What should we be doing? Should we rely upon the government to rescue us when we know very well that it is mainly concerned about lenders like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who are so big that they cannot be allowed to fail. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the new housing bill will help only 260,000 renegotiate mortgages and hang on to their homes. That is only five percent of the 2.5 million to 3 million expecting foreclosure in 2008 and 2009. The other 95% are out of luck. Or can we begin to rely more on ourselves and on one another? Why can?t more of us grow our own food? Why can?t we come together in community centers (e.g. schools or churches) to create ways and means, like skill banks, to exchange goods and services? Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. When will we begin considering basic, fundamental changes? Maybe the time has come for us to stop pursuing the old American Dream of each family achieving home ownership and a higher standard of living on its own and start creating a new American Dream of communities in which we depend more on each other. That could turn the worst of times into the best of times. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 6 15:10:48 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:10:48 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School Message-ID: <4899DB18.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/about-louis-proyect/ Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant MarxistAugust 1, 2008 Studying philosophy at the New School Filed under: Academia, philosophy - louisproyect @ 8:12 pm Hans Jonas Aron Gurwitsch A couple of items that I stumbled across on the net lately have gotten me thinking about time spent as a graduate student in the philosophy department of the New School back in 1965 to 1967. The first was an article titled ?Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines?? that appeared in the July 25th Chronicle of Higher Education. Written by UCLA professor and long-time semi-Marxist social commentator Russell Jacoby, it called attention to the disappearance of Freud, Marx and Hegel from academia: How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy? Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by sloughing off the past. I was fortunate to study at the New School long before this trend set in. But I am afraid that Jacoby is not that attuned to the philosophy scene on campus if he thought that Hegel was ever some hot commodity for the sad fact is that academia has been Hegel-free (and Descarte-free, etc.) for an entire generation except as examples of how not to ?do? philosophy. The so-called Continental philosophy that traces its lineage back to Descartes is for the most part not practiced nowadays. And if it is taught, it is taught as a part of true philosophy?s prehistory. This school, descended from Logical Positivism, has also been described as linguistic analysis. Much of its effort was directed at debunking the classic ?problems? of Continental philosophy in the style of A.J. Ayer, one of the leading figures who focused on the ?verification principle?, which means that a proposition can only be true if it can stand up to empirical testing. As such, all philosophy that derives from Descartes cannot be ?verified?. Parenthetically, I must admit a certain admiration for Ayer based on a wiki article that reveals among other things that he put in a stint at Bard College in 1987, my alma mater. That year, he had a run-in with boxer Mike Tyson that ended well apparently: At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing the (then little-known) model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: ?Do you know who the fuck I am? I?m the heavyweight champion of the world,? to which Ayer replied: ?And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.? Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out. Now in my 63rd year, I am old enough to have been educated by a couple of philosophers whose propositions might not have stood up to the ?verification principle?. Even though I came to reject the kind of philosophical idealism whose traditions they identified with (although from the standpoint of historical materialism rather than logical positivism), I remain grateful for the opportunity to have studied with them. As prototypical German-Jewish intellectuals of the type that found refuge at the New School (at one time called the University in Exile), they were a cut above the kind of sterile linguistic ?debunking? that succeeded them in philosophy departments around the U.S. The first of these was Aron Gurwitsch (1901-1973), who has been honored in a website that I happened upon the other week. http://www.gurwitsch.net/. When I was at the New School, Gurwitsch was one of the two most important figures (Hans Jonas was the other, who I will speak about momentarily.) His claim to fame was being one of the leading exponents of Edmund Husserl?s phenomenology in the U.S. Husserl was a major influence on German and French existentialism, although Gurwitsch seemed to have no connection or interest in what people like Heidegger, Merlau-Ponty and Sartre were up to. Mainly, Gurwitsch saw the ?theory of intentionality? as a kind of silver bullet that could resolve some of the outstanding problems of Continental philosophy going back to Descartes. These problems fundamentally revolved around the dualism incorporated in Descartes famous dictum: ?I think, therefore I am.? In a survey of European philosophy that had well over 100 registered students in attendance and which consisted solely of a 90 minute lecture by Gurwitsch given entirely without notes and that only permitted questions from students after he was finished, he demonstrated how the mind-body contradiction implicit in Descartes dictum invited responses that were never satisfactory, often veering off in the kind of solipsism found in George Berkeley who taking Descartes?s ideas to their logical conclusion questioned whether we could ever perceive reality directly since the mind (cogito) always a mediator that both acted on our behalf and got in the way. In reference to Berkeley?s philosophy, Dr. Samuel Johnson once kicked a heavy stone and exclaimed, ?I refute it thus!? Although Husserl?s writings are terribly complex, Gurwitsch had the knack of making them quite understandable. Basically, phenomenology sidesteps the whole Cartesian conundrum and treats consciousness as a first-person singular act worthy of study but not really applicable to the kinds of epistemological exercises found in Berkeley, Spinoza, Hume et al. Basically, the focus is shifted toward experience in the world rather than beyond it. As such, it is obvious why it would have an influence on existentialism. For Gurwitsch, however, the real affinity was with Gestalt psychology. Having already mastered physics, math and philosophy, he began a study of Piaget?s writings in order to build a bridge between Husserl?s theories and the new field in psychology that approached consciousness ?holistically?. Although I never really kept up with my philosophy studies after receiving a MA in 1967 and embarking on an unpaid career in Marxist politics, I was reminded of how powerful a tool phenomenology can be in the right hands after reviewing Simone de Beauvoir?s ?The Coming of Age? for Swans earlier this year. I marveled at her ability to weave together so many disparate strands in trying to explain the problems of aging in the ancient and modern worlds, especially in her treatment of some notable figures such as Leon Trotsky: Even if the body does send us signals, they are ambiguous. There is a temptation to confuse some curable disease with irreversible old age. Trotsky lived only for working and fighting, and he dreaded growing old: he was filled with anxiety when he remembered Turgenev?s remark, one that Lenin often quoted - ?Do you know the worst of all vices? It is being over fifty-five.? And in 1933, when he was exactly fifty-five himself, he wrote a letter to his wife, complaining of tiredness, lack of sleep, a failing memory; it seemed to him that his strength was going, and it worried him. ?Can this be age that has come for good, or is it no more than a temporary, though sudden, decline that I shall recover from? We shall see.? Sadly he called the past to mind: ?I have a painful longing for your old photograph, the picture that shows us both when we were so young.? He did get better and he took up all his activities again. The biographical sketch at http://www.gurwitsch.net/ was a real eye-opener. I knew practically nothing about my professor except that he was an expert on Husserl. It turns out that his original training was as a mathematician and physicist, studying under Max Planck in the University of Berlin. Long after he had made his mark in philosophy, Gurwitsch remained fluent in the sciences so much so that he was able to teach Physics at Harvard University during WWII and Mathematics at Brandeis University afterwards. I also found out about how Gurwitsch ended up at the New School: The last dozen years of teaching at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City have been the happiest. Originally the University in Exile and a haven for emigr? scholars, some of whom remained while; others went on to other schools, this institution has been unique. Its original faculty and orientation stemmed from pre-Nazi Europe. Alfred Schutz joined the Graduate Faculty in 1943 and became professor of philosophy and sociology .He had the idea of making the philosophy department a center for phenomenology . Dorion Cairns had been added to the department by 1956, and plans were well advanced to add a chair in 1960 for Gurwitsch. Then Schutz died suddenly, and Gurwitsch was called to replace him as professor of philosophy. I was not that surprised to discover that according Gurwitsch once expressed ?concern to a colleague that politicized students might destroy the university.? If somebody like Theodor Adorno would express similar worries, we could hardly expect Gurwitsch to be more understanding. Although I admired Gurwitsch, I found him a remote and intimidating figure. He could always be found in the New School cafeteria before class surrounded by sycophantic graduate students in tweed jackets. These were the same students who often put tape recorders in front of his lectern. With the bank of microphones and his German accent, he came across like Henry Kissinger at a press conference. Hans Jonas (1903-1993) was a horse of another color. Also a student of Husserl, as well as part of a circle that included Paul Tillich, Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blucher with whom I studied at Bard College, Jonas tried to apply phenomenology to the problems of life and ethics. Although I had no particular interest in studying philosophy except as a way to maintain a student deferment during the Vietnam War. The closest I came to feeling the kind of passion that I felt studying literature or Greek fertility cults at Bard College or Marxism later on with veterans of the 1930s labor movement came with a seminar on Kant with Jonas. I wrote a paper on Kant?s ethics that tried to integrate it with his epistemology-all operating on the basis of subjectivity-that received an A. Grades never meant very much to me but I felt very flattered to get that kind of recognition. Jonas invited all his students up to a Sunday afternoon tea at his house in New Rochelle one Sunday. He took me aside that afternoon and strongly encouraged me to continue with my studies. Six months later I was in the SWP and ready to put philosophy behind me. At the time, I tried to explain my intellectual evolution as consistent with the upward march of homo sapiens. I began as a religion major at Bard, in keeping with mankind?s superstitious origins. Then I progressed to philosophy at the New School, operating on the basis of Pure Reason. And finally I became a Trotskyist, fully cognizant that it was only by abolishing class society that human freedom-including my own-could be realized. Years later, I discovered that our paths had crossed once again. After leaving the Trotskyist movement and seeking to re-invent myself as a non-dogmatic Marxist, I found myself strongly attracted to the burgeoning environmental movement. So had Hans Jonas, on his own phenomenological basis. He had written a book titled ?The Imperative of Responsibility? in 1979 (the year after I had dropped out of the SWP) that made a deep impact on the Green movement in Germany. He wrote in the preface to the English edition: Modern technology, informed by an ever deeper penetration of nature and propelled by the forces of market and politics, has enhanced human power beyond anything known or even dreamt of before. It is a power over matter, over life on earth, and over man himself; and it keeps growing at an accelerated pace. Care for the future of mankind is the overruling duty of collective human action in the age of a technical civilization that has become ?almighty?, if not in its productive then at least in its destructive potential. This care must obviously include care for the future of all nature on this planet as a necessary condition of man?s own. ? We live in an apocalyptic situation, that is, under the threat of a universal catastrophe if we let things take their present course. ? The danger derives from the excessive dimensions of the scientific-technological-industrial civilization. ? The danger of disaster through scientific technology arises not so much from any shortcomings of its performance as from the magnitude of its success. This success is in the main of two kinds: economic and biological. Jonas?s deep ecology came as a complete surprise to me. Although I rejected the semi-Heideggerian philosophical basis for both his book and much of the movement, I respect any initiative taken to defend flora and fauna. Both Gurwitsch and Jonas remain important influences on my intellectual make-up even though it is obvious that we were worlds apart philosophically. Returning to the issue raised by Russell Jacoby, I find myself agreeing with him completely even though I am not on record as being a devotee of Sigmund Freud to put it mildly: Culture is not like an automobile that should be junked when old and decrepit. I don?t see how we can be educated - or consider ourselves educators - if we consign to the dustbin, say, Freud?s exchange with Einstein on war, Marx?s description of ?the cheap price of commodities? that batters down national boundaries, or Hegel?s notion of the master/slave relationship. Those ideas should be addressed, not parried; taught, not dismissed. With the steady erosion of culture in the U.S., as the university system suffers from ever-increasing corporatization, the rigor and intellectual passion of a Gurwitsch or a Jonas is surely missed. If the long, great crisis of the period starting with WWI and lasting through the end of WWII could produce such great thinkers, perhaps the one thing that we can look forward to during the great and perhaps terminal crisis of bourgeois society is the reemergence of a new generation of thinkers inspired to penetrate to the root causes of the impending disaster. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Possibly related posts: (automatically generated) MTV.ca Headline News 4 Comments ? hi louis proyect, this is a great post, and very interesting to hear of the new school?s history in the 60s. don?t give up hope, yet, though - hegel is still being taught there, and certainly as an example of how to do philosophy. the great jay bernstein has giving hegel seminars for many years, and just last year, a course on hegel?s logic was offered in the department. i don?t know if hegel is taught elsewhere outside of the new school, or bc, or depaul?but you can still find quite a contingent of hegelians in nyc. Comment by orenda - August 1, 2008 @ 10:36 pm There is a detailed response to the Russell Jacoby article?s claims about philosophy here: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/07/an-open-letter.html. Here?s what Jacoby says: ?A search through the philosophy-course descriptions at the University of Kansas yields a single 19th-century-survey lecture that mentions Hegel. Marx receives a passing citation in an economics class on income inequality. Freud scores zero in psychology. At the University of Arizona, Hegel again pops up in a survey course on 19th-century philosophy; Marx is shut out of economics; and, as usual, Freud has disappeared. And at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Hegel does not appear in philosophy courses, Marx does not turn up in economics, and Freud is bypassed in psychology.? Here?s the response: ?I assume that most historians have more regard for the use of evidence than is evident in Mr. Jacoby?s completely absurd sampling method, one made even more suspect by facts that are quite easy to confirm on-line but omitted by Mr. Jacoby. The Department of Philosophy at the University of Kansas, for example, has a full-time, tenure-stream young scholar who wrote his PhD thesis on Hegel, and who teaches and writes regularly (and intelligently) about both Hegel and Nietzsche. (Did it occur to Mr. Jacoby that the on-line course descriptions might be outdated?) This is all the more notable given that the Kansas department is relatively small. The University of Wisconsin at Madison also has a full-time, tenured member of the faculty (Ivan Soll), who has written one book on Hegel, and many articles on Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, among others. So much for Mr. Jacoby?s report of his random sampling. ?Here, off the top of my head, is a list of tenure-stream faculty who teach and write about Hegel in just the top 20 philosophy departments in the U.S. (I assume that will qualify as the ?scientistic? mainstream for Mr. Jacoby?s purposes): Beatrice Longuenesse at NYU; Robert Brandom at Pittsburgh; Allen Wood at Stanford; Frederick Neuhouser at Columbia; Karl Ameriks at Notre Dame; Michelle Kosch at Cornell; Michael Forster and Robert Pippin at Chicago; Kathleen Higgins at Texas; Michael Hardimon at UC San Diego. That?s not to mention, of course, all the faculty at these departments who regularly teach and write about Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, among others.? The problem is not so much that Hegel has been forgotten, but that the scholars who write about him are isolated in an academic environment that has almost no connection with any broader public discourse, let alone any kind of progressive political movement, even though almost all the Hegel scholars listed above would identify themselves as political progressives of one kind or another. The best of them is my former professor, Allen Wood (who has just moved from Stanford to Indiana). Wood is the leading authority in the US on Kant, Hegel and Marx, and has written excellent books on all of them. (My review of Wood?s book on Marx, recently reissued in a second edition, is here: http://www.isreview.org/issues/44/reviews44.shtml.) Here is what Wood writes in the Preface to his new book on *Kantian Ethics*: ?This book was written mainly in the United States, between 2004 and 2006. The history of this period is a disgraceful one. It feels as if we have been living under a malignant alien occupation. An unelected political regime, representing everything that is worst about American culture, compiled a record of injustice, corruption, and gross incompetence at home, and of numerous and aggravated war crimes abroad. Then it was confirmed in office by another election of dubious legitimacy so that it might continue unrelentingly its monstrous wrongfulness and stupidity. Those with the power to oppose its crimes instead acquiesced in them, or else resisted too late, and too feebly. The very ideas of democracy, community, and human rights are in the process of dying in our civilization - or they are being willfully murdered by those in power and by that segment of the population which supports this regime. All they give us in place of these ideas is the empty words (and plenty of those). People have now perhaps begun to awaken to the situation, but the historical roots of what has happened are sunk deep in political trends of the previous century, and I fear these trends will not be reversed soon or easily. There are references here and there in the book to this dismal history, usually to illustrate arrogance, lying, and egregious violations of right. A few readers of my earlier work have told me they think this sort of thing is inappropriate in a scholarly book. But my worries about appearing ?unscholarly? pale next to my shame, which all Americans should feel at having failed to prevent the disastrous course of events.? Fine words, which will mainly gather dust on the library shelf until significant political movements reemerge outside the academy. Comment by Phil Gasper - August 2, 2008 @ 3:49 am Someone I know who used to be an academic philosopher, does think that academic philosophy in the US is currently in a bad way. His comments are as follows (BTW, AP is analytical philosophy, and CP is continental philosophy: ?The rottenness, if any, is in the continental philosophers who have run out of things to say in their own idioms, adopt ours. I hold no particular brief for analytical philosophy, the tradition in which I was trained, I?m certainly not an AP snob though I think the approach has its virtues as well as its problems. ?AP has also sort of run out of things to say, at least compared with the 1970s and early 80s when I was in grad school and Kripke, Fodor, Brandom etc. fresh and Putnam still creative, Kuhn active and Davidson and Sellars full of ideas, and Rawls and Nozick were newish. But as I have said here before AP has this feature of being set up to produce competent writing even if it is dull, and honestly it has been a long time since I have seen a paper posted at the APA that sounded interesting. ?The quasi-Rorty-inspired (in part, the Analytical Marxists were not) appropriation? of continental phil by otherwise bored AP is a mixed bag, what isn?t. At its worst it can lose everything interesting in the CP. At its best - Larmore or Sluga on Heidegger, Nehemas or Clark on Nietzsche, Harris, Westfall or Forster on Hegel, Brudney or Fisk or Snith on Marx, it can be great. I think Brian Leiter makes Nietzsche uninteresting even though I think everything he says about Nietzsche is true. I told him that. But sweeping generalizations such as the ones you have been making lately are not constructive. Or interesting.? Comment by Jim Farmelant - August 2, 2008 @ 11:13 pm I leafed through Allen Wood?s book on Marx again this evening. The preface to the new edition gives some insight into what motivates his scholarship: ?Capitalism exploits and oppresses most of the world?s population at the beginning of the twenty-first century in very much the same way Marx described it as doing in the middle of the nineteenth century. A great many more people now than in the past have good reasons to seek a better way for the human race to live and labor together. That is fundamentally why another world is still possible? ?Only a worldwide movement of people who think about the world roughly as Marx did will be capable of reversing the present downward spiral in the affairs of humankind. It makes no difference whether such a movement calls itself ?Marxist? (just as Marx himself never thought that the working class movement had to bear his name, like a corporate logo). As things presently stand, it would be immediately fatal to any movement in this direction if it identified itself dogmatically with some self-appointed ?Marxist? faction out of the past. But it can only increase the chances of such a movement if more people reacquaint themselves with what Marx wrote and begin to think both sympathetically and critically about it, correcting the many misunderstandings that have long been perpetrated by enthusiasts and detractors alike.? Comment by Phil Gasper - August 4, 2008 @ 6:23 am This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 6 15:42:25 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:42:25 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Dual Crisis Message-ID: <4899E282.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Dual Crisis by Istv?n M?sz?ros "When we talk about a financial crisis, it's really only a symptom. . . . Financial adventurism is essentially what we have been witnessing for the last thirty or forty years, exploding from time to time in the form of financial crisis. It's really adventurist, speculative capital which has to find in some way a solution to itself. And why is that? That is the question. It is basically because of overproduced productive capital. Productive capital investment is in profound crisis. That's why so much is diverted into the channels of the speculative, and adventurist-speculative, type of transactions. Now, the other crisis . . . is a political crisis." "It is roughly around '68 when we can begin to mark what is really the structural crisis, not of capitalism but of the capital system in its entirety. The capital system is much more fundamental than capitalism. . . . What we are therefore concerned with is a crisis which can only deepen. Now, don't misunderstand me when I say we don't have a usual capitalist crisis, because capitalism and crisis are synonymous. Marx said that many times. But he was talking about a very different crisis. He was talking about conjunctural, cyclic crises. Capitalism regularly has crises. Marx even used the expression: these crises discharge themselves in a thunderstorm. Then you are back to normal, so to speak. A lot of surplus capital is destroyed, and you can start the game all over again, until again you reach a point of overaccumulation, then, a new discharge becomes necessary. That's what we have been living through. Now, our great privilege, if you like, is that we have both. We have both the cyclic, conjunctural crisis and this profound and ever-deepening structural crisis of the whole system, the whole capital system, because the Soviet Union was part of the capital system." full: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAxa82-ZQQY This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 6 15:45:37 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:45:37 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sorry folks Message-ID: <4899E341.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Sorry folks - not all that much of a breakthrough http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/8/4/13531/71482 >From Joe Romm, who knows what the fuck he is talking about when it comes to energy tech. ================================= You say you want a revolution ... 'Major discovery' from MIT unpractical, and ignores present advances in solar baseload Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 9:26 PM on 04 Aug 2008 This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From steiger2001 at centrum.cz Wed Aug 6 15:26:45 2008 From: steiger2001 at centrum.cz (steiger2001 at centrum.cz) Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:26:45 +0200 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fidel Castro on Czechoslovakia in 1968: In-Reply-To: <48986798.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48986798.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <200808062326.15756@centrum.cz> If there would be nothing else but Fidel?s "judgment" on Czechoslovakia?in 1968 for those who like me have been living in this country at the time and been experiencing the unique process called "Prague Spring" - including its end by the Soviet invasion - that "judgment" would? stop us to regard Castro as a revolutionary. Parroting Soviet lies made him a Stalinist - if had not?been one before - and even the Soviet help his country received cannot be an?excuse for his stance. His resistance against the?U.S. is remarkable but half of this "heroism" is to?be ascribed to the stupid?imperialist American policy without which Cuba though keeping remnants of what many regard as "socialist" might have developed as a more democratic (not capitalist!) system. ?t?p?n Steiger, Prague ???? ______________________________________________________________ > Od: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us > Komu: > Datum: 05.08.2008 20:47 > P?edm?t: [Marxism-Thaxis] Fidel Castro on Czechoslovakia in 1968: > Fidel Castro on Czechoslovakia in 1968: (Excerpts from two speeches by Fidel Castro on August 23rd and 24th 1968, attacking the "counter-revolutionary" anti-Stalinist movement in Czechoslovakia and supporting the USSR's invasion. ) August 23, 1968 Fidel Castro Ruz Right here, I wish to make the first important affirmation: we considered that Czechoslovakia was moving toward a counter-revolutionary situation. Toward capitalism and into the arms of imperialism. So this defines our first position in relation to the specific fact of the action taken by a group of socialist countries. That is, we consider that it was absolutely necessary, at all cost, in one way or another, to prevent this eventuality from taking place. ... Discussion of the form is not, in the final analysis, the most fundamental factor. The essential point to be accepted, or not accepted, is whether or not the socialist camp could allow a political situation to develop which would lead to the breaking away of a socialist country, to its falling into the arms of imperialism. And our point of view is that it is not permissible and that the socialist camp has a right to prevent this in one way or another. I would like to begin by making it clear that we look upon this fact as an essential one. ... A real liberal fury was unleashed; a whole series of political slogans in favor of the formation of opposition parties began to develop, in favor of open anti-Marxist and anti-Leninist theses, such as the thesis that the Party should cease to play the role which the Party plays within socialist society and begin to play the role there of a guide, supervising some things but, above all, exerting a sort of spiritual leadership. In short, that the reins of power should cease to be in the hands of the Communist Party. The revision of certain fundamental postulates to the effect that a socialist regime is a transition regime from socialism to communism, a governmental form known as the dictatorship of the proletariat. This means a government where power is wielded in behalf of one class and against the former exploiting classes by virtue of which in a revolutionary process political rights, the right to carry on political activities -- whose objective is precisely to struggle against the essence and the raison d'etre of socialism - cannot be granted to the former exploiters. A series of slogans began to be put forward and in fact certain measures were taken such as the establishment of the bourgeois "freedom" of the press. This means that the counter-revolution and the exploiters, the very enemies of socialism, were granted the right to speak and write freely against socialism. As a matter of fact, a process of seizure of the principal information media by the reactionary elements began to develop. As regards foreign policy, a whole series of slogans of open rapprochement toward capitalist concepts and theses and of rapprochement towards the West appeared... On many occasions the imperialists have publicly stated what their policy is in relation to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. And in Congress, in the press, they always talk about encouraging the liberal tendencies and even about promoting, of making available, some selective economic aid and of using every means of contributing to creating an opposition to socialism there. The imperialists are carrying out a campaign, not only in Czechoslovakia, but in all the countries of Eastern Europe, even in the Soviet Union. Opinion on Intervention August 24, 1968 Fidel Castro Ruz I wish to quickly make the first important statement that we considered Czechoslovakia to be heading toward a counterrevolutionary situation, toward capitalism and into the arms of imperialism. This is the operative concept in our first position toward the specific fact of the action taken by a group of socialist countries. That is, we consider that it was unavoidable to prevent this from happening - at any cost, in one way or another. Of course, let us not become impatient, because we propose to analyze this in line with our ideas. Discussing the form is not really the most fundamental thing. The essential thing, whether we accept it or not, is whether the socialist bloc could permit the development of a political situation which lead to the breakdown of a socialist country and its fall into the arms of imperialism. From our viewpoint, it is not permissible and the socialist bloc has the right to prevent it in one way or another. We first wish to begin by establishing what our opinion is about this essential matter. Now, it is not enough to explain simply that Czechoslovakia was heading toward a counterevolutionary situation and that it had to be stopped. It is not enough to conclude simply that the only alternative was to prevent it and nothing more. We must analyze the causes and determine the factors which made possible and necessary such a dramatic, drastic, and painful remedy. What are the factors which required a step unquestionably involving a violation of legal principles and of international standards, which have often served as shields for peoples against injustices and are so highly regarded in the world? What is not appropriate here is to say that the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak state was not violated. That would be fiction and a lie. The violation was flagrant, and on this we are going to talk about the effect on sovereignty, and on legal and political principles. From the legal viewpoint, it cannot be justified. This is quite clear. In our judgment, the decision on Czechoslovakia can be explained only from the political viewpoint and not from a legal viewpoint. Frankly, it has absolutely no legality. What are the circumstances that have permitted a remedy of this nature, a remedy which places in a difficult situation the entire world revolutionary movement, a remedy which constitutes a really traumatic situation for an entire people - as is the present case in Czechoslovakia - a remedy which implies that an entire nation has to pass through the most unpleasant circumstances of seeing the country occupied by armies of other countries, although they are armies of the socialist countries. A situation in which millions of beings of a country have to see themselves today in the tragic circumstance of electing and choosing either to be passive toward these circumstances and this event--which so much brings to mind previous episodes - or to struggle in comradeship with pro-Yankee agents and spies, the enemies of socialism, the agents of West Germany, and all that fascist and reactionary rabble that in the heat of these circumstances will try to present itself as champions of the sovereignty, patriotism, and freedom of Czechoslovakia? Logically, for the Czechoslovak people this experience and this fact constitute a better and tragic situation. Therefore, it is not enough simply to conclude that it has arisen as an inexorable necessity and even, if you wish, as an unquestionable obligation of the socialist countries to prevent such events from happening. [One must inquire] what are the cases, the factors, and the circumstances that brought forth - after 20 years of communism in Czechoslovakia - a group of persons whose names do not even appear anywhere, and this petition directed to other countries of the socialist camp, asking them to send their armies to prevent the triumph of the counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia and the triumph of the intrigues and conspiracies of the imperialist countries interested in breaking Czechoslovakia from the community of socialist countries? Could it be imagined, gentlemen, that at the end of 20 years of communism in our country - of communist revolution, of socialist revolution--that under any circumstances it could happen that a group of honest revolutionaries in this country, terrified at the prospects of an advance or, better said, of a retrogression toward counterrevolutionary positions and imperialism, would see the need of asking the aid of friendly armies to prevent such a situation from occurring? What would have remained of the communist consciousness of this people? What would have remained of the revolutionary consciousness of this people, of the dignity of this people, of the revolutionary morale of this people? What would have remained of all those things that mean for us essentially the revolution if such circumstances should one day arise? But no circumstances of that kind will ever occur in our country. First, because we believe that it is a duty and fundamental responsibility of those who direct a revolution to prevent deformations of such a nature that might make possible such circumstances. Secondly, gentlemen, for an unquestionably practical reason and not only a moral elemental reason, because we could ask if it would be worth the trouble if, after 20 years, to survive a revolution one had to resort to such procedures. And also, for a very simple practical reason: who would false personalities of this country ask to send armies? The only armies that we have in our vicinity are the Yankee army and the armies of the puppets allied with the Yankee imperialists, the because we are too alone in this part of the world for there ever to exist the most remote possibility of saving this revolution by asking aid of allied armies. And it must be said that I do not know anyone capable of having enough shame to do such a thing if they had the need and opportunity to do it, because what kind of communists would we be and what kind of communist revolution would this be if at the end of 20 years we found ourselves having to do such a thing to save it? Always, when we have thought about foreign aid, we have never had the idea of foreign aid to fight against the imperialist soldiers and against the imperialist armies. I simply analyze these facts because I know that, legally, our people are concerned with an explanation of these concepts. Such things are not in our idea of the revolution. I do not think that a person can justify the appeal of high-ranking persons, because the justification can only be the political fact in itself - that Czechoslovakia was marching toward a counterrevolutionary situation and this was seriously affecting the entire socialist community. And besides, there is no lack of figleaves of any kind. It is the political fact in itself, with all its consequences and all its importance. As we were saying, recognizing that and nothing else is simply enough. Or if it is obligatory, it is elementary to draw from this most bitter experience all the political conclusions. And as it is possible, we repeat: In these circumstances, an analysis must be made of all the factors. For the communist movement, there is the unavoidable duty of investigating deeply the causes leading to such a situation, a situation inconceivable for us, the Cuban revolutionaries. If such action is impossible for us Cuban revolutionaries - we who saw the necessity for carrying out this revolution 90 miles from imperialism - we also know that we cannot fall into these circumstances because it would mean the very end of the revolution and falling into the worst situation, provoked by our enemies, full of hatred. But this is not the reason for making or trying to make this profound analysis. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ? From cburford at gn.apc.org Thu Aug 7 00:16:37 2008 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (cburford at gn.apc.org) Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2008 07:16:37 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: <4899E341.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <4899E341.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <50135.89.62.99.103.1218089797.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> The "Asiatic mode of production" has probably been discussed several times on this list. If so apologies for missing it. Yesterday I attended an exhibition in Berlin entitled Babylon, which brings together the evidence often plundered, sometimes gathered, and stored in the Louvre, the British Museum and Berlin, where the collections of both sides of the former wall have been reviewed. It is a very impressive picture of what was actually a continuous culture and economic system, since the third millenium before common era. The agricultural system was competitive with that of Europe until the 19th century: for example there is an illustration of a plough with a device to deliver individual seeds to the furrow to maximise growth in a plain receiving little rain. The economic system describes a considerable amount of state control and oversight with a complex system of private property, concessions to large landholders favoured in the religious and political hierarchy, labourers and slaves. The use of writing from the beginning of the third millenium concentrated on records and systems of law and accountability particularly in land use. It sounded rather like today in the mixture of state and private ownership. Can anyone point to previous contributions on the Asiatic mode of production on this list? Chris Burford London From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 7 10:28:13 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:28:13 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: <50135.89.62.99.103.1218089797.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> References: <4899E341.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <50135.89.62.99.103.1218089797.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> Message-ID: <489AEA5D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Hello , Chris, long time , old comrade ! Charles >>> 08/07/2008 2:16 AM >>> The "Asiatic mode of production" has probably been discussed several times on this list. If so apologies for missing it. Yesterday I attended an exhibition in Berlin entitled Babylon, which brings together the evidence often plundered, sometimes gathered, and stored in the Louvre, the British Museum and Berlin, where the collections of both sides of the former wall have been reviewed. It is a very impressive picture of what was actually a continuous culture and economic system, since the third millenium before common era. The agricultural system was competitive with that of Europe until the 19th century: for example there is an illustration of a plough with a device to deliver individual seeds to the furrow to maximise growth in a plain receiving little rain. The economic system describes a considerable amount of state control and oversight with a complex system of private property, concessions to large landholders favoured in the religious and political hierarchy, labourers and slaves. The use of writing from the beginning of the third millenium concentrated on records and systems of law and accountability particularly in land use. It sounded rather like today in the mixture of state and private ownership. Can anyone point to previous contributions on the Asiatic mode of production on this list? Chris Burford London _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Aug 8 12:45:59 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2008 03:45:59 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] MH?? Message-ID: >>Everything Michael Hudson writes or speaks about is worth reading and hearing.<< Laugh of the day! CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Aug 8 13:10:20 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2008 04:10:20 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] State, Local and Private Pensions Message-ID: If it had been written in 2000, when much of what it refers to pertained, this article would be prescient. As it is, it recapitulates the obvious--at least for those who follow these sorts of things by actually reading the WSJ, NYT and FT and putting the pieces together. Also, after a quick read of the Hudson piece, I have to say I don't recall the article addressing the role the 'super' pension funds like CALPERS and university endowments (with Harvard and Yale being 'worth' more than most African countries) actually played in keeping the bubble going. And until the Fed raises rates to deal with inflation and the stock exchanges really lose their value like the way the Tokyo SE did back in the early 90s--well over 50% of the listed value, the official policy is to sustain the bubble in hopes that after a pause the values can march upwards again. The US hasn't faced its bubble yet, unlike Japan, which now finances the US's bubble in hopes of getting something of a return on all those dollars held. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Aug 8 13:34:14 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2008 04:34:14 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Bushwa will getcha like a case of anthrax! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: WL wrote in part: >>Something different is evolving on a planetary basis and we have to guess the probable path forward based on trying to abstract the facts. The facts deal with economic logic and insights into on what basis the masses are being improvised and how they think thinks out. >> We see some cracks of light in the wall. Venezuela and Bolivia seem to hold out the possibility of new realities. As does the rise of emancipatory organizations that largely have to function outside of the official governments, such as Hezbollah and Hamas. In the US I see the possibility of a growing and increasingly impoverished population having to deal with the 'failed' Obama presidency. Right now he is addressing the 'you can have it all generation' with a 'you can have it all' message--you can continue your national security state atrocity while exercising your 'God given' right to rule the world while enjoying a standard of living that the rest of the OECD has attained (that would be health care and old age pensions). When he doesn't deliver on that, there will be a reaction. Because attempts to do something inside the Democratic Party always fail, there are those who support efforts outside of the two party-system (which thrives because it is really comprised of Dems, Repubs and Indies, especially when the presidential elections roll around every 4 years). And we could say because efforts outside the two-party system always fail, we should .... I don't condemn discussion lists such as this one entirely (I am afterall enough of a fool to keep reading and writing on them), but they are part of the problem. Who really believed that the Internet and the WWW were going to be transcendentally emancipatory because information would flow freely to the people and they would interact in newly significant ways? I never did. Left-wing political discussion lists turn out to be great places to discuss the history of the Soviet Union or Stalin vs. Trotsky or the communist betrayal of anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, etc., which just indicates that for the most part they are a small, somewhat academic, mostly non-lucrative aspect of the voyeurist entertainment overload that inundates us. Which brings me to a final point about conspiracy theories. Chip Berlet has always struck me as a grating ass, a non-academic with a big bourgie academic chip on his shoulder. He tries to act as some sort of thought police for the left as he sees it with his theories about how sloppy thinking about fascism and conspiracies cripples the left. The reason why so many people are willing to embrace incoherent and even contradictory theories about 9-11 is that they are more detailed and , as weak as they are, make more sense than the official accounts given by the government and released in little bits in the mainstream media (including the internet). CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Aug 8 13:55:43 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2008 04:55:43 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The Bushwa will getcha like a case of anthrax! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>I think, as the originality of original work is in sharp and visible decline and logical positivism a d analytical philosophy themselves become subjects for history of philosophy, and are being treated historically by philosophers who formerly did "original" work.<< LP was a relic when I studied philosophy in the early 80s. The problem with getting an historic perspective on it was that most people in American philosophy were not good scholars of the history of any philosophy, not even their own 'tradition' (after Frege), which relegated little bits and pieces of Kant and Hegel and Marx (if at all) to history of philosophy overview courses for undergraduates who had to take it as a general education requirement. Philosophy as an academic 'research' or scholarship endeavor was for a while an academic indulgence thought to be in support of the 'social scientification' of the former humanities. Hence Chomsky, for example, reads more like a philosopher of linguistics and psycholinguistics (the non-clinical parts of it) than a real linguist much of the time. And the philosophy of 'sociobiology' came from Wilson. Now that so many of these areas of academia are stable if thoroughly unscientific and unproductive fields, philosophy is produced by a relatively small cult of professional academics for the same small cult of professional academics. What they do is to quite an extent hermetically sealed in their academic life worlds. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Aug 8 13:58:34 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2008 04:58:34 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School Message-ID: Wrong thread title, sorry about that. Here it is again, with the proper title. >>I think, as the originality of original work is in sharp and visible decline and logical positivism a d analytical philosophy themselves become subjects for history of philosophy, and are being treated historically by philosophers who formerly did "original" work.<< LP was a relic when I studied philosophy in the early 80s. The problem with getting an historic perspective on it was that most people in American philosophy were not good scholars of the history of any philosophy, not even their own 'tradition' (after Frege), which relegated little bits and pieces of Kant and Hegel and Marx (if at all) to history of philosophy overview courses for undergraduates who had to take it as a general education requirement. Philosophy as an academic 'research' or scholarship endeavor was for a while an academic indulgence thought to be in support of the 'social scientification' of the former humanities. Hence Chomsky, for example, reads more like a philosopher of linguistics and psycholinguistics (the non-clinical parts of it) than a real linguist much of the time. And the philosophy of 'sociobiology' came from Wilson. Now that so many of these areas of academia are stable if thoroughly unscientific and unproductive fields, philosophy is produced by a relatively small cult of professional academics for the same small cult of professional academics. What they do is to quite an extent hermetically sealed in their academic life worlds. CJ From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Fri Aug 8 22:42:41 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2008 21:42:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <289143.22706.qm@web50402.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Little in the training of analytical philosophers prepares them to do historical scholarship. In this respect they are like lawyers who write legal history, at best inspired amateurs. Sometimes inspired amateurs can be quite good or better. Kuhn was a physicists who taught himself history of science, Bernal a biologist the same, both of their work is far better than rigorously trained historians of science, even very fine ones like Westphal. That said wrt to history of analytical philosophy it is my impression that Michael Friedman, who is actually a real Kant scholar if not one of the first rank, is a pretty good historian of logical positivism. Scott Soames at Princeton has a two volume history of analytical philosophy. I don't know how it is as history. I suspect it is a historical account of doctrine, the sort of thing Kuhn called "internal" history when writing about approaches to the history of science, as opposed to "external" history that places the subject in a wider social context. That can be valuable if it has its limits. Logical Positivism was a relic even when I was an undergrad in the mid 70s and had a part of a class with one of the last great LPs, Carl Hempel, who, however, had implicitly renounced most of the tenets of classical LPism. Carnap and Hempel had actually deconstructed it from the inside in the late 40s, and Quine and Goodman drove a stake through its heart, but as Kuhn predicted, it did not die until its last adherents did. In the mid-70s there was a sense of excitement in analytical philosophy, what with Kripke, Putnam, Quine, and Davidson on language, Kuhn and Feyerabend on science, Fodor, Rorty, the Churchlands, Stich, on mind, Rawls and Nozick on political philosophy; it seemed to be making progress and in fact there was a lot of still vital work being done, much of which is still very interesting and we haven't exhausted it. CeJ is right about what happened, dead end, hermetic self-enclosed cult. That's why Rorty left. If you look at the major departmedbts today and compare them with the lineup I had at Princeton in the mid 70s -- Rorty, Kripke, David Lewis, Thomas Kuhn, Carl Hempel, Gil Harman, Paul Benacerraf, Thomas Nagel, Tim Scanlon, Michael Frede -- well, some of them are still there, or around, but the replacements for the ones who left aren't anything like that stature. And Harvard didn't find anyone of similar weight to replace Quine, Goodman, Nozick or Putnam (Putnam's still there but he's a caricature of himself and has been for decades); they brought in Scanlon to replace Rawls and good as Tim is, he's not a heavy element of the atomic number of Rawls. NYU and Rutgers, the rising styar schgools, just don't compare. It's symptomatic that analytical philosophy is now being treated as a subject for history, you might as well put a big sign up saying, This Is Over. But we have no idea what comes next. --- On Fri, 8/8/08, CeJ wrote: > From: CeJ > Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Date: Friday, August 8, 2008, 2:58 PM > Wrong thread title, sorry about that. Here it is again, with > the proper title. > > > > >>I think, as the originality of original work is in > sharp and visible decline and logical positivism a d > analytical philosophy themselves become subjects for history > of philosophy, and are being treated historically by > philosophers who formerly did "original" > work.<< > > LP was a relic when I studied philosophy in the early 80s. > The problem > with getting an historic perspective on it was that most > people in > American philosophy were not good scholars of the history > of any > philosophy, not even their own 'tradition' (after > Frege), which > relegated little bits and pieces of Kant and Hegel and Marx > (if at > all) to history of philosophy overview courses for > undergraduates who > had to take it as a general education requirement. > > Philosophy as an academic 'research' or scholarship > endeavor was for a > while an academic indulgence thought to be in support of > the 'social > scientification' of the former humanities. Hence > Chomsky, for example, > reads more like a philosopher of linguistics and > psycholinguistics > (the non-clinical parts of it) than a real linguist much of > the time. > And the philosophy of 'sociobiology' came from > Wilson. Now that so > many of these areas of academia are stable if thoroughly > unscientific and unproductive fields, philosophy is > produced by a > relatively small cult of professional academics for the > same small > cult of professional academics. What they do is to quite an > extent > hermetically sealed in their academic life worlds. > > CJ > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From cburford at gn.apc.org Sat Aug 9 01:54:01 2008 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (cburford at gn.apc.org) Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2008 08:54:01 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: <489AEA5D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <4899E341.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <50135.89.62.99.103.1218089797.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> <489AEA5D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <49627.89.62.111.87.1218268441.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> Good to hear from you again Charles, and to read other members. But it is difficult to keep up with more than one or two lists regularly. The theme of my post was arguably connected, even though indirectly, with other themes we have discussed. In addition to what I noted below the exhibition in Berlin had another floor devoted to the myths about Babylon. And they are extensive. And add to the overall picture of the linear distortion of history which is only now being investigated. Nothing confirms the allegations of Heroditus about the sexual practices of Babylonia. He had political motives to denigrate an empire from the middle east that had almost conquered Greece. The Hebrew Bible is hostile to the Babylonian captivity, but the Talmud that prevailed was the Talmud of the Jews of Babylon. Of all the areas of the diaspora the Jews had greater cultural and economic autonomy there, (in that they were allowed to keep tithes) than elsewhere. In the exhibition there was a tablet actually detailing the oil rations for various captives, and the amount for the Jewish king named also in the Bible (Jeoachim?) was generous. Such captivity under Nebchadnezzar II was therefore part of a sophisticated imperial policy to subjugate but also to embrace and include many different ethnic and religious groups, and was in a sense quite rational, considering that the land of the near east would always be caught between at least two large empires. The fantastic morbid preoccupations of the Book of Revelation, and its inclusion in the Christian cannon, gave a basis for florid speculations at various times in history, over the Whore of Babylon. Luther used this motif to damn the catholic church. But it is also part of eurocentric perspectives of history that have left Babylon and Babylonia as at best curiosity, which indulges our prejudices. The Romans never really conquered this large and rich plain, which was apparently the cradle of population expansion after the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa. The period of Hellenistic domination under the Seleucids was a brief episode in the span of history. What really matters is the incorporation of Mesopotamia, and the Nile valley for the first time, under the same religious, political and cultural framework with the expansion of Islam. This expansion, the west chooses to forget, was with the active acquiescence of the population, who favoured the compromises of religious belief and political power offered by Islam to Jews and Christians. No wonder the Nestorian Chrisians disappeared. And the present Pope laments that these lands were "stolen" from Christianity. What happened to the population in the land of the two rivers I do not know, but socially culturally and economically it seems certain that continuity continued. Besides the important religious rituals really impact only on the ruling class. What the western prejudiced version of history cannot accept also is that the revolutionary impetus to the merchant class that Islam represented, (it is almost explicit in the Qur?an that it was inspired by merchants for merchants), allowed for the first time in history a rapid release of the economic forces throughout this part of the world. The peak of Islamic culture in Baghdad in what we call the middle ages was therefore a continuation of what are, like China, 5,000 years of largely continuous economic, economic and administrative development. We have lived and we live in a multi-focal world. Only a mechanical, linear view of "historical materialism" can obliterate the insights of Marx and Engels that make such a wider global perspective entirely acceptable, and helpful. Chris Burford > Hello , Chris, long time , old comrade ! > > Charles > >>>> 08/07/2008 2:16 AM >>> > The "Asiatic mode of production" has probably been discussed several > times > on this list. If so apologies for missing it. > > Yesterday I attended an exhibition in Berlin entitled Babylon, which > brings together the evidence often plundered, sometimes gathered, and > stored in the Louvre, the British Museum and Berlin, where the > collections > of both sides of the former wall have been reviewed. > > It is a very impressive picture of what was actually a continuous > culture > and economic system, since the third millenium before common era. > > The agricultural system was competitive with that of Europe until the > 19th > century: for example there is an illustration of a plough with a device > to > deliver individual seeds to the furrow to maximise growth in a plain > receiving little rain. > > The economic system describes a considerable amount of state control > and > oversight with a complex system of private property, concessions to > large > landholders favoured in the religious and political hierarchy, > labourers > and slaves. The use of writing from the beginning of the third > millenium > concentrated on records and systems of law and accountability > particularly > in land use. > > It sounded rather like today in the mixture of state and private > ownership. > > Can anyone point to previous contributions on the Asiatic mode of > production on this list? > > Chris Burford > London > > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis > > > > > > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. > www.surfcontrol.com > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis > From shmage at pipeline.com Sat Aug 9 09:38:55 2008 From: shmage at pipeline.com (Shane Mage) Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2008 11:38:55 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: <49627.89.62.111.87.1218268441.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> References: <4899E341.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <50135.89.62.99.103.1218089797.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> <489AEA5D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <49627.89.62.111.87.1218268441.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> Message-ID: On Aug 9, 2008, at 3:54 AM, cburford at gn.apc.org wrote: > > Nothing confirms the allegations of Heroditus about the sexual > practices > of Babylonia. He had political motives to denigrate an empire from the > middle east that had almost conquered Greece. Herodotus reported what he saw and was told on the spot. Vas you dere, Charlie? Herodotus admired the Persians. Babylonia was not Persia. "Greece" didn't exist and the Persians never tried to conquer it (they did want to punish the Athenians for burning Sardis to the ground). The Persian punitive expedition had notable Greek allies, especially the Thebans and Ephesians. The most successful "Persian" naval commander was a Greek, Queen Artemisia. Shane Mage "Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to be called Zeus." Herakleitos of Ephesos From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Aug 9 20:33:05 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2008 11:33:05 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia Message-ID: >>The Persian punitive expedition had notable Greek allies, especially the Thebans and Ephesians. The most successful "Persian" naval commander was a Greek, Queen Artemisia.<< What treachery! But we all deep down know that the Greeks collectively and heroically defended (to the last man if necessary) all of pagan European civilization against the Asiatic horde of (Indo-European) Persians. That is why we can knowingly all enjoy a film like '300' in the triumphant era of the Bushwa-Christocentric Democracy at the end of all history, all wisdom, and time, forever and ever. I guess the true post-mo intellectual debate about '300' would be if it were or were not a faithful rendering of the comic. Or, why did this film succeed but Speed Racer bomb? You know it really only takes about 20 years to make a population already poorly educated even stupider, beyond belief. It seems to be an American weakness, though, to think that spending 12-15 years of one's life at an American university getting a PhD can somehow straighten that all out. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Aug 9 20:59:12 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2008 11:59:12 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I'm not sure if the late Mark Jones' discussion adds much to this, but it does point an obsession with irrigation. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/131.html Ancient Mesopotamia was to quite an extent a lot wetter than the current-day Iraq, so no wonder some have said it was 'Eden'. Still, much of the current 'west's' image of the place is based on equating Arab culture with deserts or of the US forces looking a lot like Rommel's desert rats, driving around in vehicles through all the dust. It isn't all desert now either. But the place was fertile for agriculture due to irrigation in the western half. And we see a similar rise of Egypt as a 'bread basket' because of the ability to irrigate from the Nile. If you say 'Asian' and 'Asiatic', most modern 'westerners' think of E. Asia. So apparently some arguments for a unique E. Asian mode of production have emerged as well. Interestingly, much of Asia is characterized (in agricultural production) by rice, which requires watered paddy fields. What I see when I look out the window here in Japan, though, depends more on modes of production in the nationalist development state of the Meiji era and then in the land reform policies of when MacArthur ruled the land. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Aug 9 21:00:33 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2008 12:00:33 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Oops, that was sloppy. I should add that all that following the link to the Jones article is my commentary, nothing from Jones's article. I published only the link. Read it--the Jones article--it is more interesting than my comments. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sun Aug 10 02:08:38 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2008 17:08:38 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I found some of the discussion at the link below about in what senses Marx is a materialist interesting because they agree with what I was earlier thinking (out loud) about the appeal of Marx to Althusser. The structuralists were overall materialist and behaviourist but quickly rejected most forms of positivism when they did philosophize about their enterprise. The problem with such abstract materialism is that in effect it is not that different from idealism when you try to discuss and explain things. Like the idea--in the case of structuralist linguistics--of language as 'langue' subsisting outside individual human psychology as a system but distinct from parole or even discernible patterns in parole. So we get concepts like the phoneme which are not actual speech sounds but neither are they psycholinguistic control units covering production and perception. It's all ontologically eerier, more elusive and potentially more obscure than idealism when you see it put into the hands of Derrida (Grammatology), if you ask me. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/160.html From jannuzi at gmail.com Mon Aug 11 00:06:56 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:06:56 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] US military doctrine in full view Message-ID: Full frontal hard on power til the rest of the world gets tired? War without end in the name of national security and the interests of our allies? Total US supremacy in all hemispheres? We ARE crazy, so you better not f- with us, or you might find out what we'll do--and even we don't know what we would do? Orange jump suits and cages at Gitmo for any who dare oppose us? No. 1. Never attack a country that can defend itself. And in light of recent of developments: 2. Never defend an ally who can't. Gotta wonder what Saakashvili was thinking. Perhaps he actually read or listened to all those speeches emanating out of DC and NATO and took them literally. CJ From cburford at gn.apc.org Mon Aug 11 01:07:41 2008 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (cburford at gn.apc.org) Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:07:41 +0100 (BST) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: References: <4899E341.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <50135.89.62.99.103.1218089797.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> <489AEA5D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <49627.89.62.111.87.1218268441.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> Message-ID: <3161.86.132.155.78.1218438461.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> Well I was only in Berlin and Charlie, I guess, was not there either. Thanks for clarifying the conventional spelling of the name of Herodotus in English. I was really skimming through that part of the exhibition, and it was rather post-modernist in flavour. What I am certain of, is that German scholars, under the eye of colleagues from the Louvre and the British Museum, would not assert that the claims of Herodotus about sexual practices in the middle east, are unsubstantiated, if they are substantiated. They suggest bias, but it may also be a question of the historical method of Herodotus, who, Wikipedia informs me, spoke only Greek. So he would be dependent on travellers tales, and interesting highlights provided by guides. Stories, true or untrue, of the sexual practices of other lands are often interesting to outsiders. Did Herodotus actually claim to have personally investigated sexual practices? Somewhere on the internet someone will know the answer. What was his methodology? The overall point is the mythology and the bias that still affects our history and perceptions of the world 2 1/2 millenia later. There is an unjustified lack of respect for 5 millenia of continuous civilisation in the middle east, and adjacent lands. The Bible, both old and new testaments, (but not the Jewish Talmud) supports that sectarian disrespect and justifies it in stories of the underdog, needing protection from the monster. Heroic little Greece is part of that Eurocentric distortion but this may be an artefact of our historical methods and selection bias arising from that point of reference. Similarly the expansion of Islam was with the understandable help of Christians, but that is air-brushed out of history. Where did the Nestorians go? They were not massacred. Chris Burford > On Aug 9, 2008, at 3:54 AM, cburford at gn.apc.org wrote: >> >> Nothing confirms the allegations of Heroditus about the sexual >> practices >> of Babylonia. He had political motives to denigrate an empire from the >> middle east that had almost conquered Greece. > > > Herodotus reported what he saw and was told on the spot. Vas you > dere, Charlie? > Herodotus admired the Persians. > Babylonia was not Persia. > "Greece" didn't exist and the Persians never tried to conquer it > (they did want > to punish the Athenians for burning Sardis to the ground). > The Persian punitive expedition had notable Greek allies, especially > the Thebans and Ephesians. > The most successful "Persian" naval commander was a Greek, Queen > Artemisia. > > > Shane Mage > > "Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to > be called Zeus." > > Herakleitos of Ephesos > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis > From shmage at pipeline.com Mon Aug 11 08:49:01 2008 From: shmage at pipeline.com (Shane Mage) Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:49:01 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: <3161.86.132.155.78.1218438461.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> References: <4899E341.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <50135.89.62.99.103.1218089797.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> <489AEA5D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <49627.89.62.111.87.1218268441.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> <3161.86.132.155.78.1218438461.squirrel@sqmail.gn.apc.org> Message-ID: <86817105-7E93-4DAD-8C2D-51610673F100@pipeline.com> On Aug 11, 2008, at 3:07 AM, cburford at gn.apc.org wrote: > ...What I am certain of, is that > German scholars, under the eye of colleagues from the Louvre and the > British Museum, would not assert that the claims of Herodotus about > sexual > practices in the middle east, are unsubstantiated, if they are > substantiated. > Academic scholars of the ancient Near East, almost all of whom are unthinking adherents of ridiculous chronologies littered with many- centuried "Dark Ages," are "authorities" without authority. They are unthinking followers of Voltaire who tossed out Herodotus's testimony as unthinkable in "l'?tat le mieux polic?" of the ancient world. But temple prostitution--and that is what is at issue here--was universal in the Near East. Voltaire--and, it seems, your European scholars-- was scandalized by the suggestion that "respectable" unmarried Babylonian ladies participated in it. > ...They suggest bias, but it may also be a question of the > historical method > of Herodotus, who, Wikipedia informs me, spoke only Greek... > Perhaps, but there were lots of Greek-speakers everywhere in the 5th century BCE. And to speak of "historical method" in connection with the inventor of "history" is to be a bit---anachronistic. > ... Stories, true or untrue, of the sexual practices of > other lands are often interesting to outsiders. Did Herodotus actually > claim to have personally investigated sexual practices?... Herodotus was not writing about Herodotus. But if he made no "personal investigations" of that sort he would have been virtually unique among Western (or Eastern!) travellers. Shane Mage "This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 30 > >> On Aug 9, 2008, at 3:54 AM, cburford at gn.apc.org wrote: >>> >>> Nothing confirms the allegations of Heroditus about the sexual >>> practices >>> of Babylonia. He had political motives to denigrate an empire from >>> the >>> middle east that had almost conquered Greece. >> >> >> Herodotus reported what he saw and was told on the spot. Vas you >> dere, Charlie? >> Herodotus admired the Persians. >> Babylonia was not Persia. >> "Greece" didn't exist and the Persians never tried to conquer it >> (they did want >> to punish the Athenians for burning Sardis to the ground). >> The Persian punitive expedition had notable Greek allies, especially >> the Thebans and Ephesians. >> The most successful "Persian" naval commander was a Greek, Queen >> Artemisia. >> From jannuzi at gmail.com Mon Aug 11 18:50:03 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:50:03 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia Message-ID: CBurford:>>The Bible, both old and new testaments, (but not the Jewish Talmud) supports that sectarian disrespect and justifies it in stories of the underdog, needing protection from the monster<< Oh please, Talmudic Judaism is as capable of sectarian disrespect as any other religion. CJ From cburford at gn.apc.org Tue Aug 12 13:52:37 2008 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:52:37 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Message-ID: <002101c8fcb4$fd733d80$59ee9e51@HPINVENT> And on another subject ...... "What is to be done with the Ossetians, of whom the Transcaucasian Ossetians are becoming assimilated (but are as yet by no means wholly assimilated) by the Georgians, while the Cis-Caucasian Ossetians are partly being assimilated by the Russians and partly continuing to develop and are creating their own literature? How are they to be "organized" into a single national union?" from a *relatively* reflective work 1913 by Joseph Stalin, reported this week to have come from an Ossetian family heritage. Later of course he was associated with wholesale brutal population movements. Centralised socialism seems to have left numerous cultural and ethnic conflicts that have exploded after its fall, as if the population had no innoculation about how to handle them. This happened in relatively unstalinist Yugoslavia too. Uncomfortable to accept, but capitalism seems to be better at breaking down the polarisations of ethnic, cultural and gender oppression into a fine calculus of financial disadvantage. Disadvantaged communities get strangled by mass migration of young people out of them, and the world is covered by great urban metropolises which have to learn to be tolerant up to a point. Or am I being too pessimistic here? Chris Burford From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 12 14:39:17 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:39:17 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia Message-ID: <48A1BCB5.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Well I was only in Berlin and Charlie, I guess, was not there either. Thanks for clarifying the conventional spelling of the name of Herodotus in English. I was really skimming through that part of the exhibition, and it was rather post-modernist in flavour. What I am certain of, is that German scholars, under the eye of colleagues from the Louvre and the British Museum, would not assert that the claims of Herodotus about sexual practices in the middle east, are unsubstantiated, if they are substantiated. ^^^^^ CB: What were Herodotus's claims about the sexual practices ? Did I miss that ? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 12 14:59:25 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:59:25 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School Message-ID: <48A1C16D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Jacoby is really out of touch here. ^^^ CB: I really don't have a dog in this hunt, and I appreciate the general survey of the state of philo, but I thought Jacoby said that Marx, Freud and Hegel aren't taught much. I didn't read what you said as majorly contradicting that. ?? ^^^^^ "Linguistic analysis" is at least a generation dead. We are at least two generations from the last of the LPs; I had the honor of being taught briefly by Carl Hempel, one of the last of and greatest of the lot. Hegel is off the untouchables list, at least since Charles Taylor's big book, itself a generation old now, although you wouldn't do Hegelian philosophy using Hegel's jargon. I have a huge shelf of recent Hegel scholarship, much done by people at mainstream institutions, that I cannot keep up with. Decartes is certainly not out and has ever been in my recollection. When I was at Tigertown on the mid 70s Margaret Wilson was teaching Descartes to crowded classrooms and Bernard Williams had just published. Marx of course enjoyed a renaissance at the prestige schools under the Analytical Marxists in 1975-1995 until they collapsed, along with the rest of Marxism, with the fall of Communism. ^^^^ CB: Aren't there lots of Marxists in China , still ? Cuba ? ^^^^ History and scholarship was and probably is somewhat disfavored as a general rule over "original" work in metaphysics, normative ethics, philosophy of mind, and other areas that ther logical positivists thought they'd put an end to, and continental history and scholarship, but even that is changing, I think, as the originality of original work is in sharp and visible decline and logical positivism a d analytical philosophy themselves become subjects for history of philosophy, and are being treated historically by philosophers who formerly did "original" work. --- On Tue, 8/5/08, Charles Brown wrote: > From: Charles Brown > Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Date: Tuesday, August 5, 2008, 1:28 PM > [Marxism] Studying philosophy at the New School > Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com > Fri Aug 1 14:15:29 MDT 2008 > > Previous message: [Marxism] Paul Le Blanc on the Trotsky > Legacy conference > Next message: [Marxism] Studying philosophy at the New > School > Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ > author ] > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > A couple of items that I stumbled across on the net lately > have gotten > me thinking about time spent as a graduate student in the > philosophy > department of the New School back in 1965 to 1967. > > The first was an article titled ?Why are some of the > greatest thinkers > being expelled from their disciplines?? that appeared in > the July 25th > Chronicle of Higher Education (unfortunately limited to > subscribers or > some university employees like myself). Written by UCLA > professor and > long-time semi-Marxist social commentator Russell Jacoby, > it called > attention to the disappearance of Freud, Marx and Hegel > from academia: This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 12 15:20:01 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:20:01 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School Message-ID: <48A1C641.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Logical Positivism was a relic even when I was an undergrad in the mid 70s and had a part of a class with one of the last great LPs, Carl Hempel, who, however, had implicitly renounced most of the tenets of classical LPism. Carnap and Hempel had actually deconstructed it from the inside in the late 40s, and Quine and Goodman drove a stake through its heart, but as Kuhn predicted, it did not die until its last adherents did. ^^^^ CB: What was the critique ? ^^^^ In the mid-70s there was a sense of excitement in analytical philosophy, what with Kripke, Putnam, Quine, and Davidson on language, Kuhn and Feyerabend on science, Fodor, Rorty, the Churchlands, Stich, on mind, Rawls and Nozick on political philosophy; it seemed to be making progress and in fact there was a lot of still vital work being done, much of which is still very interesting and we haven't exhausted it. CeJ is right about what happened, dead end, hermetic self-enclosed cult. ^^^^^ CB: Before it became a cult, was "it" being related to a wider social group ? In what sense do these schools of thought make progress ? get exhausted ? have or lack vitality ? I have some trouble understanding how what was valid in analytical philosophy before is invalidated by the shift to a cult. That's why Rorty left. If you look at the major departmedbts today and compare them with the lineup I had at Princeton in the mid 70s -- Rorty, Kripke, David Lewis, Thomas Kuhn, Carl Hempel, Gil Harman, Paul Benacerraf, Thomas Nagel, Tim Scanlon, Michael Frede -- well, some of them are still there, or around, but the replacements for the ones who left aren't anything like that stature. And Harvard didn't find anyone of similar weight to replace Quine, Goodman, Nozick or Putnam (Putnam's still there but he's a caricature of himself and has been for decades); they brought in Scanlon to replace Rawls and good as Tim is, he's not a heavy element of the atomic number of Rawls. NYU and Rutgers, the rising styar schgools, just don't compare. It's symptomatic that analytical philosophy is now being treated as a subject This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 12 15:29:08 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:29:08 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: <002101c8fcb4$fd733d80$59ee9e51@HPINVENT> References: <002101c8fcb4$fd733d80$59ee9e51@HPINVENT> Message-ID: <48A1C863.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Chris you asked: Can anyone point to previous contributions on the Asiatic mode of production on this list? ^^^^ See below Marxism-Thaxis] Preface Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org Thu Oct 20 06:58:04 MDT 2005 Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Bourgeois property seminar Next message: [Marxism-Thaxis] "Philosopher's stone" Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Karl Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Preface ________________________________ Source: K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas. ________________________________ I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the State, foreign trade, world market. The economic conditions of existence of the three great classes into which modern bourgeois society is divided are analysed under the first three headings; the interconnection of the other three headings is self-evident. The first part of the first book, dealing with Capital, comprises the following chapters: 1. The commodity, 2. Money or simple circulation; 3. Capital in general. The present part consists of the first two chapters. The entire material lies before me in the form of monographs, which were written not for publication but for self-clarification at widely separated periods; their remoulding into an integrated whole according to the plan I have indicated will depend upon circumstances. A general introduction, which I had drafted, is omitted, since on further consideration it seems to me confusing to anticipate results which still have to be substantiated, and the reader who really wishes to follow me will have to decide to advance from the particular to the general. A few brief remarks regarding the course of my study of political (economy are ?)appropriate here. Although I studied jurisprudence, I pursued it as a subject subordinated to philosophy and history. In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. The deliberations of the Rhenish Landtag on forest thefts and the division of landed property; the officials polemic started by Herr von Schaper, then Oberprasident of the Rhine Province, against the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Moselle peasantry, and finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions. On the other hand, at that time when good intentions "to push forward" often took the place of factual knowledge, an echo of French socialism and communism, slightly tinged by philosophy, was noticeable in the Rheinische Zeitung. I objected to this dilettantism, but at the same time frankly admitted in a controversy with the Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung that my previous studies did not allow me to express any opinion on the content of the French theories. When the publishers of the Rheinische Zeitung conceived the illusion that by a more compliant policy on the part of the paper it might be possible to secure the abrogation of the death sentence passed upon it, I eagerly grasped the opportunity to withdraw from the public stage to my study. The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law; the introduction to this work being published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher issued in Paris in 1844. My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term "civil society"; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy. The study of this, which I began in Paris, I continued in Brussels, where I moved owing to an expulsion order issued by M. Guizot. The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows. In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter Into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient,[A] feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence - but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation. Frederick Engels, with whom I maintained a constant exchange of ideas by correspondence since the publication of his brilliant essay on the critique of economic categories (printed in the Deutsch-Franz?sische Jahrb?cher, arrived by another road (compare his Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England) at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. The intention was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript [The German Ideology], two large octavo volumes, had long ago reached the publishers in Westphalia when we were informed that owing to changed circumstances it could not be printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose - self-clarification. Of the scattered works in which at that time we presented one or another aspect of our views to the public, I shall mention only the Manifesto of the Communist Party, jointly written by Engels and myself, and a Discours sur le libre echange, which I myself published. The salient points of our conception were first outlined in an academic, although polemical, form in my Misere de la philosophie..., this book which was aimed at Proudhon appeared in 1847. The publication of an essay on Wage-Labour [Wage-Labor and Capital] written in German in which I combined the lectures I had held on this subject at the German Workers' Association in Brussels, was interrupted by the February Revolution and my forcible removal from Belgium in consequence. The publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849 and subsequent events cut short my economic studies, which I could only resume in London in 1850. The enormous amount of material relating to the history of political economy assembled in the British Museum, the fact that London is a convenient vantage point for the observation of bourgeois society, and finally the new stage of development which this society seemed to have entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia, induced me to start again from the very beginning and to work carefully through the new material. These studies led partly of their own accord to apparently quite remote subjects on which I had to spend a certain amount of time. But it was in particular the imperative necessity of earning my living which reduced the time at my disposal. My collaboration, continued now for eight years, with the New York Tribune, the leading Anglo-American newspaper, necessitated an excessive fragmentation of my studies, for I wrote only exceptionally newspaper correspondence in the strict sense. Since a considerable part of my contributions consisted of articles dealing with important economic events in Britain and on the continent, I was compelled to become conversant with practical detail which, strictly speaking, lie outside the sphere of political economy. This sketch of the course of my studies in the domain of political economy is intended merely to show that my views - no matter how they may be judged and how little they conform to the interested prejudices of the ruling classes - are the outcome of conscientious research carried on over many years. At the entrance to science, as at the entrance to hell, the demand must be made: Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto Ogni vilta convien che qui sia morta. [From Dante, Divina Commedia: Here must all distrust be left; All cowardice must here be dead.] Karl Marx London, January 1859 ________________________________ [A] As a second footnote to the Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote in 1888: In 1847, the pre-history of society, the social organization existing previous to recorded history, [was] all but unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and, by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organization of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form, by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1861) crowning discovery of the true nature of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State , second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. Thus, as the science of understanding pre-history progressed (pre-history being that time before written records of human civilization exist), Marx & Engels changed their understanding and descriptions accordingly. In the above text, Marx mentions "Asiatic" modes of production. At the time, they had thought Asian civilization was the first we could speak of humanity (an understanding based on Hegel, see: The Oriental Realm ). After 1857 , they dropped the idea of a distinct Asiatic mode of production, and kept four basic forms: tribal, ancient, feudal, and capitalist. ________________________________ [See also: the Abstracted version] Next: I. The Commodity Table of Contents | Marx Engels Archive To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 12 15:36:55 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:36:55 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia Message-ID: <48A1CA37.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> http://www.driftline.org/cgi-bin/archive/archive_msg.cgi?file=spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1996/96-12-15.193&msgnum=94&start=7182&end=7286 File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1996/96-12-15.193, message 94 Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1996 15:54:08 -0500 (EST) From: Gerald Levy Subject: M-TH: Marx on the non-capitalist world ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1996 09:32:19 -0800 (PST) From: "David N. Smith" Subject: [PEN-L:7865] Marx on the non-capitalist world Dear friends, I'm writing to call your attention to a newly pending publication which may be of some interest to list members. This is the English-language edition of Marx's so-called "ethnological notebooks," which will appear next year, or perhaps 1998, under the title *Patriarchy and Property.* These notebooks -- systematic annotations of major ethnological works by Morgan, Maine, Phear, and Lubbock -- formed the basis for Engels' famed Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, but go far beyond Engels in terms of the richness of what they say about non-capitalist cultures, both in premodern times and in the non-Western world of the late nineteenth century. I'll say more about the substance of this book in a moment, but first, I'd like to ask list members who are interested in Marx's notebooks to let me know. As editor, I'm in the midst of delicate negotiations with the publisher over a variety of issues (the press run, total pages, the font size, etc.) and it would help me greatly to be able to report that there is lively interest among potential readers, reviewers, and so on. Hence, if you'd seriously consider reading or reviewing Patriarchy and Property, or perhaps assigning it to your students, I would greatly ap- preciate hearing from you. Just send me a private reply to this note, okay? (With your name, position, affiliation, address, and any other pertinent data, e.g. friends who should hear about this, courses you may assign this to, etc.) Many thanks, in advance, for your support! Marx's views, of course, are not the last word on any of the subjects he discusses, and they fall outside the purview of economics narrowly construed, but they are also richer and quite a bit more complex than many people suppose. The ethnological notes in particular are valuable for the light they shed on Marx's perception of African, Asian, American and ancient European cultures, which interested Marx, in the twilight of his life, in connection with his continuing work on Capital. When Marx wrote his voluminous notes on Morgan, Maine et al. in the years 1879-82, he was steeped in work on the concluding section of what we now know as Capital Vol. 2, where, for the first time, Marx began to systematically inspect the question of the global spread and sway of capital (under the rubric of the "expanded" accumulation and reproduction of capital). This led Marx to consider carefully the character of the cultures that capital was encountering. An epochal collision was underway, between capitalist Europe & North America, on the one hand, and a world of cultures that antedated and, to varying degrees, posed obstacles to capital. Marx *could* have simply posited the "solvent" power of money, and left it at that. But by 1879 he was well aware that cultures have powers of resistance that cannot be discounted. To grasp the specificity of these powers, Marx needed to put capital in context on a world scale. That, briefly, is what he began to do in the ethnological notebooks. And the result is a cornucopia of valuable data on Marx's views on myriad issues, including, e.g., the transition from the Mughals to the British in Bengal, the nature of the village commune in India, clan culture and structure in Africa and the Americas, matriliny and marriage, totem and taboo, etc. Marx's notebooks don't mark a fundamental departure from classical Marxian themes (capital, class, value) but they do represent the start of an effort to extend and contextualize these notions. (Rosa Luxemburg made a similar effort, also on the basis of Capital Vol. 2, in her Accumulation of Capital.) Closer attention to Marx's notebooks won't resolve any currently debated issues, but will, I think, help us to see Marx's views on the relations between capital and non-capitalist cultures in a slightly different light. And much of what Marx has to say in these notebooks is unfamiliar (partly because Engels gave the notebooks a very skewed and selective reading, stressing the ancient European past at the expense of Marx's far greater concern, the non-Western world in his own day). Together with related works, e.g., his notes on Kovalevsky's study of empire and land tenure (1879), which are appended to Lawrence Krader's book on The Asiatic Mode of Production, Marx's ethnological notes have something genuine to offer. My hope is that the English-language edition of these notes will make this clear. Thanks again, and I'll look forward to hearing from anyone with a further interest in this project. David Smith David N. Smith Department of Sociology University of Kansas Lawrence KS 66045 emerald-AT-lark.cc.ukans.edu PH (913) 864-4111 FAX (9913) 864-5280 --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Tue Aug 12 18:48:21 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:48:21 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: <48A1C641.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <1642.80916.qm@web50407.mail.re2.yahoo.com> --- On Tue, 8/12/08, Charles Brown wrote: > From: Charles Brown > Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2008, 4:20 PM > Logical Positivism was a relic even when I was an undergrad > in the mid > 70s and had a part of a class with one of the last great > LPs, Carl > Hempel, who, however, had implicitly renounced most of the > tenets of > classical LPism. > > Carnap and Hempel had actually deconstructed it from the > inside in the > late 40s, and Quine and Goodman drove a stake through its > heart, but as > Kuhn predicted, it did not die until its last adherents > did. > > ^^^^ > CB: What was the critique ? Familiar stuff now, atomic sentence-by-sentence verification wasn't possible, maybe the whole v-theory of meaning had to go; readthe last few pages of Two Dogmas of Empiricism or meditate on Quine's use of Neurath's remark as an epigraph for Word and Obvject: We are like sailors on a sea, we can take up any plank, but not all at once. It took a long time for the force of this sort of idea to make itself felt. > > ^^^^ > > In the mid-70s there was a sense of excitement in > analytical > philosophy, what with Kripke, Putnam, Quine, and Davidson > on language, > Kuhn and Feyerabend on science, Fodor, Rorty, the > Churchlands, Stich, on > mind, Rawls and Nozick on political philosophy; it seemed > to be making > progress and in fact there was a lot of still vital work > being done, > much of which is still very interesting and we haven't > exhausted it. > > CeJ is right about what happened, dead end, hermetic > self-enclosed > cult. > ^^^^^ > CB: Before it became a cult, was "it" being > related to a wider social > group ? As we've discussed here there has been some writing about how the LPs were mostly modernist radicals in Europe, before coming to America and becoming domesticated. > > In what sense do these schools of thought make progress ? > get > exhausted ? have or lack vitality ? I have some trouble > understanding > how what was valid in analytical philosophy before is > invalidated by the > shift to a cult. Here Lakatos' notion of a progressive versus a degenerating research program is helpful. Progressive research programs in science identify new problems and propose new solutions for them, unifying and even creating different fields and expanding their scope and the strength of the predictive and explanatory ambition. Degenerating programs circle the wagons, defending old theories with increasingly elaborate refinements while (to wax Rortian here) everyone else gets bored and moves on. What was valid in AP --a broad church -- is still valid in the sense that it (some proposition of AP) was true it still is. (Same with scholasticism, for that matter.) But at some point in the last 25 years AP stopped being able to generate new problems or generate new solutions to old olds; it became hyperrefined and very specialized and lost whatever interest it had in and for the world outside itself, so the impression one gets from a middle distance, which is far as I will ever be able to get from AP, is that APers are making very small, highly refined adjustments to the deck chairs on a Titanic that everyone else has long since left. At the risk of being provocative value theory in Marxism bears the marks of a degenerating reserach porogram as well. > -thaxis From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Tue Aug 12 18:52:17 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:52:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: <48A1C16D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <426248.80428.qm@web50412.mail.re2.yahoo.com> > ^^^ > CB: I really don't have a dog in this hunt, and I > appreciate the general survey of the state of philo, but I > thought Jacoby said that Marx, Freud and Hegel aren't > taught much. I didn't read what you said as majorly > contradicting that. ?? Sop far as he's saying that, yes. So far as he is contrasting that state of affaiurs to what he thinks is being taught, he's out of touch and out of date. > Marx of course enjoyed a renaissance at the prestige > schools under the Analytical Marxists in 1975-1995 until > they collapsed, along with the rest of Marxism, with the > fall of Communism. > > ^^^^ > CB: Aren't there lots of Marxists in China , still ? > Cuba ? If there are they aren't contributing much to a theoretical renaissance of Marxism visible from the Anglo-American-European world. From steiger2001 at centrum.cz Wed Aug 13 01:40:53 2008 From: steiger2001 at centrum.cz (steiger2001 at centrum.cz) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:40:53 +0200 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia In-Reply-To: <48A1CA37.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48A1CA37.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <200808130940.15779@centrum.cz> Having just read David?s announcement on his edtion of Marx? Ethnological Notebooks I would like to know what - if any - differences - improvements, changes - this edition may have compared what I have in front of me and which is Lawrence Krader?s edition of 1974 published by Van Gorcum, Assen, The Netherlands. Thanks for information. Stephen Steiger, Prague? ______________________________________________________________ > Od: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us > Komu: > Datum: 12.08.2008 23:38 > P?edm?t: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia > http://www.driftline.org/cgi-bin/archive/archive_msg.cgi?file=spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1996/96-12-15.193&msgnum=94&start=7182&end=7286 File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1996/96-12-15.193, message 94 Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1996 15:54:08 -0500 (EST) From: Gerald Levy Subject: M-TH: Marx on the non-capitalist world ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1996 09:32:19 -0800 (PST) From: "David N. Smith" Subject: [PEN-L:7865] Marx on the non-capitalist world Dear friends, I'm writing to call your attention to a newly pending publication which may be of some interest to list members. ?This is the English-language edition of Marx's so-called "ethnological notebooks," which will appear next year, or perhaps 1998, under the title *Patriarchy and Property.* These notebooks -- systematic annotations of major ethnological works by Morgan, Maine, Phear, and Lubbock -- formed the basis for Engels' famed Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, but go far beyond Engels in terms of the richness of what they say about non-capitalist cultures, both in premodern times and in the non-Western world of the late nineteenth century. I'll say more about the substance of this book in a moment, but first, I'd like to ask list members who are interested in Marx's notebooks to let me know. ?As editor, I'm in the midst of delicate negotiations with the publisher over a variety of issues (the press run, total pages, the font size, etc.) and it would help me greatly to be able to report that there is lively interest among potential readers, reviewers, and so on. Hence, if you'd seriously consider reading or reviewing Patriarchy and Property, or perhaps assigning it to your students, I would greatly ap- preciate hearing from you. ?Just send me a private reply to this note, okay? ?(With your name, position, affiliation, address, and any other pertinent data, e.g. friends who should hear about this, courses you may assign this to, etc.) ?Many thanks, in advance, for your support! Marx's views, of course, are not the last word on any of the subjects he discusses, and they fall outside the purview of economics narrowly construed, but they are also richer and quite a bit more complex than many people suppose. ?The ethnological notes in particular are valuable for the light they shed on Marx's perception of African, Asian, American and ancient European cultures, which interested Marx, in the twilight of his life, in connection with his continuing work on Capital. ?When Marx wrote his voluminous notes on Morgan, Maine et al. in the years 1879-82, he was steeped in work on the concluding section of what we now know as Capital Vol. 2, where, for the first time, Marx began to systematically inspect the question of the global spread and sway of capital (under the rubric of the "expanded" accumulation and reproduction of capital). This led Marx to consider carefully the character of the cultures that capital was encountering. ?An epochal collision was underway, between capitalist Europe & North America, on the one hand, and a world of cultures that antedated and, to varying degrees, posed obstacles to capital. Marx *could* have simply posited the "solvent" power of money, and left it at that. ?But by 1879 he was well aware that cultures have powers of resistance that cannot be discounted. ?To grasp the specificity of these powers, Marx needed to put capital in context on a world scale. ?That, briefly, is what he began to do in the ethnological notebooks. ?And the result is a cornucopia of valuable data on Marx's views on myriad issues, including, e.g., the transition from the Mughals to the British in Bengal, the nature of the village commune in India, clan culture and structure in Africa and the Americas, matriliny and marriage, totem and taboo, etc. Marx's notebooks don't mark a fundamental departure from classical Marxian themes (capital, class, value) but they do represent the start of an effort to extend and contextualize these notions. (Rosa Luxemburg made a similar effort, also on the basis of Capital Vol. 2, in her Accumulation of Capital.) Closer attention to Marx's notebooks won't resolve any currently debated issues, but will, I think, help us to see Marx's views on the relations between capital and non-capitalist cultures in a slightly different light. And much of what Marx has to say in these notebooks is unfamiliar (partly because Engels gave the notebooks a very skewed and selective reading, stressing the ancient European past at the expense of Marx's far greater concern, the non-Western world in his own day). ?Together with related works, e.g., his notes on Kovalevsky's study of empire and land tenure (1879), which are appended to Lawrence Krader's book on The Asiatic Mode of Production, Marx's ethnological notes have something genuine to offer. My hope is that the English-language edition of these notes will make this clear. Thanks again, and I'll look forward to hearing from anyone with a further interest in this project. David Smith David N. Smith Department of Sociology University of Kansas Lawrence KS 66045 emerald-AT-lark.cc.ukans.edu PH (913) 864-4111 FAX (9913) 864-5280 ? ? --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ? ? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ? From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 13 09:08:03 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:08:03 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: <426248.80428.qm@web50412.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <48A1C16D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <426248.80428.qm@web50412.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> >>> andie nachgeborenen If there are they aren't contributing much to a theoretical renaissance of Marxism visible from the Anglo-American-European world. ^^^^ CB: Maybe we can discuss this. I don't see where Marxism needs a theoretical renaissance. It needs a revival in practice, but the fundamentals of its analysis of capitalism and history (dare I say philosophy ;smile) seem valid. The world bourgeoisie have won some big victories over the world working class, but even in that the basic dynamic of class conflict and struggle today are very well described by Marxism. Finance capital is on top of the world with imperialist wars regularly waged, just as theoretical Leninism claims, etc. The main update of Marxism might be that the bourgeoisie have turned out to be more dangerous - with the development of weapons of mass destruction and genocidal/anti-communist wars - than even Marx or Lenin warned. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Aug 13 09:44:11 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:44:11 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48A1C16D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <426248.80428.qm@web50412.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: If there is any Marxism in China, it could only come from an underground opposition to the vicious fascist animals who rule China, the worst exploiters of labor on the planet. Value theory is not my hobby, but I'm curious to know why it's come to a dead end. At 11:08 AM 8/13/2008, Charles Brown wrote: > >>> andie nachgeborenen > >If there are they aren't contributing much to a theoretical renaissance >of Marxism visible from the Anglo-American-European world. > >^^^^ >CB: Maybe we can discuss this. I don't see where Marxism needs a >theoretical renaissance. It needs a revival in practice, but the >fundamentals of its analysis of capitalism and history (dare I say >philosophy ;smile) seem valid. The world bourgeoisie have won some big >victories over the world working class, but even in that the basic >dynamic of class conflict and struggle today are very well described by >Marxism. Finance capital is on top of the world with imperialist wars >regularly waged, just as theoretical Leninism claims, etc. > >The main update of Marxism might be that the bourgeoisie have turned >out to be more dangerous - with the development of weapons of mass >destruction and genocidal/anti-communist wars - than even Marx or >Lenin warned. From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 13 09:47:52 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:47:52 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ethnological Notebooks Message-ID: <48A2C9E8.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Having just read David?s announcement on his edtion of Marx? Ethnological Notebooks I would like to know what - if any - differences - improvements, changes - this edition may have compared what I have in front of me and which is Lawrence Krader?s edition of 1974 published by Van Gorcum, Assen, The Netherlands. Thanks for information. Stephen Steiger, Prague ^^^^^ CB: That announcement is from 1996. Jim F. may know more about David. In the section below, he mentions Krader Together with related works, e.g., his notes on Kovalevsky's study of empire and land tenure (1879), which are appended to Lawrence Krader's book on The Asiatic Mode of Production, Marx's ethnological notes have something genuine to offer. My hope is that the English-language edition of these notes will make this clear. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From steiger2001 at centrum.cz Wed Aug 13 09:35:35 2008 From: steiger2001 at centrum.cz (steiger2001 at centrum.cz) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:35:35 +0200 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48A1C16D.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <426248.80428.qm@web50412.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <200808131735.22106@centrum.cz> I fully agree with CB?s point of view but would add only this to his last paragraph: unfortunately, it i not only the weapons of mass destruction that make the bourgeoisie (BTW an almost outdated term - it?s the "ruling classes" which is not a simple identification with the bourgeoisie) - so extremely dangerous fot the whole mankind - it is its ruling over the minds of people with the new weapons of information technology (tv and internet). It is in my opinion far more difficult to reach people with Marxist ideas than it has been in my youth - 60 years ago. Stephen, Prague (Czech Republic)? ______________________________________________________________ > Od: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us > Komu: > Datum: 13.08.2008 17:10 > P?edm?t: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School > >>> andie nachgeborenen If there are they aren't contributing much to a theoretical renaissance of Marxism visible from the Anglo-American-European world. ^^^^ CB: ?Maybe we can discuss this. I don't see where Marxism needs a theoretical renaissance. ?It needs a revival in practice, but the fundamentals of its analysis of capitalism and history (dare I say philosophy ;smile) seem valid. ? The world bourgeoisie have won some big victories over the world working class, but even in that the basic dynamic of class conflict and struggle today are very well described by Marxism. ?Finance capital is on top of the world with imperialist wars regularly waged, just as theoretical Leninism claims, etc. ? The main update of Marxism might be that the bourgeoisie have turned out to be ?more dangerous - with the development of weapons of mass destruction and genocidal/anti-communist wars - ? than even Marx or Lenin warned. ? ? ? _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ? From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Wed Aug 13 14:51:19 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:51:19 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <921957.46604.qm@web50408.mail.re2.yahoo.com> --- On Wed, 8/13/08, Ralph Dumain wrote: > From: Ralph Dumain > Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Date: Wednesday, August 13, 2008, 10:44 AM > If there is any Marxism in China, it could only come from an > > underground opposition to the vicious fascist animals who > rule China, > the worst exploiters of labor on the planet. Well, there are Marxists housed safely in the Universities where they can do no harm. > > Value theory is not my hobby, but I'm curious to know > why it's come > to a dead end. I don't want to get into this, but my very short answer is that outside of exegesis, it's hard to see what positive contribution Marxian value theory has made to economic understanding in a very long time, maybe 100 years. There is a small circle of people who are passionately into defending their pet version against all comers, often with a lot of fireworks (see e.g., Andrew Kliman vs. Gerry Levy), but mainly with regard to the internal consistency of the theory. Shaikh tried to use value-theoretical concepts to explain the falling rate of profit, but apart from the fact that his thing was really whether the RoP is in fact falling, it's not evident that that VT does any real work in his story. You want to see see a survey witha controversial pov (neo-Sraffan, but all points of view are controversial), see King & Howard, they havea two volume history and one volune Political Econ of Marx. Menagh (sp?) Desai, now Lord Desai, a former defendfer of mathematical Marxisn value theory, has become a "legal Marxist" in the old Russian sense; he now argues that Marxian VT presages the triumph of capitalism. The Chinese would love that. > > > At 11:08 AM 8/13/2008, Charles Brown wrote: > > >>> andie nachgeborenen > > > >If there are they aren't contributing much to a > theoretical renaissance > >of Marxism visible from the Anglo-American-European > world. > > > >^^^^ > >CB: Maybe we can discuss this. I don't see where > Marxism needs a > >theoretical renaissance. It needs a revival in > practice, but the > >fundamentals of its analysis of capitalism and history > (dare I say > >philosophy ;smile) seem valid. The world bourgeoisie > have won some big > >victories over the world working class, but even in > that the basic > >dynamic of class conflict and struggle today are very > well described by > >Marxism. Finance capital is on top of the world with > imperialist wars > >regularly waged, just as theoretical Leninism claims, > etc. > > > >The main update of Marxism might be that the > bourgeoisie have turned > >out to be more dangerous - with the development of > weapons of mass > >destruction and genocidal/anti-communist wars - than > even Marx or > >Lenin warned. > > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Wed Aug 13 15:01:05 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:01:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <122421.68195.qm@web50402.mail.re2.yahoo.com> We've been around this block before. Two reasons why we need a Marxian theoretical renaissance, one intellectual, the other political Intellectually there are big lacunae in Marxist theory, problems the tradition has not solved. To take some less controversial ones, old and new: the failure to account for the failure of proletarian revolution in the advanced West; to which we may add the new problem, the collapse of state socialism in the East. The related question of an account of the middle classes, since Marx and the tradition say little except that these will disappear. Didn't happen. A general account of the nature of class; Marx;s own final story breaks off 40 lines into the notes in Cap 3. The relation of class to other fault lines in divided societies, race, gender, etc. A plausible account at general level of how a classless society might be feasible. Practically and politically, if the movement were vital, it would be attracting bright minds to work these problems, and its vitality depends in part on its appearance of vitality and its being intellectually vital, on having more than just the old pieties to express. But there is no movement and what there is not attracting bright minds; it's a vicious circle. --- On Wed, 8/13/08, Charles Brown wrote: > From: Charles Brown > Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Date: Wednesday, August 13, 2008, 10:08 AM > >>> andie nachgeborenen > > If there are they aren't contributing much to a > theoretical renaissance > of Marxism visible from the Anglo-American-European world. > > ^^^^ > CB: Maybe we can discuss this. I don't see where > Marxism needs a > theoretical renaissance. It needs a revival in practice, > but the > fundamentals of its analysis of capitalism and history > (dare I say > philosophy ;smile) seem valid. The world bourgeoisie have > won some big > victories over the world working class, but even in that > the basic > dynamic of class conflict and struggle today are very well > described by > Marxism. Finance capital is on top of the world with > imperialist wars > regularly waged, just as theoretical Leninism claims, etc. > > > The main update of Marxism might be that the bourgeoisie > have turned > out to be more dangerous - with the development of weapons > of mass > destruction and genocidal/anti-communist wars - than even > Marx or > Lenin warned. > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis > > > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl > plc. www.surfcontrol.com > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 13 15:07:44 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:07:44 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] How the Left Saved Capitalism Message-ID: <48A314E0.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> How the Left Saved Capitalism by Gregory W Esteven http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/esteven200708.html Monthly Review (July 20 2008) There is an entire genre of theory explaining why the Western capitalist democracies did not undergo socialist revolution in the 20th Century, as Classical Marxism had predicted. Not surprisingly, most of this material comes from the Left itself {1}. We can include Antonio Gramsci's work on hegemony in this genre, as well as the entire output of the Frankfurt School and other psychoanalytically-inclined Marxist theorists (Althusser comes to mind). Taken together, this work contributes greatly to our understanding of the complex dynamics of political and social change, reminding us to avoid over-simplifications and belief in quick fixes of all varieties. I do not want to diminish these contributions in any way and am not challenging them here. But at the same time I am suspicious of placing too much emphasis on the Left's failures in order to account for the ongoing state of affairs. To supplement the theories I've already mentioned, I would like to propose a subversive reading of the conventional narrative. Couldn't we also say that the successes of the organized Left (modest though they were) actually helped to preserve capitalism, saving it from runaway contradictions, and therefore temporarily reducing the need for revolution? At first this may seem counterintuitive, but not when we take into account a key feature of capitalism that distinguishes it from previous modes of production - namely its need for instability. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels assert that: "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones." I think that old saying, "Sometimes your greatest strength is also your greatest weakness", applies here. Capitalism sustains itself through its contradictions (e.g. the preponderance of the small owning class over the vast working class, the social nature of wealth generation contrasted with the private nature of accumulation), but these same contradictions always threaten the integrity of the system itself. We know that the capitalist class benefits, for instance, from maintaining high profits and low wages, as well as from divisions in society, such as those of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. But if workers become too impoverished, or sexism, racism, and homophobia become too pronounced, the system becomes destabilized to a dangerous degree; explosion, or rather implosion, is a real possibility. If wages drop so low that workers give up shopping, this starts to cut into profits. And although it is in the interests of the capitalist class to keep workers divided on the basis of race, they don't want crazy racist militias roving the streets murdering minorities. We have a delicate balancing act here. Capitalism can't afford for the pendulum to swing too far in either direction (towards stability or instability). Marx and Engels were writing when capitalist relations of production were at their most inhuman. Workers in most industrialized and industrializing countries weren't even afforded the bare minimum of workers' rights which at least some of us enjoy today, such as the right to organize, limits on the length of the work day, and bans on child labor. Observing these conditions, along with growing concentrations of wealth, it's no wonder that Marxism's early proponents believed that revolution was inevitable. Something strange happened, however. The rise of labor unions and radical political organizing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though they faced intense, and often violent, opposition from the ruling classes, resulted in increasing positive gains for workers. The grossest contradictions of capitalist relations were reduced, precisely because the working class was winning important battles. In many countries workers won better wages, a shortened work day, and safety regulations at the workplace. And with the birth of the welfare state in Western Europe and the New Deal in the United States, a new "capitalism with a human face" seemed to be on the horizon. Let's be clear. The level of prosperity and freedom which existed in the West, from roughly the early 1950s to the beginning of deep reaction in the 1980s, was unprecedented in world history. There were a number of reasons for this, and one of them was that the past and continuing successes of the Left were ensuring that workers were getting a fairer share of the pie, thus providing economic stability and less intense contradictions. More of the wealth was going to more of the people than ever before. (Not to mention the fact that the Left and progressive movements were working hard to reduce other contradictions, such as sexism and racism.) It's probably hard for young people nowadays to imagine, but my grandfather - after fighting in Japan in World War Two - worked for one company from the early 1950's to the early 1990's: United Gas. Until the 1970s, he and his family lived in houses provided by the company, which paid the utility bills and offered many opportunities for job advancement and higher pay. With the money they saved over the years they were able to move up to the middle class, buy land and their own home, without going into debt to do it. They had a great health plan at low cost. And when my grandfather retired, his pension was more than enough to cover living expenses. He often remarked that although he never belonged to a union, he knew that he only enjoyed these kinds of wages and benefits because other workers did belong to unions. Now, his company was perhaps more kindly and paternalistic than most, but it does illustrate the more humane capitalism which existed in that period. {2} Capitalism is an incredibly dynamic and adaptable system, since, as we have seen, it was able to adopt "socialistic" reforms in order to ameliorate the conditions of workers and avoid crisis and revolutionary upsurges in the core nations. But the question for us today is whether this (broadly-defined) Keynesian logic of amelioration has run its course, reaching its limits with the advent of the global economy, which is qualitatively distinct from the international trade of yesteryear. In other words, was the great wave of reaction, the end of capitalism with a human face, simply brought about by the initiative of certain interests represented by Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the United States, or has a more fundamental, structural change taken place in the world system? The possibility I hint at is that the more humane version of capitalism is irreconcilable with globalization, as the former was associated with more autonomous national economies which could offer greater protections to workers, shielding them from blows from foreign markets. We all know what the picture looks like today. A global division of labor has emerged, with manufacturing jobs moving to the peripheral and semi-peripheral nations, and the core nations transitioning to "postindustrial" economies, dominated by information and service industries. Whatever is left of the welfare state is being dismantled. Workers are watching the hard-won gains of the past disappear. Multinational corporations set the policy agenda and workers in one part of the world are pitted against workers in other parts of the world (e.g. the euphemistically called "outsourcing"). In the year 2000, the richest one percent of the world's adults owned forty percent of global assets. While some say that Marx is irrelevant today, I maintain that the time of Marxism has just arrived. Isn't it in today's global economy that Marx has been vindicated? The concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, and the concomitant immiseration of the vast majority of the world's population, have occurred on a scale that makes Marx's predictions seem utterly conservative. A more intense contradiction of profit-driven environmental degradation than he could have foreseen further supports the core of his theories. And isn't it really in today's era of globalization that the old Leftist dream of internationalism becomes conceivable, practically, and necessary, strategically? I've long thought that the Industrial Workers of the World's objective of organizing skilled and unskilled labor together, across national boundaries, was ahead of its time. Far from being relics of a bygone era, the work they are doing now is cutting edge. They have a better understanding of the present conjuncture than many mainstream unions, which have been slow to adapt to the realities of the postindustrial economy. The IWW has worked to organize such service industry employees as Starbucks coffee shop workers; there are more of these kinds of jobs in the US than traditional manufacturing jobs today. My perverse Leftist imagination can't help but envision workers at both ends of the chain (the people who pick the beans and the people who serve the coffee) organized into the same transnational union. But that may be a ways down the road. Whatever the case with the IWW, Marx is definitely having his revenge, and it is not at all clear whether capitalism can continue to be reformed, in any significant way, as it was in the past. What comes next we cannot be sure, but it seems that the time to revive the socialist project has arrived, and it must be one adapted to the needs of the 21st century. Notes: 1 This has led Slavoj ?i?ek to suspect - perhaps with some justification - that the Left has long settled into a comfortable, moralistic posture, relishing defeat with the masochistic rapture that we project onto Christian martyrs of old. 2 Of course, this increased sharing of the wealth with workers in the Western democracies was predicated upon the fact that those countries had largely built their fortunes through colonialism in the past and from the ongoing super-exploitation of workers in the world's periphery and semi-periphery. We can't forget this aspect of the picture. The kinder, gentler capitalism wasn't being experienced by all the world's peoples. _____ Gregory W Esteven is a sociologist working as a research assistant at the Southeastern Social Science Research Center at Southeastern Louisiana University. He also serves on the advisory board of the Land Trust for Southeast Louisiana and is a frequent contributor to Political Affairs Magazine, a publication of the CPUSA. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/esteven200708.html This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 13 15:16:46 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:16:46 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Pipes-Solzhenitsyn's troubled prophetic mission Message-ID: <48A316FE.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Pipes can't find much good to say about Solzhenitsyn. Ironically, he kind makes him out to be a creep. CB ^^^^ Pipes-Solzhenitsyn's troubled prophetic mission Solzhenitsyn's Troubled Prophetic Mission 07 August 2008 By Richard Pipes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, viewed as a political figure, was very much in the Russian conservative tradition -- a modern version of Dostoevsky. Like the great 19th-century writer, Solzhenitsyn despised socialism and yet had no use for Western culture with its stress on secularism, freedom and legality. I recall very well the commencement address that he delivered 30 years ago at Harvard University. The audience of students and their families, aware of Solzhenitsyn's anti-communism, expected a warm tribute to the West -- and especially to the United States, which had granted him asylum. Instead, they were treated to a typical Russian conservative critique of Western civilization for being too legalistic and too committed to freedom, which resulted in the "weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger." At the bottom of this censure lay a wholesale rejection of the course of Western history since the Renaissance. Solzhenitsyn blamed the evils of Soviet communism on the West. He rightly stressed the European origins of Marxism, but he never asked himself why Marxism in other European countries led not to the gulag but to the welfare state. He reacted with white fury to any suggestion that the roots of Leninism and Stalinism could be found in Russia's past. His knowledge of Russian history was very superficial and laced with a romantic sentimentalism. While accusing the West of imperialism, he seemed quite unaware of the extraordinary expansion of his own country into regions inhabited by non-Russians. He also denied that Imperial Russia practiced censorship or condemned political prisoners to hard labor, which, of course, was absurd. In some of his historical writings, there are strong hints of anti-Semitism, a common vice of writers of the conservative-nationalist persuasion in Russia. In his 1976 book, "Lenin in Zurich," Solzhenitsyn depicts Helphand-Parvus as a slimy character who tries to persuade Lenin to return to Russia to start a revolution. In "August 1914," published in its expanded form in 1984, he explains the assassination of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin by Dmitry Bogrov, a thoroughly assimilated Jew, on the alleged grounds that Stolypin's plans for a better Russia promised nothing good for the Jews. Fortunately, in his last book published in 2003, "Two Hundred Years Together," an ambitious history of Jews in Russia, Solzhenitsyn unequivocally exonerated the Jewish people of responsibility for the Russian Revolution. It is difficult to envisage what kind of a Russia Solzhenitsyn wanted. He was not unhappy about Russia's loss of its imperial possessions, yet he did not favor a state based on law and democracy. He disliked what he saw after his return to Russia in 1994, during Boris Yeltsin's rule, but, strangely enough, he came to terms with then-President Vladimir Putin and his restrictions on both democracy and the free market. Although Solzhenitsyn vehemently rejected communism, in many ways he retained a Soviet mind-set. Anyone who disagreed with him was not merely wrong but evil. He was constitutionally incapable of tolerating dissent. His comments on current events were sometimes bizarre. In 1999, he condemned the NATO bombing of Serbia in defense of Albanian Kosovo, action which he described as following the "law of the jungle: He who is mighty is completely right." He went so far as to assert that there was "no difference in the behavior of NATO and of Hitler." Yet he did not ask himself whether the Albanians, persecuted by the more mighty Serbs, did not have the right on their side. Nor did he compare NATO's actions in Kosovo to those of Putin in Chechnya, where the Russian military not only bombed a population that sought independence, but destroyed the region's capital, Grozny -- a city that was part of the Russian Federation. Solzhenitsyn's assumption that he would become a prophet upon his return to Russia did not play well with the public. My impression is that he was widely considered a relic of the past. For this reason, his television program, "A Meeting with Solzhenitsyn," attracted so small of an audience that it had to be canceled. His October 1994 speech to the State Duma was tepidly received, as was his ambitious historical novel, "The Red Wheel." When all is said and done, Solzhenitsyn will be remembered primarily for his remarkably courageous resistance to and criticism of the Soviet Union. Although many commentators claim that he was the first to alert the world to the horrors of the gulag, this is not true; there were quite a few books on this subject before the publication of his "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago." Nonetheless, it is correct to say that Solzhenitsyn's works were the first to be issued from the Soviet Union and, in the case of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," the first to be published in the Soviet Union. The effect of these works was immense both in the Soviet Union and abroad, helping to discredit morally the communist regime among those who still entertained illusions about it. In this manner, Solzhenitsyn contributed to the Soviet Union's ultimate collapse. No one can deprive Solzhenitsyn of this honor. But when it comes to the recommendations he made to his compatriots, many doubts remain. Russians obviously have little in common with the Oriental nations; by race, religion and high culture, they belong to the West. Therefore, when Solzhenitsyn rejects Western values as inapplicable to his country, he leaves it in a cultural limbo -- it belongs nowhere and only to itself. This is a recipe for isolation, and isolation breeds aggressiveness. Richard Pipes is professor of history, emeritus at Harvard University and author, most recently, of "Russian Conservatism and Its Critics," which has just been published in Russian translation. ? Copyright 2007. The Moscow Times. All rights reserved. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Aug 13 15:44:45 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:44:45 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] How the Left Saved Capitalism In-Reply-To: <48A314E0.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48A314E0.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: This reminds me of a line from one of Manny Fried's plays about McCarthyism, I think the title is "A New Beginning". A decorated World War II veteran who is a Communist being persecuted in the '50s, tears up his commendation and throws his medal away, complaining: "We saved their system for them, and they turn around and kick us in the ass." And never forget what John L. Lewis said about the commies: they're the most dedicated and idealistic organizers, so let's let 'em in and do our organizing for us. I think this is the way Barack Obama is playing his community organizing background and using the left, except that, unlike the New Deal, he doesn't have much to offer but empty rhetoric. At 05:07 PM 8/13/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >How the Left Saved Capitalism by Gregory W >Esteven >http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/esteven200708.html >Monthly Review (July 20 2008) There is an entire >genre of theory explaining why the Western >capitalist democracies did not undergo socialist >revolution in the 20th Century, as Classical >Marxism had predicted. Not surprisingly, most >of this material comes from the Left itself {1}. >We can include Antonio Gramsci's work on >hegemony in this genre, as well as the entire >output of the Frankfurt School and other >psychoanalytically-inclined Marxist theorists >(Althusser comes to mind). Taken together, this >work contributes greatly to our understanding of >the complex dynamics of political and social >change, reminding us to avoid >over-simplifications and belief in quick fixes >of all varieties. I do not want to diminish >these contributions in any way and am not >challenging them here. But at the same time I am >suspicious of placing too much emphasis on the >Left's failures in order to account for the >ongoing state of affairs. To supplement the >theories I've already mentioned, I would like to >propose a subversive reading of the conventional >narrative. Couldn't we also say that the >successes of the organized Left (modest though >they were) actually helped to preserve >capitalism, saving it from runaway >contradictions, and therefore temporarily >reducing the need for revolution? At first this >may seem counterintuitive, but not when we take >into account a key feature of capitalism that >distinguishes it from previous modes of >production - namely its need for >instability. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx >and Engels assert that: "The bourgeoisie cannot >exist without constantly revolutionizing the >instruments of production, and thereby the >relations of production, and with them the whole >of society. Conservation of the old modes of >production in unaltered form, was, on the >contrary, the first condition of existence for >all earlier industrial classes. Constant >revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted >disturbance of all social conditions, >everlasting uncertainty and agitation >distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier >ones." I think that old saying, "Sometimes your >greatest strength is also your greatest >weakness", applies here. Capitalism sustains >itself through its contradictions (e.g. the >preponderance of the small owning class over the >vast working class, the social nature of wealth >generation contrasted with the private nature of >accumulation), but these same contradictions >always threaten the integrity of the system >itself. We know that the capitalist class >benefits, for instance, from maintaining high >profits and low wages, as well as from divisions >in society, such as those of gender, race, >ethnicity, and sexual orientation. But if >workers become too impoverished, or sexism, >racism, and homophobia become too pronounced, >the system becomes destabilized to a dangerous >degree; explosion, or rather implosion, is a >real possibility. If wages drop so low that >workers give up shopping, this starts to cut >into profits. And although it is in the >interests of the capitalist class to keep >workers divided on the basis of race, they don't >want crazy racist militias roving the streets >murdering minorities. We have a delicate >balancing act here. Capitalism can't afford for >the pendulum to swing too far in either >direction (towards stability or instability). >Marx and Engels were writing when capitalist >relations of production were at their most >inhuman. Workers in most industrialized and >industrializing countries weren't even afforded >the bare minimum of workers' rights which at >least some of us enjoy today, such as the right >to organize, limits on the length of the work >day, and bans on child labor. Observing these >conditions, along with growing concentrations of >wealth, it's no wonder that Marxism's early >proponents believed that revolution was >inevitable. Something strange happened, >however. The rise of labor unions and radical >political organizing in the late 19th and early >20th centuries, though they faced intense, and >often violent, opposition from the ruling >classes, resulted in increasing positive gains >for workers. The grossest contradictions of >capitalist relations were reduced, precisely >because the working class was winning important >battles. In many countries workers won better >wages, a shortened work day, and safety >regulations at the workplace. And with the >birth of the welfare state in Western Europe and >the New Deal in the United States, a new >"capitalism with a human face" seemed to be on >the horizon. Let's be clear. The level of >prosperity and freedom which existed in the >West, from roughly the early 1950s to the >beginning of deep reaction in the 1980s, was >unprecedented in world history. There were a >number of reasons for this, and one of them was >that the past and continuing successes of the >Left were ensuring that workers were getting a >fairer share of the pie, thus providing economic >stability and less intense contradictions. More >of the wealth was going to more of the people >than ever before. (Not to mention the fact that >the Left and progressive movements were working >hard to reduce other contradictions, such as >sexism and racism.) It's probably hard for young >people nowadays to imagine, but my grandfather - >after fighting in Japan in World War Two - >worked for one company from the early 1950's to >the early 1990's: United Gas. Until the 1970s, >he and his family lived in houses provided by >the company, which paid the utility bills and >offered many opportunities for job advancement >and higher pay. With the money they saved over >the years they were able to move up to the >middle class, buy land and their own home, >without going into debt to do it. They had a >great health plan at low cost. And when my >grandfather retired, his pension was more than >enough to cover living expenses. He often >remarked that although he never belonged to a >union, he knew that he only enjoyed these kinds >of wages and benefits because other workers did >belong to unions. Now, his company was perhaps >more kindly and paternalistic than most, but it >does illustrate the more humane capitalism which >existed in that period. {2} Capitalism is an >incredibly dynamic and adaptable system, since, >as we have seen, it was able to adopt >"socialistic" reforms in order to ameliorate the >conditions of workers and avoid crisis and >revolutionary upsurges in the core nations. But >the question for us today is whether this >(broadly-defined) Keynesian logic of >amelioration has run its course, reaching its >limits with the advent of the global economy, >which is qualitatively distinct from the >international trade of yesteryear. In other >words, was the great wave of reaction, the end >of capitalism with a human face, simply brought >about by the initiative of certain interests >represented by Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in >the United States, or has a more fundamental, >structural change taken place in the world >system? The possibility I hint at is that the >more humane version of capitalism is >irreconcilable with globalization, as the former >was associated with more autonomous national >economies which could offer greater protections >to workers, shielding them from blows from >foreign markets. We all know what the picture >looks like today. A global division of labor >has emerged, with manufacturing jobs moving to >the peripheral and semi-peripheral nations, and >the core nations transitioning to >"postindustrial" economies, dominated by >information and service industries. Whatever is >left of the welfare state is being dismantled. >Workers are watching the hard-won gains of the >past disappear. Multinational corporations set >the policy agenda and workers in one part of the >world are pitted against workers in other parts >of the world (e.g. the euphemistically called >"outsourcing"). In the year 2000, the richest >one percent of the world's adults owned forty >percent of global assets. While some say that >Marx is irrelevant today, I maintain that the >time of Marxism has just arrived. Isn't it in >today's global economy that Marx has been >vindicated? The concentration of wealth in the >hands of the few, and the concomitant >immiseration of the vast majority of the world's >population, have occurred on a scale that makes >Marx's predictions seem utterly conservative. A >more intense contradiction of profit-driven >environmental degradation than he could have >foreseen further supports the core of his >theories. And isn't it really in today's era of >globalization that the old Leftist dream of >internationalism becomes conceivable, >practically, and necessary, strategically? I've >long thought that the Industrial Workers of the >World's objective of organizing skilled and >unskilled labor together, across national >boundaries, was ahead of its time. Far from >being relics of a bygone era, the work they are >doing now is cutting edge. They have a better >understanding of the present conjuncture than >many mainstream unions, which have been slow to >adapt to the realities of the postindustrial >economy. The IWW has worked to organize such >service industry employees as Starbucks coffee >shop workers; there are more of these kinds of >jobs in the US than traditional manufacturing >jobs today. My perverse Leftist imagination >can't help but envision workers at both ends of >the chain (the people who pick the beans and the >people who serve the coffee) organized into the >same transnational union. But that may be a >ways down the road. Whatever the case with the >IWW, Marx is definitely having his revenge, and >it is not at all clear whether capitalism can >continue to be reformed, in any significant way, >as it was in the past. What comes next we >cannot be sure, but it seems that the time to >revive the socialist project has arrived, and it >must be one adapted to the needs of the 21st >century. Notes: 1 This has led Slavoj ? i? ek >to suspect - perhaps with some justification - >that the Left has long settled into a >comfortable, moralistic posture, relishing >defeat with the masochistic rapture that we >project onto Christian martyrs of old. 2 Of >course, this increased sharing of the wealth >with workers in the Western democracies was >predicated upon the fact that those countries >had largely built their fortunes through >colonialism in the past and from the ongoing >super-exploitation of workers in the world's >periphery and semi-periphery. We can't forget >this aspect of the picture. The kinder, gentler >capitalism wasn't being experienced by all the >world's peoples. _____ Gregory W Esteven is a >sociologist working as a research assistant at >the Southeastern Social Science Research Center >at Southeastern Louisiana University. He also >serves on the advisory board of the Land Trust >for Southeast Louisiana and is a frequent >contributor to Political Affairs Magazine, a >publication of the CPUSA. >http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/esteven200708.html >This message has been scanned for malware by >SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com >_______________________________________________ >Marxism-Thaxis mailing list >Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change >your options or unsubscribe go to: >http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis >No virus found in this incoming message. >Checked by AVG. >Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 270.6.1/1607 >- Release Date: 8/12/2008 7:19 AM From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Aug 13 15:49:58 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:49:58 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Pipes-Solzhenitsyn's troubled prophetic mission In-Reply-To: <48A316FE.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48A316FE.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: If Pipes doesn't like S, S really must be horrible. Actually, I've met Russians who dislike S's work. I remember one, of no specific political orientation I could discern, mocking S as a typical slavophile Russian nationalist. Authoritarian personality disorder, methinks. At 05:16 PM 8/13/2008, Charles Brown wrote: > Pipes can't find much good to say about > Solzhenitsyn. Ironically, he kind makes him out > to be a creep. CB ^^^^ Pipes-Solzhenitsyn's > troubled prophetic mission Solzhenitsyn's > Troubled Prophetic Mission 07 August 2008 By > Richard Pipes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, viewed as > a political figure, was very much in the > Russian conservative tradition -- a modern > version of Dostoevsky. Like the great > 19th-century writer, Solzhenitsyn despised > socialism and yet had no use for Western > culture with its stress on secularism, freedom > and legality. I recall very well the > commencement address that he delivered 30 years > ago at Harvard University. The audience of > students and their families, aware of > Solzhenitsyn's anti-communism, expected a warm > tribute to the West -- and especially to the > United States, which had granted him asylum. > Instead, they were treated to a typical Russian > conservative critique of Western civilization > for being too legalistic and too committed to > freedom, which resulted in the "weakening of > human beings in the West while in the East they > are becoming firmer and stronger." At the > bottom of this censure lay a wholesale > rejection of the course of Western history > since the Renaissance. Solzhenitsyn blamed the > evils of Soviet communism on the West. He > rightly stressed the European origins of > Marxism, but he never asked himself why Marxism > in other European countries led not to the > gulag but to the welfare state. He reacted with > white fury to any suggestion that the roots of > Leninism and Stalinism could be found in > Russia's past. His knowledge of Russian history > was very superficial and laced with a romantic > sentimentalism. While accusing the West of > imperialism, he seemed quite unaware of the > extraordinary expansion of his own country into > regions inhabited by non-Russians. He also > denied that Imperial Russia practiced > censorship or condemned political prisoners to > hard labor, which, of course, was absurd. In > some of his historical writings, there are > strong hints of anti-Semitism, a common vice of > writers of the conservative-nationalist > persuasion in Russia. In his 1976 book, "Lenin > in Zurich," Solzhenitsyn depicts > Helphand-Parvus as a slimy character who tries > to persuade Lenin to return to Russia to start > a revolution. In "August 1914," published in > its expanded form in 1984, he explains the > assassination of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin > by Dmitry Bogrov, a thoroughly assimilated Jew, > on the alleged grounds that Stolypin's plans > for a better Russia promised nothing good for > the Jews. Fortunately, in his last book > published in 2003, "Two Hundred Years > Together," an ambitious history of Jews in > Russia, Solzhenitsyn unequivocally exonerated > the Jewish people of responsibility for the > Russian Revolution. It is difficult to envisage > what kind of a Russia Solzhenitsyn wanted. He > was not unhappy about Russia's loss of its > imperial possessions, yet he did not favor a > state based on law and democracy. He disliked > what he saw after his return to Russia in 1994, > during Boris Yeltsin's rule, but, strangely > enough, he came to terms with then-President > Vladimir Putin and his restrictions on both > democracy and the free market. Although > Solzhenitsyn vehemently rejected communism, in > many ways he retained a Soviet mind-set. Anyone > who disagreed with him was not merely wrong but > evil. He was constitutionally incapable of > tolerating dissent. His comments on current > events were sometimes bizarre. In 1999, he > condemned the NATO bombing of Serbia in defense > of Albanian Kosovo, action which he described > as following the "law of the jungle: He who is > mighty is completely right." He went so far as > to assert that there was "no difference in the > behavior of NATO and of Hitler." Yet he did not > ask himself whether the Albanians, persecuted > by the more mighty Serbs, did not have the > right on their side. Nor did he compare NATO's > actions in Kosovo to those of Putin in > Chechnya, where the Russian military not only > bombed a population that sought independence, > but destroyed the region's capital, Grozny -- a > city that was part of the Russian Federation. > Solzhenitsyn's assumption that he would become > a prophet upon his return to Russia did not > play well with the public. My impression is > that he was widely considered a relic of the > past. For this reason, his television program, > "A Meeting with Solzhenitsyn," attracted so > small of an audience that it had to be > canceled. His October 1994 speech to the State > Duma was tepidly received, as was his ambitious > historical novel, "The Red Wheel." When all is > said and done, Solzhenitsyn will be remembered > primarily for his remarkably courageous > resistance to and criticism of the Soviet > Union. Although many commentators claim that he > was the first to alert the world to the horrors > of the gulag, this is not true; there were > quite a few books on this subject before the > publication of his "One Day in the Life of Ivan > Denisovich" and "The Gulag Archipelago." > Nonetheless, it is correct to say that > Solzhenitsyn's works were the first to be > issued from the Soviet Union and, in the case > of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," > the first to be published in the Soviet Union. > The effect of these works was immense both in > the Soviet Union and abroad, helping to > discredit morally the communist regime among > those who still entertained illusions about it. > In this manner, Solzhenitsyn contributed to the > Soviet Union's ultimate collapse. No one can > deprive Solzhenitsyn of this honor. But when it > comes to the recommendations he made to his > compatriots, many doubts remain. Russians > obviously have little in common with the > Oriental nations; by race, religion and high > culture, they belong to the West. Therefore, > when Solzhenitsyn rejects Western values as > inapplicable to his country, he leaves it in a > cultural limbo -- it belongs nowhere and only > to itself. This is a recipe for isolation, and > isolation breeds aggressiveness. Richard Pipes > is professor of history, emeritus at Harvard > University and author, most recently, of > "Russian Conservatism and Its Critics," which > has just been published in Russian translation. > ?? Copyright 2007. The Moscow Times. From jannuzi at gmail.com Wed Aug 13 17:54:38 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:54:38 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Message-ID: CB>>Centralised socialism seems to have left numerous cultural and ethnic conflicts that have exploded after its fall, as if the population had no innoculation about how to handle them. This happened in relatively unstalinist Yugoslavia too.<< If capitalist Europe--namely Austria, Germany, and US/NATO--hadn't aided Slovenia to break away from Yugoslavia, in violation of international law, Yugoslavian law and sovereignty, as well as taboos about the use of power after WW II--Yugoslavia might well not have become the bloody mess it turned into. Once Slovenia was able to break away by force, the Croats got going in full force, and by then it was too late. I'm not sure what it says about socialism but it seems fairly typical of world capitalism as dominated by the US and its European allies. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Wed Aug 13 19:23:21 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:23:21 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: RD:>>Value theory is not my hobby, but I'm curious to know why it's come to a dead end.<< It's interesting (I think anyway) to see what Deleuze-Guattari do to with it--along with modes of production. How many on this list have a copy of Anti-Oedipus (D-G work on Freud and Marx, but also Lacan and Althusser) on their bookshelves? Anyone know an online English-language version of the text? CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Wed Aug 13 19:48:23 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:48:23 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Actually I think it's A Thousand Plateaus in which D-G address LTV and later developments. D-G online is pretty thin. I found M. Hardt's lecture notes or something. CJ From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Wed Aug 13 23:49:00 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:49:00 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <296019.13676.qm@web50409.mail.re2.yahoo.com> I used to have Anti-Oedipus, even taught some of it once many years ago, but in accord with my current philosophy of selling anything I haven't used in 10 and don't see using in another 10, I sold it on Amazon. I recall its been sort of fun. --- On Wed, 8/13/08, CeJ wrote: > From: CeJ > Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Date: Wednesday, August 13, 2008, 8:23 PM > RD:>>Value theory is not my hobby, but I'm curious > to know why it's > come to a dead end.<< > > It's interesting (I think anyway) to see what > Deleuze-Guattari do to > with it--along with modes of production. > > How many on this list have a copy of Anti-Oedipus (D-G work > on Freud > and Marx, but also Lacan and Althusser) on their > bookshelves? Anyone > know an online English-language version of the text? > > CJ > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From jannuzi at gmail.com Thu Aug 14 01:08:33 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:08:33 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Value Theory was Re: Studying philosophy at the New School Message-ID: Economics seem to have split into two main tracks--political economy, meaning Marxist political economy, and economics, which looks more like a philosophy of accounting and philosophy of the behaviorist psychology of consumerism. I was reading a WSJ interview online with that old salt, Greenspan, for the usual amusement, and in addition to being treated the usual obfuscatory statements of what might be some of the simplest economic concepts one could ever hope to discuss, there was some really hilarious stuff. Like Greenspan suggesting that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ought to be nationalized and sold again to private interests (although I think he means as public stock companies, not holdings for private equity). Does he remember how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got to be in the first place? Does he even care? If I remember, one was a Roosevelt era agency that got privatized, and the other was a government-created company made so there wouldn't be a monopoly of the other--circa 1968. And then Greenspan trots out what is, I believe, a value theory--a use value theory. Here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121865515167837815.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us_business "It's the imbalance of supply and demand which causes prices to go down, but it's ultimately the valuation process of the use of the commodity...which tells you where the bottom is," Mr. Greenspan said, recalling his days trading copper a half century ago. "For example, the grain markets can have a huge excess of corn or wheat, but the price never goes to zero. It'll stabilize at some level of prices where people are willing to hold the excess inventory. We have little history, but the same thing is surely true in housing as well. We will get to the point where there will be willing holders of vacant single-family dwellings, and that will no longer act to depress the price level." ---------------- The price never goes to zero. But I'm waiting for the day when the government pays some rich group of investors to take housing assets off the government's hands, at a huge loss to public finances, for sure. CJ From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Aug 13 22:53:32 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:53:32 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Access The Philosophical Forum online FREE for 30 days Message-ID: To view an online version of this message, click here. Access The Philosophical Forum online FREE for 30 days The Philosophical Forum Edited by: Douglas Lackey Click here to start your 30 day online trial today! Wiley-Blackwell is pleased to offer you 30 days of complimentary online access to The Philosophical Forum. Since 1970, The Philosophical Forum has been publishing innovative, interdisciplinary contributions in contemporary philosophical inquiry and bridging the gap between analytical and Continental scholarship. Your online trial to The Philosophical Forum will grant you access to all content from 1999 forward. Recommend a subscription to The Philosophical Forum to your institutional library so that you can continue to access the journal when your trial has ended. Forward this email to your librarian or click here to complete our online library recommendation form. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: there's some great stuff in this journal. The two most recent issues are of special interest: Folk Epistemologies, and Neo-Kantianism. Older issues have articles of interest on Hegel, Kant, and other topics. I am especially interested in the Neo-Kantianism issue, which I've just started on, as this is one key link in the chain of philosophical history underexamined in the English-Speaking world and relevant also in the history of Marxism. -- RD From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Aug 13 23:50:09 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:50:09 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: <122421.68195.qm@web50402.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <122421.68195.qm@web50402.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: But how mysterious are these topics? As for solving the problems: perhaps the problems are perfectly comprehensible but unsolvable: (1) the failure to account for the failure of proletarian revolution in the advanced West Why is this hard to understand? (2) the collapse of state socialism in the East. Why is this hard to understand? (3) an account of the middle classes Is this big news? Wasn't this recognized as an issue in the '60s? (4) The relation of class to other fault lines in divided societies, race, gender, etc. Hasn't this question been de rigeur for 35 years? (5) plausible account at general level of how a classless society might be feasible. Now here's a real problem. It does of course relate to the aforementioned failures, but also to the complexity of advanced industrial societies? As for working these problems, the problems can be analyzed and understood, but it's quite possible that they can't be fixed. I'm guessing that whatever insightful analysis does exist is divorced from political movements. There's not only a problem communicating these ideas to a general public--the proletariat or the middle classes--but also to "progressives", "activists", whatever constitutes the left, at least in the USA. These people are in as much a state of decay as the society at large. Especially obnoxious are the crackpots holding key positions in the Pacifica Radio Network. The Washington station is holding yet another fund drive. Today's featured topic was mystical drivel, and the guest of honor was Dick Gregory, who spouted more ignorant crackpot gibberish this time than I've ever heard him speak--and that's saying quite a mouthful. Apparently his illiterate grandma represents the sum total of human knowledge and wisdom that it's possible to have. And what's worse, the other idiots on the radio fawning over his every word. I think all these problems can be analyzed, but they can't be fixed. At 05:01 PM 8/13/2008, andie nachgeborenen wrote: >We've been around this block before. Two reasons why we need a >Marxian theoretical renaissance, one intellectual, the other political > >Intellectually there are big lacunae in Marxist theory, problems the >tradition has not solved. To take some less controversial ones, old >and new: the failure to account for the failure of proletarian >revolution in the advanced West; to which we may add the new >problem, the collapse of state socialism in the East. The related >question of an account of the middle classes, since Marx and the >tradition say little except that these will disappear. Didn't >happen. A general account of the nature of class; Marx;s own final >story breaks off 40 lines into the notes in Cap 3. The relation of >class to other fault lines in divided societies, race, gender, etc. >A plausible account at general level of how a classless society >might be feasible. > >Practically and politically, if the movement were vital, it would be >attracting bright minds to work these problems, and its vitality >depends in part on its appearance of vitality and its being >intellectually vital, on having more than just the old pieties to >express. But there is no movement and what there is not attracting >bright minds; it's a vicious circle. From rasherrs at eircom.net Thu Aug 14 08:41:55 2008 From: rasherrs at eircom.net (Paddy) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:41:55 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Underground Man References: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us><122421.68195.qm@web50402.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <003401c8fe1b$e64c6ec0$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> Hi I have been skimming through Notes from Underground.. Dostevosky seems, in it, to put great emphasis on the individual and individual spirit. He seems to hold the view that modernism (include here marxism) precludes individualism. The Enlightenment tradition with its overarching rational construction have left no room for defiance of the system. Consequently the successful one's are normal people who unthinkingly accept the capitalist system. While the intelligent one are holed up in their underground. Paddy Hackett From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Thu Aug 14 09:08:36 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:08:36 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <891590.52660.qm@web50403.mail.re2.yahoo.com> My point, in response to Charles's idea that perhaps we don't need any more Marxist theory, was just that there are theoretical gaps, including those listed, and I could extend the list; that vibrant movement would have people working on them, and we don't particularly. That is a polical problem in part for the resaons indicated. The fact that there used to be in the 60's or the 20's just underscores the point. If the problems are politically insoluble, well, maybe that shows the theory is defective, possibly fatally, and therefore we don't need Marxist theory not because it's all wrapped up with a bow but because it's failed and refuted. Or do you just think that it has achieved whatever limited success it can achieve and we can move on? But you are not moving on. --- On Thu, 8/14/08, Ralph Dumain wrote: > From: Ralph Dumain > Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Date: Thursday, August 14, 2008, 12:50 AM > But how mysterious are these topics? As for solving the > problems: > perhaps the problems are perfectly comprehensible but > unsolvable: > > (1) the failure to account for the failure of proletarian > revolution > in the advanced West > > Why is this hard to understand? > > (2) the collapse of state socialism in the East. > > Why is this hard to understand? > > (3) an account of the middle classes > > Is this big news? Wasn't this recognized as an issue in > the '60s? > > (4) The relation of class to other fault lines in divided > societies, > race, gender, etc. > > Hasn't this question been de rigeur for 35 years? > > (5) plausible account at general level of how a classless > society > might be feasible. > > Now here's a real problem. It does of course relate to > the > aforementioned failures, but also to the complexity of > advanced > industrial societies? > > As for working these problems, the problems can be analyzed > and > understood, but it's quite possible that they can't > be fixed. > > I'm guessing that whatever insightful analysis does > exist is divorced > from political movements. > > There's not only a problem communicating these ideas to > a general > public--the proletariat or the middle classes--but also to > "progressives", "activists", whatever > constitutes the left, at least > in the USA. These people are in as much a state of decay as > the > society at large. Especially obnoxious are the crackpots > holding key > positions in the Pacifica Radio Network. The Washington > station is > holding yet another fund drive. Today's featured topic > was mystical > drivel, and the guest of honor was Dick Gregory, who > spouted more > ignorant crackpot gibberish this time than I've ever > heard him > speak--and that's saying quite a mouthful. Apparently > his illiterate > grandma represents the sum total of human knowledge and > wisdom that > it's possible to have. And what's worse, the other > idiots on the > radio fawning over his every word. > > I think all these problems can be analyzed, but they > can't be fixed. > > At 05:01 PM 8/13/2008, andie nachgeborenen wrote: > >We've been around this block before. Two reasons > why we need a > >Marxian theoretical renaissance, one intellectual, the > other political > > > >Intellectually there are big lacunae in Marxist theory, > problems the > >tradition has not solved. To take some less > controversial ones, old > >and new: the failure to account for the failure of > proletarian > >revolution in the advanced West; to which we may add > the new > >problem, the collapse of state socialism in the East. > The related > >question of an account of the middle classes, since > Marx and the > >tradition say little except that these will disappear. > Didn't > >happen. A general account of the nature of class; > Marx;s own final > >story breaks off 40 lines into the notes in Cap 3. The > relation of > >class to other fault lines in divided societies, race, > gender, etc. > >A plausible account at general level of how a > classless society > >might be feasible. > > > >Practically and politically, if the movement were > vital, it would be > >attracting bright minds to work these problems, and its > vitality > >depends in part on its appearance of vitality and its > being > >intellectually vital, on having more than just the old > pieties to > >express. But there is no movement and what there is not > attracting > >bright minds; it's a vicious circle. > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Thu Aug 14 09:42:24 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:42:24 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: <891590.52660.qm@web50403.mail.re2.yahoo.com> References: <891590.52660.qm@web50403.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Message-ID: I'm not sure what "the theory" is at this point. Various people who have worked on the theory are themselves so scattered about it's not clear to what extent there's a coherent body of knowledge being fought over as (social) scientists or scholars do. There's probably balkanized islands of activity where people scrap over particular issues. I don't do political economy, either in a more down-to-earth way or in disputing how many surplus values can dance on the head of a pin, so I don't know how that is progressing even though I have a shelf of books on value theory. I haven't checked out Marxist anthropology for a number of years. And so on. The more obvious problem is the theory that is referenced in connection with political parties that would pretend to be doing something practical--Communist, Trotskyist, Maoist, etc. etc. There I would say that in the English-speaking world, in the advanced bourgeois democracies at any rate, whatever "theory" is there was frozen long ago and there's little more than preaching to the choir going on, combined with specific reactions to specific geopolitical situations. And in many cases, relatively sophisticated abstract perspectives are combined with really idiotic politics. For example, when I was reading INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM in the early '90s, there was some great stuff in it, but if I had to deal practically with the British SWP, I'm guessing I would have run screaming into the hills. I think various versions of the theory have failed, beginning with Marx's. It would be better to say that Marx was a work in progress, and his successors turned it into a finished system when it had barely begun. The Second International's theory failed. The Third International's theory failed. The Fourth International's theory failed. Maoism--the theory of cretins--failed. What exactly is there to move on to? That depends where in the world you are and the arena in which you act. Since I don't pretend to live halfway around the world, I can only speak of my immediate environment. It would take more ability and endurance than I possess to make a dent in the USA. Washington concentrates the worst problems of society. At best there is a liberal segment of the intelligentsia that supports the Democratic Party. It is convinced that it is the embodiment of reason, but it is brain dead. Ghetto culture is deteriorating worse and worse--brain dead, and in too many cases, real dead. I encounter both cultures on a daily basis: they are both hopeless. A problem is recognized: there is a parade of book authors complaining about a dumbed-down society, but their audiences and the authors themselves are dumbed down. So it's not surprising that theoretical production, or more likely, the consolidation, discussion, and elaboration of what live ideas exist, is stalled. It occurs to me that the academic wing of the knowledge industry, like popular culture, is also very much a distraction industry. I get dozens of notices of academic conferences and themed issues of journals every day, esp. the globalization/postmodern crap, and it's mostly variations on trivia, as befits the liberal intelligentsia. Much of Marxist intellectual activity is probably just as sterile. As I've said before, the intellectual problem at this point is to consolidate what we've already learned, distill it and make it communicable, and find an audience to communicate it to. But of course the intellectual problem is parasitic on the practical social problem which destroys the basis for public reason. At 11:08 AM 8/14/2008, andie nachgeborenen wrote: >My point, in response to Charles's idea that perhaps we don't need >any more Marxist theory, was just that there are theoretical gaps, >including those listed, and I could extend the list; that vibrant >movement would have people working on them, and we don't >particularly. That is a polical problem in part for the resaons >indicated. The fact that there used to be in the 60's or the 20's >just underscores the point. If the problems are politically >insoluble, well, maybe that shows the theory is defective, possibly >fatally, and therefore we don't need Marxist theory not because it's >all wrapped up with a bow but because it's failed and refuted. Or do >you just think that it has achieved whatever limited success it can >achieve and we can move on? But you are not moving on. > > >--- On Thu, 8/14/08, Ralph Dumain wrote: > > > From: Ralph Dumain > > Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School > > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > > Date: Thursday, August 14, 2008, 12:50 AM > > But how mysterious are these topics? As for solving the > > problems: > > perhaps the problems are perfectly comprehensible but > > unsolvable: > > > > (1) the failure to account for the failure of proletarian > > revolution > > in the advanced West > > > > Why is this hard to understand? > > > > (2) the collapse of state socialism in the East. > > > > Why is this hard to understand? > > > > (3) an account of the middle classes > > > > Is this big news? Wasn't this recognized as an issue in > > the '60s? > > > > (4) The relation of class to other fault lines in divided > > societies, > > race, gender, etc. > > > > Hasn't this question been de rigeur for 35 years? > > > > (5) plausible account at general level of how a classless > > society > > might be feasible. > > > > Now here's a real problem. It does of course relate to > > the > > aforementioned failures, but also to the complexity of > > advanced > > industrial societies? > > > > As for working these problems, the problems can be analyzed > > and > > understood, but it's quite possible that they can't > > be fixed. > > > > I'm guessing that whatever insightful analysis does > > exist is divorced > > from political movements. > > > > There's not only a problem communicating these ideas to > > a general > > public--the proletariat or the middle classes--but also to > > "progressives", "activists", whatever > > constitutes the left, at least > > in the USA. These people are in as much a state of decay as > > the > > society at large. Especially obnoxious are the crackpots > > holding key > > positions in the Pacifica Radio Network. The Washington > > station is > > holding yet another fund drive. Today's featured topic > > was mystical > > drivel, and the guest of honor was Dick Gregory, who > > spouted more > > ignorant crackpot gibberish this time than I've ever > > heard him > > speak--and that's saying quite a mouthful. Apparently > > his illiterate > > grandma represents the sum total of human knowledge and > > wisdom that > > it's possible to have. And what's worse, the other > > idiots on the > > radio fawning over his every word. > > > > I think all these problems can be analyzed, but they > > can't be fixed. > > > > At 05:01 PM 8/13/2008, andie nachgeborenen wrote: > > >We've been around this block before. Two reasons > > why we need a > > >Marxian theoretical renaissance, one intellectual, the > > other political > > > > > >Intellectually there are big lacunae in Marxist theory, > > problems the > > >tradition has not solved. To take some less > > controversial ones, old > > >and new: the failure to account for the failure of > > proletarian > > >revolution in the advanced West; to which we may add > > the new > > >problem, the collapse of state socialism in the East. > > The related > > >question of an account of the middle classes, since > > Marx and the > > >tradition say little except that these will disappear. > > Didn't > > >happen. A general account of the nature of class; > > Marx;s own final > > >story breaks off 40 lines into the notes in Cap 3. The > > relation of > > >class to other fault lines in divided societies, race, > > gender, etc. > > >A plausible account at general level of how a > > classless society > > >might be feasible. > > > > > >Practically and politically, if the movement were > > vital, it would be > > >attracting bright minds to work these problems, and its > > vitality > > >depends in part on its appearance of vitality and its > > being > > >intellectually vital, on having more than just the old > > pieties to > > >express. But there is no movement and what there is not > > attracting > > >bright minds; it's a vicious circle. From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 14 09:50:43 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:50:43 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School Message-ID: <48A41C13.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> andie nachgeborenen We've been around this block before. Two reasons why we need a Marxian theoretical renaissance, one intellectual, the other political Intellectually there are big lacunae in Marxist theory, problems the tradition has not solved. To take some less controversial ones, old and new: the failure to account for the failure of proletarian revolution in the advanced West; to which we may add the new problem, the collapse of state socialism in the East. The related question of an account of the middle classes, since Marx and the tradition say little except that these will disappear. Didn't happen. A general account of the nature of class; Marx;s own final story breaks off 40 lines into the notes in Cap 3. The relation of class to other fault lines in divided societies, race, gender, etc. A plausible account at general level of how a classless society might be feasible. ^^^ CB:_ Marxism_'s theoretical development didn't end with Marx and Engels. There's Lenin who takes gigantic steps after them. The actualization of Marxism in the real world doesn't occur until after Marx and Engels's deaths. Then after Lenin , there are Marxist led revolutions in many countries. So, there are theoretical developments of Marxism after Lenin. The failure of the proletariat to take power in the Western countries is not a big mystery. The bourgeosie focused in on the proletariat after the success of Marxism in Russia and elsewhere. They used both the state power against Communists and Gramscian "hegemonic" mind control methods. Marxist theory on race/class relation is very fully developed. Gender, well, I have a paper I sent to the list (smile). I'll agree with you on that one, as far as more development of Marxist theory, although there are many materialist feminists. ^^^^ Practically and politically, if the movement were vital, it would be attracting bright minds to work these problems, and its vitality depends in part on its appearance of vitality and its being intellectually vital, on having more than just the old pieties to express. But there is no movement and what there is not attracting bright minds; it's a vicious circle. ^^^ CB: Ok, but the "theory" needed is more some kind of extraordinary strategy to get around the extraordinary viciousness and material power of the capitalists. it's not abstract theory, philosophy or critique of political economy. Somehow, we have to persuade a new generation that it was _humanity_ and the new generation of humans that lost when the Cold War was lost to the capitalists and imperialists. Something like "Workers of the West, it's our turn. Russians, Chinese, Viet Namese, Cubans have done their part. It's on you to save humanity." I guess it's more of a spiritual renaissance than a theoretical one. Revolutionary elan more than intellectual advance. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 14 11:34:33 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:34:33 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Underground Man In-Reply-To: <003401c8fe1b$e64c6ec0$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> References: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us><122421.68195.qm@web50402.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <003401c8fe1b$e64c6ec0$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> Message-ID: <48A4346A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> >>> "Paddy" Hi I have been skimming through Notes from Underground.. Dostevosky seems, in it, to put great emphasis on the individual and individual spirit. He seems to hold the view that modernism (include here marxism) precludes individualism. The Enlightenment tradition with its overarching rational construction have left no room for defiance of the system. Consequently the successful one's are normal people who unthinkingly accept the capitalist system. While the intelligent one are holed up in their underground. Paddy Hackett ^^^^ CB: Do you think he is thinking that "individuals" had greater self-expression before modern society ? The general "line" seems to be that there is more individualism with capitalism than with feudalism. So, what is he thinking ? Individual freedom flourished under czars ?? I always liked the pun of "underground" with respect to the underground party work. Lenin sent lots of notes from underground. (smile) Isn't the character a bureaucrat with a prostitute girlfriend ? _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Thu Aug 14 11:53:38 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:53:38 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Underground Man In-Reply-To: <003401c8fe1b$e64c6ec0$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> References: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <122421.68195.qm@web50402.mail.re2.yahoo.com> <003401c8fe1b$e64c6ec0$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> Message-ID: I read this novella last winter in conjunction with a little seminar I gave on Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground". I think Wright's story is superior. Anyway, I don't agree with your interpretation. Dostoevsky, was, I hear tell, a reactionary, but there's nothing in this story that smacks of Counter-Enlightenment to me. And Russia was hardly developed as a capitalist country in the 19th century. What is noteworthy here is the self-humiliation that accompanies an obsession with status and hierarchy. The narrator's contempt for the false values of his associates is mirrored in his own self-contempt at not being able to compete with them on their own ground, both accepting and rejecting the premises of social existence at the same time. Wright addresses the social problem from another angle. He poses the question: why is that the most oppressed and least responsible for their condition are the most susceptible to guilt? BTW, I'm sick of having to wait for all my posts to pass through the moderator first. Please get off your thaxis and do something about this, moderator. At 10:41 AM 8/14/2008, Paddy wrote: >Hi >I have been skimming through Notes from Underground.. > >Dostevosky seems, in it, to put great emphasis on the individual and >individual spirit. He seems to hold the view that modernism (include here >marxism) precludes individualism. The Enlightenment tradition with its >overarching rational construction have left no room for defiance of the >system. Consequently the successful one's > are normal people who unthinkingly accept the capitalist system. While the >intelligent one are holed up in their underground. > >Paddy Hackett From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Thu Aug 14 11:32:37 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:32:37 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] scapegoating diversity Message-ID: This is a paradigmatic specimen of what we're up against: from the Chronicle of Higher Disinformation: From the issue dated August 8, 2008 POINT OF VIEW How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science By PETER WOOD http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=03hp5gr19z5sb0cdvhtsk5qgp3yhdttf From rasherrs at eircom.net Thu Aug 14 13:05:39 2008 From: rasherrs at eircom.net (Paddy) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 20:05:39 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Underground Man References: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us><122421.68195.qm@web50402.mail.re2.yahoo.com><003401c8fe1b$e64c6ec0$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> <48A4346A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <001001c8fe40$be06ae10$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> Yes! It would seem to me that individualism was promoted by earlier capital. It is not too easy to work Dost. out. Like much of existentialist thought there are features of it that may be positive and help make a contribution to a better understanding of the nature of contemporary capitalism. However that does not mean that the entire existentialism of Sartre is one that a communist would support. I do think that Dost may be making a telling point concerning the suppression of individuality. Certainly it is a matter that deserves serious consideration. Modern science, technology, the contemporary character of social relations of production, the modern state and much of bourgeois ideology together with bourgeois culture may, by their very nature, prevent the existence and development of individualism. We may think that individualism exists and that we are expressing our uniqueness. This may just a illusion and thereby among the better ways by which to block individualism. Dost presents modern science in the form of a wall. I take it that he makes use of this metaphor as a means of stating that 19th century science left no room for individualism. It left no place for its defiance. It left no room to allow it to be challenged. To a degree this is true of today. Nobody dares seriously challenge science. We accept quantum mechanics and relativity theory without understanding it. In general we take science on faith in the way that Christianity was assumed to be true in the Middle Ages. Paddy Hackett ^^^^ CB: Do you think he is thinking that "individuals" had greater self-expression before modern society ? The general "line" seems to be that there is more individualism with capitalism than with feudalism. So, what is he thinking ? Individual freedom flourished under czars ?? I always liked the pun of "underground" with respect to the underground party work. Lenin sent lots of notes from underground. (smile) Isn't the character a bureaucrat with a prostitute girlfriend ? _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Thu Aug 14 15:22:33 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:22:33 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Studying philosophy at the New School In-Reply-To: <48A41C13.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <711409.28148.qm@web50411.mail.re2.yahoo.com> > CB: Ok, but the "theory" needed is more some kind > of extraordinary > strategy to get around the extraordinary viciousness and > material power > of the capitalists. it's not abstract theory, > philosophy or critique > of political economy. Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es k?mmt drauf an, sie zu ver?ndern. Thesis 11 The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in different ways; the point, however, is to change it. Somehow, we have to persuade a new > generation > that it was _humanity_ and the new generation of humans > that lost when > the Cold War was lost to the capitalists and imperialists. I'm listening . . . . > Something > like "Workers of the West, it's our turn. > Russians, Chinese, Viet > Namese, Cubans have done their part. It's on you to > save humanity." > > I guess it's more of a spiritual renaissance than a > theoretical one. > Revolutionary elan more than intellectual advance. There's that, though your formulation has a bit of a Maoist ring. Now of course Russia is kleptocracy, China is the developing world ultra-capitalist economic superpower, and Vietnam is a region capitalist developing country. Cuba is, alas, a relic. Not an inspiring vista. So maybe we better think of something else to save humanity and get folks to rally round the whatever flag. This is not a criticism of you. If I had any ideas I would not keep them a secret. The ___'s flag is deepest ____ It shrouded oft our martyred dead (too grim?) And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold (definitely too grim) Their lifeblood dyed its every fold I think we need a new marketing job here. From cburford at gn.apc.org Thu Aug 14 15:26:31 2008 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:26:31 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians References: Message-ID: <001d01c8fe54$7ccc4950$471c9d51@HPINVENT> I take the argument below. Part of Russia's motivation now in Georgia is that the west did not respect the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia. But I was really thinking of wider argument about the different economic speeds of development in the different parts of the Yugoslav Federation. Large capitalist states seem to be able to disguise very large transfers of capital between different regions without it becoming the source of nationalistic or regional conflict. This goes for federal Germany, the EU, the United Kingdom, and the USA. Culturally it seems that the socialist states did not get to grips with the reality of racist friction but covered it over with an ideology of common good, which was then subject to attack as hypocrisy. - just my impressions. Chris Burford London ----- Original Message ----- From: "CeJ" To: Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 12:54 AM Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians | CB>>Centralised socialism seems to have left numerous cultural and | ethnic conflicts that have exploded after its fall, as if the | population had no innoculation about how to handle them. | | This happened in relatively unstalinist Yugoslavia too.<< | | If capitalist Europe--namely Austria, Germany, and US/NATO--hadn't | aided Slovenia to break away from Yugoslavia, in violation of | international law, Yugoslavian law and sovereignty, as well as taboos | about the use of power after WW II--Yugoslavia might well not have | become the bloody mess it turned into. Once Slovenia was able to break | away by force, the Croats got going in full force, and by then it was | too late. | | I'm not sure what it says about socialism but it seems fairly typical | of world capitalism as dominated by the US and its European allies. | | CJ | | _______________________________________________ | Marxism-Thaxis mailing list | Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu | To change your options or unsubscribe go to: | http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From rasherrs at eircom.net Thu Aug 14 15:53:11 2008 From: rasherrs at eircom.net (Paddy Hackett) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:53:11 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians References: <001d01c8fe54$7ccc4950$471c9d51@HPINVENT> Message-ID: <000601c8fe58$25b2ef80$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> This is just my point concerning the significance of Dostoevsky. He believed that under contemporary socio-economic conditions pertaining then spirit, free will, individuality was denied any presence. By covering over difference, ethnic distinctions, individuality with the ideology of the common good the prevailing conditions failed to facilitate the difference. Soviet ideology and culture merely denied its existence and the existence of defiance. The West, in a sense, fares no better. Under Western conditions false difference and individuality has increasingly replaced authenticity --authentic difference and individuality. Marxism may have failed too in this regard. We have got to seriously examine the matter of authentic individuality in the context of positive social, economic and technological developments. Paddy Hackett -------------- Culturally it seems that the socialist states did not get to grips with the reality of racist friction but covered it over with an ideology of common good, which was then subject to attack as hypocrisy. - just my impressions. Chris Burford London From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Thu Aug 14 23:43:17 2008 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:43:17 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians In-Reply-To: <001d01c8fe54$7ccc4950$471c9d51@HPINVENT> Message-ID: <61448.71712.qm@web50404.mail.re2.yahoo.com> There is a different explanation that had some currency in Sovietological circles. It is that Stalin's nationalities policies deliberately encouraged the cultivation of national identities and differences, in part attempting to secure central power by cultivation of local elites (often creation of new local elites with a stake in the system) which was "ok" as far as the stability of the state went when then was a unitary dictatorship, but which produced centrifugal forces that tore the central state apart when the strong centralizing force disappeared. A similar thing happened in Yugoslavia. I wouldn't overstate the stability along national lines of the Western democracies. The US famously blew up over slavery and fought a spectacularly bloody war, followed by a stringent occupation (terminated to soon), to settle a related issue. More recently Canada nearly unraveled and there is talk of breakup in both Belgium (along ethnic lines) and Italy (along economic ones). --- On Thu, 8/14/08, Chris Burford wrote: > From: Chris Burford > Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians > To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marxand the thinkers he inspired" > Date: Thursday, August 14, 2008, 4:26 PM > I take the argument below. > > Part of Russia's motivation now in Georgia is that the > west did not respect > the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia. > > But I was really thinking of wider argument about the > different economic > speeds of development in the different parts of the > Yugoslav Federation. > Large capitalist states seem to be able to disguise very > large transfers of > capital between different regions without it becoming the > source of > nationalistic or regional conflict. > > This goes for federal Germany, the EU, the United Kingdom, > and the USA. > > Culturally it seems that the socialist states did not get > to grips with the > reality of racist friction but covered it over with an > ideology of common > good, which was then subject to attack as hypocrisy. > > - just my impressions. > > Chris Burford > London > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "CeJ" > To: > Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 12:54 AM > Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians > > > | CB>>Centralised socialism seems to have left > numerous cultural and > | ethnic conflicts that have exploded after its fall, as if > the > | population had no innoculation about how to handle them. > | > | This happened in relatively unstalinist Yugoslavia > too.<< > | > | If capitalist Europe--namely Austria, Germany, and > US/NATO--hadn't > | aided Slovenia to break away from Yugoslavia, in > violation of > | international law, Yugoslavian law and sovereignty, as > well as taboos > | about the use of power after WW II--Yugoslavia might well > not have > | become the bloody mess it turned into. Once Slovenia was > able to break > | away by force, the Croats got going in full force, and by > then it was > | too late. > | > | I'm not sure what it says about socialism but it > seems fairly typical > | of world capitalism as dominated by the US and its > European allies. > | > | CJ > | > | _______________________________________________ > | Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > | Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > | To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > | > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis > > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Thu Aug 14 19:58:32 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:58:32 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians In-Reply-To: <000601c8fe58$25b2ef80$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> References: <001d01c8fe54$7ccc4950$471c9d51@HPINVENT> <000601c8fe58$25b2ef80$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> Message-ID: OK, but I don't see what ethnic conflict has to do with individualism or the suppression thereof. On individualism and Marxism, see my bibliography: Marx & the Individual Reconsidered At 05:53 PM 8/14/2008, Paddy Hackett wrote: >This is just my point concerning the significance of Dostoevsky. He believed >that under contemporary socio-economic conditions pertaining then spirit, >free will, individuality was denied any presence. By covering over >difference, ethnic distinctions, individuality with the ideology of the >common good the prevailing conditions failed to facilitate the difference. >Soviet ideology and culture merely denied its existence and the existence of >defiance. The West, in a sense, fares no better. Under Western conditions >false difference and individuality has increasingly replaced >authenticity --authentic difference and individuality. Marxism may have >failed too in this regard. We have got to seriously examine the matter of >authentic individuality in the context of positive social, economic and >technological developments. > >Paddy Hackett > >-------------- >Culturally it seems that the socialist states did not get to grips with the >reality of racist friction but covered it over with an ideology of common >good, which was then subject to attack as hypocrisy. > >- just my impressions. > >Chris Burford >London From rasherrs at eircom.net Fri Aug 15 06:11:20 2008 From: rasherrs at eircom.net (Paddy Hackett) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:11:20 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians References: <001d01c8fe54$7ccc4950$471c9d51@HPINVENT><000601c8fe58$25b2ef80$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> Message-ID: <000e01c8fed0$0724bd00$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> Has nothing to do with individualism. Merely claiming that Dost talking about the suppression of difference which can vover individualism and ethnic identity among other things. And am merely speculating. Paddy ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralph Dumain" To: Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 2:58 AM Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians OK, but I don't see what ethnic conflict has to do with individualism or the suppression thereof. On individualism and Marxism, see my bibliography: Marx & the Individual Reconsidered At 05:53 PM 8/14/2008, Paddy Hackett wrote: >This is just my point concerning the significance of Dostoevsky. He >believed >that under contemporary socio-economic conditions pertaining then spirit, >free will, individuality was denied any presence. By covering over >difference, ethnic distinctions, individuality with the ideology of the >common good the prevailing conditions failed to facilitate the difference. >Soviet ideology and culture merely denied its existence and the existence >of >defiance. The West, in a sense, fares no better. Under Western conditions >false difference and individuality has increasingly replaced >authenticity --authentic difference and individuality. Marxism may have >failed too in this regard. We have got to seriously examine the matter of >authentic individuality in the context of positive social, economic and >technological developments. > >Paddy Hackett > >-------------- >Culturally it seems that the socialist states did not get to grips with the >reality of racist friction but covered it over with an ideology of common >good, which was then subject to attack as hypocrisy. > >- just my impressions. > >Chris Burford >London _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 15 07:43:48 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:43:48 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Underground Man In-Reply-To: <001001c8fe40$be06ae10$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> References: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us><122421.68195.qm@web50402.mail.re2.yahoo.com><003401c8fe1b$e64c6ec0$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> <48A4346A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <001001c8fe40$be06ae10$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> Message-ID: <48A54FD5.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Here are some earlier thaxis discussions of Sartre. CB Marxism-Thaxis] Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905 - April 15, 1980)There are numerous web sites on Sartre. Here's one: Sartre Online ... More information about the Marxism-Thaxis mailing list. lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2005-June/018715.html - 6k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this [Marxism-Thaxis] Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905 - April 15, 1980)Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, ... Howard L. "Existentialism and Marxism in Dialogue (A Review of Sartre's Problem of ... lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/2005-June/018716.html - 6k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this More results from lists.econ.utah.edu ? [Marxism-Thaxis] Points of contact: existentialism, phenomenology ...[Marxism-Thaxis] Points of contact: existentialism, phenomenology, structuralism, post-structuralism. CeJ Fri, 14 Mar 2008 21:21:14 -0700 ... www.mail-archive.com/marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu/msg04417.html - 10k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this [Marxism-Thaxis] Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905 - April 15, 1980)[Marxism-Thaxis] Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905 - April 15, 1980) ... Parsons, Howard L. "Existentialism and Marxism in Dialogue (A Review of Sartre's ... www.mail-archive.com/marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu/msg01441.html - 10k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this More results from www.mail-archive.com ? [Marxism-Thaxis] History and Human Existence (1)The summit of Sartre's philosophical attempt to fuse existentialism with Marxism is reached .... http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis ... www.opensubscriber.com/message/marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu/9589567.html - 31k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 15 07:59:45 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:59:45 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Underground Man In-Reply-To: <001001c8fe40$be06ae10$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> References: <48A2C092.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us><122421.68195.qm@web50402.mail.re2.yahoo.com><003401c8fe1b$e64c6ec0$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> <48A4346A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <001001c8fe40$be06ae10$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> Message-ID: <48A55392.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Sartre Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com Sat Mar 6 10:16:08 MST 2004 Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] RE: Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 5, Issue 3 Next message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Sartre & Skinner Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't know if this will be of any use to you or not, but Martin Morf had an article "Sartre, Skinner, and the Compatibilist Freedom To Be Authentically" in the journal Behavior and Philosophy, 26 (1), 29-43. (http://www.behavior.org/journals_BP/1998/Morf_abstract.cfm). In that article he attempted to relate the two different psychologies advanced by Sartre and B.F. Skinner, where Sartre had advanced a psychology based on phenomenology and which placed emphasis on free will, as opposed to Skinner's attempt to develop a psychology that was materialist and determinist. Morf holds that it is possible to assimilate many of Sartre's insights into the framework of a Skinnerian psychology without our having to embrace Sartre's notions concerning free will. He also addresses the issue the relations of subject and object in the two psychologies. Thus, concerning Skinner, he writes: "While Skinner generally adopted a realist stance on the ontological questionof what there is (e. g., Kvale & Grenness, 1967), he repeatedly rejected a realist stance on the epistemological question of how and what we know. He did not see a ?personal self or perceiving subject at the epistemological center of events? (Woolfolk & Sass, 1988, p. 111). Much like Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962, p. xi), Skinner rejected the notion of the ?inner man,? the homunculus who inspects the patterns projected on the brain by the sensory organs perceiving the external world. More generally, Skinner rejected, in the best postmodern spirit, the ?double world? of subject and object, inner and outer, physical and psychological. He made no distinction between the public and the private world, other than to characterize the latter as less accessible because the ?verbal community? finds it more difficult to reinforce ?self-descriptive? than overt responses (e. g., Kvale & Grenness, 1967, p. 144; Skinner, 1963)." On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 07:55:34 -0000 "Chris Burford" writes: > I need to review a clinical psychiatric book that draws theoretical > inspiration from some of Sartre's formulas about subject and object. > > I am writing to ask for advice on what reservations are there about > Sartre's philosophical approach. > > I feel uneasy about him, despite his left wing claims, and I cannot > remember why. > > I would appreciate comments that are philosophical rather than > political for this purpose. > > Many thanks > > Chris Burford > > thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 15 08:56:40 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:56:40 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Message-ID: <48A560E9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> There is a different explanation that had some currency in Sovietological circles. It is that Stalin's nationalities policies deliberately encouraged the cultivation of national identities and differences, in part attempting to secure central power by cultivation of local elites (often creation of new local elites with a stake in the system) which was "ok" as far as the stability of the state went when then was a unitary dictatorship, but which produced centrifugal forces that tore the central state apart when the strong centralizing force disappeared. A similar thing happened in Yugoslavia. ^^^^ CB: As if the national identities and differences ( including Georgian , like Stalin) didn't exist for centuries before Stalin's policy, and as if Stalin had tried to homogenize them all into "Russians" _that_ wouldn't have been racist and great power chauvinism. Local "elites" ? As if _leaders_ shouldn't have been from the local populations. Shhheesh. What a bunch a crap. The patently illogical lengths gone to to characterize _everything_ Stalin did as wrong are ridiculous. And the vast majority of "Sovieitologists" are parts of systems and nations much more racist and chauvinist than the Soviet Union was. ^^^ ^^^^^ I wouldn't overstate the stability along national lines of the Western democracies. The US famously blew up over slavery and fought a spectacularly bloody war, followed by a stringent occupation (terminated to soon), to settle a related issue. More recently Canada nearly unraveled and there is talk of breakup in both Belgium (along ethnic lines) and Italy (along economic ones). This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 15 09:00:40 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:00:40 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx and individualism Message-ID: <48A561D9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Ossetians Paddy Hackett rasherrs at eircom.net Fri Aug 15 06:11:20 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Next message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Has nothing to do with individualism. Merely claiming that Dost talking about the suppression of difference which can vover individualism and ethnic identity among other things. And am merely speculating. Paddy ^^^^ CB: On Marx and individualism , there is a poster to a couple of related lists - lbo-talk and pen-l - Ted Winslow , who has a very developed and forceful theory on Marx's ideas on universally developed individuals as a premise for a successful socialist society. He has written tens of posts on the subject, and essays as , I think, a professor. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rasherrs at eircom.net Fri Aug 15 09:59:35 2008 From: rasherrs at eircom.net (Paddy Hackett) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:59:35 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx and individualism References: <48A561D9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <000801c8feef$ea154340$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" To: Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 4:00 PM Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx and individualism Ossetians Paddy Hackett rasherrs at eircom.net Fri Aug 15 06:11:20 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Next message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Previous message should have read: Has nothing to do with individualism. Merely claiming that Dost talking about the suppression of difference which can cover individualism and ethnic identity among other things. And am merely speculating. Paddy ^^^^ CB: On Marx and individualism , there is a poster to a couple of related lists - lbo-talk and pen-l - Ted Winslow , who has a very developed and forceful theory on Marx's ideas on universally developed individuals as a premise for a successful socialist society. He has written tens of posts on the subject, and essays as , I think, a professor. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 15 10:33:09 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:33:09 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx and individualism In-Reply-To: <48A561D9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48A561D9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48A57786.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Advanced Search Preferences Web Results 1 - 10 of about 28,100 for Ted Winslow universally developed individuals. (0.34 seconds) Search Results[PDF] Marx on the Relation between ?Justice?, ?Freedom? and ...File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML Ted Winslow. Division of Social Science. York University. Toronto, ON ..... The idea of ?universally developed individuals? appropriates Hegel?s idea of ... www.capabilityapproach.com/pubs/4_1_Winslow.pdf - Similar pages - Note this Human Development and Capability Association ()Winslow, Ted Submitted: 2006-08-28, This paper elaborates these and other aspects of ... that define what Marx calls the ?universally developed individual?. ... www.capabilityapproach.com/PubList.php?puborder=organization&sid=&6f3d76a7fb4d3257a1e81a43797c0c3... - 176k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this More results from www.capabilityapproach.com ? [lbo-talk] Dustup - final installmentTed Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com Tue Jul 29 06:41:45 PDT 2008 ... ?genuine and free development of individuals? into ?universally developed individuals,? ... mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20080728/012528.html - 18k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this [lbo-talk] Dustup - final installmentTed Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com Thu Jul 31 11:11:12 PDT 2008 .... the development of the ?universally developed individuals? who actualize ?communism? ... mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20080728/012643.html - 20k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this More results from mailman.lbo-talk.org ? York University Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought ..."Is not!" dressed up in academic garb. Ted Winslow ... Marx's "universally developed individual" is the embodied universal will capable among other things ... www.yorku.ca/spot/25th/abs.htm - 50k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this PEN-L message, Happiness of the richFrom: Ted Winslow ... Ted W: The specific meaning is indicated by the idea of "true ... Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, ... archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2007w08/msg00009.htm - 13k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this Re: Collective wisdom... subjects ("universally developed individuals" in Marx's terminology). ... Re: Collective wisdom Devine, James. Re: Collective wisdom Ted Winslow ... www.mail-archive.com/pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu/msg89210.html - 15k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this Winslow Homer and the critics in the 1870s | Magazine Antiques ...While individual works or qualities were highly regarded, Homer never fully ... William Crary Brownell (1851-1928) of the World, Theodore Grannis of the New ... findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1026/is_2_160/ai_77875497 - 48k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this [PDF] Keynes?s Economics: A Political Economy as Moral Science Approach ...File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML Ted Winslow. Paper prepared for presentation to:. Research Network Alternative Macroeconomic ...... capabilities is the ?universally developed individual. ... www.boeckler.de/pdf/v_2005_10_28_winslow.pdf - Similar pages - Note this by T Winslow - Related articles ????????? ??6???- [ Translate this page ](P.13, Atomism and Organicism, Ted Winslow). ... However, for Marx, human essence is only potential and not yet fully developed. Like the words of Aristotle ... ca.geocities.com/jazzchul2000/pols_econ/esse_man.htm - 26k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this >>> "Charles Brown" 08/15/2008 11:00 AM >>> Ossetians Paddy Hackett rasherrs at eircom.net Fri Aug 15 06:11:20 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Next message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Has nothing to do with individualism. Merely claiming that Dost talking about the suppression of difference which can vover individualism and ethnic identity among other things. And am merely speculating. Paddy ^^^^ CB: On Marx and individualism , there is a poster to a couple of related lists - lbo-talk and pen-l - Ted Winslow , who has a very developed and forceful theory on Marx's ideas on universally developed individuals as a premise for a successful socialist society. He has written tens of posts on the subject, and essays as , I think, a professor. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 15 10:35:05 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:35:05 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx and individualism In-Reply-To: <000801c8feef$ea154340$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> References: <48A561D9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <000801c8feef$ea154340$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> Message-ID: <48A577FA.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Web Results 1 - 10 of about 28,100 for Ted Winslow universally developed individuals. (0.16 seconds) Search Results[PDF] Marx on the Relation between ?Justice?, ?Freedom? and ...File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML Ted Winslow. Division of Social Science. York University. Toronto, ON ..... The idea of ?universally developed individuals? appropriates Hegel?s idea of ... www.capabilityapproach.com/pubs/4_1_Winslow.pdf - Similar pages - Note this Human Development and Capability Association ()Winslow, Ted Submitted: 2006-08-28, This paper elaborates these and other aspects of ... that define what Marx calls the ?universally developed individual?. ... www.capabilityapproach.com/PubList.php?puborder=organization&sid=&6f3d76a7fb4d3257a1e81a43797c0c3... - 176k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this More results from www.capabilityapproach.com ? [lbo-talk] Dustup - final installmentTed Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com Tue Jul 29 06:41:45 PDT 2008 ... ?genuine and free development of individuals? into ?universally developed individuals,? ... mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20080728/012528.html - 18k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this [lbo-talk] Dustup - final installmentTed Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com Thu Jul 31 11:11:12 PDT 2008 .... the development of the ?universally developed individuals? who actualize ?communism? ... mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20080728/012643.html - 20k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this More results from mailman.lbo-talk.org ? York University Graduate Programme in Social & Political Thought ..."Is not!" dressed up in academic garb. Ted Winslow ... Marx's "universally developed individual" is the embodied universal will capable among other things ... www.yorku.ca/spot/25th/abs.htm - 50k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this PEN-L message, Happiness of the richFrom: Ted Winslow ... Ted W: The specific meaning is indicated by the idea of "true ... Universally developed individuals, whose social relations, ... archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2007w08/msg00009.htm - 13k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this Re: Collective wisdom... subjects ("universally developed individuals" in Marx's terminology). ... Re: Collective wisdom Devine, James. Re: Collective wisdom Ted Winslow ... www.mail-archive.com/pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu/msg89210.html - 15k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this >>> "Paddy Hackett" 08/15/2008 11:59 AM >>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" To: Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 4:00 PM Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx and individualism Ossetians Paddy Hackett rasherrs at eircom.net Fri Aug 15 06:11:20 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Next message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Previous message should have read: Has nothing to do with individualism. Merely claiming that Dost talking about the suppression of difference which can cover individualism and ethnic identity among other things. And am merely speculating. Paddy ^^^^ CB: On Marx and individualism , there is a poster to a couple of related lists - lbo-talk and pen-l - Ted Winslow , who has a very developed and forceful theory on Marx's ideas on universally developed individuals as a premise for a successful socialist society. He has written tens of posts on the subject, and essays as , I think, a professor. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 15 10:56:22 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:56:22 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis Message-ID: <48A57CF7.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> M-TH: Life Is Beautiful Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Mar 3 07:07:16 MST 1999 Previous message: M-TH: Re: who reads marx? Next message: M-TH: Outlaw the Nazis and KKK ! Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm thinking that as between Sartre and Althusser, Sartre. Sartre was in the Resistence and in a concentration camp. He was in the struggle for real. The theoretical basis I see for his emphasizing Hegelian subject, "early" Marx, perhaps reflected below, is that we are no longer in the period when Marxists treat political economy as "a process of natural history". Rather we must be activating working class subjects. The beauty in life in the ennui, alienation, unhappiness even as in a Nazi concentration camp ! enough beauty to have enthusiasm for fighting back, as Sartre did. This is the type of activation of the working class subject we need. I wonder if a lot of the other French intellectual confusion at that time was not aimed at covering up Sartre's revolutionary elan and anti-fascism. Charles Brown >>> "James Lawler" 02/28/99 05:20PM >>> Here is a review of the film I wrote for the Sartre listserve. Sartre, I think, would say that Marx would agree with this. --Jim Lawler I just saw the amazing film, "Life Is Beautiful." Such a title for a film centered on life in a Nazi concentration camp. And yet, it is convincing. Life can be beautiful even in the horrors of the death camp. One of my favorite passages in Sartre's Being and Nothingness is from his discussion of the nature of values. "Ordinarily . . . my attitude with respect to values is eminently reassuring. In fact I am involved in a world of values. The anguished apperception of values as sustained in being by my freedom is a secondary and mediated phenomenon. The immediate is the world with its urgency; and in this world where I engage myself, my acts make values spring up like partridges." In the middle of a thick book of disturbing philosophy, Sartre gives us partridges. I thank him for that. Ordinarily, we don't realize that we cause the values to spring up, wonderfully, like partridges. We take our values as reassuring, rigid facts of life. Existential anguish arises when one discovers that the values one accepts only work as values because of one's own free, creative complicity with them. We don't want to have to ask ourselves whether these are the values we want to live by, whether this the kind of life we want to create. There must however be a step, or many steps, beyond the initial experience of anguish. Such a recognition opens up the possibility of creating values freely, like an inspired artist. Guido is the existentialist Master, a person who is able consciously to make the values of his choice spring up like partridges. He is a moral magician, who sees and creates beauty in the worst ugliness. Why does the sign say, "No Jews or Dogs Allowed"? his five or six-year-old son asks him. Guido, a Jew, tells his Jewish son that nobody likes everybody or everything. The son says that he doesn't like spiders. *There, you see? And I don't like . . . Visigoths! So let's put a sign on our store: No Spiders and Visigoths Allowed.* Those who know Sartre's book may find special significance in Guido's occupation. He is . . . a waiter. Guido's performance of being-a-waiter would make a wonderful film clip to accompany Sartre's description of the waiter whose "being a waiter" is inevitably a playing at being a waiter. The waiter creates himself as a waiter. But the ordinary, at least Parisian waiter takes his waiter values very seriously, thinking of them as stern facts rather than as creative fictions. Guido creates himself as he goes along, in all the roles he is forced to play as well as the ones he is free to make up himself, as when he plays prince to his beautiful princess. Central to Sartrean existentialism is the idea that individuals freely create their own values. This does not mean that all values are equal. It's not relativism. There are two kinds of freely created values: those that are freely created but in the *bad faith* that they are determined by outside forces--nature, tradition, a god, the Leader. And there are the values created by people who know they are creating values, and whose values must therefore reflect this knowledge. Guido sees and exposes the ridiculousness of the ordinary, conformist majority who have fallen under the self-induced spell of the first type of values. He asks the new employer of a friend what his politics are. The man is momentarily distracted by his twin sons, rough-housing rudely nearby. "Adolfo, Benito, stop that. Now, what were you asking?" Guido tactfully drops his question. He had just seen the values of that other person jumping up and down, almost partridge-like, in the form of two very large round boys. The absurdity of the Nazi values is demonstrated by Guido when he takes on the guise of a school inspector, in order to get another meeting with Dora, his *princess.* After going through a ludicrous inspection to Dora*s amusement, he finds that he has to give a lecture on the superiority of the Aryan race. By the time the real inspector has arrived, Guido has stripped down to his underwear to display the superiority of the Aryan belly button. The school authorities ridiculously force themselves to maintain their roles of admiring audience for the supposedly higher wisdom they are receiving. The power of human freedom, in the form of bad faith or self-deception, apparently knows no bounds. Why then not also the opposite use of such power on behalf of honesty and freedom? Sartre's formulated his theory of existentialist freedom under the Nazi occupation. We are free even in prison, he said. This concept of "absolute freedom" has frequently been criticized as indicating a problem with this philosophy. Life Is Beautiful demonstrates that we can indeed be meaningfully, creatively, effectively free even in a concentration camp. Even there we can cause beautiful values to spring up around us like partridges. The film suggests the question: if there can be such a possibility of creative freedom in under the worst conditions of human degradation, what are we not capable of in better conditions? Naziism has helped us to see how far down the human being can go when the idea of egotistical power over others is taken to its ultimate conclusion. Sartre's existentialist theory of the free creation of values explores the crevasses and caverns of this underground world of self-imposed darkness. He takes us on a modern tour of Plato's cave where people take concocted images seriously even though they have disturbing glimpses of their delusion. But the point of this is not a pessimistic idea that the cave is all that exists. It is to show us that if we can put ourselves in this condition, we can also take ourselves out of it. Life Is Beautiful shows what an individual can do in the dankest depths of the cave, thanks to an awareness of human beauty and the recognition that it is up to us to create, cultivate and protect it. _______________________________________ Dr. James Lawler Philosophy Department SUNY at Buffalo Buffalo, NY USA 14260 Base e-mail: jlawler at acsu.buffalo.edu forwards to: james.lawler at sympatico.ca This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 15 15:13:54 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:13:54 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Russian Support for Iran Sanctions at Risk amid Georgia Rift Message-ID: <48A5B953.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Russian Support for Iran Sanctions at Risk amid Georgia Rift -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: A-List , Rad-Green Subject: [A-List] Russian Support for Iran Sanctions at Risk amid Georgia Rift From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:52:28 -0400 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Russian support for Iran sanctions at risk amid Georgia rift The US bid to promote a fourth round of sanctions may get lost amid sharp dispute over Russian military action in Georgia. By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor from the August 14, 2008 edition ISTANBUL, Turkey - Fierce American criticism of Russia's military action in Georgia is almost certain to jeopardize a very different US strategic objective: stepping up pressure on Iran with another layer of United Nations sanctions. As builders of Iran's $800 million nuclear power reactor, Russia has long resisted imposing sanctions to halt Iran's program, which the US says is a cover to make an atomic bomb. Washington has convinced Moscow to support three previous sets of Security Council sanctions. But US efforts to launch a fourth set of sanctions - begun last week, as Iran all but ignored a US-European deadline on a nuclear deal - may get lost in the shrill US-Russian tussle in the Caucasus. "This will make any hope of cooperative effort on Iran much more difficult," says Michael McFaul, a Russia and Iran expert at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Support on Iran, he says, is "without question" the biggest strategic casualty of the renewed US-Russia tension. Iran is "the last serious issue where the Bush administration has decisions to make in terms of changing policy," says Mr. McFaul. It is also "the one place ? of high national security interest to the United States where Russia plays a direct role in what we are trying to do. In that sense, it towers over all these other things." US and European officials are scrambling for ways to punish Russia for moving armed forces into separatist, pro-Russian enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in pro-West Georgia, and then into Georgia itself, to counter a Georgian military invasion late last week. After five days of fighting that routed Georgia's small, US-advised forces, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said the "aggressors" had been "punished" and ordered an end to operations. Russia lambasted Georgia's US-educated President Mikheil Saakashvili as a "terrorist" and "lunatic" who should be tried for "genocide." But the rhetoric has also been unusually blunt between the US and Russia. President Bush this week demanded Russia end a "dramatic and brutal escalation of violence." "This has come at a very opportune time for Iran," says a Tehran-based political analyst who asked not to be named. "Any new rift between the US and Russians would be welcome by Iran ? anything that give Iran more time and a little more headache for the US." Georgia is not far from Iran's borders, and "up to a point, Iran would be quietly happy, but the conflict can escalate to something that would cause more instability and suffering," says the analyst, which Iran does not want. US warplanes carried 2,000 Georgian troops out of Iraq Sunday, until then the third-largest coalition member, which manned checkpoints to prevent weapons smuggling along Iraq's border with Iran. Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin mocked the US effort. "I'm amazed by their skills at seeing black as white, of portraying aggressors as victims," Mr. Putin said. "Some of our partners, far from assisting us, are attempting to impede us [by transferring Georgian troops] on board US aircraft directly to the conflict zone." Former Soviet leader and Nobel laureate Mikhail Gorbachev also blamed the US and the West more generally for military training and political support that "emboldened Georgian leaders." "By declaring the Caucasus, a region that is thousands of miles from the American continent, a sphere of its 'national interest,' the United States made a serious blunder," Mr. Gorbachev wrote in The Washington Post and Rossiyskaya Gazeta in Moscow. The effect will be felt beyond the Caucasus. Noting that the US wants Russia to support sanctions against Iran and to not sell weapons - "particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system" - an analysis from Stratfor, an intelligence analysis firm, said Wednesday that the Russians "have backed the Americans into a corner." "Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue," notes Stratfor. The US must either "reorient" away from the Mideast to the Caucasus, or "seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran." The US has canceled a joint NATO naval exercise with Russia due to begin this week, and the US and Europeans are debating further steps, which include kicking Russia out of a series of regional groupings including the G-8 industrialized nations, returning it to the original G-7. The harsh rhetoric comes on top of a host of issues that have rankled the once-close post-Soviet US relationship with Russia. They include expansion of the NATO alliance to Russia's western borders, US insistence on placing missile-defense units - aimed at one day stopping an Iranian missile - in eastern Europe, and strong support for a string of democratic revolutions in nations that were once part of the Soviet Union. Georgia's "Rose Revolution" was the first, in 2003. "Even if there are no more UN sanctions on Iran, at least there can still be more US and European sanctions," says a US diplomat who follows Iranian issues. The US Treasury on Tuesday imposed sanctions on five more Iranian companies it called "nuclear and missile entities ? used by Iran to hide its illicit conduct and further its dangerous nuclear ambitions." "I think [Russia has] been playing us when it comes to sanctions and stringing it out for years and years," says McFaul. "They've never wanted sanctions, and our position has moved to theirs, not vice versa. If you go back 12 years ago, we were debating whether there should be a Bushehr [nuclear reactor]. Now we are well beyond that today." But while the sanctions are affecting commercial ties, Iranian leaders insist the modest layers of UN, US, and EU sanctions in place are not the reason for the dire state of Iran's economy. Experts point out that the high price of oil is a salve. Iran benefits, too, from having the international spotlight turned on Georgia and away from its nuclear gamesmanship. "It seems to be overshadowing the Iran nuclear issue, at least for some time," says the Tehran analyst. "It makes it more difficult at the UN and the P5 [permanent five members of the Security Council] to sit down and talk about the nuclear issue when there is a conflict as well going on." This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Fri Aug 15 11:12:30 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:12:30 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: <48A57CF7.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48A57CF7.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: I deliberately boycotted "Life Is Beautiful" because I find the basic premise obscene. Life was and could not be beautiful in a Nazi concentration camp under any circumstances. Find me one Holocaust survivor who would say such a thing. I would imagine Marx would be pretty nauseated by this as well. Speaking of Nausea, has anyone else found this novel as worthless as I did? At 12:56 PM 8/15/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >M-TH: Life Is Beautiful >Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us >Wed Mar 3 07:07:16 MST 1999 > >Previous message: M-TH: Re: who reads marx? >Next message: M-TH: Outlaw the Nazis and KKK ! >Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] > >-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >I'm thinking that as between Sartre and Althusser, Sartre. Sartre was >in the Resistence and in a concentration camp. He was in the struggle >for real. The theoretical basis I see for his emphasizing Hegelian >subject, "early" Marx, perhaps reflected below, is that we are no longer >in the period when Marxists treat political economy as "a process of >natural history". Rather we must be activating working class subjects. >The beauty in life in the ennui, alienation, unhappiness even as in a >Nazi concentration camp ! enough beauty to have enthusiasm for fighting >back, as Sartre did. This is the type of activation of the working class >subject we need. I wonder if a lot of the other French intellectual >confusion at that time was not aimed at covering up Sartre's >revolutionary elan and anti-fascism. > >Charles Brown > > > > > >>> "James Lawler" 02/28/99 05:20PM >>> >Here is a review of the film I wrote for the Sartre listserve. Sartre, >I >think, would say that Marx would agree with this. > >--Jim Lawler > > I just saw the amazing film, "Life Is Beautiful." Such a title for a >film >centered on life in a Nazi concentration camp. And yet, it is >convincing. >Life can be beautiful even in the horrors of the death camp. > One of my favorite passages in Sartre's Being and Nothingness is from >his >discussion of the nature of values. "Ordinarily . . . my attitude with >respect to values is eminently reassuring. In fact I am involved in a >world >of values. The anguished apperception of values as sustained in being >by my >freedom is a secondary and mediated phenomenon. The immediate is the >world >with its urgency; and in this world where I engage myself, my acts >make >values spring up like partridges." > In the middle of a thick book of disturbing philosophy, Sartre gives >us >partridges. I thank him for that. > Ordinarily, we don't realize that we cause the values to spring up, >wonderfully, like partridges. We take our values as reassuring, rigid >facts >of life. Existential anguish arises when one discovers that the values >one >accepts only work as values because of one's own free, creative >complicity >with them. We don't want to have to ask ourselves whether these are >the >values we want to live by, whether this the kind of life we want to >create. > There must however be a step, or many steps, beyond the initial >experience >of anguish. Such a recognition opens up the possibility of creating >values >freely, like an inspired artist. > Guido is the existentialist Master, a person who is able consciously >to >make the values of his choice spring up like partridges. He is a moral >magician, who sees and creates beauty in the worst ugliness. >Why does the sign say, "No Jews or Dogs Allowed"? his five or >six-year-old >son asks him. Guido, a Jew, tells his Jewish son that nobody likes >everybody >or everything. The son says that he doesn't like spiders. *There, you >see? >And I don't like . . . Visigoths! So let's put a sign on our store: No >Spiders and Visigoths Allowed.* > Those who know Sartre's book may find special significance in Guido's >occupation. He is . . . a waiter. Guido's performance of >being-a-waiter >would make a wonderful film clip to accompany Sartre's description of >the >waiter whose "being a waiter" is inevitably a playing at being a >waiter. The >waiter creates himself as a waiter. But the ordinary, at least >Parisian >waiter takes his waiter values very seriously, thinking of them as >stern >facts rather than as creative fictions. Guido creates himself as he >goes >along, in all the roles he is forced to play as well as the ones he is >free >to make up himself, as when he plays prince to his beautiful princess. > Central to Sartrean existentialism is the idea that individuals >freely >create their own values. This does not mean that all values are equal. >It's >not relativism. There are two kinds of freely created values: those >that >are freely created but in the *bad faith* that they are determined by >outside forces--nature, tradition, a god, the Leader. And there are >the >values created by people who know they are creating values, and whose >values >must therefore reflect this knowledge. > Guido sees and exposes the ridiculousness of the ordinary, conformist >majority who have fallen under the self-induced spell of the first type >of >values. He asks the new employer of a friend what his politics are. The >man >is momentarily distracted by his twin sons, rough-housing rudely >nearby. >"Adolfo, Benito, stop that. Now, what were you asking?" Guido >tactfully >drops his question. He had just seen the values of that other person >jumping >up and down, almost partridge-like, in the form of two very large >round >boys. > The absurdity of the Nazi values is demonstrated by Guido when he >takes on >the guise of a school inspector, in order to get another meeting with >Dora, >his *princess.* After going through a ludicrous inspection to Dora*s >amusement, he finds that he has to give a lecture on the superiority of >the >Aryan race. By the time the real inspector has arrived, Guido has >stripped >down to his underwear to display the superiority of the Aryan belly >button. >The school authorities ridiculously force themselves to maintain their >roles >of admiring audience for the supposedly higher wisdom they are >receiving. >The power of human freedom, in the form of bad faith or >self-deception, >apparently knows no bounds. Why then not also the opposite use of such >power >on behalf of honesty and freedom? > Sartre's formulated his theory of existentialist freedom under the >Nazi >occupation. We are free even in prison, he said. This concept of >"absolute >freedom" has frequently been criticized as indicating a problem with >this >philosophy. Life Is Beautiful demonstrates that we can indeed be >meaningfully, creatively, effectively free even in a concentration >camp. >Even there we can cause beautiful values to spring up around us like >partridges. > The film suggests the question: if there can be such a possibility of >creative freedom in under the worst conditions of human degradation, >what >are we not capable of in better conditions? > Naziism has helped us to see how far down the human being can go when >the >idea of egotistical power over others is taken to its ultimate >conclusion. >Sartre's existentialist theory of the free creation of values explores >the >crevasses and caverns of this underground world of self-imposed >darkness. He >takes us on a modern tour of Plato's cave where people take concocted >images >seriously even though they have disturbing glimpses of their delusion. >But >the point of this is not a pessimistic idea that the cave is all that >exists. It is to show us that if we can put ourselves in this >condition, we >can also take ourselves out of it. > Life Is Beautiful shows what an individual can do in the dankest >depths of >the cave, thanks to an awareness of human beauty and the recognition >that it >is up to us to create, cultivate and protect it. > >_______________________________________ >Dr. James Lawler >Philosophy Department >SUNY at Buffalo >Buffalo, NY >USA 14260 >Base e-mail: jlawler at acsu.buffalo.edu > forwards to: james.lawler at sympatico.ca From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Fri Aug 15 11:14:24 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:14:24 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx and individualism In-Reply-To: <48A577FA.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48A561D9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <000801c8feef$ea154340$0801a8c0@padraighaceid> <48A577FA.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: It's impossible to read text formatted in this way, but in any case, I've started to look at this Winslow fellow and he has a number of cranky philosophical ideas, beginning with this ridiculous embrace of Whitehead. But now I have something new to add to my bibliography: Whitehead & Marxism: Selected Bibliography At 12:35 PM 8/15/2008, Charles Brown wrote: > Web Results 1 - 10 of about 28,100 for Ted > Winslow universally developed individuals. > (0.16 seconds) Search Results[PDF] Marx on the > Relation between ???Justice???, ???Freedom??? > and ...File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as > HTML Ted Winslow. Division of Social Science. > York University. Toronto, ON ..... The idea of > ???universally developed individuals??? > appropriates Hegel???s idea of ... > www.capabilityapproach.com/pubs/4_1_Winslow.pdf > - Similar pages - Note this Human Development > and Capability Association ()Winslow, Ted > Submitted: 2006-08-28, This paper elaborates > these and other aspects of ... that define what > Marx calls the ???universally developed > individual???. ... > www.capabilityapproach.com/PubList.php?puborder=organization&sid=&6f3d76a7fb4d3257a1e81a43797c0c3... > - 176k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this > More results from www.capabilityapproach.com ?? > [lbo-talk] Dustup - final installmentTed > Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com Tue Jul 29 > 06:41:45 PDT 2008 ... ???genuine and free > development of individuals??? into > ???universally developed individuals,??? ... > mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20080728/012528.html > - 18k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this > [lbo-talk] Dustup - final installmentTed > Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com Thu Jul 31 > 11:11:12 PDT 2008 .... the development of the > ???universally developed individuals??? who > actualize ???communism??? ... > mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20080728/012643.html > - 20k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this More > results from mailman.lbo-talk.org ?? York > University Graduate Programme in Social & > Political Thought ..."Is not!" dressed up in > academic garb. Ted Winslow ... Marx's > "universally developed individual" is the > embodied universal will capable among other > things ... www.yorku.ca/spot/25th/abs.htm - 50k > - Cached - Similar pages - Note this PEN-L > message, Happiness of the richFrom: Ted Winslow > ... Ted W: The specific meaning is indicated by > the idea of "true ... Universally developed > individuals, whose social relations, ... > archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2007w08/msg00009.htm > - 13k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this Re: > Collective wisdom... subjects ("universally > developed individuals" in Marx's terminology). > ... Re: Collective wisdom Devine, James. Re: > Collective wisdom Ted Winslow ... > www.mail-archive.com/pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu/msg89210.html > - 15k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this >>> > "Paddy Hackett" > 08/15/2008 11:59 AM >>> ----- Original Message > ----- From: "Charles Brown" > To: > Sent: > Friday, August 15, 2008 4:00 PM Subject: > [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx and individualism > Ossetians Paddy Hackett rasherrs at eircom.net > Fri Aug 15 06:11:20 MDT 2008 Previous message: > [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Next message: > [Marxism-Thaxis] Ossetians Messages sorted by: > [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Previous message should have read: Has nothing > to do with individualism. Merely claiming that > Dost talking about the suppression of > difference which can cover individualism and > ethnic identity among other things. And am > merely speculating. Paddy ^^^^ CB: On Marx and > individualism , there is a poster to a couple > of related lists - lbo-talk and pen-l - Ted > Winslow , who has a very developed and forceful > theory on Marx's ideas on universally developed > individuals as a premise for a successful > socialist society. He has written tens of > posts on the subject, and essays as , I think, a professor. From ballistanc at yahoo.com Fri Aug 15 17:19:53 2008 From: ballistanc at yahoo.com (juan De La Cruz) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:19:53 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?iso-8859-1?q?Fw=3A_=5Bcomunismo=5Fgci=5D_Rusia?= =?iso-8859-1?q?_-_Georgia=3A_una_vez_m=E1s_la_guera_en_el_C=E1ucaso?= Message-ID: <258543.30640.qm@web35504.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- On Fri, 8/15/08, betancouour romana wrote: From: betancouour romana Subject: Fw: [comunismo_gci] Rusia - Georgia: una vez m?s la guera en el C?ucaso To: "Centro Informativo Alternativo" , antinoe at hotmail.com, "juan De La Cruz" , g.melendez at verizon.net.do, juliotallo06 at hotmail.com, leninsolano at hotmail.com, luzmasluz at luzmasluz.org, "Jorge Mel?ndez" , movimiento_juventud_rebelde at yahoo.es, moyagregorio at hotmail.com, ricardoliriano at hotmail.com, "Centro de Informaci?n - Rompiendo el Silencio" , "Centro de Solidaridad- Rompiendo el Silencio" , "Lenin Solano" , tesvence at hotmail.com, vgeronimo2002 at yahoo.com Date: Friday, August 15, 2008, 7:03 PM --- On Fri, 8/15/08, GCI wrote: From: GCI Subject: [comunismo_gci] Rusia - Georgia: una vez m?s la guera en el C?ucaso To: comunismo_gci at yahoogroupes.fr Date: Friday, August 15, 2008, 10:29 AM | in English | in French | in Spanish | in Russian | in German | in Czech | | ???????????? ?????? ??-?????? | ?Nos hablan de PAZ ... y nos hacen la GUERRA! Siempre es en nombre... de la PAZ... en los C?ucaso, de la LIBERTAD... del pueblo oss?tiano o abkhaziano o ge?rgiano o ruso, de la AYUDA HUMANITARIA... para los "pueblos oprimidos", del DERECHO DE INGERENCIA... humanitaria, ... que nos preparan ?la paz... de los cementerios! La guerra en los C?ucaso es una guerra contra el proletariado mundial! ?La paz social, la sumisi?n a la dictadura del dinero hacen posibles las masacres actuales! Proletario, no te creas que las misiones diplom?ticas, las misiones humanitarias, ... van a parar las masacres. Para oponerte a la barbarie capitalista solo puedes contar con tus propias fuerzas y la de tus hermanos de clase. ?Contra la paz social, la paz de los cementerios, luchemos contra nuestra propia burgues?a! ?A la uni?n internacional de los burgueses contrapong?mosle la unidad creciente del proletariado internacionalista! ?Retomemos la bandera de la revoluci?n mundial! Grupo Comunista Internacionalista (GCI) BP 33 - Saint-Gilles (BRU) 3 - 1060 Bruxelles - B?lgica - icgcikg [at] yahoo [dot] com Envoy? avec Yahoo! Mail. Une boite mail plus intelligente. __._,_.___ Toute la discussion (1) R?pondre (en mode Web) | Nouvelle discussion Messages | Sondages Modifier vos options par le Web ((Compte Yahoo! requis) Modifier vos options par mail?: Activer lenvoi group? | Activer le format Traditionnel Aller sur votre groupe | Conditions dutilisation de Yahoo! Groupes | D?sinscription Aller sur votre groupe Yahoo! 360? Partagez l'essentiel Blog et photos avec vos proches. Yahoo! Groupes Cr?ez votre groupe Partagez vos go?ts avec les autres. Y! Toolbar 100% gratuit ! En 1 clic, acc?dez ? vos groupes. . __,_._,___ From farmelantj at juno.com Fri Aug 15 18:28:23 2008 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:28:23 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis Message-ID: <20080815.202824.2288.1.farmelantj@juno.com> On Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:56:22 -0400 "Charles Brown" writes: > M-TH: Life Is Beautiful > Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us > Wed Mar 3 07:07:16 MST 1999 > > Previous message: M-TH: Re: who reads marx? > Next message: M-TH: Outlaw the Nazis and KKK ! > Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- > > I'm thinking that as between Sartre and Althusser, Sartre. Sartre > was > in the Resistence and in a concentration camp. He was in the > struggle > for real. Actually, Sartre was never in a concentration camp. He was in a POW camp after having been caputured by the Germans following the defeat of the French in 1940. He eventually escaped from the camp, and returned to Paris. He was in the Resistance but the group that he was in, as far I can tell, was mainly a "talking shop." They didn't do anything concrete. Althusser too was held capitve in a POW camp, where he spent the entirety of the war. Apparently, he lacked the opportunities and the inclination to escape. Sartre's real activism came after the war, when he took the lead in supporting a variety of progressive movements, including the Vietnamese struggle against French colonialism (and later against the Americans), the struggle for Algerian independence , which Sartre supported when that position was unpopular even on the far left. Later on Sartre supported the student movement, and most of the movements for emancipation of one kind or another that sprung up during the 1960s. By then he was considered to be the very model of an engag? intellectual in the tradition of Voltaire and Zola. > The theoretical basis I see for his emphasizing Hegelian > subject, "early" Marx, perhaps reflected below, is that we are no > longer > in the period when Marxists treat political economy as "a process > of > natural history". Rather we must be activating working class > subjects. > The beauty in life in the ennui, alienation, unhappiness even as in > a > Nazi concentration camp ! enough beauty to have enthusiasm for > fighting > back, as Sartre did. This is the type of activation of the working > class > subject we need. I wonder if a lot of the other French intellectual > confusion at that time was not aimed at covering up Sartre's > revolutionary elan and anti-fascism. > > Charles Brown > > > > > >>> "James Lawler" 02/28/99 05:20PM > >>> > Here is a review of the film I wrote for the Sartre listserve. > Sartre, > I > think, would say that Marx would agree with this. > > --Jim Lawler > > I just saw the amazing film, "Life Is Beautiful." Such a title for > a > film > centered on life in a Nazi concentration camp. And yet, it is > convincing. > Life can be beautiful even in the horrors of the death camp. > One of my favorite passages in Sartre's Being and Nothingness is > from > his > discussion of the nature of values. "Ordinarily . . . my attitude > with > respect to values is eminently reassuring. In fact I am involved in > a > world > of values. The anguished apperception of values as sustained in > being > by my > freedom is a secondary and mediated phenomenon. The immediate is > the > world > with its urgency; and in this world where I engage myself, my acts > make > values spring up like partridges." > In the middle of a thick book of disturbing philosophy, Sartre > gives > us > partridges. I thank him for that. > Ordinarily, we don't realize that we cause the values to spring > up, > wonderfully, like partridges. We take our values as reassuring, > rigid > facts > of life. Existential anguish arises when one discovers that the > values > one > accepts only work as values because of one's own free, creative > complicity > with them. We don't want to have to ask ourselves whether these are > the > values we want to live by, whether this the kind of life we want to > create. > There must however be a step, or many steps, beyond the initial > experience > of anguish. Such a recognition opens up the possibility of creating > values > freely, like an inspired artist. > Guido is the existentialist Master, a person who is able > consciously > to > make the values of his choice spring up like partridges. He is a > moral > magician, who sees and creates beauty in the worst ugliness. > Why does the sign say, "No Jews or Dogs Allowed"? his five or > six-year-old > son asks him. Guido, a Jew, tells his Jewish son that nobody likes > everybody > or everything. The son says that he doesn't like spiders. *There, > you > see? > And I don't like . . . Visigoths! So let's put a sign on our store: > No > Spiders and Visigoths Allowed.* > Those who know Sartre's book may find special significance in > Guido's > occupation. He is . . . a waiter. Guido's performance of > being-a-waiter > would make a wonderful film clip to accompany Sartre's description > of > the > waiter whose "being a waiter" is inevitably a playing at being a > waiter. The > waiter creates himself as a waiter. But the ordinary, at least > Parisian > waiter takes his waiter values very seriously, thinking of them as > stern > facts rather than as creative fictions. Guido creates himself as he > goes > along, in all the roles he is forced to play as well as the ones he > is > free > to make up himself, as when he plays prince to his beautiful > princess. > Central to Sartrean existentialism is the idea that individuals > freely > create their own values. This does not mean that all values are > equal. > It's > not relativism. There are two kinds of freely created values: > those > that > are freely created but in the *bad faith* that they are determined > by > outside forces--nature, tradition, a god, the Leader. And there are > the > values created by people who know they are creating values, and > whose > values > must therefore reflect this knowledge. > Guido sees and exposes the ridiculousness of the ordinary, > conformist > majority who have fallen under the self-induced spell of the first > type > of > values. He asks the new employer of a friend what his politics are. > The > man > is momentarily distracted by his twin sons, rough-housing rudely > nearby. > "Adolfo, Benito, stop that. Now, what were you asking?" Guido > tactfully > drops his question. He had just seen the values of that other > person > jumping > up and down, almost partridge-like, in the form of two very large > round > boys. > The absurdity of the Nazi values is demonstrated by Guido when he > takes on > the guise of a school inspector, in order to get another meeting > with > Dora, > his *princess.* After going through a ludicrous inspection to > Dora*s > amusement, he finds that he has to give a lecture on the superiority > of > the > Aryan race. By the time the real inspector has arrived, Guido has > stripped > down to his underwear to display the superiority of the Aryan belly > button. > The school authorities ridiculously force themselves to maintain > their > roles > of admiring audience for the supposedly higher wisdom they are > receiving. > The power of human freedom, in the form of bad faith or > self-deception, > apparently knows no bounds. Why then not also the opposite use of > such > power > on behalf of honesty and freedom? > Sartre's formulated his theory of existentialist freedom under the > Nazi > occupation. We are free even in prison, he said. This concept of > "absolute > freedom" has frequently been criticized as indicating a problem > with > this > philosophy. Life Is Beautiful demonstrates that we can indeed be > meaningfully, creatively, effectively free even in a concentration > camp. > Even there we can cause beautiful values to spring up around us > like > partridges. > The film suggests the question: if there can be such a possibility > of > creative freedom in under the worst conditions of human > degradation, > what > are we not capable of in better conditions? > Naziism has helped us to see how far down the human being can go > when > the > idea of egotistical power over others is taken to its ultimate > conclusion. > Sartre's existentialist theory of the free creation of values > explores > the > crevasses and caverns of this underground world of self-imposed > darkness. He > takes us on a modern tour of Plato's cave where people take > concocted > images > seriously even though they have disturbing glimpses of their > delusion. > But > the point of this is not a pessimistic idea that the cave is all > that > exists. It is to show us that if we can put ourselves in this > condition, we > can also take ourselves out of it. > Life Is Beautiful shows what an individual can do in the dankest > depths of > the cave, thanks to an awareness of human beauty and the > recognition > that it > is up to us to create, cultivate and protect it. > > _______________________________________ > Dr. James Lawler > Philosophy Department > SUNY at Buffalo > Buffalo, NY > USA 14260 > Base e-mail: jlawler at acsu.buffalo.edu > forwards to: james.lawler at sympatico.ca > > > > > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. > www.surfcontrol.com > > _______________________________________________ > Marxism-Thaxis mailing list > Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > To change your options or unsubscribe go to: > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis > > ____________________________________________________________ Click here to find the satellite television package that meets your needs. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3mzvzsoKRrYjPckQnRqIAilmSICNodcmL2x9XAKY4tRT1RbL/ From cburford at gn.apc.org Sat Aug 16 01:46:07 2008 From: cburford at gn.apc.org (Chris Burford) Date: Sat, 16 Aug 2008 08:46:07 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia References: <48A1BCB5.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <005d01c8ff74$28ea92d0$b7cb8656@HPINVENT> | CB: What were Herodotus's claims about the sexual practices ? Did I | miss that ? I don't know. Presumably this could be tracked down on the internet, eventually but would probably generate a lot of spam. I have no great differences with Shane's comments. The basic argument in this collaborative exhibition in Berlin, was about the various components to the disrepect and ignorance shown by the European tradition to the populations of the middle East, and the associated myths or embellished stories. Chris Burford ----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles Brown" To: Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 9:39 PM Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Babylonia - Mesopotamia | | | Well I was only in Berlin and Charlie, I guess, was not there either. | | Thanks for clarifying the conventional spelling of the name of | Herodotus | in English. I was really skimming through that part of the exhibition, | and | it was rather post-modernist in flavour. What I am certain of, is that | German scholars, under the eye of colleagues from the Louvre and the | British Museum, would not assert that the claims of Herodotus about | sexual | practices in the middle east, are unsubstantiated, if they are | substantiated. | | ^^^^^ | CB: What were Herodotus's claims about the sexual practices ? Did I | miss that ? | | | | | This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com | | _______________________________________________ | Marxism-Thaxis mailing list | Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu | To change your options or unsubscribe go to: | http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 19 07:33:25 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:33:25 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Democracy and the end of cheap oil Message-ID: <48AA9365.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Democracy and the end of cheap oil By Grace Lee Boggs Special to The Michigan Citizen http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=77&twindow=Default&mad=No&sdetail=6371&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com The shift from an industrialized to an agrarian economy, mandated by the end of cheap oil, will not only slow down global warming. Our food will be safer to eat and our society more democratic, according to a paper by Maynard Kaufman presented at the recent Green Party convention in Chicago. That?s why we should ?actively affirm this as an agrarian revival, and not just wait in a passive way for it to happen. If we affirm it, we can plan for it?and for the recovery of democracy.? ?The average family of four that buys its food,? Kaufman points out, ?uses more energy in the food they buy than in the car they drive. The burning of fossil fuels such as coal (for electricity), along with oil and natural gas, has long been recognized as a source of air pollution with acid rain. ?Other environmental impacts of the industrial food system include soil erosion, wasteful use of water, run-off from excessive fertilizer use, manure pollution in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Most of these costs are ?externalized? into the environment, not included in the price. ?Thus food is cheap in America because many costs are externalized. The annual subsidy of $39 billion dollars to the oil industry is not included in the price of food. And the cost of war to secure access to oil is also externalized to be paid by our children.? Industrial civilization has also ?facilitated the transfer of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Already in 2000 the top 1% of Americans had as much disposable income as the bottom 100 million, or 35%. Thus ?the United States is more of a plutocracy than a democracy.? ?We lost our democracy when we were trained to be good consumers of what the industrial food system produced. And as long as we had energy slaves to provide our food, we did not worry about it. Now we face a new situation as the spike in energy prices creates new threats and opens new political possibilities. Thomas Jefferson promoted this possibility but it was gradually over-shadowed by a culture based on manufacturing. The end of cheap oil re-opens this possibility. ?Rising food prices are already stimulating more people to raise their own or seek local farmer?s markets which are popping up in every town. ?Still another aspect of an agrarian culture will be organic methods of food production, working in harmony with nature.? ?An agrarian economy?will be a society with a great deal more informal economic activity?.It would very likely get us off the treadmill of economic growth and into a steady-state society.? An agrarian society would be a good place or a Eutopia, according to Paul Gilk, Wisconsin Green activist in his new book, Politics is Eutopian. A utopian society is no place in that it is not grounded in a natural context but exists as a man-made imposition of abstract and conceptual mental patterns on the natural environment. By contrast, a village (or city) that is rooted in the natural environment is a real place where people raise food with organic methods and live in harmony with nature. One of Gilk?s special concerns is the status of women as we move into an agrarian way of life. In past agrarian societies work was often gendered with women bearing the brunt of drudgery. If feminism can remain strong in a post-petroleum society, sexist discrimination may be mitigated. More efficient and appropriate technology might also be helpful. Maynard Kaufman is a retired professor of religion and environmental studies. While teaching at Western Michigan University in the 1970s, he became a back-to-the-land part-time farmer so that his students could experience self-sufficiency and harmony with their environment. In 1991 his involvement in the organic movement led him to organize Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance as a state-wide group promoting local organic food and farming. Organic farming does not use chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Thus it uses 30% less fossil fuel energy. Organic fertilizers also reduce carbon emissions because they sequester carbon in the soil. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 19 07:42:35 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:42:35 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] New world emerging Message-ID: <48AA958B.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> New world emerging By Shea Howell Special to Michigan Citizen News is transient. Events grab headlines one day, then drift from memory. The constant flow of information makes it difficult to recognize when something really new is happening. So it was predictable that most current news would be dominated by the pageantry of the Olympics. Only the horror of the Russian invasion of Georgia (?) has been able to break through this focus. Behind the Olympic banners and invading tanks, a new world is emerging. The collapse of the Doha talks last week signals a fundamental shift in world power arrangements. The world order dominated by U.S. and European industrial nations is crumbling. Power is shifting to the south and to developing economies. First, developing nations such as China, India, Brazil, Venezuela, Indonesia and the Philippines are no longer going along with the U.S-European model of development. This shift in power is both because of the growing confidence within these nations and the diminished presence of the U.S. in the global imagination. Mired down in two wars, facing a free-falling economy, and dominated by ideologues that have justified horrific actions, the U.S. and its ideas of development no longer have persuasive power. We cannot reconstruct our own cities, educate our children, care for our sick, or provide for our own common good. Why should anyone think we have a key to how countries can develop in healthy ways? Second, within the U.S., Europe and the developing world, a new force is emerging offering a vision of global relationships based on fair trade, self-sufficiency, and care for the earth and one another. This force, sometimes called civil society, represents both the millions of people who have protested the WTO since its inception and their tangible efforts to create new models of international relationships. Highlighting the work of many of these organizations is the World Social Forum. Its first objective is ?the construction of a world of peace, justice, ethics and respect for different spiritualities, free of weapons, especially nuclear ones.? These civil society organizations take as their obligation the preservation of ?universal and sustainable access to the common property of mankind and nature, for the preservation of our planet and its resources.? They are committed to ?the democratization and independence of knowledge, culture and communication for the creation of a system of shared knowledge.? Third, these civil society organizations are often under the leadership and philosophical direction of indigenous people. This week, garnering only a quick headline, was the reaffirmation of Evo Morales? leadership in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in the world. The first indigenous leader of the Americas since colonization, Morales has been transforming his country. In a few short years he has used revenues garnered from nationalizing gas and oil to attack illiteracy, which has dropped by 80 percent. He has restored education in Indian languages, provided free health care to over half the population, and created a ?dignity? pension for those over 60. With aid from Cuba he has been able to provide 260,000 people with sight restoring eye operations. ?Moreover,? as Michel Collon recently reported, ?the public investments to develop the economy increased greatly. Bolivia eliminating its fiscal deficit, has repaid half of its foreign debt (now down from $5.0 to $2.2 billion), reconstituted a small financial reserve, multiplied employment in the mines and the metal industries by four, and doubled the production and the incomes of these industries. The industrial GDP passed from $4.1 to $7.1 billion in three years. A thousand tractors were distributed to peasants. New roads were built. In short, Bolivia advances.? These advances are the developments behind the headlines that are inspiring a new world. The question for us is whether we have the political will and humility to become a part of these advances. http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=1&twindow=Default&mad=No&sdetail=6374&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 19 07:48:51 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:48:51 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Prophet of possibility Message-ID: <48AA9703.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Prophet of possibility Pt. IV FIRST CO-OP: Jaramogi Agyeman shares a laugh with a customer and a clerk, both unidentified, but apparently members of his church, at the Black Star Co-op Market, 7525 Linwood south of Hogarth, the first cooperative venture of the Citywide Citizens Action Committee (CCAC), Aug. 12, 1968. BENYAS-KAUFMAN PHOTO, U. S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman and the roots of black power in Detroit http://www.michigancitizen.com/default.asp?sourceid=&smenu=106&twindow=Default&mad=No&sdetail=6253&wpage=1&skeyword=&sidate=&ccat=&ccatm=&restate=&restatus=&reoption=&retype=&repmin=&repmax=&rebed=&rebath=&subname=&pform=&sc=1070&hn=michigancitizen&he=.com By Paul Lee Special to the Michigan Citizen Pt. IV of IV: Spotlight on Black Power This week, we conclude our special four-part series celebrating the 97th birthday of the late Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, formerly the Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr., the founder and First Holy Patriarch of the Shrines of the Black Madonna of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church (PAOCC); the father of Black Christian Nationalism (BCN); and the central figure in the Black Power movement in Detroit in the 1960s. This installment presents the balance of the transcript of his long-lost interview on ?Spotlight,? which was taped at WXYZ-TV?s Broadcast House at Southfield, Mich., on Feb. 29, 1968, and aired on March 10, 1968. The moderator was WXYZ-TV News Director William C. (Bill) Fyffe and the panelists, who questioned Jaramogi Agyeman, were Channel 7 reporters Jim Herrington, Bob Maher and Barney Morris. As was noted in Pt. III, the transcript was apparently prepared from an audiotape by New Detroit, Inc., not WXYZ-TV. At any rate, it was not professionally produced. Therefore, in editing the original transcript for clarity and historical accuracy in this and last week?s installments, the following method was employed: ? Spelling and punctuation errors have been silently corrected, including phonetic renderings, such as ?Cleague? for Cleage. ? Passages that were garbled because the transcriber misunderstood them have been silently corrected. For example, in the original transcript, a passage on racial bloc voting appears nonsensical: ?I can do the same thing that I did, you know, with the freedom in our party when we went down to a glorious defeat. ?? Based upon my familiarity with Jaramogi Abebe?s life and times, I was able to recover his original statement: ?I can do the same thing that I did, you know, with the Freedom Now party when we went down to a glorious defeat. ?? In fact, he was referring to the pioneering, but unsuccessful, effort of his nearly all-black political party in the 1964 Michigan elections. ? Extended ellipsis (?..), apparently used to indicate inaudible or unintelligible words or passages, have been changed to standard ellipsis (?). ? Missing words and editorial guesses have been enclosed in [brackets]. ?Spotlight? March 10, 1968 (Cont.) The reality of separation [Morris] Sir, it still seems that your definition of self-determination is separatism, and yet you say it is not. [Cleage] It?s the same separatism that now exists. We are separate. I don?t have to advocate separatism. I?ve been separate all my life. Every neighborhood I?ve ever lived in since I was born was a separate black neighborhood. Every school I?ve ever gone to was 99 percent black. Everything I?ve ever known. I?ve never went to a church that wasn?t a black church. Everything that I?ve ever known is black. My doctor?s black, my lawyer?s black, everything is black that I know, except white businesses come in my neighborhood. I?ve never gone into white stores because white people ran all the stores. I?m already separate. All my people are separate. Integration means control [Morris] Okay. The point being, though, that there still are many institutions, churches, stores, what have you, that do have a very successful operation under integration; that there are blacks and whites operating together, living together and working together, worshipping together. [Cleage] Integration usually means white control. Now, we would like to end that. That kind of integration, you know, we don?t like. If it is integration where black people control it. ? If we set it up so you don?t control it, then I?m [not] working for you. If it is a business where we set it up, where you make a logical, you know, reasonable return on your investment, but we share in the operation of the business, we devise policies, that kind of integration the white man doesn?t seem to be willing to accept. [Morris] The way you look at it, where would be a place for the white if you did achieve your goal? You would allow him to cooperate as long as you gave the orders? Is that the idea? [Cleage] It is not even that crude. [Morris] I?m making it basic. [Cleage] I know. But capitalists has [have] money to invest. I wouldn?t say to a banker that had five million dollars that he wanted to do something with, ?Don?t bring it into our community.? I would just say, ?This is the basis in which you invest in our community.? [Fyffe] Gentlemen, time for a break. We will be back to Mr. Cleage in just a moment. [Commercial break] Cooperative economics [Fyffe] Our guest on ?Spotlight? is the Reverend Albert Cleage. We are discussing Black Power and self-determination. A question now from Bob Maher. [Bob Maher] Sir, I think you recognize that the goal you are trying to achieve is not going to be achieved next week or next year or perhaps in the next two or three or four or five years. It may, but we don?t know. It doesn?t seem as though it will be. What happens between now and then as far as the black and the white is concerned? [Cleage] That?s a complicated question. We are trying to work toward the accomplishment of this as a program. I mean, we approach it programmatically. We are trying to do it in a number of different ways through the federation and through Citywide Citizens Action Committee. We are trying to build co-ops, for one thing, which is a different approach to the understanding of how the economic system works. We have already established Black Star Co-op, which is a supermarket which black people own and control. Now, we hope within a year to have at least five supermarkets functioning that black people own and control throughout the city. We are going to open a gas station, which will also be co-operatively owned and controlled by the black community. We purchased a dress factory, a clothing factory, which is going to manufacture clothing for men and women. That?s going to be co-operatively owned and manufactured. We are trying to educate in the black community people to understand how the economic system functions now so that we begin to be a participant in the economic system, not just consumers in the economic system ? so that?s important. Negotiations Also, we are engaged in negotiations with white industrialists and capitalists regarding investments in the black community on the basis which I just outlined for you. Now, that?s reasonable and possible and many white business people are interested and are willing to invest on those principles. Also, we are trying to get the government ? to use government funds on the same basis through black corporations. So, if we had time, if this summer doesn?t destroy everything through violence that puts us so far apart in the community and destroy the black community to the extent where we can?t solve the problem rationally, if we can get through this summer and the black community can survive, can maintain its sense of identity and its sense of purpose, I think we can build the kind of thing that has to be done, but the white community reacts to what we are doing as though it were a threat to the white community. Black Power no threat We are not threatening the white community. They have less to worry about with Black Power and black nationalists than they ever had. Dr. Martin Luther King [was] saying, ?We shall overcome,? and talked about integrating the neighborhoods and the churches and the schools, and every white person thought it was beautiful because I guess it is the language he couched it in, or maybe they didn?t take him seriously, or maybe they flatter us by taking us seriously. But, at the same time, they have no threat whatsoever from us. We want our own community, we want to control it, and we are not in the least bit concerned about Grosse Pointe, Warren and Dearborn, Bloomfield Hills, Birmingham or any of the suburbs. We don?t want anything they have. We have no antagonism to them. Just stay in their own community and stop trying to exploit us. We ought to be able to live together on that basis. Building black political power [Maher] Let?s turn from economies to politics, just briefly. You stated a number of times in the past that you feel it is possible and, indeed, probable that a Negro mayor can be elected in 1969, presumably a majority, if not all, of the council. That?s a rather rapid grab of power in terms of what has been for many, many years. How realistic is that? [Cleage] It?s hard to say. I wouldn?t go broke [betting] on it. You know, whether we can do it or not depends on so many things. If we could actually mobilize the total political strength of the black community, [it] would be immediately possible. Whether we could do it or not depends on organizational skills and a lot of things that have to be proven during the next year and a half. But I think it is a reasonable goal and I think it is reasonably possible and I think white people are making all the mistakes that are necessary to drive us together and give us the kind of political strength that we need. Every idiot who sends handbills out into the black community about how, you know, ?how we are going to mow you people down,? that makes black people realize that they have to come together. So that every oppression that we suffer brings us together and makes ? gives us the cohesiveness that makes possible the kind of political power that we have to have. I think it is a reasonable thing. We may do it. If we don?t do it in the next election, we certainly will do it in the following. A bloody revolution? [Maher] All right, then. Part of the message that you are delivering here ? and I ? see if I am right. Your revolution ? and you have a revolution in mind; you?re in the middle of one ? your revolution is sociological, it?s economical, it?s psychological ? you are trying to psych the frightened white man, I think, but your plan is that it is not a bloody revolution at all. You don?t plan that, you couldn?t stand it. [Cleage] I don?t plan a bloody revolution and I would try to avoid a bloody revolution, and the only thing that could cause a bloody revolution would be a frantic white people in the suburbs failing to understand what the situation is and making an idiotic move. [Maher] All you want, then, as I get it ? and I am trying to make it real simple ? you want a fair chance and a nice fair fight with dollars and balance. [Cleage] That?s right. Catching up with Cleage [Maher] You know in years past, though, Reverend Cleage, the Negro community has not had a political cohesion. Have you ever been able to get all the Negroes together as a voting bloc? Now, what are you going to do differently to accomplish that in? It would seem as though you got to. [Cleage] Well, I?m not going to have to do, you know, too much differently. The world has caught up with me. The black community has. I can do the same thing that I did, you know, with the Freedom Now party when we went down to a glorious defeat, and it will have a different result this time because black people think differently, our sense of identity is different, the whole black revolution is in another stage. People throughout Detroit realize that we have to do things that they didn?t realize that we had to do before. They didn?t realize that it was necessary for black people to vote as a black bloc, that it was necessary to buy as a black bloc. They felt that integration was coming, that the white man really meant well and that it was just a matter of time until everything worked out. But the white man?s actions have led black people today not to believe that things are going to work out, and the more things that the white man does that indicate to more and more black people that the enmity is real, that the white man hates black people, this drives black people into the very cohesiveness that white people are so afraid of. [Fyffe] For Brother Maher, excuse me, just a moment. It is time for a time out, and you can have a question when we come back. We will be back in just a moment. [Commercial break] Black mayor or Detroit mayor? [Fyffe] Before we took time out and I suppressed you you had a question or a point you wanted to make. It is all yours. ? [Jim Herrington] I just wanted to direct to Mr. Irish Maher over there, I think that what Mr. Cleage just said and talked about is not too unlike the Irish political revolution in Boston at the turn of the century. They decided to get together and vote Irish. Mr. Cleage, in terms of that campaign for 1969, is it possible that you are talking about electing a Negro mayor in Detroit in 1969 as the beginning of a campaign for Albert Cleage for mayor? [Cleage] No, I am not announcing a campaign. I have no aspirations to be mayor. I hope to have some voice in selecting who the black mayor of Detroit is and I am very anxious that he be a black mayor in the sense that we use [it] in the black community. We say he is a black mayor or he is a Negro mayor. I don?t want a Negro mayor. I want a black mayor who is willing to go all the way with the ideas of self-determination and would try to make an example or model for what a black community could do if it had some kind of political power. [Herrington] Would he be a mayor for Detroit or for black people? [Cleage] No, I don?t think. Would you say that Cavanagh is a mayor for white people? [Herrington] I think he is a mayor for Detroit. [Cleage] All right, I think in the same sense a black mayor could be a mayor for Detroit, but at the same time I think essentially he would realize he is dealing with a community in which black people have been deprived, in which they have been oppressed, in which his basic job at the beginning would be to equalize many of the things that black people have been denied over a long period of time. Now to say he is a mayor for the whole Detroit would merely mean that Detroit would, under his administration, become perhaps the best city in America because I think you can?t build a good city in America until you build a good city for black people, and if a black mayor was building a good city for black people, I think a lot of white people would be trying to creep right back in. A changing people [Herrington] You know, it just occurred to me that a year or two years ago, if we had done this program, we would have said a Negro mayor, Negro this, Negro that. We have been educated on the streets of Detroit. I am talking about we reporters. Most people haven?t been. That?s part of your preaching that ?black is beautiful,? that part of the nationalistic move[ment is?] a sense that?s spreading very, very rapidly. Is it? [Cleage] It is. It is perhaps most noticeable on college campuses or on the streets, where you get young boys, young girls. It is almost universal there, so it shows that it is just a matter of time until the total attitude or philosophy. ? [Herrington] Does your Negro older middle class buy that? [Cleage] For the most part they are in a process of change because they have been the privileged element in the black community. They have had certain, you know, privileges that the majority of black people haven?t had, but most middle-class black people are coming home. They don?t have any place out there anymore. They can?t stay. They are identifying, they are trying to become a part of this revolution, they are trying to give their skills to it, and this is true with the college students, black college students, around the country. On most college campuses in the past, black college students, you know, where they were at an integrated college, they wouldn?t even speak to each other because they were in the process of integration and they were so dedicated to it. Now on every college campus across the country, now black students have black associations, black student associations. Ivy League colleges ? Yale, Harvard, all of them. Black students are on a campus, but they are getting ready to get back in the black community and serve black people. Now this means a whole new generation of what would ordinarily be considered middle-class black people are dedicated to the struggle, committed to it, are going back into the black community as participants in the black revolution, so there is going to be a whole new kind of black middle class. Next summer [Herrington] One final thing ? yes or no. ? I would like to boil down two weeks of talks with you, Reverend Cleage. If there is a major disturbance this summer, it will or will not come from the black community? [Cleage] It is my honest opinion, if there is a major disturbance in Detroit this summer, it will come from the white community, but the black community will defend itself. [Fyffe] Gentlemen, our time is up. Our thanks to the Reverend Albert Cleage, chairman of the Federation for Self-determination, for being our guest today on ?Spotlight? and for sharing with us his views on Black Power and black nationalism. Our thanks, too, to our panel of reporters: Barney Morris, Bob Maher and Jim Herrington. Please remember, the questions of our reporters do not necessarily reflect their point of view; it?s their way of getting the story. * * * This series would not have been possible without the kind and generous assistance of the following persons and institutions: For the history of Jaramogi Agyeman and the Shrines of the Black Madonna during the 1960s, PAOCC Cardinals Nandi (Barbara) Martin and Karamo Omari (Ron Hewitt), Grace Boggs, Dr. Karl D. Gregory, U. S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, William W. (Billy) Smith, Mwalimu Edward Vaughn, Kristin Cleage Williams and Baba Malik Yakini. For the history and photos of ?Spotlight,? Nancy Callaway Fyffe, Jim Herrington, Chuck Stokes and the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. For photographs and documents of Jaramogi Agyeman and the Shrine, the Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman Archives, headed by Kristin Cleage Williams; Imani Karega (Melanie Roby); the Library of Congress? prints and photographs division; the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum archives, Austin, Tex.; the Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit; and Mr. Smith. For photo enhancements, Kristin Cleage Williams. For copyediting and proofreading, Eddie B. Allen, Jr. Sala Andaiye, Wende Berry, Peter Goldman, H.R. Lewis and Baba Yakini. Finally, for inspiring this series, we would like to thank Cardinal Baye Keita Okhuyia (Frank Landy), editor of The Black Slate Digest. ? PL. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From dogangoecmen at aol.com Tue Aug 19 08:02:56 2008 From: dogangoecmen at aol.com (=?utf-8?Q?Do=C4=9Fan_G=C3=B6=C3=A7men?=) Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:02:56 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?utf-8?b?QmF5a3XFnzIvQmF5a3XFnyAoaXNzdWUgMik=?= In-Reply-To: <8CAD01AA80ECB3D-DF4-1EA0@webmail-de10.sysops.aol.com> References: <8CACFF4C844653E-DF4-1427@webmail-de10.sysops.aol.com> <8CACFF528B9E549-DF4-1435@webmail-de10.sysops.aol.com> <8CACFF562E5E6BD-DF4-143E@webmail-de10.sysops.aol.com> <8CAD0046F0C9D87-DF4-1617@webmail-de10.sysops.aol.com> <8CAD01AA80ECB3D-DF4-1EA0@webmail-de10.sysops.aol.com> Message-ID: <8CAD01B69F6D015-DF4-1EFB@webmail-de10.sysops.aol.com> De?erli Arkada?lar/Dear All/Liebe Freunde/ De?erli Arkada?lar, Bayku? dergisinin ikinci say?s? ??kt?. Derginin dosya konusu Hegel. Size a?a??da i?indekileri g?nderiyorum ve g?rsel bir izlenim edinmeniz i?in ayr?ca kapak sayfas? ekte dosya olarak g?nderilmektedir. The secon issue of Bayku? (a Turkish journal of philosophy) has just appeared. Please find below the table of contents. To give you a visual inpressen there is a picutre of the cover. Liebe Freunde, die 2. Nummer der t?rkischen Philosophiezeitschrift "Bayku?" ist gerade rausgekommen. Unten findet sich eine n?here Angabe ?ber den Inhalt und im Anhang der Deckel, um Ihnen einen visualen Eindruck zu geben. ??indekiler Tabe of Content Inhalt Bayku??tan... From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 19 10:57:10 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:57:10 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ain't we got fun Message-ID: <48AAC326.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Every morning Every evening Ain't we got fun Not much money Oh but honey Ain't We Got Fun The rent's unpaid dear We have'nt a bus But smiles were made dear For people like us In the winter In the summer Don't we have fun Times are bum and getting bummer Still we have fun There's nothing surer The rich get rich and the poor get children In the meantime In between time Ain't we got fun Every morning Every evening Don't we got fun Twins and cares dear Come in pairs dear Don't we have fun We've only started As mommer and pop Are we downhearted I'll say that we're not Landlords mad and getting madder Ain't we got fun Times are bad and getting badder Still we have fun There's nothing surer The rich get rich and the poor get laid off In the meantime In between time Ain't we got fun Night or day-time It's all play-time Ain't we got fun Hot or cold days Any old days Ain't we got fun If wifie wishes To go to a play Don't wash the dishes Just throw them away Street car seats are awful narrow Ain't we got fun They won't smash up our Pierce Arrow We ain't got none They've cut my wages income tax will be so much smaller When I'm paid off I'll be laid off Ain't we got fun This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Tue Aug 19 11:07:54 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:07:54 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ain't we got fun In-Reply-To: <48AAC326.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48AAC326.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: Good times! Temporary layoffs . . . Good times! Easy credit ripoffs . . . Ain't we lucky we got 'em . . . Barack Obama CPUSA People's Republic of China womanism At 12:57 PM 8/19/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >Every morning >Every evening >Ain't we got fun From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 19 11:33:58 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:33:58 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] =?utf-8?q?revolution_to_repair=3A_New_friends_co?= =?utf-8?q?me_to_the_aid_of_Ra=C3=BAl=E2=80=99s_Cuba?= Message-ID: <48AACBC6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> revolution to repair: New friends come to the aid of Ra?l?s Cuba Published: August 18 2008 19:21 | Last updated: August 18 2008 19:21 Like the other residents of the Jos? Mart? housing estate in Santiago, Cuba? s second city, Rafael Gonzalez has grown used to the taps running dry. EDITOR?S CHOICE _Cuba looks at trimming social welfare_ (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8d82eed6-6d5b-11dd-857b-0000779fd18c.html) - Aug-18 _In depth: Cuba after Castro_ (http://www.ft.com/indepth/cuba) - Aug-04 _Putin moves to bolster Cuba ties_ (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b9e1ce10-6262-11dd-9a1e-000077b07658.html) - Aug-04 _Ra?l Castro warns over Cuba slowdown_ (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/26a9cfcc-5be5-11dd-9e99-000077b07658.html) - Jul-27 _Cuba determined to perfect statist economy_ (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bd027fb8-414c-11dd-9661-0000779fd2ac.html) - Jun-23 _EU ends Cuba sanctions_ (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8c7945a2-3eea-11dd-8fd9-0000779fd2ac.html) - Jun-20 ?Sometimes water arrives only two or three times a month,? says the 46-year-old restaurant worker, who often has to rely on what he collects in the two rusting oil drums parked on the balcony of his second-floor flat. Now, however, change is in the offing. Fixing Santiago?s defective pipelines and aqueduct is one of a number of projects being given priority as Cuba?s Communist government ploughs billions of dollars into roads, electricity and water infrastructure. Jos? Mart? and other Santiago barrios should benefit, for example, from a multi-million dollar restoration plan and Mr Gonzalez and his neighbours are looking forward to the improvement. ?They say next year we will have water,? says Rolando, a 52-year-old retired carpenter. ?They are ?revolutionis ing? things.? ?Revolutionising?, however, turns out to be a slow process. Cuba?s Communists are anxious to avoid the tumultuous transition experienced by the Soviet Union and - like their Chinese allies - are determined to hold on to political power. Nor, with their traditions of austere egalitarianism, do they have much appetite for the kind of market-based liberalisation that has taken place in China and Vietnam. Even so, President Ra?l Castro, who last month completed his second year at the helm of Cuba?s economy, is determined to press on with changes designed to increase economic efficiency and improve living standards. Under his stewardship - and especially since the permanent retirement in February of his older brother, Fidel - the government has admitted the scale of problems faced by ordinary Cubans and brought a more hard-headed approach to administration and economic management. Buoyed by trade and investment from China, Venezuela, Brazil and other emerging nations, the authorities have had money to make things better. Indeed, the modest improvements promised in Santiago have already been delivered in some other parts of the country. The lights that went out during the special period of austerity decreed in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, then Cuba?s biggest trading partner, are back on thanks to supplies of Venezuelan oil. In Havana, the ugly converted articulated lorries known as ?Camels? that until recently transported Cubans to work have been replaced by hundreds of modern Chinese buses. If Cubans book early enough they can even find seats on fast and comfortable coaches that now work routes between major cities. There have been other changes, too. This year Cubans have been allowed to buy hitherto forbidden consumer goods such as computers, DVD players and mobile phones. The ban that until recently prevented Cubans from entering tourist hotels has been lifted and a new terrestrial television station broadcasts US dramas such as The Sopranos and Grey?s Anatomy. On infrastructure, investment levels that hovered around 10 per cent of gross domestic product for years are up to around 15 per cent, according to Alfredo Jam, head of macro-economic analysis at the economy ministry. Much of this change reflects a sharp improvement in Cuba?s external circumstances. Driven by demand from China, the price of nickel - Cuba?s most valuable physical export - has surged higher, with revenues last year roughly four times higher than in 2002. Beijing has locked in supplies with a long-term agreement, helping Cuba pay for the buses as well as millions of dollars? worth of Chinese televisions, rice cookers and refrigerators. Brazil and Iran have also offered credit lines, allowing Cuba to import more easily. Above all, Cuba?s prospects have been transformed by its alliance with the radical leftwing government of Venezuela. Cuba buys Venezuelan oil on concessionary terms. About 40 per cent of the bill is converted into a long-term, low-interest loan, while much of the remainder has been paid for by selling the services of some 30,000 doctors, dentists, nurses and fitness instructors to Caracas. In a series of agreements signed last year, Cuba and Venezuela mapped out long-term co-operation that involves multi-billion dollar Venezuelan investments in Cuba?s refining and petrochemicals industries and encompasses the production of everything from fertiliser to the plastic building materials being deployed in pilot housing projects - the so-called petrocasas (oil houses) - in Santiago and the southern city of Cienfuegos. ?The relations we have with Venezuela are about economic integration,? says Mr Jam. ?We are looking at developing our two economies in a complementary way.? There has also been a shift in political style, partly linked to the change at the top. Fidel Castro has an almost obsessive belief in egalitarianism and, faced with difficulties, has often exhorted his people to greater sacrifice and commitment. By contrast, his brother is more prepared to countenance financial rewards for workers and businesses that deliver better results, even if this means accepting a greater degree of inequality. Since the Cuban Revolution in 1959, this tension has been a constant in the political debate. But under Ra?l, the balance has tilted away from idealism. As one European diplomat puts it: ?Think of Cuba as if it were an old Ilyushin aircraft that Fidel Castro wants to fly to the moon. Ra?l shares that ambition but he knows that unless the plane lands and essential repairs are carried out it will crash.? At the centre of the new president?s practical concerns - voiced repeatedly in recent speeches - is low productivity in agriculture, construction and manufacturing. Cuba already has an internationally competitive state-run tourism sector, built during the 1990s by adapting management techniques learnt from western multinationals. A viable biotechnology sector, which exports about $300m (?204m, ?161m) a year, is another product of this effort. Over the past couple of years, Cuba has pursued the idea of selling medical services beyond Venezuela. Caracas still dominates but Cuban officials estimate that, of annual revenues of some $5bn, about a third comes from countries such as China and Algeria, where Cuba has built and staffed hospitals specialising in eye surgery. However, the efficiency of domestically oriented sectors has lagged behind. This imbalance is reflected in Cuba?s complicated exchange rate system and is responsible for a series of distortions in the economy. Whereas hotels and restaurants charge tourists in convertible pesos whose value is tied to the dollar, the domestic economy functions on much less valuable pesos. Cuba?s average wage of about 430 pesos a month is nominally worth only about 17 convertible pesos, for example. The problem is that this system distorts incentives, sucking labour out of fa rming and the building trades, and even creating shortages of teachers. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans work in the illegal black economy, much of it linked to tourism, where a casual tip can equal a day?s wages. Remittances mainly sent by Cuban-Americans in the US further complicate matters, undermining work incentives. Manuel Orozco, a remittances specialist at the Inter-American Dialogue think-tank in Washington, estimates that 25 per cent of Cuban families receive regular dollar payments from their families in the US, with total flows amounting to nearly $1bn a year. The government has talked about extending the management techniques used in tourism, while the administration of agriculture and construction is being decentralised in order to bring bureaucrats closer to day-to-day decisions. More radically, Mr Castro seems prepared to break with long-established commitments to income equality and increase the country?s low wage differentials in order to lift productivity. In one recent speech he claimed that equality meant equality of rights and opportunities, not of income. At one level, that means being prepared to allow workers to earn bigger bonuses. At another it might involve modifying universal entitlement to social welfare. Much of this discussion is just beginning but it could, for example, involve the replacement of the hugely expensive rationing system - in which all Cubans receive the same monthly entitlement of basic foods - with a more targeted approach, similar perhaps to the conditional income transfer programmes successfully developed in Brazil and Mexico, in which welfare is made dependent on attendance at schools and clinics. But there is much opposition to overcome. ?I favour ending the ration but this is very controversial. There is very fierce debate about these things,? explains one leading government adviser. In addition, the government is explicitly opposed to what it calls ?shock therapy? - sudden policy changes of the sort implemented by several Latin American countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, the authorities are still cautious about dealings with the private sector, limiting access to capital, technology and management know-how. Cuba has allowed foreign direct investment since the 1990s, developing an institutional framework that allows it to enter into joint ventures with private companies. But in recent years Venezuelan state companies have been the only sizeable investors. Although the government wants to make more consumer goods available, reform in this area has been timid in the extreme. Mobile phones may be legal but Cubans face some of the highest costs in the world: ETECSA, the state-owned company, charges calls at the equivalent of a US dollar a minute. There are signs too that the pace of change will slow further as Cuba adjusts to high food and energy prices. Mr Jam says that investment plans in areas such as housing and road repair are already being pared back. The chances are, then, that life will improve but only at a snail?s pace. Supported by the emerging market powers, the country will steer clear of the kind of crisis it faced in the 1990s, but popular expectations of more rapid change will be thwarted. It is perhaps not surprising that there have been signs recently that the government has been preparing to dig in, reinforcing its disposition to defend Cuba?s authoritarian brand of socialism and fight what Communist party ideologues call the ?battle of ideas?. For all his fresh thinking, there is an occasional hint of steel about the new Cuban president. As he told one recent meeting of party officials: ?When the difficulties are great, the greater the need for order and discipline.? Urban farms attempt to engineer an organic future Beyond the neat lines of lettuce at the Alamar organic market garden and across the road leading to Havana, some new land has caught the eye of Miguel Salcines. As the 58-year-old farmer explains how he wants to start growing fruit and grazing sheep there, he seems every inch the ambitious rural entrepreneur. But this market garden on the outskirts of the capital is a co-operative and Mr Salcines, its administrator, is also a government supporter and an official who wants to make the Communist system work better. In fact, the success of the business that he and his 168 fellow workers have built up makes it something of a model for President Ra?l Castro as he tries to get Cuba to produce more of its own food and reduce dependence on increasingly expensive imports. Cuba?s food import bill is expected to rise to $2.55bn (?1.74bn, ?1.37bn) in 2008 from $1.47bn in 2007. Since establishing the co-op in 1997, Mr Salcines has seen it grow 100-fold. Sales of vegetables, herbs and ornamental plants have increased from 50,000 pesos to 5m pesos a year and productivity has risen sharply. Mr Salcines claims he is producing more than 180 tonnes of lettuce, tomatoes, cauliflowers and other vegetables a hectare, more than double that achieved on most Cuban farms. ?We can get to 200 tonnes,? he says. Much is sold to the local population from market stalls but the co-op also counts Havana?s top hotels among its clients, providing them with mint for mojito rum cocktails. While Cuban state farmers and co-operatives can sometimes struggle to attract workers unimpressed by hard work and low wages, Mr Salcines finds labour easy to find. More than 60 new workers have joined in the past year, attracted by proximity to their homes and a payment system that recognises effort and commercial success. Each fortnight the co-op hands out 50 per cent of its profits in the form of a bonus, with the amount depending on seniority and length of service. The average wage of 1,000 pesos per month is twice the Cuban norm. Among the recruits are highly skilled engineers and agronomists. ?We have 17 university professionals and most of our employees are graduates,? says Mr Salcines. That technical expertise has helped the co-op develop the organic farming methods on which Cuba became dependent after losing access to Soviet oil, pesticides and fertilisers in the early 1990s. With Cuba keen to reduce dependence on hydrocarbons, there is heavy official support for organic methods. Alfredo Turro, 53, who also used to be an irrigation engineer, now spends his days rearing earthworms and creating humus. ?Vegetables consume such a lot of nutrients. Unless we farm organically we can?t use the soil so intensively.? The government is encouraging such experiments in ?urban agriculture?. Indeed, this year Mr Castro announced an ambitious decentralisation of the sector, breaking up more than 100 co-operatives in order to bring production closer to towns and cities and reduce distribution costs. In addition, the top-heavy agriculture ministry has set up 169 municipally-based offices. Alcides L?pez, the deputy agriculture minister, told the FT that ?the [new] local offices are very close to the producers. They know where and when it rains. They?ll know producers need a product or a resource so can act more quickly?.? Idle land is to be offered to private farmers and co-operatives on extended leases, with more credit made available. Farmers, rather than bureaucrats, will be able to decide whether to reinvest. Whether all this will be the answer to Cuba?s agricultural difficulties is another matter, however. That is partly because of the scale of the needs. In 2006, for example, Cuba imported 66 per cent of products that provide protein and more than half of its basic grains, a greater dependence than at any time since the 1959 revolution, according to the Centre for Study of the Cuban Economy, a pro-government think-tank based in Havana. Ideology could also limit success. Cuba?s government remains reluctant to extend market mechanisms. Although the Alamar and other ?urban farms? sell directly to the community through local markets, bigger producers - such as the state farms and rural co-ops - sell 80 per cent of their output at set prices to state-run warehouses that have traditionally been inefficient. Although Cuba has signed a deal that will bring Brazilian technology to a pilot soya project, the country seems some way away from signing joint ventures with big private international agri-business concerns. Yet that might be the only way to revive the fortunes of the moribund and capital-intensive cattle rearing and dairy farming sector. Many Cubans privately fear that bureaucracy will block success. Mr L?pez is adamant that will not be so. ?We are not magicians. We are in a rush but we are not desperate,? he says. ?The changes will be introduced gradually, without improvisation and without despair.? _Slideshow: Richard Lapper on Ra?l Castro?s cuba_ (http://www.ft.com/raul) This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Tue Aug 19 13:37:19 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:37:19 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Loyalty Oath Message-ID: <48AAE8AF.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> In the Comments "This sounds like a great idea. Honestly, how many communications majors does a country need?" ? Darrin British Universities Offer Cash to Get Students to Enroll in Unpopular Programs Recent Posts University President Arrested in Iraq's Restive Diyala Province An unnamed official in the Iraqi army accused the president of playing a role in the murder of several professors. Comment Pennsylvania Auditor Urges Governance Changes at Student-Loan Agency Among the changes sought are replacing eight of the 16 state lawmakers on the agency?s 20-member board with financial and academic experts. Comment 2 Professors Explain Why They Resigned From U. of Missouri at Kansas City The tenured academics, who were accused of sexual harassment, say their decision to quit was not an admission of wrongdoing. Comment [1] Drinking-Age Campaign Binges on Big Names, Big Media An initiative that seeks to lower the drinking age to 18 has gained the support of some college presidents, and drawn both publicity and criticism. Comment [8] Law-Schools Meeting Finds a Way to Deal With Boycott Threat The group had contracts with two San Diego hotels, including one whose owner had become controversial for supporting anti-gay-rights measures. Comment [8] Most Commented This Month New Mexico State U. Threatens to Revoke Fired Professors' Degrees | 69 Withhold 'Judgement' on Students When a Word is 'Misspelt' | 50 All U. of Iowa Professors Told to Undergo Training to Avoid Sexual Harassment | 49 Judge Rejects Christian Schools' Complaint of Bias in U. of California Decisions on Courses | 45 Student Put Ashore From Semester at Sea for Plagiarism | 45 By Category Athletics Community Colleges Government & Politics Information Technology International Money & Management Northern Illinois Research & Books Short Subjects Students The Faculty Blog Archives Search Keep Up to Date Daily news blog: RSS / Atom Daily news reported by The Chronicle: RSS Contact us Today's most e-mailed Prior days' news: By date | Search This week's print issue Back issues: By date | Search June 3, 2008 Reinstated Instructor at Cal State-Fullerton Reflects on Encounter With 'Loyalty Oath' Wendy Gonaver, a lecturer in American studies at California State University at Fullerton, won a major victory on Monday, when she and the university agreed on the conditions under which she would sign a ?loyalty oath? required under California law. Ms. Gonaver was terminated last fall at the tail end of the hiring process, when she refused to sign the oath after being told that she could not attach a statement clarifying her views as a pacifist and a Quaker. Such attachments are routinely allowed by many state agencies in California, which has never repealed a 1952 amendment to the Constitution requiring state employees to swear an oath to ?support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic.? After approaching the American Civil Liberties Union about the case and not receiving an answer, the instructor told The Chronicle, she simply let the matter drop: ?I decided to chalk it up to the fact that I stood up for my principles, and this was the consequence, and that?s the end of it.? Ms. Gonaver took up the case again after reading that another Quaker employee in the Cal State system had been fired for a similar refusal. Marianne Kearney-Brown, an instructor in the mathematics department at Cal State-East Bay, had inserted the word ?nonviolently? into her copy of the signed oath. She was later rehired by the university. When Ms. Gonaver received an offer from People for the American Way to represent her case, lawyers for the civil-liberties group negotiated the new statement with the university. ?I was always willing to negotiate the language of the addendum,? she said, adding that the university had taken the view that no additions were allowed. The language agreed to by the university, Ms. Gonaver said, reads as follows: ?I support and respect the United States Constitution and the California Constitution, and I fully intend to abide by the oath that I have been required to sign as a condition of my employment by California State University (?CSU?). As an American, I do object, however, to being compelled to sign such an oath, and want to state my belief that such compulsion violates my right to freedom of speech. And, as a Quaker, in order to sign the oath in good conscience, I must also state that I do not promise or undertake to bear arms or otherwise engage in violence, and I have been assured by CSU that my oath will not be construed to require me to do so.? Ms. Gonaver said her initial stance against signing the oath without a clarifying attachment had been spurred by preparations for the introductory American-studies course that she was to teach, including a section on civil liberties and McCarthyism that cited a U.S. Supreme Court decision about Arizona?s loyalty oath. ?When I went in and found out that there was an oath [in California], I was shocked,? Ms. Gonaver said. But now that the agreement has been reached, she said, she is excited about teaching at Fullerton in the fall semester. ?Richard Byrne Posted on Tuesday June 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments As a fellow Quaker, I am pleased to see that Ms. Gonaver has reached an agreement with the Calinfornia State System. I believe that loyalty oaths should not be a requirement of employment in higher education, since it is not a requirement to work on Wall Street or Wal-Mart or many other places of employment. Since it is difficult to change the state constitution higher education institutions should always permit Quakers and others who have a religious objection to oaths to amend or attach and adenddum in order to be able to sign. ? Stephen Nelson Jun 3, 04:05 PM # I?m not a Quaker or conscientious objector, but I strongly agree with the institution providing this accommodation. Other stories made it clear that CA state agencies often provide such an accommodation, but CSU was being a hard-ass about it. Glad to see they wised up. ? Al Jun 3, 04:18 PM # Silly that the Cal State would require this; silly that some Quaker would give a damn. They?re both sides of the same coin, and therein lies the problem with the world as a whole. That, and over-simplification. ? original marci Jun 3, 04:41 PM # What enemy of the U.S. would baulk at signing such an oath? Obviously many Cailifornia legislators realized this too. The legislation passed as a symbolic gesture of patriotism. What legislator would go on record against this patriotic gesture? Only legislators of strong conscience. The oath then triggers off another symbolic act of patriotism, for who would not sign this piece of meaninglessness to secure a job? The only people caught by the oath are pacifists or those who strongly object to coerced statements of ?loyalty,? i.e. men and woman of conscience. If it is claimed that many truly patriotic men and women were happy to declare their loyalty, I can only say the oath was devised not to ?ferret? out the loyal but rather the disloyal. Or so it was claimed. Thus does government make hypocrites of itself and the majority of us. (Yes, I signed such an oath for my first job at City University of New York way back when.) ? arnold asrelsky Jun 3, 05:17 PM # For a comprehensive review and history of loyalty oaths from a Quaker, one should read a monograph (title forgotten) by Gilbert Kilpack, who was Director of the Pendle Hill School of Religion, a Quaker institution. It was written around the time of the California amendment. In the early 17th century, traitor paranoia led to loyalty oaths, then oaths of attestation that the loyalty oaths were true, then oaths of attestation that the oaths of attestation that the loyalty oaths were true were true. At least California has faith in loyalty oaths and does not go back to the Elizabethan era of obtaining three oaths just to be sure of whatever it is they are trying to be sure of. ? Gordon Jun 3, 05:18 PM # Loyalty oaths, memoranda of agreements, to my mind, belong to marriages, civil unions and maybe secret societies, whatever those are. The application of such ancillary clauses to contracts, in institutions of learning, constitute an Ultra Vires circumvention of civil liberties and an undermining of academic freedom. ? Konfor Masanje Jun 4, 07:32 AM # Loyalty oaths were commonly used ? usually for teachers and other civil servants ? even before World War II. The reason is simple: they are an easy way for state legislators to show their patriotism and they don?t cost any money. ? Ellen Schrecker Jun 4, 08:17 AM # It is interesting that the states should resort to loyalty oaths as a measure of patriotism. The states have an arsenal of measures to control ?patriotism?; states license every aspects of their citizens? lives ? all kinds of laws- marriages, births, deaths, burials, businesses, homes, medications, the right to drive, the right to vote, the right to die?etc? and just about everything citizens own is taxed, isn?t that enough to justify ?patriotism?? Must the citizens sign a loyalty oath? Isn?t it inherent in these controls that the citizens are loyal? Those who are not are sanctioned and put in jail in certain cases, aren?t they? What is a ?Loyalty Oath? good for then? ? Konfor Masanje Jun 4, 09:01 AM # Loyalty oaths appeal only to the truly naive and the deeply hypocritical. Dr. Johnson defined ?patriotism? as ?the last refuge of a scoundrel?; Bierce went further: ?with all deference to that learned (but inferior) lexicographer, I venture to suggest that it is the first.? Loyalty oaths for employees make as much sense as religion tests for politicians. They serve only to preserve and protect us from the ethically and morally scrupulous. ? Dan Jun 4, 09:01 AM # You are right Dan. I will add that, one of these days, the ?Patriot Act? will be administered as a test of patriotism, if citizens are not alert, the world of George (Bush) Orwell?s ?1984? is here and loyalty oaths are only a small measure. ? Konfor Masanje Jun 4, 09:10 AM # Quakers do not subscribe to an ideology that calls for the destruction of the United States; Muslims do, however. Since the koran provides justification for lying and breaking truces it is unlikely that require islamic adherents to sign anything. ? Marty Jun 4, 09:52 AM # Patriotism, or jingoism. Hard to tell sometimes. ? A true follower of Keir Hardie Jun 4, 10:23 AM # The comments above are right on. Loyalty oaths only annoy the loyal and do not phase those who are not. They are simply a cheap way for legislators and administrators to puff their chests out and proclaim patriotism. ? Al Jun 4, 10:48 AM # What is the harm in signing? She and others made a big deal about it. They became famous. ? kvc Jun 4, 11:06 AM # What is the harm? Then the rest of us wouldn?t have known just how exceptional and special she and other quakers are. Rules, laws, pledges and oaths are for suckers like me. God Bless America, still the most free nation in the world. ? Ortiz Jun 4, 11:21 AM # You speak the truth, Ortiz. Free nation, indeed. Freedom bought and paid for with the blood of Americans who believed in our nation, despite its flaws, and took and OATH to defend it. I suspect most of the complaining comes from those who haven?t had to make any sacrifices for their freedom, merely accepting it as their birthright. The freedom we enjoy in this country is unrivaled anywhere in the world and is only leased to us as long as we are willing to maintain it and pay the often unimaginable cost of it. ? Andrew H. Jun 4, 11:31 AM # Maybe someday the State of California will be forced to sign a loyalty oath swearing to protect their employees against all abuses of the constitution, foreign and domestic. ? Tony B Jun 4, 11:31 AM # In saying, Marty, in Comment 11, that ?Muslims do [?subscribe to an ideology that calls for the destruction of the United States?],? do you mean to say, ?All Muslims subscribe to an ideology that calls for the destruction of the United States,? or ?Some Muslims subscribe to an ideology that calls for the destruction of the United States?? ? Richard Hennessey Jun 4, 11:57 AM # Now Ms. Gonaver can be shown the secret handshake. ? Gary Brooks Jun 4, 12:01 PM # The harm, kvc, is in allowing the enemies of freedom to cloak themselves as the guardians of freedom. People sign such unconstitutional oaths either because they don?t mind being coerced to do so, no matter how obviously ineffectual such things are, or out of cowardice. There is nothing more un-American than loyalty oaths, religious tests, and House Un-American Activities Committees. ? Dan Jun 4, 12:23 PM # No one is to be trusted. Everyone is trying to get me. The government is monitoring my toaster to see what kind of bread I buy. No one cares but me, no one understands but me. I am the arbiter of truth. I?m not buying what you?re selling, Dan. It smells like what my horses leave for me to clean up in the barn. Paranoia may destroy ya? ? Ray Davies Jun 4, 12:44 PM # To Marty (#11): I am positive that you did not mean or believe that all Muslims subscribe to the ideology of the destruction of the U.S.A. However, in the interests of clarity, let me amplify that: Not all Muslims subscribe to the ideology of the destruction of the U.S.A. Islam has over 70 different interpretive groups ?- akin to Christianities? (Catholics, Baptists, Quakers, Etc.). For Instance, take the Sufi Muslims ?- Mostly Pacifists, but Muslims nonetheless, who ? Expounding Briefly: Consider the following from Encyclopedia Britannica (1961: V. 21., Page523): ?The germs of mysticism latent in Islam from the first were rapidly developed by the political, social and intellectual conditions which prevailed in the two centuries following the prophet?s death. devastating civil wars, a ruthless military despotism caring only for the luxuries of this world, Messianic hopes and presages, the luxury of the upper classes, the ? The terrors of hell, so vividly depicted in the Koran, awakened in them an intense consciousness of sin, which drove them to seek salvation in ascetic practices. Sufism was originally a practical religion, not a speculative system. It arose, as Junayd of Baghdad says ?from hunger and taking leave of the world and breaking familiar ties and renouncing what men deem good, not from disputation? ? ? Additionally Consider the role of Sufi Women vis-a-vis Women in other sects of Islam (Encyclopedia Britannica (1961: V. 21., Page523): ?Toward the end of the 2nd century the doctrine of mystical love was set forth in the sayings of a female ascetic, Rabi?a of Basra, the first in a long line of saintly women who played an important role in the history of Sufiism. Henceforth the use of symbolic expressions, borrowed from the vocabulary of love and wine, becomes increasingly frequent as a means of indicating holy mysteries ?? And, to elaborate a little further, there are many variations within the Sufis themselves (akin to Baptists, Catholics, etc.). From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 20 13:28:11 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:28:11 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Russia Never Wanted a War Message-ID: <48AC380B.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> THE NEW YORK TIMES August 20, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor Russia Never Wanted a War By MIKHAIL GORBACHEV Moscow THE acute phase of the crisis provoked by the Georgian forces' assault on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, is now behind us. But how can one erase from memory the horrifying scenes of the nighttime rocket attack on a peaceful town, the razing of entire city blocks, the deaths of people taking cover in basements, the destruction of ancient monuments and ancestral graves? Russia did not want this crisis. The Russian leadership is in a strong enough position domestically; it did not need a little victorious war. Russia was dragged into the fray by the recklessness of the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili. He would not have dared to attack without outside support. Once he did, Russia could not afford inaction. The decision by the Russian president, Dmitri Medvedev, to now cease hostilities was the right move by a responsible leader. The Russian president acted calmly, confidently and firmly. Anyone who expected confusion in Moscow was disappointed. The planners of this campaign clearly wanted to make sure that, whatever the outcome, Russia would be blamed for worsening the situation. The West then mounted a propaganda attack against Russia, with the American news media leading the way. The news coverage has been far from fair and balanced, especially during the first days of the crisis. Tskhinvali was in smoking ruins and thousands of people were fleeing - before any Russian troops arrived. Yet Russia was already being accused of aggression; news reports were often an embarrassing recitation of the Georgian leader's deceptive statements. It is still not quite clear whether the West was aware of Mr. Saakashvili's plans to invade South Ossetia, and this is a serious matter. What is clear is that Western assistance in training Georgian troops and shipping large supplies of arms had been pushing the region toward war rather than peace. If this military misadventure was a surprise for the Georgian leader's foreign patrons, so much the worse. It looks like a classic wag-the-dog story. Mr. Saakashvili had been lavished with praise for being a staunch American ally and a real democrat - and for helping out in Iraq. Now America's friend has wrought disorder, and all of us - the Europeans and, most important, the region's innocent civilians - must pick up the pieces. Those who rush to judgment on what's happening in the Caucasus, or those who seek influence there, should first have at least some idea of this region's complexities. The Ossetians live both in Georgia and in Russia. The region is a patchwork of ethnic groups living in close proximity. Therefore, all talk of "this is our land," "we are liberating our land," is meaningless. We must think about the people who live on the land. The problems of the Caucasus region cannot be solved by force. That has been tried more than once in the past two decades, and it has always boomeranged. What is needed is a legally binding agreement not to use force. Mr. Saakashvili has repeatedly refused to sign such an agreement, for reasons that have now become abundantly clear. The West would be wise to help achieve such an agreement now. If, instead, it chooses to blame Russia and re-arm Georgia, as American officials are suggesting, a new crisis will be inevitable. In that case, expect the worst. In recent days, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush have been promising to isolate Russia. Some American politicians have threatened to expel it from the Group of 8 industrialized nations, to abolish the NATO-Russia Council and to keep Russia out of the World Trade Organization. These are empty threats. For some time now, Russians have been wondering: If our opinion counts for nothing in those institutions, do we really need them? Just to sit at the nicely set dinner table and listen to lectures? Indeed, Russia has long been told to simply accept the facts. Here's the independence of Kosovo for you. Here's the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, and the American decision to place missile defenses in neighboring countries. Here's the unending expansion of NATO. All of these moves have been set against the backdrop of sweet talk about partnership. Why would anyone put up with such a charade? There is much talk now in the United States about rethinking relations with Russia. One thing that should definitely be rethought: the habit of talking to Russia in a condescending way, without regard for its positions and interests. Our two countries could develop a serious agenda for genuine, rather than token, cooperation. Many Americans, as well as Russians, understand the need for this. But is the same true of the political leaders? A bipartisan commission led by Senator Chuck Hagel and former Senator Gary Hart has recently been established at Harvard to report on American-Russian relations to Congress and the next president. It includes serious people, and, judging by the commission's early statements, its members understand the importance of Russia and the importance of constructive bilateral relations. But the members of this commission should be careful. Their mandate is to present "policy recommendations for a new administration to advance America's national interests in relations with Russia." If that alone is the goal, then I doubt that much good will come out of it. If, however, the commission is ready to also consider the interests of the other side and of common security, it may actually help rebuild trust between Russia and the United States and allow them to start doing useful work together. Mikhail Gorbachev is the former president of the Soviet Union. This article was translated by Pavel Palazhchenko from the Russian. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 20 15:44:25 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:44:25 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Animal Farm Message-ID: <48AC57F9.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Animal Farm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: PEN-L list Subject: [Pen-l] Animal Farm From: Louis Proyect Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:09:41 -0400 Cc: User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 (Windows/20080708) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The 1954 CIA-financed Halas and Batchelor animated production of George Orwell?s ?Animal Farm? is now available on YouTube in eight parts, beginning here. I can?t remember if I saw this movie in the 1950s, but I surely remember reading this and ?1984? in high school. I am fairly sure that our social studies teachers were instructed to assign these cold war staples. For impressionable teenagers living under the threat of nuclear attack from the dirty Rooskies, Orwell?s books were designed to reinforce the belief that it was better to be dead than red. We never were told that ?1984? was written as an attack on all forms of monolithic societies, including the Cold War anticommunist west. It was strictly a warning about the dangers of Communism. ?big brother was watching you? was only about the GPU, not the FBI. To become an ?Unperson? was something that happened to Soviet dissidents, not the Hollywood 10, etc. When we got to the final chapter when Winston Smythe is threatened with having hungry rats dine on his eyeballs, it was all we needed to wrap ourselves in the American flag. Who would want to say a good word about socialism when it led to rodent hell? ?Animal Farm? was just as scary and even more directly focused on the evils of trying to run a society based on human (or barnyard animal) needs rather than private profit. This was an Aesopian fable about the USSR, with animals standing in for leaders of the Russian revolution. Snowball the pig was Leon Trotsky and Napoleon, another pig, was Joseph Stalin. Like ?big brother is watching you?, Animal Farm?s ?All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others? had the power of a mantra. The one thing that never came up in classroom discussions of ?Animal Farm? was the actual history of the Soviet Union. Unlike the Soviet Union, the animal-run farm of Orwell?s novel was never invaded by 21 countries, even if populated by penguins or ferrets. The real lesson was that human nature (or animal nature) was rotten. Once the farmers were gone from the scene, the pigs would turn out to be just as rotten. So the moral of the story was ?better the devil you know than the devil you don?t.? full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/08/18/animal-farm/ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 20 15:51:47 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:51:47 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] The story behind Animal Farm Message-ID: <48AC59B2.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> The story behind Animal Farm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: PEN-L list Subject: [Pen-l] The story behind Animal Farm From: Louis Proyect Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:22:18 -0400 Cc: User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.16 (Windows/20080708) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n13/hobe01_.html London Review of Books 5 July 2007 The story behind Animal Farm [Halas and Batchelor, 1954] by J. Hoberman In the annals of American intelligence, the mid-1950s were the golden years: the CIA overthrew elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, conducted experiments with ESP and LSD (using its own operatives as unwitting guinea pigs), ran literary journals and produced the first general-release, feature-length animation ever made in the UK. It was Howard Hunt who broke the story that the CIA funded Animal Farm, John Halas and Joy Batchelor's 1954 version of George Orwell's political allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, played out in a British farmyard. Cashing in on his Watergate notoriety, the rogue spook and sometime spy novelist took credit in Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (1974) for initiating the project, shortly after Orwell's death in 1950. The self-aggrandising Hunt may have exaggerated his own importance in the operation - possibly inventing the juicy detail that Orwell's widow, Sonia, was wooed with the promise of meeting her favourite star, Clark Gable - but, as detailed by Daniel Leab in Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of 'Animal Farm' (Pennsylvania, $55), the operation was real. Leab is a historian who has done extensive research into the production of Hollywood's Cold War movies; the central figure in his account is Louis de Rochemont, the former newsreel cameraman who supervised Time magazine's innovative monthly release The March of Time and, beginning in 1945 with The House on 92nd Street, produced a number of so-called 'journalistic features' for 20th Century Fox (which were praised by James Agee, among others, for their extensive use of location shooting). De Rochemont was also well connected to various government agencies. The House on 92nd Street dramatised the FBI's role in arresting Nazi agents; its 1946 follow-up, 13 Rue Madeleine, celebrated the wartime exploits of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's precursor, but a dispute between the studio and the OSS director, 'Wild Bill' Donovan, resulted in the organisation's being disguised as an intelligence outfit called '0-77'. De Rochemont subsequently became an independent producer affiliated with the Reader's Digest. In 1951, while preparing a new FBI collaboration, Walk East on Beacon (adapted from an article by J. Edgar Hoover originally published in the Digest), he was recruited by the CIA's blandly titled Office of Policy Co-Ordination to produce an animated Animal Farm. The CIA was already engaged in spreading the Orwellian gospel - as was the clandestine Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office. (Both agencies had been engaged in making translations and even comic-book versions of Animal Farm and 1984.) Nor were the CIA and the IRD the only interested parties: according to Leab, both the US Army and the producers of Woody Woodpecker cartoons also made inquiries as to the availability of Animal Farm's film rights. The trade press reported that de Rochemont financed Animal Farm with the frozen British box-office receipts from his racial 'passing' drama Lost Boundaries; in fact, Animal Farm was almost entirely underwritten by the CIA. De Rochemont hired Halas and Batchelor (they were less expensive and, given their experience making wartime propaganda cartoons, politically more reliable than American animators) in late 1951; well before that, his 'investors' had furnished him with detailed dissections of his team's proposed treatment. Animal Farm was scheduled for completion in spring 1953, but the ambitious production, which made use of full cell animation, was delayed for more than a year, in part because of extensive discussion and continual revisions. Among other things, the investors pushed for a more aggressively 'political' voice-over narration and were concerned that Snowball (the pig who figures as Trotsky) would be perceived by audiences as too sympathetic. Most problematic, however, was Orwell's pessimistic ending, in which the pigs become indistinguishable from their human former masters. No matter how often the movie's screenplay was altered, it always concluded with a successful farmyard uprising in which the oppressed animals overthrew the dictatorial pigs. The Animal Farm project had been initiated when Harry Truman was president; Dwight Eisenhower took office in January 1953, with John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state and Allen Dulles heading the CIA. Leab notes that Animal Farm's mandated ending complemented the new Dulles policy, which - abandoning Truman's aim of containing Communism - planned a 'roll back', at least in Eastern Europe. As one of the script's many advisors put it, Animal Farm's ending should be one where the animals 'get mad, ask for help from the outside, which they get, and which results in their (the Russian people) with the help of the free nations overthrowing their oppressors'. Animal Farm's world premiere was held at the Paris Theatre in December 1954, then as now Manhattan's poshest movie-house, and was followed by a gala reception at the United Nations. The movie received respectful reviews - as it did when it opened several months later in London - but performed poorly at the box office. (Its major precursor as a 'serious' animation, Disney's 1943 collaboration with the aviator Alexander de Seversky, Victory through Air Power, was also a flop.) Halas and Batchelor did achieve a reasonable approximation of stretchy, rounded Disney-style character animation but, as the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther observed, 'the shock of straight and raw political satire is made more grotesque in the medium of cartoon.' This was a dark cuteness. While praising Animal Farm as 'technically first-rate', Crowther concluded his review by advising parents to not 'make the mistake of thinking it is for little children, just because it is a cartoon.' Actually, Animal Farm was ultimately seen mainly by schoolchildren - particularly in West Germany. Possibly the movie was perceived by this captive audience as an unaccountably dour and violent version of Walt Disney's Dumbo. But, however the CIA's fervent call for an anti-Soviet revolt (with 'help from the outside') was received by the world, it was rendered moot some eighteen months after Animal Farm's European release by the much encouraged and subsequently abandoned Hungarian uprising. J. Hoberman is senior film critic for the Village Voice and the author of The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the Sixties. _______________________________________________ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 20 16:09:15 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:09:15 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Thought Control In Economics Message-ID: <48AC5DCB.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> [Pen-l] Thought Control In Economics -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition , pen-l at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [Pen-l] Thought Control In Economics From: Louis Proyect Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:33:34 -0400 Cc: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- These accounts are symptoms of a pervasive system of thought control in economics. But no one knows more about how unwelcome ideas are kept from being expressed in economics departments and tainting the minds of curious students than Fred Lee, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He has documented over a hundred cases where economists who wouldn't drink the neoclassical Kool-Aid got pushed aside ? a problem that began over a century ago when the working classes started to teach themselves Marxist theory. "The leading economists of the day feared that if workers understood Marxist theory, the working class would realize how badly they were being exploited," he says. "Fearing this might lead to revolutionary fervor, economists sought to recast economic theory to neutralize the Marxist critique. They limited their neoclassical theory to looking at innocuous issues such as how prices change. They also sought to prove that everyone gets paid exactly in accordance with their net contribution to society, implying that workers aren't exploited and that is no basis for workers to claim a fairer share of the pie." Listening to Lee was making me realize that there is a time-honored tradition in economics of avoiding questions about who gets the wealth, who benefits and who loses with different economic policies. But there have been times when it was possible to explore other schools of thought. Mainstream control over economics was further consolidated during the hysteria of McCarthyism in the 1950s. By the 1960s US universities had been thoroughly cleansed of dissident economists. But this ultimately undermined the discipline's credibility. With the civil rights movement highlighting injustice in America, protests against the Vietnam War spreading across campuses, independence movements gaining strength in Africa and growing signs of an environmental crisis, the mainstream economics taught in lecture halls seemed stale and irrelevant to the commotion outside the classroom windows. Students took matters into their own hands and organized unofficial study groups in alternative theories of economics. In 1970, Lee himself discovered the vast literature written by heretical economists. Eventually, universities ended up infected with economists who were openly critical of mainstream economics ? those same self-taught students who had studied outside the accepted canon and had gone on to get graduate degrees and teaching positions. "For a brief time, many departments were tolerating a couple of dissident economists on staff," Lee reminisces, "but with the surge of neoliberalism in the 1980s, those who asked the bigger questions were once again being ostracized, demoted and expelled from universities. In the last decade, the mainstream professional associations have convinced state funding bodies in the UK, elsewhere in Europe, Australia and New Zealand that other schools of economic thought should not qualify for research funds." I ask Lee if economists get the teaching positions and the research money because, as they argue, they've got the better theory ? in effect, the better mousetrap ? while the economists with other perspectives have theories that don't work? "The mainstream economists don't have the better mousetrap," insists Lee. "Much neoclassical theory has zero value in explaining any socially relevant economic problems ? in many ways, like creationist theory, it fails to offer more than superficial explanations for most of what we observe in the world." Perhaps Lee has seen too many witch-hunts against economists who stray from the neoclassical song sheet and now sees the dark shadow of suppression everywhere. After all, there might be less sinister explanations as to why only variations on the same old simplistic theory can be taught, and taught so uncritically. David Colander, who is rare among economists for being accepted in both alternative and mainstream camps, suggests that much of the perpetuation of mainstream economics is simply the result of intellectual laziness. "It's easier to teach what you've always taught, a model that's been passed down from father to son again and again," says Colander. "Economists have nice jobs, they're at the center of society, they get to travel around the world, they have prestige, and why would you open up a can of worms if you could avoid it?" I go back to Lee and ask him if there are other factors, beyond trying to defend the status quo, that would explain why professors discourage deeper questioning from students. Why are they not willing to introduce competing economic theories so students can make up their own minds? "The fact that CEOs earn millions while their workers struggle by on minimum wages is either not examined in classrooms or is shown by the mainstream model to be completely consistent with properly working markets and to be leading to the best of all possible worlds," says Lee. "This of course makes most of the students who are concerned by such issues switch to other disciplines because they find economics pointless for what they want to know and do. So generally only the unquestioning students go on to get a PhD and become professors with views just like the professors that taught them." full: http://www.adbusters.org/print/1362 This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Wed Aug 20 11:34:13 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:34:13 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Obama & the police state? Message-ID: Don?t Cage Dissent http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080813_dont_cage_dissent/ Posted on Aug 13, 2008 By Amy Goodman The bulwark against tyranny is dissent. Open opposition, the right to challenge those in power, is a mainstay of any healthy democracy. The Democratic and Republican conventions will test the commitment of the two dominant U.S. political parties to the cherished tradition of dissent. Things are not looking good. Denver?s CBS4 News just reported that the city is planning on jailing arrested Democratic convention protesters at a warehouse with barbed-wire-topped cages and signs warning of the threat of stun gun use. Meanwhile, a federal judge has ruled that a designated protest area is legal, despite claims that protesters will be too far from the Democratic delegates to be heard. The full spectrum of police and military will also be on hand at the Democratic convention in Denver, many of these units coordinated by a ?fusion center.? These centers are springing up around the country as an outgrowth of the post-9/11 national-security system. Erin Rosa of the online Colorado Independent recently published a report on the Denver fusion center, which will be sharing information with the U.S. Secret Service, the FBI and the U.S. Northern Command. The center is set up to gather and distribute ?intelligence? about ?suspicious activities,? which, Rosa points out, ?can include taking pictures or taking notes. The definition is very broad.? Civil rights advocates fear the fusion center could enable unwarranted spying on protesters exercising their First Amendment rights at the convention. Documents obtained by I-Witness Video, a group that documents police abuses and demonstrations, revealed that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency were receiving intelligence about the protests at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. The growing problem is that legal, peaceful protesters are ending up on federal databases and watch lists with scant legal oversight. Former FBI agent Mike German is now a national-security-policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. He said, ?It?s unclear who is actually in charge and whose rules apply to the information that?s being collected and shared and distributed through these fusion centers.? Maryland State Police were recently exposed infiltrating groups like the Baltimore Coalition Against the Death Penalty. German explains how police expand ?beyond normal law-enforcement functions, and start becoming intelligence collectors against protest groups. The reports that we obtained ... make clear that there was no indication of any sort of criminal activity. And yet, that investigation went on for 14 months, and these reports were uploaded into a federal database. ... When all these agencies are authorized to go out and start collecting this information and putting it in areas where it?s accessible by the intelligence community, it?s a very dangerous proposition for our democracy.? After Barack Obama became the presumptive Democratic nominee, the protest coalition in Denver splintered, as many were motivated originally by the anticipated nomination of the more hawkish Hillary Clinton. An anarchist group, Unconventional Denver, actually offered to call off its protests if Denver would redirect the $50-million federal grant it is receiving for security to ?reinvest their police budget toward real community security: new elementary schools; health care for the uninsured; providing clean, renewable energy.? The plea has not been answered. The city, meanwhile, is stocking up on ?less-lethal? pepper-ball rifles and has set aside a space for permitted protesting that some are referring to as the ?Freedom Cage.? In the Twin Cities on the evening Obama was giving his Democratic acceptance speech in June, the St. Paul Police Department arrested a 50-year-old man peacefully handing out leaflets promoting a Sept. 1 march on the Republican National Convention. After mass arrests at the RNC in Philadelphia in 2000 and roughly 1,800 arrests in New York City in 2004, ACLU Minnesota predicts hundreds will be arrested in St. Paul, and is organizing and training 75 lawyers to defend them. For now, the eyes of the world are on the Beijing Olympics. Sportswriter Dave Zirin is reporting on the suppression of protests that are occurring there. He has an interesting perspective, as he is a member of the anti-death-penalty group infiltrated in Maryland. He told me, ?Our taxpayer dollars went to pay people to infiltrate and take notes on our meetings, and it?s absolutely enraging ... a lot of this Homeland Security funding is an absolute sham ... it?s being used to actually crush dissent, not to keep us safer in any real way.? The lack of freedom of speech in China is getting a little attention in the news. But what about the crackdown on dissent here at home? Dissent is essential to the functioning of a democratic society. There is no more important time than now. Amy Goodman is the host of ?Democracy Now!,? a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. ? 2008 Amy Goodman Distributed by King Features Syndicate A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright ? 2008 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved. Web site development by Hop Studios | Hosted by NEXCESS.NET hit counter html code ____________________________________________________________ Free quote and debt consolidation information. Click Here. No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 270.6.6/1623 - Release Date: 8/20/2008 8:12 AM From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 21 13:11:48 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:11:48 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] MILLION DOORS FOR PEACE Message-ID: <48AD85B4.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> MILLION DOORS FOR PEACE September 20, 2008 - National Day of Action: Be part of one of the most ambitious and innovative anti-war activities to date! On Saturday, September 20 thousands of volunteers across the U.S. will knock on a Million Doors for Peace. www.milliondoorsforpeace.org/signup.php?code=ufp United for Peace and Justice is partnering with US Action/True Majority, Win Without War, and other organizations to make this day the biggest peace action of 2008. Volunteer doorknockers will ask people to sign an antiwar petition directed to Congress. Our message: End this immoral war, bring our troops home, and invest in America's future. In addition, we will encourage people to join local anti-war groups, engage in voter education work and become a part of the organized anti war movement in their area. In order to reach a million people in a single day, we must organize at least 25,000 volunteers in all 50 states. Peace groups have never implemented such an elaborate communication and organizing plan before now, but with new and traditional communications tools available, we anticipate success with this groundbreaking, grassroots project. A project that will not end on Sept 20, but will be a new beginning of a more organized grassroots movement for peace and justice. Training materials, petitions, local groups to canvass with in your area, and handouts will be provided. To join Million Doors for Peace www.milliondoorsforpeace.org/signup.php?code=ufp VOTE PEACE IN 2008 On Sept 20, literature inviting people to join local antiwar groups and offering other ideas for how people can get involved will also be distributed. One way you can get involved in the 2008 elections is joining UFPJ's national campaign to organize nonpartisan voter engagement in Congressional races. Intensive and creative bird-dogging of candidates, distribution of Congressional voter guides or report cards are some of the activities underway. MOBILIZE THE ANTIWAR VOTE IN ALL 50 STATES House and Senate report cards evaluating incumbent's votes on five key bills are available from UFPJ. It is a great tool for outreach to potential voters. See sample at http://unitedforpeace.org/downloads/ufpjreportcard-sample.pdf We will provide you with a bilingual (English/Spanish) PDF file of a report card for your - House Representative and/or Senator. It is ready to print and will include the name and contact information for your group. To order your Congressional and/or Senate report card, go to http://www.unitedforpeace.org/modinput4.php?modin=145 Use them in door-to-door outreach, at candidates' events, street fairs, etc. and for voter registration and education on the incumbent's actual voting record. BIRD-DOGGING CANDIDATES: Congressional and Presidential Good bird-dogging can bust the myths, involve the audience, compel candidates to change or refine their positions, and get media attention. UFPJ has training materials and tips sheets at http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=3935. You can read about how the skillful bird-dogging of one antiwar activist in NH was responsible for eliciting the "100 years in Iraq" response from McCain. http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=David+Donald+Tiffany%3A+Onehundred+years+or+not,+McCain+wants+us+in+Iraq+indefinitely&articleId=8e261e0a-1726-49c3-894c-103f5b4a9501 UFPJ is maintaining a daily schedule of Senators Obama and McCain's activities to ensure that the issues of war, nuclear disarmament, and the domestic costs of the war are discussed at their events. You can find the daily schedules at UFPJ's Voter Engagement 2008: http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?list=type&type=127. Together we will send a powerful message in the elections and organize a more politically empowered movement this year. Judith Le Blanc Van Gosse UFPJ Organizing Coordinator UFPJ Voter Engagement Working Group This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 22 08:26:46 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:26:46 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Caucasian Message-ID: <48AE9466.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> John Goliath McCain says that the Georgians adopted Christianity early. Maybe it was in their genes ! Br'er Rabbit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race Origins of the term The famed exemplary Georgian skull Blumenbach discovered in 1795 to hypothesize origination of Europeans from the Caucasus. )picture of skull( The term ?Caucasian? originated as one of the racial categories developed in the 19th century by people studying craniology. It was derived from the region of the Caucasus mountains[5]. The 18th century German philosopher Christoph Meiners first named the concept of the Caucasian race[6], but the term was more widely popularized in the 19th c. under the name ?Varietas Caucasia? by the German scientist and naturalist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) who ?borrowed the name Caucasian? from Meiners.[7] Blumenbach based the classification of the Caucasian race primarily on skull features, which Blumenbach claimed were optimized by the Caucasian peoples,[8] particularly a single skull from the Caucasia which resembled German skulls.[9] It was from this similarity that he conjectured Europeans having arisen in the Caucasia.[9] Blumenbach wrote about the ?primeval?[6] Caucasian race which he believed was ?the oldest race of man?[6] and the ?first variety of humankind?[6]. Caucasian variety ? I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind[10] In 1855, French diplomat and man of letters Arthur de Gobineau popularized ideas about race: ?I must say, once and for all, that I understand by white men the members of those races which are also called Caucasian[11] ? [these] white races ? had their first settlement in the Caucasus.?[11] The Caucasus was historically an area of fascination for Europeans. Myths of the Caucasus featured Prometheus and Jason and the Argonauts.[12] Greek mythology considered women from the Caucasus to have magical powers.[6], such as Medea of Jason and the Argonauts fame. In Greek mythology, this area was thought of as a kind of hell since Zeus imprisoned many Titans who opposed him (e.g. Prometheus) there. In this sense, these Titans were banished outside the civilized world to an area inhabited by Colchians. The Greeks considered them barbaric.[13] This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 22 15:48:36 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:48:36 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] St. George of Georgia; and Prometheus , too Message-ID: <48AEFBF4.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Who was the Great Caucasian George for whom Georgia is named > ? King George, George Washington, Georges Bush, Gorgeous > George the most beautiful original human being , puddin' > pie, kissed the girls and made them cry. > > The guy that killed the dragon. Georgia Saint George is a patron saint of Georgia. According to Georgian author Enriko Gabisashvili, Saint George is most venerated in the nation of Georgia. An 18th century Georgian geographer and historian Vakhushti Bagrationi wrote that there are 365 Orthodox churches in Georgia named after Saint George according to the number of days in one year. [19] There are indeed many churches in Georgia named after the Saint and Alaverdi Monastery is one of the largest. The Georgian Orthodox Church commemorates St. George's day twice a year, on May 6 (O.C. April 23) and November 23. The feast day in November was instituted by St Nino of Cappadocia, who was credited with bringing Christianity to the land of Georgia in the fourth century. She was from Cappadocia, like Saint George, and was his relative. This feast day is unique to Georgia and it is the day of St George's martyrdom. White George on the coat of arms of Georgia.There are also many folk traditions in Georgia that vary from Georgian Orthodox Church rules, because they portray the Saint differently than the Church does and show the veneration of Saint George in common people of Georgia. Different regions of Georgia have different traditions and in most folk tales Saint George is venerated very highly, almost as much as Jesus Christ himself. In the province of Kakheti province, there is an icon of St George known as "White George". This image of White George is also seen on the current Coat of Arms of Georgia. The region of Pshavi have icons of known as the Cuppola St. George and Lashari St. George. The Khevsureti region has "Kakhmati", "Gudani", and "Sanebi" icons dedicated to the Saint. The Pshavs and Khevsurs, during the Middle Ages used to refer to Saint George almost as much as praying to God and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Another notable icon is known as the "Lomisi Saint George" which can be found in the Mtiuleti and Khevi provinces of Georgia.[19] An example of folk tale about St. George: Once the Lord Jesus Christ, the prophet Elias and Saint George were going through Georgia. When they became tired and hungry they stopped to dine. They saw a Georgian shepherd man and decided to ask him to feed them. First, Elias went up to the shepherd and asked him for a sheep. After the shepherd asked his identity Elias said that, he was the one who sent him rain to get him a good profit from farming. The shepherd became angry at him and told him that he was the one who also sent thunderstorms, which destroyed the farms of poor widows. After Elias, Jesus Christ himself went up to the shepherd and asked him for a sheep and told him that he was God, the creator of everything. The shepherd became angry at Jesus and told him that he is the one who takes the souls away of young men and grants long lives to many dishonest people. After Elias and Christ's unsuccessful attempts, St George went up to the shepherd, asked him for a sheep and told him that he is Saint George who the shepherd calls upon every time when he has troubles and St. George protect him from all the evil and saves him from troubles. After hearing St George, the shepherd fell down on his knees and adored him and gave him everything. This folk tale shows the veneration of St George in the Middle Ages provinces of Georgia and similar tales are told in the northern mountainous parts of the country.[19] Some interesting tales come from Georgian sources, some of which are also attested to by Persian ones, that the Georgian Army during many battles were led by a knight on the white horse who came down from the Heaven. Catholicos Besarion of Georgia also testified this fact. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Aug 22 18:37:13 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 09:37:13 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Caucasian Message-ID: Best left as a name for mountains. One problem with the term 'Caucasian' for ethno-racial theorizing of that sort would be that Caucasian languages are not Indo-European (while, for example, Farsi, Kurdish, Pashtun, Greek, Albanian, Slavic languages, are). Efforts to link them to Semitic languages have been made. One interesting phenomenon is just how fluent many speakers of Caucasian languages have become in classical Arabic for religious purposes--compared to other non-Arabic Muslim cultures. Just a wild bit of speculation there. The myth about St. George sounds very accommodating to the Ottomans--we will venerate your saints and respect your religion, but Jesus is not a god. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Aug 22 19:09:28 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 10:09:28 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Caucasian In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I should add that the use of the term 'Caucasian' to describe a language group is controversial (so expectedly). Plus, the region has loads Indo-European and Turkic language speakers. The only Semitic language I could find were, interestingly enough, speakers of a sort of N. Aramaic (it is often said that Jesus Christ spoke a form of W. Aramaic, Judeo-Aramaic), who had fled to Russia from Turkish persecution in 1917. One of the things that makes Ossetians distinct from Georgians would be language, clearly unrelated in any close sense--Ossetian is Indo-European. (Of course that never stopped, for example, Croats and Serbs, who more or less speak the same language, from going at it over 'difference'.) The discussion page for editors and compilers at the Wiki page (often far more intesting than the article itself) had one American arguing against the use of such terms as Caucasian languages or the Languages of the Caucasus not because of the lack of an overall unifying group term, but because he felt the term referred to the language of white America (I guess as opposed to 'ebonics'). Another source of confusion is the use in Iberia, where there doesn't seem to be anything even remotely related to the Caucasus region or its cultures or its languages. Maybe there is a St. George connection there somewhere? The way Georgia presents itself on CNN-Intl in terms of its images of state, you would almost think it was part of the British Isles. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Fri Aug 22 19:11:14 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 10:11:14 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Caucasian In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>Efforts to link them to Semitic languages have been made.<< I should also have added there that I think this was done by some Soviet comparative linguists, who worked hard to put all languages into a small set of 'supergroups', which American linguists reject. CJ From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Fri Aug 22 20:21:46 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:21:46 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Caucasian In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Was this connected to a Five Year Plan? At 09:11 PM 8/22/2008, you wrote: > >>Efforts to link them to Semitic languages have been >made.<< > >I should also have added there that I think this was done by some >Soviet comparative linguists, who worked hard to put all languages >into a small set of 'supergroups', which American linguists reject. > >CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Aug 23 00:43:32 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:43:32 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Caucasian In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Two follow-ups: 1. RD:>>Was this connected to a Five Year Plan?<< I'm not sure. It would seem such arguments were put forwards over the period of at least two decades, so I guess you could say it transcended any five-year plan. 2. About the Iberian connections. -St. George pops up everywhere, but the heraldic imagery that Georgia has chosen does indeed look very British. -One possible link between Iberia and the Caucasian Iberia is that perhaps somehow the term 'Iberian' refers to a culture/ethnicity/language etc. of a people who populated much of what is now Europe before Indo-European groups arrived. Hence you will see reference to a 'Iberian' stock/blood/racial type for Europe. They are supposed to be in some account, stocky dark hairy caucasian people. I think I have even seen this dragged out to account for dark, short Irish and Welsh--an Iberian 'sub-strata' is proposed. This has led to theories about how languages with no known affiliation--like Basque--might have come from the Caucasus. It's all rather doubtful in terms of ever arriving at convincing evidence. CJ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 27 14:35:44 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:35:44 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] 10 Million Indian Workers on Strike Message-ID: <48B58260.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> 10 Million Indian Workers on Strike -------------------------------------------------------------- Slew of Unions Stage Strikes Across India By KRISHNA POKHAREL August 21, 2008 NEW DELHI -- A Nationwide strike by government workers and bank employees protesting rising prices and potential privatizations disrupted airports, trains and banks across India. The one-day strike was called by 48 unions, and an estimated 10 million government workers participated, according to Madhukar Kashinath Pandhe, president of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions. Financial trading wasn't affected. India's unions remain powerful even though the economy has been liberalizing for 17 years. Wednesday's strike by workers in government-owned banks, post offices, airports and railways was backed by the Leftist parties that withdrew support from the ruling United Progressive Alliance government. The Leftist parties quit the coalition to protest a deal between the U.S. and India that will give India civilian nuclear technology. Since their departure, the government has put privatizations back on the agenda ahead of national elections that must be held before May. But employees are likely to resist any privatization or divestment. India's economy has lost steam, and inflation is at a 13-year high. Employees of public-sector banks fear that a government decision to merge State Bank of India and State Bank of Saurashtra will lead to further mergers that could result in layoffs. "There will be attacks on our jobs and livelihoods," said Rajan Nagar, president of the All India Bank Employees Association in Kolkata. About 700,000 employees from public banks joined the strike, according to Mr. Nagar. Wednesday's strike mainly affected the state of West Bengal and its capital, Kolkata. The trade unions said they would plan for more strikes in coming days if the government doesn't heed their demands. A spokesman for India's Ministry of Labour and Employment declined to comment. Write to Krishna Pokharel at krishna.pokharel at xxxxxxx Des millions d'Indiens en gr?ve contre l'inflation LE MONDE | 21.08.08 | 15h04 ? Mis ? jour le 21.08.08 | 15h04 NEW DELHI CORRESPONDANT es millions d'employ?s des banques publiques, gares et a?roports ont fait gr?ve, mercredi 20 ao?t, contre les privatisations et la politique du gouvernement indien, qui "ne g?te que les entreprises, les sp?culateurs locaux et ?trangers". Le manifeste publi? par le regroupement de syndicats, et soutenu par quarante f?d?rations de fonctionnaires, ajoute que les protestations visent "une hausse sans pr?c?dent des prix, une aggravation des in?galit?s ?conomiques, la baisse des salaires r?els, la violation ? grande ?chelle des lois du travail, le ch?mage et l'augmentation du nombre d'atrocit?s commises sur les travailleurs." 900 000 employ?s des banques ont cess? le travail et 200 vols ont ?t? annul?s dans tout le pays. Les deux Etats du Bengale-Occidental et du Kerala, dirig?s par le Parti communiste (marxiste) ont ?t? paralys?s par le mouvement social. Calcutta, capitale du Bengale-Occidental, habitu?e aux gr?ves g?n?rales, avait mercredi des allures de ville fant?me. Les commerces, les entreprises, les ?coles ont ?t? ferm?s, et les transports publics interrompus. Des groupes de syndicalistes ont patrouill? dans les rues pour v?rifier que la gr?ve ?tait bien respect?e. Les routes et les rails ont ?t? bloqu?s. Seuls quelques trains et avions ont pu quitter la ville. Des policiers et des membres de la force d'action rapide ont ?t? rappel?s en renfort pour veiller au maintien de l'ordre. Cinquante bless?s ont ?t? signal?s. Le Kerala a ?t? lui aussi paralys? m?me si les avions ont pu quitter les a?roports normalement. "PARALYSIE TOTALE" Les syndicats se f?licitent du succ?s de la mobilisation. "C'est bien que les gens aient compris les probl?mes engendr?s par la politique ?conomique du gouvernement et aient suivi notre appel ? la gr?ve. C'?tait une paralysie totale", s'est r?joui Kali Ghosh, un des responsables du Centre des syndicats indiens. Cette organisation est affili?e au Parti communiste (marxiste) qui vient justement de quitter la coalition au pouvoir, en juillet. La coalition de centre-gauche, dirig?e par le Parti du Congr?s, traverse une p?riode d?licate, ? quelques mois des ?lections nationales pr?vues en mai 2009. Dans son discours de la f?te de l'ind?pendance, le 15 ao?t, le premier ministre, Manmohan Singh, a indiqu? que la croissance devait franchir le cap des 10 % pour lutter contre le ch?mage et la pauvret?. Or celle-ci ne devrait pas d?passer les 8 % cette ann?e, alors que l'inflation ne cesse d'augmenter. Elle a atteint un taux de 12,4 %, soit le plus haut niveau depuis treize ans, dop?e par une forte croissance ?conomique, ainsi que par la hausse des prix du p?trole et de l'alimentation. Dans un pays o? 500 millions d'habitants vivent avec moins de 2 dollars par jour, la moindre hausse des prix se fait durement ressentir. Enfin, le gouvernement qui avait promis, en 2005, cent jours de travail aux familles les plus pauvres, n'a pu, jusqu'? pr?sent, tenir sa promesse que pour 3,2 % d'entre elles. Julien Bouissou Article paru dans l'?dition du 22.08.08 This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 27 14:53:15 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:53:15 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Pools of Fire Message-ID: <48B5867B.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Pools of Fire -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2008w33/msg00074.htm To: "A-List" Subject: [A-List] Pools of Fire From: "Tony B." Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:25:10 -0400 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nothing highlights the fraudulent nature of the 'war on terror' so much as the long litany of failures to commit to even the most rudimentary protection measures for America's nuclear power plants and nuclear waste storage cites. The example below is merely one of these 'tales from the (nuclear) naked city'. Tony Weekend Edition August 9 / 10, 2008 The Looming Nuclear Nightmare in the Backwoods of North Carolina Pools of Fire By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR This is an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair's new environmental history, Born Under a Bad Sky, now available from AK Press / CounterPunch Books. Looking for weapons of mass destruction? Try the backwoods of North Carolina. The site is easy to find. You don't need infrared telemetry, informants, or a global positioning satellite. Just follow the railroad tracks deep into the heart of the triangle area to the gleaming cooling tower of the Shearon Harris nuclear plant, which rises like a concrete beacon out of the forest. It may not look like much-a run-of-the-mill nuke-but inside the confines of the steel fence that rings the plant, resides one of the most lethal patches of ground in North America. Shearon Harris is not just a nuclear power-generating station, but a repository for highly radioactive spent fuel rods from two other nuclear plants owned by Progress Energy. Those railroad tracks? They're for hauling nuclear waste. The spent fuel rods are carted by rail from the Brunswick and Robinson nuclear reactors to Shearon Harris, where they are stored in four densely packed pools, filled with circulating cold water to keep the waste from heating up. The pools are interconnected and enclosed within one building. That building is attached to the reactor itself. Together, they form the largest radioactive waste storage pools in the country. All this makes Shearon Harris a very inviting target for would-be terrorists. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has fingered Shearon Harris as one of the most vulnerable terrorist targets in the nation. Potential atomic terrorists don't have to steal plutonium, take a crash course in physics, or concoct a bomb to manufacture a radiological nightmare scenario in the heart of the Carolinas. All they have to do is penetrate the security fence of a lightly guarded commercial reactor and find a way to ignite the pools of high-level radioactive waste. The easiest method is to disrupt the circulation of the water system that keeps the pools cool. The resulting fire would be virtually unquenchable. Moreover, because the water system that feeds the waste pools is also connected to the Shearon Harris reactor, a pool fire could also trigger a nuclear meltdown. And so it goes. An uncontrolled pool fire and meltdown at Shearon Harris would put more than two million residents of this rapidly growing section of North Carolina in extreme peril. A recent study by the Brookhaven Labs, not known to overstate nuclear risks, estimates that a pool fire could cause 140,000 cancers, contaminate thousands of square miles of land, and cause over $500 billion in off-site property damage. An October 2000 report from the Sandia Labs in Albuquerque painted a grim picture of the consequences from a pool fire. The report, which was kept under wraps for two years by the NRC, found that a waste pool fire could spread radioactive debris over a 500-mile radius, including Cesium-137, a carcinogen linked to birth defects and genetic damage. When details from this report leaked out to the press, Mike Easley, the governor of North Carolina, responded by ordering that iodine pills be distributed to neighbors of the plant. It was a touching gesture. But iodine is no defense against the ravages of Cesium-137. Despite vows of beefed up security by the nuclear industry, it's not that difficult to break into most commercial nuclear plants and security at Shearon Harris is notoriously lax. In 1999, NRC records show that two Progress energy employees gained access to the reactor and the waste pools without security clearance. The energy company has hired numerous employees with questionable security backgrounds, including three guards who failed psychological exams and one with a criminal record. The whole plant could go up without the intervention of terrorists. Basic mismanagement and design flaws in the plant could well do the trick. In fact, the NRC has estimated that there's a 1:100 chance of a pool fire happening under the rosiest scenario. And the dossier on the Shearon Harris plant is far from rosy. In 1999, the nuclear plant experienced four emergency shutdowns, or SCRAMS. The problems led plant managers to tell the Charlotte News and Observer that they were "very disappointed," engaged in "soul searching," and unsure whether the string of malfunctions were "coincidental or a sign of deeper problems." A few months later, in April 2000, the plant's safety monitoring system, designed to provide early warning of a serious emergency, failed. It wasn't the first time. Indeed, the emergency warning system at Shearon Harris has failed fifteen times since the plant opened in 1987. Between January and July of 2002, Harris plant managers were forced to manually shut down the reactors four times. Then in August of that year, the plant automatically shut itself down when the outside power grid weakened. Documents uncovered from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reveal other problems at Shearon Harris. Inspectors have found "rubber and other foreign material" clogging the cooling lines in the plant's heat removal system. There are also internal memos from the plant reporting that many of its evacuation sirens within the ten-mile emergency zone surrounding the plant are inoperable during severe weather. In 2002 the NRC put the plant on notice about nine unresolved safety issues detected during a fire prevention inspection by NRC investigators. The plant was hit with a "Security Level III Notice of Violation." When the NRC returned to the plant a few months later for a reinspection, it determined that the corrective actions were "not acceptable." "Progress Energy is far above the industry average in three important areas: emergency reactor shutdowns, required inspections, and the fact that it has interconnected Harris reactor's cooling system to four high-level waste pools: the largest in the nation," says Jim Warren, executive director of North Carolina WARN. The problems continue with a chilling regularity. In the spring of 2003 there were four emergency shut downs of the plant, including three SCRAMs over a four-day period in the middle of May. One of the incidents occurred when the reactor core failed to cool down during a refueling operation while the reactor dome was off of the plant-a potentially catastrophic series of events. Between 1999 and 2003, there were twelve major problems requiring the shutdown of the plant. According to the NRC, the national average for commercial reactors is one shutdown per eighteen months. The situation at Shearon Harris is made more dire by virtue of the fact that the reactor is directly tied into the cooling system for the spent fuel pools. A breakdown (or sabotage) in either system could lead to serious consequences in the other. Congressman David Price, the North Carolina Democrat, sent the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a study of the situation by scientists at MIT and Princeton. The report pinpointed the waste pools as the biggest risk at the plant. "Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly and catch fire," wrote Bob Alvarez, a former advisor to the Department of Energy and co-author of the report. "The fire could well spread to older fuel. The long-term land contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than Chernobyl." The study recommended that the spent fuel pools be replaced with low-density, open frame racks and that the older waste assemblages be placed in hardened, above-ground storage units. The change could be done relatively cheaply, costing the energy giant about $5 million a year-less than the $6.6 million annual bonus for Progress CEO Warren Cavanaugh. But Progress scoffed at the idea and recruited the help of NRC Commissioner Edward McGaffigan to smear the MIT/Princeton report. In an internal memo, McGaffigan instructed NRC staffers to produce "a hard-hitting critique that sort of undermines the study deeply." McGaffigan is a veteran cold-warrior and a nuclear zealot, who has worked for both Democrats and Republicans. A veteran of the National Security Council in the Reagan administration, McGaffigan took a special interest in promoting nuclear plants to US client states. He left the White House to serve as the chief policy aide on energy and defense issues for Senator Jeff Bingaman, the Democrat from New Mexico. In 1996, President Clinton appointed him to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, where he became a tireless proponent of nuclear power on the ludicrous grounds that it will slow the onslaught of global warming. McGaffigan has also consistently dismissed the risks associated with the transport and storage of nuclear waste. Just prior to leaving office, Clinton reappointed him to another full term in 2000. McGaffigan's meddling outraged many anti-nuke activists. "There's a huge credibility in the federal regulatory agencies," said Lewis Pitts, an environmental attorney in North Carolina. "After 9/11, the nuclear industry faked a report to convince the public that an airplane hitting a nuke plant is nothing to worry about and now the NRC has directed the production of a bogus study to deny decades of science on the perils of pool fires." If the worst happens, the blame will reside in Washington, which has permitted the Shearon Harris facility to become a nuclear time bomb. The atomic clock is ticking. Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka at xxxxxxxxxxxx This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 27 14:55:20 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:55:20 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Invasion of Poland Redux ?! Message-ID: <48B586F8.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Invasion of Poland Redux http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2008w34/msg00010.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: "The A-List" Subject: [A-List] Invasion of Poland Redux From: "MARGARET WYLES" Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008 05:47:20 -0800 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So it may be that the US strategists had Poland (not Georgia) on their minds when they sent errand boy Shakashvili on a suicide mission. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20606.htm If the Bush administration proceeds with its plan to deploy its Missile Defense System in Poland, Russian Prime Minister Putin will be forced to remove it militarily. He has no other option. The proposed system integrates the the entire US nuclear arsenal into one operational-unit a mere 115 miles from the Russian border. It's no different than Khrushchev's plan to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba in the 1960s. Early last year, at a press conference that was censored in the United States, Putin explained his concerns about Bush's plan: "Once the missile defense system is put in place it will work automatically with the entire nuclear capability of the United States. It will be an integral part of the US nuclear capability....And, for the first time in history---and I want to emphasize this---there will be elements of the US nuclear capability on the European continent. It simply changes the whole configuration of international security?..Of course, we have to respond to that." This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 27 17:03:20 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:03:20 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Leftwing statement from Georgia Message-ID: <48B5A4F8.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a leftwing/progressive statement I've seen comming out of the Georgian movement: Georgians denounce Saakashvili regime?s aggression Published Aug 13, 2008 11:14 PM Workers World received this statement from the Georgian Peace Committee, a member of the World Peace Council, through other committees associated with the council. We believe our readers should have the opportunity to read this point of view. Declaration of the Georgian Peace Committee Once more Georgia was launched into a situation of chaos and bloodshed. A new fratricidal war exploded with renewed strength on Georgian soil. To our great disappointment, the alerts of the Georgian Peace Committee and of progressive personalities of Georgia on the pernicious character of the militarization of the country and on the danger of a pro-fascist and nationalist policy had no effect. The authorities of Georgia once again organized a bloody war, feeling the support of some Western countries and of regional and international organizations. It will take decades to cleanse the shame poured by the current holders of the power over the Georgian people. The Georgian army?armed and trained by U.S. instructors and using also U.S. armaments?subjected the city of Tskhinvali to a barbaric destruction. The bombings killed Ossetian civilians, our brothers and sisters, children, women and elderly people. Over 2,000 inhabitants of Tskhinvali and of its surroundings died. Hundreds of civilians of Georgian nationality also died, both in the conflict zone as well as in the entire territory of Georgia. The Georgian Peace Committee expresses its deep condolences to the relatives and friends of those who have perished. The entire responsibility for this fratricidal war, for thousands of children, women and elderly dead people, for the inhabitants of South Ossetia and of Georgia falls exclusively on the current president, on the Parliament and on the government of Georgia. The irresponsibility and the adventurism of the Saakashvili regime have no limits. There is no doubt the president of Georgia and his team are criminals and must be held responsible. The Georgian Peace Committee, together with all the progressive parties and social movements of Georgia, will struggle to assure that the organizers of this monstrous genocide have a severe and legitimate punishment. The Georgian Peace Committee declares and asks broad public opinion not to identify the current Georgian leadership with the people of Georgia, with the Georgian nation, and appeals to all to support the Georgian people in the struggle against the criminal regime of Saakashvili. We appeal to all the political forces of Georgia, the social movements and the people of Georgia to unite in order to free the country from the Russian-phobic and pro-fascist anti-popular regime of Saakashvili! The Georgian Peace Committee Tbilisi, Aug. 11, 2008 Unofficial translation by the Portuguese Peace Council, which was then edited by WW. Articles copyright 1995-2008 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 27 17:08:11 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:08:11 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Ain't we got fun Message-ID: <48B5A61B.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Ain't we got fun Ralph Dumain ------------------ Good times! Temporary layoffs . . . Good times! Easy credit ripoffs . . . Ain't we lucky we got 'em . . . Barack Obama CPUSA People's Republic of China womanism ^^^ Ain't this lame ? This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 27 17:12:00 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:12:00 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Caucasian Message-ID: <48B5A700.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> CeJ jannuzi Best left as a name for mountains. ^^^ CB: The racial typology that includes "Caucasian" is as discredited in recent physical anthropology as phonemes in recent linguistics (smile) ^^^^ One problem with the term 'Caucasian' for ethno-racial theorizing of that sort would be that Caucasian languages are not Indo-European (while, for example, Farsi, Kurdish, Pashtun, Greek, Albanian, Slavic languages, are). Efforts to link them to Semitic languages have been made. One interesting phenomenon is just how fluent many speakers of Caucasian languages have become in classical Arabic for religious purposes--compared to other non-Arabic Muslim cultures. Just a wild bit of speculation there. The myth about St. George sounds very accommodating to the Ottomans--we will venerate your saints and respect your religion, but Jesus is not a god. CJ This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 27 17:19:10 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:19:10 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis Message-ID: <48B5A8AE.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Sartre on Thaxis Ralph Dumain rdumain at autodidactproject.org Fri Aug 15 11:12:30 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis Next message: [Marxism-Thaxis] Russian Support for Iran Sanctions at Risk amid Georgia Rift Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I deliberately boycotted "Life Is Beautiful" because I find the basic premise obscene. Life was and could not be beautiful in a Nazi concentration camp under any circumstances. Find me one Holocaust survivor who would say such a thing. I would imagine Marx would be pretty nauseated by this as well. Speaking of Nausea, has anyone else found this novel as worthless as I did? ^^^^ CB: I'm sure someone did. You probably have existential ennui. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 27 17:24:51 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:24:51 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marx and individualism Message-ID: <48B5AA03.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Ralph Dumain It's impossible to read text formatted in this way, but in any case, I've started to look at this Winslow fellow and he has a number of cranky philosophical ideas, beginning with this ridiculous embrace of Whitehead. But now I have something new to add to my bibliography: Whitehead & Marxism: Selected Bibliography ^^^^^' CB: Ohhh ,lookie here ^^^^ Taoism & the Tao of Bourgeois Philosophy by Ralph Dumain Review of: Clarke, J. J. The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought. London; New York: Routledge, 2000. The game plan This book contains significant historical information about the history of Daoism (Taoism) in China, but it is really about the uses made of Daoism in the West since Jesuit missionaries first reported on it to their fellow Europeans circa 1700. Clarke discusses various Chinese positions taken on Daoism, but his main task is to outline just about every conceivable position taken on Daoism in the West over the past 300 years. The book is quite valuable for the objective information it contains as a contribution to the history of Western philosophy, in its engagement with China. In the abstract, Clarke?s own viewpoint need not interfere with our appreciation of the objective information provided, but his framing of the pros and cons, with the concomitant eventual omission of yet other possible perspectives, may interfere with a coherent evaluation on our part if we allow ourselves to get sucked into his unacceptable framework, his apparent willingness to countenance alternative perspectives notwithstanding. In relation to our present undertaking, this means that we must necessarily avoid any pretensions at rational closure while at the same time committing ourselves to the critical appraisal of all interpretative strategies, including our own. There is in an important sense no 'outside' to this process, no lofty peak to which we might hope to climb and from which we will be able to view Daoism with completely detached objectivity, and hence no separating out of some primordial and authentic Daoism into whose presence we may hope to be admitted by cutting through the layers of intervening interpretations. And of course the present study is no exception to this reflexive process but is itself just another mirror, one with its own peculiar camber and its own idiosyncratic refractions. It is not a 'view from nowhere', but the view of a white liberal, with pluralist and relativist inclinations, speaking from within the European academy, who nevertheless seeks to transcend its limitations by sighting it from a wider intellectual and cultural perspective. I make Do attempt, therefore, to disguise my own partiality towards Daoism, whether in its traditional forms or in its recent reincarnations in the Western, nor my belief in its importance for us at the present time. To echo a voice which will be heard later in this work, 'I stand in the chain of narratives, a link between links' (Buber 1956: 1). [p. 12] This of course is the latest fashion among white liberals?reflexivity, or the guilty admission of one?s own subject position as a gesture of putative epistemic honesty. However, as we shall see yet again, people can be hyper-self-conscious and yet remain utterly clueless as to their real presuppositions. The problem lies in the recurrent pattern. There are Westerners who denigrate Daoism. Then there are those who advocate it as a corrective to the West?s own alleged weaknesses. But is not even the latter stance a projection onto the East of the West?s own subjective needs? Could this too not constitute an aggressive subsumption of the Other, an act of selfish appropriation, of Western cultural imperialism? Clarke replays this scenario again and again. Clarke begins the book haunted by Edward Said?s critique of ?orientalism?. Finally, though, Clarke regards this perspective, though useful as an admonition, as itself reductive. So how can Clarke have it both ways? The key to Clarke?s position is to utilize Daoism as a critique of the West while recognizing its Otherness as well, that is, to enter into a dialogic relationship with Daoism, and the key to this maneuver is the hermeneutics of Hans-George Gadamer. [10] I?m going to jump ahead several chapters, to the end of the penultimate chapter, where Clarke again gives away his whole game, in discussing postmodernism: At the same time, however, we need to remind ourselves that these putative benefits are not the consequence of credal solidarity, and certainly not of a revamped confidence in universalism or in a new Western-inspired perennial philosophy. The benefits lie more in the tensions and differences that prevail and which continue to place Daoism and contemporary philosophical thinking in a creative counterpoint with each other rather than in comforting unison. Delicate balance is needed here, for there is an all-too-easy passage from fruitful difference to hostile incommensurability, from conversation to conflict, from liberating otherness into repressive toleration. In moving away from old-style universalism which sees all the world's major philosophical systems as expressions of a single underlying metaphysical Truth, with all its attendant Eurocentric implications, we risk gravitating to a view which patronises Daoist thinkers as merely convenient sparring partners in a contemporary philosophical game, one which helps to confirm our current thinking and to beatify our favoured cultural narratives. There is a danger here that, as with our earlier criticism of Hansen, once again we integrate the unsettling foreignness of an oriental way of thinking by assimilating it neatly into our own language game, even if that game? whether it be postmodernism, neopragmatism, or hermeneutics happens itself to be an unsettling counter-discourse. As the contemporary philosopher Hongchu Fu insists, it might simply be misleading to stress certain similarities between the two and to ignore the fact of 'disparate cultural traditions which set deconstruction and Taoism apart' (Fu 1992: 319). Both ways lead us into labyrinths of self-questioning, but while Daoist probing was part of a spiritual-religious quest, with its lighthearted irony tied to a serious soteriological enterprise, postmodernism is a theoretical discourse, a product of academic disputation rather than a pathway towards wisdom or to the enhancement of life and compassion. Deconstructive postmodernism, in spite of its rejection of some central tenets of Enlightenment modernity, its much publicised quarrels with science and its emancipatory instincts, still tends to portray the (constructed) world as inherently banal and aimless, and therefore to exude a kind of scepticism that leads to cynicism and even despair rather than to wisdom or spiritual growth. [p. 193] Clarke?s concluding statement is of course correct, that the ancient Daoists could not possibly have been interested in self-referential language games, but he still wants to utilize Daoism in pursuit of such games, wearing his white liberal guilt on his sleeve at the same time, paying lip service to the Other, difference, and traditions. But rejecting universalism and respecting difference and different traditions is a fraudulent position. And there are other ways of placing Daoism within a universalist framework, respecting its contributions and calibrating its limitations. This, bourgeois philosophy cannot do. But I am getting ahead of myself. First, we must plow through the book. Origins, demarcations, dissemination Chapter 2 informs us of the fundamental difficulties in defining our subject matter. First, there is no simple historical origin for Daoism. The different philosophical and religious traditions within China can no more be clearly separated from one another than they can be merged into one seamless whole (as acrimony is also part of the history). There is a history in the West, but also in China, of distinguishing between philosophical and religious Daoism, but historically there is no clear separation, and even the Chinese distinction (Daojia / Daojiao) does not correspond exactly to the Western philosophy/religion distinction [22]. Western engagement with Daoism is rather different from other Western encounters with Asian religions and mysticisms. Daoism was not used as a buttress of Western imperialism, and Daoism was long marginalized in the West. The Chinese had a hand in the mischief as well, as Confucians were in league with the Jesuits, who used them for their own imperial ambitions, against Daoism. Chapter 3 gives a capsule summary of Western reception. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci was the first major conduit of Chinese philosophy to Europe. His ambition was to use Confucianism as a bridge for the advance of Catholicism into China. On the other hand, Voltaire portrayed Confucianism as deistic and favorably opposed it to Catholicism. Leibniz sought a solution for religious discord. There is an historical dispute over whether Leibniz?s organicist monadology was influenced by Chinese thought. The foregoing exhibits a recurrent pattern of alternating valuation and disparagement of things Chinese. On the downside, China was viewed as corrupt, or static (e.g. in Weber?s sociological theory). Chinese Studies was founded early in the 19th century, which was also an age of Western imperial ambitions. One historical problem is that Daoism was received as a primarily textual object, not a living tradition. [50] The one Daoist text the Jesuits thought worthy of publication was the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), which they translated into Latin. The French orientalists of the 19th century were the first to take a serious scholarly interest. English and German editions followed, and a variety of interpretations ensued. [54] Of course, interpretations were already filtered through various biases, beginning with Catholic and then Protestant missionaries. James Legge, a pioneer translator, was also a Protestant missionary, and one of those inclined to dismiss popular Daoism. [44] Paul Carus saw Daoism as a model of religious universalism and toleration. [47] Other pioneers of Western scholarly appropriation include Henri Maspero, and in the 20th century, Martin Buber, Richard Wilhelm, and Martin Heidegger. Problems of translation as well as variety of interpretation are legion. The other major text, the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), was ignored by the Jesuits and French philosophes. It was translated into German in 1870 and into English in 1881. Cosmology, natural philosophy, science Clarke begins with a description of contemporary chaos theory, and reviews the argument that current scientific work on chaos, complexity, and self-organizing systems, with their emphasis on becoming and process, are in accord with Daoism. The bugbear here is mechanistic science. Daoism is seen as akin to Whitehead?s process metaphysics. [66] There are recurrent disputes over the value of Chinese science. Its cosmology is based on correlative thinking (systems of correspondences). [69] Some see this as proof of the primitive state of Chinese scientific thought. Whitehead himself did not think much of Chinese science. Many have been attracted to the yin/yang concept, Jung, for example. [73] And of course there is the rash of books such as Fritjof Capra?s The Tao of Physics. [75-76] Daoism has also played a significant ideological role in environmentalism and ecofeminism, and there is the current rage over feng shui. Joseph Needham plays a special part in this story. He was a prominent biochemist and Marxist, but also an organicist, a member of the Teilhard de Chardin Society, and an Anglican! [207] He is also famous for his multi-volume work Science and Civilisation in China. His work advocates the importance of Chinese science and the importance of Daoism in it. [76-79] Needham advocated the thesis that Leibniz was influenced by Chinese thought. [40-41, 70] Needham emphasized the basic incompatibility of Daoism with Western theism. [67] Daoism?s anti-transcendental empirical mysticism, as opposed to Confucian scholasticism, fostered the development of science (analogous to the struggle against scholasticism in Europe). [147-148] Needham saw parallels between Chinese correlative thinking and western organicist thought as an alternative to mechanism, and was sympathetic to the Chinese cosmological five-element theory. [70-71] Needham was not terribly sympathetic to the I Ching [61], uncharacteristic of his usual advocacy. He defended Daoist sexual practices while dismissing the theory behind them. [131] But Needham also lamented the dismissal of Daoism as superstition and the underestimation of its contribution to science. [74] He was even willing to speculate on the possibility that Chinese science could have bypassed the mechanistic stage en route to contemporary scientific developments. He attributed the failure of Chinese science to advance to the stage of modern science to sociological rather than philosophical causes. [78-79] He thought that Daoism would play a significant role in the philosophy of the future. [209] Needham was eager to place China on a comparable footing with the West. Some nonetheless criticize him for measuring Chinese science and culture by Western standards. Other critics argue that Daoist ?science? is totally at variance with modern science. Still others argue that Daoist ?naturalism? has little in common with Western organicism. One should also not exaggerate the case that the Chinese were devoid of concepts of natural law, even sans an external Lawgiver. [79-81] Clarke cites other criticisms raised against Western claims in general. Chinese thought was not entirely devoid of tendencies towards transcendence and creationism. [67-68] Doubts are raised about naturalism and environmentalism. [85] Actual historical Chinese practices are at odds with contemporary environmentalism. [87] And Daoism is after all a pre-modern phenomenon, hence modern interpretations are suspect. [88] An interesting paradox is raised, which recurs in the chapter on morality: how is it possible to be unnatural, not to follow nature? [86, 100-101] I want to raise another issue with Needham as my takeoff point. At various points in the book, Clarke discusses the Romantic affinity to Daoism. (Romanticism?s opposition to the Enlightenment re-emerges as a recurrent duality in Western thought to the present day.) However, he fails to criticize the dichotomy he consistently tacitly upholds: mechanism vs. organicism. Whether or not Daoism is really organicist in nature, its deployment by organicist thinkers?Romantics, process philosophers, etc.?is a symptom of a real problem. How curious it is that Needham was not only a scientist and a Marxist but an organicist who adhered to so many questionable ideas. Though it is not mentioned in this book, Needham also played a role in the history of the concept of emergent properties. Marxism is customarily opposed to organicism, though it too has a history of allegiance to the concept of emergence, and has had some crypto-organicist tendencies, perhaps because of its corruption by Stalinism and third world nationalism. When Soviet philosophy was put on a more professional basis in the 1960s, it was necessary to combat certain superficial arguments against mechanism and reductionism. The overall point, though, is that Clarke fails to challenge this dichotomy of mechanism and organicism (which roughly corresponds to scientism vs. Romanticism and positivism vs. lebensphilosophie), which functions as the backbone of the philosophical dualisms that plague bourgeois philosophy. Both the East-West dichotomy and all the attempts to transcend it are also a staple of bourgeois philosophy. In order to effect this schematic dichotomy, it is necessary to suppress a good deal of intellectual and real history?those who know the ?East? and the ?West? do not know Hegel, Marx, or Engels, to begin with. Morality & politics Daoism has been variously accused of quietism, individualism, and amoralism. On the other hand, a virtue of the Daoist approach is its skepticism towards conventional morality. The question of relativism is raised, and here there is a comparison with Nietzsche. [94-95] The ethical emphasis of Daoism seems to be on self-cultivation. Historically, Daoism?s role in the state underestimated, as Confucianism?s conservatism is overestimated. [103]. Daoism has a politically subversive history. [104-105] Some see it as an anarchist philosophy [106], but there is also a preoccupation with statecraft. [107] It has contemporary associations with primitive communitarianism [108] and pacifism [109]. Gender politics is then considered. There are arguments for and against Daoism?s feminist implications. There was relative egalitarianism in the Daoist ranks. Alchemy & other practices Chapter 6 concerns alchemy, immortality, sex, and health. Both the preoccupation and philosophy behind the notion of physical immortality are analyzed. Chinese alchemy is analyzed, along with the contribution of Carl Jung to its interpretation [126-128], emphasizing the distinction between internal and external alchemy. Daoism has a distinct meditation (?yoga?) practice, only lately imported to the West. There are also visualization techniques which have received attention. Daoist sexology is debated?the nature of the practices, their spiritual nature, attitude toward women, etc. Martial arts and other health practices are now well known. Finally, skepticism about the notion of ?holism? is noted. [138] Mysticism Chapter 7 summarizes the debates on transcendence: is Daoism mystical?yes/no, pro/con. Is Daoism another instance of a perennial philosophy or does it have characteristics peculiar to it? Among Western interpreters, Thomas Merton and Martin Buber played historical roles in promoting Daoist ideas. Clarke argues for a unique Daoist mysticism [146], which is this-worldly, emphasizing personal transformation, non-transcendental, everyday experience, and nature mysticism. Chinese landscape painting is discussed at length. As usual, the chapter ends with caveats. Is transcendentalism absent from Chinese thought? Is the postmodern interpretation of Hall and Ames and their ilk a delusion? [164] Philosophical trends In chapter 8, Clarke?s intellectual bankruptcy emerges full-blown, for here is where his sympathies for contemporary irrationalism come to the fore. But first, he confronts the historical prejudice that Chinese thought is inherently anti-philosophical and non-rational, often attributed to the character of the Chinese language. Chad Hansen approaches Chinese philosophy via differential approaches to discourse: Confucianism is conventionalist and conformist, while Daoism operates with a distrust of conventional discourse. Furthermore, Daoism is usable in the critique of Western philosophy, and is resonant with modern linguistic philosophy. Hansen is unabashedly pro-Wittgenstein. But to his credit, Clarke cites the skeptical counterarguments. And what does linguistic philosophy have to do with spiritual purification? [169-170] But Clarke doesn?t stop; he continues with the alleged crisis of Western philosophy, postmodernism, Rorty, and Heidegger. Heidegger proves to be a pivotal figure here too, and it turns out that he was inspired in a major way by Daoism and Zen. [172-175] Clarke then addresses the question of relativism and skepticism. Clarke critically analyzes the claim that Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) was a relativist. [177-179] Clarke also wonders whether Chinese ?skepticism? is different from skepticism in the West. [180] While imputations of relativism and skepticism cause existential and moral panics in the West, the Chinese case suggests that there is no need for such anxiety. Finally, we come to postmodernism and an extended discussion of Derrida and Rorty. Derrida sees Chinese thought as non-logocentric. [188] Rorty rejects rational argument and calls for different styles of discourse. Others deem Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) a kindred spirit to this project. While irony is discussed, the possible difference between the purpose it served for the Chinese Daoists and what it means as the plaything of the deconstructionists is inadequately addressed. Clarke showers this project with compliments, but concludes with his usual caveat. I?ve already cited and discussed his weaseling on p. 193, which epitomizes his master strategy. Clarke?s conclusions Clarke takes a 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, about a pilgrimage to India led by the trickster Monkey King, as a parable for the Western engagement with Daoism: is this a serious quest or an empty joke? The ?Tao? is now part of popular culture, but is it anything more than an arbitrary projection? As a rebellion against modernity, could this fascination not have a dark, politically reactionary side? [196-197] Clarke ponders with remarkable candor: Moreover, the nostalgic utopianism of Daoism?if we take its primitivism literally?which appears to favour a distant mythical past over the present, combined with a certain irrationalist and messianic mysticism, carries more sinister connotations. We have already drawn attention to the possibility that Daoism implies a form of amoralism, an apparent elevation of self-realisation above social solidarity and moral responsibility, which is open to exploitation for all sorts of undesirable ends, and that its supposed relativism can lead to moral indifferentism. At the level of the individual this attitude, especially evident in the cultivation of an inner spontaneity, may have unfortunate consequences; at the political level in the hands of a ruler who sees himself as above right and wrong, beyond good and evil, or as a species of romantic national self-realisation, the consequences could be catastrophic. We must inevitably ask, therefore, whether Daoism in the modern context could offer a subtle and seductive pathway towards the sort of irrationalist politics which fears critical thinking and seeks to return to an organic unity wherein the individual is lost to the demands of the whole or to the visions of a charismatic leader. The liaison, albeit brief, between Daoism and Legalism in the period of Warring States gives some historical substance to this fear. This seemingly unlikely conjunction might be seen as a portentous foreshadowing of certain forms of twentieth-century fascism in its identification of the sage ruler's vision with the natural order of things, the eternal ground which transcends the contingent needs and desires of individuals, a General Will which is validated by Nature itself. Also troubling is the notion that the Daoist world 'is above all the world of nature rather than that of society' (Robinet 1998: 20), and that, despite its involvement in the wider political and cultural life of China, its concern with human life is submerged in a preoccupation with a larger, all-encompassing whole. As with certain criticisms levelled by feminists at Deep Ecology, Daoism might be seen as advocating a somewhat abstract, even esoteric love of nature while discounting the importance of the love that is cultivated through personal relationships, and as obliterating the value of the individual in favour of a greater cosmic totality (Plumwood 1993). These anti-modernist, anti-democratic fears are enhanced by the interest shown in Daoism by a philosopher such as Heidegger. His criticism of the modern world led him to reject many of the key assumptions that are associated with the European Enlightenment, and for a while at least he came to identify the 'disclosure of Being' with the aims of the Nazi revolution. Such an association hardly amounts to a condemnation of Daoism, and indeed its robust individualism, its anarchist radicalism and its decentralist, anti-statist tendencies may prove liberating in ways that we have already indicated. But, as with the support given by Zen Buddhism (itself a part-product of Daoism) to militaristic nationalism in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, it warns us against the seductive assumption that Eastern wisdom is entirely unproblematic from a contemporary political and moral point of view (Heisig and Maraldo 1994). Political philosophies in the West with irrationalist and organicist tendencies have often proved to have powerful reactionary and oppressive implications, and we need to remain alert to the possible misuse of Daoism in a contemporary Western environment where democratic ideals can no longer be taken for granted. These worries, it must be added, are not directed towards Daoist ways of life in their traditional setting which, leaving aside the brief association with Legalism, have not displayed any of these fascist or collectivist tendencies, but rather against their possible misuse in their Western re-embodiment. [197-198] Clarke?s main concern, though, is with the West?s ?orientalism?, pulling the strings of its pretended dialogue and exploiting Daoism as a resource for its own needs. [198-200] But in the end Clarke doesn?t let these worries stop him. More qualifications follow, but Daoism still serves as a counterweight to Western narcissism and serves a countercultural function. [200] More Gadamer. The ?hermeneutics of difference? can even serve to conserve the Other?s traditions and indigenous practices. [201] Clarke speaks the language of postmodern particularism: Eurocentric attitudes, and the espousal of a more pluralist and decentered approach to human cultures, evident for example in the burgeoning fields of postcolonial and subaltern studies. In opposition to the universalism of modernist discourse, there has been a marked shift in recent years towards the valorisation of indigenous cultural forms and vernacular idioms, an affirmation of the importance of hitherto undervalued and marginalised practices and beliefs. Moreover, taking a view from a broader perspective, it is increasingly recognised by critics in this field that the whole orientalist phenomenon, hitherto often seen as a monolithic process of oppression carried out by the West at the expense of the East, has been a highly complex process in which currents of power and influence have operated in both directions (Young 1990: 148f17, King 1999: ch. 9). There is of course a blurred boundary between exploitation on the one hand and creative transformation on the other. However, the issue of cultural conservation, with its inescapable ambivalences, should not obscure the growing importance of Daoism in the world beyond its ancestral homeland, nor deter us from celebrating and amplifying its global impact at the present time. As we have emphasised throughout this book, Daoism has no single, unitary essence but enjoys a polychromatic richness that has been subject to constant renewal, reinterpretation and proliferation throughout its long history in China. [202] The language of multiculturalism. Sickening! Yes, cultures are not hermetically sealed, but this framework, with the rhetoric of respecting difference and the pretense of not absolutizing it, is false and deeply conservative. His categories are still ?East? and ?West?, not class society and rational universal progress. Clarke feels guilty about slumming, but ultimately, that is what the white liberal mentality consists of. It is not rational or radical in its shunning of a critical universalistic perspective: This is the spirit in which I believe we need to approach Daoism at the present time: respectful of its traditions and anxious to honour and help preserve them, to study and interpret them in their original context, while at the same time appreciating these traditions as, 'Relevant to ever new ways of thought and going along with continuously changing times' (Kohn 199la: 226). William de Bary is surely right when he insists that 'no tradition . . . can survive untransformed in the crucible of global struggle' (198 8: 138), and we need to accept that Daoism has gained a new, and inevitably different, life of its own in the modern world. It is a life in which Daoism will no doubt interact creatively with non-Chinese traditions of thought in ways similar to those which have characterised its earlier productive relationships with the other ancient traditions of China, India and Japan, and which will progressively involve scholars, writers and practitioners of all kinds from both Asia and the West. [203] This chapter?s final section, ?Beyond Daoism?, heaps on the noxious rhetoric. Daoist temples can now be found in the West, but we cannot inhabit another culture. [204] Still, Daoism can serve towards a reevaluation of Eurocentrism and Western orthodoxies. It is a valuable challenge to technology and Enlightenment thinking. [206] More rhetoric about nature and ecology. [207] Clarke places himself in the irrationalist camp: In the first half of the twentieth century, where the influence of positivism meant that traditional religious systems from remote parts of the globe could conveniently be ignored, Daoism had little place. But in recent years the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, and our times are marked by a retreat from the certainties sought by positivists, and a compensating emphasis in science, philosophy and literature on unpredictability, disorder. incommensurability and a suspicion of the truth-telling power of language. In the previous chapters, we have noted in various ways not only the importance of Chinese ideas in the emerging ecumenism of philosophical hermeneutics, but the relevance of this intercultural discourse to contemporary philosophical interest in issues concerning self, truth and gender identity, and of course in general to postmodern critiques of the Western Enlightenment project. The impact of Asian thought has long been felt, if only marginally, in the West's struggle with the nihilistic mood that arose both out of and in reaction to modernism. Earlier, it was Hinduism and Buddhism that entered into this dialectic. Now it is the turn of Daoism, with its robust sense of finitude and its romantic healing of our relationship with the natural and the ordinary, to help find a way beyond nihilism without having recourse to narratives of transcendence. [208] Clarke ponders the prominent role of Asia in the coming globalized century. He eschews a universal global perspective but favors divergence and harmonious co-existence of different beliefs and ways of being. Pluralism is the watchword, along with the Green hopes of peace with nature and other species. [209-210] What drivel! My conclusions At various points I have interjected criticism of Clarke?s fundamental assumptions?the East-West dichotomy, rejection of universalism in favor of difference and pluralism, the mechanism-organicism dichotomy (which pairs with Enlightenment/Romanticism, scientism/Romanticism, positivism/lebensphilosophie, and other analogous formulations). The one orthodoxy Clarke preserves is the postmodernist orthodoxy, the last bastion of a dying liberalism. For all of the guilty self-consciousness and anxiety about projection of the narcissistic self on to the Other, Clarke is blind to any possible perspective transcending or rejecting this dilemma. All the pros and cons and pluralist posturing add up to nothing, for, when Clarke ventures beyond strict documentation of various positions to evaluation, he fails to take a solid position on the Daoist approach to language, science, cosmology, morality, politics, and personal transformation. Lacking a coherent evaluation of the original ideas, and refusing to take a coherent stand on contemporary reality, how can anyone intelligently evaluate the applicability of Daoist ideas today? By placing Daoism in Western intellectual history, Clarke unwittingly adds to our historical picture of the ultimate dead-end to which bourgeois thought has arrived. Daoism takes its place in the irresolvable ideological dichotomies of bourgeois society, and its advocates are unable to advance beyond them. Clarke is unable to sort out the mess he dumps on us. How do we finally separate and interrelate the components of philosophical Daoism, religious and magical Daoism, physiological practices, spiritual practices, personal transformation, morality, and politics, and sift out the usable ideas from the superstitious and reactionary ones? The vacuous feelgood rhetoric about process, nature, pluralism, environmentalism and the like, is an expression, not of Western privilege, but of bourgeois privilege, useless to anyone anywhere in the world regardless of cultural background. All of this rhetoric, all of this ideological static, is, as Clarke himself half-heartedly confesses, at variance with what was valuable in the spirit of what philosophical Daoism tried to accomplish in its original setting. Discounting the superstitious, nonscientific cosmology and the obsolete feudal assumptions, what is left to us? Sadly, Clarke leaves us in the dark as to the subsequent development of Daoist ontology and epistemology in China itself, especially as Daoism entered a more logically elaborated stage in the ?Neo-Daoist? period. By historical examination of this logical development we could learn of the potentials and limitations of the original ideas couched in the less logically explicit, poetic language of image, metaphor, irony, and parable. We can respect aspects of this sensibility?the intuitive dialectic of being and non-being, of actuality and potentiality, of the indeterminate and determinate, the spirit of negation, defamiliarization of empirical reality, the ironic perspective based on the need for cunning strategic maneuvering in a restricted, contradictory, treacherous world. There is an intuitive appeal here, but it cannot stand on its own, especially not in the contemporary world where we need to know so much more and have evolved knowledge and perspectives a pre-modern society could never have dreamed of. How to we put these two scenarios together?the ancient Chinese and the contemporary global situations? Clarke is wrong about the potential of Daoism for the future. For Daoism already displayed all of its critical potential in the countercultural 1970s. I lived through that period and discerned the limitations of that kind of thinking by the time the decade was out. There was a certain plausibility to New Age ideas based on the sensibility of the time and limited access to historical information and more sophisticated philosophical concepts. It is remarkable, I think, how the ?essentialism? of New Age thought managed to morph into the postmodernism that took root in the academy of the ?70s while the counterculture had not yet discovered it. Since then we have witnessed a quarter century of cultural disintegration, which neither Daoism nor postmodernism is equipped to rectify. Incoherence is a disguise for ideological bankruptcy. Irrationalism is no solution, nor is the rhetoric of pluralism and diversity. The Dao of bourgeois thought has come to a dead end. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Wed Aug 27 17:29:11 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:29:11 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Wendy Gonaver won on loyalty oath fight Message-ID: <48B5AB07.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Wendy Gonaver wrote her master thesis on my great-great-great grandfather (!) No joke. Charles ^^^^^ Reinstated Instructor at Cal State-Fullerton Reflects on Encounter With 'Loyalty Oath' Wendy Gonaver, a lecturer in American studies at California State University at Fullerton, won a major victory on Monday, when she and the university agreed on the conditions under which she would sign a ?loyalty oath? required under California law. Ms. Gonaver was terminated last fall at the tail end of the hiring process, when she refused to sign the oath after being told that she could not attach a statement clarifying her views as a pacifist and a Quaker. Such attachments are routinely allowed by many state agencies in California, which has never repealed a 1952 amendment to the Constitution requiring state employees to swear an oath to ?support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic.? After approaching the American Civil Liberties Union about the case and not receiving an answer, the instructor told The Chronicle, she simply let the matter drop: ?I decided to chalk it up to the fact that I stood up for my principles, and this was the consequence, and that?s the end of it.? Ms. Gonaver took up the case again after reading that another Quaker employee in the Cal State system had been fired for a similar refusal. Marianne Kearney-Brown, an instructor in the mathematics department at Cal State-East Bay, had inserted the word ?nonviolently? into her copy of the signed oath. She was later rehired by the university. When Ms. Gonaver received an offer from People for the American Way to represent her case, lawyers for the civil-liberties group negotiated the new statement with the university. ?I was always willing to negotiate the language of the addendum,? she said, adding that the university had taken the view that no additions were allowed. The language agreed to by the university, Ms. Gonaver said, reads as follows: ?I support and respect the United States Constitution and the California Constitution, and I fully intend to abide by the oath that I have been required to sign as a condition of my employment by California State University (?CSU?). As an American, I do object, however, to being compelled to sign such an oath, and want to state my belief that such compulsion violates my right to freedom of speech. And, as a Quaker, in order to sign the oath in good conscience, I must also state that I do not promise or undertake to bear arms or otherwise engage in violence, and I have been assured by CSU that my oath will not be construed to require me to do so.? Ms. Gonaver said her initial stance against signing the oath without a clarifying attachment had been spurred by preparations for the introductory American-studies course that she was to teach, including a section on civil liberties and McCarthyism that cited a U.S. Supreme Court decision about Arizona?s loyalty oath. ?When I went in and found out that there was an oath [in California], I was shocked,? Ms. Gonaver said. But now that the agreement has been reached, she said, she is excited about teaching at Fullerton in the fall semester. ?Richard Byrne Posted on Tuesday June 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments As a fellow Quaker, I am pleased to see that Ms. Gonaver has reached an agreement with the Calinfornia State System. I believe that loyalty oaths should not be a requirement of employment in higher education, since it is not a requirement to work on Wall Street or Wal-Mart or many other places of employment. Since it is difficult to change the state constitution higher education institutions should always permit Quakers and others who have a religious objection to oaths to amend or attach and adenddum in order to be able to sign. ? Stephen Nelson Jun 3, 04:05 PM # I?m not a Quaker or conscientious objector, but I strongly agree with the institution providing this accommodation. Other stories made it clear that CA state agencies often provide such an accommodation, but CSU was being a hard-ass about it. Glad to see they wised up. ? Al Jun 3, 04:18 PM # Silly that the Cal State would require this; silly that some Quaker would give a damn. They?re both sides of the same coin, and therein lies the problem with the world as a whole. That, and over-simplification. ? original marci Jun 3, 04:41 PM # What enemy of the U.S. would baulk at signing such an oath? Obviously many Cailifornia legislators realized this too. The legislation passed as a symbolic gesture of patriotism. What legislator would go on record against this patriotic gesture? Only legislators of strong conscience. The oath then triggers off another symbolic act of patriotism, for who would not sign this piece of meaninglessness to secure a job? The only people caught by the oath are pacifists or those who strongly object to coerced statements of ?loyalty,? i.e. men and woman of conscience. If it is claimed that many truly patriotic men and women were happy to declare their loyalty, I can only say the oath was devised not to ?ferret? out the loyal but rather the disloyal. Or so it was claimed. Thus does government make hypocrites of itself and the majority of us. (Yes, I signed such an oath for my first job at City University of New York way back when.) ? arnold asrelsky Jun 3, 05:17 PM # For a comprehensive review and history of loyalty oaths from a Quaker, one should read a monograph (title forgotten) by Gilbert Kilpack, who was Director of the Pendle Hill School of Religion, a Quaker institution. It was written around the time of the California amendment. In the early 17th century, traitor paranoia led to loyalty oaths, then oaths of attestation that the loyalty oaths were true, then oaths of attestation that the oaths of attestation that the loyalty oaths were true were true. At least California has faith in loyalty oaths and does not go back to the Elizabethan era of obtaining three oaths just to be sure of whatever it is they are trying to be sure of. ? Gordon Jun 3, 05:18 PM # Loyalty oaths, memoranda of agreements, to my mind, belong to marriages, civil unions and maybe secret societies, whatever those are. The application of such ancillary clauses to contracts, in institutions of learning, constitute an Ultra Vires circumvention of civil liberties and an undermining of academic freedom. ? Konfor Masanje Jun 4, 07:32 AM # Loyalty oaths were commonly used ? usually for teachers and other civil servants ? even before World War II. The reason is simple: they are an easy way for state legislators to show their patriotism and they don?t cost any money. ? Ellen Schrecker Jun 4, 08:17 AM # It is interesting that the states should resort to loyalty oaths as a measure of patriotism. The states have an arsenal of measures to control ?patriotism?; states license every aspects of their citizens? lives ? all kinds of laws- marriages, births, deaths, burials, businesses, homes, medications, the right to drive, the right to vote, the right to die?etc? and just about everything citizens own is taxed, isn?t that enough to justify ?patriotism?? Must the citizens sign a loyalty oath? Isn?t it inherent in these controls that the citizens are loyal? Those who are not are sanctioned and put in jail in certain cases, aren?t they? What is a ?Loyalty Oath? good for then? ? Konfor Masanje Jun 4, 09:01 AM # Loyalty oaths appeal only to the truly naive and the deeply hypocritical. Dr. Johnson defined ?patriotism? as ?the last refuge of a scoundrel?; Bierce went further: ?with all deference to that learned (but inferior) lexicographer, I venture to suggest that it is the first.? Loyalty oaths for employees make as much sense as religion tests for politicians. They serve only to preserve and protect us from the ethically and morally scrupulous. ? Dan Jun 4, 09:01 AM # You are right Dan. I will add that, one of these days, the ?Patriot Act? will be administered as a test of patriotism, if citizens are not alert, the world of George (Bush) Orwell?s ?1984? is here and loyalty oaths are only a small measure. ? Konfor Masanje Jun 4, 09:10 AM # Quakers do not subscribe to an ideology that calls for the destruction of the United States; Muslims do, however. Since the koran provides justification for lying and breaking truces it is unlikely that require islamic adherents to sign anything. ? Marty Jun 4, 09:52 AM # Patriotism, or jingoism. Hard to tell sometimes. ? A true follower of Keir Hardie Jun 4, 10:23 AM # The comments above are right on. Loyalty oaths only annoy the loyal and do not phase those who are not. They are simply a cheap way for legislators and administrators to puff their chests out and proclaim patriotism. ? Al Jun 4, 10:48 AM # What is the harm in signing? She and others made a big deal about it. They became famous. ? kvc Jun 4, 11:06 AM # What is the harm? Then the rest of us wouldn?t have known just how exceptional and special she and other quakers are. Rules, laws, pledges and oaths are for suckers like me. God Bless America, still the most free nation in the world. ? Ortiz Jun 4, 11:21 AM # You speak the truth, Ortiz. Free nation, indeed. Freedom bought and paid for with the blood of Americans who believed in our nation, despite its flaws, and took and OATH to defend it. I suspect most of the complaining comes from those who haven?t had to make any sacrifices for their freedom, merely accepting it as their birthright. The freedom we enjoy in this country is unrivaled anywhere in the world and is only leased to us as long as we are willing to maintain it and pay the often unimaginable cost of it. ? Andrew H. Jun 4, 11:31 AM # Maybe someday the State of California will be forced to sign a loyalty oath swearing to protect their employees against all abuses of the constitution, foreign and domestic. ? Tony B Jun 4, 11:31 AM # In saying, Marty, in Comment 11, that ?Muslims do [?subscribe to an ideology that calls for the destruction of the United States?],? do you mean to say, ?All Muslims subscribe to an ideology that calls for the destruction of the United States,? or ?Some Muslims subscribe to an ideology that calls for the destruction of the United States?? ? Richard Hennessey Jun 4, 11:57 AM # Now Ms. Gonaver can be shown the secret handshake. ? Gary Brooks Jun 4, 12:01 PM # The harm, kvc, is in allowing the enemies of freedom to cloak themselves as the guardians of freedom. People sign such unconstitutional oaths either because they don?t mind being coerced to do so, no matter how obviously ineffectual such things are, or out of cowardice. There is nothing more un-American than loyalty oaths, religious tests, and House Un-American Activities Committees. ? Dan Jun 4, 12:23 PM # No one is to be trusted. Everyone is trying to get me. The government is monitoring my toaster to see what kind of bread I buy. No one cares but me, no one understands but me. I am the arbiter of truth. I?m not buying what you?re selling, Dan. It smells like what my horses leave for me to clean up in the barn. Paranoia may destroy ya? ? Ray Davies Jun 4, 12:44 PM # To Marty (#11): I am positive that you did not mean or believe that all Muslims subscribe to the ideology of the destruction of the U.S.A. However, in the interests of clarity, let me amplify that: Not all Muslims subscribe to the ideology of the destruction of the U.S.A. Islam has over 70 different interpretive groups ?- akin to Christianities? (Catholics, Baptists, Quakers, Etc.). For Instance, take the Sufi Muslims ?- Mostly Pacifists, but Muslims nonetheless, who ? Expounding Briefly: Consider the following from Encyclopedia Britannica (1961: V. 21., Page523): ?The germs of mysticism latent in Islam from the first were rapidly developed by the political, social and intellectual conditions which prevailed in the two centuries following the prophet?s death. devastating civil wars, a ruthless military despotism caring only for the luxuries of this world, Messianic hopes and presages, the luxury of the upper classes, the ? The terrors of hell, so vividly depicted in the Koran, awakened in them an intense consciousness of sin, which drove them to seek salvation in ascetic practices. Sufism was originally a practical religion, not a speculative system. It arose, as Junayd of Baghdad says ?from hunger and taking leave of the world and breaking familiar ties and renouncing what men deem good, not from disputation? ? ? Additionally Consider the role of Sufi Women vis-a-vis Women in other sects of Islam (Encyclopedia Britannica (1961: V. 21., Page523): ?Toward the end of the 2nd century the doctrine of mystical love was set forth in the sayings of a female ascetic, Rabi?a of Basra, the first in a long line of saintly women who played an important role in the history of Sufiism. Henceforth the use of symbolic expressions, borrowed from the vocabulary of love and wine, becomes increasingly frequent as a means of indicating holy mysteries ?? And, to elaborate a little further, there are many variations within the Sufis themselves (akin to Baptists, Catholics, etc.). This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 28 07:51:49 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:51:49 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis Message-ID: <48B67534.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Sartre on Thaxis Ralph Dumain I deliberately boycotted "Life Is Beautiful" because I find the basic premise obscene. Life was and could not be beautiful in a Nazi concentration camp under any circumstances. Find me one Holocaust survivor who would say such a thing. ^^^^ CB: Good point. However, perhaps the extremity of the horror of the concentration camp is used to make some point, like one can make it back even from that extreme or something. I think James Lawler, the philosophy prof , Hegelian and Marxist, who posted that comment might have been thinking in those terms. It's like Nausea you discuss below. Sartre may have been trying to induce a feeling of nausea , of how worthless life can feel...and then somehow existential philosophy seeks to find a way out of that extreme nausea, horror as in a concentration camp or any prison. ^^^^^ I would imagine Marx would be pretty nauseated by this as well. Speaking of Nausea, has anyone else found this novel as worthless as I did? ^^^^ CB: I'm sure someone did. You probably have existential ennui. Sartre may have been seeking to induce existential ennui in his readers, psychological unhappiness to a point of nausea, "boredem", a sense that one's life is worthless. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 28 08:03:19 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:03:19 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis Message-ID: <48B677E6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Jim Farmelant > > I'm thinking that as between Sartre and Althusser, Sartre. Sartre > was > in the Resistence and in a concentration camp. He was in the > struggle > for real. Actually, Sartre was never in a concentration camp. He was in a POW camp after having been caputured by the Germans following the defeat of the French in 1940. ^^^^ CB: If he was in a POW camp, that would imply he had been fighting as a soldier against the Germans. ^^^^^^ He eventually escaped from the camp, and returned to Paris. He was in the Resistance but the group that he was in, as far I can tell, was mainly a "talking shop." They didn't do anything concrete. ^^^^ CB: He must have been involved in some "concrete" combat he was in a concentration camp. Also, resistence groups as not doing anything concrete doesn't sound plausible. They were probably doing some spying at least. ^^^^^ Althusser too was held capitve in a POW camp, where he spent the entirety of the war. Apparently, he lacked the opportunities and the inclination to escape. ^^^^ CB: He must have been in combat too. Preference for Sartre over Althusser was some of a joke line when I said it. It was more in the context of praising Sartre to Marxists on a Marxist list in a discussion "choosing" among non-Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. The more I read Althusser the better I think of him ^^^^ Sartre's real activism came after the war, when he took the lead in supporting a variety of progressive movements, including the Vietnamese struggle against French colonialism (and later against the Americans), the struggle for Algerian independence , which Sartre supported when that position was unpopular even on the far left. Later on Sartre supported the student movement, and most of the movements for emancipation of one kind or another that sprung up during the 1960s. By then he was considered to be the very model of an engag? intellectual in the tradition of Voltaire and Zola. ^^^^^^^ CB: Yes, this was my point back when this thread was started. > The theoretical basis I see for his emphasizing Hegelian > subject, "early" Marx, perhaps reflected below, is that we are no > longer > in the period when Marxists treat political economy as "a process > of > natural history". Rather we must be activating working class > subjects. > The beauty in life in the ennui, alienation, unhappiness even as in > a > Nazi concentration camp ! enough beauty to have enthusiasm for > fighting > back, as Sartre did. This is the type of activation of the working > class > subject we need. I wonder if a lot of the other French intellectual > confusion at that time was not aimed at covering up Sartre's > revolutionary elan and anti-fascism. > > Charles Brown > > > > > >>> "James Lawler" 02/28/99 05:20PM > >>> > Here is a review of the film I wrote for the Sartre listserve. > Sartre, > I > think, would say that Marx would agree with this. > > --Jim Lawler > > I just saw the amazing film, "Life Is Beautiful." Such a title for > a > film > centered on life in a Nazi concentration camp. And yet, it is > convincing. > Life can be beautiful even in the horrors of the death camp. > One of my favorite passages in Sartre's Being and Nothingness is > from > his > discussion of the nature of values. "Ordinarily . . . my attitude > with > respect to values is eminently reassuring. In fact I am involved in > a > world > of values. The anguished apperception of values as sustained in > being > by my > freedom is a secondary and mediated phenomenon. The immediate is > the > world > with its urgency; and in this world where I engage myself, my acts > make > values spring up like partridges." > In the middle of a thick book of disturbing philosophy, Sartre > gives > us > partridges. I thank him for that. > Ordinarily, we don't realize that we cause the values to spring > up, > wonderfully, like partridges. We take our values as reassuring, > rigid > facts > of life. Existential anguish arises when one discovers that the > values > one > accepts only work as values because of one's own free, creative > complicity > with them. We don't want to have to ask ourselves whether these are > the > values we want to live by, whether this the kind of life we want to > create. > There must however be a step, or many steps, beyond the initial > experience > of anguish. Such a recognition opens up the possibility of creating > values > freely, like an inspired artist. > Guido is the existentialist Master, a person who is able > consciously > to > make the values of his choice spring up like partridges. He is a > moral > magician, who sees and creates beauty in the worst ugliness. > Why does the sign say, "No Jews or Dogs Allowed"? his five or > six-year-old > son asks him. Guido, a Jew, tells his Jewish son that nobody likes > everybody > or everything. The son says that he doesn't like spiders. *There, > you > see? > And I don't like . . . Visigoths! So let's put a sign on our store: > No > Spiders and Visigoths Allowed.* > Those who know Sartre's book may find special significance in > Guido's > occupation. He is . . . a waiter. Guido's performance of > being-a-waiter > would make a wonderful film clip to accompany Sartre's description > of > the > waiter whose "being a waiter" is inevitably a playing at being a > waiter. The > waiter creates himself as a waiter. But the ordinary, at least > Parisian > waiter takes his waiter values very seriously, thinking of them as > stern > facts rather than as creative fictions. Guido creates himself as he > goes > along, in all the roles he is forced to play as well as the ones he > is > free > to make up himself, as when he plays prince to his beautiful > princess. > Central to Sartrean existentialism is the idea that individuals > freely > create their own values. This does not mean that all values are > equal. > It's > not relativism. There are two kinds of freely created values: > those > that > are freely created but in the *bad faith* that they are determined > by > outside forces--nature, tradition, a god, the Leader. And there are > the > values created by people who know they are creating values, and > whose > values > must therefore reflect this knowledge. > Guido sees and exposes the ridiculousness of the ordinary, > conformist > majority who have fallen under the self-induced spell of the first > type > of > values. He asks the new employer of a friend what his politics are. > The > man > is momentarily distracted by his twin sons, rough-housing rudely > nearby. > "Adolfo, Benito, stop that. Now, what were you asking?" Guido > tactfully > drops his question. He had just seen the values of that other > person > jumping > up and down, almost partridge-like, in the form of two very large > round > boys. > The absurdity of the Nazi values is demonstrated by Guido when he > takes on > the guise of a school inspector, in order to get another meeting > with > Dora, > his *princess.* After going through a ludicrous inspection to > Dora*s > amusement, he finds that he has to give a lecture on the superiority > of > the > Aryan race. By the time the real inspector has arrived, Guido has > stripped > down to his underwear to display the superiority of the Aryan belly > button. > The school authorities ridiculously force themselves to maintain > their > roles > of admiring audience for the supposedly higher wisdom they are > receiving. > The power of human freedom, in the form of bad faith or > self-deception, > apparently knows no bounds. Why then not also the opposite use of > such > power > on behalf of honesty and freedom? > Sartre's formulated his theory of existentialist freedom under the > Nazi > occupation. We are free even in prison, he said. This concept of > "absolute > freedom" has frequently been criticized as indicating a problem > with > this > philosophy. Life Is Beautiful demonstrates that we can indeed be > meaningfully, creatively, effectively free even in a concentration > camp. > Even there we can cause beautiful values to spring up around us > like > partridges. > The film suggests the question: if there can be such a possibility > of > creative freedom in under the worst conditions of human > degradation, > what > are we not capable of in better conditions? > Naziism has helped us to see how far down the human being can go > when > the > idea of egotistical power over others is taken to its ultimate > conclusion. > Sartre's existentialist theory of the free creation of values > explores > the > crevasses and caverns of this underground world of self-imposed > darkness. He > takes us on a modern tour of Plato's cave where people take > concocted > images > seriously even though they have disturbing glimpses of their > delusion. > But > the point of this is not a pessimistic idea that the cave is all > that > exists. It is to show us that if we can put ourselves in this > condition, we > can also take ourselves out of it. > Life Is Beautiful shows what an individual can do in the dankest > depths of > the cave, thanks to an awareness of human beauty and the > recognition > that it > is up to us to create, cultivate and protect it. > > _______________________________________ > Dr. James Lawler > Philosophy Department > SUNY at Buffalo > Buffalo, NY > USA 14260 > Base e-mail: jlawler at acsu.buffalo.edu > forwards to: james.lawler at sympatico.ca > This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 28 08:04:51 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:04:51 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: <48B67534.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48B67534.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48B67842.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> >>> "Charles Brown" 08/28/2008 9:51 AM >>> Sartre on Thaxis Ralph Dumain I deliberately boycotted "Life Is Beautiful" because I find the basic premise obscene. Life was and could not be beautiful in a Nazi concentration camp under any circumstances. Find me one Holocaust survivor who would say such a thing. ^^^^ CB: Good point. However, perhaps the extremity of the horror of the concentration camp is used to make some point, like one can make it back even from that extreme or something. I think James Lawler, the philosophy prof , Hegelian and Marxist, who posted that comment might have been thinking in those terms. It's like Nausea you discuss below. Sartre may have been trying to induce a feeling of nausea , of how worthless life can feel...and then somehow existential philosophy seeks to find a way out of that extreme nausea, horror as in a concentration camp or any prison. As Lawler said back when this thread went on : The theoretical basis I see for his emphasizing Hegelian > subject, "early" Marx, perhaps reflected below, is that we are no > longer > in the period when Marxists treat political economy as "a process > of > natural history". Rather we must be activating working class > subjects. > The beauty in life in the ennui, alienation, unhappiness even as in > a > Nazi concentration camp ! enough beauty to have enthusiasm for > fighting > back, as Sartre did. This is the type of activation of the working > class > subject we need. I wonder if a lot of the other French intellectual > confusion at that time was not aimed at covering up Sartre's > revolutionary elan and anti-fascism. ^^^^^ I would imagine Marx would be pretty nauseated by this as well. Speaking of Nausea, has anyone else found this novel as worthless as I did? ^^^^ CB: I'm sure someone did. You probably have existential ennui. Sartre may have been seeking to induce existential ennui in his readers, psychological unhappiness to a point of nausea, "boredem", a sense that one's life is worthless. And then seek to recover even from such emotional depths to have enough enthusiasm to change the world. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From rdumain at autodidactproject.org Thu Aug 28 08:19:21 2008 From: rdumain at autodidactproject.org (Ralph Dumain) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:19:21 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: <48B677E6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48B677E6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: I know Lawler, but I didn't know he could write such utter rubbish. He must know that all this is false. At 10:03 AM 8/28/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >...... I just saw the amazing film, "Life Is Beautiful." Such a >title for > a > film > centered on life in a Nazi concentration >camp. And yet, it is > convincing. > Life can be beautiful even in >the horrors of the death camp. > One of my favorite passages in >Sartre's Being and Nothingness is > from > his > discussion of the >nature of values. "Ordinarily . . . my attitude > with > respect to >values is eminently reassuring. In fact I am involved in > a > >world > of values. The anguished apperception of values as sustained >in > being > by my > freedom is a secondary and mediated phenomenon. >The immediate is > the > world > with its urgency; and in this world >where I engage myself, my acts > make > values spring up like >partridges." > In the middle of a thick book of disturbing >philosophy, Sartre > gives > us > partridges. I thank him for >that. > Ordinarily, we don't realize that we cause the values to >spring > up, > wonderfully, like partridges. We take our values as >reassuring, > rigid > facts > of life. Existential anguish arises >when one discovers that the > values > one > accepts only work as >values because of one's own free, creative > complicity > with them. >We don't want to have to ask ourselves whether these are > the > >values we want to live by, whether this the kind of life we want >to > create. > There must however be a step, or many steps, beyond >the initial > experience > of anguish. Such a recognition opens up >the possibility of creating > values > freely, like an inspired >artist. > Guido is the existentialist Master, a person who is >able > consciously > to > make the values of his choice spring up >like partridges. He is a > moral > magician, who sees and creates >beauty in the worst ugliness. > Why does the sign say, "No Jews or >Dogs Allowed"? his five or > six-year-old > son asks him. Guido, a >Jew, tells his Jewish son that nobody likes > everybody > or >everything. The son says that he doesn't like spiders. *There, > >you > see? > And I don't like . . . Visigoths! So let's put a sign >on our store: > No > Spiders and Visigoths Allowed.* > Those who >know Sartre's book may find special significance in > Guido's > >occupation. He is . . . a waiter. Guido's performance of > >being-a-waiter > would make a wonderful film clip to accompany >Sartre's description > of > the > waiter whose "being a waiter" is >inevitably a playing at being a > waiter. The > waiter creates >himself as a waiter. But the ordinary, at least > Parisian > waiter >takes his waiter values very seriously, thinking of them as > >stern > facts rather than as creative fictions. Guido creates >himself as he > goes > along, in all the roles he is forced to play >as well as the ones he > is > free > to make up himself, as when he >plays prince to his beautiful > princess. > Central to Sartrean >existentialism is the idea that individuals > freely > create their >own values. This does not mean that all values are > equal. > >It's > not relativism. There are two kinds of freely created >values: > those > that > are freely created but in the *bad faith* >that they are determined > by > outside forces--nature, tradition, a >god, the Leader. And there are > the > values created by people who >know they are creating values, and > whose > values > must therefore >reflect this knowledge. > Guido sees and exposes the ridiculousness >of the ordinary, > conformist > majority who have fallen under the >self-induced spell of the first > type > of > values. He asks the >new employer of a friend what his politics are. > The > man > is >momentarily distracted by his twin sons, rough-housing rudely > >nearby. > "Adolfo, Benito, stop that. Now, what were you asking?" >Guido > tactfully > drops his question. He had just seen the values >of that other > person > jumping > up and down, almost >partridge-like, in the form of two very large > round > boys. > The >absurdity of the Nazi values is demonstrated by Guido when he > >takes on > the guise of a school inspector, in order to get another >meeting > with > Dora, > his *princess.* After going through a >ludicrous inspection to > Dora*s > amusement, he finds that he has >to give a lecture on the superiority > of > the > Aryan race. By the >time the real inspector has arrived, Guido has > stripped > down to >his underwear to display the superiority of the Aryan belly > >button. > The school authorities ridiculously force themselves to >maintain > their > roles > of admiring audience for the supposedly >higher wisdom they are > receiving. > The power of human freedom, in >the form of bad faith or > self-deception, > apparently knows no >bounds. Why then not also the opposite use of > such > power > on >behalf of honesty and freedom? > Sartre's formulated his theory of >existentialist freedom under the > Nazi > occupation. We are free >even in prison, he said. This concept of > "absolute > freedom" has >frequently been criticized as indicating a problem > with > this > >philosophy. Life Is Beautiful demonstrates that we can indeed be > >meaningfully, creatively, effectively free even in a concentration > >camp. > Even there we can cause beautiful values to spring up around >us > like > partridges. > The film suggests the question: if there >can be such a possibility > of > creative freedom in under the worst >conditions of human > degradation, > what > are we not capable of in >better conditions? > Naziism has helped us to see how far down the >human being can go > when > the > idea of egotistical power over >others is taken to its ultimate > conclusion. > Sartre's >existentialist theory of the free creation of values > explores > >the > crevasses and caverns of this underground world of >self-imposed > darkness. He > takes us on a modern tour of Plato's >cave where people take > concocted > images > seriously even though >they have disturbing glimpses of their > delusion. > But > the point >of this is not a pessimistic idea that the cave is all > that > >exists. It is to show us that if we can put ourselves in this > >condition, we > can also take ourselves out of it. > Life Is >Beautiful shows what an individual can do in the dankest > depths >of > the cave, thanks to an awareness of human beauty and the > >recognition > that it > is up to us to create, cultivate and protect >it. > > Dr. James Lawler From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 28 08:22:48 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:22:48 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: <48B67842.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48B67534.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <48B67842.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48B67C77.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> As Lawler ^^^ oops, that 's not Lawler. It's me . ^^^ said back when this thread went on : The theoretical basis I see for his emphasizing Hegelian > subject, "early" Marx, perhaps reflected below, is that we are no > longer > in the period when Marxists treat political economy as "a process > of > natural history". Rather we must be activating working class > subjects. > The beauty in life in the ennui, alienation, unhappiness even as in > a > Nazi concentration camp ! enough beauty to have enthusiasm for > fighting > back, as Sartre did. This is the type of activation of the working > class > subject we need. I wonder if a lot of the other French intellectual > confusion at that time was not aimed at covering up Sartre's > revolutionary elan and anti-fascism. ^^^^^ I would imagine Marx would be pretty nauseated by this as well. Speaking of Nausea, has anyone else found this novel as worthless as I did? ^^^^ CB: I'm sure someone did. You probably have existential ennui. Sartre may have been seeking to induce existential ennui in his readers, psychological unhappiness to a point of nausea, "boredem", a sense that one's life is worthless. And then seek to recover even from such emotional depths to have enough enthusiasm to change the world. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 28 08:26:12 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:26:12 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: References: <48B677E6.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48B67D43.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> >>> Ralph Dumain I know Lawler, but I didn't know he could write such utter rubbish. He must know that all this is false. ^^^^ CB: Well, that's certainly are conclusory remark with no supporting argumentation. It's not _all_ false. He may be involved in some reaching outside his own thinking, but it's pretty certain he doesn't think all that he's saying is "false." %%%%%%% At 10:03 AM 8/28/2008, Charles Brown wrote: >...... I just saw the amazing film, "Life Is Beautiful." Such a >title for > a > film > centered on life in a Nazi concentration >camp. And yet, it is > convincing. > Life can be beautiful even in >the horrors of the death camp. > One of my favorite passages in >Sartre's Being and Nothingness is > from > his > discussion of the >nature of values. "Ordinarily . . . my attitude > with > respect to >values is eminently reassuring. In fact I am involved in > a > >world > of values. The anguished apperception of values as sustained >in > being > by my > freedom is a secondary and mediated phenomenon. >The immediate is > the > world > with its urgency; and in this world >where I engage myself, my acts > make > values spring up like >partridges." > In the middle of a thick book of disturbing >philosophy, Sartre > gives > us > partridges. I thank him for >that. > Ordinarily, we don't realize that we cause the values to >spring > up, > wonderfully, like partridges. We take our values as >reassuring, > rigid > facts > of life. Existential anguish arises >when one discovers that the > values > one > accepts only work as >values because of one's own free, creative > complicity > with them. >We don't want to have to ask ourselves whether these are > the > >values we want to live by, whether this the kind of life we want >to > create. > There must however be a step, or many steps, beyond >the initial > experience > of anguish. Such a recognition opens up >the possibility of creating > values > freely, like an inspired >artist. > Guido is the existentialist Master, a person who is >able > consciously > to > make the values of his choice spring up >like partridges. He is a > moral > magician, who sees and creates >beauty in the worst ugliness. > Why does the sign say, "No Jews or >Dogs Allowed"? his five or > six-year-old > son asks him. Guido, a >Jew, tells his Jewish son that nobody likes > everybody > or >everything. The son says that he doesn't like spiders. *There, > >you > see? > And I don't like . . . Visigoths! So let's put a sign >on our store: > No > Spiders and Visigoths Allowed.* > Those who >know Sartre's book may find special significance in > Guido's > >occupation. He is . . . a waiter. Guido's performance of > >being-a-waiter > would make a wonderful film clip to accompany >Sartre's description > of > the > waiter whose "being a waiter" is >inevitably a playing at being a > waiter. The > waiter creates >himself as a waiter. But the ordinary, at least > Parisian > waiter >takes his waiter values very seriously, thinking of them as > >stern > facts rather than as creative fictions. Guido creates >himself as he > goes > along, in all the roles he is forced to play >as well as the ones he > is > free > to make up himself, as when he >plays prince to his beautiful > princess. > Central to Sartrean >existentialism is the idea that individuals > freely > create their >own values. This does not mean that all values are > equal. > >It's > not relativism. There are two kinds of freely created >values: > those > that > are freely created but in the *bad faith* >that they are determined > by > outside forces--nature, tradition, a >god, the Leader. And there are > the > values created by people who >know they are creating values, and > whose > values > must therefore >reflect this knowledge. > Guido sees and exposes the ridiculousness >of the ordinary, > conformist > majority who have fallen under the >self-induced spell of the first > type > of > values. He asks the >new employer of a friend what his politics are. > The > man > is >momentarily distracted by his twin sons, rough-housing rudely > >nearby. > "Adolfo, Benito, stop that. Now, what were you asking?" >Guido > tactfully > drops his question. He had just seen the values >of that other > person > jumping > up and down, almost >partridge-like, in the form of two very large > round > boys. > The >absurdity of the Nazi values is demonstrated by Guido when he > >takes on > the guise of a school inspector, in order to get another >meeting > with > Dora, > his *princess.* After going through a >ludicrous inspection to > Dora*s > amusement, he finds that he has >to give a lecture on the superiority > of > the > Aryan race. By the >time the real inspector has arrived, Guido has > stripped > down to >his underwear to display the superiority of the Aryan belly > >button. > The school authorities ridiculously force themselves to >maintain > their > roles > of admiring audience for the supposedly >higher wisdom they are > receiving. > The power of human freedom, in >the form of bad faith or > self-deception, > apparently knows no >bounds. Why then not also the opposite use of > such > power > on >behalf of honesty and freedom? > Sartre's formulated his theory of >existentialist freedom under the > Nazi > occupation. We are free >even in prison, he said. This concept of > "absolute > freedom" has >frequently been criticized as indicating a problem > with > this > >philosophy. Life Is Beautiful demonstrates that we can indeed be > >meaningfully, creatively, effectively free even in a concentration > >camp. > Even there we can cause beautiful values to spring up around >us > like > partridges. > The film suggests the question: if there >can be such a possibility > of > creative freedom in under the worst >conditions of human > degradation, > what > are we not capable of in >better conditions? > Naziism has helped us to see how far down the >human being can go > when > the > idea of egotistical power over >others is taken to its ultimate > conclusion. > Sartre's >existentialist theory of the free creation of values > explores > >the > crevasses and caverns of this underground world of >self-imposed > darkness. He > takes us on a modern tour of Plato's >cave where people take > concocted > images > seriously even though >they have disturbing glimpses of their > delusion. > But > the point >of this is not a pessimistic idea that the cave is all > that > >exists. It is to show us that if we can put ourselves in this > >condition, we > can also take ourselves out of it. > Life Is >Beautiful shows what an individual can do in the dankest > depths >of > the cave, thanks to an awareness of human beauty and the > >recognition > that it > is up to us to create, cultivate and protect >it. > > Dr. James Lawler _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 28 09:02:33 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:02:33 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: <48B67C77.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> References: <48B67534.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <48B67842.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> <48B67C77.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Message-ID: <48B685C8.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Jean-Paul Sartre Full name Jean-Paul Sartre Birth June 21, 1905 (Paris, France) Death April 15, 1980 (aged 74) (Paris, France) School/tradition Existentialism, Marxism Main interests Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Politics, Phenomenology, Ontology Notable ideas "Existence precedes essence" "Bad faith" "Nothingness" Influenced by[show] Kant, Hegel, Marx, Mao, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, De Beauvoir, Camus, Koj?ve, Flaubert, C?line, Merleau-Ponty, Dos Passos Influenced[show] De Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, R.D. Laing, Iris Murdoch, Gilles Deleuze, Andr? Gorz, Felix Guattari, Alain Badiou, Fredric Jameson, Michael Jackson, Albert Camus, Kenzaburo Oe, Doris Lessing, William Burroughs, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel L?vinas Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (June 21, 1905 - April 15, 1980), commonly known simply as Jean-Paul Sartre (pronounced [??? pol sa?t??]), was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was the leading figure in 20th century French philosophy. Contents [hide] 1 Biography 1.1 Early life and thought 1.2 Sartre and World War II 1.3 Politics 1.4 Late life and death 2 Thought 2.1 La Naus?e and existentialism 2.2 Sartre and literature 2.3 Sartre as a public intellectual 3 Sartre in popular culture 4 Selected bibliography 5 Further reading 6 References 7 Sources 8 External links 8.1 By Sartre 8.2 On Sartre [edit] Biography [edit] Early life and thought This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2007) Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris to Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of Alsatian origin, and was a cousin of German Nobel prize laureate Albert Schweitzer. When Sartre was 15 months old, his father died of a fever. Anne-Marie raised him with help from her father, Charles Schweitzer, a high school professor of German, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at a very early age. As a teenager in the 1920s while mountaineering in Canada, Jean became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He studied in Paris at the elite ?cole Normale Sup?rieure, an institution of higher education which was the alma mater for several prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy, absorbing ideas from Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger among others. In 1929 at the ?cole Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted thinker, writer, and feminist. The two, it is documented, became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship,[1] though they were not monogamous. Sartre graduated from the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure in 1929 with a doctorate in philosophy and served as a conscript in the French Army from 1929 to 1931. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually-destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" state of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L'?tre et le N?ant (Being and Nothingness) (1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), originally presented as a lecture. [edit] Sartre and World War II In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist.He was captured by German troops in 1940 in Padoux, and he spent nine months as a prisoner of war - in Nancy and finally in Stalag 12D, Trier, where he wrote his first theatrical piece, Barion?, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas. It was during this period of confinement that Sartre read Heidegger's Sein und Zeit later to become a major influence on his own essay on phenomenological ontology. Due to poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight affected his balance) Sartre was released in April 1941. Given civilian status, he recovered his position as a teacher of Lyc?e Pasteur near Paris, settled at the Hotel Mistral near Montparnasse at Paris and was given a new position at Lyc?e Condorcet, replacing a Jewish teacher who had been forbidden to teach by Vichy law. After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Libert? with other writers Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint, Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and ?cole Normale students. In August, Sartre and Beauvoir went to the French Riviera seeking the support of Andr? Gide and Andr? Malraux. However, both Gide and Malraux were undecided, and this may have been the cause of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement. Socialisme et libert? soon dissolved and Sartre decided to write, instead of being involved in active resistance. ^^^ CB: Somewhat confirming Jim F. on this issue. ^^^^ He then wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies and No Exit, none of which was censored by the Germans, and also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines. After August 1944 and the Liberation of Paris, he wrote Anti-Semite and Jew in the book he tries to explain the etiology of hate by analyzing antisemitic hate. Sartre was a very active contributor to Combat, a newspaper created during the clandestine period by Albert Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and Beauvoir remained friends with Camus until he turned away from communism, a schism that eventually divided them in 1951, after the publication of Camus' The Rebel. Later, while Sartre was labelled by some authors as a resistant, the French philosopher and resistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the German occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself. According to Camus, Sartre was a writer who resisted, not a resistor who wrote. When the war ended Sartre established Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), a monthly literary and political review, and started writing full-time as well as continuing his political activism. He would draw on his war experiences for his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Libert? (The Roads to Freedom) (1945-1949). [edit] Politics Jean Paul Sartre (middle) and Simone de Beauvoir (left) meeting with Che Guevara (right) in 1960The first period of Sartre's career, defined in large part by Being and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period as a politically engaged activist and intellectual. His 1948 work Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) in particular explored the problem of being both an intellectual at the same time as becoming "engaged" politically. He embraced communism, and defended existentialism, though never officially joining the Communist Party, and took a prominent role in the struggle against French rule in Algeria. He became perhaps the most eminent supporter of the FLN in the Algerian War and was one of the signatory of the Manifeste des 121. Furthermore, he had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elka?m, who became his adopted daughter in 1965. He opposed the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and others, organized a tribunal intended to expose alleged U.S. war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967. Its effect was limited. As a fellow-traveller, Sartre spent much of the rest of his life attempting to reconcile his existentialist ideas about free will with communist principles, which taught that socio-economic forces beyond our immediate, individual control play a critical role in shaping our lives. His major defining work of this period, the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) appeared in 1960 (a second volume appeared posthumously). In Critique, Sartre set out to give Marxism a more vigorous intellectual defense than it had received up until then; he ended by concluding that Marx's notion of "class" as an objective entity was fallacious. Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx led to a dispute with the leading Communist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx. Sartre went to Cuba in the '60s to meet Fidel Castro and spent a great deal of time philosophizing with Ernesto "Che" Guevara. After Guevara's death, Sartre would declare him: "Not only an intellectual but also the most complete human being of our age"[2] and the "era's most perfect man."[3] Sartre would also compliment Che Guevara by professing that: "He lived his words, spoke his own actions and his story and the story of the world ran parallel."[4] Following the Munich massacre in which eleven Israeli Olympians were killed by the Palestinian organization Black September in Munich 1972, Sartre said terrorism "is a terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others." Sartre also found it "perfectly scandalous that the Munich attack should be judged by the French press and a section of public opinion as an intolerable scandal."[5] Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905 - 1980 [edit] Late life and death In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first ten years of his life, Les mots (Words). The book is an ironic counterblast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of Andr? Gide (who had provided the model of litt?rature engag?e for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he declined it,[6] stating that "It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form." He was the second Nobel Laureate to voluntarily decline the Nobel Prize, he had previously refused the L?gion d'honneur, in 1945. ^^^^ CB: This would imply he did do some resisting. ^^^^ The prize was announced 1964 October 22; on October 14, Sartre had written a letter to the Nobel Institute, asking to be removed from the list of nominees, and that he would not accept the prize if awarded, but the letter went unread;[7] on October 23, Le Figaro published a statement by Sartre explaining his refusal. However, Lars Gyllensten, long time member of the Nobel prize committee has claimed in his autobiography that Sartre later tried to access the prize money, but was subsequently turned down.[8] Allegedly, the French philosopher in 1975 wrote a letter to the Nobel Prize committee saying that he had changed his mind about the prize, at least when it came to the money. At which point the prize committee is said to have declined the request, stating that the funds had been reinvested in the Nobel institute. ^^^^^^ CB: "Marx's" category of money has a little objectivity ( smile) ^^^^^^^ Though his name was now a household word (as was "existentialism" during the tumultuous 1960s), Sartre remained a simple man with few possessions, actively committed to causes until the end of his life, such as the student revolution strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968 during which he was arrested for civil disobedience. President De Gaulle intervened and pardoned him, commenting that "you don't arrest Voltaire."[9] In 1975, when asked how he would like to be remembered, Sartre replied: "I would like [people] to remember Nausea, [my plays] No Exit and The Devil and the Good Lord, and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Then my essay on Genet, Saint Genet...If these are remembered, that would be quite an achievement, and I don't ask for more. As a man, if a certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, I would like people to remember the milieu or historical situation in which I lived,...how I lived in it, in terms of all the aspirations which I tried to gather up within myself." Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially due to the merciless pace of work (and using drugs for this reason, e.g., amphetamine) he put himself through during the writing of the Critique and the last project of his life, a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert (The Family Idiot), both of which remained unfinished. He died April 15, 1980 in Paris from an oedema of the lung. Sartre's grave in the Cimeti?re de Montparnasse Sartre's atheism was foundational for his style of existentialist philosophy. In March 1980, about a month before his death, he was interviewed by his assistant, Benny L?vy, and within these interviews he expressed his interest in Judaism which was inspired by Levy's renewed interest in the faith. Through Sartre's study of Jewish history he became particularly interested in the messianic idea of the faith. Some people apparently took this to indicate a deathbed conversion; however, the text of the interviews makes it clear that he did not consider himself a Jew, and was interested in the ethical and "metaphysical character" of the Jewish religion, while continuing to reject the idea of an existing God. In a separate 1974 interview with Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre said that "I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God." But immediately adds that "this is not a clear, exact idea..." During his life, Sartre tried to draw all possible conclusions from the fact that there is no God. "Man," he wrote in 1943, "is a useless passion." He also wrote "everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident." Sartre lies buried in Cimeti?re de Montparnasse in Paris. His funeral was attended by 20,000 mourners. [edit] Thought The basis of Sartre's existentialism is found in The Transcendence of the Ego. To begin with, the thing-in-itself is infinite and overflowing. Sartre refers to any direct consciousness of the thing-in-itself as a "pre-reflective consciousness." Any attempt to describe, understand, historicize etc. the thing-in-itself, Sartre calls "reflective consciousness." There is no way for the reflective consciousness to subsume the pre-reflective, and so reflection is fated to a form of anxiety, i.e. the human condition. The reflective consciousness in all its forms, (scientific, artistic or otherwise) can only limit the thing-in-itself by virtue of its attempt to understand or describe it. It follows, therefore, that any attempt at self-knowledge (self-consciousness - a reflective consciousness of an overflowing infinite) is a construct that fails no matter how often it is attempted. Consciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object. The same holds true about knowledge of the "Other." The "Other" (meaning simply beings or objects that are not the self) is a construct of reflective consciousness. One must be careful to understand this more as a form of warning than as an ontological statement. However, there is an implication of solipsism here that Sartre considers fundamental to any coherent description of the human condition.[10] Sartre overcomes this solipsism by a kind of ritual. Self consciousness needs "the Other" to prove (display) its own existence. It has a "masochistic desire" to be limited, i.e. limited by the reflective consciousness of another subject. This is expressed metaphorically in the famous line of dialogue from No Exit, "Hell is other people." The main idea of Jean-Paul Sartre is that we are "condemned to be free."[11] This theory relies upon his atheism, and is formed using the example of the paper-knife. Sartre says that if one considered a paper-knife, one would assume that the creator would have had a plan for it: an essence. Sartre said that human beings have no essence before their existence because there is no Creator. Thus: "existence precedes essence".[12] [edit] La Naus?e and existentialism As a junior lecturer at the Lyc?e du Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Naus?e (Nausea) which serves in some ways as a manifesto of existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. Taking a page from the German phenomenological movement, he believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life situations, and that novels and plays describing such fundamental experiences have as much value as do discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories. With this mandate, the novel concerns a dejected researcher (Roquentin) in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes starkly conscious of the fact that inanimate objects and situations remain absolutely indifferent to his existence. As such, they show themselves to be resistant to whatever significance human consciousness might perceive in them. This indifference of "things in themselves" (closely linked with the later notion of "being-in-itself" in his Being and Nothingness) has the effect of highlighting all the more the freedom Roquentin has to perceive and act in the world; everywhere he looks, he finds situations imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of his existence. Hence the "nausea" referred to in the title of the book; all that he encounters in his everyday life is suffused with a pervasive, even horrible, taste - specifically, his freedom. The book takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it is used in the context of the often nauseating quality of existence. No matter how much Roquentin longs for something else or something different, he cannot get away from this harrowing evidence of his engagement with the world. The novel also acts as a terrifying realization of some of Kant's fundamental ideas; Sartre uses the idea of the autonomy of the will (that morality is derived from our ability to choose in reality; the ability to choose being derived from human freedom; embodied in the famous saying "Condemned to be free") as a way to show the world's indifference to the individual. The freedom that Kant exposed is here a strong burden, for the freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless, and the practical application of Kant's ideas prove to be bitterly rejected. The stories in Le Mur (The Wall) emphasize the arbitrary aspects of the situations people find themselves in and the absurdity of their attempts to deal rationally with them. A whole school of absurd literature subsequently developed. [edit] Sartre and literature During the 1940s and 1950s Sartre's ideas remained ambiguous, and existentialism became a favoured philosophy of the beatnik generation.[13] Sartre's views were counterposed to those of Albert Camus in the popular imagination. In 1948, the Roman Catholic Church placed his complete works on the Index of prohibited books. Most of his plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known, Huis-clos (No Exit), contains the famous line "L'enfer, c'est les autres", usually translated as "Hell is other people". Aside from the impact of Nausea, Sartre's major contribution to literature was the The Roads to Freedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas. In this way, Roads to Freedom presents a less theoretical and more practical approach to existentialism. [edit] Sartre as a public intellectual This section has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page. It may contain original research or unverifiable claims. Tagged since November 2007. Its tone or style may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. Tagged since December 2007. The grammar of this article needs to be improved. Please do so in accordance with Wikipedia's style guidelines. Tagged since August 2008. Sartre has been called "the most written about twentieth-century author."[14] At the same time, his relationship with the media is not only fraught from his individual perspective but is indicative of the societal issue of the intellectual as a subject of knowledge and the concrete subject of an intellectual and their role. What Sartre encapsulates is the "complex and paradoxical role of the intellectual in post-industrial western societies, and symbolic of the voice of political and cultural dissidence struggling for the freedom of expression in an environment increasingly subject to rapid technological change." (Scriven 1993: 1). Whilst the broad focus of his life revolved around the notion of human freedom, a sustained intellectual participation in more public matters began in 1945. Prior to this, before the Second World War, he was content with the role of apolitical liberal intellectual, "Now teaching at the a lyc?e in Laon [...] Sartre made his headquarters the Dome caf? at the crossing of Montparnasse and Raspail boulevards. He attended plays, read novels, and dined [with] women. He wrote. And he was published" (Gerassi 1989: 134). He and his lifelong companion, Simone de Beauvoir, existed in her words where ?the world about us was a mere backdrop against which our private lives were played out. (de Beauvoir 1958: 339). Sartre portrayed his own pre-war situation in the character Mathieu, chief protagonist in the The Age of Reason (completed during Sartre's first year as a soldier in the Second World War), the first episode of the Road to Freedom trilogy. By forging Mathieu as an absolute rationalist, analysing the minutae of every situation, and functioning entirely on reason, he removed any strands of authentic content from his character and as a result, Mathieu could ?recognize no allegiance except to myself? (Sarte 1942: 13), though he realized that without "responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing" (Sartre 1942: 14). Mathieu's commitment was only to himself, never to the outside. Restraining him from action each time was that he had no reasons for acting thus. Sartre then, for these reasons, was not compelled to participate in the Spanish Civil War, and it took the invasion of his own country to motivate him into action and the war itself to provide a crystallization of these ideas he had so eloquently written about. It was the war that gave him a purpose beyond himself, and the atrocities of the war can be seen as the turning point in his public stance. The war was to be the most formative experience of Sartre's life - it opened his eyes to a political reality he had not yet understood until forced into this continual engagement with it: "the world itself destroyed Sartre's illusions about isolated self-determining individuals and made clear his own personal stake in the events of the time" (Aronson 1980: 108). Returning to Paris therefore in 1941 he formed the "Socialisme et Liberte" resistance group and later, in 1943, after a lack of Communist support forced the disbandment of the first, he joined a writers Resistance group, in which he remained an active participant until the end of the war. He continued to write ferociously also, and it was due to this "crucial experience of war and captivity that Sartre began to try to build up a positive moral system and to express it through literature" (Thody 1964: 21). The symbolic initiation of this new phase in Sartre?s work is packaged in the introduction he wrote for a new journal, Les Temps Modernes, in October 1945. Here he aligned the journal and thus himself, with the Left and called for writers to express their political commitment (Aronson 1980: 107) and yet this alignment was indefinite - directed more to the concept of the Left than a specific party of the Left. Sartre's philosophy lent itself aptly to his being a public intellectual. He envisaged culture as a very fluid concept - neither pre-determined, nor definitely finished - instead, in true existential fashion, "culture was always conceived as a process of continual invention and re-invention". This marks Sartre, the intellectual, as a pragmatist, willing to move and shift stance along with events. He did not dogmatically follow a cause - other than the belief in human freedom - preferring to retain a pacifist's objectivity. It is this over-arching theme of freedom that means his work "subverts the bases for distinctions among the disciplines" (Kirsner 2003: 13) and therefore, in the fashion of a public intellectual, he was able to hold knowledge across a vast array of subjects: "the international world order, the political and economic organisation of contemporary society, especially France, the institutional and legal frameworks that regulate the lives of ordinary citizens, the educational system, the media networks that control and disseminate information. Sartre systematically refused to keep quiet about what he saw as inequalities and injustices in the world" (Scriven 1999: xii). Most often too, his views were divergent from the prevailing political situation. The most clear example of this is in his post-war attitude to the French Communist Party (PCF), who, following Liberation were infuriated by Sartre's philosophy and opposition, which appeared to lure young French men and women away from the ideology of Marxism into Sartre?s own existential nihilism (Scriven 1999: 13). Here we see Sartre telling his own truths to power, a fundamental role of the public intellectual. His troubled and varied relationship with Communism and Marxism in particular was a consequence of their doctrines that would have prevented his freedom of expression - indeed, to align himself too rigidly with any political movement, would have circumscribed the very freedom he was searching for through, initially his writings and, especially after the Second World War, his public activities, which he had begun to regard as more significant upon recognition of the futility of words in contrast to action. (Kirsner 2003: 60). In the aftermath of a war that had for the first time properly engaged him in political matters, Sartre set about a body of work which "reflected on virtually every important theme of his early thought and began to explore alternative solutions to the problems posed there" (Aronson 1980: 121). The greatest difficulties that he and all public intellectuals of the time faced were the increasing technological aspects of world that were outdating the printed word as a form of expression. So, although in Sartre's opinion, "traditional bourgeois literary forms remain innately superior" there is "a recognition that the new technological 'mass media' forms must be embraced if Sartre's ethical and political achievements as an authentic, committed intellectual are to be achieved: the demystification of bourgeois political practices and the raising of the consciousness, both political and cultural, of the working class" (Scriven 1993: 8). The struggle for Sartre was against the monopolising moguls who were beginning to take-over the media and defunct the role of the intellectual. His attempts therefore to reach a public were mediated by these powers, and it was often these powers he had to campaign against. He was skilled enough however, to circumvent some of these issues by his interactive approach to the various forms of media - advertising his radio interviews in a newspaper column for example, and vice versa. (Scriven 1993: 22). The role of a public intellectual often leads to the individual placing themselves in danger as they engage with heatedly disputed topics. In Sartre's case this was witnessed in June 1961 especially, when a plastic bomb exploded in the entrance of his apartment building. His public support of Algerian self-determination at the time, had led Sartre to become a target of the right-wing campaign of terror that mounted as the colonists' position deteriorated. A similar occurrence took place the next year and he had begun to receive threatening letters from Oran. (Aronson 1980: 157). Sartre clearly held himself and his kind in a high regard, pronouncing the intellectual to be the moral conscience of their age, their task being to observe the political and social situation of the moment and to speak out, freely, in accordance with their conscience. (Scriven 1993: 119). [edit] Sartre in popular culture Sartre appears (as Jean-Sol Partre in the French original and Jean-Pulse Heatre in the English translation) in Boris Vian's classic novel L'?cume des Jours (Froth on the Daydream). In Monty Python's Flying Circus, episode 27, there is a sketch "Mrs. Premise and Mrs. Conclusion visit Jean-Paul Sartre" in which two ladies argue what is the crux of Roads to Freedom. Sartre appears in the opening of the musical Godspell, arguing his view on the world. In Caddyshack, Carl Spackler, in the process of exterminating a golf course gopher by use of explosives refers to Sartre: "In the immortal words of Jean-Paul Sartre: 'Au revoir, gopher.'" In the MC Lars song: Roommate from Hell, Lars raps that his roommate Satan "Likes holding down Christians and reading Jean-Paul Sartre". In the Shakira song No Creo ("I Don't Believe" in Spanish), she claims - in a sense - not to believe in Karl Marx's or Jean-Paul Sartre's ideals. In the television series Extras, the character Andy Millman (played by Ricky Gervais) mutters "Jean-Paul Sartre" in response to a depressing comment made by another character. In the television series The Mighty Boosh, in the episode "The Nightmare of Milky Joe", the character Milky Joe is reported to only talk about Sartre. In the Sam Kieth comic The Maxx (Issue 5)cartoon character The Crappon Inna Hat and his methodologies are linked to John-Paul Sartre by Julie Winters. Sartre is mentioned in the song Hello by The Beloved. Sartre's quote "When the rich wage war, its the poor who die" is sampled by Linkin Park in the song "Hands Held High" off their 2007 album "Minutes to Midnight". [edit] Selected bibliography L'Imagination (Imagination: A Psychological Critique), 1936 La Transcendance de l'?go (The Transcendence of the Ego), 1937 La Naus?e (Nausea), 1938 Le Mur (The Wall), 1939 Esquisse d'une th?orie des ?motions (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions), 1939 L'Imaginaire (The Imaginary), 1940, lit. "The Unconscious" Les Mouches (The Flies), 1943 - a modern version of the Oresteia L'?tre et le n?ant (Being and Nothingness), 1943 R?flexions sur la question juive (Anti-Semite and Jew; literally, Reflections on the Jewish Question), 1943 Huis-clos (No Exit), 1944 Les Chemins de la libert? (The Roads to Freedom) trilogy, comprising: L'?ge de raison (The Age of Reason), 1945 Le Sursis (The Reprieve), 1947 La Mort dans l'?me (Troubled Sleep, title formerly translated as Iron in the Soul, literally "Death in Spirit"), 1949 Morts sans s?pulture (Deaths without burial; aka The Victors; Men Without Shadows in English), 1946 L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), 1946 La Putain respectueuse (The Respectful Whore) 1946 Qu'est ce que la litt?rature? (What is literature?), 1947 Baudelaire, 1947 Situations, 1947 -1965 Les Mains sales (Dirty Hands), 1948 "Orph?e Noir" (Black Orpheus), introduction to Anthologie de la nouvelle po?sie n?gre et malgache. edited by L?opold S?dar Senghor, 1948 Le Diable et le bon dieu (The Devil and the Good Lord), 1951 Les Jeux sont faits (The Game is Up), 1952 Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, 1952 Kean (adaptation of Alexandre Dumas, p?re's play) 1953, produced Paris 1954, revived London 2007 [1] Nekrassov, 1955 Existentialism and Human Emotions, 1957 The Problem of Method, 1957 Les S?questr?s d'Altona (The Condemned of Altona), 1959 Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), 1960 "Preface" to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, 1961 Search for a Method (English translation of preface to Critique, Vol. I), 1962 Colonialism and Neocolonialism, 1964 Les Mots (Words), 1964, autobiographical L'Idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot), 1971-1972 - on Gustave Flaubert Cahiers pour une morale (Notebooks for Ethics), 1983, 1947-48 notes on ethics Les Carnets de la dr?le de guerre: Novembre 1939 - Mars 1940 (War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War 1939-1940), 1984, notebooks from Sartre's time in the Phony War of 1939-1940 [edit] Further reading Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre 1905-80, 1985. Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Thomas Flynn, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, Volume 1: Protestant or Protester?, University of Chicago Press, 1989. ISBN 0226287971. R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy, 1950-1960, New York: Pantheon, 1971. Suzanne Lilar, A propos de Sartre et de l'amour, Paris: Grasset, 1967. Axel Madsen, Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, William Morrow & Co, 1977. Heiner Wittmann, L'esth?tique de Sartre. Artistes et intellectuels, translated from the German by N. Weitemeier and J. Yacar, ?ditions L'Harmattan (Collection L'ouverture philosophique), Paris 2001. Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Levy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, translated by Adrian van den Hoven, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. P.V. Spade, Class Lecture Notes on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. 1996. H. Wittmann, Sartre und die Kunst. Die Portr?tstudien von Tintoretto bis Flaubert, T?bingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996. Wilfrid Desan, The Tragic Finale: An Essay on the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (1954) [edit] References ^ Humphrey, Clark. "The People magazine approach to a literary supercouple", The Seattle Times. Retrieved on 2007-11-20. ^ "Remembering Che Guevara", October 09 2006, The International News, by Prof Khwaja Masud ^ Amazon Review of: The Bolivian Diary: Authorized Edition ^ HeyChe.org - People about Che Guevara ^ Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, Bernard-Henri L?vy, p.343). ^ The Nobel Prize in Literature 1964 Announcement Address by Anders ?sterling, Member of the Swedish Academy, in Frenz, Horst, ed. (1969), Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company ^ Histoire de lettres Jean-Paul Sartre refuse le Prix Nobel en 1964, Elodie Bess? ^ Gyllensten, Lars (2000), Minnen, bara minnen, Stockholm: Albert Bonniers f?rlag, p. 282, ISBN 9100571407 ^ "Superstar of the Mind", by Tom Bishop in New York Times June 7, 1987 ^ Sartre, 1936 Transcendence of the Ego, Williams and Kirkpatrick, 1957 pp. 98-106 translation from "La transcendence de l"ego... ^ Existentialism and Humanism ^ Existentialism and Humanism, page 27 ^ This is debatable. In Desolation Angels, Kerouac implies that his fantasy of Parisian life had been tarnished by Sartre and existentialism. ^ Jonathan Judaken, "Review of Jean-Paul Sartre," The Historian 69.4 (Winter 2007): 832. [edit] Sources Aronson, Ronald (1980) Jean-Paul Sartre - Philosophy in the World. London: NLB Gerassi, John (1989) Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century. Volume 1: Protestant or Protester? Chicago: University of Chicago Press Kirsner, Douglas (2003) The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Sartre and R.D. Lang. New York: Karnac Scriven, Michael (1993) Sartre and The Media. London: MacMillan Press Ltd Scriven, Michael (1999) Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France. London: MacMillan Press Ltd Thody, Philip (1964) Jean-Paul Sartre. London: Hamish Hamilton [edit] External links Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jean-Paul Sartre [edit] By Sartre Full Ebooks in french on the website 'La philosophie' Americans and Their Myths Sartre's essay in The Nation (October 18, 1947 issue) Sartre Internet Archive on Marxists.org French Audiobook (mp3), incipit of The Words (1964), read aloud in French by IncipitBlog. [edit] On Sartre Groupe d'?tudes sartriennes, Paris Sartre?s Critique of Dialectical Reason essay by Andy Blunden Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980): Existentialism Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Sartre.org Articles, archives, and forum Texts on Sartre Sartre Rubric on the website of the Sorbonne Marx Seminar "The Second Coming Of Sartre", John Lichfield, The Independent, 17 June 2005 The World According to Sartre essay by Roger Kimball Reclaiming Sartre A review of Ian Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism Biography and quotes of Sartre 1987 interview on Jean-Paul Sartre with Annie Cohen-Solal by Don Swaim at Wired for Books. Living with Mother. Sartre and the problem of maternity, Benedict O'Donohoe, International WebjournalSens Public. L?image de la femme dans le th??tre de Jean-Paul Sartre - Jean-Paul Sartre:sexiste? by Stephanie Rupert Pierre Michel, Jean-Paul Sartre et Octave Mirbeau. Listen to Radio 4's In Our Time programme on Sartre - RealAudio Sartre: philosophy, literature, politics (articles), International Webjournal Sens Public [hide]v ? d ? eNobel Laureates in Literature P?r Lagerkvist (1951) ? Fran?ois Mauriac (1952) ? Winston Churchill (1953) ? Ernest Hemingway (1954) ? Halld?r Laxness (1955) ? Juan Ram?n Jim?nez (1956) ? Albert Camus (1957) ? Boris Pasternak (1958) ? Salvatore Quasimodo (1959) ? Saint-John Perse (1960) ? Ivo Andri? (1961) ? John Steinbeck (1962) ? Giorgos Seferis (1963) ? Jean-Paul Sartre (1964) ? Michail Sholokhov (1965) ? Shmuel Yosef Agnon / Nelly Sachs (1966) ? Miguel ?ngel Asturias (1967) ? Yasunari Kawabata (1968) ? Samuel Beckett (1969) ? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970) ? Pablo Neruda (1971) ? Heinrich B?ll (1972) ? Patrick White (1973) ? Eyvind Johnson / Harry Martinson (1974) ? Eugenio Montale (1975) Complete roster ? 1901-1925 ? 1926-1950 ? 1951-1975 ? 1976-2000 ? 2001-present Persondata NAME Sartre, Jean Paul ALTERNATIVE NAMES SHORT DESCRIPTION French philosopher DATE OF BIRTH June 21, 1905(1905-06-21) PLACE OF BIRTH Paris DATE OF DEATH April 15, 1980 PLACE OF DEATH Paris Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre" Categories: 1905 births | 1980 deaths | French philosophers of the 20th century | Atheist philosophers | Continental philosophers | Existentialists | French atheists | French dramatists and playwrights | French Marxists | French novelists | French philosophers | Freudians | Metaphysicians | Nobel laureates in Literature | French Nobel laureates | Scholars of antisemitism | Polyamory | French military personnel of World War II | World War II prisoners of war held by Germany | People from Paris | Lyc?e Louis-le-Grand alumni | Alumni of the ?cole Normale Sup?rieure | Psychedelic advocates and proponents | French meteorologists | French prisoners of war Hidden categories: Articles needing additional references from May 2007 | Articles that may contain original research since November 2007 | Wikipedia articles needing style editing from December 2007 | All articles needing copy edit ViewsArticle Discussion Edit this page History Personal toolsLog in / create account Navigation Main page Contents Featured content Current events Random article Search Interaction About Wikipedia Cthaxis This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Thu Aug 28 12:43:34 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:43:34 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Why so much alarm in the West ? Message-ID: <48B6B996.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> GRANMA August 28, 2008 Why So Much Alarm in the West? ELSON CONCEPCION PEREZ elson.cp at granma.cip.cu The official statement from the Russian government to the United Nations states textually: "Russia has recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, mindful of its responsibility for ensuring the survival of their fraternal peoples in the face of aggressive, chauvinistic policy pursued by Tbilisi." After the release of the statement came the commotion and the "alarm," from the West. The first to condemn, demand and threaten was the president of the United States, who accused the Russian authorities of being irresponsible. After the boss spoke in Washington his most loyal followers in Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, the European Union, Canada and even Japan chimed in. In all cases, the language was very similar, accusing Russia for recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia. None mentioned Georgia's aggression against the Ossetia and Abkhazia populations. Not one comment about the Russian soldiers massacred by the Georgians. Likewise, neither Washington nor the European capitals now accusing Moscow, recall that their governments were the cause not only of the bombardment of Yugoslavia but also the disintegration of that great country and most recently the secession of Kosovo. In the Balkans, both the US and the EU have currently stationed more than 25,000 NATO soldiers, in charge of "democratically" guaranteeing the independence of the Serbian province. GEORGIA DEMANDS HELP FROM NATO And amid the anti-Russian climate, the government of Georgia tries to take advantage of the conflict and now demands -rather than asks-, for NATO to allow it to join from any of its borders, or via the Black Sea where NATO warships already sail. Meanwhile, in the Kremlin, the decision was firm and well thought out. President Dmitri Medvedev, his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other top officials had warned that Moscow was not afraid of threats from the West or of a new Cold War provoked by the United States and its allies. Medvedev himself reminded Washington and Europe about the case of Kosovo. So why is there so much uproar now over Ossetia and Abkhazia? The truth seems to lie in Russia's awareness that the US wants to surround them, mutilate them and take control of the rich oil resources of that region. The anti-missile shield is a piece on the military chess board. Georgia, with borders with Russia, is another piece of great value in Washington's plans. That's what one understands from President Medvedev's recent statement that a military response to the US anti-missile shield planned in Poland and the Czech Republic is not discarded. The system is very close to the Russian border and represents a threat to Moscow, said Medvedev in an interview with foreign television stations, reported Interfax news agency. The president warned: Moscow does not want another Cold War, since it would only bring problems for everyone. Later he said that now with the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the ball is in the European's court. Whether relations improve or deteriorate depends mainly on Europe, said Medvedev. Faced with the outcry of the US authorities, the Russian leader urged Washington to concentrate on resolving its economic problems, which he noted have global repercussions, instead of involving itself in matters that pertain to other countries. That's not a bad idea! This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Thu Aug 28 21:00:21 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:00:21 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Caucasian In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Some anthropologist ought to tell the police that their descriptor is discredited. I always like that idea of 'caucasian' equalling 'white person' because then I gleefully point out all the dark caucasians of the world. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Thu Aug 28 21:05:28 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:05:28 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] about the so-called missile defense system in Polan Message-ID: Of course it is not a defensive shield at all. The only thing it might eventually become effective at doing would be to augment US own first strike capability. This still only works out in those wild MAD scenarios of the Cold War. Also it would force Russia to spend money on developing counter measures. It's rather doubtful that the system will ever achieve a very high rate of success at hitting missiles that have already launched, but if it were used after a very devastating first strike, it might help to eliminate the handful that got launched in a counterattack (or that is most likely the scenario that is being used to justify funding such an ineffective anti-missile system). CJ -- Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 29 10:19:48 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:19:48 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Electoral analysis of US working class Message-ID: <48B7E964.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> [Marxism] How Obama Blew It Marvin Gandall Fri Aug 29 06:46:08 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism] How Obama Blew It Next message: [Marxism] How Obama Blew It Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Artesian writes: > The same masses voted against George Bush twice; 2/3 of the same masses > disapprove of the way Bush conducts the presidency-- regarding war, the > economy, renditions, wiretaps, the bible school screening of applicants in > the DoJ, etd so...if McCain is elected, it will only be because the > Democrats are not an effective opposition, because the Democrats would > have > McCain as president rather than mobilize that discontent, a discontent > they > know they cannot control.. ======================================= It's good that Artesian reminds the Ruthless Critic that the picture is not as bleak as the latter paints it - that the country is almost evenly divided politically between restless Democratic voters with liberal values seeking progressive change in US domestic and foreign policy and frightened Republican voters with conservative values who are opposed to everything the liberals stand for. These deep social and cultural cleavages are occasionally bridged by common economic concerns or when the US gets bogged down in a losing war, as at present. But mostly elections have become too close to call because of this fundamental underlying split. Only a few in denial on the US left don't accept that the mass of the urban working class - trade unionists, women, non-whites, youth - is solidly Democratic. They instead cling to the fiction that the minority of the population which abstains from these electoral conflicts - overwhelmingly composed of the least politically conscious Americans along with a handful of the most politically conscious ones - are or will become the real vanguard of social change. Artesian also notes that the discontent of the urban American working class is easily absorbed and contained by the Democratic leadership. But the real question which needs answering is: Why is this so? The prevailing view on the left seems to be that the US working class is bamboozled by the Democratic leadership, abetted by the leaders of the representative organizations of the various constituencies which form the party's base. But, if this is so, why does the working class let itself be bamboozled in this way? Why does it not move beyond the most mild forms of electoral protest? What explains it's long slumber, not only in the US but in all of the advanced capitalist countries? This is not at all what Marx and Engels nor the next generation led by Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky anticipated more than a century ago. They fully expected the masses would not let themselves be held back by their reformist leaders and would instead push them aside. The programs and demands which they developed flowed directly from this conclusion: that the masses were ahead of their leaders and could not be coopted or contained. So what has happened? Artesian, like most on the list, responds as though nothing much of significance has happened since the classical Marxists developed their programs. Implicit in his remarks above is the notion that sizeable numbers of workers are ahead of their leaders, which is why the Democrats are ostensibly afraid to "mobilize" their base - for fear of "losing control". But when have the insurgent masses - or insurgent majorities within unions and other representative mass organizations - waited for permission to mobilize from their leaders? Or balked from sweeping them aside if they stood in the way of their goals? These questions are obviously of more than academic importance, and more broadly relevant than the Democratic party and US election. They determine how the politically active who are seeking change present themselves in the organizations to which they belong. It is reflected in the demands they raise and how directly they confront the existing leaderships. Those who gauge that the masses are ready to move past their leaders denounce the leaders and call for their replacement. Those who estimate the leaders retain the confidence of the majority, especially of a strong majority, proceed more cautiously, avoiding rather than inviting direct confrontations with the tiops. Miscalculation on either side inevitably leads to isolation. So: a) Is the US Democratic leadership afraid of moblizing its base because of it fears it will lose control of it? I didn't see any evidence of that at Mile High Stadium last night, and I haven't seen it in this or previous campaigns. b) Is the political consciousness of the US working classes in advance or fully in sync with its leaders in the DP and in the mass organizations which support it? Clearly, the latter. The political impulse for change may be stronger at the base, but this doesn't translate into a more fully developed political consciousness or a higher level of organized dissent within the party, unions, and other organizations. Why is this so? Why does the leadership retain the confidence of its followers through all of its political twists and turns and compromises? I have my thoughts, but leave the floor open to others first. c) What implications does the above have for the notion that the crisis of the present epoch is predominantly a crisis of leadership, and that propaganda aimed at exposing the current "misleaders" will strengthen rather than isolate those forces seeking to replace them? I believe the present epoch is qualitatively different than the one in which the classical Marxists developed their theories and programs, but, here too, others on the list do not share this view, or, if they do, it is totally disconnected from the political posture they adopt. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 29 10:25:06 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:25:06 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Why I'm helping Hugo - Ken Livingstone Message-ID: <48B7EAA3.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Why I'm helping Hugo - Ken Livingstone Why I'm helping Hugo Despite what the media say, Ch?vez is a leader who listens to his people. I'm happy to take up a new job as his urban adviser * o Ken Livingstone o guardian.co.uk , o Friday August 29 2008 11:30 BST o Article history There are some countries whose reality is distorted by sections of the media. And some about which straightforward lies are written. My first trip to Caracas revealed Venezuela to be firmly in the second category. The idea that this country is a dictatorship is ridiculous - probably some of those assiduously promoting it have difficulty in keeping a straight face. Some "dictatorship" where the president accepts the loss of a referendum to change the constitution, which holds more national elections than virtually any other country in the world, and where walls and lamp-posts in areas of Caracas are vividly festooned with posters of anti-Ch?vez candidates. No, a dictatorship is a country like Saudi Arabia - whose leader is of course officially feted on visits to London. Attending a meeting with pro-Ch?vez candidates for the forthcoming local government elections in the capital, there was very definitely no certainty of success - as with the recent constitutional referendum, defeat was possible. The discussion, as with any local election in Britain, was how to address practical issues affecting peoples' quality of life. Caracas showed visibly the problems the country faces and progress made in recent years. In west central districts the houses of the old elite and upper-middle class are better than the most upmarket London suburb. They are surrounded by several million people living in poverty in "barrios" - rough-built slums perched on the side of mountains without basic facilities. These areas were not even marked on the maps under previous administrations! This is the product of a system where tens of billions of dollars of oil wealth each year were sent abroad to serve this elite without addressing the most elementary questions of quality of life of the majority of people. That has changed. A trip to one of many new community facilities showed how millions of people have been given access to a new free healthcare system, including dentistry. Illiteracy has been eliminated to Unesco standards. Further education is being rapidly expanded. A top priority now is to transform the basic infrastructure throughout the city. So that, as mayoral candidates put it to me, people feel like citizens with a stake in their neighbourhoods. The keys are reducing crime and transforming the city's economic efficiency and quality of life. A remarkable programme of expansion of tube and rail lines in poor areas has begun. Alongside this it is necessary to tackle congestion, improve bus services, develop community policing, tackle waste and environmental protection. Venezuela always had the resources, and now has the political will, to begin to raise its cities to world-class standards. But it needs expertise to do this effectively and rapidly. That is where London's experience helps. Between 2000 and 2008 London was recognised as the most successful city of its size in world and transformed its bus services, put the police back into local communities, tackled traffic congestion and won the Olympics. That experience is now sought by very many other cities - including Caracas. It is why President Ch?vez invited me to Venezuela and why, together with other cities, I am pleased to continue the programme of advice and discussion between London and Venezuela. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 29 10:28:50 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:28:50 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Electoral analysis of US working class Message-ID: <48B7EB82.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> How Obama Blew It Marvin Gandall Fri Aug 29 08:04:39 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism] How Obama Blew It Next message: [Marxism] How Obama Blew It Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Louis writes: > Marvin wrote: >>But, if this is so, why does the working class let itself be bamboozled in >>this way? Why does it not move beyond the most mild forms of electoral >>protest? What explains it's long slumber, not only in the US but in all of >>the advanced capitalist countries? > > I would say that the self-destruction of the American left has a lot > to do with our current problems. When an opportunity to build a > nation-wide leftist movement was squandered by miseducated > "Marxist-Leninists", naturally there will be relative quiescence. > That in fact is one of the reasons I am so committed to building this > mailing list, so as to avoid future feet-shooting possibilities in the > future. ================================== You've set a very ambitious task for yourself. I hope you won't be deflated if I suggest the "self-destruction" of the left is much, much more a symptom rather than a cause of the decline of political consciousness in the US and European working classes. Taken to its extreme, attributing responsibiity for the long historic decline of the Western labour and socialist movement to "miseducated 'Marxist-Leninists'" leads to bizarre conclusions of the kind I recall coming from the Spartacists, who blamed every defeat, large and small, on the political sins of the "Pabloite" faction of the tiny Trotskyist movement. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 29 10:33:30 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:33:30 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Working class voters Message-ID: <48B7EC9A.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> Marvin Gandall Fri Aug 29 08:24:57 MDT 2008 Previous message: [Marxism] How Obama Blew It Next message: [Marxism] How Obama Blew It Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Artesian writes: > > Do I think nothing has changed since the "classic" era of Marxism? Better > way to put it is-- has anything changed since the "classic" era of > capitalism and the working class struggles of that era? Indeed it has. > However, the fundamentals of capitalist accumulation remain the > fundamentals > of capitalist accumulation and that means the class struggle remains the > critical component in the social history, and future, of that > accumulation. > Do I know how to break through the layers upon layers of diversion, > reaction, patriotism, prejudice, fear, ignorance that is secreted around > and > in and through this struggle? No. > > I do think that the bourgeoisie have been on an offensive for 35 years. > Literally. After the rate of profit dropped in 1969-70, the bourgeoisie, > led by the US bourgeoisie, geared up and by 1973 they were more than ready > to start hammering away at the living standards, gains, security of the > workers in the advanced countries along with the more bloody, brutal > attacks > on workers in Chile, Argentina for example. > > And I would like to point out, that this "gearing up" and this assault did > not go without responses in the advanced countries-- in the UK with the > end > of the Heath govt. and its replacement by Wilson/Callaghan; in France with > the LIP strike; in Turin; in Portugal with the almost-revoution; and in > the > US, starting as the bourgeoisie geared up with the postal workers strike, > the NYC transit strikes, combat (and there was combat) in the auto > plants.... > > Anyway that took us to... Thatcher, who could not have achieved power if > the > Labor govt. before her had not eviscerated the workers' strikes in the UK; > Reagan and the lost decade around the world (except in China; and the NIEs > of Pacific Asia, where the OPEC price spikes, inflation, recession > dislocated the existing agriculture/rural/economies precipitating > migration > to the cities)... > > I would also point out that the working class in the US is not my father's > working class. It is female, it is immigrant, it is of color, it is > non-union, it is employed in service and retail sectors (which does not > diminish the importance of the industrial workers); and so more than ever, > a > "program" that empowers those workers to remedy discrimination in all > facets > of society is the best, if not the only, way forward. =========================================== This is a more serious reply than Louis' customary defensive crankiness, as was Jim F's brief cite of Engels. I can't see anything I don't substantially agree with. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 29 11:52:56 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:52:56 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis Message-ID: <48B7FF39.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> edit] La Naus?e and existentialism As a junior lecturer at the Lyc?e du Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Naus?e (Nausea) which serves in some ways as a manifesto of existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. Taking a page from the German phenomenological movement, he believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life situations, and that novels and plays describing such fundamental experiences have as much value as do discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories. With this mandate, the novel concerns a dejected researcher (Roquentin) in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes starkly conscious of the fact that inanimate objects and situations remain absolutely indifferent to his existence. As such, they show themselves to be resistant to whatever significance human consciousness might perceive in them. This indifference of "things in themselves" (closely linked with the later notion of "being-in-itself" in his Being and Nothingness) has the effect of highlighting all the more the freedom Roquentin has to perceive and act in the world; everywhere he looks, he finds situations imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of his existence. Hence the "nausea" referred to in the title of the book; all that he encounters in his everyday life is suffused with a pervasive, even horrible, taste - specifically, his freedom. The book takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it is used in the context of the often nauseating quality of existence. No matter how much Roquentin longs for something else or something different, he cannot get away from this harrowing evidence of his engagement with the world. The novel also acts as a terrifying realization of some of Kant's fundamental ideas; Sartre uses the idea of the autonomy of the will (that morality is derived from our ability to choose in reality; the ability to choose being derived from human freedom; embodied in the famous saying "Condemned to be free") as a way to show the world's indifference to the individual. The freedom that Kant exposed is here a strong burden, for the freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless, and the practical application of Kant's ideas prove to be bitterly rejected. ^^^^^ CB: This whole line of thought ignores that the "first" level of "things-in-themselves" is human society and other people. Other people and "society" are not at all utterly indifferent to individual people. And much of an individual's freedom and an individual's existence stamping and embuing his or her situations with _socially_ originated meanings. ^^^^ The stories in Le Mur (The Wall) emphasize the arbitrary aspects of the situations people find themselves in and the absurdity of their attempts to deal rationally with them. A whole school of absurd literature subsequently developed. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us Fri Aug 29 12:02:55 2008 From: charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us (Charles Brown) Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 14:02:55 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] about the so-called missile defense system in Poland Message-ID: <48B80190.84C9.00BF.0@cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us> about the so-called missile defense system in Polan CeJ jannuzi at gmail.com Thu Aug 28 21:05:28 MDT 2008 Of course it is not a defensive shield at all. The only thing it might eventually become effective at doing would be to augment US own first strike capability. This still only works out in those wild MAD scenarios of the Cold War. Also it would force Russia to spend money on developing counter measures. It's rather doubtful that the system will ever achieve a very high rate of success at hitting missiles that have already launched, but if it were used after a very devastating first strike, it might help to eliminate the handful that got launched in a counterattack (or that is most likely the scenario that is being used to justify funding such an ineffective anti-missile system). CJ ^^^ CB: And of course, the Soviets-Russians have been pointing out that Star Wars is offensive since Reagan and the Reganauts first came up with that bullshit, like he was fooling them. Of course , he was aiming to "fool" the American fools. It was/is another US escalation of the nuclear arms race, and the US did _every_ escalation of the nuclear arms race in history, making the US the greatest enemy of humanity in recorded history. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Aug 30 21:03:56 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:03:56 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis Message-ID: I see Sartre as a true contemporary of Russell in oh so many ways. Sartre blunders through a lot of philosophy in order to try and integrate Marxism into 'mainstream' philosophy. But that would be mainstream according to what French intellectuals might think philosophy is, and that would be the 50s and 60s (phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism). Althusser is much about the same thing, only limiting himself to what he thinks is a rigorous structuralist approach. And Merleau-Ponty tries to integrate structuralism into phenomenology, giving phenomenology a 'linguistic turn', the potential for which had long been there (since Husserl). There is probably very little in all that most American intellectuals would understand very deeply. And today's post-mos most likely resent a philosopher (Sartre) who would consume so much of our time with a 'systematic' philosophy. That being said, Sartre does make some genuinely interesting contributions to phenomenology. I would bet Derrida makes heavy use of him in conjunction with his own readings of Heidegger. And if you read Nausea back to back with Being and Nothingness, it is one of those few occasions where you get philosophy dramatized in a work of fiction combined with a long philosophical tract. The closest I can think of would be reading Camus' Outsider combined with the Myth of Sisyphus (and I consider Camus' to be a masterful example of the philosophical essay, even if Camus never had any pretense to be a philosopher, let alone a systematic one). Or perhaps reading Musil's unfinished masterpiece, Man without Qualities, in conjunction with a representative selection of Brentano, Meinong, and Husserl (but you would have to be very, very ambitious to do that). Then again some might argue read Proust instead. I remember Guattari saying in an interview back in the late 70s or early 80s what an influence Sartre had been on him because of that attempt to do something with Marxism that philosophy would recognize. That's interesting coming from an intellectual who really was at the heart of events of 1968. Oh, and I almost forgot to say, about Nausea. It does grate some, perhaps the grating of a 'young man novel'. I suspect Sartre had compiled materials for it when he was in his twenties. But I read it when I was in my twenties, and found it very funny. I can't say I found anything by Camus very funny until the much later Fall (if you find arch-irony funny). Apparently both men were considered humorous by those that knew them, but also apparently much of what they fell out over involved their inability to grasp the sense of humor in each other. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Aug 30 21:09:51 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2008 12:09:51 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>I can't say I found anything by Camus very funny until the much later Fall (if you find arch-irony funny).<< Now that I think about it, that is wrong. I remember some 'lyrical' essays, some of which seem fairly early. The account of being taken to an amateur boxing match is truly funny, as is much of Camus' depiction of working class existence in Algerian cities. Will have to check my Camus chronology of works. CJ From jannuzi at gmail.com Sun Aug 31 18:19:06 2008 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2008 09:19:06 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis Message-ID: >>And if you read Nausea back to back with Being and Nothingness, it is one of those few occasions where you get philosophy dramatized in a work of fiction combined with a long philosophical tract. << Went through my Sartre (in cardboard boxes because I had to move my office last month) collection, such as it is, and, although I didn't find anything with either 'L'imaginaire' or 'Emotions' in it, the introduction to one books says that these works relate most directly with the novel 'Nausea'. They are considered his earliest serious philosophical treatises. It is also interesting to read Camus' the Outsider back to back with Nausea. Compare, for example, what each author does with 'the sea'. Since both are more like novellas in length, they made for nice summer reading/re-reading. I'm not sure I have time to wade through any treatises by Sartre.