From cb31450 at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 09:12:28 2009 From: cb31450 at gmail.com (cb31450 at gmail.com) Date: Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:12:28 +0000 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Return after 10 years Message-ID: <000325575afe736d7a046b731657@google.com> GERALD DOWNING gerdowning at btinternet.com Tue May 12 06:58:01 MDT 2009 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Comrades,This is a return after about ten years. Here is a post from that time (2000) and an add for my WRP Explosion going online Comradely Gerry DowningAnd That's Dialectical! GD: I am with Charles Brown 100% (almost) in this dispute. ^^^^^ CB: Good to hear from you , comrade Gerry From cb31450 at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 13:51:44 2009 From: cb31450 at gmail.com (c b) Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 15:51:44 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist > calculation debate Message-ID: <5c2e4d230906031251h242191bch4f3eaf98675d79d6@mail.gmail.com> CeJ jannuzi -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If Cockshott had waited a bit more, he might not look the complete fool he does here. This is still largely an argument based on the idea that logistics is economics turned into a hard science. That would be logistics on a macro-economic scale. That may be, but it is no more a science of political economy than econometrics. CJ ^^^^^ CB: What's logistics ? From cb31450 at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 14:13:12 2009 From: cb31450 at gmail.com (c b) Date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 16:13:12 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate Message-ID: <5c2e4d230906031313x7951b214n84b84aae9e6026ff@mail.gmail.com> CeJ jannuzi -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > The Nobel Prize in Economics is arguably > not a "real" Nobel Prize since Alfred Nobel > made no provision for such a prize in his > will. It was instead established by the > Bank of Sweden in the late 1960s as a Prize > in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Yeah most people don't recall that it was first awarded in 1969! > And they arguably did this for ideological > reasons since conventional mainstream > economics was coming under fire in the > wake of the upheavals of the 1960s. Do you think it was still yet another time when the liberal-conservative spectrum was afraid of the success of some form of socialism (while both liberals and conservatives have long cherry-picked the weirdo Austrians and other various heterodoxists and libertarians) ? ^^^^^^^^ CB: Think about it. To admit that macroeconomics can be understood scientifically is to admit that there can be macroeconomic planning, ie. centralized planning, that Hayek is wrong. So, the bourgeoisie are always going to be leery of a prize for the science of economics. This contradiction also must doom the project of every school of bourgeois, i.e. "free market", economics to "fail" or else it undermines free market ideology. From jannuzi at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 22:05:49 2009 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 13:05:49 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>CB: What's logistics ?<< Basically, the science of how an economy supplies and distributes goods. Kantorovich and others work in linear programming has application for logistics. One take on Hayek's so-called arguments against central planning is that he is saying central planning requires too immense a scale. In other words, you can't run an economy at a macro-economic level. See his essay: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html As for the applications of linear programming to logistics, see: http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch4en/meth4en/ch4m2en.html From jannuzi at gmail.com Wed Jun 3 22:25:40 2009 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 13:25:40 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>CB: Think about it. To admit that macroeconomics can be understood scientifically is to admit that there can be macroeconomic planning, ie. centralized planning, that Hayek is wrong. So, the bourgeoisie are always going to be leery of a prize for the science of economics. This contradiction also must doom the project of every school of bourgeois, i.e. "free market", economics to "fail" or else it undermines free market ideology.<< Perhaps, but not necessarily. This is why the Vienna line of economists emphasize 'logic'. They think they are tapping into some sort of subsistent realm and providing a picture that captures the reality. So according to a lot of thinkers following on Hayek, markets are rational because they encompass the totality of economic activity and express a 'collective will'. What the market does is rational, even if it doesn't make sense to an individual businessman, ponzi schemer, duped investor or academic economist. I don't buy recent arguments that the advent of supercomputers will result in our ability to model sufficiently in order to 'see all'. I'm still waiting for a three day extended weather forecast that is actually correct. I think the debate of public vs. private is largely irrelevant here. The question is more along the lines of on what scale can you undertake economic planning and business. The calamities of the US's occupation of Iraq shows both the calamities of central planning and the 'magic of the markets'. Of course Hayek would look at recent financial events and see them as a rational change, a rational collective action of the market, I guess. As for being anti-science, as the paper that started this thread states, anti-science has often been associated with post-mo Marxists--literary Marxists and social theorists (although I disagree and don't seem them following mainly from Althusser). That potential was always there in the thought of Marx himself. Which brings us back to a recurring but much larger debate: is there such thing as a social science? Will there be a body of thought that unifies the various 'soft sciences' (social, psycho-, logico-formal--such as formal linguistics-- etc.)? Will there be a body of thought that ultimately unifies the social sciences with the natural sciences, etc? I tend to take an anti-scientific stance in the fields that affect me the most--applied linguistics, second language acquisition, language education, education, etc. This often gets me backed into a corner with the children of the romantics, but for me it is more a stance of rationalism--destroy all pseudo-sciences and their various forms of oppression. From andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com Thu Jun 4 07:22:22 2009 From: andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com (andie nachgeborenen) Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2009 06:22:22 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate Message-ID: <588114.71909.qm@web50401.mail.re2.yahoo.com> It's not a Nobel Prize. It's Nobel MEMORIAL Prize. Not sure the point of the question about the creation of the Prize (?) in a context of the fear of the success of socialism, idea is that the Prize was meant to shore up capitalism by honoring its apologists? (Not all NMP have been capitalist apologists btw, Wassily Leontiff and Joseph Stiglitz for example).Perhaps. 1969 seemed at the time a revolutionary year, capitalism threatened at the time a legitimation crisis. Objectively state socialism didn't look as good by the numbers as it had a decade before. --- On Wed, 6/3/09, c b wrote: > From: c b > Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate > To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Date: Wednesday, June 3, 2009, 3:13 PM > CeJ jannuzi > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > The Nobel Prize in Economics is arguably > > not a "real" Nobel Prize since Alfred Nobel > > made no provision for such a prize in his > > will.? It was instead established by the > > Bank of Sweden in the late 1960s as a Prize > > in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. > > Yeah most people don't recall that it was first awarded in > 1969! > > > > And they arguably did this for ideological > > reasons since conventional mainstream > > economics was coming under fire in the > > wake of the upheavals of the 1960s. > > Do you think it was still yet another time when the > liberal-conservative spectrum was afraid of the success of > some form > of socialism (while both liberals and conservatives have > long > cherry-picked the weirdo Austrians and other various > heterodoxists and > libertarians) ? > > > ^^^^^^^^ > CB: Think about it. To admit that macroeconomics can be > understood > scientifically is to admit that there can be macroeconomic > planning, > ie. centralized planning, that Hayek is wrong. So, the > bourgeoisie are > always going to be leery of a prize for the science of > economics. > This contradiction also must doom? the project of > every school of > bourgeois, i.e. "free market", economics to "fail" or else > it > undermines free market ideology. > > _______________________________________________ > 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 Fri Jun 5 01:37:53 2009 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 16:37:53 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>It's not a Nobel Prize. It's Nobel MEMORIAL Prize. Not sure the point of the question about the creation of the Prize (?) in a context of the fear of the success of socialism, idea is that the Prize was meant to shore up capitalism by honoring its apologists?<< Actually the prize in economics is not even that. It has been referred to as many different things in several European languages, but the last time I looked, the one English term they have settled on is: "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" I guess that is synonomous with calling it a memorial prize (=in memory of), but could we just call it Nobel Economics for short? I doubt that Nobel would have minded or that he is rolling over in his grave. In 1971 it was officially referred to in English as simply "Prize in Economic Science", which is how it is listed at the nobel .org website at the top as well. Some winners have referred to it as "the Nobel Prize in Economics" in their economics speech (the wonders of the web! never have I known so little about so many topics!). >>(Not all NMP have been capitalist apologists btw, Wassily Leontiff and Joseph Stiglitz for example).<< Even some of the early winners weren't APOLOGISTS. Leontief was identified with 'anti-communism' but I don't know if that makes him much of a friend of most capitalists--they tend to favor their accountants anyway. >>Perhaps. 1969 seemed at the time a revolutionary year, capitalism threatened at the time a legitimation crisis. Objectively state socialism didn't look as good by the numbers as it had a decade before.<< It wasn't one of the better questions I have asked over the years, but reading your answer now, it comes to mind that the US was facing crises. First, all that debt accumulated over the Vietnam War, plus the loss of face over being seen as having suffered a defeat at the hands of 'communism' and Viet nationalism. By the time Nixon is in office, we have a 'decided response'. The US will cheapen the dollar and make surplus/creditor countries pay for the war. Japan will pay an even higher penalty--tariffs (f- free trade) while undergoing major currency appreciation. Moreover, US foreign policy will shift to affirming Japan will always remain a US satellite while the US should focus on China (as a simple way to offset Soviet power). I guess some who kept track of finance were fretting that the 'big one' would soon happen and capitalism would collapse. The 70s wasn't a very good time for bond holders. Looks like the Obama years won't be either. From cb31450 at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 12:14:55 2009 From: cb31450 at gmail.com (c b) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 14:14:55 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate Message-ID: <5c2e4d230906051114y42768bc5gb9006ab97e121eba@mail.gmail.com> CeJ jannuzi at gmail.com >>CB: What's logistics ?<< Basically, the science of how an economy supplies and distributes goods. ^^^^^^^ CB: Not to be cute, but isn't economics the science of supply and distribution of goods ? From cb31450 at gmail.com Fri Jun 5 12:45:37 2009 From: cb31450 at gmail.com (c b) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 14:45:37 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate Message-ID: <5c2e4d230906051145u52136436y5032a21bab81b2d@mail.gmail.com> CeJ jannuzi at gmail.com >>CB: Think about it. To admit that macroeconomics can be understood scientifically is to admit that there can be macroeconomic planning, ie. centralized planning, that Hayek is wrong. So, the bourgeoisie are always going to be leery of a prize for the science of economics. This contradiction also must doom the project of every school of bourgeois, i.e. "free market", economics to "fail" or else it undermines free market ideology.<< Perhaps, but not necessarily. This is why the Vienna line of economists emphasize 'logic'. They think they are tapping into some sort of subsistent realm and providing a picture that captures the reality. ^^^^^ CB: What means "tapping in " ? smile. Somehow they "tap into" it, and provide a picture, but that tap in and picture don't allow using it to guide practice and plan. Sounds like some kind of Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself , what Engels calls shamefaced materialism. If the Viennans can't do anything with their "logic" , I don't think they should get credit for knowing anything. ^^^^ So according to a lot of thinkers following on Hayek, markets are rational because they encompass the totality of economic activity and express a 'collective will'. What the market does is rational, even if it doesn't make sense to an individual businessman, ponzi schemer, duped investor or academic economist. ^^^^ CB: The only ones it makes "sense" to are the anti-Communist ideologues trying to claim centralized planning is "impossible". What a mytifying crock of shit. ^^^^^ I don't buy recent arguments that the advent of supercomputers will result in our ability to model sufficiently in order to 'see all'. I'm still waiting for a three day extended weather forecast that is actually correct. ^^^^ CB: What, with such a supercomputer, hurricanes will suddenly make "sense" or be "logical" ? They make "sense" now. When one is coming , move out of town until it blows over. That's centralized weather planning. ^^^^^^^ I think the debate of public vs. private is largely irrelevant here. The question is more along the lines of on what scale can you undertake economic planning and business. The calamities of the US's occupation of Iraq shows both the calamities of central planning and the 'magic of the markets'. ^^^^^ CB: The calamaties of the US's occupation of Iraq show that centralized planning of war causes mass death and destruction. Centralized planning of production and distribution of goods and services averts and remedies death and destruction. ^^^^ Of course Hayek would look at recent financial events and see them as a rational change, a rational collective action of the market, I guess. ^^^^^^^ CB: What an idiot and prostitute for capitalism Hayek was ^^^^ As for being anti-science, as the paper that started this thread states, anti-science has often been associated with post-mo Marxists--literary Marxists and social theorists (although I disagree and don't seem them following mainly from Althusser). That potential was always there in the thought of Marx himself. ^^^^^ CB: Wheres the potential for anti-science in the thought of Marx ? ^^^^ Which brings us back to a recurring but much larger debate: is there such thing as a social science? Will there be a body of thought that unifies the various 'soft sciences' (social, psycho-, logico-formal--such as formal linguistics-- etc.)? Will there be a body of thought that ultimately unifies the social sciences with the natural sciences, etc? ^^^^^ CB: Historical materialism is the social science from Marxism. See my posts from a few months back on materialism. ^^^^^ I tend to take an anti-scientific stance in the fields that affect me the most--applied linguistics, second language acquisition, language education, education, etc. This often gets me backed into a corner with the children of the romantics, but for me it is more a stance of rationalism--destroy all pseudo-sciences and their various forms of oppression. ^^^^^^^ CB: Well, you are the linguist, but I'm not convinced there aren't laws and regular patterns in languages, grammars. Clearly we follow rules in speaking. There are definite grammatically correct and incorrect statements. There's lots of science in law, jurisprudence. It's very materialist. Must base legal claims on material evidence, etc. From Waistline2 at aol.com Fri Jun 5 17:40:41 2009 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 19:40:41 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Cynthia McKinney Announces Formation of DIGNITY Message-ID: Cynthia McKinney Announces Formation of DIGNITY By The Editors Created 06/03/2009 - 10:11 Which way forward for the Black Left? The path leads in the same direction it always has: agitation, organization, and confrontation with Power. Cynthia McKinney chose a Harlem church to announce formation of DIGNITY, to bring the Black body politic back from its current comatose state. "Dignity is attempting to show real change is possible" - if people fight for it. "We want to organize networks so that we can relay information quickly to a large number of people." Cynthia McKinney Announces Formation of DIGNITY the editors Former congresswoman (D-GA) and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney addressed a packed house at St. Mary?s Church, in Harlem, on Sunday, May 31. Also sharing the podium were Glen Ford and Margaret Kimberley, of Black Agenda Report, Nellie Bailey, Harlem Tenants Council, Prof. Anthony Monteiro, of the African American Studies Department, Temple University, and writer/activist Mae Jackson. The event was titled, ?Which Way Forward for the Black Left?? ?We agreed to found an action organization and to call it Dignity.? Thank you all for being here. On Thursday, General Taguba spoke to journalists and said that the photos currently being withheld by President Obama show rape. On Friday, he went even further and said that he saw video of U.S. soldiers raping and sodomizing detainees. From the first batch of photos that were released, we know that detainees were also murdered. In your name and mine. But some of us here in the U.S. are not shocked or surprised that this kind of behavior could occur. For those of us who have our eyes open, the gritty streets of America are filled with the experience of unarmed black and brown men being beaten, raped, sodomized, and even murdered by terroristic agents of the state. We remember the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kwame Tour?. We remember George Jackson, Soledad and Attica. We remember the American Indian Movement, the Puerto Rican Independistas, the Chicano Movement, and we remember the FBI. We know about Area A in Chicago and we?ve heard the San Francisco 8 recount for us their experiences of torture at the hands of law enforcement. We?ve heard them tell how 30 years later, the very same people who tortured them showed up on their doorsteps to re-arrest them for crimes they did not commit. So when General Taguba verifies that torture, rape, and murder were used by U.S. service men and women, we cannot be surprised. When we see Dick Cheney say that torture worked, we in this audience, are not surprised. The gritty streets of America are filled with the experience of unarmed black and brown men being beaten, raped, sodomized, and even murdered by terroristic agents of the state.? When we hear that Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown who allowed the San Francisco 8 prosecution to move forward is rumored to want to be the Governor of California, and expects our votes to win, we are not surprised. Or that Gavin Newsome, current mayor of San Francisco who is abetting the ethnic cleansing of the last remaining black neighborhood in that city wants to be Governor and expects black, brown, and progressive white votes, we are not surprised. So, when yet another young man is gunned down by the police, be it Oscar Grant in Oakland or Omar Edwards in New York City, and the policy doesn?t change to stop it. We shouldn?t be surprised. The authorities have proven that they will do everything and more if the people let them get away with it. Our President has breathed new life into the Democratic Party. But the fact is, our precious breath, that gives that Party life, is killing us. Glen Ford, Roy Singham, Dedon Kamathi of the All African People?s Revolutionary Party, and I all came together earlier this year, to not only lament the present, but to change the future. We decided that while our movement was nascent, coming out of my Power to the People campaign, that there was power in organization. That there was hope in mobilization. And that victory was possible in implementation. We agreed to found an action organization and to call it Dignity. There will be some who will maintain that this country, founded as a settler state, never had any dignity since it rested on taking and not sharing land that belonged to someone else. ?We decided that while our movement was nascent, coming out of my Power to the People campaign.? After deep engagement in slavery, the take-over of whole countries, denial of self-determination, and endless war and occupation, still others would say that our country has certainly lost whatever dignity it might have been able at one time to earn. And after Abu Ghraib, dignity is no longer possible. For about ten years, I went around the country proclaiming the black body politic to be at first moribund, then comatose. I now see the same fate awaiting the Progressive community even as we witness ongoing war, even ramping up the war machine during the greatest transfer of wealth out of black and brown communities by the wholesale theft of people?s homes. Bait and switch schemes, whitewashing, and red herrings shouldn?t be left for the people alone to decipher as they are also trying to save themselves from drowning. Some of us know what?s going on and we?re organizing Dignity in order to inform and then stop it. We are tired of watching politicians acknowledge our pain, win office, and then go about their business adding more to the existing pain. We can change the policies only by changing the nature of the debate that leads up to the selection of our policymakers. That means that we must have a way to get our message out independent of CNN, FOX, the New York Times, Clear Channel, or Public Radio. People must know in advance what the issues are, what the possibilities of policy are, and be informed, correctly, not only in slick Madison Avenue style campaigns designed to mislead. We need media of our own. ?I went around the country proclaiming the black body politic to be at first moribund, then comatose.? And finally, we need actions that serve as a wake-up call to all of our elected officials that for a critical number of us, and Glen just happens to believe that we have the right number of people supporting us in general now, business as usual is over. We have brains, we have brawn, and we?ve got guts. But is that enough? We?ve learned from our neighbors to our South, from Mexico, Cuba, and Haiti; Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Nicaragua that we don?t have to settle for less than what we need from politics. And I?m tired of feeling trapped in the politics of self-abnegation. If people in other parts of the world can do it, then we must be able to do it, too. That remains to be seen, however. So, Dignity is attempting to show that real change is possible. Dignity will show that just voting for special interest politicians who reflect special interest political parties in new faces is not enough. It is clear that some people are satisfied with that, but we demand more. Honestly, I called Glen, ready to give up, saying that I?ve done what I could do. And Glen, then Dedon, then Roy, and so many others across our country said, no. People began contacting me personally, as if they could sense what I was feeling. They started adding comments on our youtube videos, and I know many people are talking among themselves, expressing disappointment in whispered tones with the direction so far of the Obama Administration. ?Dignity is attempting to show that real change is possible.? I was saddened to read a message from Cindy Sheehan saying that she won?t run against Pelosi next election. That?s a big blow to us and I hope she will reconsider. Who was it that said the race goes not to the swift but to he who can endure? I?m willing to try one more thing, one more time. And Dignity is our effort to endure; to deliver a much-needed victory to the people. Before it?s too late. Please support us with your money, your brain, and your time. Please be sure to sign in. In the days ahead, we will contact you. You all have networks. We want to organize networks so that we can relay information quickly to a large number of people. Because of your contributions today, Dignity soon will have an internet presence and a weekly television show. We intend to have a distribution mechanism so that our supporters can place our television show on cable access stations across the country; we want to be on the radio, and we also want to be in the faces of the people who got our votes or have authority over our tax dollars and who continue to disappoint us. We are not abused spouses turning the other cheek for another slap in the face. We are individuals who know that this country can be better because we still have faith in the good will and the values of the American people. Help us organize Dignity, and with dignity, we will stand up for our rights! For more information on DIGNITY, contact Ms. McKinney at _hq2600 at gmail.com_ (mailto:hq2600 at gmail.com) [1] ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: _Marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu_ (mailto:Marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu) Set your options at: **************Mortgage rates drop to record lows. $200,000 for $1,029/mo Fixed. LendingTree? (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222653866x1201461148/aol?redir=http:%2F%2Fwww.lendingtree.com%2Fborrower%2Falliance%2Ffrom.as p%3Fwhereto%3Dpromopagev3%26promo%3D00279%26loan%5Ftype%3D2%26source%3D28895 60%26esourceid%3D2889560%26800num%3D1%2D800%2D289%2D3915%26AdType%3D2) From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 02:51:57 2009 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 17:51:57 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>CB: Not to be cute, but isn't economics the science of supply and distribution of goods ?<< I'm wondering now how to capture 'services' in my use of the term 'logistics', since so much seems to be dependent on them. I guess logistics is supposed to be the management of such economies. But then again there is the formal study of how to manage them, so this is a more theoretical 'meta-logistics'. We don't really pay or revere economists for their hands-on management of our economy, do we? If I were a central planner, I would take on the economy as one huge set of logistics issues. I think--getting back to an earlier example--linear programming really was developed with the idea that it had practical applications to logistics, but perhaps I'm wrong. But it seemed to me that some of the early prize winners which I was discussing earlier were really concerned with economics in that sense--of taking a scientific approach and implementing it in European economies and in cross-national economies (such as the Coal and Steel Community). >>CB: What means "tapping in " ? smile. Somehow they "tap into" it, and provide a picture, but that tap in and picture don't allow using it to guide practice and plan. Sounds like some kind of Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself , what Engels calls shamefaced materialism. If the Viennans can't do anything with their "logic" , I don't think they should get credit for knowing anything.<< I think the idiom I wanted was to tap in to? Anyway, to sample enough information so as to be able to do analysis of, but to be able to impose a structure on it that also revealed 'truth'. Or something like that. It seems to me to be quite parallel to the delusions the Chomsky had about studying language actually. As I get older I have become more and more sympathetic to not seeing 'logic' as something outside human mental capacity to impose it (sorry to Frege and others). >>The only ones it makes "sense" to are the anti-Communist ideologues trying to claim centralized planning is "impossible". What a mytifying crock of shit.<< I think the question is on what scale can and does 'planning' take place, in which case we see that the scale on which the Soviet Union was doing it shows that it wasn't necessarily on any more impossible scale than in a European or North American political economy. In fact, we see it being done on quite similar scale and for quite similar purposes--for example, to design, manufacture and equip a military organization with a main battle tank, to run a space program, to supply the entire Soviet bloc with strawberry jelly (did they really do it on a larger scale than Kraft?). CB>>What, with such a supercomputer, hurricanes will suddenly make "sense" or be "logical" ? They make "sense" now. When one is coming , move out of town until it blows over. That's centralized weather planning.<< I think the observation is that 'chaotic' systems display patterns and even partial repetition of patterns but that prediction is largely impossible. >>CB: The calamaties of the US's occupation of Iraq show that centralized planning of war causes mass death and destruction. Centralized planning of production and distribution of goods and services averts and remedies death and destruction.<< Well the centralized planning the US conducted was in how to destroy Iraq's military and then occupy the country with their own. Then 'free markets' (and insider government contracts) were supposed to kick in and rebuild the Iraq country, ushering in a new age of democracy, pro-western Arab governments of the pro-western Arab people, plus oil-rich Arabs were supposed to be more than happy to pay for the US to occupy them. I always had to laugh when the neocons and zio-iberals said that the US military was going to rebuild Iraq--the US military can't even dig its own latrines! CB>>What an idiot and prostitute for capitalism Hayek was<< What's interesting is this guy would probably have just gone away, except once he won the Nobel, then he got active again. CB>>Wheres the potential for anti-science in the thought of Marx ?<< In trying to be such a complete social thinker, Marx's thought does include possible anti-empiricism and anti-positivism. However, I would say in brief that in setting out to revise the science of political economy and in so doing helping to create modern social sciences, Marx and Marxist thought on such matters does not really closely follow the dominant modes of creating and perpetuating the social sciences in the modern and post-modern eras. There is, for example, positivism, experimental empiricism, behaviourism, etc., and then there are the Marxists. A good example that puts it into a microcosm is the supposed differences and similarities between Vygotsky and Piaget (whom Marxists accuse of 'idealism'). If Piaget is an idealist, then he is so in a structuralist sense, and yet he is not really very much like the sort of structuralists with which the movement is most associated. And most of the structuralists would say they are materialists. The terms Piaget used include 'genetic epistemology' and 'constructivism' (itself a term that means quite a few different things depending on the background and field of the person putting it to use, if only to theorize). >>CB: Historical materialism is the social science from Marxism. See my posts from a few months back on materialism.<< The problem with this is most of the people doing social sciences don't think so. Which brings us to the philosophy and sociology of social science I guess. But unless it is the case that they are all doing historical materialism simply because that is the only way to do social science and they are all really doing 'social science' that is a science, I have my doubts that historical materialism has had that sort of impact on the social sciences. I have to agree with Chomsky that in terms of the social sciences, we are still in the 'philosophical' phase. >>CB: Well, you are the linguist, but I'm not convinced there aren't laws and regular patterns in languages, grammars. Clearly we follow rules in speaking. There are definite grammatically correct and incorrect statements.<< But this gets us back to complexity and to self-reference. Can they be captured in a meta-language? Can they be captured in plain language? Can they be consciously encompassed by the language-using human mind? Chomsky has written much on the unconscious, internal, controlling grammar of a human's language 'competence', but attempts to externalize it as some sort of 'social linguistic mind' (like Saussure's 'langue') have not yielded anything like a natural science--instead they have yielded structuralism and then post-structuralism. >>CB: There's lots of science in law, jurisprudence. It's very materialist. Must base legal claims on material evidence, etc.<< You have a very EXPANSIVE view of what science is. That's good because then you don't have to waste a lot of time arguing what science is and is not. I'm more of the Lakatos and Feyerabend modes of thinking about the matter. At least in a theoretical way. I'm also inclined to think there is simply no such thing as 'science', but that group of people called 'scientists' nowadays are really just a fairly recent social phenomenon of laboratories, experimental procedures, research report writing, etc. I get that feeling because most of the people I meet who could be called 'scientist' (they have a PhD from an accredited university in a field of natural science, engineering or technology) are just lab technicians who have no idea what they are doing most of the time. Much like all those workers who made sure the pharaoh got his proper mass retainer burial. They do what they are told. From jannuzi at gmail.com Sat Jun 6 03:53:16 2009 From: jannuzi at gmail.com (CeJ) Date: Sat, 6 Jun 2009 18:53:16 +0900 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist calculation debate In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: >>You have a very EXPANSIVE view of what science is. That's good because then you don't have to waste a lot of time arguing what science is and is not. I'm more of the Lakatos and Feyerabend modes of thinking about the matter. << Actually now that I think about that, one, I seemed to have slipped in my views of Lakatos got by way of Feyerabend. I would have to review L. to do even a parody of justice to him. And as for F., mabye, CB, you are are the Feyerabendian yourself. From rasherrs at eircom.net Mon Jun 8 11:28:05 2009 From: rasherrs at eircom.net (Paddy Hackett) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 18:28:05 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Taxes and Workers Message-ID: The capitalist state and taxation. The capitalist state forces revenue out of the workers in the form of taxation. There is no such thing as taxpayers' money! Paddy Hackett We are constantly bombarded with the soundbyte --"taxpayers money".This contains the assumption that the revenue collected by the capitalist state in the form of taxation is taxpayers' money.This obviously implies that the taxpayer in someway owns this money. In the first place the taxpayer is a category that can include all classes since each of the social classes pays taxes.This constitutes an attempt to suggest that there obtains a deep unity between the classes. Assuming that this basis exists then there is only a short way to go to politically creating an all class alliance. But the point is that state revenue in the form of taxation is just that --state revenue. It is revenue that is controlled and owned by the state. It is not the revenue of the taxpayers. This is why the expression "taxpayers' money" is so misleading in the struggle against capitalism. It misrepresents the class interests of the working class and seeks to subordinate those interests to that of the capitalist class in an all class alliance. The point is that taxation is extracted from the working class by the force of the state. The working class have no choice in the matter within the context of capitalism. The working class have only choice within the context of an alternative --the alternative between capitalism and communism. This means that the workers, to challenge this imposition of tax on it, must mount an attack on the political state as part of an integral programme to attack and destroy capitalism. Paddy Hackett From rasherrs at eircom.net Mon Jun 8 11:30:18 2009 From: rasherrs at eircom.net (Paddy Hackett) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 18:30:18 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Taxes Message-ID: <144C685393BB45C982F93A4D21ADB923@paddyhacket> The capitalist state and taxation. The capitalist state forces revenue out of the workers in the form of taxation. There is no such thing as taxpayers' money! Paddy Hackett We are constantly bombarded with the soundbyte --"taxpayers money".This contains the assumption that the revenue collected by the capitalist state in the form of taxation is taxpayers' money.This obviously implies that the taxpayer in someway owns this money. In the first place the taxpayer is a category that can include all classes since each of the social classes pays taxes.This constitutes an attempt to suggest that there obtains a deep unity between the classes. Assuming that this basis exists then there is only a short way to go to politically creating an all class alliance. But the point is that state revenue in the form of taxation is just that --state revenue. It is revenue that is controlled and owned by the state. It is not the revenue of the taxpayers. This is why the expression "taxpayers' money" is so misleading in the struggle against capitalism. It misrepresents the class interests of the working class and seeks to subordinate those interests to that of the capitalist class in an all class alliance. The point is that taxation is extracted from the working class by the force of the state. The working class have no choice in the matter within the context of capitalism. The working class have only choice within the context of an alternative --the alternative between capitalism and communism. This means that the workers, to challenge this imposition of tax on it, must mount an attack on the political state as part of an integral programme to attack and destroy capitalism. Paddy Hackett From rasherrs at eircom.net Mon Jun 8 12:43:05 2009 From: rasherrs at eircom.net (Paddy Hackett) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 19:43:05 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Taxes Again Message-ID: Hi We are constantly bombarded with the sound byte -- "taxpayers money". This contains the assumption that the revenue collected by the capitalist state in the form of taxation is the money of taxpayers. This obviously implies that the taxpayer in some way owns this money. In the first place the taxpayer is a category that can include all classes since each of the social classes pays taxes. This constitutes an attempt to suggest that there obtains a deep unity between the classes. Assuming that this basis exists then there is only a short way to go towards politically creating an all class alliance. But the point is that state revenue in the form of taxation is just that --state revenue. It is revenue owned and controlled by the state. It is not the revenue of the taxpayers. This is why the expression "taxpayers money" is so misleading in the struggle against capitalism. It misrepresents the class interests of the working class and seeks to subordinate those interests to that of the capitalist class in an all class alliance. The point is that taxation is extracted from the working class by the force of the state. The working class have no choice in the matter within the context of capitalism. The working class has only choice with the context of an alternative --the alternative between capitalism and communism. This means that the workers, to challenge this imposition of tax on it, must mount an attack on the political state as part of an integral programme to attack and detroy capitalism. Paddy Hackett Note: Apologies for repeating this postin. It is just that the other copies were poorly formatted that I felt compelled to do it out again. From Waistline2 at aol.com Mon Jun 8 14:21:05 2009 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 16:21:05 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Taxes Message-ID: In a message dated 6/8/2009 1:30:38 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, rasherrs at eircom.net writes: The capitalist state and taxation. The capitalist state forces revenue out of the workers in the form of taxation. There is no such thing as taxpayers' money! Paddy Hackett Comment This is so right. The vocabulary and language of economics reflects, and in turn dictates, the logic of an economic system. Terms such as money, tax, capital, labor, debt, interest, profits, employment, market, depreciation, employment, job, etc., are conceptualized to describe components of a system created by power politics. The broad use of these terms over time makes an artificial system appear as the product of natural laws, rather than the conceptual components of power politics. Power politics is what beats a person down and make them a slave. In modern society, we know that no one is "just" a slave or a wage slave. Rather, individuals are forced into slavery, including wage slavery. If an individual or class cannot live without selling its labor ability for wages, this social relation is extreme compulsion under the threat of starvation, destitution and jailing by the state authority. Just as monarchism was rationalized as a natural law of politics in the past, the same is true with the market and capitalism today. Taxes are just another conceptual framework and instrument of capital rule and rationale for perpetuating the system of wage slavery. In history, taxes have always been a form of exploitation of labor perpetuated by the propertied (ruling) classes. The workers and everyone else are taught that paying taxes is necessary for the government to pay for its debt. This is not true. Government does not have debt or rather government debt is purely an agreement between capitalists controlling the state, government and relations of production. How can government have debt when it issues currency that can only be converted into more currency? When a state road or public school is built by government, the workers doing the work are paid wages in the form of money - currency. These wages are paid by a capitalist company hiring the workers or paid directly by government. The corporation gets the money for wages from the government. The government prints the money and pays it to the corporation to deploy the services of its wage slaves. When the government pays money to the corporation, what it is actually doing is creating credit and not debt. Money - currency is a credit thing - instrument, and not a debt instrument. Currency is an instrument to settle debt. When a government issues currency is owes no one anything. When you are given currency, you are being given a credit instrument and not a debt instrument. Today, one does not have to touch currency but can have symbols put into their banking account and use a debit card to use this credit for the purchase of commodities. We are taught that the government is creating debt by printing money, extending credit to corporations that in turn use this same credit to game in the market and pay workers or extend them credit that is used to purchase commodities. Modern economics (bourgeois political economy) is a game designed to keep the workers confused and keep them passive as wage slaves. When the government turns around and tax wages and company payrolls, it is not collecting revenue to pay for its debt. Rather, it is taking credit out of the market and economy. As much as I hate the conservative economists on the far right, they are correct to say that taxes distort the market and economy by withdrawing needed credit. At the same time the conservatives are horribly wrong in insisting and defending the market economy as the best form of economy. They are wrong because government can print more money. The market economy is the absolute worse form of economy for a modern society increasing run based on electronic means of production and non convertible currency. That is the currency can only be converted into another currency or more paper - stocks, bonds, fiction capital, etc. Electronic means of production reduces the amount of human labor in a commodity and slowly destroys the price form of commodities because of its greater productiveness. Generations have been taught that extending government credit means debt. This is not so. The benefit of a country having a government backed and printed currency is two fold: first this means the government is not dependent on private banks issues their own currency. When private banks issue currency the only way anyone can get this currency is by following what ever rules the private banks create and enforce. The only way the private banks can enforce their rules is with the blessing and protection of the state, which controls the army, police and jail system. Government serves the capitalist class. Once upon a time in America people went to jail for not paying their bills (debtor prison), or owning debt to the capitalists, or those individuals operating as capitalist. Second, government currency means credit can be extended to anyone and everyone without interest and without government accumulating any debt provided the services one put their labor to is socially useful, build the economy and not used to profit the individual capitalist, who in reality takes more credit out of the system than they put in. By withdrawing credit through taxes, the exploitation of the working class is increased, because more wages are required to consume. Corporations do not pay taxes. Rather, the workers pay all the taxes because corporations do not create value. The workers at General Motors create all the vehicles and this includes all the blue and white-collar workers. The corporation sells the vehicles for a value that is greater than the value paid to the workers in wages. This "greater than the value paid to the workers - surplus value," taken by the capitalist corporations is the source of their profits. What the capitalist system actually does is take a greater value out of the system than the value returned to the workers and society begins to grow poorer while the individual capitalist become wealthier. They capitalist become wealthier because they have pocket the extra value that is more than what is paid to the workers. Things get ugly because no one can spend a trillion dollars on socially useful things the individual needs for themselves and family. Investing I the market is not socially useful. That is why the American workers say the richer get richer. The problem is that the workers do not really understand why and how this takes place and the capitalist do everything in their power to prevent the workers from seeing the system as it actually operates. The government taxes the profits or the surplus value created by the workers through corporate taxes and then taxes the workers. Corporations scream that they are being taxed but what is actually taxed is the surplus value that the capitalist appropriates from the workers. We have been taught that taxes are necessary for the enforcement of law and public order, protection of property, economic infrastructure (roads, legal tender, enforcement of contracts, etc.), public works, social engineering, and the operation of government itself. Most modern governments claim to use taxes to fund welfare and public services. These services can include education systems, health care systems, pensions for the elderly, unemployment benefits, and public transportation. Energy, water and waste management systems are also common public utilities. Why does the government need to tax the working class when it prints money? This is a very important question that the communist figured out a long time ago and the subject of Karl Marx writings. All of bourgeois political economy screams "because nothing in society can happen or be created that is not paid for and a school and water system cost money." No it does not. The only thing required to build a school is material, technical know how and labor and then the extension of credit to the workers so they can consume and remain healthy while building the school. Further, the workers can be compensated today - under capitalism, by extending to them "no interest" credit backed by the government. Credit backed by the government means commodities with a price must be surrendered on demand in exchange for currency whose face value matches the price of the item. Currency is a credit instrument you carry in your pocket that is good for paying off all debt public and private. "Government levies taxes not to finance its operations, but to give value to its fiat money as credit instruments. If it chooses to, government can finance its operation entirely through user fees, as some fiscal conservatives suggest. Government needs never be indebted to the public. It creates a government debt component to anchor the debt market, not because it needs money. Technically, government never borrows. It issues tax credit in the form of fiat money. So when President Ronald Reagan said the government does not make any money, only the private sector does, he was merely mouthing a political slogan, with no clear understanding of the true nature of money and credit. Fiat money is all that government makes, freely and without constraint, as Federal Reserve governor Ben S. Bernanke recently warned in a speech on deflation. And only government can make fiat money as sovereign credit. Sovereign debt is a pretend game to make private debts tradable. The relationship between assets and liabilities is expressed as credit or debt, with the designation determined by the flow of obligation. A flow from asset to liability is known as credit, the reverse is known as debt. A creditor is one who reduces his liability to increase his assets, which include the right of collection on the liabilities of his debtors. The state, representing the people, owns all assets of a nation not assigned to the private sector. Thus the state's assets is the national wealth less that portion of private sector wealth after tax liabilities, and all other claims on the private sector by sovereign rights. Privatization generally reduces state assets. As long as a state exists, its credit is limited only by the national wealth. If sovereign credit is used to increase national wealth, then sovereign credit is limitless as long as the growth of national wealth keeps pace with the growth of sovereign credit. Even if the private sector has been assigned all of a nation's tangible assets, the state, by virtual of its existence, can still claim that portion of private sector assets allowed by the constitutional regime. Such claims include the state's power of taxation, nationalization, confiscation, condemnation by eminent domain and the power to grant and revoke monopolies, and above all, the power to issue legal tender by fiat - in other words, the inherent rights of sovereignty. When the state issues money as legal tender, it issues a monetary instrument backed by its sovereign rights, which includes taxation. The state never owes debts except specifically so denoted voluntarily. When a state borrows in order to avoid levying or raising taxes, it is a political expedience, not a financial necessity. When a state borrows, through the selling of government bonds denominated in its own currency, it is withdrawing previously-issued sovereign credit from the financial system. When a state borrows foreign currency, it forfeits its sovereign credit privilege and reduces itself to an ordinary debtor because the state cannot issue foreign currency." The Global Economy in Transition _http://henryckliu.com/page181.html_ (http://henryckliu.com/page181.html) I recommend a thoughtful and careful reading of this article, which is one of the best on politics and economics I have read in many years. . (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) **************A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222585043x1201462775/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=62&bcd= JunestepsfooterNO62) From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue Jun 9 17:06:27 2009 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 19:06:27 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Paul Cockshott on Leonid Kantorovich and the socialist c... Message-ID: In a message dated 6/4/2009 12:25:48 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, jannuzi at gmail.com writes: So according to a lot of thinkers following on Hayek, markets are rational because they encompass the totality of economic activity and express a 'collective will'. What the market does is rational, even if it doesn't make sense to an individual businessman, ponzi schemer, duped investor or academic economist. I don't buy recent arguments that the advent of supercomputers will result in our ability to model sufficiently in order to 'see all'. I'm still waiting for a three day extended weather forecast that is actually correct. I think the debate of public vs. private is largely irrelevant here. The question is more along the lines of on what scale can you undertake economic planning and business. Comment The issue of the market deals almost exclusively with property and herd instinct. The issue of the economy pivots on production and distribution rather than the market. One interpenetrates the other but both are distinct from each other. The market cannot be planned as such. The economy can. The market is an article construct. The economy is not. Since the 1980s, a new vocabulary and economic language came into being to describe the artificial system called the market. Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO), Credit Default Swaps (CDS), derivatives, financial products and financial assets are for today, what the terms insurance, stocks, bonds and physical assets were to a previous period of history. These terms do not express the two basic components of the economy; production and distribution. Rather, these terms conceptualize capital movement and the agreements between owners of capital. The market cannot be planned and is to be abolished. The public vs. private debate is a partisan issue defined by the various political poles. Economic planning, meaning production and distribution, can take place on whatever scale one chooses provided the political conditions exists. WL WL. **************A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322977x1201367197/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=62&bcd= JunestepsfooterNO62) From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue Jun 9 19:49:35 2009 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 21:49:35 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Securitization as function of speculative capital or capital as a notional value Message-ID: Financial Deregulation has Opened Up A Pandora's box by Mike Whitney Global Research (June 05 2009) Is it possible to make hundreds of billions of dollars in profits on securities that are backed by nothing more than cyber-entries into a loan book? It's not only possible; it's been done. And now the scoundrels who cashed in on the swindle have lined up outside the Federal Reserve building to trade their garbage paper for billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded loans. Where's the justice? Meanwhile, the credit bust has left the financial system in a shambles and driven the economy into the ground like a tent stake. The unemployment lines are growing longer and consumers are cutting back on everything from nights-on-the-town to trips to the grocery store. And it's all due to a Ponzi-finance scam that was concocted on Wall Street and spread through the global system like an aggressive strain of Bird Flu. The isn't a normal recession; the financial system was blown up by greedy bankers who used "financial innovation" game the system and inflate the biggest speculative bubble of all time. And they did it all legally, using a little-known process called securitization. Securitization - which is the conversion of pools of loans into securities that are sold in the secondary market - provides a means for massive debt-leveraging. The banks use off-balance sheet operations to create securities so they can avoid normal reserve requirements and bothersome regulatory oversight. Oddly enough, the quality of the loan makes no difference at all, since the banks make their money on loan originations and other related fees. What matters is quantity, quantity, quantity; an industrial-scale assembly line of fetid loans dumped on unsuspecting investors to fatten the bottom line. And, boy, can Wall Street grind out the rotten paper when there's no cop on the beat and the Fed is cheering from the bleachers. In an analysis written by economist Gary Gorton for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta?s 2009 Financial Markets Conference titled, "Slapped in the Face by the Invisible Hand; Banking and the Panic of 2007" {1}, the author shows that mortgage-related securities ballooned from $492.6 billion in 1996 to $3,071.1 in 2003, while asset backed securities (ABS) jumped from $168.4 billion in 1996 to $1,253.1 in 2006. All told, more than $20 trillion in securitized debt was sold between 1997 to 2007. How much of that debt will turn out to be worthless as foreclosures skyrocket and the banks balance sheets come under greater and greater pressure? Deregulation opened Pandora's box, unleashing a weird mix of shady off-book operations (SPVs, SIVs) and dodgy, odd-sounding derivatives that were used to amplify leverage and stack debt on tinier and tinier scraps of capital. It's easy to make money, when one has no skin in the game. That's how hedge fund managers and private equity sharpies get rich. Securitization gave the banks the opportunity to take substandard loans from applicants who had no way of paying them back, and magically transform them into Triple A securities. "Abra-kadabra". The Wall Street public relations throng boasted that securitization "democratized" credit because more people could borrow at better rates since funding came from investors rather than banks. But it was all a hoax. The real objective was to turbo-charge profits by skimming hefty salaries and bonuses on the front end, before people found out they'd been hosed. The former head of the FDIC, William Seidman, figured it all out back in 1993 when he was cleaning up after the S&L fiasco. Here's what he said in his memoirs: "Instruct regulators to look for the newest fad in the industry and examine it with great care. The next mistake will be a new way to make a loan that will not be repaid." (Bloomberg) That's it in a nutshell. The banks never expected the loans would be paid back, which is why they issued them to ninjas; applicants with no income, no collateral, no job, and a bad credit history. It made no sense at all, especially to anyone who's ever sat through a nerve-wracking credit check with a sneering banker. Trust me, bankers know how to get their money back, if that's their real intention. In this case, it didn't matter. They just wanted to keep their counterfeiting racket zooming ahead at full-throttle for as long as possible. Meanwhile, Maestro Greenspan waved pom-poms from the sidelines, extolling the virtues of the "new economy" and the permanent high plateau of prosperity that had been achieved through laissez faire capitalism. Now that the securitization bubble has burst, forty percent of the credit which had been coursing into the economy has been cut off triggering a 1930s-type meltdown. Fed chief Bernanke has stepped into the breach and provided a $13 trillion dollar backstop to keep the financial system from collapsing, but the broader economy has continued its historic nosedive. Bernanke is trying to fill the chasm that opened up when securitization ground to a halt and gas started exiting the credit bubble in one mighty whooosh. The deleveraging is ongoing, despite the Fed's many programs to rev up securitization and restore speculative bubblenomics. Bernanke's latest brainstorm, the Term Asset-backed securities Lending Facility (TALF), provides 94 percent public funding for investors willing to buy loans backed by credit card debt, student loans, auto loans or commercial real estate loans. It's a "no lose" situation for big investors who think that securitized debt will stage a comeback. But that's the problem; no one does. Attractive, non recourse (nearly) risk free loans have failed to entice the big brokerage houses and hedge fund managers. Bernanke has peddled less than $30 billion in a program that's designed to lend up to $1 trillion. It's been a complete bust. To understand securitization, one must think like a banker. Bankers believe that profits are constrained by reserve requirements. So, what they really want is to expand credit with no reserves; the equivalent of spinning flax into gold. Securitization and derivatives contracts achieve that objective. They create a confusing netherworld of odd-sounding instruments and bizarre processes which obscure the simple fact that they are creating money out of thin air. That's what securitization really is; undercapitalized junk masquerading as precious jewels. Here's how economist Henry C K Liu sums it up in his article "Mark-to-Market vs Mark-to-Model": "The shadow banking system has deviously evaded the reserve requirements of the traditional regulated banking regime and institutions and has promoted a chain-letter-like inverted pyramid scheme of escalating leverage, based in many cases on nonexistent reserve cushion. This was revealed by the AIG collapse in 2008 caused by its insurance on financial derivatives known as credit default swaps (CDS) ... "The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve jointly allowed banks with credit default swaps (CDS) insurance to keep super-senior risk assets on their books without adding capital because the risk was insured. Normally, if the banks held the super-senior risk on their books, they would need to post capital at eight percent of the liability. But capital could be reduced to one-fifth the normal amount (twenty percent of eight percent, meaning $160 for every $10,000 of risk on the books) if banks could prove to the regulators that the risk of default on the super-senior portion of the deals was truly negligible, and if the securities being issued via a collateral debt obligation (CDO) structure carried a Triple-A credit rating from a 'nationally recognized credit rating agency', such as Standard and Poor?s rating on AIG. "With CDS insurance, banks then could cut the normal $800 million capital for every $10 billion of corporate loans on their books to just $160 million, meaning banks with CDS insurance can loan up to five times more on the same capital. The CDS-insured CDO deals could then bypass international banking rules on capital." {1} The same rule applies to derivatives (CDS) as securitized instruments; neither is sufficiently capitalized because setting aside reserves impairs one's ability to maximize profits. It's all about the bottom line. The reason credit default swaps are so cheap, compared to conventional insurance, is that there's no way of knowing whether the dealer has the ability to pay claims. It's fraud, on a gigantic scale, which is why the financial system went into full-blown paralysis when Lehman Brothers defaulted. No one knew whether trillions of dollars in counterparty contracts would be paid out or not. There are simply more claims on wealth than there is money in the system. Bogus mortgages and phony counterparty promises mean nothing. "Show me the money". The system is underwater, and it cannot be fixed by more of the Fed's presto liquidity. Here's what Gary Gorton says later in the same article: "A banking panic means that the banking system is insolvent. The banking system cannot honor contractual demands; there are no private agents who can buy the amount of assets necessary to recapitalize the banking system, even if they knew the value of the assets, because of the sheer size of the banking system. When the banking system is insolvent, many markets stop functioning and this leads to very significant effects on the real economy ..." Indeed. The shadow banking system has collapsed, not because the market is "frozen" or because investors are in a state of panic after Lehman, but because derivatives and securitization have been exposed as a fraud propped up on insufficient capital. It's snake oil sold by charlatans. That's why European policymakers are resisting the Fed's requests to create a facility similar to the TALF to start up securitization again. Here's a revealing clip from the Wall Street Journal which explains what's going on behind the scenes: "Bankers are pushing European policy makers to consider a US-style program to aid the region's economy by reviving the moribund market for bundled consumer loans. Officials at the European Securitisation Forum, a trade group representing banks and other market participants, said Tuesday that central bankers should consider stepping in with a program similar to the US Federal Reserve's Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF, which provides loans to private investors who buy new securities tied to consumer loans ... "After suffering heavy losses on securities stuffed with poorly made loans, investors are reluctant to wade back in, and Europe lacks big players like the Pacific Investment Management Company in the US, whose buying can mobilize other investors ... The market also faces uncertainty over how European regulators will change the rules of the game, in part by imposing tougher capital requirements on banks, the main buyers of securitized assets in Europe. "One European Commission proposal would dramatically hike the capital required of banks holding a securitized asset if the originator allowed its share of that asset to fall below a five percent threshold ... "Paul Sharma of Britain's Financial Services Authority said regulatory action is likely to shrink the investor base for ABS, in part by increasing the capital cushions banks will have to hold against ABS holdings in their trading books. He also argued that ABS were inappropriate for banks to hold as liquid assets, because they have proven difficult to sell in a market crisis. " 'There is very much a query in the minds of regulators as to whether there is a significant future for securitization', said Mr Sharma, though he added his own view was that the market did have a future role." See? In Europe regulators still do their jobs and make sure that financial institutions have money before they create trillions of dollars in credit. They don't stick with their heads in the sand while crooked bankers fleece the public. Bernanke's job is to step in and put an end to the hanky-panky, not add to the problems by restoring a credit-generating regime that transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from hard-working people to fatcat banksters and Wall Street flim-flammers. Notes: {1} _http://www.frbatlanta.org/news/CONFEREN/09fmc/gorton.pdf_ (http://www.frbatlanta.org/news/CONFEREN/09fmc/gorton.pdf) {2} Henry C K Liu, "Mark-to-Market vs Mark-to-Model" - _http://www.henryckliu.com/page191.html_ (http://www.henryckliu.com/page191.html) {3} "In Europe, a US Way To Fix ABS Market?" by Neil Shah and Stephen Fidler, Wall Street Journal _____ Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Mike Whitney: _http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=listByAuthor&authorFirst=Mike&authorName=Whitney_ (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=listByAuthor&authorFirst=Mike&authorName=Whitney) Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article. To become a Member of Global Research: _http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=section§ionName=membership_ (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=section§ionName=membership) The CRG grants permission to cross-post original Global Research articles on community internet sites as long as the text & title are not modified. The source and the author's copyright must be displayed. For publication of Global Research articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: _crgeditor at yahoo.com_ (mailto:crgeditor at yahoo.com) _www.globalresearch.ca_ (http://www.globalresearch.ca) contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of "fair use" in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than "fair use" you must request permission from the copyright owner. For media inquiries: _crgeditor at yahoo.com_ (mailto:crgeditor at yahoo.com) (c) Copyright Mike Whitney, Global Research, 2009 (c) Copyright 2005-2007 GlobalResearch.ca _www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=13863_ (http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=13863) _http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com_ (http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com) _http://www.ashisuto.co.jp_ (http://www.ashisuto.co.jp) (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) **************A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221322977x1201367197/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=62&bcd= JunestepsfooterNO62) From Waistline2 at aol.com Wed Jun 10 12:20:55 2009 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:20:55 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] New language/new concepts: Specualtive capital vs fiction capital (3) Message-ID: III. "The 1920s were good years for the world economy. They were years of boom. Boom and speculation go together like strawberries and cream, and there was speculation aplenty as well. In such a period of ?irrational exuberance?, the illusion spreads that the good times will go on forever. Sound familiar? On the eve of the great 1929 stock exchange collapse, a journalist asked a speculator how so much money was being made on the market. This was the reply: "One investor buys General Motors at $100" (he meant a GM share) "sells to another at $150, who sells it to a third at $200. Everyone makes money". This seems pure magic, but for a while it can work. In a 'bull market' as in 1925-29 nearly all share prices go up and up. Over those years US industrial shares trebled in price! We all know what happened next." (Quoted form a Marxist paper of a certain political orientation) Speculation of the 1920?s is not the same meaning of modern speculative capital. In the above example, speculation is based on and plays itself out with stocks, bonds or certificates of all kinds or fiction capital or symbolic representations of the material value in General Motors. Material value as General Motors implies productive capital. 1920?s General Motors is the asset representing the two phases of capital circulation. Gambling - speculation or risk taking in the 1920?s is based on the movement and anticipated profitability of productive capital. This 1920?s productive capital expresses the unity of finance capital. Finance capital is short speak for the merging of banking capital and industrial capital under the domination of the financier (banker). Speculative capital as a concept does not mean speculating with capital. Speculative capital as a concept does not mean speculating with capital. Speculative capital as a concept does not mean speculating with finance capital. Capital - no matter what its form, by definition involves risk. Risk arises as an expression of the anarchy of production or different commodities (capital) competing in the market for buyers and the internal collusion and colliding of labor and capital in the process of production. . Speculative capital implies the same dynamic that merchant capital implies. Speculative capital implies the same dynamic that industrial capital implies. Speculative capital implies the same dynamic that financial capital implies. In all instances, we are dealing with a historically specific form of the social relations called capital. In the case of the merchant, as a flesh and blood individual he carries out a function. His capital enters the sphere of capital reproduction, driving the circulation of commodities between producer and buyer. Industrial capital is the flesh and blood industrial capitalist. It is called industrial capital because of its function in the production of commodities. The industrial capitalist did not create industry, nor did he ascend to earth from the moon. As a form (expression) of social relations - (material relations of production), industrial capital evolves from a previously existing form of capital rooted in the relations of manufacture/merchant capital. At a certain stage in the development of the productive forces and the capital relation, the merchant becomes a banker, banking institutions come to dominate industrial capital/ists, and this new relationship was called finance capital. In America, this took place based on the Civil War and the North ?s need to finance the war. J. D. Rockefeller in the flesh, best exemplify this merging of industrial and finance capital under the hegemony of the banks; financier. Finance capital, as does all capital, by definition involves risk. Speculation has remote roots extending back in history before the rise of capitalism. The concept speculative capital captures a form of capital, as does the concept finance capital. Speculative capital is a form of finance capital. What distinguishes speculative capital from finance capital of the previous era is its lack of connection with the process of production or the metabolizing of labor as the process of surplus value creation. Actually, speculative capital - (as a form of the capital relation), seems to me to be the final historical form of capital without even an implied connection to production and distribution of things. Speculative capital, as a dominating form of capital movement is post 1980; it is a relationship where the old fictional instruments of the previous era (fiction capital or stocks, bonds, letters) has been severed from productive capital expressed as physical assets. These assets are material factors of production, machinery, energy, oil/petroleum and labor. During the era of financial-industrial capital, General Motors assets were material. That is to say, speculative capital today, as expressed in the non-banking financial architecture, or the shadow banking system operates as a notional (imaginary) value. The underlying assets of the non-banking financial system, or the shadow banking system, as a system, ARE the ability of these institutions to buy and sell structured debt. The book assets of the non-banking financial system are not their workers sitting at machines or the desk or the building but rather, the ability to package and resale debt and the accounting for these transactions. In 1920 General Motors underlying assets, generally called "the fundamentals" were the machines, building, workers (skills), dealership network and all the things going into the production, distribution and realization of surplus value. It did not matter how many hands a stock passed through or the distance "stocks and certificates" passed from the originator or the distance traveled as "paper circulating in the market." These stocks and certificates remained fiction capital because they pivoted around and were bounded by productive capital, or capital in the process of production - metabolizing labor. After all, a 1920?s General Motors stock remained a representation of General Motors productive capacity even if the stock sold for $100 Monday, $150 Tuesday, and that night $200. The stocks, bonds and paper (fiction capital) was stilled backed by, expressed and was tied to productive capital in the form of General Motors 100,000 workers, products in process, a distribution network, etc. More, this material relation of production was seen with the eyes of man and expressed itself in the society consciousness as a material relation. All market transactions are speculative in nature to one degree or another. Speculative capital does not mean "bad risk taking" or super gambling. Fiction capital is a symbol representation of productive capital as it produces surplus value. Surplus value is produced exclusively by human labor in the process of the production. Not so, with speculative capital, whose truth is revealed in an examination of its underlying assets. The assets are on the balance sheets. What is on the balance sheets is the collection and bundling of debt. The instruments used to collect (house) this debt are called "financial instruments" . . . like derivatives. Derivatives are a math model that says, "Me bundling together debt" - (contractually created rights and obligations), "has a certain value that can only be ascertained by selling this debt in the market." The reason this debt has a market value is because I the seller, have a history and trustworthiness and if you are scared to sell these instruments back to me for their market value, which will tend to increase. Pleas buy some more. One buys and sells these contractual obligations - (one can buy them with borrowed funds or credit leveraged by assetsJ ), to achieve cash flow through continuous buying and selling and never to hold in anticipation of a future profit. (Well, only the suckers in local governments around the world and pension fund managers buy these "instruments" and hold them because they believe they are buying stock - fiction capital, with real assets. Fiction capital is called "fiction capital" because it is a representation of real productive capital, which in turn expresses the operations of the actual productive forces. Speculative capital as a further development in finance capital arises as by product of the absolute overproduction of capital. The non-banking financial institutions clearly understand these financial instruments have only an imaginary value or price. The problem is that price stability can only be maintained in an expanding market. What stabilizes price is the expansion itself. A CDO - Collateralized debt obligation is what the three words imply: collateral: to secure a loan by pledging property or goods as security; debt/obligation is obligation that a "bundle of obligation" will pay a certain amount over a period of time with a given default rate. These bundles of obligation contain no real value - (in the Marxist meaning), but have a market value, or rather MARKET PRICE, that rises with the rise in the market. What cases the market for these financial instruments to rise is the rise in the price of these instruments. The price of these instruments rise in relationship to the perceived and tactic agreement that the seller is trustworthy. The point is that modern speculation based on speculative capital is not like speculation in the era of consolidation of financial-industrial capital. The fiction capital of the financier of the 1920?s expressed real assets - productive capital. The stocks or certificates are the definition of fiction capital. The definition of speculative capital is capital operating as a notional (imaginary) value. Pardon the endless repetitiveness. "Inside" the bundled assets of the non banking financial system are more bundles of financial assets or obligations. The obligations on the books are the assets. These assets contain not one molecule of value. What these assets contain is a price. Price is not value. In theory price was once monetarized value realized though currency. The price of the new financial instruments contain no value, much less surplus value. AIG was in trouble way before it entered the Credit Default Swap market 5/6 years ago. AIG was an insurance/reinsurance company. AIG was selling insurance polices that most financial analysts knew they could not pay off and the companies that bought the polices knew that they could not pay off the claims in a catastrophic crisis. The reason companies buy these policies is the same reason people buy life insurance; because it is understood that everyone is not going to die on the same day and the law of large numbers basically says that you are going to make money if you keep getting new customers, if the current customers pay their monthly bill and you get say a 3 - 7% return over an extended period of time. When this system breaks down, as it must, the company goes out of business and all those connected with them take an enormous hit. The underlying reason is that the market is not the economy in the exact same way that price is not value. The market is an artificially created financial institutions used to enslave one section of humanity to another. What is a Credit Default Swap? A CDS is what the three words say it is; credit, default protection and swap. Companies swap insurance policies with each other to guard against financial loss - risk, when and if the market goes bad, which it must. Specifically: "Credit default swaps, or CDS, are insurance against the risk of default on a debt (such as loan, bond etc.). The writer (seller) of these swaps receive regular payments from the buyer (in most cases, in addition to an upfront payment), and in turn assumes the risk that the underlying debt will not be repaid. In the event of default, the seller of the contract has to reimburse the buyer for the unpaid interest and the principal of the debt.[1] Credit default swaps are non-standardized private contracts between the buyer and the seller. They are not traded on any exchange, and have remained unregulated by any government body. The International Swaps and Derivatives Association estimates the total amount of outstanding credit default swaps to be around $ 62.2 trillion, making these contracts the most widely traded credit derivative product, as of December 2007.[2] _http://www.wikinvest.com/wiki/Credit_Default_Swap_(CDS_ (http://www.wikinvest.com/wiki/Credit_Default_Swap_(CDS) ) Not being funny, but this crap is crazy. "Let us say that an insurer needs to enhance its capital surplus by $100 million in order to meet regulatory capital requirements. They can enter into what appears to be a completely legitimate form of reinsurance contract, an agreement that appears to transfer the liability to the reinsurer. By doing so, the "ceding company" - an insurance company that transfers a risk to a reinsurance company - gets to drop that $100 million in liability and its regulatory surplus increases by $100 million. The reinsurer assuming the risk does actually put up the $100 million in liability, but with the knowledge that they will never have to actually pay out on the contract. This is good for the reinsurer because they are paid a fee for this transaction, but it is bad for the ceding company, the insurer with the capital shortfall, because the transaction is actually a sham, a fraud meant to deceive regulators, counterparties and investors into thinking that the insurer has adequate capital. Typically the fee is 6% per year or what is called a "loan fee" in the insurance industry. When it operates in this fashion, the whole reinsurance industry could be described as a "surplus rental" proposition, whereby an insurer literally loans another insurer capital in the form of risk cover, but with a secret understanding in the form of a side letter that the loan will be reversed without any recourse to the seller of protection. You give me $6 million in cash today, and I will give you a promise that we both know I will never honor. Does this sound familiar? What our contacts in the insurance industry describe is almost a precise description of the CDS market, albeit one that evolved in the reinsurance industry literally decades ago and has been the cause of numerous insurance insolvencies and losses to insured parties. Or to put it another way, maybe the inspiration for the CDS market - at least within AIG and other insurers ? evolved from the reinsurance market over the past two decades." _http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/04/aig-before-cds-there-was-reinsurance/_ (http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/04/aig-before-cds-there-was-reinsurance/) What is Securitization? Securitization - which is the conversion of pools of loans into securities that are sold in the secondary market - provides a means for massive debt leveraging. The banks use off-balance sheet operations to create securities so they can avoid normal reserve requirements and bothersome regulatory oversight. Oddly enough, the quality of the loan makes no difference at all, since the banks make their money on loan originations and other related fees. What matters is quantity, quantity, quantity; an industrial-scale assembly line of fetid loans dumped on unsuspecting investors to fatten the bottom line. And, boy, can Wall Street grind out the rotten paper when there's no cop on the beat and the Fed is cheering from the bleachers. Financial Deregulation has Opened Up A Pandora's box by Mike Whitney Global Research (June 05 2009) _www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=13863_ (http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=13863) "All assets can be securitized so long as they are associated with cash flow. Since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began securitization in the mortgage market as part of their mandate to foster home ownership in America decades ago, securitization has expanded into a variety of markets, including credit-card debt, auto and home-equity loans, commercial mortgages, and trade receivables. The practice allows originators to sell assets from their balance sheets and devote their capital to generating new business. The benefit of securitization is that it has enabled the extension of credit to far more individuals and businesses. The danger about securitization is that financial-reporting practices have not kept up with the financial innovation. Because the programs are executed in SPEs off-balance-sheet, investors and regulators know next to nothing about the risks involved in the activities. Securitization enables banks and corporations to finance assets through the capital markets, but it does not eliminate the risks associated with those assets. In fact, in most cases, banks and other asset-sellers have retained the majority of the risk of assets transferred off-balance-sheet. The process works when the economy is expanding and credit losses are small in relation to growth, as was the case through most of the last decade. In an economic downturn, problem securitization can act as an explosive force to cause a systemic crisis. _http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/04/aig-before-cds-there-was-reinsurance/_ (http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/04/aig-before-cds-there-was-reinsurance/) Today, it is virtually impossible not to recognize that something has changed in the form of the social relations of capital. What has changed is the leading form of finance capital and the class configuration of society. The class configuration of American society is shifting, with the virtual total destruction of the middle class. The destruction of the American middle class means the middle class as it existed during the rise and ascendency of Lenin's - or rather Hobson's, financial-industrial capital. A change in the leading form of capital means a change in the form of the working class and enlargement of the proletariat. Although we tend to use working class and proletariat exchangeable these categories are not identical in theory and practice. Sections of the working class rise and fall with capital and may acquire financial reserves that allows it to live and thrive from the market relation. Home ownership, stocks, bonds and incomes levels that exceed its subsistence level and allows it to accumulate property defines the once secure sector of our middle class workers. Not so with the proletariat, who lives from hand to mouth and has no reserves or a real stake in the system. WL. **************Dell Inspiron 15 Laptop: Now in 6 vibrant colors! Shop Dell?s full line of laptops. (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222008777x1201444407/aol?redir=http:%2F%2Fad.doubleclick.net%2Fclk%3B215566094%3B3786435 8%3Bv) From Waistline2 at aol.com Wed Jun 10 12:46:58 2009 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 14:46:58 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] New language/new concepts: 1 & 2 Message-ID: Society is built around the way people produce and distribute their means of life, especially distribution. Consequently, the two basic categories or components of the economy are production and distribution. The market is not the economy. The vocabulary and language of economics reflects, and in turn dictates, the logic of an economic system. Terms such as money, tax, capital, labor, debt, interest, profits, employment, market, depreciation, employment, job, etc., are conceptualized to describe components of a system created by power politics. The broad use of these terms over time makes an artificial system appear as the product of natural laws, rather than the conceptual components of power politics. Just as monarchism was rationalized as a natural law of politics in the past, the same is true with the market and capitalism today. Since the 1980s, a new vocabulary and economic language came into being to describe the artificial system called the market. Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO), Credit Default Swaps (CDS), derivatives, financial products and financial assets are for today, what the terms insurance, stocks, bonds and physical assets were to a previous period of history. These terms do not express the two basic components of the economy; production and distribution. Rather, these terms conceptualize capital movement and the agreements between owners of capital. A market economy can be viewed as an aberration of human civilization. Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO), Credit Default Swaps (CDS), Derivatives, financial products, financial assets, reinsurance, insurance, stocks, bonds and physical assets are terms describing forms of capital, as it is traded and circulates throughout the financial market(s). These terms and concepts express the impact of capital by way of the market. That is why corporations keep more than one set of books. Books are needed to express the capital relationship of a corporation to the market and its components; the capital regulatory regime and then accounting for physical assets - the economy. When one asks "where are the real books," meaning where is the accounting for production and distribution of products, and the physical assets behind them, they are told they need to further study economy because "more is involved." The "more involved" is called "the capitalist mode" . . . . or "the bourgeois mode" of commodity production or market capitalism or "industrial capitalism." Although society is built around production and distribution an economy is not an abstract blueprint. Production and distribution does not and cannot stand outside of and apart from capital formation as the march of history. An economy is also the material manifestation of a political system expressing and protecting a specific property relation, which in turn is the interplay of group interests representing class sectors, gender, age, religion, region or nation. Individual interests are not issues of politics. The defining basis of politics is power, which takes many forms: moral, intellectual, financial, electoral and military. The material organization of power is made manifest in the state as the organization of armed bodies of men and women; the standing army, police force, judicial system and alongside all the structures in society that will "beat you down" for violating the legal property rights in society. The state is protector of the property relation of the ruling class. The global economy is the material manifestation of the global geopolitical system, and global macroeconomics is the rationalization of that geopolitical system. People came to trade to compensate for deficiencies in their state of development. Trade is not exploitation. When an individual or class of people are compelled to work for another individual or class that is exploitation. Exploitation is slavery, not trade. Imperialism is exploitation on an international level. II. The irrationality of the market is rooted in the bourgeois property relations rather than production and distribution. Markets are phenomena of large numbers and herd instinct based on another phenomenon called property, in this case bourgeois private property, and its money form. Unique individualism is of little consequence and theories about economic man, as a collection of individuals, driving the market is nonsense. Private property is expressed as power politics and power politics rests upon force - the state, rather than rational thinking expressing the functioning of the economy. The market is to the economy what capital is to the productive forces. Capital is a historically evolved social relations of production. The economy is a historically evolved expression of the division of labor in society embracing the unity of production and distribution. The market arises in tandem with private property, as this private property becomes a form of expression of (mediates) the division of labor. The market is not the division of labor. The market is an aberration in human history, inasmuch as the normal, natural and rational condition of humanity is the society of primitive collective effort and sharing (trade), to meet basic material, intellectual, sexual needs and passions. Capital is a historically evolved social relation of production or a form of "something," rather than the "something." Capital is not a machine, an energy source, water, a loaf of bread, meatloaf or a thing. The economy is things + people as people recast nature into products and distribute these products amongst themselves. The "something" that capital is . . . . .is, a form of society intercourse but not the intercourse. The society intercourse is productive forces + people. Productive forces + people + distribution = economy. Productive forces + people + distribution + capital + = the market economy, without the market being reducible to the economy. That is why capital/corporations requires more than one book. For instance, all the new financial instruments, derivatives, CDO, etc, do not exist as parts of the economy, although they interpenetrate, are interactive with and affect the economy, but rather exists as part of the market (the property form of social relations) and ideological superstructure. These financial instruments are called "obligations" precisely because they are agreements bonded to the flow of private capital. The political middle The fight along the path that runs through the political middle means breaking the ideological and political grip of the middle over the workers. This does not mean just throwing "alley apples" (ideological bricks) at the Democratic Party but more than that, the organize fight to help the fighting section of the working class re-conceptualize the system and what we are fighting. Fighting along a path that says the communist strategy is to attack the "far right" is a conception of class struggle that say the advance of the workers can take place based on blocking with the Democratic party establishment in an effort to stabilize the economic middle class. This approach condemns all political impulses to establish a communist political polarity in America. A communist political polarity in America means carrying out communist propaganda about the system, from a communist point of view. For instance, government aid and support of the proletariat does not create debt in the economy. When the government funds programs like welfare and aid to dependent children it is not creating debt. When the government extends unemployment benefits it does not create "government debt." Issuing credit to the needy does not create debt but rather, creates credit. The argument against "big government" is bogus yet some of us fall into the trap and end up fighting for "big government" as a solution to the immediate needs of the working class. A failure to understand money and why it is not currency for instance, although we use such terms interchangeably in popular literature, and a misunderstanding of the partisan nature of political economy, more often than not leads us to running the workers into the hands of the capitalists. Modern economic communism is a system of sovereign birth credits extended to the entire population. These birth credits do not create dept because they flow from accumulated productive forces and built up labor in the shape and form of our modern productive forces and society infrastructure. Establishing a communist political polarity in America means teaching and educating broad sections of the working class in the actual working of the capitalist system so that they may begin to understand how to fight for their economic interest as a class. In order to educate our workers the communists themselves must be reeducated in the actual working of our capitalist system, as we have lived and experienced capital at the front of the curve of industrial development and change. WL. This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from _http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm_ (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) **************Dell Inspiron 15 Laptop: Now in 6 vibrant colors! Shop Dell?s full line of laptops. (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1222008777x1201444407/aol?redir=http:%2F%2Fad.doubleclick.net%2Fclk%3B215566094%3B3786435 8%3Bv) From farmelantj at juno.com Sun Jun 14 16:54:51 2009 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:54:51 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Boris Hessen and Philipp Frank Message-ID: <20090614.185457.5712.1.farmelantj@juno.com> Probably at least a few people here have heard of Boris Hessen, the Soviet physicist and historian and philosopher of science, whose groundbreaking paper, "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton?s Principia" (http://webfiles.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/rereadingClassics/Hessen.pdf/V1_Hess en.pdf) would have a profound impact on the emergence of the history of science as a distinct discipline in the West, following that paper's delivery by Hessen at the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London, as part of a delegation of Soviet scholars and scientists that included Nikolai Bukharin. While many people were influenced by Hessen's paper, it made a strong impact on at least several young British scientists, including J.D. Bernal, J.B.S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben, and Joseph Needham, all of whom achieved eminence in their respective scientific specialties while also becoming very influential writers concerning the history and social functions of science, from a Marxist perspective. Recently, I have been reading Loren R. Graham's book, *Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History*. He has a discussion of Hessen and his groundbreaking paper on Newton. What is interesting about Graham's discussion of Hessen, is that he sees Hessen's work on Newton as having been motivated in large degree by his concern with defending modern physics - Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, as developed by de Broglie, Heisenberg, Schroedinger, and Bohr, from the sustained ideological attacks that these theories were enduring in the Soviet Union at that time. Both relativity and quantum mechanics were being denounced as "idealist" and "bourgeois." Furthermore, the writings of Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr along with such people as James Jeans and Arthur Eddington were widely cited by Soviet ideologists in support of their attacks on these two theories as being idealist, since some of these scientists, especially Eddington were in fact quite insistent that the new physics lent support to an idealist metaphysical worldview. In addition the fact that Einstein explicitly acknowledged drawing upon the ideas of Ernst Mach was cited against relativity, since Lenin after all, had in his book, *Materialism and Empirio-Criticism*, made the philosophies of Mach and Avernarius the chief targets of criticism. Most of the Soviet opponents of modern physics championed Newtonian physics as the physics that was most consistent with Marxism and dialectical materialism. Graham reads Hessen as attempting to undercut Soviet criticism of modern physics by attempting to show that Newtonian physics was vulnerable to the same sorts of criticism. Newton himself was the proponent of a highly theological view of the universe. He saw his science as lending support to theism and Christianity. Furthermore, Newton's work was very much tied to the class interests of the rising English bourgeoisie. Yet, despite all this, his science was of genuine and permanent value. Graham takes Hessen as attempting to present a similar case on behalf of relativity and quantum mechanics. Though both theories could and were often given idealist metaphysical interpretations. Such interpretations were not the only ones possible. Both theories could also be given materialist philosophical interpretations too, just as the case with Newtonian physics. Newton himself and many of his disciples were quite pious and they presented theological interpretations of their science, but materialist interpretations of Newtonian physics were possible and those indeed were the ones that were accepted in the Soviet Union. But if Newtonian physics could now interpreted in materialist terms, despite the intention of its founders who were decidedly not materialists, then the same sort of thing could happen to relativity and quantum mechanics. The founders of these theories might not have been materialists, but there was nothing to prevent us from giving these theories materialist interpretations. Now, I find this view of scientific theories and the philosophical interpretations to which they may be given quite similar to the view that the logical empricist Philipp Frank gave in his writings such as *Modern Science and Its Philosophy*, and *Philosophy of Science: The Link between Philosophy and Science*. There, Frank argued for the importance between distinguishing between the specifically scientific content of theories like Newton's mechanics, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics and the various assorted metaphysical interpretations that can be provided for any of these theories. iscussed the metaphysical interpretations Frank emphasized the extent to which such interpretations can support various social and political agenda. He pointed out how the popular mystical interpretations that have been given for quantum mechanics tend to support reactionary political agenda. He also made mention of the Soviet debates over philosophical interpretations of relativity and quantum mechanics. Given that Frank seems to have pretty well informed about developments in Soviet philosophy, I would be very much surprised if own approach to the treatment of metaphysical interpretations of science wasn't influenced by Boris Hessan's work. Jim Farmealnt ____________________________________________________________ Find a licensed private investigator to help you be in the know. Click now! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTHIZZoovWj26eL5kKArGWe3nXluYDlVNzhRpAB2UigwDMumZ4VFoE/ From cb31450 at gmail.com Tue Jun 16 09:34:36 2009 From: cb31450 at gmail.com (c b) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:34:36 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Humanity in the Capitalist Cul-de-sac Message-ID: <5c2e4d230906160834x56e0fa22k9f1d6d668a4f0c3c@mail.gmail.com> Humanity in the Capitalist Cul-de-sac As a result of 200 years of capitalism, humanity is deep in a very dangerous cul-de-sac which could result in barbarism on an unprecedented scale by Daniel Tanuro climateandcapitalism.com (June 05 2009) Climate change is a major challenge for humanity and the environment. Thirty percent of animal and vegetable species could disappear in a few decades, due to rapid changes in rainfall, temperature, acidity, et cetera. Hundreds of millions of people live under the threat of rising sea-levels, droughts, floods and disease. Billions more could suffer water scarcity. The poor are the most exposed, especially in Africa, where the productivity of non irrigated agriculture could decline by as much as fifty percent, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Can a catastrophe be avoided? It depends on where you're living. The people of Tuvalu {1} for instance, will probably have to move before the end of this century. Climate change is a reality, affecting millions of people on Earth. It must be mitigated, but some adaptation to its effects is unavoidable and necessary. The more quickly and radically we address the basic causes of global warming to mitigate it, the less we will have to adapt. On the other hand, the less we mitigate, the more we will have to adapt, and the more the poor will suffer the negative consequences. At a certain point, though, adaptation will become practically impossible. The IPCC 4th Assessment Report proposes six climate stabilization scenarios. The most radical requires a cut in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by fifty to 85% before 2050, with a peak before 2015. Because the "developed world" is historically responsible for more than seventy percent of global warming, it should reduce its own emissions by eighty to 95%, if it follows the IPCC {2}. But this is not enough: the situation is so serious now that no escape can be found without the participation of countries like Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Mexico. The main GHG is carbon dioxide (CO2); the main cause of its accumulation in the atmosphere is the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) and this burning provides the world with eighty percent of its energy. As a consequence, a radical reduction in GHG emissions in forty years would require a herculean effort, with ominous social, technical and economic implication. But there is simply no alternative: even the most radical IPCC scenario foresees a temperature rise of between two percent and 2.4 percent Celsius. This is above the threshold where climate change is thought to have dangerous human and environmental consequences {3}. Can we make that effort? From a scientific point of view, the answer is: "yes, we can". We can stop burning finite supplies of fossil fuels and use renewable, mostly solar, energy sources (wind energy, energy of the oceans, biomass, solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, geothermal power et cetera). The technical potential of these sources is seventeen times the global energy demand in 2001 {4}. By the way, this potential could improve very quickly if a clear political priority was given to the research on renewable energy, instead of nuclear, or even fossil energy. In other words, humanity is not doomed to energy scarcity and the societies in the South are not doomed to poverty and underdevelopment . How could we make this effort? The answer is mainly social and political, not technological, for three reasons: 1. Renewable sources are still more expensive than fossil sources and this situation will prevail for 25 to thirty years. 2. The global distribution of wealth has to be dealt with in order to provide poor countries, and the poor in general, with the considerable means necessary for the clean development and adaptation of these resources. 3. The energy transition is complex. It doesn't boil down to the replacement of one fuel with another in the same energy system: a different energy system is necessary, with different infrastructure and equipment. There will be a transitional period in which the building of new infrastructure will require an increase in conventional energy consumption . This will necessitate reductions in consumption elsewhere. However, a new system in place would be one in which there is a new way to satisfy human needs, even another view of these needs and another way to determine them. In short, another society. To clarify this point, let us take the example of the transportation sector. The easiest and cheapest way to replace petrol is to produce agrofuels. But agrofuels compete with crop production, and therefore with the satisfaction of fundamental human needs. As we have experienced over the last few years, we risk seeing the poor starving because wheat, maize, cassava, palm oil and other crops fundamental to people's lives are used to produce "green petrol". Massive agrofuel production for export intensifies speculative pressure on the land (at the expense of traditional communities) and has very negative environmental impacts in terms of pollution and biodiversity. >From this we can conclude: 1. The need for personal mobility can no longer be satisfied by producing individual cars 2. The way that commodities are transported must be questioned radically (the "just in time" delivery by planes and trucks on global competitive markets is nothing less than criminal) 3. We have to ask whether we really need all these commodities; what purpose they serve. On the one hand, billions of people want essential goods and services to fulfill very basic human needs. The capitalist system cannot satisfy them because it permanently needs masses of unemployed people - "an industrial reserve army", as Marx called them - in order to exert permanent pressure on wages, thus maximizing its profits. On the other hand, the capitalist way of satisfying needs - the production of commodities for profit by competitive businesses, the tendency always to sell more goods and services to those who can afford them - entails the constant creation of new artificial needs, on a mass scale. Overproduction and consumption, mass poverty and massive waste, unfufilled needs and permanent frustration, exploitation of labour and the destruction of natural resources are indivisible aspects of this system. The burning of cheap fossil fuels is a key condition for its functioning. Of course, fossil fuel stocks are limited, but the reserves are more than sufficient to provoke catastrophic climate change. It is highly unlikely that capitalism will decide not to use these reserves, especially in the present context of world depression and fierce competition. It is even more unlikely that it will end its addiction to fossil fuels in time to respect the physical constraints that are necessary for climate stabilization. As a result of 200 years of capitalism, humanity is deep in a very dangerous cul-de-sac which could result in barbarism on an unprecedented scale. The escape route is clear. Globally, we must use less energy, produce less material goods, and transfer clean technologies to the South: these are key conditions in order to make the transition to renewable sources possible within forty years. Simultaneously, we must satisfy fundamental human needs, especially in the developing world. The problem is that none of these objectives can be achieved within the framework of a system which, because its objective is profit, can only consider avoiding a catastrophe if the investment is "cost effective". The achievement of these objectives requires an anticapitalist perspective, translated into concrete measures such as an economic plan, reduction of working time without loss of income, nationalization of the energy sector, and nationalization of the bank and credit sector. The fight against climate change is a matter for the class struggle. It is more than that: it is a question of civilization. _____ Daniel Tanuro is a Belgian ecosocialist and journalist. This article was published in the June-July issue of the South African magazine Amandla. References [1] A Pacific Ocean island half way between Hawaii and Australia [2] IPCC 2007, WG3, page 776 [3] The danger threshold has never been determined by any official body except the European council, which estimated it at plus two degrees Celsius. This decision was taken in 1996, on the basis of the IPCC 2nd Assessment Report. Since then, scientists have established that climate change is much more dangerous than was thought. On the basis of the 4th report, it would be wise to adopt plus 1.5 degrees Celsius as the danger threshold. [4] WEA 2001, Chapter 5, table 5.26. The technical potential indicates the amount of energy that can be delivered with the existing technologies, independently of their costs. Copyright (c) 2007 Climate and Capitalism http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=695#more-695 http://www.billtotten.blogspot.com http://www.ashisuto.co.jp From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue Jun 16 12:40:39 2009 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:40:39 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Dismantling America's Financial-Military Empire Message-ID: De-Dollarization: Dismantling America's Financial-Military Empire The Yekaterinburg Turning Point By Prof. Michael Hudson Global Research, June 13, 2009 The city of Yakaterinburg, Russia's largest east of the Urals, may become known not only as the death place of the tsars but of American hegemony too - and not only where US U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, but where the US-centered international financial order was brought to ground. Challenging America will be the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) today and tomorrow (June 15-16) for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China). The attendees have assured American diplomats that dismantling the US financial and military empire is not their aim. They simply want to discuss mutual aid - but in a way that has no role for the United States, NATO or the US dollar as a vehicle for trade. US diplomats may well ask what this really means, if not a move to make US hegemony obsolete. That is what a multipolar world means, after all. For starters, in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia. Two years later the SCO countries formally aligned themselves with the former CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO. Yet the meeting has elicited only a collective yawn from the US and even European press despite its agenda is to replace the global dollar standard with a new financial and military defense system. A Council on Foreign Relations spokesman has said he hardly can imagine that Russia and China can overcome their geopolitical rivalry,1 suggesting that America can use the divide-and-conquer that Britain used so deftly for many centuries in fragmenting foreign opposition to its own empire. But George W. Bush ("I'm a uniter, not a divider") built on the Clinton administration's legacy in driving Russia, China and their neighbors to find a common ground when it comes to finding an alternative to the dollar and hence to the US ability to run balance-of-payments deficits ad infinitum. What may prove to be the last rites of American hegemony began already in April at the G-20 conference, and became even more explicit at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 5, when Mr. Medvedev called for China, Russia and India to "build an increasingly multipolar world order." What this means in plain English is: We have reached our limit in subsidizing the United States' military encirclement of Eurasia while also allowing the US to appropriate our exports, companies, stocks and real estate in exchange for paper money of questionable worth. "The artificially maintained unipolar system," Mr. Medvedev spelled out, is based on "one big centre of consumption, financed by a growing deficit, and thus growing debts, one formerly strong reserve currency, and one dominant system of assessing assets and risks."2 At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is that the United States makes too little and spends too much. Especially upsetting is its military spending, such as the stepped-up US military aid to Georgia announced just last week, the NATO missile shield in Eastern Europe and the US buildup in the oil-rich Middle East and Central Asia. The sticking point with all these countries is the US ability to print unlimited amounts of dollars. Overspending by US consumers on imports in excess of exports, US buy-outs of foreign companies and real estate, and the dollars that the Pentagon spends abroad all end up in foreign central banks. These agencies then face a hard choice: either to recycle these dollars back to the United States by purchasing US Treasury bills, or to let the "free market" force up their currency relative to the dollar - thereby pricing their exports out of world markets and hence creating domestic unemployment and business insolvency. When China and other countries recycle their dollar inflows by buying US Treasury bills to "invest" in the United States, this buildup is not really voluntary. It does not reflect faith in the U.S. economy enriching foreign central banks for their savings, or any calculated investment preference, but simply a lack of alternatives. "Free markets" US-style hook countries into a system that forces them to accept dollars without limit. Now they want out. This means creating a new alternative. Rather than making merely "cosmetic changes as some countries and perhaps the international financial organisations themselves might want," Mr. Medvedev ended his St. Petersburg speech, "what we need are financial institutions of a completely new type, where particular political issues and motives, and particular countries will not dominate." When foreign military spending forced the US balance of payments into deficit and drove the United States off gold in 1971, central banks were left without the traditional asset used to settle payments imbalances. The alternative by default was to invest their subsequent payments inflows in US Treasury bonds, as if these still were "as good as gold." Central banks now hold $4 trillion of these bonds in their international reserves - land these loans have financed most of the US Government's domestic budget deficits for over three decades now! Given the fact that about half of US Government discretionary spending is for military operations - including more than 750 foreign military bases and increasingly expensive operations in the oil-producing and transporting countries - the international financial system is organized in a way that finances the Pentagon, along with US buyouts of foreign assets expected to yield much more than the Treasury bonds that foreign central banks hold. The main political issue confronting the world's central banks is therefore how to avoid adding yet more dollars to their reserves and thereby financing yet further US deficit spending - including military spending on their borders? For starters, the six SCO countries and BRIC countries intend to trade in their own currencies so as to get the benefit of mutual credit that the United States until now has monopolized for itself. Toward this end, China has struck bilateral deals with Argentina and Brazil to denominate their trade in renminbi rather than the dollar, sterling or euros,3 and two weeks ago China reached an agreement with Malaysia to denominate trade between the two countries in renminbi.[4] Former Prime Minister Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad explained to me in January that as a Muslim country, Malaysia wants to avoid doing anything that would facilitate US military action against Islamic countries, including Palestine. The nation has too many dollar assets as it is, his colleagues explained. Central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan of the People's Bank of China wrote an official statement on its website that the goal is now to create a reserve currency "that is disconnected from individual nations."5 This is the aim of the discussions in Yekaterinburg. In addition to avoiding financing the US buyout of their own industry and the US military encirclement of the globe, China, Russia and other countries no doubt would like to get the same kind of free ride that America has been getting. As matters stand, they see the United States as a lawless nation, financially as well as militarily. How else to characterize a nation that holds out a set of laws for others - on war, debt repayment and treatment of prisoners - but ignores them itself? The United States is now the world's largest debtor yet has avoided the pain of "structural adjustments" imposed on other debtor economies. US interest-rate and tax reductions in the face of exploding trade and budget deficits are seen as the height of hypocrisy in view of the austerity programs that Washington forces on other countries via the IMF and other Washington vehicles. The United States tells debtor economies to sell off their public utilities and natural resources, raise their interest rates and increase taxes while gutting their social safety nets to squeeze out money to pay creditors. And at home, Congress blocked China's CNOOK from buying Unocal on grounds of national security, much as it blocked Dubai from buying US ports and other sovereign wealth funds from buying into key infrastructure. Foreigners are invited to emulate the Japanese purchase of white elephant trophies such as Rockefeller Center, on which investors quickly lost a billion dollars and ended up walking away. In this respect the US has not really given China and other payments-surplus nations much alternative but to find a way to avoid further dollar buildups. To date, China's attempts to diversify its dollar holdings beyond Treasury bonds have not proved very successful. For starters, Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs steered its central bank into higher-yielding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities, explaining that these were de facto public obligations. They collapsed in 2008, but at least the US Government took these two mortgage-lending agencies over, formally adding their $5.2 trillion in obligations onto the national debt. In fact, it was largely foreign official investment that prompted the bailout. Imposing a loss for foreign official agencies would have broken the Treasury-bill standard then and there, not only by utterly destroying US credibility but because there simply are too few Government bonds to absorb the dollars being flooded into the world economy by the soaring US balance-of-payments deficits. Seeking more of an equity position to protect the value of their dollar holdings as the Federal Reserve's credit bubble drove interest rates down China's sovereign wealth funds sought to diversify in late 2007. China bought stakes in the well-connected Blackstone equity fund and Morgan Stanley on Wall Street, Barclays in Britain South Africa's Standard Bank (once affiliated with Chase Manhattan back in the apartheid 1960s) and in the soon-to-collapse Belgian financial conglomerate Fortis. But the US financial sector was collapsing under the weight of its debt pyramiding, and prices for shares plunged for banks and investment firms across the globe. Foreigners see the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization as Washington surrogates in a financial system backed by American military bases and aircraft carriers encircling the globe. But this military domination is a vestige of an American empire no longer able to rule by economic strength. US military power is muscle-bound, based more on atomic weaponry and long-distance air strikes than on ground operations, which have become too politically unpopular to mount on any large scale. On the economic front there is no foreseeable way in which the United States can work off the $4 trillion it owes foreign governments, their central banks and the sovereign wealth funds set up to dispose of the global dollar glut. America has become a deadbeat - and indeed, a militarily aggressive one as it seeks to hold onto the unique power it once earned by economic means. The problem is how to constrain its behavior. Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank advisor now with China's Academy of Sciences, suggested that US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner be advised that the United States should "save" first and foremost by cutting back its military budget. "U.S. tax revenue is not likely to increase in the short term because of low economic growth, inflexible expenditures and the cost of 'fighting two wars.'"6 At present it is foreign savings, not those of Americans that are financing the US budget deficit by buying most Treasury bonds. The effect is taxation without representation for foreign voters as to how the US Government uses their forced savings. It therefore is necessary for financial diplomats to broaden the scope of their policy-making beyond the private-sector marketplace. Exchange rates are determined by many factors besides "consumers wielding credit cards," the usual euphemism that the US media cite for America's balance-of-payments deficit. Since the 13th century, war has been a dominating factor in the balance of payments of leading nations - and of their national debts. Government bond financing consists mainly of war debts, as normal peacetime budgets tend to be balanced. This links the war budget directly to the balance of payments and exchange rates. Foreign nations see themselves stuck with unpayable IOUs - under conditions where, if they move to stop the US free lunch, the dollar will plunge and their dollar holdings will fall in value relative to their own domestic currencies and other currencies. If China's currency rises by 10% against the dollar, its central bank will show the equivalent of a $200 million loss on its $2 trillion of dollar holdings as denominated in yuan. This explains why, when bond ratings agencies talk of the US Treasury securities losing their AAA rating, they don't mean that the government cannot simply print the paper dollars to "make good" on these bonds. They mean that dollars will depreciate in international value. And that is just what is now occurring. When Mr. Geithner put on his serious face and told an audience at Peking University in early June that he believed in a "strong dollar" and China's US investments therefore were safe and sound, he was greeted with derisive laughter.7 Anticipation of a rise in China's exchange rate provides an incentive for speculators to seek to borrow in dollars to buy renminbi and benefit from the appreciation. For China, the problem is that this speculative inflow would become a self-fulfilling prophecy by forcing up its currency. So the problem of international reserves is inherently linked to that of capital controls. Why should China see its profitable companies sold for yet more freely-created US dollars, which the central bank must use to buy low-yielding US Treasury bills or lose yet further money on Wall Street? To avoid this quandary it is necessary to reverse the philosophy of open capital markets that the world has held ever since Bretton Woods in 1944. On the occasion of Mr. Geithner's visit to China, "Zhou Xiaochuan, minister of the Peoples Bank of China, the country's central bank, said pointedly that this was the first time since the semiannual talks began in 2006 that China needed to learn from American mistakes as well as its successes" when it came to deregulating capital markets and dismantling controls.8 An era therefore is coming to an end. In the face of continued US overspending, de-dollarization threatens to force countries to return to the kind of dual exchange rates common between World Wars I and II: one exchange rate for commodity trade, another for capital movements and investments, at least from dollar-area economies. Even without capital controls, the nations meeting at Yekaterinburg are taking steps to avoid being the unwilling recipients of yet more dollars. Seeing that US global hegemony cannot continue without spending power that they themselves supply, governments are attempting to hasten what Chalmers Johnson has called "the sorrows of empire" in his book by that name - the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order. If China, Russia and their non-aligned allies have their way, the United States will no longer live off the savings of others (in the form of its own recycled dollars) nor have the money for unlimited military expenditures and adventures. US officials wanted to attend the Yekaterinburg meeting as observers. They were told No. It is a word that Americans will hear much more in the future. Notes 1 Andrew Scheineson, "The Shanghai Cooperation Organization," Council on Foreign Relations, Updated: March 24, 2009: "While some experts say the organization has emerged as a powerful anti-U.S. bulwark in Central Asia, others believe frictions between its two largest members, Russia and China, effectively preclude a strong, unified SCO." 2 Kremlin.ru, June 5, 2009, in Johnson's Russia List, June 8, 2009, #8. 3 Jamil Anderlini and Javier Blas, "China reveals big rise in gold reserves," Financial Times, April 24, 2009. See also "Chinese political advisors propose making yuan an int'l currency." Beijing, March 7, 2009 (Xinhua). "The key to financial reform is to make the yuan an international currency, said [Peter Kwong Ching] Woo [chairman of the Hong Kong-based Wharf (Holdings) Limited] in a speech to the Second Session of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country's top political advisory body. That means using the Chinese currency to settle international trade payments ." 4 Shai Oster, "Malaysia, China Consider Ending Trade in Dollars," Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2009. 5 Jonathan Wheatley, "Brazil and China in plan to axe dollar," Financial Times, May 19, 2009. 6 "Another Dollar Crisis inevitable unless U.S. starts Saving - China central bank adviser. Global Crisis 'Inevitable' Unless U.S. Starts Saving, Yu Says," Bloomberg News, June 1, 2009. _http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aCV0pFcAFyZw&refer=asia_ (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601080&sid=aCV0pFcAFyZw&refer=asia) 7 Kathrin Hille, "Lesson in friendship draws blushes," Financial Times, June 2, 2009. 8 Steven R. Weisman, "U.S. Tells China Subprime Woes Are No Reason to Keep Markets Closed," The New York Times, June 18, 2008. Global Research Articles by Michael Hudson Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JPMorgan Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no relation). In 1990 he helped established the worlds first sovereign debt fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark. Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinichs Chief Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002) He can be reached via his website, _www.michael-hudson.com_ (http://www.michael-hudson.com) and his email mhmichael-hudson.com . (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) **************An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221823265x1201398681/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=62&bcd=Jun eExcfooterNO62) From Waistline2 at aol.com Tue Jun 16 15:13:49 2009 From: Waistline2 at aol.com (Waistline2 at aol.com) Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:13:49 EDT Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Dismantling America's Financial-Military Empire Message-ID: The battle is for the hearts and minds of the American working class, specifically a new generation of leaders and young people. Our youth and working class think things out like little bitty capitalist. The "Yekaterinburg Turning Point" is a meeting of "Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China)." The stated goal is to reform the current system of world finance. There is no way to reform the modern world of finance against the strategic interest of American finance capital without countries - political states, leaving the orbit of finance capital. As long as the entire capitalist world uses national currency - fiat money, exchangeable with one another, no real change in monetary relations can take place. Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev are approaching financial relations in purely capitalist terms and equations. Prof. Michael Hudson defines these terms succulently. Rather than destroy the current exploitative nature of the financial system, the governments of Russia and China seek to level the playing field and somehow find the means to create an independent form of value for their holdings in US currency and Treasury notes and to strengthen their own capitalist classes. The problem is that it is not possible for China to invest its US dollars and Treasury notes into its domestic economy and create economic growth. Not possible. In order to be able to invest US currency into China and Russia domestic economy and grow their economies, the US dollars and Treasure Notes would have to become the medium for exchange and displace the government issued currency in these countries. The problem is that only the US government can print US currency. Allowing American dollars to displace China government issued currency would immediately turn the economy of China and Russia over to the US government. A political regime that surrenders the right to issue its own currency and allows another currency to have a greater value in its country is the meaning of being a financial colony. Thus, the "Yekaterinburg Turning Point" is capitalist "over there" seeking a way out of the capitalist crisis by using capitalist means, against the capitalist "over here." This cannot work because the world is round and all currencies are connected and exchangeable for one another. If you have a basket of currencies - say a billion dollars, shifting the weight of one currency in the basket to another can only create paper wealth, not economic growth or value. The world financial crisis is expressed in the domestic economic crisis. The solution to the domestic economic crisis is the solution to the world financial crisis. The domestic economic crisis is plant closings, people being unemployed, mortgage defaults, falling wages, short work hours per week and people finding it harder and impossible to pay their bills. State governments cannot finance their operations and cut back services, lay off more workers, with the most capitalist politicians demanding privatizing government functions as the solution. This is no solution because the market economy is the problem according to everyone. If private corporations cannot save themselves, how on earth can privatizing government services save these services? There is one solution only. Government should and must give peoples the money to pay their bills. That is the immediate solution for the working class and the world economy. This solution arises from the nature of modern money. Modern money is not really money at all but currency; more accurately capital/currency with no intrinsic value. When money is no longer backed up by or is exchangeable for a specie - (gold as a store of value), such money becomes fiat money or fiat currency. Fiat is defined as: 1. official sanction: a formal or official authorization of something 2. arbitrary order: an authoritative and often arbitrary command Fiat means, "because I said so and have an army to back me up." Having a big army can strengthen the monetary regime and stabilize financial markets but these markets are not the economy. The only way fiat currency can stabilize the economy is if people are working or given the money as credit. Fiat currency is a government issued credit instrument, no different from a credit or debit card or "bridge card." When money is exchangeable for gold, such money has value. The value of gold is riveted to the amount of socially necessary labor that goes into digging it up, shaping it and storing it. When gold is the standard one can measure the value of currency based on how much currency = an ounce of gold. Fiat money is not exchangeable for gold only other fiat currency. Fiat money is a credit instrument. When government prints currency it is not printing money. What is printed is a credit instrument or as it says on American currency, a "Federal Reserve Note." The government note does not create debt, only credit. What maintains currency as a credit instrument is the federal state and its system of jails, police and armed forces. Then this relationship is signed into law and the laws says, "you will honor this legal tender" or else. What happens is that we "honor this legal tender" to avoid the "or else." Since printing money cannot create debt only credit, why do government go into debt when they distribute money? This issue has to be thought out without jumping to conclusions or resting upon what we where taught as kids and in the high universities of official bourgeois society. Why do government go into debt when they distribute - loan, currency? If government DOES NOT in fact create debt by printing money, then our entire way of viewing modern economic relations must be changed and reordered to keep up with a changed reality. Government has no need to go to private lenders to borrow money because these private lenders cannot print Federal Reserve Notes. The question is why does government go to private lenders or create "Treasure Notes" to pay off debt it allegedly creates when it prints currency? Who agreed to this relationship? Who agreed and enforced into law the idea that by printing money government creates debt rather than credit? Some people once believed the world was flat. Some believed that the sun revolved around the earth, rather than the earth revolving around the sun. When a theory turns out to be wrong one should discard it. Government never has to create debt. The problem that China has with holding US Treasury Notes are that these notes can only be invested back into the American economy. When China invest back into the American economy, the profit it realize can only be invested back into the American economy. Thus, China is stuck with the only glimmer of hope is being able to export what is produced in America back to China, or capture some modern technology. No one can escape a crisis of capitalism using capitalism. The most that can happen is to dig oneself deeper into the hole of crisis. The current world wide financial regime is not a natural system or grows out of human nature or trade. The financial system is no different from the slave trade. No one is born a slave although one can be born into slavery. Just as the slave trade was enforced by the gun, so is the modern financial system. Just as the slave trade and slave system proved obsolete with the industrial revolution, so is the modern financial system. These systems are not products of human nature but rather, products of power politics . . . . the gun. At the end of the day the pen is mightier than the sword and all of human history proves this. Idea whose time has come cannot be held at bay forever. Today, new ideas are needed. The financial regime is a political system meant to steal the wealth and applied labor of the working class. Because we are dealing with a political regime, rather than a law of nature, the political regime can be changed or overthrown in the very same way humanity came to overthrow the monarchy as a so-called right to rule by the grace of God. God did not appoint the King . . . .really. Just because the King thought and believed in every bone of his body, he had been appointed by God to rule over the peasants did not make it true. Same with the capitalists. Nor does a single payer health care system have to create debt as some kind of law of nature. Government services are meant to create credit on behalf of the people. WL. (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) **************An Excellent Credit Score is 750. See Yours in Just 2 Easy Steps! (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100126575x1221823265x1201398681/aol?redir=http://www.freecreditreport.com/pm/default.aspx?sc=668072&hmpgID=62&bcd=Jun eExcfooterNO62) From cdb1003 at prodigy.net Thu Jun 25 09:25:12 2009 From: cdb1003 at prodigy.net (Charles Brown) Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:25:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] An anti-imperialist perspective Message-ID: <48920.41846.qm@web180110.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Date: Tues, Jun 23 2009 12:45 pm by Julio The passages below are from an old (mid 1970s) document. Some list members will recognize the author. If you don't and are interested in locating the source, please e-mail me off-list. (Between * designates Italics from the author. Between _ designates my emphasis. Unbracketed ellipsis ... indicating quote discontinuity are the author's while bracketed ones [...] are mine.) IMHO, this is one of the most thought-provoking works in the classical Marxist tradition ever written. In the best intellectual tradition of Marx and Engels, the author grappled deeply and seriously with the existing conditions and ideologies, acknowledging their rationales, following their logic to the point where they forced him to a deeper and broader understanding of the issues. Like Marx's best works, it shows readers how a an engaged mind, committed to the struggle, sorts things out. I read it fresh in 1979, almost as soon as its Spanish version became available in Mexico. The first few chapters were divulged first in a short-lived Marxist journal named Teor?a y Pol?tica published by a group of South American exiles. The entire work followed under Alfaguara. I re-read it a few times as an undergrad student in Cuba and discussed it at length with friends from -- I believe -- at least four continents, although I can now see how one-sided my concerns were. While some friends got really agitated about some of the -- IMO rather subsidiary -- propositions advanced in the work, some rendered irrelevant by subsequent developments (the bulk of the work is devoted to a critique of the Soviet socialist formation), the passages below taken on their own have maintained a large measure of relevance (not necessarily validity) all along. The tension at the center of the quoted section below has been splitting Marxists since Marx & Engels's times (e.g. the Irish and Slavic question). On a formal level, the issue reappeared in the late 19th century/early 20th century chasm between the early social-democrats (Lenin, Plekhanov, etc.) and the narodniki. (As shown below, on this matter, Lenin himself experienced a 180 degree turn over his political life. Just keep in mind the early concerns Lenin had about proving the political relevance of the social democracy in Russia in the light of Russia's backwardness. The young Lenin wasn't emphasizing the lack of capitalist development in Russia, but precisely the opposite. Naturally, with his responsibilities as head of the Soviet state, in the middle of a civil war, after a devastating world war, things looked quite differently.) At a deeper level, though, the controversy had intrinsic intellectual roots in Russian history (and other "backward" places), dating back to the conflict between the liberal modernizers and the ancestors of the populists. In their historical essays, E.H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher discussed the matter in some detail. Rosa Luxemburg clashed with the Polish, Galician, and Baltic nationalists on this very issue. Etc. My decision to post these passages in extenso is, of course, prompted by the current debate re. the Mousavi-Ahmedinajad conflict. IMO, the ideological cloak of the anti-imperialist struggle is secondary. The key thing is the social character of the movement and its *objective logic* (if I'm allowed to use that old Hegelian formula). It is of course twisted, ironic and shameful, historically speaking, that the global discredit of Marxism and -- more tragically and decisively -- the mechanical suppression of Marxists and socialists in central Asia and the Middle East (including here repression conducted by the very forces that now appear to lead the anti-imperialist resistance, blemishes and all) have limited its role in the local anti-imperialist struggles, which have turned instead to the ideological straight-jacketed form of political Islam. However, secondary doesn't mean unimportant. If the strictures of the religious integument have dulled beyond a point the anti-imperialism it portends, all bets are off. In that case, the triumph of the popular movement excited by Mir Hossein Mousavi or the aftermath may turn out to be the necessary precondition for a better political framework for the anti-imperialist struggle in Iran. I'd think that the risk has diminished with time, but history shows (including the history of Iran!) that even a large nation has difficulty escaping subordination to imperialism. It's not clear to me from my distance and ignorance whether this is already the case in Iran. It does disturb me to see the excited support that the Mousavi movement has elicited among the always suspect Western establishment. But that's not decisive. I have no answer to the vexing question. The matter is complex. No kidding. The left in, say, the West doesn't need to settle it as a precondition to unite in the local struggles ahead. Nothing human should be alien to us, but too much rancor in disputes that do not strictly pertain to our present and immediate circumstance strike me as a cop out. I'm hoping the quotes below highlight the inherent difficulty of the questions involved and humble us all a little. My mind on this has shifted and will continue to shift. Back and forth. And shifts on this tend to be wide pendulum swings, since many important conclusions follow from each alternative stance. But, "Only dead minds don't oscillate," wrote Isaac Deutscher. For example, during the 1990s, I took some distance from the reasoning below. Stuff related to my own personal trajectory, in Mexico in the early 1990s (after the Soviet Union failed), and then in the U.S. under Clinton. At the time, I remember discounting heavily Chomsky's categorical views on the militaristic slant of U.S. capital with regards to foreign and domestic policy. (In fairness, I'm referring to things Chomsky wrote prompted by the late 1980s Persian Gulf war, which I read with the benefit of the mid 1990s hindsight.) Assuming the inherently antagonistic form in which capitalism dissolves old conditions and introduces new ones, I thought (and still think) that the "neoliberal" globalization offered Mexico and other nations in Latin America a mixed bag that included opportunities for reducing international inequality. It wasn't automatic, but it was possible. In my mind, it was something like a recurrence of the 1850s-1910s expansion of Western capitalism. In Mexico, in the early 1990s, the whole thing appeared as a *political* swing so strong that -- in my thinking -- it had exhaust or weaken itself considerably, as a result of its own inherent contradictions, before the left could have a *political* clear shot. That, of course, didn't imply abandoning all struggles, particular the economic, day-to-day fork-and-knife fights for marginal improvements in the workers' working and living conditions, but the *political* scope of the struggle had to be downgraded or risk a worse backlash. (Clearly, Chavez took the exact opposite approach. He went for the political jugular in 1992. At the time and for a good while, his Quixotic gesture looked foolish to me. But, as history twists and turns, it turned out to be a learning experience for him and Venezuela, without which he and his country wouldn't be were they are now.) Looking at things from the perspective of the mid 1990s, it seemed to me that the vitality shown by the U.S. non-military economy and the whole thrust of the "neoliberal" globalization agenda (as opposed to the "neoconservatism" of the early 2000s) weren't entirely consistent with the view of a predominantly militaristic, parasytic U.S. (and, if I remember well Chomsky's remarks, British) economy. I remember thinking (and I believe I may have posted something about it on one of the usual lists) that we faced a sort of historical bifurcation, where the world train was being switched from the Lenin Track (1914-1989) back to the Marx Track (1850s-1914s). It was either my feverish imagination or the track switch prove not to be very robust since, with the selection of W and the U.S. reaction to 9/11, the train tripped back to the old Lenin Track. Anyway, with time, my views have become more mixed, which doesn't make them very amenable to a small set of categorical statements. Still, I can try to schematize my mental framework in a couple of sweeping statements: At the present time, the biggest danger ahead for humans doesn't arise from environmental decay or turbulent financial markets or even nuclear proliferation per se. These are, no doubt, serious dangers. But, ultimately, the biggest source of trouble lies in the abismal, persistent levels of *inequality*, especially (though not exclusively) international inequality. Imperialism, which continues to provide the current historical form of global capitalism, is an epi-phenomenon of international inequality. If the available data are to be trusted, judged according to this rough criteria, the main forces of progress in the last four or five decades have been Southeast Asia, China, India, and more recently Russia and some parts of Latin America. And the main forces of the historical reaction have remained virtually the same since colonial times: Western Europe and its offshots in other continents. Environmental decay and nuclear weapons are a problem mainly because they are embedded in a context of deeply rooted international inequality, which makes them explosive. Of course things are not so simple, but if I were to put my thought in a simple formula, I'd say that anything that contributes to reducing international inequality is very good and anything that helps increase international inequality is very bad. To which I add the Lincoln Question for reasons that will become obvious below: Whatever historical development is out there, Is it *of, by, and for* the working people? If the answer is no, then it winds up contributing to increasing inequality. And vice versa. (For limitations to the use of the Lincoln Criterion, see my speech at the NY Left Labor Project Collective on 6/11/09.) This is, in short, the rationale of my anti-imperialism. * * * The shifting of the main line of battle from the internal to the external contradictions of imperialism, which is reflected in the slogan "world countryside against the world town," perhaps dubious, but still highly significant, is of the greatest importance for a definition of all other positions in revolutionary programmes today. We must realize that _this was not expected by the classical Marxist tradition_. It has theoretical as well as practical implications for the Marxist conception of history. [...] It was only realistic of Marx to conclude in 1853 that the British rule in India would objectively tackle the task of creating the material foundations for a Western, i.e. capitalist, social order. The question was not "whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton." For while "there cannot ... remain any doubt that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and _infinitely more intensive kind_ than all Hindustan had to suffer before," England had still brought about "the greatest, and, _to speak the truth_, the only *social* revolution ever heard of in Asia." "The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?" But because the history of British rule in India scarcely displayed anything beyond the destruction of the traditional social structure, "The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether." This last mentioned alternative, however, is evidently uncharacteristic of Marx's future perspective, and the outcome of the Indian uprising a few years later proved him right in this. It was also without any further consequences that Engels made a more favourable assessment of the chances of the Taiping movement in China, fighting as this did with more suitable methods. The two friends ultimately held firmly to the general rule with which Marx ended his concluding essay on India: "When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples (*sic*), only then will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar from the skulls of the slain." For Russia, for example, Marx held that such a revolution in the West would actually provide the possibility of a comprehensive social reorganization along the lines of the Chinese people's communes of today. The traditional village communities were to join together on a regional basis, and to take over and apply the industrial achievements of a now socialist West on this broader scale. The same basic position is repeated in Engels' final statement of 1894 on the prospects of the Russian revolution: "However, it is not only possible but inescapable that once the proletariat wins out and the means of production pass into common ownership among the West-European nations, the countries which have just managed to make a start on capitalist production, and where tribal institutions or relics of them are still intact, will be able to use these relics of communal ownership and the corresponding popular customs as a _powerful_ means of considerably shortening their advance to socialist society.... But an inevitable condition of this is the example and active support of the hitherto capitalist West.... And this applies not only to Russia but to all countries at the pre-capitalist stage of development. However, this will be relatively easiest done in Russia, where a part of the native population has already assimilated the intellectual fruits of capitalist development..." The overthrow of Tsarist despotism would "also give a fresh impulse to the labour movement in the West, creating for it new and better conditions for struggle and thereby advancing the victory of the modern industrial proletariat, a victory without which present-day Russia, whether on the basis of the community or of capitalism, cannot achieve a socialist transformation of society." History has furnished a decisive corrective to this original Marxist prognosis. While the capitalist order is already in a third phase of its internal contradictions, _and *moving* in them instead of succumbing to them_, as Marx predicted for its first phase, and Lenin conclusively for its second, many peoples in the precapitalist countries have set out on their own road towards socialism. The proletarian revolution in the West did not take place; and its appearance in the form previously anticipated has become ever more improbable. The nature and character of a revolution are only determined up to a certain point by the programme and heroism of its vanguard, who can only achieve the first steps. The Soviets of 1905 and 1917 continued the Paris Commune, but after them this continuity was broken. Today, adherence to the hope of a classical socialist overthrow in the West must lead to _a pessimism that is actually groundless_. _The revolutions in Russia and China, in the Balkans and in Cuba, have probably contributed not less but rather more to the overall progress than the proletarian revolutions hoped for in the West could have done_. Marxism, in other words, set out on a different journey, via Russia to Asia, Africa and Latin America, a route associated with the names of Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, Nkrumah and Castro. _It represents today something incomparably greater and more diverse than in the era of Marx_, and also in regard to its significance for Europe. It is not a question of its "purity," but rather that it can simply no longer be monopolized as a tool for study and for changing social realities. (The variety of these must be stressed, so as to understand _the differentiation_ of Marxist thought as something *positive*.) Historical materialism itself prohibits us from judging whether conditions in the Soviet Union, People's China, etc. realize "authentic Marxism," though it can explain why the official representatives of the various tendencies struggle for sole possession of the truth. What is authentic is not the letter of theory, but the historical process. If Leninism already represents in its theory, and especially in its practice, a considerable "revision" of the orthodox doctrine, that is the great merit of the founder of the Soviet Union. Lenin's view of the revolutionary possibilities of the Asian peoples was rendered more acute right from the beginning by his understanding of the semi-Asiatic character of social relations in Russia. As early as 1900, when the Russian reactionary and liberal press were accompanying Tsarist participation in the imperialist police action against the so-called Boxer rebellion in China with a campaign of hatred against the barbarian Chinese, those enemies of culture and civilization, Lenin stressed, as he was repeatedly to do later, the similarity of the social problems facing the peoples of Russia and China: "The Chinese people suffer from the same evils as those from which the Russian people suffer -- they suffer from an Asiatic government that squeezes taxes from the starving peasantry and that suppresses every aspiration towards liberty by military force; they suffer from the oppression of capital, which has penetrated into the Middle Kingdom." The term "Asiatic" here describes a specific form of relations of domination. In the same sense, Lenin was later to write: "In very many and very essential respects, Russia is undoubtedly an Asian country and, what is more, one of the most benighted, medieval and shamefully backward of Asian countries." Against the background of this historical affinity, he observed how the Russian revolution of 1905 was followed by very similar events in Turkey, Persia and above all in 1911 in China, while India and Indonesia also began to stir. There could be no doubt, Lenin concluded in 1908, that the European policies of robbery and oppression would steel the Asian peoples for a victorious struggle against their oppressors. The Russian revolution had *two* great international allies, one in Europe (the modern proletariat) and one in Asia. In 1913 he gave an article the significant title "Backward Europe and Advanced Asia," and wrote earlier the same year: "The awakening of Asia and the beginning of the struggle for power by the advanced proletariat of Europe are a symbol of the new phase in world history that began early this century." If the mention of Asia was initially contingent, it indicated none the less the beginning of a shift of emphasis. In considering the historical destiny of Marxism in the same year 1913, Lenin emphasized with respect to the new "source of great world storms opened up in Asia": "It is in this era of storms and their 'repercussions' in Europe that we are now living.... Certain people who were inatentive to the conditions preparing and developing the mass struggle were driven to despair and to anarchism by the lengthy delays in the decisive struggle against capitalism in Europe.... The fact that Asia, with its population of eight hundred million, has been drawn into the struggle for these same European ideals should inspire us with optimism and not despair.... After Asia, Europe has also begun to stir...." Characteristic of Lenin's position is his reference to the way that the philosophical and political slogans of the anti-imperialist liberation struggle derive from the ideals of the bourgeois and the proletarian revolution in Europe. The new role of Asia in no way meant that "light shines only from the mystic, religious East." "No, quite the opposite. It means that the East has definitely taken the Western path," which Russia had itself embarked upon. At least at the theoretical level, Lenin continued to the last to hold the conviction that "the social revolution in Western Europe is maturing before our eyes." But after 1917, while the Bolsheviks _waited passionately_ for the outbreak of the revolution in the West, and in Germany in particular, which was to come to the relief of the Russian October and secure its future, a different orientation came more and more to the fore. In November 1919 Lenin developed the following idea in addressing representatives of the Communist organizations of the East: since the imperialists would not allow the European revolutions to take their course easily and swiftly, and since the "old socialist compromisers are enlisted on the side of the bourgeoisie," "the socialist revolution will not be solely or chiefly a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie -- no -- it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism." The programme of the Russian Communist Party was based on the union of the civil war in the advanced countries with wars of national liberation. "It is self-evident that _final_ victory can be won _only_ by the proletariat of _all the advanced countries_ of the world, and we, the Russians, are beginning the work which the British, French or German proletariat will consolidate. But we see" -- and _this is a completely new formulation_ -- "that they will not be victorious without the aid of the working people of all the oppressed colonial nations, first and foremost, of Eastern nations. We must realize that the transition to communism cannot be accomplished by the vanguard alone." The task Lenin proposes, therefore, is to "translate the true communist doctrine, which was intended for the Communists of the more advanced countries, into the language of every people," and "our Soviet Republic must now muster all the awakening peoples of the East and, together with them, wage a struggle against international imperialism." In March 1923, when he wrote his final testamentary essay, "Better Fewer, but Better," Lenin took a decisive step further. "Shall we be able," he asked, "to hold on with our small and very small peasant production, and in our present state of ruin, until the West-European capitalist countries consummate their development towards socialism?" After surveying the contradictions between the rich imperialist states, he reached the conclusion that "the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe," a majority schooled and trained for the struggle by capitalism itself. He then indicated what he saw as the basic contradiction and central task of the epoch introduced by October: "*To ensure our existence until the next military conflict between the counter-revolutionary imperialist West and the revolutionary and nationalist East, between the most civilized countries of the world and the Oriental backward countries which, however, comprise the majority, this majority must become civilized.* We, too, lack enough civilization to enable us to pass straight on to socialism, although we do have the political requisites for it." Two months earlier he had written: "If a definite level of culture is required for the building of socialism... why cannot we begin by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture _in a revolutionary way_, and *then*, with the aid of the workers' and peasants' government and the Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations?" In this way, therefore, Lenin derived from the enforced circumstances which the Russian revolution had arrived at by its isolation the programmatic basis of subsequent development. For the heroes of the Second International, who charged the Bolsheviks with violating "Marxist orthodoxy," and their imitators of today, Lenin offered the following consideration: "Our European philistines never even dream that the subsequent revolutions in Oriental countries, which possess much vaster populations and a much vaster diversity of social conditions, will undoubtedly display _even greater distinctions_ than the Russian revolution." What singular Leninists, then, are those who would today play schoolmaster to the Chinese revolution, the revolution of a good quarter of humanity! Marx only touched in passing on the question as to how the non-European peoples were to appropriate the achievements of the epoch of private property, i.e. the wealth of Europe with its industrial preconditions. It seems that he did not realize the full implications of either the tremendous material gap or the gap at the level of the subjective factors, the historical human types, between Europe and the colonized sector of the globe. The characteristic drama of the present, which we denote with the abstract term "development," would have been no less a problem if the hopes of the European socialists had been fulfilled -- on the contrary! Both Hegel and Marx liked to refer to the unexpected, unforeseen breakthrough of a historical necessity as the "cunning of reason." Should we not see such a cunning of reason at work in the fact that the masses of the "Third World" have anticipated the revolt of Europe? The peoples of the backward countries today are involved in a race with catastrophe, a catastrophe which could claim far more victims than the molten iron of the Russian revolution -- and needless victims at that. Revolutions such as the Russian and the Chinese are the precondition for victory over hunger. One of the earliest ideas of Marxism, that the "overthrowing" class, or the formerly oppressed classes, needs the revolution _as its own action_, in order _to "rid itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew_," is _nowhere more valid_ than for those doubly oppressed peoples whom capitalism found at a lower stage of social development. What they need is not bread from Canada, but rather bread from Asia, from Africa, and for this they need a new form of life, similarly non-capitalist to that in the Soviet Union and in China. How else are the colonized peoples to overcome their inferiority complex, to find on a massive scale the new consciousness and self-consciousness required for their ascent, except through a revolutionary liberation of their own? The external conditions for this may be favoured by the existence of other socialist powers, but the popular masses of the Southern hemisphere can _in no case_ be freed from outside. What they initially require most of all, for their material reconstruction is _a strong state_, often one that is in many respects despotic, in order really to overcome the inherited inertia. And such a state power can only draw its legitimation and authority from a revolution, and thus put a stop to the decay and corruption characteristic of the old "Asiatic mode of production." This state power *must* be in charge of any "development aid" that comes from outside with technical knowledge, and is therefore always inclined to fall into the old colonial manner. There are very few people like Norman Bethune. That is why state power resulting from liberation must be established _before_ any European advisers proclaim a "*Communaut?*." It must take the same attitude towards advisers of this kind as the young Soviet power did to bourgeois specialists. And if such advisers are now coming from the Soviet Union itself, as well as from other countries tied to it, the same arrangements must apply to them too, until they have given proof of their internationalist solidarity and fraternity. For the history of the liberation movement since the Second World War has proved irrefutably that the pace and the effect of emancipation for the masses depend on the achievement of precisely this state of affairs. Let us try and imagine what the peoples still under pre-capitalist conditions and colonial exploitation would have obtained if the West European proletariat at the turn of the century had anticipated the liberating revolutions outside of Europe. Can we assume that a spirit of human solidarity, the practice of equality towards all who bear the human countenance, would have immediately and unreservedly been achieved? The working classes of Europe are objective participants in colonialism, and this was never without its ideological effects. At the Stuttgart Congress of the Socialist International in 1907, a clause in the draft resolution that the Congress did not condemn all colonial policy on principle, since under socialism this could have a civilizing effect, was rejected by only a narrow majority. Lenin also reported how the attempt was made in the Congress's commission on the colonial question "to ban the immigration of workers from backward countries (coolies -- from China, etc.)." "This is the same spirit of aristocratism," Lenin observed, "that one finds among workers in some of the 'civilized' countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are, therefore, inclined to forget the need for international class solidarity." The immediate, trade-union interests of the Western working classes, who would have developed a considerable need to catch up, both materially and culturally, and would not have been as driven to solidarity from the foreign policy standpoint as was the poor Soviet republic, could have been kept on reins only by the most extreme revolutionary consciousness and selflessness. The bureaucracies of the social-democratic parties and trade unions, however, tended rather to cultivate colonialist prejudices. For the sharpened awareness of the present-day reader, even Frederick Engels' position is not completely free from a certain "expert" European arrogance, as can be seen for example in many of his articles on the Indian insurrection of 1857-9. More than a few authorities of the Western labour movement would have had a good try at teaching the "savage" and "half-civilized" peoples how to behave, and after the first unsuccessful attempts to spread a Protestant work ethic in Asia and Africa, withdrawn angrily like the righteous guardian from his ungrateful ward. The labour bureaucracies were all inclined, at the very least, to an _educational colonialism_. And nothing is more likely than that the peoples affected would have been forced to turn against such hypothetical socialist governments -- even if under somewhat more favourable conditions than before, and with a European left-socialist minority on their side. Above all, we must repeat once more that _these peoples have an unconditional *need to rebel for themselves*, if they are to reshape their society_. They must begin by taking a cultural distance from Europe, even while assimilating its technical achievements. For the export of European civilization is _colonialist to the roots, even if pursued by a workers' government_. Neither Russia nor China would have managed to attack their own problems of development at such pace, with such an unleashing of the human productive forces, if they had not been forced to solve them in revolutionary self-preservation against a hostile environment. If a socialist or communist order, as we have since had to realize, cannot be based on material preconditions that are merely provincial in character, then _the task of overcoming the lack of civilization which Lenin referred to must be fulfilled by the revolutionary peoples themselves, by creating the labour discipline they need in the course of their struggle, this being the major world-historical task in preparing for socialism_. _*With the revolutions in Russia and China, with the revolutionary process in Latin America, in Africa and in India, humanity is taking the shortest route to socialism*_. There, in the "East," the real wretched of this earth have awakened. The role of the working class, who gave the decisive impulse to the Russian revolution and who obviously have a task in Europe, must be seen afresh in this context. Moreover, even their revolution in Europe would not have led directly to the socialism for which Marx hoped, but far more probably to the phenomenal form so familiar to us, which Bakunin already feared from the look of the Prusso-German Social-Democrats and the style of leadership in the International. Time and again, our bureaucratic centralism is explained in terms of Russian backwardness, though _in fact_ this is only responsible for certain excesses. In so far as the hierarchichal apparatus of functionaries of the workers' organizations is the potential state machine, what this is preparing is not a new Paris Commune, but rather a state monopoly freed from capitalism. We can envisage the state monopoly tendency better, a tendency which is coming to form the object of the liberation struggle the world over, if we compare this modern transition period towards classless society with the ancient economic despotism which was the predominant form of entry into class society. This is a further reason why the history and present developmental tendencies in the East are of particular interest to us. We shall see that the character of this epoch, as it develops into the "conflict between the counter-revolutionary imperialist West and the revolutionary and nationalist East," is the present consequence of all former world history. On the essential points, it needs only the further development of the premises already provided by Marx and Engels in their materialist overview of historical evolution. From steiger2001 at centrum.cz Thu Jun 25 10:57:55 2009 From: steiger2001 at centrum.cz (steiger2001 at centrum.cz) Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:57:55 +0200 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] An anti-imperialist perspective In-Reply-To: <48920.41846.qm@web180110.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> References: <48920.41846.qm@web180110.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <200906251857.23239@centrum.cz> Being not of the old list members I would very much appreciate being told the source of this extremely interesting document. Thanks in advance. Stephen Steiger steger2001 at centrum.cz ______________________________________________________________ > Od: cdb1003 at prodigy.net > Komu: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu, a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu > Datum: 25.06.2009 17:29 > P?edm?t: [Marxism-Thaxis] An anti-imperialist perspective > Date: Tues, Jun 23 2009 12:45 pm by Julio The passages below are from an old (mid 1970s) document. ?Some list members will recognize the author. ?If you don't and are interested in locating the source, please e-mail me off-list. ?(Between * designates Italics from the author. ?Between _ designates my emphasis. Unbracketed ellipsis ... indicating quote discontinuity are the author's while bracketed ones [...] are mine.) IMHO, this is one of the most thought-provoking works in the classical Marxist tradition ever written. ?In the best intellectual tradition of Marx and Engels, the author grappled deeply and seriously with the existing conditions and ideologies, acknowledging their rationales, following their logic to the point where they forced him to a deeper and broader understanding of the issues. ?Like Marx's best works, it shows readers how a an engaged mind, committed to the struggle, sorts things out. I read it fresh in 1979, almost as soon as its Spanish version became available in Mexico. ?The first few chapters were divulged first in a short-lived Marxist journal named Teor?a y Pol?tica published by a group of South American exiles. ?The entire work followed under Alfaguara. ?I re-read it a few times as an undergrad student in Cuba and discussed it at length with friends from -- I believe -- at least four continents, although I can now see how one-sided my concerns were. ?While some friends got really agitated about some of the -- IMO rather subsidiary -- propositions advanced in the work, some rendered irrelevant by subsequent developments (the bulk of the work is devoted to a critique of the Soviet socialist formation), the passages below taken on their own have maintained a large measure of relevance (not necessarily validity) all along. The tension at the center of the quoted section below has been splitting Marxists since Marx & Engels's times (e.g. the Irish and Slavic question). ?On a formal level, the issue reappeared in the late 19th century/early 20th century chasm between the early social-democrats (Lenin, Plekhanov, etc.) and the narodniki. ?(As shown below, on this matter, Lenin himself experienced a 180 degree turn over his political life. ?Just keep in mind the early concerns Lenin had about proving the political relevance of the social democracy in Russia in the light of Russia's backwardness. ?The young Lenin wasn't emphasizing the lack of capitalist development in Russia, but precisely the opposite. ?Naturally, with his responsibilities as head of the Soviet state, in the middle of a civil war, after a devastating world war, things looked quite differently.) ?At a deeper level, though, the controversy had intrinsic intellectual roots in Russian history (and other "backward" places), dating back to the conflict between the liberal modernizers and the ancestors of the populists. ?In their historical essays, E.H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher discussed the matter in some detail. ?Rosa Luxemburg clashed with the Polish, Galician, and Baltic nationalists on this very issue. ?Etc. My decision to post these passages in extenso is, of course, prompted by the current debate re. the Mousavi-Ahmedinajad conflict. IMO, the ideological cloak of the anti-imperialist struggle is secondary. ?The key thing is the social character of the movement and its *objective logic* (if I'm allowed to use that old Hegelian formula). ?It is of course twisted, ironic and shameful, historically speaking, that the global discredit of Marxism and -- more tragically and decisively -- the mechanical suppression of Marxists and socialists in central Asia and the Middle East (including here repression conducted by the very forces that now appear to lead the anti-imperialist resistance, blemishes and all) have limited its role in the local anti-imperialist struggles, which have turned instead to the ideological straight-jacketed form of political Islam. However, secondary doesn't mean unimportant. ?If the strictures of the religious integument have dulled beyond a point the anti-imperialism it portends, all bets are off. ?In that case, the triumph of the popular movement excited by Mir Hossein Mousavi or the aftermath may turn out to be the necessary precondition for a better political framework for the anti-imperialist struggle in Iran. ?I'd think that the risk has diminished with time, but history shows (including the history of Iran!) that even a large nation has difficulty escaping subordination to imperialism. ?It's not clear to me from my distance and ignorance whether this is already the case in Iran. ?It does disturb me to see the excited support that the Mousavi movement has elicited among the always suspect Western establishment. ?But that's not decisive. I have no answer to the vexing question. ?The matter is complex. ?No kidding. ?The left in, say, the West doesn't need to settle it as a precondition to unite in the local struggles ahead. ?Nothing human should be alien to us, but too much rancor in disputes that do not strictly pertain to our present and immediate circumstance strike me as a cop out. ?I'm hoping the quotes below highlight the inherent difficulty of the questions involved and humble us all a little. ?My mind on this has shifted and will continue to shift. ?Back and forth. And shifts on this tend to be wide pendulum swings, since many important conclusions follow from each alternative stance. ?But, "Only dead minds don't oscillate," wrote Isaac Deutscher. For example, during the 1990s, I took some distance from the reasoning below. ?Stuff related to my own personal trajectory, in Mexico in the early 1990s (after the Soviet Union failed), and then in the U.S. under Clinton. ?At the time, I remember discounting heavily Chomsky's categorical views on the militaristic slant of U.S. capital with regards to foreign and domestic policy. ?(In fairness, I'm referring to things Chomsky wrote prompted by the late 1980s Persian Gulf war, which I read with the benefit of the mid 1990s hindsight.) Assuming the inherently antagonistic form in which capitalism dissolves old conditions and introduces new ones, I thought (and still think) that the "neoliberal" globalization offered Mexico and other nations in Latin America a mixed bag that included opportunities for reducing international inequality. ?It wasn't automatic, but it was possible. ?In my mind, it was something like a recurrence of the 1850s-1910s expansion of Western capitalism. ?In Mexico, in the early 1990s, the whole thing appeared as a *political* swing so strong that -- in my thinking -- it had exhaust or weaken itself considerably, as a result of its own inherent contradictions, before the left could have a *political* clear shot. ?That, of course, didn't imply abandoning all struggles, particular the economic, day-to-day fork-and-knife fights for marginal improvements in the workers' working and living conditions, but the *political* scope of the struggle had to be downgraded or risk a worse backlash. ?(Clearly, Chavez took the exact opposite approach. ?He went for the political jugular in 1992. ?At the time and for a good while, his Quixotic gesture looked foolish to me. ?But, as history twists and turns, it turned out to be a learning experience for him and Venezuela, without which he and his country wouldn't be were they are now.) Looking at things from the perspective of the mid 1990s, it seemed to me that the vitality shown by the U.S. non-military economy and the whole thrust of the "neoliberal" globalization agenda (as opposed to the "neoconservatism" of the early 2000s) weren't entirely consistent with the view of a predominantly militaristic, parasytic U.S. (and, if I remember well Chomsky's remarks, British) economy. ?I remember thinking (and I believe I may have posted something about it on one of the usual lists) that we faced a sort of historical bifurcation, where the world train was being switched from the Lenin Track (1914-1989) back to the Marx Track (1850s-1914s). It was either my feverish imagination or the track switch prove not to be very robust since, with the selection of W and the U.S. reaction to 9/11, the train tripped back to the old Lenin Track. ?Anyway, with time, my views have become more mixed, which doesn't make them very amenable to a small set of categorical statements. Still, I can try to schematize my mental framework in a couple of sweeping statements: At the present time, the biggest danger ahead for humans doesn't arise from environmental decay or turbulent financial markets or even nuclear proliferation per se. ?These are, no doubt, serious dangers. ?But, ultimately, the biggest source of trouble lies in the abismal, persistent levels of *inequality*, especially (though not exclusively) international inequality. ?Imperialism, which continues to provide the current historical form of global capitalism, is an epi-phenomenon of international inequality. If the available data are to be trusted, judged according to this rough criteria, the main forces of progress in the last four or five decades have been Southeast Asia, China, India, and more recently Russia and some parts of Latin America. ?And the main forces of the historical reaction have remained virtually the same since colonial times: Western Europe and its offshots in other continents. Environmental decay and nuclear weapons are a problem mainly because they are embedded in a context of deeply rooted international inequality, which makes them explosive. ?Of course things are not so simple, but if I were to put my thought in a simple formula, I'd say that anything that contributes to reducing international inequality is very good and anything that helps increase international inequality is very bad. ?To which I add the Lincoln Question for reasons that will become obvious below: Whatever historical development is out there, Is it *of, by, and for* the working people? ?If the answer is no, then it winds up contributing to increasing inequality. ?And vice versa. ?(For limitations to the use of the Lincoln Criterion, see my speech at the NY Left Labor Project Collective on 6/11/09.) This is, in short, the rationale of my anti-imperialism. * ?* ?* The shifting of the main line of battle from the internal to the external contradictions of imperialism, which is reflected in the slogan "world countryside against the world town," perhaps dubious, but still highly significant, is of the greatest importance for a definition of all other positions in revolutionary programmes today. We must realize that _this was not expected by the classical Marxist tradition_. ?It has theoretical as well as practical implications for the Marxist conception of history. ?[...] It was only realistic of Marx to conclude in 1853 that the British rule in India would objectively tackle the task of creating the material foundations for a Western, i.e. capitalist, social order. The question was not "whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton." ?For while "there cannot ... remain any doubt that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and _infinitely more intensive kind_ than all Hindustan had to suffer before," England had still brought about "the greatest, and, _to speak the truth_, the only *social* revolution ever heard of in Asia." ?"The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia?" ?But because the history of British rule in India scarcely displayed anything beyond the destruction of the traditional social structure, "The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether." This last mentioned alternative, however, is evidently uncharacteristic of Marx's future perspective, and the outcome of the Indian uprising a few years later proved him right in this. ?It was also without any further consequences that Engels made a more favourable assessment of the chances of the Taiping movement in China, fighting as this did with more suitable methods. ?The two friends ultimately held firmly to the general rule with which Marx ended his concluding essay on India: "When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples (*sic*), only then will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar from the skulls of the slain." ?For Russia, for example, Marx held that such a revolution in the West would actually provide the possibility of a comprehensive social reorganization along the lines of the Chinese people's communes of today. ?The traditional village communities were to join together on a regional basis, and to take over and apply the industrial achievements of a now socialist West on this broader scale. The same basic position is repeated in Engels' final statement of 1894 on the prospects of the Russian revolution: "However, it is not only possible but inescapable that once the proletariat wins out and the means of production pass into common ownership among the West-European nations, the countries which have just managed to make a start on capitalist production, and where tribal institutions or relics of them are still intact, will be able to use these relics of communal ownership and the corresponding popular customs as a _powerful_ means of considerably shortening their advance to socialist society.... But an inevitable condition of this is the example and active support of the hitherto capitalist West.... And this applies not only to Russia but to all countries at the pre-capitalist stage of development. However, this will be relatively easiest done in Russia, where a part of the native population has already assimilated the intellectual fruits of capitalist development..." ?The overthrow of Tsarist despotism would "also give a fresh impulse to the labour movement in the West, creating for it new and better conditions for struggle and thereby advancing the victory of the modern industrial proletariat, a victory without which present-day Russia, whether on the basis of the community or of capitalism, cannot achieve a socialist transformation of society." History has furnished a decisive corrective to this original Marxist prognosis. ?While the capitalist order is already in a third phase of its internal contradictions, _and *moving* in them instead of succumbing to them_, as Marx predicted for its first phase, and Lenin conclusively for its second, many peoples in the precapitalist countries have set out on their own road towards socialism. ?The proletarian revolution in the West did not take place; and its appearance in the form previously anticipated has become ever more improbable. ?The nature and character of a revolution are only determined up to a certain point by the programme and heroism of its vanguard, who can only achieve the first steps. ?The Soviets of 1905 and 1917 continued the Paris Commune, but after them this continuity was broken. ?Today, adherence to the hope of a classical socialist overthrow in the West must lead to _a pessimism that is actually groundless_. ?_The revolutions in Russia and China, in the Balkans and in Cuba, have probably contributed not less but rather more to the overall progress than the proletarian revolutions hoped for in the West could have done_. Marxism, in other words, set out on a different journey, via Russia to Asia, Africa and Latin America, a route associated with the names of Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, Nkrumah and Castro. ?_It represents today something incomparably greater and more diverse than in the era of Marx_, and also in regard to its significance for Europe. ?It is not a question of its "purity," but rather that it can simply no longer be monopolized as a tool for study and for changing social realities. (The variety of these must be stressed, so as to understand _the differentiation_ of Marxist thought as something *positive*.) Historical materialism itself prohibits us from judging whether conditions in the Soviet Union, People's China, etc. realize "authentic Marxism," though it can explain why the official representatives of the various tendencies struggle for sole possession of the truth. ?What is authentic is not the letter of theory, but the historical process. ?If Leninism already represents in its theory, and especially in its practice, a considerable "revision" of the orthodox doctrine, that is the great merit of the founder of the Soviet Union. Lenin's view of the revolutionary possibilities of the Asian peoples was rendered more acute right from the beginning by his understanding of the semi-Asiatic character of social relations in Russia. ?As early as 1900, when the Russian reactionary and liberal press were accompanying Tsarist participation in the imperialist police action against the so-called Boxer rebellion in China with a campaign of hatred against the barbarian Chinese, those enemies of culture and civilization, Lenin stressed, as he was repeatedly to do later, the similarity of the social problems facing the peoples of Russia and China: "The Chinese people suffer from the same evils as those from which the Russian people suffer -- they suffer from an Asiatic government that squeezes taxes from the starving peasantry and that suppresses every aspiration towards liberty by military force; they suffer from the oppression of capital, which has penetrated into the Middle Kingdom." ?The term "Asiatic" here describes a specific form of relations of domination. ?In the same sense, Lenin was later to write: "In very many and very essential respects, Russia is undoubtedly an Asian country and, what is more, one of the most benighted, medieval and shamefully backward of Asian countries." Against the background of this historical affinity, he observed how the Russian revolution of 1905 was followed by very similar events in Turkey, Persia and above all in 1911 in China, while India and Indonesia also began to stir. ?There could be no doubt, Lenin concluded in 1908, that the European policies of robbery and oppression would steel the Asian peoples for a victorious struggle against their oppressors. ?The Russian revolution had *two* great international allies, one in Europe (the modern proletariat) and one in Asia. ?In 1913 he gave an article the significant title "Backward Europe and Advanced Asia," and wrote earlier the same year: "The awakening of Asia and the beginning of the struggle for power by the advanced proletariat of Europe are a symbol of the new phase in world history that began early this century." ?If the mention of Asia was initially contingent, it indicated none the less the beginning of a shift of emphasis. ?In considering the historical destiny of Marxism in the same year 1913, Lenin emphasized with respect to the new "source of great world storms opened up in Asia": "It is in this era of storms and their 'repercussions' in Europe that we are now living.... ?Certain people who were inatentive to the conditions preparing and developing the mass struggle were driven to despair and to anarchism by the lengthy delays in the decisive struggle against capitalism in Europe.... ?The fact that Asia, with its population of eight hundred million, has been drawn into the struggle for these same European ideals should inspire us with optimism and not despair.... After Asia, Europe has also begun to stir...." Characteristic of Lenin's position is his reference to the way that the philosophical and political slogans of the anti-imperialist liberation struggle derive from the ideals of the bourgeois and the proletarian revolution in Europe. ?The new role of Asia in no way meant that "light shines only from the mystic, religious East." ?"No, quite the opposite. ?It means that the East has definitely taken the Western path," which Russia had itself embarked upon. ?At least at the theoretical level, Lenin continued to the last to hold the conviction that "the social revolution in Western Europe is maturing before our eyes." ?But after 1917, while the Bolsheviks _waited passionately_ for the outbreak of the revolution in the West, and in Germany in particular, which was to come to the relief of the Russian October and secure its future, a different orientation came more and more to the fore. In November 1919 Lenin developed the following idea in addressing representatives of the Communist organizations of the East: since the imperialists would not allow the European revolutions to take their course easily and swiftly, and since the "old socialist compromisers are enlisted on the side of the bourgeoisie," "the socialist revolution will not be solely or chiefly a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie -- no -- it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism." ?The programme of the Russian Communist Party was based on the union of the civil war in the advanced countries with wars of national liberation. ?"It is self-evident that _final_ victory can be won _only_ by the proletariat of _all the advanced countries_ of the world, and we, the Russians, are beginning the work which the British, French or German proletariat will consolidate. ?But we see" -- and _this is a completely new formulation_ -- "that they will not be victorious without the aid of the working people of all the oppressed colonial nations, first and foremost, of Eastern nations. ?We must realize that the transition to communism cannot be accomplished by the vanguard alone." ?The task Lenin proposes, therefore, is to "translate the true communist doctrine, which was intended for the Communists of the more advanced countries, into the language of every people," and "our Soviet Republic must now muster all the awakening peoples of the East and, together with them, wage a struggle against international imperialism." In March 1923, when he wrote his final testamentary essay, "Better Fewer, but Better," Lenin took a decisive step further. ?"Shall we be able," he asked, "to hold on with our small and very small peasant production, and in our present state of ruin, until the West-European capitalist countries consummate their development towards socialism?" After surveying the contradictions between the rich imperialist states, he reached the conclusion that "the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe," a majority schooled and trained for the struggle by capitalism itself. He then indicated what he saw as the basic contradiction and central task of the epoch introduced by October: "*To ensure our existence until the next military conflict between the counter-revolutionary imperialist West and the revolutionary and nationalist East, between the most civilized countries of the world and the Oriental backward countries which, however, comprise the majority, this majority must become civilized.* ?We, too, lack enough civilization to enable us to pass straight on to socialism, although we do have the political requisites for it." ?Two months earlier he had written: "If a definite level of culture is required for the building of socialism... why cannot we begin by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite level of culture _in a revolutionary way_, and *then*, with the aid of the workers' and peasants' government and the Soviet system, proceed to overtake the other nations?" ?In this way, therefore, Lenin derived from the enforced circumstances which the Russian revolution had arrived at by its isolation the programmatic basis of subsequent development. For the heroes of the Second International, who charged the Bolsheviks with violating "Marxist orthodoxy," and their imitators of today, Lenin offered the following consideration: "Our European philistines never even dream that the subsequent revolutions in Oriental countries, which possess much vaster populations and a much vaster diversity of social conditions, will undoubtedly display _even greater distinctions_ than the Russian revolution." ?What singular Leninists, then, are those who would today play schoolmaster to the Chinese revolution, the revolution of a good quarter of humanity! Marx only touched in passing on the question as to how the non-European peoples were to appropriate the achievements of the epoch of private property, i.e. the wealth of Europe with its industrial preconditions. ?It seems that he did not realize the full implications of either the tremendous material gap or the gap at the level of the subjective factors, the historical human types, between Europe and the colonized sector of the globe. ?The characteristic drama of the present, which we denote with the abstract term "development," would have been no less a problem if the hopes of the European socialists had been fulfilled -- on the contrary! ?Both Hegel and Marx liked to refer to the unexpected, unforeseen breakthrough of a historical necessity as the "cunning of reason." ?Should we not see such a cunning of reason at work in the fact that the masses of the "Third World" have anticipated the revolt of Europe? The peoples of the backward countries today are involved in a race with catastrophe, a catastrophe which could claim far more victims than the molten iron of the Russian revolution -- and needless victims at that. ?Revolutions such as the Russian and the Chinese are the precondition for victory over hunger. ?One of the earliest ideas of Marxism, that the "overthrowing" class, or the formerly oppressed classes, needs the revolution _as its own action_, in order _to "rid itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew_," is _nowhere more valid_ than for those doubly oppressed peoples whom capitalism found at a lower stage of social development. What they need is not bread from Canada, but rather bread from Asia, from Africa, and for this they need a new form of life, similarly non-capitalist to that in the Soviet Union and in China. ?How else are the colonized peoples to overcome their inferiority complex, to find on a massive scale the new consciousness and self-consciousness required for their ascent, except through a revolutionary liberation of their own? ?The external conditions for this may be favoured by the existence of other socialist powers, but the popular masses of the Southern hemisphere can _in no case_ be freed from outside. What they initially require most of all, for their material reconstruction is _a strong state_, often one that is in many respects despotic, in order really to overcome the inherited inertia. ?And such a state power can only draw its legitimation and authority from a revolution, and thus put a stop to the decay and corruption characteristic of the old "Asiatic mode of production." ?This state power *must* be in charge of any "development aid" that comes from outside with technical knowledge, and is therefore always inclined to fall into the old colonial manner. ?There are very few people like Norman Bethune. ?That is why state power resulting from liberation must be established _before_ any European advisers proclaim a "*Communaut?*." ?It must take the same attitude towards advisers of this kind as the young Soviet power did to bourgeois specialists. ?And if such advisers are now coming from the Soviet Union itself, as well as from other countries tied to it, the same arrangements must apply to them too, until they have given proof of their internationalist solidarity and fraternity. ?For the history of the liberation movement since the Second World War has proved irrefutably that the pace and the effect of emancipation for the masses depend on the achievement of precisely this state of affairs. Let us try and imagine what the peoples still under pre-capitalist conditions and colonial exploitation would have obtained if the West European proletariat at the turn of the century had anticipated the liberating revolutions outside of Europe. ?Can we assume that a spirit of human solidarity, the practice of equality towards all who bear the human countenance, would have immediately and unreservedly been achieved? ?The working classes of Europe are objective participants in colonialism, and this was never without its ideological effects. ?At the Stuttgart Congress of the Socialist International in 1907, a clause in the draft resolution that the Congress did not condemn all colonial policy on principle, since under socialism this could have a civilizing effect, was rejected by only a narrow majority. ?Lenin also reported how the attempt was made in the Congress's commission on the colonial question "to ban the immigration of workers from backward countries (coolies -- from China, etc.)." ?"This is the same spirit of aristocratism," Lenin observed, "that one finds among workers in some of the 'civilized' countries, who derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are, therefore, inclined to forget the need for international class solidarity." The immediate, trade-union interests of the Western working classes, who would have developed a considerable need to catch up, both materially and culturally, and would not have been as driven to solidarity from the foreign policy standpoint as was the poor Soviet republic, could have been kept on reins only by the most extreme revolutionary consciousness and selflessness. ?The bureaucracies of the social-democratic parties and trade unions, however, tended rather to cultivate colonialist prejudices. ?For the sharpened awareness of the present-day reader, even Frederick Engels' position is not completely free from a certain "expert" European arrogance, as can be seen for example in many of his articles on the Indian insurrection of 1857-9. ?More than a few authorities of the Western labour movement would have had a good try at teaching the "savage" and "half-civilized" peoples how to behave, and after the first unsuccessful attempts to spread a Protestant work ethic in Asia and Africa, withdrawn angrily like the righteous guardian from his ungrateful ward. ?The labour bureaucracies were all inclined, at the very least, to an _educational colonialism_. ?And nothing is more likely than that the peoples affected would have been forced to turn against such hypothetical socialist governments -- even if under somewhat more favourable conditions than before, and with a European left-socialist minority on their side. Above all, we must repeat once more that _these peoples have an unconditional *need to rebel for themselves*, if they are to reshape their society_. ?They must begin by taking a cultural distance from Europe, even while assimilating its technical achievements. ?For the export of European civilization is _colonialist to the roots, even if pursued by a workers' government_. ?Neither Russia nor China would have managed to attack their own problems of development at such pace, with such an unleashing of the human productive forces, if they had not been forced to solve them in revolutionary self-preservation against a hostile environment. If a socialist or communist order, as we have since had to realize, cannot be based on material preconditions that are merely provincial in character, then _the task of overcoming the lack of civilization which Lenin referred to must be fulfilled by the revolutionary peoples themselves, by creating the labour discipline they need in the course of their struggle, this being the major world-historical task in preparing for socialism_. _*With the revolutions in Russia and China, with the revolutionary process in Latin America, in Africa and in India, humanity is taking the shortest route to socialism*_. ?There, in the "East," the real wretched of this earth have awakened. ?The role of the working class, who gave the decisive impulse to the Russian revolution and who obviously have a task in Europe, must be seen afresh in this context. ?Moreover, even their revolution in Europe would not have led directly to the socialism for which Marx hoped, but far more probably to the phenomenal form so familiar to us, which Bakunin already feared from the look of the Prusso-German Social-Democrats and the style of leadership in the International. Time and again, our bureaucratic centralism is explained in terms of Russian backwardness, though _in fact_ this is only responsible for certain excesses. ?In so far as the hierarchichal apparatus of functionaries of the workers' organizations is the potential state machine, what this is preparing is not a new Paris Commune, but rather a state monopoly freed from capitalism. We can envisage the state monopoly tendency better, a tendency which is coming to form the object of the liberation struggle the world over, if we compare this modern transition period towards classless society with the ancient economic despotism which was the predominant form of entry into class society. ?This is a further reason why the history and present developmental tendencies in the East are of particular interest to us. ?We shall see that the character of this epoch, as it develops into the "conflict between the counter-revolutionary imperialist West and the revolutionary and nationalist East," is the present consequence of all former world history. ?On the essential points, it needs only the further development of the premises already provided by Marx and Engels in their materialist overview of historical evolution. _______________________________________________ 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 cb31450 at gmail.com Thu Jun 25 14:41:22 2009 From: cb31450 at gmail.com (c b) Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:41:22 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] An anti-imperialist perspective In-Reply-To: <200906251857.23239@centrum.cz> References: <48920.41846.qm@web180110.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> <200906251857.23239@centrum.cz> Message-ID: <5c2e4d230906251341k82b27d6pc7383fe836b23449@mail.gmail.com> The comment is by a comrade from another list. I'll ask him On 6/25/09, steiger2001 at centrum.cz wrote: > Being not of the old list members I would very much appreciate being told the source of this extremely interesting document. Thanks in advance. > Stephen Steiger steger2001 at centrum.cz > ______________________________________________________________ > > Od: cdb1003 at prodigy.net > > Komu: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu, a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu > > Datum: 25.06.2009 17:29 > > P?edm?t: [Marxism-Thaxis] An anti-imperialist perspective > > > > Date: Tues, Jun 23 2009 12:45 pm by Julio > > The passages below are from an old (mid 1970s) document. Some list > members will recognize the author. If you don't and are interested in > locating the source, please e-mail me off-list. (Between * designates > Italics from the author. Between _ designates my emphasis. > Unbracketed ellipsis ... indicating quote discontinuity are the > author's while bracketed ones [...] are mine.) > > IMHO, this is one of the most thought-provoking works in the classical > Marxist tradition ever written. In the best intellectual tradition of > Marx and Engels, the author grappled deeply and seriously with the > existing conditions and ideologies, acknowledging their rationales, > following their logic to the point where they forced him to a deeper > and broader understanding of the issues. Like Marx's best works, it > shows readers how a an engaged mind, committed to the struggle, sorts > things out. > > I read it fresh in 1979, almost as soon as its Spanish version became > available in Mexico. The first few chapters were divulged first in a > short-lived Marxist journal named Teor?a y Pol?tica published by a > group of South American exiles. The entire work followed under > Alfaguara. I re-read it a few times as an undergrad student in Cuba > and discussed it at length with friends from -- I believe -- at least > four continents, although I can now see how one-sided my concerns > were. While some friends got really agitated about some of the -- IMO > rather subsidiary -- propositions advanced in the work, some rendered > irrelevant by subsequent developments (the bulk of the work is devoted > to a critique of the Soviet socialist formation), the passages below > taken on their own have maintained a large measure of relevance (not > necessarily validity) all along. > > The tension at the center of the quoted section below has been > splitting Marxists since Marx & Engels's times (e.g. the Irish and > Slavic question). On a formal level, the issue reappeared in the late > 19th century/early 20th century chasm between the early > social-democrats (Lenin, Plekhanov, etc.) and the narodniki. (As > shown below, on this matter, Lenin himself experienced a 180 degree > turn over his political life. Just keep in mind the early concerns > Lenin had about proving the political relevance of the social > democracy in Russia in the light of Russia's backwardness. The young > Lenin wasn't emphasizing the lack of capitalist development in Russia, > but precisely the opposite. Naturally, with his responsibilities as > head of the Soviet state, in the middle of a civil war, after a > devastating world war, things looked quite differently.) At a deeper > level, though, the controversy had intrinsic intellectual roots in > Russian history (and other "backward" places), dating back to the > conflict between the liberal modernizers and the ancestors of the > populists. In their historical essays, E.H. Carr and Isaac Deutscher > discussed the matter in some detail. Rosa Luxemburg clashed with the > Polish, Galician, and Baltic nationalists on this very issue. Etc. > > My decision to post these passages in extenso is, of course, prompted > by the current debate re. the Mousavi-Ahmedinajad conflict. > > IMO, the ideological cloak of the anti-imperialist struggle is > secondary. The key thing is the social character of the movement and > its *objective logic* (if I'm allowed to use that old Hegelian > formula). It is of course twisted, ironic and shameful, historically > speaking, that the global discredit of Marxism and -- more tragically > and decisively -- the mechanical suppression of Marxists and > socialists in central Asia and the Middle East (including here > repression conducted by the very forces that now appear to lead the > anti-imperialist resistance, blemishes and all) have limited its role > in the local anti-imperialist struggles, which have turned instead to > the ideological straight-jacketed form of political Islam. > > However, secondary doesn't mean unimportant. If the strictures of the > religious integument have dulled beyond a point the anti-imperialism > it portends, all bets are off. In that case, the triumph of the > popular movement excited by Mir Hossein Mousavi or the aftermath may > turn out to be the necessary precondition for a better political > framework for the anti-imperialist struggle in Iran. I'd think that > the risk has diminished with time, but history shows (including the > history of Iran!) that even a large nation has difficulty escaping > subordination to imperialism. It's not clear to me from my distance > and ignorance whether this is already the case in Iran. It does > disturb me to see the excited support that the Mousavi movement has > elicited among the always suspect Western establishment. But that's > not decisive. > > I have no answer to the vexing question. The matter is complex. No > kidding. The left in, say, the West doesn't need to settle it as a > precondition to unite in the local struggles ahead. Nothing human > should be alien to us, but too much rancor in disputes that do not > strictly pertain to our present and immediate circumstance strike me > as a cop out. I'm hoping the quotes below highlight the inherent > difficulty of the questions involved and humble us all a little. My > mind on this has shifted and will continue to shift. Back and forth. > And shifts on this tend to be wide pendulum swings, since many > important conclusions follow from each alternative stance. But, "Only > dead minds don't oscillate," wrote Isaac Deutscher. > > For example, during the 1990s, I took some distance from the reasoning > below. Stuff related to my own personal trajectory, in Mexico in the > early 1990s (after the Soviet Union failed), and then in the U.S. > under Clinton. At the time, I remember discounting heavily Chomsky's > categorical views on the militaristic slant of U.S. capital with > regards to foreign and domestic policy. (In fairness, I'm referring > to things Chomsky wrote prompted by the late 1980s Persian Gulf war, > which I read with the benefit of the mid 1990s hindsight.) > > Assuming the inherently antagonistic form in which capitalism > dissolves old conditions and introduces new ones, I thought (and still > think) that the "neoliberal" globalization offered Mexico and other > nations in Latin America a mixed bag that included opportunities for > reducing international inequality. It wasn't automatic, but it was > possible. In my mind, it was something like a recurrence of the > 1850s-1910s expansion of Western capitalism. In Mexico, in the early > 1990s, the whole thing appeared as a *political* swing so strong that > -- in my thinking -- it had exhaust or weaken itself considerably, as > a result of its own inherent contradictions, before the left could > have a *political* clear shot. That, of course, didn't imply > abandoning all struggles, particular the economic, day-to-day > fork-and-knife fights for marginal improvements in the workers' > working and living conditions, but the *political* scope of the > struggle had to be downgraded or risk a worse backlash. (Clearly, > Chavez took the exact opposite approach. He went for the political > jugular in 1992. At the time and for a good while, his Quixotic > gesture looked foolish to me. But, as history twists and turns, it > turned out to be a learning experience for him and Venezuela, without > which he and his country wouldn't be were they are now.) > > Looking at things from the perspective of the mid 1990s, it seemed to > me that the vitality shown by the U.S. non-military economy and the > whole thrust of the "neoliberal" globalization agenda (as opposed to > the "neoconservatism" of the early 2000s) weren't entirely consistent > with the view of a predominantly militaristic, parasytic U.S. (and, if > I remember well Chomsky's remarks, British) economy. I remember > thinking (and I believe I may have posted something about it on one of > the usual lists) that we faced a sort of historical bifurcation, where > the world train was being switched from the Lenin Track (1914-1989) > back to the Marx Track (1850s-1914s). > > It was either my feverish imagination or the track switch prove not to > be very robust since, with the selection of W and the U.S. reaction to > 9/11, the train tripped back to the old Lenin Track. Anyway, with > time, my views have become more mixed, which doesn't make them very > amenable to a small set of categorical statements. > > Still, I can try to schematize my mental framework in a couple of > sweeping statements: At the present time, the biggest danger ahead for > humans doesn't arise from environmental decay or turbulent financial > markets or even nuclear proliferation per se. These are, no doubt, > serious dangers. But, ultimately, the biggest source of trouble lies > in the abismal, persistent levels of *inequality*, especially (though > not exclusively) international inequality. Imperialism, which > continues to provide the current historical form of global capitalism, > is an epi-phenomenon of international inequality. If the available > data are to be trusted, judged according to this rough criteria, the > main forces of progress in the last four or five decades have been > Southeast Asia, China, India, and more recently Russia and some parts > of Latin America. And the main forces of the historical reaction have > remained virtually the same since colonial times: Western Europe and > its offshots in other continents. > > Environmental decay and nuclear weapons are a problem mainly because > they are embedded in a context of deeply rooted international > inequality, which makes them explosive. Of course things are not so > simple, but if I were to put my thought in a simple formula, I'd say > that anything that contributes to reducing international inequality is > very good and anything that helps increase international inequality is > very bad. To which I add the Lincoln Question for reasons that will > become obvious below: Whatever historical development is out there, Is > it *of, by, and for* the working people? If the answer is no, then it > winds up contributing to increasing inequality. And vice versa. (For > limitations to the use of the Lincoln Criterion, see my speech at the > NY Left Labor Project Collective on 6/11/09.) > > This is, in short, the rationale of my anti-imperialism. > > * * * > > The shifting of the main line of battle from the internal to the > external contradictions of imperialism, which is reflected in the > slogan "world countryside against the world town," perhaps dubious, > but still highly significant, is of the greatest importance for a > definition of all other positions in revolutionary programmes today. > We must realize that _this was not expected by the classical Marxist > tradition_. It has theoretical as well as practical implications for > the Marxist conception of history. [...] > > It was only realistic of Marx to conclude in 1853 that the British > rule in India would objectively tackle the task of creating the > material foundations for a Western, i.e. capitalist, social order. > The question was not "whether the English had a right to conquer > India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by > the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton." For > while "there cannot ... remain any doubt that the misery inflicted by > the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and > _infinitely more intensive kind_ than all Hindustan had to suffer > before," England had still brought about "the greatest, and, _to speak > the truth_, the only *social* revolution ever heard of in Asia." "The > question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental > revolution in the social state of Asia?" But because the history of > British rule in India scarcely displayed anything beyond the > destruction of the traditional social structure, "The Indians will not > reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by > the British bourgeoisie till in Great Britain itself the now ruling > classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or > till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off > the English yoke altogether." > > This last mentioned alternative, however, is evidently > uncharacteristic of Marx's future perspective, and the outcome of the > Indian uprising a few years later proved him right in this. It was > also without any further consequences that Engels made a more > favourable assessment of the chances of the Taiping movement in China, > fighting as this did with more suitable methods. The two friends > ultimately held firmly to the general rule with which Marx ended his > concluding essay on India: "When a great social revolution shall have > mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world > and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common > control of the most advanced peoples (*sic*), only then will human > progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not > drink the nectar from the skulls of the slain." For Russia, for > example, Marx held that such a revolution in the West would actually > provide the possibility of a comprehensive social reorganization along > the lines of the Chinese people's communes of today. The traditional > village communities were to join together on a regional basis, and to > take over and apply the industrial achievements of a now socialist > West on this broader scale. > > The same basic position is repeated in Engels' final statement of 1894 > on the prospects of the Russian revolution: "However, it is not only > possible but inescapable that once the proletariat wins out and the > means of production pass into common ownership among the West-European > nations, the countries which have just managed to make a start on > capitalist production, and where tribal institutions or relics of them > are still intact, will be able to use these relics of communal > ownership and the corresponding popular customs as a _powerful_ means > of considerably shortening their advance to socialist society.... But > an inevitable condition of this is the example and active support of > the hitherto capitalist West.... And this applies not only to Russia > but to all countries at the pre-capitalist stage of development. > However, this will be relatively easiest done in Russia, where a part > of the native population has already assimilated the intellectual > fruits of capitalist development..." The overthrow of Tsarist > despotism would "also give a fresh impulse to the labour movement in > the West, creating for it new and better conditions for struggle and > thereby advancing the victory of the modern industrial proletariat, a > victory without which present-day Russia, whether on the basis of the > community or of capitalism, cannot achieve a socialist transformation > of society." > > History has furnished a decisive corrective to this original Marxist > prognosis. While the capitalist order is already in a third phase of > its internal contradictions, _and *moving* in them instead of > succumbing to them_, as Marx predicted for its first phase, and Lenin > conclusively for its second, many peoples in the precapitalist > countries have set out on their own road towards socialism. The > proletarian revolution in the West did not take place; and its > appearance in the form previously anticipated has become ever more > improbable. The nature and character of a revolution are only > determined up to a certain point by the programme and heroism of its > vanguard, who can only achieve the first steps. The Soviets of 1905 > and 1917 continued the Paris Commune, but after them this continuity > was broken. Today, adherence to the hope of a classical socialist > overthrow in the West must lead to _a pessimism that is actually > groundless_. _The revolutions in Russia and China, in the Balkans and > in Cuba, have probably contributed not less but rather more to the > overall progress than the proletarian revolutions hoped for in the > West could have done_. > > Marxism, in other words, set out on a different journey, via Russia to > Asia, Africa and Latin America, a route associated with the names of > Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, Nkrumah and Castro. _It represents today > something incomparably greater and more diverse than in the era of > Marx_, and also in regard to its significance for Europe. It is not a > question of its "purity," but rather that it can simply no longer be > monopolized as a tool for study and for changing social realities. > (The variety of these must be stressed, so as to understand _the > differentiation_ of Marxist thought as something *positive*.) > Historical materialism itself prohibits us from judging whether > conditions in the Soviet Union, People's China, etc. realize > "authentic Marxism," though it can explain why the official > representatives of the various tendencies struggle for sole possession > of the truth. What is authentic is not the letter of theory, but the > historical process. If Leninism already represents in its theory, and > especially in its practice, a considerable "revision" of the orthodox > doctrine, that is the great merit of the founder of the Soviet Union. > > Lenin's view of the revolutionary possibilities of the Asian peoples > was rendered more acute right from the beginning by his understanding > of the semi-Asiatic character of social relations in Russia. As early > as 1900, when the Russian reactionary and liberal press were > accompanying Tsarist participation in the imperialist police action > against the so-called Boxer rebellion in China with a campaign of > hatred against the barbarian Chinese, those enemies of culture and > civilization, Lenin stressed, as he was repeatedly to do later, the > similarity of the social problems facing the peoples of Russia and > China: "The Chinese people suffer from the same evils as those from > which the Russian people suffer -- they suffer from an Asiatic > government that squeezes taxes from the starving peasantry and that > suppresses every aspiration towards liberty by military force; they > suffer from the oppression of capital, which has penetrated into the > Middle Kingdom." The term "Asiatic" here describes a specific form of > relations of domination. In the same sense, Lenin was later to write: > "In very many and very essential respects, Russia is undoubtedly an > Asian country and, what is more, one of the most benighted, medieval > and shamefully backward of Asian countries." > > Against the background of this historical affinity, he observed how > the Russian revolution of 1905 was followed by very similar events in > Turkey, Persia and above all in 1911 in China, while India and > Indonesia also began to stir. There could be no doubt, Lenin > concluded in 1908, that the European policies of robbery and > oppression would steel the Asian peoples for a victorious struggle > against their oppressors. The Russian revolution had *two* great > international allies, one in Europe (the modern proletariat) and one > in Asia. In 1913 he gave an article the significant title "Backward > Europe and Advanced Asia," and wrote earlier the same year: "The > awakening of Asia and the beginning of the struggle for power by the > advanced proletariat of Europe are a symbol of the new phase in world > history that began early this century." If the mention of Asia was > initially contingent, it indicated none the less the beginning of a > shift of emphasis. In considering the historical destiny of Marxism > in the same year 1913, Lenin emphasized with respect to the new > "source of great world storms opened up in Asia": "It is in this era > of storms and their 'repercussions' in Europe that we are now > living.... Certain people who were inatentive to the conditions > preparing and developing the mass struggle were driven to despair and > to anarchism by the lengthy delays in the decisive struggle against > capitalism in Europe.... The fact that Asia, with its population of > eight hundred million, has been drawn into the struggle for these same > European ideals should inspire us with optimism and not despair.... > After Asia, Europe has also begun to stir...." > > Characteristic of Lenin's position is his reference to the way that > the philosophical and political slogans of the anti-imperialist > liberation struggle derive from the ideals of the bourgeois and the > proletarian revolution in Europe. The new role of Asia in no way > meant that "light shines only from the mystic, religious East." "No, > quite the opposite. It means that the East has definitely taken the > Western path," which Russia had itself embarked upon. At least at the > theoretical level, Lenin continued to the last to hold the conviction > that "the social revolution in Western Europe is maturing before our > eyes." But after 1917, while the Bolsheviks _waited passionately_ for > the outbreak of the revolution in the West, and in Germany in > particular, which was to come to the relief of the Russian October and > secure its future, a different orientation came more and more to the > fore. > > In November 1919 Lenin developed the following idea in addressing > representatives of the Communist organizations of the East: since the > imperialists would not allow the European revolutions to take their > course easily and swiftly, and since the "old socialist compromisers > are enlisted on the side of the bourgeoisie," "the socialist > revolution will not be solely or chiefly a struggle of the > revolutionary proletarians in each country against their bourgeoisie > -- no -- it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed > colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against > international imperialism." The programme of the Russian Communist > Party was based on the union of the civil war in the advanced > countries with wars of national liberation. "It is self-evident that > _final_ victory can be won _only_ by the proletariat of _all the > advanced countries_ of the world, and we, the Russians, are beginning > the work which the British, French or German proletariat will > consolidate. But we see" -- and _this is a completely new > formulation_ -- "that they will not be victorious without the aid of > the working people of all the oppressed colonial nations, first and > foremost, of Eastern nations. We must realize that the transition to > communism cannot be accomplished by the vanguard alone." The task > Lenin proposes, therefore, is to "translate the true communist > doctrine, which was intended for the Communists of the more advanced > countries, into the language of every people," and "our Soviet > Republic must now muster all the awakening peoples of the East and, > together with them, wage a struggle against international > imperialism." > > In March 1923, when he wrote his final testamentary essay, "Better > Fewer, but Better," Lenin took a decisive step further. "Shall we be > able," he asked, "to hold on with our small and very small peasant > production, and in our present state of ruin, until the West-European > capitalist countries consummate their development towards socialism?" > After surveying the contradictions between the rich imperialist > states, he reached the conclusion that "the outcome of the struggle > will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., > account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe," > a majority schooled and trained for the struggle by capitalism itself. > He then indicated what he saw as the basic contradiction and central > task of the epoch introduced by October: "*To ensure our existence > until the next military conflict between the counter-revolutionary > imperialist West and the revolutionary and nationalist East, between > the most civilized countries of the world and the Oriental backward > countries which, however, comprise the majority, this majority must > become civilized.* We, too, lack enough civilization to enable us to > pass straight on to socialism, although we do have the political > requisites for it." Two months earlier he had written: "If a definite > level of culture is required for the building of socialism... why > cannot we begin by first achieving the prerequisites for that definite > level of culture _in a revolutionary way_, and *then*, with the aid of > the workers' and peasants' government and the Soviet system, proceed > to overtake the other nations?" In this way, therefore, Lenin derived > from the enforced circumstances which the Russian revolution had > arrived at by its isolation the programmatic basis of subsequent > development. > > For the heroes of the Second International, who charged the Bolsheviks > with violating "Marxist orthodoxy," and their imitators of today, > Lenin offered the following consideration: "Our European philistines > never even dream that the subsequent revolutions in Oriental > countries, which possess much vaster populations and a much vaster > diversity of social conditions, will undoubtedly display _even greater > distinctions_ than the Russian revolution." What singular Leninists, > then, are those who would today play schoolmaster to the Chinese > revolution, the revolution of a good quarter of humanity! > > Marx only touched in passing on the question as to how the > non-European peoples were to appropriate the achievements of the epoch > of private property, i.e. the wealth of Europe with its industrial > preconditions. It seems that he did not realize the full implications > of either the tremendous material gap or the gap at the level of the > subjective factors, the historical human types, between Europe and the > colonized sector of the globe. The characteristic drama of the > present, which we denote with the abstract term "development," would > have been no less a problem if the hopes of the European socialists > had been fulfilled -- on the contrary! Both Hegel and Marx liked to > refer to the unexpected, unforeseen breakthrough of a historical > necessity as the "cunning of reason." Should we not see such a > cunning of reason at work in the fact that the masses of the "Third > World" have anticipated the revolt of Europe? > > The peoples of the backward countries today are involved in a race > with catastrophe, a catastrophe which could claim far more victims > than the molten iron of the Russian revolution -- and needless victims > at that. Revolutions such as the Russian and the Chinese are the > precondition for victory over hunger. One of the earliest ideas of > Marxism, that the "overthrowing" class, or the formerly oppressed > classes, needs the revolution _as its own action_, in order _to "rid > itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society > anew_," is _nowhere more valid_ than for those doubly oppressed > peoples whom capitalism found at a lower stage of social development. > What they need is not bread from Canada, but rather bread from Asia, > from Africa, and for this they need a new form of life, similarly > non-capitalist to that in the Soviet Union and in China. How else are > the colonized peoples to overcome their inferiority complex, to find > on a massive scale the new consciousness and self-consciousness > required for their ascent, except through a revolutionary liberation > of their own? The external conditions for this may be favoured by the > existence of other socialist powers, but the popular masses of the > Southern hemisphere can _in no case_ be freed from outside. > > What they initially require most of all, for their material > reconstruction is _a strong state_, often one that is in many respects > despotic, in order really to overcome the inherited inertia. And such > a state power can only draw its legitimation and authority from a > revolution, and thus put a stop to the decay and corruption > characteristic of the old "Asiatic mode of production." This state > power *must* be in charge of any "development aid" that comes from > outside with technical knowledge, and is therefore always inclined to > fall into the old colonial manner. There are very few people like > Norman Bethune. That is why state power resulting from liberation > must be established _before_ any European advisers proclaim a > "*Communaut?*." It must take the same attitude towards advisers of > this kind as the young Soviet power did to bourgeois specialists. And > if such advisers are now coming from the Soviet Union itself, as well > as from other countries tied to it, the same arrangements must apply > to them too, until they have given proof of their internationalist > solidarity and fraternity. For the history of the liberation movement > since the Second World War has proved irrefutably that the pace and > the effect of emancipation for the masses depend on the achievement of > precisely this state of affairs. > > Let us try and imagine what the peoples still under pre-capitalist > conditions and colonial exploitation would have obtained if the West > European proletariat at the turn of the century had anticipated the > liberating revolutions outside of Europe. Can we assume that a spirit > of human solidarity, the practice of equality towards all who bear the > human countenance, would have immediately and unreservedly been > achieved? The working classes of Europe are objective participants in > colonialism, and this was never without its ideological effects. At > the Stuttgart Congress of the Socialist International in 1907, a > clause in the draft resolution that the Congress did not condemn all > colonial policy on principle, since under socialism this could have a > civilizing effect, was rejected by only a narrow majority. Lenin also > reported how the attempt was made in the Congress's commission on the > colonial question "to ban the immigration of workers from backward > countries (coolies -- from China, etc.)." "This is the same spirit of > aristocratism," Lenin observed, "that one finds among workers in some > of the 'civilized' countries, who derive certain advantages from their > privileged position, and are, therefore, inclined to forget the need > for international class solidarity." > > The immediate, trade-union interests of the Western working classes, > who would have developed a considerable need to catch up, both > materially and culturally, and would not have been as driven to > solidarity from the foreign policy standpoint as was the poor Soviet > republic, could have been kept on reins only by the most extreme > revolutionary consciousness and selflessness. The bureaucracies of > the social-democratic parties and trade unions, however, tended rather > to cultivate colonialist prejudices. For the sharpened awareness of > the present-day reader, even Frederick Engels' position is not > completely free from a certain "expert" European arrogance, as can be > seen for example in many of his articles on the Indian insurrection of > 1857-9. More than a few authorities of the Western labour movement > would have had a good try at teaching the "savage" and > "half-civilized" peoples how to behave, and after the first > unsuccessful attempts to spread a Protestant work ethic in Asia and > Africa, withdrawn angrily like the righteous guardian from his > ungrateful ward. The labour bureaucracies were all inclined, at the > very least, to an _educational colonialism_. And nothing is more > likely than that the peoples affected would have been forced to turn > against such hypothetical socialist governments -- even if under > somewhat more favourable conditions than before, and with a European > left-socialist minority on their side. > > Above all, we must repeat once more that _these peoples have an > unconditional *need to rebel for themselves*, if they are to reshape > their society_. They must begin by taking a cultural distance from > Europe, even while assimilating its technical achievements. For the > export of European civilization is _colonialist to the roots, even if > pursued by a workers' government_. Neither Russia nor China would > have managed to attack their own problems of development at such pace, > with such an unleashing of the human productive forces, if they had > not been forced to solve them in revolutionary self-preservation > against a hostile environment. > > If a socialist or communist order, as we have since had to realize, > cannot be based on material preconditions that are merely provincial > in character, then _the task of overcoming the lack of civilization > which Lenin referred to must be fulfilled by the revolutionary peoples > themselves, by creating the labour discipline they need in the course > of their struggle, this being the major world-historical task in > preparing for socialism_. _*With the revolutions in Russia and China, > with the revolutionary process in Latin America, in Africa and in > India, humanity is taking the shortest route to socialism*_. There, > in the "East," the real wretched of this earth have awakened. The > role of the working class, who gave the decisive impulse to the > Russian revolution and who obviously have a task in Europe, must be > seen afresh in this context. Moreover, even their revolution in > Europe would not have led directly to the socialism for which Marx > hoped, but far more probably to the phenomenal form so familiar to us, > which Bakunin already feared from the look of the Prusso-German > Social-Democrats and the style of leadership in the International. > Time and again, our bureaucratic centralism is explained in terms of > Russian backwardness, though _in fact_ this is only responsible for > certain excesses. In so far as the hierarchichal apparatus of > functionaries of the workers' organizations is the potential state > machine, what this is preparing is not a new Paris Commune, but rather > a state monopoly freed from capitalism. > > We can envisage the state monopoly tendency better, a tendency which > is coming to form the object of the liberation struggle the world > over, if we compare this modern transition period towards classless > society with the ancient economic despotism which was the predominant > form of entry into class society. This is a further reason why the > history and present developmental tendencies in the East are of > particular interest to us. We shall see that the character of this > epoch, as it develops into the "conflict between the > counter-revolutionary imperialist West and the revolutionary and > nationalist East," is the present consequence of all former world > history. On the essential points, it needs only the further > development of the premises already provided by Marx and Engels in > their materialist overview of historical evolution. > > > > _______________________________________________ > 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 farmelantj at juno.com Fri Jun 26 21:37:57 2009 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:37:57 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Article on "New Atheism (and 'New Humanism')" Message-ID: <20090626.233758.2104.1.farmelantj@juno.com> My article, "New Atheism (and 'New Humanism')" has been published in the latest issue of the journal, Religious Humanism (Fall 2008), which is put put by the HUUmanists, a group that represents the humanist, non-theistic wing of the Unitarian-Universalists. Alas, the journal consistently mispells my name as Farmalant, rather than Farmelant. The same article had appeared last year in the German humanist journal, Aufkl?rung und Kritik (http://www.gkpn.de/Farmelant_Atheismus.pdf). The Germans, of course, spelled my name correctly. Jim Farmelant ____________________________________________________________ Senior Dating Online. Click Now! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTQbQYhLzH1uts2GJoESAdmcL3GAHSlPPte6683p65xOnQOVQGeX9u/ From karldallas at f2s.com Sat Jun 27 12:55:56 2009 From: karldallas at f2s.com (Karl Dallas) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:55:56 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 68, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: <2418689.1246125842828.JavaMail.root@n19> References: <2418689.1246125842828.JavaMail.root@n19> Message-ID: Where can we read this article in English? 2009/6/27 > Send Marxism-Thaxis mailing list submissions to > marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > marxism-thaxis-request at lists.econ.utah.edu > > You can reach the person managing the list at > marxism-thaxis-owner at lists.econ.utah.edu > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of Marxism-Thaxis digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Article on "New Atheism (and 'New Humanism')" (Jim Farmelant) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:37:57 -0400 > From: Jim Farmelant > Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Article on "New Atheism (and 'New > Humanism')" > To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org,marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu, > marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu > Message-ID: <20090626.233758.2104.1.farmelantj at juno.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 > > > > > My article, "New Atheism (and 'New Humanism')" has been published in the > latest issue of the journal, Religious Humanism (Fall 2008), which is put > put by the HUUmanists, a group that represents the humanist, non-theistic > wing of the Unitarian-Universalists. > Alas, the journal consistently mispells my name as Farmalant, rather than > Farmelant. The same article had appeared last year in the German humanist > journal, Aufkl?rung und Kritik > (http://www.gkpn.de/Farmelant_Atheismus.pdf). The Germans, of course, > spelled my name correctly. > > Jim Farmelant > ____________________________________________________________ > Senior Dating Online. Click Now! > > http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTQbQYhLzH1uts2GJoESAdmcL3GAHSlPPte6683p65xOnQOVQGeX9u/ > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > 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 > > > End of Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 68, Issue 15 > ********************************************** > > > -- Go well ------------------------------------------ Karl Dallas Tel: +44(0)1274 823949 Mobile/cell: +44(0)788 077 0721 Buy CDs, videos, books etc from the HoustonMedia aStore at (UK) http://astore.amazon.co.uk/housto-21 or (US) http://astore.amazon.com/wwwkarldallas-20. From farmelantj at juno.com Sat Jun 27 13:48:22 2009 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:48:22 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 68, Issue 15 Message-ID: <20090627.155011.676.0.farmelantj@juno.com> On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:55:56 +0100 Karl Dallas writes: > Where can we read this article in English? > > 2009/6/27 > Well, the journal, Religious Humanism, which is put out by the HUUmanists, costs something like $22 for a one year subscription. It comes out twice a year. Unfortunately, unlike the German journal, Aufkl?rung und Kritik, they are not very good about posting articles online. In fact on their website at: If you go to the website of the HUUmanists at: (http://www.huumanists.org/publications/journal), they don't display any articles past 1999. If requested offlist, I can email people my article. Jim Farmelant ____________________________________________________________ Learning Centers - Click Here. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTKNdOinI4Gf3UPAxkCO8ELuXjc3LWHkOtoLf7ZKkYubb4RYMvbC1K/ From farmelantj at juno.com Sun Jun 28 08:45:06 2009 From: farmelantj at juno.com (Jim Farmelant) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:45:06 -0400 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Coup in Honduras Message-ID: <20090628.104506.2688.2.farmelantj@juno.com> http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090628/wl_nm/us_honduras_president Troops detain Honduras president: government TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) ? Honduran soldiers detained leftist President Manuel Zelaya on Sunday in a constitutional crisis over his attempt to win re-election, government officials said. Troops took Zelaya, an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, from his residence to an unknown location, Eduardo Reina, the president's private secretary, told Reuters. He said shots were fired during the incident, but that could not be independently confirmed. "We have received reports that he was taken to a military air base," Rafael Alegria, a senior government official, told pro-Zelaya television station Channel 8. The president fired the armed forces chief of staff last week for refusing to help him organize an unofficial referendum on Sunday on allowing presidents to serve more than a single four-year term. The impoverished Central American country had been politically stable since the end of military rule in the early 1980s, but Zelaya's push to change the constitution to allow him another term has split the country's institutions. The Supreme Court last week came out against Zelaya and ordered him to reinstate fired military chief General Romeo Vasquez -- a move the president said amounted to a "coup" against him. The pro-government TV channel on Sunday called on Zelaya supporters to gather in the capital to support the president, but then went off the air without explanation. Phone calls to the presidential palace went unanswered. The global economic crisis has curbed growth in Honduras, which lives off coffee and textile exports and remittances from Honduran workers abroad. Recent opinion polls have shown that public support for Zelaya has fallen as low as 30 percent. Honduras, home to 7 million people, is a major drug trafficking transit point. (Reporting by Mica Rosenberg and Gustavo Palencia; editing by Mohammad Zargham) Copyright ? 2009 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserve ____________________________________________________________ Victim of medical malpractice? Click here to find an expert lawyer to help pursue your case. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTOiLOLsVGnmeBCNzOodxL9mQtsH6lbrBV6dRUSYft61Q8WZKBDwys/ From phil at pwalden.fsnet.co.uk Sun Jun 28 14:19:14 2009 From: phil at pwalden.fsnet.co.uk (Phil Walden) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:19:14 +0100 Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 68, Issue 15 In-Reply-To: <20090627.155011.676.0.farmelantj@juno.com> Message-ID: <20090628201923.WWER21638.aamtaout02-winn.ispmail.ntl.com@pwalden> Dear Jim, I'm glad you are making the offer to circulate your article by email. Could I have a copy. My email address is phil at pwalden.fsnet.co.uk Best wishes, Phil Walden (Oxford, England) -----Original Message----- From: marxism-thaxis-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu [mailto:marxism-thaxis-bounces at lists.econ.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Jim Farmelant Sent: 27 June 2009 20:48 To: marxism-thaxis at lists.econ.utah.edu Subject: Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 68, Issue 15 On Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:55:56 +0100 Karl Dallas writes: > Where can we read this article in English? > > 2009/6/27 > Well, the journal, Religious Humanism, which is put out by the HUUmanists, costs something like $22 for a one year subscription. It comes out twice a year. Unfortunately, unlike the German journal, Aufkldrung und Kritik, they are not very good about posting articles online. In fact on their website at: If you go to the website of the HUUmanists at: (http://www.huumanists.org/publications/journal), they don't display any articles past 1999. If requested offlist, I can email people my article. Jim Farmelant ____________________________________________________________ Learning Centers - Click Here. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/BLSrjpTKNdOinI4Gf3UPAxkCO8ELuXjc 3LWHkOtoLf7ZKkYubb4RYMvbC1K/