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421 [lbo-talk] UK election: How Zac Goldsmith bought the green movement -- rank: 1000

UK election: How Zac Goldsmith bought the green movement Mon 29 Mar, 2010 http://forth.ie/index.php/content/article_ext/uk_election_how_zac_goldsmith_bought_the_green_movement/20100329/ Why is the Conservative candidate for Richmond upon Thames funding so many of the environmental groups that ought to be attacking the Tories, asks WILL DEIGHTON You might think that there is nothing surprising about the heir to James Goldsmith's £300 million fortune saying he would stand for the Conservative Part ...

Document Size:	12343
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Apr 23 00:29:48 PDT 2010

422 [lbo-talk] Good reads -- rank: 1000

I am enjoying The World That Never Was, a history of Anarchists and police spies from 1871 to 1917 http://www.amazon.co.uk/World-That-Never-Was-Anarchists/dp/0224078070 Also, Adrian Hart's book, The Myth of Racist Kids, http://www.manifestoclub.com/mythracistkids is very good Tristram Hunt's biography of Engels is very readable http://www.amazon.co.uk/Frock-Coated-Communist-Original-Champagne-Socialist/dp/0141021403/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272004591&sr=1-1

Document Size:	5241
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 22 23:36:32 PDT 2010

423 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

Ted, the problem with your posts, if you don't mind me saying is that whatever the question is, the answer is the same: the development of mind. Wherever anyone deviates from the preconceived script you have in your head, you read that not as difference, but as error. That seems to me to be dogmatic, the opposite of the development of the human mind, but the subordination of mind to a set schema. You have erected 'Mind' into a totem before which all must worship. There are lots of people who get ...

Document Size:	10883
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 22 10:46:37 PDT 2010

424 [lbo-talk] US v UK -- rank: 1000

Doug, citing Richard Seymour: 'Interesting that our Republicans don't feel any need to re-invent themselves that way [like the UK Tories] - they just keep railing on in the old fashion.' Yes, but the conditions are very different: The Conservative Party lost the last three elections and was thought to be near unelectable around 2007. Cameron's repositioning of the party was modelled on Tony Blair#s remodelling of the labour party (both in their way modelled on Clinton re-modelling of the Democr ...

Document Size:	4956
Author:	JAMES Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 22 08:26:00 PDT 2010

425 [lbo-talk] Synaesthesiac's judgement on UK election addresses -- rank: 1000

Think Clegg, taste Spangles *James Wannerton, 51, is president of the UK Synaesthesia Association. He experiences words as tastes and textures, a neurological condition known as lexical-gustatory synaesthesia.* *Gordon Brown's* name tastes horrible, and his flavour was nasty like soil mixed with Marmite. That said, he was good on education, when he tasted of peaches, sliced potato and bacon. *Nick Clegg* tastes of a pickled onion yet he kept turning soft, mushy and warm. Immigration was good f ...

Document Size:	5658
Author:	JAMES Heartfield
Date:	Thu Apr 22 06:58:41 PDT 2010

426 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

Ted Winslow writes 'This too ignores Marx's relating of the development of science and technology to "the development of the human mind" which he in turn has occurring within the successive forms of the labour process treated as "schools."' For which I am glad. Your preoccupation with making this point is not just tedious, but fruitless. You make it again and again. And it goes nowhere. You are arrested at some point in Marx's working out of his philosophy that is between Heg ...

Document Size:	5487
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 21 23:11:55 PDT 2010

427 [lbo-talk] thoughts on the Tea Party (why the left is Dead) -- rank: 1000

Brad: 'Invert your claim- how do those who never lived through good times account for radicals? Doesn't work. Both can and have historically given rise to powerful left movements.' No, indeed. 'Men make their own history', Marx said. I say, it is not the state of the economy that shapes the left's response, but the state of the left that shapes the response to the economy. The left in the 1970s was (comparatively) assertive and self-confident, and its reaction to economic crisis was combative. ...

Document Size:	5553
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 21 23:01:39 PDT 2010

428 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

Julio: Juan Francisco Verdaguer, the Uruguayan comedian, used to joke (back in the 1960s) that the leading cause of divorce was marriage. 'Living means dying' Engels

Document Size:	4686
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 21 09:12:56 PDT 2010

429 [lbo-talk] Rundle has a beer with spiked online -- rank: 1000

Australian writer Guy Rundle said this in his Crikey column: "I was in the pub with the "spiked" Marxist-libertarian gang" And Mike Beggs asks 'Don't suppose you were there James?' Not on that occasion, but I did have a drink with Guy a week or so earlier.

Document Size:	4898
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 21 07:09:58 PDT 2010

430 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

Not wishing to fan the flames of these dying embers, I came across this today, the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov gave rather more credit to private property in encouraging science and technology than we might expect: 'the whole technological and scientific culture of Europe and North America owes its very existence to private property as an indispensable condition sine qua non. No sensible Marxist has denied or denies this.' The preceding read: 'That all "Western Culture" developed ...

Document Size:	5831
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Apr 21 06:43:45 PDT 2010

431 [lbo-talk] what is to be done -- rank: 1000

In What is to be Done, the section one, is a kind of Allan Bloom-like attack on relativism, or what Lenin caricatures as 'the swamp', the minority among the social democrats who are trying to avoid the argument coming to a head, and hoping that they can make the RSDLP into a broad church that holds many views. Section two, on 'Spontaneity of the masses' is the part where he says that spontaneously, i.e. without the party, the working class will never attain any higher consciousness than that of ...

Document Size:	5594
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Apr 20 02:00:37 PDT 2010

432 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

Sean Andrews: 'technological and scientific advances aren't the sole preserve of that mode of production' The way that Sean puts it here, I would have to agree with him, and not Brad (sorry Brad). I think Sean is saying that technology is not the same as capitalism, or not the same as whichever mode of production under which it comes into existence. And that's right. There is nothing intrinsically capitalist about the computer or the laser, it just happens that they were developed in the era we ...

Document Size:	6022
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Apr 20 01:43:44 PDT 2010

433 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

Joe C. writes: 'I trust, then, that you're adamantly pro-life?' No, I am pro-choice. If anyone wants to sacrifice themselves, or their unborn children to the Gaia, I wouldn't stop them. But I would not presume to tell anyone that they are surplus to requirements.

Document Size:	4736
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 19 14:48:03 PDT 2010

434 [lbo-talk] agricultural productivity -- rank: 1000

Sean Andrews says, somewhat surprisingly: 'there were farmers in pre-capitalist England who were using fertilizer, saving the most productive seeds, cross breeding, etc. all of the so-called "innovations" of capitalist agriculture aside from breaking up small parcels of land and enclosing the commons were largely developed by feudal individuals simply trying hard to live on the land.' Was there the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen in synthetic fertilisers in the feudal era? Were ...

Document Size:	5164
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 19 14:06:28 PDT 2010

435 [lbo-talk] KVH hearts Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems (but I don't) -- rank: 1000

Chris Brooke writes: 'I could tell similar stories to James about where I live in Oxford' Oxford and Islington, the two place where the Independent Working Class Association got support in the local council elections, I think. The Lib. Dems. candidate in Oxford is probably one of Britain's best MPs, in my opinion, for his stand on migrants' rights, on freedom of scientific research and many other things. If I were in Oxford I would break the habit of a lifetime to vote for him. But the very thou ...

Document Size:	5776
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Apr 19 09:39:19 PDT 2010