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856 [lbo-talk] once again on productive and unproductive labour -- rank: 1000

Paula writes "To support this view, he added a second argument that there are no unproductive types of labor under capitalism, because all labor employed by capital at a profit produces surplus-value." I most certainly did not. I said that public sector and finance sector workers are not productive labour, but that not all business service workers could be dismissed as 'unproductive'. I wrote in my email of 18 November "I think Marx is right that the financial services do not incr ...

Document Size:	5670
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 27 04:30:55 PST 2008

857 [lbo-talk] US spied on Blair -- rank: 1000

On the other hand, here's what one jaded Briton thought of Blair's being spied on, from the Times website: "Taste of his own medicine. Tony Blair helped create a surveillance state for every one else, so at least he knows how it feels. Dave, Scunthorpe"

Document Size:	4848
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Nov 25 03:18:48 PST 2008

858 [lbo-talk] US spied on Blair -- rank: 1000

Carrol wrote that the surveilliance of UK prime minister Tony Blair was "trivial. It has been standard practice for 60+ years for CIA, NSA, DIA, etc. to gather intelligence information on evryone and everything." Well, expected is not the same thing as trivial. You and I might know it, and the British public might have suspected it, but it is important for them to know specifically, rather than in general, that the US government spied on its most loyal ally like an enemy. Certainly the ...

Document Size:	5070
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Tue Nov 25 03:13:04 PST 2008

859 [lbo-talk] unproductive and prorductive -- rank: 1000

Paula writes: "those who believed de-industrialization didn't matter, those who claimed Western capitalism was entering a new golden era of private law firms, advertising agencies, entertainment corporations, insurance companies, management consultancies, and the like - they got it wrong." But as ever, this lacks a sense of proportion. There has been deindustrialisation, which is indeed a real problem, but you take the trend and exaggerate it out of all proportion. Just because busines ...

Document Size:	5946
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Nov 23 07:36:36 PST 2008

860 [lbo-talk] neoliberalism RIP -- rank: 1000

dredmond at efn.org wrote: > ...Either way, > the age of neoliberalism is over. > And Patrick Bond challenged "Dennis... with guys like this?? [examples, Larry Summers, etc.]" Neo-liberalism died a long time ago. The attempt to wind down government spending and open up industry to free competition collapsed in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's alarming budget deficits. The so-called entrepreneurial class are massively dependent on government hand-outs, like ...

Document Size:	6763
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Nov 23 02:31:05 PST 2008

861 [lbo-talk] On the threat from religion: Ziyad Husami -- rank: 1000

Chris says: 'I never quite got the notion of a "capitalist standard of justice," as if the notion of good and bad behaviors was invented by capitalists. The capitalist standard looks quite similar to all other standards, as far as I can tell.' Really? In the Roman Colliseum people were tied to stakes and eaten by bears for mass public entertainment. Inca priests would skin their sacrifices alive, and wear the skin, inside out so that the fat hung in little bubbles, and be praised for d ...

Document Size:	5864
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Nov 22 09:35:12 PST 2008

862 [lbo-talk] Apologies: productive and unproductive labour -- rank: 1000

Sorry, that last was posted to the wrong address. Please ignore.

Document Size:	4663
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Nov 22 08:23:39 PST 2008

863 [lbo-talk] productive and unproductive labour -- rank: 1000

"James says the only thing labor needs in order to be productive of surplus-value is a social relation to capital - it doesn't matter whether or not it produces material wealth. It's like magic. Set up a giant entertainment corporation, recruit every unemployed worker in the world, get them to tell jokes and make funny faces the entire working day, and hey presto - you have created an enormous amount of surplus-value." You have a restricted idea of material wealth. Marx says that the v ...

Document Size:	7015
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Nov 22 08:21:22 PST 2008

864 [lbo-talk] On the threat from religion: Ziyad Husami -- rank: 1000

Well, on 'Docile Body' B's advice, I read Ziyad Husami's Marx on Distributive Justice, and I can understand now why he is not much referred to on this side of the Atlantic, nor I suspect all that much on the other side. All in all Husami does not understand historical specificity, the key to Marx's social theory, which is how he can confuse capitalist standards of justice with the broader goal of human emancipation. It is a bit of a bore that one has to constantly re-invent the wheel.

Document Size:	5140
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Nov 22 07:09:53 PST 2008

865 [lbo-talk] On the Threat from Religion -- rank: 1000

"In any event, I thought this "Was Marx a moralist?" debate was a 1970s thing, like ABBA, and had been solved -- in Husami's favor, and not Carrol's. Carrol's is a position that lost out definitely. " I don't know Husami, and I just about get that Carrol is arguing that Marx is not a moralist, but from this I get the sense that the debate about whether Marx was a moralist went differently in the US than it did in the UK. Here, it was the International Marxist Group's man on t ...

Document Size:	7751
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Nov 21 13:44:12 PST 2008

866 [lbo-talk] On the threat from religion -- rank: 1000

Philip Pilkington argues that Marx oscillates between the two positions that agency determines society, or that society determines agency. But why does he think that the two are mutually exclusive? That is the point of the Marx quote that Philip goes on to cite 'men make their own history, but they do not make in conditions of their own choosing'. He is not oscillating between two positions, Philip, he is saying that life oscillates between two positions. Marx analyses capitalist production as i ...

Document Size:	5764
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Nov 21 12:23:22 PST 2008

867 [lbo-talk] religion and marxism -- rank: 1000

Carrol 'between Marx & xtianity,the sharpest contrast: there are no "ethical precepts" in Marx. He doesn't even condemn capitalism morally: it is not evil, it's history.' Yes, broadly I would agree with that, though there is a moral goal, just not one that takes the form of an abstract imperative. The moral goal in Marxism is human development. He thinks that social organisation ought to promote the widest possible human development. The case against capitalism is, as Carrol says, ...

Document Size:	5409
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 20 13:58:28 PST 2008

868 [lbo-talk] Litvinenko and the Chechens -- rank: 1000

For those interested and with access to Taylor and Francis Journals (otherwise, contact me off-list), Julia Svetlichnaja and my article based on interviews with the late Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko is published in Hillel Ticktin's journal Critique. Details and link below: The Russian Security Service's Ethnic Division and the Elimination of Moscow's Chechen Business Class in the 1990s Authors: Julia Svetlichnaja; James Heartfield DOI: 10.1080/03017600802434227 Publication Frequency: 4 issue ...

Document Size:	6164
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 20 13:08:12 PST 2008

869 [lbo-talk] Green/BNP crossover -- rank: 1000

On the Green Party/British National Party crossover 1) all the broadsheet papers are covering it, Murdoch-owned, Guardian and Independent, too. 2) far from being of no moment, the common ground between the far right National Front and the reformist left was a real political issue: what united them was there patriotic social programmes, which were a real drag on the left that some of us took issue with at the time 3) the common ground between the BNP and the Green Party, as the Green Party's spok ...

Document Size:	5884
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 20 08:35:08 PST 2008

870 [lbo-talk] Green Party admits leading activists on BNP list -- rank: 1000

Green Party admits leading activists on BNP list http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5197862.ece Nico Hines The Green Party was forced to admit today that two of its former leading lights were on a list of British National Party members leaked on the internet this week. The party conceded this morning that Keith Bessant, a two-time parliamentary candidate, and Rev John Stanton, a former local party chairman, had defected to the far-right nationalist organisation. A spokesman fo ...

Document Size:	5509
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 20 06:39:59 PST 2008