vilna43 wrote:you lost me when you made the God remark towards Andrew L.'s anabaptist parents who I would wager would reject all that you reject in the quote above. This discussion has too many important forks left dangling as it is. I think your coward remark as it originally stood was strange given the frame of the talk but I have no interest in this fork beyond what I said already.

I worry when people tell me that my actions are not sufficiently representative of what God would want from me, because it implies that they know God better than me, and nobody can prove that argument either way.

I worry when people claim to be doing God's work, because it implies that they know God better than me, and nobody can prove that argument either way. You can speculate, but everything is a matter of circumstance. There is no codicil in the ten commandments added to "Thou Shalt Not Kill", and yet, killing in self-defense has been acceptable since forever. Why didn't God say that? How do we know he said any of it?

I assume there is a God.

I am almost convinced that he had some grand plan for us, but possibly not; we display the behavior of a sociopathic virus on the planet- perhaps we were not God's creations? Perhaps we are a species introduced to the Earth by less well-intentioned forces. We don't know anything, do we? We exist, but how? Matter cannot exist where no matter previously existed, and yet at some point trillions of years ago, a family of molecules appeared?

Hard to explain, just like God.

Earwicker wrote:Why is it everyone's ability to interpret a metaphor seizes up when reading his posts (the whole flock thing had me scratching an eyebrow for a moment, I must admit)

I admit I have not read all of this thread

Really? It's only fifteen pages. Since I seem to be the last punching bag left ( I kind of hoped Marsupialized would return for a second go around but no sign of him ), and I think that since I have ground my position into powder trying to explain it and explain it in a fresh and readable manner, I make this thread my gift to you, earwicker, if you want it.

Be prepared to have certain obvious realities of economics be disputed, though- just warning you...

Earwicker wrote:Of course you could argue that all immigration should be permitted as sooner or later the lower paid immigrants will eventually want more pay and will organise alongside 'natives' and, globally, things could start to improve but do you have any idea how long that would take?

I don't but i'm guessing fucking ages?

That's an excellent point that I should have included myself- the duration of the struggle continually demoralizes the strugglers, like building a sand castle against the tide. It will be a castle in 300 years, but to those struggling now, you have to explain why they're living in a leaky sand hut.

Earwicker wrote:Also, bear in mind that in terms of solidarity people, generally, will feel it for people more like them in terms of language, ethnicity, religion. Whether good or bad (and i think bad) it is a fact. What that means is an immigrant coming to a western country will feel less concern about working with other UK workers to improve their lot. That isn't unreasonable of them it's just the way it is.
Good or bad it's a fact.

If Canada was poor and Mexico was the healthy economy and the majority of illegals came from the North, there would likely be less ignorant race-based animosity towards the illegals, but the economics would still be the same. You can make the characters cats and dogs if you want, it's all a numbers game, with some race and language baggage, which is a tool that the media uses against us because they know the Left despises to defend itself against charges of racism, while the Right talks that way but acts differently.

Earwicker wrote:So, I guess its a timescale choice in terms of hoping things could improve for the lower classes (incidentally, anyone in my view who thinks there is no such thing as class (speaking from a UK point of view) is (to use a phrase I have not used since my school days) a knob rash).
You either think immigration is fandango = many generations before anything happens by which time ecological disaster will almost certainly have trimmed our numbers anyway.
Or 'we' organise and (amongst loads of other things) force our employers (if we have them. I work for myself so dont) to pay us more or our governments to regulate against not just immigration itself but also the exploitation of immigrants.

YES! If we eventually return political and economic power to the American working class, we could potentially be the rescuers of other exploited classes in different countries. That is, if the white American working class wasn't the most self-serving and xenophobic working class on the planet.

Earwicker wrote:We'd all be best served not having a knee jerk response that only plays into the hands of the people almost everyone involved in this debate seems to be against.

It has been a weird debate, watching all the Leftists argue amongst ourselves. I'm as radical as it gets ( according to me ) and yet others have the neo con suit prepared for me. All very educational and very illustrative of how the Right wants us to behave.

sparky wrote: But given the aforementioned influx of immigrants into the UK and our relatively stable levels of unemployment, I hold that it is self-evident that here at least immigration is driven by demand for labour.

Stable levels of unemployment, but is it because you can spread the pool of capital around a lot more widely if you only fill all the soup bowls half way? Everyone with a soup bowl is employed, but satisfactorily?

Immigration is driven by demand for cheap labor; they don't want them otherwise.

sparky wrote: Clocker Bob, I am not calling for unions to be smashed as they were here. But the irresponsibility and blatant corruption of some in the past did for them almost as much as Thatcher and her vicious mob. Unions are necessary.

I want the unions to be disciplined, preferably from within, but if we are to make the grudging concession to have our unions under capitalism, we must be prepared for the market or the legal system to discipline us when warranted.

I want us to be better than those we work for; we largely are, just by our restricted economic ability to be exploiters ourselves, but I want us to be beacons of a better future for anyone watching us from other countries.

sparky wrote:As a corrolary, anyone looked up minimum wage rates?

The governor of Illinois, while a shady influence peddler, has promised a dollar per hour increase to the state's minimum wage in his second term. He passed a $1 raise in his first term as well. If so much capital wasn't confined to the speculator markets and was in the hands of the people who created it, we wouldn't have executives making salaries that are huge multiples of the worker's salaries.

Bob, you've hacked out a readership on this board, and that's great for you. For my part, I remain wholly unconvinced you have anything other than naive libertarian dipshittery to add to conversations such as this one.

clocker bob wrote:

Andrew L. wrote:Bob, my point, and I think vilna's too, is that worker solidarity is transnational. For you, it stops at the border. You've got some weird nativist stuff going on.

Not true, and I really suspect that you know that.

There is no weird nativist stuff going on, there is simply the recognition that a shepherd must tend to his flock first. Respect all similar flocks, but there will be times when other flocks are seduced into your territory, through policies favorable to the exploiters, and you must close ranks.

We don't live in one world all together; mentally and emotionally, maybe we do, but economically, we don't. Societies are still compartmentalized entities unto themselves, not to the degree that they once were, but in the world of labor, you cannot permit an endless supply of outside labor to dilute your value. If we were neighbors, I wouldn't knock on your door night after night and ask for you to put out a dinner plate for me.

If we were "neighbors" (you America-Neighbor and me Mexico-Neighbor), I might be at your doorstep with a "hatchet" kindly asking why you conspired, with the patriarchs and carpet baggers of my own "house," to destroy my own "family" garden as you take turns fucking my "mother" up the ass. You would be damned lucky if instead I simply hopped the fence and asked to clean your toilet bowl for you.

Your analogy is terrible. Neoliberal economics does not map neatly onto patronizing homespun metaphors.

You side with your great state "shepard" in the guise of populist rhetoric, because that's what libertarians do when it's convenient. And you cherry-pick terms from the Marxist tradition to bolster a reactionary position which itself has no economic legs.

Capitalism is colonizing the earth under a new imperium. Increasingly, there is no "outside." And this is just as Marx elaborated: capital operates through a constant reconfiguration of the inside and the outside--"all that is solid melts into air" (look into theories of "intensive" and "extensive" control). You don't get this. You don't get Marx. American capitalism, and capitalism generally, internalizes outside markets first and foremost through the export of a relation, a social form that breeds and replicates itself. One by-product of this is economic refugees, from country to city, from Nogales to Chicago.


The point is to work with this, rather than to react against it in the naive isolationist mode you do--to recognize and cultivate new possibilities, and new opportunities for change and struggle. And to welcome foreigners into the privileged space of the metropole. Capitalism opens up new terrain, it "deterritorializes" itself as it "territorializes" social and geographic space.

Foreigners, please don't leave us alone with the French-- Paris graffito, 1995

You continually demonstrate an inability to understand that capitalism is constituted by relations, not a coterie of bankers. In this respect, your positions will always be fundamentally retarded (As vilna says, you can slay capitalist demon-spawn until your blade's dull).

In a post-colonial world, "victorious" liberation struggles stepped directly into the ghetto of the world market and economic fascism of the WTO and IMF's structural adjustment policies (which are basically the American policies of what are in the final instance American, ie, State, organs; the mighty "shepard" you invoke). We need a more careful understanding of the persistence of State power in so-called "post-industrial" capitalism. Reports of the death of the State have been greatly exagerated.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote:There is no escaping American business

Your libertarian nativism--and that's exactly what it is--ignores all this. You acknowledge it, but you clearly don't consider it in your stupid shepard and flock analogy.

In the 19th cent. Marx and Engels saw that industrialization and factory production created the conditions for common struggle. In the advanced capitalism of the 21st, perhaps, as Hardt and Negri state outright, 'there is a new spectre haunting empire, and it is migration.' While my own provisional understanding differs from Hardt and Negri's, I'd appreciate it if you stopped picking naively at Marx's corpus: because every time you do, it is painfully clear you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.

Cheap shot. The law is more powerful than me, but the law is not always my enemy. The law can work for me. Like I said way back in this thread, there are still labor and immigration laws remainng from the time when labor could legislate self-protection into the system; you deny us that- whose side are you on?

American labor cannot be the keeper of all our brothers- we can't do that loaves and fishes trick.

You are exasperatingly full of shit.
On your federal reserve thread, I wrote:

One of my favourite quotes on globalization comes from Joao Pedro Stedile, an activist and writer associated with the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil. Stedile gave the following response to a question about what N. Americans and Europeans can do for the "developing world."

Quote:
The first thing to do is bring down your neoliberal governments. Second help us to get rid of foreign debt. . . Third, fight - build mass strugges. Don't delude yourself that because you have a higher living standard than us, you can build a better world. It's impossible for you to maintain your current patterns of consumption without exploiting us.

And your throwback to the good old days of labor is ridiculous. Do you deny you are a reactionary? Own that shit, Bob. Marx and Engels were unequivocal in their belief that capitalism created opportunities and opened up spaces for better ways of living, different relations. You have a romanticized notion of American capitalism c. 1902 (or whenever) when industrialists, railroads, and robber barons still held sway over financiers ('jew bankers')--the grand old days of honest, unimpeded Social Darwinism. Your glory days of American labor is a time when British fucking capital and the market speculations of Jay Gould, Rockefeller, JP Morgan, the Astors and Vanderbilts ruled the day. Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 with a 100 millions dollars to his name.

What do you think "labor relations" were like in 1877? Get a fucking clue. And shut the fuck up with your "when workers were paid a wage commensurate with their contribution to producton." This has never happened. Ford introduced the 5-dollar day-wage in 1914 in reponse to insane labor turnover (and the Ford Motor Company was, of course, the last of the big 3 to unionize; I think in the early fifties(?))). The Ford Sociological Department and Ford English School attempted, through a process of coercion and consent to indoctrinate immigrants as Americans (ie, Fordist workers). The 5-dollar wage was pitched as a "profit sharing" instrument. Complete bullshit. It's 2006. There are libraries full of economic history books and case studies. Stop perpetuating this reactionary capitalist propaganda, please.

Thomas Jefferson wrote:I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self government

Look forward, not back. Your reactionary position is staked out on false turf. For all its flaws, the Marxist tradition is/was at least forward looking, responsive adn dynamic rather than reactionary.

The distinction I am proposing here knows one canonical form in Hegel’s differentiation of the thinking of individual morality or moralising from that whole very different realm of collective social values and practices. But it finds its definitive form in Marx’s demonstration of the materialist dialectic, most notably in those classic pages of the Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of some more genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and change. The topic of the lesson is, of course, the historical development of capitalism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture. In a well-known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst.

The lapse from this austere dialectical imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject demands that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.

As for that reality itself, however – the as yet untheorised original space of some new “world system” of multinational or late capitalism, a space whose negative or baleful aspects are only too obvious – the dialectic requires us to hold equally to a positive or “progressive” evaluation of its emergence, as Marx did for the world market as the horizon of national economies, or as Lenin did for the older imperialist global network. For neither Marx nor Lenin was socialism a matter of returning to smaller (and thereby less repressive and comprehensive) systems of social organisation; rather, the dimensions attained by capital in their own times were grasped as the promise, the framework, and the precondition for the achievement of some new and more comprehensive socialism. Is this not the case with the yet more global and totalising space of the new world system, which demands the intervention and elaboration of an internationalism of a radically new type? The disastrous realignment of socialist revolution with the older nationalisms (not only in Southeast Asia), whose results have necessarily aroused much serious recent left reflection, can be adduced in support of this position.

Bob wrote:

Andrew L. wrote:They know State laws are designed to reinforce an unjust status quo. And they've been prepared to answer to something they see as higher.

Oh, I see. Now you're advocating theocracy? Hiding behind God Love is for cowards afraid to make the choices they have to in a world run by man. You get God to go to Mexico for me and tell them to use birth control because they can't feed the mouths they have. God Love sets in motion more behavior that leads to misery, and you know that very well. Stick to Earth-bound arguments, please.

While my parents' ethics are inseparable from a religious perspective, what they boil down to is decency, not theocracy. I don't believe in God, but I believe in ethical responsibility. For my folks this has meant "good works." Like accepting economic refugees into one's home (Incidentally, Sarath--said refugee--remains a Buddhist. My parents are totally cool with this, and always were; they're also more or less okay with my atheism).

Bob, I know you might be pleased that I've provided so much material for you to respond to here. Please don't. Don't respond. I'm super not interested.

Edited for grammar, to add a link, and to tell Bob this is my final post on this thread.

andrew l wrote:Bob, I know you might be pleased that I've provided so much material for you to respond to here. Please don't. Don't respond. I'm super not interested.

Yes, you are. You are manifestly interested in remaining top Marxist, and you will read every word of my reply ( which will be far shorter- can you ever raise close to one issue per post? It's like I get a new phone directory every week on here ).

Come back later for new coal to shovel into the furnace of your ivory tower.

last post here as well.
Bob do you really think its the US working class that is in the leaky sand hut and owns the right to act in desperation despite terrible misgivings about sacrificing the safety valve of the migrants. that is just so ridiculous I have to wonder if maybe you have not traveled much.
Andrew's last bit said clearly some of the things I have been stammering about. I will give your response a fair shake but have to confess i think the the ends you say you envision can't be sketched with nation-state brand crayons.

Andrew L. wrote:Bob, you've hacked out a readership on this board, and that's great for you.

I don't know about that; in fact, I would guess that my readership in proportion to the quantity of posts that I generate is quite low, probably due to their endless returns to the same five subjects, and also due to my tendency to provoke conflict.

If I have any readership, it may be because my posts reflect the fact that:

None of my real world friends post here- most of them are probably unaware of Electrical Audio.

I don't have real world friendships with anybody who does post here; there are people in Chicago who post here that I vaguely know and would do a favor for if asked, but we don't socialize.

I don't hold grudges on the board. The people who lambasted me in the 9/11 threads, if I come across one of their posts elsewhere, if it interests me, I'll respond to it like they're some brand new anonymous person.

If you would admit to yourself that I am more valuable to you as someone who contradicts you, because I force you to flesh out positions of yours that would otherwise go unchallenged, and if you stop trying to make me clone your positions, we could get along.

End your vendetta. You will find this discussion forum far more useful.

And you would increase your readership if your posts didn't so frequently approach the density of five year old Christmas fruitcake. Chop them down, spread the ideas around, less pasting, more Andrew L.- if something you read supports your position, put it in your words ( using less words ). We know you read- if someone challenges you, then cite the source.

vilna43 wrote:last post here as well.
Bob do you really think its the US working class that is in the leaky sand hut and owns the right to act in desperation despite terrible misgivings about sacrificing the safety valve of the migrants. that is just so ridiculous I have to wonder if maybe you have not traveled much.
Andrew's last bit said clearly some of the things I have been stammering about. I will give your response a fair shake but have to confess i think the the ends you say you envision can't be sketched with nation-state brand crayons.

I'm rushing out the door, but here's this:

The way a working man acts in 2006 will not be identical to the way that he hopes he can act in 2036. The answers and choices we make along the way are constantly evolving along with conditions. Potentially, 2036 Working Man will look back at 2006 Working Man and not like what he remembers about him, but we have to make it to 2036 first to know that.

Currently, we are under siege. The walls of global capital are closing in around us, because they have divided us in preparation of conquering us.
If we are divided, we have to fight separately to reassemble ourselves into a force that will permit us to conquer them.

Jeez you guys,

Everyone seems to be deserting this particular ship just as I was getting into it. I am thinking (and hoping that I am not being to presumptious) that this:

Andrew L. wrote:Bob, you've hacked out a readership on this board,....

...might mean me. I am now Clocker Bob's readership.
This feels strange.

(Let me just repeat before I continue that i have not read this entire thread)

I don't agree with loads of what Bob has said over previous posts (in other threads) I've glanced over but just cause I backed him up on a point I agree with I'm now his 'readership'.

Well, there you go. I suppose if someone is facing a nailing from every quarter (some justified in my view, some not) then I don't feel any necessity to join in. If the person facing the nailing has a position I agree with I'll pipe up. Just like when them kids at school used to bully Gaurav. He was a bit weird at times but the shit he got as a result was entirely out of proportion.

Andrew L. You are clearly well read up. But let me be completely frank.
I don't know what the fuck you are on about half the time.
That isn't to say I disagree or anything but I just think that often people throw quotes and dense theory at people to try and intimidate people out of conversation/debate.
If you simplified your points (for a humble working class lad perhaps you, seemingly a marxist, might defer) I might be able to get a hold of the views you are expressing. As it is I feel like I'm being hit by a big, hardback book.

I realise that may make me look like a simpleton. But I say, 'fuck off I'm not'. I'm interested and I am open minded and I am no one's 'readership' and can make up my own mind if the arguments/evidence put before me are digestible enough for me to dig. I also consider myself to be fairly intelligent and well read for my class/age so my presumption is (usually) when I don't understand something that the information i am receiving is not clear enough.

If I am too dumb to dig it then I guess it's my problem. But if you are just hurling your education about to impress people then stop it.
It isn't impressing me.

And before you fly off the handle. Being so politically opinionated I would suggest that you try and persuade me of your position as I would be quite open to it if it was expressed in a digestable way.

if I am not said 'readership' then ignore all of the above.

I've been away for a few weeks and have only skimmed this discussion.

However, I don't think anyone has mentioned the fact that whenever a racist wants to make a racist comment, they preface it with, "Ya know, I'm not a racist, but...".

Gotta love that eternally useful disclaimer.