Bulletin N°226
Subject: ON WAR AND PEACE AND PRIVATE PROFITS : FROM
THE CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS,
20 March 2006
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
In the heat of an historic social upheaval against the export of capital that
is creating fewer and fewer "real jobs" in France, a non-violent Student Movement has sparked a larger social movement that
carries the force of an earth quake, and already it is receiving much
international attention. The social class lines defining this conflict of interests between
capital and labor have never been more clearly drawn, and the freedom to export
French capital into cheap labor markets is the quintessential question.
The traditional engine of capitalism, the private profit motive, is
caught in a conundrum: to maximize short-term profits the traditional
consumer markets in western societies must be destroyed by the permanent
formation of underemployment. Part-time, temporary, low-paid jobs must
continue to replace "good jobs", and a plethora of cheap commodities
must push durable products out the market. A fools’ paradise of trinkets and
gadgets await those of us lucky enough to snag a "sometimes job". The
rest of us must wait and pray in this casino economy for the next deal, from
the same old deck of marked cards.
Meanwhile, CEIMSA has been in daily contact with an international array of
Scholars and Peace Activists, many of whom will be attending our large 3-day
International Colloquium on "The History of Pacifist
Movements in the U.S. and France" next month at the University of
Savoy in Chambéry. Friends of CEIMSA will be hearing more about this important
meeting in the near future.
But today, in this Bulletin we would like to share with you a series of
essays brought to our attention by American scholars, who have attempted to
describe and analyze the current problems produced by recent power shifts
within the capitalist world and come to terms with the transnational nature of
social movements today as expressions of democratic self-defense against
capitalist violence.
Item A. is a paper
by Bertell Ollman, who long ago developed the wit, the courage, and a talent for
"speaking Truth to Power". This economic analysis was delivered to
Chinese scholars at
Item
In item C. we have a new article by investigative
reporter, Robert Fisk, on the biases of news reporting from
Item D. is an essay co-authored by historian Staughton Lynd and former Marine
Sergeant Carl Mirra, a soldier who refused to fight in the First Gulf War. Here
they discuss the falsification of history by the ruling elite in
America.
Finally, item E. is an attempt by Noam Chomsky to synthesize events in today's tri-polar
world, where the
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université Stendhal-Grenoble3
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
_____________
A.
from Bertell Ollman
Subject: Old
wine in new skins.
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2006
Francis -
Careful. You're going to drop it all and become a Marxist
philosopher if you don't watch out. And there are not very many organizers on
the academic left as good as you... and me.
Am very excited by the events in
Bertell
____________________________________________________________
Market
Economy: Advantages and Disadvantages
(Talk
at
Reply to Prof. Kang Ouyang's Article on Marxist Philosophy in
We must all be
thankful to Prof. Kang Ouyang for his clear and concise summary of the main
tendencies in Marxist philosophy in
Considerations of space as well as my own limited familiarity with China makes
a full evaluation of Kang's wide ranging article impossible, so I will focus on
only one area, market socialism or what is often referred to as "socialism
with Chinese characteristics", which is also the area that I know best. My
choice can also be justified on the grounds that this is the subject on which
the new generation of Chinese scholars have made their most distinctive
contribution and for which they are best known outside
A market economy has seven main characteristics: l) people buy what they want,
but only if they can pay for it; 2) thus, money becomes necessary for life; 3)
people are forced to do anything and to sell anything in order to get money; 4)
maximizing profit rather than satisfying social needs is the aim of all
production and investment; 5) discipline over those who produce the wealth of
society is no longer exercised by other people (as in slavery and feudalism)
but by money and the conditions of work that one must accept in order to earn
money; 6) rationing of scarce goods takes place through money (based on who has
more than others) rather than through coupons (based on who has worked harder
or longer or has a greater need for the good); and 7) since no one is kept from
trying to get rich and everyone is paid for what they do, people acquire a
sense that each person gets (and has gotten) what he deserves economically, in
short, that both the rich and the poor are responsible for their fates.
Whether the society is developed or underdeveloped, a market economy has
several important advantages and several major disadvantages: Among the
advantages, we find the following:
These are the main advantages of the market economy, and in his article Professor Kang gives a good account of them. But, as I said, there are also major disadvantages, and these Kang neglects. Among the disadvantages, we find the following:
Once we have recognized all the main advantages
and disadvantages of the market economy, and once we have had a chance to
examine and compare them, there are three major questions that remain to be
answered. First, is it possible to have the advantages of the market economy
without the disadvantages? Both theory and empirical evidence argue strongly
that the answer is "no". Even a quick perusal of Marx's analysis of
how the market economy works reveals it as an organic whole in which each part
serves as an internal aspect in the functioning of the others. Similarly, their
effects, both good and bad (what I've called "advantages" and
"disadvantages"), entail one another; they are extended parts and/or
necessary preconditions or effects of each other. For example, market
experiences produce, of necessity, market personalities in people, and market
personalities become a necessary precondition for people of all classes to
engage in market relations effectively, and hence for the market to work as
well as it does. You can't, in other words, place people in market relations
and expect them to retain very much of the socialist ideas, values and emotions
that may once have had. And the same glue holds together all the economic,
social and psychological aspects of a market economy.
For empirical evidence, just look at how quickly and how thoroughly
A second key question
The third, and final, major question iscan people change their mind about the
market? And the answer isof course. They do so all the time, moving from
"against" to "in favor" or from "in favor" to
"against". Just because a society opted for one approach to the
market, let's say 25 years ago, when one set of problems were dominant, is not
in itself a good reason to retain this approach when another set of problems
become far more pressing.
If the answers I have given to these three questions are correct, then the
central problem facing China today might be posed as follows: Should China
stick with the market economy in order to continue to benefit from what's left
of its advantages (and simply accept all the negatives that come with it), orbecause
the disadvantages have gotten so badshould China now do whatever is necessary
to deal with them (and treat whatever benefits it once got from the market as
secondary)? It is, of course, not for me but for the Chinese people to say what
should be done. I have only tried to clarify what is involved in making such a
momentous decision, and, alsoand now we return to Kang's articleto suggest
that it is only by fully laying out the main advantages and disadvantages of
market socialism that any effective solution to
According to Kang, the core of Deng Xiaoping's teachings is directed to
"emancipating the mind" and "seeking truth from facts". I
can't think of anything that is more important for us, for all of us, to do.
The fate of
_____________
B.
from
15 March 2006
by Serge Halimi
Robert
Greenwald's documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (1), opens in a
huge room packed with shareholders attending the company's annual meeting. They
greet the CEO, H Lee Scott, with an ovation as he takes the podium.
He tells them: "When you come to this meeting, year after year you get to
say, `We had record sales, we had record earnings, we had record reinvestments
back into our company'. But you'd better get ready to be better because, today,
for whatever reasons, whether it's our success or our size, Wal-Mart
Incorporated has generated fear, if not envy, in some circles. And that makes
it more important than ever that we focus on doing the right thing. And doing
things right every time.
"There's two things we should do. Number one is tell the Wal-Mart story.
And the second thing is stay the course. Wal-Mart is too important for
individual families who are stretching a budget, we are too important for the
suppliers who employ millions of people, we are too important for our associates
for whom we have so much love, and value so much." Associates are Wal-Mart
employees (2). Scott uses the word love to describe how he feels about them.
The documentary reminds us, however, that in 2005 he earned $27,207,799, while
the average wage of a Wal-Mart salesperson was $13,861. A salary differential
of 1:2,000 seems an unusual way to show love.
Greenwald's film makes other good points. The first Wal-Mart store opened in
1962, the same year Don Hunter opened a hardware shop in
Greenwald shows the views of patriots who sincerely believe in the rights
conferred on them by the
On the soundtrack, there is Bruce Springsteen singing Woody Guthrie's famous
"This land is your land, this land is my land, this land was made for you
and me". The promise has been broken, since "this land" no
longer completely belongs to that "you and me".
Most of the people who appear are against Wal-Mart in the name of what they
understand by
He says: "It's like a Chinese company to me, with American board members.
All they've done is give
Do Asian workers profit on an income of less than $3 a day? A Chinese worker in
the film thinks not: "Do you know why you can buy cheap toys from
Wal-Mart? That's because we work each day, day and night."
Explaining prices through the cost of labour doesn't work, though, when a
miniature car sold by Wal-Mart for $14.96 costs a mere 18 cents to assemble.
Jim Bill Lynn had been in charge of certification for Wal-Mart in central
America, and he was a good soldier who believed in perfecting the system and
its social ethics. He tells the camera: "If you would have cut me, I would
have bled Wal-Mart blue blood." But one day he discovered that Wal-Mart's
altruistic propaganda was a lie, and moreover it had lied to him. The injustice
in
Not everything in the documentary works as well at this. Sometimes it resorts
to less-relevant incidents, such as a woman raped in a Wal-Mart carpark or a
woman murdered because security is too lax outside the stores. The film has a
happy ending, the successes of associations resisting new Wal-Mart stores.
These successes make you wonder if this opposition could become a focus for
joint action by those fighting the exploitation of wage-earners, green
movements opposed to environmental damage and consumerism, and conservatives
attached to their dream of
(1) Available on DVD from
(2) See the Wal-Mart dossier in the January 2006 issue Le Monde diplomatique,
English language
_____________
C.
from Robert Fisk :
March 19, 2006
by Robert Fisk
It
is a bright winter morning and I am sipping my first coffee of the day in
Datelined
Now quite apart from the fact that many Iraqis - along, I have to admit, with
myself - have grave doubts about whether Zarqawi exists, and that al-Qai'da's
Zarqawi, if he does exist, does not merit the title of "insurgency
mastermind", the words that caught my eye were "US authorities
say". And as I read through the report, I note how the
Here are the sources - on pages one and 10 for the yarn spun by reporters Josh
Meyer and Mark Mazzetti: "US officials said", "said one US
Justice Department counter-terrorism official", "Officials ...
said", "those officials said", "the officials confirmed",
"American officials complained", "the US officials
stressed", "US authorities believe", "said one senior US
intelligence official", "US officials said", "Jordanian
officials ... said" - here, at least is some light relief - "several
US officials said", "the US officials said", "American
officials said", "officials say", "say US officials",
"US officials said", "one US counter-terrorism official
said".
I do truly treasure this story. It proves my point that the
Mr Welshofer, it transpired in court, had stuffed the Iraqi General Abed Hamed
Mowhoush head-first into a sleeping bag and sat on his chest, an action which -
not surprisingly - caused the general to expire. The military jury ordered -
reader, hold your breath - a reprimand for Mr Welshofer, the forfeiting of
$6,000 of his salary and confinement to barracks for 60 days. But what caught
my eye was the sympathetic detail. Welshofer's wife's Barbara, the AP told us,
"testified that she was worried about providing for their three children
if her husband was sentenced to prison. 'I love him more for fighting this,'
she said, tears welling up in her eyes. 'He's always said that you need to do
the right thing, and sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing to
do'".
Yes, I guess torture is tough on the torturer. But try this from the same
report: "Earlier in the day ... Mr Welshofer fought back tears. 'I deeply
apologise if my actions tarnish the soldiers serving in
Note how the American killer's remorse is directed not towards his helpless and
dead victim but to the honour of his fellow soldiers, even though an earlier
hearing had revealed that some of his colleagues watched Welshofer stuffing the
general into the sleeping bag and did nothing to stop him. An earlier AP report
stated that "officials" - here we go again - "believed Mowhoush
had information that would 'break the back of the insurgency'." Wow. The
general knew all about 40,000 Iraqi insurgents. So what a good idea to stuff
him upside down inside a sleeping bag and sit on his chest.
But the real scandal about these reports is we're not told anything about the
general's family. Didn't he have a wife? I imagine the tears were "welling
up in her eyes" when she was told her husband had been done to death.
Didn't the general have children? Or parents? Or any loved ones who
"fought back tears" when told of this vile deed? Not in the AP report
he didn't. General Mowhoush comes across as an object, a dehumanised creature
who wouldn't let the Americans "break the back" of the insurgency
after being stuffed headfirst into a sleeping bag.
Now let's praise the AP. On an equally bright summer's morning in
And here is what the American colonel replied: "Mr Abbasi, your conduct is
unacceptable and this is your absolute final warning. I do not care about
international law. I do not want to hear the words international law. We are
not concerned about international law."
Alas, these words - which symbolise the very end of the American dream - are
buried down the story. The colonel, clearly a disgrace to the uniform he wears,
does not appear in the bland headline ("US papers tell Guantanamo inmates'
stories") of the Sydney paper, more interested in telling us that the
released documents identify by name the "farmers, shopkeepers or
goatherds" held in Guantanamo.
I am now in
If only, I say to myself, CNN - along with the American press - would do the
same.
D.
from Staughton Lynd and Carl Mirra :
March 15, 2006
by Staughton Lynd and Carl Mirra
One
hundred years ago, three officers of the Western Federation of Miners were
indicted for murder. President Theodore Roosevelt declared that they were
“undesirable citizens.” Working people and radicals all over the country
responded with insignia stating, “I am an undesirable citizen.”
According to popular legend, during World War II the Nazis occupied
Something similar is now required of historians in the
The president’s critique of revisionism needs to be rejected both as a specific
comment on the origins of the
I.
In the Veterans Day speech,
Bush declared that, “Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we
manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went
to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation
found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s
judgments related to
Bush believes that “it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how
[the
1. Bush (in a March 2003 speech on the eve of invasion): There is “no doubt
that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal
weapons ever devised.”[6]
Revisionist correction: The International Atomic Energy (IAEA) Update for the
Security Council Pursuant to
In early March 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, reported that “there
was no evidence
In February 2001, Colin Powell acknowledged that
Demonstrators and “revisionists” across the globe also challenged this now
fully discredited claim. Recall that the administration’s own inspection team
confirmed that
2. Bush (State of the Union 2003): “
Revisionist correction: UN inspectors almost immediately disputed the
allegation. One letter used to prove the purchase was signed by someone who
last served in the Nigerian government in 1989.[11] One would hope that the
Bush administration was capable of detecting such obvious errors. Bush shifted
blame to George Tenet, then head of the CIA, who allegedly allowed the
statement to enter the State of the Union Address. However, according to the
Wall Street Journal, the CIA sent a memo to Condoleezza Rice that “challenged
the African uranium sale” before the speech. Rice accepted responsibility for
the “error,” the article notes.[12] Rice was not reprimanded; instead she was
promoted to Secretary of State in 2005. Of course, Joseph Wilson also disputed
the uranium claim and now Cheney’s Chief of Staff is under indictment
surrounding the outing of
3. Bush in October 2002: “I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use
of force will not become necessary.”[13]
Revisionist correction: In July 2002, Sir Richard Dearlove, head of
4. Dick Cheney:
Revisionist Correction:
This last piece of propaganda is especially disconcerting. A Zogby Poll has
found that 85% of
The Iraqi people also feel that the
In the buildup to the
II.
There is a second, more
general reason to resist the president’s attack on “revisionism.”
History is revisionist. It is precisely the task of the historian to
correct, that is, to revise, the popular misconceptions of the moment.
Every responsible historian is perpetually in the position of the little child
who sees that the emperor has no clothes, or, to take an example from the life
of the mind, of Galileo when he is said to have muttered, “'Eppur si muove.”
(yet it does move).
The responsibility to revise falls especially on the historian of foreign
policy.
And it is not only official explanations of the reasons for going to war that
require revision. The underlying assumptions of policy makers are
often enough, from an historian’s vantage point, simply false. One of the
authors, after a trip to
A debate that has no obvious “politically correct” answer but that desperately
requires to be joined concerns the question, How new is the Bush administration
policy of “preventive” or “preemptive” war? Writing in The
On the one hand, commentators point to the brazen way in which policymakers in
the Bush administration destroy multinational agreements that have been painful
decades in the making, and blithely leap from rationale to rationale in seeking
to justify
Most fundamentally and grievously of all: Radical historians, anxious to
prove the meticulous character of their scholarship, have too often confined
the scope of their research to small, “manageable” topics. Creation of
the master narrative is defaulted to professors who view the world broadly, but
from the parochial perspective of Ivy League departments whose tenured members
– think of the Bundys, the Rostows, Professor Wolfowitz – in even years make
the policy that in odd years their scholarship grandly justifies.
For example, Tony Judt finds such parochialism and “triumphalism” in the
sweeping Cold War history of Yale Professor John Lewis Gaddis.[22] Among
the topics he finds lacking substantial treatment in Gaddis’ work are:
the sources and psychology of Soviet strategy; the degree to which United
States diplomats like Harriman, Acheson, Kennan and Bohlen brought to the table
a “worldly, cosmopolitan” outlook just as cold and hard as that of their
Marxist counterparts; the Third World, including the overthrow of elected
governments in Iran, Guatemala and Chile; Polish Solidarity and Hungary
in 1956; Soviet intelligence; the fact that McCarthyism did not occur in
Western Europe despite spying in those countries at least as serious as that
charged to the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss; DeGaulle; Eurocommunism; the
international New Left; the prehistory of the Cold War from 1917 to 1945; and
its posthistory, including the invasion of Iraq. One might
pardonably conclude that this master narrative is not just Hamlet without the
Prince of
To revise is more than to criticize. Revisionist historians must take
risks that will expose them, in turn, to criticism. Revisionist
historians have a responsibility to reconstruct the master narrative as well as
to polish particular tiles in the mosaic. Since William
Appleman Williams, few if any historians on the Left have had the chutzpah to
try to tell the whole story of
NOTES
:
[1] Bush quoted in “Bush raps ‘revisionist historians’ on
[2] “President Commemorates Veterans Day, Discusses War on Terror.” Tobyhanna
Army Depot,
[3] Scott Shane and Daniel Sanger, “Bush Panel Finds Big Flaws Remain in
[4] “Blix:
[5] “President Commemorates Veterans Day, Discusses War on Terror.” Tobyhanna
Army Depot,
Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, 11 November 2005,
[6] “President Says Saddam Hussein Must Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours: Remarks by
the President in Address to the Nation” (Washington, DC: Office of the Press
Secretary), 17 March 2003.
[7] IAEA Update Report for the Security Council Pursuant to Resolution 1441
(2002).
[8] “No Evidence of Nuclear Weapons Program: ElBaradei,” Sydney Morning Herald,
8 March 2003.
[9] Secretary Colin L. Powell, “Press Remarks with Foreign Minister of Egypt
Amre Moussa,” U.S. Department of State, 24 February 2001, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/933.htm
[10] “President Delivers State of the Union,” 28 January 2003, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html
[11] Dana Priest and Karen DeYoung, “CIA Questioned Documents Linking Iraq,
Uranium Ore,” Washington Post, 22 March 2003. See also “Report on the
[12] Jeanne Cummings, ‘Security Advisers Now Share Blame In Intelligence Row,”
Wall Street Journal, 23 July 2003, p. A4. Note that the CIA’s initial
challenge led to the removal of the uranium claim from an October speech. See
Ken Fireman, ‘Warning Unheeded,” Newsday, 23 July 2003.
[13] Mark Danner, “The
[14] Ibid. This quotation is from the infamous
[15] See Stephen Shalom, “
[16] Ibid, p. 174.
[17] “
[18] Sean Rayment, “Secret MoD poll: Iraqis support attacks on British Troops,”
Sunday Telegraph, 23 October 2005.
[19] “Iraqis Not So Happy,” Newsday, 29 September 2003, p. A12. Furthermore,
the Brooklings Institute identifies a February 2005 poll in which 71% of Iraqis
“oppose the presence of Coalition forces in
[20] Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Eyeless in
[21] Ralph Stavins, Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin, Washington Plans an
Aggressive War (New York: Random House, 1971), pp. 34, 39, 194, 252.
[22] Tony Judt, “A Story Still to be Told,” The
_____________________________
Lynd is a former history professor, retired attorney, lifelong activist and
author of numerous books, including Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison
Uprising. Mirra teaches American Studies at
E.
from Noam Chomsky
March 10,
2006
New world
relationships
by Noam Chomsky
03/10/06
" Khaleej Times" -- -- THE prospect that
Europe and Asia might move toward greater independence has troubled US planners
since World War II. The concerns have only risen as the ‘tripolar order’
Europe, North America and
Regional integration in Asia and Latin America is a crucial and increasingly
important issue that, from
In January, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz
of Saudi Arabia visited Beijing, which is expected to lead to a Sino-Saudi
memorandum of understanding calling for "increased cooperation and
investment between the two countries in oil, natural gas and investment,"
The Wall Street Journal reports. Already, much of
The key is India-China cooperation. In January, an agreement signed in
Meanwhile, in Latin America, left-centre governments prevail from
Venezuela, the leading oil exporter in the hemisphere, has forged probably the
closest relations with China of any Latin American country, and is planning to
sell increasing amounts of oil to China as part of its effort to reduce
dependence on the openly hostile US government. Venezuela has joined Mercosur,
the South American customs union, a move described by Argentine President
Nestor Kirchner as ‘a milestone’ in the development of this trading bloc, and
welcomed as a "new chapter in our integration" by Brazilian President
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Venezuela, apart from supplying Argentina with fuel
oil, bought almost a third of Argentine debt issued in 2005, one element of a
region-wide effort to free the countries from the controls of the International
Monetary Fund after two decades of disastrous conformity to the rules imposed
by the US -dominated international financial institutions. Steps towards
Southern Cone integration advanced further in December with the election of Evo
Morales in
The Financial Times reported that these "are expected to underpin
forthcoming radical reforms to
Cuban medical assistance is also being welcomed elsewhere. One of the most
horrendous tragedies of recent years was the earthquake in
President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan expressed his ‘deep gratitude’ to Fidel
Castro for the ‘spirit and compassion’ of the Cuban medical teams reported to
comprise more than 1,000 trained personnel, 44 per cent of them women, who
remained to work in remote mountain villages, "living in tents in freezing
weather and in an alien culture" after Western aid teams had been
withdrawn. Growing popular movements, primarily in the South, but with
increasing participation in the rich industrial countries, are serving as the
bases for many of these developments towards more independence and concern for
the needs of the great majority of the population.
Noam Chomsky, the author, most recently, of Imperial Ambitions: Conversations
on the Post-9/11 World, is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachussets
*********************
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université de Grenoble-3