From cscpo@polsci.umass.edu Thu May 1 23:18:59 1997 Fri, 2 May 1997 01:18:53 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 02 May 1997 01:18:28 -0400 From: "colin s. cavell" Subject: WSN Information & Signup Instructions To: WSN@csf.colorado.edu Message to WSN Listserv owner: Please send me or post to the list again the WSN information and signup instructions, for I wish to pass it on to an interested party. Thanks, csc ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Colin S. Cavell "Had it not been for the race problem Department of Political Science early thrust upon me and enveloping Thompson Tower, Box 37520 me, I should have probably been an University of Massachusetts unquestioning worshipper at the shrine Amherst, MA 01003-7520 of the established social order and of Internet: cscpo@polsci.umass.edu the economic development into which I Voice: (413) 546-3408 was born." http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~cscpo --W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1963 ============================================================================= From rkmoore@iol.ie Sun May 4 01:50:22 1997 Date: Sun, 4 May 1997 08:50:14 +0100 To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK From: rkmoore@iol.ie (Richard K. Moore) Subject: Re: human nature / world systems theory 4/28/97, Bruce R. McFarling wrote: > > This is a direct consequence of pointing the phrase "human nature" >at behaviors rather than capacities. I suppose that this distinction >answers some question that is relevant to some problematic, somewhere. >Personally, I don't like it, because my impression is that it moves to far >from a lay understanding of the term without any corresponding pay-off. "Capacities" is fine with me as a definition, but it seems we need to refer to observed behaviors as a clue to capacities, with the observation that any theory of capacities must explain at least the observed behaviors. Behaviors (throughout history) are the database against which human-capacity theories can be tested. > However, the relevant question is whether this distinction is >relevant to the identification of systems (world systems, world-systems, >societies), to an understanding of how they are structured, or to an >understanding of how they change over time. After all, *that* is the >relevance of Sanderson's arguments: they have implications for how we >identify social systems, how they are structured, and the viability of >future social systems that different people in wsn may either predict as >possibilities, or pursue as desireable outcomes. I agree with this characterization of the purpose of this thread. The point is to have some understanding of how people typically respond to various circumstances, and how those responses could be expected to aggregate into societal systems. Perhaps the term "human nature" needs to be abandoned (at least on this list) as being too loaded. But what other term captures not only capacities, but also preferences, tendencies, etc? But whatever term we use, it's important to refer to the gestalt totality of the human being - including what is shared with animals, what comes with the unique human psyche, the patterns by which individuals interact socially, and the societal structures that result. It is this broad definition that helps us discuss the micro level of world systems. If we could agree on the definitional framework and terminology, there are some useful substantive statements that could be made. Yours, Richard From rkmoore@iol.ie Sun May 4 02:53:24 1997 Date: Sun, 4 May 1997 09:53:17 +0100 To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK From: rkmoore@iol.ie (Richard K. Moore) Subject: Re: humanity shall vanish A friend wrote to me: >and in the long run, humanity shall vanish from the planet and the planet >will take a good long rest. Mankind, like man, lives but for a span - in the end just a blink in time. For man, so Buddha and others have said, the finite can be conquered - by perceiving the timelessness and unity of conciousness. Does mankind collectively also have a path to some kind of enlightenment? Or is mankind now in its final senile decline, having passed the time of its enlightenment opportunities? A person, seeking enlightenment, must learn to put the chariot and horse under control of the rider, before right action or right understanding can be pursued. Mankind, it would appear, is being carried hither and yon by chariot and horse while the rider - unconcious of the reins - lives in a schizophrenic dream world. Are we romanticizing in attributing to primitive societies a higher degree of self-awareness and collective wisdom? To me the garden of eden was the time before man tried to design his own societies. Awareness of technology, sociology, economics, and politics - as domains that can be altered and improved - this is the dangerous fruit of knowledge that enables mankind to go either toward or away from collective fulfillment. We're like a skiier who goes down faster and faster slopes without taking the time to master control and balance. We've orgied on our ability to manipulate society, and it's gotten away from us. I just read "Report from Iron Mountain". I don't have an opinion on whether it really was a government report, but its thesis (that warfare is the possibly indispensible organizing principle of nationhood) is difficult to dismiss. Perhaps it is more true of US, Germany, and UK (for example) than some others. Yours, Richard From rene.barendse@tip.nl Sun May 4 07:03:45 1997 id <01BC58A9.BB4F8780@amsterdam19.pop.tip.nl>; Sun, 4 May 1997 16:39:27 +-200 From: barendse To: "'wsn@csf.colorado.edu'" Subject: DS: humanity shall vanish Date: Sun, 4 May 1997 16:38:49 +-200 In response to Richard K. Moore's A friend wrote to me: >and in the long run, humanity shall vanish from the planet and the = planet >will take a good long rest. Mankind, like man, lives but for a span - in the end just a blink in = time. For man, so Buddha and others have said, the finite can be conquered - = by perceiving the timelessness and unity of conciousness. Does mankind collectively also have a path to some kind of enlightenment? Or is = mankind now in its final senile decline, having passed the time of its enlightenment opportunities? A person, seeking enlightenment, must learn to put the chariot and horse under control of the rider, before right action or right understanding = can be pursued. Mankind, it would appear, is being carried hither and yon = by chariot and horse while the rider - unconcious of the reins - lives in a schizophrenic dream world. Are we romanticizing in attributing to primitive societies a higher degree of self-awareness and collective wisdom? To me the garden of eden was the time before man tried to design his own societies. Awareness of technology, sociology, economics, and politics = - as domains that can be altered and improved - this is the dangerous = fruit of knowledge that enables mankind to go either toward or away from collective fulfillment. We're like a skiier who goes down faster and faster slopes without = taking the time to master control and balance. We've orgied on our ability to manipulate society, and it's gotten away from us. Please read Marc Aurel, the consolidation of philosophy, Richard who = wrote about this 1800 years ago and did this much better than we can and = let's use the World System list for discussing the World System. . (With = or without hyphen) Cheers Dr. R. J. Barendse From CMSJOYA@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Mon May 5 07:58:46 1997 Date: Mon, 05 May 97 09:54:35 EDT From: CMSJOYA@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Subject: political soc To: W-S Network I'm teaching a graduate course in political sociology next fall. I'd be interested in hearing suggestions from list members for their favorite readings that address political systems from a world-system perspective. I'm especially interested in those that bring race and/or gender into their conceptualizations of the state. Cheers, Joya Misra CMSJOYA@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU *********************************************************************** Assistant Professor Department of Sociology University of Georgia Baldwin Hall Athens, Georgia 30602 (706)542-3190 From OWENJACK@FS.isu.edu Mon May 5 10:19:03 1997 From: "J B Owens" To: WSN@csf.colorado.edu Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 10:22:10 -0600, MDT Subject: WHA of Texas--Conference--Sept 1997 ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 07:38:06 -0500 Reply-to: H-NET List for World History From: "Patrick Manning, Northeastern University" Subject: World History Assn. of Texas--Conference--Sept 1997 From: Bullitt Lowry, University of North Texas lowry@jove.acs.unt.edu The World History Association of Texas (WHAT) will meet in conjunction with the University of North Texas's AHA Teaching Conference on September 6, 1997. WHAT provides one track of the three at the conference; the other two are United States history and Texas history. The theme of the conference is "Revolutions." Scheduled to speak in the World History track are: Harold M. Tanner, "The Chinese Revolution" William H. Beezley, "The 1910 Revolution in Mexico" Dennis D. Cordell, "Colonial Revolutions in Twentieth Century Africa." For more information, please email: lowry@jove.acs.unt.edu or mail Bullitt Lowry Professor of History University of North Texas Denton, Texas From rkmoore@iol.ie Mon May 5 17:33:30 1997 Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 00:33:23 +0100 To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK From: rkmoore@iol.ie (Richard K. Moore) Subject: Re: discussing the World System 5/04/97, barendse wrote: >Please read Marc Aurel, the consolidation of philosophy, Richard who wrote >about this 1800 years ago and did this much better than we can and let's >use the World System list for discussing the World System. . (With or without >hyphen) Question to list: Are we to take "World System" in the broad sense of understanding world systems, or in the narrow sense of presuming a certain base paradigm (Wallenstein or whatever)? -rkm From rkmoore@iol.ie Tue May 6 06:36:38 1997 Date: Tue, 6 May 1997 13:36:00 +0100 To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK From: rkmoore@iol.ie (Richard K. Moore) Subject: re: World System scope I received the following reply to my query "Re: discussing the World System". Is there any consensus on this list favoring an "operational system which assumes the merging of nations into one global country"? Or that such would "lead to greater human progress"? -rkm ________________________________________________________________ Date: Tue, 06 May 1997 From: Richard Ragland To: rkmoore@iol.ie Subject: Re: discussing the World System -Reply Encoding: 17 Text Discuss real or theoretical base paradigms but make no presumptions! and discuss a global, operational system which assumes the merging of nations into one global country. These elements, I believe will lead to greater human progress. Richard >Question to list: Are we to take "World System" in the broad sense of >understanding world systems, or in the narrow sense of presuming a >certain base paradigm (Wallenstein or whatever)? > >-rkm ________________________________________________________________ From rkmoore@iol.ie Tue May 13 05:18:05 1997 Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 12:16:34 +0100 To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu From: rkmoore@iol.ie (Richard K. Moore) Subject: A personal WS perspective A World System (WS) can be either non-existent, anarchistic or hierarchical. Up until the fifteenth century or so, we had a non-existent WS, due, if for no other reason, to limitations in communications and logistics. Since that time, a de facto anarchistic WS has evolved - based on nation states, imperialism, warfare, and trade. Just as capitalist monopolies constitute the natural final-state of an anarchistic economic system, so political/military monopolies constitute the natural final-state of an anarchistic political system. Thus over the past few centuries, as technology has been knitting a global infrastructure, we've seen ever larger empires vying for dominance. At the end of WW II, we finally reached the stage where a single nation-state had achieved an effective near-monopoly of political/military power (cold-war propaganda notwithstanding). When a system reaches its final state, that state may be stable or unstable. If it is stable (eg ancient Inca and Egypt?), then that system may persist until outside events intervene. But if it is unstable, then the result will be either degeneration/fragmentation or else the birth of a new organizing principle - a principle strong enough to bind together the elements brought together by the predecessor system - but a principle that adds greater stability. Within the context of the anarchistic nation-state WS, the all-but-implemented final-state would be a Global Imperial America. But if such were to be formally instituted, it would be highly unstable. Uncle Sam trying to rule a traditionally-structured world empire would make Vietnam look like a Sunday picnic. It is a tribute to the acumen (I didn't say widsom) of our behind-the-scenes world leaders that they were well aware of this final-state instability, and that they took effective steps to institute a new organizing principle. Preparations began during WW II (FDR & Churchill's United Nations Declaration) for the first-ever hierarchical WS. Since that time, by means (both overt and covert) of treaty arrangements, economic/political pressures, and military interventions, the US has guided/coerced the world into its current globalization phase. Globalization brings the necessary new organizing principle, a principle stable enough to create and maintain a new global order - at least for a while. The new principle is capitalist/corporate hegemony, and the infrastructure which supports it is the collection of transnational corporations (TNCs), with their astronomical resources and control of the global economy. To a large extent, the TNCs already ARE the World System. They operate globally, they directly control much of the world's economic activity, and they've put together a set of mechanisms (GATT, WTO, etc.) that regulates, on a harmonious representative basis, the rules of their collective game. Globalization is the yielding of political sovereignty to this proven corporate system - acknowledging that competitive nation-states have evolved themselves into a historical cul de sac. If the corporations can keep the WS trains running, so to speak, that seems preferable to the uncertain future of nation-state political developments. The price to be paid, disenfranchisement and exploitation of the citizenry, is not clearly marked on the price tag of globalization. As the price becomes widely evident - as it already is in the Third World - instability will arise from citizen unrest. Police-state structures are being rapidly implemented to contain such unrest in the First World, and have already been deployed in the Third World. Meanwhile, the soporific mind-control mass media carries the primary burden of population control. The mid-term stability of this semi-fascist WS remains to be proven, but widespread precedents indicate considerable stability potential. The long-term source of coporate-WS instability relates more to Marxian contradictions - growth can't go on forever - than it does to the inability of modern political mechanisms to keep people under control. When a few corporations have swallowed up all the others (ala Rollerball or Blade Runner) then yet another final-state will have been reached. Comments welcome. Query: Are there any other candidate organizing principles for a post-nation-state/imperial WS? Must any such be necessarily hierarchical? From chriscd@jhu.edu Tue May 13 07:31:16 1997 13 May 1997 09:30:27 -0400 (EDT) 13 May 1997 09:29:53 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 09:29:29 -0400 From: christopher chase-dunn Subject: Re: A personal WS perspective To: rkmoore@iol.ie Reply-to: chriscd@jhu.edu References: one point re Richard Moore's personal w-s perspective: he says before the 15th century there was no world-system because limitations in communications and logistics. this must mean that richard is assuming that a world-system must be global in spatial extent. by this assumption there has only been a world-system since the 19th century. but it is more useful to allow for regional world-systems that are not global and to track the emergence of a global system from the incorporations by larger world-systems of smaller ones. this is what tom hall and i do and this allows us to use the world-system as a new unit of analysis for studying social evolution over the last twelve thousand years. try it. you will like it. chris From dgrammen@prairienet.org Tue May 13 10:47:04 1997 Tue, 13 May 1997 11:42:47 -0500 (CDT) Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 11:42:46 -0500 (CDT) From: Dennis Grammenos Subject: WS and International Conflict To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK In-Reply-To: Greetings, In the Fall I am going to be teaching The Geography of International Conflict and I was wondering if anybody on this list could point to some works on international conflict from a WS perspective. Regards, Dennis Grammenos _______________________________________________________ | Dennis Grammenos dgrammen@prairienet.org | | Departments of Geography | | & Russian and East European Studies | | University of Illinois Phone:(217) 333-1880 | | Urbana, Il 61801 Fax: (217) 244-1785 | ------------------------------------------------------- From dennyb@VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU Tue May 13 21:21:19 1997 13 May 1997 22:21:09 -0600 (CST) Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 22:15:40 -0700 From: "Denny Braun (May 1, 1997)" Subject: The Rich Get Richer (New Ed.) To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu boundary="------------B831D91E25CA1DA6A8227B65" --------------B831D91E25CA1DA6A8227B65 This describes the new release of the second edition of my book, The Rich Get Richer: The Rise of Income Inequality in the United States and the World. I would like to thank Terry Boswell for reviewing the entire book prior to the start of the new revision, and for again reviewing the theory chapter after the new edition was completed. The new edition continues my study of income inequality, using a explicit World Systems perspective. It documents the erosion of the middle class, and growing rates of poverty, crime, and violence. The U.S., other industrial nations, and developing countries are all examined. New information includes the working poor, Mexico and Nafta, cross-country perceptions of inequality, mass media distortion, political manipulation, corporate welfare and the overpaid CEOs of U.S. multinational businesses. More information on content and help in ordering for The Rich Get Richer (2nd Edition) can be obtained from College Textbooks Marketing, Inc.(CTM), which represents Nelson-Hall Publishers as well as a number of other book publishers. Once at this web site, click "New Arrivals" and then click "Nelson-Hall." For the latest updated information on many new books and new editions in the social sciences, visit CTM at their website: http://www.spiretech.com/~ctm/. You can also visit my personal web page at Mankato State University for further details: http://www.mankato.msus.edu/dept/soccor/web/FAC/DBraun/homepage.html If you wish to order your own copy (or for educators who would like an examination copy of The Rich Get Richer to consider for classroom adoption), you can also contact my publisher directly via e-mail at nelsonhal@aol.com. By regular mail, they are: Nelson-Hall Publishers, Inc. 111 N. Canal Street Chciago, IL 60606 TEL: (312) 930-9446 FAX: (312) 930-5903 My book lists at $25.95 (ISBN number 0-8304-1433-9), and weighs in at 538 pages. It is 150 pages longer than the first edition. An abbreviated table of Contents for The Rich Get Richer (2nd Edition) follows: 1. Chapter One--Why Increasing Inequality is a Danger to Us All 2. Chapter Two--The Battleground of Ideology: Theories and Underlying Values Surrounding the Explanation of Income Inequality. 3. Chapter Three--Economic Inequality Around the World 4. Chapter Four--Multinational Corporations: Income Inequality and Basic Needs. 5. Chapter Five--Apple Pie and Economic Pie: The American Path to a Smaller Slice. 6. Chapter Six--Sunset in the Sunbelt: How Geographic Variation Hides Income Inequality 7. Chapter Seven--Dealing From the Top of the Deck: Some Alternatives and Strategies for Needed Change: --------------B831D91E25CA1DA6A8227B65 This describes the new release of the second edition of my book, The Rich Get Richer: The Rise of Income Inequality in the United States and the World.
I would like to thank Terry Boswell for reviewing the entire book prior to the start of the new revision, and for again reviewing the theory chapter after the new edition was completed.

The new edition continues my study of income inequality, using a explicit World Systems perspective.  It documents the erosion of the middle class, and growing rates of poverty, crime, and violence. The U.S., other industrial nations, and developing countries are all examined.  New information includes the working poor, Mexico and Nafta, cross-country perceptions of inequality, mass media distortion, political manipulation, corporate welfare and the overpaid CEOs of U.S. multinational businesses.

More information on content and help in ordering  for The Rich Get Richer (2nd Edition) can be obtained from College Textbooks Marketing, Inc.(CTM), which represents Nelson-Hall Publishers as well as a number of other book publishers. Once at this web site, click "New Arrivals" and then click "Nelson-Hall."  For the latest updated information on many new books and new editions in the social sciences, visit CTM at their website: http://www.spiretech.com/~ctm/.

You can also visit my personal web page at Mankato State University for further details: http://www.mankato.msus.edu/dept/soccor/web/FAC/DBraun/homepage.html 

If you wish to order your own copy (or for educators who would like an examination copy of The Rich Get Richer to consider  for classroom adoption),  you can also contact my publisher directly via e-mail at nelsonhal@aol.com.  By regular mail, they are:

Nelson-Hall Publishers, Inc.
111 N. Canal Street
Chciago, IL  60606

TEL:      (312) 930-9446
FAX:     (312) 930-5903

My book lists at $25.95 (ISBN number 0-8304-1433-9), and weighs in at 538 pages.  It is 150 pages longer than the first edition.

An abbreviated table of Contents for The Rich Get Richer (2nd Edition) follows:

1. Chapter One--Why Increasing Inequality is a Danger to Us All
2. Chapter Two--The Battleground of Ideology: Theories and Underlying       Values Surrounding the Explanation of Income Inequality.
3. Chapter Three--Economic Inequality Around the World
4. Chapter Four--Multinational Corporations: Income Inequality and Basic Needs.
5. Chapter Five--Apple Pie and Economic Pie: The American Path to a Smaller Slice.
6. Chapter Six--Sunset in the Sunbelt: How Geographic Variation Hides Income Inequality
7. Chapter Seven--Dealing From the Top of the Deck: Some Alternatives and Strategies for Needed Change:
  --------------B831D91E25CA1DA6A8227B65-- From joseph@indigo.ie Wed May 14 13:06:25 1997 for ; Wed, 14 May 1997 20:06:20 +0100 (BST) for ; Wed, 14 May 1997 20:06:18 +0100 (BST) From: "Karl Carlile" To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 20:06:11 +0000 Subject: The floating vote................ Comrades: There has been very recently a general election in the UK in which the British Labour Party won an enormous majority in the House of Commons and now forms the current government there. In the Irish R epublic an election will more than likely take place sometime in June of this year. Some reflection on the character of these elections is opportune: The general elections are a fight for the floating vote. The election is generally fought and won over a minority of the electorate: the floating electorate. This element within the electorate tends to be fickle. It tends to vote this way or that for the most fickle of reasons such as the facial features of candidates or some such superficial characteristic. It is this element within the elector ate to which the party political image industry has most impact. The image and showbiz characteristic of modern elections is, in a sense, a function of the need to win over this element within the el ectorate. Since it is among the least political element of the voting electorate the floating electorate makes or breaks governments on the basis of secondary and superficial matters. This tends to give elect ion campaigns a more superficial character. The elections are won or loss in the marginal constituencies. And these marginals are won or loss on the basis of the how the floating vote turns. In short a small minority of the electorate, in a se nse, dictate the kind of government and even society we are to have. It is to this minority that the official politicians direct most of their attention. This minority increasingly determines the cha racter of politics during the campaign and the character of media coverage during it. The floating vote appears to be increasing and is becoming a bigger element in elections for a number of reasons. The shift of the main parties to what is questionably called the centre is a factor i n this. If there exists little difference between the principal political actors on the electoral stage then clearly their success at the polls will tend to be a product of secondary superficial fact ors such as image, style and personality. Since the differences between the contestants are marginal the contest tends to be grounded increasingly on marketing, on creating the illusion of real diffe rence. As a result of this the election is fought and won on the basis of superficial issues. This means that election campaigns are increasingly trivialised so that debate turns around superficial a nd derivative matters while the fundamental issues tend to be increasingly submerged under a mountain of trivia such as Tony Blair's football skills in relation to Kevin Keegan (the logic being that if you are good a football you are politically good). Instead of the election contributing to the increased politicisation of the populace the opposite dynamic takes place. Consequently politics tend s to turn around superficial issues. People increasingly begin to think that superficial issues is the meaning of politics. As the fundamental issues retreat into the background superficial issues ar e, in a sense, transformed into their opposite, fundamental issues. On the other hand fundamental issues are turned into their opposite, superficial issues. This is why it almost considered Neanderth al and even kitsch to raise issues such as the need to eliminate market relations. Politics then turns into anti-politics. Politics looses becomes meaningless: the postmodernist's dream (buckets of w ee signifiers emancipated from signification!). What is called politics is no longer politics. Consequently the politicians elected into government are less and less politicians but theatrical figur es from puppitry. As this trend develops the real politics increasingly takes place behind the backs of the people. The invisible figures in upper echelons of the state and certain other capitalist i nstitutions makes the real politics. Consequently the difference between the political parties continuously diminishes since they are constrained by the politics as prescribed by the invisible cliques such as the invisible administrator s of the state and parastatal bodies such as the European Commission which are an expression of the objective necessities of world capitalism. The official politicians are the "frontmen" there to dis tract our attention while the significant activity takes place behind the world stage curtain. In short the election campaigns rather than contributing towards increased politicisation forms part of a depoliticisation process: a retreat form the Enlightenment tradition. The above are but tentative observations on general elections in Ireland, Gt. Britain and possibly elsewhere. Karl From rkmoore@iol.ie Thu May 15 06:15:20 1997 Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 13:13:43 +0100 To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu From: rkmoore@iol.ie (Richard K. Moore) Subject: Re: The floating vote...while democracy sinks 5/14/97, Karl Carlile wrote: >...In short the election campaigns rather than contributing towards >increased politicisation forms part of a depoliticisation process: a >retreat form the Enlightenment tradition. Karl - thanks for the analysis. We can all see elections are bogus, but you give some understanding of the processes. -rkm From hoopes@ukans.edu Thu May 15 10:22:59 1997 Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 11:18:17 -0500 From: "John W. Hoopes" Reply-To: hoopes@ukans.edu To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Valuing Nature WSN subscribers may be interested in contributing to an online discussion of the article published by Robert Costanza et al. in today's issue of Nature. Entitled, "The value of the World's ecosystem services and natural capital", the article is an attempt to place an economic value on the services of global ecosystems. The online abstract reads: "The services of ecological systems and the natural capital stocks that produce them are critical to the functioning of the Earth's life-support system. They contribute to human welfare, both directly and indirectly, and therefore represent part of the the economic value of the planet. We have estimated the current economic value of 17 ecosystem services for 16 biomes, based on published studies and a few original calculations. For the entire biosphere, the value (most of which is outside the market) is estimated to be in the range of US$16-54 trillion per year, with an average of US$33 trillion per year. Because of the nature of the uncertainties, this must be considered a minimum estimate. Global gross national product total is around US$18 trillion per year." The full text of the article, together with some commentary, can be found through the "Ecosystems" link on the Nature homepage at: http://www.nature.com/ Information regarding subscription to the online seminar, scheduled for May 19 - June 30 and featuring contributions from Costanza and other authors of the paper, can be found at: http://csf.colorado.edu/isee/ecovalue/ -- John Hoopes hoopes@ukans.edu http://www.cc.ukans.edu/~hoopes From timmons@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu Mon May 19 10:28:02 1997 Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 11:27:53 -0500 To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu From: timmons@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu (J. Timmons Roberts) Subject: Re:Personal WS perspective/contradictions and Kst Stability WSN: I'm generally quite in agreement about Richard Moore's personal WS account. I too think we need to be ready for flexibility in capitalism's adapting to changing conditions and in creating new ones. UNLIKE Moore, however, I think the main remaining contradiction is Socio-ECOLOGICAL, not social alone. That is, as Peter Grimes accounted at the recent PEWS conference, topsoil loss, global warming, and the accumulation crisis will combine to shake the system. I am more of an agnostic than Grimes about how this Ecosocial Crisis will be dealt with by globalized capitalism. Specifically, new global environmental agreements are emerging which may lead us to a more sustainable system. On the optimistic side, the hope is that GLOBAL standards of production will emerge so that transnationals cannot flee indefinitely to "pollution haven" peripheries. On the pessimistic side is the very real possibility that some of these global standards and agreements will be manipulated by industry to become essentially vacuous. However a recent trip to Holland encouraged me that some form of capitalism can incorporate much ecological and participatory planning. These new rules are tighter, and capitalists simple (must) adapt. Certainly this is only one step on the way to real sustainability, but it's a lot further than U.S. firms are yet considering possible. I discuss these two arguments in a piece forthcoming this fall in the Journal of Developing Societies, called "Emerging International Environmental Standards: Prospects and Perils." I can email a DOS version to people if they're interested. Timmons >The price to be paid, disenfranchisement and exploitation of the citizenry, >is not clearly marked on the price tag of globalization. As the price >becomes widely evident - as it already is in the Third World - instability >will arise from citizen unrest. > >Police-state structures are being rapidly implemented to contain such >unrest in the First World, and have already been deployed in the Third >World. Meanwhile, the soporific mind-control mass media carries the >primary burden of population control. The mid-term stability of this >semi-fascist WS remains to be proven, but widespread precedents indicate >considerable stability potential. > >The long-term source of coporate-WS instability relates more to Marxian >contradictions - growth can't go on forever - than it does to the inability >of modern political mechanisms to keep people under control. When a few >corporations have swallowed up all the others (ala Rollerball or Blade >Runner) then yet another final-state will have been reached. > -- ****************************************************************** Timmons Roberts Assistant Professor Department of Sociology/Center for Latin American Studies Tulane University New Orleans LA 70118 tel: 504-865-5820/FAX 504-865-5544 timmons@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu ****************************************************************** "So many ways to understand. One for every woman and man." -- Bruce Cockburn ****************************************************************** From sbabones@jhu.edu Tue May 20 00:05:24 1997 20 May 1997 02:04:59 -0400 (EDT) 20 May 1997 02:04:57 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 02:04:45 -0400 From: Salvatore Babones Subject: ASA date To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK What day is PEWS day at the ASA convention? Would someone please post. Thank you. Salvatore From CMSJOYA@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Tue May 20 09:45:56 1997 Date: Tue, 20 May 97 11:44:22 EDT From: CMSJOYA@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Subject: Re: ASA date To: W-S Network In-Reply-To: No guarantees, but from my understanding it's Monday. Joya Misra cmsjoya@uga.cc.uga.edu On Tue, 20 May 1997 02:04:45 -0400 you said: > >What day is PEWS day at the ASA convention? Would someone please post. > >Thank you. > >Salvatore > > From tbos@social-sci.ss.emory.edu Wed May 21 14:38:31 1997 From: "Terry Boswell" To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 16:35:55 EST5EDT Subject: PEWS day at the ASA The PEWS section day at the ASA is Monday, Aug. 11. We wil have sessions and roundtables that day, with the business meeting following the roundtables. We expect to have the party that night. As the theme for the convention is in part "international," there should be several other sessions throughout the week of interest to world-system folks, including a separate world-system session chaired by Arrighi. See you there, TB ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date: Tue, 20 May 1997 02:04:45 -0400 Reply-to: sbabones@jhu.edu From: Salvatore Babones To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK Subject: ASA date What day is PEWS day at the ASA convention? Would someone please post. Thank you. Salvatore Terry Boswell Department of Sociology Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322 From p34d3611@jhu.edu Wed May 21 21:28:09 1997 21 May 1997 23:27:52 -0400 (EDT) 21 May 1997 23:27:47 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 23:27:38 -0400 From: Peter Grimes Subject: fyi & wsn's To: WSN For WSN from Gunder --Peter Grimes ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 21 May 1997 09:52:57 -0400 From: "A. Gunder Frank" To: Chris Chase-Dunn Subject: fyi & wsn's FYI THE AMERICAN COUNCIL FOR THE UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY THE MILLENNIUM PROJECT "Lessons and Questions from History to Apply in Futures Research" http://nko.org/millenium [their ship's home page?] e-mail: jglenn@igc.org [the captain of the ship?] [AGF has received an invite to respond to several questions on how the study of history may bear on research on and prognostication of the future -as well as on 'testing' the viability of others' progonses. This is part of an ongoing project whose phase 1 was in 1992, pahse 2 in 12993/4, phase 3 in 1994/5. they have +/or are creating "Millennium Proejct Nodes" in a dozen cities around the world. They invite responses by e-mail and they offer further info - which i have not myself looked at yet, but some wsn'ers may wish to - on their web page, see above fraterna/sorora-lly submitted fyi gunder frank From thomas.nielebock@uni-tuebingen.de Thu May 22 03:23:59 1997 Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 11:09:52 -0700 From: Thomas Nielebock To: world system network Subject: NATO enlargement Dear colleagues, I have to prepare a lecture on the topic "NATO enlargement" and I am looking for an explanation of this enlargement from the perspective of the world system theory. If you have any informations about articles, books etc., it would be grateful if you send me a mail. Thanks a lot in advance. -- Thomas Nielebock Universitaet Tuebingen Institut fuer Politikwissenschaft Melanchthonstrasse 36 D-72074 Tuebingen Tel.: ++49 / 7071 / 297 6463 Fax: ++49 / 7071 / 29 2417 Email: thomas.nielebock@uni-tuebingen.de URL: http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/spi From rkmoore@iol.ie Thu May 22 05:23:14 1997 Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 12:23:00 +0100 To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu From: rkmoore@iol.ie (Richard K. Moore) Subject: Re: Kst Stability & constrained capitalism rkm had written: >>The long-term source of coporate-WS instability relates more to Marxian >>contradictions - growth can't go on forever - than it does to the inability >>of modern political mechanisms to keep people under control. 5/19/97, J. Timmons Roberts wrote: >UNLIKE Moore, however, I think the main remaining contradiction is >Socio-ECOLOGICAL, not social alone. That is, as Peter Grimes accounted at >the recent PEWS conference, topsoil loss, global warming, and the >accumulation crisis will combine to shake the system. Bingo! Right you are: finite Earth, finite biolayer, finite ozone, finite markets... it's finite all the way down. Sustainability isn't an environmentalist slogan - it's a tough-love law of nature. >On >the optimistic side, the hope is that GLOBAL standards of production will >emerge so that transnationals cannot flee indefinitely to "pollution haven" >peripheries. On the pessimistic side is the very real possibility that some >of these global standards and agreements will be manipulated by industry to >become essentially vacuous. Sorry to play Grinch and burst another bubble of optimism, but the official global standards and procedures for the next millenium are now being drafted by the WTO, and they are ecologically disastrous. I've got many bulletins documenting this arhived... example snip at bottom. >However a recent trip to Holland encouraged me >that some form of capitalism can incorporate much ecological and >participatory planning. These new rules are tighter, and capitalists simple >(must) adapt. That capitalism can thrive under reasonable constraints has been proven many times over... Holland (by your observation), Scandanavia, postwar UK (to some extent), etc. Such constraints can include strong social programs, nationally-owned infrastructures, flight-of-capital restrictions, environmental protections, tough wage and labor laws, and stiff corporate taxation. As one business leader reassured FDR about the New Deal - "You pass whatever laws you want, we'll find a way to make money anyway." If such constraints are imposed politically, corporations compete alike under the regime, investor expectations are scaled down accordingly - and the game is simply played for slightly lower stakes. The increased stability of the system is even welcomed by business leaders who aren't of the plunge and boom mentality. But if the capital elite has the ability to manipulate the political rules, then such manipulation becomes a lucrative growth opportunity for corporate endeavor: loosening the constraints can produce more profit per dollar invested (via bribery, corruption, and media promotion) than the most brilliant new marketing idea. Ten percent off the corporate rates, for example, represents LOTS of bucks to the bottom line, and a privatized rail system opens a whole new industry for lucrative investment. Europe, more than America, has been the redoubt of socially-constrained capitalism, and that is why - in my view - the EU is being pushed so strongly by the corporate community. Corporations perfected their skills at manipulating the political system in America - the EU is an attempt to export America's large-scale democracy model to Europe: a new, large, multi-cultural society is more amenable to divide-and-conquer corporate tactics than is a smaller, culturally coherent society with deeply-rooted socioeconomic traditions. Besides, the EU institutions are being set up with a built-in corporate bias from the outset - witness the neoliberal social prescriptions built into the (arbitrary) "requirements" for the ECU. Holland-style regulations are lame duck in Europe - the handwriting is on the wall. While the EU levels the social playing field in Europe - taking credit for a presumed green conciousness in the process - the WTO is laying down the long range rules to which EU will eventually subscribe. The two-stage scheme is to seduce Europeans into a romanticized "Europe", and then engulf the EU in the globalist regime: thus perisheth democracy. Don't kill the messenger, rkm ________________________________________________________________ Subject: MAI:The next brick in the globalist wall Preamble Center for Public Policy: WORSE THAN NAFTA By Scott Nova and Michelle Sforza-Roderick In popular mythology, economic globalization is a natural phenomenon, like continental drift: impossible to resist or control. In reality, globalization is being shaped and advanced by carefully planned legal and institutional changes embodied in a series of international agreements. Pacts like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) promote the unregulated flow of money and goods across borders and strip elected governments of their regulatory authority, shifting power to unaccountable institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO). Virtually unreported, the latest and potentially most dangerous of these agreements is now under negotiation at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The purpose of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), as the proposed pact is known, is to grant transnational investors the unrestricted "right" to buy, sell and move businesses, and other assets, wherever they want, whenever they want. To achieve this goal, the MAI would ban a wide range of regulatory laws now in force around the globe and preempt future efforts to hold transnational corporations and investors accountable to the public. The agreement's backers (the United States and the European Union) intend to seek assent from the 29 industrial countries that comprise the OECD and then push the new accord on the developing world. Negotiations are already at an advanced stage. Yet few Americans have even heard of the agreement. Trade officials are treating MAI information like nuclear secrets; the mainstream media is oblivious. Whether the MAI is adopted, and, if so, just how far its deregulatory tentacles will extend, depends on whether opponents can force the proposal from its present obscurity into the light of public debate. As proposed, the MAI would force countries to treat foreign investors as favorably as domestic companies; laws violating this principle would be prohibited. Under these conditions, transnational corporations would find it easier and more profitable to move investments, including production facilities, to low-wage countries. At the same time, these countries would be denied the tools necessary to wrest benefits from such investment like laws mandating the employment of local managers. Efforts to promote local development by earmarking subsidies for home- grown businesses and limiting foreign ownership of local resources would also be barred. If adopted, the MAI will mean foreclosure of Third World development strategies, increased job flight from industrial nations, and new pressures on countries, rich and poor, to compete for increasingly mobile investment capital by lowering environmental and labor standards. ~----~ Frances Fukuyama may be satisfied that the current winning streak of market ideology heralds the "end of history." The corporations, however, want to put it in writing. Scott Nova is the director and Michelle Sforza-Roderick is a research associate at the Preamble Center for Public Policy, Washington, D.C. ________________________________________________________________ From dlj@inforamp.net Thu May 22 07:54:30 1997 by mail.istar.ca with esmtp (Exim 1.58 #2) Reply-To: From: "David Lloyd-Jones" To: , "WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK" Subject: Re: Kst Stability & constrained capitalism Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 09:54:06 -0400 Richard K. Moore pukes and mewls: > > Bingo! Right you are: finite Earth, finite biolayer, finite ozone, finite > markets... it's finite all the way down. Sustainability isn't an > environmentalist slogan - it's a tough-love law of nature. > Infinite ignorance to be explored -- and the more we learn the more we build pathways into that unknown. Unbounded universe to be travelled -- and we've started sending tools outside our local solar system in just the human race's first 40,000 years of civilization. Limitless innovation to be tried -- and the pig, the horse, the cow, cat, dog and domestic orchids by the thousand are indications that we're pretty good at it. Sustainability is not a tough-love law of nature -- it's a bunch of whiners settling for third best. -dlj. From eberhardw@plato.ens.gu.edu.au Thu May 22 08:04:04 1997 23 May 97 00:08:46 +1000 23 May 97 00:08:11 +1000 From: "e.wenzel@ens.gu.edu.au" To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 00:03:22 +1000 Subject: Re: Kst Stability & constrained capitalism Reply-to: e.wenzel@ens.gu.edu.au In-reply-to: David, > Sustainability is not a tough-love law of nature -- it's a bunch of whiners > settling for third best. Fine with me, if you look at the topic this way. But what are your children and grand-children think of someone who considered people concerned with ecological and economic crises on a never before seen level as "a bunch of whiners settling for the third best". Think about it - don't answer. Eberhard Wenzel MA PhD Griffith University Faculty of Environmental Sciences Nathan, Qld. 4111 Australia Tel.: 61-7-3875 7103 Fax: 61-7-3875 7459 e-mail: e.wenzel@ens.gu.edu.au http://www.ens.gu.edu.au/eberhard/welcome.htm Liberty is given by nature even to mute animals. Tacitus (55-117 A.D.) From dlj@inforamp.net Thu May 22 10:17:55 1997 by mail.istar.ca with esmtp (Exim 1.58 #2) Reply-To: From: "David Lloyd-Jones" To: , "WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK" Subject: Re: Kst Stability & constrained capitalism Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 12:17:35 -0400 e.wenzel@ens.gu.edu.au asks: > David, > > > Sustainability is not a tough-love law of nature -- it's a bunch of whiners > > settling for third best. > > Fine with me, if you look at the topic this way. But what are your children and > grand-children think of someone who considered people concerned with ecological > and economic crises on a never before seen level as "a bunch of whiners > settling for the third best". I have no problem with "people concerned with ecological and economic crises on a never before seen level", of whom I am one. The whiners are the ones who have taken one look at the situation and decided it's hopeless. -dlj. From eberhardw@plato.ens.gu.edu.au Thu May 22 10:30:49 1997 23 May 97 02:35:36 +1000 23 May 97 02:35:12 +1000 From: "e.wenzel@ens.gu.edu.au" To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 02:30:23 +1000 Subject: How do you know that they take just one look? Reply-to: e.wenzel@ens.gu.edu.au David, how do you know that the "whiners" just take one look? Is it because their look doesn't match your look? Or is it because your look is a n-times look and therefore you see what you see? Or is it because it's a matter of the viewpoint how we see things and your viewpoint is incompatible with others' viewpoint? There's one thing I learned in life and that is: don't trust your viewpoint because that's a very special one which nobody else shares because it's mine. The beauty of meeting people and sharing discussions lies in the fact that we are confronted with other than our viewpoints. We may not like them, but they're out there. And fortunately, they are there because otherwise we would end in an Eberhard's or a David's world which would be pretty boring for ourselves and the rest of the 5+ billion inhabitants of this planet. Take care. Eberhard Wenzel MA PhD Griffith University Faculty of Environmental Sciences Nathan, Qld. 4111 Australia Tel.: 61-7-3875 7103 Fax: 61-7-3875 7459 e-mail: e.wenzel@ens.gu.edu.au http://www.ens.gu.edu.au/eberhard/welcome.htm In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that's fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters.) And everything that isn't fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe. P.J. O'Rourke From aaustin@utkux.utcc.utk.edu Thu May 22 11:05:48 1997 id NAA09967; Thu, 22 May 1997 13:04:04 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 13:01:37 -0400 (EDT) From: Andrew Wayne Austin To: "e.wenzel@ens.gu.edu.au" Subject: Re: Kst Stability & constrained capitalism In-Reply-To: <229F0F45D7@plato.ens.gu.edu.au> Eberhard Wenzel, Ah, the reactionary denial of those who slogan away the reality of the approaching ecological holocaust. Beware those who deny the objective world and the consequences of objective social processes, Eberhard. Chant after me: There are only preferences! There are only preferences! My reaction and response is similar to yours; denial, sloganeering, and appeal to subjectivism will matter little to future generation mired in the actuality borne of past actions. Peace, Andy From ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au Thu May 22 19:31:00 1997 23 May 1997 11:30:21 +1000 Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 11:30:21 +1000 From: "Bruce R. McFarling" Subject: Re: Kst Stability & constrained capitalism In-reply-to: To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK On Thu, 22 May 1997, David Lloyd-Jones wrote: > e.wenzel@ens.gu.edu.au asks: > > > David, > > > > > Sustainability is not a tough-love law of nature -- it's a bunch > > > of whiners settling for third best. > > Fine with me, if you look at the topic this way. But what are your > > children and grand-children think of someone who considered people > > concerned with ecological and economic crises on a never before seen > > level as "a bunch of whiners settling for the third best". > I have no problem with "people concerned with ecological and economic > crises on a never before seen level", of whom I am one. > The whiners are the ones who have taken one look at the situation and > decided it's hopeless. I don't know what it is, but as a proponent of the position that dlj characterizes as "whining", when I see dlj unable to maintain a position for even one exchange, I find it amusing. I believe that the situation is not hopeless. Why? Because as someone put it ... now, who was it ... oh yes, it was dlj himself, on Thu, 22 May 1997 09:54:06 -0400 > Infinite ignorance to be explored -- and the more we learn the more > we build pathways into that unknown. > Unbounded universe to be travelled -- and we've started sending > tools outside our local solar system in just the human race's > first 40,000 years of civilization. > Limitless innovation to be tried -- and the pig, the horse, the cow, > cat, dog and domestic orchids by the thousand are indications that > we're pretty good at it. On the basis of the above, even though we don't presently know how to act in a sustainable way, I think it is within our capacities to find out how to act in a sustainable way. My reasoning is that, accepting that attainment of the goal is within our capacity (which is a statement that can be validated only in retrospect, but I don't see how underestimating our capacities is going to help anymore than underestimating the problem will) and since achieving the goal will avoid catastrophe, we ought to pursue the goal. > Sustainability is not a tough-love law of nature -- it's a bunch of > whiners settling for third best. Evidently, there are two types of unsustainable that are to be preferred to sustainable? I wasn't clear on the sense of this statement, but the conclusion of this earlier post (at least, it reached my mailbox earlier) seemed sufficiently vague to avoid contradication. OTOH, the conclusion of the latter post, quoted above: > The whiners are the ones who have taken one look at the situation and > decided it's hopeless. would not seem applicable to those who are proposing sustainability. We are the ones who have looked at the situation and found reason to hope. If we were looking for those who have decided its hopeless, we ought to look among the opponents of sustainability, for the subgroup who have concluded, "after me, the flood". Virtually, Bruce R. McFarling, Newcastle, NSW ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au From p34d3611@jhu.edu Fri May 23 23:01:24 1997 24 May 1997 01:00:29 -0400 (EDT) 24 May 1997 01:00:20 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 24 May 1997 01:00:13 -0400 From: Peter Grimes Subject: Re: NATO enlargement In-reply-to: <33848BF0.55AD@uni-tuebingen.de> To: Thomas Nielebock Thomas--I'm persuaded that an important motive--simplistic as it may seem--for NATO enlargement that is currently ignored in the debate is the compensation for some of the lost market demand for war equipment following the end of the cold war. Britain, France, and the US had each become hooked on the health of a massive 'defense' industry. It's contraction and near-failure has hurt the respective economies badly (for a time it seemed as though the entire state of California was going to revert back to the native Americans...NATO expansion *REQUIRES* the purchase of NATO-compatible (eg--US, British) equipment, thereby COMPELLING the 'eager' new recruits of Eastern Europe to (a) provide new markets, and, as importantly, become more heavily indebted to the IMF & World Bank (thereby becoming more politically vulnerable to US desires). I hope that this helps--Peter Grimes > Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 14:09:52 -0400 > From: Thomas Nielebock > To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK > Subject: NATO enlargement > > Dear colleagues, > > I have to prepare a lecture on the topic "NATO enlargement" and I am > looking for an explanation of this enlargement from the perspective of > the world system theory. > > If you have any informations about articles, books etc., it would be > grateful if you send me a mail. > > Thanks a lot in advance. > -- > Thomas Nielebock > Universitaet Tuebingen > Institut fuer Politikwissenschaft > Melanchthonstrasse 36 > D-72074 Tuebingen > Tel.: ++49 / 7071 / 297 6463 > Fax: ++49 / 7071 / 29 2417 > Email: thomas.nielebock@uni-tuebingen.de > URL: http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/spi > From p34d3611@jhu.edu Sun May 25 02:44:26 1997 25 May 1997 04:43:43 -0400 (EDT) 25 May 1997 04:43:37 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 25 May 1997 04:43:34 -0400 From: Peter Grimes Subject: The Final Contradiction To: WSN I recently discovered that an argument that I had presented at the recent PEWS mtgs in California had been passed along to WSN by my friend Timmons Roberts. The paper itself is a part of a larger work. Here is a summary of the essential points of my argument for why capitalism is pushing into its final contradiction: The automation of the labor process has progressed so far that it is causing 3 simultaneous crises: (I) a fiscal crisis among the states of the core; (II) an environmental crisis from global warming; and (III) an agricultural/food crisis arising from the destruction of arable land. Collectively, these crises--all linked by their common cause--combine to form the what I'm sure will be the "final" contradiction of capital, and have the capacity to depopulate the planet down to c.30% of the projected peak of 10 billion expected by the 2025. 2. The Fiscal crisis is the same as that predicted by O'Connor (The Fiscal Crisis of the State, St Martin's Press, c.1973): As automation in the monopoly sector has, since the 1960's, expelled ever more workers and middle-level managers, it has also dramatically contracted the tax base. This has been because the higher wages of that sector had provided a disproportionate amount of the taxes powering the welfare state. Hence the loss of these jobs cut out enough tax revenue to enable and compell the dismantling of the welfare state throughout the core, bringing in train the complete disenfranchisement of the urban underclasses. The disappearance of jobs in the monopoly sector has also directly fueled the "white male anger"/reaction, (itself an important component of the militias in the western USA along with a parallel revival of fascist movements throughout the core), even as it has ALSO fueled minority rage from the contraction of govt jobs and services. When combined with the inflow of cheap "illegal" labor from the periphery, racist sentiment throughout the core (e.g.--the National Front in France) is an inevitable outcome. The stage is being set for civil wars of ethnic cleansing. (In the periphery, the fiscal crisis has been a structured constant from decolonization, so the recent explosion of automation has only compounded the pre-existing and chronic crisis of unemployment without any additional fiscal effects.) 3. Global Warming is directly attributable to automation and transportation, each powered by the fossil fuels that create the warming. Known effects of the warming include the contraction of arable land, more frequent and violent storms, rising sea levels, and spread to the north of the area affected by major tropical diseases. Disease flourishes and can become very virulent in high population density areas, precisely the conditions in inner cities everywhere. 4. Contraction of arable land has also resulted from automation, this time in its application to agriculture. Agricultural mechanization has depopulated the land, the machinery also accelerating the loss of topsoil. The degradation of land from topsoil loss has been compensated for by the more intensive application of fertilizers, pesticides, and well water, each depending in turn on cheap fossil fuels. The inclusion of ever-more marginal land has likewise required geometrically increasing use of these chemicals, which in their turn have been discovered responsible for a wide array of environmental toxins. 5. BOTTOM LINE: The combination of these factors reveals how the inevitable increases in the price of fossil fuels will rapidly destabilise the world-economy. Food prices will necessarily increase, even as the area now economically viable for farming contracts. Global warming will accelerate the scarcity as desertification eats up marginal land. Food shortages will work with the collapse of the welfare state (already largely complete) to de-legitimate authority. Urban riots become more likely along with the spread of areas totally free of any governmental authority. Starvation, ethnic cleansing, and disease will spread out of the periphery to become global. Hence the prediction of depopulation. Cheers, Peter Grimes From harlowc@cats.ucsc.edu Sun May 25 12:00:08 1997 Date: Sun, 25 May 1997 10:56:12 -0700 From: Christian Harlow Reply-To: harlowc@cats.ucsc.edu To: WSN Subject: Re: The Final Contradiction Peter, Quick ?....how is this any different than what O'Connor called the "second contradiction" of Capitalism(the contradiction between capital and the environment)? Albeit he doesn't make the kind of "wild claims"* that you do in your peice...which I saw you present at PEWS. Best, Christian *not that I necessarily disagree with any of your "wild claims", your position appearred to me that it would benefit from a closer read of the "Social Ecology" literature; which points to some of the other ecological implications of the second contradiction. From ROZOV@cnit.nsu.ru Sun May 25 21:59:52 1997 Mon, 26 May 1997 10:40:46 +0700 (NSD) 26 May 97 09:41:28 NSK-6 From: "Nikolai S. Rozov" To: Peter Grimes , wsn@csf.colorado.edu Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 09:40:35 -0600 (NSK) Subject: Re: The Final Contradiction Dear Peter, i have nothing agains your arguments but i doubt very much that the contradiction is 'final' and that peripheral disasters will globalize. Fiscal crisis already began, probably it will encrease, but how miserable it is in comparison with 1930th depression! Ethnic cleansing, raise of violence probably will occur, but can you compare it with such storm of violence as Napoleonic wars, 1848, 1870, WWI and WWII? After ALL historical crises capitalism became only more strong and matural. The core always managed to save itself and transfer main load of crisis to periphery. The worst things that happened were appearence of new world-imperal challengers (f.e.France, Germany, USSR) and shift of world-economy hegemony (the Braudelian line: Venice->Anthwerp- >Amsterdam- >London- UK- >NY-US). What real arguements tell that extrapolation of this general principle fails in your 'final contradiction'? Depopulation? Sure - but only in periphery and with further fine propects for economic growth (like after Black Death in Europe). New challenger? -Yes, probably - the pact China-Islam, but it will not be very dangerous because both are too much economically linked with the West (much more than USSR in 1920-70th). Shift of leadership in the core? Probably (Japan+dragons+Southern China). Are these contradiction and crisis final for capitalism? ( as also I.Wallerstein and Ch.Chase-Dunn appeal) - NO! Capitalism just like commerce once having been born is frequently sick but never dies. best, Nikolai From: Peter Grimes To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK I recently discovered that an argument that I had presented at the recent PEWS mtgs in California had been passed along to WSN by my friend Timmons Roberts. The paper itself is a part of a larger work. Here is a summary of the essential points of my argument for why capitalism is pushing into its final contradiction: The automation of the labor process has progressed so far that it is causing 3 simultaneous crises: (I) a fiscal crisis among the states of the core; (II) an environmental crisis from global warming; and (III) an agricultural/food crisis arising from the destruction of arable land. Collectively, these crises--all linked by their common cause--combine to form the what I'm sure will be the "final" contradiction of capital, and have the capacity to depopulate the planet down to c.30% of the projected peak of 10 billion expected by the 2025. 2. The Fiscal crisis is the same as that predicted by O'Connor (The Fiscal Crisis of the State, St Martin's Press, c.1973): As automation in the monopoly sector has, since the 1960's, expelled ever more workers and middle-level managers, it has also dramatically contracted the tax base. This has been because the higher wages of that sector had provided a disproportionate amount of the taxes powering the welfare state. Hence the loss of these jobs cut out enough tax revenue to enable and compell the dismantling of the welfare state throughout the core, bringing in train the complete disenfranchisement of the urban underclasses. The disappearance of jobs in the monopoly sector has also directly fueled the "white male anger"/reaction, (itself an important component of the militias in the western USA along with a parallel revival of fascist movements throughout the core), even as it has ALSO fueled minority rage from the contraction of govt jobs and services. When combined with the inflow of cheap "illegal" labor from the periphery, racist sentiment throughout the core (e.g.--the National Front in France) is an inevitable outcome. The stage is being set for civil wars of ethnic cleansing. (In the periphery, the fiscal crisis has been a structured constant from decolonization, so the recent explosion of automation has only compounded the pre-existing and chronic crisis of unemployment without any additional fiscal effects.) 3. Global Warming is directly attributable to automation and transportation, each powered by the fossil fuels that create the warming. Known effects of the warming include the contraction of arable land, more frequent and violent storms, rising sea levels, and spread to the north of the area affected by major tropical diseases. Disease flourishes and can become very virulent in high population density areas, precisely the conditions in inner cities everywhere. 4. Contraction of arable land has also resulted from automation, this time in its application to agriculture. Agricultural mechanization has depopulated the land, the machinery also accelerating the loss of topsoil. The degradation of land from topsoil loss has been compensated for by the more intensive application of fertilizers, pesticides, and well water, each depending in turn on cheap fossil fuels. The inclusion of ever-more marginal land has likewise required geometrically increasing use of these chemicals, which in their turn have been discovered responsible for a wide array of environmental toxins. 5. BOTTOM LINE: The combination of these factors reveals how the inevitable increases in the price of fossil fuels will rapidly destabilise the world-economy. Food prices will necessarily increase, even as the area now economically viable for farming contracts. Global warming will accelerate the scarcity as desertification eats up marginal land. Food shortages will work with the collapse of the welfare state (already largely complete) to de-legitimate authority. Urban riots become more likely along with the spread of areas totally free of any governmental authority. Starvation, ethnic cleansing, and disease will spread out of the periphery to become global. Hence the prediction of depopulation. Cheers, Peter Grimes *********************************************************** Nikolai S. Rozov # Address: Dept.of Philosophy Prof.of Philosophy # Novosibirsk State University rozov@cnit.nsu.ru # 630090, Novosibirsk Fax: (3832) 355237 # Pirogova 2, RUSSIA Moderator of the mailing list PHILOFHI (PHILosophy OF HIstory and theoretical history) http://wsrv.clas.virginia.edu/~dew7e/anthronet/subscribe /philofhi.html ************************************************************ From majones@netcomuk.co.uk Mon May 26 00:42:33 1997 Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 07:42:43 -0700 From: Mark Jones To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK Subject: [Fwd: The Final Crisis] Date: Sun, 25 May 1997 13:39:55 -0700 From: Mark Jones To: jim@cag1.demon.co.uk Subject: The Final Crisis Comrades When I said > The whole history of world capitalism since 1917-19 has been conditioned > by the perceived truth of Lenin's arguments and by October. I meant that the world bourgeoisie under US leadership has been obsessed by the spectre of communism to the exclusion of everything else, ever since 25 October 1917. The red thread was twined with a blue thread: of counter-revolution, containment, Cold War, and everything they have ever said and done, and the whole FORM taken by US imperialism in its post-war cultural (Hollywoodisation of the mind, the reflex of McCarthyism etc.) as well as social and political structures: the institutionalising of Cold War lines, geopolitically, as well as in people's minds; the Bretton Woods system, the creation of the CIA, the emergence of the military-industrial complex; the wholesale reconstruction of American intellectual life, accelerated especially after the Soviet launched Sputnik I, et cetera: what lay like a nightmare on the brain of the bourgeois, was COMMUNISM and that in manifold, profound ways completely conditioned the American popular and elite psyche. After World War I, capitalism, its leaders and spokesmen disoriented, traumatised, struggled to restore the 1914 status quo ante: meaning liberalism, colonialism, a strong reserve currency, the Gold Standard etc. But in the uneasy interregnum between the Pax Britannica and the Pax Americana, there was also a certain institutional awareness of what, after 1945, was to become the dominant theme of anticommunism. Thus, Woodrow Wilson wanted a League of Nations which would incorporate the USSR within a framework of international law (containment) and the US wanted a non-vindictive peace without reparations; Wilson even offered loans to Weimar Germany to help it reconstruct, again foreshadowing Marshall Aid post-1945; but then Congress rejected US membership of the L of N and the vengeance-seekers (Clemenceau, Lloyd-George) had their reactionary hands untied. So the Entente powers demanded reparations, and at the same time twisted the predominant view of the L of N to the support of colonial adventures, not self-determination, and used the L of N as an anti-communist Trojan Horse, orienting German revanchism towards an anti-Soviet Crusade. Thus Wilsonism had failed and another war became inevitable: the Wilsonism at last became the triumphant post-1945 policy of Roosevelt/Truman, soon to be endorsed by the GOP. Thus the world bourgeoisie, reeling from the shock of 1917 and the first war, had staggered catastrophically from containment to open-aggression and back again, but always THESE WERE CADENZAS TO THE ONLY, ALL-PREVAILING THEME: ANTI-COMMUNISM WAS THE ONLY SHOW IN TOWN. After 1945 there was to be no attempt to restore the liberal verities of absolute capitalist virtue: the Gold Standard was abandoned, inflationary Keynesian demand-management was adopted, and thus western capitalism was launched on its long boom but ONLY BECAUSE OF THE MATURE ANTI-COMMUNISM of post-1945 US hegemony. Obsessional fear of communism; and the total armlock which anticommunism had over every social and economic policy: between these two things, post-war world capitalism took shape. There had to be: high defence spending; low unemployment; rising living standards; a lack of currency perturbations; a commitment to Keynesian growth. There had to be: the liquidation of colonial empires and self-determination. Most significantly within that conspectus of 'anti-communist liberation' there had to be a universalising of the 'social benefits' of capitalism: all the public goods (medicine, food, water) which transformed GLOBAL MORTALITY AND MORBIDITY INDICES. All of these went against the grain of classical capitalist economic and social liberalism. But the justification was always the same: "without these policies, we risk social unrest, a collapse of our defence efforts, and the advance of world communism." Now here is an interesting thing. Keynesianism was always seen as a tactical retreat, like containment itself. The world bankers, financiers and high Tory or GOP politicians hated that policy-set. They always hated the UN, too. But they accepted that this was TEMPORARILY a necessary price to pay in order to destroy communism and defeat the world working class. Of course, they like everyone enjoyed the somewhat unexpected benefits of the boom which lasted until 1973 and fuelled the most explosive growth in capitalist economies and corporate wealth EVER (a boom literally fuelled by the highly-entropic burning of a hydrocarbon resereve which it had taken life on earth 500,000,000 years to accumulate). But they were never reconciled to it. What they wanted, in order to feel secure, was the complete and final defeat of the working class across every front: ideological, cultural, geopolitical, social (they never understood, did not see, that in the smoke and flames was consumed not just -- in a single human lifetime -- ALL the oil, but the very future of world capitalism itself). And this is what is odd: they have done it, have destroyed world socialism, smashed the trade unions, punctured working class militancy and combativeness; restored the untrammelled working of the law of value, ended Keynesianism, restored the cruelties of liberalism, ended welfareist social policies, reasserted the absolute sovereignty of private property... The victory is total. AND YET... And yet, they are STILL obsessed by that old spectre, the spectre of communism. STILL have not woken up to the overarching fact that by the turn of the century the engine will start to judder and cough as the fuel runs out. Yes, they are still fighting the old battles, most noticeably in Russia, where they are so concerned to do to Russia what Scipio did to Carthage, namely, plough it flat at any price, that they have not noticed that while they are busy refighting these old wars, history has backed down on them and declared that, without any assistance from the communists, the Final Crisis of capitalism has begun and there is no escape from it. And what most hatened the final crisis was the Long Post-war Boom, whose principal achievement was the fourfold increase in the global reserve army of labour. The explosive growth in global population, predicted by Marx and stated by him to be an absolute constraint, barrier, on the capitalist accumulation, has proven to be so. If there had indeed been World Revolution after 1917, the liquidation of the capitalist world system would have forestalled the population growth which did occur, and whose irreversible effects already doom capitalism to inevitable destruction within the next half century. [to be continued] From TBOS@social-sci.ss.emory.edu Mon May 26 17:04:04 1997 From: "Terry Boswell" To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 19:01:08 EST5EDT Subject: Capitalism and a Grimesian ecological crisis Peter Grimes offered an interesting scenario of ecological crisis, especially an oil crisis, creating a world capitalist crisis of catastrophic proportions. While I think there are tremendous ecological problems that demand social action, such as the protection of habitats or stopping acid rain, I do not see these or other ecological limits producing limits on the expansion of capitalism. If one tours the Carter Center here in Atlanta you will see displays commenting on the major activities of his administration. A section is dedicated to the oil crisis and Carter's actions to counteract it - - 55 mph speed limits, promoting an energy-wise consumer ethic (like wearing sweaters indoors during winter), multi-billion dollar coal gasification plants, and so on. All of these policies have been abandoned. This section reminds one of newsreels about rationing during WWII, sharing the combination of higher national purpose and irksome red tape and authoritarian social control. Adjusted for inflation, the price of gasoline, which reflects its supply, is less now than it was in 1974. There is no oil crisis. There never was an ecological crisis of supply, but one of international politics. To be sure, the natural supply of oil has a real finite limit that if consumption trends continue we might reach in what, a 100 years? But long before we reached that point, Carter's coal gasification plants would be profitable again (perhaps once gas reached $5 a gallon) and there is enough coal to last 400 years. One could also mention that fuel efficient cars would again become more valued, that electric cars would become more viable, and so on. The same basic logic is true, I would argue, for most natural resources. The electronic information "revolution" means that raw materials garner an increasingly smaller share of the world economy, which is one of the reasons for the economic decline of many peripheral producers (especially in central Africa, but also for Russia). And, if ecological limits ever do begin to cut supplies and raise prices, it is easier to substitute alternatives now than was true of the past. Even in terms of food production, there is plenty to feed the hungry millions, if only they could afford it. This is not at all to say that we can ignore the environment or that ecological crises like acid rain or global warming are unimportant. They are tremendously important, just like good wages are important. But low wages or a dirty environment alone do not undermine capitalism. They make for a meaner, nastier capitalism, of less democracy and greater inequality, and one that spurs more action for change. The point is that these and other ecological problems are solvable, but the solutions are mainly social and political ones about how to organize the implementation and who will pay for it. For instance, the most fundamental solution to ecological limits is to slow or reverse population growth, the most important step in doing so would be to ban child labor and guarantee women's rights. In this sense, at the global level, ecological, women's, and labor movements share point and purpose, and should be one interconnected world movement. It would be a movement for a better world, one that supersedes capitalism, not a reaction to a catastrophic collapse of world capitalism brought on by ecological or any other single crisis. Waiting for the final contraction or final crisis or other catastrophe to replace capitalism is to hope for the worst and do nothing for the better. Terry Boswell Department of Sociology Emory University Atlanta, GA 30322 From majones@netcomuk.co.uk Mon May 26 17:17:01 1997 Date: Tue, 27 May 1997 00:16:57 -0700 From: Mark Jones To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK Subject: [Fwd: The final crisis of capitalism # 2] This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------79224A9329E8 Terry Boswell writes inter alia: > There is no oil crisis. There never was an > ecological crisis of supply, but one of international politics. > > To be sure, the natural supply of oil has a real finite limit that if > consumption trends continue we might reach in what, a 100 years? But > long before we reached that point, Carter's coal gasification plants > would be profitable again (perhaps once gas reached $5 a gallon) and > there is enough coal to last 400 years. One could also mention that > fuel efficient cars would again become more valued, that electric > cars would become more viable, and so on. He is radically wrong on all counts, for the reasons hinted out in the attached. There certainly is an ecological crisis of supply, and its effects will not take 100 years to manifest themselves. Mark Jones --------------79224A9329E8 Date: Mon, 26 May 1997 21:53:47 -0700 From: Mark Jones To: jim@cag1.demon.co.uk Subject: The final crisis of capitalism # 2 Capitalism and Fossil Fuels Comrades: Nikolai Rozov, professor of philosophy at Novosibirsk University, Russia, today criticised on WSN the theory of a 'Final Crisis of Capitalism' (as earlier described by Peter Grimes, see LL05169) as follows: > Dear Peter, > > i have nothing agains your arguments but i doubt very much that the > contradiction is 'final' and that peripheral disasters will globalize. > > Fiscal crisis already began, probably it will encrease, but how miserable it > is in comparison with 1930th depression! > > Ethnic cleansing, raise of violence > probably will occur, but can you compare it with such storm of violence as > Napoleonic wars, 1848, 1870, WWI and WWII? > > After ALL historical crises capitalism became > only more strong and matural. > > The core always managed to save itself and > transfer main load of crisis to periphery.> > The worst things that happened were > appearence of new world-imperal challengers (f.e.France, Germany, USSR) and > shift of world-economy hegemony (the Braudelian line: Venice- >Anthwerp-> >Amsterdam- >London- UK- >NY-US). > > What real arguements tell that extrapolation of this general principle > fails in your 'final contradiction'? > > Depopulation? Sure - but only in periphery and with further fine propects > for economic growth (like after Black Death in Europe). > > New challenger? -Yes, probably - the pact China-Islam, but it will not be > very dangerous because both are too much economically linked with the West > (much more than USSR in 1920-70th). > > Shift of leadership in the core? Probably (Japan+dragons+Southern China).> > Are these contradiction and crisis final for capitalism? ( as > also I.Wallerstein and Ch.Chase-Dunn appeal) - NO! > > Capitalism just like commerce once having been born is frequently sick > but never dies. > > best, Nikolai Neither Rozov nor Grimes are Marxist-Leninists. World System Network is a discussion list for bourgeois scholars operating within the intellectual framework of core/periphery world system models, an outlook illuminated by the ideas and teaching of Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Arrighi, Gunder Frank, Chase-Dunn and others. It is a school of thought of Marxist and even more of Ricardian provenance but now lacking either emancipatory or even much scientific relevance. Rozov's eternising of commodity production and now of capitalism is about par for the WSN course (recently Rozov posted an article comparing Soviet socialism with feudalism, a common attitude among post-Soviet Russian intellectuals). Nevertheless Rozov in the above message echoes concerns expressed on the LeninList: the perspective is not of ultra-imperialism but continued imperialist rivalry, with the US being challenged by Japanese/Chinese rising imperialism, as the main motor of 21st century conflict (Rozov has also put forward a scenario for China-US war). And the WSN-mindset exists in a compartment of its own, where environmental-contraints on capitalism barely figure and the single decisive fact about capitalist accumulation, namely that its entire history has been based on the exploitation of non-renewable resources, especially fossil-fuels, barely figures at all. Peter Grimes, too, produces a theory of the 'Fiscal crisis' of accumulation which is bound to seem weak to Marxists on this LeninList. The poverty of modern bourgeois scholarship is thus well illustrated by the World System Theoreticians (WST-ers). This school takes a time-frame for the development of the modern world system and extends it back as much as five thousand years, since the first agrarian, surplus-gathering settled human societies of which we have knowledge. WST then traces the rise of commodity production, from simple commodity production to modern capitalist commodity production. On the face of it this is an encyclopaedic, wide-ranging intellectual horizon. But it does not help WST-ers see fairly common-sense things, like the fact that time's arrow moves in one direction only, and the fact that because commodity production is a HISTORICAL mode of production, that is by itself reason to question its immortality. But these reservations barely scratch the surface of WST's theoretical inadequacies. The history of the earth is of a planet slowly cooling as life covered its surface. It is life which caused the cooling. Over prolonged periods lasting hundreds of millions of years, living organisms gradually sucked carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere, fixating it and depositing it in sedimentary layers. As plankton and crustacea died they sank to the sea bed and the CO2 trapped in their bones and shells was removed from the atmosphere, forming vast shales, coal, oil and gas ponds. As quantum theory shows, CO2 acts as a heat-trap; a bottle full of CO2 does not allow heat thru but traps it inside; CO2 is actually a rare gas in the earth's atmosphere, but even in small quantities it helps to trap solar radiation. Removal of atmospheric CO2 by life ensured that the climate cooled, but within the overall cooling there were oscillations, as astronomic variations in the orbits of the earth, the sun and other bodies caused phases of relative warmth to be succeeded by phases of relative cold. Sometimes there was no ice anywhere on the planet; at other times the whole planet was shrouded in ice (one such glacial period lasted 200 million years). In the present Cenozoic era which has lasted 60 million years since the last mass extinction there has been a succession of Ice Ages, fairly prolonged periods of hundreds of thousands of years, punctuated by interglacials usually of much shorter duration, usually around 10,000 years. The present Holocene interglacial has endured for the past 10-12,000 years and is presumably approaching its end. Human civilisation has arisen during this interglacial although humans have been around for a lot longer. The main impact of human civilisation has been (a) to cause a mass extinction (not everyone agrees about this, but it seems likely that around a third of all species will become extinct during the capitalist epoch) and (b) to burn off a proportion of the atmospheric carbon turned into coal and oil during the past half billion years, reinserting in a very short time a significant quantity of fossil carbon. The proportion is probably around five percent of the great 'bank' of fossilised carbon -- enough to double the percentage of atmospheric CO2, which together with methane releases and other greenhouse effects will serve to increase average global temperature by a few degrees in the next century. Naturally, WST-ers, despite their vaunted historical long sight, do not trouble themselves overmuch with this! As we see, this perspective does not figure AT ALL in the prognoses of the philosopher and one-time Marxist Nikolai Rozov. The theoretical (and historical) complacency of WST-ers is based on more than academic blinkers. For one thing, it is commonly alleged that 'the jury is still out' over anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. So nobody is sure what, if any, actual effects of global warming there may be (in fact that is not true; not only do western governments know a great deal, they, and the scientific community which serves them, are panicky about what even the short-term future holds). For another thing, the economic and social effects of the burn-off of fossil fuels is also alleged to be full of uncertainties when it comes to evaluating possible outcomes (interestingly, bourgeois spokesmen, scientists and governments do not generally like to discuss these two related things together: it is thought to be quite unserious, quite unscientific, to discuss global warming in the same breath as fossil-fuel depletion, but as we shall see they are EXTREMELY related questions when it comes to analysing the Final Crisis of Capitalism (FCC). Thus for a variety of reasons few people in the social sciences or students of politics want to discuss these questions (except in whispers). As for the newspapers -- anyone who buys the British Sunday Times is familiar with the inverse ratio which now holds between the amount of wood pulped per issue and the actual content. The bourgeois mass media draw a veil of silence over the truth. The capitalism Rozov celebrates is a gin-palace called Titanic. It has recently been discovered that the earth's climate is much more unstable than was previously supposed. Ice-cores taken from the Greenland ice-sheet show that the earth's temperature has in the past shot up and down by tens of degrees within the space of a few years. That is because the system is DIALECTICAL. The earth's climate is a dialectical unity of many contradictory and complementary components, including the World Ocean (which is in a constant flux), atmospheric and cosmic (astronomical, gravitational) oscillations. Like any dialectical system (bourgeois scientists have now discovered!), changes can be gradual or they can be sudden. As Engels showed in the Dialectics of Nature and the Anti-Duhring, gradual, cumulative, quantitative changes in physical processes eventually produce sudden dramatic QUALITATIVE changes. That, so earth scientists, geologists, climatologists and oceanologists have learnt, is exactly how the climate FLIPS from one state to another, more-or-less steady, state. Global warming may trigger a sudden change in the overall climate. The sea level may rise enough to threaten island states such as Japan, Indonesia, Great Britain. Or a new ice-age may be triggered, in which case an ice-sheet a mile thick will lie across most of the capitalist world, as far sought as Michigan, London, the Alps, sucking up the sea and reconnecting what's left of England with the continent, as happened in previous ice-ages. Of course, this may not happen for centuries, even thousands of years, although the present interglacial is nearing its end. More optimistically, global warming may only exacerbate existing trends: the decadal Sahel droughts (caused by climate change in the Atlantic); the devastating monsoon changes and typhoons, the flooding of the Mississippi in 1993 (almost certainly caused by greenhouse-gas forced climate change), the growing desertification of the world's arable land (as much as a third of arable land has become marginal since world war two). However, these effects are bad enough to doom the two-thirds of humankind living in the peripheries, the colonialised south, to much more of the same misery they now endure, with the added bonus of a collapse of freshwater systems, a spread of malaria, cholera, typhoid, super-TB and other diseases, and the emergence of antibiotic-resistant superbugs plus new forms of AIDs-type illnesses (malaria has now arrived in globally-warmed England). But it is at least probable that the doubling of atmospheric CO2 will trigger catastrophic climate changes of a nature which will cause a massive die-off of humankind. It is possible that OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL the human population may not rise to 12 billion by 2050 as present demographic trends suggest, but may stabilise or fall as a result of mass-death caused by the collapse of ecological and economic systems. But OTHER THINGS ARE NOT EQUAL and indeed the population CANNOT rise to 12 billion WITHOUT FORCING SUCH A GLOBAL CATASTROPHE. Therefore global demograhpic trends are already unsustainable, which is another way of saying that world capitalism can no longer guarantee even minimal existence to the human population. (Nikolai Rozov is already living through a real-time fragment of global catastrophe, for the Russian economy can never be reconstructed on a modernised capitalist basis, it can only be plundered as a new northern Zaire. Reforms in Russia are chimerical). Most importantly, although only five percent of fossilised carbon has been burnt off, that five percent consists of *all the oil*. I am going to post some more detailed statistics on this and also provide some web links for comrades to follow if they wish. But the plain fact is that recoverable reserves of oil will be exhausted by 2050, and world oil production will start to fall early in the next decade. The implications of this are far-reaching. They are in fact the clue to the Final Crisis of Capitalism, already in its first stage. There are two psychological crutches to the hypnotic complacency we are encouraged to enjoy in the face of this looming catastrophe. Firstly, we are constantly reassured that there is plenty of oil and there are no 'Limits to Growth'. In the past year for eg, oil majors like BP have argued at legnth that the world is 'swimming in oil'. This is simply a falsehood and I shall show why in detail in later postings. The world is running out of easily and economically recoverable oil. But the entire global capitalist economy depends critically and fundamentally on the easy availability of low-priced energy inputs. For every calorie of food you eat (produced by photosynthesis) four calories of fossil fuel have been required to grow it, process it and bring it to your table. The whole basis of material life in the metropoles depends on the consumption of cheap fossil fuel, primarily oil. And there are no substitutes for oil. This brings me to the second point: we are constantly reassured by images of techno-future utopias where cyborg-ruled, computerised, Disneyland science will solve everything. That, too, is a falsehood. Of course, it is possible that in time science will find substitutes for all the uses of fossil hydrocarbons and most of all for oil, in every stage of production, from primary energy, to transport, to plastics, fertilisers, drugs et cetera. But IN TIME is no longer good enough (even if it is AT ALL possible for human endeavour and ingenuity to substitute for the colossal profligacy, the sheer wanton plunder of the entire oil reserve accumulated in the history of life on earth, which is the real history of world capitalism). Capitalism, capitalist commodity-production, is based upon fossil-fuels, When they run out so will capitalism run out of time. Oil can be made from coal, but not cheaply, easily or without releasing even more CO2 greenhouse gas. Cars can be made to run on hydrogen, but oil is needed to make the liquid hydrogen, and so it goes on. Remember that the lead-time for any radically new technology is at least forty years. Fusion energy has been 'in the works' for almost half a century, and this alleged panacea for capitalism's energy deficits is still no nearer availability and may not be for another fifty years. By then, it will all be over as far as world capitalism is concerned. In a century's time, after the final and catastrophic colapse, after capitalism has been dismissed from history by the proletariat, there will far fewer humans living on earth, 2, billion or less at the best estimate, and they will not live as they do now. They will live in sustainable economies, they will not use non-renewable energy sources and they will not live under capitalism. The Titanic is really going down. Locked in its multiplicity of crises, with no time left to complete its increasingly desperate search for technical fixes and ways-out, capitalism is doomed and the process of its collapse has begun -- and may develop with the horrifying speed of a hurricane, as its systems fall apart and as its billions of enraged citizens, the sorcerer's apprentices of the peripheries, call it to account. --------------79224A9329E8-- From dws@scs.howard.edu Tue May 27 10:27:25 1997 Date: Tue, 27 May 1997 12:27:40 +0000 From: David Schwartzman To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Capitalism and Ecocatastrophe To WSNers, You might like to take a look at the Fall 1996 issue of Science & Society, "Marxism and Ecology", which discusses this issue at length. David Schwartzman Dept. Biology Howard University Washington, DC 20059 From majones@netcomuk.co.uk Wed May 28 04:35:35 1997 Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 11:33:01 -0700 From: Mark Jones To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK Subject: ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION: CAPITALISM IN THE AGE OF ELECTRONICS Every exploiting ruling class has had its global dimension and "global" aspirations. The level of the development of the productive forces and the economic relations of a society determine the form of this imperial oppression and exploitation. The Romans with their highly organized slave empire subjugated the world as they knew it and extracted taxes and slaves as their main source of wealth. Similarly, every stage and phase of development of capitalism has had a corresponding form of global activity. At the beginning of this century, Lenin described the stage of the development of capitalism at that time as "imperialism." Developing from major technological breakthroughs like electric generators and motors, the internal combustion engine, new steel- making processes, the telephone and the radio, the 19th-century system of competitive, industrial capitalism gave way to a global form of monopoly capitalism. This new stage of development of capitalism was characterized by the concentration of production such that monopolies controlled the economy; the emergence of "finance capital" as the decisive form of capital; the growing importance of the export of capital, as opposed to the export of commodities; and the territorial division of the world among the major capitalist powers. Today, this system of imperialism is giving way to globalization - a new stage of capitalism characterized by electronics-based production; the desperate attempt to maintain value and surplus value production by whatever means possible; the internationalization of capital; and the replacement of productive capital with speculative capital as the dominant form of capital. "Imperialism" was capitalism in the age of electro-mechanically based monopoly capitalism; "globalization" is capitalism in the age of electronics. THE END OF IMPERIALISM World War I and World War II grew out of the struggle among the imperialist powers to territorially redivide the world. The end of World War II, with the European and Japanese economies in ruins, marked the beginning of the end of direct colonialism, a system which had seriously constrained the ability of capitalist countries to invest outside their own colonies. The process of the dismantling of direct colonialism lasted over the next several decades. Led by the efforts of the United States, which had emerged as the economically dominant power by the end of the war, the agreements made at the Bretton Woods meetings in 1944 formalized the new international economic order. The U.S. dollar, fixed in relation to gold, was made the chief international currency. The United Nations was the political counterpart of the institutions made possible by the Bretton Woods agreements - the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. With the revival of the European and Japanese economies by the mid-1960s, the period of U.S. economic hegemony was over. The end of this period was signalled by the dissolution of the Bretton Woods agreement in the early 1970s. Capitalism is driven by the maximization of profit. The drive for profits requires both a constant advance in technology to cheapen production and eliminate competitors, and a constant expansion of the markets in which to sell the commodities. This demanded the ultimate expansion of the market to encompass the entire world, free of national barriers; and, at the same time, the lowering of the cost of production to the absolute minimum. This expansion demanded the end of a territorially divided world, which was accomplished by dismantling direct colonialism. At the same time, the introduction of labor-replacing technology means the beginning of the end of productive investment capital. All value (and profit) comes from the exploitation of labor. Laborless production means valueless production - and hence, profitless production. With laborless production, capital can no longer be utilized to create more value and more surplus value. So, capital is being shifted into purely speculative investment. A critical portion of capital is no longer "exported" (in the sense of being invested overseas for the production of more commodities). It is merely shifted, moved, transmitted around a global roulette table. Imperialism extended industrial production throughout the world. The introduction of electronics into capitalism is ending the stage of imperialism, and opening the new stage of globalization. ELECTRONICS-BASED PRODUCTION The stages of development of capitalism are defined by specific developments in the productive forces; the microchip defines the current stage of the development of the productive forces. Introduced in the early 1970s, the microchip is a light, tiny, cheap device that can be widely deployed to control production processes. It was the result of an effort to satisfy the growing demand for devices to reduce production costs and to cheapen the cost of coordinating the growing world economy. The microchip and its sister developments in electronics made possible practical robotics. It cheapened the cost of the instruments of scientific production, paving the way for breakthroughs in other fields like "smart" materials, biotechnology, and digital communications; and it dramatically reduced communication costs. The introduction of the microchip threw a radically new quality into an already global economy. Twenty-five years after its introduction, the power of the microprocessor continues to double every 18 months. As chips develop, they infiltrate new areas of production, increasing output and replacing the need for living labor - workers - in production. At the same time, as the British newsweekly The Economist noted, "by reducing the cost of communications, [new technologies] have helped to globalize production and financial markets. In turn, globalization spurs technology by intensifying competition and by speeding up the diffusion of technology through direct foreign investment. Together, globalization and [new technologies] crush time and space." Cheap transportation and communication have also created a global commodity market, including a global labor market. DESPERATE MEASURES Unless the market can absorb the constantly expanding output of capitalism, the economic system freezes up and enters a crisis. Ultimately, this crisis is a result of the introduction of advanced technologies that brings on a crisis in profitability, but it appears as a crisis of overproduction, the inability to circulate commodities that the market cannot absorb. William W. Keller, director of the Office of Technology, has complained, "Capitalism everywhere is turning out to be too damn productive." So, to out-compete the other capitalists on this world stage, each capitalist is compelled to seek out the cheapest labor and the most advanced technology. The increased productiveness of capital has not been matched by a proportionate increase in markets. William Greider defines the "central economic problem of our revolutionary era [as] the growing, permanent surpluses of goods, labor and productive capacity inevitably generated by technological innovation and the free-running industrial globalization." (Chicago Tribune, January 20, 1997.) These surpluses affect steel, auto, textiles, electronic appliances - virtually every industry, except those on the cutting edge today (like semiconductors or communications). To maintain profitability, corporations must lower their break- even point, redeploying parts of the production process overseas, reducing fixed costs by selling plants and other assets, cutting out middle-level employees, converting jobs to temporary work. This results in reserves of idle people and unused production. The problem is further complicated by the fact that some countries still have varying amounts of control over their markets. The United States has tried repeatedly to break down market barriers in Japan. China has been successful in limiting its home market, while benefiting from open markets, particularly in the United States. China's strategy is to build up high-cost, high-tech exports based on technology (gained from trading foreign technology for access to their markets), while producing cheap goods made by low-cost labor for its rapidly growing domestic market. Foreign goods enter China under strict rules. The Japanese feel particularly threatened by China's growth. As Harou Shimada, a Keio University economist, bluntly put it: "China is a horror story for the rest of the world if it simply grows as an exporting nation. Overcapacity will have to be squeezed down. It will be increasingly unprofitable for companies to build new capacity in advanced nations. If the Chinese develop the technology and become productive without wages rising, then they will be a tremendous competitive menace against the rest of the world. If you bring in 1.2 billion workers at those wages, that can destroy the global trading system." (Quoted in One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism by William Greider, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997, p. 162.) Already, high rates of economic growth in China coupled with low wages have produced a glut in the Chinese market, with goods worth $64 billion stockpiled, representing about one-fifth of China's total production. ("Bloom is Off China's Boom," Chicago Tribune, February 4, 1997.) At the same time, the United States is running up huge trade deficits as it attempts to soak up excess commodities. For the first time in a century, in the fourth quarter of 1993, the United States passed a critical threshold. The outflow of financial returns paid to foreign investors on the assets they held in the United States exceeded all of the profits, dividends and interest payments that American firms and investors collected from their investments abroad. In 1994, the annual outflow was negative for the first time since 1914. Trade deficits reached a record volume in 1995. (Greider, p. 201) A MAJOR BREAKDOWN? Many of the leading players in the global economy fear the system cannot continue indefinitely without a major breakdown. Christopher Whelan, a conservative financial economist in Washington, predicts that, "We are headed for an implosion. If you keep lowering and lowering wages in advanced countries, who's going to buy all this stuff? You look around and all you can see is surplus labor and surplus goods. What we don't have is enough incomes. But the only way people find out there are too many factories is when they wake up one morning and their orders are falling. If this keeps up, we're going to face a lack of demand that's worse than the 1930s." (Greider, p. 221.) George Soros, a billionaire investor who is mentioned frequently on the front pages of the financial sections of the world's newspapers, foresees a general breakdown - the collapse of the global financial system and the trading system with it. He bluntly states: "I cannot see the global system surviving. ... In my opinion, we have entered a period of global disintegration only we are not yet aware of it." (Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve, quoted in Greider, p. 248.) THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF CAPITAL The drive toward cheap production - cheap labor (whether it be at gunpoint, in prison, by children or slaves), lax environmental laws, low taxes - drives capital across the globe. With the internationalization of these markets in labor and commodities comes internationalized capital. Even with the end of the Bretton Woods agreement, capital faced national constraints on its movement around the globe. While new technologies made the rapid movement of capital technically possible, the freeing of capital from national controls came from the growing power of the multinational corporations (MNCs). The intense concentration of productive capacity in a handful of corporations has carried forward from imperialism and grown more intense. William Greider estimates that the 500 largest MNCs produce one-third of the world's manufacturing, three-fourths of all commodity trade, and four-fifths of the trade in technology and management services. These capital flows are not just from the former imperial powers to the former colonies. Foreign direct investment increased almost fourfold in the 1980s, with the largest part being invested in the United States. "Hong Kong" capital is invested in the United States, "U.S." capital is invested in Russia, "Russian" capital is invested in who-knows-where. (Some $150 to $300 billion has left Russia in the past five years, according to one Russian government official - The Nation, March 31, 1997). It is silly to speak of this capital belonging to any nation anymore. The new global regime creates an international class of investors with no tie to countries, only to stable havens where money can be parked and from which it can be moved rapidly. Under imperialism, capital was "national" in the sense that it was deeply connected to a multinational state. There was U.S. capital and German capital and British capital. This fed the recurring territorial conflicts. Under the new globalization, capital is transnational, or even supranational. Capital has been increasingly successful in freeing itself from national restraints - from restricted markets, tariffs, taxes, environmental restrictions, and organized labor. Freedom from national controls allows this capital to roam everywhere - freely and quickly - in the search for the highest rate of return. Some $1.2 trillion flows through New York currency markets each day. As Greider notes: "[T]hese transactions are carried out by a very small community - the world's largest 30 to 50 banks, and a handful of major brokerages. ... The new communications technology has created a small, elite community of international finance - perhaps no more than 200,000 traders around the world who all speak the same language and recognize a mutuality of interests despite their rivalries." (Greider, p. 245-246.) THE EMERGENCE OF SPECULATIVE CAPITAL One of the key features of this free-flowing capital is the change in the ratio of productive capital to non-productive (or speculative) capital. Lenin noted that one of the key features of imperialism was the emerging dominance of finance capital. Finance capital is the merger of industrial capital and bank capital, under the control of the financiers. It represented the domination of the financiers over the industrial capitalists. Nevertheless, this capital was destined to go back into production. The financiers invest it in order to produce more profit from the exploitation of human labor. Today, the use of capital for productive purposes is being replaced by capital invested for purely speculative purposes - that is, the hope that its value will somehow rise in relation to other speculative adventures: Tokyo real estate versus baseball cards; or New York stock futures versus rare paintings. There are still significant amounts of finance capital seeking out profits. The World Bank estimates that between 1988 and 1995 some $422 billion was invested in new factories, supplies and equipment in select developing countries. Many boats have been lifted by this tide. But the general, historical trend is such that for this capital to generate profits, it must plunge workers into slave (or near-slave) conditions. Thus, it cannot generate the purchasing power necessary to circulate commodities and hence sustain profits or the economy. Since sufficient returns cannot be made from electronics-based production, increasing amounts of capital seek returns from speculative adventures. The attempt to maintain the circulation of goods through the extension of credit is itself a speculative exercise, a maneuver done in the hope that consumers or debtor countries will eventually be able to pay off their mounting debt. Noam Chomsky cites estimates that in the early 1970s about 10 percent of the capital in international exchanges was for speculation and about 90 percent of it was related to the real economy, for investment in productive capacity and for trade. By the 1990s, those figures were reversed - 90 percent was for speculation and never destined to be invested in raw materials, or factories, or transportation systems, or for trade. Chomsky also quotes David Felix's study for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development which cites estimates that by 1994 the ratio was about 95 percent speculative to about five percent real economy-related." (Class Warfare: Interviews, Noam Chomsky with David Barsamian, p. 106) According to Grieder: "As capital owners and financial markets accumulate greater girth and a dominating influence, their search for higher returns becomes increasingly purified in purpose - detached from social concerns and abstracted from the practical realities of commerce. In this atmosphere, investors develop rising expectations of what their invested savings ought to earn and the rising prices in financial markets gradually diverge from the underlying economic reality. Since returns on capital are rising faster than the productive output that must pay them, the process imposes greater and greater burdens on commerce and societies - debt obligations that cannot possibly be fulfilled by the future and, sooner or later, must be liquidated, written off or forgiven." (Greider, p. 227.) A report on global capital by McKinsey & Company, a global consulting firm, estimated that the total stock of financial assets from advanced nations expanded in value by six percent a year from 1980 to 1992, more than twice as fast as the underlying economies were growing. The report estimated that by the year 2000 the total financial stock will triple the figures for the economic output of these economies. [These figures were adjusted for inflation.] (The Global Capital Market: Supply, Demand, Pricing and Allocation, quoted in Greider, p. 232.) The chief concern of this new speculative capital is a stable currency to protect the value of its money. It demands of governments a deflationary policy - preventing inflation by keeping pressure both on wages and government spending by use of the interest rate. We have seen the results of this policy in the United States - the growth of long-term unemployment (much of it not showing up in the statistics), the stagnation of wages, the dismantling of social programs, and the sharply growing inequality in incomes. This new, speculative capital is able to set the rules for the world economy because governments have little or no control over the actions of the speculative capital which determine their economies. NEW POLARITIES, NEW POSSIBILITIES The process of globalization is driven by the dynamics of capitalism. Capitalism's survival rests on the extraction of profit on a constantly increasing scale through the extension of production. While electronics has enabled the unification of the world commodity market (including the labor market) and the financial market - by dramatically cheapening communications and transportation - it also introduces a radical new quality - electronic production. This new element attacks the very foundation of capitalism - the extraction of surplus value from workers - by introducing laborless production. To maintain profits, capitalists seek out the cheapest production costs (regardless of whether production is done by robots or by human muscle, or whether it takes place in Detroit or in Jakarta). So, as electronics extends throughout the global economy, workers around the world are compelled to compete not only with each other but with their electronic counterparts - robots and automated machinery of increasingly diverse types. For a number of reasons, employment under these circumstances can actually increase while electronics is at the same time destroying the value of labor power. With electronics driving down the value of labor power, and therefore wages, more members of the household are compelled to enter the job market, or to work past retirement age, or to take on multiple jobs in unsuccessful attempts to maintain a slipping standard of living. Others are being driven to the bottom of the job market by the end of welfare. This is temporarily providing a cheaper alternative to technology. The capitalist does not care if production is done by the "gratuitous labor of machines" or by the "free" labor of slaves. The critical indicator of the impact of electronics on production is not "employment" statistics, but the polarization of wealth and poverty. With the destruction of the value of labor power and wages, wealth polarizes and the economic center disappears. In this process, capitalism is compelled to destroy whatever social base it may have maintained in the old imperialist center. A NEW PROLETARIAT During the period of imperialism, the main arena of class struggle was the struggle between the peoples of the earth and the imperialist powers. Under globalization, a new proletariat is emerging in the imperialist center, to join ranks with a proletariat in the former colonies - propertyless, with little or no permanent tie to the capitalist system. This process is, of course, tremendously uneven, with some Third World countries emerging as "tiger economies," with the standard of living improving for many workers. But overall, the pattern of deepening polarization is becoming clearer. A U.N. Human Development Report in 1996 noted that even though the world's economy surged during the past three decades, 1.6 billion people (one-quarter of the world's population) are actually worse off than they were 15 years ago. (Chicago Tribune, July 17, 1996.) Thirty-two countries representing a half billion people are buried under unsustainable debt burdens. Richard Barnett estimates that two-thirds of the world's population has neither the cash nor the credit to buy anything of note in the global marketplace. (Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order, Richard Barnett) This vast majority of the world's population stands opposed to 358 billionaires whose income is equal to the total income of the poorest 45 percent of the world's population. (This statistic was quoted in The Nation, July 15-22, 1996). While capitalism looks to the electronically united world market to sell its prodigious output, it is at the same time compelled to destroy the world market by driving down socially necessary labor time and, as a result, the value of labor power - and ultimately wages - to the wage of the robot. The economic middle ground is destroyed, resulting in a handful of international capitalists on one side, and a vast majority of marginalized or destitute proletarians, incapable of purchasing the flood of goods, on the other. Such is the inescapable dilemma faced by capital in the age of globalization. (c) 1997 by the League of Revolutionaries for a New America. Permission granted to reproduce, provided this message is included, the article is not changed, and no further restrictions are placed on its distribution. From chriscd@jhu.edu Wed May 28 14:20:57 1997 28 May 1997 16:19:18 -0400 (EDT) 28 May 1997 16:14:58 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 16:12:52 -0400 From: christopher chase-dunn Subject: [Fwd: private re: Homage to Professor Frank (fwd)] To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu Reply-to: chriscd@jhu.edu Thu, 15 May 1997 11:50:35 -0400 (EDT) Thu, 15 May 1997 11:49:51 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 11:49:33 -0400 From: Gernot Kohler Subject: private re: Homage to Professor Frank (fwd) To: chriscd@jhu.edu Dear Professor Chase-Dunn, Attached please find my posting to the Post Keynesian list (pkt), entitled "Homage to Professor Frank". I wrote this in order to correct, if possible, the impression which was created by a reply of mine to Professor Frank a few weeks ago. My reply was not only ill-conceived and impolite but also misrepresented my own enthusiasm for world system studies, even if from a Post(-)Keynesian perspective. If you think it's appropriate, I would appreciate if you could, perhaps, forward this post to wsn, as my reply was also posted on your list. Sincerely yours, Gernot Kohler Oakville, Canada ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Homage to Professor Frank [a personal note from Gernot Kohler] Yes, I do place the portrait of Professor Andre Gunder Frank next to my collection of Post(-)Keynesian icons, heroes and giants. I would like to pay homage to a wonderful scholar, gentleman and fighter for justice and enlightenment. I admire in Professor Frank that he is one of the pioneers of world system analysis. World system is such a rich concept that it can also enrich Post(-)Keynesianism. (I hasten to add that Post(-) Keynesianism can also enrich world system studies. Both statements made with due humility.) The study of 5000 years of world system development does not provide direct answers to such nuts-and-bolts questions as: How can we increase global effective demand? and so on. However, it plays a crucial role in shaping public consciousness, which is a foundation for finding nuts-and-bolts solutions. In particular, Professor Frank's (and colleagues') recent work raises consciousness about the fact that Western white males are not (NOT) the center of all of creation. From the imperialist doctrine of "The White Man's Burden", he shifts awareness to "the white man as a burden". I can only hope that the eminent professor, as a veteran of many scholarly and ideological battles, may have an understanding that, as a novice in these tricky matters and due to inexperience in debating, I once lost my cool in a reply to him -- which was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong words, and vis-a-vis the wrong person. Now, arranging the icons on my wall -- next to which Post(-) Keynesian should I place the effigy of Professor Frank? (But, I better stay out of more trouble ...) What was the metaphysical and/or econometric essence of what I really wanted to say in the first place? "Solidarity is a good thing" -- I bet you a doughnut that that's what I wanted to say. Nothing wrong with paying homage to a wonderful eminent scholar. (Of course, my Post(-)Keynesian heroes are also wunderbar. No doubt about that.) Regards, Gernot Kohler Oakville, Ontario From chriscd@jhu.edu Wed May 28 14:39:04 1997 28 May 1997 16:36:23 -0400 (EDT) 28 May 1997 16:31:20 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 16:30:43 -0400 From: christopher chase-dunn Subject: THE MILLENNIUM PROJECT To: wsn@csf.colorado.edu Reply-to: chriscd@jhu.edu FYI THE AMERICAN COUNCIL FOR THE UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY THE MILLENNIUM PROJECT "Lessons and Questions from History to Apply in Futures Research" http://nko.org/millenium [their ship's home page?] e-mail: jglenn@igc.org [the captain of the ship?] [AGF has received an invite to respond to several questions on how the study of history may bear on research on and prognostication of the future -as well as on 'testing' the viability of others' progonses. This is part of an ongoing project whose phase 1 was in 1992, pahse 2 in 12993/4, phase 3 in 1994/5. they have +/or are creating "Millennium Proejct Nodes" in a dozen cities around the world. They invite responses by e-mail and they offer further info - which i have not myself looked at yet, but some wsn'ers may wish to - on their web page, see above fraterna/sorora-lly submitted fyi gunder frank