Look for the union label!

[Peter_Puget]

By the way here is a photo of a labor leader who actually lived and organized under a regime of lead by socialists/commies dedicated to the working class.

 

[prole]

Detail elude you prole.

 

What Peter wrote:

The entire look for the union label movement started as a way for people to encourage consumers to avoid products derived from the labor of African-Americans. African-Americans were excluded from unions and when they could find equivalent work were happy to perform at a lower wage. As a result they were taking business away from unions. The business of unions when they actually do create higher wage is to screw somebody else. Screw the black guy across town. Screw the Chinese immigrants. Srew the poor guy in China trying to get ahead. Some things never change.

 

Note that the union label movement started in the ~ 1880's.

 

Now Debois wrote and said in 1930:

Organized labor was [long] the enemy of the black man in skilled industry.

link

 

In the final line of my quote above I point out that unions have gone from being against African Americans and US Chinese to now being against Chinese workers in China. (See bold) As I wrote above, somethings never change.

 

Somebody gets screwed. Racism is often close to the surface.

 

 

That's me, by the way.

[j_b]

Not only is it dumb but PP isn't too concerned when racism and xenophobia are used to occult ~1 million additional Iraqi death since the 2003 invasion.

[Peter_Puget]

You guys crack me up. The fact is Debois saw unions as racist and oppressive during the beginning of the union label movement. The fact that he latter became a commie doesn’t change this one iota. So remember the label's origin next time you go looking for it.

 

J_B Are you suggesting that I am a racist. I am like Dirty Harry I hate everyone equally.

 

[prole]

You guys crack me up. The fact is Debois saw unions as racist and oppressive during the beginning of the union label movement. The fact that he latter became a commie doesn’t change this one iota. So remember the label's origin next time you go looking for it.

 

If DuBois understood the particular unions in America during that time as racist, it doesn't necessarily follow that he understood unions to be racist in general. See? General and particular, abstract to the concrete? I can't put it more simply than that. If you'd like to do more research on the subject instead of dry-humping this one dumb idea you had till it's dead, please get back to me.

Edited September 24, 2009 by prole

[j_b]

You guys crack me up. The fact is Debois saw unions as racist and oppressive during the beginning of the union label movement. The fact that he latter became a commie doesn’t change this one iota. So remember the label's origin next time you go looking for it.

 

J_B Are you suggesting that I am a racist. I am like Dirty Harry I hate everyone equally.

 

You can ignore what you have been told and repeat the same illogical non-sense 1000 times but it won't make it any more true than the first time.

 

I don't know if you are actually racist but even some not racist conservatives do use racism to fuel hatred and promote division. I believe I remember some posts of yours that reeked of islamophobia, and you certainly delved into xenophobia to demonize these nations that didn't swallow your lies about Iraq. You went out of your way to deny the academic studies that demonstrate the surplus mortality that resulted from you Iraq policies, etc ...

[Mal_Con]

Unions up to the 1930's with the exception of the IWW were Trade Unions and discriminated against immigrants and minorities. Industry used immigrants and blacks as strikebreakers (and fired them once the union was busted). This of course led to resentment. Trade Unions discriminated against blacks until the 1960's. The CIO started admitting blacks in the 1930's but not in earnest until the 1950's.

[JayB]

Horseshit. Unionized workers are no more "artificially inflating" the price of labor than the owners or management of capitalist firms are "artificially suppressing" wages to maximize profits or tax-revenue. It's a political struggle over the conditions of employment and control over the work process. Nothing more. Your metaphysical abstracted "point of equilibrium" is no different than the other forms mumbo-jumbo you rail against on this board. Free your mind from these superstitions.

 

It's not clear to me that the semantic distinction between elevating prices by "artificial" vs "political" is terribly consequential, as workers who drive the cost of whatever it is that they're making above the price that consumers are willing to pay will ultimately meet the same end. The marketplace is littered with the remains of enterprises that domestic competitors ultimately put under. Candlemakers can only secure legislation that outlaws windows for so long before they lose either the political battle against the glass lobby or someone invents the lightbulb.

 

But assuming for the moment that we accept your propositions, and that the workers in the public sector win the "political struggle over the conditions of employment and control over the work process" against the tax payers and manage to increase their compensation by a percentage of your choosing, while providing no more services to the public, how exactly does this benefit anyone other than the public sector employees?

 

It's really quite hard to argue when I reject so many of your basic assumptions. It's no fun to start every post with "in the beginning...", or "first of all..." Nor am I much interested in playing along, accepting the premises of a system that is abhorrent merely for the sake of argument. I didn't letter in Debate and many of the arguments playing out here bear directly on too many lives, my own included, for parlor games.

 

The point above about artificial vs. political is not semantic. There is no such thing as "artificial" unless the you accept that the system you're talking about is a universal constant. Such a system can only exist outside time and space in a computer model or on a cocktail napkin. In fact, the struggles over how things are made, by whom, for whom, who controls the process, etc. play out in real time in a historical process. Capitalism is not a metaphysical constant with artificialities, anomalies, distortions. It's a set of relationships held in place by political power and ideology, riven by structural contradictions and conflicts. Thank you for pointing out again and again and again (in nearly all your posts) the fundamental structural conflict that exists between labor and capital. Many on this board have pointed out a similar existential contradiction with regard to the "conflict of interest" that exists between "health care providers" and patients in a for-profit health care system. The same fundamental conflict of interest runs clear across the spectrum of capitalist relations: owners and management seek to extract the maximum profit from its enterprise at the least cost possible and seeks to minimize those costs by all means at it's disposal. In the case of cutting labor costs those means run the gamut from packing up for Chinese FTZs to "social dumping" to beating striking workers.

 

It's been clear to the critics of capitalism since the beginning that it's enormously productive, that its means of generating efficiencies and economies of scale are unrivaled. The single minded pursuit of those things alone however are not necessarily compatible with human health and welfare or that of the ecological health of this planet. That people stubbornly refuse to commit social suicide in the name of greater efficiencies, cost cutting, economic growth, etc. is a mystery to you, Jay. Why? And why do you personally trumpet their miseries in the name of "creative destruction"? Part of it's probably your job, part of it is that you're comfortable enough that you can, but intellectually, I expect it's an undying commitment to human progress. As someone whose worldview extends from the same philosophical tradition as your own, I respect that. But at some point you guys started to fetishize the system, admiring its purity, its capacity for efficiency and left the human beings and their environs out of the equation. I'm not going to argue with you about the merits of milking the efficiencies of lowest cost per unit of production by minimizing the cost of inputs. As long as we're talking about people and not gears in a machine count me out of the parlor game.

 

 

 

Well - there's too much in there for me to address in one go, so you'll have to settle for a (relatively) concise and incomplete answer.

 

I was just as enchanted with the enlightenment as the next guy, particularly with Diderot, Voltaire, Condorcet, Turgot, etc - and was as puzzled as the next guy when the historical page-turner that I was reading my way through wound up with Robespierre writing the final chapter. My introduction to all of the above was via a degree program in the History of Science, and after marveling at the grandeur of Lavoisier's genius, it was more than a bit disconcerting to read of his beheading at the hands of whoever was manning the guillotine at the time.

 

I think that the most instructive episode of all involves Condorcet simultaneously penning an optimistic tome on the perfectibility of man and society through reason while fleeing and/or hiding from the revolutionary mob that was hunting for his scalp. I think from there it was off to Edmund Burke, then Hume, then Smith, along with another round of Madison, Adams, etc. I suspect that you're well acquainted with their analysis and conclusions. I assume you can extrapolate what the influence of all of the above, when grafted atop world history from the French Revolution onwards has had on my conclusions about revolutionary social change and other related topics.

 

It's hard to summarize the effect of Smith et al but for the purposes of our discussion here I'd say it gave me an appreciation of the importance of considering the interests of both the producer and the consumer in voluntary economic exchanges. That and the myriad other arguments that constitute the moral, technical, and empirical case for economic and political liberalism were just far more logically sound and convincing than the arguments for whatever alternates have been in vogue at any given time. If you're looking for the reasons why I can't support tariffs, subsidies, or any of the other permutations on protectionism and/or attempts to substitute a conception of value conceived, administered, and enforced by a bureaucracy for market prices, it's all out there all out there in the literature, but that's probably more material than you'd be willing or able to contend with (unless you happen to find yourself locked in the Cato Institute's reading room for several months).

 

At the very least, you should get your hands on Bohm-Bawerk's "Karl Marx and the Close of His System (1896)." If you can still believe in the Labor Theory of Value after reading what I think is the best, and probably the last serious technical consideration of that theory by a top-shelf economist - then you can consider yourself a Gold-Star Marxist of the highest order. If you get around to it, it'd be interesting to hear what enabled you to hang on to the gunwhales of that particular shift after an analytical torpedoing of that magnitude.

 

 

[ivan]

I am like Dirty Harry I hate everyone equally.

 

amen brotha - as i was trying to say in some other thread recently, hate is the great anteceent to politics - we start w/ hate, then w/ decide who to focus it on - the best we can hope for is to focus it generally, not specifically

[prole]

Though it may be productive, honestly I'm not willing to spend the effort to delve too deeply into most of this. I've never found conservative thought very compelling (big surprise), it tends more towards reactionary justification for whatever entrenched class interests happen to exist than any coherent philosophical position. It will use just about any outrageous claim at its disposal (usually fear-based, as your thoughts on the mob suggest) and seek to justify any unsavory practice that can help to maintain existing inequalities of privilege and power.

 

You really nail the weakness of Smith's thought here (though unintentionally, of course) and a major flaw in liberal thought, especially classical economics. When you say, "(Smith) gave me an appreciation of the importance of considering the interests of both the producer and the consumer in voluntary economic exchanges" what he (and other political economists of the time) didn't give you was an historical context for which to understand the very unequal basis of the structural relationship between labor and capital and the more often involuntary exchange (wage work or starvation) on the part of the worker created by an absolute dependency on the market for his or her means of survival. All of this requires grounding in the actually existing historical relations rather than abstracted formulae (logically sound as they may seem) or metaphysical claims about "human nature", "states of nature", people as billiard balls, or reducible to greedy utility-seeking machines. How do you square that circle, Jay, that neoclassical economists must appeal to an ahistorical, metaphysical state of being in order to prop up its ideas? It's pure fantasy, you must agree.

 

As far as the Labor Theory of Value goes, if you think this is the holy grail of debunking, you've been tragically misinformed. I think that the fundamental truth holds: like any other cost, capitalists or their managers seek to reduce labor costs to the absolute minimum required to keep that worker alive and/or showing up to work. That a capitalist can extract profit through paying a worker less than the value they produce goes without saying. I see it every day. Whether or not it has been (or is) a primary means of value extraction in a particular instance is a matter for historical or contemporary analysis. At any rate, it's not really that big of a deal for me. There are any number of Marx's ideas that don't hold water, people have been taking him to task for 150 years. His rigid notions on successive modes of production is pure nonsense, for instance. Much of Marx's thought has either been jettisoned when necessary, reworked or elaborated on by succeeding generations of social scientists whether they explicitly take a Marxian approach to their work or not. Anyway, that's more than I wanted to say.

[Fairweather]

That's nice, but no one should ever have to sit on a pumpkin.

[JayB]

Though it may be productive, honestly I'm not willing to spend the effort to delve too deeply into most of this. I've never found conservative thought very compelling (big surprise), it tends more towards reactionary justification for whatever entrenched class interests happen to exist than any coherent philosophical position. It will use just about any outrageous claim at its disposal (usually fear-based, as your thoughts on the mob suggest) and seek to justify any unsavory practice that can help to maintain existing inequalities of privilege and power.

 

You really nail the weakness of Smith's thought here (though unintentionally, of course) and a major flaw in liberal thought, especially classical economics. When you say, "(Smith) gave me an appreciation of the importance of considering the interests of both the producer and the consumer in voluntary economic exchanges" what he (and other political economists of the time) didn't give you was an historical context for which to understand the very unequal basis of the structural relationship between labor and capital and the more often involuntary exchange (wage work or starvation) on the part of the worker created by an absolute dependency on the market for his or her means of survival. All of this requires grounding in the actually existing historical relations rather than abstracted formulae (logically sound as they may seem) or metaphysical claims about "human nature", "states of nature", people as billiard balls, or reducible to greedy utility-seeking machines. How do you square that circle, Jay, that neoclassical economists must appeal to an ahistorical, metaphysical state of being in order to prop up its ideas? It's pure fantasy, you must agree.

 

As far as the Labor Theory of Value goes, if you think this is the holy grail of debunking, you've been tragically misinformed. I think that the fundamental truth holds: like any other cost, capitalists or their managers seek to reduce labor costs to the absolute minimum required to keep that worker alive and/or showing up to work. That a capitalist can extract profit through paying a worker less than the value they produce goes without saying. I see it every day. Whether or not it has been (or is) a primary means of value extraction in a particular instance is a matter for historical or contemporary analysis. At any rate, it's not really that big of a deal for me. There are any number of Marx's ideas that don't hold water, people have been taking him to task for 150 years. His rigid notions on successive modes of production is pure nonsense, for instance. Much of Marx's thought has either been jettisoned when necessary, reworked or elaborated on by succeeding generations of social scientists whether they explicitly take a Marxian approach to their work or not. Anyway, that's more than I wanted to say.

 

 

I don't think that the critique of Smith and others as blinkered-idealist-technocrats holds once you actually acquaint yourself with the full range of their output. In the case of Smith, even someone who has read a "The Wealth of Nations," - much less the Cliff-Notes summary - but fails to bother with the ideas he put forward in "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" will come away with a very incomplete picture at best, and a kind of self-serving caricature at worst. Ditto for Hayek and most other standard bearers for the liberal tradition in economics.

 

Aside from the technical economic aspects of Marxism that were subsequently demolished by the likes of Bohm-Bawerk et al (like the labor theory of value that you have recapitulated above) it seems like someone who partitions all of society into two abstract and highly idealized categories like "capital" and "labor" is ill equipped to criticize the conceptual framework that liberal economists have used in their technical work.

 

The is all particularly baffling in light of the fact that during the interval of history that Marxists concern themselves with, farmers, fishermen, basket-weavers, blacksmiths, carpenters, cooper's, wheelwrights, doctors, barbers, pharmacists, lawyers, scriveners, painters, trappers, tobacconists, silversmiths, tailors...brewers, bakers, and candlestick-makers et...cetera...have vastly, vastly outnumbered the number of people employed in enterprises that require aggregated investment in structures and machinery.

 

Unless you are willing to claim that most of humanity has provided for itself in Jeckyl and Hyde fashion - exploiting themselves by paying themselves less than the value of their output during the day, and rewarding themselves with the excess profits that they extracted from themselves in this fashion during the night - then it's hard to see how partitioning society into two "capital" and "labor" offers up a less idealized vision of society, or actually does much to help us understand "actually existing historical relations," much less an empirically correct or logically coherent methodology for understanding the dynamics that govern the full range of exchange transactions that have and do transpire in the real world. Who's operating in a conceptual dreamworld again?

 

The problems with the idealized "Dialectical Materialist" framework are even more acute when we turn to the constraints that it imposes on expression, aspiration, imagination, and living. Is a system that allows people to evaluate all of the above in light or their own subjective notions of what's valuable and important to them really more confining or oppressive than a system that consciously and deliberately values people and assigns them roles based upon how well they'll serve the interests of the state? Is there room for someone that wants to make their living as a transgendered erotic dancer in the Worker's Paradise? How about a Priest? Can a Central Committee dream up a centrally administered system of roles and categories that's fluid and dynamic enough to accommodate the soul who's deepest fulfillment will come from working in both capacities at different points in the same life? Would they have any incentive to do so even if it was possible? Is someone who answers "yes" to either question the someone who should properly congratulate themselves for anchoring their stated preference for such a system in "actually existing" realities, historical or otherwise?

 

Then there's the problem of efficient resource allocation, the coordination of supply and demand in the absence of market prices, and "the information problem" that crippled central planning in every regime that has attempted to organize itself along Marxist lines. Given the empirical track record here, and the near-century of technical demonstrations that it's impossible in practice, is a preference for that system really grounded in "actually existing historical relations?" Really? More than someone who's ignored the literature that demonstrates that a plane won't fly, knows it's crashed every time someone's managed to get it off the ground, and still wants to pack every one on earth aboard for one...more...try is grounding their beliefs in the "actually existing" principles and history of avionics?

 

I've taken the time to understand all of the principal arguments against political and economic liberalism, but from your statements here I can only conclude that you've got much more than a superficial and limited acquaintance with the arguments for them That's really kind of a shame, in the same way that meeting someone who seems smart, but turns out to be a creationist recapitulating bad versions of Paley's arguments 150 years after the publication of "The Origin of Species" and all of the evidence that has accumulated in the meantime is a shame.

 

If you change your mind, Bohm-Bawerk will always be out there, waiting for you:

 

http://hussonet.free.fr/bohm.pdf

[archenemy]

My eyes hurt.

[olyclimber]

my first thought (jay loves my one liners) is this:

 

there are too many words there. pull the chain on your head and flush your mind. ordinary average workaday 'mericans can't understand your fancy book learnin.

[ivan]

my first thought (jay loves my one liners) is this:

 

there are too many words there. pull the chain on your head and flush your mind. ordinary average workaday 'mericans can't understand your fancy book learnin.

jayb no doubt was the kinda student teachers fucking hate when they turn in a 20 page paper instead of the assigned standard 5 paragraph guy

 

i'm sure it's great stuff man, but i hope you're doing it for you own amusment, 'cuz i figure i'm officially crazy the day i start reading cc.com posts longer than say, 500 words

 

if you can't dazzle'em w/ brilliance, baffle'em w/ bullshit!

[prole]

I don't think that the critique of Smith and others as blinkered-idealist-technocrats holds once you actually acquaint yourself with the full range of their output. In the case of Smith, even someone who has read a "The Wealth of Nations," - much less the Cliff-Notes summary - but fails to bother with the ideas he put forward in "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" will come away with a very incomplete picture at best, and a kind of self-serving caricature at worst. Ditto for Hayek and most other standard bearers for the liberal tradition in economics.

 

An incomplete self-serving caricature of the the ideas you think you're debunking is exactly what you spend the rest of this post doing. Despite your claims to have made yourself familiar with the critiques of liberal political economy, it looks more like you've read a Cliff Notes version of the critiques of the critiques. Furthermore, you seem to think that by describing some of these points, I am in full agreement with them. Your points here are a mix of hopelessly muddled oversimplifications, strawmen, and a seeming unwillingness to grasp that there is a vast literature one any single one of the topics at issue here much less on the entire fucking totality of social relations. That I'm personally neither willing nor able to tackle those issues in this forum to your satisfaction sounds like your problem not mine. You'll have to find another sparring partner, I guess, that is, if you can find one that will put up with your shit personality. Fuck off.

 

 

[JayB]

Oh come on now. I actually enjoy perusing creationist literature from time to time in order to strengthen and refine my capacity to argue against it, so if you can point me to whatever you consider the most compelling defense of the LTV, central planning, etc I'll add them to the wish list on amazon and get around to them eventually. Seriously, make a list and post it. I'd like to read at least some of it. Not sure it'll help with the shit personality, but there's always Dale Carnegie for that.

 

In the meantime, what this thread really needs is a cartoon.

 

[video:youtube]sbRom1Rz8OA

[JayB]

my first thought (jay loves my one liners) is this:

 

there are too many words there. pull the chain on your head and flush your mind. ordinary average workaday 'mericans can't understand your fancy book learnin.

jayb no doubt was the kinda student teachers fucking hate when they turn in a 20 page paper instead of the assigned standard 5 paragraph guy

 

i'm sure it's great stuff man, but i hope you're doing it for you own amusment, 'cuz i figure i'm officially crazy the day i start reading cc.com posts longer than say, 500 words

 

if you can't dazzle'em w/ brilliance, baffle'em w/ bullshit!

 

Someone's gotta strengthen your scrolling capabilities every once in a while or you'll miss out on half the pretty pictures in the TR's.

[prole]

Oh come on now. I actually enjoy perusing creationist literature from time to time in order to strengthen and refine my capacity to argue against it, so if you can point me to whatever you consider the most compelling defense of the LTV, central planning, etc I'll add them to the wish list on amazon and get around to them eventually. Seriously, make a list and post it. I'd like to read at least some of it. Not sure it'll help with the shit personality, but there's always Dale Carnegie for that.

 

In the meantime, what this thread really needs is a cartoon.

 

[video:youtube]sbRom1Rz8OA

 

If you're interested in the liberal equivalent of creation story, you might do a review of the literature on "the state of nature".

[JayB]

Like the Boazian "Blank Slate?" "Coming of Age in Samoa?" The lady from I.C.A.R. that dumped a pitcher of water on E.O. Wilson's head at a seminar in the 1970's?

 

If we're going back to 18th century stuff, wasn't the LTV something that partially resulted from from Marx channeling bits of Locke et al?

 

The original arguments aren't terribly convincing any more as empirical accounts of the origin of man/society, but had at least as much to recommend it as Filmer's "Patriarcha" and all of that business about the divine right of kings, etc that were the coin of the realm back in the day.

 

 

[Peter_Puget]

Well gang it looks like the jets will be made in SC.....to the machinist union I say thanks for your support. The Puget Sound region will prosper in the future because of your wonderful strategies!

 

Lots of changes around the Sound. Elliot Bay Books might leave to find cheaper rent and increased browsing traffic. Oddly I drove by Alderwood Mall last weekend and it was hopping. Could it be that the strategy of making driving a pain in the ass could be helping to destroy Seattle's retail base.

 

ON a related note GM will certainly prosper under the guidance of its UAW and government overlords. The future is indeed RADIANT!

[Peter_Puget]

I've taken the time to understand all of the principal arguments against political and economic liberalism, but from your statements here I can only conclude that you've got much more than a superficial and limited acquaintance with the arguments for them

 

 

A bit over the top there Jay.

 

By the way Jay if you havent yet check out Russ R's chat with Calomiris it's the best one yet. He's had a shortage of really interesting guests over the last few months, but this was worth driving around the block once or twice.

[Peter_Puget]

I don't know if you are actually racist but even some not racist conservatives do use racism to fuel hatred and promote division. I believe I remember some posts of yours that reeked of islamophobia, and you certainly delved into xenophobia to demonize these nations that didn't swallow your lies about Iraq. You went out of your way to deny the academic studies that demonstrate the surplus mortality that resulted from you Iraq policies, etc ...

 

Wow J_B help me out:

 

1) Please show ( and link to) to my "islamophobia" posts but first give a definition of "islamophobia." I realized you havent actually said that they were islamophobic but that they merely reeked of it. Hedging your insults?

 

2) Provide examples (and links ) of me delving into xenophobia to demonize those nations that didnt swallow my lies about Iraq. Also please list and link to my lies about Iraq and show how any nation didn't swallow MY lies. Any nation that can resist my lies must be delt with!

 

3)Please show when I went out of my way to suggest that the Lancet(?) published estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths might be in error.

 

The while you're at it go back and see how you defended completley biased reporting of the so called "Jenin massacre".

 

Oh yea try being just a little bit nicer.

 

[tvashtarkatena]

my first thought (jay loves my one liners) is this:

 

there are too many words there. pull the chain on your head and flush your mind. ordinary average workaday 'mericans can't understand your fancy book learnin.

jayb no doubt was the kinda student teachers fucking hate when they turn in a 20 page paper instead of the assigned standard 5 paragraph guy

 

i'm sure it's great stuff man, but i hope you're doing it for you own amusment, 'cuz i figure i'm officially crazy the day i start reading cc.com posts longer than say, 500 words

 

if you can't dazzle'em w/ brilliance, baffle'em w/ bullshit!

 

I'm not sure I've ever read a single one of his posts start to finish. Even if the desire were to inexplicably spring forth within my breast, my eyes would glaze over too quickly to make such an endeavor possible.