Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Canada's Billion Dollar Rip Off
Canada's Ruling Class Hides Billions Offshore
File This Under; Capitalism is a Criminal Enterprize
I wrote yesterday about the scandal of Offshore Investments by Canada's ruling class in my Red Between the Lines Blog.
And as I predicted Conservative Fianace Critic Monte Solberg was whining that we need more tax breaks for the rich in order to make sure they don't hide their profits offshore in private bank accounts, as reported in the National Pest. (see below). Gee I wish I could say I was a great prognosticator, by commenting in my blog yesterday, but damnit the Tories and the Canadian Taxpayers (sic) Federation are so damn predictable in their knee jerk reaction. To them the solution to everything is Tax Cuts for the rich and Privatization.
The use of offshore banking by Canada's Millionaires and Billionaires, and lets call a spade a spade it's NOT Canadians investing offshore it's THE RULING CLASS, means you and I pay more taxes even after the government has so generously given the corporate capitalists major tax breaks at home. So Monte and the right wing's solution rings hollow.
And it gets better because many of those involved in this criminal enterprize of hidding profits from an already low tax rate for corporations are; Canadas Banks. These are the folks who already have a reputation for money laundering in their offshore banking operations. See my Skimming Kreme for more on Canadian Banks criminal use of offshore banking.
Even more infuriating is the fact that Canada's banks have defered their taxes, again, paying less taxes than they should. Remember that the next time you pay excessive service charges for using their monopoly Interac machines that charge you $1.75 a pop.
The Ruling Class like the Irving Family in the Maritimes makes no bones that as capitalists they should pay NO TAXES, and the old man of the family set up offshore accounts to make sure they didn't. With their Monopoly in New Brunswick they control the lives of the islanders with an old fashioned robber baron paternalism.
"The Mayor of Saint John is defending the city's decision to give Irving Oil a huge tax break. City council voted Monday to approve a deal that would see Irving pay $500,000 annually in property taxes on land where it will build its liquid natural gas terminal. The deal is good for 25 years. The city could have expected as much as $5 million a year in business taxes on that land.
He told council the deal had to be done by midnight Monday or the plant wouldn't be built. McFarlane says he spoke with Kenneth Irving several times over the last few months. "I asked him very clearly, and looked into his eyes, and said, 'Kenneth, you look into my eyes and tell me, if this does not happen, will this facility not be here?'" says McFarlane. "And he very clearly said, 'Yes, it is true.'" Taxpayers aren't so happy about the decision. It sounds like blackmail, says Saint John resident June Garfield. "Billionaires get all the breaks and the ordinary citizen gets nothing," she said. "I'm sure if Mr. Irving doesn't get his own way, there'll be somebody else will be only too willing to come in and we'd have some competition in New Brunswick."
Mayor defends tax deal with Irving CBC March 16, 2005
Its the logic of Capitalism, the capitalist sees himself as the creator of wealth, and since they create the wealth and give us poor suckers our jobs out of the goodness of their hearts and pocket books we should all be grateful and not tax their profits.
Ah thats the logic of neo-classical liberal economics, that the capitalist produces jobs and wealth. Its the logic of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation which is front for these same capitalists as is the Federal Conservative Party. To bad its a big lie, as I point out in my article; It's the Labour Theory of Value, stupid it is labour that produces this wealth not the Capitalist.
And even our very own Prime Minister Paul Martin, has his shipping company registered offshore. So he obviously agree's with Monte even though he will never admit it publicly. But actions always speak louder than poltical speeches or rhetoric.
Remember Trickle Down Economics, or as I like to call them Tinkle On Economics (the capitalist gets the gravy and we get p***ed on), the theory that the more tax breaks given the more the capitalist will invest. Can't forget it can you, its the usual canard of the right. Well since all these Canadian Corporations got their tax breaks for the past decade what did they do with them? Pocket the profits of course.
As the Globe and Mail reported yesterday:"Canada's performance in corporate research during the late 1990s was weaker than earlier believed, a new report concludes. The report, released yesterday, says the increase in the number of Canadian companies conducting research between 1994 and 2001, a period of strong economic growth, was salvaged only by government incentives. Earlier reports had suggested that Canadian companies had been showing more commitment to research during this period. "Much of the apparent activity was simply companies taking advantage of available government money," the document concludes. "There are very few positive stories in the multitude of data presented in this report." The report, called The Demographics of Industrial Research in Canada 1994-2000, was conducted by consultants The Impact Group and paid for by a consortium of federal and provincial governments.
This theft of surplus value and its investment in private bank accounts of the ruling class had a major impact on Canadian manufacturing over the past decade. Had the money been invested back into the Canadian economy as capital investments; R&D, technology upgrades, etc., we would not be facing the decline in manufacturing and it subsequent lay offs as we are now and the resulting decline in so called productivity that Canada has faced for two years now.
Canada's corporations continue to whine for handouts from the State either as tax breaks or as tax credits and investments. I have written about these corporate welfare hand outs to Bombadier, and other Canadian Corporations including those that are American owned like GM.
This is the capitalist economy in the epoch of State Capitalism. Unlike Stalinism or Keynesian Social Democracy, the epoch of Corporate State Capitalism is one which giveth to the corporations and taketh from the workers. The whole gamut of trade agreements that are identified with globalization WTO, NAFTA, FTA, APEC, etc. etc. are symptoms of this epoch of State Capitalism.
Tax Breaks, Tax Credits, Flat Tax initiatives, direct investment, lax regulations in Securities, failure to regulate offshore banking, failure to apply the Tobin Tax , giving Federal tax relief to billionaires like the Bronfmans, all this corporate welfare is symptomatic of state capitalism. Meanwhile not satisfied with workers producing surplus value and then using our taxes to prop up their companies the corporate capitalists continue to whine they need more or we will lose jobs. Hmmm, we are still losing jobs and they are banking their profits in safe havens offshore.
So if this isn't a criminal attempt to avoid paying taxes explain what investment opportunities exist in Barbados, or Luxemburg, or the British Virgin Islands. None, zip, nada. Capital is not being invested for anything more than making more money, hence more capital,(Marx's formula M-C-M) and the fact these are nice vacation spots to sit back in the sun on the beach with a cooler, well thats just one of the perks of watching your money grow. And how much you wanna bet the ruling class also applies for a tax credit for the offshore investment!
And who does Revenue Canada go after to bust for not paying their taxes? Coke dealers! If you are member of the Bronfman family or other members of the Ruling Class they forgive you your taxes.
It must be nice to be rich. Next time some company is about to lay off its workers because it can't get concessions, or tax breaks lets remember where they have hidden their profits.
OFFSHORE TAX HAVENS MORE POPULAR THAN EVER
Statscan Says The Amount Canadian Firms Socked Away Soared To $88-Billion In 2003
By PAUL WALDIE,
Globe and Mail
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Canadian companies are stashing more money into offshore tax havens than ever, a study indicates.
Between 1990 and 2003, the amount of money Canadian corporations put into tax havens, mainly in the Caribbean, soared to $88-billion from $11-billion, according to a study by Statistics Canada.
Direct investments in these countries increased 18 per cent annually on average. That compared with an annual increase of 8 per cent for investments in the United States and 14 per cent annually for investments in other countries. Tax haven countries "accounted for more than one-fifth of all Canadian direct investment abroad in 2003, double the proportion 13 years earlier," the study said. It added that of the $88-billion, $53-billion ended up in offshore banks.
The most popular tax havens were Barbados, Ireland, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas.
"This was the first time that we were measuring direct investment abroad in a subgroup of countries which we refer to as offshore financial centres," said François Lavoie, a balance of payments analyst at Statscan.
"The interesting findings were that the amount is important and increasing. [Offshore financial centres] represent now, in 2003, one-fifth of the direct investment abroad."
Mr. Lavoie said the study did not look at motivations for the investments, but he said tax issues were the most likely reason. "We know that these types of countries are characterized by low or zero taxation and moderate to light financial regulation," he said.
Canadian tax officials have raised concerns about the amount of money headed to tax havens. According to a document prepared in 2001, the Canada Revenue Agency estimated that individual Canadians invested $44.1-billion in tax haven countries. That compared with $4.5-billion in 1988.
The Internet has made it easier for individuals and businesses to set up banks and brokerage accounts in far-flung countries famous for their secrecy, said the document, titled "Tax Havens, An Evolving Taxation Issue."
The paper noted that officials are concerned that the secrecy provisions in many countries make it difficult, if not impossible, to get information from a financial institution and collect taxes owing from Canadians.
A study last year by researchers at the University of Quebec said Canada's major banks have used tax havens to avoid paying $10-billion in taxes since 1991. The study found that the banks had a total of 73 subsidiaries in tax haven countries such as Barbados and Cayman Islands.
For example, according to researchers, Bank of Nova Scotia reduced its tax bill in 2003 by $309-million to $784-million because of a "lower average tax rate applicable to subsidiaries and foreign branches."
The Canadian Bankers Association has challenged the study, saying "the underlying premise is entirely unfounded and misleading." The association added that there is nothing wrong with what the banks are doing.
Francis Wade, who runs Can-Offshore Services, a Belize-based company that specializes in offshore banking, said regulations in many countries have been tightened and he questioned Statscan's figures.
"We read these statistics with a grain of salt," Mr. Wade said. He added that most banks in the Caribbean have less than $20-million in total customer deposits and could not accommodate the sums indicated by the report.
The Statscan study also found that, between 1990 and 2003, foreign direct investment in the United States tripled to $160-billion, but rose much faster in other regions.
The United States accounted for 41 per cent of total foreign investment in 2003, compared with 60 per cent in 1990.
Offshore investment
The largest growth in direct Canadian investment in offshore financial centres has been in Barbados, Ireland, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the Bahamas. These five centres are now among the top 11 nations with the most Canadian assets.
$11-BILLION: CANADIAN ASSETS INVESTED IN OFFSHORE FINANCIAL CENTRES IN 1990
18%: ANNUAL RATE OF GROWTH IN CANADIAN DIRECT INVESTMENT OFFSHORE (1990-2003)
41%: U.S. SHARE OF CDN. DIRECT INVESTMENT IN 2003, DOWN FROM 61 in 1990.
$88-BILLION: CANADIAN ASSETS INVESTED IN OFFSHORE FINANCIAL CENTRES IN 2003
8%: ANNUAL RATE OF GROWTH IN CANADIAN DIRECT INVESTMENT IN THE U.S. (1990-2003)
$169-BILLION: AMOUNT OF CDN. DIRECT FOREIGN INVESTMENT IN FINANCIAL SECTOR ASSETS
Direct Canadian investment assets in offshore financial centres in 2003.
$million Rank
Barbados 24,690 3
Ireland 18,226 4
Bermuda 10,845 6
Cayman Islands 10,619 8
Bahamas 8,802 11
Switzerland 4,044 18
Singapore 3,735 19
Hong Kong 2,535 22
Malaysia 716 32
Luxembourg 683 33
British Virgin Is. 307 45
Panama 131 64
Netherlands 107 69
Costa Rica 94 74
Cyprus 92 76
Offshore centres ranked, but where data is confidential under the Statistics Act.
Channel Islands
Belize
Mauritius
Saint Lucia
Antigua/Barbuda
Malta
Aruba
Seychelles
Bahrain
Macau
Source: Statistics Canada
$88B FLEES CANADA:
TAXES BLAMED AS INVESTMENT IN OFFSHORE HAVENS SOARS
Eric Beauchesne; with files from Scott Stinson
CanWest News Service; with files from National Post
March 15, 2005
OTTAWA - Canadian direct investment in tax havens and other offshore financial centres has soared eight-fold since 1990 to $88-billion in 2003, says a report that has renewed calls for lower taxes to spur investment in this country.
The Statistics Canada report, released yesterday, rekindled opposition demands for a crackdown on Canadian firms' use of offshore financial centres to avoid paying taxes in Canada.
"From 1990 to 2003, Canadian enterprises invested substantial and growing amounts in countries known as 'Offshore Financial Centres,' many of them in the Caribbean," StatsCan said. "These centres include countries that are often referred to as 'tax havens,' as well as those which have important financial sectors, such as Switzerland, but also Ireland."
The largest increases went into Barbados, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Ireland, the five countries being among the 11 nations with the most Canadian assets.
John Williamson, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said yesterday the inclusion of Ireland among the top five should send Ottawa a message.
"That is a country that Canada could learn so much from. They pursued a policy of lower taxes to stimulate economic growth and have succeeded to the point that not only is their economy strong, but it is attracting Canadian capital," he said.
Mr. Williamson noted the Caribbean countries have long attracted foreign investment, because banking is a cornerstone of their economies, but Ireland has a goods-and-services economy similar to Canada's. "[Ireland] is the one that jumps out on that list.... There's certainly a lesson for the Canadian government in terms of their tax-and-spend policies."
Conservative finance critic Monte Solberg said Canada should follow Ireland's lead and use low taxes to attract investment.
"That's something we should strive for," Mr. Solberg said.
Jack Mintz, president and chief executive of the C.D. Howe Institute, said the StatsCan study underscores the reality that "we're not as attractive enough as a country for foreign investment, and that's a concern."
Mr. Mintz said it is not suprising Canadian investment in tax havens has jumped in recent years, given that Canada has one of the highest corporate tax rates among industrialized countries.
"We have a significant issue that we have to deal with on the tax side to make Canada more attractive," he said. "We've actually created a policy disadvantage for investment in Canada."
The report also brought charges that Ottawa must follow through on promises to close tax loopholes that allow such high levels of Canadian investment in such countries as Barbados.
Judy Wasylycia-Leis, the NDP finance critic, said the Liberal government "has to start taking seriously its commitment to shut down tax havens, because they result in higher taxes for Canadians."
However, Finance Minister Ralph Goodale recently said that a "consensus among all countries" would be needed to shoot down tax havens.
The International Monetary Fund defines offshore financial centres as jurisdictions that have a large number of foreign-controlled financial institutions where most transactions are initiated abroad; have assets and liabilities that are out of proportion to its economy and low or zero taxation; and have loose financial regulations and banking secrecy.
Francois Lavoie, author of the Statistics Canada study, said it is based on investments reported by firms but added he "cannot comment if these are legitimate investments or not."
They mostly are investments in financial assets but, depending on how the investment is structured, that could include investments in ships or buildings, he said.
Canada Steamship Lines, formerly owned by Prime Minister Paul Martin, who has now transferred ownership to his sons, has registered ships offshore.
An IMF background paper notes that international companies route activities through low- tax offshore OFCs to minimize their total tax bill ... moving onshore profits to low-tax regimes.
More than one-fifth of all Canadian direct investment abroad in 2003, or more than 20 cents of every dollar, went into offshore financial centres, double the proportion 13 years earlier, the report said.
In contrast, the share of direct Canadian investment going to the United States, Canada's main economic partner, shrunk over that time, it said. Direct investment mainly serves to finance the creation of new enterprises or the acquisition of existing ones.
© National Post 2005
Monday, March 14, 2005
It's the Labour Theory of Value, stupid
In Libertarian Dialectics and in other comments I have made on my blogs I have challenged what I call the price, distribution, production economic model of the Austrian School of Economics, Von Mises and Hayek, and their heirs at the Chicago School of Economics, Friedman et al. It is also called neo-classical economics, what could also be called liberal economics.
This is why I refer to the majority of right wing Libertarians, as liberaltarians, those who embrace the supply side economics of these schools. These characters are masques of capitalism as Marx once described their subjective function.
They reject out of hand the Labour Theory of Value, based on a flawed critique of Capital by the Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Austrian Minister of Finance, 1889-1904, professor and leader, along with Carl Menger and Friedrich von Weiser, of the Austrian school of economists. Böhm-Bawerk, had a special interest in the theory of capital and interest. Author of several books, including his 1896 work, Karl Marx and the Close of His System, a classic attack on Marxist economics.
The German Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding, challenged the Austrian school’s dismissal of Capital and of Marx, in his critique of Böhm-Bawerk, In his preface to his critique Hilferding writes:
“The publication of the third volume of Capital has made hardly any impression upon bourgeois economic science. We have seen nothing of the "jubilant hue and cry" anticipated by Sombart. [1] No struggle of intellects has taken place; there was no contest in majorem scientiae gloriam. For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights. As spokesman for the bourgeoisie, it enters the lists only where the bourgeoisie has practical interests to defend. In the economico-political struggles of the day it faithfully reflects the conflict of interests of the dominant cliques, but it shuns the attempt to consider the totality of social relationships, for it rightly feels that any such consideration would be incompatible with its continued existence as bourgeois economics.
The only exception is the psychological school of political economy. The adherents of this school resemble the classical economists and the Marxists in that they endeavor to apprehend economic phenomena from a unitary outlook. Opposing Marxism with a circumscribed theory, their criticism is systematic in character, and their critical attitude is forced upon them because they have started from totally different premises. As early as 1884, in his Capital and Interest, Böhm-Bawerk joined issue with the first volume of Capital, and soon after the publication of the third volume of that work he issued a detailed criticism the substance of which was reproduced in the second edition of his Capital and Interest [German edition 1900]. [2] He believes he has proved the untenability of economic Marxism, and confidently announces that "the beginning of the end of the labor theory of value" has been inaugurated by the publication of the third volume of Capital.”
Hilferding refers to the
Ayn Rand’s so called “Objectivism” is NOT, it is subjectivism and her work in philosophy is subjectivist psychology, as Von Mises is in economics. They and their followers embrace the Böhm-Bawerk dismissal of the Labour Theory of Value. As Hilferding says in his chapter on the Austrian Schools Subjectivist Outlook:
“The phenomenon of variations in the price of production has shown us that the phenomena of capitalist society can never be understood if the commodity or capital be considered in isolation. It is the social relationship which these occupy, and changes in that relationship, which control and elucidate the movements of individual capitals, themselves no more than portions of the total social capital. But the representative of the psychological school of political economy fails to see this social nexus, and he therefore necessarily misunderstands a theory which definitely aims at disclosing the social determinism of economic phenomena, a theory whose starting point therefore is society and not the individual. In apprehending and expounding this theory he is ever influenced by his own individualistic mentality, and he thus arrives at contradictions which he ascribes to the theory, while they are in truth ascribable solely to his interpretations of the theory.
This confusion may be traced in all the stages of Böhm-Bawerk's polemic. Even the fundamental concept of the Marxist system, the concept of value-creating labor, is apprehended in a purely subjective manner. To him "labor" is identical with "trouble" or "effort" ["Mühe"].To make this individual feeling of distaste the cause of value naturally leads us to see in value a purely psychological fact, and to deduce the value of commodities from our evaluation of the labor they have cost. As is well known, this is the foundation which Adam Smith adopts for his theory of value, for he is ever inclined to abandon the objective standpoint for a subjective. Smith writes: "Equal quantities of labor must at all times and places be of equal value to the laborer. In his ordinary state of health, strength, and spirits; in the ordinary degree of his skill and dexterity, he must always lay down the same portion of his ease, his liberty, and his happiness." [1] If labor regarded as "trouble" be the basis of our personal estimate of value, then the "value of the labor" is a constituent, or a "determinant" as Böhm-Bawerk puts it, of the value of commodities. But it need not be the only one, for a number of other factors which influence the subjective estimates made by individuals take their places beside labor and have an equal right to be regarded as determinants of value. If, therefore, we identify the value of commodities with the personal estimate of the value of these commodities made by this or that individual, it seems quite arbitrary to select labor as the sole basis for such an estimate.
From the subjectivist standpoint, therefore, the standpoint from which Böhm-Bawerk levels his criticism, the labor theory of value appears untenable from the very outset. And it is because he adopts this standpoint that Böhm-Bawerk is unable to perceive that Marx's concept of labor is totally opposed to his own. Already in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx had emphasized his opposition to Adam Smith's subjectivist outlook by writing "[Smith] fails to see the objective equalization of different kinds of labor which the social process forcibly carries out, mistaking it for the subjective equality of the labors of individuals." [2] In truth, Marx is entirely unconcerned with the individual motivation of the estimate of value. In capitalist society it would be absurd to make "trouble" the measure of value, for speaking generally the owners of the products have taken no trouble at all, whereas the trouble has been taken by those who have produced but do not own them. With Marx, in fact, every individual relationship is excluded from the conception of value-creating labor; labor is regarded, not as something which arouses feelings of pleasure or its opposite, but as an objective magnitude, inherent in the commodities, and determined by the degree of development of social productivity. Whereas for Böhm-Bawerk, labor seems merely one of the determinants in personal estimates of value, in Marx's view labor is the basis and connective tissue of human society, and in Marx's view the degree of productivity of labor and the method of organization of labor determine the character of social life. Since labor, viewed in its social function as the total labor of society of which each individual labor forms merely an aliquot part, is made the principle of value, economic phenomena are subordinated to objective laws independent of the individual will and controlled by social relationships. Beneath the husk of economic categories we discover social relationships, relationships of production, wherein commodities play the part of intermediaries, the social relationships being reproduced by these intermediate processes, or undergoing a gradual transformation until they demand a new type of inter-mediation.
Thus the law of value becomes a law of motion for a definite type of social organization based upon the production of commodities, for in the last resort all change in social structure can be referred to changes in the relationships of production, that is to say to changes in the evolution of productive power and in the organization of [productive] labor. We are thereby led, in the most striking contrast to the outlook of the psychological school, to regard political economy as a part of sociology, and sociology itself as a historical science. Böhm-Bawerk has never become aware of this contrast of outlooks. The question whether the "subjectivist method" or the "objectivist method" is the sound method in economics he decides in a controversy with Sombart by saying that each method must supplement the other—whereas in truth we are not concerned at all with two different methods, but with contrasted and mutually exclusive outlooks upon the whole of social life. Thus it happens that Böhm-Bawerk, unfailingly carrying on the controversy from his subjectivist and psychological standpoint, discovers contradictions in the Marxist theory which seem to him to be contradictions solely because of his own subjectivist interpretation of the theory.”
It is this subjectivity, misrepresented as being classical liberal invidualism that underlies the Right Wing Libertarians economic reason de’ etre of reducing capitalism to the economics of prices/distribution/production. It is also their misinterpretation of the market place of capitalism that makes them idealize some sort of laissez-faire utopia without the state. They fail to understand that there is a difference between government and the state.
The state is the judiciary and military power of the old aristocracy adapted by capitalism for its own functioning. Governance, government, is the function of associations of producers and always has been. Even Kropotkin realized this with his analysis of the State, and saw the free association of producers existing in the city state economies independent of any particular feudalist state; in fact it was their crushing that led to the creation of the modern capitalist state. But these associations still governed the market place, by workers control.
“On the other hand the State has also been confused with Government. Since there can be no State without government, it has sometimes been said that what one must aim at is the absence of government and not the abolition of the State. However, it seems to me that State and government are two concepts of a different order. The State idea means something quite different from the idea of government. It not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a territorial concentration as well as the concentration in the hands of a few of many functions in the life of societies. It implies some new relationships between members of society which did not exist before the formation of the State. A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing has to be developed in order to subject some classes to the domination of others.” The State: Its Historic Role, Peter Kropotkin
Under modern capitalism right wing libertarian “psychological economics” ends up not with a nation of “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, one which produces, but a nation of Fuller brush Salesmen, multilevel marketers and pyramid ponzi schemers. That is the ultimate ideal of supply side economics which sees
He is not the Scottish author, rather he is a character in the Ayn Rand Novel Atlas Shrugged who declares Rand’s idealist principles of individualism within modern capitalism:
JOHN GALT'S OATH
”The world will change when you are ready to pronounce this oath:
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man,
nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.”
The Austrian School of ‘psychological’ subjectivist economics, or the ‘what’s in it for me’ school of political economy, deliberately obfusticates the differences between themselves and the Marxist school of political economy, because they have thrown out the Labour Theory of Value, while caring only about the arithmetic of distribution, the supply and demand of the current existing capitalist system. Even in their most radical form of the free marketers or anarcho-capitalists like Bryan Caplan, they still view the world through the eyes of Ayn Rand and her capitalist heroes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
In her work The Fountainhead, which was also made into a movie, her capitalist hero is an architect who builds a monument to himself and escapes society by hiding from it. This is
Toohey's values are totally wrong, from Rand's point of view, but his analysis is almost always correct. "Every loneliness is a pinnacle," he says, like a true Randian individualist [277], and he is one of the few people able to recognize Roark's lonely genius for what it is. Toohey analyzes, in Randian fashion, the indebtedness of the many to the genius of the few, and the inspiration given to the collectivist spirit by the envy that results from that indebtedness [281-82].
The Literary Achievement of The Fountainhead By Stephen Cox
In the end, despite their protests to the contrary, the so called anarcho-capitalists heroes are Enron, WorldCom, and Martha Stewart, while their ideal of themselves is the freebooter pirate like Robert Anton Wilson’s caricature of them; Hagbard Celine in his Illuminatus Trilogy.
In order to avoid seriously confronting their differences with Marxism, Böhm-Bawerk and all his followers since have set up the straw dog of State Socialism, as their definition of Socialism, in particular
Overall with few exceptions, such as Murray Rothbard, the Libertarian Right and its Austrian and Randian allies care not one wit for class struggle, since to them it can only lead to state socialism. And here is the rub, to be a radical subjectivist you must understand that the subjects of capitalism are the workers who produce it. As Marx said, both the workers and the capitalists are the subjects and objects of capitalism.
Production does not simply produce man as a commodity, the human commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with this role as a mentally and physically dehumanized being. — Immorality, deformity, and dulling of the workers and the capitalists. — Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity ... the human commodity.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Capitalism is a system, one that goes beyond its subjects, which is why it must be overcome since the result of its existence is alienation of the subjects who create it through the commodity fetishism it demands of us not as subjects but as ‘consumers’.
The Libertarian Right, the
As I.I. Rubin the Russian Economist writes in his introduction to Essays on Marx's Theory of Value
There is a tight conceptual relationship between Marx's economic theory and his sociological theory, the theory of historical materialism. Years ago Hilferding pointed out that the theory of historical materialism and the labor theory of value have the same starting point, specifically labor as the basic element of human society, an element whose development ultimately determines the entire development of society.[1]
The working activity of people is constantly in a process of change, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and in different historical periods it has a different character. The process of change and development of the working activity of people involves changes of two types: first, there are changes in means of production and technical methods by which man affects nature, in other words, there are changes in society's productive forces; secondly, corresponding to these changes there are changes in the entire pattern of production relations among people, the participants in the social process of production. Economic formations or types of economy (for example, ancient slave economy, feudal, or capitalist economy) differ according to the character of the production relations among people. Theoretical political economy deals with a definite social-economic formation, specifically with commodity-capitalist economy.
The capitalist economy represents a union of the material-technological process and its social forms, i.e. the totality of production relations among people. The concrete activities of people in the material-technical production process presuppose concrete production relations among them, and vice versa. The ultimate goal of science is to understand the capitalist economy as a whole, as a specific system of productive forces and production relations among people. But to approach this ultimate goal, science must first of all separate, by means of abstraction, two different aspects of the capitalist economy: the technical and the social-economic, the material-technical process of production and its social form, the material productive forces and the social production relations. Each of these two aspects of the economic process is the subject of a separate science. The science of social engineering-still in embryonic state-must make the subject of its analysis the productive forces of society as they interact with the production relations. On the other hand, theoretical political economy deals with production relations specific to the capitalist economy as they interact with the productive forces of society. Each of these two sciences, dealing only with one aspect of the whole process of production, presupposes the presence of the other aspect of the production process in the form of an assumption which underlies its research. In other words, even though political economy deals with production relations, it always presupposes their unbreakable connection with the material-technical process of production, and in its research assumes a concrete stage and process of change of the material-productive forces.
Marx's theory of historical materialism and his economic theory revolve around one and the same basic problem: the relationship between productive forces and production relations. The subject of both sciences is the same: the changes of production relations which depend on the development of productive forces. The adjustment of production relations to changes of productive forces-a process which takes the form of increasing contradictions between the production relations and the productive forces, and the form of social cataclysms caused by these contradictions-is the basic theme of the theory of historical materialism.[2] By applying this general methodological approach to commodity-capitalist society we obtain Marx's economic theory. This theory analyzes the production relations of capitalist society, the process of their change as caused by changes of productive forces, and the growth of contradictions which are generally expressed in crises.
Political economy does not analyze the material-technical aspect of the capitalist process of production, but its social form, i.e., the totality of production relations which make up the "economic structure" of capitalism. Production technology (or productive forces) is included in the field of research of Marx's economic theory only as an assumption, as a starting point, which is taken into consideration only in so far as it is indispensable for the explanation of the genuine subject of our analysis, namely production relations. Marx's consistently applied distinction between the material-technical process of production and its social forms puts in our hands the key for understanding his economic system. This distinction at the same time defines the method of political economy as a social and historical science. In the variegated and diversified chaos of economic life which represents a combination of social relations and technical methods, this distinction also directs our attention precisely to those social relations among people in the process of production, to those production relations, for which the production technology serves as an assumption or basis. Political economy is not a science of the relations of things to things, as was thought by vulgar economists, nor of the relations of people to things, as was asserted by the theory of marginal utility, but of the relations of people to people in the process of production.
Political economy, which deals with the production 'relations among people in the commodity-capitalist society, presupposes a concrete social form of economy, a concrete economic formation of society. We cannot correctly understand a single statement in Marx's Capital if we overlook the fact that we are dealing with events which take place in a particular society. "In the study of economic categories, as in the case of every historical and social science, it must be borne in mind that as in reality so in our mind the subject, in this case modern bourgeois society, is given and that the categories are therefore but forms of expression, manifestations of existence, and frequently but one-sided aspects of this subject, this definite society." ". . .In the employment of the theoretical method [of Political Economy], the subject, society, must constantly be kept in mind as the premise from which we start." [3] Starting from a concrete sociological assumption, namely from the concrete social structure of an economy, Political Economy must first of all give us the characteristics of this social form of economy and the production relations which are specific to it. Marx gives us these general characteristics in his "theory of commodity fetishism," which could more accurately be called a general theory of production relations of the commodity capitalist economy.
Between these two Libertarianisms, there can never be a rapprochement, as those on the right reject the Labour Theory of Value and those of us on the Left (including some mutualists and some free-marketeers) accept the Labour Theory of Value.
Compared to the Labour Theory of Value, all other economics are simply the arithmetic of the market and the calculations of supply and demand distribution of currently existing capitalism. They offer no historical understanding of how we got here or where we are going, they only offer us the steady state of capitalism as it is, as it was, as it ever will be.
This is the contradiction of the free trade argument, since no trade in goods is truly free, each nation of producers restricts access to trade in its own capitalist interests, but in a world of commodity producers (off shore overseas, out of sight out of mind) and a world of commodity consumers (North Americans) then Free Trade is the right wing liberaltarian ideal. With that in mind all we can look forward to sweat shops in space ala Outland, with the lone sheriff being the Randian hero, if John Galt liberaltarians get their way.
The real Libertarian calls for smashing capitalism and its State. For ending the market domination of society and for the free association of producers.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Deconstructing Hayek
I came across this article on the web by Sean Johnson Andrews critical of the Regulation School of Economics that also handily dismisses the
[Author’s aside: I found it while researching material for Libertarian Anti-Imperialism, ah the joys of research based writing, it takes you off in all directions at once. And serendipitous synergies occur as happened in this case.[1] ]
Andrews study is about cultural production under capitalism, especially media concentration, and the whole article is an excellent read as are his other writings ( I have included a link to his article on blog freedom as a comment to my Blog Freedom or Cyberwar). He asks if bourgeois political economy which wants be taken seriously as a science but what kind of science and what kind of economics? He does an excellent job challenging the neo-classical school of the economics including its most radical wing the
I have excerpted some of his critique from this long article, the whole of which is well worth the read. I have excerpted a small section of his very long article dealing with neo-classical economics of the Austrian and
Excerpts From: A Conversation among Bourdieu, Regulationist Economics and Cultural Studies and the way they can help objectify this and other conjunctures
The Science of Culture and the Culture of Science:
From Culture and Political Economy (Spring 2003)
Sean Johnson Andrews Blog on Media
At the present time, scientific effort mirrors an economy filled with contradictions. The economy is in large measure dominated by monopolies, and yet on the world scale it is disorganized and chaotic, richer than ever yet unable to eliminate human wretchedness. Science, too, shows a double contradiction. Max Horkheimer, “Notes on Science and the Crisis,” c.1930
The] neoclassical consensus succeeded in replacing the labor theory of value with one grounded in subjective utility and placed the ideas of ‘marginal product’ and ‘final demand’ at the center while elbowing into the wings the concepts of total demand. With these new ideas [. . .] the economy came to be thought of less in terms of material production and reproduction and more as a logic of human action. (79)
To make matters worse, this is the model of economics that is most strongly believed as rational and verifiable by a great many capitalist subjects.
The same social alchemy is true of economic capital and, like the capital in the scientific field, capital in the economic or symbolic field, legitimated by a hierarchy of producers, is more than just a mode of exchange: it is also a mode of domination.
Regulationist economics is concerned with “the study of the transformation of social relations as it creates new forms that are organized into structures and themselves reproduce a determinant structure, the mode of production”(16). This characterization of the economy seems similar to the Polanyian idea of embeddedness, which he describe in detail in The Great Transformation. In short, embeddedness is a way of giving primacy to one social formation over another. Polanyi insists that before the development of modern market capitalism in the 19th century, “the human economy was always embedded in society”(xxiii) and, more importantly,
The idea of a [disembedded] self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way. (3-4)
This is understanding of the relations between the economy, society and the state is, indeed, similar to the Regulationist view, but they tend to posit the agency with the market instead of with society. The concept of a Regime of Accumulation, central to the school, is not concerned with the effect of capitalism on society per se, but rather on the way that society can be best transformed to accommodate capitalism. It could be said that, in relation to Polanyi, they recognize that there are times when the relation between the two is unique. The concepts of a the predominantly extensive and intensive regimes of accumulation indicate this understanding. The former is the regime of accumulation which Polanyi might call “disembedded;” it is “that in which relative surplus value is obtained by transforming the organization of labor; the traditional way of life may persist or be destroyed, but it is not radically recomposed by the logic of utilitarian funcitonalism”(Aglietta, 71). This is the type of accumulation regime, according to Aglietta, which existed in late nineteenth-century
The crisis of worldwide depression and the rise of fascism that ensued when this accumulation regime could no longer continue is what Polanyi has witnessed when he says, in 1944, “nineteenth-century civilization has collapsed.” But whereas Polanyi thinks this is primarily the social result of an economic phenomenon, Aglietta describes it as a social phenomenon with economic consequences: “The Great Depression [. . .] was a major crisis of accumulation because the transformation of the labor process itself set up obstacles to valorization. What was at stake in the crisis was the transformation of the conditions of existence on the working class”(95).
What this understanding of capitalism points to is the “progressive, historical role of capitalism”(Lenin, 47) which Aglietta describes as only being fully possible in an intensive regime of accumulation, or some other “set of mechanisms for social mediation that guide the accumulation of capital in the direction of social progress”(Aglietta, 412). The description of he gives of this concept is important because it points to the place where Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus becomes relevant to the Regulationist description of capitalism:
The predominantly intensive regime of accumulation creates a new mode of life for the wage-earning class by establishing a logic that operates on the totality of time and space occupied or traversed by its individuals in daily life. A social consumption norm is formed, which no longer depends in any way on communal life [. . . .] This norm is stratified according to principles that closely correspond to the stratification of social groups within the wage-earning class. The intensive regime of accumulation accomplishes an integration of the two departments of production that makes possible a far more regular pace of accumulation and a far more rapid increase in the rate of surplus value.(71)
Packed into this quote are several ideas that become more fully articulated concepts in the hands of later Regulationist theorists. So, the “mode of life” which Aglietta mentions above, becomes a mode of regulation and the “logic that operates on the totality of time and space” is similar to Alain Lipietz’s description of a schema of reproduction (32-33).
Aglietta describes the major problem of capitalism in terms that are similar to Althusser and the conception of “capital” as quite similar to eponymous idea in Bourdieu: “we conceive of capital not as an eminent entity but as the development of the wage relation. Every major crisis of accumulation is a crisis of the present conditions of reproduction of this relation”(Aglietta, 169). The idea of a “schema reproduction” is something which is meant to stem this crisis in the production relation or the “reproduction of the material conditions of production”(Althusser, Lenin, 127). The schema of reproduction accounts for the relationship of labor, the relationship between departments of production, and the patterns of distribution and consumption which all together form “the skeleton of a regime of accumulation or a mathematical diagram of its social coherence”(Lipietz, 32). This system of relations is not necessarily planned or settled upon before it is implemented, it is just the schema that was “found” to work. And the schema works in so far as there is a “mode of regulation” that is appropriate: “If any schema is to be realized and to reproduce itself for any length of time, there must be institutional forms, procedures and habits which either coerce or persuade private agents to conform to its schemas”(33). Thus the “mode of regulation” is almost identical to the habitus.
In relation to Bourdieu’s capital, which again, Aglietta describes as a development of the relation, capitalism can be conceived in terms of a certain formalization of an economic field. However, there is a highly stratified relation between the people able to accumulate capital and the people who only serve as, what could be called, relational support, for their accumulation. Workers, whose laboring capacity may reward them with symbolic capital within the field of economic relations, are not typically able to accumulate enough of the economic capital (which their work valorizes) to change their position in the field. Thus there has to be a strong relation of domination within the field which encourages a disposition for the worker to continue to play this relational support role when it is clearly more in the interest of the capitalist for him to do so.
For unlike other, more settled sciences, economics has had a difficult history in convincing other practitioners from other sciences that it has the same sort of quantitative verifiability of mathematics or physics. Its status as a social science makes its seem less authoritative among other scientists. On the other hand, its status as a social science having to do with the basic relations of humankind gives its authoritative practitioners a great deal of symbolic capital, even as many of them attempt to disconnect their theories from the messy assemblages of power and production that they are supposed to describe. Friedrich Hayek, whose most famous book Road to Serfdom, was published the same year as Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, went to far as to suggest that the term “society” should be stricken from “our poisoned language” (Hayek, 112-115), making a point of not using the term to describe “our extended moral order” lest he be branded a socialist.
This dimension of the authoritative position of economics is evident enough in common parlance. Nevertheless, an example of an attempt to move outside of the scientific field to accumulate symbolic capital is visible on
In 1968, the Bank of Sweden, interested in conferring a greater legitimacy on the discipline of economics, decided to offer a prize to the most innovative and important thinkers in the field and to dedicate it to Alfred Nobel, which was strange since he wasn’t an economist. However, the organizers in charge of the creation of the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “ had its their own reasons for choosing Nobel. As Gringas tells it:
First, despite the skepticism of some scientists towards the ‘scientificity’ of economics, the Bank managed to convince the
Furthermore, since the full name of the prize is too onerous for people (especially journalists) to say, it became common parlance to call the prize “The Nobel Prize in Economics.” This work of social alchemy meant to solve the problem of the “primitive accumulation of symbolic capital”(Gringas) regarding this prize and its related field.
Of course not everyone has been happy about this. In 1974, when Gunnar Myrdel shared the prize with Hayek in 1974, he reserved his speech to advocate for the abolition of the prize. If Hayek was supposed to be the best an brightest in the field, then he wanted nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, the prize continues, despite the abyssal divide between what are arguably, ideological points of difference within the field itself. Which brings us back to the early 1970s and the intervention which Michel Aglietta was, arguably, attempting to make.
Fordism –or as the theoretical component was better known, Keynesianism—was obviously in crisis since both of the “cyclical” tendencies—stagnation and inflation—were happening at once; Althusser and others on the “New Left” were inspired both by world events and the appearance of any sort of crisis tendency in the capitalist system; and, perhaps more importantly, Hayek had just won the “Nobel prize in Economics” and Milton Friedman and the Chicago school were hard at work turning Pinochet’s Chile into a neo-liberal paradise. Finally, on a monetary level, abandoning the gold standard and replacing it with the “black gold” standard of recycled petrodollars was developing an extension of the financial markets and giving unprecedented control of world capital over to a “stratified oligopoly” of private banks. It was an important moment for economic science because, again, “history has infinitely more imagination than we do.” It was a moment when the flaws of the dominant economic model—and the theories that were supposed to explain it—were showing through. It was a good time to revert to a subversion strategy and, as a graduate student, Aglietta was in the sort of position Bourdieu recommends to make the heretical invention. But instead of saying anything too revolutionary, what he actually did was to begin by make an originally strong set of economic concepts into a set of symbolically legitimate equations: he rewrote the basic arguments of Capital, starting with one that Adam Smith himself would find it hard to contest.
As was said before, by Caporaso and Levine, the labor theory of value, a foundational concept in Marx’s Capital, had been disproven. Caporaso and Levine themselves, in their textbook which purports to explain economic theories, are unable to explain LTV without providing a neo-classical excuse for it. In the section supposedly devoted to the theories of Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc., they do not describe labor theory of value in any detail, but instead revert to the statement, “the theory runs into a number of analytical difficulties, which convinced modern economists working in the classical tradition to build a materialist basis for exchange by employing a distinct starting point also present in the classical theories: price of production”(47). They then go on to explain the changes to they make to equations of inputs and outputs (10t iron + 250 bu wheat + 100 hr labor…): “when labor enters as an input, it is really so much wheat, which went to produce the labor, and enters as an input through its product, the laboring capacity of the worker”(50).
Leaving aside the problems of all the naked, sickly, wheat-fed laborers sleeping on the factory floors and the ethical implications of this revolutionary new crop of wheat that evidently plows, plants, grows and harvests, mills and bakes itself, what is important is that Caporaso and Levine, while trying to present an overall balanced look at political economy, are unable to even consider the possibility that the Labor Theory of Value has any theoretical validity. Instead, it makes much more sense to think of things in terms of some monetary equivalent, the amount of which, in one way or another, “indicates the utility that the seeker recognizes in the materiality of the object sold or on offer” (Nadel, 29).
In other words, even though there have been many theorists in the tradition of Regulationist Political Economy, the dominant groups in the field of economics—especially anyone outside of France—namely the proponents of the neo-classical general equilibrium model taught in every ECON 101 classroom, did not want to acknowledge the possibility of an alternative model for the Labor Theory of Value, even to refute it: to do so would also be to consecrate it and admit that there was a legitimate challenge to the powerful agents and apparatuses, the Departments of Economic theory, all of which have a vested interest in keeping the current model functioning. Not only in terms of the field, which is largely based on these assumptions, but also of the market dominated society in which it operates and for which it provides a placating explanation. As Aglietta says, “If this theory has exercised such a dictatorship over economic thought, it is because it supplies a reassuring vision of society and a justification for the profession of economist”(10).
This, of course, brings us full circle to the central dialectical problem of the need for a simultaneous understanding of the culture of science and a science of culture. The former is something which Cultural Studies has done vigorously but not rigorously. The basic assumption was that one could simply understand scientific or even merely disciplinary claims as ideological cultural productions.
The project of cultural studies is an important one and the cultural significance of economic science is one of the most important ideological investigations we could undertake. There was a time when this type of discussion being engaged. Despite what Murdock and Golding have to say about the problem of “examining the economic base,” Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and others began to present a system of concepts which attempted to illuminate the dynamic nature and role of culture—starting primarily in its very material nature. As Williams says in Marxism and Literature:
The insertion of economic determinations into cultural studies is of course the special contribution of Marxism, and there are times when its simple insertion is an evident advance. But in the end it can never be a simple insertion, since what is required, beyond the limiting formulas, is restoration of the whole social material process, and specifically of cultural production as social and material.(138)
Williams goes on to begin the project he continues in The Sociology of Culture in which the most basic task “is analysis of the interrelationships within this complex unity: a task distinct from reduced sociology of institutions, formations, and communication relationships and yet, as a sociology, radically distinct also from the analysis of isolated forms”(139). This loose set of concepts—as well as the many others he presents to describe cultural (as normally in the creative and/or artistic sense)—is developed with an eye to make the realm of cultural production describable so that the investigator could then position that process within the production relations.
[Author’s aside. This is why I currently run four blogs and over the past decade have had multiple web pages. This log is for longer features, which is supplemented by my site at modblog for news over views of the current crisis state of capitalism and the resistance of capitalisms subjects. It is why my bloglines site has numerous news, activist and alternative news/blogs linked up to supplement my writings, to give an alternative to what is called consensus reality or the ruling ideas or the ruling class. To give readers more research links. And I can blow off some steam at that blog with my Devils Dictionary Redux.
And I have added a new blog this week; Heresiology-for the little heretic in each of us. This is for my other interests in cultural studies, the occult, esoterica, science, crypto science, and all aspects of popular culture, as the saying goes; all the news that doesn’t fit in these other blogs.]
Saturday, March 12, 2005
Libertarian Anti-Imperialism
William Appleman Williams
I had come across Joseph Stromberg’s libertarian analysis of Anti-Imperialist American Historian William Appleman Williams, some time ago on the web and had the opportunity to cruise Stromberg’s column at antiwar.com again and thought it important enough to share.
I had not heard of Williams before, and appreciated Stromberg’s introduction to this overlooked American revisionist historian.
I came to appreciate why his socialist critique of American Empire and foreign policy would influence Americans of both the Libertarian Left and the Right. "Radicals have hailed him as a supreme anti-imperialist, while Libertarian conservatives have seen him as the ``second Charles Beard,'' renewing the perspectives of the nation's foremost historian.” says Paul Buhle.
Williams fell out of favour in the eighties and nineties as the neo-liberal ideology steamrolled over its opponents on the left after the collapse of the
With Stromberg’s appreciation of Williams, written in 1999 at the height of Clintons Popular Front War against Serbia, we see libertarian dialectical analysis unafraid to confront a marxian dialectic and appreciate it. Williams insight into American Imperialism became even more relevant as
An essential aspect of Libertarian Dialectics is the praxis of revisionist history. In this we need no conspiracy theories to understand that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, and that theirs is a history of the winners and losers. Our revisionism arises from understanding this dialectic we look at history from below, not from the losers, but the actual historical actors who have created the social change in the first place, the people themselves, as individuals and as social beings.
Stromberg is not your papa's libertarianism. It is not Republicanism Right, nor is it "vulgar libertarianism" or "liberaltarianism". If Kevin Carson is a Free Market Anti-Capitalist then Stromberg is a Libertarian Anti-Imperialist.
Stromberg is a consistent and outspoken opponent of Imperialism and War from a Libertarian perspective. And he has been so when such opposition on the right was tantamount to treason, which it has been in every case of American intervention abroad regardless of the popular opposition to it. Even now as half the American population opposes the
Carson and Stromberg are amongst the few and the brave, who use Libertarian Dialectics, to confront the right wing liberaltarians and those who would reduce revisionist history to being a caricature of itself; conspiracy theory. Revisionist history is not a creature of the right but of the left, its essence is historical materialism, unable to accept this basic fact, the right insists on reducing every act to those of conspiracies amongst the rulers over the ruled.
So I am pleased to offer this introduction to Williams by Stromberg and a link to the rest of the article on Williams here on my blog. As well as readers will know from my web writings I have included other references to Williams as well as examples of his writings available on the web.
William Appleman Williams:
Premier New Left Revisionist
A PROGRESSIVE HISTORIAN
by
Joseph R.
Stromberg
Last week in a discussion of Charles Austin Beard, "isolationist" Progressive historian, I mentioned Beard's influence on a number of younger scholars, among them William Appleman Williams and Murray N. Rothbard. Williams emerged in the late 1950s as the spearhead of New Left diplomatic history and has had an enduring influence on the writing of American history. "Mainstream" scholars take his insights into account but acknowledge his impact only in the most backhanded way possible. It is probably among libertarians and anti-imperialist conservatives that Williams now finds his true following.
A LIFE IN HISTORY
William Appleman Williams (1921-1990) was born in
After the war, he took a PhD in History at the
A BODY OF WORK
His Tragedy of American Diplomacy [1959; 1972] was noticed by the scholarly community, although the Cold War liberals, of course, hated it. The House Un-American Activities Committee noticed his work and wasted his time with summonses which were suddenly revoked after he had spent money and time traveling to hearings. This petty harassment was continued for a while by another government agency I need not mention.
As the quagmire in
Joseph R. Stromberg has been writing for libertarian publications since 1973, including The Individualist, Reason, the Journal of Libertarian Studies, Libertarian Review, and the Agorist Quarterly, and is completing a set of essays on
William Appleman Williams Learning From History
American Radicals , American Radicals series
Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin
``I prefer to die as a free man struggling to create a human community than as a pawn of empire,'' wrote historian William Appleman Williams in 1976.
Annapolis graduate and World War II Naval officer, civil rights activist and President of the Organization of American Historians, Williams (1921-1990) is remembered as the pre-eminent historian and critic of Empire in the second half of this century. More than any other scholar, he anticipated, encouraged and explained the attack of conscience suffered by the nation during the Vietnam War. Radicals have hailed him as a supreme anti-imperialist, while Libertarian conservatives have seen him as the ``second Charles Beard,'' renewing the perspectives of the nation's foremost historian. Fellow historians consider him a great figure in American thought at large, one who looked for large patterns and asked the right questions.
Counterpunch also has an excellent article on Williams’s relevancy today in light of the new age of American Imperialism:
The Relevance of William Appleman Williams
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
"William Appleman Williams suggested that in spite of its best intentions American foreign policy was based largely on a one-dimensional American belief that Americans and American democracy had all the answers. The sad truth is that that belief might not be far wrong, but the inflexibility of the administrators in charge of its application has contributed to a century of failure in foreign relations.
According to Williams, American diplomacy was based on three premises, which, for all intents and purposes, have not changed and maintain a contemporary validity and relevance. The first is the humanitarian impulse to help other people solve their problems. The second principle encourages self-determination, which insists that every society have the right to establish its own goals or objectives, and to realize them internally through the means it decides are appropriate. Third-and here's the kicker-American diplomacy has typically insisted that other people cannot really solve their problems and improve their lives unless they follow the American formula. The contradiction evident in this third premise effectively nullifies the genuine best interests of the first two, but it also speaks volumes about the global perception of American arrogance."
American Marxism: Theory without Tradition
by John B. Judis ,
The Choice Before Us by William Appleman Williams
The American Socialist, July 1957
Preface: History as a Way of Learning
Excerpted from The Contours of American History
by William Appleman Williams (1966) pp. 17-23.
Martin Luther King and the New American Frontier
By William Appleman Williams and Lewis Kreinberg
for Renewal Magazine. Originally Published April 5, 1968.
William Appleman Williams and the Myth of Economic Determinism
Steven Hurst
Manchester Metropolitan University
Paper prepared for the APG Conference, Reading, January 3-5 2003
Kindleberger on Bretton Woods
Redefining the Past: Essays in Honor of William Appleman Williams
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