Link Byfield Historical Revisionist

Link Byfield, son of Ted and Virgina Byfield, former Editor Publisher of the now bankrupt (fiscally as well as politically) Alberta Report, scion of the Right in Canada has a column in todays Sun, Calgary, blasting the Sun, Toronto, for belittiling Harpers Tarnished Image.

No problem with that. Let the right wing regionalists fight amongst themselves about Wiley E. Harper, who is also a White Wascist like the missing-Link.

What I have a problem with is his historical revisionism where he blames the victim and extolls the virtues of colonial expansion into Western Canada.

Link says: "The historical fact is that after Ottawa stood by and let the Natives wipe out the last remaining Canadian buffalo in the Cypress Hills in 1879, the empty western plains soon filled up with unfenced cattle ranches bigger than present-day Toronto. These were owned and operated by newcomers from Britain, Canada and the U.S. -- the Waldron, the Cochrane, the Oxley, the Northwest Cattle Co., the Beresford, the Bar U. "

Excuse me, Natives wiped out the last remaining buffalo? Sure the Natives hunted buffalo, but they were not responsible for wiping them out, that was already done by the Western Expansion of American and Canadian railway barons, mercantilists and settlers.

Tell that to Poundmaker, Old Crow, and the rest who testified to the destruction of the buffalo with the coming of the white man. And Ottawa didn't stand by it encouraged the destruction of the plains buffalo in order to expand the CPR which opened the west to the Big Ranchers.

"After the whites came, the buffalo became fewer and fewer. We all know that. We began to hate the white persons. They were robbing us of our birthright. We became very poor. We wandered to the south. The buffalo were not coming back. We were told, "the land is not yours anymore. We were to stay only on our small patches of land that were leftover (iskonikana). Our grandfathers travelled on these great plains and called it their own." Poundmaker's last speech.

See my Rebel Yell for the history of the Northwest Rebellion. Yep Link is being a deliberately provacative Dink, so typical of the historical revisionism of the Byfield clan. Well read a book you twit. And not one your dad wrote and you edited. And get your facts straight.

Actually you know your facts you just like to twist them to justify the white mans colonialization of the so called 'empty western plains".

Like we argued on Medicine Hat radio during the Federal Election, yours are the politics of Alberta First, mine are the politics of Alberta in Canada. You still have to anwser my point I made then that since most of the Oil in Alberta is on Native land then following your provincial rights arguement, it is logical to cede control of resources back to those who were here first.

Clever now to argue that the plains were empty.

More Praise For My Blogs

Grandinite has created a list of 12 blogs that readers should check for daily news. And in no particluar order he has listed my daily blog #10.

He says that Red Between the Lines is "The best daily dose of left-wingery in Canada. It is the moonbat-free zone that Rabble.ca isn’t." Aw Shucks.

Capitalism’s vampires

I thought this post from the Vancouver weekly The Republic made an excellent point about the Vampire motif in popular culture that made up for it's abscence from my article Gothic Capitalism. So I thought I would post an excerpt here.

The Vampire who preyed on peasants such as the historical Elizabeth Bathory and Vlad Tepes, the impaler, gave rise to these legends among the peasants and rising bourgoise of Europe. The subtext was always the same, and of course had some truth in it. The aristocracy were living off the peasants, some became literal bloodsuckers in the declining period of fudealism and the rise of capitalism.

But the aristocracy was always bloodsuckers which is why fudealism declined. Now capital itself has become the bloodsucker of our time and labour, and it lives on eternally in the commodification of our lives.

Nobles are confronted by ample evidence of their fundamental identity with the people they oppress. Try though they might, they can't escape the human condition, a condition marked by suffering, decay, and death.

In the transition from complex societies to modern states, the taste for exploitation was retained

by Michael Nenonen

I used to be one of Anne Rice's most committed fans. Interview With A Vampire (1976) hooked me, and for years thereafter I let Rice's imagination mould my own. By the time I finished reading Lasher (1993), though, I'd had my fill. Her cuisine remained the same, but my palate hadn't. After reading Eli Sagan's At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origin of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State (Knopf, 1985), I understand why.

Before discussing Sagan's work, I should offer some idea of what Rice's novels are about—or at least the thirteen I've read. Until 1993, at any rate, Rice was writing about beautiful vampires even when she was supposedly writing about witches and mummies, upper-class nymphettes and sadomasochistic aristocrats. Vampirism isn't restricted to literal bloodsucking; it occurs whenever we steal another person's vitality, regardless of how the theft is carried out. This theft was the centerpiece of Rice's fiction.

Her protagonists were typically talented and gorgeous, wealthy and amoral. Some were superhuman. By the early 90s the vampire Lestat could fly and lift many tonnes; he might as well have been from Krypton. Whether they were drinking blood or enjoying fine art, her characters' tastes were invariably expensive. The plight of the characters forced to feed those tastes was paid little heed; the poor and ugly were regularly exploited, humiliated, and literally devoured. Her protagonists' virtue was highlighted by the material, intellectual, aesthetic, and psychological poverty of the people beneath their feet.

Rice's influence upon the S&M and Goth subcultures has been remarkable. Much like Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, her fiction inspires a way of life, though few of her fans seem to understand the classism underlying that fiction. Though she certainly celebrates the power of beauty, Rice also promotes the beauty of power.

Let's turn to Sagan's work, which explores the psychosocial transformations that accompanied the rise of complex societies. These are transitional societies, existing between early tribal societies on the one side and literate state societies on the other. Complex societies are marked by kingship and aristocracy, phenomena unknown in previous stages of social development. Whereas tribal societies maintain order through the informal pressures of kinship networks, in complex societies the nobility escapes the bonds of collective existence.

The most vicious feature of complex societies, and one that's particularly relevant for Anne Rice's work, is their nearly universal practice of human sacrifice, a practice that's rare in tribal societies and that dies out as complex societies give way to literate states.

Ritually sacrificing the powerless reinforces the class structure of complex societies and makes it easier for the nobility to psychologically dissociate itself from kinship ties. Nobles must, after all, believe they have qualities that set them apart from base commoners. To be "noble" is to be superhuman, with all the privileges due to such an elevated condition and without any of the moral fetters binding the inferior classes. Nobles define themselves in contrast to commoners. Commoners are ugly, while nobles are beautiful; commoners are stupid, while nobles are wise; commoners are poor, while nobles are rich; commoners are weak, while nobles are mighty. Human sacrifice enshrines this division between the lordly and the contemptible. Vampires like Lestat are perfect embodiments of noble fantasy.

Corruption, nationalism and capitalism

I found this interesting article by a comrade in Quebec that I thought I would share excerpts from

Corruption, nationalism and capitalism
by Steve Tremblay

Nothing new under the sun

Canadian history is in its entirety branded by affairs of political corruption. To underline the hypocrisy of the comments about the Liberal’s particular corruption made by the leader of the Conservative Party, Stephen Harper, we have only used examples of when the Conservatives were in power. But we just as well could have referred to as many incidents from the history of Liberal governments or even from the NDP (do you remember the bingo scandal in British Columbia?).

Capitalism itself is corrupt

All the fuss raised by the Conservative profiteers, the Bloc nationalistic demagogues and the NDP bureaucrats aims to make us believe that the sponsorship scandal and the Liberal’s moral turpitude constitute a hijacking of parliamentarianism, a debasement of bourgeois democracy. However, as we have seen, not only has corruption been an important factor through the whole history of Québec and Canadian governments, but our analysis is that our country is no exception. It would be too easy here to list a multitude of examples of corruption in the countries of the periphery of capitalism. It would be also quite easy to bring up all kinds of cases from China or Russia. But we think it is more useful to remind our readers how governmental corruption reigns within the historical heart of capitalism itself, inside the great centres of capital.

The importance of this crisis and what it’s all about

This new scandal and the political crisis it has created is the product of many factors. It feeds on the general disgust of a huge part of the population and the working class in particular, for political practices that appear more-and-more unacceptable in an economic context where the state increasingly uses arguments of austerity and rigor against us. It also feeds on the constitutional crisis that divides the majority of the Québec bourgeoisie from the majority of the Canadian ruling class, over the issue of a new division of responsibilities between the different levels of government. It is for this reason but under other pretexts (nation, language and distinct society) that they will soon have us marching again, either under the folds of the blue and white of the fleurdelisé or the red and white of the maple leaf. As long as we stand divided, the reign of exploitation, corruption and oppression shall remain secure. One must also not forget the role played by the important fracture existing inside the Liberal Party itself, the main historical party of capital’s domination in Canada.

The Internationalist Workers Group, Canadian section of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, Montreal, May 20th 2005. Contact: R.S., P.O. Box 173, Station “C”, Montreal, Canada, H2L 4K1 or canada@ibrp.org

100 years of the Avante-Garde 1905-2005

One hundred years ago in Zurich; Lenin, Tristan Tzara and James Joyce were in exile, drinking coffee in cafes, and writing.

Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, workers in Russia called a General Strike and organized workers councils for the first time.

It was the birth of Modernism.

And I celebrate this movement with a cut and paste of the avante-garde manifestos that have influenced the 20th century.

Dada, Surrealism and Situationism, and their children the post modernists, were not just "Art" movements but movements that embraced revolution and revolutionary aims in Art and Society.

Since it is to long to blog you can download it at:
100 years of the Avante-Garde 1905-2005.doc

You will also find both a word doc and pdf
of Gothic Capitalism my six part essay originally posted here.

Both these files are large; Avante-Garde and Goth Capitalism are 2mb.

Tyrant Time-Tempus Fug'it

The creation of the clock is a defining moment in the history of capitalism. It allowed for the regimintation of work, and for the development of industrialization as clock works were applied to steam power.

The proletariat was created to work by the time of the clock. Prior to that the artisan and farmer who worked by hours of daylight. With the advent of the factory system in the late 18th Century, workers could be forced to work in the darkness with the help of kerosene lamps, and by the use of clocks to tell the time of the working day. Literally the working day as we know it today began back then. (EP Thompson, Past and Present (1967). Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism )

For generations, there has been no better illustration of the collective idiocy of the crowd than the story of the English calendar riots of 1752. At the trial of Henry Hunt and others for treason in 1820, James Scarlett, the prosecuting counsel, had this to say:
The ridiculous folly of a mob had been exemplified in a most humorous manner by that eminent painter, Mr. Hogarth. It was found necessary many years ago, in order to prevent a confusion in the reckoning of time, to knock eleven days out of the calendar, and it was supposed by ignorant persons that the legislature had actually deprived them of eleven days of their existence. This ridiculous idea was finely exposed in Mr. Hogarth's picture, where the mob were painted throwing up their hats, and crying out "Give us back our eleven days". Thus it was at the present time; that many individuals, who could not distinguish words from things, were making an outcry for that of which they could not well explain the nature. 'Give us our eleven days!': calendar reform in eighteenth-century England

The time of the clock is the historical moment when capitalism begins to supercede fuedalism. Clockworks were literally the mechanization of feudal society, hinting at the capitalism time to come. A vision of the future workers of Gothic Capitalism were first introduced with the creation of mechanical men, automatons, in the 17th century. As described in the Tales of Hoffman by Offenbach. They would presage the future proletariat of the machine age of the factories of the late 19th and early 20th century, where workers would become cogs in the machine.

But in the history of “clocks and culture” what is new in the development of Western horology is the application of mechanics in a system of economic production. Prior to their remarkable development in the course of the Renaissance, clocks were products of art and science.More than coincidence, a causal relationship can be seen in the invention of the mechanical clock in the period of early capitalism. The Renaissance Discovery of Time.

With the advent of further mechinization of work in the 20th Century skilled craft work was abolished in favour of the factory where work could be proportioned according to units of time, as developed by Fredrick Taylor. Hence the famous phrase 'Time is money" has been the essence of capitalism since the its inception with the development of the first mechanical clocks.

Representations of Capital interconnect with representations of space and time. E.P. Thompson, in his famous essay on the "Industrialization of Clock Time," showed how the transition from peasantry to wage labor -- from a feudal economy to a capitalist society -- entailed dramatic changes in the experience of time. Clock time was essential if industrialists were to measure output per a generalizable unit of labor. The capitalist organization of work made hours the constant variable needed to measure work and wages.

Today, the relationship between clock time and Capital is cast in terms of Investors. In this Fidelity ad, where the images are choreographed to the fast-paced rock pulse of the Rolling Stone's song, "Time," the focus is on the consumer or the retail investor who races against time.

As Marx observed, workers formally exchanged their labor-time for a wage -- hence the requirement for punching a time clock. Today, we still recognize the relative freedom offered by professionalized occupations where one sells a product or a service (rather than the hours that went into making it) -- the distinction between a salary and a wage

MAPPING GLOBAL CAPITAL

To this day native peoples who do not live in industrialized society do not live by the tyranny of the clock, which is why you will find in farmer and artisan cultures the idea of 'manyana' timelessness, as in 'later', we will do that later, or as it is known here in Canada as native time. Aboriginal peoples do not keep time the same way as those of us enslaved to the tyranny of the clock.

While the clock marks the time of capitalism in Europe its truimph was in the creation of the American nation. No other nation was so defined by the clock. A nation of shop keepers, artisans, and even the farmers, who lived worked and died by the clock. In particular by the pocket watch. Accounting practices were set by the clock, as were business deals, farmers no longered worked to the pace of the sun but to the time of the clock. And even in the darkest interiors of the east coast mills during the civil war, time was told by the hands of the clock, which ticked away the minutes of the newly industrialized proletariat lives.

England was the prototype for industrialization. The rest of the world could look to that country as an example of what to emulate and what to avoid. Some saw a land of power and prosperity and wondered aloud whether God might after all be an Englishman; others saw "dark, Satanic mills" and the "specter of Manchester" with its filthy slums and human misery. Americans in particular thought hard about industry and whether it could be reconciled with the republican virtues seemingly rooted in an agrarian order. "Let our workshops remain in Europe," urged Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia in 1785, and he was no happier for being wiser about the feasibility of that policy after the War of 1812. Nor did all his fellow countrymen agree in principle. Some saw vast opportunities for industry in a land rich in natural resources, including seemingly endless supplies of wood and of waterpower. The debate between the two views became a continuing theme of American literature, characterized by Leo Marx as The Machine in the Garden (NY, 1964).

The combination of abundant resources and scarce labor meant that industrialization in America would depend on the use of machinery, and from the outset American inventors strove to translate manual tasks into mechanical action. For reasons that so far elude scholarly consensus, Americans' fascination with machines informed their approach to manufacturing to such an extent that British observers in the mid-19th century characterized machine-based production as the "American System". Precisely what was meant by that at the time is not clear, but by the end of the century it came to mean mass production by means of interchangeable parts. The origins of that system lay in the new nation's armories, in particular at Harpers Ferry, where John H. Hall first devised techniques for serial machining of parts within given tolerances.The Machine in the Garden, John H. Hall and the Origins of the "American System"

All automation is clock driven and has been in conflict with human time, our subjective sense of being. With the advent of machining automation, as David Noble discusses in his book Progress Without People, in the late fities, a further step was taken in moving the factory towards a robotic assembly line requiring less workers and more engineers.

And today as you read this in cyberspace, your time is created by clockworks, whether in your computer, look down in the right hand corner, there is the clock.
And it's time has now become autonomous from our time. In fact as you read this your computer has it's own time that it operates under, while you read your geographical time, whether it is MST, CST, or EST or Grenwich Mean Time.

Scientists had long realized that atoms (and molecules) have resonances; each chemical element and compound absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation at its own characteristic frequencies. These resonances are inherently stable over time and space. An atom of hydrogen or cesium here today is (so far as we know) exactly like one a million years ago or in another galaxy. Thus atoms constitute a potential "pendulum" with a reproducible rate that can form the basis for more accurate clocks.

The development of radar and extremely high frequency radio communications in the 1930s and 1940s made possible the generation of the kind of electromagnetic waves (microwaves) needed to interact with atoms. Research aimed at developing an atomic clock focused first on microwave resonances in the ammonia molecule. In 1949, NIST built the first atomic clock, which was based on ammonia. However, its performance wasn't much better than the existing standards, and attention shifted almost immediately to more promising atomic-beam devices based on cesium.
The "Atomic Age" of Time Standards

In fact the Y2k crsis was all about the pending apocalyptic failure of the clockworks of millions of computers around the world, and it was a vision of the collapse of capitalism as we know it. That it did not come to pass, does not lessen its social impact for that historical moment five years ago when the hands of clockwork of capitalism touched 12 midnight ending one millinieum and begining another. For in that moment in space and time, humanity held its breathe waiting for the clocks to stop. And had they, capitalism itself would have stopped.

Far from being a mere hoax, or urban myth, it was a vision of a future without clocks or capitalism. For some it was the fear of the ensuing chaos of living in a distopia without the tyranny of the clock, just as those feared living in a society without kings, rulers or bosses. For others it was a hope for a different future, a utopian moment that allowed us to imagine living in our own time rather than the rule of the clock.

That it affected America more than anywhere else, and was driven by American fears, shows the power of the clock in America. America is literally a clockwork nation, whose existance is identified with the clock and clockworks.
For American capitalism Y2k was as fearful as Bolshevism had been at the turn of last century. But the moment passed, and all was well once again. Or was it.

The reason American capitalism cannot concieve of the importance of Global Warming, or any long term disaster scenario is that due to its internal clockworks it can only think in terms of quarters of time, the time it takes for the market to make a short term profit. Wall Street is driven by its own clock works, which determine that it cannot think in long waves or over long periods of time.

Global Warming is an issue that takes in decades, if not hundreds of years to imagine. And the clockwork nation of America can only think in terms of 24/7, the ever present moment.

The Luddite movement was all about challenging work time, the tyranny of the clock and its machinery. As the situationists said; "The only difference between my free time and my work time is that I don't get paid for my free time."

Today modern capitalism is all about the speed up, whether its in the factory, or on the farm (feedlots are a form of speeding up of the fattening of cattle for the market, chemical fertilizers to enhance the growth of crops in a shorter time, the green revolution, genetic modification of crops, etc.). It's about having no time for ourselves as we are forced to work two jobs to make ends meet. In the last decade work time across Canada has increased. The average hours of work in Alberta is a 44 hour work week before overtime is considered to apply. Gone is the eight hour day for most of us.

Yet we know that if we all worked less more of us would work. The Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) has successfully challenged the big three auto companies to reduce forced overtime in favour of hiring more workers.

One hundred years ago the IWW called for the 4 hour day. And we are no closer to that achievment today then we were then. But if it seemed impossible then, it is an even more utopian vision today to most people. Just as they cannot concieve of ending wage slavery and abolishing the wages system, which is not based on our labour but our 'time' at work.

The revolutionary struggle of the proletariat has never been about 'abolishing work' nor has it been about embracing the 'revolutionary worker who gives her all for the party and state'. It has been about challenging work time, challenging the tyranny of the clock, of the regimination of life, work and play, free time and work time , have no meaning without King Clock.

That is the revolutionary struggle, to end the tyranny of time as we know it.


It is the secret of the childrens rhyme about Humpty Dumpty, who was not an egg but a clockwork machine.

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

Humpty Dumpty is a historically important pinball machine released by Gottlieb in October 1947. It is considered to be the first true pinball machine ever produced, distinguishing it from earlier bagatelle game machines. Humpty Dumpty had six flippers, but, unlike modern pinball tables, they faced outward instead of inward and were not placed at the bottom of the table near the main outhole. Like all early pinball tables, Humpty Dumpty was constructed with wood and had backlit scoring in preset units of scoring rather than mechanical reel or electronic LED scoring.

THE TYRANNY OF THE CLOCK
Now the movement of the clock sets the tempo men's lives - they become the servant of the concept of time which they themselves have made, and are held in fear, like Frankenstein by his own monster. In a sane and free society such an arbitrary domination of man's functions by either clock or machine would obviously be out of the question. The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man. Mechanical time would be relegated to its true function of a means of reference and co-ordination, and men would return again to a balance view of life no longer dominated by the worship of the clock. Complete liberty implies freedom from the tyranny of abstractions as well as from the rule of men.
George Woodcock
First published in War Commentary - For Anarchism mid-march 1944.


A Revolution in Timekeeping

In Europe during most of the Middle Ages (roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE), technological advancement virtually ceased. Sundial styles evolved, but didn't move far from ancient Egyptian principles.

During these times, simple sundials placed above doorways were used to identify midday and four "tides" (important times or periods) of the sunlit day. By the 10th century, several types of pocket sundials were used. One English model even compensated for seasonal changes of the Sun's altitude.

Then, in the first half of the 14th century, large mechanical clocks began to appear in the towers of several large Italian cities. We have no evidence or record of the working models preceding these public clocks, which were weight-driven and regulated by a verge-and-foliot escapement. Variations of the verge-and-foliot mechanism reigned for more than 300 years, but all had the same basic problem: the period of oscillation of the escapement depended heavily on the amount of driving force and the amount of friction in the drive. Like water flow, the rate was difficult to regulate.

Another advance was the invention of spring-powered clocks between 1500 and 1510 by Peter Henlein of Nuremberg. Replacing the heavy drive weights permitted smaller (and portable) clocks and watches. Although they ran slower as the mainspring unwound, they were popular among wealthy individuals due to their small size and the fact that they could be put on a shelf or table instead of hanging on the wall or being housed in tall cases. These advances in design were precursors to truly accurate timekeeping.

Accurate Mechanical Clocks
In 1656, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch scientist, made the first pendulum clock, regulated by a mechanism with a "natural" period of oscillation. (Galileo Galilei is credited with inventing the pendulum-clock concept, and he studied the motion of the pendulum as early as 1582. He even sketched out a design for a pendulum clock, but he never actually constructed one before his death in 1642.) Huygens' early pendulum clock had an error of less than 1 minute a day, the first time such accuracy had been achieved. His later refinements reduced his clock's error to less than 10 seconds a day.

Around 1675, Huygens developed the balance wheel and spring assembly, still found in some of today's wristwatches. This improvement allowed portable 17th century watches to keep time to 10 minutes a day. And in London in 1671, William Clement began building clocks with the new "anchor" or "recoil" escapement, a substantial improvement over the verge because it interferes less with the motion of the pendulum.

clock

The clock is a particularly emblematic piece of technology.The invention of the mechanical clock in the thirteenth century inaugurated a new representation of time. For the West, the clock symbolized regularity, predictibility, and control. A clock serves to produce a correspondence between events and vertices of time moments.

The disciplining of labor and of social relations through time is another profound function of the clock. Monasticism asserted the originally Jewish thesis that work is an essential kind of worship, that God's command to labor six days of the week was as binding as that to rest on the seventh. The regulation of the day, which started in the ringing of the bells in the monastery, was extended to society at large through the tyranny of the clock. cf orrery. Lewis Mumford described the relation between the clock and the monastery in Technics and Civilization. For Mumford, "The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age." Mumford notes that the clock changes our perception of time as quantity. Deleuze and Guattari describe this process as striation. The model for an analysis of the clock would be Foucault's examination of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish. (see diagram.)

It is important to keep in mind the socially coercive function of the clock. (see E.P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism" in Giddens and Held, Classes, Power, and Conflict.) Thompson distinguishes between the "natural" rhythms of "task time" and "clock time," in which time becomes currency that in not passed but spent, which is marked by "time thrift" and a clear demarcation between work and life. Time obedience can be distiguished from time discipline: an internalization of social discipline, away from public spectacle (the clocktower) in favor of the personal (the pocket watch.)
Contents Under Pressure - A Hypertext in Progress by Christian Hubert


On Time
by Carlene E. Stephens and The Smithsonian Institution

Increasingly, after about 1820, the cadences of the ticking clock echoing in industry, railroads, and cities grew more insistent. Very much in demand, clocks and watches began to spill from American factories. More people found themselves governed by the mechanical regularity and pace of the clock.

By about 1880, the American railroads had knit together a national economy, and late in 1883 they abandoned the fifty-some regional operating times to voluntarily impose five time zones on their routes across the continent. Clocks, no longer set to the sun overhead, were instead synchronized to the new system. Some people enjoyed the conveniences of the new national standard time, but others resisted the change.

As the twentieth century dawned, the country became obsessed with using time efficiently. Like it or not, people found themselves pressured by the clock, especially in the form of factory time clocks and stopwatches. Experts in "scientific management" segmented, streamlined, and standardized both factory and office work to increase productivity. They advocated timesaving efficiencies for nearly every aspect of American life, including the home. Even leisure - time off - became defined by the clock. It was divided up, measured out, not to be wasted.

Alexis McCrossen

Current Research
Between the Civil War and the Great Depression civic and business interests across the nation erected thousands of public timepieces. Using an array of sources, including local histories, the papers of the Seth Thomas and E. Howard Clock companies, and the Historic Engineering and Buildings Surveys, I am at once assessing when, where and under what circumstances public timepieces were installed and considering what life was like under them.
The second part of the project considers the distribution and ownership of pocket watches during the transition to widespread watch ownership (1870s and 1880s). I am using the watch register of David Edwards Hoxie, who repaired watches in Northampton, Massachusetts between 1863 and 1884. By using census schedules, tax records, city directories, and other demographic data I can construct a picture of watch ownership during a critical moment in the “reformation of time consciousness.” (Michael O’Malley Keeping Watch: A History of American Time 1990)

"A Republic in Time: History, Modernity,
and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America"

My research project, a book-length study entitled “A Republic in Time: History, Modernity, and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America,” investigates how transformations in the perception of time shaped American conceptions of democratic society and modern nationhood. The fundamental premise of the study is that time is not a transhistorical phenomenon, an aspect of nature existing outside of human society, but rather a historical artifact produced by human beings acting within specific historical circumstances. I focus upon the central role that time played in the nineteenth-century United States in linking the economic transformations wrought by developing capitalism with the political imperative to define American national identity. New technologies and scientific discoveries made it possible to imagine new forms of time, including clock time and geological “deep time,” but it was American writers, pundits, and political thinkers who gave these new temporalities their significance. Theories of American nationality emphasized how the United States, as a revolutionary “modern” nation, represented a rupture with all past examples of nationhood. But despite the widespread consensus that America was different from older nations, the precise nature of America’s modernity remained to be defined. This question was a historical one, and hence it is appropriate that time itself became the most important medium through which American thinkers debated this crucial issue. Industrial capitalism and market-oriented forms of commerce seemed to demand that Americans adjust their perception to the time of the clock. Clockwork rationality became a compelling way of defining a modern way of life, but Americans critical of capitalism and those less closely linked to the market proposed other possible versions of modernity based on other modes of temporality. It is only retrospectively that clockwork rationality has come to seem an inevitable foundation of modernity. Recovering alternate ways of defining America as a modern nation helps us to avoid imposing an artificial teleology upon our national history, and reveals instead a history created by human beings in response to the contingencies of circumstance.

Reading Hamilton's Clocks: Time Consciousness in Early National and Antebellum Urban Commercial Culture

Julia Ott
Department of History
Yale University

Historians of early American labor and time consciousness have largely ignored these social and cultural consequences of an accelerating credit clock. Inspired by E.P. Thompson's seminal essay, scholars have extensively analyzed the transition from task-orientation to time-discipline, as well as the tensions between a notion of divinely originating natural time and clock time. [3] According to Thompson, "mature industrial societies of all varieties are marked by time-thrift and by a clear demarcation between 'work' and 'life'." [4] The advent of industrialism "entailed a severe restructuring of working habits," including alterations "in the inward notation of time." [5] Where men controlled "their own working lives . . .alternate bouts of intense labor and idleness" characterized labor.

[6] In contrast, factory organization of labor demanded synchronization through internalization of the mechanical clock. "Time-sense" represented "technological conditioning" while "time-measurement" embodied "a means of labor exploitation." [7] Herbert Gutman's "Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America" initiated the application of Thompsonian analysis to labor relations and work culture in the United States. Gutman posited "a recurrent tension" throughout the course of the nineteenth century between the "diverse pre-modern native and foreign peoples" entering the factory system "and the demands placed upon them by the regularities and disciplines of factory labor," particularly clock-discipline. [8] Building on Gutman, subsequent scholarship noted clock-regulation's mitigation by the retention of piece-work and family systems of labor in early American factories and mills, as well as the clock's use as an instrument of planter hegemony in the South. [9]

But to fully understand capitalism's central temporal conflict, we need to know more about the origins of capitalists' "modern time/money calculus." [10] What implanted this underlying temporal logic? The answer lies in the escalating exigencies of credit in the early national period. Certainly the profit motive contributed to capitalist desires to discipline and control workers, but the credit clock provided the model for the specific selection of the time-discipline solution. Some historians have correctly accredited capitalist temporality to a legacy of mercantile notions of time-thrift and recognized both its continuity and its intensification during the course of the nineteenth century. [11] Yet the ascendancy of the credit value of time over the labor value of time and the associated development of commercial temporal anxiety remain unexamined. Historians generally prefer to see long continuities in mercantile temporality, originating in the Middle Ages with an urban, commercial break from seasonal, cyclical, natural notions of time. [12] But the recognition of the credit value of time represented an crucial step for capitalists, for it ascribed a market value to time independent of labor performed and the exploited worker performing the labor.

Blog of the Week

Well this blog has gotten the coveted rabble.ca blog of the week for July 8. Thanks rabble rousers.

The Ethanol Scam: ADM and Brian Mulroney

Ethanol burns more than it saves: study
Researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29 per cent more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces. For switch grass, a warm weather perennial grass found in the Great Plains and eastern United States, it takes 45 per cent more energy and for wood, 57 per cent. It takes 27 per cent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel, the study found. "Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment," according to the study by Cornell's David Pimentel and Berkeley's Tad Patzek. They conclude the country would be better off investing in solar, wind and hydrogen energy.The researchers included such factors as the energy used in producing the crop, costs that were not used in other studies that supported ethanol production, Mr. Pimentel said.The study also omitted $3-billion (U.S.) in state and federal government subsidies that go toward ethanol production in the United States each year, payments that mask the true costs, Mr. Pimentel said

Gee would those subsidies be the ones that went to Agribusiness giants like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), who monopolize the ethanol market with their domination of corn and soyabean markets. As the "Supermarket to the World" brags on their web page:

"ADM is working with the abundant and renewable products of agriculture to develop nature-based fuels & industrials alternatives to the world’s finite stores of fossil fuels. Today, we are recognized as a leader in the production of cleaner-burning fuel ethanol. Additionally, ADM is a leading producer of consistently reliable, high-performing and naturally derived products for a diverse group of industries."

ADM, who have been charged with criminal conspiracy in the past, claim that they are helping create a clean energy for the future with their corn/soyabean ethanol projects. Hmm but the study says: "Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation's energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment" But it sure does benefit ADM.



"Little attention is given to ADM's controlling position within ethanol, the industry's shaky dependence on a complex, multi-tiered subsidy regime, or the basic volatility of commodity prices." Ethanol Subsidies for ADM & Other Corporate Kleptomaniacs Will Not Solve Energy Crisis

ADM's Canadian connection: during the ADM price fixing scandal they hired former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, to act as a director in charge of corporate transparency. He remains on the board today.

The Mulroney Government approved the sale of Ogilvie Mills, the last independent milling company in Canada to ADM after they passed NAFTA.

"1993-1994 - ADM purchased Ogilvie Mills, the largest miller in Canada and a world leader in production of starch, gluten, and other wheat ingredients, with annual sales of $275 million. The flour-milling business arm of the new conglomerate then signed long-term supply contracts with the Toronto-based food and retailing giant George Weston Ltd, United Oilseeds Products Inc., a canola crushing plant in Lloydminster, Alta., (which was jointly owned by United Grain Growers Ltd. of Winnipeg and Mitsubishi Corp. of Japan), and the agriculture operations of International Multifoods Corp. of Minneapolis, a business that included 11 feed mills and a chicken hatchery in Canada."
Ogilvie Flour Mills :Univeristy of Manitoba Special Collections

"The sheer fact that Brian Mulroney went from being a Canadian prime minister to the most prominent director of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) should never be lost o­n the investigation. The statement of ADM chairman to some grumbling shareholders in praising Brian Mulroney and showing them the highest value to the company is a glaring testimony."The Death of the Canadian Farmer

The Andreas family that owns ADM have been large contributors to U.S. Presidential Campaigns. Especially Republican ones. The recent Bush subsidies for Agriculture benefit ADM more than the family farmer.

"The Andreas clan began supplanting the founding Archer and Daniels families in the 60s and still own a few percent of the century-old company. While chief competitors Cargill and Bunge Ltd. established a broad global network of suppliers as well as customers during the last half of the 20th century, the charismatic Dwayne Andreas built ADM as "supermarket to the world" almost entirely on the crops of American farmers. The elder Andreas was an advisor to several U.S. presidents and could count on his Washington connections to prop up prices for key ADM products domestically, including high-fructose corn syrup and ethanol, a gasoline alternative made from corn." Heartland transformation: ADM CEO Allen Andreas has led the giant out of scandal and put it on a winning path

Harpers Tarnished Image

Stephen Harper to spend summer bolstering image

It didn't work. Not looking like this.
(And what is with this fey hand on the hip routine?)

Harper gained power through the machinations of the Alberta powerbrokers in the Alliance Party who ousted Preston Manning and then Stockwell Day.

Despite his Alberta inspired belief in der fuerher prinziple;

"his inability to reach out, of his deeply held suspicions of those who don't march in single file with him, of his tendency to walk away when the going gets tough."

He is about to suffer the slings and arrows of his membership, unlike his mentor King Ralph. Harper is still acting like a character out of Shakespeare who may soon be uttering 'Et Tu Bruti'.

As the Globe and Mail reports:
Majority want Harper replaced, poll shows
Stephen Harper moved yesterday to revive his political fortunes in the electoral heartland of Ontario even as a new poll shows that 59 per cent of Canadians want him replaced, including more than one-third of his own supporters.

While the Bloggin Tories all run around defending the Harper (with cute little buttons on their blogs), and his one man school for scandal;MP Gurmant Grewal, it has been for naught.

The New York Times reported on his failure to connect with Canadians. Voters turn from Tories in Canada In fact even right wing columnists in the Unitcd States have criticized Harper for his lack of populist politics let alone popular appeal. Yoiks that's the kiss of death for sure.

In fact the recent spate of Canada hating from his own Fianance Critic Monte Solberg, Tory columnists, and tory bloggers has added fuel to the fire.

And Harpers silence over Grewal and the Canada Hating/Baiting comments has only exasperated Canadians, even those who support the Conservatives.

As Belinda Stronach, when she crossed to the Liberals, correctly pointed out Canadians want an oppositon party from the Centre.

"I am sometimes asked why I did not sit as an independent MP. The answer is simple. I came to realize that the Conservative Party was being led in a direction with which I was not comfortable, especially as an urban Ontarian."

"I've been uncomfortable for some time with the direction the Conservative party was taking," Stronach said. "I regret to say that I do not believe the party leader is truly sensitive to the needs of each part of the country and just how big and complex Canada really is." And Canadians appear to agree with her more and more. Her defection from the Conservatives moved the party further to the right.

Unfortunately for Harper and his rag tag collection of Blogging Tories, Alberta First MP's and misanthropic media supporters, ensconced as he is in the hot house of my way or the highway politics of Alberta, he is out of touch with the politcs of the Centre and the Centre of Canada.

Last summer, Harper answered his critics by recruiting a bevy of Quebec organizers, distancing himself from the University of Calgary crowd that helped him run the Canadian Alliance — although he still speaks regularly to former chief of staff Tom Flanagan and policy guru Ken Boessenkool — and importing senior staff from the ranks of the now-defunct Progressive ConservativOne of those people, communications director Geoff Norquay, announced this week he's leaving. He was followed by Yaroslav Baran, the party's strategic communications manager, bringing the running total of communications departures to four. Harper has also lost Nancy Hepner, who co-ordinated the party's daily question period strategy and coached MPs on how to formulate their queries. Toronto Star

And while the Bloggin Tories go a Liberal Bashing and even former Chretienite Liberals like Warren Kinsella go soft on Stephen it is for naught. While Flipping burgers, Harper is followed by scandal and staff deserting a party listing heavily to the right.

Of course Warren's new found fawning for Harper is cause he's p.o. with the Marinites (though some might suspect he has a soft spot for a fellow Calgarian). Warren and the old guard Liberal's hope to oust PM from being PM, ala Richard the Third. And his poll numbers show he and they should be concerned. This leaves the average Canadian in the center looking elsewhere.

And who do they find in the wings, well if it ain't smilin' Jack, leader of the NDP who has gained most in popularity, with the folks in the Centre. And unlike Harper he can feel comfortable with all Canadians.


Jack and wife Olivia Chow at Montreal Gay Pride Parade

Like Jack's presence at the Toronto Gay Pride Parade, one of the largest in North America and certainly the largest in Canada, which drew a crowd of hundreds of thousands.

Harper missed it not because of politics but because he was being petulant.

He decided instead to adress a Muslim convention in Missasagua, a last minute arrangement, and even then he only addressed 'the mens section', of the convention. Opps, I guess Harper believes Muslim women only vote the way their husbands tell them to. Sort of like MP Nina Grewal.

Of course he pandered to yet another patriarchical religious group promising them once elected as PM he would repeal the Same Sex Marriage act. But that appears to be another promise that is for naught, as the majority of Canadians accept the new law.

Same-sex marriage bill must stand, majority say
In wake of Tory vow to repeal legislation, poll suggests 55 per cent want it untouched

"Ottawa — Canadians do not want their political leaders to undo historic legislation allowing gays to legally marry in the wake of a pledge from the Conservatives that they would do just that if elected. In a new poll conducted for The Globe and Mail/CTV, 55 per cent of Canadians surveyed say the next government should let same-sex legislation stand, while 39 per cent would like to see an attempt made to repeal it. A further 6 per cent said they did not know. The results appear to bolster Prime Minister Paul Martin's remarks two weeks ago that Canadians do not want to revisit the issue, despite a promise by Conservative Leader Stephen Harper that he would rescind the law if he becomes prime minister in an election expected next winter. Pollsters said Mr. Harper's promise to repeal the legislation may be helping to consolidate Liberal support. For example, Canadians who are undecided on whether to support the Liberals or the NDP may find themselves opting for the Liberals if they fear Mr. Harper would follow through. Pollsters said they also found that while Conservative supporters are the most likely to favour an attempt to repeal the legislation, "potential" Conservative voters are more likely to prefer that the current legislation stand.Mr. Harper's position may only consolidate his Conservative base, they said, and not expand his support to other groups."

Harper's problem is Harper.

He can never be a man of the people, he can only manage to be a man of some of the people, those that agree with him and so far that appears to be only the Volk in Calgary. But even some of them will have think twice if he keeps dressing like this.

Majority want Harper replaced, poll shows
Leadership popularity

Question: Fore each of the following leaders, I'd like to know if your opinion of them has improved, stayed the same or gotten worse in the last year?
Improved Stayed the same Gotten worse
Jack Layton 32 53 15
Gilles Deceppe 17 66 17
Paul Martin 15 43 42
Stephen Harper 14 45 41

Question: If you had your way, would you like to see the Liberals, the Conservatives, the NDP and in Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois keep or replace their leaders?

Keep
Liberals 48%
Conservatives 41%
NDP 78%
Bloc Quebecois 76%

Replace
Liberals 52%
Conservatives 59%
NDP 22%
Bloc Quebecois 24%

SOURCE: THE STRATEGIC COUNSEL

Andre Norton 1912-2005

I was surfing the net when I discovered an obituary for Andre Norton, who passed away March 17 of this year. This is my belated personal obituary for the First Lady of Fantasy Literature.



MURFREEBORO, Tenn. Science fiction author Andre Norton, who wrote the popular "Witch World" series of books, died today at her home in Murfreesboro. She was 93. Her death was announced by friend Jean Rabe, who said Norton died of congestive heart failure.

Norton was born Alice Mary Norton on February 17th, 1912 in Cleveland. She penned more than 130 novels during her career of nearly 70 years.

The "Witch World" series, which detailed life on a planet reachable only through metaphysical gateways, included more than 30 novels.

Her last complete novel, "Three Hands of Scorpio," is set to be released next month.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America recently created the Andre Norton Award for young adult novels, and the first award will be presented in 2006.

Rabe says Norton requested before her death that she not have a funeral service.

Copyright 2005 Associated Press.

If you are a baby boomer there were two juvenile authors of science fiction and fantasy you read. One was R. A. Heinlien the other was Andre Norton. Her asexual nom de plume allowed her to be published at a time when SF was dominated by men.
"It was when she published her first novel that Ms. Norton began to legally use the name Andre, and she has continued to use it exclusively. Thus, the citation of "Andre" as a pseudonym for her given name, Alice Mary, in a number of bibliographies, biographies, and critical accounts is in error. This name change was implemented primarily because she expected to be writing for young boys, and she felt that the change would increase the marketability of her work in this traditionally male market. This was an added asset when she entered the masculine-dominated science-fiction field." Andre Norton Biography By Roger C. Schlobin

I was one of those boys who became an Andre Norton fan. It was when I was in elementary school I discovered her science fiction Witch World series. I continued to read her through out my school years, and became an avid SF and Fanatasy fan. It was her writing style, that was clear and crisp, that inspired me to become a writer, not one of fiction but of journalism.

I also read the Mary Norton's (no relation) Borrowers Series, and the wonderfully wistful and strange The Red Planet, whose chapter title illustrations made Martians look like onions rather than little green men. But it was Andre Norton's voluminous writings that kept me entranced, through out my elementary and junior high years, even after I found Sherlock Holmes, the works of Edgar Alan Poe, and Donald Wolhiem.

Her passing at such an old age, and with such a large literary output is astonishing. She had just finished another novel which was being prepared for publishing when she passed away.

She influenced me and many young readers with her wonderous tales, and we ended up wanting more. She produced for my generation, novels on par with Harry Potter for this generation. And like Rowling, she never talked down to her readers.

She was a feminist, in the sense that she developed strong female characters in her novels, they taught us about egaltarian relations through the medium of fantasy and SF. Her books allowed both boys and girls to see that we could go beyond gender stereotypes to be whatever we wanted to be.

Her love of cats came through in many of her novels, and certainly over the years I have learned that joy of living and communing with our feline companions. Again a subtle influence of her writing in my life.

And her work is not dated, I hope that a new generation of readers inspired by Harry Potter will avail themselves of her books. In a publishing industry today, that is flooded with commercial fantasy novels written for profit rather than any literary value, her works still stand out and stand the test of time.

So long Alice/Andre you have spoken to the imagination of generations, we will always remember you and be grateful for the worlds you opened to us.



Her last complete novel, "Three Hands for Scorpio," .
Norton's publisher, Tor Books, rushed to have one copy printed so that the author, who had been sick for almost a year, could see it. "She was able to hold it on Friday," Jewell said. "She took it and said, 'What a pretty cobalt blue for the cover." Although several more collaborations are scheduled for printing, Three Hands for Scorpio is Andre's last novel written solely on her own. Her last legacy. As you know, Andre has requested that she be cremated with a copy of her first and last book, the alpha and omega. This book will be one of them.