gmane.science.economics.progressive-economists

Query: best work on enclosure of commons

Gar Lipow — 2013-05-19T08:24:36

I'm interested in two related question on UK enclosure of the commons.

1) How well were the commons managed prior to enclosure? Was the grazing
land being exhausted or was it preserved through limitations on use? What
about  forest a nd woods and wood lots used as sources of firewood? Was
firewood harvested from the same woods generation after generation, or were
the wood lots being exhausted? What are the best sources on this? Is there
controversy or is the story I hear that the commons were successful in
preserving resources across generations widely agreed on?

2) After enclosure to what extent was grazing land maintained and to what
extent exhausted? And (for my purposes, more imortantly) to what extent
were wooded areas that had been preserved as sources of fuel for
generations exhausted, sometimes just for the wood, sometimes to expand
grazing land to raise more sheep and cattle?

What are the most rigorous works that answer these question?. If there is a
serious controversy, what are the best works o

Re: Some points about carbon rationing ("personal carbontrading")

Gar Lipow — 2013-05-19T05:47:15

hope of occcasionally winning them and as part of movement building.  But I
strong disagree with this form of carbon trading as I do with all forms of
carbon trading mainly because I don't think they are path to emissions
reductions.    I'm glad to finally be able to answer you on this. I have
been following this thread with increasing frustration as various muscular
skeletal problems have prevented me from replying even thiough I have been
able to read along. Catching up after the discussion has been so extensive
means I may have to be lose some nuance in my reply. So here are my
objections with a certain amount of lossy commpression:

1) All forms of carbon trading ultimately work by putting a price on
carbon, evern if (as you say) it is a second dimension of pricinsg. And
this can't tackle the fundamental problems which physically are
infrastructure. Carbon pricing can motivate someone to dirver less and take
the train instead. It can't get  a new train line built or a an existing
train line upgraded. Be

Bidder 70

Louis Proyect — 2013-05-18T17:14:28

As one of the more counter-intuitive economics departments in the United 
States, the University of Utah has not only been the long-time host of 
the Marxmail server but also where Tim DeChristopher was a graduate 
student. When you first take a look at Tim’s face in the documentary 
“Bidder 70” that opened yesterday at the Quad in New York without 
knowing anything about him in advance, you might assume that he was just 
another conservative Mormon student especially with his military-style 
haircut.

It turns out that he was one of the most courageous and principled civil 
disobedience activists in recent American history, standing in the 
tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. The title of 
the film refers to Tim’s taking part in an oil and gas lease auction on 
December 19, 2008 in which he bid $1.8 million for 14 parcels of land 
without any intention of paying for them. Although there was a 
well-organized environmental movement in Utah to protect the pristine 
land that wa

Re: McMahon: Is Hollywood becoming a risk-free business?

Louis Proyect — 2013-05-18T15:30:20


NY Times May 17, 2013
The Flop Looms as Studios Lean on Blockbusters
By JAMES B. STEWART

For the big Hollywood film studios, this summer could turn out to be 
“Apocalypse the Day after Tomorrow: Clash of the Blockbusters.” Or maybe 
“Armageddon 2 — Revenge of the Critics.”

With a record number of big-budget action- and special-effect-laden 
blockbusters opening between the beginning of this month and the end of 
August, competition for the spectacle-craving young male and surging 
international audience has never been more intense.

Steven Soderbergh, the much-admired filmmaker, delivered a blistering 
critique of the phenomenon at the San Francisco International Film 
Festival a few weeks ago, bemoaning studio executives’ lack of 
imagination and their fixation on big-budget franchise films. “Cinema as 
I define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the 
studios,” he said. He likened the big studios to “Detroit before the 
bailout” and worried that the hegemony o

Re: Naive notes on Heinrich/Locascio

Jim Devine — 2013-05-18T15:23:42

a company's high profits indicates that a unionization effort can get
a piece of the pie, but it also means that the company has more
resources for fighting unionization. In the specific case of Wal-Mart,
its high profits have a lot to do with its monopsony power, including
the absence of unionization.

BTW, thanks for the good news, Marv.

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 7:48 PM,  <ronpeterson1-Wuw85uim5zDR7s880joybQ< at >public.gmane.org> wrote:

Re: Naive notes on Heinrich/Locascio

Marv Gandall — 2013-05-18T13:15:28

On 2013-05-17, at 10:48 PM, ronpeterson1-Wuw85uim5zDR7s880joybQ< at >public.gmane.org wrote:


Some evidence that its low wage policy is eroding its competitive position:

Customers Flee Wal-Mart Empty Shelves for Target, Costco
By Renee Dudley
Bloomberg News
March 26, 2013

Margaret Hancock has long considered the local Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) superstore her one- stop shopping destination. No longer.

During recent visits, the retired accountant from Newark, Delaware, says she failed to find more than a dozen basic items, including certain types of face cream, cold medicine, bandages, mouthwash, hangers, lamps and fabrics.

The cosmetics section “looked like someone raided it,” said Hancock, 63.

Wal-Mart’s loss was a gain for Kohl’s Corp. (KSS), Safeway Inc. (SWY), Target Corp. (TGT) and Walgreen Co. (WAG) -- the chains Hancock hit for the items she couldn’t find at Wal-Mart.

“If it’s not on the shelf, I can’t buy it,” she said. “You hate to see a company self-destruct, but there are ot

Some points about carbon rationing ("personal carbon trading")

2013-05-18T12:45:14

Sorry for the delay in answering.  Joseph Green sees
inconsistencies in my thinking because I am in favor of the
artificial market of feed-in tariffs but opposed to the
artificial market of cap and trade.  With cap and trade my
inconsistency seems even worse to him because I reject it
under the name "cap and trade" but support it under the name
"carbon rationing."

If you look at markets, you always have to ask what options
the market participants have when reacting to market
outcomes.  Feed-in tariffs are so effective because they
take the initiative away from the incumbent energy firms.
They leave it up to millions of individual "prosumers" to
decide how much investment goes into renewable energy.  They
don't allow the electric utilities to slow down renewable
energy under the pretext of cost or grid stability or
transmission availability or how it fits together with their
sunk investments.  The importance to take this veto power
away from the incumbent energy firms is stressed by Hermann
Scheer in

http:

Re: Naive notes on Heinrich/Locascio

2013-05-18T02:48:18

"Michael Perelman" <MPerelman-N1s09ta5PBL2fBVCVOL8/A< at >public.gmane.org> wrote: 



http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/oswald/wprs.pdf seems to show that 
profitability per employee correlates with wages, but not as much as one would hope. 


For instance, Walmart has low wages per employee despite being a large firm.

Re: Naive notes on Heinrich/Locascio

Perelman, Michael — 2013-05-18T01:38:13

There is a large literature on the relationship between firm size and wages.  I wonder if it still holds. 
________________________________________
From: pen-l-bounces-FPEHb7Xf0XWG9Rqvk1bdOTe48wsgrGvP< at >public.gmane.org [pen-l-bounces-FPEHb7Xf0XWG9Rqvk1bdOTe48wsgrGvP< at >public.gmane.org] On Behalf Of Julio Huato [jhuato.sfc-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org]
Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2013 8:29 PM
To: Progressive Economics
Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Naive notes on Heinrich/Locascio

And, of course, controlling for (orthogonalized) union membership?

On Thursday, May 16, 2013, Julio Huato wrote:
Max wrote:

Really? Exploded it with data? I always thought workers in big monopolized industries got paid much better than average. The U.S. archetype was the auto workers.

Controlling for productivity (which depends on how well equipped workers are, etc.), skills or qualifications, and all that?
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Heinrich Blücher: street-fighting man

Louis Proyect — 2013-05-17T21:12:26

It was an eerie experience sitting through the press screening for 
Margarethe von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” at the Film Forum yesterday, a 
biopic that focuses on her reporting from the Eichmann trial with some 
flashbacks to her early affair with Heidegger.

Two of the major characters in the film were Heinrich Blücher and Hans 
Jonas, two professors I knew from Bard College and the New School 
Graduate Philosophy department respectively. I can’t say that I knew 
them all that well on a personal level but their teaching had a profound 
effect on my thinking.

This was especially true of Blücher whose insisted that principle and 
truth always trumped patriotism and the state, frequently citing the 
trial of Socrates in his Common Course, a humanities type required 
class. After discovering from von Trotta’s film notes that Blücher had 
been in the German CP in the 20s, I decided to stop by the Columbia 
University library and take out a few books that will help me prepare an 
in-depth article on

Re: Is Obama the New Nixon? > Counterpunch: Tells the Facts,Names the Names

Carrol Cox — 2013-05-17T20:33:24

Some very desirable legislation passed while Nixon was president. It is an
insult to Nixon to compare him to Obama.

Carrol

that



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Re: Is Obama the New Nixon? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

Ben Pope — 2013-05-17T20:18:58

As Zizek has called Obama, "Bush with a human face." I think he is losing
that human face.


On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 12:03 PM, Louis Proyect <lnp3-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> wrote:

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a new paper on the "cigarette-money emergent in POW camp"fairy-tale

raghu — 2013-05-17T18:28:23

http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3685820/desan_coinreconsidered.pdf?sequence=2

via

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/04/was-cigarette-money-in-world-war-ii-pow-camps-a-case-of-commodity-money-origination.html

(Be warned: the paper is an open-access article published by that notorious
reactionary organization, Harvard University..)

------------------------snip

But unfortunately for our commodity money theorists, the POW camp story is
almost as much of a fairy tale as is the tall tale of *The Princess and The
Hair*. If the economic theory of “pure” exchange is purely anything, then
it is purely mistaken.

As Christine Desan explains in her article, “*Coin Reconsidered: The
Political Alchemy of Commodity
Money<http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3685820/desan_coinreconsidered.pdf?sequence=2>
*”, Radford’s story “capture a powerful intuition about money’s origins and
its character that continues to anchor assumptions about the market.” That
“most of that history is i

Re: Wed. 5/22: "Why Do Popular Movements Vanish?"

Julio Huato — 2013-05-17T17:59:22


People should not reflect.  People should not problematize the world.
They just should know.  Everything is so obvious.

Except that people keep seeing *this* as a problem, because *it is* a
problem!  This is our recurrent problem, the problem of working people
sustaining the political initiative, on which most everything hinges,
which is the problem of "organization," the problem of creating
robust, lasting structures and the problem of the relationship between
the organs of representation on the one side of these structures and
their constituencies on the other side.  Resolving this issue
concretely, i.e. in dealing with concrete situations, learning from
concrete experience, is something that will recur whether Carrol gets
impatient with it or not.

Time for a re-plug of S&S, 2012, 76-4:  The old problem of the
"revolution in permanence" (again, of sustaining the combative
momentum of the workers' movement in Europe in the conditions of the
late 19th century and early 20th century) that puzzled Mehring,

Is Obama the New Nixon? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

Louis Proyect — 2013-05-17T17:03:47

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/17/is-obama-the-new-nixon/
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Full-time mothers in Venezuela now get a guaranteed income !

c b — 2013-05-17T16:34:56

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/17-3

Published on Friday, May 17, 2013 by Rabble.ca
Venezuela's New Labour Law: The Best Mother's Day Gift
by Thomas Ponniah

Here is some news that the conservative critics of Venezuela's leftist
government will not publicize. The Chavistas announced that a new
labour law, part of which will grant recognition to non-salaried work
traditionally done by women, will come into effect this week.
Full-time mothers will now be able to collect a pension.

(Photo: marcossalgado.info/flickr)While there are a number of
criticisms to be made of the Venezuelan government, the genius of the
Bolivarian process is that it combines numerous forms of struggle
against inequality. The most obvious lies in its commitment to
economic redistribution, and measured by the Gini co-efficient,
Venezuela has the lowest rate of inequality in Latin America. An
equally significant form of struggle against inequality, however, lies
in its pursuit of gender equity.

One of the major theoretical crit

Pentagon to Request $80 Billion for War Costs in FY2014

Robert Naiman — 2013-05-17T15:15:03

for those "scoring at home," the Pentagon proposes to spend on the next
year of the war 50% of what chained CPI would save over ten years by
cutting Social Security and veterans' benefits.

*Pentagon Said to Seek $80 Billion for War Amid Withdrawal*
By Tony Capaccio and Gopal Ratnam
Bloomberg, May 17, 2013
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-16/pentagon-said-to-seek-80-billion-for-war-amid-withdrawal.html

The Pentagon will ask Congress to approve about $79.5 billion for combat
operations, the least since 2005, as U.S. troops withdraw from Afghanistan,
according to administration officials.

The proposal for war operations, which aren’t included in the main Pentagon
budget, may be submitted as soon as today, said the officials, who asked
not to be identified discussing the funding request before it’s presented.

War spending soared in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks, peaking at $187 billion in fiscal 2008, when the U.S. had 166,300
troops in Iraq during the “surge” under Presi

World's tallest dam approved by Chinese environmental officials | Environment | guardian.co.uk

2013-05-17T15:11:48

Lou Proyect forwarded a link with the comment:


There have indeed been many news items recently describing
from various angles how precarious the situation is and how
urgent it is to take action now if we want our children and
grandchildren to have a future.  A common thread of most
of these environmental disaster stories is that humankind
has the knowledge and technology to avert this disaster,
the only obstacle is our social relations.

Social relations exist only in our actions and are
reproduced by our actions.  The byline should therefore be
that we must learn to act in ways which do not reproduce the
social relations dooming our species, but foster the needed
change -- and maybe a discussion of those initiatives which
most deserve our support (such as Bill McKibben's
international power shift).  Instead, Lou's joke conjures
the inevitability of the destructive path which our present
social relations have in store for us.  Marx calls this
"commodity fetishism," the view that our own social
relations a

Re: Naive notes on Heinrich/Locascio

Jim Devine — 2013-05-17T15:08:00

The whole idea of the "labor aristocracy" involves an incomplete
(partial) vision of the world. It's not that such a grouping can't
exist. After all, didn't the oil-workers' union in Venezuela side with
the oil owners against Chávez and benefit mightily as  result (until
Chávez won)? (The USAID has always encouraged such unionization in
Latin America and likely elsewhere.)

One part that's missing in the usual "labor aristocracy" story is the
point of view of the workers themselves, as Max suggests. As a part of
individuals' collective efforts to survive and even to prosper (to pay
the bills, support the family, to get not just bread but also roses)
there are different strategies, varying from the craft-union economism
of the AFL to the broader, more inclusive, industrial unionism of the
original CIO to the idea of "one big union" of the IWW to the idea of
merging unionism with a labor party to... All of these strategies make
sense to one degree or another (depending on the historical context,
of course).

Re: Wed. 5/22: "Why Do Popular Movements Vanish?"

Carrol Cox — 2013-05-17T14:34:35

future.

Bull shit. People have to go back to work eventually: they can't stay in the
streets forever.

It's not a history of failed revolts; it's a history of mass movements
ebbing when they have achieved as much as or more than was actually
possible.

This voluntarism that infects so many left historians is itself one of the
barriers to resistance.

The Commune. The Pullman Strike. Russia. The Black Panthers. China. These
were not failures in the least. They represented what was possible under the
given world conditions.

One thread that runs through Lenin (more tone than explicit argument) is
crucial: one has to try even if defeat is probable. See also Luxemburg's
last editorial.

Carrol


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Re: Naive notes on Heinrich/Locascio

Max Sawicky — 2013-05-17T14:34:33

"Resistance to capitalism" or simply agitating for a bigger piece of the
pie? By appearances it has been the latter. After all, I love the CIO --
Daddy was part of it -- but there has been no overtly anti-capitalist
workers movement since the 30s, if then. ("FDR wants you to join the
union.") Or since dual unionism and the IWW.

Nothing wrong with making deals. People gotta eat. It's part of class
struggle, but does it deserve to be described as "resistance to capitalism"?




On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox-U/Mp738JmJiHXe+LvDLADg< at >public.gmane.org> wrote:

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