|
Little
Library of the Lair
Readings
Geoffrey Fox
| Notes
& Essays | Bio
| Pequeña
biblioteca comentada
Fiction |
Poetry
Essays, History & Analysis
Bensel, Richard Franklin. The Political Economy of American Industrialization,
1877-1900
Chomsky, Noam. 9-11
Clauson, Sir Gerard (1972). An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth
Century Turkish
Cockcroft. James D.
, Mexico's Hope: An Encounter with Politics and
History
Connell, Evan S. Son
of the Morning Star
Ehrenreich, Barbara. The
Snarling Citizen: Essays
González de
Clavijo, Ruy. Narrative of the Embassy of
Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to the Court of Timour at Samarcand,
A.D. 1403-6
Gray, John. "Hollow triumph: Why Marx
still provides a potent critique of the contradictions of late
modern capitalism."
Guillermoprieto, Alma. Looking
for History: Dispatches from Latin America
Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest Hemingway
Hochman, Elaine S. Architects
of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich
Hourani, Albert. A
History of the Arab Peoples
Lewis, Bernard. The
Jews of Islam
Miles, Jack. God: A Biography
Sabato, Ernesto. Claves políticas. (see my other site,
América Latina)
Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World
Sher, Barbara, with Annie Gottlieb. Wishcraft:
How to Get What you Really Want
Singer, Daniel. Whose
Millennium? Theirs or Ours?
Sobel, Dava. Longitude
Stackelberg, Roderick. Hitler's
Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies
Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and
SecretsWood
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism
Wucker, Michele. Why the Cocks Fight:
Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola.
Latin American cities (click here
for bibliography)
Bensel, Richard Franklin. The Political
Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
"Economic development with
democratic institutions has been rare because transitions from
agrarian to industrial societies almost always generate intense
conflict over the distribution of wealth." So how did this
happen in 19th century U.S.A.? "Summed up in a single sentence,
democracy and development were compatible because the major groups
most likely to pursue political claims on industrial profits,
southern cotton producers and northern industrial workers, were
unable to coalesce because they occupied antithetical positions
within a national political economy restructured and influenced
by the primacy of the Republican party." Introduction, p.
2.
For industrialization to occur
within a democratic system, then, it seem there have to be sectoral
divisions so deep that they prevent the protesting groups from
joining forces against a common foe, i.e., the industrializers
who are disrupting their lives. I suppose you could make that
case for England, the only other industrial democracy to emerge
in the 19th century. Wherever else industrialization has proceeded
untrammeled, it has been protected by an authoritarian regime
deaf to social protests: Chile under Pinochet, Brazil under the
generals, Cuba, China, the old USSR, Germany under Bismarck and
later under the Third Reich.
Where today do we see such a
combination of democratic institutions and deep, depoliticizing
divisions? India, most notably, too divided by religion and caste
for workers and peasants to unite. Israel, perhaps, where the
unending conflict with the Palestinians saps the Labor Party
and other leftists of energy for other causes. Let's keep these
conflicts in mind, especially the antidemocratic nature of capital
accumulation and "development," as we critique Zimbabwe,
or Venezuela, or any other country either for too slow industrialization
or too little democracy.
Chomsky, Noam. 9-11.
New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. 125
Chomsky, like almost everybody
else in the US and abroad, is appalled by the destruction of
civilian lives in the attacks on the World Trade Center of last
September. Where he differs most sharply from established US
opinion is in the appropriate response: instead of inflicting
more terror by bombing a poor country (Afghanistan), we should
do what we did in the Oklahoma City bombing, i.e., try to catch
and try the perpetrators, who may or may not include Osama bin
Laden. (Even today, there is no clear evidence that bin Laden
knew about the attacks before they occurred, though he celebrated
them afterwards.) Chomsky insists that the US is the leading
terrorist state in the world, citing these recent examples: USG's
funding of the contra war directed against "soft" civilian
targets in Nicaragua, condemned as terrorism by the World Court
in the Hague, 1986; the CIA's car bombing of a Beirut mosque,
killing 80 and wounding 250 other worshippers, in an unsuccessful
attempt to assassinate a Muslim sheikh in 1985; arming of the
Turks in the war against the Kurds, in the 1990s; support of
the Indonesian military during their terror campaigns in East
Timor, up through 1999; the bombing of Serbia in that same period;
the destruction by bombing of the main pharmaceutical plant in
Sudan in 1998. Chomsky uses the US government's own definition
of terrorism: "the calculated use of violence or threat
of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or
ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion,
or instilling fear." (An appendix gives the definition of
"terrorist activity" in the US Immigration and Nationality
Act, which adds examples, including hijacking, kidnapping, assassination,
or use of biological or explosive weapons to "endanger"
persons or damage property.)
Since this book has appeared,
the US Government has declared that it will not be bound by international
treaties it had signed (but not "ratified") and that
it will not be subject to nor cooperate with the newly strengthened
World Court in The Hague. Thus it has announced to the world
its intention to carry out further terrorist acts whenever it
suits it. This little book has been a tremendous success for
its tiny publisher, The New York Times has reported. And a good
thing. It helps delegitimize abusive practices that do no country,
including our own, any good. 02/05/13
Clauson, Sir Gerard (1972).
An
Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth Century Turkish. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Fascinating, a rich source for
exploring the history of ideas among speakers of Turkic languages
--but beyond my language capactiy at present. 020806
Cockcroft.
James D. , Mexico's Hope: An Encounter with Politics and History. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1998. 320 pp.
An excellent summary
of Mexico's political history from independence through the Zedillo
administration, emphasizing the tensions threatening to blow
the PRI-dominated system apart -- as in fact seems to be happening.
See my review in Monthly
Review, vol 4, no. 52 (September 2000).
Connell,
Evan S. 1984. Son of the Morning Star. New York: Harper
& Row.
The annihilation of George Armstrong
Custer and his 200+ 7th Cavalrymen at the Little Bighorn in June,
1876 was late 19th century America's most celebrated and most
flagrantly misrepresented tragedy. Connell presents vivid portraits:
G. A. Custer (reckless, flamboyant & very ambitious -- he
may have timed his attack to influence the Republican convention
to nominate him for president), Maj. Marcus Reno (brave but slow-thinking,
he panicked and survived in disgrace), Capt. Frederick Benteen
(hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, sagacious & very bold, he too
survived but also managed to save most of his men), and other
whites, and of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Gall (possibly the
most frightful of all the Sioux), Rain in the Face and other
Sioux & Cheyennes, plus Crow scouts, Buffalo Bill (as flamboyant
as Custer, and not much use in actual combat) and others, including
a few white and Indian women. Where accounts are wildly contradictory,
Connell presents the different versions in their contexts. Exciting
story, masterfully told. 021021
Ehrenreich,
Barbara. (1995). The Snarling Citizen: Essays. New York,
Farrar Straus Giroux.
All attitude, no alalysis, but
fun if you like wisecracks. 020807
González
de Clavijo, Ruy. Narrative
of the Embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to the Court of Timour
at Samarcand, A.D. 1403-6.
Translated by Clements R. Markham. 1859 ed. Vol. 26. London:
Hakluyt Society, 1407. 200 pp.
The amazing but
true adventures of a knight of Castile and "the oldest Spanish
narrative of travels of any value," according to the translator.
González, together with the theologian Fray Alonso Páez
de Santa María, the knight Gómez de Salazar, their
squires, and an ambassador Timur had sent to Castile the year
before, set out in a carrack from Sta María (Cádiz)
1403 May 21, as an embassy from Enrique III of Castile to Timur.
Timur and Enrique had learned of one another's existence the
year before, when two previous Castilian ambassadors to the Ottoman
sultan Bayezid happened to witness Timur's utter destruction
of their host and his horde at the battle of Ankara. González
either had a phenomenal memory, or the phenomenal discipline
and resourcefulness to take notes of every step of the long,
hard journey. Just crossing the length of the Mediterranean takes
5 months: after a 16 day stop in Gaeta, Italy, a change of ships
at Chios, etc, they reach "the city of Pera" on Oct.
24 and Constantinople (across the Golden Horn a day or so later).
His reports on the marvels of the great city is the most quoted
passages of the book. Then came the hard parts:the Black Sea,
where gales drive vessels against the rock, and hostile forces
are on all sides; on horseback through plains, mountains and
deserts, wherethey all get sick and Gómez de Salazar dies,
and finally the extravagant encampment, a city whose palaces
are made of cloth, pitched outside the more solid city of Samarkand.
At least they meet the aged, infirm and still terrible "Scourge
of Allah," Timur. As an example of the festivities:
"As soon as
these ambassadors, and many others, who had come from distant
countries, were seated in order, they brought much meat, boiled,
roasted, and dressed in other ways, and roasted horses; and they
placed these sheep and horses on very large round pieces of stamped
leather. When the lord [Timur] called for meat, the people dragged
it to him on these pieces of leather, so great was its weight;
and as soon as it was within twenty paces of him, the carvers
came, who cut it up, kneeling on the leather. They cut it in
pieces, and put the pieces in basins of gold and silver, earthenware
and glass, and porcelain, which is very scarce and precious.
The most honourable piece was a haunch of the horse, with the
loin, but without the leg, and they placed parts of it in ten
cups of gold and silver. They also cut up the haunches of the
sheep. They then put pieces of the tripes of the horses, about
the size of a man's fist, into the cups, and entire sheep's heads,
and in this way they made many dishes."
And those were
just the appetizers. Everone was also expected to drink gallons
of wine. González did not care much for roast horse and
was a teetotaler, which astounded his hosts. Timur's other amusements
included ordering the townspeople to play games. E.g., women
dressed up as goats and men as wolves and bears to chase them
around. Then he ordered executions, to show that he wasn't all
fun and games. Beheading, for powerful lords who had held back
on taxes; hanging for a simple butcher accused of overcharging,
and so on, each punishment suiting the victim's rank. Timur fell
ill before the ambassadors could leave. Worse, he died while
they are en route home, so his safe conduct was no longer effective
as his territories broke into civil wars. González' party
were merely harassed and robbed, but the Turkish and Egyptian
ambassadors were taken captive by a rebel chief. The Castilians
finally got home on March 24, 1406. Enrique III died the next
year, but Ruy González lived on until April 2, 1412.
Gray, John. "Hollow triumph:
Why Marx still provides a potent critique of the contradictions
of late modern capitalism." The Times Literary Supplement,
May 8, 1998:3-4.
Less than a decade after the collapse of European Marxist
state socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are back on the
bookshelves in new editions and with eager new readers. John
Gray argues that these phenomena are related: the collapse of
state socialism proves the fallacy of Marx's utopian longings,
but has also freed world capitalism to operate in the destructive,
creative, ever-churning way that he and Engels described in The
Communist Manifesto 150 years ago this year. Their analysis
of capitalism is even more relevant and persuasive now that the
Socialist bloc no longer represents an alternative economic system.
"Western Marxists who resist the lessons of the Soviet
experience do Marx no favors," he says in his review of
Manifesto and two books of essays about that impassioned
denunciation of and paean to capitalism. They are "defending
his thought were it is least defensible," and they thus
"obscure its most powerful insights."
The "least defensible"parts of Marx's thought is
his vision of a society where political conflict has withered
away, for which he had no empirical evidence, and his "disregard
for the damage-limiting functions of democracy." Lenin's
centrally-planned command economy was an attempt to operationalize
the faulty vision. But its lack of "a properly functioning
price mechanism and ÷ clear, enforceable property rights,"
or of democratic guarantees for dissenting voices, led to colossal
waste and "spectacular indifference to human needs."
The "powerful insights" include this passage from
the 1848 Manifesto:
All old-established national industries have been destroyed
or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries,
whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all
civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous
raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones;
industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but
in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied
by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring
for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.
In place of the old and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,
we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence
of nations.
That could have been written this morning, by someone thinking
of the unprecedentedly huge mergers of banks, entertainment,
and/or auto industries, or the constant churning and expansion
of the new "information technology" industry.
Conservatives misunderstand this process totally, Gray argues.
They "seek to promote free markets, while at the same time
defending traditional values," oblivious to the fact that
it is the "free markets" that obliterate traditions.
Or, as Marx and Engels wrote 150 years ago,
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient
and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed
ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last
compelled to face, with sober senses, his real condition of life,
and his relations with his kind.
John Gray is Professor of European Thought at the London School
of Economics. For a hilariously obtuse attack on Gray's own recent
book, False Dawns: The Delusions of Global Capitalism
(Granta £17.99), see the Times (London) review
by the former Tory postmaster general David Willetts, now opposition
spokesman on employment and higher education. See also Wood,
The Origin of Capitalism; Singer,
Daniel. Whose Millennium? Theirs
or Ours?
Guillermoprieto,
Alma. Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America.
New York: Pantheon, 2001. 303
Alma Guillermoprieto is such
good company that I enjoy her voice even in articles first published
as long ago as 1994, when the world was very different (the PRI
was still in power in Mexico, for example). Her great gifts are
observation and interviewing, and her favored subjects are politics
and social patters at the most basic level. Whether sharing middle-class
anxieties in the face of terror in Bogotá, discussing
dating with the girl guerrillas of the FARC, watching old Communists'
reactions to the visit of the Pope in Havana, chatting at midnight
with el Subcomandante Marcos in the Lacandón jungle,
or interviewing the sister of the witch who created evidence
against Raúl Salinas de Gortari in a bizarre murder case,
she makes us feel that we too are at the scene. In contrast,
her research-based essays on Eva Perón, Che Guevara and
Mario Vargas Llosa, though thoughtfully and gracefully written,
show up Guillermoprieto's weaker side she's no theoretician.
If by "history" we mean a coherent interpretative narrative,
then Alma Guillermoprieto hasn't found it. Fortunately, she's
still looking, and willing to do the legwork and expose herself
to the embarrassment to dig out some of its elements. 020403
Hemingway, Ernest. By-Line: Ernest
Hemingway. Edited by William White. Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
England: Penguin Ltd., 1980.
75 articles and dispatches from Hem's days with the Toronto
Star and other publications.
Hochman,
Elaine S. Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third
Reich. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. 382
Declaredly anti-rational, aesthetically
atavistic, murderous and internally contradictory, German National
Socialism nevertheless succeeded in cowing many artists and intellectuals
into endorsing the lunacy. How did they do it? One good way to
approach that question is to ask how they managed to subdue as
intelligent, stubborn and uncompromising a man as Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe.The paired shows, "Mies in Berlin" at
the Museum of Modern Art and "Mies in America" at the
Guggenheim earlier this year, provided only the barest of hints.
For those not satisfied, Elaine Hochman's densely researched
biography of a crisis tells the story together cogently and coherently
.
Mies was man of great bulk
two meters tall and nearly as wide who compensated his
relative lack of education by great drawing talent and intelligence
and enormous ambition. He had little interest in other human
beings either in his architecture or his family or professional
life. His greatest passions were design and building, to be judged
solely by their elegance, or (the term coming into use) "modernity,"
not their usefulness or comfort. Born a stonemason's son in Aachen,
near the Dutch and Belgian borders, in 1876, after service in
the German Army in World War I, he added the pseudo-aristocratic
"van der Rohe" to his name and by hard work and bold
design, made himself into one of Germany's most prominent architects.
His colleagues and clients included several Jews, including the
Communist Party official who commissioned his 1926 monument to
the famed Spartakusbund revolutionaries martyred by proto-fascist
thugs in 1919, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. (The impressive,
rough-faced brick structure with an enormous star and hammer-and-sickle
motif is preserved only in a photograph, on display at the MoMA
show.) In 1930, just as the Nazis were celebrating their huge
electoral success in September of that year, Mies became director
of the Bauhaus, famous for its devotion under its founder, Walter
Gropius, and then under Swiss Marxist Hannes Meyer, for its devotion
to innovative and socially committed arts, crafts and architecture
the antithesis of Nazism. Gropius, Heinrich Mann and most
of the other intellectuals in Mies' circles emigrated as soon
as they could. In 1933, Hitler became Reichskanzler, but still
Mies stayed on, until April 1936.
How could he continue working
in Germany for so long under the Nazis? And why did he want to?
He regarded himself as above politics, and thought everyone should
understand that his was a higher calling. Thus he was very put
out that anyone should think he was a red just he had designed
a monument to Communist martyrs, and as director of the Bauhaus
he strove to depoliticize it. From the Nazis, he sought commissions
on the argument that his work was authentically German and suited
for the technological progress the Nazis so admired. In a drawing
submitted in a competition to design an exhibition hall, he sketched
in a couple of flags with swastikas to show his willingness to
cooperate (that drawing was one of the more startling items in
the MoMA show). All to no avail, however. Not only was he in
suspicion as insufficiently Nazi, but Hitler fancied himself
an architect, with a taste for gigantic rococo which Mies
abhorred. Nevertheless, with no hope for further commissions
and in danger of being arrested, Mies was reluctant to accept
invitations to take a foreign appointment until his stubbornly
loyal assistant Lilly Reich practically forced him to.
The kindest thing to say is that
Mies was a principled opportunist principled not politically,
but in his commitment to modernist design. If they would let
him work as he wished, he was willing to go along with anybody
-- Communist, Nazi, or whiskey distiller (the Seagram Building
in New York is his most important surviving structure). This
book is about much more than Mies. It is about the whole suborning
of a culture, and about characters as sinister as Alfred Rosenberg
and as astute as Walter Gropius or Heinrich Mann, as steadfast
but self-deluding as Käthe Kollwitz or, in a less excusable
way, Mies van der Rohe. We cannot really understand Nazism without
examining this episode. 2001-10-26
Cf. Stackelberg, Roderick. Hitler's Germany: Origins, Interpretations,
Legacies
Hourani,
Albert. A History of the Arab Peoples. New York: Warner
Books, 1991. 551 pp.
Reputed to be the best 1-volume
history available, I found it to be immensely helpful. Islam
was essential to the development of "Arabs" as a self-conscious
imagined community; under the influence of Islam and of the civil
administrations imposed by Arab conquerors, peoples in neighboring
regions came to adopt the dialect and redefine themselves as
"Arabs." For this reason the book is as much a history
of early Islam as of the Arabs (though today, more than half
the world's Muslims are not Arabs, and many Arabs profess Christianity
or other religions).The book is very good on the origins of Islam
and its relationship to earlier religions of the Arabian Peninsula;
very thorough also on organization, administration and culture
in Islamic cities in the long period, roughly 1000-1400 AD, when
they were far more stable and productive than cities in Christian
Europe.
See also Lewis, Bernard. The Jews of Islam.
Lewis,
Bernard. The Jews of Islam. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1984. 245 pp.
A very lucid treatment of a complex
and varied relationship over the centuries. Jews were always
a discriminated minority in Muslim lands, and in the societies
on the fringes of Islamic power, especially in Shi'ite Iran and
narrow-minded Morocco, they sometimes suffered greatly. However,
until recent times, the larger Christian minority was far more
seriously harassed, mainly because it represented more of a threat
(suspected of collusion with Christian enemy powers). In the
central, Sunni-dominated areas, especially in Ottoman lands,
Jews were protected and, in certain periods, their services (as
physicians, translators and diplomats) were highly valued. This
mutually beneficial coexistence ended, however, with the drastic
decline in power of Muslim regimes in the 19th century, when
the Islamic masses and their rulers became more suspicious of
all their minorities, and the Christians among them (Greek Orthodox,
Syrian Catholics, Armenians and others) deflected hostility toward
them onto the Jews. European Christian anti-Semitism was also
popularized and reproduced, both by those same Christian minorities
in Ottoman and Arab lands and by the anti-Semitism of French
and other western consular officials, until today many Arabs,
Semites themselves, have become fanatical converts to the worst
Christian myths ("Protocols of Zion" and all the rest
of it). Lewis's recent article in The New Yorker brings
the story up to date.
See also Hourani, Albert.
A History of the Arab Peoples.
Miles, Jack.
God: A Biography. 1996 ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. 431
pp.
God in the Tanakh (Hebrew Old
Testament) is contradictory -- unpredictable, undoubtedly because
he is a synthesis of many earlier Mesopotamian gods and goddesses.
He can be benevolent, cruel, petty, deceptive (he lies to Adam,
saying he will immediately die if he eats the forbidden fruit);
he can be bargained with (e.g., by Abraham); then at the end
of the Tanakh (which, unlike the Christian version, puts the
prophets before "the writings," Psalms through Chronicles)
he falls silent. At the end of the book Miles "imagines
the one God as many," as "if the several personalities
fused in the character of the Lord God were broken loose as separate
characters." In this hypothetical reconstruction, the Creation
of the physical world and then of man is accomplished by two
brother gods, Eloh and Yah; the reptilian goddess Mot tempts
the woman into defying Yah, who then punishes Mot by making her
crawl, snakelike, on her belly. Mot later returns as the reptilian
rivers, flooding the earth, battling Eloh andYah for 40 days
(the brothers finally win). Still later, she assumes the form
of the Red Sea and Moses with his sword cuts her in two, to cross,
etc.
See also Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's
Encyclopedia of Myths and SecretsWood
Singer,
Daniel . Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999.
279 pp.
For all of us who counted on
the tension between the socialist bloc and the capitalist to
give us room to work for real change, the sudden collapse of
the Soviet Union and its sattelite states was devastating both
practically and psychologically. "Real existing socialism"
(a Soviet phrase to describe their system) was admittedly awful
in many ways. But it did safeguard certain human rights -- employment,
health care, public education -- and some of us still thought
it had the potential of transforming itself into a more emancipatory
form of socialism. And even if it did not, the Soviet Union was
a source of critical support to liberation struggles elsewhere
and the only available restraint on what we called US imperialism.
But when the Berlin wall cracked open and Communists throughout
Europe were sucked into the vortex and out of power, we on the
left had no answer to the gloating of capitalist ideologues --
"There is no alternative," a slogan repeated so often
we have come to know it as "TINA."
Daniel Singer believes there
must be an alternative. Or are we condemned to destroy ourselves
by self-pollution and genocidal rage, capitalism's most conspicuous
global products?
Singer describes how the Soviet
Union failed either to deepen its socialism or to modernize itself,
despited Khrushchev's attempts, and became instead -- during
the Brezhnev years especially -- the property of a "priviligentsia."
Then, after Brezhnev, Gorbachev was naïve, Yeltsin corrupt,
and the sudden dismanteling of the Soviet Union after 1989 turned
into a scramble for even more privileges for this new class.
After an extended analysis of Russia, and especially the election
of 1996 ( which Yeltsin was poised to lose), Singer discusses
the failure of Soidarity in Poland to live up to the the promising
future Singer foresaw in his earlier book, The Road to Gdansk
(1981). He devotes another chapter to the 1995 strikes in
France. This is all vivid, reporting, though not all of it is
clearly to the point: Is there an alternative to global capitalism,
and if so, how do we find it?
In the last chapters Singer turns
to this, the most important question, and his answer is no more
satisfactory than was Lenin's, years ago, when he asked, "What
is to be done?" Singer advises us to read Rosa Luxemburg.
This is probably good advice, and I intend to take it, but it's
only a hint of the direction we might take. Luxemburg was murdered
in 1918; we can hardly expect her to offer answers about a world
she never saw. But in important ways, now that the socialist
block has disappeared, the unresolved issues of 1918 are with
us again, and perhaps Rosa Luxemburg is as good a place as any
to begin renewing the debate.
Sagan,
Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the
Dark. New York: Ballantine, 1996.
Sagan's last book is a disjointed
collection of reworked essays & lectures, too many of them
devoted to debunking reports of abductions by extraterrestrials,
and most in some way asserting the pragmatic as well as emotional
rewards of scientific rather than mystical or obscurantist thinking.
Among the several provocative hypotheses he offers is this: Superstition
must not be as ancient as science, since hunters & gathers
have to think scientifically to find their prey -- inferring
the weight of the animal and its speed from its tracks, for example;
it seems rather that superstition (a belief in unseen forces
that must be placated) is imposed by elites -- he doesn't say
it, but necessarily urban elites. In a later chapter, Sagan persuaded
me of the importance of Maxwell's discoveries about electricity
and magnetism, but he doesn't even attempt to explain them, instead
presenting us with formulas that he tells us require several
years of graduate study to understand. So why present them? Or
why not, instead, try to explain them anyway? (1998/11/3)
See also Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's
Encyclopedia of Myths and SecretsWood
Sobel,
Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the
Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Penguin Books,
1995. 180
Early navigators could easily
tell their latitude -- how far north or south they were -- from
the angle of the sun. However, with no reliable way of measuring
their longitude once they were out of sight of land, they were
forever missing their intended destinations and wrecking their
ships on shoals they thought they'd miss. In 1714, the Royal
Society offered a prize for whoever solved this puzzle. Nevil
Maskelyne is the villain in Sobel's little historical summary,the
Astronomer Royal who does everything possible to prevent John
Harrison, inventor of a reliable sea-going clock, from winning
the Royal Society's prize for solving the problem of longitude;
Maskelyne favors more complicated astronomical methods. Harrison
nevertheless won the prize in 1736. With an accurate clock, mariners
could tell what time it was in Greenwich; then, by looking at
the sun, they could tell what time it was where they were, and
thus calculate their distance -- longitude -- east or west of
Greenwich. In Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon (q.v.),
Harrison is mentioned only in passing, and Maskelyne's role is
more to taunt than to torment both Mason & Dixon (though
never both at once) by arranging ridiculous and uncomfortable
assignments in inhospitable places.
Stackelberg,
Roderick. Hitler's Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies.
London: Routledge, 1999. 306
Exceptionally clear exposition,
covering everything from the cultural origins of Nazism to economic
policies to military and diplomatic strategy to the Holocaust.
Especially useful is Stackelberg's summing up of the major debates
among scholars and pseudo-scholars, in which the author makes
his own views clear while treating opposing views in a calmer,
more judicious manner than is usual on this subject. Q: Was Nazism
"left" or "right"? A: Although Nazism borrowed
some of its tactics and rhetoric from the left, it was an extreme
and violent expression of the "right" (serving the
interests of financial and industrial capital as against the
workers). Q: Was Hitler the mastermind of the Holocaust? A: Well,
he was certainly more in charge than anybody else, but he had
a lot of help, and there were those who were even more extreme
in their desire to attack the Jews than Hitler (on a couple of
occasions, for reasons of diplomatic caution he had to restrain
the hotheads). Nazism would not have been possible without Hitler,
but blaming it all on him lets the German conservatives -- men
such as Krupp -- off too easily.
Cf. Hochman, Elaine S. Architects
of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich
Walker,
Barbara G. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco (HarperCollins), 1983) 1121.
Not just for women, but for all
devotees of the Great Goddess. This wonderful reference book
tells you where the Koran really came from (pre-Islamic texts
to the goddess Kore), how the tri-part goddess came to be renamed
"Mary" and how she got absorbed into Christian mythology
(and how she became a virgin), and why Christian Orthodoxy's
greatest temple was dedicated to Sophia. It also explains why
my editorial collaborator, Mr. Glib, is
named Hyacinth. (2001/10/22)
See also Miles, Jack.
God: A Biography
Wood,
Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1999. 138 pp.
Elegant & persuasive critique
of all theories (include Marxist) that assume the inevitablity
of capitalism: that it is the natural evolution of any market,
the system to which all societies tend to once obstacles are
removed, or that it emerges as a consequence of demographic and/or
technological changes.
Wood defines capitalism
as "a system in which goods and services, down to the most
basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchage,
where even human labor power is a commodity for sale in the market,
and where, because all economic actors are dependent on the market,
the requirements of competition and profit maximization are the
fundamental rules of life." Markets & trade, which have
existed from earliest historical times, are not forerunners of
and do not naturally lead to such a system. They do not operate
on maximizing profit, competition, and compulsion. but on the
older principle of buying cheap in one market (say, Samarkand)
and carrying goods to sell dear in another (say, Constantinople).
Capitalism first emerges in one
place only, the English countryside, NOT all of Europe and not
in the cities, even in England. It appears because of a unique
set of conditions there in the 15-17th centuries: 1, exceptionally
wide land holdings by lords, municipalities & other corporate
entities; 2, the autonomous powers of these landowners, and 3,
their ability to rely on their economic power (to demand rents)
and forego use of military power to extract surplus.
This combination set off a chain
of events leading to modern capitalism: The landlords' reliance
on rents that varied according to market conditions, including
the productivity of the land, made them interested above all
in productivity, thus on organizational & technical improvements;
improving productivity of land led to enclosures (privatizing
and fencing in land that previously had been used the entire
community); enclosures deprived much of the rural population
of their livelihoods (just as Marx describes in much detail in
Capital, Vol. I); .the dipossessed ended up in the cities,
especially London, which grew to become the first mass market
for cheap consumer goods.
English capitalism benefited
enormously from its overseas empire, through which it imposed
itself on the world. But it grew in the first instance in response
to England's domestic, mainly London, market, which became so
powerful it obliged other countries to modify their economies
to serve it.
The obvious next question is,
is there any way to reverse this fatal chain of events? The great
socialist experiment that began in October 1917 seems finally
to have failed, but that is hardly the end of resistance to a
system that turns us all into commodiities. (00/3/20, 00/9/12)
See also Gray, John. "Hollow triumph"; Singer,
Daniel. Whose Millennium? Theirs
or Ours?
Wucker,
Michele. Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle
for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. 281 pp.
Elegantly written, closely observed,
intelligently argued, this book is essential reading for understanding
the bitter conflicts between the people of one poor country and
those of another that is even poorer. The cockfight is a real,
highly charged spectacle on both ends of the island, --a metaphor
for the struggle for dominance -- brittle aggressiveness which
allowed Trujillo and Balaguer to exacerbate anti-Haitian sentiment
to distract from their own failings.
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