Insurgent Notes?

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Is Insurgent Notes still being published? September and October editions have been posted but nothing since. I miss reading it.

I taught myself some of the basics of Marxism reading Loren Goldner's stuff a few years ago (I've since supplemented this with David Harvey and Uncle Karl himself) and S. Artesian;s writing is always interesting.

I hope the IN project succeeds.The class struggle is heating up worldwide. Where is IN?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Yes, it's still being published. The next issue should be out soon, though I couldn't tell you exactly when. Issue 4 is already in the works.

(Issue #1 was released in June, by the way.)

[S.Artesian]

Yeah, we're still around, old, cranky bastards that we are. Next issue will have Loren on
the history of the MNR in Bolivia; Artesian wrestling with rent; articles on the Iranian Revolution of 1906 and beyond; an article on the decomposition of industrial capitalism in the Monongahela coal country; thrill, spills, and chills.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
(http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FMononga hela_River&ei=5ftVTYVl05q3B4aHzcsM&usg=AFQjCNGQPTVsnOaIZAyZWfI8-K1YtR5E1w&sig2=DFQ100NEuFyxYf3v7wTTvQ)

[S.Artesian]

Finally, #3 is available at http://insurgentnotes.com (http://insurgentnotes.com/)

[Die Neue Zeit]

The article on rent is too historical and not programmatic enough, as opposed to this:

“Wisconsin Death Trip.” Mass Privatization as the "Final Stage" of Neoliberal Doctrine (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23664) by Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers


A plague of rent-seekers is seeking quick gains by privatizng the public sector and erecting tollbooths to charge access fees to roads, power plants and other basic infrastructure.

[...]

Most wealth in history has been acquired either by armed conquest of the land, or by political insider dealing, such as the great US railroad land giveaways of the mid 19th century. The great American fortunes have been founded by prying land, public enterprises and monopoly rights from the public domain, because that's where the assets are to take.

And:

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004327


There is also no reason to retain private ownership in economic sectors which are either already monopolistic (mainly in infrastructure) or highly oligopolistic (the manufacture of cars, consumer durables, etc). The flow of profits to the private owners in these sectors is largely a rent charged on the rest of the economy.

The housing problem and its concomitant, property price bubbles in the US and elsewhere, was at the centre of the 2008-09 crisis and is a persisting ‘overhang’ affecting the current economy. The British government has leaned on the financial sector to postpone the inevitable wave of defaults and foreclosures, but in due course they will feed through.

Public ownership of the financial sector, proposed above, automatically implies public ownership in the large majority of cases of the mortgagee’s interests in mortgaged property. This should be extended to all mortgages. Within this framework, it is possible in an orderly way to cut the capital and interest liabilities incurred at the height of the property bubble down to levels consistent with needs (ie, the replacement and repair costs of buildings, etc).

Engels argued back in 1872-73 that renting was more in the interests of the working class than freehold mortgage. The enormous expansion of freehold mortgage since World War II has been the product of deliberate state policy aimed at creating the “property-owning democracy”: its outcome is the property bubble of recent years and the pain of growing numbers of foreclosures affecting US workers (and soon, probably, British workers).

But for the alternative - renting - to be attractive, we need to replace both private landlords and bureaucratic-hierarchical public landlords. As far as the private landlords are concerned, their interest, like that of other monopolists, needs to be replaced by public ownership. In relation to public landlords, what is needed is democratically controlled public ownership housing; and a housing system which also respects the genuine human need for individual and group self-expression in relation to housing: ie, does not rely on bureaucratic micromanagement.

This aim requires - as Marx says of a post-capitalist economy generally - “continuous relative overproduction”. That is, there is a need to plan for a permanent oversupply of a substantial range of housing types (and, consequently, for staffing to maintain vacant housing) in order to achieve flexibility. Hence, while money values in housing are falling, the common interest of the working class requires the opposite judgment: that more resources should be put into housing.

[S.Artesian]

Exactly why I don't waste a minute reading Hudson, etc. He has nothing to offer about capitalism as a mode of production-- he thinks its all about rent-gouging.

The points are to 1) uncover the actual historical significance of rent in the development of capitalist relations of production in agriculture and the like 2) understand how Marx's analysis of rent changes between TSV part 2 and Capital Vol 3 when contained in Marx's analysis of the distribution of the total social profit is the apprehension of rent as subordinate to the accumulation of capital.

And Hudson is flat out stone-dead historically wrong, not that the railroads didn't appropriate "public land" but that the land has NO VALUE outside the process of appropriation.

What Hudson consistently does is argue for capitalism to NOT BE capitalism, to not require private acquisition, as if somehow that acquisition, the bullshit bugaboo of "monopoly" is somehow anti-thetical to a "healthy" capitalism.

In the end, Hudson program reduces itself to nothing but populism, appeals to small businesses, and criticism of capital for everything except the expropriation of wage labor.
In short, everything but class

Hmmh... no wonder you feel a common bond with his bunk.

Thanks for your input. And my best wishes for your future endeavors, although I don't think you know the slightest thing about what you pretend to talk about.

[Die Neue Zeit]

In the end, Hudson program reduces itself to nothing but populism, appeals to small businesses, and criticism of capital for everything except the expropriation of wage labor.
In short, everything but class

Hmmh... no wonder you feel a common bond with his bunk.

There's cheap economic populism and then there's radical economic populism. The latter combines substantive programmatic measures with populist delivery. I'm not a fan of his appeals to small businesses in countries with proletarian demographic majorities (i.e., the First World), but worker populism is something to connect with and not turn down like the Academic Marxists, New Leftists, and post-modernists do.

The Paris Commune was the first Communitarian Populist Front, anyway.

[S.Artesian]

There's cheap economic populism and then there's radical economic populism. The latter combines substantive programmatic measures with populist delivery. I'm not a fan of his appeals to small businesses in countries with proletarian demographic majorities (i.e., the First World), but worker populism is something to connect with and not turn down like the Academic Marxists, New Leftists, and post-modernists do.

The Paris Commune was the first Communitarian Populist Front, anyway.

Blahblahblahblahblahblah, there's this, and on the other hand there's that; then there's this again, and what's always missing is any concrete analysis of how the mode of production determines the agent and the means and the necessity for its own abolition.

[Die Neue Zeit]

He has nothing to offer about capitalism as a mode of production-- he thinks its all about rent-gouging.

To a large extent he is correct anyway, and perhaps more correct than he himself thinks. After all, he mentions the broadcast spectrum, which no theory of ground rent has or can cover.

Something I thought about only today, despite all my previous education on the subject: economies of scale. Revelation: a lot of this is in fact rent-gouging. Assuming comparable technologies with similar processes but different scale, there's no technical or process innovation, just scale. It's the same as differences between agriculturally productive land and unproductive land yielding rent, and differences between shop customer inflows in different locations.

Conclusion: Socialize all rents, 100%.

[S.Artesian]

And the bottom line is for Hudson, for all the rent mega-theorists ["everything's rent] is nothing other than Proudhon's little homily: "Property is theft." That's all there is to it.

Look at Hudson's take again:


A plague of rent-seekers is seeking quick gains by privatizng the public sector and erecting tollbooths to charge access fees to roads, power plants and other basic infrastructure.

[...]

Most wealth in history has been acquired either by armed conquest of the land, or by political insider dealing, such as the great US railroad land giveaways of the mid 19th century. The great American fortunes have been founded by prying land, public enterprises and monopoly rights from the public domain, because that's where the assets are to take. Ummm... so in fact what was the "wealth" of the land, the value of land, that the railroads acquired. Actually, there was no "value" embedded in the land outside the social relationship of production, which was in fact to use the land as private property to build a railroad to further the accumulation of capital.

If in the fact there was a public domain that could remain a public domain, then capitalism wouldn't be capitalism.

Behind Hudson's seemingly deep insight into "rent" is nothing other than the prosaic and pedestrian reality that capitalist production, like all production, has to access and utilize natural resources; that it takes place in a material world where value has no innate existence; that value is not inherent in nature. That's a wonderful insight.

And then... and then to say the "more wealth" has been obtained by armed conquest in land or by political insider dealing leads to the question... "more wealth than what?" Exactly what more wealth? The access to public land at reduced or no prices didn't make the railroads wealthy. It certainly reduced their costs, but it didn't make railroads wealthy except when and if those lands were sold off. And all that land grab did absolutely nothing to mitigate the violent boom-bust cycles of the railroads in the US both before and after the Civil War.

And so where does that get us... making capitalism a system of collecting rents as opposed to the reproduction of specific social relations of production? Nowhere. Worse than nowhere. To Proudhon's "anarchist" but state subsidized "socialism." To Hudson himself, imaging himself chairman of the council of economic advisors if only Kucinich where elected President.

Yep, that's gonna happen.... just as soon as I pay my rent.