The following is a copy of an interview given by the American historian Clayborne Carson with the World Socialist Web Site. I found it illuminating for it’s discussion on the demarcation and bracketing of historical movements, those that are latent… those which are eventually born.

Clayborne Carson is professor of history at Stanford University and director of its Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. He is the author and editor of numerous books on King and the civil rights movement. Carson was chosen by Coretta Scott King to oversee the publication of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Seven of 14 planned volumes have been published under his direction.

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Teresa Hayter’s ‘Aid as Imperialism’, was one of the first somewhat critical texts written about the post world-war II monetary institutions, from a so called insider’s view. Having spent some time employed at the Overseas Development Institute, the World Bank financed Teresa’s research on the effectiveness of aid packages provided to Third World countries. Given it was intended as a publication on behalf of the ODI, one certainly encounters a report which offers an objective overview of the various policy approaches that these institutions taken. The first half of the text, is an outline, not a critique. The second half turns to evaluating the implementation of these approaches in several countries. Here is where we find a critical evaluation, which best portrays the inflexibility of foreign aid packages, which, Teresa believed, were given more so as blanket prescriptions, dogmas even. A standard buffet of currency devaluations and austerity measures — liberalize, liberalize, liberalize! It is for this reason that the Overseas Development Institute rejected the original report for publication. Fortunately, it eventually made it’s way to us common readers. The following is an excerpt from the text, focusing on the involvement of these aid agencies in Chile, a country which is emblematic of the deep difficulties of modernization and sovereignty in the global periphery.

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An excerpt from William Lazonick’s terrific work “Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy”, a book that offers a critique of what a ‘market economy’ is purported to be, through an evaluation of the strategies and economic histories of businesses within what can be called “actually existing capitalism”.

Here, at the risk of a small amount of repetition, I shall supplement that discussion by focusing on the nature of fixed costs, the different sources of uncertainty the innovative organization faces, and the relation between organizational capability and technological change. Through its investment activities, a business organization commits financial resources to specific processes to make particular products with the expectation of reaping financial returns. Once they are committed, the productive assets of the organization represent fixed costs that must then be recouped by the production and sale of output. If, through the sale of sufficient output, investments could generate expected financial returns instantaneously, fixed costs would not represent an economic problem to the organization. But then, we would probably not call the “assets” underlying these costs “investments.” Indeed, we might not even deem it appropriate to call these costs “fixed” or the entity that incurs them a firm. The problem of fixed costs occurs because the production and sale of the enterprise’s output occur neither instantaneously nor with certainty. The basic economic problem that confronts the capitalist enterprise is to transform fixed costs into revenue-generating products to realize financial returns. An analysis of how and with what success the business organization manages this transformation is the key to understanding technological change, value creation, and economic growth.

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Chapter five from Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain by Dan Stone.

As we have seen, before the First World War, and in some circles until well into the interwar period, eugenics — literally, ‘well born’ or ‘good stocks’— was the height of sophisticated, ‘progressive’ thought.¹ Across Europe, the novels and plays of the period, such as H. G. Wells’s The New Machiavelli (1911) and George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1905), are suffused with the language of race-regeneration and fears of physical deterioration. In Arthur Schnitzler’s novel, The Road to the Open (1908), Berthold Stauber, a young and enthusiastic Viennese Jewish physician, tells his father, the humane Dr Stauber, that ‘You need only consider, father, that the most honest and consistent social hygiene would have the direct result of annihilating diseased people, or at any rate excluding them from all enjoyment of life, and I don’t deny that I have all kinds of ideas tending in that way which may seem cruel at the first glance.’ He went on to say that ‘You needn’t be afraid, father, that I shall begin straight away to preach the murder of the unhealthy and superfluous. But theoretically that’s certainly what my programme leads to.’² Although primarily a conservative ideology, both left and right were attracted to eugenic proposals. These ranged from ‘positive’ measures such as the encouragement of ‘hygienic marriage’, that is, marriage between two people of good stock, to ‘negative’ measures such as sterilisation or segregation in order to ensure that the unfit, feeble-minded and morally degenerate did not have children. In this chapter I will consider eugenics in general, before concentrating on one aspect of its rhetoric which to a post-Second World War audience is perhaps even more shocking than it was to an Edwardian one.

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Stephen R. Shalom is emeritus professor of Political Science at William Paterson University of New Jersey, USA. He is a member of the editorial board of New Politics, and a long-time activist in peace and justice movements. Among other works, he is the author of Which Side Are You On? An Introduction to Politics (Longman, 2003), “Parpolity: A Political System for a Good Society,” in Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century, ed. Chris Spannos, AK Press, 2008) and editor of Socialist Visions (South End Press, 1983).

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Published in 1966. The text speaks for itself – a terrific contextualisation of the National Liberation Movements.

If any of us came to Cuba with doubts in our mind about the solidity, strength, maturity and vitality of the Cuban Revolution, these doubts have been removed by what we have been able to see. Our hearts are now warmed by an unshakeable certainty which gives us courage in the difficult but glorious struggle against the common enemy: no power in the world will be able to destroy this Cuban Revolution, which is creating in the countryside and in the towns not only a new life but also — and even more important — a New Man, fully conscious of his national, continental and international rights and duties. In every field of activity the Cuban people have made major progress during the last seven years, particularly in 1965, Year of Agriculture.

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In The Fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm.An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said, no, I was a teacher.What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain community college not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. “Oh well,” I heard him say finally, behind me: “I guess I have to take your course to find out.”

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I see this as a terrific example of where reasoned and well formed criticism can stand on its own, in spite of the divergent trajectory which the author appears to take later on in his life through his reactionary offshoots.

As with any analytical field of inquiry which aspires to achieving insights, syntheses and increased understandings of the world, Marxism contains a broad array of unique and differeing perspectives, some of which fall far short of the high standard of rigor demanded of a scientific field. Here, Geras addresses several lazy and incongruent arguments put forward by Marxists who are themselves claiming to remedy pitfalls in Marx’s views; a public purging of sorts, these types of obloquy.

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Class Letters seeks to be a regularly updated feed of articles, unified by the goal of building a socialist~communist consciousness, itself thereafter seeking a real body politic.

Alongside more clearly defined political and philosophical texts, Class Letters incorporates works from different scientific, and health fields, bound by the commitment that communist work can, and should be scientific. Without a doubt, there is a purposeful goal of educating, and the goals of the autodidact are encouraged — we have a reverence for education and it’s transformative potentials.

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In looking to imagine and crystallise potential alternatives to the seemingly unending vortex of underdevelopment and poverty in third and second world nations, an understanding of the deficiencies and insufficiencies of the current macroeconomic arrangement is an obvious starting point. The post-Bretton Woods monetary consensus, which promised to guarantee mutual ‘real growth’ through endless liberalization of domestic markets and fluctuating exchange rates, has in whole been failure for developing countries. Instead, of self-sufficiency and self-confidence, there isn’t even what one one called ‘multi-lateral beneficence’, but rather, a reliance and dependency on the most powerful players in the game, at the mercy of commodities swings and speculative exuberance (rather than being ’liberated’ and domestically sound, buffered from ‘shocks’). One wonders what one would do if they swapped shoes. What shall we do once we take control of these responsibilities?

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This is part 2 of the post on Jason Fung’s ‘Cancer Code’. I found this a remarkable case point in the iatrogenic potential of public health interventions in which the effect on mortality is masked by a surrogate of survival; early detection. When tracked for long enough time, early detection does more harm than good, and thus, fails as a successful surrogate. You can find part one here.

I encourage everyone to read the entirety of Jason’s “The Cancer Code”. It’s a terrific work of ‘popular’ scientific writing, a story as much about the biology of Cancer as it is about the sociology of biomedical practice and research.

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This post will be in two parts, both of which I find are illustrative of the difficulties of public health strategies. One makes particularly obvious the severe misanthropic consequences of profit seeking drives in the areas of health and medicine, and the second is a remarkable case point in the iatrogenic potential of public health interventions which may be completely benevolent in intention – something that all states irrespective of political structure must address. Part one is contained below, you can find part two here.

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Original at https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ . Linked to it via Paul Cockshott.

The Question

That said this is a question that is not absurd a priori. As we’ll see, the Roman Empire was never close to an industrial revolution – a great many of the preconditions were missing – but the idea that it might have been on the cusp of being something like a modern economy did once have its day in the scholarship. As I’ve mentioned before, the dominant feature of the historical debate among scholars about the shape of the Roman economy is between ‘modernists’ who argue the Roman economy is relatively more like a modern economy (meaning both that it was relatively more prosperous than other ancient economies but also that the Romans themselves maintained a more modern, familiar outlook towards money, investment and production) and ‘primitivsts’ who argue that actually the Roman economy was quite primitive, less prosperous and with the Romans themselves holding attitudes about the economy quite alien to our own. But here we need to get into a bit more specificity because beneath that quick description it is necessary to separate what we might call the ‘old modernists’ and the ‘new modernists.’

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Few events inspire more speculation than long and unexplained pauses in the activities of famous people. Rossini crowned a brilliant operatic career with William Tell and then wrote almost nothing for the next thirty-five years. Dorothy Sayers abandoned Lord Peter Wimsey at the height of his popularity and turned instead to God. Charles Darwin developed a radical theory of evolution in 1838 and published it twenty-one years later only because A. R. Wallace was about to scoop him.

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The articles contained in this book were written some ten years ago. Author and reader may well ask why they should be republished just now. At first sight they might seem to lack all topicality. Subject and tone alike may appear remote to a considerable section of public opinion. I believe, however, that they have some topicality in that, without entering upon any detailed polemics, they represent a point of view in opposition to certain literary and philosophical trends still very much to the fore today. Let us begin with the general atmosphere: the clouds of mysticism which once surrounded the phenomena of literature with a poetic colour and warmth and created an intimate and ‘‘interesting’’ atmosphere around them, have been dispersed. Things now face us in a clear, sharp light which to many may seem cold and hard; a light shed on them by the teachings of Marx. Marxism searches for the material roots of each phenomenon, regards them in their historical connections and movement, ascertains the laws of such movement and demonstrates their development from root to flower, and in so doing lifts every phenomenon out of a merely emotional, irrational, mystic fog and brings it to the bright light of understanding.

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