Subject: Re: Discrimination and the OPE list
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 11:28:27 -0400 ()


Juan,
     Don't feel bad.  I was off all lists when the initial 
invitation went out.  I have been told that I was 
"recommended for admittance" to OPE-L, but, hey, I've never 
actually been invited.  And I am an academic, indeed a 
chaired professor with several books under my belt.
     But hey, everybody knows that on the M lists I get 
down and dirty, almost as bad as Proyect and malecki.  So, 
I don't blame the listmanagers of OPE-L, whoever they may 
be for not wanting me around.
Barkley Rosser
On Wed, 25 Sep 1996 01:30:26 -0400 Juan Inigo 
<jinigo-AT-inscri.org.ar> wrote:


> Gerald Levy (Jerry) writes about himself by way of his hypothetical obituary:
> 
> >As an economist, he will be best remembered (?) as the organizer and
> >coordinator of OPE-L, a small, closed Internet mailing list of Marxist
> >economists which began in 1995.
> 
> I've been in the Marxism list from its very beginning. Up to the end of
> 1995 I had the habit of reading every post sent to the list. But I've never
> seen here any public call to join the OPE list, nor even a concrete
> announcement about its formation. Only some vague, rather mysterious,
> comments from Jerry, concerning his intentions of leaving the list and
> forming his own one, since at that time he was unconfortable with
> everything that was going on here. So it seems most probable, and rather
> obvious, that the members of the OPE list joined it by a direct invitation
> from Jerry. How did it come I was never invited to join it?
> 
> Perhaps, Jerry ignored my existence. But no. During 1994 and 1995 I was a
> regular contributor to the discussions about scientific cognition as a
> necessary concrete form of conscious revolutionary action, dialectics,
> mathematics, the alienated and historical nature of philosophy and its
> necessary end as scientific method develops its historically concrete form
> of the reproduction of the concrete through the path of thought (Marx), as
> opposed to theoretical representation, etc. Moreover, I discussed about the
> historical nature of logical representation as the necessary historical
> form of alienated scientific cognition in capitalism with Jerry himself.
> And he was interested in renewing a discussion on my "style."
> 
> Perhaps Jerry ignored my interest in economic forms. But no. Currently, I
> was one of the main participants in most of the discussions on these
> matters: commodity, value, capital, surplus-value, the rate of profit, etc.
> 
> Perhaps Jerry considered my degree as a Licenciado en Economia from the
> Universidad de Buenos Aires (about 120 credits according to US standards)
> wasn't enough to enter a specialists' list. And, of course, like Doug
> Henwood, I don't enjoy calling myself an economist. But no. Apparently,
> Lisa Rogers was a member of the OPE list, and she didn't have any degree in
> political economy, nor made any claim about being an economist, as far as I
> know.
> 
> Perhaps Jerry considered I lacked the level of knowledge and original
> thinking needed to participate in the OPE discussions. But no. According to
> Jerry's own words, I am:
> 
> > you are a very sharp Marxist, ...
> 
> Perhaps Jerry believed I was a too frequent poster, that would flood the
> OPE with my messages. But no, I hardly posted more than one, at most two or
> three, messages a week, even while the discussions I participated in were
> peaking.
> 
> Perhaps Jerry considered I am too bad-mannered and fond of "a rather
> graphic language" (as Chris Burford called it once) to alternate with
> academic economists, so not even getting Louis Proyect lending me his
> opera-gala blue tuxedo would make me presentable at the OPE. But no. Most
> probably, I would have met there people like Steve Keen or John Ernst, who
> had such polite things to say about me as:
> 
> >You sound
> >more like a religious fundamentalist predicting Armageddon on the basis of
> >a reading of scriptures than a serious analyst of society.
> 
> >Your post reproduced below is simply absurd. You have just defended in
> >your own unique fashion the ... You do not even know it. You mount some
> >high horse about ideal and abstract and yammer away. Now that I have
> >vented, let's return to basics.
> >this accounts for a portion of my anger with you, ... I do think you do so
> >not out of dishonesty ...
> 
> In fact, Jerry himself felt the urgency of muddying his discussion with me,
> by turning me and "real workers" into two abstractions whose relationship
> should be such a funny thing as to deserved to be videotaped for him to
> enjoy later. And why? Just because he wasn't able to rationally deal with
> the proofs about Marx's unconditioned rejection of logic for being a
> necessary concrete form of alienated conscience that has to leave its place
> to the reproduction of the real necessity in thought, I opposed to Jerry's
> claims about "Marx's logic."
> 
> But wait. Perhaps my exclusion from the OPE list actually was due to my bad
> manners according to academic standards. Or aren't bad manners in the
> academic world to demand for a rational concrete reply without leaving the
> discussion just go round and round in an endless abstraction, that is
> thereafter presented as the "proof" that scientific cognition can't go
> further than interpreting the world in different ways?
> 
> And, really, I was bad-mannered in this respect. For instance, I was
> academically bad-mannered as to follow Steve Keen's fantasies about Marx
> being the true source of Steve's theory about the means of production being
> a source of surplus-value, not only to the point of making evident the true
> apologetic content of Steve's attempt, but that he himself produced his
> alleged Marx's self-contradiction by openly chopping a paragraph to change
> the grammatical subject of a sentence for its opposite. Has this
> falsification inhibited Jerry from inviting Steve to the OPE?
> 
> I was academically bad-mannered as to go on asking Allin Cottrell and Paul
> Cockshott to develop their concrete definition of "value" beyond their
> abstract "value=abstract labor," they needed to bring down all the specific
> determinations of the social product that embodies at the same time the
> general social relation among the private independent producers
> (commodities, and therefore, capital), to a "shorthand way of saying" (sic)
> _the attributes that are common to all the products of human labor
> whichever their social form_. Of course, their "model of
> socialism/communism," where a commodity producing society in which capital
> has reached its complete concentration is represented as the realization of
> human freedom, could be built only on such an inversion. Has their
> impossibility to develop the concrete determinations of value (and
> therefore, of self-valorizing value, capital) inhibited Jerry from inviting
> Allin and Paul to the OPE?
> 
> I was academically bad-mannered as to go on asking John Ernst for the units
> in which he claims to unequivocally measure the technical composition of
> capital (a material relationship that is impossible to measure in that way)
> to construct his model of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. And I
> was equally bad-mannered to ask him for a reply to my mathematical
> demonstration of how John's model brings down the organic determinations of
> that tendency to a tautological mechanical relation inherent in its
> mathematical structure, after starting by abstracting from the development
> of value into its concrete forms by labeling this development a "religious"
> approach, thus fulfilling its ideological determination as the perfect
> partner of Neo-Ricardianism in some endless apparent discussions. Has the
> open abstractness of John's models inhibited Jerry from inviting him to the
> OPE?
> 
> Now, why do I care? In the first place, I don't belong to the academic
> world. Which means, among many other things, that my writings probably will
> never pass a "peer" refereeing (I have a collection of the most funny
> reasons to justify their rejection, including one from Science and Society
> stating that my arguments should be isolated from my "relentless logic"
> (sic), as the only possible way of concluding that "there must be something
> wrong" in them).
> 
> At the same time, I live in what could be properly considered "el culo del
> mundo," both in the geographic and the Marxist scientific discussion sense.
> To attend a scientific meeting were I can get engaged in a direct public
> exchange with, for instance, Fred Moseley (who, in a recent paper, refers
> his arguments to the detailed discussions held on the OPE list), means to
> me paying a 1000 $ air ticket, to begin with (and recall I live on a third
> world wage). If I wanted to get in touch with any journal or new book
> published on Marxist economic theory, I have no way other than buying them
> from the publisher (add 8 $ per book for air mail freight). This sort of
> books has ceased to be published in Spanish long ago, and they are not
> available in public libraries here. I can only mitigate the problem thanks
> to some good friends that send me photocopies, specially of journal's
> articles.
> 
> With the opening of the Marxism list, a breath of fresh air came to me. It
> offered me the possibility of engaging in open scientific discussions,
> unrestricted by length or time limitations to develop one's arguments, and
> free from "peer" censorship. It looked as an exceptional place to develop
> (regardless to what degree) the necessarily collective task of developing
> science as the necessary way of ruling conscious revolutionary action. In
> this sense, my expectations about the Marxism list were no so far from
> Louis Proyect's, albeit "conscious revolutionary action" has quite
> different concrete meanings for each of us. And the same applies concerning
> people with a strong scientific formation but outside, and solidly critic
> to, the academic world, as Jim Miller. Furthermore, the same type of
> expectations was shared by other members of the list that, for their own
> reasons, preferred to manifest them in their personal posts. Even the (to
> me and others) foreign language seemed a minor obstacle, under such
> exceptional conditions.
> 
> But they were exceptional conditions, indeed. Academia doesn't exist just
> because. It is a necessary concrete form taken by the capitalist regulation
> of social life with respect to the production of scientific cognition. And
> an open place were non-academic scientists criticized academic dogma and
> false constructions that enjoy passing as the quintessence of social
> criticism under the label of Marxism, to the extent of making evident their
> emptiness (and actually ideological fullness), jeopardizes (again, in
> whatever extent) the production of alienated conscience. So the time to
> restore the monopoly on scientific cognition to the academic world reached
> the Marxism list quite soon.
> 
> At first sight, the so-called activists that flood the list with an
> abstract post after another (abstract since the most concrete real form is
> turned into a pure abstraction as soon as it is isolated from its
> determinations, as it is the norm in that sort of posts) appear as the
> absolute opposite to academics. Yet, they are the two faces of the same
> coin in this question of rebuilding the monopoly of academia on scientific
> discussion on the Internet.
> 
> The flood in question is the most useless stuff concerning conscious
> action. Still, it is better to have a 1000:1 "flame-war"/substantiated
> posts ratio, to the close of the open substantiated discussion on the
> single latter. But the flood of "flame-war" posts is a necessary condition
> for the academics to close that discussion without unveiling their true
> political determinations. The discussion must be closed, not because
> academics are openly exposed as what they are, personifications of
> capital's necessity to produce alienated conscience, but because "no
> serious scientific discussion can be developed under such a noise"!
> 
> This was exactly the sort of argument Jerry used by the time he was, most
> probably, building his private (that this is what something exclusive is,
> in the most strict sense of the word) list. The situation reproduced itself
> on a larger scale with the formation of Marxism 2. And since it became
> visible that this was not enough, it exploded in the complete fragmentation
> of M1 and M2 into a bunch of closed niches. Jerry's pioneering "admittance
> only on invitation" and "restricted matters only" is now the general
> emblem. At the same time, the remainings of the open list are constantly
> presented under the leitmotif "recommended for flame-wars lover's only" or
> "you will get what you deserve for being in that sort of list."
> 
> But, of course, no political intention underlies the Spoon's decision! It
> is just the "rational decision" of a group of good-willed people to enhance
> everyone's possibility of substantiated and profound discussion vis-a-vis
> the endless flame-wars inherent in an unique open list! Provided you are
> invited, admitted and not expelled following the "moderators"' disposition,
> of course. Mierda!
> 
> Jerry is guilty of exercising political discrimination (against me, to
> begin with and to be absolutely concrete), as he personifies capital's need
> to exclude from scientific discussion the criticism of social forms beyond
> appearances.
> 
> Like Marx, I'm not interested in "writing recipes for the cook-shops of the
> future." Much less, in how Jerry "will be best remembered" after his death.
> I'm interested in changing what exists now. From this point of view, Jerry
> is today a concrete living head of the political action aimed at disarming
> the open discussion about capitalist economic forms (therefore, about the
> necessity itself of the proletariat's conscious revolutionary action) and
> at pushing it into secluded environments as the OPE list.
> 
> Today, Jerry is best known to me as the economist that, as a part of the
> authoritative structure of academy, exercises political discrimination,
> therefore repression, against people like me that have the political aim of
> developing science as the necessary concrete form of ruling conscious
> revolutionary action. And, obviously, he is quite proud of it.
> 
> Could Jerry reply this post other than by opening the OPE list to anyone
> interested in a substantiated and unconditioned scientific discussion in
> it?
> 
> Juan Inigo
> jinigo-AT-inscri.org.ar
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Rosser Jr, John Barkley
rosserjb-AT-jmu.edu




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