Two Poems

Poetry by Dale Tracy

Critiques of growth in classical political economy: Mill's stationary state and a Marxian response

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in New Political Economy, 18(3), 431 - 457, 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13563467.2012.709839.In recent political-economic theories of ‘nature’, Mill and Marx/Engels form important reference points. Ecological economists see Mill's ‘stationary state’ as seminal, while Marxists have ‘brought capitalism back in’ to debates on growth and climate change, sparking a Marxological renaissance that has overturned our understanding of Marx/Engels' opus. This article explores aspects of Mill's and Marx/Engels' work and contemporary reception. It identifies a resemblance between their historical dialectics. Marx's communism is driven by logics of ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ (including the ‘tendency of profit rates to fall’). In Mill's dialectic a ‘thesis’, material progress, calls forth its ‘antithesis’, diminishing returns. The inevitable ‘Aufhebung’ is a stationary state of wealth and population; Mill mentions countervailing tendencies but fails to consider their capacity to postpone utopia's arrival. Today, Mill's schema lives on in ecological economics, shorn of determinism but with its market advocacy intact. It appears to contrast with the ‘productive forces expansion’ espoused by Marx/Engels. They stand accused of ‘Promethean arrogance’, ignoring ‘natural limits’ and ‘gambling on abundance’. But I find these criticisms to be ill-judged, and propose an alternative reading, arguing that their work contains a critique of the ‘growth paradigm’, and that their ‘cornucopian’ ends do not sanction ‘Promethean’ means

An Inside Game in Wisconsin: IBEW 1791 vs. Marathon Electric

[Excerpt] By the mid-1980s, allegations of union busting had become as common in the upper Midwest\u27s labor environment as management claims that competition was forcing it to seek concessions. Regardless of management\u27s true intent, local unions from Milwaukee to Minneapolis often lost ground, either in contract talks or in keeping their members interested and supportive. They lost because they continued to fight the old way, while management was using a barrage of new weapons from corporate restructurings and plant modernizations to clever legal maneuvers. But a battle fought in central Wisconsin turned the tables on management there in 1987, when 590 members of Local 1791 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) mastered the use of previously unheard of workplace strategies. The new labor tactic saved Local 1791 and its members\u27 jobs. It eventually led management to reverse its stand from harsh concessions to a healthy pay and benefit increase, and it sent a significant sign to management that labor had learned to fight back the modern way

Achieving User Interface Heterogeneity in a Distributed Environment

The introduction of distribution into the field of computing has enhanced the possibilities of information processing and interchange on scales which could not previously be achieved with stand-alone machines. However, the successful distribution of a process across a distributed system requires three problems to be considered; how the functionality of a process is distributed, how the data set on which the process works is distributed and how the interface that allows the process to communicate with the outside world is distributed. The focus of the work in this paper lies in describing a model that attempts to provide a solution to the latter problem. The model that has been developed allows the functionality of a process to be separated from and to exist independently from its interface and employs user interface independent display languages to provide distributed and heterogeneous user interfaces to processes. This separation also facilitates access to a service from diverse platforms and can support user interface mobility and third-party application integration. The goals and advantages of this model are partially realised in a prototype that has been designed around the WWW and its associated protocols, and it is predicted how the model could be fully realised by adopting a modular and object-oriented approach, as advocated by the Java programming environment

Karl Polanyi’s the great transformation: Perverse effects, protectionism and gemeinschaft

Drawing upon Karl Polanyi’s journalistic writings and unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, this article reconstructs the lineaments of his research programme that was to assume its finished form in The Great Transformation. It identifies and corrects a common misinterpretation of the thesis of that book, and argues that Polanyi’s basic theoretical framework is best conceived as Tönniesian: the ‘protective counter-movement’ of The Great Transformation is Gemeinschaft, understood dynamically, while the market society is Gesellschaft. It examines the two central mechanisms by which, in Polanyi’s understanding, Gesellschaft broke down in the mid-twentieth century: the ‘clash between democracy and capitalism,’ and a doctrine of ‘perverse effects’ whereby political intervention in markets impairs profitability and saps the vitality of the market system

Ask an expert: setting the frame

Recently, I asked my second year university students to debate the pros and cons of written versus verbal contracts. They divided into groups with one half of the room listing the pros and the other half the cons. One group thought a written contract contravenes the ethical principle of justice, as it militates against the blind or illiterate. Whereas the other group pointed out that without a written contract that the client can take home and consider, it is hard to obtain informed consent. One person pointed out that the ethical question might be whether or not justice (treating everyone fairly) trumps autonomy (informed consent). What is a contrac