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

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

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

“On the menu or at the table”: Corporations and climate change

“Another World Is Possible!” announces a placard held by a demonstrator on an unspecified global justice movement protest. The photograph is the background graphic of an advert. Above it the Shell logo. The advert is for a conference sponsored by the oil giant, entitled “Climate Change: Is Business Doing Enough?” Not so long ago Shell denied climate change altogether. In 1989 it set up the Global Climate Coalition along with several dozen other fossil fuel, vehicle and chemical companies. The avowed aims were to sow doubt about scientific claims concerning global warming and to forestall political efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The coalition invested heavily in public relations campaigns warning that efforts to reduce emissions by restricting the burning of fossil fuels were misguided and would cause economic disaster. Its efforts helped to put policy making on climate change on hold for years

Karl Polanyi and Oszkar Jászi: Liberal socialism, the aster revolution and the Tanácsköztársaság

For the abstract, please see the attached PDF