Metal Reviews

*steeples fingers*

I'm afraid I can't allow it. Would set a dangerous precedent, you see. We'd have all sorts of people posting their homework and asking for help. This isn't an after-school club... small boys, in the park, jumpers for goalposts, mm?

*rambles incoherently*

And so you see I was very, very drunk.

Homework thread! homework thread!

implicit vanguardist I like when professors get cheeky. That sounds so much better than commie bastard.

How about I change the OT of my essay thread into something more general?

Yeah The guy I showed it to yesterday is my most senior supervisor and it's the first time I showed him my work I'd spent 6 months on. Basically the first thing he said was "so, what's the point of this document" in a manner that suggested the next line should be "because it's only good for wiping my arse with".

But anyway, it was weird because he mellowed throughout the meeting... by the end he was all like "It's pretty good, easily enough to pass". I think it was just because I managed to justify everything I'd written verbally, which maybe he wasn't expecting.

I assume your work was something leftist. I just wrote a term paper for a sociology course on how Marxism is completely disregarded by academia and its effect on social change. A few weeks ago, a professor said what I want to study was "conjured-up crap". I couldn't understand the relationship between oppression and power to "conjured-up crap". It's probably worse since you're in a business program setting right?

Yeah, basically my project is about how organised labour adapts to globalisation. I start with the assumption pretty much that international cooperation between trade unions is essential (so pretty much bog standard international socialism right there). Then I talk a lot about how getting involved in the "social contract" nation state project stops this happening and has made unions incapable of dealing with multinational corporations with supply chains in China and god knows where else (so, Lenin and Trotsky right there, both of whom I use as citations a couple of times for my theoretical chapter).

Actually, the setting is OK for me because of my department. The industrial relations department seems to have cloistered itself away from the rest of the establishment and be full of lefties who feel pretty out of place in a business school. My junior supervisor who I have the most contact with has a bookshelf full of Marx and Engels and even has a big picture of Karl as his desktop wallpaper. Then again, a lot of (in fact, I think nearly all) of the other students in my department are doing Human Resources Management, which I see as being pretty much the antithesis of my own area. But it's not like I get discriminated against at all. Supervisor criticisms are always academic rather than ideological. I think the "vanguardist" remark was almost made semi-approvingly. It's weird though because my own beliefs are a bit more libertarian socialist (Chomsky, Rudolf Rocker etc.) than Trotskyist.

That sucks... did they mean the very subject of Marxism was "conjured up crap", or did they have problems with the way you presented it? If the former, then you really have to worry about their qualifications, esp. if they are in a philosophy department.

International labor laws are the solution to preventing the exploitation of workers my multi-national corporations. I can tolerate Chomsky but if you started saying that Rawlsian liberalism, which Chosmky often tiptoes around, is fine then I'm going to stop respecting you.

About the "conjured up crap" comment, it was in a lecture about epistemology that he labeled marxism, deconstructionism, existentialism and critical theory as crap. The whole dept besides one guy is biased against non-analytical philosophy, ie: non british-american philosophy. The department as a whole is geared towards neurophysiology, which I wish I would've known before I applied but it was the closest university to me and I have 2/3 of the cost covered by a scholarship from them.

Well, International labour laws would be nice but by the time you've developed ones that can be tolerated by corporations, and which can actually be monitored and enforced (if that's even possible to do at all) then you have something that is vague and toothless. Plus the fact that you are relying on government to solve a problem that government has created.

International labour standards have to come from the bottom up. It is far, far better for developing world sweatshop workers to unionise and protect themselves than it is for them to be relying on some international regulatory body. The point of the Western labour movement should be to help us see international upwards convergence in standards through supporting labour movements in poorer countries. Laws themselves don't really help you do that.

When I say I'm more libertarian socialist than Trotskyist I mean that I am more in favour of "spontaneous" activism, or "creating the new world in the shell of the old", rather than an old-style revolutionary vanguard party which I see as engendering a dictatorial bureaucracy a la the USSR. I don't mean that I don't agree with the majority of Marxist analysis (both philosophically and in terms of political economy), because generally I do.

But as soon as you unionize in third world countries, the mnc will simply pack the factory up and ship it to a different country. There will always be new outlets people to exploit.

Well, it depends. Sometimes that isn't the case and actually there is more leeway than is commonly supposed. The logistical costs for the company are often greater than the costs of accomodating the union.

But yeah, of course, the ability of capital to up and leave is still the big problem here. This is precisely the reason Western unions have to collaborate with developing world ones. The only way forward is to develop international bargaining structures within companies, so it gradually becomes normal for collective bargaining to apply to the entire supply chain rather than individual workplaces. If that happens, then the company loses its spatial advantage.

The only actual legislation that I can see being effective myself (and that's actual pragmatically possible) would be something like a tax on capital mobility.

I could imagine companies simply eating the costs simply to avoid unions. Do you know if this would be common or do companies base moves on strictly economic reasoning? You don't have to know the answer; I was just wondering since it seems to be what you're studying and what not.

Depends on the environment, I guess. If you look at somewhere like China, 99% of unions there are likely to put very little burden on the company. All of them have to be affiliated to the central federation, which is effectively just another arm of the Party. So, many companies will tolerate unions there. In fact, as far as I know, China is the ONLY place in the world where Wal-Mart outlets are unionised, and that doesn't seem to have put that company off being there. Of course, like I said, this is because the union there is unable to challenge the company in any significant way.

So it all depends. But in my experience (which really isn't authoritative), the threat of relocating is used more often than the reality of it. When I was volunteering on a case at a factory in Alabama, the company was always dropping hints that they would relocate to a different city if the union got set up. The workers called their bluff in that case, and as far as I know the company is still there and the union has won some advances.

So, the idea of the "race to the bottom", while obviously being true in many cases, shouldn't be seen as a cause for too much nihilism amongst workers wanting to unionise. They can still fight. And, it is increasingly in the interests of Western trade unions to help them do so.

Get a room, Commies.

Charlie Manson, as he is now:

If anyone hasn't seen when Charles Manson did an interview in the early 80s, they need to. He calls people out for abusing the environment and all of this other shit that rings so true 20 years later. Still might be a fucking nutjob though.

Yeah, just possibly.

I guess I need to explain what I meant. He could either be a nutjob, a psychopath who had no understanding of the consequences or the inability to empathize with his victims, or just a straight up sick fuck who knew exactly what he was doing.

Or it could've all been just a conspiracy to pin him as a murderer when he was actually the Che of east LA.

Heh, as if.

Meanwhile, America nearly comes a cropper:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7956689.stm

the 3 in the pic are not from New Jersey.

A New Jersey 10 is an LA 6.

just so you know

God damn it, why is the cheapest copy of Obscura on Amazon $60?

Fridge's avatar makes me take his posts more seriously now, for some reason The Dude commands respect. I wonder if it works the opposite way for my Tobias?