Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

July 31, 2015

Merchants of Doubt

Filed under: Counterpunch,Ecology — louisproyect @ 12:49 pm

Manufacturing Denial

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”, the 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, is required reading in order to understand the threats to our health and overall survival posed by the well-funded pseudo-scientific think-tanks that have their origins in Cold War anti-Communism. As unlikely as it might seem, the very scientists who ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers pay to cast doubt on climate change are part of a network that got started in the 1950s when scientists, including those who worked for the tobacco industry, were at last coming to the conclusion that smoking causes cancer. The tobacco companies needed “experts” to obfuscate the issues just as they need them today to cast doubt on climate change.

How and why this kind of bogus science was rooted in the anti-Communist crusade of the post-WWII era is laid out in compelling detail in “Merchants of Doubt”, a book that combines investigative reporting by a couple of science historians with a flair for detective work that would impress Agatha Christie.

As a companion piece, I can also recommend the 2014 documentary of the same name that the book inspired. Ably directed by Robert Kenner, it can now be seen on Amazon.com streaming. Both the book and the film will leave you with the conclusion that some of America’s richest and most powerful corporations prostituted a group of scientists into betraying science to boost their patron’s profits. But on further reflection, it is likely that these men would have lied even if they had never received a penny since their ideological predispositions made them the perfect tools to carry out the corporate mandate. And on even further reflection after that, it probably does not make sense to refer to prostitution since it is an honorable profession compared to what these scientists were up to.

Read full article

July 29, 2015

Richard Bernstein and New York’s nail salons

Filed under: sexism,workers — louisproyect @ 2:43 pm

Richard Bernstein

In May the NY Times ran a series of investigative reports on the city’s nail salons that depicted a trail of abuse that consisted of sub-minimum wage pay, exposure to toxic chemicals and a work week that might consist of 66 hours according to one report.

I found the articles compelling both for what they said about super-exploitation and as a welcome exposure of one of the city’s more dubious enterprises. When I moved to New York in 1979, they were beginning to take root. Like everything else that has transformed the city into a playground for the rich and the superrich, they always struck me as a kind of decadent reminder of colonialism with white women having their hands and feet catered to by Asian women. Sarah Maslin Nir, who deserves a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting, wrote:

The juxtapositions in nail salon workers’ lives can be jarring. Many spend their days holding hands with women of unimaginable affluence, at salons on Madison Avenue and in Greenwich, Conn. Away from the manicure tables they crash in flophouses packed with bunk beds, or in fetid apartments shared by as many as a dozen strangers.

Ms. Ren worked at Bee Nails, a chandelier-spangled salon in Hicksville, N.Y., where leather pedicure chairs are equipped with iPads on articulated arms so patrons can scroll the screens without smudging their manicures. They rarely spoke more than a few words to Ms. Ren, who, like most manicurists, wore a fake name chosen by a supervisor on a tag pinned to her chest. She was “Sherry.” She worked in silence, sloughing off calluses from customers’ feet or clipping dead skin from around their fingernail beds.

At night she returned to sleep jammed in a one-bedroom apartment in Flushing with her cousin, her cousin’s father and three strangers. Beds crowded the living room, each cordoned off by shower curtains hung from the ceiling. When lights flicked on in the kitchen, cockroaches skittered across the countertops.

The articles were so well researched and so filled with righteous indignation simmering beneath the surface of the typically neutral reportorial style that they were enough to spur NY State’s neoliberal governor into action. On May 18th he announced a series of bills that would curtail such abuses and that would include a Bill of Rights to be posted in every workplace informing workers of their rights to a decent wage and normal working hours.

Four days ago, however, a blog post titled “What the ‘Times’ Got Wrong About Nail Salons” appeared in the New York Review of Books, a high-toned journal that has been around since 1963. During the Vietnam War it reflected the popular mood, publishing articles by Noam Chomsky and other leftists. As it has gotten older, it has moved to the center and become complacent. So in that sense, it was no surprise that Bernstein would submit his article to the NY Review and that they would publish it.

Bernstein traded on the fact that he used to work for the Times and that his Chinese wife and sister-in-law run a nail salon:

As a former New York Times journalist who also has been, for the last twelve years, a part owner of two day-spas in Manhattan, I read the exposé with particular interest. (A second part of the same investigation, which appeared in the Times a day later, concerned chemicals used in the salon industry that might be harmful to workers.) Our two modestly-sized establishments are operated by my wife, Zhongmei Li, and my sister-in-law, Zhongqin Li, both originally from China, and “mani-pedi” is a big part of the business. We were startled by the Times article’s Dickensian portrait of an industry in which workers “spend their days holding hands with women of unimaginable affluence,” and retire at night to “flophouses packed with bunk beds, or in fetid apartments shared by as many as a dozen strangers.” Its conclusion was not just that some salons or even many salons steal wages from their workers but that virtually all of them do. “Step into the prim confines of almost any salon and workers paid astonishingly low wages can be readily found,” the story asserts. This depiction of the business didn’t correspond with what we have experienced over the past twelve years. But far more troubling, as we discovered when we began to look into the story’s claims and check its sources, was the flimsy and sometimes wholly inaccurate information on which those sweeping conclusions were based.

Today I was pleased to see the NY Times response to Bernstein that basically stated that Bernstein was trying to depict his own nail salons as typical of the industry when the investigative reporting team’s work was based on a broad cross-section and backed up by Department of Labor statistics. It concluded with this knockout punch:

Mr. Bernstein produced much fine and admirable work during his lengthy tenure at The Times. He has many friends here. To his credit, he has been upfront about being part of the salon industry and having a vested financial interest in its health. Still, that doesn’t alter the fact that he has taken on the role of a partisan defender, not a journalist.

In an exchange prior to his story, Mr. Bernstein argued that our stories failed to highlight how being a manicurist can lead to a successful career as a salon owner. We concede he made a valid point about certain positives in the industry that could have been amplified. But we are nonetheless disappointed that the New York Review of Books chose to publish what is essentially an example of industry advocacy, not unbiased journalism.

Out of curiosity, I checked out Bernstein’s articles in the NY Times archives just to see why someone would try to put a positive spin on an industry that was just one step up from slave labor. With 1,867 articles to his credit, I could find none that were particularly obnoxious.

But what did catch my eye was a review of a book he wrote in 2009 titled “The East, The West, And Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters”. Hmm. What was up with that? Reviewer Simon Winchester found this observation of Bernstein’s troublesome: “the sexual advantage of the Western man in the East is an aspect of Western dynamism, the questing spirit of Europeans, compared with the relative passivity of Asian in these matters.” Talk about Orientalism!

Winchester was relatively charitable to Bernstein, as you would expect for a review of an alumni’s book, but Salon.com not so much as might be indicated by the tile of Laura Miller’s review: “White male seeking sexy Asian women”. She wrote:

However, sexual freedom, to a greater and more intimate degree than any other freedom, is a paradoxical thing. Unless you’re talking about masturbation, then someone else — a human being with his or her own desires and dislikes — is involved. If you define sexual freedom as being able to do whatever you want with whomever you please, then (except in very rare cases of perfect compatibility with one’s partner at every moment) one man’s freedom is another woman’s compulsion. Women in traditional harem cultures languished in a condition of de facto slavery, where they had no right to determine anything about their own lives, let alone their sexual partners and activities. Their very survival was predicated on pleasing men. They were treated for the most part as animate commodities, like livestock, to be bought, sold and discarded at will. And if Eastern men’s adulterous shenanigans were regarded as “natural,” in women such behavior was punishable by extreme social ostracism and frequently by death.

No wonder that a man who wrote a book that was indifferent to Asian women languishing in “a condition of de facto slavery” and being treated “like livestock” would put the best possible spin on nail salons.

Disgusting.

 

 

July 28, 2015

A Putin fan of note

Filed under: anti-Semitism,Fascism,Russia — louisproyect @ 9:52 pm

Screen Shot 2015-07-28 at 5.46.47 PM

An example of how a Putin fan understood the origins of WWII

WordPress has a list of all the url’s that link to my blog and I am in the habit of checking them out, including one that  that took me to a neo-Nazi website run by a piece of dirt named Mike King. In an rant against the Working Families Party, King linked to my blog: “The Working Families Party is a known Marxist entity – a detail which the writer fails to mention. (here)”

I am the aforementioned writer and the here in parentheses is a link to something I wrote that described the WFP as a wing of the Democratic Party despite their nominal independence.

Looking a bit more into King’s website, I found this on a page about the origins of WWII: “Jewish Red terrorists, their Polish government protectors, and their Globalist-Zionist masters have picked a fight with Germany!”

On his video page, he has a clip described as “ZIONIST-MARXISTS PROMOTE ANTI-WHITE VIOLENCE”.

But what really intrigued me was how this guy was a big Putin fan. On the video page, he has a clip of Putin laughing “in the Face of a Stupid Western Journalist!”

So gung-ho is he on Putin that he wrote an entire book titled “The Talented Mr. Putin: How the government media complex does not want you to know about the new Russia.” Sounds fascinating.

As it turns out Paul Craig Roberts reviewed the book:

There is an interesting book, a pamphlet (booklet) really, titled “The War Against Putin” by M.S. King available on Amazon.com. The book has 16 5-star reviews and one review accusing the book of being Kremlin propaganda.

The value of this publication is in showing how Washington operated against the Soviet Union and how Washington operates against Russia today. Readers will gain insight into the mendacity of the government in Washington and learn that the US and European media are propagandistic organizations that impose false stories on the minds of Americans and Europeans. Anyone who relies on the Western media lives inside The Matrix.

(clip)

Interesting. Very interesting.

Continuing the conversation about IT and the Grexit

Filed under: computers,Greece — louisproyect @ 3:32 pm

Apparently my brief reference to Australian economics professor emeritus Bill Mitchell’s failure to mention the IT aspects of Grexit in a Naked Capitalism article touched a nerve. In a 3500 word article that appeared on his blog on Friday, July 24th he minimized the challenges and appealed to his own authority as an IT professional to drive his case home. He also took up some points in my article that weren’t really directed at him, particularly my brief remarks around the question of a Grexit not being sufficient to bring an end to austerity.

I did not have Dr. Mitchell in mind when I made that point. Furthermore, I don’t think that there is that much difference between us on the economic questions but as I will now point out we are still far apart on the IT implications of a Grexit that I will now explain.

To start with, he groups me with the sensationalistic media reports on Y2K that warned about Armageddon as if I or any other seasoned professional really worried about such an outcome. He also alludes to the opportunistic sales pitches from consulting companies anxious to get their foot in the door to help firms large and small avoid a Y2K catastrophe but at a steep price. If you were part of the permanent staff in any large organization like Columbia University, you had a very clear idea about how to do a Y2K conversion without tears.

Furthermore, I am quite sure that given sufficient time, funding and personnel, the conversion to the drachma is feasible. But the purpose of my article was not to argue that it was impossible. It was only to alert a lay audience what kind of challenge it represented. For those who have not managed large-scale project implementations, it was easy to imagine that such a conversion could take place in something like a few months. But I am convinced that it would probably take no less than three years based on my 44 year experience managing, designing, programming and testing mission-critical applications in a variety of banks, brokerage houses, and insurance companies. That was about what it took to go from national currencies to the euro and I would expect that it would take about the same amount of time to reverse engineer the process.

Perhaps nothing captures Dr. Mitchell’s unfamiliarity with the IT challenges facing a euro-to-drachma conversion than what he has to say about Y2K:

As the Naked Capitalism author notes it was really about software that had used two numbers to designate the year (MMDDYY) instead of four (MMDDYYYY). Several straightforward computer changes were made to resolve the possible problems depending on the situation (date expansion, date re-partitioning in overfull databases, windowing patches etc). Very trivial.

I did a double-take when I read this. Very trivial? Well, it is very trivial to expand the year from two digits to four digits but that was never the challenge. In fact Dr. Mitchell completely ignored what I wrote, namely that the task of finding the code was like looking for a needle in haystack. At Columbia University we divided up thousands of programs and assigned programmers to search through thousands of lines within each program to track down a six-digit date and convert it to eight digits. It took 10 seconds to modify each date when it was found but it took the better part of a year to find them all. To repeat, a search for any field of data that had “date” in its name was straightforward but what if a programmer labeled it “dt” or even “d”? Furthermore, what if a piece of data identified as “admission_date” is moved into a temporary field called “admission_temp”? You have to track the movement of data within the entire program to be sure that you had all bases covered. This was a laborious task that took us the better part of a year. It also took another year for IT to test all of the modified programs to make sure that the integrity of the data was preserved.

Greece would run into the same challenges in a euro to drachma conversion but likely would not have the kind of infrastructure that a well-endowed Ivy university was able to rely on. Given the economic desperation and chaotic conditions that Greek firms large and small operate within, it is a serious mistake to use one’s influence to persuade policy-makers to leap without looking first.

Continuing in his best case scenario vein, Dr. Mitchell dismisses the possibility that hard-coded values in a program constitute a major hurdle:

The issue is simple. Rules for determining eligibility for a service (mortgage etc) might have thresholds hard-coded into the computer system. So if your bank balance is above 1000 you qualify for a loan. Good programming clearly creates variable definitions (say, $threshold = 1000) in easy to find and edit part of the system and then uses symbolic references ($threshold) throughout the rest of the system so that when the threshold might require alteration there is one data entry required which feed the old system.

Yes, we are all for “good programming” but my experience over the years is that there is enough space between “good programming” and the actual code in legacy systems to steer an ocean liner through. In the ideal world, a hard-coded value is never used. For example, as Dr. Mitchell points out, it is good practice to define an external variable such as $threshold but in practice Cobol programmers (the language of choice in most financial applications) tend to take shortcuts because they are always under the gun to meet a deadline. So instead of defining an external variable that can be modified in a single location, they will test for ’10000’ or whatever. Since the software in Greek banks is likely to be decades old, I doubt that the “good programming” practices hailed in computer science classes find much reflection within them. In fact, Mitchell expresses a surprising degree of naiveté when he writes:

So if there is a lot of ‘hard-coding’ in the Greek financial and business systems it would require some work. The reference the Naked Capitalism article uses was written in 1999 and relevant to rather dated practices and the big challenge of converting all the currencies into the euro and all the different national business systems into an integrated set of systems that could cope with the common currency.

I would suspect the assessment that there is a lot of ‘hard-coding’ now would be amiss. Business systems have become much more sophisticated and homogenised in the 16 years since that article was written.

But the point is that when Greece went from the drachma to the euro in 2002, it was practically preordained that the modifications would be made to existing software that might have been written in the 1980s or earlier. Why would Greek banks have written an entirely new Direct Demand Accounting system in that period? Yes, business systems have become more sophisticated since the year 2000 but you can be assured that those that serve the mission-critical needs of Greek banks are decades old.

I should add that although I worked on mainframes for 23 years, the last 21 were spent at Columbia in leading edge technologies of the sort that he describes as “sophisticated” and “homogenized”. When I was hired by Columbia University in 1991, it was to make recommendations about exactly such technologies in my capacity as Development Technology Coordinator. Later on, once such technologies were adopted, I had over 15 years experience designing and programming financial applications in Java using the Struts framework. Additionally, I supported that application’s Sybase backend using Perl and other Unix-based tools. Finally, part of my retirement contract involved being available on a contingency basis for technical support as the need arose. Even now I stay in touch with my colleagues to give them my take on future IT directions.

Dr. Mitchell also seems to have missed the point I was making about historical data:

These include the historical presentation of records, for example, bank statements. These problems were already encountered and solved in the transition to the euro. There is no reason to suspect that any new issues have arisen. The Bank of Greece knows how to do this and could easily issue a procedural manual to the commercial banks and other financial institutions.

But my point was that ad hoc software would have to be developed to modify historical data. For example, just to repeat myself, if the United States elected a Marxist president and adopted a new currency called the Rosa that was pegged 10 Rosas to the dollar, you would have to develop software that went through the databases to multiply all occurrences of each cash-based data store by 10. (Let’s hope we’ll see that someday.)

Finally, if I understand Mitchell correctly, he seems to be saying that you could dust off the pre-euro conversion software from 1999 or so and use it to replace current-day systems. That would be fine if there had been no modifications made in the past 16 years to incorporate new business rules. But as we know financial applications are highly dynamic since the industry is always sensitive to opportunities that can always boost corporate profits to the disadvantage of the poor customer. Who knows? Maybe when the entire world converts to the Rosa, or even when money is no longer necessary, we will not have to face such problems but in the meantime reality must govern all major policy decisions, including ones that revolve around information technology—the nervous system of any modern economy.

July 26, 2015

Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu on the Brenner thesis

Filed under: transition debate — louisproyect @ 8:33 pm

(From pages 22 to 27 of the above new book.)

The Brenner Thesis: Explanation and Critique

In what has become one of the most influential theorisations of capitalism’s emergence, Robert Brenner mobilised Marx’s emphasis on changing relations of production (for Brenner, reconceptualised as ‘social property relations'”) in order to historicise the origins of capitalism in terms of class struggles specific to feudalism.” These struggles were determined by relations based on the appropriation of surplus from the peasantry by lords through extra-economic means: lords would habitually ‘squeeze’ agricultural productivity by imposing fines, extending work hours and extracting higher proportions of surpluses. In the 15th century, this sparked class conflicts in the English countryside, where serfs rebelled against their worsening conditions and won formal enfranchisement. The liberation of serfs from ties and obligations to the lord’s demesne in turn initiated a rise in tenant farming and led to increased market dependence, as peasants were turned away from their land and forced into wage-labour as an alternative means of subsistence. Although peasant expulsions were met with significant resistance, the strength and unity of the English state ensured victory for the landed ruling class.” This concentrated land in the private possession of landlords, who leased it to free peasants, unintentionally giving rise to ‘the classical landlord—capitalist tenant—wage labour structure’.79

By contrast, in France, the freeing of the peasants and their ability to retain the land was bound up with the development of a centralised monarchical state that came to take on a ‘class-like’ character as an independent extractor of surpluses through the taxing of land. The French absolutist state consequently had an interest in securing and protecting peasant landowning as a source of revenue against the re-encroachments of the lordly classes. The ability of the peasants to hold on to the land in turn prevented the systematic emergence of wage-labour in France, hampering the transition to capitalism.80

For Brenner, the differential outcomes of the class struggles in England and France are explained by the divergent evolution of the English and French states. Curiously, in explaining these divergent state trajectories Brenner explicitly evokes ‘international’ factors: the Normandy invasions for England, and the political-military pressures of the English state on the French. The ‘precocious English feudal centralization … owed its strength in large part to the level of feudal “political” organization already achieved by the Normans in Normandy before the Conquest, which was probably unparalleled elsewhere in Europe’.81 As Brenner notes:

the English feudal class self-government appears to have been ‘ahead’ of the French in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, not only because its starting point was different, but because it was built upon advances in this sphere already achieved on the Continent, especially in Normandy. In turn, when French centralization accelerated somewhat later it was influenced by English development, and was indeed, in part, a response to direct English politico-military pressure. Thus the development of the mechanisms of feudal accumulation tended to be not only `uneven’ but also ‘combined’, in the sense that later developers could build on previous advances made elsewhere in feudal class organizations.82

Although evoking the concept of ‘uneven and combined development’ here, Brenner’s analysis proceeds within the confines of a comparative historical analysis whereby ‘the international’ remains an ad-hoc addendum to an essentially ‘internalise analysis of the changing balance of class forces and state formation. Nowhere does ‘the international’ enter into Brenner’s theoretical presuppositions centred, as they are, around his concept of ‘social property relations’. Yet, as Neil Davidson argues, ‘[b]y focusing almost exclusively on what [Political Marxists] call social property relations, they “have no terms” to explain events that lie outside these relationships’.” This is particularly problematic for Brenner and his followers, who explicitly reject any conception of the origins of capitalism as immanently developing from the contradictions of feudal society.” Rather, feudalism is conceived as a ‘self-enclosed, self-perpetuating system that cannot be undermined by its own internal contradictions’.”

Hence, in spite of an extensive and informative historical explanation, Brenner’s conception of the origins of capitalism based on shifting social property relations is conceptually too narrow and too simple; Brenner ultimately tries to explain too much with too little. In Brenner’s schema, Marx’s master concept, the ‘mode of production’ — conceived as the composite totality of relations encapsulating the economic, legal, ideological, cultural and political spheres — is reduced to the much thinner ‘social properly relations’ concept, which is itself reduced to a form of exploitation. Brenner’s error is to take the singular relation of exploitation between lord and peasant as the most fundamental and axiomatic component of the mode of production, which in turn constitutes the foundational ontology and analytical building block upon which ensuing theoretical and historical investigation is constructed. Yet, as Ricardo Duchesne argues, this stretches the concept of the ‘relations of production’ too far, as it seeks to incorporate under the logic of ‘class struggle’ all military, political and economic factors, while reducing military, political and legal relations — conceptualised as ‘political accumulation’ by Brenner — to functions of this singular relation.”

The result of this ontological singularity is a dual tunnelling — both temporal and spatial — of our empirical field of enquiry. Temporally, the history of capitalism’s origins is reduced to the historical manifestation of one conceptual moment — the freeing of labour — and in turn explained by it. Spatially, the genesis of capitalism is confined to a single geographical region — the English countryside — immune from wider intersocietal developments. Such tunnelling cannot explain why the extensive presence of formally free wage-labour prior to the 16th century (both inside and outside England) did not give rise to capitalism.” Nor can it explain subsequent social developments, by obliterating the histories of colonialism, slavery and imperialism, Brenner ‘freezes’ capitalism’s history.”

This substantially narrows Marx’s more robust conception of the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ to which Brenner and his students give so much analytical weight In explaining capitalism’s origins. In a famous passage, Marx wrote:

the discovery of gold and silver in America, the expiration, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterized the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation …. The different moments of primitive simulation can be assigned in particular to Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England, in more or less chronological order. These moments are systematically combined together at the end of the seventeenth century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection.89

In Marx’s temporally and spatially more expansive view, capitalism’s genesis was not a national phenomenon, but rather an intersocietal one. It therefore makes sense to follow Perry Anderson in viewing the origins of capitalism as a value-added process gaining in complexity as it moved along a chain of interrelated sites’.90

In contrast, Brenner spatially reduces capitalism’s origins to processes that obtained solely in the English countryside; towns and cities are omitted, Europe-wide dynamics are analytically active only as comparative cases, and the world outside Europe does not figure at all. Similarly excluded are the numerous technological, cultural, institutional and social-relational discoveries and developments originating outside Europe that were appropriated by Europe in the course of its capitalist development.91 In short, Brenner neglects the determinations and conditions that arose from the social interactions between societies, since ‘political community’, in his conception, is subordinated to ‘class’, while classes themselves are conceptualised within the spatial limits of the political community in question.92 This leads to the various moments of Eurocentrism outlined in the Introduction. Temporal tunnelling gives rise to the notion of historical priority; spatial tunnelling gives rise to a methodologically internalist analysis. For Brenner’s followers these problems are only compounded, as the possibility of the development of early capitalisms outside of the English countryside that Brenner allows for is rejected.93 The notion of the origins of ‘capitalism in one country’94 is thus taken literally.

This Eurocentrism of Political Marxist analyses is further reinforced by their conception of pre-capitalist societies as generally incapable of significant technological innovations by either the direct producers or exploiters. For in the absence of the market compulsions that are unique to capitalist property relations, Political Marxists claim that there was no equivalent systemic ‘imperative’ to increase labour productivity and generalise technical improvements across different economic sectors.” Under feudalism, the consequence of this systemic inability was that ‘real [economic] growth’ could only be achieved `by opening up new land for cultivation’.96 Moreover, the ‘cross-cultural’ diffusions of technologies and organisational forms which could facilitate modal transformations in recipient societies is explicitly rejected by Brenner since, as he writes, ‘new forces of production were readily assimilable by already existing social classes’.97

In short, Political Marxists deny the development of the productive forces any causal role in explaining the transition from feudalism to capitalism, since doing otherwise would inevitably run the risk of ‘technological determinism’, emptying human agency in the process.98 To counter this common charge of `techno-determinism’, it is important to note that the concept of ‘productive forces’ not only took on different meanings relating to different historical contexts in Marx’s writings (at one point it was identified with early social communities),99 but, moreover, should not be conflated with mere ‘technologies’. Rather, the forces of production refer to both the means of production — including ‘nature itself, the capacity to labour, the skills brought to the process, the tools used, and the techniques with which these tools are set to work’ — and the labour process — ‘the way in which the different means of production are combined in the act of production itself”.100

As this definition indicates, the forces of production (or ‘productive powers’) cannot be subsumed under any ‘techno-determinist’ interpretation. They are simultaneously material and social: for example, the ways in which tools are used involve both accumulated collective knowledge and a particular socio-historical context in which they operate. To say that there is a tendency for the forces of production to develop over time is simply to say that humans have been motivated to change them, and have done so in ways that have increased the social productivity of labour. Human agency is thus crucial to the process.101

What is more, the Political Marxist conception of pre-capitalist societies as relatively stagnant social formations, incapable of either endogenous or exogenously driven technological advances, has been challenged by a wealth of more recent studies of economic growth in pre-capitalist epochs.102 Indeed, sustained technological and organisational innovations, and thus agrarian productivity, were important features of late Medieval and early modern ‘European’ societies (see Chapters 3 to 6). Denying productive forces any explanatory significance prior to capitalism also generates a pervasive Eurocentrism, since it situates their development exclusively in modern Europe, as the harbinger of capitalist property relations. This obscures from view the extensive development of productive forces in non-European contexts, such as with the early modern tributary empires of the Ottomans and Mughals (see Chapters 4 and 8) and the dynamic colonial plantation systems in the Americas over the 16th to 18th centuries. In so doing, it occludes from the outset the possibility that productive forces transmitted from these extra-European sources to Europe contributed to the formation of capitalism in Europe itself (see Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 8).

So the Political Marxist conception of pre-capitalist societies as essentially developmental dead-ends is an historical claim that is both Eurocentric and difficult to sustain empirically. This should force us to reconsider the significance of productive forces historically, and re-evaluate the possibility of reincorporating their study into our theoretical explanations of the transition to capitalism.

July 24, 2015

In defense of Counterpunch

Filed under: Counterpunch — louisproyect @ 7:52 pm

Jeff St. Clair

On June 25th a guest post by Amith Gupta appeared on my blog criticizing Jewish Voice for Peace’s decision to terminate relations with Alison Weir, a supporter of Palestinian rights because of her appearances on the radio show of Clay Douglas, a reactionary racist according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Since their objection is not so much about what she said in the interview but about her mere appearance on the show, it begs the question about her views. Are you to judge someone by the venue they appear on or write for? I ask because I have now been Weired, to coin a term.

On June 19th a blogger named Elise Hendrick wrote a long attack on CounterPunch for supposedly promoting the agenda of the far right and named me as an enabler. Three days later Tony Greenstein crossposted the same article and embellished it with a nice photo of me taken by my good friend the late Fred Baker about 17 years ago. Greenstein added a caption characterizing me as an “ex-Marxist”. Very nice.

I know Greenstein by reputation as a very sharp critic of Zionism but like many pro-Palestinian activists he has the unfortunate tendency to repeat Baathist propaganda such as blaming the FSA for carrying out a slaughter of villagers in al-Houla. He followed that up with the standard pro-Assad propaganda about the Syrian rebels using sarin gas on their supporters in East Ghouta as a false flag operation. I can understand why well-meaning people like Greenstein, Tariq Ali and Robert Fisk would serve Baathist aims even if unintentionally. When so much of the left is ready to put a plus where the American ruling class puts a minus, why swim against the tide? Their heart is in the right place even if their brain is not.

Since Greenstein is a pretty smart guy (just ask him), it is astonishing why he would swallow the statistics that Hendricks put together that supposedly proved CounterPunch was promoting the far right:

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This is really quite pathetic, a classic example of “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. If you really want to characterize CounterPunch, it would be necessary to conduct an analysis of all of the articles that appear there, not just a sampling. How do I and the other “left/progressives” (god, what an awful term) exhaust the inventory of all those on the left who write for CounterPunch? All you need to do is look at a typical weekend edition, like the one that came out today, to get a handle on what it stands for. There are 40 articles and not a single one has even the slightest whiff of rightwing politics. Speaking of which, one has to wonder what criteria Hendricks used to categorize some of the people as rightwingers. She includes Franklin Lamb and Paul Larudee. Unless I am missing something, they have never written anything I would associate with the Republican Party. For that matter, mostly what they do is circulate pro-Baathist propaganda after the fashion of Tony Greenstein.

It would seem to me that the bloggers at Jews sans Frontieres have served as the shock troops on all this and particularly someone known as “levi9909” (Mark Elf, I am not sure?) who posted 18 times underneath Amith’s article and who shows an alarming interest in my activity on the Internet that makes me feel like I was being stalked. To some extent, I have become a proxy for Amith Gupta who had little interest in debating someone like “levi9909” who reminds me of how James P. Cannon once described Trotskyists: the kind of people who stayed later at meetings than anybody else trying to get called on by the chair to make their point one more time, all along hoping that everybody else would get exhausted and go home.

Unlike “levi9909”who has written me frenzied emails on several occasions demanding that I confess for my sins, Amith is someone I know in real space as opposed to the lunatic asylum cyberspace can often resemble. He first came to my attention when Leon Botstein had fired Joel Kovel at Bard College. Amith, who was a leader of the International Solidarity Movement on campus, was an outspoken supporter of Kovel in a place where hipster liberalism was hegemonic. As a graduate with the class of 1965, I am always happy to be connected to someone who represents the real values of Bard College, the place that Walter Winchell called the little red whorehouse on the Hudson.

I want to conclude with some words about CounterPunch, which I am proud to have written for since August 2012 (I should add that I have written 168 articles not the 59 that Hendricks counted, at least according to the grep/wc command I ran on my server.)

It really has a lot to do with my esteem for Alexander Cockburn who I count as my most important political influence next to Peter Camejo. No matter how many times I wrote attacks on his global warming denialism, he was always someone who held a special place in my heart for helping me rebound from the post-traumatic stress syndrome I was experiencing after 11 years in the Trotskyist movement. In 1979 when I moved to New York from Kansas City, I had resolved to put politics behind me but when I stumbled across his column in the Village Voice, it was like being reborn. The clarity of his prose, the sharpness of his analysis and his biting humor were like nothing I had ever read in the Militant newspaper. Three years later, when I was still sorting out my experiences in the SWP, I read Camejo’s “Against Sectarianism”, an article that had the same bracing effect as Alexander’s columns. With their help, I was able to land on my feet and keep going for another 36 years.

It is Alexander’s spirit that lives on in CounterPunch and it is to Jeff St. Clair’s everlasting credit that he has kept the ship afloat after the captain passed on. No matter how many times people complain about articles in CounterPunch, it is the essential voice of the left in the USA and one that has a global presence. When I began writing about Swedish Marxist detective stories, a Swede contacted me with his own take on the country’s darker side and remains an occasional correspondent.

The idea that it is promoting rightwing ideas is patently absurd. While everybody knows that Paul Craig Roberts was a member of the Reagan administration, there’s not a single word that he writes that can be mistaken for a Fox News report. Like Kevin Phillips, he has turned against the increasingly plutocratic nature of American politics. In fact, the idea of a left-right alliance is not limited to CounterPunch. Ralph Nader has promoted the same strategy, including on CounterPunch. In years past, he was vilified for saying things that sounded like Pat Buchanan. If we are about building a movement based on ideological purity, we might as well go the route of the Marxist-Leninist left that has largely proven itself irrelevant. In any movement with the social weight capable of confronting the ruling class, you can expect that there will be clashing ideas in our ranks. It happened in Cuba in the late 50s and it will happen here. You’d better get used to the idea.

While the Marxism mailing list is obviously more ideologically focused than CounterPunch, we try to maintain diversity even if some disgruntled souls believe I am a tyrant (don’t listen to a word they say or you’ll regret it.) Mark Jones, one of my closest comrades who died of oral cancer in 2003, was an ardent admirer of Joseph Stalin who argued that it was necessary to purge the Soviet officer corps on the eve of WWII. Despite that, our views on the environmental crisis and the character of American imperialism bound us together as comrades. Another Marxmailer, who I hold in the highest regard, was a global warming skeptic and vociferous about it (until he changed his mind.) Sol Dollinger, an old-timer who died in 2001, was a member of the Socialist Union, a group led by Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman in the 1950s that I strongly identify with. During his time on Marxmail he stated his concerns about undocumented workers undermining the trade union movement on numerous occasions sounding for all the world like someone writing for VDare, the nativist magazine that Paul Craig Roberts writes for. In the radical movement we need to build in the USA, you can expect all sorts of differences to develop. That’s the kind of party we need if we are to have any possibility of attracting millions of people rather than hundreds.

I am enormously glad to have the opportunity to write for CounterPunch even though there are articles that I obviously disagree with, starting with what Franklin Lamb and Paul Larudee write about Syria. I am reconciled to the reality that my views are in a distinct minority and that those of Lamb, Larudee and Greenstein are those of the overwhelming majority.

That being said, I give Jeff St. Clair and Joshua Frank a lot of credit for publishing an article I had written about Syria that went against the current. For that matter, Jeff invited me to become a regular contributor to CounterPunch after I had blogged a complaint about how one article supported the arrest of Pussy Riot. Jeff said that if I disagreed with the article, why don’t I write my own. Frankly, if we had more people like Jeff St. Clair editing electronic and print media nowadays, the left would be in a lot better shape.

Dicte; Borgen

Filed under: Counterpunch,television — louisproyect @ 2:34 pm

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The Female Power of Danish Noir

CounterPunchers, particularly those who watched those Marxist Swedish television detective series I recommended last year, will likely appreciate “Dicte” and “Borgen”, two shows that appeared originally on Danish television. Both feature superb writing and performances even if the artistic teams behind them are not exactly Marxist. As Joe E. Brown said in the final seconds of “Some Like it Hot”, nobody’s perfect.

Whatever they lack politically, they more than make for in storytelling, character development, dialog, and plot—the ABC’s of writing going back to Aristotle. And most of all, they are distinguished by powerful female characters that put American television with its “Astronaut Wives Club” et al to shame.

“Dicte”, which can be seen on Netflix streaming, is the eponymous character–a female crime reporter in her late 30s who has taken a job with a newspaper in Aarhus, which is Denmark’s second largest city and where she grew up. In broad outlines, it has the same sort of plot found in the Swedish series “Annika Bengtzon, Crime Reporter” that was included in the survey referred to above. “Dicte” ends up as an amateur detective in almost every episode, one step ahead of the cops. In researching her articles, she inevitably finds herself being targeted by some bad guy who has decided that she knows too much and must be terminated.

Every time the town’s homicide detective runs into her at a crime scene, he warns her about interfering with an on-going investigation but in the end Dicte proves to be a better sleuth than the cops and finally vindicated.

read full article

July 22, 2015

Once again on the IT challenges in converting to the drachma

Filed under: computers,Greece — louisproyect @ 6:48 pm

On July 14th I wrote an article titled “Convert to the drachma–piece of cake. Right…” that was a first take on the difficulties in implementing a Grexit from an IT standpoint. Since then I have tracked down a number of high-level strategic planning documents written in the late 90s that give me a much better handle on what those difficulties amount to. Except for the folks at Naked Capitalism who reposted my original article, there are very few people on the left who have any inkling of the problem. One of them is Robert Urie who alluded to it in a recent CounterPunch article:

A central difference between Argentina and Greece is that ‘all’ that Argentina had to do was to break the peg (fixed currency exchange ratio) with the USD while implementation of the Euro was a massive technological undertaking that replaced the Greek technology and institutions that supported the drachma. In the event of a forced Greek exit recovery of these technologies and institutions would take time that the Greeks don’t have. Breakdown of the supply-chain— the integrated economic relations that together facilitate economic production, causes a cascade effect where once lost, has to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Instead what I have mainly heard is that it is much more of a piece of cake than my article would suggest. For example, Canadian leftist Ken Hanley, who wrote an article titled “The German Grexit plan may have been the lesser of two evils”, commented: “The creditors were able to develop a Grexit plan. Schaeuble even presented a Grexit plan as an alternative to deal and many think that his whole plan was to force a Grexit.” He also referred me to an article by an Australian economist that assured his readers “A Greek exit is not rocket science”. Well, it might not be rocket science but computer science is certainly relevant notwithstanding the economist’s failure to refer to IT once in his article.

The same shortcoming exists in an article that has been embraced by many on the left as a recipe for overcoming austerity. Titled “Greece: Alternatives and Exiting the Eurozone” and written by Eric Toussaint, who works with the Committee to Abolish Third World Debt, it makes very useful recommendations but once again neglects to mention anything about IT.

Now my point in referring to these difficulties was never to support staying in the Eurozone. It was primarily intended to alert the left about the dangers of thinking in terms of short-term solutions. Furthermore, my own position is that Greece’s difficulties have more to do with the underlying economy rather than what currency it uses. Some Marxists, who have been sharply critical of Tsipras, appear to understand what this means. For example, In Defense of Marxism, warned:

Some people have argued that if Greece is pushed out of the Euro this could eventually provide a solution to its economic problems. That is naïve in the extreme, not to say irresponsible. The question would still remain: what kind of an economy, run by whom and on the interests of whom?

Let us assume that the new currency is called the drachma. What will happen to it? It will fall like a stone because nobody will want to hold it. That will cause prices to rise steeply, even hyper-inflation, as in Germany in 1923. People’s savings will be wiped out. There will be a deep slump and even more unemployment.

Moreover, if Greece is forced out of the Euro, it will also find itself out of the European Union. The European bourgeois will not want to see its markets invaded by Greek goods made cheaper by the inevitable fall of the drachma (or whatever other currency is chosen). It will be necessary to take very drastic measures in order to avoid an economic catastrophe. Half measures will be useless. One cannot cure cancer with an aspirin.

I also thought that the Belgian Trotskyists of the LCR-SAP had good advice:

  1. Leaving the Euro is not a sufficient condition to break with austerity (as the case of Britain proves) but, in the Greek case, for the countries of the periphery and those which are not in the heart of the euro zone, it is clearly a requirement.
  2. The need to break with the euro does not imply making leaving the euro the central axis of an alternative programme. Even in Greece, where the question arises in a burning and immediate way, the axis of the alternative programme must be the rejection of any austerity and the implementation of social, ecological, anticapitalist and democratic policies, which directly improve the fate of workers, young people, women, the victims of racism, and the peasants.
  3. To make leaving the euro the axis of the alternative would be to run up unnecessarily against the very generally-held idea that the currency is only “neutral” technical means of allowing trade, whereas it is in fact also the crystallization of a social relationship. To make leaving the euro (or the EU) the axis of the battle would be also to play the game of the hard-line and far right, by spreading the illusion that a harmonious socio-economic-ecological development would be possible within the national framework. This illusion harms internationalist solidarity. However, this is crucial not only for the fight in Greece, but also because the integration of the economies on the continent requires a European anticapitalist perspective to satisfy social needs and to answer the urgent ecological needs.

Before moving on to the technical aspects of a Grexit, I should say a few words about my background. Even though my regular readers know that I worked in IT for 44 years, it might be useful to mention something about my experience.

To start with, before I began working at Columbia University in 1991, most of my work experience was in financial applications. I worked for five different banks: FNB of Boston, Texas Commerce Bank, Irving Trust, United Missouri Bank (where I programmed ATM’s) and Chase Manhattan. I also worked for investment banks: Salomon Brothers and Goldman-Sachs. Finally, in the 21 years I was at Columbia University, most of the time was spent working on the financial system used for purchases, general ledger and the like. Back in 1998, part of my workload over a two year period was to evaluate legacy software to identify changes needed to accommodate the arrival of 2000, a technical challenge that was dwarfed by Eurozone conversion that I will now explain.

The following documents were key to the observations I will be making:

  1. Daniel O’Leary, “The Impact of the Euro on Information Systems”, Journal of Information Systems Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall 1999. (https://msbfile03.usc.edu/digitalmeasures/doleary/intellcont/Impact%20of%20Euro-1.pdf). I referred to this in my original article.
  2. Pieter Dekker, “Preparing Information Systems for the Euro”, a sixty page white paper prepared for the European Commission on the Eurozone in September 1997. (http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/accounting/docs/markt-1997-7038/7038_en.pdf)
  3. Patrick O’Beirne, “Managing Risk in Euro Currency Conversion”, Cutter IT Journal, 1998 (http://www.sysmod.com/eurorisk.pdf). This is basically a shorter version of the Dekker article above with a useful bibliography referring to other material in this vein.
  4. Rainer Gimnich, “Analysis and Conversion Tools for Euro Currency Migration”, Workshop on Software Reengineering, May 1999. (http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~ist/RWS99/beitraege/Gimnich.pdf)

To start with, it would be useful to understand what took place in a Y2K migration. In many programs written in the 60s and 70s, when the year 2000 seemed like a long way off, dates were formatted as MMDDYY. This meant if you were trying to establish whether a bond would mature in five years, you’d subtract something like 07/22/67 from 07/22/72 but when 2000 arrived, how could you determine whether 07/22/04 meant 1904 or 2004? The answer was to wade through millions of lines of code and expand MMDDYY to MMDDYYYY.

In a computer program, every field of data is uniquely named. This means searching in a COBOL program for something like “date_today” is pretty simple. But what if a programmer called it dt_today instead? Of course, you might figure out that “dt” means date but some lazy programmer might have written it as “tdy”.

You will have the same problem, of course, with a euro to drachma conversion. Searching for the Greek equivalent of “amount” or “amt” becomes a drain on any IT staff.

A conversion from a local currency to the euro was a whole order of magnitude more difficult when it comes to converting currency amounts, even when they are identified. For nations such as Spain that did not have a decimal based currency like the euro, the rounding became a challenge. Since this did not apply to the drachma, a simple replacement might be in order and that would be the end of it.

However, the big problem was testing for a hard-coded amount parameter as I tried to explain on Naked Capitalism underneath the crossposting of my original article:

For example, there might be tests to see if a customer has sufficient funds to be qualified for a mortgage. A program might conceivably mark it as eligible if there were 10,000 euros in the account. Switching to a drachma might make everybody eligible–not that there’s anything wrong with that obviously–but you can see that this is not a simple matter. Just being able to handle a drachma instead of a euro does not mean that software is meeting expectations. You have to do a BUSINESS analysis, which is the first stage in any systems implementation.

As it turned out, the Gimnich article listed above makes an identical point:

In many cases, amounts are hard-coded in the application programs. For instance, statements of the kind IF amt_1 < 1000 THEN … appear quite often. Here, the threshold value is simply used as a constant in the program: no symbolic constant, no variable declaration, no external amount table read.

Assuming that Greece’s programmers could convert programs to handle the drachma rather than a euro, this would mean that you could start withdrawing a new currency from an ATM on day one. And at the end of the month, you’ll get a bank statement with amounts designated in the new currency with the proper currency symbol, etc. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Any bank maintains a history of transactions for all customers that are used for determining loan eligibility, etc. Your account might have the proper data from the day when the drachma conversion took place going forward but what about the ten years or so of prior transaction history which were denominated in euros? A suite of programs would have to be written to manage the conversion of historical data. This is not a minor task since identifying which files contain such data requires plowing through an enormous IT inventory. Since documentation is always given short shrift in the corporate world, expect major technological hiccups or even heart attacks.

The tasks described above are properly administered in an IT department, which is centrally controlled but that’s not the end of it. Ever since the advent of personal computers, there are huge amounts of mission-critical data that are not maintained by the IT staff. The finance department of any modern corporation is overflowing with PC-based spreadsheets that are used for budgeting, etc. All of these spreadsheets will have to be evaluated for their criticality and converted to the drachma if need be. Once again, a major task.

In August 2001, Computerworld, a trade magazine I read for many years before retiring, described the risks facing small and medium sized businesses that had not gotten up to speed on the euro conversion:

Pollard said the unpreparedness of vendors and suppliers won’t create a catastrophe in the European marketplace, but it will cause supply chain slowdowns and force some small and medium-size businesses to revert to using paper invoices, bound ledgers and filing cabinets.

But Noel Hepworth, head of the euro conversion project at the European Federation of Accountants (FEE), an industry trade group in London, said companies that aren’t ready will quickly be forced out of business by large manufacturers that will refuse to deal with them.

Think about what this would mean for Greece as its businesses tried to do the same thing in reverse. This nation has a huge proportion of smaller firms. It will be exactly those that will be forced out of business if they can’t make the cut. If adopting the drachma will lead to a sharp devaluation as all experts predict, those businesses will be rotten ripe for buying up by foreign investors looking to make a killing.

Now in the long run, it might not matter that all these problems lie in store. It is probably the case that leaving the Eurozone is a necessary first step to escaping the clutches of the German bankers, the IMF and all other predatory institutions. But the left does not look good by minimizing the technical challenges. Most of all, it is worth remembering what Lenin wrote in “State and Revolution”, which is just applicable to a state embarking on an anti-austerity program based on neo-Keynesian principles as it was to the infant USSR:

We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and “foremen and accountants”.

I would only add programmers to the people Lenin identified above.

July 21, 2015

Separated at Birth

Filed under: separated at birth? — louisproyect @ 11:49 pm

Andy Rooney: generally humorous

Garrison Keilor: never humorous

July 20, 2015

Still Alice

Filed under: aging,Film,health and fitness — louisproyect @ 3:24 pm

“Still Alice” is now the fourth narrative film that I have seen dealing with Alzheimer’s and by far the best. (Brief summaries of the other three appear at the end of this review.) Starring Julianne Moore as Alice Howland, a 50-year old Columbia University linguistics professor with early onset, the film is blessed by an exceptionally intelligent screenplay and direction by the late Richard Glatzer whose wife died of ALS. Some critics feel that his own family tragedy helped him shape the material but probably the most important element was the novel upon which it was based.

Written by Lisa Genova in 2007, the novel not only benefited from the author’s expertise as a neuroscience researcher with a PhD from Harvard but her familiarity with the mandarin life-style of her characters. Given the main character’s lofty perch in an Ivy League school, her husband’s own privileged status as a medical researcher, and their familiarity with Manhattan’s exquisite but pricey restaurants and other luxuries, her descent into an illness that would rob her of both her livelihood and—worse—her identity is unimaginably steep. In a key scene, when she and her husband are at their Hamptons summer home, she wets her pants because she cannot remember where the bathroom was.

Moore’s performance won her an Academy Award for best performance by an actress in 2014 and was one I would have supported if I had seen the film that year. Now that is available on Amazon streaming, I cannot recommend it highly enough. At the age of 55, Moore manages to convey the desperation of a world-class intellectual trying to keep her wits about her in the face of insurmountable odds. Her life begins to revolve around her IPhone, which is used to remind her of how to bake a cake or to take the pills she needs for a suicide when the smart phone no longer can bail her out.

Alex Baldwin, who plays her husband, is also very good as a man who does his best to run interference for his wife but finally comes to the sad realization that nothing will make up for her not being able to recognize her own daughter after she has seen her perform in an off-Broadway production of a Chekhov play.

Given the ineluctably predictable nature of the disease, any such film will lack the suspense element that is found in most tragedies. Indeed, it is open to question whether a film about Alzheimer’s can be called a tragedy since it lacks the “fatal flaw”, especially hubris, which is common to the classic tragedy from Sophocles to Shakespeare.

Some scholars believe that King Lear suffered from dementia although it impossible to pin down which kind. What made his downfall a tragedy was not his illness but his hubris, demanding more from his daughters than they were willing to give. There is an element of this in “Still Alice” to be sure. Alice constantly nags her youngest daughter Lydia (played superbly by Kristen Steward, the star of the insipid Twilight vampire movies) about abandoning her career as an actress and doing something more practical. When Lydia finally makes it relatively big in a Chekhov play, mom cannot recognize her—at least momentarily.

While the film is primarily a character study of how a dreaded illness takes down a very successful and self-possessed overachiever, it is also has universal meaning for any human being, particularly those over the age of sixty. 1 out of 9 Americans over the age of 65 has Alzheimer’s disease, increasing to one out of three over the age of 85. Scary odds. A week ago on the first night of my wife’s arrival at her parents’ home in Istanbul, her 87-year old father wandered off and ended up in a neighborhood far from home. When it became obvious to a young couple on a bus that he was lost, they were fortunate enough to find his phone number in one of his pockets. He is safe and at home now, much to my relief.

I hold out hope that my mother’s genes will hold me in good stead. Just a few days before her death in 2008, she was as lucid as ever. It was her circulatory system that was her undoing, an outcome of the wrong foods and a long time lack of exercise. Of course, sooner or later something will do you in whether it is Alzheimer’s, a circulatory system collapse, cancer or some other event associated with being in the “mortality zone” as Tom Brokaw put it in a column dealing with his battle against multiple myeloma.

In one key scene, Alice bemoans the fact that she has Alzheimer’s rather than cancer since at least cancer will not rob you of your identity. It is a disease like no other in that it transforms you into a stranger as if a zombie has taken possession of your body. Perhaps the best way to describe films such as “Still Alice” is as a subcategory of the horror movie with the monster being made up of the plaque in your nervous system rather than one stalking you with a butcher knife.

Other films in this genre:

The Savages”: a brother and sister cope with an ailing father in a nursing home. It is bittersweet comedy/tragedy directed by Tamara Jenkins who had the experience of putting her own father into a nursing home when she was in her 30s. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney turn in fine performances as the feckless brother and sister. The DVD can be purchased for pennies on Amazon.com.

Away from Her”: Based on an Alice Munro short story, the wife has entered a nursing home and soon falls in love with another Alzheimer’s patient leaving her husband in the lurch. When he visits her, she has no idea who he is and prefers the company of her new companion. I found the film preposterous but you can make your own evaluation through Amazon.com streaming.

Memories of Tomorrow”: A Japanese film about a successful and hard-driving “salaryman”, who the disease takes down, just like Alice. It is much more of a love story than a tragedy since he depends on a newly kindled relationship to his long-neglected wife to help him through his vicissitudes. Ken Watanabe, one of Japan’s best-known actors, plays the lead character. It is a very fine film that can be only be seen through a Netflix DVD rental.

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