Lula and the Markets

Gwynne Dyer

George Soros, the world's leading currency speculator, told a
Brazilian newspaper in August that the 170 million Brazilians simply
wouldn't be allowed to have Labour Party leader Luiz Inacio 'Lula' da
Silva as their president. The higher his standing rose in the opinion
polls, the fiercer would be the speculative attacks on Brazil's currency,
the real. If he actually won the presidency, the markets' reaction would
be so negative that the country would have to declare a moratorium on its
huge $260 billion foreign debt.

hydrarchist writes

"Marcel Mauss: Give It Away"

David Graeber

Have
you noticed how there aren't any new French intellectuals any more? There
was a veritable flood in the late '70s and early '80s: Derrida, Foucault,
Baudrillard, Kristeva, Lyotard, de Certeau ... but there has been almost
no one since. Trendy academics and intellectual hipsters have been forced
to endlessly recycle theories now 20 or 30 years old, or turn to countries
like Italy or even Slovenia for dazzling meta-theory.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

This paper written by Chris Carrico will be presented Oct. 23 at the Inter-Guianas Conference, University of Guyana, Turkeyen, Co-operative Republic of Guyana.

Guyana and the Amerindian Question

Christopher R. Carrico

Introduction

In current legal theory regarding indigenous peoples, one of the most commonly cited differences between indigenous societies and modern states is their divergent notions of property. Since anthropology's formation as a science in the nineteenth century, anthropologists have been aware that indigenous peoples have a communal mode of property, while capitalist states are founded on the idea of individual private property. This idea from anthropology contributed in a fundamental way to the thinking of social theorist Karl Marx. In his critiques of the assumptions of political economy he often showed how Adam Smith and the entire classical tradition naturalized the social conditions of capitalist society and projected its image backwards onto human origins. Classical political economy assumed that human beings in their original state were self-maximizing individual owners of property, an observation that was not borne out by ethnographic fact, and was not the state of much of the world prior to the age of European colonialism.

Taking It To London's Streets

The New Anti-War Movement

Tariq Ali, Counterpunch, September 30, 2002

London: Saturday 28th September. It was a beautiful clear blue sky. No mists but a great deal of mellow fruitfulness. The Stop the War Coalition--- a united front that includes socialists of most stripes, liberals and radicals, pacifists and the moderate Muslim groups----had expected 200,000 people, but the mood in Britain was uneasy and large numbers of people, many of them conservative or even apolitical, had decided to swell the march.