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John Kenneth Galbraith does not fail to amaze me once again with his book "The New Industrial State". After reading "The Affluent Society", Galbraith quickly became one of my favorite economists. Rarely have I seen someone critical of the capitalist system without considering themselves socialist. Many of those critical of capitalist economics are too easily swept away by utopianism and Marxist views. Galbraith maintains independence from the traditional ideological left.

Galbraith starts his critique of the capitalist system by stating "Eighty years ago the corporation was still confined to those industries... where, it seemed, production had to be on a large scale. Now it also sells groceries, mill grain, publishes newspapers and provides public entertainment." I'm not sure how well such a critique applies to modern society, for many companies seek to outsource and subcontract much of their services. In fact, some of our most renown corporations don't sell any product at all. They simply purchase pre-manufactured goods set to their customization, brand it, and market it.

Another observation concerns ownership. Most corporations these days operate independently from the actual owners. While previous business entities were owned by a small number of wealthy families, today's corporation is characterized by a board of directors and an independent management. "The men who now run the large corporations own no appreciable share of the enterprise," notes Galbraith.

Proponents of free market capitalism state that the "sovereign consumer who, through the market, issues the instructions that bend the productive mechanism to his ultimate will." While this statement has a sort of democratic essence about it, I feel it necessary to note that some are more consumer than others. Economists such as Ludwig Von Mises hail the democratic potential of consumerism equating a dollar spend with a vote casted, some of us have the wealth to "vote" thousands of more times than others.

Also, the word "sovereign consumer" is quite contradictory. Consumers have been subjected to manipulative marketing, guerrilla advertising, addictive additives, and profound market research meant to hijack the psychological. Aside from such perpendicular controls, producers and marketers can also obligate consumers to purchase goods at their outlets by utilizing aggressive tactics to squeeze out competitors. There are many areas of the industrial world where citizens have no choice but to purchase fast food or shop at a mega department store to tend to their needs.

Just finished reading Ice T's "The Ice Opinion". Interesting book I must say. While I have never been so much a fan of gangster rap, it wasn't until I had watched a few movies with Ice T in it that I began to grow curious as to whether or not his lyrics maintained a sort of social message. A quick wiki search on Ice T showed me what I was missing out on.

Just check:

When [the L.A.] riots jumped off they immediately rushed up to me and put me on Channel 11. The newscaster said to me: "Ice, stop the riots." Stop the riots? Who the fuck am I?... I said... "I can't honestly say that if I didn't have the money in my pocket, and I wasn't who I was, that I wouldn't be there too"... If I'd been in control of the riots, I would've moved on the police, and I would've been locked up like Geronimo Pratt."

Pick up a $1 copy off of Amazon. Great bathroom read.

My favorite book as a child. The (almost) silent French film. Pick up a used copy here, read the wiki here, and find the torrent here.

By reading "Beyond Culture" I quickly became a fan of Anthropologist Edward T. Hall. Hall tends to tackle rarely studies aspects of foreign culture (such as concepts of time and space) and presents them in a very intriguing way. In "Hidden Dimension", Hall concentrates more on the intangible than the tangible. Using many animals as an example, Hall identifies a sort of invisible barrier between species of animals, whereas say a lizard, would always maintain a distance of a few feet between itself and a human being. Birds sitting on a telephone line also have an identically distance between them. Even people sitting on benches in a train station maintain a similar distance between each other. The urinal in a mens room is another perfect example. Lions on the other hand maintain a certain distance from human beings but once we pass a certain line, they move in to strike. "Hidden dimensions" are shared by all species from rats to walruses and even human beings.

When this "dimension" is violated - as depicted in a number of experiments where deers and rats were crowded into a space small enough to create such conditions - the animals begin to grow hostile, violent towards each other, and begin to die off due to diseases and stress. Hall questions whether or not man is subject to these same effects, as apparent by the plague, stress, and violence that haunts our crowded cities.

Great book. I would suggest any fan of anthropology to check it out.

While waiting for my grandmother at one of her medical appointments, today I finished reading Hernando de Soto's "The Mystery of Capital". For those of you who don't know, Mr. de Soto is probably today's most renown and famed latin American economist and a poster boy for Western diplomats and international banking officials (the back of his book features praising quotes by both Bush Sr. and Clinton.) De Soto is a genius, I must clarify, for his exhausting statistics and social experiments are quite respectable.

De Soto's theory is that the main reason why Capitalism functions in the West and fails in the Third World and former Communist countries is not because of a lack of entrepreneurial drive, but due to the presence of a legal system where property can be trades, sold, bought, defended, and rented in a legal market. De Soto states:

"You cannot walk through a Middle Eastern market, hike up to a Latin American village, or climb into a taxicab in Moscow without someone trying to make a deal with you... most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make success of capitalism... [but] because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital. (pp. 4-6)

De Soto cites the sprawling Brazilian favelas and the informal economy as evidence. Very true, but there are a few points that I would like to add.  First of all,  I totally endorse de Soto's call for the state to acknowledge such an unformal sector, attempting to include it into the legitimate economy. Favelas and the informal market - which I often refer to as "la economia del pueblo" covers needs that the market nor the state can provide. They represent a sort of truly authentic third way that can be hailed by both Ludwig von Mises followers and anarcho-communists. What I do disagree with is his straight forward rejection that culture might have anything to do with it.

De Soto speaks as if by simply inacting uniform property codes that the problem would fix itself. In fact, he speaks of the Third World as if it was British and the U.S. shortly before their industrial revolutions, making plenty of relations and parallels. This legal system itself represents an entire body of cultural values and norms, of which cannot be put in motion with a simple piece of legislation from top-to-bottom sources of power.

Also, de Soto's books speak strictly of legal economies and legal property exchange in a strict capitalist context. He speaks as if free market capitalism has become the sole and only option available to mankind. (I'm not bashing on de Soto for believing so, I'm simply interested in seeing how he would apply his  theories to modern day leftist states such as those of Brazil and Venezuela where the state has approached the informal sectors in a way that he seems to not have bothered outlining.)

The concept is a fascinating one, but the book fails to keep the reader interested beyond the first chapter or two. He pretty much gets to the point and follows it by stating an endless stream of statistics and data. Don't buy it - the Wikipedia article probably suffices.

The bulk of this book was quite boring with the exception of the last few chapters. Either ways, it was my opportunity to be introduced into the world of Hannah Arendt, the famous German political scientist. The later chapters of the book were so rich in content that it was well worth reading through the two hundred-or-so pages of rubbish.

Arendt carried out an in-debt study of the concept of revolution throughout the American, French, and Russian Revolutions among others. The most interesting aspects of these rebellions are the rise of community-based grassroots organizations constructed by the common citizens in order to provide some sort of "emergency government" during periods of no-government. These organizations were known simply as "town hall meetings" in the American Revolution, "soviets" in the Russian Revolution, and so on. Such a rise of an organic democracy seemed to be a natural companion to the lack of a clear state power during and immediately after revolution.

Unfortunately, processional revolutionaries and other men of power often sweep in to steal victory from the hands of the town hall communities. In America's case, the founding fathers failed to incorporate them into the American political system, replacing them with four-year elections, and so on. In Russia's case, Soviets were cleaned of those who were not Bolsheviks, and in general terms, replaced by a centralized party dictatorship.

Fascinating book, especially if one has often sympathized for the social revolutions of both two centuries ago and those of recent decades.

Fascinated by the talk of the rise of town hall meetings, community organization, and "soviet"-style units of political mobilization in Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution", I picked up a copy of Fitzpatrick's "Russian Revolution", which was not only considered one of the most informative books on the subject (or says the other reviews), but it was also half.com's cheapest. (Jaja. I just needed a map legend to get over the hill - Wikipedia would provide the vehicle for the rest of the way.)

Once an idolizer of Lenin (Senior year, baby), and to a lesser degree the early years of the Russian Revolution, the book shattered the pinch of sympathy that I had for the Red guards of Russia (most of my sympathy was washed away after reading the culturally imperialistic tales of Soviet Russia in Stalin's "The National Question" and "The Soviet House of Culture" - the later being reviewed a few weeks ago.)

The Revolution itself was quite romantic. In the face of the crumbling Czarist administration, workers and peasants alike in the absence of the bureaucratic state bound together and gave rise to organic democratic units of action, known as "Soviets" (a term which carried an erroneous definition until I read Arend). These Soviets - probably far more democratic than any possible form of representative democracy that could have been coughed up by the American Founding Fathers - succeeded in eliminating the division between public policy and community. Such carries the same flavor as Thomas Jefferson's rantings on perpetual revolution and the dangers of representative democracy.

Unfortunately, the popular and democratic revolution of the masses and their democratic soviets was hijacked by Lenin and his band of conspiring Bolsheviks; professional revolutionaries that lacked faith in the ability of the common man to devise or implement effective policies for his own good. "All Power to the Soviets" was but a hollow cry, used by Lenin and his men to skillfully snatch power from the same forces that had initiated the revolution.

The industrial drive of Stalin was even more disgusting. The damage forced upon the indigenous and ethic groups of the Soviet Union, the traditional peasant communities, to the villages and towns, and even the environment must have ushered in much quicker than any perceivable Old World colonialism or savage capitalism could ever. "National modernization, not international revolution, was the primary objective of the Soviet Communist Party," states the author. In a rush to proletarianize the "barbaric" nomadic peoples and the peasants, members of these pre-capitalist societies became labor slaves to a degree higher than possible under a the capitalist economy that the Marxists so much criticized.

The book can be purchased for about a dollar off of any of the Internet's many used book websites, so if you are interested in the subject, I suggest that you pick up a copy. The paperback copy is exceptionally flexible (facilitating the folding of the book, thus making it easier to read with one hand) and the recycled paper pages work wonders with taking notes with ball-point pens. (You know your a dork when you make comments as the one above).

Don't even bother. It's like reading COMPAQ instruction manuals or wikipedia articles on entries such as "RAM" and "bits".

I came across this book because one of those socio-technology-slash-Lawrence-Lessig type books kept making reference to it.

Boring. With a name like Nicholas Negroponte you'd think the book would be a bit cooler.

Great book to read right after Fitzpatrick's. While I'm not a fan of essay collections from single authors, the book is a wonderful anarchist account from a social and technological perspective. Watson finished the job that Fitzpatrick started by eliminating much of the technical and final differences between traditional socialism and capitalism. Khrushchev's bashing of the West was not an effort to offer a different style of life, but simply more of the same; a mechanized style of life dependent on industrialism's endless cycle of production and consumptions.

Favorite quote: "In human terms, the last ten thousand years of human society represent on percent of our time on earth. The other ninety-nine percent was lived in small, stateless, propertyless, egalitarian, visionary societies like the Wintu"

Boring. The concept of the book is bad ass, and the author is a respectable figure (any public official willing to write a book on such a specific subject - as opposed to a general, dumbified account of his boring life - gains serious cool points), but the book just doesn't cut it. Sure, the author points out a number of *neat* observations within socialist and capitalist societies, but it is not until the last two chapters that he actually touches the core of the book's subject. The rest of the chapters are simple critics of highly centralized socialist systems.

Basically, Luard criticizes centralized socialism's inability to tend to the problems that socialists are worried about - inequality, injustice, class, etc. - and suggests a sort of "grass roots" socialism instead. In such a system, schools would be ran by communities, minority interest groups would receive state assistance, and so on. Luard's vision is great, but it's a shame that it took him the entire book to pamper the reader for such a concept.

If you can get a photocopy of the second to last chapter, or read it page-for-page in an online book-searching tool then go for it. Otherwise, save your money.

I really wish books would be a little more specific with their titles. While I thought that the book would be based on general U.S.S.R. cultural policy towards it's citizens, it turned out to be an account of Soviet cultural imperialism towards the indigenous and ethnic groups living in Siberia. The book does an excellent job at documenting a century of frequently changing cultural policy concerning Russia's surrounding minorities. For instance, at first the goal was to bless these barbarian groups with civilization. Collectivization of their farms and fishing industries ensued, as did education. Russians created a written language using Latin instead of Cyrillic letters due to the fact that they were "more international". (The concept of a state creating a written language for an illiterate population fascinated me.) A few decades later, Stalin reversed the policy, scrapping the old written language for a new Cyrillic one, implementing an indirect policy of Russianization. This book was an interesting account of a small peoples' cultural roller coaster ride - especially if you are the resident of a colony such as myself.

I picked up title in a used bookstore in the outskirts of Denver. After finishing "Affluent Society" one morning, I read through this baby that same afternoon and evening.

Concentrating solely on African societies effected by colonization, I was quite upset to see that the tribes of the Americas and Asia were not mentioned. Also, the groups mentioned in the book appear to have been already influenced by the colonial powers of the day. A better title for the book after reading its last half would have been "The Limited Self-Governments of Colonial Subject in Africa".

If you can pick up this title in a thrift shop, go for it, but you don't need to go through he trouble of ordering it off of Amazon.

Yet another read-in-a-day book. Being the second time I had read this book, it wasn't that hard to zip through it while in the waiting room at my grandmother's doctor's office.

I purchased this book off of ebay, if I remember correctly. I have a practice of roaming the nonfiction book section for $0.01 books with shipping below $2.00. This was one of those finds, I believe.

While obviously bias and anti-German in the most blunt form (then again, what book on the Nazis is not?), the book is enlightening. The book covers pretty much every aspect of the Nazi rise, from Hitler's youth to the party's founding, to its creation of a parallel government, its various foiled attempts to gain power, its political peak, and finally it's fall. Great pick for a starter book on the Nazis, especially with the $0.13 price tag from Amazon's used books.

With a title and book cover that resembles the feel and look portrayed by Autonomedia books such as Temporary Autonomous Movement and others by Bob Black, this title caught my attention as it peeped at me through a stack of aged and tattered books in a run down Anaheim bookshop. With chapter titles such as "The Paradox of Culture," "Hidden Culture," and "Rhythm and Body Movement" I had to pick up this title.

I've read plenty of anthropology books - most of which were ethnographic in one way or another - but must say that Hall is probably one of the most unorthodox and revolutionary anthropologists that I have ever read. What Freakanomics is to Economics, Beyond Culture is to Anthropology. Below are a few concepts high lightened by the book:

M-Time vs P-Time
Hall identifies two different concept of time and space systems; Monochronic time (M-time) and polychromic time (P-time.) "M-time emphasizes schedules, segmentation, and promptness... It is also tangible; they speak of it as being saved, spent, wasted, lost, made up, accelerated, slowed down, crawling, and running out." Meanwhile, P-time is "characterized by several things happening at once... [and opposed to M-time] is apt to be considered a point rather than a ribbon or a road, and that point is sacred." In Puerto Rico's P-time system, for example, an American would perceive the line at a local bakery to be chaotic and without order. "There is no order as to who is served next, and to the northern European or American, confusion and clamor abound."

Hall makes the dangerous conclusion that "without schedules and something very much like the M-time system, it is doubtful if our industrial civilization could have developed as it has." Hall's statement has revolutionary impact on culture-economics relations. If P-time systems are not as industrialization-friendly as M-time systems, should not successful should not a public policy be tuned to such a reality? P-time Latin America has traditionally adopted the economic policies of M-time systems without having the "cultural tools" required to carry out such a task. Neoliberals might push for assimilate into a M-time system, but I once again must differ. Economic policy reform is much more convenient, efficient, and easier than the reform of an entire culture. P-time-friendly economic models must be pursued.

And now to expand upon a number of points made by Hall:

Technology as Solution
"World problems such as food and housing," state Hall, "are seen as technological." Genetically modified foodstuffs, nanotechnology, and stem cell research, for example, are often praised as solutions to serious world problems. Ironically, the industrial revolution and the green revolution were similarly championed as solutions to the evils of the poverty.

Proponents of such a concept believe that methods must be found as to where a given product can be extended to those who need it. By making food cheaper to cultivate and market, it is believed, social justice can be achieved. The final goal does little to restructure social mobility access and existing power arrangements. It simply extends a service from an inefficient and weak grid to surrounding areas. Ironically, technology has furthered our capacity for exploitation and large scale destruction. Neither the industrial nor the green revolution has allowed mankind to secure its survival as a species - but in fact has endangered it.

Panhuman Syncing
Video taping subjects talking at a 1/18 and 1/24 frame rate, Hall noticed a considerable amount of common body synchrony in body movement. Hall refers to a person's array of physical gestures and expression during conversation as a sort of "dance". Subjects portrayed the same gestures and syncing and even shared identical recording pen movements when connected to an EEG. "When the two people talked, the recording pens moved together as though driven by a single brain."

While "it appears to be innate", syncing is also culture-specific. "American children," states Hall, "synced with Chinese just as well as they did with English [but] while infants will sync with the human voice regardless of language, they later become habituated to the rhythms of their own language and culture." The study concludes that body movements are "rooted in biology (bio-basic) and modified by culture".

Even if one was to learn a foreign language, misalignment with body movement patterns can cause communication difficulties. Americans and the English, for example, "have problems reading each other's kinesics." Hall calls this a "local beat".

Hall's observation revolutionizes the way one can perceive music. When one finds a style of music that do they not like, this is attributed to a "poor job in capturing the perception and rhythm" of a local beat.

Product of the Environment
Hall makes reference to yet another interesting study:

[Science reporter] Rosenhan, and his colleagues presented themselves to twelve mental hospitals in five different states on both coasts. This group of sane scientists simply told the admissions personnel that they heard voices uttering words like "thud," "empty," and "hollow." [sic] Otherwise, everything the scientists did and said, including their case histories, was true. In all cases, hearing voices was sufficient cause for admission. Once inside, regardless of their behavior, Rosenhan and his group were judged insane and treated accordingly. The mere fact that they were patients in the actual situation of a mental hospital was enough to distort every perception of the hospital staff. There is no such thing as a patient independent and separate from his hospital situation.

"If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry." p. 19

"Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head" p. 21

"Poetic Terrorism proposes this sabotage of archetypes as the only practical insurrectionary tactic for the present." p. 33

What I learned from this book:
-How "Clientel democracy" or "democracy by alliance" works in the shanty towns
-How "democracy through bureacracy" works in the shanty towns.
-How institutional paternalism can be raped by anti-paternalists.

Good book. Get it for $12.50. Link.