NEP Stands with Correntewire

3 responses to “NEP Stands with Correntewire”

1. lambert strether | December 6, 2012 at 4:19 pm |

   [lambert blushes modestly]

   I would be really remiss if I didn’t point out the key role played by Correntian Joe Firestone, who took point on the conference. That said, had there been no Corrente site or Corrente community — the garden where I do the planting and the weeding and even the fertilizer distribution 😉 — the conference (original transcripts) would not have taken place; several Correntians stepped up to help out and even traveled to DC. I should also mention the role played by Selise in processing the video and producing finished transcripts.

   * * *

   Also, I couldn’t make it down to the Manhattan MMT presentations this fall, which I really regretted. At our 2010 conference, seeing Mitchell, Kelton, Mosler, Auerback, Wray, and Tcherevna sitting at the same table and interacting with the audience and each other was like watching the tightest rock and roll band ever trading riffs in a small hall. Everything was totally honed. It should surprise nobody that MMT is starting to get real traction given the quality of its proponents.

2. F. Beard | December 6, 2012 at 4:25 pm |

   OK Lambert, I donated since you are a great guy and one of the few to notice my absence from NC 🙂

3. lambert strether | December 7, 2012 at 10:46 am |

   I used “take point” instead of “got the ball rolling” for the role Joe Firestone played partly because that was the metaphor for “initiated” back in the day when I worked in cube, but also because I wanted to work in a quote from Homage to Catalonia to suggest what the Occupiers call pre-fguration, but I couldn’t find one. So this will have to do:

   In practice the democratic ‘revolutionary’ type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected. In a workers’ army discipline is theoretically voluntary. It is based on class-loyalty, whereas the discipline of a bourgeois conscript army is based ultimately on fear. (The Popular Army that replaced the militias was midway between the two types.) In the militias the bullying and abuse that go on in an ordinary army would never have been tolerated for a moment. The normal military punishments existed, but they were only invoked for very serious offences. When a man refused to obey an order you did not immediately get him punished; you first appealed to him in the name of comradeship. Cynical people with no experience of handling men will say instantly that this would never ‘work’, but as a matter of fact it does ‘work’ in the long run. The discipline of even the worst drafts of militia visibly improved as time went on. In January the job of keeping a dozen raw recruits up to the mark almost turned my hair grey. In May for a short while I was acting-lieutenant in command of about thirty men, English and Spanish. We had all been under fire for months, and I never had the slightest difficulty in getting an order obeyed or in getting men to volunteer for a dangerous job. ‘Revolutionary’ discipline depends on political consciousness–on an understanding of _why_ orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.