Walking along, moving on a narrow lane, along a wide line – wide, as in the Russian term Ясная Поляна, which cannot be translated , with its inherent link to wide and bright … white …, as witty? .. Imagine it is not an imagination but you move in a space that really transcends time and you and you live in a time that does not refer to any space … – where The Stranger is actually not a stranger anymore as we all are truly and everywhere and anytime at home.
Autore: Peter Herrmann's Blog
Dr. Peter Herrmann is a sociologist of German origin -- well, he was, before moving forward, being now ..., well, some say: social philosopher, permanently crossing borders between arts, economics, jurisprudence, philosophy, political science and .., yes, still sociology ... and having lost many links to the origins as fasr as nationality is concerned, trying to imagine that there is no border ...
the latest issue of The International Journal of Social Quality
A bit of advertisement – the copy of a mail I received via a mailing list:
Dear Colleague,
We are pleased to announce that the latest issue of The International Journal of Social Quality has recently been published by Berghahn Journals.
In this issue, the articles consider multiple approaches as they address societal issues such as the challenge of sustainability, gender parity and equality, the digital revolution and its effects on labor markets and Corporate Social Responsibility. This issue also includes an article by Steve Corbett that examines the 2016 Referendum on the United Kingdom’s (UK) European Union (EU) membership. This article will be free to access until March 15!
Please visit the Berghahn website for more information about the journal:
www.berghahnjournals.com/ijsq
Current Issue: Volume 6, Issue 1
Editorial
Editorial: Brexit, Sustainability, Economics, Companies’ Responsibilities, and Current Representations
http://bit.ly/2kXZ2H1
Free Article – until March 15
The Social Consequences of Brexit for the UK and Europe: Euroscepticism, Populism, Nationalism, and Societal Division
Steve Corbett
http://bit.ly/2l265hy
Articles
Humanosphere Potentiality Index: Appraising Existing Indicators from a Long-term Perspective
Takahiro Sato, Mario López, Taizo Wada, Shiro Sato, Makoto Nishi and Kazuo Watanabe
http://bit.ly/2kXTWdQ
Gender Parity and Equality in the Sultanate of Oman: A Case in Education for the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries
Faryal Khan and Maricel Fernandez-Carag
http://bit.ly/2kBsCBh
Social Quality: Regaining Political Economy
Peter Herrmann
http://bit.ly/2lsJN9Y
An Exogenous Path of Development: Explaining the Rise of Corporate Social Responsibility in China
Ka Lin, Dan Banik and Longfei Yi
http://bit.ly/2lzr0q5
How Our Collective Representations Affect the Future of the European Union
Jan Berting
http://bit.ly/2l29Ljy
Be sure to recommend IJSQ to your institution’s library: http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/ijsq/library-recommendations/
Free Sample Issue: http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/ijsq/sample/
Contact: info@berghahnjournals.com
Sharing economy …
… or being Pawlowian dog?
There are so many “likes” and endorsements and people one “knows”, i.e. with whom one is “friends” or to whom one is linked in, gated in a research “community” …, and one gets frequently messages about having been found or people following you on academic sites while you are yourself googling around the world … – it really sometimes suggests that we are all brothers and sisters now — such a joyful time os sharing being endorsed and not alone: yes, somebody …
… has endorsed you …, and likes you … and was interested in y0ur work … and wants to be linked to you and be part of your network and … there are all these messages about your achievements, and how many people read your articles and quoted it and watched your videos …
… and there are at least two things that may makes us especially think, two remarkable facts even if we state that the figures are actually correct (though I do know for sure that they often are not):
First, there on the WWW (as well as in the traditional print media) the reported figures are actually often remarkably low. Second, there is a misconception by high figures: for instance publishers sell “packages” to libraries, and if one is “lucky” enough to be part of such package, one benefits from the package numbers – something I currently suspect: For instance, I contributed to a book titled KONDRATIEFF WAVES . Juglar – Kuznets – Kondratieff which has high scores. I am seriously wondering if any of these reading brothers and sisters even recognised the title of my contribution in the book (the downloads of the entire book brings the scores …), dealing with Indicators – More than Evidence and Maths – well, this probably is not the only contribution that drowned in the floods of contributions.
But the Pawlowian dog begins for me at another point, and lets me ask if I am part and guinea pig of any larger test scenario.
People endorsing me for several things – and I am of course most grateful. And then people do this not I know that they do not know what I am working on AND they can know that they are endorsing me for something I hardly know anything about, let alone deserving to be endorsed as expert.
So may be that the question underlying big brothers test is the following: How much expertise do people accept on there shoulders, even if they are not experts at all?
Latest when somebody endorses me for …believing everything — I will turn the endorsement down – may be my biographer(s) can add little notes here and there – before the work will emerge as biography and pos to print, saying probably more about the biographer than about the biographee.
Ma grazie lo stesso …. è molto gentile, mi obbligando molto …
Uncivilised people
Much had been, will be and can be said about tax evasion. One point is that there is an obvious link between paying taxes and civilisation, which, if turned around, demands to conclude that those who evade paying taxes, and of course especially those who do it on a lagre scale for personal enrichment, are simply uncivilised people. A link that is also confirmed as being “legally relevant”, even the US-law considering in some way civilisation as legal(ly relevant) issue. the issue in question had been raised by judge Holmes, in the case
Compania General de Tabacos v. Collector, 275 U.S. 87 (1927) – Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue (U.S. Supreme Court, No. 42, Argued October 18, 19, 1927, Decided November 21, 1927, 275 U.S. 87)
Holmes stated there that
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, including the chance to insure.
The Quote Investigator came up with several other occasions and perspectives on bringing up this link between civilisation and payment of taxes.
And it is surely worrying then to see how many uncivilised people are occupying positions not only in big business it also in governments and national and international governing and governance bodies. However, mind ….
impressions ….
Too often in today’s life and academic thinking we are (following what we are required to do:) jumping from one to the next stepping stone, barely being allowed to think about building bridges, let alone building them.
Peanuts …
A commonly known – und uncontested – pattern is that people who are more or less poor, have to turn every cent, 人民币, копейка, centavo … around and round before spending it … – so different to those who have enough, barely looking at the denomination.
And so it is as well on the “other side”, those who are at the receiving end, or those who are dealing with the “payers” – these are then people who do the same with the money they receive or that have to check, when closing a bank account, transferring petty money from these poorish people into another account or even country etc.: every cent, 人民币, копейка, centavo … has to be turned around and around again and again, forms have to be completed … .
The prayers of the rich and superrich may be better, more substantial, in any case surely: “closer to the higher ecehlons”, to those whom they elected as the political leaders and to heaven?.
Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.[1]
And so is it with all the rest of it – cum grano salis and at times inversely: A petty crime will be most likely detected and at court it will be turned around and around like the cents until a reason is found to penalise it I the most stern manner. The major and definitely criminal offense of speculators and other “functionaries” may even get away with some fanfares, re-interpreting the delict as support of economic development, act of fostering investment and growth and good deed.
You remember Brecht’s Macheath, asking in Act 3, scene 3
What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank?
Indeed, we have to take up again o the wisdom of the ancestors, already struggling with a world characterised by these patterns
To nonsense, reason’s self they turn; Beneficence becomes a pest; Woe unto thee, that thou’rt a grandson born! As for the law born with us, unexpressed;– That law, alas, none careth to discern.
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[1] T.J. Dunning, l. c. [Trades Union and Strikes], pp. 35, 36; in: Marx, Karl, 1867: Capital; Volume I; in: Karl Marx/Frederick Engels. Collected Works; Volume 35; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996: 748, footnote 2
About the real realities of the presence … and its morals
As we read in
Bernard Shaw’s Preface to Major Barbara
Now to deplore this preference as sordid, and teach children that it is sinful to desire money, is to strain towards the extreme possible limit of impudence in lying, and corruption in hypocrisy. The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization, the one sound spot in our social conscience. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life as truly as sovereigns and bank notes are money. The first duty of every citizen is to insist on having money on reasonable terms; and this demand is not complied with by giving four men three shillings each for ten or twelve hours’ drudgery and one man a thousand pounds for nothing. The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty.
One can read as complement then from Marx, according to Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Capital (London/New York: Veso, 2010: 257)
He is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake. In this way he spurs on the development of society’s productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the miser an absolute drive towards self-enrichment. But what appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the effect of a social mechanism in which he is merely a cog. Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it necessary constantly to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation.
Indeed, no reason for wanting for the moral entrepreneur, doing good and emerging as pursuer of cooperate social responsibility … mind: the term “entrepreneur” translates nicely into undertaker … – first bringing the workers to the graves, and then preparing himself to be buried on the dust heap of history.
About the real realities of the presence …
… not the realities of a proposed future in the making,
There we are talking about digitalisation, the abundance of today’s society and zero-marginality, of course often or not, considering, admitting, commiserating the poverty, asking even for changes of the distribution and policies of distribution, allowing the “inclusion”. Looking honestly at the other sides, we should surely register also the “exclusion of mindfulness”, the fact that the reference we use is actually itself exclusive, establishing a real- and mind-set that evokes and even is excluding. In his book Mike Davis, looking at the Planet of Slums, we find on Page 49 the decisive statement:
“Most displaced … are social outcasts, excluded from formal life and employment.”
– important to note that he is quoting an aid NGO.
The attempts to arrive at a really integrated approach, understanding concisely the intimate link, are at least today too often caught in a certain kind of “positivity/Positiveness of the future” – be it by looking at the Precariat as the New Dangerous Class
or also my own approaches as for instance in the project asking Is it really about Industry 4.0.? or the earlier presentations proposing to go From 5 giant evils to 5 giant tensions – the current crisis of capitalism as seedbed for its overturn or to revisit the Challenges for a Global Agenda, looking at Growth and Development – Complement or Contradiction? Also in Moscow I talked about it in February 2017.
In sum, all these positive approaches are overestimating – for one or another reason – the somewhat futurist view, proposing some new normal, and easily forgetting that fact that for many life is still actually still “the normal we thought to be overcome fro some time already”, the suggested “historic, early normal”.
Sure, development is rapid – we find also his statement in Davis’ book:
Angola, only 14 percent urban in 1970, is now a majority urban nation. Most of its city-dwellers are both desperately poor and almost totally ignored by the state, which in 1998 was estimated to spend only 1 percent of its budget on public education and welfare. The unending civil wars in Colombia likewise have added more than 400,000 IDPs to Bogota’s urban poverty belt, which includes the huge informal settlements of Sumapaz, Ciudad Bolivar, Usme, and Soacha.
And although I think we are too often look at crude data which do not really say anything about life and what it is about here is another figure, taken from Davis’ book:
If UN data are accurate, the household per-capita income differential between a rich city like Seattle and a very poor city like Ibadan is as great as 739 to 1 – an incredible inequality.
A gentle reminder to the readers of the blog — whenever the modern and “postmodern” world is looked at on these pages, taking the “positive outlook” the author is well aware of the ore “positivist perspective”, if you want: the story told by the reality as it is shown by the far too many real lives standing behind every “single figure” that amounts to the brute reality of global capitalist development that is by no means flat and where talking about Postcapitalism as a Guide to Our Future is really more science fiction and should realistically not be seen as vision.
Social management – brief overview and introduction
A brief look at social management is given in a lecture to students at Plekanov university and can be accessed on my YouTube channel.
Preparing the presentation was interesting, as actually on the Internet the search for social management does not show any results anymore …. – only issues around social media are schowing up. So, in this light the reflections may be of some special interest also historically.
comedy or tragedy?
I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel — a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.
Letter by Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann (31 December 1769)
