The Carbondale Caper

Abstract

“In July, 1950, Wesley R. Fishel, then an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State College, met Ngo Dinh Diem, a Vietnamese politician out of power, in Tokyo, Japan. The professor and the politician kept up a correspondence and, in early 1951, Fishel had his friend made a consultant to Michigan State's Governmental Research Bureau.” With these words Robert Scigliano and Guy H. Fox begin “Technical Assistance in Vietnam: The Michigan State University Experience”. The authors, whose duties with the Michigan State University Group (MSUG) in Vietnam “spanned all but four of the project's eighty-six months,” describe a university activity, infiltrated by the CIA, which still sends shudders through professors across the country.     

Appendix A: The DPRK's Debts

The global value chain concept has become one of the most influential frameworks used in the study of globalization. The paradigm, however, is deficient in explicating the exploitative nature of global value chain governance. Based on a study of soccer ball production in China and Pakistan, this article analyzes global production from three perspectives: the role of the state in shaping the host countries' mode of production and legal framework, the issue of how surplus value is created and distributed, and the use of child labor or prison labor to remain competitive in the chain. The article shows, in the case of Pakistan, how a country using a lower-labor-costs strategy to retain a place in a global value chain allows its workers to be exploited and pauperizes its people.     

锡克教:一个没有种姓的社会

锡克教是在反对印度教的种姓制度的基础上,为建立一个平等社会而形成的新型宗教.锡克教通过建立桑格特(Sangat,公共圣会)、旁格特(Pangat,共餐或免费公共餐堂)和入教仪式(洗礼)等宗教体制实践平等的教义,从而形成了一个没有种姓的锡克教社会.     

The Problem of Incentives: A Discussion

This article represents the greater part of a discussion, organisedat the Royal Empire Society on the 29th October, to considercertain points made by Mrs. Huxley in her recent paper on EastAfrica. The Chairman was Sir William Goodenough, Chairman ofBarclays Bank.     

The Levant: A Profoundly Disturbed Environment

An account of two separate expeditions to climb mountains in Tibet, which, while not among the highest in the world, offer a technical challenge equal to the Matterhorn – indeed they are roughly the same height (about 6,500 metres). The first expedition was to Kajaqiao, which the author, Mick Fowler successfully climbed with Chris Watts, the second, a couple of years later, was to Manamcho, which was climbed with Paul Ramsden. The article contains a wealth of detail about the technicalities of this sort of climbing.     

锡克教:一个没有种姓的社会

锡克教是在反对印度教的种姓制度的基础上,为建立一个平等社会而形成的新型宗教.锡克教通过建立桑格特(Sangat,公共圣会)、旁格特(Pangat,共餐或免费公共餐堂)和入教仪式(洗礼)等宗教体制实践平等的教义,从而形成了一个没有种姓的锡克教社会.     

The Gorbachev Reform: A Maximal Case

Assumptions that major reform in the Soviet economy cannot be realized are challenged. Beliefs that Gorbachev is unable or unwilling to take necessary political risks, that bureaucratic resistance will forestall efforts at incremental change, and that Communist ideology lacks themes that can be used to mobilize support for innovation are analyzed. Assessment of reform should be based on an awareness of the advantages (as well as risks) of a strategy tying Gorbachev's political fate to reform and of the effectiveness of a timetable that consolidates gains in services and agriculture before confronting an entrenched industrial bureaucracy. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 113, 124.     

The meaning of war: A heterodox perspective

This article raises serious methodological, conceptual, historical and empirical questions concerning the notion of China as the next world superpower. The most dynamic sector of growth is the private sector, but within that sector foreign capital is growing the fastest, especially in strategic export sectors and increasingly in finance and the domestic market. Historically China has passed from a semi-colony to a collectivist state to a state capitalist economy toward a neo-liberal economy which contains the seeds for the re-emergence of a foreign capitalist-dominated economy. Contradictions in the current neo-liberal economy are leading to increased class struggle especially in the countryside and increasing tension between the super-rich Chinese bourgeois allied to foreign capital and ‘national statist’ sectors of the governing class. The efforts by the new leadership to ameliorate the contradiction through increased social spending are too little and too late.     

The Military: A Threat to Democracy?

The military is by its very nature a potential threat to democracy, but in well-established democracies civilian supremacy has generally been maintained, though there are dangers of excessive military influence. S. E. Finer's seminal 1962 study of civil-military relations distinguished between the modes and effectiveness of civilian control in mature, developed and low or minimal political cultures. These categories are distinguished in particular by varying degrees of political legitimacy. Finer's conclusion about the prospects for political stability and democracy in most developing countries was pessimistic. But Finer's conclusions can now be challenged, primarily because the nature of civil-military relations has changed. In mature political cultures like the USA, the threat from the military-industrial complex has receded. Japan, Germany or France — key examples in Finer's second category — have now become mature political cultures; and Russia (newly in this category) is not, despite its many problems, threatened by direct military intervention. Many countries previously classified within low political culture have moved into the second category, and despite some notable exceptions the military have become more cautious about taking responsibility for government.