Marxism and the Concept of a Social Formation: An Immanent Critique of the Views of Jairus Banaji

Jairus Banaji associates the concept of a social formation (involving modal combination, or the articulation of modes of production) with “vulgar Marxism.” This includes both the Marxism of the Second International and the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser. Banaji is critical of those Marxists who employ the concept because in his view they are insufficiently sensitive to the complexities of history. His reasons for thinking this may be subjected to an immanent critique. Such a critique attempts to show that, given an argument's starting assumptions, a different (perhaps even the opposite) conclusion from that which is drawn by its author is possible. Applying this idea to the work of Banaji, it can be demonstrated that his rejection of the concept of a social formation is not required by his own theoretical assumptions and that endorsement of the concept is consistent with them.

Discrimination on the Ground of Age in Uganda: Analysing Madrama Izama v. Attorney General (Constitutional Appeal No.01 of 2016) [2019] UGSC 1 (14 February 2019)

Article 21(2) of the Ugandan constitution provides that ‘a person shall not be discriminated against on the ground of sex, race, colour, ethnic origin, tribe, birth, creed or religion, social or economic standing, political opinion or disability’. Article 21(3) defines discrimination to mean ‘to give different treatment to different persons attributable only or mainly to their respective descriptions by sex, race, colour, ethnic origin, tribe, birth, creed or religion, social or economic standing, political opinion or disability’. Age is not one of the grounds mentioned in Article 21 against which a person may not be discriminated against. In Madrama Izama v. Attorney General the Ugandan Supreme Court dealt with the issue of whether, notwithstanding the fact that age is not mentioned under Article 21, a person could argue that he has a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of age. The majority judgment answered that question in the negative whereas the minority judgments came to the opposite conclusion. In this article, the author highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the majority and minority judgments.

RELIANCE, FORMALITIES AND THE MODE OF ACCEPTANCE OF AN OFFER Pillay v Shaik 2009 4 SA 74 (SCA)

In Pillay v Shaik (2009 4 SA 74 (SCA)), the Supreme Court of Appeal was confronted with a situation which tends to feature in the law reports more frequently than one would expect, and that is where a party to a transaction involving the sale of immovable property reneges on an apparent agreement by invoking some form of technicality (in casu the lack of a signature on a contractual document) as a bar to the proper conclusion of the contract. Usually, where immovable property is sold directly to a purchaser, section 2(1) of theAlienation of Land Act 68 of 1981 applies and provides that no alienation of land will be of any force or effect unless contained in a deed of alienation signed by the parties, or by their agents acting on their written authority. Failure to comply with this provision renders an alienation of land void. Where, however, immovable property is held in the name of a close corporation or private company merely the members’ interests or shares are transferred to the purchaser, but the purchaser still indirectly gains control over the property owned by the juridical entity. The present matter dealt with the latter type of situation and the legal question was whether the sellers had accepted a signed, written offer made by the purchasers despite the fact that the sellers had not in turn signed the contractual documents. The Natal Provincial Division (Shaik v Pillay 2008 3 SA 59 (N)) found that contractual liability did not lie for want of compliance with a party-imposed signature formality, whereas the Supreme Court of Appeal applied the reliance theory to reach the opposite conclusion in the circumstances. The respective approaches of these two courts are diametrically opposed giving rise to some interesting issues on doctrinal as well as policy levels.

How You Estimate Calories Matters: Calorie Estimation Reversals

Consumers often form calorie estimates. How consumers estimate calories can systematically bias their calorie assessments. We distinguish between magnitude estimates—when consumers judge whether something has “very few” to “many” calories—and numeric estimates—when consumers estimate a number of calories. These two estimation modes lead to calorie estimate reversals when assessing calories in stimuli that trade off type and quantity, such as when assessing calories in a smaller portion of unhealthy food versus a larger portion of healthier food. When forming a “magnitude estimate,” people judge the larger, healthier food portion as containing fewer calories than the smaller, unhealthy food portion. However, when forming a “numeric estimate,” people often come to the opposite conclusion—judging the larger, healthier food portion as having more calories. This reversal occurs because these two estimation modes are differentially sensitive to information regarding a stimulus’ type (e.g., food healthiness), which is processed first, and quantity (e.g., food portion size), which is processed secondarily. Specifically, magnitude estimates are more sensitive to type, whereas numeric estimates attend to both type and quantity. Accordingly, this divergence between calorie estimation modes attenuates when: 1) quantity information is made primary or 2) in an intuitive (vs. deliberative) mindset.

Dilemma for appeals to the moral significance of birth

Giubilini and Minerva argue that the permissibility of abortion entails the permissibility of infanticide. Proponents of what we refer to as the Birth Strategy claim that there is a morally significant difference brought about at birth that accounts for our strong intuition that killing newborns is morally impermissible. We argue that strategy does not account for the moral intuition that late-term, non-therapeutic abortions are morally impermissible. Advocates of the Birth Strategy must either judge non-therapeutic abortions as impermissible in the later stages of pregnancy or conclude that they are permissible on the basis of premises that are far less intuitively plausible than the opposite conclusion and its supporting premises.

Beyond Censorship: Polish Independent Press Debates on Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

The article analyzes discussions around the documentary film Shoah, by Claude Lanzmann, conducted in the uncensored press in communist Poland. In the literature on the subject, a popular thesis claims that the democratic opposition in Poland, like the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic, subjected this film to explicit criticism. The authors’ research into discussions about the Holocaust in the Polish independent press leads to the opposite conclusion. Ours analysis shows that authors publishing in the underground press had varied reactions to Lanzmann’s film. Voices opposing the official campaign against the director and his film predominate (which did not mean a complete lack of criticism vis-à-vis some of the movie’s features). We found only two opinions that can be considered clearly negative. The debate about Lanzmann’s film is important because it shows the complexity of the democratic opposition’s attitude of toward Polish-Jewish history and memory. In the opposition elite’s view of history, two currents ran in parallel, often in statements authored by the same people. On the one hand, the trend was primarily affirmative, as a reaction to the communist propaganda that bypassed or completely distorted some aspects of Polish history. On the other hand, there was also a tendency to include more controversial or even clearly shameful aspects of the history of Poland.

Heterogeneous Beliefs and School Choice Mechanisms

This paper studies how welfare outcomes in centralized school choice depend on the assignment mechanism when participants are not fully informed. Using a survey of school choice participants in a strategic setting, we show that beliefs about admissions chances differ from rational expectations values and predict choice behavior. To quantify the welfare costs of belief errors, we estimate a model of school choice that incorporates subjective beliefs. We evaluate the equilibrium effects of switching to a strategy-proof deferred acceptance algorithm, and of improving households’ belief accuracy. We find that a switch to truthful reporting in the DA mechanism offers welfare improvements over the baseline given the belief errors we observe in the data, but that an analyst who assumed families had accurate beliefs would have reached the opposite conclusion. (JEL D83, H75, I21, I28)

Wrongs

Chapter 7 examines remedies issued in response to wrongs. Some writers assume that all remedies are responses to wrong; others argue for the opposite conclusion. This chapter defends a mid-way position, arguing that some (but only some) damages awards are wrong-responding, specifically: nominal damages, exemplary damages, pain and suffering damages, and a variety of awards that are described compendiously as ‘vindicatory’ damages (and individually as user damages, waiver damages, market-price damages, non-pecuniary damages, and gain-based damages). Importantly, ordinary compensatory damages are not responses to wrongs. In defending this position, Chapter 7 rejects the ‘continuity thesis’ and, more generally, the idea of a substantive duty to pay damages. The chapter also explains the distinctive characteristics of wrong-based remedies, arguing that there is no natural or logical remedial response to a wrong (and, therefore, that, like criminal punishment, the sums awarded under this heading are determined by choice and convention).

Legality of China’s Entitlements of Historic Rights beyond the UNCLOS in the South China Sea

In the Award of the South China Sea Arbitration, the Tribunal concluded that the Convention had superseded any historic rights in excess of the limits imposed by the Convention. Consequently, China’s claim of historic rights in the relevant part encompassed by the nine-dashed lines in the South China Sea exceeded the limits of China’s maritime entitlements under the Convention. But an analysis on the context and negotiation history of paragraph 8 of the preamble and issues related to historic rights in the Convention leads to an opposite conclusion. For the issues related to historic rights, the negotiation history of the Convention indicated that the Convention does not supersede any historic rights but left lacunae on related issues. According to the text and negotiation history of paragraph 8 of the Convention, historic rights were not superseded but were regulated by general international law.

Sull’origine della poesia romanza: ipotesi andalusa e mediolatina alla luce del rapporto fra rima e melodia

Within the long-standing, and yet still lively debate over the origin of Romance poetry in general, and of regular rhyme in particular, one key element appears to have been often overlooked: music. Although it is very well known that Troubadour lyric poems were meant to be sung, their melodic form has so far indisputably been considered to be independent from the formal structure of the texts. However, a radical reconsideration of this common belief, based on a brand-new approach that takes orality into account, leads to the opposite conclusion that regular rhyme schemes, at their origins, were indeed closely related to the musical form of the songs. Linking rhymes to music may therefore represent a potentially decisive argument in the quest for the origin of Romance lyric poetry. For, even if rhymes and rhyme schemes may be found in many different and independent literary traditions, their structural relation to musical form is by far much rarer, hence offering a much more specific hint about the origin of Vernacular lyric forms, which are based on regular rhyme schemes. Tracing this metrical-musical technique back to its roots, may validate once and for all one of the two main theories competing around the origin of Vernacular lyric poetry, namely the Medieval Latin and the Andalusian Arabic theory.