1989年之后，中国大陆就再也没有发生过大规模的学生运动了。最近一段时间，几所高校因为文凭等问题发生学生群体事件，这让学生运动再度成为人们关注的问题。我们来看看西方国家的学生运动，也许可以作个借鉴。

前一段时间，法国大学生为了政府的就业政策重新走上街头，声势浩大引起举世关注，并最终迫使政府收回原来的决策，取得了学生运动的胜利成果。这场运动让很多人想起了1968年法国的学生运动，并惊呼“学生运动东山再起”。

不遑多让的是美国这边。因为移民政策，美国的民权运动也有再起的趋势。移民团体几次发起全国范围的大游行，并得到学生组织的大力支持。美国学生对政治与社会议题的兴趣逐渐高涨。这似乎有“三十年河东，三十年河西”的样子了。

在我“挂单”做研究的美国加州大学洛杉矶分校（UCLA），学生们也蠢蠢欲动。最近由于学生的串连反对，UCLA董事会已经决定撤回对与苏丹政权有牵连的公司的投资。

事情还要从两年前说起：当时媒体报道出苏丹难民营的妇女和女童在离开营地出外收集木材和水的时候，经常被苏丹士兵强暴的事情，引起了UCLA一些积极的女权运动分子的关注，她们随即发起“撤资”运动，迅速得到其他学生响应，参加人数由第一次会议的六人增加到几百人，最终组成了“行动委员会”，并得到了学校非洲研究中心的教授的支持。他们收集所有来自“国际危机组织”和“无国界医生”的相关报告，与其他学校的团体合办“苏丹周”唤醒人们关注，他们播放电影，组织演讲，最终，他们的目光转向了学校当局。

去年11月4日，加大投资委员会召开会议，讨论投资事项，会前学生进行了积极的串连。当天会议召开前的一个小时，学生在校园内举行沉默游行，举办记者会，强烈反对延续对与苏丹有关的公司的投资。学生的行动对董事们产生了很大的压力，当天的会议提出了关于撤资的提案。这被成为“加州学生运动历史上的又一项胜利”。

这种角色承担的例子绝不仅仅是美国和大学生群体。2005年11月17日，三名法国大学生进入巴黎郊区一所高中的生物实验室，毁坏了其中价值数万法郎的生物辨识仪器，因为他们认为这样的仪器把人当作试验工具，不仅侵犯了个人自由，而且为警察国家的形成提供了可能性。他们自然面临着走上法庭的命运。也许他们的做法不可取，但是他们这种社会关怀还是引起广泛的同情。法国一些著名知识分子就公开表达对他们的道义支持。

在相对成熟的民主社会里，学生运动是否还有空间呢？加州大学学生的行动给出了答案：关注世界范围的人权发展，推动普世价值的实现，是学生在学习自由的过程中实践自由的重要方向。无论是对抗跨国集团，还是伸张基本伦理，或者是挑战政府政策，青年学生的主张和做法都也面临质疑和批评。但是我想，他们的这种社会热情和理想主义，是没有人可以反对的。谁说小孩子无法改变社会，今天在西方的这些学生就在试图参与历史。
首发RFA

经历了12年漫长的“不可告人”的利益博弈，中国的《反垄断法》立法总算有了眉目。这该是经济生活中的一件好事。

《反垄断法》素有一国“经济宪法”之称，之于经济社会其作用之大，由此可见。然而，也有利益集团称“反‘垄断’是全盘私有化的险恶圈套”。如此一论，足让那些苦心孤旨推动反垄断法出台的专业人士惊怵，因为果真被判明是在设立“圈套”，那么，他们就解犯了“政治上正确”的纪律底线。

此外，中国的制度惯性再一次显现于《反垄断法》草案中，称曰：“对本法规定的垄断行为，有关法律、行政法规另有规定的，依照其规定（对待）”。由于这个“例外”条款，《反垄断法》也就成了一个新的“只许州官放火，不许百姓点灯”的“法的垄断”版本。由反垄断立法堕入“法的垄断”，成为中国立法史上的“准丑闻”，尽管它远没突发事件应对法那样引发普遍的质疑——盖由于它较为专业之故，少为普通世人所关注。

果真“除外”条例成为最后通过的立法条款，那可以相信：像烟草、铁路、通讯这样的行业将会少为《反垄断法》限制，而新兴的民营（私企）的新技术含量高的行业（或专门企业）反而会受到钳制。所以说，近些日子媒体炒作的“外资企业加紧预习《反垄断法》”的报道，绝非空穴来风。这说明：1，外企的母国法律背景清晰，知道的《反垄断法》与企业命运攸关的关系；2，深知中国制度惯性——更多的是“言在法外”；3，中国垄断行业与政府存在法定的利益输送关系，甚至说就是政府的一部分，如烟草、盐业、粮食等行业本身既负责市场规制的确定，自己又实行营利经营。

关于第2点，是引发对《反垄断法》大讨论的肇因。2004年上半年，有政府背景的调研专家推出了《在华跨国公司限制性竞争行为报告》；国家工商总局也随之“小狗吠，大狗咬”，发布权威文件《在华跨国公司限制竞争行为表现及对策》。两个文件引起了外企的“恐慌”，纷纷要求国家工商管理当局对文件做出完善解释…

如此案例，似乎让传统的与政府有利益输送关系的垄断行业有“转移视线”之收获。但是，中国传统垄断行业的特殊地位导致了严重的政治与社会后果：

（一）这类行业腐败高发，使高薪养廉之策在此范围内犹如以雪填井。因为再高的年薪也有上限（如100万），而腐败的“合理所得”可能一次就是十年、五十年的年薪。现在亿元大案已经不是“新闻”！

（二）这类行业平均工资畸高，“央企十二强”（如电力、石油等）人均年工资高达12万元，是普通行业平均年工资5至6倍，甚至是小型民企工资水平的20倍。这必然导致托克维尔意义上“分散的、互仇的社会小团体存在”，也是社会崩盘的一个重要诱因。

（三）这类企业效率低且排斥新的市场准者，至少让新进入者要向政府主管部门花上一笔相当可观的许可申请费（含寻租），才得进入。如此，推动社会整体腐败。与此同时，作为“二级政府”或曰“代理政府”，他们更愿意操作“壳资源”－－出卖垄断衍生权、吸纳民间资本与其“挂靠”。

12年来，《反垄断法》迟迟拿不到“准生证”，这本身就是由政治垄断产生出来的问题。表面的一些利益博弈虽然影响很大，但绝不是核心问题。一党执政必然形成政府作为党的“政治公司”的存在，比方说一个地方（如县级市）的党委书记就相当于这个“第四级政治公司”的董事长，而其县（市）长则是总经理。在政治垄断且公司化的经营下，那些拥有经济垄断权力的行业则：（一）以“国字号”为荣，与政治权力公司密切协作，横向攫取地方利益，转而进行纵向输送；（二）积极寻求“由商而政”的途径，实现最本位化的官商一体。

在现有政治构架瞬时解构之整体社会风险较大即认可所谓渐进政治改革的情况下，那么，《反垄断法》既便是一件法律次品，也不应回避它的私有化导向，因为只有标准的私有化才能彻底解决政治资源配置效率不高的问题。这个过程可能较为缓慢，但它绝对能够中间性地解决“权贵私有化”问题。

简言之，只有彻底私有化才能将“经济－－政治”双重垄断下的中国传统垄断行业予以解构，至少能压缩到最小空间。此后的问题则是，一部改进型的《反垄断法》再来约束新技术型私企的垄断行为。

彻底私有化，能够解决社会冲突极端化问题。因为“人手一份的资产”，便生成了“有恒产亦有恒心”的社会。设想，将国有（原叫“全民所有”）企业如石油、铁路、航空等的资产存量人均一份地分到每一个拥有中国籍的人手中，还会出现大量的上访吗？

不会的！初步估计，国有（全民）资产的人民私有化，会使每一个中国国籍人能分到30万元人民币（以现不变价格计）。考虑农村土地实际“准私有状况”，可以适当降低农村的人均货币资产获得量，同时依不同区域的人均地亩量划分等级，决定货币资产的配比。但同时规定每个农民的货币资产分得量不少于10万元的条款。

当然，这是一个理想化的思路，在具体操作上有待全民讨论（甚至确立并启动全民公决程序）及立法确认，比如在《反垄断法》之后推出《私有化法》与《全民公决法》（可先期确立）。

时至今日，反腐败仍是个伪问题。因为腐败的根源就是权力（特别是经济资源配置的设计权力及操作权的）集中，完全私有化则可最大程度地遏止腐败。在行为经济学意义上，专制即政治垄断国家的腐败无非都是“个体主动私有化”行为。每一个腐败者，都想从公有的“大堆”上及早拿回自己的那一份。只不过，就像精细化刑法之前的血族报复那样，计量不准而已。

所以说，只有私有化才能将初始意义上的腐败冲动予以计量化。在唱之已久的“反腐败亡党，不反腐败亡国”两律悖反状态下，只有标准的私有化才是唯一的答案。换言之：只有（标准的）私有化才能救中国，只有（标准的）私有化才能救中共。

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2006年7月18日上午构思于乡下细雨中

2006年7月19日下午定稿于小城绵逸书房

首发新世纪

The First Feminists

The American womens rights movement was born 158 years ago today, on July 19, 1848, when about 300 people gathered in Seneca Falls, New York. Their meeting was a result of long dissatisfaction. It all went back to when two of the events organizers were kept out of an abolitionist convention in London eight years before, simply for being women.

In 1840 a young woman named Elizabeth Cady accepted a marriage proposal from Henry Stanton partly so she could attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London with him. To her shock and dismay she found when she got there that women were not permitted to speak, or even to sit with the men. Her husband was not much bothered by this and took his seat. However the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison refused to speak because of it.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as she insisted on being called, was outraged. Lucretia Mott, a friend of hers who had also hoped to attend, was similarly dismayed, though not surprised. Mott was older and more experienced in the antislavery world, and, in conversations with her, Stanton began to realize that she wasnt held in much higher regard by white men than were the slaves on whose behalf she had come to London.

The Stantons soon settled in upstate New York, where they had met. At their home in Seneca Falls, Elizabeth Cady Stanton would be near other women who shared her views. One day, while having tea, she, Mott, and three other women, Jane Hunt, Mary Ann McClintock, and Martha Wright, began discussing the lack of rights afforded to married women, who couldnt own land or significant sums of money. Also, divorce was almost impossible from an unwilling husband, even if he abused his wife, his children, or the bottle. When divorce did occur, women had no right to the custody of their children. The group decided that to make any progress they must start by holding a convention on womens rights.

They took no more than five days to put the convention together, and they advertised it in a Seneca Falls newspaper. About 300 people attended, 40 of them men. One of them was Frederick Douglass, who was already well known for his antislavery work. He was to play a key role in the conventions outcome.

The meeting lasted for two days. Lucretia Motts husband, James Mott, ran it, as having a woman do so was unthinkable. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had written up a document only days before that she called the Declaration of Sentiments, the general tone of which mimicked the Declaration of Independence. It described abuses and injustices inflicted on women and demanded that they be righted.

After her opening remarks, Stanton read the Declaration of Sentiments to the audience. Later the Declaration was read for a second time, after which there were votes on its various parts. Every part was controversial, but none more than its demand for the right to vote, whichwas especially difficult for those present to accept because most of them were Quaker; among Quakers, even men seldom voted.

By all accounts it was Frederick Douglass who finally convinced the group of the importance of woman suffrage. We are free to say, he wrote not long after, that in respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men. A hundred people, 68 of them women, signed the Declaration.

Douglasss speech at the convention began a period of almost 18 years during which he was one of the womens movements most important allies. There are two obvious reasons for his support. First, many women had been involved in the abolitionist movement. Second, the two causes were clearly similar in seeing a moral imperative in gaining basic civil rights for a large segment of the population that had been denied them. Despite this, the two causes did not ultimately remain fully sympathetic.

Friction between them occurred when it became apparent to the feminists that most of their male supporters, including Douglass, saw woman suffrage as secondary to suffrage for black men. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony wanted voting rights for blacks only if women got them too. At the second meeting of the newly formed American Equal Rights Association, Stanton demanded, Why ask educated women, who love their country, who desire to mould its institutions on the highest idea of justice and equality, who feel that their enfranchisement is of vital importance to this end, why ask them to stand aside while two million ignorant men are ushered into the halls of legislation?

Despite such comments, which sometimes descended to the baldly racist, the women still wanted Frederick Douglass to speak on their behalf. But in 1868 he wrote to a woman named Josephine Griffing, whom Stanton had appointed to communicate with him: I am now devoting myself to a cause [if] not more sacred, certainly more urgent, because it is one of life and death to the long enslaved people of this country and this is: negro suffrage.

This debate soon divided the political parties, with Republicans dropping the fight for woman suffrage in order to strengthen the argument for black suffrage, and Democrats picking up the womens cause in order to stave off black suffrage. As George Francis Train, a Democrat whose support Stanton and Anthony enlisted, put it, Women first and negro last is my slogan.

Black men, who had had been fighting for freedom since the nations birth, finally won the right to vote after the Civil War, with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Women had to struggle for most of a century too. They waited until August 1920 to gain suffrage. By then only one woman, Charlotte Woodward, of the original 68 who had signed the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 was alive to cast her vote, which she proudly did.

Sally Waggoner is an undergraduate at Syracuse University.

One World Cup

Soccer gives American elites the chance to celebrate nationalism in other countries but not ours.

By Steve Sailer

Just as Brazil, soccers dominant nation, has been the Country of the Future for, roughly, ever, the quadrennial arrival of another month-long World Cup reminds us that, for Americans, soccer is the Sport of the Future and always will be. Every four years Americans get lectured that the World Cup is the biggest single-sport competition on Earth and that well no doubt be hopping on this global bandwagon Real Soon Now.

Yet during the first weekend of the 2006 event, more people in America watched the World Cup on foreign-language networks such as Univision than on English-language ABC. Univision has paid $325 million for the Spanish-language rights in America to the 2010 and 2014 World Cups, while Disney (ABC and ESPN) chipped in only $100 million for the English-language rights to these same 128 games. NBC, in contrast, bought the 2010 Winter Olympics and 2012 Summer Olympics for $2.2 billion.

Lately, though, a soccer-crazed fraction of our post-nationalist verbal elite has switched tactics and now implies that Americans will never get excited about soccer as a spectator sport because we just dont deserve the beautiful game. In the new anthology The Thinking Fans Guide to the World Cup, novelist Dave Eggers contends that watching soccer on TV hasnt caught on here because people of influence in America long believed that soccer was the chosen sport of Communists. & If you were soccer, the sport of kings, would you want the adulation of a people who elected Bush and Cheney, not once but twice?

This World Cup in Germany offers the soccerati the opportunity to flaunt their cosmopolitanism as they elucidate the exhilarating subtleties you likely missed in that Croatia-Japan nil-nil draw because you prefer native pastimes such as baseball, basketball, or, God forbid, NASCAR. The celebrate diversity folk want America to become athletically homogeneous with the rest of the world. To them, the tepid American response to the World Cup is evidence of our bigotry, our xenophobic failure to get with the global program. As Kevin Michael Grace says, their slogan would be One people, one world, one sport, if they werent so freaked out by all the host-country fans waving German flags. Ironically, while the World Cup is an occasion for globalist preening in the U.S., in the rest of the world its a prime locus for jingoism.

A common defense among intellectual soccer advocates against charges of status-climbing is that they are instead welcoming the Hispanicization of America by mass immigration. But in truth, soccer is growing in the U.S. on two distinctly separate tracks, the immigrant and the upper middle class.

When my family lived in Chicagos Uptown neighborhood, an immigrant entryway where 100 different languages are supposedly spoken in two square miles, every Saturday morning the adjoining soccer fields would swarm with white yuppie families from the posh Lincoln Park neighborhood attending American Youth Soccer Organization games. Intrigued, my wife repeatedly called AYSO to sign our boys up, but she got the runaround until she finally swore that, despite living in an immigrant neighborhood, our boys were not demonically gifted foreign soccer dervishes but just American-born klutzes like the rest of the league.

As with many aspects of American life, however, where the tangible contributions of Latin American immigration have been slower to arrive than orecasted by the advocates of multiculturalism, the enormous Hispanic influx into America has had less impact on American soccer than the census numbers would suggest. Only two of the 23 players on the U.S. World Cup roster have Spanish surnames. In contrast, six players are black, even though African-Americans overall show little interest in the game.

Soccer is by no means a bad sport to play. It’s fun, good exercise, cheap, and, unlike basketball or football, it doesn’t help to be 7-feet tall or 300 pounds. In fact, soccer shares many virtues with hiking, but there are no hiking hooligans and nobody calls you a chauvinistic boor if you don’t watch Sweden v. Paraguay on TV in the World Hiking Cup.

The American professional classes have learned that soccer is a terrific game for small children. In comparison, tee-ball generates farce, while Little League baseball inflicts humiliation on rightfielders who drop fly balls, strike out, and get picked off. (Not that I’m bitter or anything.) Via random Brownian motion, a soccer team of tykes is almost guaranteed to stumble into a few goals. (That’s why college robot-building competitions typically feature soccer matches.) When my five-year-old would trot off the field after one of his AYSO games, which he spent discussing the Power Rangers with his opponents while occasionally swiping at the ball as it rolled past, he’d brightly inquire, “Did we win? How many goals did I score?”

To us Americans, a kids’ soccer game doesn’t look all that different from the endlessly ineffectual endeavors of the scoreless 1994 Brazil-Italy World Cup final in the Rose Bowl. Similarly, because we can’t recognize quality soccer, we’re as happy to root for our women as our men. We were ecstatic over America’s victory in the 1999 Women’s World Cup of soccer. We’d beaten the world! When cynics pointed out that the world, other than China and Norway, doesn’t much care about women’s soccer, well, that just made us even prouder of how liberated our women are, compared to those poor, oppressed women of Paris, Milan, and London, whose consciousnesses haven’t been raised enough to want to trade in their Manolo Blahniks for soccer spikes.

Why is soccer played so much around the world? The countless hand-eye co-ordination sports like tennis, golf, ping-pong, and boxing are more popular taken together than foot-eye coordination sports like soccer, hacky sack, and tlachtli (that Aztec ballgame where every contest was sudden death—the losing team captain was sacrificed to the gods). Yet no single sport commands a large market share of hand games, while soccer holds a gigantic slice among foot games—perhaps not surprisingly when considering the quality of the competition—and thus its position as the top sport.

Unfortunately, there’s a cost to abjuring the use of the opposable thumb: competence. While the average National Basketball Association team sinks three dozen field goals per 48-minute game, the all-star squads in the knockout rounds of the 2002 World Cup averaged less than one goal per 90-minute game. The reason soccer so often seems like an exercise in futility is that it’s played with the wrong part of the anatomy.

For a conspicuous component of our alienated punditry, though, soccer’s ennui is perversely attractive. The New Republic, under the editorship of Franklin Foer, author of the 2004 book How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, has gone gaga over the World Cup.

Geopolitical theories of soccer (and soccer theories of geopolitics) trace back at least to Henry Kissinger’s bravura 1986 essay on how differences in national character are embodied in the contrasting styles of their teams. Dr. K. majestically analogized:

The German national team plays the way its general staff prepared for the war. . . . At the same time, [it] suffers from the same disability as the famous Schlieffen plan for German strategy in World War I. There is a limit to human foresight; psychological stress on those charged with executing excessively complex maneuvers cannot be calculated in advance. If the German team falls behind, or if its intricate approach yields no results, its game is shadowed by the underlying national premonition that in the end even the most dedicated effort will go unrewarded, by the nightmare that ultimately fate is cruel.

Sadly, it has been downhill for soccer highbrowisms ever since, with The New Republic posting endless World Cup Deep Thoughts, including a classic on the psychosexual relationship between “the Suez Canal conflict of 1963” and the rise of English soccer hooliganism. (Uh, actually, Suez was in 1956.)

Obsessing over soccer has “been a way of resisting assimilation, because it’s always been such a foreign phenomenon in the country,” explains Foer, who was raised in our nation’s capital by his baseball-crazed father. So Foer isn’t “resisting assimilation,” but de-assimilating away from his native culture. Not surprisingly, Foer has denounced American criticism of soccer as “Buchananite.”

The irony is that if soccer were a traditional American game, these same commentators would be excoriating it as politically retrograde. Around the world, soccer fans are far more explicitly nationalist, uneducated, working class, and reactionary (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) than those of any American sport other than professional wrestling. To the American alienists, however, lauding foreign nativists illustrates their cultural and moral superiority over their fellow Americans.

Outside the U.S., soccer players don’t start out too bright on average and a lifetime of bouncing balls off their skulls doesn’t improve matters. Not surprisingly, soccer statistics only recently surpassed the rudimentary. If Bill James, the great baseball numbers analyst, had been born in a soccer country, he would have expired of mental inanition.

In Tony Blair’s vulgarized Cool Britannia, it looks like the class war is over and the chavs have won. Even the most expensively educated captains of industry, the fans of cricket, rugby, and golf, must proclaim that since boyhood they have stood on the terraces with the lads. Because the game is only minimally entertaining to watch, it leaves many idle minds to become the devil’s workshop. While hooliganism has ebbed since 1989, when 94 fans died in a stampede at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, and no country has invaded a soccer rival since the 1967 Futbol War between El Salvador and Honduras that cost about 2,000 lives, the level of off-field violence remains wholly alien to American sports.

To the common people of Europe, whose ancient nation-states are being dissolved by immigration, economic globalization, and the Eurocrats of Brussels, soccer provides a rare outlet for expressing their love of country. Unfortunately, in the minds of the ruling caste of Europe, the linkage between national pride and soccer hooliganism only reinforces their belief that all people of quality disdain patriotism.

While soccer is usually extolled or derided as a Eurosport—Tom Piatak calls it “the metric system in short pants”—it is actually another triumph of Anglo-Saxon culture. Sports have been played all over the world for all of history, but 19th-century Britain and its offshoots possessed a genius for self-organization. The Victorian emphasis on fair play created enough trust for local sportsmen to be able to co-operate nationally. Most of todays major spectator sports, such as baseball, basketball, track and field, ice hockey, boxing, cricket, tennis, and golf, were formalized by English-speakers in the 1800s.

Soccer, rugby, and American football evolved out of medieval English mass mêlées in which the livelier lads of rival villages would celebrate Shrove Tuesday by trying to propel an inflated pigs bladder past the other mob. In England, soccer became the gentlemans game played by thugs and rugby the thugs game played by gentlemen.

Today, the English Premier League, which formed in 1992 with the backing of Rupert Murdochs satellite TV channel, is the biggest money circuit in all of soccer, with the most fans around the world. In contrast, the professional leagues in Brazil, home to the best playing talent, are moribund due to corruption, with almost all their best players in Europe.

Strikingly, one place where soccer is not terribly popular is in Britains cultural offspring. Being equally blessed with co-operative creativity, Canadians instead devised ice hockey and Australians developed Aussie rules football.

Similarly, Americans didnt need to import soccer or rugby because we could cultivate our own variant. American football was adopted by the Republics commercial classes and refined into the most perfect sport for television the world has known. While soccer remains hamstrung by the need to keep the game affordable in the Third World, Americans could adopt costly innovations such as separate offensive and defensive units that make the football far more exciting than soccer, where tired players often visibly dog it around the field.

In summary, Americans play soccerat least until we are co-ordinated enough to try other sportsbut we dont watch it on TV. Quite possibly, weve found the worlds best way to deal with soccer.
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Steve Sailer is TACs film critic and VDARE.coms Monday morning columnist.

Ideas whose time has come: A Conversation with Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo

Danny Postel

Ramin Jahanbegloo, one of Iran’s preeminent intellectual figures, is currently behind bars in Tehran’s notorious Evin