[Marxism] Let us Return to the Squares to Complete our Revolution
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Let us Return to the Squares to Complete our Revolution The revolution has returned to all of Egypt’s squares and streets yet again to complete its course. The masses are once again pouring into the squares to announce that the only legitimacy is that of the revolution and the people in the heart of the squares. They affirm the masses’ distrust and refusal of the… [Read more…] http://otheraspect.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/let-us-return-to-the-squares-to-complete-our-revolution/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Translation (Cuba): The economy, and the economist?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == From Cuba's Socialist Renewal http://cubasocialistrenewal.blogspot.com To receive email updates or feeds click link above Support this blog http://cubasocialistrenewal.blogspot.com/p/support-this-blog.html Here, Juventud Rebelde columnist Ricardo Ronquillo Bello takes up the role of the economics profession in the updating of the Cuban economic model. How to harmonise the political and social objectives of the Cuban Revolution with the striving for labour productivity growth, the wellspring of human social progress for millennia? Where does the pursuit of economic rationality become an end in itself rather than a means to an end? These are difficult questions that Cuba's revolutionaries are grappling with today. I've also translated selected comments by readers as they appear on the Juventud Rebelde website. Link: http://cubasocialistrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/11/translation-economy-and-economist.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Youssou N'Dour to enter politics
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/nov/28/youssou-ndour-politics-senegal-music Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Gilbert Achcar: the revolution continues
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/revolution-continues Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Who is conspiring against Syria?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3303/who-is-conspiring-against-syria Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Man faces 75 year prison term for videotaping cops
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embeddedv=80DbxSZ_FB8 Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The best laid plans of mice and George Osborne
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/uk-the-best-laid-plans-of-mice-and-george-osborne/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] White Voting and the Republican Party
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Tristan raised the question about white Southerners and the Civil War. This has been a question that has perplexed many. I had thought that the white Southern ruling class, in it's propaganda ignored the question of slavery, and used patriotism as a ralllying cry, sort of like the US in both Gulf Wars. You can't very well get troops motivated by admitting oil and other economic issues are the cause for going to war. Like Tristan I am also an expatriated white southerner. While all my relatives, except for a few live in Georgia, I was actually born in Charleston, SC. For the benefit of some of you smartasses, no, I did NOT witness the attack on Ft. Sumpter! In her book, What this Cruel War is Over Chandra Manning takes up this question. Manning makes a good argument, that slavery was very much the issue, to poor Southern whites, as well as to the planter aristocracy. To put it in crude terms, the existence of slaves kept poor whites from being on the bottom of the social order. This was certainly a contributing factor to many whites in the south supporting Jim Crow laws that discriminated against Blacks. When I emailed her to discuss her book, she said that she was surprised, that the best response she got was from white southerners over 50! Interesting. When the cops attacked a picket line of Longshore workers at the Port of Charleston, SC, January, 2000, they had planned on dividing the workers based on race. The clerks local is mostly white, while the longshore local is mostly black. Much to the surpise of the cops, they found white and black workers fighting back against the cop attack. This is the only instance I know of in my lifetime, where black and white workers, in the south, fought the cops. The ensuing defense campaign for the 5 longshoremen, the Charleston 5, involved unity between white and black workers in the south. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] White Voting and the Republican Party
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Realizing that South Carolina is a kind of special case, this strikes me as a reflection of what one of the liberals was arguing to me the other day, that America's just a reactionary, right-wing country because the people are reactionary and right-wing. It just isn't, for all the muddleheadedness and easy distractions. White Southerners simply did not respond to the events of secession and war the same way. And they have responded to later events with still less unanimity. And still less are white Southerners some kind of surrogate stand-in for the white population in the U.S. (no, not even the males.) All of these oft-repeated generalizations ignore the fact that, notwithstanding the hickup of 2008, the participation in elections of those qualified to vote has been declining since World War II. And those who are voting are doing so with less and less enthusiasm for the options. ML Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Kasama Project: a bit problematic
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Lou wrote: In a discussion under an altogether reasonable article by Rebecca Solnit criticizing the Black Bloc posted to the Kasama Project, some of the ultraleftists who hang out there have stood up for the Black Bloc. Mike Ely stayed out of the discussion until today when he referred people to an article he wrote a while back… There is so much wrong with this post I don't know where to start. Let me be very up front and say that I am a long time supporter of the Kasama project and under the press of events since the Occupy Movement began, I feel it is important to join the comrades there. Be that as it may, accuracy is always important and there is a noticeable lack of that quality in this post. The project itself is more than a website although that is a critically important part of the work. The discussions there are open to everyone and given the number of posts by Carl Davidson, I just don't get the snarky dismissal of the “ultra leftists who hang out there.” The qualifier “some” was meant to imply that that not all those ultra leftists support the black bloc I suppose. Commenting on Mike Ely’s reminisces about the Vietnam era protest movement, Lou says, I was shocked by the gross misunderstanding of what was really revolutionary about the antiwar movement. I understand why Lou hates the memories of college kids waving VC flags. So what. This may make Mike Ely’s writing problematic, but Mike Ely is not the “the Kasama project” unless you believe it is an Avakianesque type cult. Is it? Even a brief visit to the RCP website and the Kasama web site would indicate otherwise. Ely’s response on the kasama site is worth posting here. I’m a bit amused by the fact that we could fall out over a summation of Walter Teague (an activist no one has heard from in forty years). Regardless of differences over the long-forgotten disputes of an old antiwar movement, I think we should unite or disunite based on far more current things. I can certainly unite with those last two lines. I hope comrade Proyect can too. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Cave of Forgotten Dreams; Into the Abyss
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Review of two very good Werner Herzog documentaries: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/cave-of-forgotten-dreams-into-the-abyss/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] White Voting and the Republican Party
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Mark Lause wrote: Realizing that South Carolina is a kind of special case, this strikes me as a reflection of what one of the liberals was arguing to me the other day, that America's just a reactionary, right-wing country because the people are reactionary and right-wing. It just isn't, for all the muddleheadedness and easy distractions. *Response*: It's not just South Carolina is a special case, but the South, or at least the states of the former Confederacy fall in that category. White Southerners simply did not respond to the events of secession and war the same way. And they have responded to later events with still less unanimity. And still less are white Southerners some kind of surrogate stand-in for the white population in the U.S. (no, not even the males.) *Response:* The majority of white Southerners did support secession and the war, at least until late 1864. The lowest figures I've seen for total number enrolled in Confederate Army is 900,000, or 15% of total white population. this stands in contrast to 12% of total US population in military in World War II. No white Southerners are not some sort of surrogate stand-in for the white population... During the civil rights movement, the majority of white Southerners, were indeed oppossed to desegregation. There is a difference between the South and the rest of the country. The so called rocky mountain states, with the possible exception of Montana, may be as conservative as the South. All of these oft-repeated generalizations ignore the fact that, notwithstanding the hickup of 2008, the participation in elections of those qualified to vote has been declining since World War II. And those who are voting are doing so with less and less enthusiasm for the options. *Response*: For what it's worth, exit polls during the 2008 elections claim the majority of white Southerners under 30 voted for Obama. This is in a region where the Republicans routinely get 75-80% of the total white vote. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Two takes on Pinker
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Thanks for posting the two articles. Fry makes an excellent point about Pinker avoiding the issue of structural violence -- which causes immense pain and suffering. But I was also wondering about Pinker's argument that deaths due to wars are decreasing. Is he referring to absolute numbers or percentages of the population? In absolute numbers, when you consider deaths in the two world wars, in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (in the millions), in the Iran-Iraq conflict and the Gulf Wars (also millions) and the Congo (5 to 6 million), it seems the death toll for the 20th century is far higher than that of previous centuries. And that's not even considering the mass repressions of places like Indonesia and Guatemala. Fry's point that the military's capacity for violence -- including nuclear -- is greater than ever seems incontrovertible. Glenn Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] YCL presentation at WFDY meeting
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == We in the Young Communist League USA look forward to working with all of you to push the U.S. government to reach a cooperative, rather than imperialist, approach to foreign policy around the world. That said the fight for jobs and for real solutions must include reelecting Obama in 2012. If youth, whether in the Occupy movement or elsewhere, do not want to work with any politician, then being absent from the political process is only allowing the ultra-right wing to build power http://cpusa.org/u-s-young-people-show-their-discontent-with-capitalism/?utm_source=feedburnerutm_medium=feedutm_campaign=Feed%3A+cpusaMain+%28CPUSA+Front+Page%29 -- I know after all these decades one shouldn't still be aghast at such thinking, but... Jay Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Early reviews of Too Many People?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Based on my previous experiences, I expected to wait months before seeing any feedback, but four reviews of Too Many people? have already been published in four countries -- just 6 weeks after the official publication date. Two are in print publications, all are available online. SOCIALIST REVIEW (UK): Too Many People? is not disheartening or alarmist, as some books about climate change can be. It is assertive, passionate and a key reference for arming ourselves against those, on the right and the left, who talk about population control. http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11851 ECOCLUB (GREECE) This timely work methodically reviews and demolishes the pseudo-science of Populationism … reinforcing humanist and internationalist arguments exposing the methods and politics and pseudo-statistics of populationist organisations ... A must read which will become a classic http://ecoclub.com/headlines/reviews/756-27-review SOCIALIST WORKER (CANADA) Their central argument – that it is not simply our numbers, but how our society is organized to benefit only few – is one that needs to be heard in the environmental movement. http://socialistworkercanada.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/book-review-are-too-many-p\ eople-the-problem/ HOT TOPIC (NEW ZEALAND) An ever-necessary reminder that the world's poor are the first victims of ecological disaster, not the cause. http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=5824 TOO MANY PEOPLE? by Ian Angus and Simon Butler, is available through most bookstores, or directly from the publisher, Haymarket Books. http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Too-Many-People Ian Angus Editor, Climate Capitalism http://climateandcapitalism.com -- Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Tree of LIfe: terminally pretentious
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 11/28/11 9:43 PM, A Vasquez wrote: Have you done an extensive review of this movie? I'd love to read it. I don't know if I will be able to muster the energy but in the meanwhile here's something from Armond White, my colleague in NYFCO who I admire immensely: http://www.nypress.com/article-22454-unintelligent-design.html Unintelligent Design Terrence Malick tries to make up for lost time with a clunky opus, The Tree of Life By Armond White Tuesday, May 24,2011 Give 20th Century Fox credit for releasing Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life as a movie and not as a glue-trap for year-end awards. Five films into Malick’s eccentric 40-year career, it’s understood that he intentionally brands himself as art-minded. Indifferent to the usual commercial concerns of mainstream filmmakers, Malick has always exercised the privileges of erudition, which lend each of his films the aura of a cultural event. But that doesn’t mean The Tree of Life is a great movie—despite the pole-vaulting ambitions of its title. Just when you get accustomed to Malick’s precise hand-held camera movements and sly jump-cuts that give elegant spontaneity to the illusion of a family’s idyllic-then-tragic life in a small Texas town, The Tree of Life shifts style and tense to observe the beginning of the cosmos, then pre-history, then shifting again to examine the infinitesimal origins of cells. Those huge leaps are not immediately coherent, but Malick does them with such domineering confidence that viewers will accept his grandiose allusions to phases of life and the construction of time—his belief in his own visual poetry. Perched on a cliff of near self-parody, The Tree of Life dares to reveal Malick’s idiosyncratic—and humorless—interest in existential occurrences. He uses America’s past to showcase mankind, nature and time. The Texas O’Brien family (Father Brad Pitt, Mother Jessica Chastain and three boys well-cast for remarkable genetic similarity as their sons) supplies a story context for Malick’s personal speculation on spiritual themes. His previous movies grew from the germ of mid-20th century pop ideas: juvenile delinquency (Badlands), the industrial revolution (Days of Heaven), war (The Thin Red Line) and colonialism (The New World). Being of the movie-brat generation, Malick related those subjects to familiar genres and iconography that he expanded into what critic and Malick-scholar Gregory Solman accurately termed phenomenological epics. As an artiste, Malick collates spiritual signs, questing for meaning; an ambition that achieved its fullest expression in the historical, political, sexual, racial paradoxes of The New World. But The Tree of Life is little more than a grab-bag of generational preoccupations: outerspace explorations and inner space doubt. Starting with a scriptural quotation from the Book of Job, Malick depicts a nuclear family’s disillusionment still evident in son Jack O’Brien’s adulthood (played by Sean Penn), whose modern anomie is depicted in familiar cold, gleaming industrial settings that contrast warm, lyrical boyhood memories of his father’s frustrations as businessman, artist and parent. Malick digresses with etudes on Intelligent Design, where CGI scenes of prehistoric animals, mitochondria and phallic fish are meant to reflect later aggression in human behavior. But these aquarium/observatory tropes get mixed-up with Malick’s own quasi-profound (quasi-religious) reaching: dividing Father and Mother as Nature vs. Grace in voiceover counterpoint. The son’s eventual questioning of authority (“Why should I be good if you aren’t?”) is either blasphemy or just the ultimate 1970s youth-rebellion—with no small amount of New Age sentimentality. Koyaanisqatsi, anyone? “Tell us a story from before we can remember”—one of O’Brien sons requests of his mother—typifies Malick’s storytelling impulse. Always undeniably romantic and nostalgic, he will transcend nostalgia through specific adolescent fetishes: key instances of private pleasure, lonely perceptions, secrets. These are often pop myths (like the dinosaurs and planets), but they can also be psychic myths, as when Young Jack (played by Hunter McCracken) spies on arguing couples or sneaks a woman’s lingerie, leading to a signature Malick surmise, “What have I done? What have I started?” and equating sex, guilt and sin. Malick falls back on these surmises as a reflex: montages on sibling rivalry, filial resentment and a clever, expansive sequence where the O’Brien boys imitating a street drunk becomes a confrontation with the infirm, then with criminal-class unfortunates. Frankly, these meanderings cause Jack’s symbolism to go berserk—from Job to Judas to Cain to Abel.
[Marxism] Lucio Magri [1932-2011]
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == THE TAILOR OF ULM http://newleftreview.org/?view=2722 At one of the crowded meetings held in 1991 to decide whether or not to change the name of the Italian Communist Party, a comrade posed this question to Pietro Ingrao: 'After everything that has happened and all that is now taking place, do you still believe the word communist can be used to describe the kind of large, democratic mass party that ours has been, and is, and which we want to renew so as to take it into government?' Ingrao, who had already laid out in full the reasons for his dissent and proposed that an alternative course be taken, replied—not altogether in jest—with Brecht's famous parable of the tailor of Ulm. This 16th-century German artisan had been obsessed by the idea of building a device that would allow men to fly. One day, convinced he had succeeded, he took his contraption to the Bishop and said: 'Look, I can fly'. Challenged to prove it, the tailor launched himself into the air from the top of the church roof, and, naturally, ended up in smithereens on the paving stones below. And yet, Brecht's poem suggests: a few centuries later men did indeed learn to fly. Ingrao's reply was not just witty but well-founded. How many centuries, how many bloody struggles, advances and defeats did it take for the capitalist system to reach—in a Western Europe that had initially been more backward and barbaric than other parts of the world—an unprecedented degree of economic efficiency, and for it to acquire new, more open political institutions, a more rational culture? What irreducible contradictions were to mark liberalism over those years, between the solemn ideals—common human nature, freedom of speech and thought, popular sovereignty—and the practices that constantly belied them: slavery, colonial domination, expulsion of peasants from common land, wars of religion? Contradictions whose social reality was legitimated in thought: the idea that freedom could and should only be granted to those who, by virtue of property and culture—even race and colour—were capable of exercising it wisely; and the correlative notion that ownership of goods was an absolute, inviolable right which therefore precluded universal suffrage. Nor was it just the onset of this historical cycle that was beset by such contradictions: they were reproduced under various forms in its subsequent development, and gradually diminished only by the action of new social subjects, and of forces contesting the reigning system and its ideas. If, then, the real history of capitalist modernity was not one of unambiguous linear progress, but was rather dramatic and costly, why should the process of its supersession be otherwise? This is the lesson that the tailor's story was meant to convey. Yet the parable also poses further questions. Can we be sure that if the tailor of Ulm had been crippled rather than killed by his disastrous fall, he would immediately have got to his feet to try again; or that his friends would not have tried to prevent him doing so? And secondly, what actual contribution did he make to the subsequent history of aeronautics? In relation to Communism, such questions are especially pointed and difficult—above all because, at its theoretical formation, it had claimed to be not an inspiring ideal, but part of a historical process already under way, and of a real movement that was changing the existing state of things. Communism therefore always entailed a factual test, a scientific analysis of the present and a realistic prognosis of the future, to prevent it dissolving into myth. But we also need to register a significant difference between the defeats suffered by the bourgeois revolutions in France and England, and the recent collapse suffered by 'actually existing socialism'—measured not by the number of deaths or recourse to despotism, but by their respective outcomes. The former left an inheritance that, though much more modest than the initial hopes they aroused, is nonetheless immediately apparent; it is difficult, by contrast, to discern the legacy of the latter, and to identify legitimate heirs. *clip* read in full: http://marxistupdate.blogspot.com/2011/11/remembering-lucio-magri-1932-2011.html Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Tree of LIfe: terminally pretentious
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Another great review from another NYFCO colleague. http://www.observer.com/2011/culture/evolution-real-time-terrence-malicks-ponderous-tree-life-ponders-meaning-existence Evolution, In Real Time! Terrence Malick’s Ponderous ‘The Tree of Life’ Ponders the Meaning of Existence By Rex Reed 5/24 11:28pm The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s incomprehensible history of evolution from seed to death (and beyond), was booed in Cannes. Now I know why. It is 138 minutes of the kind of pretentious twaddle that makes critics slobber and audiences snore. Sifting through the reams of recyclable blogs and print reviews dispatched from Cannes, where the film went on to win a prize, I’m saddened but also relieved to discover that all those frenzied fans and detractors have no more idea what this metaphysical mumbo-jumbo is about than I do. The more they try to explain it, the sillier they get. One over-zealous critic called it “a religious experience.” No wonder church attendance is down on Sunday. I wanted to like this one, but Mr. Malick–who hates the press, never gives interviews, and has made only five films in 30 years (all flops)–makes it impossible. I can only report what I see. Gorgeous camerawork fills the spaces in the first hour with impressionistic images, as the director, a devout Christian questioning the mysteries of the universe, conducts private talks with God in the form of whispers. (“Where were you?” “Answer me.”) Instead of a narrative cinema, we get fields of sunflowers. Pastures of grazing cows. Oak limbs filtered by sun rays. Instead of dialogue, we get boiling lava, stars like dust mites wafting through midnight darkness, rents in the earth’s surface that invite steaming gases, tears and crevices in the skin of a vessel called Earth that lead to volcanic explosions. After an hour of disconnected poetic vision, it becomes wincingly clear that Mr. Malick has seen Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey too many times and is still trying to figure it out. By the time the movie reached the bloody tissues in the arterial walls of sea urchins floating up from the bottom of the sea, I looked at my watch. Forty-five minutes had passed without a sign of Brad Pitt, and I figured it was time for something to happen. Through deductive reasoning, I also decided, based on evidence, this was not a movie, but a TV special made for the National Geographic channel. Enter the computer-generated dinosaurs, tramping through the woods and stomping each other like figs. Oh, I get it. This is Mr. Malick showing us the beginning of time. Whole centuries are left out (thank God) but eventually some people appear, living simply off the land in Waco, Texas. (The movie was filmed in Austin, where it is hard to get a good T-rex.) Is there a plot? Well, no. I mean, maybe. That is, sort of. A man (Brad Pitt) and a woman (Jessica Chastain) bear three sons. Step by step, they learn to walk, talk, feel pain and fear, and explore the boundaries of love. In the second hour of this interminable silent saga, Mr. Malick finally gets around to showing two parents raising their children–attending a barbecue, working in the garden, teaching the boys self-defense. They also learn the meaning of cruelty and hate, two things the father possesses in abundance. Never having lived up to his dream of becoming a musician, Dad is a strict and abusive disciplinarian–slapping his wife around, punishing the boys for the slightest offense, like talking at the table with your mouth full of meat loaf (the only thing the mother ever cooks). The kids witness the drowning of a playmate at the swimming pool. The mother hangs the laundry on the clothesline and washes her feet with a lawn hose in the Texas heat. Paced at the speed of an inchworm climbing a tomato vine, the realism is admirable, but none of it has any trajectory or narrative structure. With his short, stocky frame, thick bifocals and Texas Panhandle burr cut, Brad Pitt is perfect as a shapeless, faceless 1950s Everyman, and I was especially impressed by Hunter McCracken as the troubled eldest son, Jack, who also serves as the lens through which the actions unfold. Not a single character is developed beyond a penciled outline, the episodic fragments just fly around like popping corn kernels, and instead of acting, Mr. Pitt (who also co-produced) is heard on the soundtrack saying things like, “You spoke to me through her, before I knew I loved you” and “When did you first touch my heart?” Say what? What is he talking about? God, or his miserable, mistreated wife? There is no evidence that anything has ever touched his heart, although the family goes soft and sentimental when one of the boys is killed in the
Re: [Marxism] Kasama Project: a bit problematic (the fact check)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == In response to this by Lou, In a discussion under an altogether reasonable article by Rebecca Solnit criticizing the Black Bloc posted to the Kasama Project, some of the ultraleftists who hang out there have stood up for the Black Bloc… Kenneth responded: Are there actually people who think that busting out a few windows carries more significance then shutting down a major port, such as Oakland, CA? If so, please explain. And now it is way past time for some fact checking. The article is here: http://kasamaproject.org/2011/11/24/critical-response-needed-is-it- wrong-to-fight-back/ and it really didn’t take long to discover the following. The discussion was sparked by Rebecca Solnit’s essy promoting a pacifist approach to political struggle using the Occupy movement as her focus. It has generated 68 comments to date from 22 different people. Far from being the love feast for the Black Bloc as Lou alleges, an actual analysis of the responses shows something far different. Of the three top three responders (accounting for 32 posts altogether), Louis Proyect (9) and Carl Davidson (10) were certifiably not ultra left. There was, indeed, a great deal of criticism of the Solnitt essay but on the general grounds of pacifism and not for defending what the Black Bloc did in Oakland. Here is a sampling of specific references to the Black Bloc in posts criticizing Solnitt for her pacifist analysis of world history. Much of what she said re the very stupid “Black Bloc” action of Nov. 2 is true.” ...black bloc bullshit All of the arguments that Black Bloc instigations have been stupid and counter-productive are valid. …wanna be street fighter OK, two of those quotes are from my own responses but the fact is that most of the discussion was not about anarchist wanna be street fighters at all. However, the most number of posts came from the person most enamored of the Black Bloc. I love the Black Bloc: they present the question of violence of the oppressed as violence in a stark way. It is propaganda of the deed. One person. It is also important to that that four of the posts were entirely consumed by the question of whether Lou should have speculated on the identity of that enthusiast for broken glass. If Lou wants to castigate Mike Elly over the burning question of Walter Teague, he is free to do so. How, exactly, does that make the Kasama project “problematic” or “ultra left?” The short answer is that it does not. Left undiscussed now are the earlier comments by Lou as to his support for Ely's enthusiastic support and promotion of the Occupy movement. Is it really worth drawing a line of demarcation now over Ely supposedly being a Teaguite and attacking the Kasama Project for something that it is not? Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] White Voting and the Republican Party
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == There are examples. I don't have time to ennumerate the many instances of the violent repression of Southern Unionists. But in terms of the armed conflict, the secessionist militias on the border states pretty much dissolved when pressed and many of the members crossed over and joined Federal outfits. In the Indian Territory, the official regiment of the bogus Confederate Cherokee government crossed over at the first opportunity in late 1861 to fight against the secessionists. After the rebels rebuilt that regiment, they put the new recruits into the field in 1862, and they crossed over en masse and reorganized as a Union regiment. This sort of thing also happened in Arkansas. What you see about the MEMORY of the Civil War tells us nothing about the war itself. The ruling class down there imposed the entire rationalizing mythos of the Lost Cause on the section along with Jim Crow. I remember being on the Pea Ridge battlefield once and one of the rangers there was complainign that they can't do much as much reenacting as he'd like because people around there just won't wear the blue uniform. This was where three-quarters of the white population were actually Unionists. I've seen those statues on the courthouse lawns all over the South in counties where the majority of those who participated in the Civil War fought against secession. Most telling to me was what happened when the dead weight of the region's ruling class no longer bore down on the population. New Orleans provided one remarkable example, a case where the Federal authorities had to keep pulling in the white mechanics who were arguing that a new loyal state government there should include black suffrage and citizenship--and that was 1863. The conflict was the Second American Revolution on many levels, though often more in its promise than the delivery. But one aspect of thsi was what happened in the South. ML Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] YCL presentation at WFDY meeting
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 30.11.2011 01:07, jay rothermel wrote: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == We in the Young Communist League USA look forward to working with all of you to push the U.S. government to reach a cooperative, rather than imperialist, approach to foreign policy around the world. That said the fight for jobs and for real solutions must include reelecting Obama in 2012. If youth, whether in the Occupy movement or elsewhere, do not want to work with any politician, then being absent from the political process is only allowing the ultra-right wing to build power http://cpusa.org/u-s-young-people-show-their-discontent-with-capitalism/?utm_source=feedburnerutm_medium=feedutm_campaign=Feed%3A+cpusaMain+%28CPUSA+Front+Page%29 -- I know after all these decades one shouldn't still be aghast at such thinking, but... To be honest I'm even more aghast that WFDY still exists after all these years - although that may be slightly overstating it - mildly surprised might be more appropriate. ;-) I had thought that it collapsed in the early nineties after the governments that financially supported it fell from power. Einde O'callaghan Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism-Thaxis] Let us Return to the Squares to Complete our Revolution
Let us Return to the Squares to Complete our Revolution The revolution has returned to all of Egypt’s squares and streets yet again to complete its course. The masses are once again pouring into the squares to announce that the only legitimacy is that of the revolution and the people in the heart of the squares. They affirm the masses’ distrust and refusal of the… [Read more…] http://otheraspect.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/let-us-return-to-the-squares-to-complete-our-revolution/ ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73
Extraordinary thinking. On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 9:45 AM, farmela...@juno.com farmela...@juno.com wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/science/lynn-margulis-trailblazing-theorist-on-evolution-dies-at-73.html?_r=1 November 24, 2011 Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73 By BRUCE WEBER Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73. She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan. Dr. Margulis, who had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988, drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria. The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation. Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species. “She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.” The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory — which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory — became her first book, “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.” A revised version, “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution,” followed in 1981, and though it challenged the presumptions of many prominent scientists, it has since become accepted evolutionary doctrine. “Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable. “I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.” Lynn Petra Alexander was born on March 5, 1938, in Chicago, where she grew up in a tough neighborhood on the South Side. Her father was a lawyer and a businessman. Precocious, she graduated at 18 from the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sagan as they passed each other on a stairway. She earned a master’s degree in genetics and zoology from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, she taught for 22 years at Boston University. Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself. Dr. Margulis’s marriage to Dr. Sagan ended in divorce, as did a marriage to Thomas N. Margulis, a chemist. Dr. Sagan died in 1996. In addition to her daughter and her son Dorion, a science writer with whom she sometimes collaborated, she is survived by two other sons, Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; three sisters, Joan Glashow, Sharon Kleitman and Diane Alexander; two half-brothers, Robert and Mark Alexander; a half-sister, Sara Alexander; and nine grandchildren. “More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct,” Dr. Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in “Microcosmos,” a 1986 book that traced, in readable language, the history of evolution over four billion years, “but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, has continued for more than three billion years. And the basis of the patina, past, present and future, is the microcosm — trillions of communicating, evolving microbes.” Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
