[Marxism] What politics to unite Australia’s left?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/53004 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] Saturday's socialist speak out
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Labor Party factions have become mere conduits for self-servers on the way to power. They are the safe houses where the Dons can divvy up or stash the loot of office. http://enpassant.com.au/2012/12/08/saturdays-socialist-speak-out-70/ 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] More on the 'Anti-German' Idiocy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Einde wrote: > and within DIE LINKE and particularly it's youth group the anti-Germans > around BAK Shalom are still active in attempting to witchhunt > anti-Zionists in the party. See, I think this dilutes the term to the point of making it conceptually meaningless. BAK Shalom are essentially right-wing social democrats, similar to the rotten milieu in the United States around SDUSA, or Albert Shanker, the American Federation of Teachers, or Max Shachtman's later years. Or, in fact, large swathes of the right-wing of the AFL bureaucracy in general. In other words, they occupy the space where pro-imperialist Social Democracy blends into Neo-Conservatism. Unwavering commitment to Zionism has always been characteristic of this wing of the social democratic and labor bureaucreacy. A couple of figures in BAK Shalom, like Sebastian Vogt (is he even still in DIE LINKE?) come out of the rotten Leipzig milieu, but they quickly seemed to realize that any rhetorical affirmations of "communism" stood in the way of their realpolitik commitments to Zionism. Others, like Bahamas, abandoned any tenuous contact with the left at all and have retreated into a sort of weird blend of cultural pessimism and affirmation of "Western liberal values". They don't even like the label "Anti-German" anymore, since it interferes with their attempts to make out potential Pro-Israel allies among the likes of the CSU or Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI. They've long since abandoned any commitment, even rhetorical, to opposing "Germany" or some perceived German national collective. They have basically adopted completely bog standard Neo-Conservative politics. That's why the attempts by Platypus to make out the Anti-German milieu as some sort of interesting political novelty is such a joke. The original anti-national movement of the 1990s is an interesting object of historical inquiry, but the "Anti-German" movement that emerged in the brief window between Second Intifada-Afghanistan/Iraq wars - Gaza/Lebanon wars was basically just a transitional phase for people leaving the left and becoming right-wing. The momentary superficial adoption of Adorno phrase-mongering was just the particular German manifestation of this neo-conservative transformation (just like absurd Trotsky and Orwell posturings were the mode of expression of the Hitchens and Eustonite goofballs). > Katja Kipping, one of the party chairpersons, is strongly influenced by > the > anti-German milieu Again, I think you're using the term in an inflated sense to basically mean "soft on/supportive of Israel", but that was never a position unique to the Anti-Germans. It's a peculiar idiosyncrasy of the (West-)German left that goes all the way back to Ulrike Meinhof's pre-RAF writings, not to mention the debates within the Autonomist milieu in the 1980s concerning the legacy of the uglier manifestations of Palestinian solidarity in Germany (see the text by the Revolutionary Cells, "Gerd Albertus is dead", or various writings by the Autonome L.U.P.U.S. Gruppe). Kipping seems primarily influenced by a lot of trendy Post-Structuralist and Queer Theory, and like many German leftists, she's got a wishy-washy position on Israel that wouldn't fly in any context outside of Germany. I think it's a huge stretch to consider her in any way "Anti-German." I maintain: The Anti-Germans are dead. For some it was a transitory stop on the way to shitty politics (Neo-Conservatism or right-wing Social Democracy), others abandoned it for better politics (the milieu around Junge Linke or ums Ganze), but in its post-2001 manifestation, it was a short-lived phenomenon. 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] More on the 'Anti-German' Idiocy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 07.12.2012 17:15, Angelus Novus wrote: Honestly, what decade is the Weekly Worker living in? If I were cynical I'd suspect they were conspiring with the Playtpus sect to pretend that the Anti-Germans were still relevant, or even that such a thing still exists. The whole "Anti-German" thing is deader than doornail. Has been since around 2006. I don't know about that. There are still far too many people running around with American and Israeli flags on anti-fascist demos denouncing people wearing Palestinian scarves (kheffiyehs) - and within DIE LINKE and particularly it's youth group the anti-Germans around BAK Shalom are still active in attempting to witchhunt anti-Zionists in the party. Some of those within DIE LINKE may be "soft" anti-Germans but they're still a pain in the arse and Katja Kipping, one of the party chairpersons, is strongly influenced by the anti-German milieu. 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] U.S. Court of Appeals Rejects CIA's Motion to Squash Lawsuit on Bay of Pigs History
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 5:34 PM, National Security Archive wrote: > U.S. Court of Appeals Rejects CIA's Motion to Squash Lawsuit on Bay of > Pigs History > > National Security Archive Freedom of Information Case to Receive Full > Hearing > > CIA and Justice Department Argued That Release of Draft History Would > "Confuse the Public" > > Posted - December 7, 2012 > > For more information contact: > Tom Blanton or Nate Jones- 202/994-7000 or foiad...@gwu.edu > > http://www.nsarchive.org > > Washington, DC, December 7, 2012 -- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. > Circuit yesterday rejected the CIA's attempt to shortcut the National > Security Archive's lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain > the last still-secret history of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in > 1961. > > With the ruling, the Archive has moved a step closer to compelling > openness for the only remaining unreleased volume of a draft history of the > Bay of Pigs operation, written by a CIA staff historian in the 1980s. One > volume of the five-volume history reached the public through the John F. > Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board's action in the 1990s; and the > Archive filed its FOIA lawsuit for the remaining volumes in April 2011, on > the 50th anniversary of the failed CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba. > > > Check out today's posting at the National Security Archive website - > http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20121207/ > > Find us on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/NSArchive > > Unredacted, the Archive blog - http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/ > > > > THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research > institute and library located at The George Washington University in > Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents > acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public > charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is > supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and > individuals. > > 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] Turkey in Syria
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == At 10:58 07-12-12 -0500, Red Arnie wrote: > >For another perspective on what's going on in Syria, see this interview on The Real News Network: > >http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Item id=74&jumival=9288 Well I listened to this man (who I assume is Turkish) and the presenter talk all about Syria in terms of geopolitics and Turkish interests, and I really don't think I learned a single thing of relevance. They managed to yak for 13 minutes without once mentioning that a revolution is underway in Syria while instead only contemplating the interests of various other states plus the Muslim Brotherhood which they just assumed would come to power when Assad falls without explanation. They also talked about American and Turkish intervention in the Syrian conflict as a given without even telling me what they hell they were referring to. It is just as if someone wrote a history of Russia in 1917 and the role of the Czar, Kerensky, and Lenin in relation to the world war but failed to ever mention the two revolutions that took place that year. The stock responses from the left I keep hearing (thus also from the Real News Network) in relation to Syria seem so totally disconnected from reality that I almost find it embarrassing. Since the beginning of the Syrian revolution I hear time and again that the latest news report is "just the excuse needed" for the imperialists to intervene, and this gets repeated month after month. The latest one is the mention of chemical weapons possibly being used by Assad as another hot pretext for imperialist intervention which starts with the placing the patriot missiles on the Turkish border, which doesn't even make any sense. (Note: this is a VERY different discussion from the imperialists stated interest in "securing" the chemical weapons AFTER Assad has been defeated; in that regard I don't doubt their inclination to act at all.). If someone had asked me I would have said that, beyond dealing with the influx of refugees, any active role of Turkey is remarkably absent given its border with Syria. The most surprising thing I see in regards to the deployment of the patriot missiles on the border, is what a very limited response it is in relation to what's happening right over the border. Given that shells have landed in Turkey killing people, as a NATO member Turkey could have formally called for collective offensive action by NATO. Perhaps I am naive, but I truly have no reason to disbelieve the news reports to the effect that the Turkish government is under pressure by its citizens living in those areas to take action (there have been repeated protests) and the patriot missiles are a symbolic response to placate those demands (if they had really wanted missiles that worked, they would have obtained the ones made in Israel!). Yet so many leftists are so sure of their preconceptions that they will continue to read those preconceptions into anything that develops there, again and again raising the alarm over imminent imperialist action in support of the revolution, which Obama essentially ruled out when he said that the "red line" was use of chemical weapons, thus telling Assad exactly how far he could go with impunity. - Jeff 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] A "fair and balanced" book on Cuba?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I can understand why Sam Farber’s new book on Cuba would carry a blurb from Carmelo Mesa-Lago since he is a professional Cubanologist like Farber (but who thankfully doesn’t frame his attacks in terms of the Marxist worldview.) What I don’t get is those from Mike Davis and Jeffrey Webber who have leftist credentials, especially Mike Davis whose name is as connected to “environmental crisis” as Jerry Seinfeld’s is with stand-up comedy. I just picked up Farber’s book from the Columbia University library and spent about an hour trying to find some reference to “ecology” or “environmental”. There was nada (Spanish for nothing.) That’s really something. You write a 368 page book on Cuba purporting to be a balance sheet and you say nothing about Cuban farming, wildlife preservation, protection against hurricanes, or Fidel Castro’s numerous speeches and articles on climate change and species extinction. Here’s a reminder of the sort of thing he has been saying (from May 2012): “This Reflection could be written today, tomorrow or any other day without the risk of being mistaken. Our species faces new problems. When 20 years ago I stated at the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro that a species was in danger of extinction, I had fewer reasons than today for warning about a danger that I was seeing perhaps 100 years away. At that time, a handful of leaders of the most powerful countries were in charge of the world. They applauded my words as a matter of mere courtesy and placidly continued to dig for the burial of our species.” But it doesn’t matter to Sam Farber. It doesn’t matter in the same way that FOX-TV presents its “fair and balanced” coverage every night. It cherry-picks its facts in order to make its enemies look bad. What I will never understand is why smart people like Mike Davis, Jeff Webber and the good people in the “state capitalist” current can give Sam Farber a free ride. Although my days of submitting articles to academic print journals is long gone, I am familiar enough with peer process to know that Farber must be aware of it. If I was writing a book on Cuba, I would include a whole chapter on ecosocialist initiatives there. I guess they don't do peer review at Haymarket books even though there are a lot of graduate students and professors in its ranks. Dereliction of duty, I would say. I am quite sure that Mike Davis is familiar with the writings of Richard Levins since he has been around as long as I have. Maybe the young people in the ISO and the British SWP are too clueless or too biased to read something that differs from their preset ideas but for people who are serious about presenting a balanced picture of Cuba, his writings and those on a similar wave-length are indispensable. Here’s Levins from the 2008 Monthly Review (http://monthlyreview.org/2008/01/01/living-the-11th-thesis): I first went to Cuba in 1964 to help develop their population genetics and get a look at the Cuban Revolution. Over the years I became involved in the ongoing Cuban struggle for ecological agriculture and an ecological pathway of economic development that was just, egalitarian, and sustainable. Progressivist thinking, so powerful in the socialist tradition, expected that developing countries had to catch up with advanced countries along the single pathway of modernization. It dismissed critics of the high-tech pathway of industrial agriculture as “idealists,” urban sentimentalists nostalgic for a bucolic rural golden age that never really existed. But there was another view, that each society creates its own ways of relating to the rest of nature, its own pattern of land use, its own appropriate technology, and its own criteria of efficiency. This discussion raged in Cuba in the 1970s and by the 1980s the ecological model had basically won although implementation was still a long process. The Special Period, that time of economic crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the materials for high-tech became unavailable, allowed ecologists by conviction to recruit the ecologists by necessity. This was possible only because the ecologists by conviction had prepared the way. I will of course have much more to say about this book. 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] DJANGO UNCHAINED Screening
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 12/7/12 2:23 PM, Claire Kelleher wrote: Hi Louis, Thank you for coming to see DJANGO! I’d love to know your thoughts on the film, any reaction you can send my way? Best, Claire Well, I won't be reviewing it since I walked out after Christof Waltz and Jamie Foxx arrived at the plantation owned by Don Johnson 15 minutes into the film. I just got tired of the white characters using the word "nigger" in about every line that came out their mouths. I know it's supposed to be the Old South but I couldn't help feeling that Quentin Tarantino was just up to his old tricks, having his white characters use the word for shock value. I guess I am just tired of this kind of faux hipster pose. It reminds me to much of Lena Dunham's all-white shtick on the HBO "comedy" Girls. I also rubbed my eyes when I saw Jamie Foxx as Django dressed in a powder-blue servant's costume from the court of Louis XIV. Does anybody have the nerve nowadays to tell Quentin that something like that is stupid? Don't forget that when Woody Allen got too big for his britches, he ended up eventually having to make films in Europe because Hollywood decided he was no longer bankable. Anyhow, don't worry about what I think. I blog as the Unrepentant Marxist to give you an idea of how "unhip" I am. I am sure that people will line up around the block to buy a ticket for the movie when it opens. 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] More on the 'Anti-German' Idiocy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Honestly, what decade is the Weekly Worker living in? If I were cynical I'd suspect they were conspiring with the Playtpus sect to pretend that the Anti-Germans were still relevant, or even that such a thing still exists. The whole "Anti-German" thing is deader than doornail. Has been since around 2006. The hardcore Anti-Germans around Bahamas and similar formations no longer consider themselves "communists" or even "Anti-Germans" anymore and instead are just openly neo-conservative reactionaries. What used to be considered the "softcore" Anti-German milieu has abandoned the idiotic theoretical posture entirely, many having moved on to a sort of general anti-nationalism inspired by the journal Gegenstandpunkt (which was always hostile to the "Anti-Germans"). Bahamas made a rather public show a few years ago of disclaiming any pretensions to being communists or in any way a part of the left, and even decided that the label "Anti-German" was no longer any kind of indication of their politics (this is the magazine, by the way, that engaged in apologetics for the EDL). Susann Witt-Stahl is a decent journalist, so I'm not sure why she's indulging in this weird alarmist sensationalism for an English-speaking audience, pretending that a marginal sect has any kind of influence in the left. What *is* true to some extent is that the German left as a whole, even the radical left, has a somewhat indulgent position toward Israel that would probably shock most leftists from Anglophone countries, but that doesn't have anything to do with the "Anti-Germans." You can kind that sort of thing going all the way back to the extra-parliamentary milieu of the 1980s. But the Anti-German tendency belongs to an era when the iPod was considered a bold new technological innovation, Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films still topped the box office charts, and George W. Bush still occupied the White House. Usually it's only the Platypus cult who try to rehabilitate the Anti-Germans and assert their supposed relevance. How weird to see their critics doing the same. 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] Turkey in Syria
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == For another perspective on what's going on in Syria, see this interview on The Real News Network: http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=9288 Red Arnie 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 Recession's Toll: How Middle Class Wealth Collapsed to a 40-Year Low
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/the-recessions-toll-how-middle-class-wealth-collapsed-to-a-40-year-low/265743/ 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] Rats jump from sinking ship?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.latimes.com/news/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-syria-russia-endgame-20121206,0,6006330.story In Syrian war's end game, Moscow maneuvers away from Assad By Carol J. Williams December 7, 2012, 2:00 a.m. As concerns mount that Syrian President Bashar Assad could unleash chemical weapons against his opponents, the Kremlin appears to be recalibrating its support for a desperate ally. Russia three times has wielded its veto power in the U.N. Security Council to shield Assad from international condemnation for brutality against Syrians fighting for his ouster, a 21-month-old siege that by some accounts has taken 40,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million. Russian President Vladimir Putin signaled the first step back from ardent defense of Assad after a meeting with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan this week. Putin and Erdogan left their Istanbul meeting still occupying opposite positions on the need for Turkey to defend itself from stray Syrian rocket fire with NATO-supplied Patriot missiles, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. But they also agreed to pursue “some new, fresh ideas” in hope of resolving the intractable conflict, Peskov said. Pentagon chief Leon E. Panetta said Thursday that Western intelligence agencies had been warning in recent days that the increasingly isolated Assad may be positioning missiles to fire payloads of sarin gas against opponents. Though Moscow and Washington have been bitterly divided over a potential role for Assad’s loyalists in a post-war Syria, the erstwhile superpowers share concern about the potential for horrific escalation if Assad turns to his poison gas arsenal for a last blast at the rebels or the neighbor states he accuses of supporting them. Jolted out of their diplomatic standoff by the prospect of chemical warfare, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met twice Thursday on the fringes of a human rights gathering in Dublin, Ireland. In the second meeting, they were joined by the special U.N. and Arab League envoy on Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi. “We haven’t taken any sensational decisions,” the Associated Press quoted Brahimi as saying after the meeting. “But I think we have agreed that the situation is bad, and we have agreed that we must continue to work together to see how we can find creative ways of bringing this problem under control and hopefully starting to resolve it.” The U.S. State Department issued a brief statement saying that the next step would be a meeting of Brahimi and senior U.S. and Russian officials in the next few days to discuss "taking this work forward." As the chief U.S. and Russian diplomats huddled in Dublin, Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov was sending positive messages via Twitter about reports that the United States was about to declare the Al Qaeda-linked Al Nusra Front a terrorist organization. Russia has long accepted Assad’s assertions that the rebellion in Syria is driven by foreign enemies, and the U.S. branding of Al Nusra, which is allied with the rebellion, gives Moscow another patch of common ground on which to stand with Washington. Russian officials are now modifying their stance toward Assad because it is becoming increasingly obvious that he will eventually be toppled, international security experts say. “Russian officials certainly sound as though they've downgraded Assad's survival chances,” said Stephen Sestanovich, senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. It remains to be seen, Sestanovich said, whether Moscow is just repositioning itself diplomatically ahead of Assad’s fall or seeks to play a direct role in negotiating an end to the conflict, perhaps persuading Assad to take up one of the rumored offers of foreign exile. Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad recently visited the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, triggering speculation that the leftist leadership of ailing President Hugo Chavez was open to giving refuge to the embattled Assad and his top lieutenants. The Guardian newspaper of Britain and Israel’s Haaretz have also reported alleged asylum offers from Cuba, Ecuador, Tunisia, Qatar, Belarus and Russia. Andrew Tabler, Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, dismisses the notion that Assad would be safe in foreign exile from assassination by angry countrymen, with the possible exception of Iran. He holds out the prospect that Assad could live up to his promise never to abandon his Syrian homeland, especially if the civil war is ended by breaking the country into sectarian components. Assad is of the minority Alawite population, a Shiite Muslim-aligned sect concentrated i
