[Marxism] Fidel Castro: The duty to avoid a war in Korea | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

[glparramatta]

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http://links.org.au/node/3289



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[Marxism] France: From Gloire to Desespoir » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

[James Creegan]

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I don't mean to exceed my daily posting limit, but I came across 
something so outrageous that I just had to pound the keyboard.
I was skimming through the /Counterpunch /weekend edition and came 
across the below article by a former /60 Minutes
/producer. It takes Francois Hollande to task for taxing corporations 
and the rich too highly, not being tough enough
on unions, leaving intact the 35-hour week and giving Paris municipal 
employees too many sick days. I had to read it
twice to make sure my superannuated eyes and brain were not deceiving 
me. Read it for youself. In /Counterpunch/?!!!

What the hell is going on?

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/05/france-from-gloire-to-desespoir/

Jim Creegan

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[Marxism] Damaged Nuclear Plant in Japan Leaks Toxic Water

[Louis Proyect]

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NY Times April 6, 2013
Damaged Nuclear Plant in Japan Leaks Toxic Water
By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO — Tens of thousands of gallons of radioactive water leaked from a 
large underground storage pool at Japan’s crippled nuclear plant, and 
thousands more gallons could seep out before the faulty pool can be 
emptied, the plant’s operator said Saturday.


About 120 tons, or almost 32,000 gallons, of highly contaminated water 
appeared to have breached the inner protective lining of the pool at the 
Fukushima Daiichi plant, said the operator, Tokyo Electric Power 
Company. It was unclear how much of the water had made it through two 
additional layers of lining to reach soil, but radiation levels outside 
the pool have risen, a sign that some water is getting out, said the 
company, known as Tepco.


The leak highlights the daunting challenge of what to do with the huge 
amounts of contaminated water created by makeshift cooling systems at 
the plant, after a huge earthquake and tsunami knocked out its regular 
cooling systems two years ago in the worst nuclear accident since 
Chernobyl. Since then, Tepco has essentially been pouring water onto the 
damaged reactor cores and storage ponds to keep them from overheating.


As it is used for cooling, the water becomes so contaminated that it 
must be safely stored at the plant. Tepco said it was already storing 
more than a quarter-million tons of radioactive water in hundreds of 
large silver or blue tanks that seem to fill every available space at 
the plant, or in underground pools like the leaking one. With the 
decommissioning of the Fukushima plant likely to take decades, Tepco has 
said it expects the amount of radioactive water to keep growing, and 
possibly more than double within three years. The company has said it is 
building more storage space and new filtering facilities to clean the water.


The company said the leak appeared to be the biggest since the early 
months after the March 2011 disaster, when leaks allowed contaminated 
water to flow into the nearby Pacific Ocean. Tepco said that this time, 
it did not expect any of the toxic water to reach the sea, since the 
pool is half a mile from the coast.


Still, Tepco said it had begun pumping the remaining 13,000 tons of 
water out of the faulty pool and into a similar pool. The pools are like 
large ponds dug into the ground, protected by multiple layers of plastic 
sheets and covered with dirt.


Emptying the damaged pool could take five more days, the company said, 
during which time an additional 47 tons, or about 12,000 gallons, could 
leak.



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Re: [Marxism] Shachtmanites during WWII

[Louis Proyect]

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On 4/6/13 6:37 PM, Einde O'Callaghan wrote:

Thank you for drawing my attention to the typo - our OCRing isn't always
100% perfect.


I'm surprised that Michael missed this one, which was even more open to 
a witticism:


James P. Cannon:  "I said that a party which yields to this pressure 
already before the actual war begins would never be able to stand up 
when the real beat is turned on."


DJ Cannon?




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Re: [Marxism] Shachtmanites during WWII

[Einde O'Callaghan]

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On 06.04.2013 22:27, Michael Smith wrote:





  The children who are coming today arrive
with their nurses arid governesses and tutors.


Governesses are indeed mostly pretty arid, in my experience, but
there are exceptions.

Thank you for drawing my attention to the typo - our OCRing isn't always 
100% perfect.


On a more general point: Every issue of Labor Action from 1940 to 1958 
is available online in full in PDF format. We are still indexing the 
contents - we're up to April 1942 - and we're OCRing a selection of 
articles from each issue - we're up to January 1942. After we've 
finished the initial trawl we'll start adding other articles until every 
substantial article is online in searchable HTML format - but that may 
take a few years.


For those who want to compare the theoretical productivity of the SWP 
and the WP all wartime articles from Fourth International are already 
online in HTML format and from New International a selection or articles 
is online in HTML format but the complete magazines are online in PDF 
format for the years 1942, 1944, 1945 and 1946.


Einde O'Callaghan (MIA & ETOL)



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Re: [Marxism] NPR's rancid reporting on long-term disabiiity

[Joshua Fiero]

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Thank you for posting the article, Louis. I am ordinarily just a lurker
here, but feel compelled to reply on this topic, as I worked for a brief
time at a law firm of the type the Planet Money story trashed, one which
specialized in getting folks on disability. That was more than enough life
experience for me to recognize the story, when I read a transcript a couple
of weeks ago, as mendacious garbage. Nearly every last one of the people we
represented deserved, by any reasonable criteria, the benefits they sought.
The guy who ran my firm was a Republican and a fairly cold-hearted and
business-minded sort, who saw most of his client base with inartfully
concealed contempt, but he, at least, recognized the various schemes to gut
and subsequently privatize Social Security for what they are: Cons. Takes
one to know one, as they say. At least his "con" helped some people bear up
under their lives of grinding poverty with a (very) little more dignity.
The liberal scumbags who put this trash on the air have no such excuse or
mitigation to offer for their hypocrisy.

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Re: [Marxism] Law school is a sham - Salon.com

[michael perelman]

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Maybe it is not a sham.  I just read an article about unemployed law
graduates suing their schools.  They might turn a profit on their tuition???


On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 2:15 PM, Louis Proyect  wrote:

> ==**==**==
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>
> http://www.salon.com/2013/04/**06/law_school_is_a_sham/
>
> __**__
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-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA
95929

530 898 5321
fax 530 898 5901
http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com

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[Marxism] An enfant terrible stumbles upon the Vietnam War

[Dennis Brasky]

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“If Turse were a true journalist and scholar, he would be shouting, ‘Why
didn’t anyone listen to veterans who told these stories forty years ago?’
He ripped off our history shouting – Look what I discovered! – and
presented the case as if it’s being told for the first time.”



http://www.inthemindfield.com/2013/04/05/an-enfant-terrible-stumbles-upon-the-vietnam-war/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InTheMindField+%28In+The+Mind+Field%3A+News+%26+Commentary+from+Veteran+Writer-Activists%29

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[Marxism] Law school is a sham - Salon.com

[Louis Proyect]

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http://www.salon.com/2013/04/06/law_school_is_a_sham/


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[Marxism] Marxism 2013 conference the biggest to date

[En Passant with John Passant]

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The Marxism 2013 conference, held in Melbourne over the Easter weekend, was the 
biggest and the most successful to date write the editors of Socialist 
Alternative. Some 1,140 people came to participate in debates and discussions 
and to hear stories of the struggle from Australia and the world. 

http://enpassant.com.au/2013/04/07/marxism-2013-conference-the-biggest-to-date/

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[Marxism] Palestinians and the Syrian Revolution: Lessons from the fight against fascism | +972 Magazine

[Louis Proyect]

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http://972mag.com/palestinians-and-the-syrian-revolution-lessons-from-the-fight-against-fascism/68718/


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Re: [Marxism] Shachtmanites during WWII

[Michael Smith]

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>  The children who are coming today arrive 
> with their nurses arid governesses and tutors. 

Governesses are indeed mostly pretty arid, in my experience, but 
there are exceptions. 

 
-- 
--

Michael J. Smith
m...@smithbowen.net

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
http://cars-suck.org
 
The Comic Spirit conceives a definite 
situation for a number of characters 
and rejects all accessories in the 
exclusive pursuit of them and their 
speech. He has not a thought of persuading
you to believe in him. Follow and you 
will see. But there is a question of the 
value of a run at his heels. 


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[Marxism] Shachtmanites during WWII

[Louis Proyect]

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Comrades can check out for themselves what kind of issues their 
newspaper was covering after the split with Cannon:


http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/laboraction-ny/index.htm

Mostly there's nothing but the table of contents for each issue but 
there are some articles as well, like David Coolidge's Aug. 12, 1940 
article titled "Big Business Wrests Huge Profits Out of Preparations for 
War". It states:


They will do all of these things with these war profits just as they did 
during and after the last war. They will seek to cover up and hide their 
waste and luxury by claiming that their gaudy social affairs are for the 
benefit of European refugees. What refugees? For the sons and daughters 
of the workers of England? No. The children who are coming today arrive 
with their nurses arid governesses and tutors. J.P. Morgan comes down 
the gang-plank with little eleven year old Lord Primrose and takes him 
to his estate to be safe from Hitler’s bombs.


All of these things happen while 70,000 black and white forest workers 
labor for as little as ten cents an hour. While whole families work in 
Minnesota lumber camps for $10 a week. While thousands of Negro workers 
are chained to the slave farms of the South and New Jersey. While 
unemployment remains at 10,000,000. In a country where the mother in an 
unemployed family kills herself and six children because the family has 
nothing to eat. Their only comfort was a headstone for the graves paid 
for with money collected by the neighbors.


This is by no means the whole story. But this is enough. Every worker 
knows full well what the next move is. The main task is to get those 
profits into the pay envelopes of the workers. This doesn’t require long 
arguments with the bosses. What is required however is stronger union, 
unification of the labor movement, a greater militancy and determination.


full: 
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/mckinney/1940/08/patriotism.htm


And what did Cannon predict about this "petty bourgeois opposition"? In 
a 1939 letter to Dobbs, he claimed: "I characterised—and, by God, I was 
right!—the offensive against the Soviet Union inside our party as 
nothing but a craven capitulation to the pressure of bourgeois public 
opinion. I said that a party which yields to this pressure already 
before the actual war begins would never be able to stand up when the 
real beat is turned on. You see, we didn't get along very well together 
at all."


full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1940/party/ch05.htm

So, where is the evidence of this yielding to pressure?

The answer: you won't find any.

I should also mention that 5 years after the split the Cannonites and 
the Shachtmanites opened up discussions about reuniting. I guess the 
gangrene wasn't terminal. But the sectarianism--which might be likened 
to impetigo--was.






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Re: [Marxism] Awesome Proletarian Positions

[turbulo]

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Mark Lause wrote:

The question isn't cutting off debate but pretending to hash over something
that's been worked over quite enough.


*


I thought we were actually hashing over the question rather than pretending to. 

Define "the question" as you will, but for me it is one of historical accuracy.
And Louis obviously hasn't hashed it over enough, because he gets a few
important facts wrong.

Jim Creegan  






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Re: [Marxism] Sokal style hoax at HM

[Les Schaffer]

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i don't see anything hoax-y about this article at all some prof sees 
marx describe elliptical motion of pairs of bodies about each other as a 
form of solved contradiction and an application of the dialectical 
method in nature and writes a paper about it... i havent read the whole 
thing - its longgg - and the physics could be tightened up ... 
buts its kind of interesting from a philosophy of science perspective.


maybe i have the right level of expectation for the journal that others 
do not.



Les


On 04/06/2013 11:40 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:


On 4/6/13 11:24 AM, andrew coates wrote:

Left Journal Falls for Sokal Style Hoax. (?)




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[Marxism] Living with differences

[Louis Proyect]

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(Forwarded from Paul Buhle)

The local appearance in Madison of the young author of TRUTH AND 
REVOLUTION, the history of the Sojourner Truth Organization, has an 
interesting back story: the author happened upon a print shop in Chicago 
where he happened upon leader of the extinguished mini-organization 
influenced by CLR James among others, and set about to do the research 
and write the history. A lot of pages for a small and marginal group but 
so what: there’s some insight and I was glad to write a review note and 
include the book in the new edition of MARXISM IN THE UNITED STATES.


This story reminds me of other young people looking around, trying to 
figure out what they can use from vanished movements. And of those my 
age, like Lou, looking back upon experiences good and bad, the 
experiences insights and illusions of those Marxists yet older 
–experiences in the decades when considerable working class movements 
had radical influences and some stability--and now long gone, with those 
movements.


My contribution, like the interviews lodged in the Oral History of the 
American Left at Tamiment Library, NYU, and my magazine RADICAL AMERICA, 
is so eclectic as to escape the usual categories of Communist, 
Trotskyist, etc., and are often usefully about the ethnic working class 
milieux that English-language Marxists depended upon but didn’t 
understand or appreciate sufficiently.


But let me make a few relevant comments.

First, having interviewed around 1976-83 the participants of 1920s CPUSA 
factionalism, and having lived through the factional smash-up of SDS in 
1968-69, I confirmed what I suspected: most people, the overwhelming 
majority, joined the factions led by their friends and shopmates, 
sometimes also lovers. Arguing was done mostly after the decision was 
made to “choose sides.” It was to a great relief of most that the 
arguing stopped, although of course that meant the limited democracy 
(mostly arguments about leaders anyway) had ended.


Second, and this time in relation to those who became Trotskyists and 
I’m especially thinking about Marty Glaberman but also a range of other 
oldtimers, like the contributor to a Yiddish Trotskyist newspaper that 
barely appeared before disappearing. It was a commonplace at least in 
retrospect that Trotskyists lacked the self-confidence to organize, 
recruit, etc., in the vast majority of industrial cities where Communist 
regulars had no organization or none above ground; until wartime, they 
gathered or sent groups into plants, neighborhoods, etc., where the CP 
was present, thinking the task was to win over disillusioned CPers, a 
hopeless task from the beginning and worse then hopeless in many ways. 
They spent more time arguing than organizing, and often arguing among 
themselves.


An elderly erstwhile Musteite (one of the “Musteite girls” from Vassar) 
observed, “in the thirties we had activity, in the forties we had 
theory,” which obviously applied mainly to the followers of CLR James 
but gives pause, lots of exceptions notwithstanding. Organizing outside 
of a few places might not be successful, never was successful, thinking 
might be. But mainly directed toward men and women who were already 
leaning toward Marxism, not really toward much of the working class. And 
mainly, with success, toward lower-middle class Jewish young people who 
were committed to revolution but also aspired to theory.


Third, and I close here, there was a real ruthlessness toward anything, 
anyone, likely to stay on the Left but not likely to be recruited. A few 
years after the explusion from the Socialist Party, one of the 
Trotskyist leaders remarked that even if they had gained few members 
(Marty used to say he was practically the only former YPSL who stayed in 
industry), they had removed “an obstacle,” i.e., fairly demolished the 
SP itself. Consider that small industrial towns in Wisconsin, 
Pennsylvania and a few other places were still electing local socialist 
officials and drawing some young people to themselves. The Popular Front 
and the Democratic Party fairly overwhelmed most third party efforts. 
But a lot remained, large ethnic in background and largely middle aged 
but real. The joy at demoralizing the SP pointed up the nastiness of 
which Marxists can be capable, and the stupidity of this kind of behavior.


What lessons to learn? To live with differences, that is live with each 
other as Marxists, and to try to convey the best of our useful 
experiences to the next generation. Nothing more complicated than that. 
The material offered in the new sections of MARXISM IN THE US goes in 
this direction.


I’m happy to see any comments, although I probably will not be 
responding to them.




__

Re: [Marxism] Awesome Proletarian Positions

[turbulo]

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Regarding the question of petty bourgeois v. proletatian consciousness, I offer 
the following from Kautsky (quoted by Lenin somewhere; exactly
where I forget):

"As an isolated individual, the proletarian is a nonentity. His strength, his 
progress, his hopes and expectations are entirely derived from organisation, 
from systematic action in conjunction with his fellows. He feels himself big 
and strong when he is part of a big and strong organism. The organism is the 
main thing for him; the individual by comparison means very little. The 
proletarian fights with the utmost devotion as part of the anonymous mass, 
without prospect of personal advantage or personal glory, performing his duty 
in any post assigned to him, with a voluntary discipline which pervades all his 
feelings and thoughts.
 
"Quite different is the case of the intellectual. He fights not by means of 
power, but by argument. His weapons are his personal knowledge, his personal 
ability and his personal convictions. He can attain a position only through his 
personal abilities. Hence the freest play for these seems to him the prime 
condition for success. It is only with difficulty that he submits to serving as 
a part which is subordinate to the whole, and then only from necessity, not 
from inclination. He recognises the need of discipline only for the masses, not 
for the select few. And naturally he counts himself among the latter." (The 
Workers and the Intellectuals, Die Neue Zeit, 1903, reproduced in the Kautsky 
Internet Archive) 

Sparty Jim 

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Re: [Marxism] Awesome Proletarian Positions

[Mark Lause]

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The question isn't cutting off debate but pretending to hash over something
that's been worked over quite enough.

Nor is it a matter of whether or not one's placement in the process of
production--productions of all sorts--might predispose us to different
social perspectives but whether or not it does and why it might not.

And, more, whether or not such a predisposition has any particular meaning
in the context of evaluating what might be the best approach to a
particular problem.

ML



On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 1:30 PM,  wrote:

> ==
> Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
> ==
>
>
>
> Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> It is a waste of time for me to argue with someone who spent a decade or
> so in the Spartacist League and the International Bolshevik Tendency. I
> congratulate you that you are no longer a member but I am afraid that
> your take on the Cannon-Shachtman fight is straight out of the
> Spartacist League canon.
>
>
>   
>
> To recapitulate: Louis objects to the sectarian practice of hurling
> the epithet, "petty bourgeois" as a way of stigmatizing people and cutting
> off
> debate. He cites the Burnham-Shachtman fight of 1940 in the SWP as
> a prime example of this technique, and, to support his claim, supplies a
> capsule
> history of the dispute. I challenge Louis's claim that the 1940 fight was
> a precedent
> on fairly narrow factual grounds, citing certain inaccuracies in his
> retelling.
> Louis responds that he simply can't argue with me because I am a former
> Spartacist and former member of the International Bolshevik Tendency.
> I leave it to readers of this newsgroup to determine who is calling names
> in order to stigmatize people and cut off debate.
>
>
>
>
>
> 
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Re: [Marxism] Awesome Proletarian Positions

[turbulo]

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Louis Proyect wrote:

It is a waste of time for me to argue with someone who spent a decade or 
so in the Spartacist League and the International Bolshevik Tendency. I 
congratulate you that you are no longer a member but I am afraid that 
your take on the Cannon-Shachtman fight is straight out of the 
Spartacist League canon.


  

To recapitulate: Louis objects to the sectarian practice of hurling
the epithet, "petty bourgeois" as a way of stigmatizing people and cutting off
debate. He cites the Burnham-Shachtman fight of 1940 in the SWP as
a prime example of this technique, and, to support his claim, supplies a 
capsule 
history of the dispute. I challenge Louis's claim that the 1940 fight was a 
precedent
on fairly narrow factual grounds, citing certain inaccuracies in his retelling.
Louis responds that he simply can't argue with me because I am a former 
Spartacist and former member of the International Bolshevik Tendency.
I leave it to readers of this newsgroup to determine who is calling names 
in order to stigmatize people and cut off debate.   






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Re: [Marxism] Awesome Proletarian Positions

[Andrew Pollack]

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OK, now we're back to the heart of the matter, and with a comradely tone.
Thanks Angelus,  and I'll try to do the same.

So yes, the question is whether the workplace (and the home) is a breeding
ground for different ideas, reactions to experience, potential -- and not
just the coincidental habitation for large numbers.

Have to work on an article (exposing the petty-bourgeois nature of David
Graeber's "Debt" -- I kid you not :)

So I'll have to put further responses here on hold.

Andy P.

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Re: [Marxism] James and Glaberman (was Awesome Proletarian Positions)

[Louis Proyect]

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On 4/6/13 12:33 PM, Einde O'Callaghan wrote:

Lazy argumentation like this makes me very angry and is a travesty of
Marxism! If you disagree with somebody, present counter-arguments! Don't
blame your differences on the fact that you're a crystal pure
proletarian and your opponent is an incurable petty bourgeois.


The sad irony, of course, is that Einde's IST movement uses the same 
methodology in Britain. Alex Callinicos's defense of "Leninism" involved 
making an amalgam of Richard Seymour with Owen Jones, a Labor Party 
member and obvious carrier of germs that can lead to gangrene. I do 
acknowledge, however, that Einde has repudiated this garbage.




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Re: [Marxism] James and Glaberman (was Awesome Proletarian Positions)

[Einde O'Callaghan]

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On 06.04.2013 13:23, Angelus Novus wrote:


Lou wrote:


I regard CLR James as the greatest Marxist thinker to come out of the
Trotskyist movement after Trotsky's death.


And James' close comrade Marty Glaberman was precisely one of those "City College 
boys" that turbulo refers to.

Marty spent decades working in a Detroit auto factory, and then went on to 
write (IMHO) the most insightful analysis of the shop-floor activity of the 
American working class.

So I guess those "City College boys" were good for something,

Further to this unspeakable debate about the proletarian credentials of 
those that supported Shachtman and those that supported Cannon in the 
1940 split. To describe the class origins of the members who had been 
students at CCNY in the 1930s as petty bourgeois as distinct from those 
members elsewhere is stretching things a bit.


If I recall CCNY was the only institution of higher education that was 
open for the vast majority of young people of working class and 
immigrant backgrounds. It was actually known as the "college of the 
proletariat", such was its reputation.


I fail to see why former CCNY students should be regarded as petty 
bourgeois while other college boys who supported Cannon weren't. 
Examples of the latter were Joseph Hansen and Harry Braverman - until 
the latter proved how petty bourgeois he was by joining Bert Cochrane. I 
even remember reading somewhere that Farrell Dobbs had spent a few terms 
at college - and judging by the line of the CLA in the early 1930s that 
made him part of a counter-revolutionary mass - cf. A.M. Glotzer: 
Student Youth and the Workers Movement, The Militant, 1 June 1931 
 
- of course some might argue that Glotzer was already tainted because, 
after all, 9 years later he joined Shachtman & Co.


This is of course nonsense - but it it the level at which a lot of the 
arguments about "petty bourgeois" oppositions have been posed since the 
1940 split down to the recent past! For some "orthodox" Trotskyists all 
the articles in "In Defence of Marxism" have taken on the status of Holy 
Writ. However, some of the articles weren't exactly Trotsky's finest. 
Particularyl the articles about the "petty bourgeois opposition". It 
wasn't a good argument then and it's absolute bullshit today!


During the the war the oh so proletarian SWP was a theoretical desert - 
anybody who was in any way creative ended up being driven out of the 
movement - do we need to list them: Morrow, Goldman, Heijenoort, James 
on more than one occasion and numerous others. After the way they were 
treated it's no great surprise that many of them turned away from 
revolutionary politics. The Workers Party, on the other hand, creatively 
grappled with the new issues as they came up - they weren't always right 
but they did at least try. That they eventually burned out was as much a 
result of the objective conditions as it was of theoretical weakness on 
their part or their innate "petty bourgeoisness".


Lazy argumentation like this makes me very angry and is a travesty of 
Marxism! If you disagree with somebody, present counter-arguments! Don't 
blame your differences on the fact that you're a crystal pure 
proletarian and your opponent is an incurable petty bourgeois.


Einde O'Callaghan



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[Marxism] Sokal style hoax at HM

[Louis Proyect]

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On 4/6/13 11:24 AM, andrew coates wrote:

Left Journal Falls for Sokal Style Hoax. (?)
Historical Materialism Journal has Posadist Moment.
In the latest Historical Materialism, apparently a Marxist journal, there is 
this,
Marx on the Dialectics of Elliptical Motion, Thomas Weston

http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/left-journal-falls-for-sokal-style-hoax/

Andrew Coates




Well, that's to be expected with Sebastian Bludgeon as editor.



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Re: [Marxism] Marxism Digest, Vol 114, Issue 8

[andrew coates]

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Left Journal Falls for Sokal Style Hoax. (?)
Historical Materialism Journal has Posadist Moment.
In the latest Historical Materialism, apparently a Marxist journal, there is 
this,
Marx on the Dialectics of Elliptical Motion, Thomas Weston

http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2013/04/04/left-journal-falls-for-sokal-style-hoax/

Andrew Coates 
  


> 

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[Marxism] North Korea: What’s really happening - Salon.com

[Louis Proyect]

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An article by Tim Shorrock, a really sharp analyst who was on Marxmail 
briefly if I remember correctly.


http://www.salon.com/2013/04/05/north_korea_whats_really_happening/


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[Marxism] Nice tribute to Ebert by NYT's A.O. Scott

[Louis Proyect]

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NY Times April 5, 2013
Ebert Was a Critic Whose Sting Was Salved by Caring
By A. O. SCOTT

By midafternoon on Thursday the digital common was crowded with 
mourners. #Ebert and #RIPEbert crowded out all the other hashtags on 
Twitter. Every movie blogger, entertainment journalist, critic and film 
buff who had crossed paths with Roger Ebert or absorbed his influence — 
which is to say just about all of us — posted an elegy or a 
reminiscence. Along with those collegial and filial tributes came 
salutes from filmmakers and a statement from the White House after his 
death at 70, almost surely the first time a film critic has been 
eulogized by a president.


There is a hometown connection between President Obama and Mr. Ebert, of 
course, and there is much to be said about what Chicago meant to Mr. 
Ebert (who grew up downstate, in Champaign-Urbana), and vice versa. He 
was a singular figure in a city where celebrity is typically the 
prerogative of politicians and professional athletes, and where the 
local news media sometimes seems determined to feed a longstanding civic 
inferiority complex. Not only was he a great newspaperman, an heir to 
the noble tradition of Mike Royko and Irv Kupcinet, but also the man 
who, with his rival and television partner, Gene Siskel of The Chicago 
Tribune, helped to make Chicago the first city of movie criticism.


He was proudly local, his byline gracing The Chicago Sun-Times, his 
caricature decorating the wall of half the restaurants in the Loop, his 
aisle seat reserved at the Lake Street screening room. All this even 
after he became the universal embodiment and global ambassador of his 
profession, at home in Cannes and Hollywood and, most recently, on Twitter.


Twitter was the last, and maybe the least, of the discursive forms Mr. 
Ebert mastered. A journalist for nearly half a century, a television 
star for three decades, a tireless blogger and the author of a memoir 
and a cookbook, he was platform agnostic long before that unfortunate 
bit of jargon was invented. Social media, another neologism and, too 
often, an oxymoron, was for him a tautology.


Every medium he made use of was, above all, a tool of communication, a 
way of talking to people — Sun-Times readers, the critic in the other 
chair, Facebook friends, insomniacs and enthusiasts — about the movies 
he cared about and, perhaps more important, the human emotions and 
aspirations those movies represented.


An unapologetic liberal (always ready to fight back when scolded for the 
imaginary sin of injecting political views into his criticism), he was 
also an exemplary small-d democrat, a committed anti-snob. He routinely 
answered letters and e-mail from schoolchildren and college students and 
happily tangled with younger, less credentialed critics who challenged him.


After surgery for cancer of the salivary glands and chin took away his 
power of speech, his blog, Roger Ebert’s Journal, became the vehicle of 
a newly personal, at times breathtakingly intimate, literary voice, as 
illness forced him — and freed him — to contemplate memory, mortality, 
religion, sex and other noncinematic matters. Somehow, in the midst of 
reviewing five movies a week and working on a half-dozen other writing 
projects, he found time and energy to respond to his commenters.


It is partly this ubiquity that makes his loss feel so personal, even to 
people who never met him. Anyone with an interest in movies who came of 
age in the post-’70s film generations — through the blockbusters of the 
’80s, the indie boom of the ’90s and the digital revolution that 
followed — has had Roger Ebert as a foil, a role model and a companion. 
It was sometimes easy to take him for granted, to make fun of him 
(though he and Siskel were brilliant at beating mockers to the punch 
with knowing self-parody) or to complain about the thumbs.


Like many critics who grew up under his influence, I have been guilty of 
all that. My relationship with Roger (if I may abandon the pretense of 
formality) got off to an unpromising start. In the fall of 1999 I wrote 
an article for Slate about Martin Scorsese that accused film critics (in 
whose ranks I was not yet enrolled) of giving him a free ride, and 
singled out Roger’s embrace of the dreadful “Bringing Out the Dead” as a 
prime example of uncritical favoritism.


It wasn’t very nice, but in retrospect I would not say that I was wrong. 
Roger was not wrong either, though, when a few months later he greeted 
the news of my hiring as a film critic at The New York Times with 
skepticism. What could it have been thinking when it hired a 
wet-behind-the-ears book reviewer with no film background to write about 
movies?


“Has he seen six films by Bresson? Ozu?” Roger wondered aloud

[Marxism] Brown Moses Blog: DIY Weapons In Syria

[Louis Proyect]

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http://brown-moses.blogspot.com/2013/04/diy-weapons-in-syria.html


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Re: [Marxism] James and Glaberman (was Awesome Proletarian Positions)

[Angelus Novus]

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Lou wrote:

> I regard CLR James as the greatest Marxist thinker to come out of the 
> Trotskyist movement after Trotsky's death. 

And James' close comrade Marty Glaberman was precisely one of those "City 
College boys" that turbulo refers to.

Marty spent decades working in a Detroit auto factory, and then went on to 
write (IMHO) the most insightful analysis of the shop-floor activity of the 
American working class.

So I guess those "City College boys" were good for something,





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Re: [Marxism] Awesome Proletarian Positions

[Angelus Novus]

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Andy wrote:

> extrapolated from that to deny the importance or possibility of such
> consciousness, because they wanted to defend Richard Estes' piece in North
> Star.

Hey wait a minute, I said nothing about any of this, nor do I feel strongly 
enough by Estes' piece to think long enough about it to formulate a position 
pro or contra.

I was simply needling you about your tendency to ascribe "proletarian" or 
"petit-bourgeois" status to abstract positions.

My point is this: obviously we all accept (more or less) Marx's critique of 
capitalism, and the reasons it should be abolished.  We can hopefully also 
explain this to others.  But I think it's just an absurd legacy of "worldview 
Marxism" to assume you can ascribe a class character to a set of positions.

Marx's critique isn't correct because it's "proletarian"; it's correct because 
it's correct.  Now, Marx also happens to explain that capitalism exists at 
tremendous, horrible cost to workers and the environment, and hopefully we will 
be able to convince a lot of workers and environmentalists of this, but that's 
different than saying that Marx's insights express a certain class position 
(though if you want to say they take the side of the working class, I'd agree 
with that).

> The core issue remains: does working in a working class job -- whether
> factory, school, hospital, domestic work, whatever -- provide the 
> potential for a different kind of consciousness?

A resounding "maybe".  Obviously those of us on that list have a different kind 
of consciousness.  But we're in the vast minority on this.  

Again, I'll reiterate my point that since the working class comprises the vast 
numerical majority of people in industrial societies, it's kind of pointless to 
ask whether they possess some quasi-mystical ability to see capitalism 
critically as a result of their class position.

The more important point is: we sure as hell better have the correct arguments 
to convince people to see why capitalism is destruction of workers and the 
environment, because otherwise we'll never end it.




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