Re: [Marxism] Worker strike actions in Donbass? (h0ost)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Thanks, that makes sense as far as the miners go. However they are not the only working class in the region. How about workers in the Ukrainian arms industry, closely integrated with the Russian arms industry: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-07/putin-eyes-ukrainian-arms-prize-as-troops-build-up-along-border.html I'd caution about tossing around the word fascists in the manner of our opponents, until actual fascist organizations can be identified. We have Pravy Sektor and the youth arm of Svoboda, but I've not seen actual fascist *organizations* identified amongst the Donbas militias. I don't mean individuals such as A. Dugin - more of a Russian neo-con than a fascist - or Cossacks, unless we are to label all so-called Cossacks, whom I thought had been wiped out anyway, as fascists. Putin is already starting to backpedal: Ukraine crisis: Russia's Putin 'backs' 25 May election Breaking news Russia's President Vladimir Putin says Ukraine's presidential election on 25 May is a step in the right direction. But he said the 25 May vote would decide nothing unless the rights of all citizens are protected. Mr Putin also urged pro-Russian activists in south-eastern Ukraine to call off a series of independence referendums planned for this weekend. It comes amid high tension between Russia and Kiev, and its allies in the West, over the crisis in Ukraine. Russia has been accused of backing pro-Moscow activists in a bid to try and break up the country and annex more regions after Crimea. Moscow says it will protect the rights of the largely Russian-speaking people in the south and east against what it calls an undemocratic government in Kiev. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27314816 I'm seeing preliminary signs of backpedaling from various sides. EXCEPT in Washington, D.C., where the approach remains the same. With reference to Golden Dawn on the crisis in Ukraine, the question is begged: What IS the US up to in Ukraine and Europe more generally? I'm not seeing much serious address on this here on Marxmail beyond snark. Consequentially it is left to our opponents to fill in their answer. You know my answer: Strategically, drive a wedge between further Russo-German economic integration. The US will halt and change course when Germany finally says stop, the US will not risk its ties with Germany - unless the looney bin called Congress steps in and mucks it up. But the US will have already achieved a slowdown or interruption of such ties, administered another hit to its German competition, plus it has concocted a new atmosphere of a new cold war to replace the other wars Washington is winding down. To this extent the US is not only an active driver for civil conflict in Ukraine, it is the most active driver for conflict there. It makes sense as the US has the least to lose in this situation. None of which is good for the working class struggle. -Matt 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] Smoke and Mirrors: The Roots of Russian Revanchism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Chris Floyd has finally had enough: http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2389-smoke-and-mirrors-the-roots-of-russian-revanchism.html See also my comment in the list. -Matt 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] Volodymyr Ishchenko: For Ukrainians, as for any other people in the world, the main threat is capitalism.
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == One can substantially agree with the thrust of the interview. And then we get to the nub of the problem I see again and again with respect to understanding Ukraine: Q: ...So is this really a Ukrainian uprising? Or are these just superpowers playing with a pawn? Obviously you cannot deny that both the U.S. and Russia?and the EU?try to influence Ukrainian politics. They would be stupid if they didn?t. They are great powers, they have their imperialist interests, and that?s what we can expect from them. But then you deny the grassroots nature of this protest. People are talking about real problems. People are self-organizing, both in Maidan in the Western Ukraine and in the Eastern Ukraine now. And you cannot just reduce it to this great power play. But this artificial juxtaposition of uprising vs. superpowers is quite a silly and completely unnecessary way of putting matters. It is an absurd way of framing a question that guarantees the absurd answer. It is this behavior that I find most puzzling. The real answer is that it is *both*. Louis has done valuable yeoman's work in drawing a clear line against especially our most rabid political opponents on what for the time being we must refer to as the Left, on the questions of the Arab Spring and Maidan. However that is not enough. We need to be able to present our own analysis of the motives and actions of the outside powers. In particular we need to present an analysis of the actions of our own Great Power capitalist regimes, first of all because that is where we interact with ordinary people on a daily basis. And second of all because these Great Power interventions are an objective factor and condition for the uprising and for any self-organizing movement. Today Ukraine is clearly heading toward disintegration as a result, not of Maidan, but of the actions of the outside Powers. My own analysis indicates that this result is *primarily*, but obviously not solely due to the actions and attitude of the US government. It is hard to imagine that a conservative like Putin would not want a status quo settlement that would divide up the spoils. But the US gambled for it all. And lost, as its policy predictably heads towards fubar. So far I've not seen this, perhaps out of a scratch-gangrene fear of resembling our opponents, or perhaps because one agrees with Slavoj Žižek in his surprisingly good Barbarism with a Human Face article in LRB (I confess that Žižek has come off too much as the philosophical clown for my tastes in the past, but this is the acme of sobriety from him, relatively speaking), when he ends by stating Such geopolitical games are of no interest whatever to authentic emancipatory politics. Here Žižek presents the above same artificial juxtaposition stood on its head as a conflation. Of course Great Power geopolitical games have nothing to do, are utterly alien, to authentic emancipatory politics. They are the *conscious enemy* of such a politics, that's why they exist! And that is why, as against Žižek, we MUST BE INTERESTED in the games they play against us, from ALL sides, and especially from the side of the Great Power closest to you. After all, a new Cold War against Russia is intended to whip up a militarist mentality in the US, generating not only the economic waste of yet another military buildup with directly negative consequences for our working class, but intended to create a political environment hostile to any authentic emancipatory politics in the US. Just as exactly 100 years ago, the machinations of the Great Powers provoked a World War with devastating consequences for the prospects of authentic emancipatory politics of the time, above all for the international working class Socialist movement. We clearly have a vital material interest in preventing that from happening, and that means going against all the idiotic new Cold War rhetoric coming out of Washington. With eyes wide open. I don't know why the concept of know thy enemy is so difficult to grasp. The failure to do so means defaulting to our opponents on the Left. It is not enough to know that we are not them. We have to defeat them. How else do we expect to win? Or are we content to simply be oppositionists? I don't know about you, but I fight to win. -Matt PS: Thank god it appears the Ukrainian officer corps has no stomach for shooting its own people. Who knows, with Ukraine facing disintegration, they might even move against the US-installed coup government. And good news that a troop of torch-bearing Neo-Nazis just meet with real hostility from the present Maidan encampment yesterday. Unfortunately I had to glean this latter from RT.com: http.com//rt.com/news/155748-rally-kiev-massive-fight/ See what I mean? Why do I have
[Marxism] Ukraine: Miners strike in Lugansk region
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 22 April a strike began at the six mines of PJSC Krasnodonugol in Krasnodon, region of Lugansk. The mines are owned by SCM, the company of Rinat Akhmetov, one of the country’s wealthiest businessmen and a key regional oligarch. 2000 miners gathered at the mine office, *demanding the reinstatement of 30 miners who had been dismissed for participating in a rally in Lugansk*. The striking miners demanded a wage increase to bring their wages up to the average wage of workers in the Donbas coalfield and the lifting of sanctions against their fellow miners. The passage in asterisks is confirmation of actions by Donbass based oligarchs (a.k.a. ordinary capitalists, who are all by social nature 'oligarchs') that they have been actively repressing - thru threats, dismissals etc - any independent political activity in connection to Ukrainian events by miners. http://www.marxist.com/ukraine-lugansk-strike.htm http://topics.bloomberg.com/rinat-akhmetov/ http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1474449/ukrainian-tycoon-rinat-akhmetov-takes-peacemaker-role-home-city-donetsk I am also read that Donetsk miners are also planning a march in Kiev. That should be interesting. Credo: The same Meanyite hardhat beating me up at an antiwar demo, I'd defend unconditionally against his bosses. -Matt 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] (no subject)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Well that's interesting. BTW, the original part imperialist, part semicolonial state was the USA itself, up until the 1890's. In general, the rise of China and Russia (and lesser others in the wings) as imperialist contenders is a stunning long term confirmation of Lenin's *basic* theory of imperialism. I say *basic* as Lenin's presentation is quite incomplete, even in 1916 context, and further must take account of the phenomena of the intervening years, particularly the facts of the Russian Revolutionary era (1917-1991) that Lenin could not possibly foresee, even as his own actions altered the landscape. But if, in a phrase, Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism, then Russia and China represent the highest stage of its monopoly development, as they must as combined development leverage in order to compete with the Triad bloc. -Matt More on Russia and China as Great Imperialist Powers *A Reply to Chris Slee (Socialist Alliance, Australia) and Walter Daum (LRP, USA)* /By Michael Pr?bsting,/ /Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 11 April 2014, www.thecommunists.net http://www.thecommunists.net / Chris Slee, a long-time activist from the Socialist Alliance (Australia), has published an article which focuses on whether Russia and China are great imperialist powers. (1) The article is mainly a critical review of the RCIT's analysis of Russia and China, which I have elaborated in several documents. (2) Read more at http://www.thecommunists.net/theory/reply-to-slee-on-russia-china/ 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] Discussion: Are Russia and China imperialist powers?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Answer: Yes, agreed. Applied also to Tsarist Russia and 19th century USA. Dialectics of uneven and combined development. -Matt Discussion: Are Russia and China imperialist powers? http://links.org.au/node/3795 http://links.org.au/node/3795 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] Socialist Action secedes from internationalism, joins tankies
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Triad = Literally, US, EU/NATO, Japan. They form a triangle. It is a term heard in cyberspace, I find it handy. -Matt 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] Global empire or imperialism? | International Socialist Review
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Yes, PG openly say so in their just published book, The Making of Global Capitalism. However the problem is not their Kautskyist view, but that they mistake Kautsky's formulation in Ultra-imperialism (1914) for what actually came into existence after WW2, which didn't correspond to Kautsky's formula at all, nor for that matter, Lenin's, as neither he nor Kautsky could not take into account the effects of the Bolsheviks own actions in founding the USSR, the subsequent world revolutionary wave(s), the collapse of the colonial empires, etc. on the world situation. Instead of Kautsky's voluntary inter-imperialist concert based on the global interpenetration and concentration of capital (an entirely mechanistic and deterministic conception of the relation of state and capital, btw), the postwar saw initial US dominance in Germany Italy and Japan converted into hegemonic consent to US leadership along with the UK and France. The is a very lopsided US hegemony over the Triad, not a global concert of the leading imperialist states. After 1991 there appeared the theoretical possibility that the US could extend this to the world, but the US failed to accomplish this. So we are back to Lenin's concept. PG, of course, argue the opposite, that the US succeeded with China, Russia and the BRICs, and I leave it to them to square that with their MR comrades' tendency to see the BRICs as a counter-hegemonic bloc. Well, which is it? -Matt They adopt a position remarkably similar to that of the German Social Democrat, Karl Kautsky, who held the possibility that the great powers could form a ?golden international? and jointly exploit the world?s working classes in concert with one another?a theory he expressed just before the outbreak of World War I. For Panitch and Gindin, this outcome has now been achieved, not by an alliance of great powers, however, but through an informal empire established by the United States. 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] Wolf at Door
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Artesian weighs in on the overall present situation: http://thewolfatthedoor.blogspot.com/2014/03/lunch-with-karl.html I find it generally agreeable. Note the last line on Thailand, which parallels my own. And now we can add Taiwan to the list in Asia. A clarifying moment for many. -Matt 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] Thailand's red shirts
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A review of an eye-witness book on Thailand's red-shirts: http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=950issue=141 I would add there is also no mention of the relation of imperialism (U.S., Japan, China) to the Thai situation. My own guess is that there is not actually much imperialist engagement within Thailand, one reason the struggle drags on inconclusively. And even the BBC, not known to be adverse to Triad-style misrepresentations, describes the yellows as middle class, and generally has indicated displeasure with their openly anti-democratic tack, much as the EU and the Ukraine provisional gov't have had to react against the embarrassment of Pravy Secktor, as these present the wrong propaganda faces (not to equate the yellows with Pravy Secktor, of course). The red-shirt backed Thai government, OTOH, has some faint resemblance to the Bolivarian regime in Venezuela in terms of social basis, if not to the extent of policies. The absence of overt US imperialist moves against the Thai government, marks the main apparent external difference. But in the final analysis these are both bourgeois national reformist regimes at best. -Matt 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 Sympathy Problem: Is Germany a Country of Russia Apologists?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == More on the various material bases of our opponents' perspective, approvingly posted on MoA, from Der Spiegel : www.spiegel.de/international/germany/prominent-germans-have-understanding-for-russian-annexation-of-crimea-a-961711.html Gregor Gysi is almost literally a latter-day Parvus. -Matt 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] New ACTIVIST NEWSLETTER
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Yes it is remarkable how a certain section of the left swallows the fatuously self-serving propaganda of U.S. imperialism concerning its supposed almightyness. In fact the Triad countries continue to sink in a secular stagnation and decline for which they have no solution as yet. This has and will continue to provoke a series of spasmodic, contradictory responses from this imperialist bloc. A clear and present danger for humanity, for sure, but hardly a well-scripted CIA plot. Just a lot of stupid stuff. As in Venezuela, objectively totally unnecessary from the chessboard view of U.S. imperialism. Bolivarian regime would be happy to cut a deal with the U.S. One day the Cold War is over, mission accomplished, triumphalism, end of historynext thing you know, the Cold War is on again! It really is another Iraq moment, but over a longer and more profound time frame: what happened to the Mission Accomplished? What happened to Saint Ronald's Glorious Victory? People in the U.S. have to be asking: Why do we have to do this Cold War thing again? Machiavellis are rare in human history. Most ruling class move are actually quite inane. -Matt So we have not two imperialist powers, one old and strong but weakening (the US), the other newer but trying to assert itself (Russia), but rather a single superpower, the US. This goes even further than the tankies' argument that we should support the weaker imperialist power; Smith sees only one superpower (whose alleged social uniqueness is never defined). 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 next stage in the global offensive by U.S. imperialism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Here for your reference, or perhaps just to ruin your day, is the ANSWER perspective couched as a grand historical narrative: http://www.answercoalition.org/national/news/crimea-referendum-history.html?utm_source=newsletterutm_medium=emailutm_content=majorutm_campaign=ANSWER%20Newsletter No surprises, completely trapped in its time warp. I would draw attention instead to the fundamental organizing concept: Imperialism as a single, global economic system. According to this, after WW2, imperialism was organized under the hegemony of a *single* imperialist state, the U.S. In general, this would be indistinguishable from Kautsky's concept of ultra-imperialism since the hegemonized imperialist partner countries by definition, *consent* to U.S. leadership. That much is accurate. However, I seem to recall that the USSR and the PRC made their exit from the imperialist system for a time. Further, the colonial state structures that organized the system rapidly collapsed after the war. How then can imperialism be seen as a unitary global economic system when such vast geopolitical swathes remained either in unstable relation or completely outside it? Contradiction #1. It follows from this that the U.S. was not *globally* hegemonic. Then post-Soviet Russia and China re-entered the system, decisively after 2000. But not under a U.S. hegemony, but as new contending imperialist great powers, together with lesser ones such as India or Brazil. Further, the old Triadic core of the system went into a stagnation and decline that shows no sign of a decisive exit. At this point one can talk about imperialism as a single *global* economic system, but only in the Leninist, and not Kautskyian sense, of a world divided between states, and where the U.S. is still not globally hegemonic (and never will be). But this is the point Brian Becker has to dodge so as to maintain his Kautskyian theory of imperialism: But the inherently expansionist nature of modern day imperialism puts it on a continual collision course with Russia, China or any national entity or mass movement that serves as a brake or an obstacle to its desire for unfettered domination over the planets' land and resources. Russia, China but national entities, not imperialist powers in their own right, grabbing for their share of the planets' land and resources. Why hang your counter-hegemonic strategic hat on such non-global non-entities? Of course, because they are very much global entities, growing on average considerably faster than the stagnant, sluggish Triad. Hello, Chinese capital anyone, buying shit left and right around the world? ANSWER simply proposes to align with the up and coming imperialists against the old and flagging ones. Like I said, it's the Alexander Parvus Brigade, guided by Kautsky's revisionist theory of imperialism. -Matt 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] Ukraine far-right leader Muzychko dies 'in police raid'
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Looks like the far right retreat may have begun, though this Muzychko guy looks like a fall guy : http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26729273 Of note, my guess is that these soldiers families are Crimean: Mr Tenyukh said he had received requests to leave Crimea from about 6,500 soldiers and family members. That means about two-thirds of the 18,800 military personnel and relatives stationed there are staying on the peninsula, the Associated Press news agency reports. Earlier, a senior Ukrainian armed forces officer, Oleksandr Rozmaznin, was quoted as saying nearly half of the Ukrainian military staff based in Crimea had opted to stay there and some of them were joining the Russian military. -Matt 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] (no subject)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == My response to various scattered comments out on LT: Electoral influence and street influence in a fluid and dynamic political situation are two different things. Bolsheviks are a good example. The Stalinoid tankist apologetics for Putin's Red-Brown Russian imperialism are predictable. What is denounced as Typical Trotskyite bullshit is called dialectical logic, comrades. While NATO-Triad imperialism is the greater danger on the world scale, on the regional scale of Ukraine this is not true. Rather it is Russian imperialism that is driving the situation here, not the Triad, too weak to intervene effectively, and only able to throw firebombs in Russia's way (as with its opportunistic involvement with Euro-maidan and aftermath), promoting mayhem and disorder while the US hopes to use this to drive a wedge between Germany and Russia. But without the capacity to impose a New Order in Ukraine. (This, BTW, explains an apparent contradiction in the Stalinoid rhetoric, alternately exaggerating and belittling NATO and Triad imperialism with respect to Ukraine while standing pat with high confidence in the capacities of Putin and Russia). That is a backhanded confirmation of the the perspective on the real balance for forces in the region outlined above. There is nothing wrong in principle in considerations on the 'chessboard' per se. In fact we need to take the chessboard analysis out of the hands of the Stalinoids. The main enemy is at home is a slogan that targets one's own imperialist bourgeoisie. But Ukraine is not an imperialist country; However one can without contradiction withhold support for and oppose the current right-wing Ukraine putsch government while at the same time standing for the territorial integrity - including Crimea - of Ukraine, against the encroachments (overt in Crimea, covert in other provinces) of Russian imperialism. Maybe our Stalinoid opponents, like Putin, don't believe Ukraine is a real country. The bastards could at least stop the hypocrisy and come right out and say what they really think. Oh, and let's not forget: Leon Trotsky was born Ukrainian. -Matt 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] Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == There is no basic disagreement with the below, besides some terminological quibbles over structure and conjuncture. These are always united, they don't define different eras. So within a general structural crisis (of capitalism), you can certainly have localized conjunctural displacement crises if that is what you meant to say. Ukraine, and potentially Russia itself (this is the critical criterion) is one such zone of conjunctural displacement. In Ukraine we have a fragmented and not stable bourgeois democratic government, and an *independent* fascist mass movement - Pravy Secktor is certainly fascist (and see themselves in that tradition), while Svoboda is opportunist. As I've said before, they are not likely to take power now indeed they may go into retreat shortly, but reemerge later. This is the flaw in LPs argument by analogy on UM: This is not the postwar economy with the crisis of the Great Depression solved after a historic defeat of fascism. Ukraine demonstrates that there is space for the development of an independent fascist mass movement within the scope of a local conjunctural displacement that, if it sustains itself as such, will be a beacon for fascists internationally - ESPECIALLY (if dialectically) IN RUSSIA. Once again, a purely formal analytical separation is made, this time structure vs. conjuncture. Sustained structural crises will inevitably lead to a period of *generalized* conjunctural displacement, if that is what was really meant. It is not generalized yet, but... More dialectical logic comrades! The Putin regime is a reactionary capitalist (Bonapartist?) regime that, *therefore generally* creates ideal conditions legitimizing the rise of openly fascist or crypto-fascist movements in Russia. The present Putin policy towards Ukraine accelerates the further development of Russian fascist movements precisely in the context of the general structural crisis as it conjuncturaly spills out over the BRICs and developing countries. In Russia, the conjuncture will be further exacerbated by any hostile moves taken by the Triad. So to the extent we are concerned about fascism, it is the potential for Russian and not Ukrainian fascism that is the main concern. And to the best of my knowledge, the key sector of the Ukraine proletariat is in the East. Here is the concrete ground for raising the fight, from a working class perspective, against Putin and Russian imperialism AND against Triad interference (sanctions). Question to all: Do we support Western sanctions against Russia? Seems to me that *in the same breath* that we denounce Russian imperialism, we need to denounce Triad imperialism in this context. Not to simply appear evenhanded; quite the contrary, Triad imperialism is the stronger, Russian imperialism the weaker. Keep that in mind when making historical analogies: I think of the situation of imperialist Germany 100 years ago when I think of Russia. We know how that ended up. We oppose any actions that advance the conditions for the rise of the far right or fascism in Russia. The Triad's every move does nothing but advance those conditions, just as they did in Ukraine. That is strategic. Sorry, but revolutionary Marxists are mostly playing defense in this part of the world, them is the historical-material facts until we get our own shit together. And for this very reason above, especially if we hail from Triad countries, it is our *moral duty* to denounce our own imperialists in context, for like those brave Moscow anti-war demonstrators put it: The main enemy is at home!. -Matt --- The Kremlin will be the executioner of the realisation of any favourable possibility for the Ukranian proletariat. In my opinion, fascism is not the real historical danger here but rather Putin and his generals. Great Russian Chauvinism. The historic structural crisis of capital cannot possibly form stable ground for the establishment of Fascism as we saw in the 1930s because such a regime finds its historical presupposition outside such a structural crisis, in an age of conjunctural displaceable crises. And this, no matter how much Ukraine becomes a western or NATO client state. A few fascists (if that is what they are) and thugs on the street in a neo-liberal government does not a fascist regime make. Fascism - or call it by any other name - presupposes a whole series and complex of historical conditions fundamental to which is a crisis of capital which is conjunctural and displaceable in its internal contradictory dynamic i.e. which is not structural, deepening, insoluble. If there is war in the Ukraine, we must call for the unconditional defeat and removal of all Russian forces, including from the Crimea.
[Marxism] Ernst Niekisch and National Bolshevism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Dredging through the Red-Brown muck and slime brought up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Niekisch National Bolshevism is of course a Russian movement today: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevism According to this, In Russia, as the civil war dragged on, a number of prominent Whites switched to the Bolshevik side because they saw it as the only hope for restoring greatness to Russia. Amongst these was Professor Nikolai Ustrialov, initially an anti-communist, who came to believe that Bolshevism could be modified to serve nationalistic purposes. His followers, the Smenovekhovtsi (named after a series of articles he published in 1921) *Smena vekh* (Russian: volte-face), came to regard themselves as National Bolsheviks, borrowing the term from Niekisch.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevism#cite_note-Lee-7 Similar ideas were expressed by the Evraziitsi party and the pro-Monarchist Mladorossi. Joseph Stalin's idea of socialism in one country was interpreted as a victory by the National Bolsheviks. Vladimir Lenin, who did not use the term 'National Bolshevism', identified the Smenovekhovtsi as a tendency of the old Constitutional Democratic Party who saw Russian communism as just an evolution in the process of Russian aggrandisement. He further added that they were a 'class enemy' and warned against communist believing them to be allies. The movement attracted many party members, but was itself an intellectual current and not a political party. Lunacharsky supported it.* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources* that Zinoviev and Bukharin condemned it. Stalin condemned it in 1923. So Putin is basically a Cadet in power. Got it. -Matt 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 Main Enemy is at Home
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Mass demo in Moscow against Putin's policy: A helicopter buzzed overhead as some chanted The main enemy is in the Kremlin. No to fascism, no to imperialism. http://news.yahoo.com/thousands-moscow-protest-russias-action-crimea-003037662.html -Matt 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] Essence of Time
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == From that same Yahoo ariticle previously posted, I noticed: There will never be a Maidan in Moscow, ultra-conservative figure Sergei Kurginyan shouted from the stage, referring to the focal point of the Kiev uprising. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Kurginyan Yet Wikipedia describes Essence of Time as a kind of Russian social patriot group. Apparently they have a wordpress site: http://essenceofourtimes.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/the-essence-of-our-times-a-brief-description-of-the-movement-and-its-history/ Seems to be a remarkably concise distillation of the ideology of our Left political opponents of the Alexander Parvus Brigade. Parvus was probably the original strategist of counter-hegemonic anti-imperialism in his bloc with the German Second Reich against (mainly) Tsarist Russia and by extension, Anglo-French imperialism. Of course this is the Parvus associated with the passage of Lenin to Petrograd. -Matt 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] Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == That's not the argument. The argument instead is that FASCISM is not a likely outcome in any European country since WWII for reasons that are probably not worth going into at any great length except to say that the conditions that created Nazi Germany, Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy belonged to a certain time and place. As I posted also over on UP, I don't share what has been described as LP's complacency on the Ukrainian - or for that matter, but even more so, Russian - fascist movements. The problem with the argument above is that it doesn't recognize that the contemporary situation is no longer that of the postwar. In particular, it doesn't account for the aftermath of the historic capitalist crisis that broke in 2008 and that continues to have all of the Triad countries in its grip, and whose effects are currently rolling across the BRICS (hence Russia) and the so-called developing world. As far as I can see, Triad imperialism has no strategy for exiting the crisis except for more of the same old so-called neo-liberialism that caused the crisis in the first place. Hence their actions will only exacerbate the crisis, not resolve it. Hence instead of a Marshall Plan for Ukraine there will be an IMF austerity suicide government. The situation now resembles more the interwar than the postwar economically and socially - with the key political difference being the absence of strong movements on either the far left or the far right, this a legacy of the postwar. Ukraine-Russia has the potential to mark a historic turning point in that circumstance. The mere existence of nukes and WMD does not materially intervene to alter this emergent circumstance. As opposed to the partisans of the Alexander Parvus Brigade, I am a Triad declinist and have little confidence in especially the feckless EU's ability to somehow corral the fascists in Ukraine, as they are attempting to do with Golden Dawn in Greece (as a counterexample). But Golden Dawn doesn't hold a qualitative candle to Pravy Secktor. Finally the argument here is not whether a fascist regime coming to power in Ukraine is imminent. It is not. Svoboda is an opportunist pro-EU party. It is whether an *independent* fascist mass movement will come into existence anywhere in the world. That is why I compared this aspect of the Ukraine situation to the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. It is not the Reichstag Fire. -Matt 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] Ukraine: The dispute between Russia and the imperialist powers [FT-CI]
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Ukraine: The dispute between Russia and the imperialist powers Put right off by title. So they don't consider Russia a contending imperialist power? How about China? They also see the US as a declining imperialist hegemon, but the US has never been globally hegemonic, as precisely the dissolution of the USSR would demonstrate. The US has only ever been hegemonic over the Triad bloc and its local satellites. The US hegemony over these has *not* declined, and the news is that the entire Triad, and not merely the US, is in relative decline vis-a-vis the rest of the world. Good News For Our Time. Trotsky raised the right to Ukraine's self-determination Of course: Trotsky was Ukrainian. -Matt 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] Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I share your concerns (I write from the US) and think what passes for Pham Binh's revolutionary strategy - a sort of deterritorialized revolutionary movement intervening globally - is basically crazy. Contrary to Antonio Negri, no such space exists, only its negation, the *inter*national space. The main enemy is at home! is therefore more than a slogan, but material reality. I think it is easy to combining opposition to Russian imperialism to countering the US/EU campaign. One need only point out the appalling hypocrisy. I can't think of any American who supported the many imperialist adventures of the US - and I am talking about many liberals - who'd declare for the sanctity of international frontiers while declaiming against the right of self-determination of Crimea, with a straight face. Anyway the main problem the EU has is restoring order in Ukraine all the while imposing an IMF mandated austerity. That should be interesting. You made your bed now sleep in it biatches. -Matt I also think Lenin's revolutionary defeatism, and Liebknecht's slogan, The main enemy is at home! are relevant here. These slogans were meant to ensure that anti-war socialists of the time did not proclaim their neutrality in the war while at the same time tilting toward their own bourgeoisie. The tilt, L L were saying, should have been in the other direction. Without siding with Russia (and without making any facile comparisons to WWI), we should view our main responsibility as leftists and socialists as countering the anti-Russian propaganda campaign being waged by our own government and its Western European partners.I'm uncomfortable with the views of those who tend to concentrate their fire on Russia and Putin out of some misbegotten faith in the masses of Maidan. There is no Ukrainian left to speak of. Whatever tensions may exist within the liberal-fascist coalition of Kiev, it is serving as the internal agent of a US/EU attempt to rip off Ukraine for the IMF and NATO. (And I'm not saying this out of some mandarin disdain for the masses, but rather because there are many situations in which people in the streets figure less significantly in the outcome than the machinations of big powers; this, IMO, is one such situation) Russia shouldn't dominate Ukraine either. But those whose main thrust is to denounce Russian imperialism come dangerously close to echoing the propaganda of their own ruling class. Jim Creegan 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] Ukraine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Sigh, should probably read down the whole list before responding... While you could use a lot of terrible words to describe the Putin regime, like undemocratic and illiberal, it is not anti-Semitic, he added. It is suppressing all of society equally. So it is not suppressing Jews more than anyone else. LOL Putin has a fair cachee among US conservatives, who are envious that he is not their own Great Leader. -Matt 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] Fascism?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Clay, Louis, and others have also denounced those who point to the interimperialist rivalry between the West and Russia, dismissing the international context as largely irrelevant to the development of the Maidan movement and an effort by their political opponents to undercut it. Sorry, but largely irrelevant are weasel words, implying the partial relevance of the international context in general and the Triad/Russia interimperialist rivalry in particular, to the formation of the Maidan movement, certainly with respect to its ideological formation. The question to Louis and Clay is then, WHAT is that relevance, however partial, of the above? IOW, what is the analysis here? I've yet to hear much of one concerning the political and economic designs of the EU/NATO/US with regard to Ukraine. And in addition, as people commenting from afar, mostly from the US, one of the imperialist contenders, our own interventions are by material definition internationalist from the get-go. In this vary real context, it is a violation of the most elementary revolutionary morality to not analyze and denounce the actions of your own imperialist countries as they pertain to the situation, which on this list is likely the US/UK/ANZAC/CN. AS A FIRST PRIORITY, because that is where you live and communicate from, not Ukraine. Stop trying to represent yourself as the ordinary people of Ukraine, American! That is what Leon Trotsky did as journalist in the 1912 Balkan Wars before he was a Trotskyist, writing for a Russian readership, despite that the only real imperialist power involved was the crumbling Ottoman Empire. He bashed (tsarist) Russia, his own imperialism even though not a single Russian soldier was sent there by the Tsarist regime (quite a few Russians volunteered, in fact the very first airplane even shot down in war was flown by a Russian volunteer). Perhaps what we have here is a defensive overreaction (AKA denunciation :-D) to the so-called anti-imperialists who have now been exposed as simply pro-Russian imperialists (and that, and not white supremacy, was behind their stance on Libya and Syria). However as I have already denounced on UM and perhaps here, this tendency towards Manichean juxtaposition is not exactly what I'd call the Marxist method. So I keep seeing such juxtapositions as: Objective analysis generally, considerations of the international chessboard, etc. VS ordinary people, the real movement, etc., and now, The international or inter-imperialist context VS the Maidan movement. In short, a classic reduction. As if ordinary people or real movements (especially!) aren't interested in objective analysis! Really? I call BS on that! You are hereby charged with elitism towards the masses. -Matt 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] Fascism?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Honestly, I don't have such a problem with this as a tactic. I was taught that revolutionaries should enter even fascist-organized trade unions to agitate, and in the case of the Ukraine street the point is to intervene to compete with the fascists for the loyalty of the mass vanguard of the movement. Under slogans against Russian imperialism, obviously, but also against EU/NATO imperialism as well. Note that the Euro Far Right generally and the Ukranian Pravy secktor in particular hates the EU. Svoboda is opportunistically pro-EU for the moment, though. Doing this while attacking honest (if wrong-headed) leftists is a problem, as in tactically wrong. -Matt serious as a heart attack http://notgeorgesabra.tumblr.com/post/78848780314/2-russias-1-ukraine Wow, so he went from the North Star to this? I'm confused, but this is striking development. 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] (no subject)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On 3/10/14 11:28 PM, Marv Gandall wrote: Fair enough. But do we support all mass movements without exception - even ones led by popular right wing groups and parties often viciously opposed to the values and institutions historically supported by the left? There was no mass movement. This was a spontaneous revolt of people fed up by corruption and poverty. A mass movement would be something like the civil rights movement in the USA that has developed organically over decades or the antiwar movement. People poured into Maidan square and the well-organized and powerful ultraright used the opportunity to muscle out the left. Don't need to define away Marv's premise: Maidan is a new mass movement in search of political leadership. Marv's mistake was to assume leadership by popular right wing groups. The Far Right was only decisive in the street fighting that toppled Yanukovych, that's their pitch to the mass movement. But they have competition from other political currents, including those tied to the EU. -Matt 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] What is Russian Crimea's stand on the Right of Return?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == This may yet yield the darkest result of the world allowing Crimea to be taken from Ukraine by Russia without a fight. If all the countries of the world draw the appropriate conclusions about the value of international guarantees of territorial integrity, and decide, they too need a bomb to defend themselves, then there will be hell to pay for our tolerance Talk about going over the deep end: Exactly what world and its international law are we talking about here? Is it not clear that from the Kosovo war through Iraq and Afghanistan that international law is whatever Triad (US/EU/Japan) imperialism says it is? So this dark result already exists, and to invoke the world and the rest of the formalistic legal tripe is in fact to take one side (the Triad) in an inter-imperialist contest with Russia. -Matt 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 Was in Kiev's Independence Square?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I posted this also on UM. Interesting takaways for me at least: - Questions the Nazi characterization of the Bandera nationalist movement during WW2; - Charts the migration of what eventually became Svoboda to the post-fascist Euro Far Right a la the French FN, etc.; Svoboda anomalously is pro-EU, whereas the EU Far Right is anti-EU; - Confirms that the actual neo-fascists of Pravy (Right) Sector comprised the fighting vanguard on the streets. Dreyfus claims that for the moment, [Pravy Sector] enjoys real popular support. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/07/who-was-in-kievs-independence-square/ -Matt 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 Real, Anti-capitalist Pussy Riot
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Interesting split in the org: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26067971 -Matt 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] FW: How the West Manufactures Opposition Movements
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == +1 on the internal Ukrainian situation. However, the interventions of EU/NATO imperialism must also be taken into account. The tendency to not properly do so is my main beef with some of the 'anti-anti-imperialists, in a reaction to the Putin-loving phonies that can be overly one-sided and mechanical at times. Since the EU/NATO bloc will obviously not be interested in promoting anti-capitalist movements, they will be forced to back the right wing elements, no doubt requiring the promotion of a respectable moderate face for a movement acceptable to them, whose essential animus will nevertheless come for extreme reactionaries, neo-Nazi ultra-nationalists and the like - of which there are also many in Putin's Russia, let us not forget, basically coddled by that regime. This same basically holds for Syria, where NATO indirectly blocs with Saudi-promoted Islamic Jihadi ideologues who aren't exactly the friends of progress. This latter is of course problematic for NATO, as can be seen in Iraq, where the US at least finds itself arming the Maliki government against the same. Nobody said trying to dominate the world would be easy. The good news is, so far, they are failing. The NATO-Japan bloc may not be the only imperialism in the world, but it is BY FAR still the strongest imperialism on Earth, militarily, politically and economically, even in its relative historical decline. -Matt 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] Capitalism vs. Democracy - NYTimes.com
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == ...defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism. What left orthodoxy is he referring to..? Standard NYT journalistic boilerplate, please disregard. Piketty is correct to characterize the six decades - and I'd add, particularly the postwar - as an exceptional episode in the history of capitalism. That's something that people are only just now beginning to awaken to. In its essence it was the result of advances in the class struggle on the part of the working class, particularly in the train of the series of socialist and anti-colonial revolutions after 1917. Rather, contrary to what this article appears to have Piketty say, the two world wars and the (unmentioned in the article) intervening fascism acted *against* that positive trend, but did not overcome it. Fascism failed. Instead it was primarily an inside job, featuring the commercial and financial capitalist invasion of the process of the reproduction of labor power itself, promoting the successive degradation of labor power backed by judicious applications of state power from the outside. This process may be reaching its limits presently. The response of left-Keynesian Dean Baker is in turns amusing and prescient: ..he believes that Piketty is far too pessimistic. Baker contends that there are a host of far less ambitious actions that might help to ameliorate inequality: Is it really implausible that we would ever see any sort of tax on finance in the U.S., either the financial transactions tax that I would favor or the financial activities tax advocated by the I.M.F.? We still wait, Dean...perhaps that's the answer? Baker also noted that much of our capital is tied up in intellectual property and that reform of patent laws could serve both to limit the value of drug and other patents and simultaneously lower consumer costs. Not only intellectual property, but also landed property, telecommunications property, and other forms of private property in the use values of nature - as we saw in the mortgage credit induced 2008 crash. This particular question is closely bound up with Piketty's six decades. These span the transition from the old European form of rentiership featuring a consolidated traditional aristocratic but thoroughly bourgeois landlord gentry - generally aping the English original - dominant in the State apparatus, in the colonial possessions and therefore over emerging industrial and new forms of commercial (railroads, etc.) capital. The significant *exception* to the old regime of accumulation was the United States, precisely as this country emerged as a distinct social formation initially in direct contradictory connection to the English regime, specifically in the failure to consolidate a landed bourgeois aristocracy as a privileged caste of the class. Instead the U.S. regime of accumulation generally - but not always in a crisis-free way - featured the subordination of both landed property and banking capital to a continental commercial capital. Piketty's six decades involved the transition from the European to the American regime. This is not to be seen in some pre-ordained teleology. We are now in the era of the terminal crisis of the American regime as big U.S. capital abandons and guts the old traditional continental basis of U.S. capitalist accumulation as incompatible with imperialism. -Matt 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] LRB review of Sperber bio of Karl Marx
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Lame, pedestrian pieces of logic stand out: His assumption that there was no contradiction between revolution and reform would be proved wrong in the years after his death and this whole passage is a totally ignorant POS: Marx?s later economic writings also complicated the Communist Manifesto?s bipolar account of class relations between bourgeoisie and proletariat by devoting considerable attention to landowners and agriculture, and by grappling with Malthus?s dire prediction that population growth would outpace the land?s ability to sustain it. At a time when agriculture in Europe was rapidly decreasing in size and importance [Matt: but not in the US and Russia!], this too belonged to a ?backward-looking economics?. Marx had little good to say about the service sector, whose expansion would be a central feature of 20th-century economies (?From the whore to the pope, there is a mass of such scum,? was one of his more choice remarks). When his economic theories finally aroused public discussion, thanks to Engels?s posthumous publication of his manuscripts, ?most economists were living in a completely different intellectual world from the one Marx had inhabited.? The Austrian economist Eugen von B?hm-Bawerk briskly dismissed his labour theory of value by pointing out that prices and values are determined by market forces and consumer preferences, not by labour time. Marx has a lot to say about the relative surplus population at the end of Vol I of Capital, of which the low wage service sector wage slaves of Walmart and fast food belong to, to only name a few of the obvious. This relative surplus population is now an enormous percentage of the total workforce, but is nevertheless required to go through the charade of selling their capacity to labor for wages, despite not contributing to the valorization process that now only requires a small percentage of the total laboring population, as their labor power is not required for the accumulation of capital. This neatly expresses the domination of the social relations of the valorization process over the whole of society despite the fact that few are actively involved in it. And *that* is the problem, dear nitwit reviewer. This outcome Marx predicted 144 years ago. -Matt 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] The KKE is a tragedy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The KKE is also a good example of a sect - in this case a large, Stalinist sect. IOW, being a sect has nothing to do with a particular set of extreme tactics, nor of a particular historic political current, nor be restricted to a small size. -Matt http://kasamaproject.org/2012/10/05/communist-organization-of-greece-kke-is-a-tragedy 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] The Black Bloc Doth Protest Too Much
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Little behind the time curve with this, but: I?ve encountered it recently. In Chicago, during the NATO protests in May, Black Bloc participants gathered with other activists in Grant Park, wearing masks, waving banners and angrily confronting anyone who took their photo. My response was that if you don?t want your photo taken don?t go to a public protest where you know there are going to be hundreds of journalists. Further, picking a fight with the police only endangers journalists and other activists. While covering the Eurozone crisis in Athens this summer, I was confronted by so-called anarchists for photographing them, and in fact, they routinely assault journalists in demonstrations while later celebrating television news footage of their street fighting. They want to have their dumpster-dived vegan cake and eat it, too. This suggests an interesting tactical alternative to engaging in fisticuffs, probably the only other way to deal with them. Organize a Photo Shoot Brigade to take mass photos when the BBBastids show up. They can't accuse everyone of being police agents, as they can with a single photographer. Say 'cheeze', boys and watch them shrivel up whining. If they get violent (likely) then we get photos of them attacking demo participants. All in all, it will put them in a bad light with the left. -Matt 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] NYT sponsoring reactionary bs from Germany
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Anybody the least bit familiar with U.S. economic history knows these passages are b**t, besides being an interesting interpretation of Hamilton as being, too, a socialist. Ever hear of the railroads? Back to schule, Herr HANS-WERNER SINN: When Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton socialized the states’ war debt after the Revolutionary War, he raised the expectation of further debt socialization in the future, which induced the states to over-borrow. This resulted in political tensions in the early 19th century that severely threatened the stability of the young nation. It took the experience of eight states and territories going bankrupt in the 1830s and 1840s for the United States to shed socialization. Today no one suggests bailing out California, which is nearly bankrupt but is expected to find its own solutions. (cough) California was basically created out of a huge Federal land grant to build the first and subsequent transcontinental railroads. The aforementioned bankrupt states were concentrated in the early Midwest. All this ignores the Civil War era, which event put into the shadows the evil socialization tendencies of Hamiltonianism. The 1830's were a brief Jacksonian disturbance that was also the last hurrah of Jeffersonian agrarianism. Afterwards it was full steam ahead, literally speaking. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/opinion/germany-cant-fix-the-euro-crisis.html?_r=1nl=todaysheadlinesemc=edit_th_20120613 -Matt Oakland, CA 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] KKE on the Greek electioins
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://inter.kke.gr/News/news2012/2012-05-07-ekloges Love this 'analysis': As the results show up to this point the KKE had a small increase. Of course we would have liked a bigger one. Nevertheless, I have to say that the CC and the party as a whole had no illusions that the votes of the KKE could increase exponentially because the performance of the KKE in the elections is above all related to the formation not only of a militant people's movement but to the formation of a powerful majority current that will be emancipated from the well-known dilemmas but also from the regenerated illusions. Translation: We had no illusions that we would ever view the massive split from the PASOK to the left, on an determined antiausterity basis, as a huge opening for our party. Because opposition to the policies of the Troika is the 'regeneneration of illusions'. The substance of the article concerning a supposed call for a government of the Left is a red herring, as the article itself makes clear, as there are not the vote in the parliament. What they are really opposed to is what is now on the agenda: a united front of Left opposition to whatever government takes shape, and an offensive against the rising neo-fascists. Third Periodism run amok in Weimar Greece! -Matt 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] Glenn Beck Fascinated with Revolutionary Marxism Course at PSU
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == BTW, the dittoheads encourage you to go to this site and write a review. Let them know you feel about their courses on Marxism. Portland State Universi … http://www.pdx.edu +1 503 725 3000 724 SW Harrison St, Portland, United States What was once, in 1946, the Vanport Extension Center became Portland State College in 1955. It slowly accelerated from being a four-year … more (4 Reviews) Open: 8a-5p M-F Well I feel great about it, and I'd encourage the same :-) -Matt Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:11:32 -0700 From: Dan Russell proletarian...@gmail.com To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Subject: [Marxism] Glenn Beck Fascinated with Revolutionary Marxism Course at PSU Message-ID: CAO36icr6kqP00_BhX0- 5p9vkiLdsss9M_Kn-YY_zQ=wshts...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 http://www.theblaze.com/stories/portland-state-university-offering-revolutionary-marxism-course-and-wait-until-you-see-the-syllabus/ 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] Glenn Beck Fascinated with Revolutionary Marxism Course at PSU
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == BTW, Portland State also offers a minor in (gasp!) Political Economy! http://www.pdx.edu/sites/www.pdx.edu.econ/files/POLITICALECONMINOR.pdf I think I just found my new favorite college sports team: Go Portland State! -Matt 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 Tendentious POS
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == by one Joshua Sperber, once again via Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/15/the-queasy-liberal/ I mean, comparing Nazis to critics of ultra-leftism, and the BB *anarchists* (Josh!) to communists, is reaching new depths of ridiculousness. Hedges is not the best critic of the self-promoting, petit-bourgeois, ultra leftist and BB childishness, but I'm detecting greater consistency in the Counterpunch line across a variety of areas. -Matt 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] Statement of ANTARSYA, Sunday, February 12, 2012
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Greece, Oakland, CA - notice a pattern here? The European bourgeoisie sees Greece as a test case of how much they can get away with, as the neoliberal wish list called the Memorandum of Understanding makes clear. Greece has been in the forefront of militancy before the present crisis, and if they can get their way there, then next Portugal, etc. The immediate tactic has been to simply *ignore* the mass resistance (that is why normally such resistance is tolerated in such small militancy ghetto countries). Likewise, but on a far smaller scale and intensity relatively, Oakland has had a reputation for militancy and soon confirmed this within Occupy. That is why it was the first target for the most violent repression. Should the state power come into question, though, it will be interesting to see their next move. Notice we've heard little of the well-armed Greek military. It's not like they don't have an infamous history here. Would give an excuse to kick Greece clear out of the EU, washing their democratic hands of the embarrassment. Time to start end-gaming this. -Matt 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] Childish Nonsense or Provocateurs?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/28/10260959-oakland-assesses-city-hall-damage-after-occupy-break-in Most MSM reports gleefully feature this photo-op front and center. Maybe it is just just dumb kids who don't realist that we are not at the point of bringing down the bloody imperialist war flag, or dumb kids being given a bum steer by police provocateurs. I dunno, but something smells, it is all just too picture perfect. Were the cops somehow mysteriously unable to cover City Hall? -Matt 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] Just Don’t Call Her Che
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Typical NYT hogwash - Mr. Wilson certainly knows the capitalist party line! So couldn't resist bracketed comments. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/student-protests-rile-chile.html?pagewanted=allsrc=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB By WILLIAM MOSS WILSON Santiago, Chile LATE last month the British newspaper The Guardian asked readers to vote for its person of the year. The candidates included household names like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Egyptian techno-revolutionary Wael Ghonim and the Burmese pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. All placed far behind a striking, nose-ringed student from Chile named Camila Vallejo. Though far from a familiar face in the United States, the 23-year-old Ms. Vallejo has gained rock-star status among the global activist class. Since June she has led regular street marches of up to 200,000 people through Santiago’s broad avenues — the largest demonstrations since the waning days of the Pinochet regime in the late 1980s. Under her leadership, the mobilization, known as the Chilean Winter, has gained nationwide support; one of its slogans, “We are the 90 percent,” referred to its approval rating in late September. Ms. Vallejo’s charismatic leadership has led commentators to make the obligatory comparisons to other Latin American leftist icons like Subcomandante Marcos and Che Guevara. Yet “Commander Camila,” as her followers call her, has become a personality in her own regard. She skewers senators in prime-time TV debates and stays on message with daytime talk-show hosts hungry for lurid details about her personal life, while her eloquence gives her a preternatural ability to connect with an audience far beyond her left-wing base. In perhaps the most poignant set piece in the year of the protester, Ms. Vallejo addressed a dense ring of photographers and reporters in August while kneeling within a peace sign made of spent tear-gas shells, where she calmly mused about how many educational improvements could have been bought with the $100,000 worth of munitions at her feet. Ms. Vallejo, like many of her fellow student leaders, is an avowed communist. But while she has publicly commended other regional leftists like Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, she and her generation have little in common with the older left of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez. They are less ideological purists than change-seeking pragmatists, even if that means working within the existing political order. Still, there’s no question that the movement is upending Chilean society. True, it is centered on a policy question, namely reforming an educational system that disproportionally favors the children of wealthy families. But the earth-shaking Paris protests in 1968 also began with calls for university reform — before spiraling into street battles between radicalized students and truncheon-wielding gendarmes, opposing symbols in the culture war between old and new France. The same process is under way in Chile. As the protests increasingly devolve into rock and tear-gas exchanges between students and the police, it’s becoming clear that more than education policy is at stake: a nonviolent social revolution in which disaffected, politically savvy youth are trying to overthrow the mores of an older generation, one they feel is still tainted by the legacy of Pinochet. It is not just about policy reform, but also about changing the underlying timbers of Chilean society. It’s no surprise that the movement should be led by someone as charismatic as Ms. Vallejo. Paris 1968 had its celebrity protesters, handsome faces that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets, photogenic young men like Jacques Sauvageot and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Chile has Ms. Vallejo. [Wait for it..]Chile is perhaps Latin America’s greatest success story. After decades of authoritarian rule, it has spent the last 20 years building a thriving economy with a renewed democratic culture and a booming, educated middle class. But it is also confronting a dangerous imbalance: While the liberalization of higher education has led to improvements in access, tuition has consistently outpaced inflation and now represents 40 percent of the average household’s income. At the same time, protesters say that wealthy students from private and expensive, co-pay charter schools have unfair access to elite universities, while the rest struggle to meet entrance standards at under-financed public institutions. Criticism of the university system has been growing for years, but it was only in April that, energized by protests against a dam in Patagonia, students finally took to the streets. The protests grew over the winter; by the first press conference held by the national confederation of student
[Marxism] Protesters attack NTC's Benghazi headquarters
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == BTW: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2012/01/2012121141933822408.html Abdel Hafiz Ghoga soon resigns: Deputy head of Libya's NTC resigns http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2012/01/2012122123257948842.html We fought on the front line and received injuries but we did not see the NTC with us, he said. I have one single question: Why has the NTC failed at everything except selling oil? We want to correct the path of the revolution. -Matt 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] Conservative frets over class divide
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Not surprisingly, working class marriage has been tossed into the meat grinder of capitalist crisis. The Jetsons get religion; Fred and Wilma got a divorce; Pebbles and Bam-Bam stay single. Paradoxically this acts to make the reproduction of labor power even more costly, as two people living together can do this more efficiently than living alone. Housing rents and transportation, more costly for the lone individual. This only intensifies what I see as the basic problem of U.S. capitalism, for more background see: http://unitedstatesofmarxism.com/2012/01/22/rent-and-the-crisis-of-u-s-capitalist-production/ OTOH it is very encouraging to see the mighty rise of secularism within the working class as defined by the WSJ. What's next, socialism!? Guest it takes money to believe in your own personal guardian angel. -Matt 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] How the U.S. lost out on IPhone work
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers* inside the company’s dormitories* [commuting on foot from housing they pay little rent on], according to the executive. Each employee was *given* *a biscuit and a cup of tea* [they didn't even have to brew their own tea!], guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. (italics and bracket comments mine) What's in italics would certainly qualify as a lowered reproduction value of labor power. No bloated housing rents eating up 40% of wages need be included. Not to mention in addition the huge scale of this factory complex as a phenomenal rise in the organic composition, raising it to the top ranks of relative surplus value extraction at the same time its technical composition permits the exploitation of a large mass of low wage labor power. The best of all possible capitalist exploiter worlds... An opportunity for another shameless plug: http://unitedstatesofmarxism.com/2012/01/22/rent-and-the-crisis-of-u-s-capitalist-production/ I may write a followup on this theme keyed to the NYT article, once I finish reading it. Also note that Obama had dinner in one of that WSJ Reaganite's SuperZips, Woodside, CA -Matt An absolute must-read in terms of the creative destruction question. This lengthy article makes the case that iPhones are being made in China not just because the wages are lower but because China has an ability to mobilize the latest technologies and infrastructure to satisfy Apple's needs that cannot be met in the U.S. It also explicitly states that manufacturing is finished in the U.S. I urge comrades to read this article to really get a handle on the changing world economy. The NY Times website also has some eye-opening graphics, including a comparison of the largest employers in 1960 and 2010 in the U.S. The second largest employer in 1960 was Bell Systems, the paternalistic phone company we used to call Ma Bell. Today it is Kelly Services, a temp work agency. That says it all. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.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] MRZine's latest spin for al-Assad dictatorship and the Armenian genocide
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == It is the duty of socialists and progressive people around the world not to be fooled by imperialist propaganda and to defend the achievements of the Chinese Revolution—regardless of disagreements with the CPC leadership. It would be the greatest crime to stand aside as over 1 billion Chinese workers and peasants were once again thrown to the mercy of unfettered imperialist exploitation—the inevitable outcome, under the current political circumstances, of the overthrow of the Chinese government. Thanks to the failure to overthrow the Chinese government, over 1 billion Chinese workers and peasants were NOT once again thrown to the mercy of unfettered imperialist exploitation in 1989. That's because socialists and progressive people around the world were successfully fooled by imperialist propaganda as channeled by PSL and kindred groups into believing that the Chinese government was comprised of communists who would defend the achievements of the Chinese Revolution. Wow, I think I qualify as an editor of PSLweb! That way we can all play our pre-assigned parts, robed in the appropriate garb, in the stage-managed theory of history. Restorers of capitalist exploitation can dress up as communists, reactionaries as progressives, exploiters as liberators, imperialist ideologues as anti-imperialist revolutionaries, and all can have a grand time fooling themselves by imagining they are fooling others. The only requirement is to repeat the original Hungarian error over and over again ad infinitum, for this is ALL that distinguishes PSL, WWP and kindred groups from the rest of the revolutionary socialist left - yes I am that generous in political characterization! -Matt On 1/16/12 12:55 PM, Eli Stephens wrote: Really? Is not everything in that paragraph a perfectly reasonable statement or question? Is it not all relevant? Indeed, the paragraph doesn't go far enough, because it doesn't call into question the totally unsubstantiated daily claims by someone in London claiming to know precisely how many people were killed in Syria the day before, although rarely specifying precisely (as with the questions of the preceding paragraph) the circumstances of the deaths (even while periodically claiming the deaths of Syrian military, so SOMEONE is shooting at the Syrian military, and it would be rather remarkable if none of them were being killed, only innocent civilians), and while essentially never being challenged in the corporate imperialist-serving media, who dutifully repeat the claims without requiring the slightest evidence. This reminds me. The Nic Robertson CNN interview that MRZine linked to compared Syria's treatment of protestors with Tiananmen Square. Here's his favorite party's take on Tiananmen Square just to remind you where Eli is coming from ideologically: http://www2.pslweb.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticleid=12203news_iv_ctrl=1261 It has been nearly 20 years since the Chinese government suppressed a mass student demonstration in Tiananmen Square, Beijing?s main plaza, in 1989. The image of that event is still used to this day as evidence of the sinister character of the Chinese government. In spite of the massive propaganda campaign against the Chinese government in the aftermath of the Tiananmen demonstrations, the facts of the events are generally recognized today to be in accord with the Chinese government?s description. More importantly, the political character of that demonstration was clearly aimed at the overthrow of the Communist Party of China?and its replacement not by a more progressive government of the working class and peasants?but by a U.S.-oriented clique of relatively privileged students and bureaucrats who hoped to restore capitalism in China. 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] good news in today's Times
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I think this pertains more to Israel than the U.S. The latter is not driving towards a war right now, IMO, but is trying to keep in front of the actions of the former, who are almost certainly behind the recent string of terrorist actions within Iran, including the latest assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist. If you observe carefully, the current U.S. Administration has been unusually critical of certain Israeli moves (unusual relative to the 'all Israel all the time' norm of U.S. policy) such as the expansion of settlements, and Clinton condemned the assassination, this AFAIK for the first time. Now they could be lying, but it is more likely a case of lying about their knowledge of the Israeli terror/sabotage campaign rather than about their own direct involvement. The problem that Obama faces is that Israel might decide to vote against him in retaliation for those very limited criticisms in an election year, with a unilateral strike against Iran. No doubt the whole coterie of neo-cons are looking forward to another October Surprise, and the prospect of any visible U.S. naval losses right before November might do the trick, while providing another neat little Pearl Harbor moment for the benefit of Israel. The danger of war is truly high this year. Indeed, this situation looks like the #1 threat to Obama's reelection, for otherwise the vulture capitalist Romney provides the perfect designated loser foil for another fake populist campaign against this veritable poster child of all that is perceived as wrong with the U.S. economy. Obama has served his ruling class well, and outside the neo-con sector - closely associated with imperialism's military-industrial sector, of which Israel is virtually a wholly owned subsidiary - and allied wingnut useful idiot ideologues, I don't see any real ruling coalition lining up against him as they did behind Reagan against Carter in 1980. But then, all the more reason for a desperate launch of torpedoes against Obama by Israel, the Gambler State. Even more as the Republican elected by Israeli actions would be heavily beholden to the neo-cons, enabling these to exercise the sort of exclusive influence on this classic American Zionist - it was the Mormons who first declared the U.S.A. as the new Zion in the mid-19th century, an ideological device that permitted the settlement of Utah beyond the territories prescribed by the theology of John Smith - that they wielded on Baby Bush. Nevertheless Obama's unelection would be fine by me, as I view him as the greater evil in this election, compared to the prospect of a domestically weak Republican Admin., compensating with an aggressive neo-con style foreign policy as its only cache' with a U.S. populace that has yet to throw off its ideological support for imperialism even as the domestic material basis of that support deepens its erosion. A greater evil because first and foremost, the African-American people can begin their own mobilization against an economic crisis whose impact upon them has been the most severe of the post war. This all the more as the unelection of Obama will be seen as a racial slap in the face. Hopefully it will be the last straw, for the relative absence of African Americans as a movement (I am not referring to individual involvement) has been an important net drag on the struggle against the crisis. We have to hand it to our ruling class on this one, opting just in time for the correct face that would demobilize a historically key source of militancy and opposition to the coming economic disaster, one that has been a catastrophe for African Americans by almost any measure. A mass return to the fight will give our side a great boost. That's the case despite the downside of war and suffering in the Middle East and another bout of militarist hysteria in the U.S. These are not new phenomena and are calculable. If the neo-cons wriggle back in the saddle, their high risk policies can only do further damage to the position of U.S. imperialism, because they won't be able to go full Hitler in an effort to decisively alter the strategic situation in their favor - the ultimate logic of the neo-con ideology - in the face of the opposition of a Pentagon officer corps that currently enjoys high status in U.S. society. Unlike the interwar German counterpart, who opportunistically saw the Nazis as a way to regain the status lost after WW1. So in the balance, a Obama loss is a net plus under present conditions. -Matt 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. == Yes, the DPL (Democratic Party Left) is likely in a full court press against the Occupy tendency. Happily one of the strong points of Occupy was its organic (structured, ideological) hostility to the two capitalist parties. In this case Occupy is a direct effect of the Obama betrayal of 2008. The DPL never gives up on its one-note tactic - because it is actually a strategy that assumes that the U.S. working class will always be too pro-capitalist to ever manifest itself as a class for itself in independent political form. The Occupy tendency is a dire threat to the strategy, and therefore to the existence of the DPL, and must be co-opted at all costs. -Matt - ...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 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] Who's Behind the Mayhem at the Occupy Oakland Protests?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == IMO, Holland's article another example of the generally reactionary stance of DPL left-liberals towards the Occupy phenomenon. Not as openly hostile as with Reed's NYT OpEd, but the same general tone of emphasize the negative, with the undertone of hope that this will all go away so we can go back to pulling levers in the electoral farce - as happened with the Wisconsin events. At bottom, it reveals a deep discomfort, if not outright hostility, to the whole OWS approach. So imagine how the official Left - our very own analogue to the Legal Marxists - will react if OWS should prove the thin edge of the wedge of a new era of mass struggle. The tactical shift from legalism to nonviolent resistance would be their doom, even as they will not go down without a fight, of course. This possibility, a perspective I share with Binh in my own nuanced way, dovetails with the issue of the relation of what I call the legacy Russian Revolution Era revolutionary socialist partylets - and this includes the ISO - to the present forms of its emergence, should that in fact prove to be the case. While this obviously important issue deserves a full-length treatment that no one can pretend to give here, the reactions to Binh's little foray, coming from what appear to be an ISO direction, served only to confirm Binh's basic point that the legacy parties will relate themselves in terms of their actual practice and perspective to phenomenon such as OWS on the assumption that this is just another movement with at most a temporal, serial connection to other recent movements. IOW, there is *in practice* no perspective that might identify the latest series of mobilizations since the outbreak of the capitalist crisis in 2008 as bearing the potential for a qualitative escalation that will transform the political environment, and therefore there is no strategy of approach that will ever countenance fusion with an actually existing mass working class movement, regardless of what the publications of the legacy parties may print. *That* situation will be totally outside the actual historical experience of the legacy parties, even as they correctly adhere formally to the historical legacy of the experience of the Russian Revolution, an experience that in fact they have never known. This is confirmed by one respondent's comment that OWS was hardly the mass working class movement, or even the mass vanguard movement - to toss in another variable - that a revolutionary socialist party could fuse with. This appears to be a correct expression of pessimism of the intellect, and is correct as far as the OWS goes - (I see this movement at core as a radicalization of would-be middle class, mostly white, youth in the process of proletarianization, with my definition of youth here being 35 and under :-) - who have known nothing but Reaganism their whole lives and perhaps heard of the Sixties through their parents, in this sense Red Diaper Baby Redux.) Nothing new in this purely formal sense, but that would be to ignore the profound, even opposed, differences in the conditions giving rise to this phenomenon: Whereas in the Sixties we had working class youth entering a middle class existence via the massive postwar expansion of the U.S. university system, some with memories of their parents' Thirties time, experiencing a sort of class culture shock at a time when the Russian Revolution Era still represented a living legacy, what we have now is what I just described above. (This was my own belated experience sans the red diapers at the end of the Seventies) It is a totally different dynamic, one that won't terminate in the achievement of a middle class Nirvana *as it did for most of the former youth at the end of the Seventies*. In practice, pessimism here spill And that is just the U.S., and just the youth, with, OTOH the Black, Latino youth and OTOH the Asian American youth, a more middle class group with its own national origin divisions, more important out here on the West Coast, having a different dynamic of their own. Not to mention its connection to the Arab Spring, especially as in Egypt, where again the youth played a prominent role, there in close connection with a more general militant working class movement, likely the only real case of this - so far. As well as with the student/youth movement that has, and is, emerging throughout Latin America right now. Finally there is the phenomenon of collateral movements that emerge in parallel with OWS, but organizationally or ideologically unconnected to it, of which we've seen quite a bit here in the U.S. All of this, together with the fact that the capitalists do not see a solution to their crisis on the horizon - because one key feature of this crisis has been the qualitative
[Marxism] Ismail Reed Race Baits OccupyOakland on NYT OpEd page
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == What a reactionary POS. But I guess you got to do what you have to do - stick your small knife in the back - if you want to be prominently featured on the BYT OpEd page. Really, What are Asian Americans to think...? Of course, Reed provides no proof on his out of towner charge, resorting to the same outsider rhetoric of every right wing reactionary. (PS: twitter rumor has it the OPD is preparing another raid) -Matt: Trouble Beside the Bay By ISHMAEL REED Oakland, Calif. JEAN QUAN may be the first in many categories — the first Asian-American and first woman to be mayor of Oakland — but she is far from the city’s first chief executive to face off with its police force. While dozens of mayors around the country have had to deal with Occupy movements, only Ms. Quan has seen the initially peaceful protests turn into street violence and even a general strike — a turn almost wholly attributable to the brutality of the city police. In their zeal to fight back, however, the protesters, many of them white out-of-towners, have left locals unsure of who really has their best interests at heart. On Oct. 25 the world saw an Oakland police force that blacks have had to deal with for decades — even before the Black Panthers organized to protest the shooting of a black youth in the 1960s, a time when the police were said to be recruited from the South because they knew how to handle African-Americans. In a video watched worldwide, an officer in riot gear fired a tear gas canister at a protester; the victim, an Iraq War veteran, later underwent surgery for his wounds. When some occupiers went to help him, another canister was lobbed at them. That same night officers allegedly used rubber bullets during an assault on campers in Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. If so, that would violate the department’s rules of engagement. Those rules were adopted in 2003, after the police assaulted antiwar protesters at the Port of Oakland, even injuring some longshoremen who happened to be passing by. The force’s viciousness, particularly against blacks and Latinos, is legendary. In one recent case, a group of officers known as the Riders, who racked up an impressive list of drug takedowns, were accused of brutality, kidnapping and planting evidence on their road to arrests. Another officer, nicknamed “Audie Murphy,” after the sharpshooting war hero and film star, shot four suspects and killed three. So little has been done to reform the force that a federal judge has threatened to take the entire department into receivership. Many of Oakland’s officers don’t even live in the city, but rather its suburbs, a fact that helps maintain a strong “us versus them” worldview. (At a recent community meeting I proposed that the city study a plan, developed by Detroit, that rents foreclosed homes to police officers for as little as $1,000, to keep them in the city.) The police still have influence in City Hall, though: their union repeatedly and vocally criticizes elected officials, including the mayor. For years it opposed making officers pay toward their pensions like other city workers. (The union agreed to start contributing in July.) Mayor Quan initially supported the police after the Oct. 25 clashes. Keith Olbermann called for her resignation; so did Michael Moore, who made a nuisance of himself by barging into Oakland Highland General Hospital, demanding to see the injured veteran (who had already been transferred to another hospital). Support for the protests grew, with statements of sympathy coming in from Cairo and Düsseldorf, Germany. Such pressure may explain why Ms. Quan later apologized for the use of excessive force by the police, and is now trying to take a hands-off approach to the matter. Needless to say, the police department has been critical, saying it was “confused” by her latest moves. All of this has left Oakland’s blacks and Latinos in a difficult position. They rightly criticize the police, but they also criticize the other invading army, the whites from other cities, and even other states, whom they blame for the vandalism that tends to break out whenever there is a heated protest in town: from the riots after the murder of Oscar Grant by a transit police officer in 2009, to the violence of the last two weeks downtown and, most recently, near the port. Someday we may discern the deeper historical meaning of these latest events. For now, what’s striking are the racial optics. How did Asian-Americans respond to the sight of a diminutive Asian-American mayor being hooted off the stage by a largely white crowd at an Oct. 27 rally? And where was the sympathy when, in years past, unarmed blacks and Hispanics were beaten or killed? Why did it take the injury of a white protester to attract attention? Meanwhile,
[Marxism] Group of 8/NATO summit scheduled for Obama's Chicago in May '12
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Kim, standing down the way, has a theory about Emanuel’s tactics. In May 2012, Chicago will host the Group of 8/NATO summit. Emanuel is aware that a ferocious protest is likely. “He does not want to set a precedent” for a protest, says Kim, who spends a few hours of the week holding signs at the intersection. During the mass arrests in October in Grant Park, the Chicago police let slip that this was a practice run for the likely May demonstrations. On October 26, Occupy Chicago and the Coalition Against NATO/G8 War and Poverty Agenda went in to occupy City Hall. They wanted the charges dropped against those arrested and permits for their May demonstration. Emanuel knows the stakes. If he allows a protest, and if it begins to resemble the 1968 Days of Rage, Obama’s re-election in November might be challenged. If he does not allow the protest, and it happens anyway, the outcome might be worse. “The ball’s in Emanuel’s court,” Andy Thayer of the Coalition said. from http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/07/%E2%80%9Cdon%E2%80%99t-trade-on-me%E2%80%9D/ Would dearly like to see the arrogant DP bully Emanuel gets a big fat black eye on this, especially if it leads to the downfall of Obama. But that's hoping he stupidly plays his standard thug bully role. If Emanuel is smart, he'd allow the demos by keeping the police off the streets, thereby ensuring the peace. Stay tuned -Matt 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] ?Black Bloc Anarchists?: A Section of the Lumpenproletariat
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Nothing against anarchism as an ideology. But associating the blackblocheads with the lumpenproleteriant is an insult to lumpenproleterians everywhere. More likely just some spoiled middle class white boys thirsting for the oppression they've been denied all their lives. -Matt 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] Oakland and broken windows, etc
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Was there as well with wife, encountered DW at the encampment, participated in the march to the port, utterly peaceful, except for an apparent port worker who insisted in spinning donuts with his muscle car for the crowd's entertainment. No police or other effort appeared to be in play to keep the port open for the night shift. As for the White Boys in Black, I'm all in favor of not mincing words with either them or their apologists. Instead, I favor - precisely in the spirit of OWS self-organizing - organizing a special detachment of particularly big, strong people to deal with the parasites, in the correct time and place, in the only language they understand and respect. End of discussion. -Matt 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] Hedge's Marx Bashing
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == In the present circumstances, give me the anti-marxist, anarchist sympathizing Hedges any time over the marxist Angela Davis (for example), so long as the former is a determined opponent of the Democratic Party - and therefore the regime as a whole - while the latter is not. Hedges analogy with the 1989-91 events in E. Europe and the former Soviet Union is wrong of course. The way was greatly eased in that case by the fact that the regime players wanted to become capitalists, whereas our regimes are already capitalist, and will fight to the death to remain that way. -Matt 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] Oakland general strike question
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == David is essentially right, this is not a 'true general strike in the organizational sense. But I wouldn't disparage it either as some anarchist kids' fantasy of a general strike (of course David was not doing this at all). That 's the sneering DPL (Democratic Party Left) attitude. I wouldn't disparage people in struggle against state repression. I see this as possibly building towards a true general strike, and not just in Oakland. Under present conditions, what would appear as a delusional stunt before could spark a fire now. I wouldn't characterize the below as demands. They are rather pretty general positions. I'm against the demand for demands at this stage: build the movement first. At this stage demands are just a snare for the DPL. Be there nov. 2nd. I'm bringing camping gear to donate. These people are a huge middle finger raised in the faces of all our enemies - keep it raised high! :-) Keep them on the playing field. -Matt If participation is massive enough, and enough rank and file union workers actually show up, it could set the stage for a series of walkouts protesting the banks, the war and so on. --- * Solidarity with the worldwide Occupy Movement * End police attacks on our communities * Defend Oakland schools libraries * Against an economic system built on inequality corporate power that perpetuates racism, sexism the destruction of the environment 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] Video of Oakland PD attack on Occupy Oakland last night
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Tom: It seems like the OWS could be beginning to take on the character of the early councils or soviet movement in Russia in 1905 or what happened along those lines in Argentina a few years ago. Repeat this old Marxian saw in the style of the OWS GA human mike: Pessimism of the intellect... (PESSIMISM OF THE INTELLECT...) Optimism of the spirit. (OPTIMISM OF THE SPIRIT!) -Matt 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] OWS Oakland Update
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Update from a MoveOn email: Last night, Scott Olsen, a Marine who served two tours in Iraq, was struck in the head by a nonlethal projectile fired by the Oakland police. The round fractured his skull, leaving him in critical condition.1 Olsen had joined with other members of Occupy Oakland to peacefully protest the group's eviction that morning. When a group gathered to help Olsen after he was hit, a police officer threw a flash bang grenade into the group from a few feet away. Deeply disturbing video of the incident was captured by a local news crew and provides the clearest evidence yet of the lengths that authorities will go to to stop Occupy protesters from voicing uncomfortable truths about our economy. Yesterday's eviction in the predawn hours2 and last night's violence against protesters are only the latest attempts to silence the voices of those who are speaking up for the 99%. But members of Occupy Oakland, who faced the most brutal crackdown yet, refuse to be intimidated. They've called for another peaceful gathering tonight to stand up for their First Amendment rights.3 To help defend their rights, we're scrambling to put together a rapid response ad to run in Oakland urging Mayor Quan and the police to end their brutal tactics and respect the protesters' rights. We want to make sure everyone in Oakland sees the footage of the crackdown for themselves. Every dollar we raise will go to pay for the ad, and if there's anything left over, we'll donate it to a group doing good work helping our veterans as they come home from war. The OPD was well versed in thuggery by the former mayor and now thug Governor of California, Jerry Brown - he who during the Iraq war gloried in shooting defenseless pacifist protesters in the back with rubber bullets as they fled the cops. He who just recently vetoed a bill that passed the state legislature that would have given more power for domestic workers to organize. Let our ignorant gangster ruling class continue to play with fire. Let's see what happens. I'm over to Oakland tonite to see myself. -Matt 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] How the NYT really viewed Gadaffi
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == For all the Gadaffi-hopers out there, whom no doubt will see this as another dose of deliberate imperialist misinformation to lead the naive such as myself astray. Actually, it accurately reflects the fact that the Obama Admin faces the same dilemma in the Middle East as it faces in the domestic economy: the contradictions of policy probelms created by its very own benefactors: transnational US capital and the Wall Street banks in the former, Saudi Arabia and Israel in the latter -Matt: Tumult of Arab Spring Prompts Worries in Washington By STEVEN LEE MYERS [not familiar with this guy] WASHINGTON — While the popular uprisings of the Arab Spring created new opportunities for American diplomacy, the tumult has also presented the United States with challenges — and worst-case scenarios — that would have once been almost unimaginable. What if the Palestinians’ quest for recognition of a state at the United Nations, despite American pleas otherwise, lands Israel in the International Criminal Court, fuels deeper resentment of the United States, or touches off a new convulsion of violence in the West Bank and Gaza? Or if Egypt, emerging from decades of autocratic rule under President Hosni Mubarak, responds to anti-Israeli sentiments on the street and abrogates the Camp David peace treaty, a bulwark of Arab-Israeli stability for three decades? “We’re facing an Arab awakening that nobody could have imagined and few predicted just a few years ago,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a recent interview with reporters and editors of The New York Times. “And it’s sweeping aside a lot of the old preconceptions.” It may also sweep aside, or at least diminish, American influence in the region. The bold vow on Friday by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to seek full membership at the United Nations amounted to a public rebuff of weeks of feverish American diplomacy. His vow came on top of a rapid and worrisome deterioration of relations between Egypt and Israel and between Israel and Turkey, the three countries that have been the strongest American allies in the region. Diplomacy has never been easy in the Middle East, but the recent events have so roiled the region that the United States fears being forced to take sides in diplomatic or, worse, military disputes among its friends. Hypothetical outcomes seem chillingly present. What would happen if Turkey, a NATO ally that the United States is bound by treaty to defend, sent warships to escort ships to Gaza in defiance of Israel’s blockade, as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to do? Crises like the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador in Turkey, the storming of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo and protests outside the one in Amman, Jordan, have compounded a sense of urgency and forced the Obama administration to reassess some of this country’s fundamental assumptions, and to do so on the fly. “The region has come unglued,” said Robert Malley, a senior analyst in Washington for the International Crisis Group. “And all the tools the United States has marshaled in the past are no longer as effective.” The United States, as a global power and permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, still has significant ability to shape events in the region. This was underscored by the flurry of telephone calls that President Obama, Mrs. Clinton and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta made to their Egyptian and Israeli counterparts to diffuse tensions after the siege of Israeli Embassy in Cairo this month. At the same time, the toppling of leaders*** who preserved a stable, if strained, status quo for decades*** — Mr. Mubarak, ***Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya*** and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia — has unleashed powerful and still unpredictable forces that the United States has only begun to grapple with and is likely to be doing so for years. In the process, diplomats worry, the actions of the United States could even nudge the Arab Spring toward radicalism by angering newly enfranchised citizens of democratic nations. In the case of Egypt, the administration has promised millions of dollars in aid to support a democratic transition, only to see the military council ruling the country object to how and where it is spent, according to two administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss diplomatic matters. The objection echoed similar ones that came from Mr. Mubarak’s government. The government and the political parties vying for support before new elections there have also intensified anti-American talk. The officials privately warned of the emergence of an outwardly hostile government, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and remnants of Mr. Mubarak’s party. The upheaval in Egypt
[Marxism] ANC Julius Malema's Shoot the Boer ruled 'hate speech'
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I want to shoot you, 'cause you're a liberal: South Africa's high court has ruled that the anti-apartheid song Shoot the Boer is hate speech and banned the ruling ANC from singing it. Afrikaans interest group Afriforum had complained about ANC youth league leader Julius Malema singing the song, which refers to white farmers. Mr Malema and other ANC leaders had argued that the song was a celebration of the fight against minority rule. They said the words were not meant to be taken literally. The high court upheld a ruling by a lower court and ordered Mr Malema to pay legal costs. Those words are derogatory, dehumanising, said judge Collin Lamont, adding that in post-apartheid South Africa, all citizens are called to treat each other equally. He urged the ANC to find new customs which did not bring disunity. This is a victory for the promotion of mutual respect and dignity of communities, over the culture of disrespect that Julius Malema is sowing around the country” The BBC's Karen Allen in Johannesburg says the ruling comes as a blow to Mr Malema, who has made the song his signature tune. The 30-year-old populist, now a critic of President Jacob Zuma, is also facing an ANC internal disciplinary hearing, which could see him expelled from the party. Although he is seen as a maverick within his own party, when evidence was heard in the high court earlier this year, a string of ANC grandees queued up to defend him, she says. He has previously been convicted of hate speech after saying a woman who had accused Mr Zuma of rape had had a nice time. Mr Zuma was acquitted. The ANC has said it is appalled at the judgement, which it calls an attempt to rewrite South Africa's history. Afriforum head Kallie Kriel, however, welcomed the ruling. This is a victory for the promotion of mutual respect and dignity of communities, over the culture of disrespect that Julius Malema is sowing around the country. Mr Malema was not in court to hear the verdict and does not face any further punishment as it was a civil case. Mr Malema faces more cross-questioning on Tuesday when the ANC disciplinary hearing against him resumes. If found guilty of a number of charges he could be expelled from the party altogether, as he is already on probation after criticising President Zuma last year. Mr Malema's latest ANC charges relate to his call for regime change in neighbouring Botswana, which runs against both government and ANC policy. He fell out with Mr Zuma after accusing him of not doing enough for the poor black South Africans - his main support group in the 2009 elections which brought him to power. Mr Malema wants him to nationalise South Africa's rich mines and seize white-owned land. He has praised President Robert Mugabe's land reform in neighbouring Zimbabwe. Mr Malema is also being investigated by state prosecutors on allegations of fraud and corruption, which he denies. 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] Anthony Brain's analysis etc.
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://brainontrotskyisttheory.blogspot.com/ Typical boneheaded sect reductionism. Get out and talk to some real people. -Matt 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] Cuba does not recognize the Transitional National Council
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == and the Libyan people have impeded progress towards a negotiated and peaceful solution, in the exercise of self-determination. I had to read this three times to ensure that the meaning would not be inadvertently distorted by quoting a phrase out of context. Nope, unless the translation is bad, it literally means what it says: Wäre es da Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung Löste das Volk auf und Wählte ein anderes? (Ironically this classic of Brecht was pulled off MRzine!) If so, fie on the Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Cuba for not recognizing the Libyan people's right of self-determination! -Matt 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] New article on events in Libya by Socialist Action National Secretary Jeff Mackler
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I'll refrain from name-calling and just ask: is this what anti-imperialists in the west consider an appropriate way of approaching Arab revolutions? - Jeff Exactly, this is the real concrete issue at stake; the relation of internationalists to the Arab revolts. As if the Arab people, of all the people of the world, aren't the least naive of peoples concerning imperialism. So now just who is lecturing whom, from afar, on the proper way to exercise basic rights of self-determination? -Matt 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] Cuba does not recognize the Transitional National Council
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == y han impedido al pueblo libio avanzar hacia una solucion negociada y pacfica, en pleno ejercicio de su autodeterminacion. Yeah it's a bad translation, it means to say that the NATO intervention has impeded the Libyan people from advancing towards a peaceful, negotiated solution, in full exercise of their [rights] of self determination. No mention of course, of how the Gadaffi regime was the original impediment, and how that in turn created the opening for NATO to add its own weight as a further impediment. That would be the concrete analysis, as opposed to the empty homilies above. -Matt 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] Profile of Libyan jihadist commander
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == BTW, this is a pretty good example of the total absence of any real investigative journalism in the MS press, not surprisingly I'm sure. It does mention that Belhaj cut his jihadi teeth in the Soviet-Afghan war. Now that is a profile that should tell anyone with half a brain something. Arab Afghan jihadis were typically sponsored out of the Gulf States or Saudi Arabia at that time. If Belhaj was one of these, then he has long had ties to those states, but not one word on this one way or another in this article. Then there's the apparent shug of the shoulders on both sides now, on the less than amicable relations between the CIA and Belhaj during the high War on Terror years. So I continue to bet that Belhaj is the thin edge of the wedge of Gulf State intervention in Libya, together with actual Qatari military involvement. It is a piece with the general Saudi strategy to mobilize Islamists of various stripes for a counterrevolutionary intervention against the ongoing Arab Spring, throughout the Arab world. And that is effectively not just another NATO intervention front, but the linchpin of the united front of Saudi-sponsored Islamism together with NATO imperialism against the Arab Spring. Reagan's Afghan freedom fighters redux in essence. -Matt 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] Hamid Dabashi vs. Zizek
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I believe we are on the cusp of a new wave of world revolution as a result of the outbreak of a capitalist crisis since 2008 that is the most profound such crisis since the 1930s, one that still lingers and shows every sign of deepening. However, unlike the period 100 to 50 years ago, this new wave is not led by revolutionary socialists and communists, thanks to the success of counterrevolutionary politics from within their own ranks stemming from that same period. Therefore two things appear to be going on right now, whether it is Libya or philosophy, or the riots in Britain: OTOH, there is the keen desire to be done with all the old rubbish, particularly that leftover from the 20th century, by partisans of the new revolutionary wave. This is an absolutely healthy impulse, as there is indeed quite a bit of rubbish, socialist or otherwise, that does need dispensing with. At the same time, there is also a tendency to subjectively idealize the various forms taken by the new revolutionary wave, forms that are in actuality experiments seeking the most effective ways forward in the struggle. Both sweeping away the old and groping towards the new are really one and the same process, and I am convinced that the value of some key elements of the old will be rediscovered, among them the classical principles of revolutionary Marxism, before it was overlaid with all the old crap of that cursed century. We are entering the time when the wheat really will be sorted from the chaff. That OTOH; on the other, the present-day avatars of the old crap themselves. I think Dabashi correctly sees this in Zizek, even as he engages in his own idealization of the Arab Spring; it can also be seen behind the veil of phony anti-imperialism in the attitude of certain sectors of the Left towards that same event, as it takes aim at their crap *and* ours**; and again in the apparent irrelevance of much of the socialist left in Britain in connection with the so-called riots, an irrelevance certain to be repeated in the USA. Here the perspective is that of a gloomy pessimism, occasionally punctuated by hysterics as with all true depressive states. Why the glum face at the cusp of a New Dawn, one that some of us have waited decades for? To put it simply, it's the intimation of one's own doom, of being swept away forever by these new events. For the remainder of us, whose brains are still living yet keenly recall the nightmare, it will be our duty to be a part of that new wave, not as idealists, but materialists: the turn of 1848. Zizek then turns his attention to the Arab Spring: ?But weren?t the Arab uprisings a collective act of resistance that avoided the false alternative of self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism?? This should have given the European philosopher a sign of hope in what appeared to be a worldless world filled with absolutist religious meanings thrown like grenades by terrorist Hegelians. But it did not. The European philosopher has lost all hope: ?Unfortunately, the Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of revolution, a time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated.? And so forth... ** Yes, the allusion to Trotsky's book title is deliberate. -Matt 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] Tripoli Divided as Rebels Jostle to Fill Power Vacuum
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == More confirmation of the active Qatari involvement on the ground. The axis of Islamists/Gulf States/Saudis/NATO is the main danger in Libya now, and if imperialism can get its way directly via the TNC, I can bet they will use this axis to provoke a second civil war. -Matt Several liberals among the rebel leadership council complained privately that Mr. Hasadi had been a leader of the disbanded Libyan Islamist Fighting Group, which rebelled against Colonel Qaddafi in the 1990s. Some said they feared it was the first step in an attempt at an Islamist takeover. They noted that Mr. Hasadi was named commander by the five battalions of the so-called Tripoli Brigade, rather than by any civilian authority. And they complained about the perceived influence of Qatar, which helped train and equip the Tripoli Brigade and also finances Al Jazeera. ?This guy is just a creation of the Qataris and their money, and they are sponsoring the element of Muslim extremism here,? another council member from the western region said. ?The revolutionary fighters are extremely unhappy and surprised. He is the commander of nothing!? .. Mr. Hasadi could not be reached for comment, in part because he was attending meetings in Doha, Qatar. Mustafa Abdel Jalil, chairman of the Transitional National Council, said he made a point to take Mr. Hasadi along to a meeting with their NATO allies in Doha to show that despite his background, he poses ?no danger to international peace and stability.? 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] Gaddafi still threat for Libya and world - NTC's Jalil
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Now for the other front of the two front war of words on the left: Speaking at a meeting of defence chiefs in Qatar, the NTC's head, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, said Col Gaddafi's forces could still wage brutal counter-attacks even as rebel forces pushed into the last pockets of resistance by pro-Gaddafi troops. Gaddafi's defiance of the coalition forces still poses a danger, not only for Libya, but for the world. That is why we are calling for the coalition to continue its support, Mr Jalil said at the meeting in Doha. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14706543 Coalition forces, Freudian slip by Jalil? Look at that attached BBC photo. No more pop-gun on a pick-up Mr. Nice Guy, huh? That appears to be *heavy armor* massing in front of Sirte, backed of course by the usual allotment of NATO air power and Tomahawk missiles. Question: How has the balance of forces changed in Libya? Is Gadaffi still a threat? Clue: Think those Misrata rebels, or anyone else who defy Jalil/Qatar/NATO/UN, stand a chance in hell against such power? What angel from the sky will protect them? Answer: No, and Nobody. -Matt 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] From Art to Libya
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Whether art in any sphere can have a transcendent influence, or whether it embodies a dialectical expression on the part of the artist, is not a matter for Marxism, but for the artist and the art critic only. But the question of that relation only is a question proper to a Marxmail list, for which I give one view here above. But to questions that *are* in the main proper to Marxism, the Conn Hallihan article is a perfect example of the consequences of a failure to articulate a critical analysis of NATO intervention. The critical vacuum will be filled by others, regardless of whether one thinks there was or was not a revolution - I think there *was* an Arab Spring mass movement, and there needs to be such an *independent* movement again, while the revolution was a bourgeois political affair, of little consequence for the world proletariat no matter how many newspapers are published, for Libya is a oil-rentier state the vital part of whose proletariat consisted of foreign migrant workers from Egypt , Tunisia, Africa and imperialist countries, who fled at the first shot of civil war. Libya was basically the petite-bourgeois activism without the Egyptian-style working class movement behind it. Given this analysis, it is not surprising that Libyan petite-bourgeois independence was fleeting, as the whole modern history of revolution tells us concerning such activism. Meanwhile Hallihan's article is not unreasonable, failing anything else. And as far as the oil explanation goes, it might surprise some to think that the aim of the U.S. is to *suppress* oil production in the most fertile fields - of which Iraq and Libya are to be surely counted among the worlds' most fertile - in order to keep online the most marginal fields, located in the homelands of imperialism, in Texas, the North Sea and Canada. And if you know your law of differential land rent, then you'll know what determines the (super) rents on the most fertile fields. -Matt Art in the public sphere can most certainly have that kind of transcendent influence, and the idea that the dialect[ic] wasn't supposed to apply to such things strikes me as a terribly innovative bit of fish-slapping. 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] MLK statue
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The below response to Werner's incisive critique of the MLK monument nicely expresses the idealist trajectory of some on Marxmail, named after a guy who, precisely, critiqued Hegelian idealism on the question of dialectical transcendence. It is a view that can be extended to questions Libyan, where the reduction of this country to NATO finds its complement in the complete exclusion of all things NATO from the analytical mix. Please stop and think, before one must drop the name of the great materialist from all things email or repentant . -Matt I suppose that's the avowed purpose of the transcendent spiritual/humanist qualities people are expected to find in works of art; but as this is a Marxist list I would strongly question whether such qualities exist. In this case - and I've only seen photographs - the MLK monument strikes me as a particularly confused mish-mash of techniques and approaches - a bastard child of Gutzon Borglum and Maya Lin. Paul Werner, editor WOID: a journal of visual language I'm astonished to hear of a Marxism that doesn't involve transcendence. That was, after all, one-word summary of Hegel. The question is the impact the statue will have on people. Will it strengthen their admiration of King's admirable qualities or make them want to buy a Coke. If the former, it's presence is transcendent enough. 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
[Marxism] An Opium of Idealist Politics
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Well now I find myself in a 2 front battle against 2 sets of idealisms: that of the 'counter-hegemonic bloc-ists, and that of an idealization of revolution, in this case a political revolution. The first will hang its hat on anything that has an inter-bourgeois dispute with Washington. That quote from Sergii Kutnii nails it: The BRIC rulers are not only bourgeois, they are neo-imperialists of the second rank. They are home to transnational enterprises with tentacles everywhere - likely they got one chopped off in Libya. It would be like blocking with Italy, Japan or Austria-Hungary because they were second-rankers in confilct with Britain or France before 1914. Support for the national bourgeoisies of the de-colonizing world after WW2 was conditioned on their actually carrying out such a struggle. But the condition that made such struggles possible was the existence of the bloc of worker's states, however deformed, degenerated, etc. *That condition no longer exists!* Not surprisingly, few national bourgeoisies of the sub-imperial world pursue an anti-imperialist struggle these days. OTOH, where is the evidence that the Libyan mass movement is about to break with imperialism, and rejoin the Arab Spring? We all certainly hope so, but hope is not a basis for a materialist politics. Neither is graffitti adequate evidence. Who are the leaderships of mass organizations outside the TNC? *Are* there any? We really don't know. But there is plenty of non-conspiracy theory type evidence that the TNC has acted as a transmission belt for NATO imperialism - first of all by calling for their intervention. In reply to what else could they have done?, it all depends on who they are. If it is the TNC, we are talking about an anti-regime fraction of the bourgeoisie for whom it is only natural to look for powerful foreign support in NATO. This was especially so after the mass movement in the west of Libya, outgunned by the vicious Gadaffi - and yes, Gadaffi, Assad will live in infamy for such deeds - went underground. Therefore the TNC could not ride the masses in the west. But therein lies the answer to the question: *That's what you do*, go underground, and the evidence that that is what they did shows in the recent reappearance of the uprising in West Libya - obviously they we not all massacred, and NATO warplanes could have not prevented a massacre in detail in the west had Gadaffi's militia been so inclined, or had had the resources. But it didn't happen. The time honored example of the Russian revolution can serve here as well. The 1905 revolution was suppressed by the Tsarist army. Should the RSDLP have called for German intervention? What else could they do? wail our latter day idealists. But one does not recall any such call from any faction of that party, much less the Bolsheviks - unless one wants to count Parvus. So what they did was go underground, into exile, etc. to live to fight another day. This principle is correct even though that new day was brought about by the disintegration of that same Tsarist army in inter-imperialist conflict, and if you really want to stretch the historical analogy - and it's a stretch - you can apply the same to a conflict between NATO and the pathetic militia of the bourgeois Gadaffi regime - who couldn't even carry out an effective massacre. It is highly probable, given Libya's history, that mass sentiment favors a quick NATO exit. Unfortunately for them, the TNC, in dialectical relation to Gadaffis repression in the west, has been able to channel the mass movement into defacto support for NATO. That's how it stands until proven otherwise. So please, stop with the idealizing of the situation, and show us hard evidence! Otherwise, why not Syria? -Matt 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] Juan Cole: The Great Tripoli Uprising
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Cheer up. I don't think Libya will so easily be turned into a Somalia on the Med without a strong ground intervention by Nato, and that won't be so easily covered in the absence of a baby-bayoneting devil. Besides, Nato has a potential Somalia of an very inconvenient kind developing on the Gaza-Egyptian Sinai border. Tunisia is not a Somalia, and the Tripoli region is to a certain extent an extension of the geographical zone, while Benghazi is in another set of circumstances an extension of Egypt. Depending on what kind of leadership arises in Western Libya, Nato's divide and conquer maneuver could fail. What would secure that failure would be the displacement of the Benghazi TNC. Nato Out (slogan now) - Down with the TNC (slogan later)! -Matt This is so sad. The heroic masses of Libya have proven, as they did in the beginning of the anti-Qaddafi revolt, that they share the courage and self-sacrifice needed to make their own revolution. But in between they have allowed their leaders to hand the country over to the imperialists. At the beginning of this betrayal, the claim was that a massacre in Benghazi had to be prevented. I wonder has anyone ever compared the numbers who would have died there with the numbers who have died in the months of fighting against the butcher Assad. So now Libya faces years of death and destruction imposed by Washington a la Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, etc. UNTIL, that is, the Libyan masses, proud of their role in ousting the lunatic butcher Qaddafi, realize they can oust the US as well. PS on a very related note, see my speech at: http://socialistaction.blogspot.com/2011/08/victory-to-syrian-peoples-uprising.html I post this not because it's the best speech ever made, but simply so people know SA's position on 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
Re: [Marxism] Primary Lessons.
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Agreed, a waste of precious time. Anyway, I predict the DemoPwog strategy will be to ignore the now deeply hated Obama and focus on Winning Back Congress. -Matt On 8/2/2011 10:28 AM, Prashad, Vijay wrote: The California Democratic Party's Progressive Caucus calls for a primary challenge: http://www.counterpunch.org/prashad08022011.html Vijay. http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/whats-wrong-with-a-primary-challenge-to-obama/ 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] Today's Political Infotainment from the NYT
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A compendium of journalistic tendentiousness and outright falsehoods titled Saudi Arabia Scrambles to Limit Region’s Upheaval and more importantly Aid Pledge by Group of 8 Seeks to Bolster Arab Democracy, notably squawking about the reemergence of old leftist parties threatening the discouraging (of) foreign investors, that is, the G8: But political change has, if anything, brought more economic pain. In Egypt, many people are again complaining of soaring food prices, just as they did last fall before the revolution. Many are now also wrestling with exaggerated expectations about how much the revolution will lift their personal fortunes. Labor unrest has swept the country as workers everywhere demand more pay. Newspapers report rumors of vast illicit fortunes to be recovered from Mr. Mubarak and his associates that many mistakenly believe will change the Egyptian economy. Old leftist political parties are re-emerging as though they have been frozen in time for the 30 years of the Mubarak police state to demand that the government again expand its role in the economy to help the poor, even at the price of discouraging foreign investors. In Tunisia, the revolution that ousted former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali began in the country’s impoverished interior as a revolt against dismal economic conditions; it only later took on demands for political democracy and freedom as it reached the more affluent, educated and Westernized coast. Now many inlanders are complaining that the resulting upheaval has not brought development or opportunity. Resentment of the coastal elite runs high, and some say they feel so disappointed they have soured on participating in the democratic process. In Tunisia, too, old leftist parties are trying to come back, and parts of the country’s strong labor movement are stepping up their demands or returning to radical roots. The G8, in targeting Egypt and Tunisia in particular in the Arab world, are almost certainly seeking to intervene against any left turn that might push forward the process of revolution in these countries. On Tunisian left parties: The Moor Next Door, http://themoornextdoor.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/some-thoughts-tunisian-political-trends-and-charts/#more-6384 Something that tends to be overlooked is the leading role taken by European, rather than U.S., imperialism, in the counterrevolutionary intervention against the Arab Spring, with Sarkozy emerging as the main bullhorn in this effort. This reflects a relative weakness of U.S. imperialism in the region despite overwhelming military power, as the Europeans (Britain excluded) are not tied down by the twin albatrosses of special relations with Israel or Saudi Arabia; however the Europeans have objectively much more to fear strategically from a complete democratic revolution in this region next door that would lead to a united, independent federation of Arab countries, than does the U.S. - if only this latter weren't saddled with its subjective, ideological stupidities in re Zionism and Islamic fundamentalism. In this way events in the Arab world present a double conundrum for U.S. imperialist hegemony: it risks losing the initiative to its anxious and impatient European partners as its own traditional positions to which it is ideologically wedded (U.S. backed despotisms Israel, just another despotism really) come under pressure. Finally note how the mighty imperialist state of Canada (a.k.a another proxy vote for the U.S./Britain) tries to out-Zion the Lord of all Zionist Entities itself, the United States, at the G8. Hilarious. -Matt 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] Another B-HLevy Humanitarian Intervention
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == on behalf of DSK's human right' to be a global swinging dick along with the rest of the financial gang-bangers: What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs. What I know is that nothing, no suspicion whatever (for let’s remind ourselves that, as I write these lines, we are dealing only with suspicions!), permits the entire world to revel in the spectacle, this morning, of this handcuffed figure, his features blurred by 30 hours of detention and questioning, but still proud. [suppressed guffawing] What I know as well is that nothing, no earthly law, should also allow another woman, his wife, admirable in her love and courage, to be exposed to the slime of a public opinion drunk on salacious gossip and driven by who knows what obscure vengeance. (Sob!) the entire world...is not permitted to revel.. - let's not ask why the entire world should take great joy in such a revel. Effing IMF austerity pig. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-16/bernard-henri-lvy-the-dominique-strauss-kahn-i-know/# -Matt 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] on Libya and interventionism.
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I'll take a more respectful tone with those such as Vijay, Jay Moore or Amicus over on Louis' UM site who apparently are taking an honest approach to the question of Libya. That is not to be be mistaken for an unwillingness to draw differences as sharply as necessary if need be. I've also found nothing particularly disagreeable about Vijay's writings until the present, when it became apparent that for some, anti-imperialism always has priority over the revolution of the masses in what was once the Third World, not only in the imperialist countries, but also within those countries undergoing revolution themselves. To start: Vijay states, Nor indeed do I need to show that the opposition is tainted, and so a defense of Qaddafi is warranted. Quite the contrary. I believe that the revolt that begins just after Terbil's arrest in Feb. 15 was along the lines of Tunisia, except that after Qaddafi had strengthen his hold on the military after a 1980 coup attempt, it was going to be impossible to pull away military units from the west of the country. The rebellion was not going to break beyond the limits of the 2006 attempt. The CIA and the Elysee Palace had their own chips on the table, and these have been seeded, as I put it in italics, before the Tunisian uprising. The machinations of the Counterrevolution have been ongoing in eastern Libya. It is this section that crowded out the authentic rebellion, provoked it to act further and then begged the US and France for air support. In other words, the leadership of the rebellion by late February had already changed its class and political character. These two paragraphs are a combined expression of elements that first must be clearly distinguished. Vijay agrees that the Libyan uprising was an extension of the Arab revolutions, and was pan-Libyan. The key factor, though, was the reaction of the Qaddafi regime itself. From Day One it came out guns a-blazing against the revolution, in true Mafia gangster style. The Qaddafi counterrevolution laid down an armed reign of terror that effectively divided the Libyan uprising in two, a fact about the character of the Qaddafi regime that the more dishonest anti-anti-Qaddafists wish to obscure at all costs, and one that Vijay unfortunately tends to downplay with The machinations of the Counterrevolution have been ongoing in eastern Libya, as if counterrevolution was confined only to the East, as if the counterrevolution had not in fact begun in Tripoli itself. It was THIS action above of Qaddafi, and not the (usual) machinations of imperialism, that created the opening for an imperialist intervention to take the lead in the counterrevolution . This in turn created a basis for the emergence - the sprouting of the seeds if you will - in the East of Libya of the equally counterrevolutionary NTC. BTW, the NTC possessed this character from the beginning, it did not turn this way. As for whatever conspiracies imperialism was engaged in before Tunisia, we can be sure that imperialism is always engaged in such operations everywhere in an effort to maximize its tactical options. Simply because imperialism plots doesn't mean that their schemes will automatically come to fruition. That requires an objective opening, and that opening, I cannot stress and repeat more, was provided by the Qaddafi regime itself, for which they bear responsibility and for which they will always live in infamy as nothing more than a counterrevolutionary criminal gang, regardless of whatever their regime accomplished in the past. Now it is precisely this correct characterization of the Qaddafi regime at present, including it as the *originator* of the present counterrevolution that reigns over Libya today (much as it reigns over Bahrain) that draws all of the slanders, smears, slurs and insults of the dishonest wing of anti-anti-Qaddafism. The basic slander is that one is joining imperialism in demonizing poor-ole Muammar Sons, Inc. Quite the opposite - it is imperialism that saw an opportunity to pretend to join in on the mass rebellion against a regime that only yesterday they were quite content to work with (while of course cultivating their options) - unless one thinks that the folks that support torture and murder in Yemen, Iraq, Bahrain and Egypt are sincere in their condemnation. And imperialism's' complaints are rather tame: Qaddafi has lost legitimacy (read: we can't work through them anymore, alas), NATO intervenes only to protect civilians, and so forth. Not much different from their eventual view of Mubarak, and for the same basic reasons. The broader question of the character of the era we live in today that opened up after 1989, including the catechisms concerning just what isone's duty in one's own country in the
Re: [Marxism] The U.S.-NATO War against Libya
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == This excerpt from a BBC report at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13029165 got a chuckle out of me as I thought of our poor Marcyites: Libyan Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim said government forces had shot down two rebel helicopters in the east but this also cannot been confirmed. He said: A clear violation was committed by the rebels to [UN] resolution 1973 relating to the no-fly zone. And NATO hastens to agree! Speaking in Brussels, Nato spokesman Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard said that air strikes were also targeting government ammunition bunkers and lines of communication. He cited as an example of Nato impartiality a report that a MiG 23 jet flown by rebel forces had been intercepted and forced to land within minutes of taking off from Benina Airfield near Benghazi on Saturday. Yes, that Mig 23 was obviously off to commit humanitarian crimes! There certainly is a U.S.-NATO War against Libya - the question is, which Libya? The answer may not be as simple as some of our more simple-minded commentators would have us believe. Looks like to me they don't want the rebels to win, they want to de facto partition the country, and they WANT TO KEEP THE GADHAFFI REGIME IN POWER, with or without the personage of Muammar, in one part of the country. Hence the problem of the demand for Gadhaffi's ouster. -Matt 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] Egypt arming Libya rebels, WSJ reports
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == As in Iraq and Afghanistan, imperialist strategy will be to prolong the conflict as long as possible to maximize the destruction and promote partition, with Benghazi an Egyptian satellite. Egypt arming Libya rebels, Wall Street Journal reports Fri Mar 18, 2011 9:50am GMT LONDON, March 18 (Reuters) - Egypt's military has begun shipping arms over the border to Libyan rebels with Washington's knowledge, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Quoting U.S. and Libyan rebel officials, the newspaper said the shipments were mostly of small arms such as assault rifles and ammunition. It appeared to be the first case of an outside government arming the rebel fighters, the newspaper said. Rebels have been losing ground for days in the face of an advance by forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi. The rebels have, however, been buoyed by the decision on Thursday by the United Nations Security Council to authorise air strikes in an attempt to curb Gaddafi's forces. The Journal reported that Egyptian weapons transfers began a few days ago and are continuing, according to a senior U.S. official. There's no formal U.S. policy or acknowledgement that this is going on, said the official. But this is something we have knowledge of. There was no official Egyptian confirmation of the shipments, the newspaper said. The Unied States is a major ally and supplier of military aid to Egypt. We know the Egyptian military council is helping us, but they can't be so visible, said Hani Souflakis, a Libyan businessman in Cairo who has been acting as a rebel liaison with the Egyptian government since the uprising began, according to the newspaper. Weapons are getting through, said Souflakis. Americans have given the green light to the Egyptians to help. The Americans don't want to be involved in a direct level, but the Egyptians wouldn't do it if they didn't get the green light. A spokesman for the rebel government in Benghazi said arms shipments had begun arriving to the rebels but declined to specify where they came from, the Journal said. (Writing by Giles Elgood; editing by Andrew Roche) -Matt 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] Egypt youth refuse to meet U.S. Sec of State
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == But will the Brotherhood meed with Clinton? Egypt youth refuse to meet U.S. Sec of State Mar 15th, 2011 | By Mohamed Abdel Salam CAIRO: The Coalition of the Youth of the 25 January Revolution rejected an invitation to attend a meeting with U.S. Secretary of the State Hillary Clinton, who is beginning a two-day visit to Egypt and Tunisia Tuesday, announced the coalition on its Facebook page on Monday. “As we are keen on working in a transparent manner, with the masses of the revolution, the Coalition announces that it has received an invitation to meet with the U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and due to her negative stance towards the revolution during its inception and the approach of the US Administration towards the Middle East Region, we decided to refuse this invitation,” the statement of the Coalition said, without clarifying any other reasons for turning down the invitation. Clinton stated on the first day of the revolution that the Egyptian regime was “stable,” a statement considered by many demonstrators as clear support for the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak. Clinton is set to arrive in Cairo today, Tuesday, as the first senior U.S. official to visit the country following the ouster of Mubarak. She will meet with Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, head of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, and Foreign Minister Nabil al-Araby. Following the steps of other senior Western officials, Clinton plans to visit Tahrir Square and meet with a delegation of opposition forces that was slated to include the coalition of the youth and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood at the U.S. Embassy. Clinton will discuss developments in the region, especially Libya. She met with a delegation from the Libyan rebels in Paris on Monday. -Matt 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] Yemen expels four foreign journalists amid fears of clampdown
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Two British and two American journalists were taken from their house in Sana'a shortly after dawn and told to leave Yemen * Tom Finn Sana'a * guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 March 2011 19.45 GMT Yemen has begun a clampdown on western media, arresting and deporting four foreign journalists covering violent government attacks on protesters in which seven people were killed over the weekend. The journalists were taken from their house in Sana'a shortly after dawn, when police from the interior ministry forced their way into the building and confiscated their mobile phones and passports. They were held for three hours at the immigration centre in Sana'a before being told to pack their bags and leave the country immediately. The four, all young freelancers for American newspapers, included two US citizens – Haley Sweetland Edwards, who writes for the Los Angeles Times, and Joshua Maricich, a photographer – and two Britons – Portia Walker, who writes for the Washington Post, and Oliver Holmes, who writes for the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine. Speaking from Sana'a airport, Holmes, 24, said he had not been given an explanation for the deportation but suspected it was because of their recent reporting of the attacks on protesters. With only a handful of foreign journalists remaining in the country, analysts are worried the regime may be planning a severe crackdown on protesters. The deportation of these journalists along with the increasingly violent assaults on protesters are extremely worrying. I think a **Gaddafi-style** clampdown could be imminent, said Abdullah Al-Qahdi, a professor of politics at Sana'a University. There have been daily anti-government demonstrations in Sana'a and other cities around the country since the former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was ousted on 11 February. So far 40 people have been killed in the unrest, according to international rights groups. Fresh violence erupted on Monday when the governor of Marib, an eastern desert province, was stabbed in the neck while trying to disperse anti-government protesters, a local official said. Governor Ahmed Naji al-Zaid was stabbed by a group of armed men who attacked his convoy. He is said to be in a critical condition. In Jowf, north-east of Sana'a, 40 protesters trying to storm the government headquarters were wounded when security forces and pro-regime loyalists guarding the building opened fire. Monday's fighting followed a dramatic weekend in the capital. Seven people were killed when riot police with water cannon, teargas, and rubber bullets fired on anti-government protesters near Sana'a University. Sami Zaid, a doctor from Islamic Relief, said plain-clothes civilians were also involved in the shooting. There have also been reports of Yemeni security forces abducting injured protesters from hospital for interrogation. Two wounded individuals at the Saudi German hospital were arrested on Saturday by national security men who arrived in civilian clothing, said Abdulrahman Barman, a Yemeni human rights activist and a legal representative of the protesters. The hospital is morally and professionally responsible for their arrest. They shouldn't allow any patient to be removed from the premises illegally, he said. **My emphasis - Arabs see the common connection between the processes in the different countries. -Matt 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] Tzipi Livni to the rescue - 'For the Mideast, a code for rising democracies' - and comment
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Our Neocon Zionist enemies are also split by the Arab revolution. Livni is part of the whistling past the graveyard faction. Dream on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7sBod3Gk4Yfeature=youtu.be English context by As'ad AbuKhalil: So there was a confrontation between Egyptian youth and Amr Musa, who is desperate to be president of Egypt. This is the New York Times' report on the face-off: He took a fairly straightforward approach in answering often hostile questions for more than three hours, telling the audience that dealing with Israel was a reality, and that good relations with the United States were also important. At one point, parts of the crowd responded by breaking into chants of “No normalization with Israel” and one questioner also demanded to know why the Arab League was so impotent. Well, it was more intense than this, much more. Watch for yourself: toward the end, a questioner goes on to ask him series of tough questions and then concludes by pressing to answer whether Israel is a [legitimate] state, or not? He was also asked about what he has done against Israeli nuclear weapons. Musa was as comfortable as Mubarak was during his last trip to Sharm Ash-Shaykh. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/world/middleeast/09cairo.html The last ditch fall-back position of the remains of the old regime in Egypt appears to be to defend at all costs the states' connection with the US settler colony and the US war on terror torture rendition arrangement. -Matt 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] Re Bricmont
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Yes, the other shoe falls in lockstep, just like clockwork. I sent Brichead a nasty email as well. Next up this weekend will be the Jefe himself, A. Cockburn. No subscription for you, Alex. And to think your last issue on The Great Uprising (and that it is) *almost* got me to the point of actually subscribing! In the past I would ignore these well-worn differences due to the profoundly different contexts of the Iraqi and Kosovo wars, etc., in fact participating in their (ANSWER, etc) events, supporting them against UFPJ on Tikkum, etc. But not this time. What they are doing - particularly the base slanders, of course - is beyond the pale. It deeply angers me. It is not merely that Chavez, by screwing up on this one, has lent these fleas a prestigious back to crawl upon; it is that this is an effing pan-Arab revolution, in my view the most important revolutionary event in a generation, recalling that 1989-91 was a counter-revolution. So this time I feel they must be made to pay, and this time there is a way to do so: villify them with a young, militant Arab Left current. If that takes teaching myself Arabic - I was able to acquire a fair amount of Japanese, so I think I can do Arabic - to do so, so be it. But it can begin in English. Anything to preserve our honor - and honor is important - in this movement. We all need to establish real international contact with this movement, particularly with its working class under-current in Egypt. Time to wash our hands of this debate, and move on to action. -Matt 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] Libya: A Pox on Both Their Houses (and the U.S.)
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Real Parenti-9-11 Truther style thinking there. Not one iota of thought about the class struggle, etc, that is, this is a line of thought completely alien to Marxism. It is a profoundly demoralized left perspective that is convinced of of the all-powerful character of imperialism, where the rest of us are merely its puppets, and there is no place for revolution against it. So, the first fallacy is that the rebellion in Libya is simply equated with the FNSL, no doubt a bunch of petit-bourgeois emigres who want to hijack the movement for their own, likely imperialist friendly, purposes. What else is new? The same is essentially true, with different forms, of Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Tunisia. For example, the Egyptian movement has big illusions about the Egyptian officer corps, this - and not Special Forces, etc. - being the main avenue for imperialist intervention. It is for this reason that the more consistent Truthers come to the logical conclusion: perhaps all of these Arab revolts are just another in a series of imperialist-conjured color revolutions. They were just waiting for a plausible case to raise their general position in opposition to these rebellions, which is where they objectively stand. The second fallacy is that no context is presented. Sure there is: its called Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Tunisia. Ah, but of course the Special Forces / CIA sleeper cells were just waiting for this moment of Arab uprising to strike! A crazy mass of arbitrarily connected data points devoid of any recognizable perspective, a dessicated skeleton of politics. A pox on this, and not Libya. There are of course conspiracies and conspiratorial operations in the world; it is just that they are not the motor force of history. The masses are, and working class revolutionaries must swim with them - not stand outside and put a pox on them - and struggle to win their leadership despite all the obvious hazards. -Matt Similarly, in Libya today, there is no context or history to the FNSL 'rebels': they are categorically presented as the good guys, no matter that they seem to have appeared out of thin air. No one explains who these people are who are cited by the New York Times or CNN or Democracy Now as sources. http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=vaaid=23481 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] PL: Venezuelan Business Owners Support Gov't Plan
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I'd generally agree with this assessment. It was the product of the times. From the 1989 Caracazo onwards, the Venezuelan movement bravely moved, and still moves, against a global reactionary tide. That is why, when that tide shows signs of turning, now is no time to be playing King Canute. The strength of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie ultimately depends on the health of imperialism. That, in turn, strategically depends on its domination of the Arab world, which is why there is such a concentration of autocratic regimes there. Even successful democratic revolutions, not to mention socialist revolutions, that result in regimes independent of imperialism, pose great problems for a continuing US hegemony that the situation in Latin America does not pose. That is why the US is willing to cut L.A. some slack. Not so much in the Arab world. Their progressive aspects, and not only their working class aspects, must be given a great deal of support. -Matt Hugo Chavez is a revolutionary nationalist and a strong supporter of the Cuban Revolution, but Venezuela remains a capitalist state and there is no indication a socialist revolution is on the agenda there in the immediately forseeable future. A contradictory mixture of socialistic initiatives and private capitalism is what we see in the Venezuela of today. Furthermore, in these circumstances, and with the existence of a broadly-supported and fully capitalist-minded opposition, armed as well with a media which campaigns againt the Chavez administration relentlessly, to the extent the Chavez team can win support from such private sector forces as these, progress is certainly being made. This freaks out those who believe that socialism requires nationalization of virtually all private enterprises, but it's still a political fact, in my opinion. That nationalization should be a mantra, presented as the only valid method of constructing a socialist society, is the source of a certain amount of political conclusion in my opinion. Walter Lippmann La Habana, Cuba http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/ 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] Canción de los Partisanos
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == To Arab Comrades http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBbZA0ZQF6I We should learn from each others history in the struggle against imperialism. -Matt 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] United front of gadhafi and Libya opposition
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Anybody who thinks that at this late date that gadhafi would actually call for an antiimperialist united front with the opposition much less think that there is any prospect for its achievement must be drinking some of al quaedas hallucinagenic nescafe gaddfi was talking about. More later. Its really getting ridiculous. 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] Libya and the Middle Eastern Revolution
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On the situation in the Arab world: While revolutionary processes are always some dialectical combination of democratic and social revolution, rather than a staged counter-position of one versus the other, I'd agree that at present this is a predominantly democratic revolutionary process, with an objective undercurrent of social revolution centered in Egypt. The subjective element - parties of socialist revolutionaries - is obviously mostly missing, therefore this cannot possibly be analogous to, say, 1917; Instead the period of democratic revolution is likely to have a prolonged life depending upon the rapidity with which a meaningful socialist opposition can be constructed as the only means to guarantee its permanence. That much is obvious. However it is just as obvious that the Arab world is overdetermined by two peculiarities of its superstructure for which even a democratic revolutionary process poses a uniquely grave danger to imperialism. These are the existence of a feudal relic in the form of the House of Saud and its princely Persian Gulf satellites, the ultimate tribal Arabs so beloved of imperialist orientalism and the axial template it wishes to impose on the whole region; And, closely related in structure to this, the American Zionist settler regime, an integral part of the United States projected into the Middle East. Both these features place sharp restraints on imperialism's capacity to maneuver within and against the democratic revolution, these peculiarities on top of an increasing volatile world situation due fundamentally to the deepening capitalist crisis and posing the need to contain contagion (for example see The Global Political Awakening and the New World Order by Andrew Gavin Marshall, inspired by the ever watchful Zbigniew Brzezinski http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=vaaid=19873 - alas our latter-day Wilsonian liberals don't stand a chance despite their man Obama being in the White House). Imperialism might give up the first in extremis but never the second - unless the U.S. is dethroned as leader of imperialism. But the fate of U.S. domination of the imperialist world is itself bound up with the fate of the Arab world and its revolution. Even the progress of a purely democratic revolution here could lead to that dethronement, an event that would mark a sort of democratic revolutionary progress in the imperialist world itself, and especially within the United States. On historical analogies: Though they formally seek to identify commonalities between different historical events, the real usefulness of analogies is to identify the differences, and therefore what is new and different in the present. The analogy with 1848 highlights the expansive and synchronous global character of the mass movements as well as the political weakness of the socialist element. But it is the powerful global synchronicity that stands out as new and different in the present. It's an internationalists dream, a great time to be alive. -Matt 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] US war plans on the Libyan people taking shape
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == stansfield smith, shallow, phony anti-imperialist troll. Listen, one of my own personal goals in this new revolutionary era that is beginning to open up, is to accomplish the total eradication of a certain trend in the post Russian Revolution socialist left that almost strangled to death revolutionary Marxism. Almost, but I think not quite. There will be scores to settle. That is the honest truth. -Matt Boy, all this talk about the outrages against the people of Libya by Qaddafi just melts away when we are asked to?stand up?against imperialist intervention against them. That's quite a lesson in the phoniness and hypocrasy of the people on this list. 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] Libya
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The term sub-imperial has been in use for some time to fill in some of the gaps. But in fact the composition of the core imperialist countries has remained pretty stable. The key sub-imperialist countries are comprised by the BRICs. I don't really understand the question. A key, necessary feature of imperialism is an effective monopoly on the global means of production, which is why it appears that a developed, industrialized country is also always in the imperialist camp. -Matt One issue which puzzles me is the continued persistence of the assumption that the same group of countries that was imperialist a hundred years ago still exclusively comprises the imperialist world today. I can't imagine Lenin or Marx, having such a cramped imagination or understanding as to insist that New Zealand is imperialist, but that no non-white nations aside from Japan can be even considered for such a designation. I have the sense that there's a dawning recognition that China is stepping into imperialist shoes, especially in Africa, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that still debated about a generation hence. Here's a question: can a country be considered industrialized or developed and *not* be imperialist? If not, then de facto, a whole group of nations are either already newly imperialist or are about to become as such. And if so, then the question of living standards and the exploitation of the global South has to go by the wayside to a certain extent. 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] Anti-imperialist Fallacies
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The chief of which is that imperialism WAS NOT intervening in Libya prior to the present uprising. In fact, as has been amply documented on this list, that intervention was occurring via the good offices of the progressive Gaddfi regime. It's a strange concept of imperialism that sees intervention as a purely military phenomenon, when most of the time it intervenes by peaceful means. It is also a notion of imperialism that is alien to the Leninist concept, with all of its theoretical gaps and shortcomings. But what were all those thousands of Americans and Europeans doing in Libya in the first place? Therefore it is also fallacious to counterpose criticizing Gaddafi with a supposedly correct anti-imperialist posture. The correct anti-imperialist stand was to attack the decisive neo-liberal turn of the Gaddafi regime 10 years ago: how's that for opposition in advance? Yet one strains their ears to hear such criticisms from the camp of our socialist political opponents on this list. Thus the anti-Gaddafi revolt appears as an annoying inconvenience to imperialism, requiring a shift in mode of intervention - not a new intervention. Perhaps they can turn this into a new opportunity, but right now they strike me as less than enthusiastic. In the final analysis, the anti-imperialism of our opponents is but empty posturing, a cover for their anxiety over the fate of some historic Latin American currents they've aligned themselves with as the center of their little world. The rest of us can begin by criticizing the Chinese-style neo-liberal turn of the Cuban CP NOW, in advance, for as a neo-liberal turn is is also a turn TOWARDS imperialism. -Matt 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] Democracy means...
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == ...never having to say they are sorry as they shoot you. A bloody day today in Iraq, but that's OK, its the will of the people - except that they forgot to add that it was the American democracy and the American people who willed it, for sure in the 2004 elections. A neat synopsis from Angry Arab: How US media cover occupied Iraq: some observations First, notice that US media, especially the New York Times and Washington Post, cover Iraq with barely a mention that the country is occupied and has been occupied since 2003. Secondly, notice that every article about repression and protests in Iraq has to mention that the country is a democracy as if to express amazement at the willingness of Iraqis to protest against it (this is today's NYT: Unlike protests elsewhere in the region, the crowds in this young, war-torn democracy did not call for an entirely new form of government...). Notice that the murder and repression by Iraqi puppet forces are always justified: (in the NYT today it said that people died from clashes: Iraq’s “day of rage” on Friday ended with nearly 20 protesters killed in clashes with security forces.). Thirdly, notice that any protests against the occupation and its puppet forces are instantly conflated with Al-Qa`idah terrorism (this is from today's NYT: But on Friday, he celebrated the fact that there had been no suicide bombings. Their absence was perhaps a fluke, but it suggested that heavy security restrictions... I mean, why should they link the protests to suicide bombings? Unless they are implying--like the sectarian puppet, Al-Maliki, that Bin Laden was behind the protests--just like Qadhdhafi has claimed in Libya). Fourthly, there is no opportunity missed to heap praise on puppet Iraqi repression forces. (Upon learning that some 20 protesters were killed, this is what a US commander has said: Col. Barry A. Johnson, a spokesman for the United States military, said Iraq’s security forces appeared to respond well to the volatile, sometimes violent, crowds. “The Iraqi forces’ response appeared professional and restrained,” he said in an e-mail.). Fifthly, It is hard for US media to accept this, but Iraqis and Arabs in general in particular never treat Iraq as a democracy. It is never treated like a model to emulate. If anything, there is wide contempt for a republic jointly run by an obscurantist Ayatullah in cooperation with US and Iran. Nuri Al-Maliki is seen, rightly, like any other tyrant, no matter if he has sectarian support by virtue of the corrupt sectarian system that the US has set up there. In his speech the other day warning against protests, Al-Maliki sounded like Saddam warning ominously against suspicious forces. In fact, his rhetoric is a replica of that of Qadhdhafi. Sixthly, the absurd myth that Iraqi Kurdistan is a heaven and haven, is shattered by the daily protests and repression there is still being promoted and for that the coverage of protests there is scant. Seventhly, the nature of non-sectarian protests is ignored because Bush taught them that you can only speak of sects in Iraq. [This is why they want to hurry the transition to democracy so they can unleash the repression without reservation or apology] -Matt 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] US war plans on the Libyan people taking shape
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Brilliant logic. Yes we are all in an unconscious conspiracy to cover up imperialist war plans. Are you serious or just a stupid troll? Your domain name suggests that you are a bit eddicated, a real commentary on the intellectual caliber of whatever school in Utah you are associated with. Don't want to be insulted? Then stop insulting people's intelligence with this old-school pseudo-anti-imperialist drivel deployed as a cover to attack the mass movement in Benghazi and in the rest of Libya simply because they moved against someones' favorite progressive Bonapartist dictator. That someone being a certain old school of leftists that now evinces a pattern of suspicion towards and denigration of the mass movement, especially of its working class element, an attitude that first emerged with respect to Egypt. That's the pattern I see, and it is disgusting to watch. Marx was a revolutionary long before he was a Marxist. The first duty of honest revolutionaries is to unconditionally take the side of a mass movement of the oppressed and exploited. That's Principle No. 1. After that we then look into the plans of our enemies. In regards to Libya, all the evidence I've seen indicates a mass movement that: 1) Is hostile to Zionism and Israel; 2) Is hostile to an imperialist intervention, and 3) Importantly, stands for the unity of Libya Ironically, some of the evidence of the above can be gleaned from CNN, an organization devoted 24x7 to twisting every bit of evidence into a justification for imperialist intervention everywhere in the world. So you can be sure that some of us are acutely aware of imperialist plans. My sense so far is: 1) They were unprepared for this whole string of uprisings in the Arab world - imagine that, our enemies are not infallible - and 2) They are now scrambling to put together viable plans - as opposed to the contingencies gamed in some think-tank, disconnected as they must be from the radicalization of reality -Matt ? US Wars Plans for Libya taking Shape ? http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/02/24/us.obama.libya/?hpt=Sbin ? ?? It's great you Marxists on this list can keep directing attention on what a discreditable guy Gaddafi is, while?avoid exposing US war plans on Libya. Isn't something more required of Marxists than being lemmings jumping an the imperialist bankwagon? 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] From the Arab World to Latin America
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Progressive Latin America, whose pioneering liberation processes constitute hope for world-wide anti-imperialism, ought to support the Arab world right now without reservation, moving beyond the strategy of the Western powers overtaken by events, as well as those that are providing an opportunity for Gaddafi's return - perhaps militarily, but above all, propagandistically - as a champion of human rights and democracy. That discourse is hardly credible in this part of the world, where Fidel and Chávez enjoy enormous popular credit, but if Latin America aligns itself, actively or passively, with the tyrant, the contagious popular advances that are already extending toward Europe, and have gone as far as Wisconsin, will not only see themselves irreparably halted but will also produce a new fracture in the anti-imperialist camp, so that the world's ever vigilant timekeeper, the United States of America can seize advantage in order to recover lost ground. Hear, hear, sense from Latin America! But it is precisely the intent of a certain sector of the left to put a brake to the spread of the contagion. Hence the tendency to downplay the process underway in the Arab world, to deprecate its working class component in particular. After all, given the recent turn of the Cuban CP down a Chinese style capitalist road, might they also confront a like situation in Cuba in the not too distant future? -Matt 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] Chavez not silent
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Somewhere along the line I plan to write about Marxist realpolitik, a way of thinking that unfortunately reflects the bad habits of the bourgeoisie. Yes, please do, that same had occurred to myself concerning the penchant for anti-imperialist rather than Marxist realpolitik. Its point of origin is, of course, the idea of socialism in one country; Given that, the rest resolves into classic inter-state realpolitik. I don't want to open an argument along lines from a dead historical era - the point is that these dead lines still live as ghosts in the minds of some, and that's a problem in the present. News flash: On CNN, I just a poster held up in a mass rally in Benghazi showing Gadhafi caricatured as a dog, but with a Star of David emblazoned on his side. Dog of Israel. Dastardly agents of imperialism! (Another poster featured the same Gadhafi-dog sodomizing his son, lol) Now obviously MANY CURRENTS are active in this revolutionary process, at this stage, as they are also in the rest of the Arab world. That's the certificate of authenticity for this revolutionary upsurge. It is the unconditional obligation of anyone who would call themselves a revolutionary to swim in the tide and fight for the classical (and updated) Marxist program. As is CNN, whose reportage openly begs for imperialist intervention, where CNN's Ben Wedeman projects his fantasies of the liberation of Paris. But here is an interesting CNN report from the Egyptian-Libyan border: At the Libyan-Egyptian Border http://topics.cnn.com/topics/libya The reporter claims aid from medical teams that aided the Cairo demonstrations, etc. If there is any outside intervention, it appears to come from Egypt. But given the unsettled state of the Egyptian regime, WHO from Egypt? While the military junta easily comes to mind, our knowledge of factions and their relations with the opposition are too poor to judge right now. -Matt 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] Project to Enhance the Profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Interesting document for the US consulting company, Monitor Company Group, L.P. — Confidential, 2007: http://www.libya-nclo.com/Portals/0/pdf%20files/Monitor%203.pdf Note that most of the active interest comes from the Democratic Party side of the imperialist functionary ledger, with additional representation from the Republican side in the shape of the arch-neocon Perle and from Pappy Bushs' Carlyle Group. What is interesting is not the interest in Gadhafi, but that, these days. the 'rational' management of U.S. imperialism is largely in the hands of the Democratic Party (remember, Baby Bush was still POTUS), highlighting the ongoing degeneration of the Republicans in this area, with the neocons continue being the main trend as the Pappy Bush faction continues to decline in influence. Close call for Fareed Zakaria! Otherwise he'd look like quite a hypocrite, as right now Zakaria is pounding the table on CNN, complaining that Obama/Clinton has not more forcefully denounced and called for the ouster of Gadhafi. Good question (naturally from the always perspicacious Zakaria, one of the few of the Amero-centric punditocracy I have some respect for) - why has the White House not done so? So far, it is just warmed over lines a la Egypt. Can't they sail a carrier task force off the shores of Tripoli (Semper Fi!) in support of the rebellion? I can hear the propaganda music already, but where is it? The Pavlovian lapdog media is straining at the leash, snarling and drooling at the distant whiff of intervention. I'll agree with Nestor on one point: Libya is ripe for an overt imperialist intervention, but I get the sense they weren't prepared with a plan. Their plan of record was to work with Gadhafi. Imperialism doesn't really know who the revolutionaries are, is the conclusion. Any other conclusion about this process is at the same level of Gadhafis mad ravings about how Al Queda has spiked the coffee served in Benghazi cafes with hallucinogenic drugs. -Matt 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 IMF hearts Arab tyrants
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == More evidence of how unprepared imperialism was for the revolutionary process now opened up in the Arab world, scraped off the Angry Arab. How much more evidence do we need of the old regimes' collaboration with imperialism, and the latters' complete lack of preparation of a plan for intervention? Chavez, Ortega, Castro = WRONG. Just look at the thousands of Americans and Brits trying to flee Libya. Looks more like Saigon than Belgrade. The IMF hearts Arab tyrants Less than two weeks ago, the International Monetary Fund’s executive board, its highest authority, assessed a North African country’s economy and commended its government for its “ambitious reform agenda.” The I.M.F. also welcomed its “strong macroeconomic performance and the progress on enhancing the role of the private sector,” and “encouraged” the authorities to continue on that promising path. By unfortunate timing, that country was Libya. The fund’s mission to Tripoli had somehow omitted to check whether the “ambitious” reform agenda was based on any kind of popular support. Libya is not an isolated case. And the I.M.F. doesn’t look good after it gave glowing reviews to many of the countries shaken by popular revolts in recent weeks. Tunisia was hailed last September for its “wide-ranging structural reforms” and “prudent macroeconomic management.” Bahrain was credited in December with a “favorable near-term outlook” after the economy “managed the global crisis well.” Algeria’s “prudent macroeconomic policies” helped it to “build a sound financial position with a very low level of debt.” And in Cairo, the I.M.F. directors last April praised the authorities’ response to the crisis as well as their “sound macroeconomic management.” (thanks A.) It's past time to get it straight that the era of the Russian Revolution, and the political forms and lines that it generated, is OVER, and that a new revolutionary era that generates its own forms enclosing the same classical questions is now upon us. -Matt 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] Gaddafi gets the Swiss-Ass Freeze
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == You know the bell tolls for thee when you get tossed into this lower ring of bourgeois hell: http://blogs.forbes.com/afontevecchia/2011/02/24/amidst-rumors-that-gaddafis-been-shot-swiss-freeze-his-assets/ King of Bahrain must be feeling the icy cold blowing up his own Swiss derriere right now. -Matt 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] Workers World on Libya and imperialism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == While in general agreement with Louis' views on all things WWP, the below passage strikes me as equivocal about Gadhafi, an attempt at nuance. It clearly makes reference to the neo-liberal turn without calling it that: -- After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 and leveled much of Baghdad with a bombing campaign that the Pentagon exultantly called ?shock and awe,? Gadhafi tried to ward off further threatened aggression on Libya by making big political and economic concessions to the imperialists. He opened the economy to foreign banks and corporations; he agreed to IMF demands for ?structural adjustment,? privatizing many state-owned enterprises and cutting state subsidies on necessities like food and fuel. The Libyan people are suffering from the same high prices and unemployment that underlie the rebellions elsewhere and that flow from the worldwide capitalist economic crisis. -- Of course calling this an attempt 'to ward off further threatened aggression' by adopting measures that make that aggression unnecessary is an irony apparently beyond the grasp of the WWP writer. But WWP equivocation is matched by that of the White House and US government, which has yet to come out in favor of deposing Gadhafi. -Matt Progressive people are in sympathy with what they see as a popular movement in Libya. We can help such a movement most by supporting its just demands while rejecting imperialist intervention, in whatever form it may take. It is the people of Libya who must decide their future. You will notice not a single word about the neoliberal turn in this article. As I pointed out originally, which probably led to this intervention by a non-subscriber, the WWP is living in the past. This is *not* 1969 or 1979 any longer. It is as if writing about the PLO today as if it were the early 70s. Marxists who do not keep pace with historical events are not very good Marxists at all. 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] Tariq Ali: US hegemony is only dented
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == While not as pessimistic as Tariq Ali, I do agree with this: -- The big worry for Euro-America is Bahrain. If its rulers are removed it will be difficult to prevent a democratic upheaval in Saudi Arabia. Can Washington afford to let that happen? Or will it deploy armed force to keep the Wahhabi kleptocrats in power? - Knocking off one of these Persian Gulf monarchs would set a useful precedent, and possibly light a fuse leading into Saudi Arabia. That would be good, very good. -Matt 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] Libya
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == LOL, Nestor, you make this sound like Der Untergang des Imperialismus, with Obama and the gang hunkered down in the Fuhrerbunker preparing for their last stand while torching Germany out of spite. An interesting contrast to Tariq Ali's pessimism, though. -- Anyway, the lesson (a lesson in LA too many people failed to learn in the past and hope will learn now -I am wary about no less man than Evo) is that once you sign up with the devil, the devil will try to cheat and kill you as soon as possible. In THIS sense, and only in this sense, what is taking place in Lybia today is the revenge of imperialists for what took place in Egypt yesterday. This is my take, at least, until further events prove me wrong. Not because Fidel has given G his support or understanding. Because Sarkozy has said what he has said. Whatever state Lybia had was (in many senses, I repeat) built on sand. But it was not completely functional to imperialists. They would never miss the opportunity to ride another people?s wave to topple the head of that state and turn Lybia into either a lax federation of sheikhdoms (with Eastern Lybia almost independent) or simply more than a single state. There did NOT exist a Lybian nation (not even in the provisional sense the word nation can be applied to a fraction of the Arab peoples) before Gadafi. There does not exist such a thing even today. But what exists is too much for besieged imperialists to bear. As to how besieged they are, just cast a glance on what takes place near Lybia, in Greece, while we are debating this. -- Don't think imperialism is under siege in the present. Now, if the Greek working class were to topple the parliamentary regime, and in doing so topple the real dictatorship of capital just as the Egyptians toppled the formal dictator Mubarak (without as yet ending the imperialist backed regime, much less the dictatorship of capital), and this moreover in a democratic EU country, then I'd say that the siege upon a retreating imperialism may have begun. But in the Greek situation I have seen no sign that this is not just another Big General Strike with a few street antics thrown in by a movement that refuses to recognize that the task now is to overthrow the bourgeois democracy and take power directly into the hands of the worker's organizations as the only way to bring an end to the austerity. Anything short of that is a farce. Please prove me wrong here, I'd love it! But I am not so pessimistic (as with Tariq Ali) concerning the Arab Middle East, including Libya, for if this is really a revolutionary situation - apparently Ali thinks not - then as the stock-jobbers say, The past is no indicator of future performance, and a variety of very different outcomes is possible, despite the dead weight of Nasser's' military caste. -Matt 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] Grover Cleveland, Obama's Percursor?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == I had posted on this not too long ago, keying off a Cleveland reference by Louis. Note: 1) The phrase Bourbon Democrats refers to a late 19th century Federal level coalition of Redeemer Southern landowners existing off the rents gotten from Jim Crow structured share cropping, and a sector of the New York bourgeoisie representing old mercantile and allied banking and urban landlord money - who had long had ties to the previous Slavocracy, as well as Tammany Hall - the New York Bourbons factionally opposed to and being eclipsed by the new money financial-industrial combines being organized by such as JP Morgan and centered in the Republican Party. These latter finally triumphed in 1896 as the Bourbon position in the Democratic Party collapsed with the nomination of William Jennings Bryan. 2) The closer analogy of Obama/Clinton is to Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner transplanted to the Northeast who began his political career as a New York Bourbon Democrat, but who obviously made a certain metamorphosis as Wilson clearly ended up not opposed to inflation, imperialism and subsidies to business in the shape of the First World War. The key is the so-called Progressive movement that gave its name to that era. Wilson had one foot firmly planted in the camp of finance, unified and modernized by the creation of the Federal Reserve system, but the other was less steadily planted upon a sector of bourgeois progressives such as Walther Lippmann who had gone into the Democratic Party with the general Progressive exodus from the Republicans via Theodore Roosevelt's' Bull Moose party in 1912. Likewise Obama, in his ascending phase had one foot in finance capital, and the other on the backs of progressive Democrats. We see here how American progressives have ever been the useful idiots of U.S. capitalist politics in both the case of Wilson and Obama. But there the analogy ends: whereas Wilson in turning sharply Right could use the world war (and Red Scare) to bind the progressives to himself, Obama (like the later Clinton) tends to find his left foot dangling in midair, a condition much less stable that that of the New Deal Democrats, a capitalist coalition of industrial capital and landed property, with finance in subordination. The New Deal therefore is an exceptional episode in the history of a Democratic Party that now seeks (in vain, I believe) to return to its origins. Anybody read The Democrats, a critical history, by Lance Selfa? -Matt --- I have been thinking about presidential comparisons with Obama. The closest I could imagine was Grover Cleveland's second administration. Cleveland was the leader of the pro-business Bourbon Democrats who opposed high tariffs, free silver, inflation, imperialism and subsidies to business, farmers or veterans. His battles for political reform and fiscal conservatism made him an icon for American conservatives. Cleveland was tight with the bankers and the railroad. Maybe he was not so much in love with them as Obama, but it is still pretty disgusting. Here are my notes from Matthew Josephson's The Politicos: read more at: http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/grover-cleveland-obamas-percursor/ 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
