[Marxism] Fwd: Romania: No Country for Poor Men | LeftEast
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * This is a picture of the Socialist working class’ life after death: a never-ending cheap commodity guarding another commodity. The dialectical lesson in political economy for poor Romanians. They have tragically been, and always will be, closer to the truth of capitalism than any of us. They are, both literally and figuratively, the guardians of this truth. They have never gained and will never gain more than their own physical reproduction. For them, the historical and moral low which Marx talks about coincides with the high. This is exactly how opposites cross paths when in poverty. And since gender differences are an issue, the last wave of lay-offs has meant an instant reconversion into housekeepers and babysitters for the upper classes. They are heroines, at times supporting an entire family while paying for their husbands’ reconversion programs. They put up with a great deal, including posters of Iohannis glued by their employers on the well-stocked refrigerators in the kitchens these women have to clean. The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie is polished by these women – and they’re doing it while being lectured on the virtues of the political right-wing. full: http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/romania-no-country-for-the-poor/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Essay on character sketches and a 'typology of scholars' @insidehighered
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Scott McLemee writes: A couple of weeks ago Boer won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize (sort of an equivalent of the Pulitzer for Marxist scholarship) for Criticism of Heaven and Earth, a study of the ongoing interaction of Marxism with theology and the Bible – the fifth volume of which just appeared from the European scholarly publisher Brill, with previous installment issued in paperback from Haymarket Press. I would be glad to write about it except for being stuck in volume two. The news that volume five brings the series to a close is somewhat encouraging, but in the shorter term it only inspired me to look around at his blog, Stalin’s Moustache. (Anyone attempting to extract ideological significance from that title does so at his or her own peril. Boer himself indicates that it was inspired by General Tito’s remark “Stalin is known the world over for his moustache, but not for his wisdom.”) https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/11/26/essay-character-sketches-and-typology-scholars --- I don't understand how so many bright people can get taken in by Roland Boer. Boer's blog affects irony but in another non-ironic venue, Boer makes clear his admiration for Stalinist rule. Just take a look at this: http://philosophersforchange.org/2014/10/28/the-failure-of-communism-a-fall-narrative/ It is an attempt to rationalize Nicolae Ceaușescu, citing Lukacs that bad communism is better than good capitalism. Lukacs had many profound insights but that was not one of them. Boer is not an advocate of socialism. He has the typical tankie distrust of democratic movements and puts his trust in paternalistic authoritarian states such as Bulgaria's that is lauded in the same article, where he writes: -Meanwhile, Zhivkov exercised his ‘tyrannical’ rule. People often made jokes about his dialect and proletarian manners. But did Zhivkov have the perpetrators arrested and punished by the secret police? No, he collected them for a good laugh now and then. He was usually known as ‘bai Tosho’ (old uncle Tosho) or ‘Tato’, a dialectical term for ‘poppa’.- So maybe the ISO can invite Boer to their next Marxism conference where he can expound on Bulgarian communism. Put Paul Le Blanc and Scott McLemee on the same panel with him so they can share ironic observations. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] How the USA bolsters Assad
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * The U.S.-led coalition's strikes have enabled the regime to reallocate assets to face mainstream rebels, whose defeat remains the regime's top priority. Since strikes against the Islamic State began, regime forces have gained ground against mainstream rebels on key fronts in Hama province and in Aleppo city; in the case of the latter, they have done so against the very same rebel groups that are confronting the Islamic State in the nearby northern countryside. The targeting in Washington's air campaign has further blurred the lines between U.S. and regime military strategies. Rather than maintain singular focus on hitting Islamic State targets in eastern Syria, the United States has struck al-Nusra Front, an al Qaeda affiliate whose role in combatting the regime and Islamic State has earned it credibility with the opposition's base, west of Aleppo. On one occasion, the United States also appears to have hit Ahrar al-Sham, a Salafi group that has moderated its political platform substantially in recent months and that is broadly viewed as an authentically Syrian (albeit hard-line) component of the rebellion. Washington's claims that these strikes targeted members of a secretive Khorasan cell planning attacks against the United States or Europe are unconvincing in rebel eyes -- not least because Washington never publicly mentioned Khorasan until the week preceding the first round of strikes. Such attacks strengthen jihadi claims that the U.S. campaign aims to quietly boost Assad while degrading a range of Islamist forces, and thus they are a significant blow to the credibility of those rebels willing to partner with the United States. For a rebel commander seeking to convince his fighters that cooperation with Washington is in the rebellion's best interest, American strikes that ignore the Assad regime while hitting Ahrar al-Sham are extremely difficult to explain. Even assuming Khorasan poses a threat justifying urgent action, Washington should more carefully weigh the immediate losses jihadis suffer in strikes against the recruiting benefit they derive from rising disgust with the U.S. approach among the rebel rank and file. full: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/11/26/obama_administration_syria_policy_review_islamic_state_rebels_militias --- NY Times, Nov. 28 2014 Conflicting Policies on Syria and Islamic State Erode U.S. Standing in Mideast By ANNE BARNARD BEIRUT, Lebanon — American and Syrian warplanes screamed over the Syrian city of Raqqa in separate raids this week, ostensibly against the same target, the Islamic State militants in control there. In the first raid, on Sunday, United States warplanes hit an Islamic State building, with no report of civilian casualties. On Tuesday, Syrian jets struck 10 times, killing scores of civilians, according to residents and Islamic State videos. The back-to-back strikes, coming just days after President Bashar al-Assad of Syria declared that the West needed to side with him in “real and sincere” cooperation to defeat the extremist group, infuriated Syrians who oppose both Mr. Assad and the Islamic State. They see American jets sharing the skies with the Syrians but doing nothing to stop them from indiscriminately bombing rebellious neighborhoods. They conclude, increasingly, that the Obama administration is siding with Mr. Assad, that by training United States firepower solely on the Islamic State it is aiding a president whose ouster is still, at least officially, an American goal. Their dismay reflects a broader sense on all sides that President Obama’s policies on Syria and the Islamic State remain contradictory, and the longer the fight goes on without the policies being resolved, the more damage is being done to America’s standing in the region. More than two months after the campaign against the Islamic State plunged the United States into direct military involvement in Syria, something Mr. Obama had long avoided, the group has held its strongholds there and even expanded its reach. That has called into question basic assumptions of American strategy. One is that the United States can defeat the Islamic State without taking sides in Syria’s civil war. Another is that it can drive the group out of Iraq while merely diminishing and containing it in Syria, pursuing different approaches on each side of a porous border that the Islamic State seeks to erase. “The fundamental disconnects in U.S. strategy have been exposed and amplified” as Islamic State militants have advanced in central Syria in recent weeks, said Emile Hokayem, a Syria analyst at the
[Marxism] Fwd: Mexico, a criminal country - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Mexicans have grown used to news of decapitations, group executions and torture, but this story has aroused unprecedented indignation, leading to widespread protests in late November. This proof of terrorism stemming from the way power is shared by politicians and cartels raises troubling questions about the reach of Mexico’s narco-state and its capacity for repression. It also exposes a structural problem: drug money makes the Mexican economy go round. A 2010 US-Mexican study estimated that the cartels are responsible for an annual cash flow of between $19bn and $29bn from the US to Mexico (2). According to Kroll, the leading risk and security consultancy, the figure fluctuates between $25 and $40bn (3). So the drugs trade may be the main source of foreign currency revenue, ahead of oil exports ($25bn) and remittances from expatriates ($25bn). This money feeds directly into the financial system, which is the backbone of the neoliberal order. Stemming the flow would lead to the economic collapse of the country. Mexico and the narco-economy are mutually dependent. full: http://mondediplo.com/2014/12/04mexico _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Ukrainian language suppressed in Crimea
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Washington Post, Nov. 28 2014 In Crimea, old ways fade as Russia takes hold by Michael Birnbaum SIMFEROPOL, Crimea - Eight months into the Russian annexation of the Black Sea resort region of Crimea, traces of Ukraine's 60-year rule here are rapidly being wiped away. Now Ukrainians themselves worry that they are next. The Ukrainian language has vanished from school curriculums, Russia's two-headed eagle has been bolted onto government buildings, and Russian laws are slowly taking hold. And as the peninsula Russifies, Ukrainians and other minority groups are finding that an area once renowned for its easygoing cosmopolitanism is now stifling. Some are fleeing their native home. Many complain that they have been written off both by the world and by Ukraine itself, which is focused on the bloody conflict in its southeast. The turmoil is a harsh consequence of the first major land grab in Europe since World War II - and it comes despite Kremlin assurances that life would be better in Crimea for Russians and Ukrainians alike. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has quickly become a haven for Ukrainian speakers in Crimea, who can gather on Sunday mornings to gossip and to send up prayers in sanctuaries whose authorities sit in Kiev, not Moscow. But Archbishop Kliment, the leader of the church here, fears for his future. I get up worried, and I go to bed worried, he said, speaking in the converted school building in Simferopol that houses the church headquarters on this peninsula of 2.4 million. They are closing down Ukrainian schools, Ukrainian newspapers. It's all closed, and the Ukrainian church is the only thing left. One poll taken when Crimea was still part of Ukraine found that about 12 percent of Crimean residents, or 280,000 people, identified as Ukrainian Orthodox. Since the Russian takeover, the church leader says, pressure has forced him to close almost a third of his congregations. Several of his priests have fled. Archbishop Kliment finds himself a world away from the heady days he spent in Kiev in February, when he announced onstage to a crowd of battle-scarred protesters that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which broke away from Russian Orthodoxy after the fall of the Soviet Union, had withdrawn its support for then-President Viktor Yanukovych. That provoked cheers from the crowd. Within days, Yanukovych was toppled - and Russia was moving in on Crimea. Russian President Vladimir Putin said he was acting to defend the rights of ethnic Russians, although the risks they purportedly faced appeared to be almost exclusively voiced within broadcasts by state-run Russian media. President Obama called the Russian annexation illegitimate. Many ethnic Russians were excited to join a richer nation that promised them a higher standard of living. In a March referendum, 97.6 percent were said to have voted to join Russia. Critics questioned the validity of the results, and opponents largely boycotted the voting. Now they say that an entire constellation of life is swiftly fading away. Some say they have no future in Crimea. Darya Karpenko emptied her Simferopol apartment and sold her Nissan this month, setting out last week with her 2-year-old daughter to join her husband in the Polish city of Krakow. Even though she is ethnically Russian, she said there is no future for her family in the city where she was born. I feel almost like I'm jumping on the last train car that's leaving, Karpenko said, shortly before she left for Poland. We never planned our lives to leave. We bought a very nice apartment. We renovated it. We filled it with expensive furniture. We lost everything here. My husband works in IT. There were 50 small companies in the city, and they're all closed now. Before the Russian annexation, Karpenko ran a popular blog and was a business consultant in Ukraine. Since the takeover, she said, she posts cautiously on her Facebook page, worrying constantly about Russian security services. I'm expecting security services to come for me any time there is a spirited conversation in the comments section of her Facebook profile, she said. Because security services do visit people. It's not an old wives' tale. Some of her friends were questioned when they criticized the annexation, she said. At least 25 of her friends and acquaintances have left, Karpenko said, leaving no one to talk to who sympathizes with her position in her final days in Crimea. People are leaving every day, she said. These are very intelligent people, the middle class, very well educated. Many Crimean residents, even those supportive of the
[Marxism] Fwd: The Bizarre Compulsion of Black Men to “Reach for their Waistbands” » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/28/the-bizarre-compulsion-of-black-men-to-reach-for-their-waistbands/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Effacing the radical tradition in the American Jewish community
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * on Donnerstag, 27. November 2014 at 15:55, Marv Gandall via Marxism wrote: Here’s a long but interesting piece (h/t Gordon Peffer) by Rachel Cohen, a writer for the liberal bimonthly American Prospect, on the expunging from the Jewish American historical memory of the community’s secular, left-wing, working class origins. What a coincidence. As it happens, I am currently reading the 1998 book by Karen Brodkin, How Jews became White Folks, and What That Says About Race in America. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ. ISBN 0-8135-2590-X I am in the middle of the fourth of five chapters, Not quite white: Gender and Jewish Identity. Based on what I have read up to now, I can highly recommend it. Here is the Summary of Chapter 2: Race Making: Summary Initially invented to justify a brutal but profitable regime of slave labor, race became the way America organized labor and the explanation it used to justify it as natural. Africans, Europeans, Mexicans, and Asians each came to be treated as members of less civilized, less moral, less self-restrained races only when recruited to be the core of America’s capitalist labor force. Such race making depended and continues to depend upon occupational and residential segregation. Race making in turn facilitated the degradation of work itself, its organization as “unskilled,” intensely driven, mass production work. Although they worked in jobs that were termed “unskilled,” that label cannot be taken at face value. Workers often possessed skills that they were not allowed to exercise. It is also important to distinguish conceptually the skills actually required to perform a job from the job’s classification as skilled or unskilled. As Patricia Cooper has noted of the racial and gender pattern to occupational segregation generally, it seems to have little relationship to anything concrete. It does not relate to the physical difficulty of the job or to the technologies involved. . . . Given the arbitrary and artificial nature of skill definition and its ideological construction, job sorting is not related to some abstract definition of skill. Women’s jobs are often marked as less skilled because it is women who hold them. The same argument applies to the jobs of nonwhite men. Indeed, race and gender job segregation are interlinked. In line with Venus Green’s findings, others have noted that when women of color replace white women, or when white women replace white men in significant numbers, the result is job degradation, which takes the form of marking the job as less skilled while driving the workers more intensely. Although hostility from male workers presents a barrier to access by women and workers of color to white-male-type jobs, employers are in ultimate control. They may recruit women with an eye to cutting the price of skilled white male labor, or they may transform a requirement to hire women into an opportunity to de-skill and degrade the job. Such actions, not natural processes, reproduce occupational segregation by race and sex. In sum, the temporary darkening of Jews and other European immigrants during the period when they formed the core of the industrial working class clearly illustrates the linkages between degraded and driven jobs and nonwhite racial status. Similarly, the “Indianness” of Mexicans and Asians, as they became key to capitalist agribusiness, stands as another variant on the earlier constructions of blackness and redness. I am suggesting that this construction of race almost is the American construction of class, that capitalism as an economic organization in the United States is racially structured. Just as the United States is a racial state, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant have argued, so too is American capitalism a racial economic system. This does not mean that there are no white workers in degraded jobs. However, it does suggest that such workers may experience their position as somewhat contradictory or as an out-of-placeness in the American racial way of constructing class. Cheers, Lüko Willms Frankfurt, Germany _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Cracking down on Crimean Tatars
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * On September 15, police in Simferopol conducted a 17-hour search of the offices of the Mejlis, the Crimea Foundation, the charitable organization that administers the Mejlis, and the Mejlis newspaper Avdet. Riza Shevkiev, the general director of the Crimea Foundation and a Mejlis member, told Human Rights Watch that at 9 a.m. on September 15 the police and unidentified armed, masked men surrounded the building that houses all three offices, blocking the front door. [20] The armed men warned journalists to stay away and threatened them when they tried to film, one of the journalists who was at the scene told Human Rights Watch. [21] When Shevkiev arrived at the office shortly afterwards, law enforcement agents provided him with a copy of a court order requesting that a search be conducted at the Mejlis office “with the purpose of finding weapons, firearms and publications inciting racial, gender or religious discord.” According to Shevkiev, after searching the Mejlis offices and library, law enforcement agents searched the separate offices of the Crimea Foundation and Avdet. When Shevkiev requested a search warrant for those premises, law enforcement agents failed to provide one. full: http://www.hrw.org/node/130593/section/5 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fwd: Inside the Grey Lady » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Arrogance, Propaganda and Fabulation at the New York Times Inside the Grey Lady by LOUIS PROYECT For most CounterPunch readers, Judith Miller is the name that springs to mind if asked to identify the New York Times reporter discredited by articles written during the early days of the “war on terror”. As it turns out, she was not the only one to lose a job over bogus reporting. The other disgraced reporter had no particular ideological stake in Dubya’s wars but his fall from grace says as much about the Grey Lady’s overblown reputation as hers. I speak of Jayson Blair, the subject of an intriguing documentary titled “Fragile Trust” that originally aired on PBS and that can be purchased from Bulldog Films, an outlet for radical documentaries (in line with their politics, they offer the film to activist and advocacy groups at a reduced rate.) full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/28/inside-the-grey-lady/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Naomi Klein on Big Green and fracking
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * Raghu, replying to me, wrote: I call bullshit. Who exactly from the liberal/social democratic establishment is supporting corn ethanol, fracking, or clean coal? Not even Al Gore as far as I know, and most certainly not the likes of Naomi Klein. -raghu. My point was that there are bourgeois environmentalists who support fracking. I didn't say Naomi Klein supported fracking, but instead promoted her exposure of the activities of Big Green. According to her, one of those activities was that some of Big Green supports natural gas and fracking, thus harming the anti-fracking movements in various communities. She herself opposes fracking, and does it seriously, so she also exposes the groups who support it. That's what a serious opponent of fracking should do. In her own words, on some of Big Green supporting natural gas: The big, corporate-affiliated green groups don't deny the reality of climate change, of course--many work hard to raise the alarm. And yet several of these groups have consistently, and aggressively, pushed responses to climate change that are the least burdensome, and often directly beneficial, to the largest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet--even when the policies come at the direct expense of communities fighting to keep fossil fuels in the ground And many of these same groups have championed one of the main fossil fuels--natural gas--as a supposed solution to climate change, despite mounting evidence that in the coming decades, the methane it releases, particularly through the fracking process, has the potential to help lock us into catastrophic levels of warming (as explained in chapter four). In some cases, large foundations have colaborated to explicitly direct the U.S. green movement toward these policies. (pp. 198-9) Then again, in a section of the book labelled Fracking and the Burning Bridge, Naomi Klein talks about certain progressive groups supporting fracking: The gas industry itself came up with the pitch that it could be a 'bridge' to a clean energy future back in the early 1980s. The in 1988, with climate change awareness breaking into the mainstream, the American Gas Association became to explicitly frame its product as a resonse to the 'greenhouse effect.' In 1992, a coalition of progressive groups--including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, Environmental Action, and Public Citizen--officially embraced the idea, presenting a 'Sustainable Energy Blueprint' to the incoming administration of Bill Clinton that included a significant role for natural gas. The NRDC was a particularly strong advocate, going on to call natural gas 'the bridge to greater reliance on cleaner and renewable forms of energy.' (p. 2130 I don't know whether these groups, called progressive groups by Klein, should be called liberal or liberal/social democratic or whatever. But what we need to be concerned with is whether bourgeois environmentalism has promoted, and still promotes, bad things. One of the great virtues of Klein's book is that she points this problem out. One of my points is that there isn't unity in the environmental movement. In writing replies to Marv Gandall on this, I was dealing with what goes on in the movement as a whole, and the significance of Bloomberg being taken up in the movement (which was the point of the thread I was writing in), while Marv Gandall would talk about certain unnamed groups with a liberal/social democratic leadership with what he regarded as a sound program. I cut corners in replying to him, instead of expressing things in a longer and more explanatory way, so he thought I was saying that he himself supported fracking. *My apologies* -- my meaning, which was not expressed clearly enough -- was instead that to overlook the differences in the movement would mean that we would have to simply be supporters of what was being done, things which we opposed, things which harmed the environment. The difference over fracking is an example of a concrete, real difference in the movement, which cannot be written off as mere abstract boilerplate denunciation. And by the way, Michael Bloomberg backs fracking. And Klein pointed that out. Klein on Michael Bloomberg supporting fracking: The EDF [Environmental Defense Fund-JG] has also received a $6 million grant from the foundation of New York's billionaire ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg (who is strongly pro-fracking), specifically to develop and secure regulations intended to make fracking safe--once again, not to impartially assess whether such an outcome is even possible. ... The EDF has done more than help the
[Marxism] Challenging the globalisation of indifference: Pope Francis meets with popular movements | Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
POSTING RULES NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * By *Judith Marshall* November 21, 2014 -- /Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal/ -- I have recently returned from three fascinating days in Rome where I participated in a World Meeting of Popular Movements. This event brought to the Vatican a throng of articulate delegates from among the poor and excluded of the 21st Century, people fighting for land, for housing, for work and for dignity. Pope Francis was a central force in creating this gathering in Rome. Our meeting with him in the Old Synod Hall of the Basilica was a high point. The meeting brought together 150 delegates. Thirty of them were Bishops from various parts of the world whose ministries include strong accompaniment and support for movements of the poor. The other 120 came from various popular movements working on the thematic issues of the meeting -- Terra, Labor, Domus. Men and women fighting for land, work and housing were present from every continent. In a statement from the organisers, the logic was clear. Full article at http://links.org.au/node/4172 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
