[Marxism] Israel - world's most racist state?

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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https://rdln.wordpress.com/2015/08/15/israel-worlds-most-racist-state/
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[Marxism] crisis in British Labour

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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The Guardian has announced that the challenge to Corbyn is on. The Deputy
Leader Tom Watson withdrew from talks and it would appear that the
challenge is indeed about to begin. So, the chicken coupers have finally
come out cackling.  They surely intend to keep Corbyn off the ballot. Or
perhaps they believe their own propaganda that there is an enormous number
of members eager to sack Corbyn. If Corbyn is on the ballot thrre will be a
huge demonstration of support for him.  The BREXIT vote showed that
contrarianism has gripped the Britidh people and they are in no mood to
listrn to their "betters".

Britain would seem to be in turmoil. There is a mood in the country for
change and it is being fought out in the Labiur Party.  A party split would
seem to be one of the most likeky outcomes. In the meantime they have
wheeled out that windbag Lord Kinnock to save the party he tells us he
loves. Of course they are prepared to destroy the party in order to save it.
The problem for the Right is that they do not have much of a base outside a
narrow social layer and the mass media. They got hold of the party
following the defeats of theThatcher years.  The right used their control
of the centre to impose their candidates on the party branches.  That
explains Angela Eagle being opposed by her constituency party but hailed as
a potential saviour by the  media. She is the candidate of the Blairites
whilst thd Old Right would appear to favour Owen Smith.

in any case it would seem there is a new generation in the UK who  want to
test themselves in the struggle and they have chosen tbe defence of Corbyn
as the site of that struggle. We should all wish them well.

comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] Massive open-access database on human cultures created

[Brian McKenna via Marxism]

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PUBLIC RELEASE: 8-JUL-2016
Massive open-access database on human cultures created

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

[image: IMAGE]


IMAGE: NORMS OF DOMESTIC ORGANIZATION VARY SUBSTANTIALLY AMONG THE WORLD'S
CULTURAL GROUPS. FOR THE GLOBAL SAMPLE OF SOCIETIES IN D-PLACE, A NEARLY
EQUAL NUMBER TEND TOWARDS SINGLE-GENERATION AS MULTI-GENERATION (EXTENDED
FAMILY)... view more  

CREDIT: COURTESY OF KATHRYN KIRBY/UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

TORONTO, ON - An international team of researchers has developed a website
at d-place.org to help answer long-standing questions about the forces that
shaped human cultural diversity.

D-PLACE - the Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment - is an
expandable, open access database that brings together a dispersed body of
information on the language, geography, culture and environment of more
than 1,400 human societies. It comprises information mainly on
pre-industrial societies that were described by ethnographers in the 19th
and early 20th centuries.

FOR MORE SEE:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-07/uot-mod070816.php



-- 
Brian McKenna, Ph.D.
Anthropologist
Department of Behavioral Sciences
CASL 4025
University of Michigan-Dearborn
Dearborn, Michigan
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[Marxism] Fwd: Che Guevara's political relevance today | International Socialist Review

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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This is the introduction to Samuel Farber's latest exercise in Cubanology:

http://isreview.org/issue/101/che-guevaras-political-relevance-today

It includes a swipe at Lenin for creating the preconditions for the rise 
of Stalin, just what you'd expect. The ISO is okay with his Cuba-bashing 
but probably would never connect his anti-Bolshevik commentary with it.


In 1996 Science and Society published a special issue on Lenin that 
included an article by Farber titled 'The Relevance of Lenin Today'. In 
a nutshell, it encapsulates the Sovietology article of faith that Lenin 
led to Stalin, although he does not come out and state that explicitly. 
But anybody can figure out that this is implicit argument here:


	Yet, here we find one of the more striking paradoxes in the Marxist 
tradition. While the struggle for democracy was central to Lenin’s 
politics, his conception of the nature of democracy was flawed even 
while he was in opposition, let alone when he was the head of the Soviet 
state. As I have argued at length elsewhere (Färber, 1990), there was a 
quasi-Jacobinism in Lenin’s politics that led him, for example, to give 
more importance to the politically more advanced elements organized in 
the party than to broader class institutions such as the soviets. Yet an 
elementary sense of proportion and perspective demands that we 
distinguish between Lenin’s flawed conception of democracy, which he 
mostly upheld until at least the Spring of 1918, and the clearly 
anti-democratic perspective that, with his associates, he began to adopt 
shortly before and especially during the course of the Civil War. These 
anti-democratic views and practices fully crystallized after the Civil 
War, in the period 1921-1923, even as Lenin reacted in genuine horror 
against the practical outcomes of those very views and actions. It was 
particularly during and after the Civil War that many undemocratic 
practices that may have indeed been justified as necessary came to be 
seen and defended by Lenin and other mainstream party leaders as 
intrinsically virtuous. The existence of this attitude is also 
demonstrated by the virtual absence of statements by Lenin attesting to 
the temporary or conjunctural nature of his repressive and 
anti-democratic measures, except in a few isolated instances, such as 
when the 1921 ban on party factions was originally declared to be temporary.


I should mention that Farber’s reference to “Lenin’s flawed conception 
of democracy” is another instance of idealism, seeking to explain the 
problems of Soviet statehood in the 1920s in terms of faulty thinking 
rather than the economic devastation and loss of cadre in a bloody civil 
war. If you discount such factors in the USSR, you are bound to discount 
them in Cuba, a country that faced sabotage and terror the minute the 
guerrillas marched into Havana.


I suspect that both the USSR under Lenin and Cuba under Castro get 
failing grades from the professor emeritus will matter little to those 
who remain committed to the state capitalist theoretical prophylaxis. 
But at least in one instance a leader of the British SWP had Farber 
nailed. John Rees, who has since gone his own way, wrote a book in 1997 
titled In Defense of October that included an article by Farber along 
the lines of the S article cited above. As editor, Rees enjoyed the 
privilege of commenting on the various articles and made sure to inform 
Farber that his contribution reminded him of Robert Conquest.


In some ways, Farber is correct. Both the Russian Revolution and the 
Cuban Revolution were “from above”. Both used political and cultural 
repression against its enemies. And both certainly failed to measure up 
to the yardstick of socialism as defined in the Marxist classics. My 
guess is that no revolution ever will.


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[Marxism] Fwd: Marxism in Noir | International Socialist Review

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Alan Wald article.

http://isreview.org/issue/101/marxism-noir
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[Marxism] [UCE] Fwd: Reaction to Governor Cuomo’s Criminalization of BDS

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=12661
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[Marxism] Fwd: A Police Killing in Baton Rouge - The New Yorker

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A man with Sterling’s arrest record would have been all but locked out 
of the legitimate economy. Men with criminal records constitute a third 
of the unemployed males between ages twenty-five and fifty-four. 
Sterling earned his living the way untold numbers of men in such 
circumstances do: vending on the streets. His death immediately recalled 
that of Eric Garner, who sold loose cigarettes on the street in Staten 
Island and also died at the hands of police officers. These men are a 
familiar sight in black communities: They pop into the local barbershop 
hawking music and movies. They stand outside the subway station selling 
socks and pantyhose. On rainy days they are the convenient purveyors of 
cheap umbrellas. This is a pedestrian labor force populated by men for 
whom hustles have taken the place of jobs. All informal economies carry 
the whiff of danger. A black man is thirteen times more likely to be 
murdered in this country than a white person; eighty-four per cent of 
the time it involves a firearm. But no amount of statistical 
palm-reading can foretell the risks borne by a black man with a criminal 
record who frequents poor neighborhoods and is known to conduct cash 
transactions. The gospel of the gun as a tool of self-protection is 
directed at middle-class whites, but it is most applicable to precisely 
the populations among whom they are most heavily prohibited—people who 
are poor and black.


full: 
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-police-killing-in-baton-rouge

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Re: [Marxism] Yassamine Mather on death of film-maker Abbas Kiarostami

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/8/16 9:19 PM, Philip Ferguson via Marxism wrote:


https://rdln.wordpress.com/2016/07/09/abbas-kiarostami-a-profoundly-political-film-maker-1940-2016/


I will be writing up a survey on Kiarostami before long but want to 
mention a film omitted from Yassamine's article that is key to 
understanding how political he could be. Directed by Jafar Panahi, 
someone who does make political films (to the point of being arrested 
for un-Islamic behavior), "Crimson Gold" was written by Kiarostami. My 
review is here: https://louisproyect.org/2004/10/02/crimson-gold/

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[Marxism] Mason on British politics

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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Here is a link to a Paul Mason article on the UK situation

https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/trouble-in-remainia-ad93a0da124b#.ivg926jwc

I do not necessarily agree with all of this article, but it does make the
clear point (towards the end} that the neoliberal project is over.  I
consider that the key point of our times. It is behind the stalemate in
Australia and the Brexit vote and the surge for Sanders and Trump.

It is also now clear that in the UK the 200,000 people who have surged into
the Labour Party in the last two weeks have done it as an expression of the
need for an alternative politics. The Right (Old & Blairite) and the
so-called Soft Left know that, because of their commitment to
neoliberalism,  they will be humiliated if they take Corbyn on in an
election.

One needs to dig beneath the hysteria of fast thinking such as "Corbyn is
unelectable" to recognize the desperation for an an alternative politics to
neoliberalism. People need protecting from neoliberal governments and in
Australia a hung parliament represents something of a solution.

The other point I would make that it is vital to grasp how moderate
Corbyn's politics are. They are a return to Keynesianism.  What ever one
thinks of that as a political strategy, it at least starts from the premise
that we must break with neoliberalism. If twitterdom is any kind of
evidence, it was a mistake of a Blairite to heckle Corbyn yesterday when he
was apologizing in the Commons for the war. The BBC of course is beyond
disgrace with their claim that the Chilcot report had exonerated Blair.

Australian exceptionalism is very real, but there are signs that we are
facing similar pressures. In any case a defeat for neoliberalism in the UK
would have a profound effect on Australia.


regards

Gary
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