[Marxism] Venezuela: Seized US-owned factory was well-stocked, despite closure
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[Marxism] Turkey: After failed coup, Erdoğan cracks down
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. * Faced with an attempt to overthrow his government, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described the coup as “a gift from God” — and wasted no time in exploiting it to further entrench his authoritarian regime. https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/62232 _ 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] Fwd: Sanders warns his supporters against choosing a third party - The Washington Post
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. * That is a very harsh and angry thing to say, Lou. Very, very harsh, old comrade, and I agree 100%. Maybe it is a function of my age, but I am getting increasingly frustrated about the moments missed in US politics - the moments that could have broken the two party stranglehold and propelled us into a new era. I am thinking of Nader's campaign and now the Sanders' campaign. BTW, I must "confess to almighty god so help me Mary ever virgin", but I watched Michelle Obama's speech. It was a brilliant rhetorical effort. Looked at from the point of view of the aesthetics of spectacle - delivery, appearance of speaker, reaction of crowd etc, this was very impressive. I wept uncontrollably at times. The problem was the lie at the heart of the speech. The central untruth lay in the construction of the character Obama called "Hilary". The latter bears no resemblance to the character we know as Hilary Clinton, the mediocre and vicious careerist who will probably plunge us all into ever more wars. Ultimately it is the lie about Hilary which means that this was not a moral effort. No amount of talk of slaves or black children playing on the lawns of the White House can disguise the dirty deal the Obamas have done to deliver a Clinton Presidency. We will all pay. Comradely Gary _ 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: Foreign Ministry: Syria welcomes Russian-US agreement on counterterrorism – Syrian Arab News Agency
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. * Syria welcomes statements issued following the recent US Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Moscow in assertion of agreement between Moscow and Washington on counterterrorism. An official source at Foreign and Expatriates Ministry said on Sunday that the Syrian Arab republic has followed with interest the statements issued following the US Secretary of State’s visit to Moscow on the 15th of the current month, which stressed the agreement between the Russian and US sides on combating terrorism (ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra groups), adding that Syria, which is standing in the frontline in combating this sweeping evil, welcomes these statements. “Syria reiterates keenness on achieving a political solution for the crisis in the country that meets the aspirations of the Syrian people and gains their support as it is ready for resuming the intra-Syrian dialogue without preconditions with a view that this dialogue would lead to a comprehensive solution led by the Syrians themselves without foreign meddling and backed by the United Nations and the international community,” it added. The source said that Syria stresses the Army and Armed Forces’ determination to go ahead in combating terrorists for eliminating them in cooperation with the Russian Federation based on mutual trust and also in cooperation with the other members of the international community who share us, as well as cooperate with Russia, in achieving this goal; to this end, Syria is ready to coordinate counterterrorism air raids in accordance with the agreement between Russia and the USA. full: http://sana.sy/en/?p=83375 _ 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: Sanders warns his supporters against choosing a third party - The Washington Post
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. * What a sleazy worthless shell of a human being. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07/26/sanders-warns-his-supporters-against-choosing-a-third-party/ _ 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] The UK situation
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. * There is something of a lull in the struggles within the British Labour Party at present. All eyes have turned to the court which will give its verdict on Thursday on whether Corbyn can be automatically on the ballot. This is, I think, the last throw of the dice for the Blairites. The millionaire bringing the case is a bitter enemy of Corbyn's, seemingly over the latter's support for the Palestinian cause. It is pointless to speculate what will happen if Corbyn is not included automatically and then has to seek support from within the PLP which so bitterly opposes him. Apart from the court case, the other main news appears to be that the Soft Left candidate against Corbyn, Owen Smith, is gaining little traction. Everyone knows that if Corbyn is not knocked off the ballot, he will win massively over Smith, whose candidature has sparked zero enthusiasm anywhere. Presuming then that the campaign goes ahead, the Right and the Soft Centre seem to have decided to use the campaign to smear Corbyn and to drive the party down even further in the polls. It is a risky strategy, in terms of the electoral survival of the Party. It reminds me of Clausewitz' comments on war that is divorced from policy/politics (*politik)*. For Clausewitz such a war was unthinkable because it would end in mutual destruction. But the Blairites in particular seem to be drawn to just such an irrational outcome. Amidst the mayhem of an internal civil war in the Labour Party, can Corbyn turn the campaign into an effort to build a broad anti-neoliberal social movement? I should note that my interest in all this is not because I have any illusions in the British Labor Party. Puh...leezze. But this is a decisive moment in the class struggle. Of that I have no doubt at all. The defence of Corbyn's leadership should be taken up by all leftists. If he wins, we *might*, just might, get the broad based party/movement that will be able to challenge capital. The core of just such a movement has flocked to join Corbyn's team. That they constitute such a tide as to overwhelm those who control the party is one of the most intriguing aspects of all this. As an old leftist who has long predicted the decay and irrelevance and even death of the Labour Party, all I can say "Who would have thunk it?" comradely Gary _ 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: Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist
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. * If you like me appreciate good writing about what it means to be a working stiff, don’t waste any time. Send in a check to subscribe to Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life that is edited by Noel Ignatiev, a long-time revolutionary scholar, journal and activist. A check for how much, you are probably asking. Unlike many journals on the left, particularly the high-toned ones that are peer reviewed, the operating principles for Hard Crackers is—how shall we put it?—socialistic. As they say on the inside cover, “There is no set price for either single issues or subscriptions. Pay what you can. Bulk orders are particularly appreciated.” Send checks and printed material to: Hard Crackers, PO Box 28022, Philadelphia, PA 19131 Communications to noelignat...@gmail.com There is something decidedly old school about Hard Crackers. There is no website, a gesture that is consistent with the esthetic of the magazine that has the redolence of the factory floor, the billiards parlor, the bowling alley and the saloon whose juke box features Hank Williams and Hank Ballard. full: https://louisproyect.org/2016/07/26/hard-crackers-chronicles-of-everyday-life/ _ 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] Alexander Zamyatin: Three and a Half Theses on the Elections in Russia
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. * A useful primer on September's elections to the Russian State Duma and Russian electoral politics in general, as well as pertinent reflections on how progressive leftists should act within this regime of electoral authoritarianism, by Alexander Zamyatin of the Russian Socialist Movement (RSD). Alexander Zamyatin: 'The parliament in Russia has been reduced to such a condition there is no point in talking about a hypothetical leftist faction or a group of MPs from single-mandate electoral districts tabling or blocking law bills independently of the presidential administration. If there has been anything consistent about the political reforms of the past fifteen years, it is that legislative bodies, the Duma foremost among them, have been stripped of the power to influence the government’s social and economic policies, even despite their formally voting budgets up or down. 'The elections to the Seventh State Duma are not a chance to transform the political regime or even have an impact on it. 'The entire campaign is controlled to a lesser or greater extent by the presidential administration’s Office for Domestic Policy. The leaders of the current Duma factions have long ago left no doubt as to the complete absence of conflict within parliament. Even such a harmless identity as “systemic opposition” has taken a backseat to rallying round the president by way of combatting the “fifth column.”' Read the rest here: https://therussianreader.wordpress.com/2016/07/26/zamyatin-rsd-elections-leftist-involvement/ _ 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] Fwd: Review: David Williams, Bitterly Divided: the South’s Inner Civil War (2008) | Insurgent Notes
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. * Someone should really devote a book to the 1st Alabama Cavalry. _ 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: Review: David Williams, Bitterly Divided: the South’s Inner Civil War (2008) | Insurgent Notes
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 best kept secret in US history is the resistance of southerners, and especially southern non-slaveholding whites, to the slaveholders during the Civil War. W.E.B. Du Bois, in the chapter “The General Strike” in Black Reconstruction in America, told the story of black resistance. Bitterly Divided: the South’s Inner Civil War by David Williams (New Press, 2008), while giving due weight to the resistance of black people and Indians, focuses on southern whites. full: http://insurgentnotes.com/2014/03/review-david-williams-bitterly-divided-the-souths-inner-civil-war-2008/ _ 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: Huntsville Notes | The Brooklyn Rail
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. * Throughout Southern history, there is an alternative to the conventional narratives, much of it uncovered in recent years. Historian David Williams, in volumes such as Bitterly Divided, his book about internal resistance to the Civil War, has brilliantly captured this suppressed history. More recently, Dixie Be Damned by Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford also brings together shreds of this alternative narrative. Sparsely populated, mostly white Winston county, a few dozen miles from Huntsville, for example, seceded during the Civil War and formed “The Free State of Winston.” Very few and small shards of this history make it into the official curriculum, and the irony of those celebrating the glories of old Dixie by waving the Confederate flag is that their grand-pappies may well have been draft resistors or anti-Confederacy guerrilla fighters. A more recent example of this alternative history can be seen in the 1967 wildcat strike at the Masonite plant in Laurel, Mississippi.5 Management used the fact that the union local was led by a Klansman to leaflet black workers to cross the picket line because it wasn’t a strike in their interests, while the International withdrew support: all the elements for another defeated strike were in place. But, thanks to the intervention of civil rights movement activists from the Southern Christian Education Fund (SCEF), multi-racial rallies evolved, drawing hundreds of workers for months in nearby fields. The strike, one of many SCEF was involved in around the same time in Mississippi, was lost, but workers published a newspaper and formed a workers’ party to contest local elections in Laurel. For now, all this history has been lost. In his 2008 autobiography, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, Bob Zellner, one of the SCEF organizers involved, recounts an incident where he was asked to “discuss this communist thing” by some white strikers with a known racist background. To his surprise, they said “they had looked it up and as far as they could tell, they were communists, because it said that people should share and share alike and that all people were equal.” In a small but significant way, the Laurel strike shows how consciousness doesn’t change by abstract propaganda but by the pressure of real events. People start to act differently even as the old ways of thought they use to understand their situation lag behind the need to act to resolve a concrete problem. full: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/12/field-notes/huntsville-notes _ 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] [UCE] Fwd: “Ye Oldest Native” speaks: Jasper J. Collins, 1913 – Renegade South
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. * Several articles have been posted on Renegade South concerning the Civil War Unionist activities of various member of the Collins family of Mississippi and Texas. All were sons of early Piney Woods settler Stacy Collins (1786-1854). One of the sons, Jasper J. Collins (1827-1913), helped organize the Knight Band of renegades in which he was listed as “1st Lieutenant.”* The following is a profile of Jasper Collins as published in the Jones County News in April 1913. The editor of the newspaper felt Jasper made a suitable subject based on his venerable age (86 when the article appeared) and his staunch character. Jasper would died just four months later in August 1913. As the account makes clear, Jasper Collins was a thoughtful man of firm convictions. Although he had a minimal backwoods education, he read on the topics of the day and formed his own opinions. Over his lifetime, this led him to side with the Unionists of the Knight Band, to establish a newspaper in 1895 promoting the Populist Party (“Jasper Collins and the ‘Ellisville Patriot’“), and to help found a Universalist Church near his farm in Moselle. In her 1951 book Echo of the Black Horn, author Ethel Knight had little complimentary to say about the Knight Band in general and much less about its leader Newt Knight. But she described Jasper Collins as a “gentleman of the ‘first water'” and stated that his motives were those of a true Unionist. Further evidence, if necessary, comes from the fact that Jasper named his first son born after the Civil War general, Ulysses Sherman Collins (“Unionist naming of Mississippi children: 1861-1880”). full: https://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/2016/07/18/ye-oldest-native-speaks-jasper-j-collins-1913/ _ 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: Memories of Jim Green | LAWCHA
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. * When I moved to Boston in the fall of 1971, one of the first people I set out to meet was Jim Green, then a second-year junior history professor at Brandeis University nearby. I think Paul Buhle of Radical America magazine, also new to Boston, tipped me off. Paul and I and other history grad students at the University of Wisconsin had shared a range of radical-history projects, certain that a new understanding of history was emerging from the 1960s New Left that we were part of. Jim was seen as a kindred spirit. http://lawcha.org/wordpress/2016/07/25/memories-jim-green/ _ 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] Peru Scrambles to Drive Out Illegal Gold Mining and Save Precious Land
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. * (Poverty is one of the main causes of environmental degradation. This article points out that illegal gold mining that pours toxic waste into Peru's rivers is one of the ways that poor, mostly indigenous, Peruvians can survive. It is the same kind of problem that accounts for deforestation as land-hungry peasants are forced into the Amazon in order to subsist.) NY Times, July 26 2016 Peru Scrambles to Drive Out Illegal Gold Mining and Save Precious Land by SUZANNE DALEY ON THE BORDER OF THE TAMBOPATA RESERVE, Peru — The raid began at dawn. In four small wooden boats, the forest rangers and Peruvian marines, checking and rechecking their automatic weapons, headed silently downriver toward the illegal gold miners. They didn’t have to go far. Around the first bend was a ramshackle mining settlement, tarps stretched over tree poles. Soon, the marines were firing into the air, the miners and their families were on the run, and the rangers were moving in with machetes. They speared bags of rice and plastic barrels of drinking water, kicked aside toys and smashed tools before setting everything on fire. High above the Amazon rain forest, home to trees that are more than 1,000 years old, heavy plumes of black smoke spiraled toward the clouds. Trying to protect one of the most biologically diverse places on earth from an army of illegal miners that has carved a toxic path through the rain forest, the Peruvian government is setting up outposts and stepping up raids along the Malinowski River in the Tambopata Nature Reserve. But some experts wonder whether it is far too little too late. To get here, a remote front line in Latin America’s battle against illegal mining, I hiked nine and a half hours through the jungle, at times in water up to my armpits. But any sense of being in a pristine wilderness was lost at the river’s edge. Already, the miners had done so much damage that the water ran the color of milky coffee. The landscape was worthy of a “Mad Max” movie. Huge sandy craters, mounds of pebbles and poisoned waterways were everywhere. Garbage — rags, plastic bags, plastic foam food containers — clung to the freshly cut tree branches piled up in the river’s nooks and crannies. With the price of gold high for years, illegal mining has blossomed in many parts of Latin America, not just in Peru. But in this country, one of the world’s major gold producers, the problem has gotten particularly bad. The amount of gold collected by unlicensed miners is far larger than elsewhere in Latin America. And it is ballooning so quickly that environmentalists fear that even a remote reserve like this one — home to thousands of species of plants and animals, some perhaps not even identified by humans — has little chance of survival. For all the environmental damage done by corporate mining, illegal miners are far more destructive, experts say. While mining companies tend to concentrate on areas with rich underground veins of gold, illegal miners move swiftly across vast amounts of territory. They cut down broad swaths of jungle, sifting through perhaps 200 tons of topsoil to find enough flecks of gold for a single wedding ring. Without help, some experts say, the areas they leave behind — robbed of all topsoil and loaded with mercury — could take 500 years to recover. The miners use so much mercury to process the gold that the government declared a health emergency in much of the Madre de Dios region in May. Tests in 97 villages found that more than 40 percent of the people had absorbed dangerous levels of the heavy metal. Mercury poisoning affects people in many ways, from chronic headaches to kidney damage, but it is most harmful to children, who are likely to suffer permanent brain damage. “The next generations will pay for what we are doing now,” said Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who heads the Peruvian Ministry of the Environment. Statistics undercount the amount of illegal mining. But Víctor Torres Cuzcano, an economist with the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, calculated that unregistered and informal mining increased by 540 percent between 2006 and 2015, while production from legal mining, which brings in tax revenue, fell by 28.5 percent. Indigenous miners pushing parts for a water pump to their camp near the Madre de Dios River. Credit Tomas Munita for The New York Times “I fear that illegal mining is crowding out the legal activities,” said Guillermo Arbe Carbonel, an economist with Scotiabank. “You see social protests against the legal mining all the time. But the illegal is growing, and it is the worst kind of mining when
