[Marxism] The Invention of Science

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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LRB, Vol. 38 No. 18 · 22 September 2016

Such Matters as the Soul
Dmitri Levitin

The Invention of Science: a New History of the Scientific Revolution by 
David Wootton

Penguin, 784 pp, £12.99, September, ISBN 978 0 14 104083 7

On 11 February, David Reitze, executive director of the Laser 
Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, 
announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had detected 
evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 
billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of 
Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The observation required 
astonishing technical precision: the 4 km-long arms of each of the two 
branches of Ligo, three thousand miles apart in Louisiana and 
Washington, were altered by just one ten-thousandth of the width of a 
proton, proportionally equivalent to changing the distance to our 
nearest star by a hair’s width. The announcement was greeted with a 
sense of wonder at human ingenuity, even by those who neither understood 
the physics involved, nor why the result was so important.


How, historically, did we arrive at a situation in which science holds 
such sway over our imaginations, and such power, financial not least 
(Ligo’s total cost is around $620 million)? One answer, almost as old as 
the events that it describes and subscribed to by many historians, runs 
something like this. Before 1492, literate Europeans derived their 
knowledge of the universe from authoritative classical texts, on the 
basis of which they concluded that change was limited to the sublunary 
world (beyond this were the unchanging heavens), at the centre of which 
lay an Earth with no antipodes. The institutions in which this knowledge 
was propagated – primarily the universities – were centres of rigid 
Latinate pedantry. Then America was discovered and there was a wave of 
reverence for empirical, non-bookish knowledge, which culminated in the 
findings of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, all of whom worked outside 
the official world of learning (the institutions, meanwhile, remained 
tragically wedded to the old authorities). This Scientific Revolution 
slowly but surely ushered in an age of rationalism, sweeping away the 
superstition of the medieval world and the Renaissance humanists’ 
slavish reverence for ancient, textual authority.


A new version of this story is told in David Wootton’s ambitious, 
trenchantly polemical new book. But before talking about revolution, we 
should ask what was being revolutionised; before dismissing something as 
rigid and ossified, we might ask whether things really were as bad as 
all that. What did science look like before the Scientific Revolution? 
And was there something about the Western world that made it uniquely 
suitable as a crucible for the development of science?


There can be no doubt that the origins of something like science lie in 
the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, in particular their 
development of medical, mathematical and astronomical techniques and 
observations. The Babylonians’ astronomy and mathematics was 
sufficiently advanced that, by the first millennium BC, they may have 
been able to predict eclipses of the moon (which is not to say that 
their astronomy wasn’t for the most part developed in service of 
celestial divination). Babylonian astrology/astronomy (the two cannot be 
separated) was communicated to Hellenistic Greece in the third and 
second centuries BC, and that inheritance shaped the European 
astronomical enterprise for the next two thousand years. Even so, there 
is some foundation for the traditional story – as old as Aristotle – 
that speculation about nature was revolutionised by a group of Greeks 
from the sixth century BC onwards. Although modern historians have 
qualified Aristotle’s claims, it remains the consensus that a small 
group of thinkers, based around Miletus in Ionia, asked questions about 
the world in a way that was unknown to, and directly critical of, their 
predecessors. They were interested in questions about the world’s shape 
and composition, in particular whether it was made up of one substance 
or many. Most important, the answers they came up with, though to the 
modern mind they appear fanciful and unscientific, were naturalistic. 
Where Homer and Hesiod had accounted for phenomena such as earthquakes 
or lightning storms in terms of divine intervention, by the sixth 
century BC Thales could claim that the earth floated on water, and that 
earthquakes were caused by wave-tremors. What’s more, philosophers of 
this period knew and criticised one another’s ideas. Thales 

Re: [Marxism] Ah, the madness

[Stephen Shalom via Marxism]

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Louis Proyect wrote

I hate Putin but the fact is that Russia has signed a no-first strike
pledge while Obama just refused to do so.

This is not so. In 1993 Russia revoked its 1982 no-first-use pledge,
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/04/world/russia-drops-pledge-of-no-first-use-of-atom-arms.html,
and it continues to have a policy of first-use in specified conditions
(like the US)

http://www.nti.org/learn/countries/russia/nuclear/

For more details from a rightwing think tank, see
http://www.nipp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/FINAL-FOR-WEB-1.12.16.pdf

Steve Shalom

On Sun, Sep 25, 2016 at 8:51 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
>
> Just watched a segment on "60 Minutes" that was positively Orwellian. It
> was about steps that the USA was taking to refurbish its nuclear strike
> force, especially putting fins on the B-61 bunker buster that can be dialed
> to deliver from .3 to 340 kilotons, just like a volume control on your
> remote. They interviewed a crew of scumbag military officers defending
> Obama's escalation, all with the intention of making it sound as if the USA
> was doing it because of Putin's saber-rattling. I hate Putin but the fact
> is that Russia has signed a no-first strike pledge while Obama just refused
> to do so.
>
> The most horrifically surreal interview was with a guy named David Shlapak
> from the RAND Corporation who had directed a series of war games
> commissioned by the Pentagon in which Russia invaded the Baltic states of
> Estonia and Latvia. This would be an ideal battleground to use B-61's if
> you take Shlapak at his word.
>
> But what I couldn't get my eyes off of was the two earrings he had in his
> left ear and the one he had on his right, looking for all the world like an
> art gallery director. I said to myself that whatever life-style changes the
> 60s induced could hardly seem more irrelevant to its deeper goals. Maybe
> Shlapak had a tattoo on his ass. So did Goering for all I know.
>
> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-risk-of-nuclear-attack-rises/
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[Marxism] The Great Trap for All Americans

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NYR, October 13 2016
The Great Trap for All Americans
Maya Jasanoff

The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World
by Greg Grandin
Picador, 400 pp., $19.00 (paper)

New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America
by Wendy Warren
Liveright, 368 pp., $29.95

One hundred and fifty years after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished 
slavery in the United States, the nation’s first black president paid 
tribute to “a century and a half of freedom—not simply for former 
slaves, but for all of us.” It sounds innocuous enough till you start 
listening to the very different kinds of political rhetoric around us. 
All of us are not free, insists the Black Lives Matter movement, when 
“the afterlife of slavery” endures in police brutality and mass 
incarceration. All of us are not free, says the Occupy movement, when 
student loans impose “debt slavery” on the middle and working classes. 
All of us are not free, protests the Tea Party, when “slavery” lurks 
within big government. Social Security? “A form of modern, 
twenty-first-century slavery,” says Florida congressman Allen West. The 
national debt? “It’s going to be like slavery when that note is due,” 
says Sarah Palin. Obamacare? “Worse than slavery,” says Ben Carson. 
Black, white, left, right—all of us, it seems, can be enslaved now.


Americans learn about slavery as an “original sin” that tempted the 
better angels of our nation’s egalitarian nature. But “the thing about 
American slavery,” writes Greg Grandin in his 2014 book The Empire of 
Necessity, about an uprising on a slave ship off the coast of Chile and 
the successful effort to end it, is that “it never was just about 
slavery.” It was about an idea of freedom that depended on owning and 
protecting personal property. As more and more settlers arrived in the 
English colonies, the property they owned increasingly took the human 
form of African slaves. Edmund Morgan captured the paradox in the title 
of his classic American Slavery, American Freedom: “Freedom for some 
required the enslavement of others.” When the patriots protested British 
taxation as a form of “slavery,” they weren’t being hypocrites. They 
were defending what they believed to be the essence of freedom: the 
right to preserve their property.


The Empire of Necessity explores “the fullness of the paradox of freedom 
and slavery” in the America of the early 1800s. Yet to understand the 
chokehold of slavery on American ideas of freedom, it helps to go back 
to the beginning. At the time of the Revolution, slavery had been a 
fixture of the thirteen colonies for as long as the US today has been 
without it. “Slavery was in England’s American colonies, even its New 
England colonies, from the very beginning,” explains Princeton historian 
Wendy Warren in her deeply thoughtful, elegantly written New England 
Bound, an exploration of captivity in seventeenth-century New England. 
The Puritan ideal of a “city on a hill,” long held up as a model of 
America at its communitarian best, actually rested on the backs of 
“numerous enslaved and colonized people.”


New England was never a “slave society”—where slaves performed the bulk 
of labor—but it depended heavily on slavery nonetheless, due to its 
economic entanglement with the Caribbean. As a crucial supplier of 
provisions to the sugar islands, New England, one captain observed, was 
truly “the key of the Indies without w[hi]ch Jamaica, Barbados & the 
Caribee Islands are not able to subsist.” Fortunes made in sugar, fish, 
and slaves underpinned the development of New England colonies in turn, 
not least the colleges taking shape in Cambridge, Providence, and New Haven.


The greatest revelations of New England Bound lie in Warren’s meticulous 
reconstruction of slavery in colonial New England. Enslaved Africans and 
Indians have been “largely invisible” to historians of the region in 
part because they blended into the economy alongside free laborers. They 
weren’t invisible to colonists. With slaves comprising 5 to 10 percent 
of the urban population, anyone in a New England town would have seen 
slaves hauling water, loading warehouses, “boxing” pine trees for 
turpentine, or serving meals in a wealthy family’s house.


Warren pores over the patchy archival record with a probing eye and an 
ear keen to silences. One of Boston’s first colonists orders a slave to 
rape and impregnate another “so that he might own a ‘breed of Negroes’” 
to cultivate his land. In the heat of King Philip’s War in 1675 and 
1676, the white women of Marblehead, Massachusetts, set upon two Indian 
captives with sticks and stones, flaying them alive t

Re: [Marxism] Ah, the madness

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 9/26/16 7:51 AM, Stephen Shalom via Marxism wrote:

Louis Proyect wrote

I hate Putin but the fact is that Russia has signed a no-first strike
pledge while Obama just refused to do so.

This is not so. In 1993 Russia revoked its 1982 no-first-use pledge,
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/04/world/russia-drops-pledge-of-no-first-use-of-atom-arms.html,
and it continues to have a policy of first-use in specified conditions
(like the US)

http://www.nti.org/learn/countries/russia/nuclear/

For more details from a rightwing think tank, see
http://www.nipp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/FINAL-FOR-WEB-1.12.16.pdf

Steve Shalom





I guess I came to the wrong conclusion based on an official Russian 
statement that was cited in the 60 Minutes episode yesterday:


"Russia reserves the right to use all forces and means at its disposal, 
including nuclear weapons, in case an armed aggression creates a threat 
to the very existence of the Russian Federation as an independent 
sovereign state."


These words were interpreted by 60 Minutes and the military brass they 
interviewed as an existential threat to the USA in the manner of what 
Freud called projection.


By contrast, the earring-bedecked asshole from the Rand Corporation made 
the case for the use of those teeny-weeny B-61's in case Russia invaded 
Estonia and Latvia. WTF?


To repeat myself, I loathe Putin but I am desperately afraid of America 
as Allen Ginsberg might have said.



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[Marxism] Obama’s Betrayal of Black colleges

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Chronicle of Higher Education, SEPTEMBER 25, 2016
Obama’s Betrayal of HBCUs
By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

I attended Morehouse College in the 1980s. It was a heady time to be at 
a historically black college. We were fighting for divestment from South 
Africa and struggling against the consolidation of the Reagan 
revolution. Racial politics were everywhere, and at Morehouse, I was 
immersed in the diverse beauty and power of black culture.


My son, who came of age during the Obama years, now confronts, as I did 
during my time at college, the ugliness of American racism. His 
political consciousness has been shaped by the deaths of Michael Brown, 
Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Alton Sterling, and too many others. But my son is 
not at Morehouse, or any other HBCU. He attends Brown University.


The trend in my family is reflected nationally. In the 1970s, HBCUs 
educated 75 to 85 percent of African-Americans. Today, according to the 
Thurgood Marshall Fund, only 9 percent of black students in American 
higher education attend an HBCU. Many HBCUs can barely keep their doors 
open.


Their decline is a complicated story, stretching back decades. It is a 
tale both of greater inclusion of African-Americans at predominantly 
white institutions, and of a broad economic and institutional crisis 
engulfing black communities. The very institutions that once protected 
black people from the headwinds of racism are collapsing, and the Great 
Recession of 2008 quickened the pace. Important "free spaces," like 
bookstores and community churches — where African-Americans can 
cultivate civic virtues and a healthy self-regard — are contracting 
because of the destabilizing effects of poverty. All of which has been 
complicated, even more, by the general crisis in American higher education.


Yet the story would be incomplete if we didn’t confront a troubling 
paradox: America’s first black president has accelerated the crisis 
facing historically black colleges and universities.


"When white America has a cold," the old saying goes, "black America has 
the flu." HBCUs have a severe case of the flu. The economic fallout from 
the 2008 recession cracked the foundations of black America: more than 
240,000 homes lost, skyrocketing levels of unemployment, and downward 
mobility as families fell into poverty.


Colleges with small endowments found it difficult to hold on, leading to 
furloughs of staff and faculty members and decreased enrollments (75 
percent of HBCU students rely on Pell Grants, and 13 percent use Parent 
Plus loans). Like predominantly white institutions, HBCUs, with already 
strapped budgets, had to tighten their belts.


The election of President Obama, even amid this economic storm, brought 
a moment of excitement. His administration expanded funding for Title 
III Part B grants, which are aimed at predominantly black institutions. 
The hopes of many HBCU leaders were lifted. "Then the wheels fell off," 
Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University, told me.


America's first black president has accelerated the crisis facing 
historically black colleges and universities.  In 2011 the Department of 
Education changed the standards for Parent Plus Loans. Borrowers could 
not have any loan accounts more than 90 days late, or any foreclosures 
or defaults, a change that cost HBCUs tens of millions of dollars. The 
United Negro College Fund reported that in 2012-13, "the number of 
students attending HBCUs with Parent Plus loans dropped by 45 percent, 
or more than 17,000 students." Four years later, the Department of 
Education changed its policy, but for already cash-strapped 
institutions, the damage was done.


Then, in 2015, Obama put forward a program for two years of free tuition 
for qualified students at community colleges without apparent 
consideration of the effect on HBCUs, who often compete for the same 
students. Congressional intervention made sure that the free-tuition 
provisions were expanded to include HBCUs and other minority-serving 
institutions. It seemed as if the Obama administration held little, if 
any, concern for black colleges.


In addition to the economic and political challenges, HBCUs face 
increased competition. Elite colleges like Princeton, Harvard, and 
Amherst offer generous financial-aid packages to high-achieving black 
students, and HBCUs find it difficult to compete. Black faculty members 
now have more options to work at all sorts of institutions. The 
advantage that HBCUs once had — a captured population — no longer obtains.


On the face of it, more opportunities for black students at elite 
colleges is something to celebrate, but the fact is that, ev

[Marxism] Fwd: Campuses see flurry of racist incidents and protests against racism

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Here are some of the incidents:

At the University of North Dakota last week, students posted photographs 
of themselves in blackface to social media twice in a 48-hour period. In 
the image at the top of this article, the students added a reference to 
Black Lives Matter. The university is investigating whether the posts 
violate any rules. Mark Kennedy, president of the university, issued a 
statement that said in part: "I am appalled that within 48 hours two 
photos with racially charged messages have been posted on social media 
and associated with the UND campus community. It is abundantly clear 
that we have much work to do at the University of North Dakota in 
educating our students, and the entire university community on issues 
related to diversity, inclusion, and respect for others."


Also this month, Kansas State University and Quinnipiac University 
students posted photographs of themselves in blackface, prompting campus 
debates and denunciations.


At the University of Mississippi, students on Friday held a sit-in (at 
right) for several hours in the main administration building to demand a 
reaction from the university to a student's tweet in response to the 
protests in Charlotte, N.C., over the police shooting of a black man. 
The student tweeted of those protesting:  "I have a tree with room 
enough for all of them, if you want to settle this Old West Style." 
Chancellor Jeffrey S. Vitter, whom some students criticized for not 
immediately calling the tweet racist, issued a statement late Friday 
that said in part: "To be clear, we condemn the recent social media post 
by one of our students that referenced lynching. In light of our 
country’s history, that comment can only be seen as racist, offensive 
and hurtful, especially to members of our African American community. 
There is no place in our community for racist or violent acts."
San Jose State University officials are investigating two incidents 
involving graffiti with swastikas and "hateful language" in two separate 
incidents in dormitories. One of the swastikas was drawn next to the 
words "Admit One Jew." Mary Papazian, sent a message to the campus 
condemning the incidents and outlining a series of meetings being held 
about what had happened.


At Ohio University, a "free speech" wall where students may write what 
they want was the site of controversy last week when students found on 
the wall the words "Build the Wall" (an apparent reference to one of 
Donald Trump's campaign promises) and a drawing of a person hanging in a 
noose from a tree. Photos of the wall (at right) quickly spread on 
social media.


At the University of Dayton last week, a racial slur appeared on the 
door of a room of two black students. Eric F. Spina, the president, 
condemned this action. In an email message to the campus, he said that 
"this behavior is simply not acceptable and will not be tolerated." He 
added that "we will continue to investigate and will hold those 
responsible accountable for this action."


At the State University of New York at Brockport, officials are 
investigating how the words "niggers deserve to die" were written on a 
whiteboard in a dormitory that houses many minority students. In 
response, Heidi Macpherson, the Brockport president, sent a message to 
all students and faculty members condemning what had happened, reporting 
that an investigation was taking place, and saying that campus 
discussions would be scheduled to discuss hate speech.
A freshman at Belmont University ceased to be enrolled last week -- 
after he posted a racist photo on Snapchat, labeling three National 
Football League players with the N-word.


At American University last week, hundreds of black students held a 
protest over racist incidents. The rally was organized after two black 
women reported incidents involving bananas -- one thrown at a woman and 
one left outside the door of a woman. Students carried signs saying 
"Racism at AU Is Bananas."


At Eastern Michigan University, the letters KKK and racial slurs were 
found on several buildings last week, prompting protests and 
condemnations by university officials.


full: 
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/26/campuses-see-flurry-racist-incidents-and-protests-against-racism

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[Marxism] Diana Johnstone leading the pack

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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I've heard that the Syrian government has offered $25,000 to its best 
propagandist in 2016. Diana Johnstone will surely win with this:


It cannot be ruled out that Syrian forces attacked the aid convoy 
because the truce was already broken at Deir ez-Zor and they believed it 
concealed weapons being transported to Daech. Such things happen. Or the 
attack could have been carried out by rebels as an act of propaganda, a 
“false flag”, designed precisely to be used to accuse the adversary. 
Such things also happen.


http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/26/the-hillary-clinton-presidency-has-already-begun-as-lame-ducks-promote-her-war/
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[Marxism] Fwd: “The Battle of Algiers” at 50: From 1960s Radicalism to the Classrooms of West Point - Los Angeles Review of Books

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/battle-algiers-50-1960s-radicalism-classrooms-west-point/
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Re: [Marxism] The Invention of Science

[Jim Farmelant via Marxism]

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"Then America was discovered and there was a wave of 
reverence for empirical, non-bookish knowledge, which culminated in the 
findings of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, all of whom worked outside 
the official world of learning (the institutions, meanwhile, remained 
tragically wedded to the old authorities)"

What?  Galileo had a chair in mathematics at the University of Pisa and later 
was a professor at the University of Padua. Isaac Newton was Lucasian Professor 
of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. 


Jim Farmelant
http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
http://www.foxymath.com 
Learn or Review Basic Math



Forget Botox - Do This Once Daily
Fit Mom Daily
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[Marxism] Fwd: bellingcat - The Russian Defence Ministry Presents Evidence They Faked Their Previous MH17 Evidence - bellingcat

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2016/09/26/russian-defence-ministry-presents-evidence-faked-previous-mh17-evidence/
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Re: [Marxism] Diana Johnstone leading the pack

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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If you google:
"diana johnstone" "louis proyect"
... you'll get a list of past dissections of this stalinoid author by Louis.
I've started work on an article on the social and political roots of
campism, so this material is very useful.
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Re: [Marxism] Diana Johnstone leading the pack

[Jeff via Marxism]

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At 08:50 26-09-16 -0400, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
>
>I've heard that the Syrian government has offered $25,000 to its best 
>propagandist in 2016. Diana Johnstone will surely win

Wait a minute! She faces some stiff competion. Here are two recent performances 
by none other than Michel Chossudovsky and Finian Cunningham, both strong 
contenders for that award:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article45558.htm

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/09/24/us-turkey-lurch-world-war-syria.html

>
>http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/26/the-hillary-clinton-presidency-has-already-begun-as-lame-ducks-promote-her-war/

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[Marxism] Fwd: Book review & recommendation: UNSINKABLE PATRIOT

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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BOOK REVIEW: UNSINKABLE PATRIOT

By CLIFFORD D. CONNER

Unsinkable Patriot: The Life and Times of Thomas Cave in Revolutionary 
America, by Michael Schreiber, 2016.


Thomas who? If Thomas Cave’s name does not ring any bells, it does not 
indicate a deficit in your education. He was not an outstanding 
historical figure in any sense, and his name was lost to history until 
Michael Schreiber recently undertook a prodigious effort to restore it 
to our collective human memory. So why would anyone want to read a 
lengthy biography of a thoroughly ordinary person named Thomas Cave? I 
can think of several good reasons.


One is that even ordinary people often live lives that have their 
extraordinary aspects and moments, or at least produce the material for 
interesting stories, and Thomas Cave’s was exemplary in that respect. 
His is an epic saga of war, battles on the high seas, revolution, the 
birth of a new nation, imprisonment and escape from prison, epidemic 
disease, love, financial ruin, and triumph. Everything a novelist could 
want, with the added bonus that it is, as movie publicity often boasts, 
“based on a true story.” The chapters devoted to Cave’s maritime 
adventures, for example, are as drama-packed as the sea novels of 
Patrick O’Brian.


Another reason is that the very act of rescuing a 
forgotten-for-two-centuries life from oblivion can itself make for a 
fascinating tale. The subtext of this biography—the author’s sleuthing 
in the archives—is a detective story worthy of Agatha Christie.


But the book’s primary virtue stems from the fact that it is not only a 
biography—a “life”—but a “life and times.” The times Thomas Cave 
witnessed and participated in were among the most transformative periods 
in all of human history. It was the era of what some historians have 
called the Atlantic Revolution, which combined the American Revolution, 
the French Revolution, the liberation of Haiti by a slave uprising, the 
Great Rebellion in Ireland, and a powerful radicalization in Great 
Britain. As is generally acknowledged, three of these historic 
upheavals, the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, resulted in 
irreversible social change that—for better and for worse—created the 
world we inhabit today.


Furthermore, the other two social cataclysms, generally perceived as 
unsuccessful revolutions, nonetheless also indelibly affected the 
futures of their countries. The divisions in Irish society that were 
exacerbated by the 1798 Rebellion have to this day not fully healed. The 
resistance of the rebels to British savagery was so courageous that 
today, more than two hundred years later, Irish nationalists still 
derive inspiration from the spirit of 1798. And the lasting relevance of 
the deep radicalization in late-18th-century Britain is encapsulated in 
the title of E. P. Thompson’s well-known history of the epoch, The 
Making of the English Working Class.


Schreiber gives attention in several chapters to the activities of Irish 
rebels who sought refuge in Philadelphia, and reports on the prejudice 
and repression that some of them were subjected to while in exile.


Students of the history of France will find valuable material on that 
country and its people throughout the volume. There are two major 
sections on France; the first discusses Thomas Cave's visits to Nantes 
and Paris as a seaman, and the second has to do with French visitors and 
immigrants in Philadelphia. The latter included acrobat and pastry chef 
Etienne Simonet; the balloonist Jean Paul Blanchard; the controversial 
French ambassador Edmund-Charles Genet; French doctors, including Jean 
Deveze, who treated victims of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic; and 
French colonialist refugees fleeing the Haitian Revolution.


Thomas Cave’s very “ordinariness” meant that he was as representative a 
participant in the Atlantic Revolution as anyone could possibly have 
been. He was born in Ireland to a family of “middling” social status, 
emigrated to America as an indentured servant, served in the American 
navy during the Revolutionary War, was imprisoned in England for a 
number of years, and found his way to France, where Benjamin Franklin 
helped him and other revolutionary fighters return to America. After the 
Revolution, Cave settled in the capital city of the newborn United 
States, Philadelphia; politically supported the democratic opposition to 
the conservative Federalist party; defended the Revolution’s gains as a 
lifelong militiaman; felt the impact of the Haitian Revolution as 
fleeing French colonialists sought refuge in Philadelphia; and wound up, 
at the time of the War of 1812, in charge o

[Marxism] Everyone Knows Peter, Paul and Mary. But What About Bob?

[Andrew Pollack via Marxism]

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Note labor, left context

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/26/nyregion/everyone-knows-peter-paul-and-mary-but-what-about-the-other-guy.html?ref=todayspaper
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Re: [Marxism] Ah, the madness

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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I think Goering had a little Aryan bunny rabbit tatooed on his ass.  Though
I probably saw this in a History channel documentary . . . .

ML
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Re: [Marxism] Ah, the madness

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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I know for a fact that George Shultz has a tiger tattoo. On his behind.

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 4:58 PM, Mark Lause via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> I think Goering had a little Aryan bunny rabbit tatooed on his ass.  Though
> I probably saw this in a History channel documentary . . . .
>
> ML
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[Marxism] Fwd: The Unknown Girl | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Like “The Promise” and “Two Days, One Night”, “The Unknown Girl” 
examines the moral dilemmas facing people living in Belgian society 
where the possibilities of acting honorably are constrained by the 
capitalist system. In “The Promise”, a teenaged boy is forced by his 
racist father to keep secret the death of an undocumented worker from 
Africa. When he comes in contact with the man’s widow, he violates his 
father’s trust but discovers his own innate humanity. In “Two Days, One 
Night”, a woman pleads with co-workers from her factory to forsake a 
desperately needed year-end bonus so that she won’t be laid off.


The unknown girl referred to in the title is a seventeen-year old 
prostitute from Africa who buzzes to be let into the medical offices of 
Dr. Jenny Davin an hour after office hours have closed. Since her office 
is in a poor neighborhood in the outskirts of Lieges with more than 
enough patients to make regular hours exhausting in themselves, the 
refusal to open the door does not seem particularly portentous.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2016/09/26/the-unknown-girl/
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Re: [Marxism] Ah, the madness

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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I don't want to know how you know!

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 5:58 PM, Greg McDonald via Marxism
>
>
> I know for a fact that George Shultz has a tiger tattoo. On his behind.
>
>
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Russia]: Silina on DeHaan, 'Stalinist City Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 1:22 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-Russia]: Silina on DeHaan, 'Stalinist City
Planning: Professionals, Performance, and Power'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


Heather D. DeHaan.  Stalinist City Planning: Professionals,
Performance, and Power.  Toronto  University of Toronto Press, 2012.
272 pp.  $72.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4426-4534-9.

Reviewed by Maria Silina (Université du Québec à Montréal /
Research Institute for Theory and History of Fine Arts, Russian
Academy of Arts, Moscow, Russia.)
Published on H-Russia (September, 2016)
Commissioned by Hanna Chuchvaha

Heather D. DeHaan's monograph is devoted to the city planning of the
Avtozavod district of Nizhny Novrogod (Gorky from 1932 to 1990) that
was undertaken in its most dramatic moment in Soviet history. It
began in 1928-31 with the series of ambitious avant-garde projects
which aimed to build an ideal socialist city and ended with the
1935-39 bombastic projects of representative ensembles that were
destined never to come to life. The author's aim is to emphasize the
role of experts in creating a Stalinist city and to scrutinize the
"tensions between technological (expert-led) and sociological
(class-driven) transformations" (p. 14).

In order to achieve this goal DeHaan considers three main topics: 1)
the symbolic and representational dimension of the totalitarian
state, a domain which is well established in Slavic studies due to
the seminal works of Catherina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, and others; 2)
the expert's role in making Stalinist culture; and 3) a close-up
study of the local institutional history of city planning. The latter
two themes are less studied in Western scholarship and discussed only
by contemporary Russian scholars.[1]

To address the available literature on expert's role in city
planning, we should mention the works of Yulia Kosenkova, which are
the most important sources on Soviet planning, construction laws, and
institutional history.[2] Evgenia Konysheva has published in Russian
and German on socialist city planning in Magnitogorsk, Cheliabinsk,
Orsk, and other cities.[3] In his publications, Mark Meerovich also
considers planning, urbanization, and mass housing in industrial
centers as seen from a social-economic perspective.[4] The detailed
studies of local histories of Soviet planning and architecture that
contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms of
Stalinist culture-making and the institutional history of
architecture and city planning in the dominantly industrial cities of
Western Siberia,[5] such as Yekaterinburg (former Sverdlovsk),[6]
Samara,[7] and others, are of particular interest. This list of
books, published predominantly in Russian, shows the great
bibliographical importance of DeHaan's research devoted to the
planning of Nizhny Novgorod/Gorky in the 1920s and the 1930s.

Divided into seven chapters, the book starts with the symbolic
cityscape that embraces the development of architecture from Peter
the Great to the October Revolution of 1917 and ends with a narrative
on city life metaphorically portrayed as a theatrical scene and
examined through a description of the spectacular mass and
semi-volunteer beautification of the city. These mass mobilizations
were widely used throughout the 1930s to conceal the failure of the
systematic approach to solve the continual urban problems of Nizhny
Novgorod/Gorky. The focus on urban identity and ritualization
practices is especially pronounced in chapter 4, which narrates, as
the author calls it, the Stalinist "iconographic vision" of city
representation (1935-38). The author provides valuable data on the
practices of local Gorky authorities, who aimed to include in local
cityscapes monumental and impractical designs crafted in and for
Moscow, a practice that became routine in Soviet city planning for
years.[8] The use of metaphorical language of theatrical
performance--"the drama of building socialism" (p. 16)--still follows
the concept of Stalinism as an avant-garde creative project, offered
and developed by Boris Groys. It seems that allusions and references
to theater are popular in Soviet studies because the chaos and
anarchy of city management appears to be too confusing for scholars
to take a closer look at the complex reality that was a mixture of
Communist Party ideological imperatives, spontaneous and irregular
administrative and institutional reforms, and professional ambitions.

The author, however, proposes a more nuanced and intuitive approach
to the history of Soviet city planning by opening the discussion of
agency in constructing Soviet socialis

[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-SHEAR]: Harris on Sager, 'Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 11:34 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-SHEAR]: Harris on Sager, 'Marital Cruelty in
Antebellum America'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


Robin C. Sager.  Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America.  Baton Rouge
Lousiana State University Press, 2016.  203 pp.  $48.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-8071-6310-8.

Reviewed by Leslie J. Harris (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Published on H-SHEAR (September, 2016)
Commissioned by Robert P. Murray

In literature and the popular press, antebellum women were lauded for
their virtue and piety; they maintained the sanctity of the home and
were responsible for the moral training of the next generation. Yet,
many homes were not idyllic sites of domestic tranquility. In
_Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America_, Robin C. Sager uncovers the
fascinating and disturbing account of "those spouses who were simply
trying not to kill one another" (p. 12). Through an analysis of 1,500
divorce cases in Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin, Sager chronicles the
meanings and cultural significance of marital cruelty in the years
1840-60. Sager contends that regional scholarship has tended to label
the South as particularly violent, connecting that violence to norms
of Southern honor. To interrogate these assumptions, the author
analyzes Virginia (often considered the archetypal Southern state),
Texas (a frontier Southern state), and Wisconsin (a frontier state in
the process of settlement). Sager finds that the cultural uncertainty
of frontier Wisconsin perpetuated violent domestic cruelty, while
greater stability of gender norms in Virginia and Texas mitigated
violence in marriage.

_Marital Cruelty_ is organized around types of cruelty: verbal,
physical, sexual, and negligence. Within each chapter Sager compares
divorce cases from Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin. In the chapter on
physical cruelty, for example, Sager identifies a fixation on the
exact nature of the violence in each state's attempt to determine the
line between permissible violence and marital cruelty. Courts would
attempt to determine the exact number of blows, the type of violence,
and the emotional valences behind the violence. While there was no
universal standard for what constituted cruelty, violence that
reinforced gendered familial duty was more likely to be considered
legitimate. As such, whipping tended to be more acceptable than
punching, and the seemingly rational administration of violence was
more acceptable than emotional or animalistic violence. Sager also
identifies significant regional differences in physical violence,
explaining that the unsettled frontier of Wisconsin led to "more
permanent injuries and generalized brutality within marriages than
can be seen in either Virginia or Texas for the period" (p. 39). This
chapter is also notable because it includes instances of wives'
cruelty toward their husbands, a particularly egregious violation of
gender expectations.

The chapters on verbal, sexual, and negligent cruelty follow a
similar pattern as the physical cruelty chapter. Verbal abuse was, at
times, considered as cruel as physical cruelty, especially when
verbal insults were brought outside of the home and made public. The
chapter on sexual misconduct illustrates some of the conditions in
which the state could regulate sexual practice, including what was
deemed excessive sexual demands and the transmission of sexually
transmitted diseases to seemingly innocent wives. Negligent cruelty
cases uncovered assumptions of familial duty, framing a failure to
perform these duties as cruelty. In the final chapter Sager traces
community responses to domestic violence, chronicling how communities
negotiated the limits to domestic privacy.

The unrelenting litany of domestic violence can be challenging to
read, but the attention to regional difference and lower court
marriage law makes the study valuable to researchers. While state and
federal appeals and Supreme Court decisions from the antebellum era
are more likely to be accessible, documents from lower-level divorce
cases can be difficult to find. The vast majority of citizens seeking
a divorce would have had their case only heard before a lower-level
court, such as a circuit, district, or chancery court, and Sager's
meticulous research provides unique insight into the ways in which
Americans used the state to negotiate marital conflict. However, as
the author notes, not all Americans had equal access to the law, and
Sager acknowledges that the choice to study divorce cases may
obfuscate questions of race and class. This absence limits the scope
of the study such that we do not s

[Marxism] Statement on Syria

[RKOB via Marxism]

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Joint Statement 
 
of the RCIT and Sınıf Savaşı (Turkey)

http://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/defend-aleppo/

--
Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG
www.rkob.net
ak...@rkob.net
Tel.: 0650 406 83 14



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