[Marxism] protest in Oakland: A new movement struggling to be born?

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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Are the recent protests against gun violence another sign of a new movement
struggling to be born?
https://oaklandsocialist.com/2018/03/25/march-against-violence-another-sign-of-coming-movement/

-- 
*“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone
willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine
sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us
thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” *Sophie Scholl,
executed by the Nazis 2/22/1943. She was 21 years old.
Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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[Marxism] Cricket, lovely cricket was at Newlands when I saw it...

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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I have been a fanatical cricket follower since 1957 - a long time and
though recently my fanaticism has waned and weakened somewhat, last night I
sat up to watch the test match between Australia and South Africa into the
early hours of the morning.  While I nodded nearly napping suddenly I
noticed the camera focus on the pocket and crotch of one of the Aussie
teams - young Cameron Bancroft.

In brief he was trying to scratch the ball on one side while keeping the
other side smooth.  This is the recipe for what is called reverse swing -
the balll moves and the batsmen can be beaten. The action is illegal and is
regarded as cheating.

Everything Bancroft did was captured on the big screen.  We all saw him
loosen his belt and put the offending object used to roughen up the ball in
his under pants.  It was as if a naughty school boy was trapped smoking and
put the joint in his undies.

Well I thought to myself as I went to bed 'Will this be a bgi thing or a
trivial thing?'

My last post was about how we in Australia may be drawn into nucear
conflict beause of the looming USA-China conflict. Given the coverage in
the news, one would think that is a minor matter.  But sport is of another
dimension for Australians.  It is the source of Utopian dreams and
compensation for the shitty lives we lead.

Australians take their sporting dreams more seriously than political
reality. Transgressions are not easily forgiven and it looks like we have a
major incident. The Australian Board of Control meets later on today and
they will be forced, I think, to take action against the Captain, Steve
Smith, who sanctioned the cheating.

Money has flooded into cricket and it has destroyed what used to be known
as the spirit of cricket - its ethos or ethics. Australia has led the way
in the persoanal abuse of opponents and it would seem that generally
Australian players are unloved outside of Australia. I keep thinking of
Marx's great lines *'All* that is solid melts into air, *all that is holy
is profaned*, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.'

My comment on this has always been that we kick against the pricks and
refuse to face with sober senses that our dreams are compensations and that
capitalism ruins everything - even cricket, lovely cricket.

comradely

Gary
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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Re: William Davies - Why the outrage? - LRB

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 3/24/18 7:11 PM, Steve Heeren via Marxism wrote:


this interesting-sounding article is behind a paywall. Is there any way
your readers can get access to it?




Sorry. I assumed it wasn't.

Why the Outrage?
William Davies on Cambridge Analytica

There is at least one certainty where Cambridge Analytica is concerned. 
If forty thousand people scattered across Michigan, Wisconsin and 
Pennsylvania had changed their minds about Donald Trump before 8 
November 2016, and cast their votes instead for Hillary Clinton, this 
small London-based political consultancy would not now be the subject of 
breathless headlines and Downing Street statements. Cambridge Analytica 
could have harvested, breached, brain-washed and honey-trapped to their 
evil hearts’ content, but if Clinton had won, it wouldn’t be a story.


The villains of the piece would no doubt agree with this assessment, but 
not for very plausible reasons. The exposé conducted by Channel 4 News, 
with the support of the Observer and the New York Times, captured the 
now suspended CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Alexander Nix, bragging to 
someone he believed was a potential client that he’d met Trump ‘many 
times’ and master-minded the entire Trump campaign strategy. Nix implies 
that those forty thousand votes were scientifically wrested from Hillary 
and delivered to Trump thanks to micro-targeted advertising and some 
especially persuasive messaging. ‘Our data informed all the strategy,’ 
Nix says, with the swagger of an estate agent reporting that demand for 
period features is red-hot right now.


It’s true that Cambridge Analytica was recruited to work on the Trump 
campaign, though not necessarily because of its Machiavellian 
brilliance. Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager, was on the board of 
the company at the time, and probably tossed it a contract for some data 
analysis so as to keep things between friends. When the company first 
attracted attention in the British media in early 2017, it was reported 
as also having had close ties to the Leave campaign. In one of several 
investigative reports on the topic, the Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr 
wrote in May 2017 that ‘what is happening in America and what is 
happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The 
Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined. And 
Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all 
these relationships in play.’


Against that heady backdrop, the more recent revelations must register 
as something of an anticlimax, not least for Cambridge Analytica’s more 
gullible clients. First, there is no firm evidence that Cambridge 
Analytica provided consultancy services to any of the major players in 
the EU referendum of 2016. Nix initially bragged in an article that it 
had, but confessed to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select 
Committee in February this year that the article had been drafted by a 
‘slightly overzealous PR consultant’. Certainly we should try to 
understand how ‘Brexit and Trump are entwined,’ but that requires 
sociological and economic analysis: the process won’t be as simple (or 
as exciting) as identifying a secret control room.


Second, there is not – and cannot be – any evidence that it swung the 
election for Trump (by the same token, it isn’t strictly provable that 
it didn’t), though unsurprisingly the company claims otherwise. This 
still appears painful for Clinton herself to accept. Interviewed for one 
of the Channel 4 reports, she speaks of Cambridge Analytica’s ‘massive 
propaganda effort [which] affected the thought processes of voters’. And 
yet data analysis is at the heart of modern political campaigning. 
Clinton, after all, preferred to study data on Michigan from the comfort 
of her Brooklyn campaign office than actually to visit the state, even 
as panicking Michigan Democrats pleaded with her to spend time there in 
the final weeks. If things had turned out differently, there would no 
doubt have been star-struck puff pieces on the bleeding edge data 
analytics that were behind the election of America’s first female president.


The scandal is twofold, but neither part really concerns elections. The 
first is the ‘data breach’, which granted the Trump campaign access to 
fifty million Facebook profiles without the users’ permission. This 
occurred by means of the abuse of a simple app called 
thisisyourdigitallife, the like of which many Facebook users will have 
come across. Apps such as this appear in a user’s newsfeed as a 
personality questionnaire, producing relatively banal results which can 
then be shared with friends. 

[Marxism] William Davies - Why the outrage? - LRB

[Steve Heeren via Marxism]

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this interesting-sounding article is behind a paywall. Is there any way
your readers can get access to it?

--


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[Marxism] Capitalism and slavery | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Fifteen years ago I began writing a series of articles about capitalism 
and slavery to answer Charles Post’s July 2003 Journal of Agrarian 
Change article titled “Plantation Slavery and Economic Development in 
the Antebellum Southern United States” that applied the Brenner thesis 
to the “peculiar institution” and its abolition. In essence, Post argues 
that slavery in the south was “pre-capitalist”, a term I always found 
rather noncommittal since it failed to make a distinction between a 
slave economy based on commodity-production—such as the American 
south—and those that were associated with a tributary society like the 
Ottoman Empire. There is a huge difference obviously between Janissary 
slaves who were highly privileged military elites and those men and 
women kidnapped from Africa and forced to produce cotton for the textile 
mills of capitalist England.


full: https://louisproyect.org/2018/03/24/capitalism-and-slavery/
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Re: [Marxism] Review of Gerald Horne?s *The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism

[Allen Ruff via Marxism]

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My 3/22 radio interview with Gerald Horne, re: "The Apocalypse…”:
https://monthlyreview.org/press/gerald-horne-on-the-centrality-of-race-via-wort-community-radio/
 


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[Marxism] Dialectical analysis of the Arab Spring

[Julian Samboma via Marxism]

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Hi Comrade,

This link is to Chapter 5 of my forthcoming book, "The Dialectic and the
Detective: The Arab Spring and Regime Change in Libya":
http://ebeefs.com/beefs/arab-spring-was-a-spring-of-lies.html

Please share with comrades.

Thanks and best regards

JL Samboma


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[Marxism] As we look back on the horror of Iraq 15 years later, I wonder – would this have happened if Trump was president? | The Independent

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Robert Fisk, certifiably insane.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iraq-war-anniversary-tony-blair-president-bush-trump-death-middle-east-a8270516.html
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[Marxism] William Davies · Why the Outrage?: Cambridge Analytica · LRB 5 April 2018

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n07/william-davies/why-the-outrage
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[Marxism] “Johnny Appleseed” and the Revision of American Masculinity - Los Angeles Review of Books

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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MOST AMERICAN FOLKTALES are characterized by violence. The American myth 
glories in the inevitability of westward expansion, venerating war 
heroes or men who wrangled the land into submission, subjugated the 
frontier piece by piece until it no longer existed. To be manly is to be 
strong, and strength is too commonly demonstrated by the physical 
domination of weaker parties. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett grew famous 
through hunting, trapping, and their conquests in the Indian Wars. John 
Henry and Paul Bunyan exerted mastery over nature by laying railroad 
track and clearing the forests, subduing the wilderness by fundamentally 
altering it. The traditional American folk hero adheres to an 
aggressively masculine stereotype, rooted in destructive traits like 
violence, coercion, domination, and mastery. In Johnny Appleseed, Paul 
Buhle and Noah Van Sciver present the life of a man who dramatically 
defies this characterization. Buhle and Van Sciver’s graphic biography 
is nothing if not timely: published in 2017, it appears at a moment when 
some Americans are rekindling and others rejecting the violent and 
oppressive narratives that have long underwritten the nation’s peculiar 
brand of patriotism.


full: 
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/johnny-appleseed-and-the-revision-of-american-masculinity/

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Re: [Marxism] Australia accused of delaying Chinese students' visas - The World - ABC News

[Gary MacLennan via Marxism]

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This goes to the heart of a serious contradiction in Australian politics.
Economically Australia is dependent on China. Militarily it is linked to
Washington. That military link is designed to protect Australia from the
ancient fear of the Yellow Peril (historically China but also Japan in
WW2). But the entry of the UK into then Common Market (later ERU) forced an
economic turn to China that was strongest during the normative phase of
neoliberal globalization (1989-2008). Somehow Australia was able to manage
the contradiction of military loyalty to the USA and ever growing economic
dependence on China.

But we are going now thorugh what Koselleck called a "saddle time" when the
structure and content of the post neoliberal paradigm is being determined.

Fate has deigned to decree that during this period of struggle and
uncertainty the most militarily powerful nation in the world is led by a
dangerous unpredictable moron. It is unclear, to me at least, what the
Trump project actually means. Bannon appeared to want a war with China and
it may be that in Washington the Trump forces may be able to provoke a
conflict with China. The tariffs that Trump is imposing would seem to point
in that direction.

What will Australia do?  Will we follow the flag and join the fake "freedom
of navigation" struggle and send a warship to confront the Chinese?  In
part we are a white colonial settler nation still that has exchanged the
USA as mother country for the UK. And the logic of that relationship is
that we join the drift to war. Certainly Australia has fought in all of the
USA's wars since WW2.

But Chinese money, trade and investment count.  Well let's hope they do and
that the desperadoes who want war will be marginalised. But I have to say
that with the appointment of John Bolton things are not looking good.


comradely

Gary


On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 11:37 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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> My friend David Brophy comments on Sinophobia.
>
> http://www.abc.net.au/news/programs/the-world/2018-03-23/aus
> tralia-accused-of-delaying-chinese-students/9582872
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