[Marxism] Erdoğan Article in WSJ
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. * He is in cul-de-sac. He also confirms that Turkey and his FSA allies are ready to conduct "counter-terrorism operations" against HTS et al. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-must-stop-assad-1536614148 -- Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG (Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net) www.rkob.net ak...@rkob.net Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314 --- Diese E-Mail wurde von Avast Antivirus-Software auf Viren geprüft. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ 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] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA?s Founders
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. * First off, I've been pretty mature and level-headed considering some of the wild and overall insulting stuff hurled at me over pointing out that the Democrats are always the Democrats. Your silence when people were saying that stuff was noted. Second, lighten the hell up, really. Irving Howe was a cranky old grouch and racist asshole. Michael Harrington was a fence-sitter and straddled the status quo when the urban middle class of New York City was being repulsive, racist, and classist towards a set of political developments that could have led to a genuine municipal democratic socialism. If you go read David Harvey, one of his pinpoints on the timeline of neoliberal history is 1975 and Gerald Ford telling NYC to 'Drop Dead'. That was the moment of finance capitalism in America speaking from the Oval Office and causing a counter-revolution we are still in the death grip of. The only reason that happened was because Howe and Harrington and Shanker had broken the alliance between the middle class unionists and the working class taxpayers who were most reliant upon the Welfare state. I will close here with this quote from Noel Ignativev's essay on Thomas E. Watson, the Populist politician who ended life as a Dixiecrat < https://hardcrackers.com/rainbow-coalition-class-war/>: In 1896, the national Democratic Party, feeling the heat of Populism, nominated William Jennings Bryan for President on a platform that borrowed planks from Populism. Now the Party was confronted with a dilemma, to go with Bryan or hold out for the complete platform. At its St. Louis Convention, the Party split, some voting to support Bryan, others to remain independent. As a compromise Watson agreed to accept the Populist nomination for vice-president on a ticket headed by Bryan. The election, won by Republican William McKinley, was a debacle for Populism, leaving its supporters embittered and leading to the Party’s demise. Watson withdrew from politics, turning his attention to writing histories, biographies, and a novel. Then in 1904 he returned to politics, now as an advocate of disfranchising black voters. (At that time, black people still voted in the South even though their political organizations had been repressed and their power reduced when Reconstruction was overturned.) How to explain the change? It was not a result of corruption, bribery or personal betrayal; in fact, it was not personal at all, but representative of a general problem in U.S. history, and there was logic in it. The so-called “Negro Question” had always been his nemesis; if, he reasoned, the black vote could be eliminated as a factor in elections, poor whites would no longer be afraid to vote their interests, and the banker-industrialists dominating the New South could be overturned. Hence, he endorsed the disfranchisement of black voters. He also launched attacks against the Catholic Church, which he accused of serving a foreign power, and against Jews, whom he saw as representatives of northern capitalist interests. (His stirring up popular resentment of Jews led to the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta.) The roots of his transubstantiation were to be found in his failure, and the failure of the movement he led, even in the days when he was preaching unity of black and white poor, to address the material basis of the disunity. There were always fissures in the Populist coalition, largely based in differences in standing between black wage-laborers and white farm owners: for example, when the Colored Farmers’ Alliance proposed to call a strike of black cotton-pickers, the president of the (white) Alliance denounced it as an effort “to better their condition at the expense of their white brethren.” Watson’s efforts at uniting the poor of both races had always been grounded on the premise that the “races” had divergent (as well as common) interests; it was, therefore, a small step for him to abandon those efforts when new avenues promising greater success opened. What if black laborers were more often than whites wage-workers? What if black sharecroppers generally found themselves laboring under more unfavorable terms than whites, terms enforced by legal and extra-legal terror? What if black people made up the overwhelming majority of victims of the convict lease system? What if rural schools for black children were open a hundred days of the year, shutting down during cotton-picking season, while schools for whites stayed open year-round? Why, when the task is to unite the laborers, focus on the things that divide them? Doesn’t it make more sense to focus on the grievances they have in common, their common subordination to the
Re: [Marxism] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA?s Founders
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 in the hell does this have anything to do with any serious discussion of DSA today--for or against (cis-gendered man having sex with etc.etc jussy gossip about Irwing Howe sodomizing Harrington...)? This from your previous comment says it all: "First, I have to admit that I find it deeply satisfying to see that I garnered such a reaction, it means I struck a nerve. Either way one looks at it, my ego profits mightily from this exercise. Way cool!" Please stop trolling on this list. No matter what you think you are doing. Don't need this filth presented as debate on DSA, any more than I need "grabbing Pussy" on part of Trump as legitimate discussion. On Monday, September 10, 2018, 9:14:34 PM CDT, Andrew Stewart via Marxism wrote: 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) There is nothing bizarre or even radical in describing Bayard Rustin as a cis-gendered man, which he was. He did not present himself as trans in public and I have not encountered anything saying otherwise. He was cis, he was a man who had sex with men (MSM), and he was Black. Ergo "*they all are cis men and, except for Rustin, white heterosexuals*" is the proper description. What, is there some juicy gossip about Harrington sodomizing Howe that I missed out on? ;) _ 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] In memory of Fred Feldman (John Riddell)
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. * Sorry to hear this. Vale Fred comradely Gary On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 7:05 AM Richard Fidler via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > In memory of Fred Feldman > (Including: A guide to Fred's online writings) > > By John Riddell > > Fred Feldman, a widely respected socialist activist and long-time leader > of the > U.S. Socialist Workers Party, died August 25, 2018. An accomplished and > influential writer, Fred had fallen silent in recent years due to ill > health. > Fortunately, most of his texts are online and easily accessible. A guide > to his > writings is provided below. > > Back in the early sixties, as a student activist, Fred was often arrested > during > the Freedom Rides for Black human rights. In 1964, Fred supported the > Socialists Workers Party (SWP) presidential campaign against L.B. Johnson > and > Barry Goldwater. He soon joined the SWP. He wrote voluminously for SWP > publications, mostly on international issues, and served for many years as > a > full-time volunteer on the staff of its publications and of > Intercontinental > Press/Inprecor. > > Full: http://tinyurl.com/y7cr9sm2 > > > > > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/gary.maclennan1%40gmail.com > _ 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] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA?s Founders
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) There is nothing bizarre or even radical in describing Bayard Rustin as a cis-gendered man, which he was. He did not present himself as trans in public and I have not encountered anything saying otherwise. He was cis, he was a man who had sex with men (MSM), and he was Black. Ergo "*they all are cis men and, except for Rustin, white heterosexuals*" is the proper description. What, is there some juicy gossip about Harrington sodomizing Howe that I missed out on? ;) b) Two matters to discuss here: You might want to check when bombing of North Vietnam began (hint: JFK was out of office;) he was criticized on the right for *not* trying to invade Cuba i) American bombing of North Vietnam We can go back and forth for days about what exactly qualifies as "American bombing", which to me strikes me as being equivalent to arguing how many Angels of Death can dance on the head of a pin. In the hindsight provided by the Pentagon Papers, the National Archives disclosures, the Kennedy administration papers being declassified, and Wikileaks, there is a cogent and logical case for American provision of arms and bombs to the forces opposing the North Vietnamese as early as 1946 as a response to Ho's election in January of that year. Some might argue the French were not acting as our proxies in that instance (something I fundamentally beg to differ on). However, since Chomsky and his blush response is being brought up, here is what Noam wrote in his polemic RETHINKING CAMELOT < https://zcomm.org/rethinking-camelot/> and particularly < https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/htdocs/chomsky/rc/rc-c01-s05.html >: *On October 11, 1961, Kennedy ordered dispatch of a US Air Force Farmgate squadron to South Vietnam, 12 planes especially equipped for counterinsurgency warfare, soon authorized “to fly coordinated missions with Vietnamese personnel in support of Vietnamese ground forces.” On December 16, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, whom JFK had put in charge of running the war, authorized their participation in combat operations against southerners resisting the violence of the US-imposed terror state or living in villages out of government control. These were the first steps in engaging US forces directly in bombing and other combat operations in South Vietnam from 1962, along with sabotage missions in the North. These 1961-1962 actions laid the groundwork for the huge expansion of the war in later years, with its awesome toll...* Certainly we can ask about when the public knew about bombing or when they became cognizant of the war. But the record indicates, after 50 years, that we had our hands in that cookie jar during the Truman administration with an air war component as late as the first Eisenhower term. ii) he was criticized on the right for *not* trying to invade Cuba We sent a CIA-backed invasion force into the Bay of Pigs. That was an American operation. JFK was criticized for not sending in the cavalry ---to re-enforce ground troops we had already put into action---. That whole episode would have been little more than a failed fireworks display had it not been for the CIA's role in training and provision of arms. As for the matter of parking lots, I don't think that is hyperbolic at all. Where are you going to put all the dump trucks as they steal the pillaged natural resources and other booty from our piratical imperialist operations, Ho Chi Minh's bungalow? We were trying to ransack the place and make room for highways by which the expropriation might be streamlined. I invite you to take a second look at my analysis here: < https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/08/31/grappling-with-the-racism-of-the-dsas-founders/ > -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart from: Matt Harvey to: hasc.warrior.s...@gmail.com cc: marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu date: Sep 10, 2018, 8:00 PM subject: [Marxism] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA?s Founders Andrew, I really wanted to give your piece on DSA a chance. It starts off well and I think the legacy of Cold War era Pentagon--CIA or DC think tank, pick your description--socialists as represented first by the *Encounter* then *Dissent*, Irving Howe and late-period Schactman is fertile ground for repertorial spade work. Shanker's destructive cleaving the old NYC liberal coalition is an extremely interesting footnote if nothing else. I even tried to choke down this bizarre line, "*(and they all are cis men and, except for Rustin, white heterosexuals)" *[Cis?] in the hopes that you were attempting irony or it was an unfortunate editorial addition. Unfortunately the ahistoricism continues apace with an anti-Kennedy rant--climaxing with, "[JFK] was in the
[Marxism] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA?s Founders
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. * Andrew, I really wanted to give your piece on DSA a chance. It starts off well and I think the legacy of Cold War era Pentagon--CIA or DC think tank, pick your description--socialists as represented first by the *Encounter* then *Dissent*, Irving Howe and late-period Schactman is fertile ground for repertorial spade work. Shanker's destructive cleaving the old NYC liberal coalition is an extremely interesting footnote if nothing else. I even tried to choke down this bizarre line, "*(and they all are cis men and, except for Rustin, white heterosexuals)" *[Cis?] in the hopes that you were attempting irony or it was an unfortunate editorial addition. Unfortunately the ahistoricism continues apace with an anti-Kennedy rant--climaxing with, "[JFK] was in the midst of the genocidal effort to turn Vietnam into a parking lot"--that would make Chomsky or Alexander Cockburn blush. (You might want to check when bombing of North Vietnam began (hint: JFK was out of office;) he was criticized on the right for *not* trying to invade Cuba, btw.) So I alas I didn't find out if the overhyped DSA is doomed by original sin. _ 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] Citizen Action: It's Easier than We Think, Pt 1
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * This morning I woke from a bad dream about being in the back seat of a car driven by Puff Diddy who made a sharp turn off the highway into a corn field. As happens customarily, I listen to the radio for a few minutes to get over the bad dream--usually to sports radio stations or NPR. This morning, I accidentally tuned to the wretched WBAI by mistake, thinking I had hit the button for NPR. It was Ralph Nader being interviewed by David Barsamian instead and it was really great stuff. You can get an mp3 or a pdf for $10 from his website, which is kind of steep. But I promise you that you will hear Nader in rare form. https://www.alternativeradio.org/collections/latest-programs/products/nadr020 _ 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] China to take over Zambia's power firm over loan default – Finance – Pulselive.co.ke
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. * https://www.pulselive.co.ke/bi/finance/china-to-take-over-zambias-power-firm-over-loan-default-id8826502.html This news follows puff piece from a few days ago about China offering $60 billion in loans to African countries with no strings attached. _ 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] I see you, Bashar al-Assad
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The following is an open letter to Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria.
***
As the famous Ibn Khaldun phrase goes, "The tyrants bring the invaders".
Bashar al-Assad, you are truly are a pied piper.
For only you can bring tens of thousands of Iranians, Iraqis, Lebanese,
Afghans and Pakistanis to fight your battles on the ground (because for
years now, you've been unable to find enough Syrians to fight for you)
while claiming that you're defending Syrian "self-determination".
You can boast unashamedly of how you valiantly "recaptured" cities such
as Aleppo, while the foreign forces representing you on the ground
boasted of their greater importance than your vastly outnumbered rump army.
These forces were of course dominated by "secular" and "non-sectarian"
border-crossing anti-Islamists - such as "The Nobles of the Party of
God" (Hizballah al-Nujaba), the "Imam Ali Brigades" and "The Party of
God" (Hizballah).
You can engage in conspiracy theories about the "plot" against you
through your friends in Russian and western ("alt-right", and
unfortunately, much of the "alt-left") propaganda outlets. But the real
conspiracy has always been how the "democratic world" allowed you to
employ a genocidal scale of violence in the 21st century.
You can - quite literally - say that "millions" of Syrians rose up
against you in 2011, though you claim all were sympathisers of "Islamic
extremists", while actually sectarian militias from seven different
countries fought your battles on the ground.
full:
https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2018/9/10/i-see-you-bashar-al-assad
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[Marxism] Jim Higgins: The Prophet's Children (Winter 1995/96)
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 late Jim Higgins was irreplaceable. The last paragraph of his review of Tim Wolforth's memoir: The Prophet’s Children is a strange book. At the end of it one does not understand why Tim Wohlforth did what he did. He was, it seems, motivated by goodwill to others, he was hardworking and unselfish, and prepared for sacrifice. But why he made those sacrifices is unclear. He thought Shachtman was a great man, and also James P. Cannon. To be fair, they certainly stood out in a field full of the vertically challenged, but to confer similar status on Healy shows a lack of judgement that sets you firmly amongst those who cannot tell Stork from butter. Still, Wohlforth has an endearing foible of larding his tale with little vignettes from everyday life. He visited a female comrade, Deborah, who worked in the party office, but was off sick. She was, it appears, not sick, just in love with him. Before you can say knife: “... we kissed passionately and started to undress each other. We staggered to her bed and were soon making passionate sweaty love.” Afterwards, Tim gets up, gets dressed, and is about to leave when the phone rings. Deborah answers the phone. “Hello, Trina”, she says, “I just fucked the Great Pumpkin.” Tim does not say so, but I think it must have been Halloween. What other explanation can there be? https://www.marxists.org/archive/higgins/1995/xx/prophetskids.htm _ 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] The Guardian continues its shameless misinformation campaign against Nicaragua and its people | BLOG: Tirades and Diatribes
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://www.camiloemejia.com/?p=195 _ 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] In memory of Fred Feldman (John Riddell)
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. * In memory of Fred Feldman (Including: A guide to Fred's online writings) By John Riddell Fred Feldman, a widely respected socialist activist and long-time leader of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party, died August 25, 2018. An accomplished and influential writer, Fred had fallen silent in recent years due to ill health. Fortunately, most of his texts are online and easily accessible. A guide to his writings is provided below. Back in the early sixties, as a student activist, Fred was often arrested during the Freedom Rides for Black human rights. In 1964, Fred supported the Socialists Workers Party (SWP) presidential campaign against L.B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater. He soon joined the SWP. He wrote voluminously for SWP publications, mostly on international issues, and served for many years as a full-time volunteer on the staff of its publications and of Intercontinental Press/Inprecor. Full: http://tinyurl.com/y7cr9sm2 _ 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] The controversial ending of the US war against Vietnam
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's the Chomsky view - that it was a symbolic but Pyrrhic victory for the DRV/NLF. On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 4:09 PM Michael Meeropol wrote: > MUCH MORE INTERESTING QUESTION _- Did the US in the end "WIN" the wars in > Indochina by destroying the indigenous independent revolutionary forces > within "South" Vietnam thereby leading to the conquest of South Vietnam by > North Vietnam -- the unification of Vietnam under the Northern regime > rather than a true compromise --- leading, ultimately, to the slide towards > capitalism in Vietnam --- > > Whether it was because of the politics of the DRV or the destruction of > the ability of the entire country -- north and south -- to support itself > due to agent orange, unexploded ordinance, a massive death toll, etc. --- > the result was no "socialist paradise" but an economically depressed > country that in the end opted for capitalism. > > The US prevented the spread of a nationalistic version of communism which > of course was the main reason for opposing the Viet Minh when they were > fighting the French --- a great cost in human life. Vietnam, Laos and > Cambodia got to control their own country but the people of none of those > countries ended up with socialism ... > > So the question remains -- did international capitalism ultimately WIN the > war against the INdochinese people?? > _ 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] The controversial ending of the US war against Vietnam
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. * MUCH MORE INTERESTING QUESTION _- Did the US in the end "WIN" the wars in Indochina by destroying the indigenous independent revolutionary forces within "South" Vietnam thereby leading to the conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam -- the unification of Vietnam under the Northern regime rather than a true compromise --- leading, ultimately, to the slide towards capitalism in Vietnam --- Whether it was because of the politics of the DRV or the destruction of the ability of the entire country -- north and south -- to support itself due to agent orange, unexploded ordinance, a massive death toll, etc. --- the result was no "socialist paradise" but an economically depressed country that in the end opted for capitalism. The US prevented the spread of a nationalistic version of communism which of course was the main reason for opposing the Viet Minh when they were fighting the French --- a great cost in human life. Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia got to control their own country but the people of none of those countries ended up with socialism ... So the question remains -- did international capitalism ultimately WIN the war against the INdochinese people?? _ 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] China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’
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. * These are Gulags. They are straight out of the totalitarian playbook of destroying all foundations of life and social being by seeing any kind of attachment as a threat to the Party. It's a society run by the secret police. Such purges are always tried out first on troublesome "alien" forces, even if they are the actual indigenes. Scary. _ 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] is Trump really fascist?
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * This message did not go thru. 2d try. John Reiman wrote However, I still feel that the end of bourgeois democracy in the US, if it happens anytime soon, will more resemble bonapartism/one-man rule than fascism, although there will likely be a fascist component to it. Agree. But of course, with the threat to women's right to their own bodies, all the billions with a different hue or eye-shape from whites, immigrants, those subject to the dangers of military and environmental annihilation, and the working class and all affected by a lifetime of far-right SCOTUS, no reference to farce follows. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ 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] Grappling With the Racism of the DSA’s Founders
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. * Howe's legacy is not insubstantial - just from the founding of Dissent back in the 1950s. That journal has long been a leading voice of voices associated with DSA. Whether or not it is now eclipsed by Jacobin is a legitimate question. More important was Howe's role on shaping DSA's perspective on international matters. Yes, he was a zionist but he was also a cold warrior. Toward the end of his life, he supported the Gulf War of 1991. Not all DSA leaders shared his precise views on that point, but he certainly influenced them. Harold Myerson comes to mind. In 1991 he was a columnist for the Los Angeles Weekly and a DSA member. Myerson devoted a better part of a column of his to red baiting the main local and regional anti-war coalition, attacking it as being led by a bunch of Trots. Those attacks led to the creation of a rival coalition. The war ended before the new coalition did much of anything. Whether or not the current DSA inherits the foreign policy views of Howe is - hopefully - doubtful because of the huge influx of new, younger members and the change of the group's character from a small largely paper organization to a much larger activist grouping. Given all that, the current DSA is more likely to be influenced by the politics of Bernie Sanders and less by Harrington and Howe. While that is problematic on its own terms, it is not addressed by dredging up the history of Shachtman, Harrington and the Coalition Caucus. SR > On September 9, 2018 at 10:15 AM Joaquin Bustelo via Marxism > wrote: > > Yet, when I saw the name of Irving Howe my reaction was: "Irving who? > The guy who wrote World of our Fathers?" So I'm not the one to judge him. > > So that was the first reason I didn't include him. The second reason is > that the charges he lays against Howe are that he was a Zionist > (perfectly true, I gather), that he was part of the cold-war > anticommunist social democratic current years before DSA was founded, > and that he never completely abandoned some of those views. > > _ 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] is Trump really fascist?
POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. * http://www.startribune.com/review-one-person-no-vote-by-carol-anderson/492648911/ On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 11:24 AM John Reimann <1999wild...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes, that is certainly possible. Another alternative could be that if he > and the Republicans feel that loss of control of one or both houses is very > likely this November, they could carry out voter suppression to a degree > not seen since the pre-civil rights days in the US. This could possibly > lead to major protests, possibly even on voting day itself and there could > be mass repression in response to that. That could lead to one-man rule > along with the further expansion of groups like the Oathkeepers. But I > think that would tend to mean one-man rule/bonapartism, not fascism. > > John > > Sent from my iPad > > On Sep 10, 2018, at 5:04 PM, Dennis Brasky wrote: > > If Trump loses the House to the Dems in November and/or faces the end of > his rule from the Mueller investigations, does he blame it on "voter fraud" > and call out his supporters to protest? Do they get violent and if so, will > that be tolerated or crushed? > > >> _ 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] is Trump really fascist?
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. * Yes, that is certainly possible. Another alternative could be that if he and the Republicans feel that loss of control of one or both houses is very likely this November, they could carry out voter suppression to a degree not seen since the pre-civil rights days in the US. This could possibly lead to major protests, possibly even on voting day itself and there could be mass repression in response to that. That could lead to one-man rule along with the further expansion of groups like the Oathkeepers. But I think that would tend to mean one-man rule/bonapartism, not fascism. John Sent from my iPad > On Sep 10, 2018, at 5:04 PM, Dennis Brasky wrote: > > If Trump loses the House to the Dems in November and/or faces the end of his > rule from the Mueller investigations, does he blame it on "voter fraud" and > call out his supporters to protest? Do they get violent and if so, will that > be tolerated or crushed? > >> On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 6:28 AM John Reimann via Marxism >> wrote: >> >> >> In the first place, I hope nobody is claiming that we already have a >> fascist regime in place in the US. if they are, they will have to explain >> why we are not all writing not from prison, but from six feet under. >> >> Which brings me to my second point: What is Trump building? Is it fascism >> or what could popularly be called one-man rule, or bonapartism? I think >> there is an overlap between the two, but one element that distinguishes >> fascism is a real, crazed mass base willing to go to the greatest extremes >> and a militia directly controlled by the fascist movement. The Islamic >> State has those characteristics, in my opinion. Trumpism does not. But it's >> what enables fascism to go farther than bonapartism. Whether Trump will be >> able to achieve a true fully bonapartist, or one-man, rule is an open >> question, in my opinion. Which already says a lot, much more than I ever >> expected to be able to say about the US in my lifetime. >> _ 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] "What to do about 10, 000 al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in Idlib?"
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. * Indeed, this slipped into another article announcing a new supposedly harder response to the current Assad-Putin massacre going on in Idlib: "Asked whether the United States would consider its own airstrikes against terrorist forces who are interspersed with Syrian rebel fighters in Idlib, Jeffrey said, “We have asked repeatedly for permission to operate” there, and “that would be one way” to respond." (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-a-shift-trump-approves-an-indefinite-military-and-diplomatic-effort-in-syria-us-officials-say/2018/09/06/0351ab54-b20f-11e8-9a6a-565d92a3585d_story.html?utm_term=.689651109268) So US sour grapes about not being allowed to continue its own bombing of rebels in Idlib alongside Assad and Putin, as it was doing till the end of the first quarter of 2017, seems to be a factor in this "new" rhetorical approach. This produced events such as the US bombing of a mosque in western Aleppo province (ie, part of 'Greater Idlib') in March 2017 that killed 57 worshippers (https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2017/03/16/us-missile-remains-reportedly-recovered-from-site-of-aleppo-mosque-bombing/). Supposedly the US was targeting "terrorists" (ie, HTS) who it claimed used that mosque,sometimes. Of course, neither Russia nor Assad had any objection to the US bombing Idlib alongside them. The problem is that a couple of weeks later, after Assad, encouraged by this Trump policy, bombed another Idlib town with chemical weapons, the US launched a credibility strike against an emptied Assad airbase in nearby Homs, from where the chemical attack had been launched. Of course, as Trump had tipped off Putin who had tipped off Assad, there wasn't much of value hit, and thankfully no-one was killed (unlike with the US bombing of rebels and "terrorists"), but for this affront, Russia effectively banned US air operations in the northwest corner of Syria (the Russian area of operation) after that. That's why the US now has to ask permission "repeatedly" to rejoin the Assad-Putin bombing of "terrorists" in Greater Idlib that Obama and Trump had both excelled in. On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 7:48 PM RKOB via Marxism wrote: > > 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 bourgeois propaganda article reflecting the general agreement of US > and Russian imperialism to fight "terrorism" in Idlib. > > https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/09/turkey-syria-hts-alqaeda-idlib-erdogan-ceasefire.html > > -- > Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG > (Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net) > www.rkob.net > ak...@rkob.net > Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314 > > > > --- > Diese E-Mail wurde von Avast Antivirus-Software auf Viren geprüft. > https://www.avast.com/antivirus > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/mkaradjis%40gmail.com _ 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] is Trump really fascist?
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 Trump loses the House to the Dems in November and/or faces the end of his rule from the Mueller investigations, does he blame it on "voter fraud" and call out his supporters to protest? Do they get violent and if so, will that be tolerated or crushed? On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 6:28 AM John Reimann via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > > > In the first place, I hope nobody is claiming that we already have a > fascist regime in place in the US. if they are, they will have to explain > why we are not all writing not from prison, but from six feet under. > > Which brings me to my second point: What is Trump building? Is it fascism > or what could popularly be called one-man rule, or bonapartism? I think > there is an overlap between the two, but one element that distinguishes > fascism is a real, crazed mass base willing to go to the greatest extremes > and a militia directly controlled by the fascist movement. The Islamic > State has those characteristics, in my opinion. Trumpism does not. But it's > what enables fascism to go farther than bonapartism. Whether Trump will be > able to achieve a true fully bonapartist, or one-man, rule is an open > question, in my opinion. Which already says a lot, much more than I ever > expected to be able to say about the US in my lifetime. > > _ 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] Green and Pleasant 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. * A great review of a great set of books. The bottom line: it's all about the soil... David Walters _ 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] is Trump really fascist?
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. * Yes, I agree about at least a major wing of the Christian evangelical right wing. Every fascist movement takes on the public face of the culture and traditions that are appropriate to the country or society in which it develops. I don’t think the openly fascist groups, with their “heil, Hitler” and similar stuff, will become a mass fascist movement here; they are too far outside the cultural traditions. Even the day of the KKK is past as far as becoming a mass movement, in my opinion. It’s the Christian evangelicals who have that potential. However, while almost all of them are far right, I don’t think they all are fascist; it’s only.a wing of them that is or has that potential. And that’s the entire point - that they aren’t a mass movement yet and don’t have that mass militia yet, although some of the Second Amendment gun fanatics could develop into such. But clearly, we are far from there, although especially in the US a lot of ground can be covered quite quickly. However, I still feel that the end of bourgeois democracy in the US, if it happens anytime soon, will more resemble bonapartism/one-man rule than fascism, although there will likely be a fascist component to it. John Sent from my iPad > On Sep 10, 2018, at 2:35 PM, Michael Meeropol wrote: > > There is a potential mass movement that began to take shape quite a number of > years ago under the aegis (sp?) of the so-called "Christian Right." My best > source on this is the Chris HEdges book AMERICAN FASCISTS which I think was > published over a decade ago (memory is hazy > >> On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 6:27 AM John Reimann via Marxism >> wrote: >> 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. >> * >> >> In the first place, I hope nobody is claiming that we already have a >> fascist regime in place in the US. if they are, they will have to explain >> why we are not all writing not from prison, but from six feet under. >> >> Which brings me to my second point: What is Trump building? Is it fascism >> or what could popularly be called one-man rule, or bonapartism? I think >> there is an overlap between the two, but one element that distinguishes >> fascism is a real, crazed mass base willing to go to the greatest extremes >> and a militia directly controlled by the fascist movement. The Islamic >> State has those characteristics, in my opinion. Trumpism does not. But it's >> what enables fascism to go farther than bonapartism. Whether Trump will be >> able to achieve a true fully bonapartist, or one-man, rule is an open >> question, in my opinion. Which already says a lot, much more than I ever >> expected to be able to say about the US in my lifetime. >> >> John Reimann >> _ >> Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm >> Set your options at: >> http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/mameerop%40gmail.com _ 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] is Trump really fascist?
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 a potential mass movement that began to take shape quite a number of years ago under the aegis (sp?) of the so-called "Christian Right." My best source on this is the Chris HEdges book AMERICAN FASCISTS which I think was published over a decade ago (memory is hazy On Mon, Sep 10, 2018 at 6:27 AM John Reimann via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > 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. > * > > In the first place, I hope nobody is claiming that we already have a > fascist regime in place in the US. if they are, they will have to explain > why we are not all writing not from prison, but from six feet under. > > Which brings me to my second point: What is Trump building? Is it fascism > or what could popularly be called one-man rule, or bonapartism? I think > there is an overlap between the two, but one element that distinguishes > fascism is a real, crazed mass base willing to go to the greatest extremes > and a militia directly controlled by the fascist movement. The Islamic > State has those characteristics, in my opinion. Trumpism does not. But it's > what enables fascism to go farther than bonapartism. Whether Trump will be > able to achieve a true fully bonapartist, or one-man, rule is an open > question, in my opinion. Which already says a lot, much more than I ever > expected to be able to say about the US in my lifetime. > > John Reimann > _ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: > http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/mameerop%40gmail.com > _ 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] ZCommunications » Both Hate and Hope
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. * Victor Grossman on Chemnitz. https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/both-hate-and-hope/ _ 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] Cabrini Blues | by Reinier de Graaf | The New York Review of Books
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 it came to housing, segregation was enforced through racially restrictive covenants—binding legal obligations written into the deed of a property by the seller that barred African-Americans (and other minorities) from buying, leasing, or using it. The practice was common in both the southern and northern United States. Ironically, it was the National Housing Act of 1934—part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal—that established housing segregation throughout the country. The newly created Federal Housing Administration’s Underwriting Manual expressly identifies “an incompatible racial element” within neighborhoods as a liability and recommends that the social and racial structure of neighborhoods be maintained by restrictions on eligibility for mortgages. It wasn’t until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that such practices were abandoned and housing segregation was definitively banned. full: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/09/27/cabrini-green-blues/ _ 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] Review of Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
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. * NY Review of Books, SEPTEMBER 27, 2018 ISSUE Missing the Dark Satanic Mills Deborah Cohen Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman Norton, 427 pp., $27.95 Practically from the start of industrial manufacturing, gawkers appeared to marvel at the sight. The cotton mills of sooty Manchester were an obligatory stop for every clued-in visitor to that city. In the summer of 1915, Henry Ford’s Highland Park factory in Michigan, the first with a continuous assembly line, drew three to four hundred visitors a day. So prominent a feature of the industrial landscape were factory tourists that Diego Rivera painted them into his mural sequence Detroit Industry (1932–1933). In one panel, the throngs at Ford’s River Rouge plant (young, old, women, men, Dick Tracy among them) look on, their mouths downturned, as the line of chassis—pierced by steering wheels and ministered to by bent-over, jumpsuited workers—rolls by. In 1971, 243,000 people visited River Rouge. Later that decade, the Commerce Department’s USA Plant Visits, 1977–78, a compendium of factories that offered tours, ran to 153 pages. Although American manufacturing output today is near a historic high, the percentage of manufacturing jobs drifted steadily downward in the decades after World War II, and then in 2000 plunged sharply. Factories currently employ less than 8 percent of the American workforce, a consequence of offshoring as well as automation. Perhaps because there is not much romance in watching robots go about their day, the factory tour pickings are now more meager. In the Chicago area in the 1960s, you could have seen how steel, furniture, newspapers, pottery, automobile parts, hosiery, and, yes, sausages were made. Today, the only factory tours left in the city are epicurean: craft distilleries, artisanal chocolateries, and a popcorn factory. If you want to have a look at manufacturing of the Make-America-Great-Again variety in Illinois, you will need to drive nearly two and a half hours to Moline, where the John Deere company, headquartered there since 1848, still provides free tours of the harvester works. With nostalgia for manufacturing jobs now thoroughly weaponized in American politics, Joshua Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World is timely. Freeman, a historian of American labor and the author of American Empire, the Penguin history of the post–World War II United States, takes as his subject huge factories, the behemoths of his title: River Rouge; the Soviet steel complex Magnitogorsk, east of the Urals; and China’s Foxconn City, with its hundreds of thousands of workers, arguably the largest factory ever in operation. Focusing on these giants, Freeman suggests, reveals what happens when concentrated production and economies of scale are taken to the showiest extreme. It also helps to explain the hold that factories have had on the imagination over the past 250 years: the promise (largely delivered on) that industrialization would lift billions out of poverty, competing with the fears (also realized) that it would wreck the environment and sharpen social conflicts. The scholarly literature on industrialization is vast and thicketed with controversy, but Behemoth is not one of those doorstop histories of the around-the-world-in-eight-hundred-pages variety. Rather, the book is episodic, assessing the turning points that take the reader from late-eighteenth-century Britain—where modern factories emerged—to early twenty-first-century China, with most of its pages devoted to the United States and the Soviet Union. Freeman’s account is evocative and fair-minded, a humane treatment of the subject written with flair. It is also a fresh approach to a well-established genre: the biography of an object, which tells a story of global transfer and connections. Thus far, commodities such as tea, coffee, cod, cotton, porcelain, and gold have soaked up most of the attention. Unlike cod or cotton or any of the other objects that have been nominated for world-historical significance, factories did literally make the modern world. Unless you’re reading this review in an old-growth forest, nearly everything you’re looking at now was factory-made. But as Freeman charts the rise of the factory across the world, his book also poses the question, Is the factory a “thing,” and did it have a global history? The rise of the factory was the consequence of three interrelated developments: machinery that was so large or expensive that production could not be carried out at home,
[Marxism] Green and Pleasant 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. * NY Review of Books, September 27, 2018 Issue Green and Pleasant Land Verlyn Klinkenborg The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History by Richard Lyman Bushman Yale University Press, 376 pp., $40.00 This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm by Ted Genoways Norton, 226 pp., $26.95 Fruitful Labor: The Ecology, Economy, and Practice of a Family Farm by Mike Madison Chelsea Green, 164 pp., $18.00 (paper) Walking the Flatlands: The Rural Landscape of the Lower Sacramento Valley by Mike Madison Great Valley/Heyday, 157 pp. (2004) “I owe very little to books,” wrote William Cobbett in 1818. At the time, he was living on Long Island in political exile from his native England, and he was referring to practical books about how to farm and garden. The sentiment sounds a little strange coming from him, for he was a great maker of books of the kind he owed very little to—books like Cottage Economy, A Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn, The American Gardener, The English Gardener, The Woodlands, A Year’s Residence in the United States of America, and, in its own way, Rural Rides. As a farmer and writer about farming, Cobbett was both an innovator and a radical nostalgist, a forward-looking plantsman with an almost Roman sense of the relationship between the farmer as cultivator and the farmer as citizen. In his often obstreperous way, he wrote endlessly about the link between farming and politics, farming and monetary policy, farming and society itself. He was an unrelenting critic of the effect of capital and its manipulation on farmers and farm laborers, and his criticism is still instructive. Agriculturally, we live now on the planet of Cobbett’s nightmares. The United States, Cobbett wrote, “is really and truly a country of farmers. Here, Governors, Legislators, Presidents, all are farmers.” Yet what Cobbett complained of in England—that farming had become a form of investment, purely a matter of profit and return—was barely understood in America at the time. In his illuminating new study, The American Farmer in the Eighteenth Century: A Social and Cultural History, Richard Lyman Bushman quotes a letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington in 1793, commenting on a query from Arthur Young in England. “I had never before thought of calculating what were the profits of a capital invested in Virginia agriculture,” Jefferson wrote. An entirely different farming model prevailed in this nascent country, where land was abundant and labor scarce. The ideal was the “self-provisioning” farm, a family living upon a piece of land and working first to survive, then “to amass resources for the next generation.” As Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur put it in 1782, in one of his widely read “Letters from an American Farmer,” every American farmer was a kind of “universal fabricator like Crusoe,” struggling to develop what Bushman calls “a core household economy to satisfy most of the family’s wants.” Yet “almost no one,” he explains, “was self sufficient. Farmers had to enter into exchanges to live.” Instead of self-sufficiency, the goal was “to keep in balance with the world,” to avoid debt by producing what you needed at home. Farming wasn’t a vocation. It was “an activity, like gardening, that could be combined with other work.” And that other work—building coffins or boats, for instance, like Joshua Hempstead of New London, Connecticut—was as much a part of the system of exchange as the buying and selling of sheep or wheat. The model of the self-provisioning farm eventually died, though it persisted, Bushman notes, right up to World War II and was the basis of the Homestead Act of 1862, which “adopted the small farm as the predominant plan for disposing of the national domain.” Yet you can still hear the idea echoing not only in the realm of small, diversified market farms, which have begun to proliferate (again) in the past decade or two, but also among conventional farmers trying to voice their relevance in the national economy. Take Meghan Hammond, the outspoken Nebraska farmer who appears in This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm by Ted Genoways. She and her family go about farming in much the same way as their neighbors, raising corn and soybeans and running some cattle. They use conventional methods, which involve, as one writer puts it, killing “everything but the crop.” And like their neighbors, they’re trapped, financially and contractually. Late in the book—late enough that the reader has a feel for her frustration—Hammond offers an impromptu survey of the
[Marxism] Aquarius Rising | by Jackson Lears | The New York Review of Books
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. * Review of nine books about the 1960s radicalization. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/09/27/1968-aquarius-rising/ _ 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] Sweden in deadlock | Michael Roberts Blog
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 is not often known is that Sweden is no longer an epitome of state provision. The country is one of the world leaders in having public services supplied by the private sector, paid for by the government. About one-third of all Swedish secondary schools are so-called ‘free schools’, with the majority of them run by for-profit companies, while about 40% of primary healthcare providers are privately owned. Public provision has been outsourced to the detriment of quality. Sweden’s schools have slipped from being one of the world’s best in international ratings to “one of the most mediocre”. The rise of the Democrats follows the pattern of so-called populism that we have seen in Germany, France, Italy, Denmark and other EU countries, as well as with Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US. It is the product of the failure of capitalism to deliver after the end of the Golden Age in the mid-1960s, but particularly after the global financial crash, the Great Recession and the ensuing Long Depression. full: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/sweden-in-deadlock/ _ 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] is Trump really fascist?
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. * In the first place, I hope nobody is claiming that we already have a fascist regime in place in the US. if they are, they will have to explain why we are not all writing not from prison, but from six feet under. Which brings me to my second point: What is Trump building? Is it fascism or what could popularly be called one-man rule, or bonapartism? I think there is an overlap between the two, but one element that distinguishes fascism is a real, crazed mass base willing to go to the greatest extremes and a militia directly controlled by the fascist movement. The Islamic State has those characteristics, in my opinion. Trumpism does not. But it's what enables fascism to go farther than bonapartism. Whether Trump will be able to achieve a true fully bonapartist, or one-man, rule is an open question, in my opinion. Which already says a lot, much more than I ever expected to be able to say about the US in my lifetime. John Reimann _ 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] Guerralism and Nicaragua
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. * I read the comments on Nicaragua of comrade Bustelo with interest. Of course, direct personal experience with the situation in any country is irreplaceable. But so is theory, which is compressed history. (Disclaimer: Much of the following is drawn from articles in Militant International Review, which was in effect the theoretical journal of the Committee for a Workers international. I was a founding member of the US group associated with the CWI. While I have major criticisms of them, I largely agree with much, but not all, of their world view of that time.) We should remember that there was a strike wave in Nicaragua in the earlier 1970s. This includes strikes of teachers, health workers and construction workers. In 1977, construction workers once again went on strike. In the absence of any revolutionary working class force, many workers looked to the FSLN as the force that could overthrow Samoza. However, with many of its founding members drawn from the Moscow oriented Nicaraguan Socialist Party (PSN), the Sandinistas never had either an anti capitalist orientation or one based on the conscious activity of the working class. Instead, its guerrilla strategy meant at best acting IN PLACE OF the working class. A guerrilla strategy rarely succeeds in overthrowing a regime. In Vietnam, for example, the intervention of the regulars from the North plus arms supplied by the Soviet Union played a decisive role militarily. (Of course, so did the support of the Vietnamese masses.) In Nicaragua, the FSLN was facing a military, at best, stalemate by 1970. This resulted in a debate with one wing, the "Proletarian Tendency", advocating rooting itself in the working class. They were expelled. Another wing advocated a Tupamaro-like urban guerrilla strategy. The majority, led by Ortega, favored continuing the guerrilla war. Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan bourgeoisie became divided, with a sector of them organizing what amounted to a popular front called the Democratic Liberation Union (UDEL) in 1974. This included a wing of the union movement. In 1977, Samoza lifted his State of Emergency, but rather than mollifying people, this spurred them on further. An appeal for a "democratic alternative" was made by UDEL in that same year. The response was to assassinate Chamorro, the publisher of the newspaper which published it. This was in 1978. UDEL and the unions called for a general strike on the day of the funeral of Chamorro. 120 000 participated, terrifying the bourgeoisie, which set up negotiations for a "moderate" solution. A wing of the FSLN participated in this until US imperialism was brought in. We should note, once again, that in the absence of a revolutionary organization based on the conscious activity of the working class, of course the FSLN was supported as the force that could overthrow Samoza, but on behalf of the working class. So in early 1979, a new grouping arose, based on some unions, the FSLN and a few bourgeois. The regime was isolated, with its only real base being the National Guard. On June 10, 1979, a spontaneous general strike/mass uprising took place in Managua. Even the National Guard was overwhelmed and fled. A vacuum was created. Into this vacuum marched the Sandinista leadership, many of them from exile in Costa Rica. (Incidentally, there are similar lessons to be drawn from the FMLNexperience in El Salvador. They had a military offensive in January of 1981. This was a military failure. However, the expectation was not a military victory. Commander in chief Joaquin Villalibos explained in Le Monde Diplomatique that the "objective was not to wipe out the army, but to rouse the masses to revolt." But the masses March according to their own timetable, and Villalobos admits that that time had already passed. In early 1979, following the assassination of Archbishop Romero, Villalobos admits there had been an enormous upswing, and he said that "the revolutionary movement at the time had the capacity to paralyze the country without any necessity of resorting to military action." But after the moment passed, the regime went into the offensive.) In Nicaragua, bourgeois state had been overthrown, but the economy remained in private hands. Nor did the working class ever have direct control over this state through its own organization. These were the preconditions for inevitable degeneration and corruption, with the main difference between Nicragua and, say, Zimbabwe being that Mobutu had many decades longer to further that process. A comrade I used to know who was in a small Trotskyist group that supported the FSLN both before and after they came to power recounted to me that after
[Marxism] "What to do about 10, 000 al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in Idlib?"
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 bourgeois propaganda article reflecting the general agreement of US and Russian imperialism to fight "terrorism" in Idlib. https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/09/turkey-syria-hts-alqaeda-idlib-erdogan-ceasefire.html -- Revolutionär-Kommunistische Organisation BEFREIUNG (Österreichische Sektion der RCIT, www.thecommunists.net) www.rkob.net ak...@rkob.net Tel./SMS/WhatsApp/Telegram: +43-650-4068314 --- Diese E-Mail wurde von Avast Antivirus-Software auf Viren geprüft. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _ 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
