[Marxism] Making Safe Nuclear Power from Thorium - what do comrades think of this?

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHO1ebNxhVI
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[Marxism] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Re: [Discussion] Left of Europe, by Ashley Smith | Harper's Magazine

[Tim Nelson via Marxism]

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While Neil's analysis of the nature of the E.U. and the Tory Party is
largely correct, I take issue with his analysis of those that support
Remain:

" The main backers of Remain and a new vote on Brexit are the big
capitalists, the professional middle class, and sections of the well-paid
working class."

I don't think there's really any evidence to support that. Big capitalists
and PMC do largely support Remain, but on the basis of the vote in the
referendum, much more of the working class voted Remain than just "sections
of the well-paid working class".

Wayne Asher made this point much better than I can (
http://secure-web.cisco.com/1Ccgm2_bpkeKTepW2Yj1n5Ta0MK8cKbB8qJ55E5Nnnut9Za0-SQqqvvQdeBjQFauUZT-W-zjFcX0B0Ec6_LFVnGJhJO0Bxh9t8wsVOoDhZqMKr6RVCzEMS4Z199TEGHyw0fRIDA2NFDPYQ_08De1YnomfEJfqJKXZkhhksQhbiFJFFZXQtT2mWXm04Qaq5MxAJHA5qOGN0EkcY4hiJO_RC21BLqBU4SqjiFU4jyIyx0EFvXDAjLYWEOC1WJybJp9wVGvOL55Tn6ZrULmlVUrpacSFAHDhARU2X3PNNe0UXD0oFm2ftM6do20iQK7zUYl-gXJNNomdxXI3zzR6_btX8j9EURR7cbi7q0CO9BidSTMnNFDcYq5_ID0jfQ5SKpTV/http%3A%2F%2Fisj.org.uk%2Fthe-left-and-brexit%2F%29%3A

● "Two out of three Labour voters voted Remain. (I suppose that voting
Labour rather than Tory counts as the minimum entry level of class
consciousness.)

● A majority of those in work voted Remain, irrespective of whether they
were in part-time or full-time work.

● Two-thirds (67 percent) of those describing themselves as Asian voted
Remain. Four out of five black voters (73 percent) voted Remain, and 70
percent of Muslim voters did so too. These voters obviously understand the
real dog-whistle message during the referendum campaign.

● The generally accepted idea that working class areas voted massively for
Leave is only partially correct; many did, but traditional working class
areas in London delivered the highest Remain votes (peaking at 75 percent
in Haringey and 78 percent in Hackney and Lambeth). Remain won in most of
the great working class regional capitals (Bristol, Cardiff, Leicester,
Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.) Only three cities of
similar importance voted Leave and even then they did so by tiny margins
(Birmingham, Sheffield, Nottingham). Working class Scotland voted massively
for Remain of course."



On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 8:30 PM Louis Proyect 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.
> *
>
> On 9/18/19 3:11 PM, DW via Marxism wrote:
> >
> > Davidson clearly stands for Brexit.
>
> I must have missed his Spiked-Online article, I guess.
>
> It strikes me that the only thing he is forthright about is the need for
> the left to break with sectarianism:
>
> That indicates that we’re coming to an end of a particular way of
> building revolutionary organization and its relationship with social and
> labor movements. We’ve tested that method for half a century but have
> not managed to succeed. That’s one reason why Kautskyism is making a bit
> of a comeback, and, although that’s not the answer, it’s clear that we
> have to do something differently, because it’s not going to happen like
> 1917 in Russia.
>
> Now, how to do that is a question. We need intellectual clarity about
> what we’re doing, first and foremost. The approach of the British
> International Socialists back in the early 1960s is more like what we
> need to do today. It was about 500 people, it had real analysis of the
> dynamics of the system, and it was open and fluid and really more
> “Luxemburgist” than Leninist. So, we need revolutionary organization of
> that sort.
>
> In the movements we need to gather together people who agree and want to
> collaborate, regardless of organizational affiliation, around shared
> viewpoints to push demands on a left government if it comes to power.
> This is classic united-front tactics, and it might be easier in Scotland
> than Britain as a whole. But we have to work together on what we agree
> on, like anti-austerity, freedom of movement, more democracy, defense
> and expansion of the welfare state, and so on.
>
> We have come to the end of the process of party building that began in
> the 1960s. We are in a new phase and there are new movements. Of course,
> there are similarities with the past, and there will always be as long
> as capitalism exists; but the left should stop expecting tomorrow to be
> like yesterday and the day before that.
>
> There are n

[Marxism] China to invest in Iranian oil industry

[John Reimann via Marxism]

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China is planning to invest $280 billion in Iran’s oil, gas, and
petrochemical sectors that are being affected by US sanctions,
according to *Petroleum
Economist*  magazine.

The energy affairs magazine quoted a senior source who was linked to the
Iranian Oil Ministry, as stating that this enormous investment represents a
key point in a new agreement between the two countries. This was confirmed
during Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s

visit
to China in late August, to present a roadmap for the strategic
comprehensive partnership agreement, which concluded in 2016.

According to the magazine, Beijing

also
pledged to invest $120 billion in Iran’s oil sector and industrial
infrastructure.

This vast amount will be disbursed during the first five years of the
agreement’s entry into implementation, with possible additional investments
in subsequent similar periods, if both parties agree.

In return, Iran will grant Chinese companies the priority right to
participate in tenders for any new, frozen or incomplete projects to
develop oil and gas fields, as well as all petrochemical projects,
including the provision of technology and staff to implement these projects.

This comprises the deployment of up to 5,000 Chinese security officers in
Iranian territories to secure Chinese projects, as well as the involvement
of other staff and resources in securing oil, gas or petrochemical exports
from Iran to China, including those across the Gulf, the source explained.

Opinion: Are the US and Iran playing the same game?


The agreement also permits China to purchase oil, gas and petrochemical
products at low prices, with the right to delay the payment of these prices
for two years in the Chinese national currency (Yuan) or other “easy
currencies” with which Beijing makes profits, through its projects in
Africa and the former Soviet republics, without resorting to transactions
in USD.

According to the source, this agreement grants China a total discount of
around 32 per cent on all oil, gas, and petrochemical products from Iran.

This plan also emerged during the course of China’s “One Belt, One Road
”
initiative, in which Beijing intends to take advantage of the low-cost
labour force available in Iran, to establish factories to be supervised by
Chinese prominent companies.

In return, the new agreement enables Tehran to strengthen its partnership
with Beijing, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and raise the
level of production in three of its largest oil and gas fields, in addition
to China’s approval to increase the volume of oil imports from Iran.

The source stressed that the main points of the new agreement will not be
publicly announced, although they represent a significant shift in the
balance of power in the world’s oil and gas sectors.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190907-a-blow-to-washington-china-to-invest-280-billion-in-iranian-sectors-targeted-by-sanctions/?fbclid=IwAR0hyS8bLra88ly9AYG3bQ93Q3h89Club3ZEreRas4MdueF1Nl729yvyWc0#.XYLFROk4iuA.facebook

-- 
*“In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” *from "The Black
Jacobins" by C. L. R. James
Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook
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[Marxism] Terry Glavin

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Someone just emailed me about the rightwing tendencies of this guy, who 
I had never heard of before. This bears out his questionable credentials:


https://platypus1917.org/2009/02/01/afghanistan-internationalism-and-the-left-an-interview-with-terry-glavin/

The problem for me is that some real shits have denounced Assad along 
the lines of the Glavin article I forwarded. They are the kind of people 
who signed the Euston Manifesto in the early 2000s.


Maybe there would be less of an impetus to forward what they write to 
the list if there wasn't such a blizzard of lies supporting Assad, the 
latest coming from Verso author Max Blumenthal who just returned from a 
Syria junket with other leftists. When two of the most well-known 
magazines on the left, New Left Review and Monthly Review, are in 
Assad's camp, Glavin's politics don't seen 1/1000th as bad as the 
Assadist left. At least on this question.


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[Marxism] Project Nettie calls on scientists to defend biology

[Philip Ferguson via Marxism]

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"Sex chromosomes were, in 1905, discovered by a female geneticist called
Nettie Stevens. We hope, in some small way, to honour her achievements."

https://rdln.wordpress.com/2019/09/18/project-nettie-calls-on-scientists-to-defend-biology/
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[Marxism] PASS IT ON---When Our Turn Comes' launch debut single 'Climate Strike' | Green Left Weekly

[michael a. lebowitz via Marxism]

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https://www.greenleft.org.au/video/when-our-turn-comes-launch-debut-single-climate-strike

--
-
Michael A. Lebowitz
Professor Emeritus
Economics Department
Simon Fraser University
 University Drive
Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6
Home:   Phone 604-689-9510
Cell: 604-789-4803


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[Marxism] Smash the two-tier labor system! | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://louisproyect.org/2019/09/18/smash-the-two-tier-labor-system/
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[Marxism] The trouble with 'desperate environmentalism'

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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LA Times Op-Ed, Oct. 29, 2015
The trouble with 'desperate environmentalism'
By Joshua Galperin

When I started teaching environmental law and policy, I thought I would 
work with the next generation of extraordinary environmentalists. I don't.


My students are extraordinary, but many see themselves as "corporate 
social responsibility consultants," "ecosystem service managers," 
"sustainability leaders," "industrial efficiency experts," maybe "clean 
energy entrepreneurs" -- not environmentalists. They avoid that label 
because they associate it with stalled progress on the issues they care 
about. But this reinvention is a losing strategy.


It is hard to blame anyone for shying away from the environmental 
movement. Many of my students were infants at the time of the 1990 Clean 
Air Act amendments, the last time there was national legislative success 
on an environmental issue. Without a long view, traditional 
environmentalism can look like a failure.


But dormancy does not equal failure.

The kind of stewardship championed by David Brower, Paul Ehrlich, E.O. 
Wilson, Morris and Stewart Udall, Edmund Muskie and Richard Nixon 
reflected their awe at the grandeur, interconnectedness and 
unpredictability of the ecosystems and wild landscapes. That perspective 
was transformative. It ushered in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act 
and the Endangered Species Act, to name just a few successes.


This suite of laws produced real results and is still working, still 
protecting natural systems and the people who rely on them. After all, 
we have the hopeful and heroic thinkers who gave us the Clean Air Act to 
thank for the 2015 Clean Power Plan, the only tool the United States has 
to enforce national climate change action.


But from climate change denial to corporate malfeasance, resistance to 
enforceable environmental protection is rampant. Seeking any conceivable 
path forward, many young leaders are exchanging their sympathy for the 
victims of environmental damage for the concerns of the regulated 
community. They turn away from enforceability-based approaches and 
promote more conservative techniques that they hope will impress and 
persuade reticent and cynical policymakers and power brokers.


If this is environmentalism at all, it is "desperate environmentalism," 
characterized not by awe, enthusiasm and enjoyment of nature but by 
appeasement. It relies on utilitarian efficiencies, cost-benefit 
analyses, private sector indulgences and anthropocentric divvying of 
natural resources. It champions voluntary commitments, tweaks to 
corporate supply chains, protection not of the last great places on 
Earth but of those places that yield profit or services. From 
market-friendly cap-and-trade to profit-driven corporate social 
responsibility, desperate environmentalists angle for the least-bad of 
the worst options rather than the robust and enforceable safeguards that 
once defined the movement.


At best, the desperate form of environmentalism is a greyhound chasing a 
rabbit lure futilely around the track. At worst it is the ratcheting of 
individually good policies into a sweeping, embedded ideology from which 
the movement cannot return.


The environmentalists of old insisted on transformation not marginal 
gains. The Clean Water Act aimed to restore the integrity of all the 
nation's waters by eliminating water pollution. Now we quantify whether 
such improvement is economically efficient, and we politely ask whether 
an industrial facility might consider reducing its discharge. Perhaps, 
desperate environmentalists suggest, such a reduction would improve the 
bottom line by reducing some costs. Suddenly, economic efficiency moves 
from being one in a collection of cultural values that drive decisions 
to the only relevant value.


And the ratchet turns in only one direction. Having conceded so much to 
conservative approaches, desperate environmentalists cannot advocate 
what is now a radical idea of the past: Government should force 
polluters to reduce pollution for the sake of healthy natural systems 
and human enjoyment.


The problem is, desperate environmentalists strive for a mythical 
conservative embrace but cooperation from the right is unrealistic. As 
they move right in an attempt to meet their opponents, the opponents 
will not, at some undefined threshold of compromise, consent to new 
policies of protection. Rather, desperate environmentalists could 
continue to erode their position until environmentalism grows 
unrecognizable.


The bait-and-switch has already happened. In the 1990s, Republicans 
helped develop the effective but also conservative idea of a 
c

Re: [Marxism] [Discussion] Left of Europe, by Ashley Smith | Harper's Magazine

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 9/18/19 3:11 PM, DW via Marxism wrote:


Davidson clearly stands for Brexit.


I must have missed his Spiked-Online article, I guess.

It strikes me that the only thing he is forthright about is the need for 
the left to break with sectarianism:


That indicates that we’re coming to an end of a particular way of 
building revolutionary organization and its relationship with social and 
labor movements. We’ve tested that method for half a century but have 
not managed to succeed. That’s one reason why Kautskyism is making a bit 
of a comeback, and, although that’s not the answer, it’s clear that we 
have to do something differently, because it’s not going to happen like 
1917 in Russia.


Now, how to do that is a question. We need intellectual clarity about 
what we’re doing, first and foremost. The approach of the British 
International Socialists back in the early 1960s is more like what we 
need to do today. It was about 500 people, it had real analysis of the 
dynamics of the system, and it was open and fluid and really more 
“Luxemburgist” than Leninist. So, we need revolutionary organization of 
that sort.


In the movements we need to gather together people who agree and want to 
collaborate, regardless of organizational affiliation, around shared 
viewpoints to push demands on a left government if it comes to power. 
This is classic united-front tactics, and it might be easier in Scotland 
than Britain as a whole. But we have to work together on what we agree 
on, like anti-austerity, freedom of movement, more democracy, defense 
and expansion of the welfare state, and so on.


We have come to the end of the process of party building that began in 
the 1960s. We are in a new phase and there are new movements. Of course, 
there are similarities with the past, and there will always be as long 
as capitalism exists; but the left should stop expecting tomorrow to be 
like yesterday and the day before that.


There are new things happening, like the struggle over climate change. 
And the most interesting thing today is how these new movements are 
adopting working-class methods of struggle. Just look at how climate 
activists, the International Women’s Strike, and immigrants’ rights 
groups have all turned to striking as the way to advance their demands.


That’s interesting because it means that working-class methods of 
organizing are developing within the movement, but not as a result of 
initiatives from the unions or left organizations. It’s coming up 
organically, with people realizing that if you want to have an impact 
you have to shut down institutions and workplaces by striking. Out of 
this dynamic, we have to find our way to build new forms of 
revolutionary organization and parties to fight for transformation of 
the system into socialism.




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Re: [Marxism] [Discussion] Left of Europe, by Ashley Smith | Harper's Magazine

[DW via Marxism]

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Davidson clearly stands for Brexit. His arguments are quite clear. His
analysis is a clearly Marxist one. People here who oppose Brexit will be
very disappointed. A worthwhile contribution to the "EU" discussion.

David W.
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[Marxism] Glavin: Syria’s Assad has had thousands murdered. Why is a Canadian labour activist lending him credibility? | Ottawa Citizen

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-syrias-assad-has-had-thousands-murdered-why-is-a-canadian-labour-activist-lending-him-credibility
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[Marxism] Border fence construction could destroy archaeological sites, National Park Service finds

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Washington Post, Sept. 18, 2019
Border fence construction could destroy archaeological sites, National 
Park Service finds

By Juliet Eilperin and Nick Miroff

Bulldozers and excavators rushing to install President Trump’s border 
barrier could damage or destroy up to 22 archaeological sites within 
Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in coming months, 
according to an internal National Park Service report obtained by The 
Washington Post.


The administration’s plan to convert an existing five-foot-high vehicle 
barrier into a 30-foot steel edifice could pose irreparable harm to 
unexcavated remnants of ancient Sonoran Desert peoples. Experts 
identified these risks as U.S. Customs and Border Protection seeks to 
fast-track the construction to meet Trump’s campaign pledge of 
completing 500 miles of barrier by next year’s election.


Unlike concerns about the barrier project that have come from private 
landowners, churches, communities and advocacy groups, these new 
warnings about the potential destruction of historic sites come from 
within the government itself.


The National Park Service’s 123-page report, obtained via the Freedom of 
Information Act, emerges from a well-respected agency within the 
Interior Department as the Department of Homeland Security and the White 
House push ahead with their construction plans. While the government 
scrambles to analyze vulnerable sites as heavy equipment moves in, the 
administration also faces external challenges seeking to block the use 
of eminent domain to seize land, as well as lawsuits asking courts to 
halt work in and around wildlife refuges and other protected lands.


New construction began last month within the Organ Pipe Cactus National 
Monument, an internationally recognized biosphere reserve southwest of 
Phoenix with nearly 330,000 acres of congressionally designated 
wilderness. The work is part of a 43-mile span of fencing that also 
traverses the adjacent Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.


With the president demanding weekly updates on construction progress and 
tweeting out drone footage of new fencing through the desert, 
administration officials have said they are under extraordinary pressure 
to meet Trump’s construction goals.



The Department of Homeland Security has taken advantage of a 2005 law to 
waive several federal requirements — including the Archaeological 
Resources Protection Act, the National Historic Preservation Act and the 
Endangered Species Act — that could have slowed and possibly stopped the 
barrier’s advance in the stretch in Arizona.


Trump: Nearly 500 miles of border wall will be completed by end of 2020
President Trump gave an update Sept. 12 on the construction of a wall 
alongside the U.S.-Mexico border. (The Washington Post)
Some archaeological features along the border already have suffered 
damage as Border Patrol agents zoom through in pursuit of migrants and 
smugglers in all-terrain vehicles, according to federal officials and 
two experts who have conducted research in the region.


Environmental groups have fought unsuccessfully to halt construction in 
protected areas, arguing that more-imposing barriers could disrupt 
wildlife migration and threaten the survival of imperiled species.


‘Take the land’: Trump wants a border wall by Election Day

But there has been little mention of the potential damage to 
archaeological sites, where stone tools, ceramic shards and other 
pre-Columbian artifacts are extremely well-preserved in the arid 
environment. Desert-dwelling peoples have populated the area for at 
least 16,000 years, particularly around the oasis of Quitobaquito 
Springs in the national monument, one of the few places where the 
Quitobaquito pupfish and the endangered Sonoyta mud turtle still live in 
the wild.


The oasis was part of a prehistoric trade route, the Old Salt Trail, 
where northern Mexican commodities including salt, obsidian and 
seashells were plentiful, according to the Park Service. The traders 
were followed by Spanish missionaries, Western settlers, and other 
travelers and nomads who came to drink.


The springs and surrounding desert wetlands are just 200 feet from the 
border, where crews plan to bring in heavy earth-moving equipment to 
install the giant steel barriers. Scientists have raised concerns that 
the springs could dry up if crews pump groundwater from the area for the 
barrier’s concrete base.


CBP officials said the agency has looked at “most” of the archaeological 
sites identified in the Park Service report and found just five that are 
within the 60-foot-wide strip of federal land on the U.S. side of the 
border wher

[Marxism] Toronto International Film Festival 2019 | Rita Di Santo | The Morning Star

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/toronto-international-film-festival


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[Marxism] How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Learned to Play by Washington’s Rules

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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NY Times, Sept. 18, 2019
How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Learned to Play by Washington’s Rules
By Catie Edmondson

WASHINGTON — Less than two weeks after being sworn in last year, 
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a young progressive star fresh 
off an upset of one of the top Democratic leaders in the House, put her 
fellow Democrats on notice that she would soon be coming for them, too.


Appearing in a promotional video for Justice Democrats, the insurgent 
liberal group dedicated to unseating entrenched Democratic lawmakers 
that helped sweep Ms. Ocasio-Cortez to power, the Bronx firebrand urged 
her supporters to recruit candidates to run against her new colleagues. 
She was flanked by the group’s three co-founders, two of whom had just 
taken top jobs in her office. There were even whispers that she might 
try to oust Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, a rising star 
regarded by many Democrats as a future speaker of the House.


But after nearly nine months, with her eyes now wide open to the 
downsides of her revolutionary reputation and social media fame, Ms. 
Ocasio-Cortez has tempered her brash, institution-be-damned style with 
something different: a careful political calculus that adheres more 
closely to the unwritten rules of Washington she once disdained.


“I think I have more of a context of what it takes to do this job and 
survive on a day-to-day basis in a culture that is inherently hostile to 
people like me,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview.


Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer
A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with 
voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news 
cycle, telling you what you really need to know.


Gone from her Washington office are her original chief of staff and her 
communications director, two Justice Democrats co-founders who were 
intent on waging their divisive brand of politics from their offices on 
Capitol Hill. No longer an unabashed ambassador of the combative group, 
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has carefully managed her involvement with it.


And she never did go after Mr. Jeffries, now the chairman of the House 
Democratic Caucus, the same position held by former Representative 
Joseph Crowley last year when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez set her sights on 
ousting him. Instead, on Tuesday she announced that her first 
endorsement of a primary challenger to an incumbent Democrat would be 
Marie Newman, who is making a second run at ousting Representative 
Daniel Lipinski of Illinois, a conservative-leaning Democrat who is 
regarded by many of his colleagues as something of an outlier because of 
his opposition to abortion rights and his vote against the Affordable 
Care Act. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is not the only Democrat to break with Mr. 
Lipinski and support Ms. Newman, nor is she the first.


Deciding on the endorsement, she said, was in part a product of having 
learned to balance her twin roles as a dissident and a member of Congress.


“It’s not just about being an activist,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “It 
forces you to grow. So it doesn’t mean you don’t endorse activists, but 
it also requires an assessment for a capacity of growth and how you 
navigate a space like this.”


When she first arrived on Capitol Hill, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her team 
made it clear they planned to use their perch inside Congress as a 
platform for their divisive, outsider brand of politics. On her first 
day of orientation, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez joined protesters camped outside 
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office agitating for the Green New Deal.


“It could have made people mad, they could have put me on the dog 
walking committee,” she joked later that week on a Justice Democrats 
conference call promoting the organization’s candidate recruitment 
campaign. “They still might.”


Ms. Ocasio-Cortez may have meant it as an offhand quip, but her comment 
underscored a reality on Capitol Hill that she and her team were slow to 
fully appreciate: the extent to which power and the ability to get 
things done in the House were dependent on personal relationships and 
respect for the hierarchy. The first-term congresswoman enjoys rich 
public support outside the halls of Congress, particularly on the social 
media platforms where progressive activism thrives. But the approach 
that she and her cohorts champion — pulling the institution to the left 
in part by threatening the careers of any Democrat who fail to embrace 
their ideas — quickly alienated many of her colleagues, and has made it 
difficult for her to get anything done.


And in private conversations, many of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Democratic 
colleagues routinel

[Marxism] Limits to growth

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Guess who's a big fan of Erle Ellis? Leigh Phillips, Jacobin's resident 
eco-modernist, that's who.)


And forget about limits to growth. If human population doubled between 
1804 and 1927, and doubled again between 1927 and 1974, and almost 
doubled again to 7.5 billion today, with the latest forecasts projecting 
more than ten billion people by 2100, the new conservationists bid us 
look to nanotechnology, genetically modified crops and animals, 
laboratory meat, industrial fish farms, hydroponics, optimized 
fertilizers and bio-friendly pesticides, geoengineering and mass climate 
modification, more efficient transportation networks, electric cars, 
denser cities with more people efficient packed in them, safe nuclear 
energy, wind and solar arrays, smart grids, advanced recycling, and much 
else in the techno-arsenal to keep the human species from crashing 
against the wall of planetary carrying capacity. (Erle Ellis, professor 
of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland and 
ally of the neo-greens, offered this absurd assessment in The New York 
Times in 2013: "There really is no such thing as a human carrying 
capacity. . . . We are nothing at all like bacteria in a petri dish. . . 
. Our planet's human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of 
our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental 
limits.")


Christopher Ketcham, "This Land"
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Re: [Marxism] [Discussion] Left of Europe, by Ashley Smith | Harper's Magazine

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 9/18/19 1:02 PM, Richard Fidler wrote:

As the first sentence states, this interview was published in New Politics this
last summer. Available on-line:
https://tinyurl.com/y68ydotk


Excellent. But I want comrades to take advantage of any free downloads 
from Harper's, which for my money, is the best magazine in the USA and 
one I have subscribed to since the early 80s.


I suspect that "Life after Life: Why parole in America in just another 
prison" should be a valuable read especially in light of the Amazon 
documentary I reviewed recently about the rapper whose career has been 
jeopardized by a vindictive judge who keeps extending the number of 
years he is on parole for minor technical infractions.


---

Sara Norman is an attorney who for the past two decades has worked at 
the Prison Law Office, which has been at the forefront of litigation 
against the California prison system since 1976, fighting for the 
improved treatment of the mentally ill as well as the developmentally 
and physically disabled, for the provision of adequate medical care for 
all prisoners, and for the reduction of overcrowding. After a string of 
amazing victories, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, the office 
is nothing short of legendary inside the state’s prisons.


I ask Norman about the parole system. She recounts some of the cases 
she’s been involved with, like that of a prisoner named Gene Horrocks, a 
wheelchair user, who, in 1995, was forced to crawl up two flights of 
stairs to get to a Board of Prison Terms hearing; that of Clifton 
Feathers, legally blind and terminally ill, who, in 1997, was denied 
parole because he had “failed to develop a marketable skill that can be 
put to use upon release”; and that of Elio Castro, a deaf man with 
profound developmental disabilities who, in 1996, was denied parole and 
directed to participate in Alcoholics Anonymous programs without an 
interpreter.


https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/life-after-life/
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Re: [Marxism] [Discussion] Left of Europe, by Ashley Smith | Harper's Magazine

[Richard Fidler via Marxism]

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As the first sentence states, this interview was published in New Politics this
last summer. Available on-line:
https://tinyurl.com/y68ydotk


-Original Message-
From: Marxism [mailto:marxism-boun...@lists.csbs.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Louis
Proyect via Marxism
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 11:18 AM
To: rfid...@ncf.ca
Subject: [Marxism] [Discussion] Left of Europe, by Ashley Smith | Harper's
Magazine

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Neil Davidson interview. Harper's used to have a strict paywall barrier 
but recently they have eased up a bit. I am not sure how many free 
articles you are allowed but this one should be retrieved.

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/left-of-europe-brexit-european-union/
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[Marxism] MR Online | Music and film this time

[Richard Taylor via Marxism]

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> https://mronline.org/2019/09/17/music-and-film-this-time/?utm_source=MR+Email+List&utm_campaign=e1b84a7524-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_MRONLINE_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4f879628ac-e1b84a7524-295763553&mc_cid=e1b84a7524&mc_eid=412a72aac3
>  
> 
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[Marxism] [Discussion] Left of Europe, by Ashley Smith | Harper's Magazine

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Neil Davidson interview. Harper's used to have a strict paywall barrier 
but recently they have eased up a bit. I am not sure how many free 
articles you are allowed but this one should be retrieved.


https://harpers.org/archive/2019/10/left-of-europe-brexit-european-union/
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[Marxism] US mainstream media leaves Israel out of the worsening Iran/Saudi Arabia/Yemen crisis

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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https://mondoweiss.net/2019/09/mainstre am-leaves-worsening/

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[Marxism] March with the Seattle Youth Climate Strikers

[Joseph Green via Marxism]

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Help build the movement to save this green earth--
March with the Youth Climate Strikers on September 20!
(from "Seattle Workers' Voice", Sept. 16, 2019)


Seattle Climate Strike on Friday, Sept. 20, 2019
Meet at Cal Anderson Park at 9 AM.
March to City Hall begins at 12:30 PM.
Amazon and other tech workers will meet at the Amazon Spheres  (7th Ave and 
Lenora)  at 11:30 AM and march to City Hall
Hosted by Washington Youth Climate Strike and 11 other groups

As global temperatures rise, this summer the world has been burning from the 
Amazon to Africa, Siberia and Alaska. But the long-known cause of this global 
warming, greenhouse gas emissions, is not seriously being addressed. That's 
why last year global carbon emissions hit another record, while the United 
States 
burned through more crude oil and related products than ever, and the Canadian 
government has again approved expansion of the Trans Mountain project so that 
more profits can be made by exporting Alberta oil. This business-as-usual 
approach is leading the world to climate chaos and catastrophe.

But over the past year millions more working people, and especially young 
people, have gotten into motion against this nightmarish future. In the face of 
the 
climate change denialism of Trump and others they've been in the streets 
demanding that governments take action. Now, the New York City schools are 
excusing students for the September 20 climate strike. As well, workers at 
Amazon are denouncing Amazon's use of fossil fuels and denouncing Jeff Bezos 
for giving money to climate denying think tanks and politicians. Hundreds of 
them 
are pledging to walk out this Friday, and they'll be joined by Microsoft 
employees 
who are also organizing their fellow workers. These are welcome developments.

System change, not climate change!
--

There must be extensive change in the present economic system, i.e., direct 
government regulation and planning of the economy to achieve rapid transition 
to 
an economy that relies on renewable energy sources. But since the corporations 
will fight to make any regulation be at the expense of the workers and poor, 
there 
must be direct participation of the working people who live with the effects of 
industrial pollution in this planning, and protection of the living standards 
of those 
workers who will be worst affected by environmental regulation. And there 
should 
be overall economic planning to back up the planning and regulation of energy 
in 
order to deal with other environmental problems, and to protect peoples 
livelihoods in the massive economic dislocations that are coming.

Tax the rich to pay for environmental and social programs!
--

Since the big corporations and financiers control society's resources, there 
won't 
be any serious environmental program without taxing them. It's a farce to ask 
the 
poor for more sacrifice. In fact, if the environmental movement is to be 
successful 
it needs to become a class movement. That's because the polluting and 
otherwise earth-destroying corporations and their financiers are bitterly 
driven to 
oppose any environmental measures that infringe on their profits. And further, 
the 
corporate politicians defend them. The billions of working people of the world, 
however, have no interest in preserving the profits of those destroying the 
earth 
and every interest in preserving and replenishing it.

Fight Trump's rampage against the environment!
-

Trump's latest atrocity is an executive order that rolls back a rule that 
somewhat 
protects waters and wetlands. We should fight this along with all the corporate 
frackers, water poisoners, and climate denialists. Among many other things this 
means fighting against the liquefied natural gas plants in Tacoma and Kalama, 
fighting against expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline project in B.C., and 
fighting against pollution and other ravaging of the earth by our own employers.

There's also a need to oppose false solutions
-

One of these is reliance on carbon pricing, which is pushed by the IMF and 
World 
Bank, big oil and coal companies, Gov. Inslee and mainstream environmental 
groups. But carbon taxes around the world have either failed to meet 
environmental goals or are highly unlikely to. For example, Sweden implemented 
the highest carbon tax in the world in 1991, with the gov

[Marxism] Trump replaces Bolton with Robert C O"Brien

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

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Here's a hagiographic plug for his book While America Slept, a paranoid
work.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/16/review-while-america-slept/



-- 
Check out my newest books *Still Tripping in the Dark

*,* Capitalism
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[Marxism] Support the Climate Strike, Not a Military Strike

[Ron Jacobs via Marxism]

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http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2019/09/support-climate-strike-not-military.html

-- 
Check out my newest books *Still Tripping in the Dark

*,* Capitalism
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and Daydream Sunset:60s Counterculture in the 70s
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[Marxism] Gian Maria Volonté

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(From Jairus Banaji on FB.)

Well-known film stars who are (or were) committed left-wingers are hard 
to find. Gian Maria Volonté (1933–1994) was probably the best example of 
this rare category. He was often called an “activist” and his political 
commitment described as “relentless”. In 1994 shortly after G.M.V. died, 
Oreste Scalzone, one of the founders of Potere Operaio who had been 
arrested in 1979 and “accused of planning armed attacks and plotting to 
overthrow the government”, revealed that it was Volonté who helped him 
to escape from Italy, from where he sailed to Corsica on a boat owned by 
the actor. (Scalzone later took French citizenship.)


As an actor Volonté was both prolific and immensely creative, choosing 
his roles with an indelible sense of the politics behind them—in a 
string of overtly political films like We Still Kill the Old Way (Petri, 
1967), Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Petri, 1970), Sacco & 
Vanzetti (Montaldo, 1971), The Mattei Affair (Rosi, 1972), Property is 
No Longer Theft (Petri, 1973), Ogro (Pontecorvo, 1979), Christ Stopped 
at Eboli (Rosi, 1979), and The Moro Affair (Ferrara, 1986)!


“Nothing is more anarchic than power. Power does what it wants”, said 
Pasolini about his film “Saló”, something many of us in India can 
understand perfectly from the past six years or so. It is this theme (of 
the anarchy of power) that forms the thread of one of Volonté’s most 
powerful roles, the police inspector who murders his lover, implicates 
himself in the crime by leaving clues all over the flat, and then 
watches to see how his subordinates in the homicide squad investigate 
her murder—the story line of Elio Petri’s brilliant thriller 
“Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion” (1970).


Here’s a very short summary of the write-up in the link below. Volonté 
worked for major Italian directors from Sergio Leone and his spaghetti 
westerns to overtly left-leaning film makers like Francesco Rosi, Elio 
Petri, Gillo Pontecorvo, Damiano Damiani, and Giuseppe Ferrara. His 
performances were “dazzling” and his versatility astonishing. With the 
same “rigour and aptitude” he could play a worker as well as a 
businessman, an intellectual and a neurotically obsessed police 
commissioner, a revolutionary and a man of power. He starred in as many 
as four of Petri’s films, because each shared the other’s left-wing 
convictions, had a common “predilection for uncomfortable themes” and an 
equal drive to portray a country racked by corruption and social 
turmoil. The Petri/Volonté partnership was the basis on which Italian 
political cinema established its success in the seventies.


“Investigation of a Citizen” would win an academy award in 1971 as the 
“best foreign language film”, and Volonté himself would win numerous 
Italian awards for his portrayal of the police chief whom his colleagues 
referred to simply as “il Dottore”. (The far-left group Lotta Continua 
was quick to identify Volonté’s character as the police official Luigi 
Calabresi who was widely held to be responsible for the death of the 
anarchist railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli, who, it was said, had “fallen 
out” of the fourth floor window of the Milan police headquarters shortly 
after being detained towards the middle of December 1969.)


Volonté’s collaboration with Petri would continue, with Investigation 
becoming part of a “trilogy of neurosis” in which Petri explores the 
pathologies of power, money and work in that order, treating them as the 
three pillars of the “newly enriched Italian middle class” that came out 
of the economic boom of the 1960s. Volonté was also directed by 
Francesco Rosi in several other roles, including that of the 
anti-Fascist writer Carlo Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979), a 
Bafta-winning performance based on Levi’s autobiographical account of 
his years in exile (in 1935–36) in the impoverished Italian South.


“Although Volonté died quite young (from a heart attack in Greece in 
1994, while filming Ulysses’ Gaze...), he also boasts a long list of 
films and roles outside Italy. Among these Ogro, shot in 1979, the same 
year as Christ Stopped at Eboli. Written and directed by Gillo 
Pontecorvo, Ogro was based on true events of Operation Ogre, the name 
given by ETA to its assassination of Luis Carrero Blanco, Prime Minister 
of Spain in 1973. The final film worth mentioning is Il Caso Moro (The 
Moro Affair) by Giuseppe Ferrara in 1986, based on the Christian 
Democrat secretary’s kidnapping and execution by the Red Brigades. For 
this role he won best actor at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986. At the 
1991 Venice Film Festival Volonté’s out

[Marxism] Land Without Bread: the Green New Deal Forsakes America’s Countryside - CounterPunch.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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A super-important article.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/18/land-without-bread-the-green-new-deal-forsakes-americas-countryside/
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[Marxism] Exporting Anti-Corruption, Eastern European Style | Lefteast

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/exporting-anti-corruption-eastern-european-style/
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[Marxism] You can take a horse to water but…. | Michael Roberts Blog

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The monetarists are hopeful that boosting bank profitability will lead 
to an expansion of lending to business and households and get the 
Eurozone out of its renewing depression. This assumes that the problem 
is the banks not being prepared to lend because it is not profitable for 
them.  But is that the reason for low loan growth rates and investment? 
It’s not the supply of money or bank profitability that is the problem, 
but the demand for loans.  Nobody wants to borrow to invest or spend 
even at zero or negative rates, because revenues and profits are 
stagnant, inflation and wage growth are low and, above all, export trade 
has collapsed.


https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2019/09/17/you-can-take-a-horse-to-water-but/
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