[Marxism] Marxism Goes To The Movies | Mike Wayne | Culture Matters
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-Slavery]: Rothera on Holm, 'A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era'
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. * Best regards, Andrew Stewart - - - Subscribe to the Washington Babylon newsletter via https://washingtonbabylon.com/newsletter/ Begin forwarded message: > From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW > Date: January 30, 2020 at 12:48:16 PM EST > To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org > Cc: H-Net Staff > Subject: H-Net Review [H-Slavery]: Rothera on Holm, 'A Kingdom Divided: > Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era' > Reply-To: h-rev...@lists.h-net.org > > April E. Holm. A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and > Sectionalism in the Civil War Era. Conflicting Worlds: New > Dimensions of the American Civil War Series. Baton Rouge Louisiana > State University Press, 2017. 288 pp. $47.50 (cloth), ISBN > 978-0-8071-6771-7. > > Reviewed by Evan C. Rothera (University of Arkansas - Fort Smith) > Published on H-Slavery (January, 2020) > Commissioned by Andrew J. Kettler > > Most people today, April E. Holm contends, do not blame churches for > the coming of the US Civil War. However, plenty of people did at the > time. According to Holm, Robert L. Stanton's _The Church and the > Rebellion_ (1864), for instance, claimed that future historians would > take notice of the "'agency of the Church' and the 'zeal of the > ministers of religion' in promoting secession." Holm cautions readers > against brushing such accusations aside as marginal or irrelevant. _A > Kingdom Divided_ employs religion "as a critical lens through which > to analyze sectionalism, war, and reunion. More than simply gazing at > the church's role in causing secession, it examines how religion, > politics, and morality interacted in a time of political crisis to > create lasting institutional and cultural divisions in American > Christianity" (p. 1). Holm begins with the Second Great Awakening, > ends in the Gilded Age, and focuses on three denominations: Baptists, > Methodists, and Presbyterians.[1] These groups experienced tremendous > growth during the early nineteenth century, but by the 1850s, the > issue of slavery divided each denomination into sectional branches. > As the northern and southern branches of each denomination became > increasingly politicized, people living on the border between North > and South, the region that interests Holm, employed a strategy of > neutrality to navigate through the difficulties of sectional > division.[2] > > Holm defines the border as "the area in which, when faced with > divisive political conflicts, evangelicals struggled with the > question of whether they were northern or southern" (p. 7). > Geographically, it encompassed Delaware, Maryland, western Virginia, > Kentucky, Missouri, and portions of every neighboring state. _A > Kingdom Divided_ charts the expansion of the three religions during > the Second Great Awakening, noting that all three shared the same > imperative to evangelize. As one might expect, the western members of > each of the denominations wanted their own religious institutions. > They established newspapers, seminaries, and publishing houses and > accumulated a considerable amount of property. This did not pose a > major problem until the three churches split into sectional branches. > > Evangelical denominations were national organizations and, therefore, > brought people from across the nation into contact with each other. > Consequently, regional differences of belief about slavery, > abolition, and the nature of sin could not be ignored. Churches, like > other US institutions, soon felt the divisive power of the slavery > question. Slavery did not cause the Presbyterian fracture into Old > School and New School branches in 1837, and Holm does not find either > branch explicitly proslavery or antislavery, but most antislavery > Presbyterians ended up in the New School. The Methodists and Baptists > split into northern and southern branches in 1844-45, largely due to > slavery and questions about clergymen owning slaves. The Methodist > Plan of Separation, designed to ease the transition, led instead to > acrimonious property disputes that heightened tensions on the border. > Making a choice about whether to affiliate with the northern or the > southern branch proved comparatively easy for people who lived in > northern or southern states, but for westerners, it was often nearly > impossible and fraught with difficulty. Holm describes how these > sectional divisions created an ecclesiastical border. > > Problematically, for border evangelicals, division did not mean the > end of the disputes, as both the northern and southern branches of > each denomination laid claim to the border
[Marxism] Granma: Asela de los Santos Tamayo - 1929-2020
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. * Asela de los Santos Tamayo, a prominent Cuban revolutionary, considered a founder of Cuba’s emancipatory education, died in the dawn hours yesterday, January 23, at the age of 90. She was born September 10, 1929 in the city of Santiago de Cuba. At a very young age, she joined student struggles at the University of Oriente, where she graduated with a PhD in Pedagogy, and met Vilma Espín, a life-long friend and comrade. She collaborated in supporting survivors of the attack on the Moncada, and under the leadership of Frank País, became part of the original core of the 26th of July Movement. During the insurrectional, she carried out many missions, moving reinforcements and weapons to the Sierra Maestra. In August 1958, she joined the Rebel Army’s Second Eastern led by then-Comandante Raúl Castro Ruz, who named her of head Education in the liberated territory, where she participated in the creation of more than 400 schools for children and study groups for combatants. After the triumph of the Revolution, her work with Vilma in the Federation of Cuban Women was key, serving first on the National Committee and later becoming Secretary General. In 1966, she joined the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces to direct the Camilo Cienfuegos Teaching and Military Schools, and in 1970 took on a leading role at the Ministry of Education, later coming Minister. Asela was a founder of the Cuban Communist Party and a member of its Central Committee for three terms. She was also a member of the national leadership of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution. Ideals and love united her until the last moments of her life to the Hero of the Republic of Cuba, José Ramón Fernández. Asela will be remembered for her modesty, firmness, commitment to social justice and loyalty to Fidel, Raul, Vilma and the Cuban Revolution. In accordance with her expressed will, her body was cremated and the urn bearing her ashes will be displayed tomorrow, January 25, at the Veterans Pantheon in Havana’s Colon Cemetery, where the public may pay their respects, to be subsequently transferred to the Second Eastern Front Mausoleum, in the province of Santiago de Cuba. http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-01-24/asela-de-los-santos-tamayo-1929-2020 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Bernie Sanders praised George Wallace as 'sensitive' in 1972
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[Marxism] critique of Giridharadas book?
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[Marxism] I Will Hold You in My Arms a Day After the War: The Fifth Newsletter (2020).
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 Monday, 27 January, the South African photographer Santu Mofokeng slipped away. His camera had been a familiar presence in the anti-apartheid struggle; after years of photographing police violence and popular resistance, he tired of making ‘images bespeaking gloom, monotony, anguish, struggle, [and] oppression’, he wrote in 1993. It was then that Santu turned his camera on the life of the black working class. ‘Perhaps I was looking for something that refuses to be photographed,’ he said. ‘I was only chasing shadows, perhaps’. Those who search for the future chase shadows. https://mailchi.mp/thetricontinental.org/i-will-hold-you-in-my-arms-a-day-after-the-war-the-fifth-newsletter-2020?e=77bd6c9887 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Capitalism in America: the Coming Crisis - CounterPunch.org
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. * Economists drunk on capitalism love to talk about the wonders of “creative destruction”. Apart from the obvious—that it is self-contradictory on its face—the concept, even as defined by its apostles, collapses under the weight of historical evidence, critical analysis, and moral philosophy. It is so preposterous as to be comical, but as the basis for a set of myths that has turned a theoretical construct into a secular religion it’s no laughing matter. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/30/capitalism-in-america-the-coming-crisis/ _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] critique of Giridharadas book?
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. * Can anyone on the list direct me to a critique of /Winners Take All /by Anand Giridharadas? It was recommended to my son as an antidote to his anticapitalist sentiments. Thanks, Michael Sola "No investigation, no right to speak." —Mao Tse Tung _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] A Cultural History of Tragedy
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. * LRB, Vol. 42 No. 3 · 6 February 2020 Antigone on Your Knee by Terry Eagleton A Cultural History of Tragedy: Vols I-VI edited by Rebecca Bushnell. Bloomsbury Academic, 1302 pp., £395, November 2019, 978 1 4742 8814 9 When we were students, a friend of mine discovered that he could trump anything anybody else said by using the word ‘tragic’. If someone said he needed a new pair of glasses or was thinking of joining the civil service, the two terse, dismissive syllables were enough to bring the conversation to a halt. ‘Tragic’ is a powerful, semi-sacred word, and the artform it names, like all sacred phenomena, is hedged about with prohibitions. Traditionally, tragedy mustn’t come about as the result of an accident, but must involve fate or providence, which may in turn require the presence of numinous powers. W.B. Yeats could see nothing tragic about a car crash. Pure contingency – falling drunkenly from a fifth-floor window, for example – lacks the grandeur of the tragic. The protagonist must be of high social rank, partly because the lives of ordinary people aren’t valuable enough for their destruction to be worth weeping over, and partly because those who fall from a lofty height make a greater splash. The death of a princess has complex consequences in society as a whole; the death of a chauffeur does not. In a democratic age, by contrast, the ranks of potential tragic protagonists have swollen immeasurably. Anybody plucked from the street and put in an intolerably tight spot is a plausible candidate. But he or she can’t be a villain, since, as Aristotle points out, we don’t grieve over scoundrels. In the traditional view, tragic events must not be reparable. Lear’s problems could not be solved by parking him in an old people’s home, and marriage counselling would do nothing for Anna Karenina. Anything that can be rectified by social reform or a spot of psychotherapy lacks the sublimity tragedy demands. Surprisingly, however, it’s not necessary for tragedies to end badly; in fact, Euripides’ contemporaries seem to have thought he came up with too many gloomy endings. Some tragic art simply portrays the precariousness and fragility of human lives, not their culmination in calamity. As Emily Wilson points out in the first volume of this ambitious history of the form, tragedy in ancient times was confined to the theatre. You couldn’t have a tragic novel or a tragic view of the world. Nor could you have a tragic famine or case of heart failure. Using the word to mean a real-life catastrophe, as we do today, is a case of life imitating art. It follows from this that Aeschylus is tragic but Auschwitz is not. Although sorrow and despair constitute a lingua franca among human beings, tragic art tends to flourish only in highly specific circumstances. Tragedy is an act of collective mourning, remembrance and meditation, an attempt to find some meaning or even value in suffering, not simply an image of wretchedness in the raw. The ceremonies that take place on Remembrance Day are in this sense closer to the ancient sense of tragedy than the carnage they commemorate is. Besides, as both Theodor Adorno and Slavoj Žižek have argued, to describe the inmates of the Nazi camps as tragic is a moral obscenity. It is as though the use of the terms ascribes a meaning, or even a value, to something that resists all intelligibility. Tragedy aestheticises the intolerable. Against this, one can argue that to invest such suffering with a shape by transforming it into art is not necessarily to rationalise it away. But this is a deeply dangerous aesthetic. How is it not simply a matter of gentrifying the unspeakable? From Schelling to Nietzsche, tragedy not only seeks meaning in human affliction, but portrays it in a way that leaves its audience edified and exalted. In wrestling with whatever brings him to ruin, either refusing to succumb to it or defiantly embracing it, the tragic protagonist rises above his defeat at the moment of death. Elated by the triumph of the indomitable human spirit, we leave the theatre chastened and consoled rather than ready to jump off a cliff. Nothing, it seems, is more life-affirming than watching a bunch of our fellow humans being torn apart. This is another reason Auschwitz, it’s claimed, has nothing to do with tragedy. There is a seed of truth in this: watching tragic drama is life-enhancing in the sense that it recalls us to the preciousness of what we see perish. The tragic is a measure of what we value most deeply, which is why we wouldn’t use the term to describe swatting a fly or the suicide of Hermann Goe
[Marxism] James Butler on Labour’s defeat
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. * (James Butler is co-founder of Novara Media.) LRB, Vol. 42 No. 3 · 6 February 2020 What Happened? James Butler on Labour’s defeat In ‘After the Landslide’, a newsletter written shortly after Labour’s defeat in the 1983 general election, the Labour Co-ordinating Committee, a faction within the party, argued that any conversation about the future must acknowledge two things: ‘the sheer depth of our defeat, and the shallowness of much party reaction to it’. The defeats of 1983 and 2019 diverge in several ways: in 1983 Labour was still dominant in Scotland, and the SDP-Liberal Alliance was a far more significant force than the Liberal Democrats or the Brexit Party were in December; Labour remained strong in its northern heartlands, while many of the cities that are now coloured red then returned Tories. But in the two respects identified in ‘After the Landslide’, the position in 1983 was remarkably similar to the one today. This is unsurprising: in such situations defeat is painful, and consolation hard to find. The temptations to jettison everything you ever believed or to refuse the possibility you were wrong about anything are equally strong; some people shuttle between the two several times a day. When Jeremy Corbyn announced his resignation he also called for a ‘period of reflection’, but there has been little evidence of one. Labour has now lost four elections in a row and nobody is without blame. The left should admit to its mismanagement of the party, but explanations of the 2019 defeat that seem to have been held over from 2017 – such as Alan Johnson’s comment, within moments of the exit poll, that Momentum should be purged – are inadequate. At the very least, any inquiry should account for the drop-off from Labour’s performance in 2017; it should also try to explain the Tories’ success. The stereotype of the Labour Party is that it is wracked by factional and ideological warfare, whereas the Conservatives go through bloody and brutal succession struggles but then quickly pull together in pursuit of their true goal, the exercise and maintenance of power. The Tories aren’t averse to ideology – that is a cliché learned from Burke and rarely questioned – but it is certainly less important to them than it is to Labour, an uneasy coalition of organised workers, socialists, social democrats and the progressive middle class. What the party says it believes matters to its members because these beliefs will profoundly shape its actions if and when it forms a government. It is worth emphasising early on that Corbynism brought intellectual and political life – as well as a mass membership – back to the Labour Party. In 2015 Labour didn’t appear ideologically split so much as intellectually exhausted. Its response to the financial crisis had been first to promise to cut ‘tougher and deeper’ than Thatcher, then, under Ed Miliband, to commit to a milder form of austerity. Its whipped abstention on the Tories’ welfare bill shortly after its election defeat was emblematic of its lost bearings. In a field of leadership candidates remarkable only for its lack of distinction, Corbyn’s candidacy reminded the party what it had been missing: socialist principle. Since Corbyn’s election the membership has learned difficult and frustrating lessons about the autonomy of the parliamentary party – many Labour MPs never hid their conviction that Corbyn and the politics he represented were illegitimate. The tension between party members and elected representatives, however, is congenital in Labour: Richard Crossman observed in 1968 that the nominal sovereignty given to the party conference was vitiated in practice by the freedom given to MPs in matters of political judgment. Perversely, the unremitting attacks from his own MPs made it more difficult, not less, for Corbyn to resign even after the weaknesses of his leadership became apparent; the membership backed him again in the leadership challenge of 2016 in part because they feared the political direction the party would take without him. Despite MPs’ fears that Corbyn would democratise the party in the manner once envisioned by Tony Benn – compulsory reselection of MPs and so on – the leadership’s embrace of the new members was lukewarm. Little effort was made to convert members on paper into active participants, and party headquarters didn’t try very hard to find out who they were, why they had joined, or what they wanted. Doubtless most of them supported Corbyn’s anti-austerity message, and they were certainly sufficiently politically engaged to use their veto to prevent his removal. But be
[Marxism] Liberalism at Large: The World According to the ‘Economist’
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. * LRB, Vol. 42 No. 3 · 6 February 2020 In real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled by Stefan Collini Liberalism at Large: The World According to the ‘Economist’ by Alexander Zevin. Verso, 538 pp., £25, November 2019, 978 1 78168 624 9 ‘How do you write like the Economist?’ a new member of staff asked as he began to compose his first leading article for the paper some years ago. ‘Pretend you are God,’ a senior colleague replied. Given that the deity tends not to comment directly on current affairs these days, the anxious recruit may have struggled to put this advice into practice. Browsing leaders from the previous couple of decades might have yielded a more concrete sense of what was wanted. It would appear that omniscience is one attribute of the God-like perspective; absence of self-doubt is another. Then there is a lapidary style leavened by the obiter dicta of powerful individuals, plus a tendency to reiterate a few stern commandments, which one might imagine as: ‘Thou shalt not inhibit economic growth.’ ‘Thou shalt not be parochial.’ ‘Thou shalt not worship false gods – and don’t pretend thou knowest not the ones we mean.’ In recent decades the divine model has served the paper exceptionally well. On remarkable sales of just under 1.5 million copies, in 2017 the Economist generated operating profits of £54 million alongside its subsidiary enterprises, despite being part of an industry where increasingly large losses are already the norm (though print sales have since fallen back somewhat and advertising revenue has declined sharply). And its readers seem to include many, perhaps most, of those who, given their wealth or power, have decisive influence on the world’s future. Certainly, it appears to continue to enjoy special access to such people. The globe’s political and business leaders pay the paper their ultimate compliment: they take an Economist journalist’s call. In Britain, the editor has traditionally been among those given a private briefing by the chancellor of the Exchequer the day after a new budget is presented. At some points in its history, it may have seemed like a cross between the Spectator and the Banker, at others an amalgam of Time and Investors’ Chronicle, but it now has a unique position in the global media landscape that can be expressed as follows: if you want to know what’s happening in the world, read the New York Times. If you want to know what’s wrong with what’s happening in the world, read the Guardian. If you want to know what’s going to happen next in the world (unless tinpot leftists wreck everything), read the Economist. After all, omniscience extends to the future, too, the one period of time that investors are really interested in. Nothing about the Economist’s beginnings could have suggested that it would ever ascend to such dizzy heights. In the course of the agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper should be an independent voice. Launched in August 1843, it was initially entitled the Economist: or The Political, Commercial, Agricultural and Free Trade Journal. In its first year it attained a circulation of 1750 and was already proving its usefulness to men of business for its compilations of statistics about trade and investment. Within two years Wilson altered the subtitle to the Weekly Commercial Times, Bankers’ Gazette and Railway Monitor, a Political, Literary and General Newspaper, signalling its growing ambition. Wilson’s own fanatical attachment to laissez-faire didn’t prevent him from becoming an MP and accepting government office, rising to be financial secretary to the Treasury and paymaster general by the end of the 1850s. He also managed to combine laissez-faire at home with bellicose intervention abroad, vigorously supporting the Crimean War in 1854. This led to a final break with Cobden and Bright, who opposed all such military adventurism and so came in for fierce criticism from the paper. ‘I never see the Economist,’ Cobden answered when asked what he thought of its latest editorial broadside, ‘though I have it on my conscience that I was mainly concerned in starting it. It was always a dull stupid paper even when it was honest. But to read sophistical arguments in no better style than Wilson’s is a task I would not condemn a dog to.’ This less than
[Marxism] How Harvard Aims to Muzzle Unions | by Walter Johnson | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books
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[Marxism] Segment Of Trump's Border Wall Falls Over Into Mexico Due To Wind | HuffPost
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[Marxism] A Cooperation Northfield Primer - Regeneration Magazine
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