[Marxism] An old enigma of the movement

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Decades ago, I spent a few years in the Workers League, the offspring of
the old Socialist Workers Party that led to the current abomination of the
Worldwide Socialist Web. The nemesis of the Workers League was the
Spartacisoid League which was inhabited by alcoholic vampires and
psychological damaged people.

One person who had passed through both of these august sects was a guy
named Shane Mage. Mage, despite his descent from Healyite orthodoxy into
Spatracisoid heresy and even worse, psychidelic Buddhism, as held in some
esteem by Workers League leaders. apparently, he had been a smart guy.

So when some one using that name popped up on this list, I paid attention.

Must be a different person, I thought.

Anthony


Shane Mage 
To: Louis Proyect 
Subject: Re: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes


On Nov 5, 2014, at 11:44 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
>>
>
> So weird to see Shane fulminating against the Fourth International
> for adapting to Stalinism when his primary role on Marxmail is to
> serve as a transmission belt for RT.com talking points.

I wonder where on "RT.com" (which, in fact, I have never even seen--
except maybe for occasional and unnoteworthy reposts on Johnson's
Russia List) it describes Putin as a "Czar" or refers to his KGB
status.  Louis and a few others posting on Syria and the Ukraine could
perhaps more properly be described as "a transmission belt for
Washington Post Editorial Board talking points," but since I refuse to
accept slander as an acceptable element in political discussion I
would never say any such thing.


Shane Mage
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[Marxism] Buffeted by strong winds but safe in the Andes

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Wow! Syriza won! And Miss Colombia is now Miss Universe! Mind blowing! And
Obama is doing what his lefty supporters wanted him to do all along! The
sun must be shining, so we should expect a shit storm. Best from Bogota,
Anthony
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[Marxism] Add me to the list, too

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Although I have a low profile, you can add me to the list of those who are
against the Russian backed "separatists".

Anthony
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[Marxism] Greece

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*Greece*


The Greek crisis, and the crisis of Syriza, IMHO shows just how impossible
capitalism in one country is. Greece in not just in debt beyond the point
where it can every repay even if half the country starves to death, but it
has a long term negative trade balance. Greece, like the United States and
Great Britain, is subsidized by the rest of the world. It consumes more
than it produces. Unlike the USA and UK, Greece is not a central
imperialist power.


The Euro trap means that staying in the Euro zone and European Union
requires the Greek government, and now this means the Syriza government, to
starve the Greek working class and petty bourgeoisie to pay the debt. A
Grexit on the other hand will almost certainly have a devastating impact on
the domestic banking system in Greece and on Greece’s already disastrous
balance of trade.


In other words, unless the Germans play nice, Syriza has no short term
options that will alleviate the desperate situation of the Greek people.
And the German capitalists are not in the mood for playing nice because
Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and even France are waiting to see what
happens.


What to do?


Greeks are not going to have much choice but to fight each other for
survival. The Greek standard of living will fall further, maybe much
further.


The Greek bourgeoisie will transfer whatever assets they can, and that are
still in the country, someplace else.


If you just look at Greece alone, either the left, inside of Syriza and/or
outside of Syriza, will take power, nationalize the land, banks and
whatever large scale production there is in Greece, and impose a
dictatorship to guarantee basic minimum needs of the people. Or, the right
– almost certainly led by New Dawn, will bathe Greece in the blood of its
people, and sell the blood to the German vampires.


Of course, this leaves out a lot: most importantly it leaves out the rest
of Europe and it leaves out what happens between now and descent into civil
war in Greece.


Syriza is clearly trying to buy time. That’s why it blinked in the
negotiations with the European Finance Ministers. The question is, time to
do what?


The first thing that is obvious is that all of Europe is on the precipice.
Greece is going to default. If not last week, this summer, if not this
summer, than in January.


Not even Saudi Arabia’s wonderful present of lower oil prices is enough to
save Greece, or the rest of Europe.


When Greece defaults the train will start to roll: Spain, Italy, Portugal,
Ireland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary….France.


The meltdown that did not happen in 2008 will happen.


The Greek dilemma will become the European dilemma.


Will the rise of the new European left be fast enough, powerful enough, and
revolutionary enough?


Only time will tell. But this is where the efforts of Marxists should be.
If I were in Greece, I would be in Syriza on its left. If I were in Spain,
I would be in Podemos.


Best, Anthony
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[Marxism] What is Grace?

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlFCKZkeBrg
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[Marxism] A vote to 86

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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I vote to 86 Joseph Catron
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[Marxism] 86

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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86 is not police code! it is bartender code! This list is getting too close
to the twilight zone for comfort. The urban dictionary has the correct
definition and it's origin, so I think anyone trying to say otherwise is a
slanderer who may very well work for the evil empire. Read the urban
dictionary here
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=86
Anthony
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[Marxism] 86

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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86 is bar slang for throw the drunken bum out the door. Usually it is done
as softly and nicely as possible. When the drunk does not know the slang,
he is probably hanging out with the wrong social class, i.e. has no
business having anything to do with the common folk. I would say this
applies to Joe and his friends. Anthony
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[Marxism] First round of Colombian Presidential elections

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*A quick note on Colombian Presidential Elections*



Last Sunday the first round of Presidential elections was held here in
Colombia, on the same date as sundry other elections in sundry other
places. The final round between the two top vote getters will be on June 15.

It could have been an election at the country club. There were five
candidates: former Presdient Alvaro Uribe’s former girlfriend, two of his
former Defense Ministers, a candidate he had earlier supported for Mayor of
Bogotá, and his current pet dog.

Sixty percent of the eligible voters failed to show up at the polls. Six
percent of those who did show up cast blank ballots.

Here is a rundown of the candidates.

Clara Lopez, the ex-girlfriend, was the candidate of the leftist Polo
Democratico Alternativo. Lopez was appointed acting Mayor of Bogotá after
former Polo leader Samuel Moreno was removed on grounds of massive
corruption. She served in the position for a few months and tried to defend
Moreno without damaging the party.

Lopez, through luck and hard work, received more than 15% of the votes
cast. This puts the Polo back where it was in terms of vote share before
the disastrous term in office of Samuel Moreno led to a split in the Polo
and seriously tarnished the party’s reputation.

Her lukewarm campaign emphasized change, but gave few details about what
she wanted to change.

Juan Manuel Santos, currently serving his first term as president of
Colombia, was the Minister of Defense under Uribe. He was responsible for
most of the military operations that killed much of the central military
leadership of the FARC. He is the candidate of the Partido de la U and the
Liberal Party. He came in second place with 25% in the first round of
voting and will be on the ballot in the final round.

Santos campaigned as the peace candidate on the basis of his negotiations
with the FARC. The Santos government and the FARC have signed off on three
of the six original negotiating points and seem to be making slow,
difficult, but steady progress toward an agreement.

Oscar Ivan Zuluaga is currently Uribe’s pet dog and the candidate of the
Centro Democratico Uribe, Uribe’s personal political vehicle. Zuluaga came
in first with almost 30% in the first round and will be on the ballot on
June 15.

Zuluaga campaigned against the peace negotiations. He wants the FARC
leaders to spend a minimum of six years in jail and said he would not
continue negotiating unless the FARC unilaterally stops fighting within
eight days of his election. Zuluaga also promised to raise the pay of
everyone and make the schools better.

Martha Lucia Ramirez was the candidate of the Conservative Party. She is an
unsmiling former fashion model who became a Senator and then Uribe’s first
Minister of Defense. While Minister of Defense she fired a lot of the
corrupt old generals and told the rest that they could only continue
stealing if they would get off their asses and fight.

She campaigned against corruption, for jails, and for adding more
conditions to any peace deal with the FARC. She got 15% of the vote in the
first round, and promptly endorsed Zuluaga for the second. Zuluaga promptly
adopted her “peace proposal” which was never really very different from his.

Enrique Peñalosa was the candidate of the Green Alliance. Another former
Mayor of Bogotá, this is his third loss in a row in a campaign for high
elected office. Peñalosa campaigned for a change, too. He wants to
establish a Ministery of Campesino affairs in response to the two recent
agrarian paros (farmers strikes, protests and road blockages.)

Peñalosa only got 8% of the vote.

Now the two first round leaders are scrambling to make deals with the other
parties. The conservative Party promptly split, with Martha Lucia Ramirez
supporting Zuluaga and most of its members of Congress and Senators
supporting Santos.

It seems that the Catholic Church which is historically tied to the
Conservative Party is also split between Santso and Zuluaga. The new pope
favors a peace deal and Santos and the local hierarchy is split for other
reasons including ties of some of it to the paramilitaries and thus to
Zuluaga, and including antipathy to Zuluaga for his promises to improve
public education.

Similarly the Polo Democratico Alternativo seems to be split as well.
Senator Jorge Robledo, the leader of the MOIR faction within the Polo
(descendant of Colombian Maoism) has called for people to vote blank, but
Clara Lopez and Senator Ivan Cepeda  who are allied with the Communist
Party faction of the Polo have called for a vote for Santos as a vote for
peace.

The Green Alliance has said that its supporters are free to vote their
consciences, but key Green alliance leaders like Senator John Sidarsky have
called for a vote fo

[Marxism] Pre-election deal between FARC and Colombian Government

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Another short note regarding Colombia.

One week from today the second and final round of the presidential
elections will be held. Ex-presideent Alvaro Uribe's surrogate candidate
Oscar ivan Zuluaga is facing Uribe's former ally and Defense Minister - and
current president and arch nemesis of Uribe - in the second round. The most
recent polls show Santos with a slight lead, but Colombian polls are
notoriously poor predictors of anything real.

As many people have expected they would, the government and the FARC have
just announced a deal on the next point of the agenda of the peace
negotiations: recognition of victims rights.

You can read the text in Spanish here:

http://www.elpais.com.co/elpais/archivos/ComunicadoConjuntoVictimas.pdf

And an article from a more or less independent source here:

http://lasillavacia.com/queridodiario/acuerdo-sobre-victimas-le-tumba-zuluaga-uno-de-sus-principales-argumentos-de-campana

The agreement has ten basic points:

1. Recognition of all victims of the conflict
2. Recognition of responsibility without any exchange of impunity
3. Satisfaction of victims rights
4. Participation of victims in discussions about violations of their rights
5. Clarification of the truth about the entire conflict and all of its
causes
6. Reparations to victims for damages suffered
7. Guarantees of protection and security for the lives and personal
integrity of victims.
8. Guarantee that there will be no repetition
9. Principle of reconciliation
10. Focus on rights

In addition the communique outlines two practical measures agreed to:

1. Creation of a technical subcommision composed of members of the two
delegations to begin discussing Point 3 of the original agenda which is an
end to the conflict.

2. To advance discussion of the issue of victims an expert commission
regarding the history of the conflict and its victims will be formed. This
commission will not be a substitute for full clarification of the truth of
the conflict. The parties also requested that the Office of the UN in
Colombia and the Centro de Pensamiento y Seguimiento al Diálogo de Paz de
la Universidad organize three regional forums on these issues.

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[Marxism] Colombian Elections

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Final note on the Colombian elections...

Last Sunday incumbent President Juan Manuel Santos was reelected for a
second term with about 8,000,000 votes. His opponent, the Uribista
candidate Oscar Ivan Zuluaga, got about 7,000,000 votes.

Santos was supported by his own party, the Partido de la U, and by the
Liberal Party, Cambio Radical, most of the elected officials of the
Conservative Party - but not its Presidential candidate,  and almost all of
the left. While the left parties did not endorse Santos, the main leaders
of the Polo Democartico Alternativo, Marcha Patriotica, the Progresistas
and the Partido Verde (which is not really very green or very left), all
endorsed Santos int he second round and campaigned for him. The one
important exception was Senator Jorge Robledo of the Polo who campaigned
for a blank vote.

Santos is a cold blooded murderer who brags of being the FARC's worst enemy
and enumerates the dozens of FARC leaders who have been killed on his
orders. Nevertheless, the Uribistas tried to paint him as a friend of the
FARC who was "giving away the country" to the FARC. The Uribistas spread
Bizzarre rumors like Santos planned to cut military pensions so that the
money could be transferred to the FARC.

The central difference between Santos and Uribe is that - like the United
States but unlike former President Alvaro Uribe and his acolytes, Santos
views military victories as the means to bring about a negotiated peace
with the FARC and the ELN rather than as an end in themselves.

Most of the left had some version of the view that this was more of a
plebiscite on the peace negotiations in which they voted "yes" than a
normal Presidential election. The Polo has announced that it will not
accept any posts in the government and will remain in opposition. It is not
yet clear what the Progresistas of Gustavo Petro are going to do.

Santos was elected the first time with the support of Uribe. His oppponent
in the second round of elections was Antanas Mockus of the Green Party.
Mockus received many of the votes of the left in that election (the
rest abstained or cast blank ballots.)

In conventional terms, Santos was elected the first time as the leader of a
"center-right" coalition, and elected the second time as the leader of a
"center-left" coalition.

This time around Santos used the pork barrel so freely that it is hard to
see how he will manage handing out the favors to such a varied array of
crooks and grafters.

The only ones left out of the party are the Uribistas, who Santos is now
making overtures to in an apparent effort to peal off the more opportunist
elements of Uribe´s coalition.

Uribe himself is in bitter opposition, having issued a barely veiled call
for a military coup immediately after the election results were announced
Sunday. TV stations started to broadcast his speech, and then abruptly cut
him off. Only later were carefully edited portions of the least
inflammatory parts of the speech broadcast.

El Tiempo, the most important newspaper in the country and the family organ
of President Santos, did not mention Uribe's speech the following day, and
to date has buried it with a very brief mention in the back pages.

What will happen next is far from clear. Santos will try to finish the
peace negotiations with the FARC as quickly as possible. Assuming that a
deal is made, it will be submitted to a referendum for approval of the
voters.

If a deal is made with the FARC, there will almost certainly be a deal with
the ELN which began a preliminary phase of negotiations the week before the
elections.

The electoral left was clearly strengthened by this election, although
it remains weak and divided. The Polo has recovered much of its former vote
getting ability, while the Progresistas have lost much of theirs.
Superficially the Polo seems to have recovered from the damage done to it
by the Samuel Moreno scandals.

Nevertheless, the independence of all sectors of the electoral left (except
Senator Robledo and his faction) is now in question.

On the horizon now there are several scandals and trials that have yet to
play out. They include the effort to extradite the former head of the DAS
(Colombian version of the FBI/CIA combined) under Uribe who is currently
avoiding prosecution in exile in Panama for a major bugging scandal in
which she orchestrated illegal eavesdropping on the Supreme Court and
opposition. They also include the trial of Oscar Zuluaga's IT chief who was
arrested for the same kinds of things during the election campaign.

Once a peace agreement is in place, it will include a "truth commission"
which will have the responsibility of digging out the reasons for the
conflict in Colombia and investigating the responsibility of of all the
different actors inc

[Marxism] A 20% discount offer for ?GREEK CAPITALISM IN CRISIS?

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Just a book? I thought this was for the whole country.

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[Marxism] Translators collective

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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I think this is a wonderful idea for any movement, but Michael Yates has a
point. However, if movement lawyers and doctors can work for free, I don't
see why translators can't do the same.

Everything Michael says about translating is true, except for one point:
you don't have to be able to write well in the language you are translating
from, only in the language you are translating to. If such a collective
were ever to be set up, it should work with teams of translators so that
someone, say Vladimir, would translate from English to Russian, and someone
else, say Karl, would translate from English to German, and someone else,
say Fred, would translate from German to English, and so on.

Any large, well organized social democratic party, revolutionary party,
workers international, or even a fucking church trying to evangelize people
to steal their money has to have a translation department within their
communications apparatus.

Best, Anthony
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[Marxism] Hard-boiled dectives: Dashiell Hammet

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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​The early hard-boled deteective fiction of the 1920's had a strong left
lean to epitomized by the work of Dashiell Hammet. Raymond Chandler edged
the genre to the right where it mostly stayed until writers like Chester
Himes, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, and Tony Hillerman pushed it back a
little int he other direction. The genre contains all kinds of political
perspectives now. It seems to reflect the direction of class struggle as it
was a decade before the writers publish. Anthony
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[Marxism] UPS contract

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Embattled Hoffa Offers Two-Tier, UPSers Push for a Better Deal
*by Alexandra Bradbury*

In negotiations over the nation’s largest union contract, a three-way
battle is raging. UPS is demanding new givebacks, top Teamsters are
offering them up, and rank and filers are organizing a grassroots network
to push for better—and getting ready to vote down a bad deal, if necessary.

In February, Chief Negotiator Denis Taylor threw one opposition leader off
the UPS bargaining committee; in May he kicked off three more. Their
apparent crime was breaking the information “brownout” that keeps Teamsters
in the dark about their own contract negotiations.

“We were told that negotiations could be just two people in a room and
somehow that’s acceptable,” said Matt Taibi, principal officer of Local 251
in Rhode Island and one of those tossed from the committee. “It’s not.
You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people who have a stake in
it.”

Word had leaked out that the union was proposing a major
concession—creating two-tier pay in package delivery. New “hybrid drivers”
would work 40 hours a week, which could be split between delivering
packages and working inside a hub. They would work Sunday-Thursday or
Tuesday-Saturday at straight time, with lower wages and without the
overtime protection or weekend premium pay that full-time drivers get.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/16398b7af409b092?compose=16398dedfb3b3499
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[Marxism] Red-Brown Zombie plague

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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IMHO the plague is real, but not the result of nefarious infiltration (even
though there have always been infiltrators in any even moderately
significant leftist organization). This is the same type of phenomenon that
swept leftists into the cold war right during the witch hunts, and during
earlier periods of history (remember where Mussolini started). When leftist
individuals and small groups get disconnected from the working class and
mass movements on the left, some of them drift through the swampy waters
until a rightward eddy moves them into the enemy camp. In the post 1927
world, one major path has been from Stalinism to support of state regimes
in conflict with the USA and/or Western Europe. With the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the rise of Putin's klepto-orthodox rightist regime, it
was inevitable that some of the blindest and most corrupt supporters of the
old Soviet Union would go along for the ride, and that they would draw some
others into the right-wing eddies of the swamp along with them.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Trump, Korea and Trade

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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IMHO D. Trump does not really give a rat's ass about No. Korea one way or
the other, except that his current road show is a lever to help the
Republican Party maintain its majorities in the House and Senate in the
upcoming November elections. Sure, he would like to get a Nobel Peace Prize
for "ending the Korean War", and sure, there are opportunities for making
quick bucks in side deals by his daughter or some other member of his
coterie, but the big prize is Congress. Trump is all about getting power
and glory to make money, and making money to get power and glory.

Behind this man stands a sector of the ruling class who want to enrich
themselves at the expense of not only the working class and petty
bourgeoisie, but also of other members of their own class.

Trump's trade war is not about making the pie get bigger so that everyone
can have a nice slice, it is about reslicing a smaller pie so that those
favored by Trump can have a bigger piece. This is the operating principle
behind Trump's "policy". This, and survival, dictate Trump's actions.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Quick note on Colombian elections

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*Quick note on Colombian elections*



Colombia has just elected Ivan Duque president. This should come as no
surprise to anyone who pays attention to Colombia (even though it does seem
to surprise the reporters at the Nation magazine
https://www.thenation.com/article/right-wing-wins-colombia-amid-divisions-left/).




Duque, like outgoing President Juan Manuel Santos is the scion of one of
the country’s powerful political families. His father, Ivan Duque Escobar,
was one of the most powerful 20th century Liberal Party politicians of
Antioquia. In the 1980’s, when Alvaro Uribe was mayor of Medellín, Duque’s
father was governor of Antioquia. Medellin is the capital of Antioquia and
the second largest city in Colombia. Another important friend of the two
men at the time was Pablo Escobar.



The younger Duque grew up surrounded by the politically powerful in Bogotá.
His father graduated to become the Minister of Mines and Development and
served as CEO of the municipally owned water company of Bogotá, SOFASA
(Renault manufacturing subsidiary), and Banco Popular. He also served on
the board of directors of the Banco de la Republica, the country’s central
bank. Duque’s mother also came from a politically important family.



Duque’s roots in the Liberal Party of Antioquia, plus a lifetime spent
making connections in the high society of Bogotá boosted him into the
Senate where he quickly became known as a friend of big business. He was
the key ally of the sugar and soft drink industries’ successful campaign to
squash the Minister of Health’s public education campaign against obesity.
From there, it was a hop, skip and a jump to becoming Alvaro Uribe’s chosen
successor.



The Uribista coalition has been in perpetual crisis. Aside from the number
of its leading figures who have fled into exile to avoid prosecution or
been convicted and served time in jail, the Uribistas are very short on
talent. During the last presidential election they had a field of primary
candidates who could barely compose sentences while standing on two feet.
Their eventual nominee, Ivan Zuluaga was a case in point.



One Uribista who could talk and think on his feet was Andrés Felipe Arias
Leiva. He was Uribe’s chosen successor eight years ago. Known as Uribito,
he was Uribe’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development. Unfortunately
for Uribe’s plans, Uribito was sentenced to 17 years and 4 months of prison
for corruption. He fled to the United States where he now lives comfortably
and anonymously.



Duque is the new Uribito, but under new circumstances. The demobilization
of the FARC ended a whole period of history in Colombia, even though
guerrilla warfare continues. The ELN is expanding into some of the areas
which were once controlled by the FARC, but it is numerically weak and has
no popular support. Guerrillaism in fact, has no popular support.



Instead a broad, but not cohesive, social democratic movement has risen in
its place. Gustavo Petro personified it in the recent elections. While much
is made of Petro’s background in M-19, he is a man whose politics are very
flexible but tend more towards the ideas of 19th century French radicalism
with a hint of environmentalism mixed in than to anything anyone would
associate with the Paris commune or the Bogotazo.



Nevertheless, Petro is a fighter.



His eight million votes represent the largest mass left wing movement ever
seen in Colombia. It has two basic wings: a movement of the working class
and the very poor displaced people of the cities of Colombia, and a
movement of the university trained technocrats, bureaucrats, and
intelligentsia of the same cities. Petro is the titular leader of the
former while Sergio Fajardo, former mayor of Medellín is the titular leader
of the latter.



Duque’s speeches were full of bland, empty posturing attempting to appeal
to Fajardo’s base. He promised not to return to war and even promised to
protect the environment. Behind the empty phrases, Duque has already
launched a lottery for Ministries. Corruption even bigger than usual is the
guiding theme of the new government.



The great danger now is further revival of the paramilitaries. The old
paramilitary organizations have been demobilized and remodeled. During the
election campaign and now after the elections, the new paramilitary
organization, the Aguilas Negras (Black Eagles), closely tied to the
Medellín oligarchy and to the cocaine trade, has threatened Petro
supporters with assassination.



According to Indepaz (Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz –
Institute for Studies of Development and Peace), between January and May
this year there were 78 assas

[Marxism] Ms. Ocasio-Cortez

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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 I think the victory of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in a Democratic Party primary is
fantastic news, but I would not have campaigned for her or voted for her.

Whether or not she does anything progressive, radical or even revolutionary
in the future is besides the point. What is important now is the fact that
the voters in that district voted for her and her program over the machine
hack and his program.

Those mostly working class voters are radicalizing. Her program will not
ever be promoted or voted into being by the Democratic Party, so those
voters will either have to give up and go home, or will come into conflict
with their party over this program.

That's a good thing.

How should revolutionaries relate to this movement? United in the streets
in demonstrations, united in the labor movement, but separate when it comes
to elections.

The idea that we always have to be with the masses, especially in a country
like the United States where a substantial part of the masses have
reactionary consciousness on many issues, is wrong.

Sometimes we have to explain and wait.

Despite the growing mass movements, and their tendency to grow together,
when it comes to supporting the party of war in the United States (that
would be the party of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Clinton
and Obama) we have to separate ourselves from working class supporters of
that party, including the ones who are trying to take it over and change it.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez 's election is not much different from the election and
reelection of Ron Dellums in Oakland/Berkeley. Dellums made lots of radical
speeches and received the enthusiastic support of a large part of the left
in the Bay Area. He was instrumental in deflating the movement for the
Peace and Freedom Party.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez may turn out to be different. Maybe, she will move left
and break with the Democrats. Maybe she will become a revolutionary. Maybe,
she will do great things. But for now she is part of one of the two most
powerful imperialist political parties on the planet.

Anthony
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[Marxism] From 2011 to 2016 hydraulic fracturing water use per well increased up to 770%, flowback increased up to 1440%.

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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 *http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/8/eaar5982
* *The intensification
of the water footprint of hydraulic fracturing*

*1.**Andrew J. Kondash**, *

*2.**Nancy E. Lauer** and *

*3.**Avner Vengosh***
*

 See all authors and affiliations

Science Advances  15 Aug 2018:
Vol. 4, no. 8, eaar5982
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar5982



*Abstract*

Unconventional oil and gas exploration in the United States has experienced
a period of rapid growth, followed by several years of limited production
due to falling and low natural gas and oil prices. Throughout this
transition, the water use for hydraulic fracturing and wastewater
production in major shale gas and oil production regions has increased;
from 2011 to 2016, the water use per well increased up to 770%, while
flowback and produced water volumes generated within the first year of
production increased up to 1440%. The water-use intensity (that is,
normalized to the energy production) increased ubiquitously in all U.S.
shale basins during this transition period. The steady increase of the
water footprint of hydraulic fracturing with time implies that future
unconventional oil and gas operations will require larger volumes of water
for hydraulic fracturing, which will result in larger produced oil and gas
wastewater volumes.
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[Marxism] What would have happened if...

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No one knows what would have happened if

But the situation in Latin America - not just Nicaragua - in 1979 into the
mid 1980's was explosive. David wrote,

" Leaving that aside is if it's applied to Nicaragua, this means...what
exactly? Not seizing power? Limiting, even against the wishes of the rural
masses and urban workers further nationalizations? What would be the point
then of the FSLN coming to power if only to topple the hated dictatorship?
In fact, the self-limitations imposed by the FSLN worked out well, huh?
Plus, Louis, you make it out to seem as if nothing else was going on the
region...like El Salvador, Guatemala, etc. I am not arguing had, as A.
Sandino suggested..."only the workers and peasants can go all the way"
...that the results wouldn't of been any different. Though we never would
know had they, the FSLN, lead the masses to just that, that an even deeper
radicalization would not have shifted the entirety of Central America
working masses to consider socialist solutions. Revolutions happen when
it's least expected, afterall."

What would have happened if the Sandinistas had gone further? Two things
are likely, much deeper radicalization in the rest of Central America and
into Mexico and crucially Colombia, AND US military intervention. Almost
certainly, the proverbial shit would have hit the fan.

What would have happened in the United States? What would have happened to
Iran/Contragate?

What would the results of such a revolutionary crisis have been? We will
never know now, but the Sandinistas and their advisers and friends feared
that they would lose.

Considering where they are now, would this have been worse? or better?

And, what if the gamble had paid off?

Certainly there are no guarantees. The Bolsheviks took the gamble, and in
the end the Russian revolution failed, but certainly without taking that
risk, no revolution in one country is likely to spread and overcome its
isolation.

The path to international socialism almost certainly lies in a series of
successful socialist revolutions in individual countries rather than in one
gigantic international uprising.

Anthony
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[Marxism] What would have happened if

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Well, Lou...if you guys in New York City can pull off a revolutionary in
Brooklyn, I will do my best to join in.

Anthony
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Re: [Marxism] The controversial ending of the US war against Vietnam

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IMHO, the United States lost the wars in Indochina, but won a strategic
victory in the war against world revolution (misnamed the cold war).

The terrible destruction in Vietnam drew a new cordon around the countries
that had become independent of imperialism through revolution.

At the same time, the Nixon-Mao deal meant that China would not aid Vietnam
or any other revolutionary movement in return for access to US markets and
capital. An alliance that has lasted until now, although it may not last
much longer.

Michael Meeropol also raised another interesting question.

1. "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 ---?"

An important part of the independent revolutionary forces in the south in
1945 were the Trotskyists who were massacred by the Viet Minh not the
United States.

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/vietnam/pirani/index.htm

After that date, the rise of independent opposition forces in the south
faced not only the repression of the puppet South Vietnamese State and the
US, but the efforts of the NLF and Lao Dong (Communist Party) to
infliltrate and coopt them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/15/opinion/south-vietnam-had-an-antiwar-movement-too.html

Anthony
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[Marxism] How Can the Left Participate in Electoral Campaigns?? ? Organizing Upgrade

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Warren Mar's interesting article shows how the path of I Wor Kuen, a very
large Chinese immigrant and Chinese American Maoist movement in the late
1970's and early 80's, that was at first close to the Black Panther Party,
and then became a key component of the League of Revolutionary struggle,
one of the largest of the post Maoist parties in the USA followed a path
into the union bureaucracy and the Democratic Party through the
transmission belt of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow coalition. Their remnants are
now a key part of the Democratic Party and union bureaucracy (especially
Unite-Here and SEIU), especially in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Warren represents an important, but not very publicly visible, trend on the
left margin of the Democrats who have organized Asian workers into the
unions, and then marshaled them behind the Democratic Party machine.

Anthony
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[Marxism] How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump

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I think there is no doubt in the mind of anyone who has half a brain and
pays attention that Russia helped Trump get elected. That includes Trump
himself even though he may not pay attention.



Discussing this topic, Michael Meeropol wrote,



“Here is a scary thought -- if Hillary had squeaked in to the Presidency,
the Court packing would not have occurred and the massive deportations and
family separations would not have occurred (as much as under Trump) and
environmental roll backs would not have occurred -- but NEITHER would the
mobilization of young people, the various women's marches, etc.

“AND -- the mass movement towards fascism would have been MUCH STRONGER and
the probability of a Republican wave in 2018 followed by a MUCH MORE
POLITICALLY ACCEPTABLE extreme right-winger knocking off Hillary in 2020
would have been much higher –



“Scary to think we actually as better off in the long run mobilizing to

fight TRUMP than complaining about Hillary's policies from a much more

isolated position ... while being placed in the very dicey position of
"defending" her from extreme right wing attacks ”



I think Michael’s speculation is off the mark.



Trump's election has indeed shaped the path that the class struggle has
followed since he was elected, but it is an over-determination not the
basic driving force. The class struggle in all of its dimensions was
already intensifying while Obama was president.



Think about the real and not rhetorical differences between Trump and
Obama. Obama started off on the environmental path that Trump is following,
Obama started off on the military path that Trump is following, and Obama
started off on the immigration path that Trump is following. And Obama
championed charter schools. The differences in these areas are mostly ones
of tempo or theatrics.



Racism, healthcare and international trade policy are the three key
differences, but who knows where Hillary Clinton would have led us on
health care and international trade, may be the substance would not have
been so much different from what Trump is actually doing.



Trump's mobilization of the ultra-right on the streets is the key
difference. And it is a big difference. But, they likely would have
mobilized if Trump had lost, too. How different would Charlottesville have
been with Hillary in the White House? Maybe Trump would have been the
keynote speaker in Charlottesville, and maybe now he would already be in
jail as a accessory to murder.



On other levels, Trump’s election changed little or nothing. The slow, year
by year bleeding of public education that led to the massive teachers
strikes of the last year (that are continuing in the state of Washington,
and maybe in several districts here in California) would have happened with
or without Trump’s election. It’s a good bet that the strikes would have
happened, too.



On one level things would have been decidedly different. The Democrats
complicity and agreement with, and even leadership of, many of the policies
now labelled with Trump’s name would be much harder to hide, so the growing
split and crisis in the Democratic Party would be much greater.



And, the opportunity for the left to emerge out of the stranglehold the
Democrats have exercised over both the working class within the Democrats
and the revolutionary left outside of the Democrats ever since the New Deal
would be that much greater.



In any case, we have to conduct our struggles with the hand that has been
dealt rather than in some contrafactual speculative alternate world.



One important and difficult to predict twist of the real path of history is
the stench of fear coming from both Democrats and Republicans around the
issue of removing Trump. Their fear of a constitutional crisis has trumped
the demonstrated patriotic fervor of the Democrats, and the long standing
patriotic flag-waving of the Republicans. It seems odd on the face of it
that they have not impeached Trump already and strung him up on a flag pole
somewhere.



What will happen after Mueller’s report finally comes out, should be very
interesting.



Anthony
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Re: [Marxism] How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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In response to Jason: A short list of the political reasons not to vote for
the Democrats were listed in my post. You could start with fracking,
continue with the deporter in chief, go on to drones...

If you think these are issues of individualistic moral analysis, it only
shows that you do not understand which side you are on. That would make you
one of the majority for now.

Anthony

On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 5:20 AM Jason Hicks  wrote:

>
>
> > On Sep 24, 2018, at 7:50 PM, Anthony Boynton via Marxism <
> marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:
> >
> > On one level things would have been decidedly different. The Democrats
> > complicity and agreement with, and even leadership of, many of the
> policies
> > now labelled with Trump’s name would be much harder to hide, so the
> growing
> > split and crisis in the Democratic Party would be much greater.
>
> An extremely important point and a key reason that voting for Democrats
> does not equate to political capitulation unless one has some kind of
> individualistic moral analysis rather than a political one.
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[Marxism] Peking University

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  The link provided by Red Arnie ran into a pay wall, so here is the whole
article

Chinese politics & policy Add to myFT Peking University threatens to close
down Marxism society Students continue to back workers in dispute over
trade union rights President Xi Jinping visits the Marxist literature
centre at Peking University in May to commemorate the 200th anniversary of
Karl Marx’s birth © Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock Share on Twitter (opens new
window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new
window) Save Save to myFT Yuan Yang and Xinning Liu in Beijing SEPTEMBER
23, 2018 Print this page33 China’s most prestigious university has
threatened to shut down its student Marxist society amid a continuing
police crackdown on students who support workers in a dispute over trade
union organisation. Under China’s Communist party, Marxism has been part of
the compulsory university curriculum for decades. But universities are now
under pressure to embrace “Xi Jinping thought” as the president strengthens
his ideological control over the nation. The government is also inspecting
primary and secondary school textbooks to remove foreign content. Peking
University’s Marxist Society was not able to re-register for the new
academic year because it did not have the backing required from teachers,
the society said. “Everyone can see what the Peking University Marxist
Society has done over the past few years to speak out for marginalised
groups on campus,” it added. The threat to close the society follows a
summer of student and worker unrest in the Chinese manufacturing hub of
Shenzhen. Students from Peking and other elite Chinese universities were
detained for supporting workers trying to organise a trade union at a Jasic
Technology factory. While workers’ protests have become more common in
China, the support of a small yet growing student movement has made the
Jasic protests politically sensitive. Zhan Zhenzhen, a member of the
Marxist Society at Peking University, was among those arrested in Shenzhen
last month. In July, police detained about 30 workers in the biggest such
arrest since 2015. In August, police wearing riot gear stormed a student
dormitory and took away about 40 students who had been supporting the
workers, according to witnesses. Recommended Jamil Anderlini China is at
risk of becoming a colonialist power Mr Zhan and the Marxist Society
initiated an investigation into working conditions for low-paid workers at
Peking University this year. The group said its focus was labour rights,
and it gained media attention in 2015 when it published an earlier working
conditions report. The Marxist Society said it had approached teachers in
the university’s department of Marxism for support with registration but
had been refused, with no explanation. A teacher from another department
had volunteered to register the society but said his offer was rejected by
the university’s Student Society Committee. The university’s Marxism
department did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The
Student Society Committee declined to comment. Mr Xi visited Peking
University this year to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s
birth. “Peking University is the first place to spread and study Marxism in
China. It makes a great contribution to the spread of Marxism and the
foundation of China’s Communist Party,” he said at the time. Be alerted on
Chinese politics & policy Enable alerts Copyright The Financial Times
Limited 2018. All rights reserved. Latest on Chinese politics & policy
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Special Report China’s Belt & Road Initiative Special Report FT Wealth
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highlights sharper focus on affordability Belt and Road Initiative India on
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and Road Initiative ‘We say, if you want to get rich, build roads first’
COMMENTS (33) Sign in + Follow Submit Comment Please keep comments
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comments. Newest | Oldest | Most recommended Yu-Tai Chia 2 days ago Under a
communist government proletariat is supposed to dictate the political
power. What this story tells us is that the People's Republic of China is
not a proletariat dictatorship. What President Xi wants is an empire and he
is the emperor 

[Marxism] Why Manafort matters

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https://www.publicintegrity.org/2018/09/26/22258/manaforts-guilty-plea-goes-heart-russian-intelligence-operation-2016?utm_source=Watchdog&utm_campaign=4f0beeb78f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_08_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ffd1d0160d-4f0beeb78f-101663225&mc_cid=4f0beeb78f&mc_eid=afdc6da885
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[Marxism] Assadist and Putinist BS

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Given how willing Joaquin is to swallow all Trump, Putin et al.'s bullshit
propaganda about
everything, I have to ask him if he also believes in the Easter Bunny?

Joaquin knows that Putin has already terminated with extreme prejudice
thousands. Does he really
think his toleration of even his critics in the United States is limitless?
Does he think Putin's
toleration for Marxists is limitless?

Learn to spell indicments before you apply for another job in the media.
And please stop repeating brain-dead Assadist and Putinist imperialist
propaganda.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Another strike

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https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/health-and-medicine/article220348595.html
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[Marxism] Democrats and Trump

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Trump has been a useful idiot for the Republicans, so the Democrats are
hoping to have their turn. This is a new twist on the old two party shell
game, that the DSA-Our Revolutipn left will bear a share of responsibility
for in the Democrats take control of the House. Also, the implications for
Democratic plans for impeachment are there for anyone interested to read.

First Up if Democrats Win: Campaign and Ethics Changes, Infrastructure and
Drug Prices

Representative Nancy Pelosi says House Democrats will focus on
infrastructure and prescription drug costs, in an effort to test President
Trump on bipartisan deals, if they gain control of Congress in the midterm
election.CreditCreditErin Schaff for The New York Times

New York Times By Nicholas Fandos Oct. 31, 2018

WASHINGTON — Democrats would use their first month in the House majority to
advance sweeping changes to future campaign and ethics laws, requiring the
disclosure of shadowy political donors, outlawing the gerrymandering of
congressional districts and restoring key enforcement provisions to the
Voting Rights Act, top Democratic leaders said on Tuesday.



If they win, they would then turn to infrastructure investment and the
climbing costs of prescription drugs, answering voter demands and
challenging President Trump’s willingness to work on shared policy
priorities with a party he has vilified. The idea, said Representative
Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, is to show voters that
Democrats are a governing party, not the leftist mob that Mr. Trump
describes — and to extend an arm of cooperation to the president after an
electoral rebuke.



“This is going to be a bitter pill for them all to swallow when they see
the election results, if they turn out as we expect,” Ms. Pelosi said in an
extended interview on Tuesday, predicting a Democratic wave. She added of
the prospect Mr. Trump would collaborate, “I don’t think he himself knows
what he is going to do.”



As Mr. Trump spends the final week of a scorched-earth midterm campaign
rallying his base around hot-button immigration issues and depicting
Democrats as a security threat, Ms. Pelosi and her deputies sought to
project a more modest and politically popular agenda on issues ranging from
health care to criminal justice changes. They said they would work to
improve the Affordable Care Act, for example, rather than rushing to
replace it with a single-payer health care plan.



Full article here
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/us/politics/democrats-midterm-elections.html
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Re: [Marxism] Democrats and Trump

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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A lot of us have spent years and decades trying. In California, the Peace
and Freedom Party was effectively scuttled by the Communist Party and other
supporters of the Democratic Party who gained control of its internal
machinery soon after it was formed. The old Socialist Workers Party ceded
this ground to the old CP by refusing to join this attempt at an umbrella
party to the left of the Democrats. Instead, it ran its own invisible and
useless sectarian campaigns. IMHO left third party efforts are essential,
but are unlikely to succeed in building anything significant until there is
a mass movement outside of the electoral arena.

Anthony

On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 9:57 AM Mark Lause  wrote:

> The bottom line is there should be some sort of national progressive
> alternative.  Whether it calls itself socialist or labor or anything isn't
> as important as challenging the dictatorship of capitalism.   This could
> have happened and it didn't.
>
> Notwithstanding complaints about Our Revolution or the ambiguities of the
> DSA--and let's throw in the almost religious flakiness of the
> Greens--something could have been done about this.  And years ago.
>
> There are literally thousands of us ready to throw ourselves into such an
> effort.  This could have happened easily if two or three or more of the
> various socialist tiddlywinks clubs had decided that building this
> alternative--even temporarily.
>
> Doesn't it make you wonder?  :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Mark L.
>
>
>
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[Marxism] (no subject)

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*Impressions of elections in San Leandro*

Two years and three months ago, for reasons totally unrelated to politics,
we moved back to the United States from Colombia. After nearly twenty years
of life in Bogotá, we landed in San Leandro, California.

During that time, I kept up on the USA through Marxmail, the New York
Times, the Sacramento Bee and sundry other sources, but I paid close to
zero attention to the nitty-gritty details of local politics in this
country.

A few months after we arrived, Donald Trump was surprisingly elected. Ouch.
That was a wake-up call. I had thought that the next big crisis of
capitalism in the USA was going to be presided over by a Democrat and that
one result would be radicalization to the left of the Democratic Party -
something like what happened during the 1960’s when Kennedy and Johnson
presided over US escalation of the war in Viet Nam.

Now, it seems that the new radicalization is occurring during the
presidency of a racist, misogynist, authoritarian Republican. One
consequence is that radicalization to the left is occurring mostly in, and
through, the Democratic Party.

I guess you could say that the United States suffers from a form of bipolar
disorder.

Leaving aside any deeper discussion of the present conjuncture, here are my
impressions of the 2018 midterm elections from my current vantage point on
the border of East Oakland and San Leandro.

I live just inside of San Leandro at the north end of town, one block from
East Oakland (which is really in the southern part of Oakland). The
dividing line is Durant Avenue. When I was a kid, it was the dividing line
between all-white San Leandro, and all-black Oakland.

Segregation was a reality here even if it was not written into law. Here,
it was a strange kind of segregation because “white” in San Leandro meant
“not-black” most of the time, so English speaking Chicanos, various other
brown Latinos, Filipinos, and various Asians were able to live in San
Leandro and own property here.

Now both sides of the city line have integrated, but not in exactly the
same ways. Real estate prices are substantially higher here than they are
two blocks away in Oakland, so this part of San Leandro has gentrified with
leakage from Silicon Valley as well as gaining more Asian and Latino
residents, a substantial number of black residents, most of whom are
professional people, and a slew of multiracial and multicultural couples
with their kids. Now the neighborhood reminds me of the way south Berkeley
and north Oakland were back in the 60’s and 70’s.

Nearby East Oakland has mostly avoided gentrification, although real estate
prices there have risen apace with real estate prices throughout the Bay
Area. Integration there has taken the form of Latino and Asian renters
moving in. There are also a smaller number of white gentrifiers buying
moving in.

In 1960, this neighborhood was full of white trade unionists with a
smattering of small business owners and professionals. The Oakland General
motors plant was located just a few blocks away at Durant and East 14th St.
(now called International Blvd in Oakland). In 1963, GM opened its big new
assembly plant in Fremont, so the Oakland plant was turned into a parts
warehouse, but the adjacent neighborhoods remained UAW bastions: white GM
workers across East 14th street in an extension of San Leandro, and black
GM workers north of the plant and north of the white workers’ neighborhood.

In those days, there was also the giant Caterpillar tractor factory nearby
(the first Caterpillar factory anywhere, since Caterpillar was started here
in San Leandro.) My first wife worked there for a time. Not too far away,
there was a Mack Truck factory, a Peterbilt truck factory, a couple of GE
plants, many food processing plants, and dozens of machine shops and sheet
metal shops.

Black east Oakland was even more a bastion of trade unionism than was San
Leandro, especially the UAW, the ILWU and the UE.

East Oakland and San Leandro were right in the center of the World War II
industrial belt that snaked along the bay from Pittsburgh, California on
the Carquinez Straits, where US steel had a plant, through Martinez and
Richmond, where the oil refineries and chemical plants were located,
through the enormous Kaiser shipyards which stretched from Richmond almost
to Albany, through the foundries, glass factories, food processing plants,
and automobile, farm machinery and truck factories of Oakland, San Leandro
and Hayward.

In the center of it all was, and still is, the Port of Oakland. In the
1960’s it was transformed by the war in Viet Nam into one of the world’s
most important container ports.

[Marxism] Democrats and Trump

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Lou's idea of a "united front" demonstration against Trump could be a good
idea, but what unifying slogan do you think is likely to be used: Out Now!
Impeach Trump!?

In any case, I think the Democrats and most of their coterie are not likely
to be in the mood for demonstrations if they win the house, even less if
they win the Senate. If they do win one or both, it's very liked that any
demos will take on the coloring of "Impeach Trump" lending themselves to
the presidential campaigns of any Demo willing to latch on to impeachment.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Donald Trump, Lumpen Capitalist

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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I didn't read Farber's article yet, but the entire coterie around Trump is
made up of lumpen-capitalists, a class fraction that proliferates whenever
and wherever the real rate of profit falls near or below zero. Accumulation
of wealth through scams, theft and plunder characterize this sector.

They have always had an important place at the margins in the USA, but have
grown in importance.

Look at Trump's Devos, Mercer, Zinke, Mnunchin

Anthony
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[Marxism] Open borders

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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IMHO "Open Borders" is what is required for all imperialist countries, but
not for other countries.

I am writing in reply to Michael Meeropol. He wrote,

"But until real wages in the world become equal with a "race to the top"
rather than a race to the bottom there will be a tension between open
borders and (global north) working class incomes 

"Pushing solidarity is important but there is no question that this reality
makes it doubly harder ... "

Open borders is the most basic democratic right, the right to move from one
place to another.

The fact that it contradicts the existence of nation states at a very
fundamental level makes it what people used to call a "transitional
demand", but in reality ALL programmatic issues that meet the needs of the
working class and oppressed are transitional because achieving any one of
them intensifies the crisis of the system in one way or another.

Achieving a $15/hour minimum wage in the USA is a good example of what I
mean.

Opponents of the working class always latch on to these effects: raising
wages will cause employers to lay off workers, opening the borders will
result in competition for jobs and resources, etc, etc.

To the extent that their arguments are true, a revolutionary and really
socialist program must have answers at a higher level.

At this point in history, our program cannot be achieved in the short run,
so our answers can serve only to educate small numbers of people.

By the same token, the programmatic points developed 50 or one hundred
years ago also need to be revised. How can anyone talk about
"nationalizing" an industry when all of the main industries operate
internationally? Take the automobile industry as an example. Nationalize GM
in the USA? What about Canada, China, Mexico and the other countries whre
GM operates?

Similarly, how can the global warming catastrophe be addressed within a
single "nation state", even one like the USA? Toothless climate change
treaties?

Capitalism has truly gone beyond the limits of the "nation-state" but
cannot do without it either.

On the other hand, if we just march around with signs saying "world wide
socialist revolution now!" we will be marching alone.

James Cannon, despite all of his warts and nose hair, once wrote about
agitation, propaganda and education. To this he should have added,
development of theory.

Today's left is atomized, but growing. Dominated by abject reformism, but
searching for answers to problems that reformism cannot solve.

There are grounds for hope, but not if we just adapt to the arguments
against struggle.

Anthony.
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[Marxism] "Peace" in Colombia

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Today the government of Colombia and the FARC-EP signed off on a key part
of the peace agreement, "transitional justice". The deal establishes a
process for prosecuting FARC leaders and militants for serious war crimes,
and sentencing them to sentences of 5 to 8 years in a separate system of
incarceration from the ordinary prison system, provided they confess, and
to sentences of up to 20 years int he ordinary prison system if they do not
confess. Crimes by the Colombian military can be prosecuted through the
same special process. Where the paramilitary groups fit is not clear, since
they have already made a "peace" deal with its own transitional justice
measures. The FARC and the government agreed to complete peace talks within
six months, after which the FARC will have sixty days to disarm and
demobilize. The two sides agreed that the transition of the FARC from armed
protagonists into a political movement within the constitutional framework
of Colombia is a common goal. The deal was brokered by Cuba and Norway with
the help of the pope.

What does this all mean in real terms?

More later,

Anthony
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[Marxism] The death of an old comrade and friend

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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An old friend and comrade, Gino Pepi, recently died. A memorial and
celebration of his life is being held today. Gene was a great guy, and a
true working class hero. Here is a link to a little video his son posted on
YouTube, and the text of the invitation to the memorial celebration with a
little bio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0WZPAGt8do

Please join us celebrating the life of Eugene Pepi.

There will be time for Speaking, Musical Performance & Dancing. A Special
Gumbo will be served in Gino's honor as well as other small bites.

Gino was born and raised in San Francisco. As a young man he became
convinced of the need of an equal and just society, and dedicated his life
to socialism and to the struggles of the working class internationally. He
worked hard to enhance the living conditions of all Bay Area workers
especially B.A.R.T workers, fought against racism and discrimination,
defended immigrant workers and women’s rights, and participated in
countless efforts to stop wars and environmental destruction. When Gino
wasn't fighting tirelessly for the rights of the oppressed, he would dive
deep into his other passions, Zydeco dancing and Photography. Through dance
and music Gino made a long lasting group of friends that shared his joy and
passion for the sounds of Louisiana. Gino enjoyed life to its fullest. He
embraced all challenges with humor, honesty and with a strong sense of
solidarity.

We will remember you Gino.
This city will remember you.
Your friends, family and comrades will always remember you.

There will be time for Speaking, Musical Performance,Dancing, and food.

Please if you plan to Speak, Perform Music, etc. conatct me ahead of time
so that we can make a schedule.
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[Marxism] Colombian elections

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Last week Colombia had its off-year elections: Governors, mayors,
departmental deputies (assembly people), city councils, and other local
offices.
The most important result was the very unsurprising loss by the Polo
Democratico in the mayoral election in Bogotà, the country's largest city
and the capital, to the zombie-like retread who has apparently risen from
the political graveyard, former mayor Enrique Peñalosa.

To make the loss even more humiliating, the Polo's candidate Clara Lopez
came in third behind Peñalosa and Rafael Pardo.  Peñalosa was backed by the
country's big construction companies, the municipal transportation cartel,
Cambio Radical - the party of the country's Vice President - and heir
apparent of President Juan Manuel Santos - and by the Conservative Party.
Pardo, the Minister of Labor in santos' cabinet who briefly served as
acting Mayor of Bogotà when outgoing Mayor Petro was suspended, was
supported by some of the country's biggest Banks and by the Liberal Party.
Lopez was supported by the widow of Julio Mario Santo Domingo - by far the
richest woman in Colombia, and by her own party and assorted unions.

The left had won the mayoralty in Bogotà three straight elections before
this. Rather than using their victories to strengthen any movement in the
streets, they did almost everything and anything else. The first  of the
three mayors, Lucho Garzon, used the job as a stepping stone into the
cabinet of Juan Manuel Santos. The second, Samuel Moreno, used the
opportunity to organize the massive wholesale robbery of the city. When the
scandal was blown open by then-Polo Senator Gustavo Petro, it led to the
unraveling of an enormous corruption scandal which nearly destroyed the
Polo. The Polo split, with Petro forming the Progresistas which allowed him
to win the next mayoral election. While Mayor, Petro managed to make
enemies of most of his friends and allies, and earn the bitter hatred of
the ctiies middle class, without gaining any new friends or allies, and
leaving the Progresistas a nearly dead shell of a political movement that
could not even field its own candidate for mayor this time around.

The Polo did win some city council seats, a couple of departmental
governors seats, and still has the possibility to come back as an electoral
force. if Peñalosa cold come back after his corrupt administration, almost
anything is possible.

How does this fit into the peace process? These elections were a clear
victory for the architect of that process, President Juan Manuel Santos,
and for his hand picked successor Vice-President Gèrman Vargas Lleras. The
parties of Santos' colaition: his own Partido de la U, Lleras' Cambio
Radical, and Pardo's Liberal party were the clear winners all around the
country.

The Uribistas were even bigger losers than the Polo. They lost both the
governorship of Antioquia and the mayoralty of mediìn (the capital of
Antioquia) the stronghold of the Uribistsas so-called Centro Democratico
Uribista. Their candidate for mayor Fracisco Santos (cousin of the
president) came in a miserable fourth place. This means Santas et al. will
be able to complete the peace process without major obstacles from the
militarily right. it also means their already dominant bargaining position
with the FARC will be even stronger.

More later, Anthony
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[Marxism] The Elections in the USA seen from Afar

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*The 2016 Elections from Afar*

The Republican debates remind me of food fights in the cafeteria of my
junior high school, but, entertainment aside, this year’s elections have
all the earmarks of an unprecedented political crisis in the United States.

The results of the civil rights movement and the upheaval of the 1960’s are
coming home to roost in a way that nobody anticipated. When John Kennedy
cynically calculated that he could put his presidential bid over the top
with black votes, he was right. But he must not have expected that he would
be assassinated not so long after, or that the southern democratic Party
would split, and end up in the Republican Party after a brief fling as an
independent party.

From the long view of history, the Republican party has been in terminal
decline ever since the close of the western frontier of the United States
in 1890. It was the party of the North that won the civil war: to be more
accurate the party of the northern capitalists, small businessmen and
farmers that won the civil war. Its electoral base was always the northern
farmers and petty bourgeoisie. That base began to shrink as a percentage of
the electorate as the great wave of immigrant workers that built the
railroads and factories in the United States after the civil war. That base
begin to shrink absolutely when the number of small farms began to decrease
with the close of the frontier and the inevitable series of shake-outs and
agricultural crisis that eventually created modern agro-business.

On the other hand, the hybrid monster of the Democratic Party began to grow
as soon as the immigrants became citizens and began to vote  (and they
began to vote even sooner in some places!) The new voters were not exactly
fresh off the boat or fresh off the farm, but they were divided into dozens
of nationalities and language groups. Against all odds they began to
organize themselves, but by the First World War were still divided, mostly
not organized into unions, and mostly dominated by the Democratic party’s
big city political machines. Those machines tied the immigrant working
class to the Jim Crow Democratic Party and the Ku Klux Klan of the south.

The decline was masked temporarily by two events: the passage of the 19th
Amendment to the constitution of the USA which gave women the right to
vote, and the cold war. The first improbably helped the Republicans recover
their electoral power when they opportunistically stole the platform of the
temperance movement and advocated the insane social experiment of
prohibition. Women’s enthusiasm for the Republicans wore off in a dozen
years or so, no doubt because prohibition was such as disasters, but also
because the Republicans were such a disaster in other ways and ended up
being universally blamed for causing the great depression. FDR’s landslide
victory in the 1932 elections showed the real shape of the American
electorate.

Whether or not the failure of the New Deal to overcome the agony of the
great depression might have led to the demise of the northern Democratic
Party and the formation of a mass working class party will never be known.
Certainly the support Roosevelt received from the Communist Party and the
Socialist Party helped prevent such a development. But what really saved
the northern Democrats was the Second World War. When Japan attacked Pearl
Harbor, Roosevelt was ready to become the great patriotic savoir of the
United States.

Cold War anticommunism allowed the Republicans to once again portray
themselves as patriots, even as the best patriots. The flirtation of the
whole party with Nazism in the 1930’s, and the open relations of important
parts of US business with the Nazi and Fascist regimes had badly damaged
the GOP’s patriotic credentials during World War II. When they were able to
nominate Dwight Eisenhower, the general who people credited with winning
the war in Europe, as their presidential candidate in 1952, the Republicans
were back in business.

In 1960 the cold war still dominated the thinking and the politics of the
United States. Kennedy’s cynical pragmatism fit right in.

Eight years later, it led to the Southern strategy of Richard Nixon. By the
time Nixon fell from power, the Southern Democrats had shifted almost
entirely into the Republican Party.

Still, this only bought the Republicans time because of the great change
created in the social consciousness of the United States by the 1960’s
cultural revolution. Racism was mortally wounded and beginning to die.

The invention of the Moral Majority, an offshoot of the Southern Strategy
by some Republican geniuses, was a sign that, at least in terms of
practical elec

[Marxism] Trumped?

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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A note from afar


Last night I watched my 15 minutes of reality show and was amazed at the
way things looked.


Donald Trump looked like a little boy bully who had been spanked, maybe
whipped, by his bully father.


He didn’t call anyone a liar or a wimp. He held his tongue instead of
interrupting.

Good boy, Donny, boy.


He looked miserable. He looked like he really, really wanted to have more
fun bullying little Mario and Teddy, but was afraid he would really get his
ass kicked if he did.

Maybe I misread the situation, but if I didn’t, who is dear old daddy? And
what did the whipping consist of?


Mario, Johnie, and Donny read their lines and played the game according to
the rules, too.


No food fight!


Boring.


But, interesting for what it says about the inner intrigues of the GOP. IMHO


Anthony
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[Marxism] Is a Republican Meltdown on the agenda?

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*Is a Republican Meltdown on the agenda?*



Although my crystal ball stopped working years ago, it looks to me like the
electoral system in the United States is entering a major crisis.

The center of the crisis right now is the Republican Party. What a circus!
What low-life clowns! How could any sane human being vote for any of them?

But this is the party of Lincoln. This is the Grand Old Party that won the
civil war and rebuilt the United States. This is the party of business;
this is the main party of the American capitalist class. And it is
self-destructing.

Food for thought.

Since the 1960’s the GOP has rebuilt itself into a new party. Clearly a
party of business owners and farmers in the 20th century United States was
doomed to be a minority party in elections. Even if every small business
owner voted for it, it would lose every election if the working class and
poor all voted for some other party. The party of business needed to
acquire voters from among the ignorant masses.

It found them after World War II by being more anti-communist than even the
Democratic Party. But, cold-war anti-communism was a card that had worn
thin by 1960.

John F. Kennedy’s razor thin election victor paradoxically gave the
Republicans the key to getting a lot more voters. Kennedy’s cynical ploy of
supporting black voting rights had helped him win the elections, but it
insulted and betrayed the southern Jim Crow base of his party. When
Kennedy’s southern born and bred Vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson,
took over, he only made matters worse for his southern Democratic brothers
in arms by pushing through the Civil Rights Act.

The revolt followed when Alabama Governor George Wallace led the southern
Democrats out of the Democratic Party and temporarily into a short-lived
new party called the American Independent Party. The GOP saw the
opportunity to grab the very base of the old Democratic Party. Nixon’s
southern strategy swallowed the AIP whole, and took the Texas Democratic
Party along with it. By 1972 what had been the solid Democratic South had
been transformed into the solid Republican south.

Unfortunately for the GOP political strategists around Nixon, racism had
been dealt a powerful blow by the great uprising of youth and black people
of the 1960’s. Racism had not been killed, but it was mortally wounded and
has never recovered. The fact that Barack Obama was elected president is
very strong evidence of this. The fact that two of the most important
clowns in the Republican primaries this year, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have
Spanish last names, and the facts that one of the GOP candidates was black
and another was a woman are additional evidence.

The GOP needed to find another way to attract some other group of backward
people. They found it in religion. The Moral Majority helped Ronald Reagan
into the White House and transformed abortion from a medical issue into a
political litmus test.

To add to the toxic mixture, the GOP became the party of the National Rifle
Association.

This hybrid monster, led by the traditional Calvin Coolidge stratum of the
Republican Party, was headed for a disaster.

The problem is, even the most backward Republican voter expects something
in return for his vote. And the voter base of the Republican Party got
almost nothing from Republican victories. Less than nothing for most of
them when it comes to the nuts and bolts of “the economy stupid”.

Whether or not they were aware of the tenuous nature of their electoral
victories, the GOP was working hard to use its electoral base to give it
permanent dominance of the electoral system. They focused on gaining
control of the Supreme Court and state legislatures. These were the keys to
reversing the inclusion of poor people into the voting booths that had
resulted from the civil rights movement and the black rebellions of the
1960’s.

This strategy led to the creation of the Burger Supreme Court in place of
the Warren Supreme Court, and it lead to Republican control of almost 40
state legislatures and a cascade of big and small court decisions and
legislative actions that has whittled down the electorate to give a
minority party the position of the majority party in everything but
presidential elections.

And it is all unraveling in front of our eyes.

It is not just Ted Cruz and Donald Trump trashing each other’s wives. It is
not just the Tea Party faction of the GOP running candidates against
mainstream Republicans in primaries. It is not just the ever more intense
crisis in the Republican Congressional and Senate delegations.

The top of the Republican Party has fractured. The Koch brothers are not an
accident. And,

[Marxism] Puerto Rican teachers

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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https://labornotes.org/2019/08/teachers-fighting-public-schools-were-key-uprising-puerto-rico
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[Marxism] Baby boomers

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If you count the baby boom as lasting from 1946 to 1960, and members of
that generation first became socially and politically active when they were
15 in 1961, and stayed at center stage until the last ones were 30 in 1991,
then at the very least we were the foot soldiers not only in Viet Nam, but
in Oakland, Watts, Detroit and Newark, too.

Not only that, we were the ones who made disco, the cultural edge of real
integration, happen.

Not only that, the reaction among us made Ronald Reagan possible.

Our leaders and our inspirations were all from earlier generations,
especially from among those born during the depression and WWII, but then
who writes history just by looking at the leaders? Not Marxists

Anthony
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[Marxism] Refoundation of the FARC

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQNMQxTV46o&feature=youtu.be

https://elpais.com/internacional/2019/08/29/actualidad/1567065255_850419.html
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[Marxism] Moderate the Moderator

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Moderate the Moderator



Would everybody else on this list please join me in asking Louis, our
moderator, to take a few deep breaths, go stand in the corner, steel
himself for a scolding, calm down, and put David Walters back on this list?



Earlier this month Louis became enraged at David for no good reason, and
also for no reason related to MarxMail. After telling David to get fucked
several times, he kicked him off the list.



This happened in a series of emails about Left Trainspotting from 5:55 AM
EDT to 11:51 AM EDT on Tuesday September 3. Louis began politely,



“David, yesterday I posted a link to a documentary about Rittenberg that
has not shown up yet even though another post about him has. I don't
understand why you don't change the moderation rules so that anybody who
has ever had a post approved, like me, gets automatic approval henceforth.
We actually had a chat about this once.”

David replied politely,

“Louis, first, I was able to unmoderate you. Wasn't sure I could. Second,
no, the default is to be moderated for all new members. The protocol I
established is that people become unmoderated after a period of time of not
posting BS. People like John Holmes, a friend of mine though unfortunately
a Spart sycophant can post numerous times and then do a spate of
non-spotting Spart propaganda. He's on permanent moderation. As I'm always
on line within 10 hours or so of a moderated post, I can usually ok it
quickly. Anyway, you are unmoderated now. Keep it spotterly...”

Then Louis wrote,

“Go fuck yourself.”

And,

“You have some fucking nerve telling me to be "spotterly". I have posted
maybe 3 or 4 times since I subbed to a list that I have little interest in
to begin with, and mostly because someone told me that I was being
discussed there. There has not been the slightest hint in the 3 posts or so
I made that were not "spotterly".

“Anyhow, you got my dander up and will pay for it. Unlike the gossipy
trainspotter's list, Marxmail has real value. You will regret being rude to
me.”

Then Louis unsubbed David.

The thing is this list is still a valuable asset for Marxists, and not just
Louis’ personal property. Louis needs to decide which is more important to
him, his pride in his personal property, or the service he has rendered the
rest of us and the world.

Come on Louis, get off your high horse.

Comradely, Anthony
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[Marxism] Tim Wohlforth

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Wikipedia's version of Tim Wohlforth's biography is a lot mor accurate than
the one that was posted yesterday. Here's the link for anyone interested in
this arcane topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wohlforth
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[Marxism] Pure and simple electoralism (was Bernie Sanders is in trouble)

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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I was about to write something similar to what David wrote. One historic
dividing line between the revolutionary left and the reformist left was
always their attitudes towards elections. For revolutionaries, elections
are a means to mobilize and organize the working class and the oppressed.
Getting candidates elected, even electing majorities, does not overthrow
the capitalist state. In fact, it only makes the danger greater as history
has shown. Remember what happened to the people of Chile and the government
of Salvador Allende.

IMHO, other kinds of militancy are more important right now than
participation in the 2020 election. There is no movement for a third party
on the left. At this point I plan to support whomever the Greens run. If
they did not run anyone, I would support the awful and irrelevant campaign
of Jeff Mackler, but either of these choices is just to add one vote of
protest against the capitalist state and its two party electoral system.

This does not mean that the mass social democratic electoral movement is
unimportant. Bernie Sanders and DSA are both important, but fundamentally
flawed by their work building the Democratic Party. Working together with
these people inside of protest movements, unions and other non-electoral
struggles should be tied to criticism of their electoralism from outside of
the Democratic Party.

Anthony

Anthony
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[Marxism] Trump's withdrawal from Syria

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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I agree with John that the comparison between the US defeat in Vietnam, and
its ultimate disastrous withdrawal, with Trump's withdrawal of US forces
from Syria is way off the mark.

The United States was not defeated militarily in Syria as it was in Viet
Nam.

However, the United States has suffered a serious and historic reversal in
the Middle East which no sector of the American ruling class knows how to
address. The two wars against Iraq completely failed to achieve their goals
of creating compliant client states in the Persian Gulf. The endless war in
Afghanistan has failed to accomplish anything other than devastation and
death.

Trump's decision has undoubtedly worsened this disaster for United States
imperialism, threatening even to undo its one victory, the Kurdish defeat
of the Islamic State.

One thing we should keep in mind, is the boundless corruption of Mr. Trump.
Rather than thinking that this was done on a personal whim, Trump may have
found a way to make a little cash off of the situation, banking on the
endless debasement of the Republican Senate, and the undying support of the
Christian right, gun fanatics, and racists.

Whether a whim, or a bribe, this action has brought Trump several steps
closer to being removed from office before the elections next year.

A lot of gun lovers are soldiers and former soldiers, and their love for
Trump has taken a big hit with this decision. He had already proven his
disdain for soldiers, but now he is increasingly being seen as a traitor to
the grunts on the front lines.

How this will play out behind closed doors is difficult to predict, but if
the Republicans cannot find a way to remove him before next November,
Trump´s vaunted base may have flown the coop, and we could see an historic
change putting the Democrats in control of everything except the Supreme
Court and a few state houses.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Hella calendar

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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John's calendar ought to focus a little on Latin America other than the
well-worn tragedy of Venezuela. For starters, there are the situations in
Chile, Peru, and Colombia. Who knows what is about to happen in Bolivia.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50119649

https://colombiareports.com/bogota-anti-corruption-student-escalates-into-full-blown-riots-at-least-5-injured/


https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/01/world/peru-protests-vizcarra-congress-intl/index.html
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[Marxism] The GOP and D. trump

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*Donald Trump represents a significant minority of the US capitalist class*

The recent discussion on this list about whether Trump’s “policy” in Syria
represents the interests of US imperialism or not points to a bigger, and
deeper question about Trump. It is easy to dismiss him as an accidental
figure of history propelled through the cracks in the system from real
estate and reality show to the White House, especially since his behavior
is so blatantly inconsistent and outrageous. Nevertheless, he is not an
accidental figure: he represents a significant sector of the capitalist
class and its thinking.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, and the United States won the cold war,
the ruling class of the United States was elated, but didn’t really know
what to do. They tried to continue on as if nothing had happened. They
didn’t close down all of those military basis ringing the old USSR, they
did not say “Good-bye Nato, you’re mission is over. Thank you very much.”
They tried to invent new enemies and were overjoyed when Al-Queda gave them
a new world threat to their system. No need to rework the system.

But, the system designed for the cold war, was not working very well for
its aftermath. China grew to become a new world power, US economic
dominance was fading, and US military dominance was being challenged. The
echoes of the defeat in Vietnam continue to resound around the world. The
military power of the United States has not won the hearts and minds of the
people of the world, except for a thin crust of corrupt politicians and
businesspeople. The results are the truly endless series of wars the United
States is involved in.

And, Republicans remembered their tradition and their past. They remembered
what they did after the First World War. They never ratified the Versailles
Treaty, and they never joined the League of Nations. They turned their back
on Europe, except to collect the money the Europeans owed the US. The
closed the doors to immigration. They told the Europeans they believed in
the Monroe Doctrine, and they tried to figure out how to get China out of
the hands of the Europeans and the Japanese. They ripped up the wartime
economic regulation of Woodrow Wilson and said that the business of America
is business. They orchestrated a major escalation of union busting and a
wave a racist terrorism.

Of course, these policies were a disaster, but it took a decade before that
became apparent. Even then they did not disappear, as the America First
movement took firm root within the GOP. World War II caused the GOP to make
a hasty retreat from their most openly pro-Nazi sentiments, and the
beginning of the cold war caused them to continue their patriotic alliance
of convenience with the Truman wing of the Democrats. This alliance was
embodied by Dwight David Eisenhower’s presidency.

Those ideas and policies never disappeared from the GOP. Senator Barry
Goldwater, and 1964 GOP Presidential candidate, wanted the United States to
leave the United Nations throughout his political career.

The global policy framework within which Trump works is a throwback to this
thread of traditional 20th century GOP thinking. Its basic tenets are that
the United States should stop trying to be the leader of a world system.
Instead it should look for ways to increase the wealth and power of the
United States even when those goals bring the USA into conflict with old
allies and friends. Alliances should be short term and based on expediency.

This is why Trump has no qualms about betraying the Kurds. This is also why
he has no qualms about calling for an end to NATO and trying to form a new
alliance with Putin’s Russia. Trump has formed a de facto alliance among
the three largest oil producers in the world: the USA, Russia and Saudi
Arabia. In my opinion, this is the “rational” core of his geopolitics.

Trump views Europe, all of Europe, as a headache that is more trouble than
it is worth. So, get rid of it. Trump views China as a big problem. China
should go back to being a big reservoir of cheap labor for US business to
exploit.

Within this framework, Trump works within a view of the world that does not
care whether global warming is leading to a disaster or not, and does not
care whether the economy is growing or contracting. According to this kind
of thinking, capitalism will survive no matter what, and someone will
always be able to make a buck out of every situation. Trump views
capitalism as a continuous series of real estate swindles and casino bets.
The best cheaters are the winners most of the time.

Even if the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal
and even the American Ent

[Marxism] Sandinista

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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The sad present of Daniel Ortega can be seen in the first link below.
Especially sad because the Sandinistas inspired hope 40 years ago, as in
the second link.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/magazine/ralph-drollinger-white-house-evangelical.html


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnSQFaHvxTI&list=PLw8I74P--tlVmX53NXBA_YtzoovpSfdlU
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[Marxism] Noteworthy election result

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/11/10/progressive-lawyer-wins-san-francisco-district-attorney-race-continuing-national-reform-trend/

*Chesea Boudin wins DA Race in SF *

"Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), who has made an overhaul of the justice
system a cornerstone of his campaign for president, was among Boudin’s
highest-profile supporters. “Now is the moment to fundamentally transform
our racist and broken criminal justice system by ending mass incarceration,
the failed war on drugs and the criminalization of poverty," Sanders tweeted
 Saturday.
"Congratulations @chesaboudin on your historic victory!”


"The race for San Francisco’s district attorney kicked off in fall 2018
when then-district attorney George Gascón, himself a progressive, announced
he wouldn’t seek reelection. His departure paved the way for the city’s
first district attorney race in a century with no incumbent.

AD

"As recently as a few years ago, Loftus might have been a shoo-in for the
job. Many of the state’s highest-ranking Democrats lined up behind her,
with endorsements coming from San Francisco Mayor London Breed, California
Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sens. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) and Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.)."



Boudin is the son of Weatherpeople David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin who was
adopted and raised by William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
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[Marxism] Thursday in Colombia

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*Quick update on Colombia*

With all eyes moving from Ecuador, to Peru, to Chile and now to Bolivia,
public attention has moved away from Colombia. It may be about to return.

This coming Thursday, November 21, there will be a national work stoppage
in Colombia. Usually these things are symbolic protests, sort of like a
walk in the park, but this year is likely to be different.

The popularity of Uribismo, and of Uribe’s puppet Ivan Duque (the current
president) has plummeted. In the recent departmental and municipal
elections, Uribe’s Centro Democratic was smashed. Duque’s approval rating
according to the latest poll is only 27%, down from a high of 64% early in
his term of office. His disapproval rating is 69%.

The recent resignation of the Minister of Defense in the face of his orders
to bomb a town that resulted in the deaths of many children, and then his
cover-up of the crime, is just the most obvious symptom of the government’s
internal crisis.

The CUT (Central Unitaria de TrabajadoresI, FECODE (teachers’ union), all
the key student organizations, and many, many other organizations are all
promoting the event. Very few people who plan to participate have any idea
about what the demands of these organizations are, but people are planning
to go in a general protest and expression of anger about the government’s
austerity measures, recent military actions, corruption, antipathy to
public education, and failure to do anything to improve the country’s
stagnant economy.

The Uribistas are running an online and a media advertising campaign
against participation in the event. It is not aimed at the left but is
rather aimed at the children of the Uribistas, especially the private
university students who have for the first time shown signs of join the
mass movement in large numbers. The Uribista effort seems to be propelling
even more support for the event this Thursday.

One of the reasons that students from the private universities are joining
the movement was the attack by the riot police on students at Universidad
Javeriana a few months ago.

Now, many are worried about police provocations on Thursday to justify
police attacks. Despite these worries, this event is likely to be the first
major challenge to the Duque government.


Anthony
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[Marxism] Holodomor, Genocide & Russia: the great

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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And the Roma?
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[Marxism] Brexit and Impeachment

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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IMHO, the Labour Party should have campaigned for "Remain" to defend the
right of free immigration despite everything else reactionary about the
European Union.

I think that it did not because of the historic dirty secret of the white
racism among British workers which combines itself with leftish economism.

IMHO Corbyn's Manifesto did not take this issue head-on because of fear of
losing racist working class votes and therefore seats in the House.

Similarly, Nancy Pelosi et al. have whittled the impeachment charges
against Trump down so far that they have almost no content, and are open to
ridicule by Congressional Republicans. Their whittling was done to please
various members of Congress on the right of that right-wing party.

However, revolutionaries in the UK should have supported a vote for Labour,
just as revolutionaries in the USA should support impeachment.

In the case of impeachment, there are three reasons: Trump is a criminal
who is attacking the working class, Trump is a criminal in terms of the
law, and impeaching Trump will deepen the crisis of the state while not
impeaching him will help the state overcome the crisis.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Overview of Latin America's military forces

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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https://www.americasquarterly.org/content/latin-americas-armed-forces?utm_source=AQ%27s+Week+in+Review&utm_campaign=b9d33c973a-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_08_17_06_51_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6a33e16b5d-b9d33c973a-26120485
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[Marxism] Mass graves and False positives

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Mass graves and False positives (Spanish)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nEPNy_22vM
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[Marxism] Brown-Green Alliance in Austria

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/world/europe/austria-kurz-greens-coalition-government.html
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[Marxism] It?s Time for the Left to Build a Force Outside

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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I think that this year is a good time to talk about building a third party
to the left of the Democrats, but it is not the time to actively organize
it. For, now supporting Howie Hawkins as a protest vote, or whoever the
Peace and Freedom Party in California runs, is the least evil option.

However, both the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party have
undemocratic internal structures and leaderships committed to preventing
them from challenging the Democrats or even to running robust slates of
candidates. In other words, neither is likely to be a vehicle for a
resurgence of the left.

However, I think the possibilities for the formation of a third party of
the left are growing rapidly. The Sandernista movement is its unlikely
incubator, but the millions of Sanders activists and voters, mostly young
people, will have to go through the experience of this election and the
hatred and sabotage against their campaign orchestrated by the Democratic
National Committee.

The DNC's failed attempt to steal Iowa from Sanders is a direct
continuation of Hillary Clinton's unprincipled campaign against Sanders in
2016. Does anyone doubt it will continue to escalate this year?

What will the Sanders do if he is robbed of the nomination?

Will he launch a third party himself? I think this is very unlikely, but
not impossible.

What will the Sandernistas do if Sanders is robbed of the nomination, and
then meekly decides to support Butttigieg, Klobuchar, Biden, Bloomberg or
whomever the DNC anoints (Hillary Clinton wouldn't mind the job)?

Will some of them set off on the path of building a third party?

I think that this is the most likely scenario for the emergence of a third
party of the left in the USA.

Of course, there is the very unlikely possibility that the Democrats will
actually nominate Sanders for president. In that case the emergence of such
a party will be off the table in the near term. The "new left" that is now
growing would move deeper into the Democratic Party. It would likely stay
there for at least the following four years if only electoral factors were
at work.

The biggest unknown however, is not in the electoral arena. Mass movements
of the working class lead to the formation of mass working class parties.
This is sort of an ABC of the history of class struggle. In recent years,
we have seen momentary and partial mass movements, immigrant rights, black
lives matter, occupy, Me Too, and even a noticeable revival of trade union
militancy as demonstrated by the ongoing series of teachers' strikes.

What happens on the streets will ultimately determine the possibilities for
forming a viable new party of the left in the United States.

Anthony
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Re: [Marxism] A party of the left and historical materialism

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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(In response to John Reiman's comments)

Historical materialism, in my view, means studying the real material
movement and development of human society, and continuous abstracting out
of that study the essential movement of society. This is the opposite of
taking a dead abstraction from some book, even some great books by some
great writers, and trying to impose it as a schema on living, breathing,
human history.

I think Marx's abstraction from history that the working class is the
revolutionary class in capitalist society remains valid today, but the
working class of the United States is fragmented by race, gender, region,
citizenship status, and a dozen other major impediments to uniting itself.

The vast majority of workers in the United States are not organized, not
even into unions. The really existing working class is not a class for
itself, and it is not even conscious that it is a class.

How can it achieve class consciousness? Well, part of that answer is
through the class struggle, even through the fragments of that struggle
like what we have seen in Black Lives Matter, Me-Too, the immigrant rights
movement, the various anti-war movements, and even the trade union
movement. All of these are fragmented parts of the working class struggle,
even when they are initiated and led by petty bourgeois individuals. The
student movement, which is showing some signs of life again in the United
States, is today also basically a working class movement (even if they are
mostly working class youth who would like to exit their own class.)

The other part of that answer lies in the activity of people on this list,
and others, who are part of the vanguard of human social consciousness.
True, we are not organized into anything that  could or should be called a
"vanguard party" (although some of us are members of hopelessly and
ridiculously deluded self-important sects), but we are nevertheless part of
that vanguard.

Historically, working class parties, and all revolutionary parties, start
out as parties of the conscious minority...the vanguard. Right now, most of
the people likely to be part of the vanguard of the next five to ten years
are out campaigning for Bernie Sanders.

Should we join them?

No. We should warn them about the wall they are going to hit, and offer
them another course of action for the time they pick themselves up, dust
themselves off, and start looking for a better way to fight.

That is historical materialism in my book, and I am pretty sure Marx,
Engels and the revolutionaries who followed after them would agree with me.

Anthony
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[Marxism] NYT says Maduro and Mendoza made a deal in 2018

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*Venezuela’s Socialists Embrace Business, Making Partner of a ‘Parasite’*

The New York Times By Anatoly Kurmanaev Feb. 23, 2020

CARACAS, Venezuela — As Venezuela tumbled deeper into economic crisis in
2017 and its people searched for a way out, one name kept coming up:
Lorenzo Mendoza.

The family name is universally known in Venezuela. Empresas Polar, the food
conglomerate started by Mr. Mendoza’s grandfather, had grown into the
country’s largest private company. Its corn meal, used to make the national
dish, was in every pantry, and its beer a welcome part of social
gatherings.

As President Nicolás Maduro’s disastrous economic policies set off food
shortages and a refugee crisis, Mr. Mendoza emerged as an outspoken critic
of his administration and its persecution of the private sector.

Polished and eloquent, Mr. Mendoza also offered a stark contrast to the
gruff president. His popularity was such that pollsters measured him
against Mr. Maduro in mock presidential matchups.

Then, suddenly, Mr. Mendoza disappeared from public view, and Mr. Maduro
stopped calling him a “thief,” a “parasite” and a “traitor.” The government
quit harassing Polar with disruptive raids and began, in time, to adopt the
economic changes Mr. Mendoza had proposed, like ending crippling price
controls.

The story behind Mr. Mendoza and Mr. Maduro’s truce, sealed in a previously
unreported meeting in mid-2018, describes the rapprochement between
Venezuela’s self-styled revolutionary government and the business class it
waged war against for nearly two decades.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/23/world/americas/venezuela-economy-polar.html
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[Marxism] Red-baiting in the 21st century

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*Red-baiting in the 21st century*

The expected red-baiting of Bernie Sanders has begun in earnest, but don’t
expect it to succeed.

The cold war ended a long time ago.

Most of Sanders’ supporters were not even born when it ended. And, how many
people in the United States care about Nicaragua, Venezuela or Cuba,
anyway? And, those who do – including those who hate the current
governments of those countries, are likely to know that those countries
have all been victims of the United States.

Sure, red-baiting will get to the aging cold warriors, but face it – a lot
of them do not clearly understand that the Soviet Union does not exist, and
that today’s Russia is capitalist country governed by a right wing
kleptocracy. In fact, there are a few lunatics on the left who still think
that Russia is some sort of workers state.

The demise of the Soviet Union and the cold war, and the long decline of
the traditional reformist Communist and Social Democratic Parties has had
an unforeseen but easily understood side effect of diminishing the
reservoir of mass anti-communism that had been so carefully built up over
decades by capitalist ruling classes.

Donald Trump is fully aware of this. He is brazen about his corrupt embrace
of Vladimir Putin. He survived impeachment because the Republican Party
coldly calculated that Trump’s corrupt ties to Russia and other countries
would not be seen as treason by the right in the United States.

Their calculation was correct, but it makes their red-baiting problematic.
After all, Sanders visited Russia a long time ago, Trump loves Russia today.

There is also the issue of China to be considered. China, as capitalist as
it is, is still ruled by a Communist Party. China is the rising power in
the world today. It is a great success story! And, Mr. Trump admires Xi
Jinping almost as much as he admires Vladdy.

How this plays out in the popular mind will depend in part on how Sanders
et al. respond to the attacks.

Will the red-baiting be nothing more than water off the back of a duck?
Will it back-fire against the red-baiters and burn their hands? Will it put
a big enough dent in Sanders’ momentum to deny him the Democratic Party’s
presidential nomination?

We will see shortly, but one thing that it probably won’t do is stop the
growth of the reformist social democratic mass movement that Sanders now
leads.

A very likely result will be that some of the more serious minded among his
youthful supporters will go back and study what happened in Russia, China,
Cuba, Nicaragua and even Venezuela.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Ceasefire in Colombia

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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This is a key step in the peace process. The next step will be a referndum.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/world/americas/colombia-farc-peace-deal-rebels-cease-fire-santos.html?emc=edit_th_20160623&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=38183359
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[Marxism] Vote for Jill Stein

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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​Nothing good will every come out of voting for any Democrat or any
Republican. The "lesser "evil" left advocated voting for Adlai Stevenson,
John Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale...and on
to Barack Obama and now Hillary Clinton.​ What happened when the
Republicans won? Wars, attacks on the working class, the poor and
minorities. What happened when the Democrats won? The same thing!

What is different about this election? It is not that Trump is a racist or
a white nationalist, or that he is incoherent. Virtually every president of
the USA has been a racist, and not a few have been incoherent.

What is different is that the electoral system is in a crisis. The
Republican Party is split with half of its leaders withholding support from
their candidate who is a virulently racist and incoherent reality show
star. Meanwhile the Democratic party has a candidate whom any other
Republican other than Trump could beat without getting out of bed.

What should be done? We should stoke the fires of crisis to the extent that
we can. The best thing that could happen for the entire world with the
exception of the very rich int he United States would be the absolute
destruction of the two party system.

You can do a little bit to bring this about. Vote for Jill Stein.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Colombian peace agreement

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*Colombian Peace Agreement*

This Sunday October 2, Colombians will vote in a referendum on the peace
agreement signed on Monday September 26 between the FARC-EP  (Fuerzas
Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia – Ejercito Popular – Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia – Popular Army) and the government of Colombia.


Everyone I talk to, and all the polls, say the “yes” vote will win, but
that the “No vote will be substantial.


The peace agreement will result in the demobilization of the FARC and the
reintegration of the organization and its members into Colombia society. It
involves a number of important points about redistribution of land
expropriated during the long armed conflict, protection of FARC militants
from assassination and attack, a truth commission about the history of the
conflict and measures to help reintegrate the organization and its
militants into legality.


What will happen after the agreement goes into effect remains to be seen.


Here are some key issues:


What will the military, police and paramilitaries do this time?


After past agreements, notably the one with M-19, there were assassinations
of important leaders and militants. This situation is different, but the
strength of the “No” vote this Sunday will indicate the depth of popular
hatred for the FARC upon which the paramilitary and their legal leaders
like, notably former President Alvaro Uribe, base themselves. The
paramilitary demobilization while Uribe was president was a sham, and these
organizations continue to exist as organized criminal gangs and private
security companies with links to sections of the military and state
apparatus.


What will the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN) do?


Informal peace talks have been going on between the ELN and the Colombian
government throughout this year, and the FARC and the ELN are also reported
to be in talks, but so far there has been no start of a formal negotiation
process. If there is not, many people think there will be a military
offensive against them at the beginning of next year.


Will the FARC be able to become a legal political force in Colombia?


This is the biggest question of all. The FARC’s military strategy not only
resulted in the deaths of many who joined it to fight for a better
Colombia, it turned a large part of the Colombian working class and poor
against the left. The two great stones around the Colombian left’s neck are
the death and suffering caused by the FARC and the corruption of the legal
left when it has held office.


The very fact that the FARC has negotiated this peace agreement is a step
in the right direction.


Now the FARC will reappear in the arena of electoral politics, trade
unionism, and social movements.


Without speculating on what it will do, it is clear that this is the
beginning of a new chapter in Colombian political history.


Anthony
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[Marxism] Colombia votes No to peace agreement

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Colombia has voted No on the peace agreement with the FARC. Approximately
13,000,000 of the 34,000,000 people who were eligible to vote voted. The no
vote won by about 70,000 votes.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Republican meltdown

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*There Is a Republican Meltdown on the agenda*


In march I sent this list a long note asking the question, "Is a Republican
Meltdown on the Agenda?"


You can read it below if you want. At the time it went mostly unnoticed.


Now, the Republican meltdown is becoming a fact. Trump is not the cause, he
is just a catalyst in what was already a toxic cocktail waiting to explode.


The Democrats are likely to win the White House and the Senate, and go on
to appoint a historic Supreme Court majority. They may even win the House
of Representatives.


This will be a disaster for the lesser-evil left who have always argued
that we must support the Democrats because the Republicans are so much
worse. What will they argue if the Democrats win the whole show?


Lesser-evilism is pragmatic, and it has worked to a certain extent. You get
a road fixed and a school built here or there, you might even get more
democratic access to voting, at the price of wars, war machines, permanent
union busting...


But lesser evilism has gotten us into the fix we are in now. In the 1960's
the Black Panther Party began as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.
Huey Newton and Boby Seale and their comrades read the law, got some guns,
and rode around following white cops in Oakland to prevent them from
murdering young black people on the streets of the city.


And, now the Black Lives Matter movement is still conducting the same fight.


What happened. What did the lesser evil Democrats do? We had Lyndon
Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.


You could look at our wars...Viet Nam, Central America, Yugoslavia, Iraq,
Iraq, Afghanistan...


Who led them? Republicans and Democrats arm in arm together.


We should be voting for the Green Party and/or any socialist candidates on
the ballot this year. And we should be looking forward to great
opportunities in the next four years because lesser-evilism may be in for
its biggest defeat in decades.


Here is what I posted in March.



"Although my crystal ball stopped working years ago, it looks to me like
the electoral system in the United States is entering a major crisis.


"The center of the crisis right now is the Republican Party. What a circus!
What low-life clowns! How could any sane human being vote for any of them?


"But this is the party of Lincoln. This is the Grand Old Party that won the
civil war and rebuilt the United States. This is the party of business;
this is the main party of the American capitalist class. And it is
self-destructing.


"Food for thought.


"Since the 1960’s the GOP has rebuilt itself into a new party. Clearly a
party of business owners and farmers in the 20th century United States was
doomed to be a minority party in elections. Even if every small business
owner voted for it, it would lose every election if the working class and
poor all voted for some other party. The party of business needed to
acquire voters from among the ignorant masses.


"It found them after World War II by being more anti-communist than even
the Democratic Party. But, cold-war anti-communism was a card that had worn
thin by 1960.


"John F. Kennedy’s razor thin election victory paradoxically gave the
Republicans the key to getting a lot more voters. Kennedy’s cynical ploy of
supporting black voting rights had helped him win the elections, but it
insulted and betrayed the southern Jim Crow base of his party. When
Kennedy’s southern born and bred Vice president, Lyndon Baines Johnson,
took over, he only made matters worse for his southern Democratic brothers
in arms by pushing through the Civil Rights Act.


"The revolt followed when Alabama Governor George Wallace led the southern
Democrats out of the Democratic Party and temporarily into a short-lived
new party called the American Independent Party. The GOP saw the
opportunity to grab the very base of the old Democratic Party. Nixon’s
southern strategy swallowed the AIP whole, and took the Texas Democratic
Party along with it. By 1972 what had been the solid Democratic South had
been transformed into the solid Republican south.


"Unfortunately for the GOP political strategists around Nixon, racism had
been dealt a powerful blow by the great uprising of youth and black people
of the 1960’s. Racism had not been killed, but it was mortally wounded and
has never recovered. The fact that Barack Obama was elected president is
very strong evidence of this. The fact that two of the most important
clowns in the Republican primaries this year, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have
Spanish last names, and the facts that one of the GOP candidates was black
and another was a woman are additional evidence.


"The G

[Marxism] US political crisis

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Whatever happens Tuesday, the political crisis in the USA is likely to
deepen. Will the GOP unite around a bill of impeachment against Hillary
Clinton, or will its fracks fracture further? if Trump is elected, how soon
will he face a conflict with the Congress? And, what will they all do if
the economy heads south next Spring?
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[Marxism] Narcos

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Louis is a good reviewer, but one piece of history that is totally fiction
in Narcos is the portrayl of an alliance between M-19 and Pablo Escobar
which is a fiction invented by the DEA and the paramilitaries and spread by
Alvaro Uribe. it should not be repeated on this list as if it were true,
especially since it has been used as justification for killing M-19 leaders.

Anthony
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Re: [Marxism] Narcos

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Me too, so these are my last words on Narcos. The M-19 leader Elisa Alvarez
in Narcos is a totally fictional character, unlike most of the key
characters in Narcos. Her character makes this part of the story hang
together dramatically. Unlike most of the series, this part is really
fiction. To my knowledge, Ana Carrigan has not explained why she believes
M-19 was financed by the Medellin cartel, and no one has ever published any
creditable evidence that it was. Nevertheless, the story has become
accepted as fact as the result of countless repetition. Anthony

On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 5:04 AM, Louis Proyect  wrote:

> On 12/13/16 12:34 AM, Anthony Boynton via Marxism wrote:
>
>>
>> Louis is a good reviewer, but one piece of history that is totally fiction
>> in Narcos is the portrayl of an alliance between M-19 and Pablo Escobar
>> which is a fiction invented by the DEA and the paramilitaries and spread
>> by
>> Alvaro Uribe. it should not be repeated on this list as if it were true,
>> especially since it has been used as justification for killing M-19
>> leaders.
>>
>>
> As I pointed out in my review, there was a consistent attempt to smear the
> left in "Narcos" so I would be happy to be found wrong on the M-19, however
> this caught my eye in the Wiki on the assault on the Palace of Justice:
>
> "Author Ana Carrigan, who quoted the June 1986 report in her book on the
> siege and originally dismissed any such links between the M-19 and the drug
> mafia, told Cromos magazine in late 2005 that she now believes that the
> mafia may have financially supported the M-19."
>
> There was a link to an article that no longer works so I couldn't follow
> up on this. Maybe others would be motivated to track it down but I am too
> busy with other matters now.
>
>
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[Marxism] Nixon Part 3

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Who knows how this roller-coaster ride will go, but Donald Trump has
started his term in office in a weaker position than any president in the
last 100 years. His own party does not like him, his poll ratings are low
and falling, he has not suddenly become coherent after babbling
incoherently through his election campaign, and his inauguration has been
met with the largest wave of protests in the USA since the Viet Nam War.

Martin Luther King day this year had already turned into a national protest
against Trump, but the women's marches turned the anti-Trump anger out on a
scale far, far bigger than anyone, especially the protest's organizers, had
expected. It was not just the 500,000 plus people in Washington DC, the
750,000 plus people in LA, the 400,000 in New York, and the hundred
thousand plus crowds in cities from Boston to San Francisco, it was the
crowds of 20,000 in Houston, 15,000 in Nashville and several to tens of
thousands in dozens of other cities around the USA.

To start with, this movement is led by Democratic Party politicians with a
Democratic party agenda of saving what's left of the New Deal and Great
Society reforms, and saving Obama Care. For the Democratic Party, the true
aim of the agenda is to reverse their losses in the House of
Representatives and Senate (a product of their own electoral strategy).
Judging by the homemade signs in the marches, the agenda of the people in
the streets already goes further to include raising the minimum wage,
defending black lives, advancing immigrant rights, defending and advancing
LGBT rights, defending the environment...

Mobilizing people in the streets is exactly what the Democratic Party has
tried to steer clear of for years. And when people have taken to the
streets, all effort has been exerted to tamp the genie back down into the
bottle. Now, it seems that the genie is out and will be very hard to put
back.

Anthony
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[Marxism] President Elect Trump

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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All Hail!

Wow! What a weird week, what a weird time in history. Makes me think of my
old pal, Zippy. he reminds me of the new president of the United States

[image: Image result for zippy the pinhead]
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[Marxism] Russia/Trump

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*Reading the tea leaves*


This list has a tea leaf reading session going on about why FBI Director
Comey was fired by President Donald Trump.


After stirring them again, and examining them under a magnifying glass, I
have come up with the following reasoning.

First of all Donald Trump is in deep trouble over the issue of Russia. It’s
not just the Democrats who have an anti-Russia program, it is the
“internationalist” Republicans of the John McCain ilk. In fact, there is
little evidence that any significant sector of the Republican party
supports Trump’s Russian turn.


The Russian intervention into the elections was not an invention of
hysterical Democrats or of the New York Times. Cyber-warfare has been going
on world-wide for some time among businesses and states. The North Korean
cyber-attack against the Sony Films picture *The Interview *may have been
the funniest moment, but there have been plenty of serious moments
including the very recent attack against hospitals in the UK. In any case,
Trump’s infatuation with Vladimir Putin and Putin’s support for Trump were
both on the record in the media of the world. Why wouldn’t Putin try to
help Trump? He would have been an idiot not to.


The Russian state remains a competitor to the American state in
geopolitics. It has the only nuclear arsenal that can compete with that of
the USA, and it is aggressively countering US/NATO pressure on it: most
notably by its land grab in the Ukraine and its genocidal role in Syria.


Although both US and Russian imperialism are counter-revolutionary through
and through, that does not mean that their geopolitical interests are
identical. The French and German empires of 1914 were thoroughly
counterrevolutionary, but their geopolitical interests clashed.


What interests are at stake?


First of all client states. Every client state an imperial power has is a
client! Who buys arms from the biggest arms merchant in the world? (that
would be the USA) It’s client states!


Who buys arms from the Russians? Not too many client states these days, but
the market of the old Soviet Union is still holding up. Oh, and then there
is Syria.


Nevertheless, a significant sector of big US corporations are heavily
invested in Russia, and the GOP is still the party of business despite the
Clinton’s efforts to bring them all into the Democratic party family.
Corporations heavily invested in Russia include not only Mr. Tillerson’s
alma mater Exxon, but Boeing, Pepsi, Ford, Procter & Gamble, McDonald's,
Mondelez International, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Cargill, Alcoa,
General Electric, and Morgan Stanley.


They would like to have their cake and eat it, too. Keep the geopolitical
power of the United States, diminish Russian power still further, but get
rid of the sanctions against Russia so that they could get on with business.


Fat chance.


One significant overlap of ideology and interest between Putin and Trump is
on global warming. It doesn’t exist! But, if it did, opening up the arctic
to oil exploration and development would be just that much easier. Why not
make the Arctic Ocean navigable – and drillable - 365 days a year!


So far there is no evidence that President Trump is a deep thinker or
strategist. Trump appears to be a blow-hard idiot and a bully who was the
right man, in the right place at the right time. His Russia turn could be
no more than admiration and attraction for other blow-hard bullies.


But, maybe the man is more than he seems.


At the very least, he is a cunning and corrupt real estate developer.
Certainly, he has been attracted to doing business with the cunning and
corrupt operators in Moscow. Apparently, he has made no big deals in
Russia, but Trump is a man who has not released his income tax returns, and
who has built an opaque business empire of interlocking private
partnerships that no one has yet deciphered. What kinds of dirty deals are
hiding in that labyrinth can only be guessed at, but some dirty deals in
Russia would easily fit into Trump’s pattern of behavior.


And this raises another issue that the American ruling class has with
Trump. They do not like to be robbed. Sharp business practices are routine,
and that is why they do not normally put one of their own in the White
House. They hire lawyers like Obama and the Clintons, or put the idiot son
in charge. Now, the President is a member of their own class who is out to
rob the rest of the members of the country club and use the powers of the
state to do it.


True, a few of them have jumped on board. Some to participate in the
plunder, and others to try to control him, to guide him, to use him. This
in fact is what most

[Marxism] The Comey "thang"

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Gary wrote, "This is big news here in Oz.  I have told everyone who will
listen (a
rapidly diminishing number!) that the Democrats are trapped by all this.
They are (very) reluctant  to be impeachers.  I think they would much
rather hope in Obama's words, that Trump "succeeds because then America
succeeds".

Impeachment will not happen if the Republicans do not split, and the
Democrats will not move for impeachment if they do not have at least 50
Republicans who are for impeachment in the house. The Republicans currently
have 238 seats in the house, the Democrats only have 193.

The likelihood that this will happen greatly increased today when
Deputy Att
​orney
 Gen
​eral ​
. Rod Rosenstein
​appointed former FBI Director
fDirector Robert S. Mueller III
​ to be the special prosecutor to investigate the connections of Trump et
al. to the Russians.

Rothstein, like Trump, is a Republican.

True, the Democrats do not want to impeach, but it is important to
understand that the Republicans are in the driver's seat here.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Der Speigel calls for Trump's removal

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/donald-trump-is-a-menace-to-the-world-opinion-a-1148471.html
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[Marxism] "Ground rent" thesis at the Left forum

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Hi everyone: This is a comment on the "ground rent" thesis about oil and
mining rents in Venezuela and other countries that Lou discussed in his
blog post about the Left Forum.

This thesis would be better if it were a "differential rent" thesis. Like
rents from agricultural land, rents from mining can also be differential
with above average rents accruing to especially productive mines or oil
fields, or to those located closest to markets. In addition, rents are
affected by market saturation in a way that is similar to profits.

In other words, you can have a crisis of over-production of oil. What
happened in the world markets for oil and its near substitutes (natural
gas, coal, etc.) was a crisis of overproduction caused by fracking in the
United States. That caused the collapse of oil prices in 2014 when the
Saudis decided to stop cutting production to prop up prices in the face of
Obama's fracking glut.

Because of differential rents, some oil producing countries were hurt worse
than others, Venezuela was particularly hard hit because of its heavy oils.

On top of this, the Chavezistas, despite being aware of the need to use oil
rents to diversify the Venezuelan economy to be more self-reliant - and
therefore less vulnerable to oil price swings and imperialist economic
warfare (among other things), failed to take any serious action. Chavez
died, Maduro was left holding the bag, Venezualans are leaving the country
in droves to do manicures in Bogotá, but the right is deathly afraid of
taking power in Venezuela because they will then have to take responsible
for the economic disaster which they helped create before Chavez came to
power, and for which they have no solution now.  I don't have much hope for
the Latin American left in the short-run, but learning the lessons of
Venezuela should be top priority.

Anthony
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[Marxism] On Venezuela

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My post on the "ground rent thesis" was mostly aimed at talking about how
differential rent works in mining and mineral extractions, but I mentioned
my opinion that Venezuela under the Chavistas had failed "to diversify the
Venezuelan economy to be more self-reliant."

This ruffled Lou's feather's, but it is a fact that no one can deny.
Despite big plans and lots of speeches, Venezuela's economy is less diverse
now then it was when Chavez was first elected. This is true not just for
industry, but for agriculture and tourism and every sector of the
Venezuelan economy.

I did not venture an opinion about the intentions of Chavez and his
followers, or about their big plans, or about their sincerity, or even
about why they failed.

IMHO Venezuela faces a crisis that in some ways is very much like the one
Cuba faced when Gorbachev pulled the rug out from under them. So far, the
Chavistas have not been able to mobilize the Venezuelan people to endure
their own "special period" and emerge from it in one piece. And, it does
not look like they have any ability to do so at this point.

This is not a good thing for Venezuela, or for anyone on this planet,
because the failure of the Venezuelan experiment will set the left back not
only in Venezuela, but everywhere in Latin America.

However, the drama is not over yet, and the unexpected is still very
possible.

All of Latin America remains extremely volatile. The right and the United
States have no solutions for any of the long standing problems of the
region. Witness Brazil. In Colombia, next door to Venezuela, the city of
Buenaventura, the main Pacific Ocean port of this country, just ended a
three week long "paro" that had many of the earmarks of a communal
insurrection. It occurred simultaneously with a month long public school
teachers' strike.

One of the lessons from the experience of the Soviet Union that everyone
should have learned, and that strongly applies to Venezuela, is that
socialism in one country, even a big country with a lot of natural
resources, is not possible in the long run. However, one of the lessons we
should all learn from Cuba is, that where there is a will, it can survive
for a long time against very stiff odds.

Anthony
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[Marxism] FARC keeps its name, establishes a new political party

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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As far as I can tell, this piece of news has not made it to this list. The
FARC has established itself as a legal political party and kept the same
acronym with a slightly different name, Fuerzas Alternativas (instead of
Armadas) Revolucionarias de Colombia. Leaders of a section of the
fragmented Polo Democratico Alternativo attended part of the FARC
convention. Currently there are three leftist candidates, two formerly of
the Polo, running for president: Gustavo Petro (formerly mayor of Bogotá),
Clara Lopez (formerly the head of the Polo), and Piedad Cordoba (formerly a
Liberal Party Senator). It is too soon to tell whether the new FARC will be
able to swim in the electoral waters of Colombia, but it will certainly
play a role in rearranging the fragments of the left. Read more about this
in Spanish at this link
http://www.resumenlatinoamericano.org/2017/08/27/colombia-las-farc-inician-su-congreso-en-que-se-tranforman-en-un-portido-politico-denominado-fuerzas-alternativas-revolucionarias-de-colombia/

Anthony
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[Marxism] Kennedy School

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The Kennedy School is also a training ground for future US approved leaders
of other countries. Two of the last three Presidents of Colombia, Pastrana
and Santos passed through, and many, many other Colombian political leaders
including Clara Lopez the former head of the Polo.

Anthony
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[Marxism] The Case Against Civilization

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Louis recently posted a New Yorker article on the Case against
Civilization. It was an essay by John Lanchester that was largely based on
the research and opinions of a guy named by James C. Scott who is Sterling
Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and
Co-Director of the Agrarian Studies Program, Yale University. The link
below takes you to a talk by Scott, you have to get through the first eight
minutes before things really get started. Interesting content, boring
presentation. Scott is some sort of anarchist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO__r8Q0bmU


Anthony
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[Marxism] Anti-racism in Winnipeg

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Those signs are all over the place in my current neighborhood in San
Leandro, CA competing with Black Lives matter signs.

Anthony
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[Marxism] The Gay Architects of Classic Rock

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Steve Hereen makes one good point about classic rock: it started in the
late 1940's as jump blues in the United States and became rock n' roll when
Alan Freed renamed it, BUT we still do not know how many of the early stars
and the people behind the scene were gay. Little Richard certainly was gay,
and there has always been a lot of speculation about the king himself
https://gcn.ie/elvis-presley-gay/

Classic rock in the USA, and the entire music business almost certainly had
many, many LGBT people in it, but given the repressive conditions of the
McCarthy era witch-hunts, nobody came out of the closet at the time, and
very few came out later.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Subject: Fwd: Venezuela crisis is the hidden consequence of

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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The article is more or less on the money, but the current deal between
Saudi Arabia, Russia, and tacitly US producers is to  stabilize prices at
$50/barrel. This price level will not sink Russia or Iran, will keep  the
US frackers working and making money, will keep the Chinese happy, and will
keep Venezuela with enough income to pay its debts in oil (primarily to
China) but not to feed its people. This is one reason the big banks, and
ipso facto the Trump administration, do not want the Maduro government to
fall. He is committed to payment no matter what whereas the opposition is
not trustworthy when it comes to paying what is due the banks (or anything
else.9

Anthony
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[Marxism] Hundreds Face Conspiracy Charges For Actions Of A Few During Inauguration Day Protests

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Black Bloc tactics are consciously planned, rather than spontaneous, acts
that have often lead to the arrest of protesters who did not participate in
the planning and who have no knowledge of the planning, object or intent of
the black bloc.

Of course, the capitalist state loves these tactics, and in fact if the
various police agencies are working up to speed, they have sent
provocateurs into the black bloc to promote these tactics. This is what
they did in the 60's and 70's in the USA, this is what they do all over
Latin America today. The "encapuchados" in Colombia are famous for their
potato bombs, and famously infiltrated.

The net effect of black bloc tactics is to make people who want to protest
peacefully wary of joining any demonstration, wary of joining any protest
movement in which the black bloc or similar formation is involved.

In the end, these tactics serve to demobilize mass movements and to
strengthen the capitalist state independently of justifiable rage against
the system of individual black bloc militants.

Anthony
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[Marxism] On China and Michael Roberts

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Tristan Sloughter wrote, "He (Michael Roberts) doesn't say it is a deformed
workers state, does he? He only argues that the main production (in China)
is not based on capitalist laws. There must be some way he can describe
such an autocratic state besides a capitalist state or a deformed workers
state?"

Yes, there is some way that the state in China can be described other than
as a "capitalist state" or "deformed workers state": it is a "state
capitalist state".

Anthony
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[Marxism] Chinese capitalism with special features

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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China counts over 100 billionaires among top Communist legislators

By AFP 

PUBLISHED: 08:43 EDT, 3 March 2017 | UPDATED: 08:48 EDT, 3 March 2017


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*17*shares

[image: China's ruling Politburo Standing Committee are given a round of
applause during the opening session of the Chinese People's Political
Consultative Conference (CPPCC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing,
on March 3, 2017]
+2

China's ruling Politburo Standing Committee are given a round of applause
during the opening session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative
Conference (CPPCC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, on March 3,
2017

   -

China counts more than 100 billionaires among its top legislators, with 209
of the richest holding wealth nearly equivalent to Belgium's annual GDP,
according to a report released as the Communist Party's annual
parliamentary session started Friday.

A key focus of the sessions is eliminating poverty and creating a
"moderately prosperous society", a project President Xi Jinping has
frequently cited as a national priority in a country that suffers from a
gaping chasm between the rich and poor.

The annual session of the country's top political bodies started Friday
with a meeting of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference
(CPPCC), a group that is part of the Communist Party-controlled government
structure.

The opening of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's rubber-stamp
legislature, will be held Sunday, with the country's economic elite and top
leaders rubbing shoulders for some two weeks in the imposing corridors of
the Great Hall of the People, situated off Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

Out of the more than 5,100 delegates to these two assemblies, 209 possess
individual wealth of more than 2 billion yuan ($290 million),
Shanghai-based luxury magazine publisher the Hurun Report said in a survey.

More than 100 of the wealthy individuals are members of the NPC, and 97 are
from the CPPCC.

According to the survey, their cumulative assets tallied "almost 3.5
trillion yuan" ($507 billion) -- nearly equivalent to the annual GDP of
countries such as Belgium, Sweden or Poland.

The majority of the wealthy delegates were businessmen, rather than
politicians who had spent their careers within the party apparatus.

Among them are the heads of internet giants, such as Pony Ma of Tencent and
Robin Li of Baidu, smartphone maker Xiaomi's CEO Lei Jun, and Zong Qinghou,
head of soft drink producer Wahaha.
[image: China's National People's Congress (NPC) is held at the Great Hall
of the People in Beijing]
+2

China's National People's Congress (NPC) is held at the Great Hall of the
People in Beijing

   -

Despite a large-scale anti-corruption campaign launched in 2013 by
President Xi to clean up the Communist Party's ranks, the heads of private
businesses remain welcome in the cavernous halls of power as Beijing seeks
to rebalance its economy towards domestic consumption and the services
sector.

Nevertheless, some wealthy entrepreneurs could be tempted to keep a low
profile this year as the Communist Party ups its attacks on real estate
"speculators" and "financial crocodiles".

While Xi has pledged to lift more than 45 million people out of poverty by
2020, his time in office has already been exceptionally good for the
country's wealthiest politicians.

While the economy as a whole has expanded at a rate of under seven percent
in recent years, the legislature's 100 or so dollar billionaires have seen
their cumulative wealth jump 64 percent since 2013 when he assumed the
presidency, Hurun said.
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[Marxism] Alvaro Uribe - the most dangerous man in Colombian

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Dennis Brasky posted an article titled "Alvaro Uribe - the most dangerous
man in Colombian" which is generally correct about Uribe's evil record, but
behind the times about Uribe's plans for the 2018 elections. As of this
moment he is negotiating a deal to support Gérman Vargas Lleras's candidacy
rather than running one of his own puppets. Vargas Lleras was Juan Manuel
Santos's Vice President, and was in charge of controlling the pork barrel
for Santos. Lleras always kept a public distance from the peace process and
was considered to be Santos's back door to the Uribistas. Here is the
Wikipedia version of the man...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ%C3%A1n_Vargas_Lleras

It is way too early to tell what will happen in next year's elections, but
Vargas Lleras is clearly the candidate of the most important ruling class
factions as of this moment.

Anthony
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[Marxism] State Capitalist State

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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mkaradjis wrote

that China is "...a kind of state-directed capitalism, like Keynesianism,
like fascism, like Nasserism/Peronism, like NICism etc. But a
"state capitalist state" as some kind of new social formation? A
tad unscientific I would think.

"Really, what is the big resistance still to recognising China as
a capitalist state?"

Personally, I think it is a capitalist state, but it is not the same kind
of capitalist state that Russia is, not the kind of capitalist state that
the United States is, not the kind of a capitalist state that France is...

China is a special kind of capitalist state very close to what Mexico was
during the long reign of the PRI. Social revolutions in both countries,
based on the peasantry and not the urban working class, led to transitional
revolutionary dictatorships. The PRI dictatorship always saw itself as
leading the capitalist development of Mexico, albeit it had a social
democratic view of its capitalism. The Chinese Communist Party believed
that it was leading a socialist country, but then pragmatically - and
self-consciously - decided to follow the capitalist road.

It has done so in a planned, thought out way led by the state and the
Communist Party.

This is almost the opposite of the collapse of planning that occurred when
the Soviet Union collapsed.

There is nothing unscientific about delineating different varieties of pigs
and cows. Why would it be unscientific to delineate different varieties of
capitalist political regimes?

Chinese capitalism shows the absolute limits of capitalist development on
this planet. Capitalism can no longer develop without being directed by the
state. This is only a stop gap because China is not exempt from the laws of
the world market and is likely to be at the center of the next great
crisis.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Turner Classics "The Hollywood Blacklist"

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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*For all of the movie buffs on this list...*


*http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/1365242%7C0/The-Hollywood-Blacklist-Mon-Tues-in-November.html
*


THE HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST - MON & TUES IN NOVEMBER

"The Hollywood Blacklist" marked a turbulent period during the Cold War and
was the result of the American government embarking on what some considered
to be a "witch hunt" against communism, ruining many career and lives.
Beginning in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)
conducted a series of investigations into Hollywood actors, screenwriters,
directors and other creative types, inquiring into their ties to communism
and any motives they may have had to spread subversive ideas.

This month's Spotlight on TCM highlights the professionals that were
affected, along with the films they worked on or in. The month's films are
divided into categories and host Ben Mankiewicz will be joined by two
special co-hosts. On November 20 and 21, the author of *High Noon: The
Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic*, Glenn Frankel,
will sit down with Ben, and on November 27 and 28 actress and director Lee
Grant, who was directly affected by the Blacklist, will focus on comebacks
after the controversial investigations.

*Before the Blacklist - The Hollywood Ten* looks at the individuals who
were cited for contempt of Congress and blacklisted after refusing to
answer questions about their alleged involvement with the Communist Party:
screenwriters Alvah Bessie and Leslie Cole (*Objective, Burma!*, 1945),
Ring Lardner Jr. (*Woman of the Year*, 1942), John Howard Lawson (
*Counter-Attack*, 1945), Albert Maltz (*Pride of the Marines*, 1945),
Samuel Ornitz (*One Man's Journey*, 1933) and Dalton Trumbo (*Our Vines
Have Tender Grapes*, 1945); director/screenwriter Herbert J. Biberman (*The
Master Race*, 1944); and director Edward Dmytryk and producer/screenwriter
Adrian Scott (*Crossfire*, 1947).

*Before the Blacklist - Others Blacklisted (Writers and Directors)* includes
writer Sidney Buchman (*Here Comes Mr. Jordan* (1941), director John
Cromwell (*The Racket*, 1951), director Jules Dassin (*The Naked City*,
1948), director Irving Pichel (*The Man I Married*, TCM premiere, 1940),
writer-director Abraham Polonsky (*Force of Evil*, 1948) and writers
Marguerite Roberts and John Sanford (*Honky Tonk*, 1941).

*Before the Blacklist - Others Blacklisted (Actors)* features Morris
Carnovsky (*Gun Crazy*, 1949), Dorothy Comingore (*Citizen Kane*, 1941),
John Garfield and Norman Lloyd (*He Ran All the Way*, 1951), Marsha Hunt (*A
Letter for Evie*, 1945), Kim Hunter (*A Streetcar Named Desire*, 1951),
Karen Morley (*Scarface*, 1931) and Gale Sondergaard (*Anthony Adverse*,
1936).

*During the Blacklist - Working Abroad and Using Pseudonyms* is co-hosted
by Frankel with a focus on the talents that continued working by leaving
Hollywood and using false names or forgoing credit. Director Herbert J.
Biberman, writer Michael Wilson, producer Paul Jarrico and actor Will Geer
shot *Salt of the Earth* (1954) primarily in New Mexico and Mexico. Writer
Dalton Trumbo, who was fronted by Robert Rich on *The Brave One* (1956),
saw his Oscar® for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story go to Rich before
finally claiming it in 1975. John Howard Lawson, who co-wrote *Cry, the
Beloved Country* (1952) was not given a screen credit until after his
death. American-born director Jules Dassin (*Rififi*, 1955) relocated to
Europe so successfully that many thought he was a native Greek or
Frenchman. Joseph Losey, another American director, (*The Big Night*, 1951)
relocated to Great Britain and sometimes used the pseudonym "Joseph
Walton."

*After the Blacklist - Comebacks* is co-hosted by Grant. This night focuses
on those who were fortunate enough to reclaim their careers after surviving
the notoriety of the blacklist. These included director Martin Ritt (*Edge
of the City*, 1957) and actors Jeff Corey (*The Cincinnati Kid*, 1965),
Zero Mostel (*The Front*, 1976), Grant (*The Landlord*, 1970) and Howard Da
Silva (*David and Lisa*, 1962) among others in this month's programming.

By Roger Fristoe
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[Marxism] NYT As a Debt Deadline Looms for Venezuela, Maduro Is Defiant

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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As a Debt Deadline Looms for Venezuela, Maduro Is Defiant

By KIRK SEMPLE  and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
NOV. 2, 2017
Continue reading the main story
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Photo
President Nicolás Maduro said his vice president, Tareck El Aissami, left,
will lead the restructuring effort.CreditMiraflores Palace, via Reuters

CARACAS, Venezuela — With the threat of default looming over Venezuela
, President
Nicolás Maduro said late Thursday that his government would initiate a
restructuring and refinancing of the country’s foreign debt.

The announcement came at the deadline for a $1.2 billion payment by the
state oil company on a maturing bond, which Mr. Maduro said his government
would instead deliver on Friday.

Speaking on national television, Mr. Maduro said that his government was
fighting “a battle for the financial stability and tranquillity of
Venezuela.”

“We’re going to win this battle,” he vowed.

The move is an acknowledgment of how serious the government’s financial
problems have become, and throws further into doubt the future of the
country, which has been grappling with an economic crisis that has caused dire
shortages of food and medicine
.

Mr. Maduro has blamed the crisis in part on the Trump administration, which
he has accused of leading an “economic war” against his country through
economic sanctions intended to prevent Venezuela’s government from
contracting new debt.
Continue reading the main story

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   -
   Venezuelan Opposition Receives E.U.’s Sakharov Freedom Prize OCT. 26,
   2017

   

   -
   Deep Cracks Appear in Venezuela’s Weakened Opposition OCT. 24, 2017

   

   -
   Russia Uses Its Oil Giant, Rosneft, as a Foreign Policy Tool OCT. 29,
   2017

   


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Given the sanctions, however, it remained unclear how Mr. Maduro intended
to restructure the government’s debt.

“There’s no way to restructure under existing U.S. sanctions, but the
government may be hoping that bond holders now pressure the Trump
administration to create an exemption to the sanctions,” said Risa
Grais-Targow, director for Latin America at Eurasia Group, a political risk
analysis firm.

In a challenge to the Trump administration, Mr. Maduro also named Vice
President Tareck El Aisammí

to
lead the efforts. Mr. El Aisammí has been sanctioned by the United States
over allegations that he is a narcotics trafficker, which blocks Americans
from doing business with him.

There was no grace period for the loan payment due on Thursday, and it
remained unclear how investors would react to the failure of the state oil
company, Petróleos de Venezuela, or Pdvsa, to make the payment on time.

But Diego Ferro, co-chief investment officer at Greylock Capital
Management, a New York hedge fund that invests in distressed high-yield
bonds, said the restructuring announcement could buy Mr. Maduro some time
with bondholders and the Venezuelan people.

“People were expecting the payment late anyway,” he said. “As of now they
have at least a few months to come up with an offer to put off litigation
in the United States. It will depend on what they offer” in terms of
payments of principal and interest.
Photo
Venezuela’s state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, or Pdvsa, has
offered l

[Marxism] Oil rents and intellectual property rents

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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According to the NYT, a big chunk of the venture capital in Silicon Valley
consists of recycled plunder and oil rents

"... mostly we need to talk about this money because, boy, is there a whole
lot of it — and as the world’s moneyed dictators, oligarchs and other
characters look for more places to park their billions, mountains more will
be coming to Silicon Valley."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/technology/unsavory-sources-money-fueling-tech.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront
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[Marxism] DSA, Jacobin, elections

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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The growth of the DSA, electoral victories of milk-toast social-democrats,
and even the electoral victories of the Democratic Party as a whole should
be taken for what they are: a movement to the left by a very important part
of the voting age population of the United States. How far will this go? We
don't know yet, but I hope, and also predict, that it will become a new
wave of radicalization that will surpass that of the 1960's. Remember, how
mealy-mouthed and patriotic the SDS was in 1962? (If you don't the Porty
Huron statement can be found at the link below), but SDS and not the SWP
became the massive wave of radicalization in the early and mid-1960's.

How could it have been otherwise then, and how can it be otherwise now? Are
people who have been immersed in the glories of capitalism such as the Fall
of the horrible Berlin Wall and in the criminality of communism like that
Anglina Jolie hopes to use to win an Oscar going to start instantly
debating what happened in 1917 on this list when they first get mad enough
to go vote?

This year's election results are good news for the left, even though known
of us on this list led any insurrections.

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html

Anthony
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[Marxism] Port Huron Statement

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Thank you Michael and Glenn. Sorry about the error. My point about the
statement's politics stands, and is borne out by the complete version.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Okay, so who is

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Okay, so who is Ben Norton?
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[Marxism] These Sex Scandals Are Pushing The Country Further To The Right | Washington Babylon

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Rubbish.

The Women's marches the day after Trump's inauguration set the tone for a
new rise of the left in the United States, and this is an important
continuation of it.

In terms of Democrat-Republican political rivalry, Andrew has also
completely missed what is going on, probably because he himself is a
progressive Democrat and lesser evilist.

Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer et al. have pressured Conyers
and Franken to resign because they are planning to reprise the Hillary
Clinton strategy of 2016 in 2018. The Republicans are the party of racists
and rapists, and the Democrats are the anti-racists and anti-rapists -
therefore the Democrats need to say nothing else about anything else.

This strategy almost worked in 2016: Clinton won a popular majority of
nearly 3 million votes.

One reason Clinton did not do better was that she is the wife of Bill
Clinton, a man who has the reputation of a liar and abuser, even if he was
never convicted of anything. Hillary has the reputation of a woman who
accepted all of that in the name of lesser-evilism and getting herself
elected later.

Nancy Pelosi learned a lesson in 2016, and so did Chuck. Hence, they can
give up a couple of votes now in a gamble that it will help them out next
year. Why not? They are in the minority anyway and will continue to be
after Conyers and Franken are gone.

One of the best things that could happen to the United States, and to the
world,would be for BOTH imperialist parties of racists and rapists - those
would be the Democrats and the Republicans - to blow up into pieces.

Hopefully, the current me-too moment will help make this happen.

Anthony
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[Marxism] Venezuela's Future?

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Sri Lanka, Struggling With Debt, Hands a Major Port to China

New York Times by Kai Schultz Dec. 12, 2017



NEW DELHI — Struggling to pay its debt to Chinese firms, the nation of Sri
Lanka formally handed over the strategic port of Hambantota to China on a
99-year lease last week, in a deal that government critics have said
threatens the country’s sovereignty.

In recent years, China has shored up its presence in the Indian Ocean,
investing billions of dollars to build port facilities and plan maritime
trade routes as part of its “One Belt, One Road” initiative to help
increase its market reach.

Along the way, smaller countries like Sri Lanka have found themselves owing
debts they cannot pay. Sri Lanka owes more than $8 billion to
state-controlled Chinese firms, officials say.

Sri Lankan politicians said the Hambantota deal, valued at $1.1 billion,
was necessary to chip away at the debt, but analysts warned of the
consequences of signing away too much control to China.

“The price being paid for reducing the China debt could prove more costly
than the debt burden Sri Lanka seeks to reduce,” said N. Sathiya Moorthy, a
senior fellow specializing in Sri Lanka at the New Delhi-based Observer
Research Foundation.

Full article at
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/world/asia/sri-lanka-china-port.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront
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[Marxism] Albert Matlz's America

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Apropos of Phillip Roth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhPwtnGviyg
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Re: [Marxism] Some thoughts on US perspectives

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Hmmm

This document says that Donald Trump's election was a defeat for the
working class in the United States, that it also would have been a defeat
for the working class if Hillary Clinton had won the election, and that the
working class does not exist as a coherent force in the United States.

It also says that the absence of a mass working class party is the key
factor in all of this, from which a reader might concludeall of US
history has been a long interrupted string of defeats for workers.

We must have returned to chattel slavery long ago, in fact it probably was
never abolished.

I recommend going back to the drawing board.

Anthony
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Re: [Marxism] Some thoughts on US perspectives

[Anthony Boynton via Marxism]

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Hi John: I wasn't confused, but your perspectives mix things up and add to
confusion IMHO. The recent elections were not an instance of class struggle
between the working class and the capitalist class. The working class was
absent. Working class individuals voted for ruling class candidates, but
the working class as a class did not participate.

Undoubtedly, the election of Trump reflects and is part of growing crisis
within the capitalist class, and the election of Trump has led to
additional attacks on the working class, class struggle by the ruling class
and its state against the working class, but the aftermath of his election
has also seen an upsurge of struggle  by sectors of the working class, most
notably women.

My point was simple: don't confuse elections which offer only ruling class
candidates with the class struggle.

Anthony
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