[Marxism] Aung San Suu Kyi stands for her people and democracy
Aung San Suu Kyi stands for her people and democracy A single slender woman who terrifies an army of generals By Badri Raina, ZNet, Aug 16, 2009 Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page In Burma resides a dame, Terra Firma is her name; They lock her indoors, But her pitying smile soars, And the Generals are rendered lame. Thomas Carlyle, that prophetic voice of the 19C, delineated in Heroes And Hero Worship (1841) what he thought were types of world-historical individuals. Among them he projected Cromwell as a type of hero whose strength lay in a species of obdurate conviction that had no need of any flamboyant oratorical skills. Two other figures from the 20C/21C spring to mind as further exemplars of the type, namely, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi. No more true metaphor for them than the grass, which Whitman called the “handkerchief of the Lord,” fusing in a magnificently visionary way god with democracy. The grass, it grows everywhere, however you trample on it. In its fecund unendingness, it symbolizes and manifests the will-to-life itself, and in its undefeatably cussed humility, it is the spirit of universal freedom and common democracy that refuse to be quelled. And, as any good gardener knows, the more you cut the more it grows. Which may be why the sensible British did not heed Hitler’s counsel in 1938: When Chamberlain went to reason with him, he mentioned Gandhi and how troubled the empire was by him. Uncomprehending, the Fuhrer asked, “why don’t you shoot him?” And had they done so, nothing might have brought about so early a collapse of the empire—and in predictably brutal ways. Clearly, the two-penny tyrants in Burma who strut about in a prison of their own making—if Suu Kyi cannot leave her house, the Generals may not leave Burma, for they are reviled everywhere, including in those parts of the world who have shabby deals with them—have understood that much. Thus, for their own wretched safety, they desist from doing that Hitler on her. So, we ask, are they winning or losing Burma? Losing, we think. And over that knowledge, Suu Kyi’s smile arches like that of angels, seeing far far beyond the events of any single day, beyond even her own life. Continues http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/22324 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Woodstock, or how art lasts longer than politics (was: Exchange on Woodstock)
Tom Cod (t...@hotmail.com) wrote on 2009-08-15 at 22:35:31 in about [Marxism] Exchange on Woodstock: Woodstock being remembered four decades later is just one more proof that artistic and generally cultural productions of us humans last longer than the remembrance of the people ruled at that time or whose political action made those cultural manifestations possible or tried to make them impossible. We know of Antonio Vivaldi and many love his music, but who can remember who was Pope in Rome and who ruled Venice in his time? Music composed by Johann-Sebastian Bach is still performed and loved all over the world, but who remembers the Grand Duke of Brandenburg who gave Bach the livelyhood to write the Brandenburg Concertos? Isn't the memory of the English kings and queens kept alive by the wonderful art of William Shakespeare? We admire the Gothic and Romanic churches in Western Europe, the Roman theatres, Greek temples, Egyptian pyramides, but what do we know about the political fights taking place at the times their creation? What do we know of the people who ruled when the Mayan pyramides or the sculputres marking the Easter Island (as Europeans call it)? Coming back to Woodstock -- how many people dreaming of Woodstock and re-hearing its Music can tell who was POTUS then? Fidel Castro once made similar remarks, telling an interviewer that he would be long forgotten while the art being created in his time would still be alive and kicking. But should Fidel Castro have given up on politics and have pursued a carreer as musician in the Havana brothrels? For me, that's dialectical materialism. Tom Cod quoted his correspondent D. Cheers, Lüko Willms Frankfurt, Germany YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The New American Dream: Renting
The Wall Street Journal LIFE STYLE AUGUST 15, 2009, 8:20 P.M. ET The New American Dream: Renting It's time to accept that home ownership is not a realistic goal for many people and to curtail the enormous government programs fueling this ambition. By Thomas J. Sugrue 'A man is not a whole and complete man, wrote Walt Whitman, unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on. America's lesser bards sang of my old Kentucky Home and Home Sweet Home, leading no less than that great critic Herbert Hoover to declaim that their ballads were not written about tenements or apartments…they never sing about a pile of rent receipts. To own a home is to be American. To rent is to be something less. Every generation has offered its own version of the claim that owner-occupied homes are the nation's saving grace. During the Cold War, home ownership was moral armor, protecting America from dangerous outside influences. No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist, proclaimed builder William Levitt. With no more reds hiding under the beds, Bill Clinton launched National Homeownership Day in 1995, offering a new rationale about personal responsibility. You want to reinforce family values in America, encourage two-parent households, get people to stay home? he said. George W. Bush similarly pledged his commitment to an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, 'welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property.' Surveys show that Americans buy into our gauzy platitudes about the character-building qualities of home ownership—at least those who still own them. A February Pew survey reported that nine out of 10 homeowners viewed their homes as a comfort in their lives. But for millions of Americans at risk of foreclosure, the home has become something else altogether: the source of panic and despair. Those emotions were on full display last week, when an estimated 53,000 people packed the Save the Dream fair at Atlanta's World Congress Center. Its planners, with the support of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, brought together struggling homeowners, housing counselors, and lenders, including industry giants Bank of America and Citigroup, to renegotiate at-risk mortgages. Georgia's housing market has been devastated by the current economic crisis—338,411 homes in the Peachtree state went into foreclosure in May and June alone. Atlanta represents the current housing crisis in microcosm. Since the second quarter of 2006, housing values across the United States have fallen by one third. Over a million homes were lost to foreclosure nationwide in 2008, as homeowners struggled to meet payments. The number of foreclosures reached an all-time record last month—when owners of one in every 355 houses in the country received default or auction notices or were seized by creditors. The collapse in confidence in securitized, high-risk mortgages has also devastated some of the nation's largest banks and lenders. The home financing giant Fannie Mae alone held an estimated $230 billion in toxic assets. Even if there are signs of hope on the horizon (home prices ticked upward by 0.5% in May and new housing starts rose in June), analysts like Yale's Robert Shiller expect that housing prices will remain level for the next five years. Many economists, like the Wharton School's Joseph Gyourko, are beginning to make the case that public policies should encourage renting, or at least put it on a level playing field with home ownership. A June 2009 survey commissioned by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, found a deep-seated pessimism about home ownership, suggesting that even if renting doesn't yet have cachet, it's the only choice left for those who have been burned by the housing market. One third of respondents don't believe that they will ever be able to own a home. And 42% of those who once purchased a home, but don't own one now, believe that they'll never own one again. Some countries—such as Spain and Italy—have higher rates of home ownership than the U.S., but there, homes are often purchased with the support of extended families and are places to settle for the long term, not to flip to eager buyers or trade up for a McMansion. In France, Germany, and Switzerland, renting is more common than purchasing. There, most people invest their earnings in the stock market or squirrel it away in savings accounts. In those countries, whether you are a renter or an owner, houses have use value, not exchange value. For most Americans, until the recent past, home ownership was a dream and the pile of rent receipts was the reality. From 1900, when the census first started gathering data on home ownership, through 1940, fewer than half of all Americans owned their own homes. Home ownership rates actually fell in three of the first four decades of the 20th
[Marxism] Engels as angel
(A surprisingly sympathetic article from the Economist.) http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14209490 A biography of Friedrich Engels A very special business angel Aug 13th 2009 Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels. By Tristram Hunt. Metropolitan Books; 448 pages; $32. Published in Britain as “The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels”. Allen Lane; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk WHEN the financial crisis took off last autumn, Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, originally published in 1867, whooshed up bestseller lists. The first book to describe the relentless, all-consuming and global nature of capitalism had suddenly gained new meaning. But Marx had never really gone away, whereas Friedrich Engels—the man who worked hand in glove with him for most of his life and made a huge contribution to “Das Kapital”—is almost forgotten. A new biography by a British historian, Tristram Hunt, makes a good case for giving him greater credit. The two men became friends in Paris in 1844 when both were in their mid-20s, and remained extremely close until Marx died in 1883. Both were Rhinelanders (our picture shows Engels standing behind Marx in the press room of Rheinische Zeitung which they edited jointly) but came from very different backgrounds: Marx’s father was a Jewish lawyer turned Christian; Engels’s a prosperous Protestant cotton-mill owner. Marx studied law, then philosophy; Engels, the black sheep of his family, was sent to work in the family business at 17. While doing his military service in 1841 in Berlin, he was exposed to the ferment of ideas swirling around the Prussian capital. Next, he went to work for the Manchester branch of the family business, Ermen Engels. Manchester’s “cottonopolis” in the mid-19th century was a manufacturer’s heaven and a working man’s hell, and it provided an invaluable lesson for Engels: that economic factors were the basic cause of the clash between different classes of society. By 1845, when he was just 24, he had not only learnt how to be a successful capitalist; he had also written a coruscatingly anti-capitalist work, “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, which charted the inhumanity of modern methods of production in minute detail. Engels left Manchester to work with Marx on the “Communist Manifesto” and the two of them spent the late 1840s criss-crossing Europe to chase the continental revolutions of the time, ending up in England. Marx had started work on “Das Kapital”, but there was a problem. He had by then acquired an aristocratic German wife, a clutch of small children and aspirations for a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, but no means of support. Engels (whose name resembles the word for “angel” in German) offered an astoundingly big-hearted solution: he would go back to Manchester to resume life in the detested family cotton business and provide Marx with the money he needed to write his world-changing treatise. For the next 20 years Engels worked grumpily away, handing over half his generous income to an ever more demanding Marx. He also collaborated intensively on the great work, contributing many ideas, practical examples from business and much-needed editorial attention. When at last volume I of “Das Kapital” was finished, he extricated himself from the business and moved to London to be near the Marx family, enjoying life as an Economist-reading rentier and intellectual. Engels was an enigma. Gifted, energetic and fascinated by political ideas, he was nevertheless ready to play second fiddle to Marx. “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented,” he declared after his friend’s death. Mr Hunt does a brilliant job of setting the two men’s endeavours in the context of the political, social and philosophical currents at the time. It makes for a complex story that can be hard to follow but is well worth persevering with. Tall and handsome, Engels had a taste not just for ideas but for the good life—wine, women, riding with the Cheshire hunt—and seems to have felt little sense of irony that all these things were paid for by the proletariat’s back-breaking labour. His domestic life was much more unconventional than Marx’s. He lived, on and off, with a semi-literate Irish working-class girl, Mary Burns; then, when she died, with her sister, Lizzy, whom he married only on her deathbed. He had no children, though he chivalrously took responsibility for a boy whom Marx had fathered with a housekeeper. Engels’s sacrifices continued after Marx’s death. He not only carried on funding the Marx family and their various hangers-on, but also spent years pulling together the chaotic notes Marx left behind for volumes II and III of “Das Kapital”. Inevitably there were lots of loose ends which Engels tied up as he saw fit, and sometimes the results were more revolutionary than the author may have intended. In volume
Re: [Marxism] Public option and cooperatives
As with the war, public opinion tends to gravitate towards the right side of the question...towards skepticism of a status quo they know isn't working. However, deferential Americans have learned to look to the politicians and the media for some validation of that skepticism. When they don't get it, the noisiest voices on the idiot box tend to frame and direct the rethinking. The Democrats never did leap to sustain public opinion against Bush and the liberrals aren't doing it against Obama's fear of rocking the boat. So the dynamic becomes precisely what the media and the government tells us what it is. ML YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] District 9
I have not seen this movie yet, but two of my colleagues in NYFCO did not care for it very much. Prairie Miller, a hard-core leftist like me, wrote: Relentlessly clunky and grating in the extreme, District 9 takes its cue from Cloverfield's contrived artsy vertigo to situate the futuristic tall tale combining premeditated pseudo-disorganized camera and surveillance video footage, as supposedly hyper-real journalistic racial profiling panic in the here and now. Sharlto Copley is Wilkus van der Merwe, the public face of private mercenaries contracted by the South African government to evict and relocate to a concentration camp, the surging population of Johannesburg District 9 aliens from outer space. Those refusing to be ordered out of the teeming slum as Merwe cheerfully hands them notices to vacate on camera, are summarily shot dead to the delight of black viewers of the evening news. But in the course of Merwe's elated pursuit of his fifteen minutes of photo op small screen fame, he contracts an alien virus which to his initial dismay, harvests the host creature and his superpowers within which, well, turns him into a pregnant man. And while Merwe spends the rest of the future as now thriller fleeing mercenaries and hiding out among his new odd couple alien allies in District 9, real South African blacks express relief on camera about alien removal and extinction. The distasteful joke here being perpetrated by director Neill Blomkamp, is that he fooled his subjects into talking about their aversion to the swelling immigrant population from other African countries, particularly Nigeria, and then, so to speak, photo-shopped them into his politically odious victims-as-villains movie. Clever. At the same time, the Nigerians are depicted as despicable when not depraved bottom feeder hustlers and homicidal gangs financially exploiting the aliens, when not forcing the females into cross-species sex for sale. This, while the white dominated government is simply perplexed. full: http://newsblaze.com/story/20090807123235mill.nb/topstory.html Meanwhile, Armond White, an African-American reviewer who does not suffer foolish movies lightly, wrote this: It’s been 33 years since South Africa’s Soweto riots stirred the world’s disgust with that country’s regime where legal segregation kept blacks “apart” and in “hoods” (thus, Apartheid) unequal to whites. District 9’s sci-fi concept celebrates—yes, that’s the word—Soweto’s legacy by ignoring the issues of self-determination (where a mass demonstration by African students on June 16, 1976, protested their refusal to learn the dominant culture’s Afrikaans language). District 9 also trivializes the bloody outcome where an estimated 500 students were killed, by ignoring that complex history and enjoying its chaos. Let’s see if the Spielberg bashers put-off by the metaphysics in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be as offended by District 9’s mangled anthropology. District 9 represents the sloppiest and dopiest pop cinema—the kind that comes from a second-rate film culture. No surprise, this South African fantasia from director Neill Blomkamp was produced by the intellectually juvenile New Zealander Peter Jackson. It idiotically combines sci-fi wonderment with the inane “realism” of a mockumentary to show the South African government’s xenophobic response to a global threat: Alien-on-earth population has reached one million, all housed—like Katrina refugees or Soweto protesters—in restricted territories. “Before we knew it, it was a slum,” says Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley, a nervous, Daniel Day-Lewis type) who is a white executive for multinational corporation MNU. He brings a camera crew when he serves eviction notices to relocate the aliens. These restless, hostile (thus dangerous) foreigners resemble bi-ped crustaceans and are derisively referred to as “prawns” just as South African blacks were derogatively tagged “kaffi.” Wikus tells the camera, “The prawn doesn’t understand. One has to say ‘This is our land. Please, will you go?’” full: http://www.nypress.com/article-20206-from-mothership-to-bullship.html Apparently Armond's review struck a raw nerve since he has gotten hundreds of angry comments on Rotten Tomatoes. I am really envious! Here's one of them: Armond White you are the worst kind of film reviewer - ie one using his elitist so called educated opinion as a vehicle for poorly formed social commentary. If you ever met a South African (black or white) you may be ashamed of what you have written here (but by all accounts your arrogance is so large that you feel unaccountable). The complexities of South Africa cannot be explained in one little Sci-fi film - and nor I expect it too -Does the NYP realise that it gets a third rate social commentator along with a third rate film reviewer?? Oh and I think to call in to question what Peter Jackson thinks about Aborigines or Maoris is
Re: [Marxism] Engels as angel
Louis Proyect (l...@panix.com) wrote on 2009-08-17 at 09:25:44 in about [Marxism] Engels as angel: actually quoting a book review from The economist: Marx had no means of support. Engels [...] offered an astoundingly big-hearted solution: he would go back to Manchester to resume life in the detested family cotton business and provide Marx with the money he needed to write his world-changing treatise. For the next 20 years Engels worked grumpily away, handing over half his generous income to an ever more demanding Marx. This is only partially correct. First, Marx and Engels had nothing but disdain for revolutionists which in the London exile would not try to earn their living by work, and it was a matter of course for them to work for their living. For Engels, the easiest and first choice was to take up again work in his fathers partnership with Ermen at Ermen Engels in Manchester. Marx tried to survive as journalist and worked a regular column for the New York newspaper Tribune, which only ended with the advent of the US-american civil war. Both revolutionists were also convinced that playing revolution would lead to nowhere in the years after the defeat of the Europe-wide revolution of 1848/49. Marx had not yet started to work on his masterpiece Das Kapital when Engels moved back to Manchester. But true is that Engels helped a lot with money to ease the Marxens economic problems. Cheers, Lüko Willms Frankfurt, Germany YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] District 9
Louis Proyect wrote: I have not seen this movie yet, but two of my colleagues in NYFCO did not care for it very much. went to see it yesterday, it's the first movie i have walked out on since i walked out on Cujo in 1983. District 9 is a very very evocative film ... see it if you want your ultra-leftist feelings evoked otherwise, the movie has a ton of problems ... though i am told the second half that i missed was better. Les YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] District 9
Louis Proyect wrote: full: http://newsblaze.com/story/20090807123235mill.nb/topstory.html Meanwhile, Armond White, an African-American reviewer who does not suffer foolish movies lightly, wrote wow, great review there were several deeply disturbing scenes in the first half of the movie that made me sick to my stomach ... but the way these scenes were embedded within the structure of the film convinced me the filmmaker was an apolitical jackass, and some reviews i read with him afterwards sealed the deal for me. i suppose the coming attractions didnt help either: one was for a movie about angels that come to earth to destroy its people. the coming attraction showed an sweet elderly grandmotherly woman suddenly baring her teeth/fangs and attacking some truck driver (or whatever he was) ... i thought to myself how fitting to make an elderly woman the face of an enemy in an age where the health care system was becoming ever more fragile for the elderly; why not play them as evil. then there was a preview of yet another Final Destination, where some kid sees the future death of people and so we are treated to a spectacle of ways to die grossly. the third coming attraction was a Woody Harrelson flick about zombies, and featured scene after scene of ways to kill ghoulish characters with maximum blood spray. the fourth coming attraction was for a movie called Sorority Row, where some young college age women plan a prank against a college age man who cheated on one of the sorority sisters. the prank goes awry and one sorority sister gets killed, and ghoulish mayhem follows. somehow the films snippets were made to seem every bit as apocalyptic as the other three movies. in that context sprang District 9. i walked out halfway through, when an alien was led up to a firing range and the main character of the film was forced to murder him, with an alien weapon finally rendered activated so that some capitalists could make billions on new weapons systems. the image of this alien being lead to his death still haunts me 24 hours later ... as it was intended to, being a play on Nazi experimentation in the concentration camps (this was made explicit in the film). i curse filmmakers like the one who made District 9, who play with these kinds of sensibilities simply to get ahead in the Hollywood power game. Les YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] District 9
As an allegory to apartheid the film for me was a complete failure.But compared to other mainstream films, it was a rather entertaining sci-fi movie. Les-- that was an unusual point to walk out on a film. I didn't see the overt Nazi comparison, but even if I did I still don't quite understand why you found that to be especially objectionable given its context--- it was an act of violence by the films military-private-contractors antagonists. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] the apartheid wall - learn the latest on Bil’in and what you can do to help
http://mondoweiss.net/2009/08/learn-the-latest-on-bilin-and-what-you-can-do-to-help.html It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.- *Voltaire* -- YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Woodstock, or how art lasts longer than politics (was: Exchange on Woodstock)
You're kidding, who could forget Dick Nixon? Coming back to Woodstock -- how many people dreaming of Woodstock and re-hearing its Music can tell who was POTUS then? Cheers, Lüko Willms Frankfurt, Germany YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/tcod%40hotmail.com _ Get back to school stuff for them and cashback for you. http://www.bing.com/cashback?form=MSHYCBpubl=WLHMTAGcrea=TEXT_MSHYCB_BackToSchool_Cashback_BTSCashback_1x1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] District 9
I saw the whole movie. I have mixed feelings about it. I agree with the comment that the person who wrote/produced this was immature politically. The very obvious comparison with Apartheid was the main comparison, combined with a sort of faux-Nazi approach as a Final Solution to the Alien Problem. Duh, it was so transparent to be dumb. Film making has gotten so good now that it really looked like a giant space craft floating over Johannesburg, the Aliens look real and believable, and like giant prawns they were modeled on. I would agree that the filmmaker wanted to make 'regular township' residents seem like bigots and Nigerians like cannibalistic criminal gangs to the last person. The second half of the movie is definitely better and they could of almost started it about 40 minutes in and it would of been better besides the lame political points, which probably would of been better contextualized though. David YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] District 9
Did anyone notice that the true aliens are not the prawns but the Nigerians? Despite their bizarre appearance, the prawns are immediately anthomorphized, so we are made to feel pity for C.J. - the child prawn, and we come to identify with the wise and smart Christopher. We feel no such pity for the Nigerians - who are exoticized so completely with their cannibalism and witchcraft with we can hardly identify them as human. We pity the prawns for being forced to live in the townships, but we regard the townships are the proper home for the Nigerians. Of course, below even the Nigerians (who at least have the benefit of being from some other place) are the completely genocided (disappeared) South African blacks. The movie is worse than a failed satire of race. It attempts rather to fantasize about a white-only South Africa that is colonized by outsiders, including prawns and blacks. But we are made to identify with the prawns exactly because they are not black. As such, this movie fits within the genocidal agenda of most cinema from the settler states. --- On Mon, 17/8/09, Louis Proyect l...@panix.com wrote: From: Louis Proyect l...@panix.com Subject: [Marxism] District 9 To: Adrian Bankhead invisibleman...@yahoo.com Date: Monday, 17 August, 2009, 9:08 AM I have not seen this movie yet, but two of my colleagues in NYFCO did not care for it very much. Prairie Miller, a hard-core leftist like me, wrote: Relentlessly clunky and grating in the extreme, District 9 takes its cue from Cloverfield's contrived artsy vertigo to situate the futuristic tall tale combining premeditated pseudo-disorganized camera and surveillance video footage, as supposedly hyper-real journalistic racial profiling panic in the here and now. Sharlto Copley is Wilkus van der Merwe, the public face of private mercenaries contracted by the South African government to evict and relocate to a concentration camp, the surging population of Johannesburg District 9 aliens from outer space. Those refusing to be ordered out of the teeming slum as Merwe cheerfully hands them notices to vacate on camera, are summarily shot dead to the delight of black viewers of the evening news. But in the course of Merwe's elated pursuit of his fifteen minutes of photo op small screen fame, he contracts an alien virus which to his initial dismay, harvests the host creature and his superpowers within which, well, turns him into a pregnant man. And while Merwe spends the rest of the future as now thriller fleeing mercenaries and hiding out among his new odd couple alien allies in District 9, real South African blacks express relief on camera about alien removal and extinction. The distasteful joke here being perpetrated by director Neill Blomkamp, is that he fooled his subjects into talking about their aversion to the swelling immigrant population from other African countries, particularly Nigeria, and then, so to speak, photo-shopped them into his politically odious victims-as-villains movie. Clever. At the same time, the Nigerians are depicted as despicable when not depraved bottom feeder hustlers and homicidal gangs financially exploiting the aliens, when not forcing the females into cross-species sex for sale. This, while the white dominated government is simply perplexed. full: http://newsblaze.com/story/20090807123235mill.nb/topstory.html Meanwhile, Armond White, an African-American reviewer who does not suffer foolish movies lightly, wrote this: It’s been 33 years since South Africa’s Soweto riots stirred the world’s disgust with that country’s regime where legal segregation kept blacks “apart” and in “hoods” (thus, Apartheid) unequal to whites. District 9’s sci-fi concept celebrates—yes, that’s the word—Soweto’s legacy by ignoring the issues of self-determination (where a mass demonstration by African students on June 16, 1976, protested their refusal to learn the dominant culture’s Afrikaans language). District 9 also trivializes the bloody outcome where an estimated 500 students were killed, by ignoring that complex history and enjoying its chaos. Let’s see if the Spielberg bashers put-off by the metaphysics in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be as offended by District 9’s mangled anthropology. District 9 represents the sloppiest and dopiest pop cinema—the kind that comes from a second-rate film culture. No surprise, this South African fantasia from director Neill Blomkamp was produced by the intellectually juvenile New Zealander Peter Jackson. It idiotically combines sci-fi wonderment with the inane “realism” of a mockumentary to show the South African government’s xenophobic response to a global threat: Alien-on-earth population has reached one million, all housed—like Katrina refugees or Soweto protesters—in restricted territories. “Before we knew it, it was a slum,” says Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley, a nervous, Daniel Day-Lewis type) who is a white executive
Re: [Marxism] District 9
Adrian Bankhead wrote: Despite their bizarre appearance, the prawns are immediately anthomorphized, so we are made to feel pity for C.J. - the child prawn, and we come to identify with the wise and smart Christopher. We feel no such pity for the Nigerians all well said, i am glad someone can make good sense of this movie... Les YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Woodstock, or how art lasts longer than politics
Tom Cod (t...@hotmail.com) wrote on 2009-08-17 at 20:26:46 in about Re: [Marxism] Woodstock, or how art lasts longer than politics (was: Exchange on Woodstock): You're kidding, who could forget Dick Nixon? Who is that? Cheers, Lüko Willms Frankfurt, Germany YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Woodstock, or how art lasts longer than politics (was: Exchange on Woodstock)
Well, there are some 5.7 billion people outside USofAm. Maybe a few won´t remember that Nixon ruled in 1969, or a few may even ignore who was Nixon. But more than you can guess will find Santana´s solos a masterpiece, etc. 2009/8/17 Tom Cod t...@hotmail.com: You're kidding, who could forget Dick Nixon? Coming back to Woodstock -- how many people dreaming of Woodstock and re-hearing its Music can tell who was POTUS then? Cheers, Lüko Willms Frankfurt, Germany YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/tcod%40hotmail.com _ Get back to school stuff for them and cashback for you. http://www.bing.com/cashback?form=MSHYCBpubl=WLHMTAGcrea=TEXT_MSHYCB_BackToSchool_Cashback_BTSCashback_1x1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/nmgoro%40gmail.com -- Néstor Gorojovsky El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autoría YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Woodstock, or how art lasts longer than politics (was: Exchange on Woodstock)
No, but anyone who was old enough to have been at Woodstock will remember Nixon and the Vietnam War. _ With Windows Live, you can organize, edit, and share your photos. http://www.windowslive.com/Desktop/PhotoGallery YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Another forward from Rosa L. - Analytic Marxsim
midhurs...@aol.com wrote: Dialectical Materialism is a method of thinking That every event is connected This is idealism (or simple-minded Hegelianism). Capitalism _tends_ towards being a totality, and to that extent is subject to dialectical analysis. But history as a whole is probably _not_ dialectical. Contingency remains an ultimate power. Read Gould on evolution and the importance there of contingency. Orgasms are (or are close to being) totalities, and to that extent subject todialectical understanding. An understanding of continggency was behind Rosa Luxemburg's phrase socialism or barbarism. She understood that nothign was certain in human affairs and that barbarissm was a real possibility, Carrol YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Fallout from Whole Foods CEO lining up with Republicans
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/whole-foods-fight/ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Indonesian revolutionary publisher and journalist dies - Joesoef Isak
http://thejakartaglobe.com/opinion/the-thinker-joesoef-was-right/324443 http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/maxlaneintlasia/2009/08/post_6.html -- Mobile: 62 - (0)0813 818 40958 http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/maxlaneintlasia/ www.asia-pacific-solidarity.net http://www.versobooks.com/books/klm/l-titles/lane_max_unfinished_nation.shtml YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Country Joe at Woodstock
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwwEHJ0K_ywfeature=related YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] District 9
Apparently, I saw a different District 9 than Prarie Miller and Armond White did! I won't spoil the movie - it's a film best seen cold with no foreknowedge of the storyline - but it's one of the most anti racist mainstream films I've ever seen - AND it's an EXCELLENT Sci-Fi movie, where they manage to make the fantastical (aliens from space on the streets of Johannesburg) seem - normal and mundane! I would recommend any Sci-Fi fan - or anti racist - run out and see this picture! I happen to know Prarie Miller - we were in the Communist Party USA together and we were briefly collegeues during my short tenure as a general assignment rewrite guy for the People's Weekly World - and I see her movie reviews are as didactic, tone deaf and closed minded now as they were then. I don't know Armond White personally but his editor is one of my neighbors. Based on years of reading (or trying to read) White's almost unreadably bad movie reviews in the New York Press, White has always been a pretentious windbag, a Hollywood asskisser and a self hating Negro, so I'm not surprised he'd hate a movie that's an allegory about Apartheid. But perhaps they were hoodwinked - maybe they saw some other movie called District 9 (perhaps they brought a bootleg DVD on the street and it said District 9 on the wrapper but was some other, really bad, movie on the actual disk?) - Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:08:35 -0400 From: Louis Proyect l...@panix.com Subject: [Marxism] District 9 To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Message-ID: 4a898083.2050...@panix.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed I have not seen this movie yet, but two of my colleagues in NYFCO did not care for it very much. Prairie Miller, a hard-core leftist like me, wrote: Relentlessly clunky and grating in the extreme, District 9 takes its cue from Cloverfield's contrived artsy vertigo to situate the futuristic tall tale combining premeditated pseudo-disorganized camera and surveillance video footage, as supposedly hyper-real journalistic racial profiling panic in the here and now. Sharlto Copley is Wilkus van der Merwe, the public face of private mercenaries contracted by the South African government to evict and relocate to a concentration camp, the surging population of Johannesburg District 9 aliens from outer space. Those refusing to be ordered out of the teeming slum as Merwe cheerfully hands them notices to vacate on camera, are summarily shot dead to the delight of black viewers of the evening news. But in the course of Merwe's elated pursuit of his fifteen minutes of photo op small screen fame, he contracts an alien virus which to his initial dismay, harvests the host creature and his superpowers within which, well, turns him into a pregnant man. And while Merwe spends the rest of the future as now thriller fleeing mercenaries and hiding out among his new odd couple alien allies in District 9, real South African blacks express relief on camera about alien removal and extinction. The distasteful joke here being perpetrated by director Neill Blomkamp, is that he fooled his subjects into talking about their aversion to the swelling immigrant population from other African countries, particularly Nigeria, and then, so to speak, photo-shopped them into his politically odious victims-as-villains movie. Clever. At the same time, the Nigerians are depicted as despicable when not depraved bottom feeder hustlers and homicidal gangs financially exploiting the aliens, when not forcing the females into cross-species sex for sale. This, while the white dominated government is simply perplexed. full: http://newsblaze.com/story/20090807123235mill.nb/topstory.html Meanwhile, Armond White, an African-American reviewer who does not suffer foolish movies lightly, wrote this: It?s been 33 years since South Africa?s Soweto riots stirred the world?s disgust with that country?s regime where legal segregation kept blacks ?apart? and in ?hoods? (thus, Apartheid) unequal to whites. District 9?s sci-fi concept celebrates?yes, that?s the word?Soweto?s legacy by ignoring the issues of self-determination (where a mass demonstration by African students on June 16, 1976, protested their refusal to learn the dominant culture?s Afrikaans language). District 9 also trivializes the bloody outcome where an estimated 500 students were killed, by ignoring that complex history and enjoying its chaos. Let?s see if the Spielberg bashers put-off by the metaphysics in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be as offended by District 9?s mangled anthropology. District 9 represents the sloppiest and dopiest pop cinema?the kind that comes from a second-rate film culture. No surprise, this South African fantasia from director Neill Blomkamp was produced by the intellectually juvenile New Zealander Peter Jackson. It idiotically combines sci-fi wonderment with the inane
Re: [Marxism] Woodstock 40 years ago: Country Joe McDonald's and Jimi Hendrix's antiwar classics | Links
Jim Farmelant wrote: That sort of thing was rather characteristic of much of the socialist movement in both the US and UK at the time. One of the leading figures in the American branch of the IWMA, was Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the US, was a famous medium. That sort of thing aroused the disapproval of Marx Engels. Engels wrote a an article debunking spiritualism, Natural Science and the Spirit World, which was later published in *The Dialectics of Nature*. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/don/ch10.htm Careful, now. You're talking about a hero of mine. Not only was she the first woman to run for president, but she was a White woman and her running mate was Frederick Douglas (though he wasn't actually involved in the campaign). She was a leader of the US branch of the IWMA, an abolitionist, feminist and advocate of free love. She published a newspaper that was the first to print the Communist Manifesto in the US (in English, anyway). Altogether, she was about the coolest person to ever live and the oldest person I've ever had a crush on. YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Woodstock, or how art lasts longer than politics
Tom Cod (t...@hotmail.com) wrote on 2009-08-17 at 23:27:04 in about Re: [Marxism] Woodstock, or how art lasts longer than politics (was: Exchange on Woodstock): No, but anyone who was old enough to have been at Woodstock will remember Nixon and the Vietnam War. In some 40-year jubilee films on the Woodstock concert, they did show people who had been there: old people. Maybe, but the 40-year jubilee rememberence is an act for a new generation of people who have not even been born in 1969. How many of the artists and the public at Woodstock are still alive? BTW, asked for it, I would have answered that Lyndon B. Johnson had been POTUS during the time of the Woodstock festival. I would have to research papers to verify... But if it shall be Richard Nixon, so be it. It is not important. BTW, I could not recognize POTUS Nixon behind Dick Nixon. I knew him as Richard. Cheers, Lüko Willms Frankfurt, Germany YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism-Thaxis] Some talk on the Detroit City Council Election
Detroit City Council - the fall campaign by: Grebner Fri Aug 07, 2009 at 06:32:09 AM EDT The primary is over, and voters in Detroit have reduced their field for City Council to a mere eighteen. There are two major questions to be answered: who will finish first, and become Council President? And which of the four candidates who finished in places 8 through 11 (19471 to 22899 votes) will survive the cut by finishing ninth or higher? Grebner :: Detroit City Council - the fall campaign The answer to the first question seems obvious, at least right now. Charles Pugh easily out-distanced Ken Cockrel, running nearly 10,000 votes ahead. Given that Cockrel is such a known quantity to Detroit voters, it would seem very hard for him to make up the margin. That leaves the possibility that Pugh's luster will wear off as he becomes better known, but that seems unlikely as well. For one thing, in a mad scramble among 18 candidates in a vote-for-9 election, there's no incentive for negative campaigning. It's a lot easier to pick up a vote for yourself by convincing a voter to add you to their shopping list than to convince them to vote AGAINST everybody who might finish ahead of you. For another, Pugh's TV career seems to have trained him to present himself well and avoid gaffes. I don't know Detroit politics very well, but I don't think an anti-gay backlash seems likely at this late date. So I'd put my money on Pugh for Council President, with Cockrel relegated to President Pro Tem. The second question is much harder: which of the four candidates who finished 8-9-10-11 will make the final cut? Jo Ann Watson, who took seventh place, exactly 2000 votes ahead of Jai-Lee Dearing in eighth might conceivably be squeezed out, but I doubt it. And the gap between eleventh place and twelfth was huge: 19471 for James Tate, versus 12493 for Lisa Howze. So the question comes down to four candidates (James Tate, Andre Spivey, Alberta Tinsley-Talabi - the only incumbent, and Jai-Lee Dearing) scrambling for the final two seats. Insiders who care about the impact of the election on the balance of power in Detroit devote their attention to those four and nowhere else. Any endorsements, campaigning, media exposure, or scandal that doesn't affect the relative standings of those four candidates will be an irrelevant sideshow. But much of American politics is devoted to irrelevant sideshows, of course. PPC plans to conduct a series of robo-polls covering the council race, in cooperation with Inside Michigan Politics, which will be reported here roughly every 14 days. Top of Form 1 You must enter a subject for your comment Huge leap there (0.00 / 0) That leaves the possibility that Pugh's luster will wear off as he becomes better known, but that seems unlikely as well. Your analysis is pretty good as usual, Grebner, but I think you jumped to a huge conclusion that may not be entirely justified. It's pretty obvious that Pugh's name (and face) recognition clearly overwhelmed any anti-gay feelings that may be percolating about Detroit's consciousness - and that is a good thing. But he is new to politics and hasn't come under any heavy scrutiny before this week. Trust me, the lights are on now, people are talking about him all across the country, so that's going to change. I hope he does well, a lot of people are hoping he does well, but we just can't make that assumption right now. Second, Cockrel is pretty popular in Detroit and a lot of people like him as City Council president. You cannot take an election result where only about 15% of the REGISTERED voters showed up to predict what's going to happen in a general election. This is going to come down to voter turnout, and who does a better job of it. by: yvette248 @ Fri Aug 07, 2009 at 08:16:49 AM CDT by: you @ soon To post this comment click here: Otherwise click cancel. You must enter a subject for your comment The past is prologue as some old guy said. (4.00 / 1) Detroit's electorate appears to be shrinking. For each of the last three elections, they've turned out in smaller numbers than I guessed. Now, I'm guessing that's because much of the middle class has moved outside the City's borders, leaving a larger fraction of non-voters behind. The special primary for Mayor brought out 89,000 votes. The special general brought only 92,000. And the City Council primary appears to have attracted only 98,000 or so. (I had been guessing 110,000 or 120,000.) This leads me to guess November's election will bring only 120,000 or so to the polls. And if that's the case, only 25,000 will be additions to the primary's turnout. Those additions will be, on the average, somewhat younger, less likely to vote by absentee ballot, and more liberal than the core whose votes we've already counted. In short, looking among them to find 10,000 voters who will cast
