date:20090823

In a message dated 8/23/2009 8:04:03 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
meis...@xs4all.nl writes:

By the way, I think the thesis of Waistline, that we cannot and thus  should
not try to prevent infiltration and spying is completely off the  mark!
 
Comment
 
Interesting comment after an inordinate amount of writing was put into  
stating in detail how to spot the agent and organize against them, including 
how  long a meeting should be held. One cannot prevent infiltration. It is not 
 possible. One can control flow at best and safeguard the work. Maybe you 
had  success. Why not simply state how you achieved the goal? Why all the 
double  talk? My example was George Sams. Facts Please.  
 
 
WL. 
 


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Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP

In a message dated 8/23/2009 3:51:26 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
shm...@pipeline.com writes:

>> They are all the more able to achieve this if one of the  "mean  
time...penetrators" has already established himself as an agent  of  
influence in the highest leadership of a revolutionary party, like  the  
Okhraniks Stalin and Malinovsky in the Bolshevik  leadership.<<
 
Comment
 
You pose the issue incorrectly. There are no organizations that have not  
long ago been penetrated. Thus, the question emerged what is our collective  
experience of detection and safeguarding the work. I am most certainly  
interested in the method you devoid in your work with organization. Much of the 
 
combat tactics peculiar to America were drawn from the Cleveland experience 
of  the CPUSA. 
 
This experience allows the basic unit to detect on what basis one is  
"pulled up into leadership."  Perhaps a couple of years ago I made  available 
for 
the list a U-Tube presentation of the Cleveland experience. 
 
What was your experience? 
 
 
WL. 
 


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[Marxism] to read?

2009-08-23 Thread guava tree

do people think reading volumes 2&3 of Capital is more valuable than reading
the Grundrisse? Or-- is one's time better spent reading Lenin, or even Hegel
than moving into books Marx didn't have the time to put his finishing
touches on?

My guess is that people here will not be big on reading Hegel--but may
suggest reading Lenin over "deep" Marx (2&3+Grund) -- But Lenin did read
Hegel, didn't he?

The goal, of course, is to read all of this, but from what I've gleaned I'm
not convinced volumes 2&3 are going to be the best way for me to spend my
time.

thanks for any thoughts

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[Marxism] British firefighters union calls for Israel boycott

2009-08-23 Thread Stuart Munckton

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/808/41576
 British firefighters call for boycott of Israel
Chris Latham
22 August 2009


*The British Fire Brigades Union (FBU), which represents 85% of firefighters
and support staff in Britain, plans to move motions at the Trade Union
Congress’s (TUC) annual congress in September for the British trade union to
work to increase Israel’s international isolation.*

The FBU’s motions reflect growing support for the Palestinian struggle among
unions internationally, resulting in Israel and its supporters in the labour
movement becoming increasingly isolated.

The FBU has submitted a range of motions, including that the general council
of the TUC pressure the British government to place trade sanctions on
Israel, including ending arms sales; that the TUC developed an effective
boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign; that the TUC review its ties
with Israel’s racist Histadrut union federation and seek to build solidarity
with Palestinian General Confederation of Labour; and that the TUC affiliate
to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

It reflects growing support among British unions for the global boycott,
divestment and sanctions campaign. This began with the Scottish Trade Union
Congress (STUC) voting to support the BDS campaign in March. This was
followed by motions being passed in support of the BDS campaign at the
congress of the University and College Union.

In addition, unions such as public sector union Unison, the National Union
of Teachers, the Union of Shop Distribution and Allied Workers and the
Communication Workers Union (CWU) have recently passed softer motions
supporting elements of the BDS campaign.

Significantly, the FBU’s motions were put forward despite attempts by the
Labour government to pressure unions to stop supporting the BDS campaign.

On June 23, foreign secretary David Miliband said “the government is
dismayed that motions calling for boycotts of Israel are being discussed at
trade union congresses and conferences this summer”.

Miliband appointed Ivan Lewis, an outspoken supporter of Israel’s
December-January war on Gaza that killed more than 1300 Palestinian
civilians, to dissuade unionists from supporting the BDS campaign.

Support in British unions for the boycott campaign has resulted from both
revulsion at the Israel’s war on Gaza as well as increasing investigation of
the reality faced by Palestinians. STUC Assistant Secretary Mary Senior told
Electronicintifada.net on August 16: “It was very important we carefully
considered the issue.”

At the STUC’s 2007 congress, a motion was passed calling on the leadership
to “explore the merits of the calls” for a BDS campaign. The STUC organised
a delegation that visited Palestine in February and March. This led to a
report at the STUC congress recommending support for the BDS campaign.

Critics of the BDS campaign, many of them organised in the recently
established pro-Israel Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine (TULIP),
have argued the BDS campaign breaks down the capacity to build links between
Israeli and Palestinian workers that could end the conflict.

However, the basis on which such collaboration occurs is important.

The Israeli union federation Histadrut has a long history of supporting
unjust policies against Palestinians. The report from the STUC delegation
criticised the federation: “At no time did Histadrut acknowledge that the
West Bank is occupied.”

FBU President Mark Shaw outlined an alternative approach to building
solidarity between Israeli and Palestinian workers to the August 16 *Jerusalem
Post*: “In line with a resolution passed at our 2005 annual conference, we
recognize ‘…that there are progressive elements within Israeli society, both
within the working class and trade union movement, and political parties who
strive for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian people and the
establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state’, he continued.

‘We would seek to positively engage with such elements’.”

[Chris Latham edits www.revitalisinglabour.blogspot.com. A copy of the
Scottish Trade Union Congress Palestine delegation’s report is available at
www.stuc.org.uk/palestine.]

From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue
#80826 August 2009.

-- 
"The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of
dummy?" — Jarvis Cocker

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror" — Oscar Wilde

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Re: [Marxism] the truth about . . . combating the poltiical police


Look we do need to move on and I don't have time for along winded and 
condescending lecture from you about the bona fides of Workers World and PSL 
which I accept.  No, this was not a trivial or "petty squabble" thing to those 
of us involved with it and was deadly serious and protracted fight.  Anyone who 
knows who Joseph Hansen was and the circumstances of this fight knows that 
which was a real history that merits respect and an experience that needs to be 
learned from.  Moreover, given that these characters claimed to be orthodox 
Trotskyists, calling out their lie that Trotsky's bodyguard was a fink is a Big 
Lie by reference to the Moscow Trials in the manner of "talk about 'Stalinism'" 
was apt in that context.  If you don't care about it, why comment at such long 
winded length as you have no basis for belittling or questioning the tactics 
involved therein.  You have the right to your opinion which is seriously 
uninformed but as you suggest let's not waste any more time on it.  

> From: waistli...@aol.com
> Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:11:11 -0400
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] the truth about . . . combating the poltiical police
> To: t...@hotmail.com
> 
  
> Reply 
>  

>  
> From a petty squabble about the role of agents in the murder of Trotsky,  
> which I have zero interest in, my point of departure is to teach real history 
>  about combating the political police. Our job is to teach and transfer  
> experience.  
>  
> Enough of this. 
>  
> WL
>  (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm)  
> 
> 
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_
Get back to school stuff for them and cashback for you.
http://www.bing.com/cashback?form=MSHYCB&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_MSHYCB_BackToSchool_Cashback_BTSCashback_1x1

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[Marxism] Paranoia over state surveillance

2009-08-23 Thread Jeff

At 14:38 23/08/09 EDT, waistli...@aol.com wrote:
>
> Modern  
>surveillance allows the state to track anyone by cell phone or the magnetic  
>strip on ones driver license, credit card, computer or GPS system in ones  
>vehicle. 

Whenever I hear inaccurate and paranoia-generating remarks such as this, I
feel compelled to correct the record so that people can take precautions
which are prudent without expending useless energy on nonexistent threats,
and also so that they don't just throw up their hands and conclude "Well,
EVERYTHING we say and do is monitored, so why even bother taking measures."
(I think Waistline finds himself in the latter category!).

With the exception of the remark about cell phones, all of the above
threats are invalid:
- Magnetic stripes on ID or credit cards CANNOT be read from a distance.
Period.
- GPS units are just RECEIVERS which pick up the signals from satellites.
They do not transmit anything (unless it is part of a different system, not
one that you would request when you bought the GPS!).
- Only a PC which is turned on having a wireless network interface could be
detected, not the "computer" in your car (aka black box) which controls the
spark and fuel injection.

But yes, if you have a mobile phone which is on "standby" (so that it can
receive calls) then your location is known by the mobile phone network.
Signals periodically sent out by the phone (which of course DOES have a
transmitter), even when on standby, are used by the network to decide which
tower is closest and will be used for communication to that phone. Your
phone's position can be determined and this information, almost surely, IS
available to the police! You don't hear that talked about much, but some
time back they had a puff story on BBC where an American police department
was bragging about how they helped locate the recipient for an organ
transplant when an organ became available (and had to be transplanted
promptly) using that person's mobile phone. Even though the person didn't
answer the phone when called, the police got his location from the mobile
phone company and rushed there to get him to the hospital for his
life-saving transplant! How sweet!!

But it goes without saying that if the police were able to do that
delightful service on short notice when the hospital called, they are
certainly hooked into the mobile network and can use it (for ANY reason) to
find the location of a particular telephone as long as it isn't powered
down: they just don't like to publicize that fact. So yes, having a mobile
phone WILL give away your location, and to prevent that you must power it
off, to the state where it cannot receive phone calls. Same goes for a PC
or palmtop with wireless.

Also not mentioned are RFID chips, which are nowadays ubiquitous: they each
can be queried and return a code number which likely is associated with you
personally. All US passports contain one, for instance. Normally they are
read from close range (centimeters) and probably cannot be read from much
more than 1 meter away using normal technology. But it is theoretically
possible for them to be read from further (many meters) given a
sufficiently strong transmitter and fancy receiving antenna, though I don't
know that this has been done, or would be practical to implement even by
the CIA.

Like a mobile phone, they can be detected only because they have a
transmitter (which is powered by radiation from the reader). The ability of
any radio signal to reach the snooper can be defeated by placing it in a
"Faraday cage," that is, a closed metal box. You can wrap your passport
completely in aluminum foil (use a few loose layers) to prevent its
radiation from escaping (or the reader's radiation from entering). Do that
with anything you're not sure about, if you think it might be capable of
sending radio signals out.

The biggest actual dangers are from devices which have been intentionally
planted on you, having their own battery or which are wired to the power
mains (or your car's battery). A transponder or bug, unlike an RFID chip,
can send out a STRONG radio signal, sufficient to be detected at a large
distance (including by an overhead satellite!). There is no simple
countermeasure except to keep them from being planted in the first place.

By the way, I think the thesis of Waistline, that we cannot and thus should
not try to prevent infiltration and spying is completely off the mark!
There are lots of times that certain actions are undertaken which would be
jeopardized by their use of surveillance or spies. Even something as banal
as putting up posters in "illegal" locations where they can bust you (or
just tear them down). Understanding what they can and cannot see, and how
to protect ourselves can be the difference between success and failure (or
even jail time!) in carrying out various tactical activities. I won't get
into the broader questions of strategy in dealing with known or suspected
infiltrators. But being overly (or und

[Marxism] Swans Release: August 24, 2009

Swans Commentary http://www.swans.com/ August 24, 2009

*** Many thanks to Don Durivan for his generous contribution. People, 
you  need to SUPPORT US FINANCIALLY. We keep at it on a bi-weekly basis. 
All  original content, which brings you thoughts and thoroughly 
researched facts  to help you make your own decisions. We help you. 
Please help us. Check our  Donation page: 
http://www.swans.com/about/donate.html. Send us a check or  enclose a 
few $20 bills in an envelope and mail them to us. THANKS! ***

P L E A S E ! ! !

Note from the Editors:   If you landed on Swans while searching for an 
answer  to whether Michael Jackson had a nose when he died, or if it's 
appropriate  for a First Lady to don shorts; if you're looking for the 
scoop on John  Edward's love child or Mark Sanford's mistress, you've 
come to the right  place! Because it's time to turn off the television 
and redirect your  attention to matters that matter... For example, why 
is US foreign policy so  focused on Afghanistan (and Iraq, and 
Yugoslavia...)? The answer is neither  new nor "democracy" -- but if you 
need a geopolitical primer read Gilles  d'Aymery's treatment of the 
spectacle and reality of the West's Eurasia  interests. Nor did Hillary 
Clinton visit Africa recently to export democracy - - as Femi Akomolafe 
reports from Ghana, she did what Western leaders always  do best...when 
it comes to colonialism and imperialism. And if you're a post- racial 
liberal, you'll find Michael Barker's research on liberal 
philanthropy's cooption of anti-racism activism an eye-opener.

Britons are rightly concerned about their military presence in 
Afghanistan  and the rise in casualties, while being fed the same "fight 
them there so we  don't have to fight them here" rhetoric. Peter Byrne 
considers the aftermath  of terrorism in London and New York, along with 
the novelists capitalizing on  the new wealth of material. Time to put 
down the terror novels and pick up  Tiziano Terzani's *Letters Against 
the War.* Martin Murie continues his  exploration of this powerful 
collection, with a review of Terzani's letter  from Afghanistan in the 
days following 9/11. Jan Baughman takes a sardonic  stab at the "death 
by socialism" rhetoric that's infecting the health care  debate; while 
Charles Marowitz challenges our president (with his sharp  tongue -- 
certainly not a gun) to take off his community-organizer / 
coalition-builder hat and put serious pressure on Congress for reform. 
And  for a Kafkaesque moment, Michael Doliner follows Franz's confused 
spiritual  journey in the midst of the Enlightenment and revolution.

*Dans le coin français,* Graham Lea concludes his colorful observations 
on  the riders, politics, and pharmacology of the 2009 Tour de France; 
Xavier  Robert examines our role in making the planet uninhabitable and 
our  responsibility to reverse course; Marie Rennard shows how 
liberalism is  trumping solidarity and failing retirees; Patrice Houzeau 
pens a lunar- inspired literary fantasy; and we share the 1753 
anti-Twitterati, legendary  discourse of Mr. de Buffon on style and 
prose. The poetry corner is enriched  by Guido Monte, who considers the 
mystery of the universe; Jeffery Klaehn,  who exalts a mysterious love; 
and Art Shay, who recalls his former  photographic subject, the 
recently-departed Robert McNamara. The looming  departure of summer 
means the ramping up of football -- Raju Peddada reviews  the diluted 
state of the game. Finally, we close with your letters, on Saul 
Bellows, the Cash for Clunkers scam, and more.

 # # # # #

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/ga271.html  Eurasian Spectacle And 
Reality - Gilles d'Aymery

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/femia17.html  Oh, Shut Up, Mrs. 
Clinton! - Femi Akomolafe

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/barker29.html  Liberal Foundations 
And Anti-Racism Activism - Michael Barker

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/pbyrne107.html Counting The Dead In 
London - Peter Byrne

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/murie77.html  An Opportunity - Martin 
Murie

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/jeb210.html  Death By Socialism - Jan 
Baughman

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/cmarow145.html  "Yes We Can" -- But 
We Won't! - Charles Marowitz

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/mdolin46.html  How Kafka Became So 
Kafkaesque - Michael Doliner

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/glea06.html  Le Tour De France -- 
Part Two: So were the Riders all Heroes? - Graham Lea

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/xavier01.html  Gaïa et ses prophètes 
- Xavier Robert (FR)

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/marier36.html  Libéralisme et 
Solidarité : Quand le système faut  - Marie Rennard (FR)

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/houzeau01.html  Douze brefs lunaires 
et d'autres lieux - Patrice Houzeau (FR)

http://www.swans.com/library/art15/xxx136.html  Discours sur le style - 
Georges-Louis Lecl

[Marxism] Union fires official for demanding equal pay for women

2009-08-23 Thread Andy Chambers

This is pretty embarrassing.

http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2526939.0.union_fires_official_for_taking_side_of_lowpaid_women.php

Can anyone point to any additional details regarding this case?  I
drew a blank on google.

> A VETERAN trade union negotiator has been sacked in the middle of a 
> multi-million pound dispute over equal pay that could cripple Scottish 
> councils.
>
> Ken Seaward, a regional organiser with Unison, was dismissed by his union 
> after a fallout over how to handle the thousands of pay claims made by 
> low-paid women.
>
> The 59-year-old, who was fired for alleged misconduct, is understood to be a 
> staunch critic of Unison urging its members to settle for a figure that 
> protects councils from having to cut their budgets.
>
> advertisement
>
> Female workers are currently pursuing equal pay claims against their 
> public-sector employers. It is estimated that around 35,000 cases have been 
> lodged with employment tribunals.
>
> Holyrood's local government committee was told earlier this year by Unison, a 
> public-sector union representing many of the women seeking redress, that the 
> final bill could reach £1 billion.
>
> It was also revealed recently that legal firms had received £1.6 million from 
> councils contesting the equal pay settlements.
>
> However, it is also understood that tensions exist within Unison on how to 
> approach the equal pay claims.
>
> Senior union officials have in the past urged female members to sign 
> "compromise" deals with councils, partly to prevent local authorities from 
> cutting services to meet a huge equal pay bill.
>
> Other union figures believe the women should hold out for the full amount to 
> which they are legally entitled.
>
> Seaward, the Unison official who was in charge of negotiating an equal pay 
> day with Midlothian Council, is said to be in the latter camp.
>
> The Sunday Herald can reveal that the official, who has 29 years' service, 
> has been sacked for alleged misconduct and bringing Unison into disrepute.
>
> Seaward was dismissed after his union upheld complaints made by Midlothian 
> Council.
>
> His hearing was chaired by Unison deputy general secretary Keith Sonnet, and 
> he is expected to appeal the decision.
>
> Eddy Coulson, a former Unison regional organiser, said: "What Unison have 
> done to Ken is bang out of order. This is all a question of Unison not 
> wanting to upset the established order."
>
> Another senior trade unionist said: "There is definitely a split within the 
> unions, which are male dominated, on how to deal with equal pay. There are 
> tensions between and within the unions."
>
> It is also understood that some Unison members believe the union's hierarchy 
> is too close to the Labour Party and to local authorities. Unison advised its 
> female members in Glasgow to sign a "compromise" agreement in 2005, an 
> approach opposed by some of the union's members.
>
> The women included school dinner ladies, home carers, cleaners and nursery 
> nurses.
>
> David O'Connor, while a branch secretary at Unison, said: "We have approached 
> pragmatically the issue of what can be afforded by the council without job 
> losses and loss of services."
>
> Since the Glasgow deal was struck, Unison has been the subject of legal 
> action taken out by former members unhappy at the agreement the union advised 
> them to sign.
>
> A Unison spokesperson said: "We do not comment on individual disciplinary 
> cases, particularly while they are still in process."
>
> Seaward declined to comment.

--
Andy Chambers


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Re: [Marxism] Moderator's note

Baba Aye wrote:
> 
> This I suggest with the view of assuaging any latent view of the
> implementation of these being an arbitrary dictatorship of the moderator.
> 

This is an excellent idea. I am finally getting ready to build a new 
website for Marxmail and will incorporate this.

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Re: [Marxism] Moderator's note

2009-08-23 Thread Baba Aye

Lou wrote:
alt.politics.socialism.trotsky, a newsgroup for the criminally insane

I'd been on that usenet group for a few years -as "Jasper"- before more
recently joining MarxmailI very much agree with this description of it,
despite some incredibly useful stuff that do mix with its sense of insanity.

I would however suggest that the ground rules of Marxmail be circulated on
the list(I have not checked the list's page before writing this but assume
such is stated therea sort of in-list reminder would however do no
harm).

This I suggest with the view of assuaging any latent view of the
implementation of these being an arbitrary dictatorship of the moderator.

Baba Aye

Global Labour University, Unicamp
solidarityandstruggle.blogspot.com
skype name: iron1lion


"Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness
of necessity." - Karl Marx

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Re: [Marxism] On Food...

2009-08-23 Thread nada

"What exactly are you talking about as making no difference, no 
difference in what- output per acre, output per
input."

Production per acre based on size of land holdings. Quality is more or 
less same, tonnage per acre is not dependent on ownership or small 
holder advantages over larger ownership units on *output per acre*. 
Techniques are almost always the same. Capitization of some inputs, 
sure, but generally...not.

Vegetables and fruit is where smaller sometimes IS better.

And interesting little factoids...spaghetti sauce. A 'prepared' food 
item very common in the US and Europe. Very few people use fresh 
tomatoes to make it. Just not done. Even some of the finest restaurants 
use canned Roma tomatoes. By and large..it doesn't matter how these are 
produced. So there is room for factory type production in some cases. 
This was my main point and that in most cases, it's a question of 
'ownership' and less of techniques.

All my other points are valid about the problems of corporate ownership 
of agriculture.

David


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Re: [Marxism] the truth about . . . combating the poltiical police

In a message dated 8/23/2009 3:05:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, 
_t...@hotmail.com_ (mailto:t...@hotmail.com)  writes: 
 
>> Look, you still don't get it, these Healyite provacateurs SUED the  SWP 
in the US courts in the 1980s around these trumped up allegations causing  
that party to spend tens of thousands of dollars in court and attorneys fees  
fighting it. Maybe if you knew about this you'd realize that an attitude of 
 solidarity is called for and not hand wringing about factionalism and 
overheated  rhetoric. Maybe if it was Sam Marcy or Gloria LaRiva they had 
attacked you'd  feel different and realize what this is about. 
 
Their latest antic was during the recent auto strike when they went around  
placing their main fire on the UNION which they claim is no longer a union 
and  which workers should abandon, not pointing out the difference between 
the union  and its reformist leaders. The whole raison d'etre of this outfit, 
rooted in the  same political milieu as Lyndon LaRouche, is to harass and 
disrupt the  Left.<< 
 

Reply 
 
You are probably right  . . . I just don’t get it. 
 
Let’s start with Lyndon LaRouche. 
 
Prior to the start of their "Mop Up Campaign," - against the CPUSA, the  
NCLC sent one of their black sociopath's to our office with a copy of Marx’s  
"Poverty of Philosophy." His task was to "feel us out" and present an 
ultimatum  to us: join their group or get "mopped up." His intent was to try 
and 
create his  modality for a fascist paramilitary group on us. Finding this 
proposition  amazing but not amusing, we politely listened, examined and 
studied the relevant  passages presented by this psychopath - Zeke Boyd to be 
exact, then asked if he  were willing to bring some of his comrades to the 
office or any meeting place of  his desire for further study. Upon agreement we 
proceeded to present a  non-literary propaganda form to convince them it was 
best they approached the  CPUSA, or someone us less desperate. Apparently 
LaRouche himself made a decision  we "were not worth expending organizational 
resources on." 
 
This was no isolated incident. Previously Emily Mazy -Secretary Treasure of 
 the UAW, had branded us black fascist, who deserved nothing more than 
caskets  for our union activity. This was in harmony with a section of the 
local 
 AFL-CIO/Teamsters, who had threatened to carry out all kinds of foul deeds 
on us  because of our armed intrusion into the building trade unions 
demanding that our  card carrying member be hired. 
 
There are different forms of propaganda. Our particular ideology finds  
asking to be hired during a period of labor shortage offensive. Our motto was  
"arm yourself or harm yourself." Our ideology was "It is better to die on 
ones  feet than live on ones knees." Since the struggle presented itself as 
being  skipped over for employment  - (with employers demanding more laborers 
and  the union refusing to supply them) the issue was quite clear. Actually, 
it was  this "nor literary propaganda" that lead to Emily Mazy branding us 
black  fascists "destroying the unity of the working class." 
 
During this period intelligence had tried to send the famous police agent  
that wrecked the Panthers - George Sams, into our ranks. George would attend 
our  meeting but could not penetrate our ranks and was sent to Oakland. 
George Sams  possessed no skills and was not teachable. No one can just hang 
around "shooting  the breeze." I personally knew George Sams because he lived 
in Highland Park, as  did I. Highland Park was the home of our office and 
home to Henry Ford’s first  assembly plant. Everyone in the neighborhood knew 
George to be a dope fiend who  was shot three times for breaking into the 
local "Ma and Pa" store on the corner  of Richton and Lincoln. More often than 
not degenerates and psychopaths are  recruited to inflict blows against 
ones organization. However, these agents can  only exist and thrive in an 
environment that nurture their personality and  activity. 
 
Comrade, I write about putting the agent to work and teach tactics and  
method to combat the political police. You seem to write ideology. 
 
Now this story about George Sams,  which has been documented, goes  back 
further and exist on a continuum. Of course I am referring to Fred Hampton  - 
the famous Black Panther leader in Chicago, assassinated in his sleep. Fred  
was proletarian in his core and was sent to Detroit to present us an 
ultimatum.  The police agents within the Black Panther Party mobilized a 
furious 
assault  against us for two reasons; first, we stated the so-called lumpen 
proletariat  was not the vanguard of the revolution and put forth the 
proposition that the  black worker at the key point of production was the line 
of 
march in 1969. The  line was the organization of the black industrial workers 
and the formation of a  League of Revolutionary Black Workers was the next 
historical juncture because  it completed and took to t

Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP

2009-08-23 Thread Shane Mage

On Aug 23, 2009, at 2:38 PM, waistli...@aol.com wrote:
>
> During and after a successful insurrection a section of the political
> police and intelligence are recruited to the cause of the victor...

But only to infiltrate, undermine, and destroy the proletarian cause.
>
> ...In the mean time agencies of the state monitors everyone and  
> penetrates all
> social organizations...

They are all the more able to achieve this if one of the "mean  
time...penetrators" has already established himself as an agent of  
influence in the highest leadership of a revolutionary party, like the  
Okhraniks Stalin and Malinovsky in the Bolshevik leadership.

Shane Mage

> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos

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Re: [Marxism] Pittsburgh Protests?

2009-08-23 Thread Bill Quimby

It's the G-20 meeting. See the G-20 page at

http://www.g20.org/

 From the site...

"Since 1999, the G-20 has contributed to strengthen the international financial 
architecture and to foster sustainable economic growth and development. The 
G-20 
now has a crucial role in driving forward work between advanced and emerging 
economies to tackle the international financial and economic crisis, restore 
worldwide financial stability, lead the international economic recovery and 
secure a sustainable future for all countries."

Papers report that they are looking for 4000 extra police from all over the 
country to control
demonstrations.

- Bill

Tom Cod wrote:
> there's been a lot of traffic on a local activist list I sub to about 
> protests planned for some kind of G-8 conclave set to occur in Pittsburgh?
> 
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[Marxism] Pittsburgh Protests?


there's been a lot of traffic on a local activist list I sub to about protests 
planned for some kind of G-8 conclave set to occur in Pittsburgh?

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Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP


Look, you still don't get it, these Healyite provacateurs SUED the SWP in the 
US courts in the 1980s around these trumped up allegations causing that party 
to spend tens of thousands of dollars in court and attorneys fees fighting it.  
Maybe if you knew about this you'd realize that an attitude of solidarity is 
called for and not hand wringing about factionalism and overheated rhetoric.  
Maybe if it was Sam Marcy or Gloria LaRiva they had attacked you'd feel 
different and realize what this is about.

Their latest antic was during the recent auto strike when they went around 
placing their main fire on the UNION which they claim is no longer a union and 
which workers should abandon, not pointing out the difference between the union 
and its reformist leaders.  The whole raison d'etre of this outfit, rooted in 
the same political milieu as Lyndon LaRouche, is to harass and disrupt the Left.


> Comment
>  
> Actually, I know much about the subject and most certainly the details of  
> the murder of Malcolm X. Actually I know the specific tactic of how agents  
> entered an organization and literally get "pulled up" through the ranks. In 
> fact  I gave reference sources for such activity years ago. 
>  


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Re: [Marxism] Moderator's note

Bill Quimby wrote:
> Whatsa "apst",  please?
> 

alt.politics.socialism.trotsky, a newsgroup for the criminally insane 
that David Walters and Einde O'Callaghan still inexplicably post to. It 
has daily doses of anti-Semitism, conspiracy mongering, xenophobia, etc. 
  It is like drinking out of a urinal.

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Re: [Marxism] Moderator's note

2009-08-23 Thread Bill Quimby

Whatsa "apst",  please?

- Bill

Tom Cod wrote:
> Thank you! we don't need to have this become another "apst".
> 
>> Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:48:53 -0400
>> From: l...@panix.com
>> Subject: [Marxism] Moderator's note
>> To: t...@hotmail.com
>>
>> Greg Butler has been unsubbed.
>>
>> 
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Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP

In a message dated 8/23/2009 2:48:50 P.M.  Eastern Daylight Time, 
t...@hotmail.com writes:

I'm not sure what your  lengthy pontification has to do with this issue 
which you apparently know little  about.  


Comment
 
Actually, I know much about the subject and most certainly the details of  
the murder of Malcolm X. Actually I know the specific tactic of how agents  
entered an organization and literally get "pulled up" through the ranks. In 
fact  I gave reference sources for such activity years ago. 
 
I wrote from a relevant point of view dealing with the reality today. 
 
May I ask, how old are you?  I ask because we survived  organizationally 
and watched most get destroyed. Sure, some of our comrades were  murdered but 
we were not broken organizationally. 
 
Reality a bitch. 
 
 
WL. 


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Re: [Marxism] Moderator's note


Thank you! we don't need to have this become another "apst".

> Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:48:53 -0400
> From: l...@panix.com
> Subject: [Marxism] Moderator's note
> To: t...@hotmail.com
> 
> Greg Butler has been unsubbed.
> 
> 
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[Marxism] Moderator's note

Greg Butler has been unsubbed.


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Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP

I'm not sure what your lengthy pontification has to do with this issue which 
you apparently know little about. 

> From: waistli...@aol.com
> Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:38:33 -0400
> Subject: Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP
> To: t...@hotmail.com
> 
> In a message dated 8/23/2009 1:19:45 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
> t...@hotmail.com writes:
> 
> >> Actually that's Joseph Hansen whose 1962 screed "Cuba: The  Acid Test" 
> in defense of the Cuban Revolution against sectarian critics is what  got 
> them going against him with these wild fabrications worthy of Stalin and the  
> Moscow Trials.<< 
>  
>. Here is how it works. Every issue is somehow  
> linked to the Soviet Union and Stalin. Every ill and misdeed in the American  
> communist movement is "magically" linked to Stalinism. The trade union 
> movement  in America . . . . Bad because of Stalinists.  The nationality 
> movement’
> s  alledged weaknesses . . . Stalin. A mistaken point of view . . . 
> Stalinist  falsification of history, or the Moscow Trials, rather then a 
> proposition not  very well thought out. 
>  

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[Marxism] The Comedians - and the stubborness of facts

2009-08-23 Thread gregoryabutler

So, since the "threat" of banning me from this list won't work - and the facts 
cannot be refuted - some folks resort to ridicule and/or really stupid childish 
arguments.

But the facts are quite clear here - about the NKVD's infiltration of the SWP, 
about the role of James Hansen and other SWP'ers in facilitating the NKVD's 
assassination of Leon Trotsky, about the FBI's role in the SWP leadership for 
many many years.

Facts are facts - and it doesn't matter what the source is.

And, considering we're talking about matters of espionage here, the files of 
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the statements of NKVD asset turned FBI 
informant Louis Budenz are quite relevant here - because, quite frankly, who 
would know better than them about who was spying for whom?

Budenz in this case would be quite the authority on this matter - since he 
followed the same path that James Hansen did, from the NKVD to the FBI!

As for the murder of Malcolm X - isn't anybody besides myself just a little bit 
curious as to WHY the SWPers on the security detail (and I know this for a fact 
from speaking with Roland Sheppard, who was one of those SWPers on security 
that fateful day) were ordered to report to the assignment unarmed - and that 
the Muslim Mosque Inc security people working the door did not search anybody 
for weapons? 

Yes, there have been claims that "Malcolm X wanted it that way" because he 
"didn't want to offend the middle class people" who were attending that day - 
but, since Minister Shabazz is dead, we really can't confirm that he gave those 
orders!

And yes, our old buddy James Hansen was intimately involved in those security 
arraingements.

Isn't it an odd coincidence that the same guy was on scene - and IN CHARGE OF 
SECURITY - when two of the greatest revolutionaries of the 20th century were 
murdered by two of the most vicious intelligence agencies of the 20th century?

I for one don't believe in coincidences.

And Louis, in answer to your silly claims, John Lennon was a minor late 20th 
century British musician killed by a psychologically disturbed security guard 
from Hawaii - his murder was about as "political" as the death of Sal Mineo or 
the Notorious B.I.G.

As for everybody else - little children, when presented with an unpleasant 
fact, will sometimes put their fingers in their ears so they don't have to 
listen.

Intelligent grown folks know how to listen to the truth - no matter how much 
you dislike the source.

In other words - it's time to grow up and listen to the facts, my friends.

The SWP was rotten to the core politically from the beginning - not to mention 
ridden with spies - and that explains volumes about the subsequent political 
decay of Trotskyism, since the SWP was the defective source code for much of 
modern post WW II Trotskyism.

If you don't like that fact - fine (I don't like that fact either) but you need 
to face reality.

And making fun of me - however much you enjoy it - does not negate those cold 
hard facts.

Gregory A. Butler



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Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP

In a message dated 8/23/2009 1:19:45 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
t...@hotmail.com writes:

>> Actually that's Joseph Hansen whose 1962 screed "Cuba: The  Acid Test" 
in defense of the Cuban Revolution against sectarian critics is what  got 
them going against him with these wild fabrications worthy of Stalin and the  
Moscow Trials.<< 
 
 
Comment
 
 
Beneath much of this discussion is the matter of combating the political  
police. The political police cannot be defeated. 
 
During and after a successful insurrection a section of the political  
police and intelligence are recruited to the cause of the victor. No form of  
"independent movement of the workers" is sufficient to defeat the state, which 
 is precisely why the insurrection - (not to be confused with the concept  
revolution) is against and to secure state power or the commanding heights 
of  state power. Revolution is crowned by insurrection. Revolutionaries come 
to  power when the state is at loggerhead or polarized. 
 
The state never is "halted" or collapse as an institution. Or rather,  
"revolutionary collapse" means the state has become polarized within and 
against 
 itself and can longer defend the existing structure and political 
organization  of power. This motion appears as paralysis. We see this today in 
a 
tiny way on  the Health Care issue. 
 
In the mean time agencies of the state monitors everyone and penetrates all 
 social organizations  . . . Period. The local bingo-club has somebody that 
 is connected to someone that is linked to and with the state. Modern  
surveillance allows the state to track anyone by cell phone or the magnetic  
strip on ones driver license, credit card, computer or GPS system in ones  
vehicle. 
 
This means everyone is vulnerable and everyone suspect. Given this  
situation and its realization, one can relax. 
 
As organizational matters, meetings must have a material purpose bound up  
with activity that can be verified. Arrive on time discuss the work - say  
organizing for a town hall meeting, assign task and end the meeting. 
 
The "after meeting" is for political discussion and on going debates or  
simply socializing, which allows battle hardened comrades to detect those with 
 less than honorable intentions. Trust your instincts. You will know by the 
shake  of a hand, a hug, an inappropriate question; subtle prying into ones 
background  and "too many questions."  Agents must gather real time 
information to keep  getting their paycheck. 
 
Limit the arena for information gathering to the after meeting. Begin every 
 meeting with a strong and rigid 3-4 point agenda. A 45-minute meeting is  
perfection and requires an ultra high level of discipline and intellectual  
toughness. Younger workers that are serious about change cannot hang around 
in  many "after meetings" and generally go home to their spouse and 
children. Teens  of course have the time and a social gathering after every 
meeting 
is always  appropriate. Older comrades will immediately spot another person 
inappropriately  hanging around with the teens. The teens know "who is cool" 
and will tell you  who is inappropriate and suspect or "something not right 
about that guy." 
 
Where Lenin spoke of making each factory a fortress, today ones  
neighborhoods is ones fortress. The character of the working class has changed. 
 A 
federation form of organization is most desirable, ideally based in  
neighborhood zones. He who cannot make contacts, distribute literature and  
recruit 
individuals for practical work is to be isolated outside the field of  
practical work because they have nothing to contribute. If you cannot make  
contacts and recruit or pay dues and raise money, why are you here? There are  
exceptions like the 76 years old comrade.  He is here because this is what  he 
does . . . inspire.  Good agents know they have to pay dues and produce  
results. Make them earn their paycheck. Afterall, Intelligence long ago  
perfected their technique and have a material interest in being part of all  
sides 
and every ideological camp. Intelligence has no loyalty other than to  
themselves and cares very little who wins the political contest provided it is  
them. 
 
On line, there is no defense against the literary agent. 
 
Those who habitually create polarity are suspect, but then again everyone  
is suspect. Generally, on this list, the polarity is driven based on  
anti-Stalinism and subtle racism. Here is how it works. Every issue is somehow  
linked to the Soviet Union and Stalin. Every ill and misdeed in the American  
communist movement is "magically" linked to Stalinism. The trade union 
movement  in America . . . . Bad because of Stalinists.  The nationality 
movement’
s  alledged weaknesses . . . Stalin. A mistaken point of view . . . 
Stalinist  falsification of history, or the Moscow Trials, rather then a 
proposition not  very well thought out. 
 
Within an organization, the agent can be contained. 
 
Not

Re: [Marxism] On Food...

2009-08-23 Thread Michael Perelman

Traditional ag. is a shorthand, true.  I had not intention of shifting the 
focus as you suggested.

The book that I mentioned tried to focus on such things as you mentioned.

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 02:14:25PM -0400, brad bauerly wrote:
> 
> M. Perelman-  What exactly do you mean by 'traditional agriculture'?  This
> term is thrown around a lot in the food literature, but has no real
> meaning.  Do you mean pre-GMO, pre-factory farming, pre-green revolution or
> pre- early forms of crop rotation and manuring?  My critique of much of the
> recent food literature is that it tends to create a false binary between
> contemporary ag and some mythical 'traditional ag'.  Agricultural technology
> has never been static but always developing.  So to compare today's ag with
> some notion of ag before things changed and got bad is to promote fighting
> against agricultural development (like fighting gravity).  This is not to
> say that there are not problems but to shift the focus away from technology,
> scale, local/global and towards the class nature of the process and how this
> impacts the decisions/directions of Ag's development.

-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
michaelperelman.wordpress.com

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Re: [Marxism] On Food...

2009-08-23 Thread brad bauerly

Nada wrote- "in cereal production, it makes almost no difference whatsoever
if wheat, barely or other grains are produced in very large tracts or
smaller more intensely farmed ones. "

What is your source for this position?  What exactly are you talking about
as making no difference, no difference in what- output per acre, output per
input. what ?

M. Perelman-  What exactly do you mean by 'traditional agriculture'?  This
term is thrown around a lot in the food literature, but has no real
meaning.  Do you mean pre-GMO, pre-factory farming, pre-green revolution or
pre- early forms of crop rotation and manuring?  My critique of much of the
recent food literature is that it tends to create a false binary between
contemporary ag and some mythical 'traditional ag'.  Agricultural technology
has never been static but always developing.  So to compare today's ag with
some notion of ag before things changed and got bad is to promote fighting
against agricultural development (like fighting gravity).  This is not to
say that there are not problems but to shift the focus away from technology,
scale, local/global and towards the class nature of the process and how this
impacts the decisions/directions of Ag's development.

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Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP

2009-08-23 Thread Steve Olson

Yes, and the Sparts published back in the mid-eighties the Healyism Implodes 
pamphlet:

http://www.marx.org/history/etol/document/icl-spartacists/1986/implodes.html

--- On Sun, 8/23/09, Louis Proyect  wrote:

From: Louis Proyect 
Subject: Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP
To: "Steve Olson" 
Date: Sunday, August 23, 2009, 10:27 AM

Tom Cod wrote:
> Actually that's Joseph Hansen whose 1962 screed "Cuba: The Acid Test" in 
> defense of the Cuban Revolution against sectarian critics is what got them 
> going against him with these wild fabrications worthy of Stalin and the 
> Moscow Trials.
> 

You also should be aware that Britain's Gerry Healy, who got this 
slander going, was notorious for finding secret agents under beds. Tim 
Wolforth, who was leader of a small sect in the USA allied with Healy, 
was charged as an agent as was his partner Nancy Fields who had the 
misfortune to have an uncle who was a CIA agent. Healy was eventually 
expelled from his own group for forcing himself sexually on young women 
in his movement. Healy was a real turd, in other words.

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Re: [Marxism] ginsberg quotes

2009-08-23 Thread David Thorstad

If this is a reference to Allen Ginsberg, who was a friend of mine, here 
is another quote which he gave to me and said NAMBLA could use in any 
way it wanted to. It was in reaction to the FBI's witch hunt against the 
group in 1982 during which it claimed the group had kidnapped Etan Patz:

"Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit, 
humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance, obvious pack journalism. 
/New York Times/ and /Time/ magazine on the subject have been 
obnoxiously hypocritical. I'm a member of NAMBLA because I love boys 
too--everybody does who has a little humanity."
David
==
Max Clark wrote:
> 'Nobody publishes a word that is not the cowardly robot ravings of a 
> depraved mentality
> The day of the publication of the true literature of the American body 
> will be day of Revolution.' -'Death to Van Gogh's Ear!'
>
> 'I was always a communist...' -'The Velocity of Money'
>

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Re: [Marxism] Useful background on alleged Pan Am 103 bomber being released

2009-08-23 Thread Paul Flewers

Lou P recommended link to Links: 

'For more than a year, US, Scottish and British investigators were convinced
that the Syrian-based PFLP-GC was the prime suspect. In October 1990,
Washington and London suddenly began pointing the finger at Libya and
started unearthing "evidence" out of the blue to justify this. It coincided
with the US military build-up in the Persian Gulf following Iraq's invasion
of Kuwait. In 1991, two Libyans - including al Megrahi - were formally
indicted. 

'What changed between 1988 and 1991? Syrian dictator Hafiz Assad was an
enthusiastic participant and key US ally in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq,
whereas Libya's leader Muammar Qadhafi opposed the war and campaigned for a
peaceful settlement.'

Yes, Oceania was at war with Eurasia; Oceania had always been at war with
Eurasia.

I remember the blame on this being shifted from Syria to Libya at this very
convenient moment. This act was probably the most cynical move of blame I
have ever seen in 30 years of political activity. I thought that it was a
fraud then, and I do to this day. Yet Libya's purported culpability and all
the ensuing manoeuvres, culminating in last week's repatriation of the
alleged perpetrator, is taken seriously by so many commentators.

I think that the return of al Megrahi, thus avoiding his appeal being held,
was damage limitation, as an appeal would almost certainly have led to
awkward details coming to light that would expose the whole sorry business,
and put a lot of Western statesmen in a very bad light.

Paul F


 




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Re: [Marxism] Words (was 'Alexander Cockburn RIP')


Well as I recall the SWP VP candidate in 1948 was African American, not that 
these shopworn trot faction fights belong on here.



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Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP

Tom Cod wrote:
> Actually that's Joseph Hansen whose 1962 screed "Cuba: The Acid Test" in 
> defense of the Cuban Revolution against sectarian critics is what got them 
> going against him with these wild fabrications worthy of Stalin and the 
> Moscow Trials.
> 

You also should be aware that Britain's Gerry Healy, who got this 
slander going, was notorious for finding secret agents under beds. Tim 
Wolforth, who was leader of a small sect in the USA allied with Healy, 
was charged as an agent as was his partner Nancy Fields who had the 
misfortune to have an uncle who was a CIA agent. Healy was eventually 
expelled from his own group for forcing himself sexually on young women 
in his movement. Healy was a real turd, in other words.

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Re: [Marxism] Silone biography


Today's New York Times has a review of a bio of this guy, whom I had never 
heard of, which compares the posthumous snitch controversy over him to the 
Dreyfus affair given the polarization over this issue that has arisen in 
Italian society.  The reviewer's conclusion is that while he was an open 
cold-war liberal from the 50s on, he is unconvinced that the allegation that he 
was a fascist snitch during the 20s and 30s is true as he was in exile during 
that period.  Rather, he suggests that the offending letters had to do with 
intervening with the authorities on behalf of his brother? 



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Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP


Actually that's Joseph Hansen whose 1962 screed "Cuba: The Acid Test" in 
defense of the Cuban Revolution against sectarian critics is what got them 
going against him with these wild fabrications worthy of Stalin and the Moscow 
Trials.



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[Marxism] Louis Budenz

2009-08-23 Thread Hunter Gray

Most of the human intricacies of this discussion are beyond my personal purview 
-- I came of "radical age" in early 1955.  I am aware of a little of this from 
a purely historical perspective.   But on one point:  I am surprised that 
anyone, regardless of his or her Left perspective, would take the word of Louis 
Budenz for anything, including a weather report.

Hunter [Hunter Bear]


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Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP

gregoryabut...@aol.com wrote:
> I do apologize for one little error - in my haste to make a post last night, 
> I relied on my memory rather than double checking the original source.
> 
> I attacked a "George" Hansen of the Socialist Workers Party as being an 
> [alleged] NKVD and FBI asset.
> 
> I actually meant JAMES Hansen of the Socialist Workers Party!
> 

Yes, he was quite an amazing character. Not only was he behind the 
assassination of Leon Trotsky, Malcolm X (and likely that of Jimmy Hoffa 
and John Lennon), he also was a scientist on the side. His analysis of 
global warming does remain controversial within some sectors of the 
left, like Spiked Online and the Workers Bolshevik Leninist Tendency of 
Madison, New Jersey.

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Re: [Marxism] the truth about James Hansen of the SWP

2009-08-23 Thread gregoryabutler

I do apologize for one little error - in my haste to make a post last night, I 
relied on my memory rather than double checking the original source.

I attacked a "George" Hansen of the Socialist Workers Party as being an 
[alleged] NKVD and FBI asset.

I actually meant JAMES Hansen of the Socialist Workers Party!

My apologies to George Hansen, whoever he might be.

And as I sometimes do when I rush to write I got the broad brush details right, 
but I wasn't as detailed or specific as I like to be in my writing - it could 
have done with an edit and a bit of rewrite work.

And there were other SWP'ers who I could have condemned by name as well.

Here's a bit of background for my allegations, courtesy of the World Socialist 
Web Site [hands down the best left wing news website on the left - in large 
part cause they run articles like this one, that nobody else has the intestinal 
fortitude to touch!] -

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/hist-o07.shtml

and here are some relevant excerpts

"Hansen, who libeled Healy's concern for the security of the
international Trotskyist movement as "paranoia," had witnessed the
assassination of Leon Trotsky by Mercader. It was none other than
Hansen who authorized the admission of the GPU agent into Trotsky's
villa in Coyoacan on the day of the murder. Hansen also knew that
Mercader had developed a personal relationship with a young member of
the SWP as a ploy to gain access to Trotsky. James P. Cannon, after
Trotsky's assassination, indicted th
e "carelessness" that had
compromised Trotsky's personal security. "We haven't probed deeply
enough into the past of people even in leading positions — where they
came from, how they live, whom they are married to, etc. Whenever in
the past such questions — elementary for a revolutionary organization —
were raised, the petty-bourgeois opposition would cry, ‘My God, you are
invading the private lives of comrades!' Yes, that is precisely what we
were doing, or more correctly, threatening to do — nothing ever came of
it in the past. If we had checked up on such matters a little more
carefully we might have prevented some bad things in the days gone
by."[99]"

And here's some more relevant stuff

"

The Role of Joseph Hansen
 
164.
The initial stages of the investigation uncovered recently declassified
documents, which revealed the conspiracy that prepared Trotsky's
assassination and the fatal role played by agents who had managed to
infiltrate all the major political centers of the Fourth International.
The ICFI uncovered documents relating to the activities of agents such
as Mark Zborowski, who became the principal assistant of Trotsky's son,
Leon Sedov. Zborowski played a key role in the murder of Sedov and
other leading members of the Fourth International in Europe. Another
important Stalinist agent, who supplied the Kremlin with valuable
information on Trotsky's activities was Sylvia Caldwell (née Callen),
the personal secretary of James P. Cannon. But the most significant
information u
ncovered by the ICFI related to the activities of Joseph
Hansen. Documents discovered in the US National Archives, and others
obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that Hansen,
immediately after the assassination of Trotsky, sought out and
established a covert relationship with high-level US government agents.
One such document, a letter from the American Consul in Mexico City to
an official in the State Department, dated September 25, 1940, reported
that Hansen "wishes to be put in touch with someone in your confidence
located in New York to whom confidential information could be imparted
with impunity."[100]
 



165. The ICFI discovered
conclusive evidence that Joseph Hansen had functioned as an agent
inside the Trotskyist movement. A lawsuit brought by Alan Gelfand
against the US government, alleging state control of the Socialist
Workers Party, forced the release of official documents that
substantiated the findings of the Security and the Fourth International
investigation. Among the most significant facts uncovered as a result
of the lawsuit was that the FBI had known, from at least the mid-1940s,
that Joseph Hansen had worked for the GPU inside the SWP. He had been
identified as a Stalinist agent by former Communist Party leader Louis
Budenz, the same man who had publicly exposed Sylvia Caldwell. This
revelation made clear why Hansen and the SWP leadership vehemently
denounced Budenz and defended Caldwell. To admit the truth of Budenz's
allegations against Caldwell would lend substantial credibility to h
is
identification of Hansen as an agent. Thus, up until the court-ordered
release of Sylvia Caldwell's grand jury testimony, in which she
admitted to having worked inside the SWP as a GPU spy, the SWP defended
her as an "exemplary" comrade. Reba Hansen, the wife of Joseph Hansen,
lied publicly about the reasons for Caldwell's sudden departure from
the party in 1947 (the year Budenz's revelations were made publ

Re: [Marxism] On Food...

nada wrote:
> It is pretty easy to get into a centrifugal discussion about food. 
> Before Greg was thrown off the list this morning (I would of *warned* 
> him about this, he's simply bouncing silly rumors he picked up from the 
> wsws.org, before throwing him off) he did post a comment I think that is 
> worth referring to.

Greg was not unsubbed, but for everybody's benefit we will not allow 
socialists to be accused of being government agents. Ex-leftists like 
Silone, Orwell and Whittaker Chambers are different stories obviously.

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Re: [Marxism] Silone biography

Shane Mage wrote:
> On Aug 23, 2009, at 10:42 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
> 
>> (Silone does not come across as a very admirable character here,
>> especially serving as a fascist snitch...
> 
> Why this slander? Wheatcroft wrote "It does seem that Silone had at  
> least some contact with the police, who  had arrested his one  
> surviving brother, Romolo (who would die in prison at the hands of his  
> captors), but it’s hard to see evidence of any great betrayal."

I would add, btw, that Wheatcroft is a long-time Tory and Zionist hawk 
so it is not surprising that he would cut Silone a lot of slack.

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Re: [Marxism] On Food...

2009-08-23 Thread Michael Perelman

The case for the efficiency of factory farming usually depends on 
assuming that the consequences are measured in terms of a simple, 
easily-measured output.  When I was working on my book, Farming for 
Profit in a Hungry World (1977), I became more sensitive to the need to 
understand agriculture in a larger context.

Generally, US agriculture excels in reducing the labor input per unit 
of output.  In terms of output per acre, we do not fare as well.  
Traditional farming tended to be multifaceted.  Inputs from one part of 
the system may be byproducts of another. Pigs were not an exception. 
Waste products became food and the excrement became fertilizer.

With an intense production of animals, the land cannot absorb the 
manure, which ends up polluting the land in the water.  Labor has never 
been treated particularly well in any kind of commercial agriculture, 
but the concentration of animals creates horrendous working conditions 
for the people that process the meat.

The origination of the swine flu epidemic in Mexico has not been 
completely proven, but the possibility reminds us about a different 
kind of externality.  Finally, the intensive use of antibiotics (which 
is supposed to be somewhat regulated now) presents another health 
hazard from factory farming.




-- 
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929

Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
michaelperelman.wordpress.com


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[Marxism] On Food...

2009-08-23 Thread nada

It is pretty easy to get into a centrifugal discussion about food. 
Before Greg was thrown off the list this morning (I would of *warned* 
him about this, he's simply bouncing silly rumors he picked up from the 
wsws.org, before throwing him off) he did post a comment I think that is 
worth referring to.

Productivity. There are various aspects of agriculture that need to be 
contextualized before we can talk about cheap or expensive food.

First, factory farming is not more productive than family farms in many 
areas. But lets examine where it it? Animal husbandry: dairy farms, 
cattle raising/feed lots, pig farming/feedlots and some forms of 
vegetable farming. That's it.

Secondly, there are no real 'factory farms' outside of animal husbandry. 
Family farms, by and large, are *far more productive* per acre of land 
tilled than 'factory farms'. Factory farms in legumes and cereals tend 
to be simply the *same* family farm plots farmed with lager spaces 
between rows to accommodate tractors (sometimes) but essentially it 
means *ownership* not organization of the local forces of production. If 
you drive by a "family farm" in or around Watsonville, CA, you will have 
a hard time distinguishing between family and corporate farms. It is 
one, primarily of ownership.

Plot sizes are the same, usually number of farm hands is the same, etc. 
The 'advantage' of being a 'factory' farm is one of capital investment 
and better distribution (for the futures market) of the vegetables 
produced. The large factory/corp farm has advantages in financial 
management no family farmer could hope to compete with outside of 
belonging to some sophisticated farm co-op organizations.

Thirldly, smaller truck farms, often farmed organically, with far more 
labor hours per in per ton of produce, often, usually, far out weigh the 
larger factory farming methods. One of the reasons Chinese farmers, and 
indeed European farmers are so productive per acre is that they farm 
their land very, very intensely. Some on at Food First! in a paper once 
wrote that essentially China is a nation of 1 billion gardeners. And 
this is true. Better quality, organic produce is higly valued (in the 
social, not Marxist sense).

European farms, almost never talked about when discussing agriculture, 
seem to have the best balance between size and labor input while turning 
out a decent produce, be it organic or non-organic.

Fourthly, in cereal production, it makes almost no difference whatsoever 
if wheat, barely or other grains are produced in very large tracts or 
smaller more intensely farmed ones. This is not so true with rice 
production, I've read, but I don't know enough about that.

The advantage of "artisinal wheat" production and other grains is the 
same with the underground seed movement in North America and Europe: to 
keep great tasting, wonderfully hybridized over centuries wheat strains 
from certain death at the hands of corporate seed fascists: AMD, Burpee, 
Monsanto, etc. and this is true with all aspects of agricultural in 
general, *including* animal husbandry. The US demand, for example, that 
every last "Kreole Pig" in Haiti...a unique breed of special tasting 
animal raised exclusively in Haiti...be terminated was carried out 10 
years ago at the behest of US corp. pig farmers because they didn't want 
Haitians to raise their own animals but instead import them from the US 
and, to prevent a 'chance' that "diseases" supposedly carried by these 
animals somehow infect American breeds.

The problem with corp ownership in agriculture tends to be the massive, 
often inevitable motion to homogenize food from production to 
consumption. It's actually a 'totalitarian' form of production that is 
quite scary. These same and different corps were quite open about this 
in the 1950s when they viewed, not malevolently per se, that all food 
would be processed, homogenized, tasteless before you cooked it...er 
heated it up...at home.

Grey attacks "Foodies". Being one, I take this personally. If  the 
entire US working class were 'foodies' there would probably be a massive 
socialist revolution by tuesday, weds. latest. It has reversed, to some 
significant degree, this move toward homogenization of our food 
supply.Yesterday I went the San Francisco farmers market. There are two 
of these. One is the yuppie ultra-fancy one at the Ferry Building that 
has been on numerous food shows with very expensive organic foods of all 
types. We went to the one off of Allameny Avenue, located between the 
three largest working class neighborhoods left in SF. It's massive and, 
every Saturday, it seems to get bigger & bigger, composed almost 
exclusively of San Francisco's working class communities. [in you are in 
NY, it's like hte difference between the Union Square farmers market and 
the one I went to recently in Red Hook in Brooklyn] It never gets any TV 
coverage, which is a good thing, IMO. We get up early and eat our 
breakfast at a wonderful

[Marxism] ginsberg quotes

2009-08-23 Thread Max Clark

'Nobody publishes a word that is not the cowardly robot ravings of a depraved 
mentality
The day of the publication of the true literature of the American body will be 
day of Revolution.' -'Death to Van Gogh's Ear!'

'I was always a communist...' -'The Velocity of Money'


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Re: [Marxism] Silone biography

Shane Mage wrote:
> Why this slander? Wheatcroft wrote "It does seem that Silone had at  
> least some contact with the police, who  had arrested his one  
> surviving brother, Romolo (who would die in prison at the hands of his  
> captors), but it’s hard to see evidence of any great betrayal."

New Left Review 3, May-June 2000

John Foot on Dario Biocca and Mauro Canali, L’informatore. The 
sensational revelation of Ignazio Silone’s long-term service as informer 
for Mussolini’s regime—the Italian Orwell as a fascist spy.

JOHN FOOT
THE SECRET LIFE OF IGNAZIO SILONE

Ignazio Silone, best known as a remarkable writer and novelist, was born 
on the First of May 1900 in a small village in the Abruzzo. His real 
name was Secondino Tranquilli. The son of a small landowner who died 
when he was eleven, he became an orphan at the age of fifteen when a 
massive earthquake wiped out his home town in twenty-five seconds. 
During the First World War he became a teenage militant in the ranks of 
the Young Socialists, rising quickly through its ranks in the ‘two red 
years’ (biennio rosso) between 1919 and 1920, when he was active in 
Rome. When the Italian Socialists split in 1921, he became a founder 
member of the Italian Communist Party. Nominated to the Young Communist 
International, he was a frequent visitor to Berlin and Moscow, and 
organized Italian workers’ groups in Spain, France, Belgium and 
Luxemburg. Within a few years, as Fascism consolidated its rule in the 
country, he became one of the eight top leaders of the PCI in exile, and 
in 1927 was sent back into Italy as head of the party’s underground 
network. When Moscow imposed the sectarian policies of the Third Period 
on the Communist International at the end of the decade, a line which 
threatened to tear the Italian party apart, Silone was eventually 
expelled from the PCI for sympathies with the opposition to it.

Withdrawing from active politics after his expulsion, Silone wrote his 
masterpieces Fontamara (1933) and Bread and Wine (1936), two of the most 
powerful anti-fascist novels ever written, in Switzerland. His analytic 
study School for Dictators (1938) remains unsurpassed in the brilliance 
and accuracy of its dissection of fascism’s rise to power and of 
Mussolini’s rule. In 1941, he rejoined the Socialist Party in Zurich; he 
was arrested and interned by the Swiss police a year later. In October 
1944 he returned to Rome, and played a leading role in the Socialist 
Party, opposing Nenni’s alliance with the Communist Party. In 1947 he 
left the PSI and, as the Cold War developed, took a prominent part in 
the anti-communist politics of the time, contributing to the notorious 
symposium The God that Failed (1950), and creating the journal Tempo 
Presente under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of 
whose Italian section he became the director. Detested as a Cold Warrior 
by the PCI, Silone was widely admired outside it. His Emergency Exit 
(1965), a collection of essays and testimonies on his time in the Party, 
became a touchstone for the non-Communist left. Continuing to write and 
revise his novels, Silone described himself as ‘a socialist without a 
party, a christian without a church’. For so long a central figure in 
the Italian intellectual landscape, he died in 1978. For many, his life 
and work embodied the vicissitudes, alternately tragic and heroic, of 
the century.

Some ten years later, plans for an exhibition of documents about the 
novelist were mounted in his home town. Requests were sent to Rome for 
relevant materials. There a senior official of the State Archive, 
looking through a file devoted to Silone by the OVRA, the political 
police of the Fascist period, came upon two letters that he set aside 
from the rest of the file, which he sent on. The documents that he 
abstracted, he neither made public nor put back where they belonged. He 
removed them. In one, written in early 1930 and addressed to Emilia 
Bellone, sister of Guido Bellone, General Inspector of Public Security 
charged with stamping out subversion, the writer speaks of a deep moral 
and psychological crisis, and pleads to be released from ‘all falsehood, 
doubt and secrecy’, expressing a desire ‘to repair the damage that I 
have caused, to seek redemption, to help the workers, the peasants (to 
whom I am bound with every fibre in my body) and my country.’ No word of 
this document reached the outside world. But as it happened, a young 
historian working on a biography of Silone, Dario Biocca, was starting 
to come across other documents which suggested that Silone might have 
been a police informer between 1928 and 1930. At a conference held in 
Florence in 1996, Biocca for the first time aired this conclusion in 
public. A storm immediately broke over the allegations, which generated 
a huge controversy in the national press. At this juncture, a lesser 
official at the Archive in Rome who knew of the letter of 1930, but had 
neithe

Re: [Marxism] cheap food

2009-08-23 Thread brad bauerly

Hold on a minute.  If we are all going to agree that cheap food is a good
thing for the working class I would, from a marxist position, first question
what cheap food actually means: Are we talking about exchange value as being
cheap and what about the relationship of cheap food to value?  To talk about
cheap food fro a non-value theoretical point of view leads us to miss the
way that cheap food has reduced the input costs of capitalists by reducing
the cost of the reproduction of labor. That this has occurred on the back of
the environment should point to a clear contradiction in the development of
capitalism throughout the 20th century.  However this is hardly the only
contradiction.  A most important one, but one rarely broached by Marxists,
is the impact on the health of workers.  This is related to the issue of
meat and how in the US the consumption of meat has nearly doubled in the
last 50 years (I am talking about the 1960's and not some romanticized
peasant agrarian society) as the health of the average person has not
improved.  Meat being cheaper to produce, from a value perspective, due to
the productivity advances in the growing of feed grains that has occurred in
the last century, it is therefore been the most readily available and
cheapest way to reproduce labor (along with other highly processed 'junk
food'.

The point is that we need to understand the cheapness of food as one moment
in the chain of the circulation of capital and not as an
independent occurrence.   In the US the portion of income spent on food
is one of the lowest in the world and this leads directly to one of
the highest percentage of income spent on non-essential consumer goods (not
that these are necessarily bad). This means that cheap food is used to
decrease the cost of labor and increase the consumption of, and therefore
surplus profits of, other consumer goods production (increasingly info tech
devices).

I spent five years as an organic farmer and grew very tired of arguing with
people chatting on $500 phones, in $200 shoes and drinking $5 coffees that
my $1.50 bunch of carrots were way too expensive.  Just think
about how important food is to our survival, yet how little of all of our
incomes goes to food.  While I would reject the logic that says that by
leading working people to spend more on healthy food we remove their
capacity to buy more nonessential goods (or get them to plant a garden and
remove the time they would spend watching Fox News), I understand the point
but think it is flawed in practice.  I also understand how food is becoming
(always was?) class bifurcated into the expensive healthy v. the cheap crap
and the problems this creates.  Again, it is not really as simple as either
of these approaches makes it seem and only by connecting cheap food to the
production of value can we illuminate the problems of these two
(non-marxists) approaches.

Brad

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[Marxism] US now has more US mercenaries than troops in Afganistan

2009-08-23 Thread Ralph Johansen

[By the end of the year, Obama will have almost 150,000 troops and 
mercenaries in Afghanistan, compared to 250,000, and counting, now in 
Iraq. It's another almost fool-proof way to continue to privatize 
government functions, ronin under the guise of "security contractors" 
and non-combatant service personnel. We already know that KBR and others 
are not just there to serve up snacks. As police forces, foreign troop 
training advisors or supplements, bodyguards, piloting armed 
reconnaissance planes and other military duties, they're effectively 
unlawful combatants under the Geneva conventions - with awesome, 
sci-fi-powerful weaponry. They are licensed by the State Department, 
they are contracting with foreign governments, training soldiers and 
reorganizing militaries in Nigeria 
, Bulgaria 
, Taiwan 
, and Equatorial Guinea 
. The PMC industry is 
now worth well over $100 billion a year. The sub-plot is 
unaccountability, covert atrocities: drones, satellite surveillance, 
private contractors, mercenaries, mega-corporate boondoggling, more 
sophisticated Pentagon-financed r&d, embedded journalists (if any, in a 
collapsing news market).  How can the liberals object, much less even 
have an inkling as to what's going on there? Don't even have to pile the 
wounded and body bags at military hospitals and installations.  All the 
WSJ et al can report if they so choose is how many, not what they're 
doing there, in those remote mountains and poppy fields. What gruesome, 
My Lai massacre-type stories are  developing for a Seymour M. Hersh-type 
or probing foreign reporter to tell some day - well after the event.  
And this form of off-the-charts warfare is endlessly expandable, in all 
corners of the strategically necessary planet.

Or ... is a bloated contractor presence also a form of Neo-Keynesianism, 
in a Depression plus Endless Wars? A new boondoggle CCC: contractor 
'conservation' corps, with Pentagon cover, and with no need to fight it 
out in the Congress, even or especially with Republicans since all 
districts benefit, and it's not even colorably welfare?]


Afghanistan Contractors Outnumber Troops Despite Surge in U.S. Deployments 
More Civilians Are Posted in War Zone; Reliance Echoes the Controversy 
in Iraq
By AUGUST COLE 
Wall Street Journal
August 22, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125089638739950599.html

Even as U.S. troops surge to new highs in Afghanistan they are 
outnumbered by military contractors working alongside them, according to 
a Defense Department census due to be distributed to Congress -- 
illustrating how hard it is for the U.S. to wean itself from the large 
numbers of war-zone contractors that proved controversial in Iraq.

The number of military contractors in Afghanistan rose to almost 74,000 
by June 30, far outnumbering the roughly 58,000 U.S. soldiers on the 
ground at that point. As the military force in Afghanistan grows 
further, to a planned 68,000 by the end of the year, the Defense 
Department expects the ranks of contractors to increase more.

The military requires contractors for essential functions ranging from 
supplying food and laundry services to guarding convoys and even 
military bases -- functions that were once performed by military 
personnel but have been outsourced so a slimmed-down military can focus 
more on battle-related tasks.

The Obama administration has sought to reduce its reliance on military 
contractors, worried that the Pentagon was ceding too much power to 
outside companies, failing to rein in costs and not achieving desired 
results.

President Obama has repeatedly called defense contractors to task since 
taking office. "In Iraq, too much money has been paid out for services 
that were never performed, buildings that were never completed, 
companies that skimmed off the top," he said during a March speech.

In April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced plans to hire 30,000 
civilian officials during to cut the percentage of contractors in the 
Pentagon's own work force, and last month he told an audience of 
soldiers that contractor use overseas needed better controls.

Military contractors' personnel for a time outnumbered U.S. troops in 
Iraq. The large contractor force was accompanied by issues ranging from 
questionable costs billed to the government to shooting of civilians by 
armed security guards. A September 2007 shooting incident involving 
Blackwater Worldwide guards working for the U.S. State Department, in 
which 17 Iraqis were killed, forced the U.S. to aggressively rework 
oversight of security firms.

Yet in Afghanistan as in Iraq, the Pentagon has found that the military 
has shrunk so much since the Cold War ended that it isn't big enough to 
sustain operations without using companies to directly support military 
operations.

"Because of t

Re: [Marxism] Interesting article.

2009-08-23 Thread David Picón Álvarez

From: "Shane Mage" 
"No only does he ludicrously describe Keynes--who repeatedly ridicules
mathematical modeling of economic behavior--as "Neoclassical."  He
even fails to understand the theoretical basis of ordinary (including
Marxist) microeconomics, which is not that economic actors are
"rational informed value judging individuals,"  but merely that
*enough* economic actors act rationally--the sum of other behaviors
being random with respect to that rationality--for economic
rationality to model the central tendency ("average") of market
behavior."

On-point on Keynes, although I've doubts on your other point. One of the 
fundamental premises of the article is that the reality of the matter is 
that economic agents cannot be assumed to act rationally in the aggregate, 
and really I think this is an empirical question which could be answered by 
the right experiment. One of the ways to look at it is on the lights of the 
efficient market hypothesis, according to which an efficient market will 
embody all known information on an asset through its price, so that it is 
impossible to make better predictions than the market itself can on its 
future price except by chance, whether by examining the fundamentals, the 
historical pricing of the asset, or any other way. This doesn't quite seem 
to hold in reality, there being agents who seem to successfully exceed the 
performance expected from a random choice.

More to the point, the whole mechanism of marketing suggests that there is a 
serious rationality deficit somewhere: either consumers are rational, in 
which case enterprises are irrational in spending resources on marketing, or 
enterprises are rational, and consumers are irrational and their 
susceptibility to marketing must be more than a random variable.

In the end, though, the whole premise of rationality and so on entails a 
certain model about agents, as utility maximisers, which I'm not sure how 
seriously to take. Aside from the fact that, assuming people really act on 
the basis of utility functions, those aren't likely to be completely 
endogenous, but in all likelyhood contain references to the state of others, 
it's a bit difficult for me to believe that decisions can be reduced to a 
single factor, an ordered scalar. The concept of choice itself seems 
difficult to formalise without possiting some sort of independent autonomous 
process outside causality, or maybe I'm just not versed enough on this 
matter.

--David.



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Re: [Marxism] Silone biography

2009-08-23 Thread Shane Mage

On Aug 23, 2009, at 10:42 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:

> (Silone does not come across as a very admirable character here,
> especially serving as a fascist snitch...

Why this slander? Wheatcroft wrote "It does seem that Silone had at  
least some contact with the police, who  had arrested his one  
surviving brother, Romolo (who would die in prison at the hands of his  
captors), but it’s hard to see evidence of any great betrayal."

> , but "Bread and Wine" is one of
> the finest leftwing novels I have ever read.)
>
And "School for Dictators" is one of the finest early books on  
fascism, ranking with Guerin's "Fascism and Big Business."

Shane Mage

> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos

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Re: [Marxism] Eduardo Galeano's latest

2009-08-23 Thread Andrew Pollack

But of course it contained the gem below. I bet the reviewer is a
liberal; there's not a liberal who wouldn't have written the same
racist filth against Palestinians. Imagine the uproar if someone
complained about how Jewish accounts of the Holocaust "elide" the
responsibility of Jewish collaborators, Jewish financiers, etc., for
Jewish deaths.

On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Louis Proyect wrote:
> (Considering the neoconservative slant of the book review section, this
> is a remarkably positive review.)

> AT times the entries are simply testimonial: “In a single night in
> August 1944, 2,897 Gypsies, women, children, men, perished in the gas
> chambers of Auschwitz.” Elsewhere they are poetic. And sometimes they
> can be uncomfortably polemical: a brief history of the Holocaust (a
> “colossal butchery organized by Hitler”) concludes that “hunting Jews
> has always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians, who never played
> it, are paying the bill.” Is the elision of the complex victimization of
> the Palestinians by Arab states a necessary consequence of this lapidary
> form?
>

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Re: [Marxism] Words (was 'Alexander Cockburn RIP')

2009-08-23 Thread Carrol Cox

waistli...@aol.com wrote:
> 
> >> Actually, Max Schactm

Who the hell are you quoting?

Carrol

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[Marxism] Barack Obama and Adam Smith

NY Times Book Review, August 23, 2009
Crossroads
Theory and Morality in the New Economy
By DAVID LEONHARDT

The indispensable economist of the moment is clearly John Maynard 
Keynes. Keynes’s prescription for financial crises — aggressive 
government action and, by definition, big budget deficits — has been 
Washington’s basic approach since Lehman Brothers collapsed last 
September. Eleven months later, the economy remains deeply troubled, and 
it probably will be for some time. But our Great Recession seems 
unlikely to turn into another Great Depression.

It is impossible to know just how much credit the Keynesian approach 
deserves, because we can’t rerun the past year with a Hooverite economic 
strategy and see what would happen. Still, history seems to have 
vindicated Keynes. Likewise, it has indicted the laissez-faire 
philosophy that had been ascendant for most of the last three decades.

The indispensable economist of that philosophy, of course, is Adam 
Smith. Smith’s invisible hand — which, in his description, guides an 
individual to promote the interests of society more effectually than he 
intends — has not looked so effectual lately. In Obama’s Washington, 
understandably enough, Keynes seems to be in and Smith out.

Yet here is where the story becomes a little complicated. Six years ago, 
Bantam Classic published a mass-market volume of Smith’s 1776 
masterwork, “The Wealth of Nations,” with an introduction by Alan B. 
Krueger, an economics professor at Princeton. Krueger argued that 
Smith’s modern image had become unhinged from his actual writings. 
“Smith was a nuanced thinker. He was not nearly as doctrinaire a 
defender of unfettered free enterprise as many of his late-20th-century 
followers have made him out to be,” Krueger wrote. “He recognized that 
human judgment was not infallible.”

Smith was indeed a champion of individual liberty and worried about how 
governments might muck up an economy. But he also wrote that the goal of 
employers, “always and everywhere,” was to keep wages as low as 
possible. “When the regulation, therefore, is in favor of the workmen, 
it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in 
favor of the masters,” he concluded. He supported a tax on luxury 
carriages and taxes on alcohol, sugar and tobacco. He said that 
“negligence and profusion” inevitably occur when corporate managers 
control shareholders’ money. And as the historian Emma Rothschild has 
noted, “The Wealth of Nations” uses the phrase “invisible hand” 
precisely once. In the 1,231-page Bantam edition, it appears on Page 572.

I stumbled on that edition earlier this year in my local bookstore and 
was struck by Krueger’s name on the cover. These days, he is the chief 
economist in the Obama Treasury Department, the lead agency in the 
administration’s efforts to halt the economic crisis. The ideas of 
Keynes, surely, are central to those efforts. But the ideas of Smith are 
not anathema to the administration. In fact, Smith turns out to be a 
useful guide to the ways Obama is and is not trying to reshape the 
American economy. Smith also lurks, often unnamed, in some of the most 
thoughtful early books to have been published on the Great Recession.

Beyond the immediate crisis, today’s overarching economic challenge is 
figuring out how the country can reap the benefits of Smith’s 
market-based system without experiencing the worst of its downsides. In 
the decades after World War II, the Keynesians who descended on 
Washington thought they had solved this problem. With the right mix of 
spending, regulation and interest rates, they believed, the business 
cycle could be tamed and unemployment largely eliminated. “This was 
hubris,” Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate and liberal Times Op-Ed 
columnist, writes in “The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis 
of 2008.” Technocrats overestimated how many jobs they could create 
without aggravating inflation, and aggravate inflation they did.

Their failures, combined with the greater failure of socialist 
economies, set the stage for the ascendancy of laissez-faire economics. 
Much of Asia moved to a market-based system and experienced stunning 
improvements in living conditions. As Krugman writes, “capitalism could 
with considerable justification claim the credit.” These successes, 
however, created their own excesses. The principles of laissez-faire 
capitalism were elevated to the status of religious scripture, with Alan 
Greenspan as high priest. In “The Cost of Capitalism,” Robert J. 
Barbera, a longtime Wall Street economist, notes that Greenspan and 
others confused the fact that market capitalism was thebest economic 
system with the misguided notion that it was the perfect system.

Barbera calls instead for “an enlightened synthesis.” Such a synthesis — 
one that takes Smith at his word rather than his caricature — is at the 
core of almost every serious vision of a postcrisis American economy. 
For Barbera,

[Marxism] Silone biography

(Silone does not come across as a very admirable character here, 
especially serving as a fascist snitch, but "Bread and Wine" is one of 
the finest leftwing novels I have ever read.)

NY Times Book Review, August 23, 2009
Bread, Wine, Politics
By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT

BITTER SPRING
A Life of Ignazio Silone
By Stanislao G. Pugliese
Illustrated. 426 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35

When an earthquake struck L’Aquila in April (and the preposterous Silvio 
Berlusconi told survivors to think of their emergency tents as a holiday 
camp), it was hardly the first such tragedy Italy had known. On Jan. 13, 
1915, quite near L’Aquila in the mountainous Abruzzo region east of 
Rome, a much more terrible earthquake hit Pescina dei Marsi and killed 
3,500 people in a village of 5,000 — among them, the mother of a 
14-year-old boy named Secondino Tranquilli.

He had already lost his father and five of his six siblings, and so 
young Secondino carried heavy emotional burdens before he reinvented 
himself as Ignazio Silone in a Spanish prison in 1923. At first an 
underground party operative like Trotsky or Tito, Silone would become a 
celebrated realist novelist: Italy’s greatest living writer, in 
Faulkner’s opinion, as famous in his time as George Orwell or Arthur 
Koestler. Like them, he was a moral critic of the horrors of the age 
who told the truth about both Fascism and Communism. Later he was 
embroiled in some of the darker controversies of the cold war, and was 
still a lightning rod in Italy even after his death in 1978. But his 
fame has faded outside his country, and Stanislao G. Pugliese’s 
absorbing new biography, “Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone,” is 
the first to appear in English.

Having become secretary of a radical peasants’ group at only 16, Silone 
was already a prominent left-wing socialist by 1921. Early that year, at 
an age when others are still studying or in their modest first jobs, he 
helped found the Italian Communist Party. This was only the beginning of 
a life that would seem implausible in fiction. Indeed, Pugliese says of 
one later episode that it was the kind of outrageous coincidence found 
in Victorian romantic novels, although if anything Silone’s life was 
closer to the kind of pop “faction” in which the hero finds himself 
wherever history is being made, rubbing shoulders with its makers.

He met Lenin in Moscow, where (as he later recalled in a radio 
interview) “everyone was contributing to remaking society.” Then came 
the Spanish interlude, when he was imprisoned while helping the local 
Communists. In 1927 he was in Moscow again for the epic meeting of the 
Communist International that saw the showdown between Stalin and 
Trotsky. Silone refused to condemn Trotsky on the basis of a document 
that he, like all others present, had not been allowed to study. 
Afterward he read that Trotsky had been condemned “unanimously.” It was 
not long after that eye-opening experience that Silone broke with the 
Communists.

Now he was on his own, an anti-Fascist physically exiled from 
Mussolini’s Italy and an anti-Stalinist intellectually and morally 
exiled from much of the left. Living in Switzerland in the 1930s and 
1940s he found fame not as an activist but as a writer, for three novels 
set in his birthplace, Pescina. “Fontamara” — literally “Bitter Spring,” 
giving Pugliese his title — was followed by “Bread and Wine” and “The 
Seed Beneath the Snow.” The first two especially were pioneering 
classics of proletarian fiction, telling of the tragic struggle of the 
Abruzzese peasants against rapacious landlords and brutal officials.

It’s hard now to recapture the impact of those books in their day. 
“Fontamara” was turned into a play in New York in 1936, and “Bread and 
Wine” was chosen over “The Grapes of Wrath” as a Book-of-the-Month 
selection. Silone himself made few literary claims for the trilogy, and 
no doubt they aren’t “great novels” in the sense that “Anna Karenina” 
and “Ulysses” are. But then neither are “Darkness at Noon” or “Nineteen 
Eighty-Four,” let alone “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: political or didactic 
fiction is not to be judged by the standards of Flaubert. The fact is 
that “Fontamara” and its successors inspired a generation, and Silone’s 
admirers included Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Thomas Mann and 
Arturo Toscanini.

By Christmas 1942, Silone was back in prison. The Swiss wanted to expel 
him — no joke when the country was surrounded by Axis territory — but 
relented because of his eminence, whereupon he found a new ally and a 
new career. Allen Dulles was then the Bern station chief of the Office 
of Strategic Services, forerunner of the C.I.A., and enlisted Silone. He 
gave Dulles advice both military — the Brenner pass should be 
interdicted — and political, correctly predicting that “unconditional 
surrender” was a foolish policy that would prolong the defeat of Italy.

fter the war, Silone was active for a time in Italian politics as a 
l

[Marxism] Eduardo Galeano's latest

(Considering the neoconservative slant of the book review section, this 
is a remarkably positive review.)


NY Times Book Review, August 23, 2009
A History of Us
By NEIL GORDON

MIRRORS
Stories of Almost Everyone
By Eduardo Galeano
Translated by Mark Fried
Illustrated. 391 pp. Nation Books. $26.95

Leftist political outrage is a tricky mode for storytellers, lending 
itself to platitudes and the verities of liberal self-righteousness. 
That’s why so many political novels turn to the techniques of suspense, 
and why so many fail.

And then there’s Eduardo Galeano, the lifelong political and literary 
activist recently brought to the American public eye when Hugo Chávez 
gave President Obama a copy of “Open Veins of Latin America,” Galeano’s 
seminal history of, as his subtitle has it, “Five Centuries of the 
Pillage of a Continent.” His political stance is one of consistent moral 
horror and his idiom the plain and sometimes primitivist voice of his 
native Uruguay, captured neatly in the memoir “Days and Nights of Love 
and War” in his description of an early political insight: “When I 
learned this, I had long since lost my innocence, but I felt like a 
cheated little boy.”

The literary form Galeano has created in his many books is unique: 
little narratives and descriptive vignettes — here elegantly translated 
by Mark Fried — that might range from a paragraph to a dozen pages and 
that progress with a powerful hypnotic rhythm. Each is self-contained 
and neatly tells its story not only by what it says, but, equally 
powerfully, by what it leaves out — and by its juxtaposition, or 
syncopation, with its neighbors.

Galeano’s latest book, “Mirrors,” uses this technique to create nothing 
less than a capsule history of the human race. In some 600 short 
entries, he travels from prehistory to the present, from the 
impressionistic to the brutally, precisely documented. Each entry is an 
avatar of outrage over the depredations of power against its 
multifarious victims, those rendered helpless by poverty, religion, 
race, sexual identity or — as in the vignettes about Galileo and Isaac 
Babel — the simple accident of being right when the truth defined by the 
prevailing authority was wrong.

The first dozen or so stories move us from the origin of humanity in 
desire (“Life was alone, no name, no memory. It had hands, but no one to 
touch. It had a tongue, but no one to talk to. Life was one, and one was 
none. . . . The arrow of desire split life down the middle, and life was 
two”) to a meditation on the likelihood that Adam and Eve were black, an 
evocation of the mystery of the cave paintings in the Sahara, an 
explanation of the origin of Indian castes and a tribute to the Rosetta 
stone. Greek mythology figures centrally in the book, as do the 
flowering of Moorish civilization in Spain, the Crusades and the 
Inquisition.

AT times the entries are simply testimonial: “In a single night in 
August 1944, 2,897 Gypsies, women, children, men, perished in the gas 
chambers of Auschwitz.” Elsewhere they are poetic. And sometimes they 
can be uncomfortably polemical: a brief history of the Holocaust (a 
“colossal butchery organized by Hitler”) concludes that “hunting Jews 
has always been a European sport. Now the Palestinians, who never played 
it, are paying the bill.” Is the elision of the complex victimization of 
the Palestinians by Arab states a necessary consequence of this lapidary 
form?

Galeano’s prose is nearly lulling in its lyricism, a quality that gives 
it an overridingly shamanic tone. His powerful voice reminds us, over 
and over again, of the responsibility of writers to be constantly in 
search of new forms of expression that may draw us out of our 
complacency, as he does so eloquently here. As in his previous books, he 
succeeds in capturing the bottomless horror of the state’s capacity to 
inflict pain on the individual, offering as effective an act of 
political dissent as exists anywhere in contemporary literature.

Neil Gordon is a novelist and the dean of Eugene Lang College the New 
School for Liberal Arts.


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Re: [Marxism] Interesting article.

2009-08-23 Thread Shane Mage

On Aug 23, 2009, at 4:05 AM, David Picón Álvarez wrote:

> this article seems an interesting overview of economic history and  
> serves
> well to put neoclassicism and the Austrian school in context:
> http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/biology_economics.htm

I'm afraid, having read it's first three sentences, that this article  
has little merit:
"...Neoclassical economics can be considered to cover a relatively  
wide range of economic thought ranging from the pure “free-market”  
economics of those like Milton Friedman to the Keynesian economics of  
John Keynes.
What virtually all of the Neoclassical schools of thought share, is a  
view of human beings as rational informed value judging individuals,  
whose behaviors can be modeled by mathematical formulas."

No only does he ludicrously describe Keynes--who repeatedly ridicules  
mathematical modeling of economic behavior--as "Neoclassical."  He  
even fails to understand the theoretical basis of ordinary (including  
Marxist) microeconomics, which is not that economic actors are  
"rational informed value judging individuals,"  but merely that  
*enough* economic actors act rationally--the sum of other behaviors  
being random with respect to that rationality--for economic  
rationality to model the central tendency ("average") of market  
behavior.

Shane Mage

> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures."
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos

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[Marxism] Feminism and imperialism

Clare Midgley. Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 
1790-1865. London: Routledge, 2007. X, 206 S. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 
978-0-415-25014-6; $32.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-25015-3; (cloth), ISBN 
978-0-203-08949-1.

Reviewed by Michelle Tusan
Published on H-Soz-u-Kult (May, 2009)

Claire Midgley has written a useful and well-argued study that traces 
the imperial origins of British feminism. Although imperial history has 
been the fashion in British feminist studies for over fifteen years, 
Feminism and Empire is the first book to connect these two fields in a 
study of the early nineteenth century. Midgley who is perhaps best known 
for her work on women and the anti-slavery movement is well-positioned 
to explore feminist connections between colony and metropole and makes a 
convincing case for the significance of imperialism in shaping the 
practice and ideology of the early feminist movement.

full: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.php?id=24978

---

(Amazing piece to appear in the Times.)

NY Times Magazine, August 23, 2009
The Medium
The Feminist Hawks
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

How do big ideas spread on the Internet, and how are they changed in the 
process?

Consider the feminist-hawk position — the one that advocates the use of 
force to liberate Muslim women from persecution and burkas. This 
position has become an integral part of the ideological Web. 
Feminist-hawk arguments may even be considered an artifact of the Web, 
just the way the revolutionary arguments of 18th-century America can be 
seen as an artifact of pamphlets.

In the late 1990s, an e-mail petition of unclear origin began to 
circulate. It was called “The Taliban Is Waging a War on Women!” Styled 
like a chain letter, it came in several variations, each featuring 
reports of misogynistic crimes in Afghanistan. (“One woman was beaten to 
DEATH by an angry mob of fundamentalists for accidentally exposing her 
arm.”) If you signed, you agreed that the United Nations ought to, by 
“support and action,” show its intolerance for “the situation overseas.”

The petition blamed the Afghan regime and not Muslim culture for the 
abuses of women, and some iterations sought to pre-empt relativists who 
would “excuse everything on cultural grounds.” The petition typically 
carried a list of signatories, some with M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s, from cities 
like Grenoble, Cleveland and New Delhi.

Unlike Revolutionary-era pamphlets, the petition did not ground its case 
in political theory. Instead, it relied on the promise of global 
participation implicit in online communication. It made clear that a 
far-flung community with eyes and ears everywhere — and connections in 
high places — already existed. You could add your name to its moral 
ranks with a few keystrokes.

Today that e-mail message rarely lands in in-boxes, and when it’s cited, 
it’s mostly to show the oppressiveness of spam. (“The Taliban has since 
been removed from power,” says BreaktheChain, an anti-junk-mail site. 
“Too bad this chain letter can’t similarly be ‘removed.’ ”) This is a 
mistake. Though the petition didn’t stop the Taliban, it sounded a 
meaningful alarm. It also codified a polemical line that has, 
unexpectedly, become a war horse of hawkish bloggers.

David Horowitz, the conservative firebrand, is among those who have 
seized on the feminist-hawk position. Horowitz may not be an obvious 
feminist, but as someone who has dedicated his life to political media 
(producing or contributing to magazines, books, political ads, cable 
news, talk radio, blogs, video podcasts, even a pamphlet), he’s adroit 
at adapting ideologies for media platforms. Right now, this one is 
working for him.

Like many conservatives, Horowitz appears to have come to 
feminist-hawkism after 9/11. But in his hands, the ideology has fast 
became a tenacious memebrid — as Tim Hwang, a sociologist and the 
director of the Web Ecology Project, calls memes that unite two or more 
cultural phenomena.

“The neat marriage of hawkish tendencies and feminist framing of issues 
does this quite effectively,” Hwang explained to me in an e-mail 
message. Borrowing left-wing shibboleths is one way that “conservative 
ideas can make it big in a generally more liberal online social sphere,” 
he wrote. Furthermore, to depict Islamic regimes less as terrorists than 
as repressors of civil liberties may appeal even to traditional 
isolationists, as it “plays off of the strong communities of 
libertarians that dominate some prominent spaces.”

Hawkish sites that have taken up feminism include Little Green 
Footballs, Jihad Watch and Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine. On a recent 
day, the home page of the last featured reports of female prisoners 
being raped in Iran; prepubescent girls getting married in Gaza; and a 
possible honor killing by an immigrant in New York. This material is 
expected to help seal Horowitz’s general case for the war on terror, 
though he has not yet changed the name of

[Marxism] Useful background on alleged Pan Am 103 bomber being released

http://links.org.au/node/809


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[Marxism] Moderator's note

Greg Butler's agent-baiting garbage has no place on Marxmail. If I ever 
read anything again from him that has even the slightest whiff of that, 
he will be removed. Permanently.


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[Marxism] Food Inc.: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer

2009-08-23 Thread Pat Costello

Summer blockbusters are often contrived, schlocky representations of the books 
on which they are based. But the documentary “Food, Inc.,” which drew heavily 
on the nonfiction bestsellers “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “Fast Food Nation” 
for its subject matter, has produced an accompanying book, “Food Inc.: How 
Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer — And What You Can Do 
About It,” that does far more than just rehash the film. This is no “one-two 
punch” marketing ploy by the folks at Participant Media, but rather a 
well-conceived, thoughtful follow-up to the overview offered up on the big 
screen. Perhaps it is the weighty subject matter-the industrialization and 
externalization of our food supply-or the all-star cast of creators and 
real-life participants, but in this case the combination of movie and book 
offers ample education and inspiration for even the most discerning consumer. 
Happily, the book is doing almost
 as well as the movie, which is the year’s top-grossing documentary: it is 
currently No. 325 on Amazon.com.


full:

http://www.ethicurean.com/2009/07/26/food-inc/



  



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Re: [Marxism] The high Cost of Cheap Food

2009-08-23 Thread Greg McDonald

Gregory Butler writes:

This article that you approvingly quote from a corporate media
mouthpiece, Time Magazine, attacks cheap food - and, implicitly, wants
to make meat unaffordable to working class people and the poor.

Me: Nutritious cheap food is readily available, as is cheap junk food.
To suggest that this article is "attacking" cheap food is ridiculous.
It is stating that so-called cheap meat is not really cheap after all.
There is a high price tag in terms of environmental damage, not to
mention the health related concerns due to the overuse of antibiotics
and the spawning of new viruses, etc. When you factor in the material
and non-material costs of all this, the bacon is not really cheap
after all is said and done. That seems to me to be the point of the
article.

Gregory: Communists and socialists SUPPORT the idea of cheap food -
because of the fact that most of the world's population lives in
penury and want, and desperately need a low cost balanced diet -
including meat.

Me: Agreed.

Are there problems with American factory farming - of course there
are, it's capitalism!

Like every industry, the bosses try and sweat every dime they can out
of the process - and the homo sapiens who work in the pork industry
are far more abused than the pigs are (because the bodies of the pigs
are valuable while the low paid Latino workers are easily replaceable)

Me: Both are treated poorly.

Gregory:Be that as it may, factory farming is far more efficient than
the much romanticized "family farm" - which is why they pushed the
family farms onto the economic scrapheap in the first place!

Me: You need to reread the article. BTW, family farms are not
inefficient, which is why Cuba is now pushing the idea, and Wendell
Berry, hardly the romanticist, has some very interesting things to say
about the family farm in contradistinction to factory farming. See:

http://organictobe.org/index.php/2008/10/06/in-defense-of-the-family-farm-by-wendell-berry/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05berry.html

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_18076.cfm

So yes, cheap food - and factory farming - is something that we should
wholeheartedly support, while constantly supporting the struggles of
the workers in those industries, and demanding that the commercial hog
farmers improve wages, working conditions and animal safety conditions
(in particular those animal safety conditions that directly impact
workplace safety and food quality).

Me: But all of those reforms will raise the costs of the final
product, Gregory. You can't have it both ways.

Gregory: We do not want to make common cause with the snobbish
foodies, the vegan fanatics, the "animal rights" reactionaries and the
anti working class environmentalists, who want to make meat a luxury
only affordable for the upper classes - every human? has a right to
eat meat and we should fight to defend that right!

Me: Judi Bari, the IWW, and Earth First did precisely that, and look
what happened! Except I would not characterize the environmentalists
as anti-working class. Neither did Judi, and she ended up with a bomb
planted in her car by the FBI.

http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/BariObit1.shtml

Besides, if you look at the new food pyramid sponsored by even
mainstream nutritionists, you will discover that red meat is
recommended for consumption at most twice a week. Veggies and fruits
should be consumed in much higher quantities, and lean chicken
(deskinned) and fish somewhere in between. Given the fact that most
freshwater fish in the USA is laced with mercury, and even deep, salt
water fish is also contaminated, the prescribed consumption of fish
should also be re-evaluated, IMHO. Where I live, free range,
non-antibiotic chicken (produced on a family farm) is readily
available in the meat counter, is 75 cents a pound more expensive than
Tyson, and does not taste like rubber from having been bleached white.
So when you factor in all of the costs of reforming capitalist
factory farms, including higher wages for the humans, more humane
conditions for the animals, and higher environmental standards, the
better-tasting and more nutritious meat produced on family farms is
actually cheaper, and thus produced more efficiently. Also, it is
possible to obtain sufficient protein from non-meat sources such as
legumes and soy products, (which are cheaper even than family farm
meat) so that the unhealthy over consumption of meat products is
really unnecessary, from a scientific, nutritional, perspective.

Greg McDonald

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