Re: [Marxism] Spiked online says that the death of a tribal language is okay

[Gary MacLennan]

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It interesting to note what features of modernity Spike will approve of.
They recently attacked Dawkins and Hitchens for threats to prosecute the
pope over child abuse. Here they rub their hands gleefully at the decay of a
culture and a people's language.  what have these two seemingly unrelated
phenomena got in common.

My answer is that Spiked's version of modernity is very much that of the
lamentable Herr Professor Nietzsche - a true weakling who had fantasies
about virility and power and saying yes to life.

So anything that smacks of weakness, such as counselling in disasters, or
worrying about children being abused or fretting over  a culture dying, is
seen as a kind of nay saying to life and so it is degenerate and must be
condemned by all the intellectuals with fantasies about having hairy chests
etc.

regards

Gary

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Re: [Marxism] Mark Twain: a Marxist view

[Mark Lause]

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Folks might also find entertaining the essay "Archimedes," advocating
Henry George's Single Tax and ascribed to Mark Twain.  (Contrary to
the description on this website, almost nobody not a Georgist seems to
credit this attribution.)

http://www.henrygeorge.org/archimedes.htm

ML


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[Marxism] Mark Twain: a Marxist view

[jay rothermel]

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http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/twai-a22.shtml



Twain wrote *The United States of Lyncherdom*, a significant essay published
posthumously (in 1923), in outrage over the 1901 lynching of three black men
in Pierce City, Missouri. In the piece, the author counters the claim that
the people constituting the lynch mob approved and enjoyed the torturous
killings. Rather, the crowds acquiesced for fear of scorn by their peers. In
a plaintive suggestion to end these killings—then totaling more than a
hundred per year in the US—Twain wrote: “[P]erhaps the remedy for lynchings
comes to this: station a brave man in each affected community to encourage,
support, and bring to light the deep disapproval of lynching hidden in the
secret places of its heart—for it is there, beyond question.”

Throughout his adult life, Twain was scathing about American political life
and its practitioners. Who could look on the self-important and thieving
corporate toadies collectively known as the US Congress with the same eyes
after a dose of Twain’s wit? For example, he once noted, “Suppose you were
an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
In *What is Man?* the novelist observed that “Fleas can be taught nearly
anything that a Congressman can.” A personal favorite: “It could probably be
shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American
criminal class except Congress.”

Several significant episodes in Twain’s life have received relatively scant
attention in tributes this week. One of these is Twain’s critical role in
the publication of the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant had been the US
Civil War general most responsible for the military defeat of the Southern
slavocracy, and later became US president. The memoirs, with their singular
political and literary value, would not likely have seen the light of day
without Twain publishing them himself. And he did so with considerable
generosity towards their author. Grant finished the memoirs five days before
his death in 1885. Twain awarded 75 percent of the proceeds to Grant’s
estate, allowing his widow to escape the poverty in which Grant had been
left after being swindled out of the last of his money.

Another fascinating episode in Twain’s life was his sojourn in Vienna from
September 1897 to May 1899. It is not possible to do justice here to this
period in the author’s life (which is the subject of an excellent book, *Our
Famous Guest: Mark Twain in Vienna* by Carl Dolmetsch). But it should be
briefly noted that from Vienna, Twain wrote articles for the American press
denouncing the anti-Semitism of the ruling party and articulating a warm
sympathy for and appreciation of the Jews who were the subject of widespread
persecution.

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Re: [Marxism] The Party's Role

[Mark Lause]

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I've already answered this question, didn't I?  We agree that the
political organization of the working class is essential.  The
difference is that you see the principle as inseparable from the party
project, while I think reality is unlikely to fit our preconceived
models.  It never really has.

I certainly don't see building a socialist party as on the agenda
right nowparticularly as I look around at what the people who
think it is on the agenda are building...

It seems far more likely to me that new struggles will take place and
left wings will naturally develop within them.  The Marxist project, I
think, will involve building these struggles, building these left
wings, and trying to bring them together.

I suspect that it will not be particularly relevant if your primary
purpose in going among them will be recruiting to some pre-existing
One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Party as laid out by Comrade Benedict.
  : - )

ML


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Re: [Marxism] US - If the tapes DESTROYED then torture did not occur

[Matt Bewig]

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Actually, under centuries of legal precedent the destruction of the 
tapes proves that torture did occur.  In a case that is everywhere 
taught in law school, Armory v. Delamirie, 93 Eng.Rep. 664 (K.B. 1722), 
a chimney sweep who sued a jeweler for return of the jewel he had found 
and left with the jeweler, was allowed to infer from the fact that the 
jeweler did not return the jewel that it was a stone "of the finest 
water."  Somehow, though, I doubt any Court would allow the inference to 
be raised against the State in a case involving so-called national security.

Matt

Nchamah Miller wrote:
> ==
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> ==
>
>
>   
>>  
>> http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1983613,00.html?hpt=T2
>> 
>
> 
> Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu
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>   

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[Marxism] US - If the tapes DESTROYED then torture did not occur

[Nchamah Miller]

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> 
>  
> http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1983613,00.html?hpt=T2


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[Marxism] Shattered Dreams - Cesar Chavez and La Causa

[Dennis Brasky]

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>
> By Jeffrey W. Rubin
>
>
> The Union of Their Dreams: Power,
> Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez's Farm Worker
> Movement by Miriam Pawel Bloomsbury Press, 2009, 384 pp., $28
>
> clip --
>


> In 1978, just after I graduated from college, I worked at a migrant health
> clinic in California's San Joaquin Valley and saw what 1960s activism had
> achieved. Farmworkers received health services at government-funded rural
> health clinics, regardless of citizenship status or ability to pay, and the
> landmark Agricultural Labor Relations Act, achieved through a decade of
> struggle on the part of the United Farm Workers (UFW) movement, promised
> access to union representation for those who harvested the country's fruits
> and vegetables.
>
> I lived down the road from the UFW headquarters, a mountain retreat center
> known as La Paz, and the director of the union's new school for organizers
> hired me to teach English there. Between classes, I passed Cesar Chavez as
> he strolled from office to lunch, and at celebrations I watched Dolores
> Huerta fly across the dance floor, projecting the allure and pleasure that
> accompanies immersion in a struggle for social justice. I also learned that
> social movements are sometimes not what they seem.
>
> The graduation for the three English classes at the UFW school was a
> momentous event. Families arrived in their Sunday best from across central
> and southern California for a formal ceremony and communal lunch. The high
> point of the ceremony was a slideshow put together by the most advanced
> class, setting out in English the students' experiences and hopes for the
> future. At the end of the show, photos of Cesar Chavez, La Paz, and a farm
> worker in the fields came onscreen with a voiceover saying, "The Union is
> not Cesar Chavez, the Union is not La Paz, the Union is the farmworkers."
>
> In the bright sun, families strolled from the school building to the dining
> room, congratulating the graduates and helping themselves heartily to the
> cafeteria-style buffet. Soon after lunch began, however, Huerta stood up to
> denounce an act of treason. "There are traitors here who want to destroy
> Cesar," she said with characteristic fierceness. These covert enemies,
> Huerta explained, had inserted the words "The Union is not Cesar Chavez" in
> the slideshow as part of an effort to usurp the leader's authority, and they
> needed to be named and expelled from the movement.
>
> Huerta demanded that the teachers identify the authors of the subversive
> phrase. The teacher of the advanced class refused, as did the rest of us.
> The meal ended quickly and awkwardly, the families dispersed, and the
> teachers from all three classes were ushered to a small table in a backroom
> office. Confronted there by Huerta, Richard Chavez, and Cesar Chavez
> himself, we were accused of being part of a subversive plot, railed at,
> called "chicken shit" by Cesar, and thrown out of La Paz and the union.
>
> I went home distraught and scared. I understood that I had been part of a
> purge, but I didn't understand why the purge had happened or what it meant.
> And like the protagonists in Miriam Pawel's groundbreaking and deeply moving
> The Union of Their Dreams, I did not speak of these events to anyone for
> more than a decade and never aired them publicly.
>
> Thirty years later, Pawel's meticulously documented book portrays the rise
> of the UFW and the mix of passion, solidarity, and organizing genius that
> enabled it to take on the largest agricultural enterprises in the country.
> And The Union of Their Dreams clears up the mystery carried inside everyone
> who worked for the movement through the late 1970s and early 1980s, from
> lawyers and ministers to farm workers and volunteers. What happened to make
> such a successful and inspiring victory for social justice end in bitter,
> drawn-out defeat? Pawel's nuanced analysis brings with it a sad truth most
> people don't know: only a tiny percentage of California's farmworkers are
> unionized today, and the pay and working conditions in most of California's
> fields are as bad as they were in the 1960s, before the landmark struggle
> that captured the national imagination. Today workers live in cars, shacks,
> and rundown barracks, and the UFW can neither organize farmworkers nor win
> union elections effectively.
>
> full -- http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=2452
>
>
>
>

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[Marxism] US food still tainted with old chemicals

[Dennis Brasky]

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> Thirty-eight years after DDT was banned, Americans still consume trace
> amounts of the infamous insecticide every day, along with more than 20 other
> banned chemicals.
>
> http://www.alternet.org/food/146576

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Re: [Marxism] "Anybody's Son Will Do"

[Paddy Apling]

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You should remember how often young officers (and those grew up as
petot=bourgeois, like Lenin) have played substantial roles in successful
revolutionary outbreaks - just think of Abdul Nassar in Egypt, the overthrow
of Salazar in Portugal, just to name a couple.

I feel sure that thepolitical discussions in the British Army, conducted by
troop officers on the basis of material produced by the Army Bureau of
Current Affairs for weekly discussions, played a not-insubstantial role in
the electoral defeat pf WinstonChurchill and his Tory minions in Britain in
1945 (though I was expected to lead my troop in political discussions - I
was too young to vote in 1945).

Don't be so blatantly short-sighted..

Paddy

Re: [Marxism] Huge march for Venezuelan independence day

[Nestor Gorojovsky]

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Dear Fred, first things first.

I have learnt as much from many people on this list as you claim to have
learnt from me. You´re one of those who I have learnt more from.

So that we are even.

;-)

But I may not have been a good teacher, because

a) I have never intended to treat
> 
> Latin American national-liberation struggles as though 
> "Justicialismo" was the only model, with only accidental and 
> inessential differences in the successors.

This is an unrewarding task that I leave for Peronists...

And believe me they try, with little success. But, as William of
Baskerville´s doctors at the Sorbonne, they are as wrong as they are
convinced of their errors. We Argentineans are famously considered a
crowing boastful braggard lot, a somewhat unfair attribution of the
features of some social classes in Buenos Aires to the whole nation,
which is more or less as if we believed every American to be like a
Southern Californian because of the image Hollywood expands the world
over. But I admit that when you meet a Peronist trying to explain the
world in the terms of Justicialista "doctrine", you can easily arrive at
that conclusion (not without reason).

The sterility of such an endeavour can be explained, in the first place,
by the sad elementarity of what passes for "Justicialist doctrine". The
"Doctrine" sums itself up in two documents, the "2o verdades
justicialistas" and Peron´s book on the "Organized Community" (La
Comunidad Organizada). Those interested can Google the net and will
easily find them and  thus evaluate them in their real depth. They are
NOT important as doctrine, as any such Google searcher will easily
discover, but as a textbook example of an
ideological coverup for a national bourgeois movement with massive
working class support. The very name itself is misleading. The whole
core of Perón´s movement can be expressed much better than through
"Justicialismo" in the triad (reminiscent, BTW, of Sun Yat Sen or of the
Programme of the NLF of VN) "a just, free and sovereign homeland" or in
a more elaborate way "social justice, economic freedom, political
sovereignty". In this formula, the last term supports the second, and
the second supports the first. This is Peronism in a nutshell: A
struggle for national sovereignty in order to achieve economic freedom,
with "social justice", that is a situation where wage slavery is more
palatable than under the conditions of semicolonial underdevelopment, as
a final result.

Peronists used to define imperialist domination as the rule of "capitalists"
while the Peronist age was that of "Justicialists", as if there were no
"capitalists" under the Peronist order. But as you can see,
this formula itself emasculates Peronism of its main revolutionary
contents: the struggle for national sovereignty. In this way, the
bourgeois movement substituted "capitalism" for "imperialist subjection"
(thus avoiding some thorny issues with the old Left wing traditions of
the Argentinean working class -but from time to time both Perón and Eva
Perón spoke of "imperialisms", by this meaning _both_ USA and the
fSU), offering the socialist tendencies of the workers a surrogate that
channeled them naturally into "just, worthy" (but also "just, no more
than") anti-imperialist struggles.

I am so much against suggesting that "Justicialismo" can be offered as a
universal way for Latin Americans that I consider that the very name
"Justicialismo" implies a long step back from "peronismo", in the sense
that it throws to the dustbin the core of that movement, which is its
popular nationalist definition in a semicolonial country. In fact, when
Peronism created the political structure that still bears the name
"Justicialista" it gave the first step into acceptation by the
pro-imperialist caucus, a process we in Argentina call "Alvearización"
because it was headed by Marcelo T. de Alvear in the other
national-popular movement of the 20th Century, the Unión Cívica Radical
of Hipólito Yrigoyen.

b)  I have never argued as

> though the Cuban revolution had never taken place or as though its 
> role and example in the region had been irrelevant and only 
> "accidental and not essential."

Particularly because I believe the Cuban revolution has taken place, and
I have never believed its role and example in the region to be
"accidental" or "not essential", I have been stressing that the general
road to socialism in Latin America (Cuba included, and let me explain
this later on) lies in the national liberation process not only within
each Latin American state but in Latin America as a whole. Not at all in
"Justicialismo"... Again: this I leave to Peronists and wish them luck
in the enterprise, because they need it. But of course whenever a
national-democratic organizer or intellectua

Re: [Marxism] The Party's Role

[Mark Lause]

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Look, you're the one who's posited single general scenario here.

I'm just pointing out that the movement takes and will take many
twists and turns, in which the formation of a party or parties may or
may not be essential.  Workers launching a new party of their own
might not decide to call themselves "socialist" for any of half a
dozen major reasons.  We should react on the basis of its ideas and
not its label.  And it's unclear to me what a socialist party can do
that a coalition or front of groups can't dobut that's why I've
asked you the question

ML


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[Marxism] Climate & Capitalism - More from Cochabamba

[Ian Angus]

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CLIMATE AND CAPITALISM
An online journal focusing on capitalism, climate change,
and the ecosocialist alternative.

April 22, 2010

QUOTE OF THE DAY
“We have two paths: either capitalism dies or Mother Earth dies.
Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives. Of course, brothers and
sisters, we are here for life, for humanity and for the rights of
Mother Earth. Long live the rights of Mother Earth! Death to
capitalism!” - Bolivian President Evo Morales

On-site reports from Cochabamba

CANADIAN YOUTH ACTIVIST REPORTS FROM COCHABAMBA
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2181
“What I am seeing before me, here in Cochabamba, is a truly global
resistance. A resistance to the world’s greatest polluters– polluters
who refuse to accept their responsibility for causing this global
catastrophe”

‘A PERSPECTIVE THAT IS UNASHAMEDLY AND EXPLICITLY ANTI-CAPITALIST’
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2185
Australian ‘Beyond Zero Emissions’ activists report on the first two
days to the World People’s Summit in Cochabamba

Commentaries on World People’s Summit

REBICK: COCHABAMBA SHOWS THE WAY FORWARD
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2189
Earth Day is limited by today’s corporate capitalism. In Bolivia, a
different imagination is possible.

EDUARDO GALEANO: MESSAGE TO THE MOTHER EARTH SUMMIT
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2175
The rights of human beings and the rights of nature are two names of
the same dignity Read this article

And this is the alternative ….

OBAMA’S CLIMATE DEAL PUTS WORLD ‘IN DIRE PERIL’
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2187
“Equivalent to racing towards a cliff and hoping to stop just before it”

+

Previous reports on the World Peoples’ Summit in Bolivia

EVO: ‘PLANET OR DEATH, WE SHALL OVERCOME!’
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2156

FROM COPENHAGEN TO COCHABAMBA, VIA THE AMAZON
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2128

CIVIL SOCIETY PLAYING KEY ROLE IN PEOPLE’S CONFERENCE
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2154

NORTH AMERICAN INDIGENOUS ACTIVISTS IN COCHABAMBA
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2152

REPORT BACK FROM COCHABAMBA: TORONTO, MAY 7
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2166
For those in Toronto and southern Ontario, this is a can’t miss event.
Mark your calendar now

VIDEO: BOLIVIA’S AMBASSADOR ON THE PEOPLE’S CLIMATE SUMMIT
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=2077

AFTER COPENHAGEN: HOW CAN WE SAVE THE WORLD?
http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=1926


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[Marxism] Street and DiMaggio on the Tea Party movement

[Louis Proyect]

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http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/sd210410.html


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Re: [Marxism] "Anybody's Son Will Do"

[S. Artesian]

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Dear Lord, save us from our officers and we'll do the rest. 


- Original Message - 
From: "Paddy Apling" 


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[Marxism] Lenin's Tomb on the British elections

[Louis Proyect]

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http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/04/debating-2010-election.html


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Re: [Marxism] Huge march for Venezuelan independence day

[Néstor Gorojovsky]

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Dear Stuart M., I understand your addendum. And I am sympathetic to
the feelings that take you to send it to the list.

But.

(I may be wrong, and I hope I am wrong.)

But, honestly, this "Socialism of the 21st Century" smells a lot like
Peronist "Justicialismo".

In both cases, it was never completely clear what the whole thing was about.

But PRACTICE explained away any doubt.

At any rate, one of the possible views of Peronism, which I learnt
from Louis Proyect here, is that it was a peculiarly Saint Simonian
alliance between the nationalist wing of the Armed Forces and the
working class. The Armed Forces acting as surrogates for a bourgeoisie
without class consciousness nor, of course, the guts to fight against
imperialist dependence. If we consider "Socialism" a form of
Socialism, well, then "Justicialism" was the "Socialism of the 20th
Century".

The differences between the Vnzl and Arg versions, in my own way to
see it, are accidental and not essential.

I insist. What makes Chávez dangerous, and made Perón dangerous (the
same happened with Vargas) was their clear consciousness of the
necessity of union.

BTW: this is what made Abraham Lincoln dangerous, too, and not his
views on slavery.

2010/4/21 Stuart Munckton :
>

-- 

Néstor Gorojovsky
El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autoría


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Re: [Marxism] "Anybody's Son Will Do"

[Paddy Apling]

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Many thanks Ray, for that URL.

I have watched the film this morning - and cannot help wondering what its
impact is on those who have never served in their country's army.

For me, having joined the British army only in August 1944, aged 19 -it felt
like the truth personified.  The first drill sergeant (not actually the
first, because I spent six weeks in primary training, of which I have few
memories, before joining the Armoured Corps for my main training as a
driver/(wireless) operator impressed on one's memory, which left me with the
pride in the Royal Tank Regiment) - how true.  (This was up in Co. Durham -
so different from my home territory of East Anglia - with its stone houses,
and a dialect "Geordie" which was mainly incomprehensible to me when
arrived). 

My first (in Armoured Corps training) was named Sergeant Steel - what an
appropriate name - and certainly his face is truly impressed on my memory,
as someone the whole troop came to partly regard as a lunatic demon, but who
yet gained a deep-seated respect.

Then this was followed by officer training at Sandhurst, which was even more
vigorous as well as more academic with theory of strategy and tactics as
well as the combat training which left me at my heaviest ever with muscles I
had never known I had !!

The main difference between my experience and that of today's recruits was
that we were training to liberate the world from fascism, not to simply be
used as tools of our and other governments' attempts to rule the world ... a
difference which puts a whole new complexion on the system and basis of army
training.

By the time I was commissioned as a junior officer VE-day had come, to be
followed by VJ-day before the planned embarkation of my unit for the Far
East, and I spent two very eventual (and, in retrospect) enjoyable and
educative years in occupation duties in Italy and Egypt - in which, as a
very young man, I was entrusted with responsibilities which were vast in
comparison with anything I experienced in the remainder of my professional
life.

It still remains almost impossible for me to enter into any deep
conversation, whether concerned with politics or with family and local
affairs, without harking back to parallels, and sometimes solutions, which
are coloured by my 4 years in the army.

Paddy


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om




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Re: [Marxism] Moderator's note

[Einde O'Callaghan]

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On 22.04.10 00:35, Dan wrote:


>
> In Sate and Revolution, Lenin is engaged in countering both
> Social-Democratic AND "anti-authoritarian" views. This two-prong aspect
> is present throughout the text. He endeavours to find out Marx's views
> on the State by examining his writings. In doing so, Lenin correctly
> states that Marx considered the State to be a mechanism, brought about
> by the material relationships of production, for a certain class to
> exploit another. He then goes on to argue that the State apparatus must
> be taken over because it cannot be destroyed until the specific mode of
> production has not been superseeded with another.
>
I'm sorry - the second statement simply isn't true. Lenin followed Marx 
in believing that the capoitalist state had to be destroyed. He also 
followed Marx in believing that the capitalist state had to be replaced 
by a proletarian state during the period of transition that Marx and 
Engels had dubbed the "dictatorship of the proletariat".

I begin to suspect that Dan has never read Lenin's State and Revolution 
(nor the wordks by Marx and Engels that are the basis of the exposition 
in S&R) and is relying on inaccurate summaries by opponents, otherwise 
whe wouldn't make such glaring errors.

Einde O'Callaghan


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