[Marxism-Thaxis] WHAT DO PEOPLE THINK? RE: Two Choices at GM: Bankruptcy or Union Takeover
Two Choices at General Motors: Bankruptcy or Union Takeover By John Case General Motors Corporation (GM) posted an $8.6 Billion loss last week. The President says: No bailout: build "a product that's relevant". The American automotive industry has reached the serial restructuring stage. Nothing can stop it. Further, as the United Auto Workers union(UAW) has repeatedly warned, automobile industry or Wall Street schemes to cut workers, close plants and rejigger benefits are unlikely to save the companies, particularly GM. US auto makers could solve their problems by selling better cars, of course. What happened to the billions they made from SUV's in the 90's while competitors were investing in fuel efficiency? But winning back customers will take years, a luxury GM does not now have. What's needed is a radical solution that breaks the restructuring cycle and saves General Motors. The United Auto Workers union says a national health-care plan would solve a big chunk of the auto industry's cost problems. Thats true, and not just for the auto industry -- but all manufacturing. But such a solution is highly unlikely in time to save GM, and possibly Ford as well. So here's another idea from Rob Lache, a prominent auto-industry analyst from Deutsch Bank in Detroit (reported by S. Eisinger from the Wall Street Journal on Jan 24): Transform GM's workers and retirees into owners in exchange for benefit givebacks. Here are the details: GM had a pension liability of about $90 billion at the end of 2004. Mr. Lache estimates GM has health-care liabilities of about $65 billion. That's $155 billion in liabilities, and the overwhelming majority of that debt is OWED to GM workers. What assets does GM have to fund those obligations? GM says the pension plan should have $96 billion at the end of 2005 -- which they claim is $6 Billion over- funded. The health-care obligations, however, are underfunded by $50 billion. Lets assume these figures are accurate... Mr. Lache proposes to give the money reserved for pensions and health care to the auto workers. Then, he proposes that GM transfer GMAC, the GM financing unit, to the workers. GMAC has about $23 billion in book value. Add that to the existing $15 billion long-term health-care trust, which employees then manage. The pension plan becomes an employee-run retirement plan. TIAA-CREF for auto workers! (TIAA-CREF is arguably the best participant based retirement fund. It was established to serve for college professors and researchers). That amounts to $128 billion in assets, far short of the $155 billion in estimated liabilities. Analyst Lache proposes: give the workers $20 billion in GM equity. Even though General Motors market value is just $11 billion today, after getting out from under the benefit costs, the company would be, potentially, a much better competitor. Mr. Lache estimates that GM would generate a little less than $13 billion in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization a year under his plan which the market would translate into approximately $63 Billion in available cash flow. After subtracting the remaining debt to the workers ($32 Billion) there would be $31 Billion of equity value, raised from the current $11 Billion!! Mr Lache calculates the shareholders interests are strongly served by 'giving' the workers the $20 billion difference between current and expected restructuring value -- with no loss to themselves and the ability to avoid a bankruptcy filing. In this plan, the workers would get about $148 billion in assets for the $155 billion that they are owed. That amounts to almost $250,000 of value, on average, for the roughly 600,000 active workers, retirees and spouses covered under the pension and health care plan. The workers would come up short $7 billion and many older workers would be counting on risky shares in a difficult industry to make up for reduced benefits. However the alternative is probably massive restructuring under a bandit like Kirk Kerkorian, and years of deterioration ending in bankruptcy. Ownership would provide a chance for an upside in income and an opportunity to save a large number of the jobs. Academic research and common sense suggests that employee-ownership plans work best if employees are given some say in the management. It has rarely been tried on a grand scale. United Airlines became majority owned by the employees, but failed with an ill-designed plan where workers were isolated from management decisions, and relations between management and the union remained intensely adversarial. Which brings up the profound cultural and ideological challenge that an opportunity like this presents to the UAW. Walter Reuther and the left-wing founders of the Union--George Addes, Wyndham Mortimer, Bob Travis and others--all believed it necessary to remain ABSOLUTELY neutral with respect to competing auto companies and push for across-the-board wage, benefit and working condition standards. This stra
[Marxism-Thaxis] FW: Davi Joseph and Lil Joe Discussing Communism on [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Davi Joseph wrote: I see true or full communism as a society in which property would be owned in common and the necessities of life shared by members of the community. We can look at Plato's Republic or Sir Thomas More's Utopia (early 16th century) as examples of similar ideas. Lil Joe Reply: I haven't read Thomas Moore's Utopia. Could you provide some details from it, to better understand why from reading it you came to the conclusion that 'communism' is impossible? I have read Plato's Republic, however. He didn't advocate 'communism', but a caste society in which the masses of laborers would be controlled by a military class, and at the head of society, literally, would be a guardian's Ruling Class - modeled on the Hindu Brahmin. The head of this intellectual/military elite will be a 'philosopher king', with tyrannical powers. Modern Communism isn't about abolishing 'property' in the means of consumption among the ruling classes, and allowing it for the working classes as in Plato's Republic. But of expropriating bourgeois property in the advanced industrial democracies, by the proletariat. QUOTE: The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a mans own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property? But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism. To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm UNQUOTE Everyone would have a right to food, clothing, shelter, education, religious worship, cultural enrichments as exist among the bourgeois classes today. But, with the productive forces the common property of all, high quality life now reserved for the bourgeoisie and the rich, will be the common inheritance of all. People would still 'own' personal property, the same as they do today, but more abundantly so and at the highest quality, for all. It won't cost a thing. The motivation for work will be production for consumption, rather than the current production for money (wages, profits). Production for consumption is natural, production for money is artificial, and will fall from its own internal contradictions. Production is a material process of human nature, and it is the productive classes that will put an end to this artificial capitalist market economy by taking the productive forces from the private possession of the bourgeois, abolishing capitalist commodity production and wage labor. This working class transfer of the productive forces from the private possession of the capitalist classes to the public property of workers associations, isn't an acting out of any 'ideal' of 'social justice', but springs directly from the bellies of hungry workers exploited by capitalists and ripped off by landlords and banks. In order to not forfeit the fruits of civilization, it is in the material interests of workers to do away with capitalism. Whether or not these workers in general have read Marx is irrelevant. This is about implementing self-int
[Marxism-Thaxis] Article on New Orleans Leeve Corruption
lf of Mexico, Seed said, and caused most of the flooding in the city. He said that surge from Lake Borgne resulted in the breaches on the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal known in New Orleans as the industrial canal. The industrial canal breaches occurred first, about 9 a.m. on Aug. 29, the day Katrina hit. The second breach occurred at the 17th Street Canal about 4 p.m. The London Avenue levee did not fail until about midnight. The storm surge swept over the top of the industrial canal and eroded its foundation. But the water was more than two feet below the tops of the walls on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, Seed said. As a result, the loads were well-within the wall's design, he said. "The wall sections were designed to carry water to a higher level than we saw," he said. "The wall should not have failed." Construction defects also may have played a role. Analysis of concrete samples from the 17th Street Canal shows that the levee fractured in ways that suggest the material was substandard. The defects in design and construction might have been offset had the Corps of Engineers used higher safety margins. In basic terms, the walls were weak and unsafe, Bea said. Once it calculated the maximum loads a hurricane could impose on the levees and walls, the corps applied a margin of safety 30% higher than the maximum load, according to guidelines published in 2002 and throughout other Army engineering documents. Such a margin is far below the level engineers typically set for highway bridges, dams, offshore oil platforms and other public structures, Bea said. A more typical approach would have doubled the wall strength over the maximum expected loads. Such a margin of safety is used for two reasons: uncertainly about the loads and the strength of the wall's construction. "This margin of safety was incredibly low," Bea said. Engineering expert Ron Hamburger said most engineers for decades had used a more sophisticated design approach called probabilistic design analysis, a field pioneered in part by Bea. This method tries to estimate the probability of failure over time. Public safety structures now are designed to last an estimated 10,000 years without failure. By contrast, the New Orleans levees may have been designed to withstand 50 to 100 years of natural forces, Bea said. Beyond the immediate causes of the levee failures, Seed said, investigators are finding that the flood protection system in New Orleans is overseen by a tangle of local, state, multi-state and federal organizations that do not work in a coordinated way. Along a single levee in one section of New Orleans, Seed said, investigators have found seven overlapping lines of government and private authority, including road agencies, levee boards, railroads and the Corps of Engineers. Such confusion has led to designs that don't always make sense, he said. "They should rethink the entire flood protection system of New Orleans," Seed said. "It is a real hodgepodge of authority. If there was a coordinated effort, more could be done with less money." In addition to examining the levee breaches, investigators are looking into whether railroad companies failed to shore up gaps in storm walls where tracks pass through. Those gaps are unprotected and are supposed to be plugged with sandbags during a hurricane. Preliminary evidence suggests they were left open, allowing water to pass unobstructed into the 9th Ward. The Army Corps and local officials had warning signs that the levee system had shortcomings. In the case of the soil defects, at least two contractors had warned that the soil conditions were weaker than the corps realized. But the federal officials failed to heed the warning signs, Bea said, citing a culture that has the same flaws that investigators found in NASA after the Columbia space shuttle accident. Bea said the corps had "normalized deviance," meaning the corps had accepted as normal deviations that should have warned of impending disaster. -Original Message- From: Lil Joe Sent: Oct 24, 2005 9:01 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], NaijaPolitics@yahoogroups.com, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Haiti: A proletarian perspective Haiti: A proletarian perspective by Aduku Addae & Lil Joe Shirley Pate declares that solidarity activists "must connect dots that those who wish to join our movement understand, for instance, that the occupation of Palestine, Iraq and Haiti are related." ( http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?sectionID=55&ItemID=8938 ). We concur. We should indeed connect dots. We should be cautioned, however, about the arbitrary distribution of these dots as we venture to connect them. We could end up with an indecipherable maze which leaves us even more confused than before we began the dot
[Marxism-Thaxis] Political Structures of Pan-African Federal Republic and it's economics basis - Text
50 Years of Transition - Or, Toward a United Africa by 2065 By Li'l Joe [EMAIL PROTECTED] I see the Pan-African Federal Parliamentary Republic coming into existence by the support of the African Union. The African Union must be seen as a transitional, rather than a permanent organization. The authority of the African Union is based on its component state governments having been elected, or by some other method coming to be the state's government. The state is a cohesive, bureaucratic-military political power, with a monopoly of armed power, with courts and prisons. Power without authority is tyranny, so the first concern of the Pan- African Federal Republic is the establishment of what constitutes its authority, the method of authorization. The capitalist mode of production and appropriation has created a 'natural' condition, derived from competition, that every man is an enemy, or a tool; the relation of man to man is mutual exploitation, the nexus of man and man is trade and therefore money. Political power is based on material wealth. This 'wealth', however, is not 'money' in the pocket, purse, cash register or bank, which is but government backed banknotes, used as 'currency'. Rather, the material wealth of nations is it's natural resources and productive assets, productive forces. Thus the classes in possession of the nation's national resources and productive forces possess thereby the wealth and power of the nation, the state is therefore an instrument of class rule. The Pan-African Federal Republic, unlike the current African Union and its component states, is to be 'democratic', i.e., consent of the governed. This is but a cliché, however, indeed it is an illusory community of interests, if the People are not the Power. The Power of the People, that is Majority Rule, having the ability to authorize members of Parliament by Elections, can be an actuality only if the Natural Wealth of a nation is the Possession of the Whole People. Thus, in the course of formation of the All Africa Federal Republic the Natural Resources of Africa must become the Public Property of Africa and the inheritance of everyone of its diverse people. The national states that comprise the African Union are anachronisms that have served historically to move Africans from Colonial domination to formal, Universally recognized Independent States. Yet, the Natural Resources and Productive Forces have remained the Possession of the national capitalists in league with transnational corporations and finance capital. Consequently, African states have degenerated into a condition where Public Power is mocked, and deteriorated into warring economic factions, a war of all against all. The more developed industrially and technologically advanced capitalists, represented by the national government's of Europe and North America, have been party to these conflicts, beginning with Civil, or rather Tribal Wars, in Congo, and Nigeria, spanning the decades with such similar, outside sponsored wars in Ethiopia, Uganda, Sudan, Angola, Mozambique, and full circle to Rwanda and again in Congo. The prime causes of these Wars are economic, the motivation being the control of Africa's Natural Resources, Raw Materials and Production capabilities. The first task of the African Union is to create technological, economic and socio-political stasis; there can be no African unity where the natural resources and raw materials are for the grabbing, resulting in tribal politics, the bourgeois- neo-colonialist collaboration of one camp against another. Africa is a Continent of Failed States. This is true. However, wars and 'failed states' are not the cause of economic chaos, but one of the many consequences. The same thing has been happening in Europe over the past two centuries. Consider the savage wars of the 20th century, imperial rivalries and nationalist expansionism. The fact is that capitalist commodity production by wageworkers is a war of capitalist against capitalist, nation against nation, and class against class. The proletariat of the European Union can put an end to the anarchy of capitalist commodity production by winning the battles of democracy, legislating the transfer of the productive forces from the private possessions of national capitalists to the public property of the working classes and toiling masses, and thereupon abolishing capitalist commodity production and wage labor. The anarchy of capitalist commodity production, competition, wars and civil wars are presently destroying Africa and ruining its economies. Ethnic cliques associated with this or that tribal nationalistic bourgeois are fighting to control territories rich with natural resources and raw materials, trading diamonds, gold and oil contracts in exchange for guns, tanks, mines, military aircraft and anti-aircraft weapons while allowing -- if not acerbating -- famine, draught, malaria, and AIDS to wreck havoc in what's left of national economies, and d
[Marxism-Thaxis] LaborPartyPraxis
Labor Party Praxis is an organization and e-group that is committed to participating in the self-organization of the working class as a class and, consequently, a political party. History has shown that every class struggle is a political struggle. Based on monopoly possession of the productive forces, the most powerful, economically dominant class is the most powerful politically dominant class. Those who own do not work, and those who work do not own. It is only when the working class is a community of owners of the productive forces and agriculture that we will become the most powerful, economically dominant class. The productive forces are forms of wealth derived from the mode of appropriating labor and/or the products of labor. The capitalist mode of appropriation -- the result of the capitalist mode of production of commodities -- produces capitalist private property. The form of wealth is capital, and the economic domination of capital compels the individual members of society -- having no means of production of their own -- to capitalize their labor ability, that is, to sell their labor power in order to live. Labor Party Praxis challenges this arrangement, and fights for a society in which the working class becomes the ruling class. We posit that winning the battle of democracy, taking the productive forces from the capitalist class, and transferring those means of social production and distribution from the private sector to public property could accomplish working class ownership of the means of social production. The struggle by the working class for state power is a political struggle that requires an active and energetic American Labor Party that competes in the electoral arena against the Democratic Party as well as the Republican Party. The formation of an American Labor Party must be financially based in, and accountable to, the trade unions, and socially based in the class as a whole. This requires nothing short of internal revolutions in the trade unions -- throwing out of office the Democratic and Republican parties' advocates and representatives in the trade unions, and by replacing these with union representatives and officers that are committed to building the American Labor Party. This is the praxis -- the practical-critical, revolutionizing activity in the self-organization of the working class. The focus is on this praxis as a strategy toward winning the battle of democracy in order to become the majority in the American House of Representatives, and to engage in class war with the Senate, Presidency, Judiciary, and their Constitution. The struggle for democracy is necessarily the struggle for a Labor Party majority in the House of Representatives -- comprised of workers (industrial workers, agricultural workers, service workers, salaried medical professionals, sanitation workers, etc.) and members of oppressed ethnic and gender communities who are also overwhelmingly working class. This working class majority in the House of Representatives will: 1.. Legislate the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Law; 2.. Restrict the Labor Relations Board to working-class members; 3.. Place the Civil Rights Commissions in the oppressed ethnic and gender communities; 4.. Legislate a Living Wage equal to the Median Income; 5.. Reduce the working-day from eight to six hours a day in order to re-employ the sectors that capital has displaced and tossed out as a surplus population; 6.. Legislating the expropriation of all plants and factories and agribusinesses that refuse to implement these changes or move abroad; 7.. Legislate free health care facilities for everyone in America regardless of national origin; 8.. Legislate the free movement of workers in the NAFTA countries and formation of cross border trade unions; 9.. Legislate free public education with open enrollment from kindergarten through graduate school, open to all who live in Amnerica without regard to race, ethnicity or national origin; 10.. Legislate the funding of these programs with a progressive income tax, capital gains tax, and inheritance tax written into the tax code, so that capitalists who try to worm out of these taxes by loopholes will go to prison, and the expropriation of any and all capitalist businesses that refuse to continue to invest in those taxed companies or seek to relocate. Labor Party Praxis will be in the trade union movement and the Labor Party f
[Marxism-Thaxis] Political Structures of Pan-African Federal Republic and it's economics basis: Preface
August, 2005 Political Structures of Pan-African Federal Republic and it's economics basis A Possible Scenario Submitted for discussion purposes by Lil Joe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Preface 1 The political representatives of the G8's industrial and finance capitals -- representatives of the agribusinesses, industrial and finance capitalist's of the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan -- and Russia -- met in Britain to politically mediate their economic conflicts, and develop a joint political strategy needed to confront the global economic crises, and, consequently, political crisis. The G8's capitalists are presently locked into a battle between the interest's of the big capitalists of the European Union and Asia, represented by the governments of Germany, France, and Japan on the one side, against those represented by the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom on the other. It is an economic war waged by technological advances of the productive forces in capitalist commodity production by wageworkers, competing with rival capitalists of the same industries in the frameworks of domestic and transnational corporations. Global rivalries including, for example, the steel industries, the agricultural blocs -- e.g. the 'banana wars' -- and control of energy resources, and 3rd world debt -- have always been part and parcel of the anarchic nature of capitalist commodity production by wage labor, an economic war of all against all. In their respective industrial or agricultural business rivalries, the struggle to dominate the market, possibly by driving out competitors, one capitalist kills many. But, large-scale industries and agriculture of necessity go over from one 'captain of industry' proprietorships to corporate capital formations, social capital, the ownership of which is by many in stocks, shares. These in turn hire workers, salaried employees to manage the business for them, to run the corporation, the objective of their jobs being to drive out competitors and maximize profits. The epicenter of these conflicts is Middle Asia and North Africa. US capitalists, by the superior military power of their political state want to expand that state power into Middle Asia and North Africa to thus subordinate the capitalists of the European Union, politically -- by means of military occupation forces controlling the oil fields -- to thereby control the energy sources upon which the industries and agribusinesses of the European Union, and Japan, are dependent. This is the real legacy of the so-called "Carter Doctrine". The European Union nations, and Japan, have the most advanced technology and high labor productivity, but relatively low military capacity, and the United States has less efficient productive forces, but an awesome military capacity and willingness to use it. It is using it in Central Europe and Middle Asia. Warfare is politics by other means, by violence. But, ideological propaganda is required to bamboozle the American and British working classes to justify these wars and occupations of Middle Asian countries. British and American capitalist's cannot argue their case for wars and occupations on the truthful basis of generating profit maximizations by the conquest and control of oil fields vis-à-vis the rival capitalist's of Germany, Japan and France, so US and UK demagogic politicians generate politics of fear: "The Arabs are coming!" i.e. "Arab and Islamic terrorists are coming!" And by the sophistry and flowery rhetoric and propaganda through the news media of the White Man's Burden of spreading into these "medieval" Arab and Islamic lands Western Christian 'values', and institutions: "human rights", "woman's rights", and "democracy". Now in control of Iraqi oil fields, the politico-military representatives of U.S. industrial and finance capitalist's forced the German, French and Russian industrial and finance capitalists to cancel debts and interests payments due them by Iraqi capitalists and their bureaucratic-military apparatus. This is what U.S. troop movement in Central Asian former Soviet Republics, together with colonial occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait is all about. This also is the explication of Britain and America pressure in the U.N to authorize their 'right' to intervene directly in Sudan in Africa. The British, through its so-called "Commonwealth" of neo-colonies has Nigeria, and other oil producing African countries under its political, and America's economic control. But, Sudan has not been 'co-operative', as it is doing its business with the rising economic powerhouse of Asia, China. It is to be understood, that this is not the crude materialist analysis of the American's wanting to own the oilfield as the motive i
[Marxism-Thaxis] FW: Political Structures of Pan-African Federal Republic and it's economics basis: Introduction
Introduction 1 What I want to show here is how a number of technological and economic changes, facilitated by European trade with India and China, benefited Europe. The printing press, gunpowder, navigation, and spices from the East Indies contributed to scientific, technological and economic revolutions in the 16th and 17th centuries. World trade fed capitalist commodity production in the Netherlands and Britain. This resulted in capital accumulation leading to the industrial revolutions in Britain and France, and underdevelopment in Africa, lose of its skilled laborers in the slave trade, and the acquisition of commodities produced by wageworkers in Europe consequently retarding Africa's own handicrafts. We need not do an entire analysis of the economics of primitive capital accumulation and the role that the trans-Atlantic slave trade played in it engendering European development and African underdevelopment. Suffice it to refer the readers to: I) Karl Marx: "Capital Vol. II II) W.E.B. Dubois: "The World and Africa" III) Eric Williams: "Capitalism and Slavery" IV) Walter Rodney: "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" The industrial development of England and the Underdevelopment of West Africa were directly related to: A) American plantation systems needing experienced, skilled agricultural laborers, not hunters-gatherers. B) African Slavers needed Guns C) Human beings bartered in Africa, had more value in America than the exchange value of Guns. Assume that in England and in America one gun is equal to one pair of shoes and to one shirt. The merchant goes to Africa, rather than directly to America. Were the merchant capitalist to trade directly with American customers, using monetary forms of exchange, one gun would exchange for one pound of sugar or one pound of coffee. The Triangular Trade between European merchant ships brought guns, and other commodities to costal African kingdoms exchanging them for human beings. These human beings were carried from Africa to America and sold into chattel slavery. Agricultural produce and raw materials were purchased with the money derived from the selling of the slaves. These commodities were then carried from the American colonies and sold to customers in Europe. Produce was sold to merchants; raw materials, e.g. sugar and cotton, were sold to capitalists in Britain to be processed in manufactures and industries, thus directly contributed to the industrial revolution in England. The factors that coalesced in the development of Europe; thus, the Triangular Trade is "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa". The dialectical interaction of trade between Europe and Asia, however, has also to be factored in as very important to the rise of capitalism and industry in Europe. Without gunpowder, and therefore guns, muskets and cannon, there would have been no colonization of the Americas, or the triangular trade. Had it not been for muskets and cannons, the Portuguese and Spanish conquistadors would not have had the capacity to conquer the Americas. The America's natural resources included, as well as the gold used in European economies, agriculture, maize, potatoes, sugar, tobacco, which were important in the world-market and its products in the trans-Atlantic, triangular trade. Potatoes were cheaply produced in great quantities, which together with bread, became the cheap but filling component of English workers and Irish farmer's diets. Africans had been smelting iron for centuries, but had no gunpowder and consequently no gun industry. The Chinese invention and harmless use of 'gun powder' was made into a weapon of violence, war. The brisk arms trade, made all the more necessary that African tribes and feudal warrior kingdoms conquer and present to gun merchants human beings of other tribes to become economic chattel, rather than having members of their own tribe or kingdom become captured, and made into chattel. The depopulation of Africa nor Africa's reliance upon industrial commodities imported from Europe, would not have occurred had it not been for Europe's trade with Asia, and consequently there would have been no colonization and underdevelopment of Africa. The French and British mercantile systems, predicated upon the manufacture and industry in England ,were domestic capitalist commodity production surrounded by colonial crop economies. The emerging capitalist modes of production and distribution in England subordinated the Portuguese and specifically the Spaniard's system of colonial possession of plunder and taxes. 2 Mercantile capitalistic commodity Production originated in Britain and Western European kingdoms, under absolute monarchs, initially in cottage industries. Of course this cannot be fully explicated without taking into account other contributing factors, in England for instance. In the history of England, from the days of the Roman Empire, garment industries were important. The Romans brought sheep to England,
[Marxism-Thaxis] Debunking "Man the Killer Ape" Myth
Washington University in St. Louis News & Information > News Tips > Early man more wary than war-like, new book asserts Refutes 'natural born killer' model By Tony Fitzpatrick July 7, 2005 — Early man was more wary than war-like, more intelligent, agile, and cooperative than aggressive, predator or killer, and he co-evolved as the prey of many species. Moreover, in the old days, woman wore the pants in the family and men were basically expendable, not the brightest bulbs on the tree when it came to tools, and functioning best as sentinels wary of predators in edge environments between the forest and savannah. Those are the primary themes of a new book, Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators and Human Evolution, co-authored by Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Donna L. Hart, Ph.D., a member of the faculty of Pierre Laclede Honors College and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Since the process of human evolution is so long and varied, Sussman and Hart decided to focus their research on one specific species, Australopithecus afarensis, which lived between five million and two and a half million years ago and is one of the better known early human species. Most paleontologists agree that Australopithecus afarensis is the common link between fossils that came before and those that came after. It shares dental, cranial and skeletal traits with both. It's also a very well represented species in the fossil record. According to Sussman, three factors made our forbearer a prime target for a host of predators — small size (adults ranged from around three to five feet and they weighed 60-100 pounds); a total lack of tools or weapons; the inability to use fire. 'Natural born killers' A sampling of primate fossils found in and near a crowned hawk eagle's nest in east Africa, vivid proof that primates long have been the target of predator species. The book rebuts the prevailing popular notion that humans are "natural born killers," genetically programmed to kill, as well as the notion that human males share with chimpanzee males and our common ancestor a killer instinct. Sussman says that a book published in the late 1990s, Demonic Male, by Richard W. Wrangham, has helped foster notions that humans are inherently violent and hunters first, rather than social beings who evolved that way as a self-defense mechanism. "These erroneous notions have arisen from observations that, out of many primate species, only humans and chimpanzees will kill their own kind and hunt other mammals," Sussman notes. "The end product is that chimpanzees and humans share genes and biological instincts for killing and that's what makes them good hunters. Our theory says that is all unadulterated garbage. Our reliance upon each other to avoid predators made us survivors. Instead of a need to kill, we developed first the need to cooperate. Group-living mammals need to cooperate to live." Sussman says that there is absolutely no fossil evidence to support the natural killer scenario. There is, on the other hand, abundant evidence in the fossil record that animals attack and kill primates, from birds of prey millions of years ago to wolves in Europe and crocodiles in Asia today. And, Sussman notes, if you don't think that humans today are not fearful of animal predators, trying yelling "shark!" on a crowded beach. "Humans are still extremely nervous about predation," he says. "In the book, we look at cats, dogs, birds, reptiles such as crocodiles, even sharks and how they might affect modern primates today and we found that, in nations where there is still lots of natural environment, the predation rate is very high — humans are still preyed upon. "The main thing that allowed us to survive, and may even had led to our developing language skills, was our counter mechanisms against predators. Early humans had to keep one step ahead of their predators." Following the female lead Robert Sussman Sussman and Hart point to a large body of evidence, some old and some recent, that shows females developed and used tools, knew the geography (they remembered where water sources were, but males didn't) chose males as friends that would protect them, and used males as sentinels to protect the group. "If the females didn't have a male, they would get picked off by predators," he says. "There usually was more than one male in a social group." The book is illustrated with much fossil evidence, such as an incredible array of primate bones found beneath the nest of a Harpy's Eagle in South America, which, along with Africa's Crowned Eagle and the Phillipine Eagle (formerly the monkey-eating eagle), are the primary birds of prey that to this day are a threat to primates, including humans. There are pictures of Indian men wearing masks on the backs of their heads so that tigers won't attack them, and electrified dummie
[Marxism-Thaxis] Economics and Politics: The State and Revolution (ESSAY) by Lil Joe
> June 1, 2005 > > > > Economics and Politics: The State and Revolution > by Lil Joe > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > Introduction > > In this short essay, I will argue that the essence of the State flows from > or is a product of human sociology. In other words, what I here call the > State at the same time embodies and mediates the technological divisions > of labor, economies of exchange, the subsequent class formations with > mutually exclusive economic interests, and the resultant and mutually > opposed political factions representing classes. Every class struggle is a > political struggle, both relative and absolute. > > I. The Origins Of The State > > The divisions of labor with their corresponding property forms produce > conflicts of interests between the economic categories of proprietors. For > instance, pastoral tribes or classes conflict with agricultural tribes or > classes. The origins of the conflict in Southern Sudan exemplify the > conflicts among pastoral and agricultural classes regarding land usage. > These pastoral/agricultural class conflicts center on whether fertile > lands will be allowed to remain as natural grazing lands to provide > pastures for cattle, sheep, camels, etc., or will they be transformed by > human labor into farm lands to grow crop in subsistence agriculture and > commercial crops for sale. (Note: the conflict in Southern Sudan has grown > to be more complex, but its origins can be traced back to a conflict > between pastoral and agricultural classes, as well as conflicts between > individual proprietors of cattle, sheep, camels, etc. for exclusive sway > and ownership of grazing lands.) > > Within civil society, the State arises as a public power based in a > military capacity to mediate the conflicts between property formations, > and to regulate these conflicts through laws. Additionally, in civil > society the State is used by the propertied classes to press their will on > the property-less working classes and toiling masses. The political > factions in the State represent class interests. Within these divisions > and conflicts of interests arise further divisions and antagonisms. To > regulate these proprietary conflicts and class antagonisms, the State > arises to mediate conflict. > > Max Weber wrote, "Like the political institutions historically preceding > it, the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by > means of legitimate (i.e., considered to be legitimate) violence. If the > state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimed by the > powers that be. * Today, however, we have to say that a state is a > human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate > use of physical force within a given territory. * Of course, force is > certainly not the normal or the only means of the state-nobody says > that-but force is a means specific to the state." > (Max weber's definition of the modern state 1918, > see http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/study/xweb.htm.) > > Keeping with the earlier example of pastoral and agricultural classes, > conflicts between the various forms of property resulting from the > sub-divisions engenders conflicts. For instance, among farmers arose > antagonisms between farmers who want to, for example, raise fields of > vegetables for consumption and/or commerce, and, say, commercial farmers > that want to produce cash crops for local and/or distant markets. The > function of the state is to mediate conflicts between and among classes, > to establish rules of equation, property rights, and privileges, and to > legislate laws that are enforced by armed men. > > Read Article at: http://laborpartypraxis.org/Economics.html ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Class struggle in Zimbabwe
> The class struggle in Zimbabwe is moving from the > Black bourgeoisie of that country mobilizing the > workers and landless peasants in that African country > in its own class interests against "White settler- > colonists" into a struggle in which the Zimbabwean > worker's and peasants have come to be and think > as a 'mind and will' of their own, class consciousness > as opposed to bourgeois nationalist race consciousness. > > The ZANU-PF, while it is to be defended in the > earlier stages of land expropriations of settler- > capitalists by landless peasants, it has always > been clear that this is a bourgeois-democratic > extension of the liberation movement into the > economics of the country-side, but the ZANU-PF > socialist rhetoric has always been a sham. > > Land reform or land redistribution has always been a > component of the bourgeois democratic revolutions, > whether the English Revolution in 1840, the Great > French Revolution in its radical stages represented > by the Committee of Public Safety Jacobins government, > the Russian Revolution in 1917, 1921-8, or even the > Chinese Revolution in the 1930-40s, and the Zapata > factions in Southern Mexico in the Mexican Revolution > in the early to mid-20th century. This kind of radical > land redistribution in Zimbabwe was put on hold by > the Lancaster Agreements in which the ZANU-PF shifted > its alliance with the poor peasants and workers of > Zimbabwe to the settler-capitalists, and subsequently > with IMF. > > The Zimbabwe landless peasants led by the war veterans > took matters into their own hands in the latter part > of the 1990s, and continue to do so today. In need > of their political support against the imperialist > supported "Movement for Democratic Change (MDF) the > ZANU-PF government supported rather than opposed the > land expropriations. Britain, Amnesty International, > the American government (both the Clinton and the > Bush administrations) and the Congressional Black > Caucus and Trans-Africa and Black Radical Congress > all came out in opposition to the land expropriations > ostensibly in opposition to "Mugabe" the individual. > > While it is the duty of workers to defend the peasant's > land expropriation, it is never to be with illusions > that it has anything to do with socialism which is > based in the proletariat in the agribusinesses as well > as industries and mines themselves expropriating these > productive forces not as individuals for private wealth > but as collective class property for social wealth of > the people of Zimbabwe, both these expropriations and > management of expropriated bourgeois wealth must occur > without regard to the race, tribe, religion or color > of the capitalists being expropriated or of the workers > doing the expropriating! > > The article below shows that the ZANU-PF is as it has > always been: the political party of the dominate factions > of Zimbabwa's Black urban bourgeois (the peasants are > nothing but the rural bourgeois) now that the poorest > of the peasants, following their class interests are now > expropriating Black bourgeois property and are being > chased from those properties by the ZANU-PF government's > state. > > It is becoming clearer to African workers and even > the poorer peasants that racial nationalism is nothing > but the ideology of the African "Black" bourgeoisie, > mobilizing African workers and peasants to pursue > the interests of the African bourgeoisie in the liberation > movements and wars. > > Since for the past several decades the Black bourgeoisie > has been in power, and have wrecked African civil societies, > and wars of competition has broken out between the > competiting factions of this bourgeoisie on the basis > of supposed "tribal" interests, including ethnic wars, > it is clear in Zimbabwe where the class content of these > social wars is most advanced in consequence of the > peasants risings (expropriations) -- now that these > poorest peasants are expropriating the lands of > the African bourgeoisie and being repealed by the > ZANU-PF state -- that the bourgeois democratic revolutions > by the poor peasants land expropriations have to > throw-off racial ideology and disassociate themselves > from the bourgeois party in power (in this case in > Zimbabwe ZANU-PF). > > Only by forming an alliance with the wageworkers in > the factories, and mines, and yes, the wageworkers > on the farms - the expropriation of all the bourgeois > property in Zimbabwe, including the Black bourgeoisie - > can the peasants and workers of Zimbabwe advance the > permanent re
[Marxism-Thaxis] Cosby want to hide his dirty linen
> About a year ago Bill Cosby was reported in all the American press outlets > and media for 'scolding' the 'lower socioeconomic class of Blacks', for > lack of moral values and not speaking proper English, as the cause of > their own massive unemployment and high prison proportions, going so far > as to justify the cops killing a Black teenager, wearing his hat on > backward and wearing their pants on their backsides, for stealing a pound > cake: that the kid had it coming. > Endorsing his attacking the counter-culture of Black working class youth, > Cosby has 'won' praise from editorials ranging from traditional Negro > weekly publications of the Black bourgeoisie wannabe "Black Anglo-Saxons", > to the conservative racists in American publications, to the Economist > published in England on behalf of the English bourgeoisie. > In the 2004 July 10th-16th issue of the Economist, the editorial on the > United States has a cartoon of Cosby as a school teacher standing next to > a black board with his right hand on his hip and left hand finger pointing > to the words on the blackboard which states: TODAY'S LESSON: GETTING YOUR > ACT TOGETHER. The article goes on to state: > "Bill Cosby has had it up to here with black street culture" -- going on > to quote Cosby having said: " ' Your dirty laundry gets out of school at > 2.30pm every day, its cursing and calling each other nigger' ... They > think they're hip. They can't read; nor can they write. They're laughing > and giggling, and their going nowhere...You can't be a doctor with that > kind of crap coming out of your mouth.'" > Well, Cosby didn't accuse the Black youth of rape - which is precisely > what Cosby is standing trial for! > Cosby defended his attacks on the Black youth in the hood, saying it's > time to speak the truth in public and rejected the criticism that Blacks > shouldn't 'air their dirty linen in public'. Well, now that his ass and > the shit in his pants is exposed to the public, his attorneys are arguing > on his behalf for a gag order to prevent his rape victims from airing his > dirty linen in public! > Lil Joe > ===- > No gag order in Cosby sexual assault case > June 03, 2005 4:55 PM EDT > PHILADELPHIA, Jun 03, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- > There'll be no gag order in the Bill Cosby sexual assault case -- at least > for now. > A federal judge in Philadelphia refused to block anyone involved in the > case from talking about it. But, U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno > warned the lawyers they would face his wrath, in the form of fines or > disciplinary action, if the case turns into a "media circus," the > Philadelphia Daily News said Friday. > The civil suit against Cosby was brought by Andrea Constand, 31, a > Canadian and former director of operations for women's basketball at > Temple University. > Constand contends that while alone with the entertainer in his suburban > Philadelphia home in January 2004, Cosby gave her some type of knockout > drug and then sexually assaulted her. > Court papers said 13 other women may be called to testify at trial "to > details of alleged similar incidents of sexual assaults involving" Cosby. > Copyright 2005 by United Press International. > ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Emerging worker centered anti-capitalist Left in German and French politics?
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,1564,1595658,00.html 26.05.2005 A Threat From the Left for Schröder? Lafontaine left Schröder's government in 1999 Oskar Lafontaine, ex-chairman of Germany's Social Democrats, has left the party to support a possible new left-wing alliance to challenge Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's center-left government in the upcoming election. Long the bane of Schröder's political life, Lafontaine has played the leftist gadfly since petulantly quitting as finance minister in 1999. Having flirted with the idea of leaving the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and he clearly felt the time was right after the chancellor decided to bring forward the next general election for this fall. Lafontaine has consistently attacked Schröder's so-called Agenda 2010, a package of unpopular welfare cuts and labor market reforms dubbed Hartz IV that slashed unemployment benefits. "I have always said that if my party went into the election with Agenda 2010 and Hartz IV, I couldn't support it anymore," Lafontaine said on German television. "The decision has now been made." After abandoning the SPD, Lafontaine immediate went about trying to forge a new political home for himself. He has proposed an alliance between the eastern German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and a new western left-wing party calling itself Election Alternative (WASG). Trailing the conservatives Already trailing the conservative opposition, a new threat from the left could seriously jeopardize Schröder's re-election chances this autumn as it could siphon off support from disgruntled trade unionists and left-wing hardliners in the SPD. After 39 years as a Social Democrat, the charismatic Lafontaine could possibly draw many people to the banner of any new party. "Such an alliance would be a clear challenge and one that I don't underestimate," said SPD Chairman Franz Müntefering. The SPD is still reeling from the crushing defeat in last Sunday’s election in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, once a regional stronghold for the Social Democrats. Schröder felt he had no choice but to bring the general election scheduled for autumn 2006 forward by a year after the conservatives won the poll. Professor Jürgen Falter, a political scientist at the University of Mainz, said a potential left-wing coalition could try to combine Lafontaine's popularity with that of the PDS' former leader Gregor Gysi to build a pan-German far-left party. "With people like Oskar Lafontaine and perhaps Gregor Gysi as the respective candidates for western and eastern Germany, the party will very likely get past the five percent parliamentary hurdle," Falter told DW-RADIO. PDS unsure The leadership of the PDS, which rose from the ashes of East Germany's former communist party, is uncertain there is enough time to try to merge the two parties. However, PDS Chairman Lothar Bisky on Wednesday said he still thought a united leftist party would was a good idea. "It would possibly provide a great lift for the left overall," said in an interview with WDR television. Regardless of how successful the hard left is at combining their election efforts, it could force the SPD to swing away from the political center. Recent attacks by Müntefering on supposedly unbridled capitalist principles could return in campaign rhetoric. That could placate several high-profile SPD left-wingers, who, for the moment, appear prepared to stay in the party and fight for it to turn away from Schröder's reform course. DW staff (mry) = The Year of the Locust The insect metaphor is finding plenty of resonance in German media A senior politician sparked the current debate on capitalism in Germany by comparing foreign investors to a plague of locusts. But some say the use of such populist rhetoric masks a deep-seated aversion to capitalism. The hum started in April, when SPD party secretary Franz Müntefering unleashed a stream of rhetoric likening foreign investors to a swarm of insects. "Some financial investors spare no thought for the people whose jobs they destroy," he told the mass-circulation tabloid Bild. "They remain anonymous, have no face, fall like a plague of locusts over our companies, devour everything, then fly on to the next one." Since then, the droning buzz has grown ever louder: locusts, everywhere. A giant locust and the Union Jack flag superimposed on the Frankfurt stock exchange in Bild. An insect with a Yankee Doodle hat and the headline "US Companies in Germany
[Marxism-Thaxis] FW: RE O! Dialectics
Lil Joe: Rather Idealistic, Charles. ^ CB: I think not. Idealism/materialism doesn't really arise as an issue until the occurrence of class divided societies and the antagonism between mental and physical labor. See rest of response to Steve. The question of what defines humans from their primate ancestors is not a question of idealism vs materialism. ^^^^^ Lil Joe: Here, Charles, I think we have a major disagreement as far as Marxian materialism is concerned. Marx never wrote of 'materialism' and 'idealism' as a discussion outside the context of the materialist conception of history. "First Premises of Materialist Method: The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way." It was in this sense that M-E in German Ideology critiqued Idealism, which is a conception of humanity in contrast to their materialist philosophy of humanity, where they wrote: "Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation." What the bourgeois ideologists masquerading as cultural anthropologists and sociologists call "culture", Charles, is what Hegel called 'the Idea' objectified in politics, religion and philosophy manifested in civil society's systems of production and appropriation (exchange). The Idea -- whether you call it Culture, Self-Consciousness, Substance qua God, Man qua Subject, or Absolute as not just Substance but Subject as well -- it is Consciousness that is determinate, and that is what makes it Idealism. This is what Marx and Engels critiqued of both the Old Hegelians and the Young Hegelians: "The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelian logical category. The Young Hegelians criticised everything by attributing to it religious conceptions or by pronouncing it a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of a universal principle in the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion as usurpation. while the other extols it as legitimate. / Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering" statements, are the staunchest conservatives. " It was in opposition to the Idealist conception of history, that is of humanity, that Marx and Engels famous pronouncements concerning 'materialism' were stated in opposition to the Idealism both to the Old and the Young Hegelian dialecticians. The Idea that Marx and Engels stated their materialist idea based on empirical science: "In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their
[Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics!
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message: 1 Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 16:11:28 -0400 From: "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] O, Dialectics! To: "'Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx andthe thinkers he inspired'" Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Steve Gabosch quotes: Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. ^ CB: Actually this isn't quite true. The first human modes of production are termed "hunting and gathering" because humans do not produce their own subsistence, but rather gather what nature has produced without human intervention. , so to speak. That doesn't happen until tens of thousands of years after the origin of the human species with horticulture, farming and domestication of animals. I'm not sure what implication this has for our dialectics and nature discussion What distinguishes humans from other animials is culture, language and methods of passing on experiences from one generation to the next. === Lil Joe: Rather Idealistic, Charles. Actually, Steve missed the important quote in the paragraph that followed: The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a2 But, this was stated more scientifically that philosophically by Marx in Capital: The soil (and this, economically speaking, includes water) in the virgin state in which it supplies [1] man with necessaries or the means of subsistence ready to hand, exists independently of him, and is the universal subject of human labour. All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connexion with their environment, are subjects of labour spontaneously provided by Nature. Such are fish which we catch and take from their element, water, timber which we fell in the virgin forest, and ores which we extract from their veins. If, on the other hand, the subject of labour has, so to say, been filtered through previous labour, we call it raw material; such is ore already extracted and ready for washing. All raw material is the subject of labour, but not every subject of labour is raw material: it can only become so, after it has undergone some alteration by means of labour. An instrument of labour is a thing, or a complex of things, which the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour, and which serves as the conductor of his activity. He makes use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some substances in order to make other substances subservient to his aims. [2] Leaving out of consideration such ready-made means of subsistence as fruits, in gathering which a man's own limbs serve as the instruments of his labour, the first thing of which the labourer possesses himself is not the subject of labour but its instrument. Thus Nature becomes one of the organs of his activity, one that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so too it is his original tool house. It supplies him, for instance, with stones for throwing, grinding, pressing, cutting, &c. The earth itself is an instrument of labour, but when used as such in agriculture implies a whole series of other instruments and a comparatively high development of labour. [3] No sooner does labour undergo the least development, than it requires specially prepared instruments. Thus in the oldest caves we find stone implements and weapons. In the earliest period of human history domesticated animals, i.e., animals which have been bred for the purpose, and have undergone modifications by means of labour, play the chief part as instruments of labour along with specially prepared stones, wood, bones, and shells. [4] The use and fabrication of ins
[Marxism-Thaxis] Socialist Leads U.S. Senate Race in Vermont
Power Snip: "That support is evident at the Old Labor Hall in Barre. "He is as good as they come," says Sue Lucas, a nurse in Morrisville. "He is about everything we believe in." "He is not afraid to stand up to either party," said Jim Genovesi, a worker for an electric utility in Rutland. "He doesn't seem to be affected by political pressure or lobbyist pressure. He stands his ground." "Sanders' booming voice fills the hall as he nears the end of his speech. "We know that our opponents have hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that they put into the political process. We know they control much of the media. We know they have an attack machine that goes from Fox to Rush Limbaugh, the Drudge Report and all over the place. "We know that is what THEY have," his voice thunders. "But there is one thing they do not have. They do not have ordinary people prepared to knock on doors and organize all over America. "That is what WE have. "They have the money. We have the people. "And when push comes to shove, the people are going to defeat the money." (((((((- - Lil Joe Comment: Of course, 'ordinary people' versus the rich folk is not a clear statement of partisan working class socialist politics. It is populism boarding on demagogy, but in America for a successful populist running as an open 'socialist' in independent campaign races beating Democrats as well as Republicans in very significant. Sanders successes in Congressional races, which aren't as expensive as Senate races, shows to Green Party, Peace and Freedom Party and Labor Party activists that it can be done. Rather than spreading money and resources running candidates for President, Governors, the US and State Senate, with no chance of winning those races, it is demonstrated by this maverick Congressman that we can in fact win seats to the House of Representatives. Suppose the Green, Peace and Freedom, and Labor Parties collaborate in elections, an electoral united front forum to run candidates in, say ten "Blue State" Congressional Districts in 2008. Following the example of Bernie Sanders, rather than wasting money and people power in symbolic campaigns for 'President', instead spend their finances and resources including human power in these ten winnable Congressional Districts; in Districts with a favorable Green candidate the Labor and P&F party activists would support the Green -- in Districts where the P&F candidates are strong the Green and Labor activists would support the P&F candidate, and so on if we can force the Labor Party to stand candidates the Greens and P&F activists will support the Labor candidate. This electoral united front at the polls could continue as these freshmen congress persons will be a Red-Green alliance of Congress Persons that could then work together in Congress, constantly challenging the Republicans and exposing the Democrats voting choices as nothing but capitalist political partisans masquerading in liberal costume spewing 'progressive' jibe. Newt Gingrich showed America that an aggressive, self-confident new crew of activist politicians that are actually running to win offices in the House of Representatives, for the first time, can both win elections and in Congress pose a formidable challenge to the old guard of both parties. If Cynthia McKinney and Barbara Lee are serious about representing the interests of ethnic working class minorities, then they could prove it by resigning the Democratic Party and coming over to the Red-Green alliance as independents if not joining the Labor, Green or P&F Party, and running as such when their reelection comes term. If they don't, then they will be exposed as just Democrats, representative of capital and the party of war. By repeatedly winning elections as an independent candidate and open socialist maverick Bernie Sanders has demonstrated again and again that the American working class is ready to hear class struggle socialist ideas and work to elect socialist representative of workers issues as such in the U.S. House of Representatives. I have argued that the Labor Party needs to undertake a radicalizing campaign to run candidates against the Democrats as well as the Republicans to actually win seats can in a decade become the majority of seats in the House of Representatives legislate a working class agenda including a sustainable living wage equal to the median income and comparable to workers wages in Northern Europe (Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, &C) and ending unemployment by reducing the workweek from 8+ hours a day (40+workweek) to 6- hours a day or 30 hour workweek with triple-pay for overtime (for more than 6 hours a day or 30 hours a week). As technology and robo
[Marxism-Thaxis] The Religious Right: The Lure of Christian Nationalism
Readers must consider the source: It was the official Quisling Judges of the Sanhedrin, and Roman State that legally executed Jesus. It was all legal. It wasn't 'the Jews' but the pagan Roman State that is to be held responsible. It is in this historical tradition that Judge Roy Moore's masquerade as a 'Christian Judge' is to be exposed. It was the State who condemned Jesus, the Roman state ordered and carried through the execution; the crucifixion of Jesus. The Judaic Sanhedrin might have regarded 'Blasphemy' to be a Palestinian 'crime', punishable by death (capital punishment); but, it was the Roman Courts that declared Jesus 'guilty' -- not of 'blasphemy', however, but guilty of 'sedition'. Jesus was a revolutionary, and regarded as such when he was arrested on the Mount of Olives. Jesus was arrested by the Temple guards in the middle of the night; tried by the Sanhedrin in the middle of the night; sent to the Israeli Quisling Herod in the middle of the same night. It was not the Jews, but the Roman occupation forces in the same night, and condemned to execution -- not by the Jewish Sanhedrin or the Quisling Herod, but by the Roman State - whipped throughout the night, crowned with a circle of thorns, and sent to crucifixion taken by Roman soldiers; nailed to the cross by Roman soldiers; and on the cross by Roman soldiers punctured in the side. The United States derived from Europe patterns itself on the model of the Roman State. The Roman Eagle, and the brutality it symbolizes. The American Court system, although different in historical content and legality of substance because of differences in time and place, is based on Rome, the murderers of the Christ is, has nothing to do with the Jesus Christians. It is only by exploitation of the ignorance of American wanna-be Christians, that the US Constitution and Courts masquerade as Christian. Lil Joe - This is part 2 of a 5-part series. Part I: The Lure of Christian Nationalism Part II: Hang Ten and Fight! America's Religious Right - Saints or Subversives? By Steve Weissman t r u t h o u t | Investigation Part II: Hang Ten and Fight! Friday 15 April 2005 Judge Roy Moore knows how to rally the troops, especially among right-wing Christian evangelicals. A devout Southern Baptist, he tells them what they want to hear, as he did in early 2002 to a gathering in Tennessee: Since September 11, we have been at war. I submit to you there is another war raging - a war between good and evil, between right and wrong. For 40 years we have wandered like the children of Israel. In homes and schools across our land, it's time for Christians to take a stand. This is not a nation established on the principles of Buddha or Hinduism. Our faith is not Islam. What we follow is not the Koran but the Bible. This is a Christian nation. Judge Roy Moore and his monument to the Ten Commandments. A West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, Moore also knows how to pick his weapon - the iconic Ten Commandments, which he has honed over long years into a popular organizing tool and a potentially winning issue. Moore began his campaign back in the early 1990s. As a local judge in Alabama's Etowah County, he put a small wooden display of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and opened his judicial sittings with prayer. The American Civil Liberties Union took legal action to stop him, and the state courts eventually dismissed the case over a question of legal standing. But, even as the wheels of justice turned, politics quickly took hold. Alabama Governor Fob James Jr. loudly threatened to send in the National Guard if federal authorities tried to remove the Ten Commandments from Moore's courtroom. The US House of Representatives voted 295-125 to support the right of public officials to display copies of the Ten Commandments, which - said Congress - are "fundamental principles that are the cornerstone of a fair and just society." And in the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush proposed that a "standard version" of the Ten Commandments be posted in schools and other public places. "I have no problem with the Ten Commandments posted on the wall of every public place," he told reporters. In the arcane world where religious militants become political organizers, evangelical Christians and others all over the country escalated their long-term fight to bring back school prayer and encourage the official display of the Ten Commandments. Moore had found his signature issue, and gained growing fame throughout Alabama and across the nation as the "Ten Commandments Judge." Judge Roy Moore, the "Ten Commandments Judge." Elected Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court in 2000, he s
[Marxism-Thaxis] New COINTELPRO campaign directed at Arabs, Muslims and South East Asians
I hesitate to forward this, because in the 60s and 70s, when we were child-rebels thinking of ourselves as 'revolutionaries' but having no strategy to take state power and the productive forces, we were disrupted, became mutually suspicious within organizations and between organizations. This, leading to self-destruction on the one hand and focusing on victims of government murders and incarcerations on the other, helped defeat the movement. Bearing this in mind, I nevertheless forward this as an FYI. Lil Joe === Al_Jazeerah New COINTELPRO campaign directed at Arabs, Muslims and South East Asians By Abdus Sattar Ghazali BERKELEY, CA: Similar to the COINTELPRO operation against the African Americans during the 1960s, the Arab, Muslim and South East Asian communities are currently facing a new FBI counter intelligence program, says Dr. Hatem Bazian, Professor at the Near East and Ethnic Studies Department, University of California, Berkeley. COINTELPRO is the acronym for a series of FBI counterintelligence programs designed to neutralize political dissidents. In the 1960s and 1970s _ the program was directed against the civil rights movements, and especially against the community leadership of African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. In the 1980s there was a program against Central American solidarity groups. In a speech entitled, the New COINTELPRO campaign directed at Arabs, Muslims and South East Asians, Dr. Bazian said that the present FBI operations directed at Arabs and Muslims and South Asians, which it deems to be the enemies of state, have similarities between what took place in 1960s and what is taking place now. He added that all sub_divisions _ such as ethnic groupings, immigrants or indigenous and ideological differentiations of the Muslims, Arabs and South Asians are included as target by the counter Intelligence operation. Dr. Bazian went on to say that as pinpointed by Brian Glick author of War At Home, four methods were employed by the FBI during the height of the Cointelpro poperation during 1960s and the same methods are being employed now which are: 1) Infiltration. 2) Psychological warfare from outside. 3) Harassment through the legal system. 4) Extra legal force and violence. He graphically explained how the community has been affected by the arrests, raids or search warrants against the Muslim, Arab and South Asian individuals, groups and organizations. In the hour long speech at the UC Berkeley campus, he also exposed the media frenzy created by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security by pre_arranging media coverage of these arrests, raids or search warrants. Through legal harassment, he added, the government can set in motion a great size of fear which begins to permeate every sector of the targeted community. A number of areas in the US have been hard hit by the government legal campaign and it will take sometimes before we are recovered both financially and organizationally to national level. Dr. Bazian argued that the arrests, raids or search warrants campaign is redirecting the agenda of the Muslim, Arab and South Asian individuals, groups and organizations while the legal cases are draining resources of the community. Infiltration in the Arab, Muslim and South East Asian community Explaining the infiltration in the Arab, Muslim and South East Asian groups and organizations, Dr. Bazian said: "In my opinion the period of recruitment was put into place immediately after 9/11 and is still underway, three years removed after the tragic events." The Infiltration is underway, under the premise of security America from the sleeper cells, he added. He believes that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI arms have reached the limit in the recruitment campaign and every major Arab and Muslim and South East Asian organization or center must have someone on the job of collecting information for big brother. "The discredit and disrupt phase has just started and rest assure that it will kick into high gear in the next few years, considering the personnel inducted by the Bush administration in his second term." Dr. Bazian said that the Israeli centric members of the American society is offering its services for collecting information about the Muslims for its own ideological reason which is to benefit of the security of Israeli political and economic interests in America. "Many Israeli centric individuals and organizations view with great alarm the increase in numbers and assertiveness of American Muslim and Arab communities. Since it has potential in the long run of causing the reconsideration of the existing policies vis a vis Israel and the Middle East." "The infiltration program directed by the Israeli centric grouping has longer experience in this field and is also able to recruit from a diverse group of personnel that speak Arabic and served possibly in some capacity in the occupied territory. The
[Marxism-Thaxis] Scientists in America make concessions to Religious Right
--Alt-Boundary-192.389890171 Science standards debated Thursday, March 10, 2005 12:00 am Committee members spar over evolutions place in states science standards By MICHAEL STRAND Salina Journal Coming closer together, getting more specific, allowing for uncertainty and eliminating dogmatic phrases marked Wednesdays meeting of some two dozen science educators working to rewrite the states science standards for public schools. The group dealing with elementary school science standards already had wrapped up its work on its second draft before arriving in Salina Wednesday morning, and the group working on middle school standards largely breezed through its task, as well. But as with past gatherings of the committee, most of the disagreement was among members of the group working on high school standards, where two of the most vocal voices have ended up. Jack Krebs, a mathematics and technology coordinator in Lawrence, and Bill Harris, professor of medicine at the University of Missouri and managing director of the Intelligent Design Network, have sparred at several meetings mostly over evolutions place in the states science standards. Agreement on document changes Harris and about a third of the committee dont want evolution portrayed as incontrovertible fact. They also want at least some mention given to intelligent design, which holds life didnt start spontaneously and is the product of some higher power. Intelligent design isnt considered part of mainstream science. But Wednesday, Krebs, Harris and the rest of the committee were able to agree on numerous document changes, mostly acknowledging that science doesnt have all the answers. Krebs, for example, supported wording changes such as from biological evolution explains ..., to biological evolution is used to explain ... In another case, evidence may indicate that simple, bacteria-like life existed billions of years ago was amended to evidence indicates that simple bacteria- like life may have existed billions of years ago. In other instances, the word evolution was replaced with natural selection or genetic drift, terms Krebs said were both more specific and avoided using the lightning-rod term evolution. In other places, statements such as the fact that life is very similar at the most basic level is evidence of evolution was changed to is used as evidence of evolution. That makes it clear that this is the current, prevailing model, Krebs said, adding its a subtle point but an important one. Science is one way of explaining the world not the only way, he said. Harris, however, said that no matter which way such phrases are worded, theres still a preference given to evolution. Those same basic facts common cell structures, for example are also used as evidence of common design and were not saying that. It highlights one but not the other. Tables turned But Krebs and others used much that same argument later, when Harris wanted to amend the introduction to the biology section to add theory of in front of biological evolution. Id be OK with saying theory here if we say it everywhere else in the standards where were talking about a theory, committee chairman Steve Case said in mentioning plate tectonics and other less-controversial parts of the standards. Others, too, said they opposed singling out evolution to specify as a theory; when put to a vote of the entire committee, Harris proposal failed 16-5. Not for preaching But everyone agreed the classroom is not for conversion or, as Case put it, preaching instead of teaching is wrong we want to make sure the standards dont give energy to people who want to do that. And the committee approved a statement that believing in evolution is different than understanding it, and compelling students to believe is inconsistent with the goal of evolution. Minority report Throughout the days discussion, when consensus couldnt be reached, Harris often said he simply would include his position in a separate draft of the recommendations he and several other members plans to submit. The State Board of Education, which eventually will use the committees report in drafting new science standards, has said it wants to hear from that minority group, as well. Case said he thinks its a valid way of dealing with issues where committee members cant reach consensus. Krebs said he was concerned that this pro-intelligent design minority report would include substantial evidence to back its points, while the majority report wouldnt. He asked if he could compile evidence in favor of evolution for the state board to consider. If a small group can go off and do things on its own, why cant I form a group of one? Krebs asked. I agree, one committee member can submit a minority report, Case said. Good, I needed something else to do, Krebs replied. Following the meeting, Harris explained why, even though hell be writing
[Marxism-Thaxis] Who's Turning Their Back? The Black Bourgeois
Snip: "The political landscape of Black America has changed dramatically since the 80s because a new bread of Black people in America have separated themselves from the masses. A new breed of Black folks who consistently judge and sometimes treat other Black people more harshly than they judge and treat those of other races. Unless you live under a rock, you must notice the harsh criticism of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume and other African American political figures; you must notice the people who look down upon those who suffer in low income communities; and you must also notice that a large percentage of this criticism is dished out by Black folks that have more self-hatred than a little bit." Lil Joe comment: Actually, there is no Black bourgeoisie because there is no Black nation: Blacks in the US are either capitalists, professionals, working class or and chronically unemployed, and in these economic categories the Black capitalists no different from White capitalists, Black workers the same class with common class interests with White workers. Therefore, understanding that politically organizations of classes represent class interests, it is evident that Jesse Jackson, Sharpton and Mfume are Democrats qua Democrats, representing the class faction of capitalists represented by the Democratic Party. I therefore disagree with the authors conclusions, snip: "What this all means is that the American society is moving away from racism and moving toward classism which puts the future of the Black community in the hands of the Black Bourgeois. Until they make major changes in their attitude as a overall group, the African American community will continue down this road to destruction." Lil Joe: This is untrue, because the 'moving away from racism and to classism' means only that American workers are beginning to see beyond their socialized ideologies of 'race matters', to discussing class matters which unite all working class activists regardless of race, creed, color or national origin into a single class party, Labor Party. It is a good thing, not a bad thing to be attacked by the enemy, so by the attacks by Bill Cosby and Black Democrats, representing the thinking of their social base, it is not 'race self-hatred' but class hatred attacking those of us who are working class, as 'lower socioeconomic rungs of society'. This is good! This makes it easier for people like me to dismiss nationalistic and racialist false consciousness, along with patriotism as bourgeois ideological ploys to keep workers stupid and at each others throats. I think the new consciousness of Black working class thinkers and social critics was represented in the movie Barbershop, the dismissal of the Democrat's Black icons Rosa Parks and Jesse Jackson: "Fuck Jesse Jackson" meant: Fuck the Democratic Party. - www.emergingminds.org/aug0 3/politics.html Who's Turning Their Back? The Black Bourgeois by Saadiq Mance The political landscape of Black America has changed dramatically since the 80s because a new bread of Black people in America have separated themselves from the masses. A new breed of Black folks who consistently judge and sometimes treat other Black people more harshly than they judge and treat those of other races. Unless you live under a rock, you must notice the harsh criticism of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume and other African American political figures; you must notice the people who look down upon those who suffer in low income communities; and you must also notice that a large percentage of this criticism is dished out by Black folks that have more self-hatred than a little bit. The Bourgeois within the Black community are the ones who display this attitude most often, and are ultimately the ones who have changed the politics within the Black community so much since the 80s. Often times these individuals or their parents grew up in poor Black communities and through hard work, moved up the social latter. This sounds great for the Black community on the surface, but the fact is most of these hard working Black folks move out of the Black community once they make the move to the middle class, and start few businesses that employ and pay African Americans high wages. If you understand this you should now be able to see why the African American community has a weaker position in American politics today then they had 25 yrs ago. The Black "Talented Tenth" or Black Bourgeois has dispersed throughout majority White middle and upper class neighborhoods instead of concentrated in communities where Blacks are the majority. In addition, the Black people who society considers successful are the same Black Folks who display the most self-hatred (hating on the Black activist, community a
[Marxism-Thaxis] Portuguese Socialists Win Landslide Electoral Victory
> The "Socialist" 'victory' is meaningless, unless > and until the Socialist Party members of parliament > legislates the transfer of the productive forces > and financial institutions from the private possessions > of the capitalist class, to the public possession of > the working class. > > Other wise, capitalist class possession of the > means of social production, with workers owning > nothing but their labor power means the continued > subordination of wage labor to capital in the > economy, and thus the subordination of the > Socialist Party as no more than "new management" > of the bourgeois state, as they will have to > play by the capitalists rules of economy and > therefore polity. > > When European workers, trade unionists politically > organized into Socialist and Communist Parties vote > for those Parties to take government, they know > what socialism is and what their voting for. > > Yet, the expropriating of the productive forces > has ceased to be the central programme of these > parties. It is up to the class-conscious workers > in the trade unions and outside, in the Socialist > Party and outside, to force the Socialist Party > members of Parliament to legislate the transfer > of the productive forces from the private property > of the capitalist class to the public property of > the working class. This is the only acceptable way > the capitalist economic crisis can be solved in > the interest of labor. > > This by a member state in the European Union, will > pressure Socialist, Social-Democrat, Labor and > Communist parties Members of Parliament to do the > same in Germany, France, Spain and Italy as well. > > Lil Joe > > As clearly stated by the International Working-Men's > Association: > > That the emancipation of the working classes must > be conquered by the working classes themselves, > that the struggle for the emancipation of the > working classes means not a struggle for class > privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights > and duties, and the abolition of all class rule; > > That the economical subjection of the man of > labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor > - that is, the source of life - lies at the bottom > of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, > mental degradation, and political dependence; > > That the economical emancipation of the working > classes is therefore the great end to which every > political movement ought to be subordinate as a > means; > > That all efforts aiming at the great end hitherto > failed from the want of solidarity between the > manifold divisions of labor in each country, > and from the absence of a fraternal bond of > union between the working classes of different > countries; > > That the emancipation of labor is neither a > local nor a national, but a social problem, > embracing all countries in which modern > society exists, and depending for its > solution on the concurrence, practical > and theoretical, of the most advanced > countries... > http://www.marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/1864/rules.ht > m > > Lil Joe > > > > Main opposition Socialists win landslide victory in > Portugal's general election > > Canadian Press > > February 20, 2005 > > LISBON, Portugal (AP) - The Socialist party returned to > power after three years in opposition with a landslide > election victory on Sunday, as voters appeared to > punish the conservative government for failing to pull > Portugal out of an economic slump. > > In its biggest win ever, the Socialist party collected > 120 seats to secure an overall majority in the 230-seat > legislature for the first time. > > The result allows Socialist leader Jose Socrates, who > will be the fourth prime minister in three months, to > push through potentially painful economic reforms. > > Socrates, a former environment minister, has said he > wants this country of 10.3 million to "change > direction" and modernize the economy. > > Socrates also said he is committed to closer foreign > policy co-ordination between European Union countries. > He opposed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which the > outgoing government supported, although he said he > values warm relations with the United States. > > The Social Democratic party, which has governed in a > coalition with the smaller Popular party since 2002, > recorded its worst result since 1983. It elected 72 > members of Parliament. > > Turnout was 65 per cent of the country's 8.8 million > registered voters, slightly up from the last electi
[Marxism-Thaxis] RE: SEN. BARACK OBAMA (member of Congres.Black Caucus) STATEMENT ON SUDAN
Snip: "The international community has failed to do enough. The United
Nations passed a toothless resolution and, in recent debates, China, Russia,
Pakistan and Algeria have been reluctant to support any meaningful action.
The UN is failing in its mission by allowing politics to get in the way of
needed action. American leadership is needed to mobilize European support
and force action. On the 10th anniversary of Rwandan atrocities, we must
not let history repeat itself." Obama, US Senator
---
It is finally happening. A US Senator is raising the issue for displacing
the African Union mediation solving problems in Sudan, advocating instead
deploying US and NATO imperialist armies into Sudan. This move is really
about oil, and China as an investor in Sudan oil, and about hatred by the US
and Israel because the Sudanese government backs the Palestinian antiradar
and opposed the US genocidal sanctions and military invasion's Gestapo
occupation of Iraq. It has nothing to do with Black Africans, or Rwanda or
Africa as such.
One must bare in mind that it is this same Party, the Democratic Party
including Democrats in Blackface (the so-called Congressional Black Caucus)
that supported the Republican Congressional Resolution setting sanctions
against Zimbabwe in retaliation for peasant land expropriations. Again, at
the end of his 'statement', Obama says the usual American propaganda crap
about 'humanitarian mission' (they used to call it 'the White Man's Burden')
to cover for their unwanted military intervention - in Afghanistan they said
it was to free Afghan women from their government which outlawed hot dogs
and;lowed miniskirts, in Iraq they try to justify maiming and killing Iraqis
in the name of 'peace and security' (which is what the Nazis said when they
suppressed the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto Rebellion). American Democrats as well
as Republicans has blood of people of color on its hands -- nuclearized
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killed 3,000,000 Koreans in the decade of the 50s,
3,000,000 Vietnamese in the 60s, are responsible for the deaths of millions
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, El Salvador,
Honduras and so on, and we are to believe this Democrat when he says he's
concerned for 'Black Africans', when really? Really, what's up is that he's
trying to politically neutralize Blacks if and when Britain and America turn
Sudan into another Iraq.
Here Obama shows you whose side he's on, and what's really going on as they
say in the hood, when he attacks the UN for not giving the British and
American troops the fig leaf of 'international community' invasion of Sudan,
using the same language as Bush and Powell did against them re Iraq: "The
international community has failed to do enough. The United Nations passed
a toothless resolution and, in recent debates, China, Russia, Pakistan and
Algeria have been reluctant to support any meaningful action. The UN is
failing in its mission by allowing politics to get in the way of needed
action. American leadership is needed to mobilize European support and
force action."
This has everything to do with Sudan and Iraqi oil, and opposition to
regimes that oppose both the Israeli genocide on Palestinians and American
genocide on Iraqis, yet, this American Democrats has the gall to bring up
Rwanda!
-Original Message-
From: nwaakwukwo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, February 15, 2005 7:38 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: SEN. BARACK OBAMA (member of Congres.Black Caucus) STATEMENT ON
SUDAN
Barack Obama
Democrat U.S. Senate 2004
www.obamaforillinois.com/index.asp?Type=B_PR&SEC={4C624248-27E9-4F6
7-A6...
Statement from Barack Obama on Darfur, Sudan
Thursday, October 07, 2004
"Genocide is underway in Darfur, Sudan. Already, 50,000
African Muslims have been killed and 1.2 million displaced by the Sudanese
Government and by Arab Janjaweed militias armed and encouraged by Khartoum.
The Bush Administration itself warned of the magnitude of the crisis, if no
action is taken. Andrew Natsios, head of USAID, said in June that "if
nothing changes we will have one million casualties." We cannot, in good
conscience, stand by and let this genocide continue.
"A July 30th UN Security Council resolution threatened
the Sudanese government with possible punitive measures if there were not
significant progress in protecting people and curbing the violence.
Secretary General Annan's follow-up report to the UN Security Council last
week makes plain that Sudan has failed to meet its commitment to rein in
these militias. According to the report, "No concrete steps have been taken
to bring to justice or even identify any of the militia leaders or
perpetrators of these attacks, allowing the violations
[Marxism-Thaxis] Debs, U.S. trade union socialist respond's to racism and white supremacism in working class
E. V. Debs The Negro and His Nemesis http://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1904/negronemesis.htm - Since the appearance of my article on The Negro in the Class Struggle in the November Review I have received the following anonymous letter: Elgin, Ill., November 25, 1903. Mr. Debs: Elgin Sir, I am a constant reader of the International Socialist Review. I have analyzed your last article on the Negro question with apprehension and fear. you say that the South is permeated with the race prejudice of the Negro more than the North. I say it is not so. When it comes right down to a test, the North is more fierce in the race prejudice of the Negro than the South ever has been or ever will be. I tell you, you will jeopardize the best interests of the Socialist Party if you insist on political equality of the Negro. For that will not only mean politial equality but also social equality eventually. I do not believe you realize what that means. You get social and political equality for the Negro, then let him come and ask the hand of your daughter in marriage, For that seems to be the height of his ambition, and we will see whether you still have a hankering for social and political equality for the Negro. For I tell you, the Negro will not be satisfied with equality with reservation. It is impossible for the Anglo-Saxon and the African to live on equal terms. You try it, and he will pull you down to his level. Mr. Lincoln, himself, said, that There is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid them living together on terms of social and political equality. If the Socialist leaders stoop to this method to gain votes, then their policy and doctrine is as rotten and degraded as that of the Republican and Democratic parties, and I tell you, if the resolutions are adopted to give the African equality with the Anglo-Saxon you will lose more votes than you now think. I for my part shall do all I can to make you lose as many as possible and there will be others. For dont you know that just a little sour dough will spoil the whole batch of bread. You will do the Negro a greater favor by leaving him where he is. You elevate and educate him, adn you will make his position impossible in the U.S.A. Mr. Debs, if you have any doubt on this subject, I beg you for humanitys sake to read Mr. Thomas Dixons The Leopards Spots and I hope that all others who have voiced your sentiments heretofore, will do the same. I assure you, I shall watch the International Socialist Review with the most intense hope of a reply after you have read Mr. Thomas Dixons message to humanity. Respectfully yours, So far a staunch member of the Socialist Party The writer, who subscribed himself A staunch member of the Socialist Party is the only member of that kind I have ever heard of who fears to sign his name to, and accept responsibility for what he writes. The really staunch Socialist attacks in the openhe does not shoot from ambush. The anonymous writer, as a rule, ought to be ignored, since he is unwilling to face those he accuses, while he may be a sneak or coward, traitor or spy, in the role of a staunch Socialist, whose base design it is to divide and disrupt the movement. For reasons which will appear later, this communication is made an exception and will be treated as if from a known party member in good standing. It would be interesting to know of what branch our critic is a member and how long he has been, and how he happened to become a staunch member of the Socialist Party. That he is entirely ignorant of the philosophy of Socialism may not be to his discredit, but that a staunch member has not even read the platform of his party not only admits of no excuse, but takes the staunchness all out of him, punctures and discredits his foolish and fanatical criticism and leaves him naked and exposed to ridicule and contempt. The Elgin writer has all the eminent and well recognized qualifications necessary to oppose Negro equality. His criticism and the spirit that prompts it harmonize delightfully with his assumed superiority. That he may understand that he claims to be a staunch member of a party he knows nothing about I here incorporate the Negro Resolutions adopted by our last national convention, which constitute a vital part of the national platform of the Socialist Party and clearly defined its attitude toward the Negro: NEGRO RESOLUTION Whereas, The Negroes of the United States, because of their long training in slavery and but recent emancipation therefrom, occupy a peculiar position in the working class and in society at large; Whereas, The capitalist class seeks to preserve this peculiar condition, and to foster and increase color prejudice and race hatred between the white worker and the black, so as to make their social and economic interes
[Marxism-Thaxis] Crisis of capitalism is not 'over population'
Crisis of Capitalism is not 'over population' [aka Malthus] but, because of the drives of capital accumulation (the 'self-expansion of capital' [Marx]) on one hand, and competitive displacement of men by machines resulting in tendencies of declining rates of profits on the other. People don't go homeless and hungry because there are 'too many people and too few resources' - not 'overpopulation' but 'relative surplus' population. Lil Joe - "We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social interrelations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialised production. But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has its peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social interrelations, i.e., in exchange, and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers. * * * * * It is never able to get out of that "vicious circle" which Fourier had already discovered. What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of the planets, by collision with the centre. It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin. But the perfecting of machinery is making human labour superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, *9 available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead-weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. " 'The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital" (Marx's Capital, p. 671.) * * * * * "We have seen that the ever increasing perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to improve his machinery, always to increase its producti
[Marxism-Thaxis] Please help!
I know everyone is busy, but I would appreciate any help locating this, or any other relevant article on US fanning flames of religious civil war in Iraq. I forget who wrote the article, and who posted it, but can you or anyone repost, or send me articles on how the U.S. is fanning flames of Civil War in Iraq? Please!! Thank you!!! [the more the better]I need it! Lil Joe [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Darwin's insights on animal 'loyalty, lonliness, sorrow" &C. Not unique to 'man'...
trongly developed would survive in larger numbers. Whether this is the case with the migratory in comparison with the maternal instinct, may be doubted. The great persistence, or steady action of the former at certain seasons of the year during the whole day, may give it for a time paramount force. Man a social animal.-Every one will admit that man is a social being. We see this in his dislike of solitude, and in his wish for society beyond that of his own family. Solitary confinement is one of the severest punishments which can be inflicted. Some authors suppose that man primevally lived in single families; but at the present day, though single families, or only two or three together, roam the solitudes of some savage lands, they always, as far as I can discover, hold friendly relations with other families inhabiting the same district. Such families occasionally meet in council, and unite for their common defence. It is no argument against savage man being a social animal, that the tribes inhabiting adjacent districts are almost always at war with each other; for the social instincts never extend to all the individuals of the same species. Judging from the analogy of the majority of the Quadrumana, it is probable that the early ape-like progenitors of man were likewise social; but this is not of much importance for us. Although man, as 22 This fact, the Rev. L. Jenyns states (see his edition of 'White's Nat. Hist. of Selborne,' 1853, p. 204), was first recorded by the illustrious Jenner, in 'Phil. Transact.' 1824, and has since been confirmed by several observers, especially by Mr. Blackwall. This latter careful observer examined, late in the autumn, during two years, thirty-six nests; he found that twelve contained young dead birds, five contained eggs on the point of being hatched, and three, eggs not nearly hatched. Many birds, not yet old enough for a prolonged flight, are likewise deserted and left behind. See Blackwall, 'Researches in Zoology,' 1834, pp. 108, 118. For some additional evidence, although this is not wanted, see Leroy, 'Lettres Phil.' 1802, p. 217. For Swifts, Gould's 'Introduction to the Birds of Great Britain,' 1823, p. 5. Similar cases have been observed in Canada by Mr. Adams; 'Pop. Science Review,' July, 1873, p. 283. [page] 109 he now exists, has few special instincts, having lost any which his early progenitors may have possessed, this is no reason why he should not have retained from an extremely remote period some degree of instinctive love and sympathy for his fellows. We are indeed all conscious that we do possess such sympathetic feelings;23 but our consciousness does not tell us whether they are instinctive, having originated long ago in the same manner as with the lower animals, or whether they have been acquired by each of us during our early years. As man is a social animal, it is almost certain that he would inherit a tendency to be faithful to his comrades, and obedient to the leader of his tribe; for these qualities are common to most social animals. He would consequently possess some capacity for self-command. He would from an inherited tendency be willing to defend, in concert with others, his fellow-men; and would be ready to aid them in any way, which did not too greatly interfere with his own welfare or his own strong desires. -Original Message- From: nwaakwukwo [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2005 11:17 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Africa-Politics] JACK JOHNSON'S REAL OPPONENT Lil Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: LJ: I agree with you. But, there's a difference between boys and girls using each other to reach orgasm and merging in love. 'Never in this world can there be too much love', as I recall the Iselies or Impressions singing in the 60s. That's not love, Lil Joe. Not between "boys" and "girls". Love is a verb, an action word that happens with committment. It has nothing to do with sex. LJ: The evolution of millions of social animals (reptiles back to the dinosaurs, mammals and insects evolve 'loyalty and sacrifice' for ones groups survival. Its a genetic determined adaptation of instinct. Humans 'instinct' is a conscious one, therefore ideological. The types of families change (patriarchal monogamy being but the latest, which arose with private property, wealth and competition along with the political military state. Okay, a dog's behavior can be perceived as "loyalty" to his master. But, lonliness, sorrow, regret are unique to man and are attributes of his Creator, in whose image he was made (only explanation of why these "emotions" exist) Yes! This is not talking about "competing" with others. But, it is talking about competing with "self"...shar
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re Malcolm X advocating "Race War" lunacy
Re: Lil Joe - Malcolm X advocating "Race War" is lunacy Waistline wrote: In a message dated 1/19/2005 1:00:38 PM Central Standard Time. Waistline: All classes of African Americans were in motion and the white sector of the industrial proletariat was passive. The trade unions - especially the UAW, is not the "white sector of the industrial proletariat" (my exact words.) Lil Joe: Duh. If the "White sector" of the Auto Industry were not part of the 'industrial proletariat' - then what was the auto industry? Or, rather - if the 'white sector of the industrial proletariat' were not in the "trade unions" then it follows from your statements that the 'trade unions' were exclusively Black! Waistline: Further, Reuther opposed Civil Rights for a very long time and only shifted his position concerning Civil Rights within the union and outside the union as the result of immense pressure. He died opposing integrating the UAW in fact. The trade Unions and especially the UAW - for various political reasons, were pressured into supporting the Civil Rights Movement and after the 1967 Rebellion in Detroit was compelled by the polarity it created to changed it internal policy. Lil Joe: Waistline's confused tortured 'logic' is completely illogical. First he says that the 'white sector of the industrial proletariat' is different from "the trade unions - especially the UAW"; then he says that Walter Reuther, a White industrial worker, who was not only in "the UAW", but its leader was a racist and the UAW opposed 'Civil Rights', "for a very long time". In place of any objective documentation on the history of the American trade unions, or even the UAW, Waistline delves into a personal tirade against an individual - Walter Reuther! Based on this particular, Waistline leaps back into his general condemnation of the UAW. Completely mystifying illogic. Waistline: Every one of course (who was actually involved in the events) remembers how Walter Reuther was placed at the head of the "March On Washington" alongside Dr. King. Malcolm X gave a very famous presentation - in Detroit, concerning this political development. Lil Joe: The only thing we know, on the basis of photographic documentation is that the UAW had thousands of members at the March on Washington carrying UAW signs and banners demanding jobs, the Nation of Islam's reactionary nationalism prevented them from participating. Reuther was there, Malcolm wasn't! Those are the facts, no matter what 'militant' rhetoric Malcolm sprouted to attempt to justify his and the NOI's boycotting of this important historical event in the Speech Message to the Grass Roots. Waistline: The point is that individuals look at things different and we speak as individuals as opposed to "this is the Marxist position." Lil Joe: I would be a fool to continue to debate with an existential solipsist who reduces world history to himself and his personal perceptions. How can any one respond to this confused rhetoric, when the man's premise is "it seems to me". Waistline: Here is the basic problem. The Trade Union Movement is not the white sector of the industrial proletariat. The industrial proletariat is not the working class. The American Labor Movement seems to me to be a broader category than the working class, since in American history farm laborers and even the sharecropper would fall under the category of labor. The deeper question is that you have no experience to authenticate any of your statements, while on the other hand . . . I do. Therefore I shall write the history as I understand it as opposed to how you understand it since you were not there and offer zero source material. Lil Joe: I am not going to match this self-congratulatory self-praise by similar autobiographical irrational gibberish. I will only say this, even without 'source materials' it is an objective fact that only a fool living with roaches would claim that he knows more about roaches than an entomologist, because the entomologist didn't have the personal experience of growing up with them in the projects! Finally, on the title of this post. Malcolm X not only called the "White man" THE devil, but the 'enemy', and advocated 'Black Revolution'. Well Revolution is War, and if 'the enemy' in this war is 'the White man', then this is a race war. This is a simple syllogism which Waistline rejects on the basis of solipsism. Bullshit. Lil Joe http://www.nathanielturner.com/liljoebio.htm ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Anti-evolution: religion and reactionary politics in public schools
January 19, 2005 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Caught Between Church and State By SUSAN JACOBY HORTLY after the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial," the usually astute historian Frederick Lewis Allen concluded that fundamentalism had been permanently discredited by the prosecution in Dayton, Tenn., of John T. Scopes, who had taught his biology students about Darwin's theory of evolution. "Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws," Allen wrote, "and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from fundamentalist certainty continued." This was a serious historical misjudgment, as most recently demonstrated by the renewed determination of anti-evolution crusaders - buoyed by conservative gains in state and local elections - to force public school science classes to give equal time to religiously based speculation about the origins of life. These challenges to evolution range from old-time biblical literalism, insisting that the universe and man were created in seven days, to the newer "intelligent design," which maintains that if evolution occurred at all it could never be explained by Darwinian natural selection and could only have been directed at every stage by an omniscient creator. Kansas, where evolution opponents regained control of the state board of education in November, is likely to be the first battleground. Proposals to modify the state's recommended science curriculum with alternatives to Darwinian evolution will be an issue at statewide public hearings scheduled in February. In Georgia last week, a federal judge ordered a suburban Atlanta school board to remove stickers labeling evolution "a theory, not a fact" from high school biology textbooks, but an appeal seems likely. Other states where the teaching of evolution is on the 2005 legislative or judicial calendar include Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Many liberals mistakenly believe that these controversies are largely a product of the post-1980 politicization of the Christian right. In fact, the elected anti-evolutionists on local and state school boards today are the heirs of eight decades of fundamentalist campaigning against Darwinism through back-door pressure on textbook publishers and school officials. Even efforts to cloak creationism with the words "science" and "scientific" - as in "creation science" - is an old tactic. More sophisticated proponents of intelligent design, those who are religiously conservative but not insistent on literal adherence to the biblical creation story, use anti-Darwinist arguments from a tiny minority of scientists to bolster their case for a creator. Last month, a group of parents in Dover, Penn., filed the first lawsuit to address the issue, challenging the local school board's contention that "intelligent design" is a scientific rather than a religious theory and, therefore, does not violate the separation of church and state. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, America was well on its way to an accommodation between science and mainstream religion, now a fait accompli in the rest of the developed world, that pleases neither atheists nor theocrats manquis but works for almost everyone else. A growing number of Americans accepted both evolution and religion but considered it the responsibility of the church, not public schools, to sort out the role of God. This view was expressed in 1904 by Maynard M. Metcalf, a zoologist and a liberal Christian, who praised the move to exclude religious speculation from the teaching of life sciences. The Scopes trial changed all that. Instead of being the nail in the coffin of creationism as many believe, the trial undermined the emerging accommodation between religion and science by intensifying the fundamentalists' conviction that acceptance of evolution would inevitably weaken any type of faith. When the 24-year-old Scopes was charged with violating a state law forbidding the teaching of evolution, his conviction by a jury (later overturned on a technicality) was a foregone conclusion. Clarence Darrow, the nation's most famous lawyer and most famous agnostic, turned a jury defeat into a public relations victory (at least among scientists and intellectuals) by goading William Jennings Bryan, who was assisting the prosecution, into taking the stand as an expert witness on the Bible. Bryan, in the view of the Northern press, made a fool of himself. Opponents of evolution, however, lauded Bryan, and the press's ridicule of their hero helped to create the enduring fundamentalist resentment of secular science and secular government that has become such a conspicuous feature of our culture. Between the Scopes trial and the early 1930's, "science-proof" fundamentalists pressured publishers into excising discussions of evolution - and often the word itself - f
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Lil Joe - Haiti
Dishonesty? That's an ad hominem that can be neither proved, nor disproved. I responded to what you wrote. "Zero tolerance" is a term/concept that emerged in the American right-wing movement for 'tough jail sentences' - Three Strikes =25 years with no parole. When you said you had 'zero tolerance' for American Trotskyism, in such a blanket statement what was I supposed to think? You didn't say you had criticisms for any particular Trotskyist organization, but lumped them together - and I take it you were prejudging Trotskyists and not just "Trotskyism", because you neither mentioned any particular work by Trotsky or Trotskyists, and you also cannot have 'zero tolerance' for literature - zero tolerance is with respect to behavior of people. Did I misunderstand what you said re Aristide? Wasn't he a Catholic priest? Is the Catholic Church not reactionary? The movement of working class communism is the exact opposite of the 'love communism', that Feuerbach, Engels and Kautsky talked about, and is in the Book of Acts 2nd and 4th chapters, which was based on consumption but demanded nothing from owners of the productive forces. Proletarian communism on the contrary is based on working class ownership of the productive forces, not sharing what is purchased by wages but abolition of the wage system. The love-communism of the early Christ-communities degenerated from collective meals every day, to token 'communion' once a month! The love- communism actually had its ideological heritage in the Essen Community, which early Christians adopted (e.g. the Ebonite). This was prior to the emergence of the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Empire. The earliest writings in the Christian "New Testament" are those attributed to St Paul, where he expressly promotes that slaves be obedient to their masters 'in cheerfulness', and wives submit to their husband, and that the State (military) are authorized of god and should be obeyed. Hardly 'revolutionary', completely reactionary. I am not talking about Jesus or the earliest Jesus Messiah movement among the Jewish proletariat, and Roman artisans in Rome, as well as slaves. I am talking about the Christianity in the Epistles and the Church. The League of Black Revolutionaries and Communist League was led by Nelson Perry into (League of Revolutionaries" [or something like that, that still put out People's Tribune which appears regularly on laborpartypraxis postings by Mike] not to the PLP. Being a Black person and member of the Black movement in the 60s does not mean you understood it, any more than being Black validate your ideologies regarding either nationalism; or having been raise in the Church constitute and understanding of Christianity. And, you are wrong about Trotsky and the SWP, what he had were discussions with CLR James, James Cannon and others regarding the Negro question, and made suggestions to them. BTW - my criticism of Aristide and the Church has nothing to do with the crude atheism of Stalinists masquerading as "Bolsheviks". -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 17:37:42 EST From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Lil Joe - Haiti >>Your criticism of me calling Aristide a 'reactionary Christian' is well taken. Religion is not the issue in this discussion, and was not mentioned in the original. The Catholic Church has shown itself to be reactionary and anti-Communist, so I don't understand how you can work with and respect Catholic priests as such, and yet regard Trotskyists and Trotskyism as your enemy. The only enemy I know is the bourgeois and its conscious political; and ideological agents in power. << Comment This will be my last response since you appear to have an inability to be honest on an elementary level. No where have I stated that I "regard Trotskyists and Trotskyism as (my) enemy. You invited this, although I specifically spoke of American Trotskyism. This is what I stated and what you quoted me stating: "I am working on controlling my anger and vulgarity but I have zero tolerance for American Trotskyism and their entire history on the National Factor in the American Union. " The above means in no uncertain terms that "I have zero tolerance for American Trotskyism . . . on the National Factor in the American Union." To go to far Comrade Joe. I evolved my concepts on the National Question on the basis of the African American Liberation Movement as a founding member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Communist League and later a founding member of the Communist Labor Party. Even Leon Trotsky . . . no friend of mine, criticized the American Trotskyists on their treatment of the Negro Question. You are gravely mistaken to pretend that my statement contains something about "
[Marxism-Thaxis] Rangel to reintroduce notorious draft bill
I have made my position on this clearly stated when it was first introduced, at the time when the Left-Opportunists if not out right supporting the bill, said nothing against it or against Rangel, referred to as 'the Brother', and supported by members of the so-called Congressional Black Caucus (Democrats in Blackface). Leftists" used such excuses for supporting Rangel the same as today they do Maxine Waters attacks on the Haitian armed opposition to the UN, French &C. forces in Haiti, as 'fighting racism' as 'the main enemy' and 'primary contradiction' and mealy mouthing condescending and patronizing platitudes about "one aspect of this is that the democratic right to vote and be represented is something Black 'people' (sic!) in this country fought for and died for" as if the right to vote equals the right to be Democrats! " 'They' (sic!) view the presence of these 'Black people'( read: Democrats)" in Congress as a conquest, as *their* representatives". This is pure racist condescension and patronizing assuming the "White" workers are smart enough to understand critiques of "White" Democrats in Congress as critiques of the Democrats as a party, and "Black" workers are incapable of distinguishing an attack on policies of the Blacks in Congress as critiques of the Democrats who happen to be "Black". In reality the issue is not one of race but of class, it is evident that 99.99% of CBC votes on domestic and international policies are the same as the rest of the Congressional Democrats, notwithstanding the this or that individual (such as Cynthia McKinney or Barbara Lee) occasionally brake ranks on this or that issue, without however denouncing the Democratic Party as a Party and publicly resigning from it in protest. Yet, these Maverick Democrats hoodwink the American 'progressives', or rather enable them to support Democratic Party policy when the policy is put forth by Democrats in Blackface, ostensibly as 'fighting racism' as though the CBC were "Black folk", rather than the Democrats that they are! Black workers are no less intelligent that "White" workers, and class-conscious Black workers the same as class-conscious White workers recognize the Democrats for what they are - representatives of capital- who therefore reject the Democrats as 'the bosses party', and advocate a Labor Party. Lets see whether Stan will also, now come out in support of the reinstatement of the draft - introduced by 'Brother Rangel" with the support of the CBC. Do they see Rangel as a 'Soul Brother' representing "Black people", as he claims to be by reintroducing the draft? Or as a Democrat representing the interests of US imperialism by reintroducing the draft? Lil Joe = Rangel to reintroduce notorious draft bill by People Against the Draft 13 Jan 2005 Rep. Charles Rangel intends to reintroduce legislation calling for resumption of the draft during the current Congressional term, according to a memo circulated by Bill Galvin of the Center on Conscience and War. Rangel, it will be recalled, was the author of the notorious HR 163, the "universal" conscription bill that became a political football during the 2004 Presidential campaign. When charges that Bush would reinstate the draft emerged as a red-hot election issue last October, HR 163 became a liability for the Kerry campaign - whereupon Rangel's bill was rushed to the floor and summarily voted down by a huge majority. For tactical reasons even the bill's sponsors, including Rangel, voted against it. With the election over, the way is clear for politicians on both sides of the aisle to get behind the draft, and Rep. Rangel will likely be leading the charge. According to Galvin's memo, CCW officers were told in a Dec. 21 meeting with Rangel's legislative director, Emile Milne, that Rangel will "probably introduce similar legislation" in the 2005 term. Rangel continues to argue that conscription would force privileged Americans to share the burden of military service now disproportionately carried by the poor and minorities. He also asserts that future wars would be made less likely by reintroduction of the draft. Both arguments are wrong. Conscription has never made the Armed Services more equitable, racially or economically. During the Vietnam war, minority draftees disproportionately served on the front lines. The affluent had, and still have, the means to gain medical deferments, or to secure soft, safe positions. If Rep. Rangel and other pro-draft "progressives" really wanted to fix social and racial inequities, they'd be advocating for jobs, education, and opportunity, not equal-opportunity warmaking. More broadly, it's not "fair" to people of color and the p
[Marxism-Thaxis] RE: Discussion on Haiti
-Original Message- From: Lil Joe [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, January 14, 2005 12:11 PM To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu Cc: Aduku Addae Subject: Thank you for your response, comrade. I need to state for the list, and you, that my reference to Jim was a mistake. It was not he, but Stan to whom I responded. Got the names wrong, as Jim only forwarded from Stan. I agree with your assessment of the 60s and splits in the military. I will forward this to Aduku, my comrade and co-thinker. Your criticism of me calling Aristide a 'reactionary Christian' is well taken. Religion is not the issue in this discussion, and was not mentioned in the original. The Catholic Church has shown itself to be reactionary and anti-Communist, so I don't understand how you can work with and respect Catholic priests as such, and yet regard Trotskyists and Trotskyism as your enemy. The only enemy I know is the bourgeois and its conscious political; and ideological agents in power. The criticism of Aristide was not the man as such, but that his regime (for which California mercenaries provided 'protection') as head of state represented one faction of the bourgeoisie. Moderators - please post this texts rather than the previous one [without a subject title that I sent accidently, before I made the change of the name from "Jim" to "Stan". Again, my apologies to Jim! Thank you Joe === Text: It is not possible for any government head of state to represent the proletariat so long as the productive forces of the country is the private wealth of the capitalist class and foreign investors. The most powerful, economically dominate class is the most politically dominate class. A worker's state presupposes workers having become the ruling class expropriating capitalist private property to the public property of the working class, ending wage labor and capital. Lil Joe Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Li'l Joe and Aduku on Haiti (from Marxmail) (Lil Joe) To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" >>Lil Joe: Kill the Niggers, eh? Stan advocates that the UN invader forces in Haiti round up and execute the former members of the Haitian military -- Who else will do it? Yet, I know of no instance where he has advocated the round up and execute American military forces that are directly responsible for the murder of millions of workers and peasants all over Asia, and indirectly in Africa and Latin America. Nor am I aware of any posts where ** has advocated that the members of the Israeli army, which as a collective are responsible for the murder and maiming of a million Palestinians. <<< Comment I have followed this exchange on Marxmail and some of the events in Haiti over a length of time. Communists and Marxists revolutionaries in the American Union tend to overstep their bounds in assessing the revolutionary process in the colonial and formerly colonial world. It is correct as the ABC of political Leninism to critically examine the splitting of the state and the polarization of its various armed agencies as an important aspect of the revolutionary process. The group of Marxist and communist workers from which I come have understood this specific process on the basis of the revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s and the behavior of what we call "the men in uniform." Our relationship to the Ethiopian Revolution of the 1970s and the seizure of political power on the basis of "the men in uniform," under the banner of Marxism and Communism and the lessons of the Congo Brazzaville from this same period are instructive. To a degree this process of polarization and splitting of state agencies, government bureaucracy, the police forces and the shifting of political polarities - their mutual penetration, was present throughout the period between the 1963 Rebellion in Birmingham Alabama, 1965 Watts Rebellion, 1967 Detroit and roughly 750 rebellions bring to an end the last phase of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid and late 1970s. The ending of this social process witnessed the crossing over of a section of the masses in the realm of electoral politics expressed as the "Vote Communist Campaign" in Detroit and later the election of Harold Washington as Mayor of Chicago in the early 1980s. To my knowledge no section of the Marxist and Communist Movement in America has called for the shooting of members of our "warrior class" as just retribution for our crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, the actual revolutionary process of society and the splitting and polarization and the shifting and switching of sides of "the men in uniform" and armed bodies of men is complicated and not for the faint of heart or ideologue. In Detroit this process expressed itself ver
[Marxism-Thaxis] (no subject)
Thank you for your response, comrade. I need to state for the list, and you, that my reference to "Jim" was a mistake. It was not he, but Stan to whom I responded. Got the names wrong, as Jim only forwarded from Stan. I agree with your assessment of the 60s and splits in the military. I will forward this to Aduku, my comrade and co-thinker. Your criticism of me calling Aristide a 'reactionary Christian' is well taken. Religion is not the issue in this discussion, and was not mentioned in the original. The Catholic Church has shown itself to be reactionary and anti-Communist, so I don't understand how you can work with and respect Catholic priests as such, and yet regard Trotskyists and Trotskyism as your enemy. The only enemy I know is the bourgeois and its conscious political; and ideological agents in power. The criticism of Aristide was not the man as such, but that his regime (for which California mercenaries provided 'protection') as head of state represented one faction of the bourgeoisie. It is not possible for any government head of state to represent the proletariat so long as the productive forces of the country is the private wealth of the capitalist class and foreign investors. The most powerful, economically dominate class is the most politically dominate class. A worker's state presupposes workers having become the ruling class expropriating capitalist private property to the public property of the working class, ending wage labor and capital. Lil Joe Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Re: Li'l Joe and Aduku on Haiti (from Marxmail) (Lil Joe) To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" >>Lil Joe: Kill the Niggers, eh? Jim advocates that the UN invader forces in Haiti round up and execute the former members of the Haitian military -- Who else will do it? Yet, I know of no instance where he has advocated the round up and execute American military forces that are directly responsible for the murder of millions of workers and peasants all over Asia, and indirectly in Africa and Latin America. Nor am I aware of any posts where ** has advocated that the members of the Israeli army, which as a collective are responsible for the murder and maiming of a million Palestinians. <<< Comment I have followed this exchange on Marxmail and some of the events in Haiti over a length of time. Communists and Marxists revolutionaries in the American Union tend to overstep their bounds in assessing the revolutionary process in the colonial and formerly colonial world. It is correct as the ABC of political Leninism to critically examine the splitting of the state and the polarization of its various armed agencies as an important aspect of the revolutionary process. The group of Marxist and communist workers from which I come have understood this specific process on the basis of the revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s and the behavior of what we call "the men in uniform." Our relationship to the Ethiopian Revolution of the 1970s and the seizure of political power on the basis of "the men in uniform," under the banner of Marxism and Communism and the lessons of the Congo Brazzaville from this same period are instructive. To a degree this process of polarization and splitting of state agencies, government bureaucracy, the police forces and the shifting of political polarities - their mutual penetration, was present throughout the period between the 1963 Rebellion in Birmingham Alabama, 1965 Watts Rebellion, 1967 Detroit and roughly 750 rebellions bring to an end the last phase of the Civil Rights Movement in the mid and late 1970s. The ending of this social process witnessed the crossing over of a section of the masses in the realm of electoral politics expressed as the "Vote Communist Campaign" in Detroit and later the election of Harold Washington as Mayor of Chicago in the early 1980s. To my knowledge no section of the Marxist and Communist Movement in America has called for the shooting of members of our "warrior class" as just retribution for our crimes against humanity. Nevertheless, the actual revolutionary process of society and the splitting and polarization and the shifting and switching of sides of "the men in uniform" and armed bodies of men is complicated and not for the faint of heart or ideologue. In Detroit this process expressed itself very sharp as local agencies turned in on themselves under the impact of the 1967 Rebellion and the post rebellion reform movement. Some of this is outlined in the book "Detroit, I Do Mind Dying." It seem to me as an individual, that identifying Aristide, as "the reactionary Christian Aristide" is counter productive because it places his Christ-ness in dispute. The oldest and most stable strand of communism in America is of course
[Marxism-Thaxis] Correction: Re Stan Goff's reply to [Aduku and] Li'l Joe on Haiti (from Marxmail)
On Marxism list, and Marxism Thaxis, the piece was forwarded from "Stan" by others. It is therefore not to Jim, but "Stan", to whom I am responding. Lil Joe >I have no idea who Joe Radical is or where he gets his information on >Haiti, but the idea that the former FRAPH and FAdH paramilitaries that >are demanding back pay in Haiti are some expression of proletarian >contestation if not asserted out of pure ignorance of Haitis class >dynamics is worthy of Timothy Leary on his best mescaline. Lil Joe: Aduku is my comrade, a working class revolutionary socialist from Jamaica, with direct lines of communication with comrades in the Caribbean. Thus, unlike Stan who wrote this, who must get his information from the Democrats and the bourgeois media. Stan's entire attack but mealy mouth the Democrats attack on Haitians workers for being armed, advocating violent suppression of these armed workers and peasants. == Rep. Maxine Waters > http://www.house.gov/waters/ > > January 07, 2005 > > > Haiti: Rep. Maxine Waters and 13 Other Members of Congress Urge > President Bush to Oppose Payments to Thugs by the Interim Government > of Haiti > > PRESS RELEASE -- Washington, D.C. -- Today, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) > sent a letter to President Bush, urging him to immediately inform the > interim government of Haiti that he opposes providing any payments to > former members of the Haitian army. The letter also requests that he > take all necessary steps to ensure that no U.S. foreign assistance > funds or other U.S. government funds are diverted for use as payments > to these thugs and killers. Thirteen of the Congresswoman's > colleagues signed her letter. Copies of the letter were sent to > Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of State Designate > Condoleezza Rice. The text of the letter follows: > > We were outraged to learn that the interim Haitian government has > begun to provide financial payments to former members of the dreaded > Haitian army. We urge you to oppose any payments from the interim > government to these thugs and killers who have terrorized the Haitian > population and refused to disarm, and we also urge you to make > certain that U.S. funds are not used for this purpose. > > As you know, the Haitian army overthrew President Jean-Bertrand > Aristide in a coup d'etat in 1991, less than one year after he was > first elected president of Haiti. During its three-year reign in > Haiti from 1991 to 1994, the Haitian army committed widespread human > rights violations, including murder, rape and torture. President > Aristide disbanded the Haitian army after he was restored to power in > 1994, but its soldiers were never disarmed. > > According to recent press reports, the interim government has agreed > to provide payments over the next three months to all of the > estimated 6,000 former members of the Haitian army. The payments will > average about $4,800 per person. The cost of these payments will be > an estimated $29 million, an enormous price for the Western > Hemisphere's poorest country. The interim government has not > explained where the funds for these payments will be obtained, but > Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue has already distributed checks > to dozens of armed individuals who claim to be former soldiers. > > These former soldiers are thugs and killers who refuse to lay down > their weapons and who currently illegally control several Haitian > towns. They are the same thugs and killers who attacked police > stations, freed criminals from prisons and assisted in the coup > d'etat that overthrew President Aristide last February. Since then, > they have murdered untold numbers of Lavalas Party supporters, > terrorized the Haitian population and demanded ten years of back pay. > Remissainthes Ravix, the self-appointed leader of the former > soldiers, has even called on ex-soldiers from across Haiti to > organize a guerrilla war against the interim government. These thugs > and killers should be disarmed. They should not be rewarded for their > crimes. > > We respectfully request that you immediately inform the interim > government of Haiti in no uncertain terms that you oppose providing > any payments to former members of the Haitian army. We also request > that you take all necessary steps to ensure that no U.S. foreign > assistance funds or other U.S. government funds are diverted for use > as payments to these thugs and killers. > > Sincerely, > > > Maxine Waters > Barbara Lee > John Conyers > Raul Grijalva > Donald Payne > Jan Schakowsky > Stephanie Tubbs Jones > Major Owens > Chaka Fattah > Edolphus Towns > Melvin L. Watt > Corrine Brown > Sheila Jackson-Lee
[Marxism-Thaxis] Re Stan Goff's reply to [Aduku and] Li'l Joe on Haiti (from Marxmail)
Message: 2 Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:03:12 -0500 From: Jim Farmelant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Stan Goff's reply to Li'l Joe on Haiti (from Marxmail) To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain >I have no idea who Joe Radical is or where he gets his information on >Haiti, but the idea that the former FRAPH and FAdH paramilitaries that >are demanding back pay in Haiti are some expression of proletarian >contestation if not asserted out of pure ignorance of Haitis class >dynamics is worthy of Timothy Leary on his best mescaline. Lil Joe: Aduku is my comrade, a working class revolutionary socialist from Jamaica, with direct lines of communication with comrades in the Caribbean. Thus, unlike Jim who gets his information from the Democrats and the bourgeois media. Jim's entire attack but mealy mouth the Democrats attack on Haitians workers for being armed, advocating violent suppression of these armed workers and peasants. == Rep. Maxine Waters > http://www.house.gov/waters/ > > January 07, 2005 > > > Haiti: Rep. Maxine Waters and 13 Other Members of Congress Urge > President Bush to Oppose Payments to Thugs by the Interim Government > of Haiti > > PRESS RELEASE -- Washington, D.C. -- Today, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) > sent a letter to President Bush, urging him to immediately inform the > interim government of Haiti that he opposes providing any payments to > former members of the Haitian army. The letter also requests that he > take all necessary steps to ensure that no U.S. foreign assistance > funds or other U.S. government funds are diverted for use as payments > to these thugs and killers. Thirteen of the Congresswoman's > colleagues signed her letter. Copies of the letter were sent to > Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of State Designate > Condoleezza Rice. The text of the letter follows: > > We were outraged to learn that the interim Haitian government has > begun to provide financial payments to former members of the dreaded > Haitian army. We urge you to oppose any payments from the interim > government to these thugs and killers who have terrorized the Haitian > population and refused to disarm, and we also urge you to make > certain that U.S. funds are not used for this purpose. > > As you know, the Haitian army overthrew President Jean-Bertrand > Aristide in a coup d'etat in 1991, less than one year after he was > first elected president of Haiti. During its three-year reign in > Haiti from 1991 to 1994, the Haitian army committed widespread human > rights violations, including murder, rape and torture. President > Aristide disbanded the Haitian army after he was restored to power in > 1994, but its soldiers were never disarmed. > > According to recent press reports, the interim government has agreed > to provide payments over the next three months to all of the > estimated 6,000 former members of the Haitian army. The payments will > average about $4,800 per person. The cost of these payments will be > an estimated $29 million, an enormous price for the Western > Hemisphere's poorest country. The interim government has not > explained where the funds for these payments will be obtained, but > Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue has already distributed checks > to dozens of armed individuals who claim to be former soldiers. > > These former soldiers are thugs and killers who refuse to lay down > their weapons and who currently illegally control several Haitian > towns. They are the same thugs and killers who attacked police > stations, freed criminals from prisons and assisted in the coup > d'etat that overthrew President Aristide last February. Since then, > they have murdered untold numbers of Lavalas Party supporters, > terrorized the Haitian population and demanded ten years of back pay. > Remissainthes Ravix, the self-appointed leader of the former > soldiers, has even called on ex-soldiers from across Haiti to > organize a guerrilla war against the interim government. These thugs > and killers should be disarmed. They should not be rewarded for their > crimes. > > We respectfully request that you immediately inform the interim > government of Haiti in no uncertain terms that you oppose providing > any payments to former members of the Haitian army. We also request > that you take all necessary steps to ensure that no U.S. foreign > assistance funds or other U.S. government funds are diverted for use > as payments to these thugs and killers. > > Sincerely, > > > Maxine Waters > Barbara Lee > John Conyers > Raul Grijalva > Donald Payne > Jan Schakowsky > Stephanie Tubbs Jones > Major Ow
[Marxism-Thaxis] Statement on Haiti
Statement on Haiti Lil Joe and Aduku Addae The crisis in Haiti has been covered in a mystical shroud of racism, theatrical historicism and plain old superstition. The popular version has this drama packaged as a battle between the black and white races, wrapped up in the spirit of the epic struggle of the Black Jacobins, drawing lavishly on the lure of Voodoo for maximum dramatic effect. It is a wondrous tale from the crypt and the audience is just lapping it up. But while the world is consumed by this tale from the twilight zone a struggle of epic historical proportions is taking place. It is a struggle between classes of people which is based in the temporal, material, economic and social life of the Haitian people. Yes, the class struggle, defined in its classic Marxian sense, is taking place in Haiti! The latest episode of the struggle has Maxine Waters casting the ex-soldiers, who have been universally credited as the agents of Aristide s demise, as thugs and murderers who are prospective recipients of bribe money. This is the manner in which she has disposed herself to discredit the approximately 6000 strong former employees of the Haitian state who have mounted a spirited and discipline struggle to force the representatives of the Haitian State to pay ten years in back pay. Thus Ms Walters have set the tone for another salvo in the ideological war. We begin with a few basic propositions, as we must, in conducting these sorts of discourses, if we hope to gain any clarity. The Haitian population is divided into social classes. These classes are determined by the divisions of labor which arises in the course of the economic activities which these humans in Haiti undertake to produce and reproduce their material being this being construed as their economic life. The manner in which they produce their material existence, their economic endeavors, and the divisions of labor thereby occasioned, are determined by the tools in existence at a given period. Moreover, the manner of appropriation is conditional upon the division of labor and on the property relations so determined. So, the nature of classes and class relations, then, is determined ultimately by the nature of the tools available to the human community in Haiti. We posit, also, that contending class interests is the motor of the class struggle and that unending class struggles is the very essence of politics. We posit these premises, derived from the most rigorous of scientific investigation, as our point of departure. We dont want any confusion as we go along. The battle in Haiti is for the material wealth of that country. It has brought into contention the US/France/Brazil/Group 184 conglomerate, on the one hand and the impoverished workers of the numerous slums of Haiti together with elements of the petty bourgeoisie, on the other hand. The conglomeration of the US, France, Brazil and the Haitian Group 184 is the very embodiment of the marauding global capital. The Haitian petty bourgeoisie is comprised of a variegated collection of laborers who own property and who generally are proprietors of their means of production. What we see in Haiti, therefore, is an alignment of the global bourgeoisie, the trans-national capitalist players, against the petty capitalist (mostly of agrarian vintage) in combination with the utterly dispossessed hoards, the proletarian masses, of the slum cities of Haiti, including Bel Air and Cite Soleil. That is the basic manner in which the contending forces are aligned against each other. The Haitian petty-bourgeoisie is in contention with the global bourgeoisie. The elements of the working-class engaged in this struggle is engaged as the armed champions of one or either of the contending sides. The global bourgeoisie has enlisted the service of the so-called ex-soldiers while the hapless members of the street gangs from the slum cities have been forced by default, due to their prior association with the party of the petty bourgeoisie, Fanmi Lavalas, to become the arm bearers of the Haitian petty bourgeoisie. From this vantage point we can see that the armed workers are indisputably the decisive force, the very fulcrum on which the struggle turns. A cautionary note must be sounded here. Though they bear the arms proletarian partisans have no over-riding class-conscious objective. This is an unqualified detriment. As long as this remains the case they will be used against each other and become decimated in the contest between the factions of the bourgeoisie. Bottom-line, the conflict in Haiti is being driven by a fractious dispute between elements of the bourgeoisie about how production should be organized in Haiti and about how surplus value will be appropriated. It is not yet a dispute, strictly speaking, centered on class war and the very critical question of the abolition of private property through the seizure of the productive forces. By this I mean to say that the
[Marxism-Thaxis] FW: The ABCs of Class Struggle By Aduku Addae
This Essay doesn't need an Introduction; or, rather, an introduction can be stated in a single word: Powerful! Lil Joe === The ABCs of Class Struggle By Aduku Addae http://www.nathanielturner.com/abcsofclassstruggle.htm Scientific Socialism is now just two dirty words. One dare not mention these words in polite circles. And, that is a grave pity, for, the organizations of the working class are in disarray and the struggle for social equity has stagnated because workers have foolishly abandoned five centuries of working peoples' history. Discarded along with this history are a unique anti-philosophy, a system of critical thought, a methodology of struggle, and the tools for analyzing the contemporary social drama. Assuredly, the worker's instinct will direct him/her to the rediscovery of Scientific Socialism. Working people have been so directed at other times in history. I am, however, impatient of the laborers' natural inclination to return to studying history and shaping human destiny through self-conscious action. So, at the risk of being impolite, perhaps to the extent of being unpopular, I would like to initiate a discussion about Scientific Socialism and the working class struggle in the age of "global" Capitalism. I am not proposing here to revive some tedious debate over "Marxist" minutiae. I am talking about getting back to basics. Soviet tactical exigencies gave birth to a miserable doctrine that posited the nationalist struggle as essentially anti-capitalist and a necessary antecedent to the working class revolution. This doctrine which held currency for the better part of a century showed itself to be hopelessly and definitively bankrupt in and through the implosion and fragmentation of the Soviet Union into nation states within the borders of which the worst robber baron capitalism has taken root. This, to say the least, is the essence of irony, for, it is towards the preservation of this Stalinist monstrosity (the Soviet Union), perceived by millions as the Mecca of socialism, that the doctrine was aimed. But of course people get what they work for, and the socialists of the world worked for world capitalism, from 1917 to 1991 under the cold direction of pragmatic Russian politicians. One would expect that the demise of the Soviet experiment would have signaled the beginning of a critical assessment of the history of the Fourth International with a view to laying a foundation for formulating a practical program of struggle for the fifth international under 21st century conditions. It seems, however, that the Reagan-Gorbachev onslaught not only destroyed the crumbling edifice of the Russian Gulag, under which the working people of Eastern Europe stood, but it sapped the intellectual energy and destroyed the imagination of the socialists worldwide. The silencing of the working class and the decade-old replacement of informed socialist discourse with the half-wit sound bites of liberalism in the world-sociopolitical debate is a natural consequence of generations of adherence to the "political line" which preached the gospel of "United Democratic Fronts" against "Imperialism." This doctrine, as we have seen in practice, is capitalist ideology in essence, all nationalist struggles being ultimately directed at fortifying the capitalist order of society. It has yielded the most repressive and corrupt regimes in Angola, The Congo, Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Somalia - - the list goes on ad infinitum. The most notable effect of this doctrine is that it sapped the energy of the working class in imaginary battles against a so-called imperialistic enemy. These were battles, however, which were in reality against the working class itself. This misguided doctrine of "anti-imperialist struggle" is at the foundation of historic errors made by the socialist worldwide. In Jamaica, for example, the workers movement with its strong grass-roots (genuinely proletarian) trade unionist structure was delivered over to the quasi-nationalist-brown-man-parties of Norman W. Manley and Alexander Bustamante. The genuine working class leaders such as G. S. Coombs were consigned to oblivion and a life of hardship and destitution. Socialist intellectuals Richard Hart and the Hill brothers were later expelled from the People's National Party (circa 1951). Thus the workers' unions came to be placed at the beck and call of generations of 'gangster' politicians in the fractious parliamentary politics which essentially reinforced and preserved the capitalist order of things. (That this took place at a time when the workers were in a superb position to gain ascendancy is, of course, unbelievable). The same thing happened in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and the rest of the Caribbean region. Ultimately this gave rise to the tragicomedy that was unveiled in little Grenada and
[Marxism-Thaxis] RE: S. Freud and Wilhelm Reich RE "Moral Values" and Repression, Neuroses
In Defence of Marxism- http://www.marxist.com Marxism and Psychoanalysis Notes on Wilhelm Reichs Life and Works By Alessandro D'Aloia This article was first published in Italian on the web site of the journal FalceMartello. The original Italian version can be found at Marxismo e psicoanalisi (la figura di Wilhelm Reich). Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was a Marxist, a psychologist and a scientist. His written works are invaluable resources in understanding the relationships existing between Marxism and psychoanalysis without requiring the special approach or knowledge of a student of psychology. His personal tragedies illustrate how a wide range of otherwise abstract issues can manifest and interconnect with ones life. His Education Neither Reichs historical role nor his works are recognized by most psychoanalysts, be they students, professionals or simple amateurs. This state of affairs enabled renowned intellectuals, such as those from the Frankfurt School, to easily pillage from his works (especially those from his most manifestly Marxist period) without ever giving a nod of acknowledgement to Reich and, moreover, without anyone ever realizing that fact. As a result, today most people who have an interest in psychology learn little more than Freuds classics. This leads to a lack of any knowledge of a number of major contributions made to psychology, such as Reichs, which are essential reading in order to fully understand psychoanalysis, its current contradictions, and its current class standpoint. Were these contributions more widely known, the so-called reformed Freudian postulates would be completely undermined and their reactionary implications would be exposed. Reichs most well-known work is The Sexual Revolution, published in Vienna in 1930. His scientific products have a much broader scope than Freuds, including important works such as: The Function of Orgasm, The Irruption of Coercive Sexual Morale, The Individual and the State, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, and Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich was an active member of the International Psychoanalytic Society (IPS), which had been founded by Freud. At the time of his first publishing (of The Function of Orgasm) he was widely acknowledged as the most gifted of all Freuds disciples. But even within that very work were, in essence, all of those elements of thought which were to clash with Freud during his second period. Reich agreed with Freud that sexual development was the fundamental origin of mental disorder. Together, they advocated the following positions: that most psychological activity was ruled by subconscious processes; that children quickly develop an active sexuality; that childrens sexual energy is the cause of most psychological developments; that infant sexuality is subsequently repressed and that this has major consequences for mental health; that morality does not derive from any supernatural being or set of rules, but that it is the product of imposed repressions against the sexuality of individuals as they progress in age from a child, to a teenager and finally to an adult. Reich went on, seeking to develop these ideas and to cohere them with concrete findings. He explored and exposed the relationships between sexual life and bourgeois morality, then proceeded to address in the same fashion the connection between bourgeois morality itself and the social and economic structures that produced and influenced it. Reich wrote that bourgeois sexual repression and its subconscious influences were the main causes of neuroses. He advanced the idea that a sexual life that was free from feelings of guilt would be the best therapy to treat those neuroses. He concluded by stating that such a liberation from shame and repression could only be realized through a non-authoritarian morality, which in turn would only come from an economic system that had been able to overcome and abolish repression. However, Freud was soon to alter the content of his thoughts, and in the process he would break with those ideas that Reich agreed with Freud upon and had taken as his starting point. In 1926, in the work, The Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiousness, Freud claimed that, ...[it is] anxiousness that produces repression and not, as I believed in the past, that repression produces anxiousness... This was a turn of 180 degrees. Freuds new theory claimed that anxiousness (sexual anxiety) was something endogenous, from within the individual psyche. Thus, Freud no longer considered it to be the by-product of external, social conditions. All external, objective, environmental factors were simply dropped from Freuds analyses. Freuds new body of ideas became a vehicle for all those theories that maintain that all human faults are inherent within the physical being of men and women (for example, the idea that there is a gene that causes criminality). This is in stark contradiction to the materialist conception
[Marxism-Thaxis] S. Freud and Wilhelm Reich RE "Moral Values" and Repression, Neuroses
In Defence of Marxism- http://www.marxist.com Marxism and Psychoanalysis Notes on Wilhelm Reichs Life and Works By Alessandro D'Aloia This article was first published in Italian on the web site of the journal FalceMartello. The original Italian version can be found at Marxismo e psicoanalisi (la figura di Wilhelm Reich). Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was a Marxist, a psychologist and a scientist. His written works are invaluable resources in understanding the relationships existing between Marxism and psychoanalysis without requiring the special approach or knowledge of a student of psychology. His personal tragedies illustrate how a wide range of otherwise abstract issues can manifest and interconnect with ones life. His Education Neither Reichs historical role nor his works are recognized by most psychoanalysts, be they students, professionals or simple amateurs. This state of affairs enabled renowned intellectuals, such as those from the Frankfurt School, to easily pillage from his works (especially those from his most manifestly Marxist period) without ever giving a nod of acknowledgement to Reich and, moreover, without anyone ever realizing that fact. As a result, today most people who have an interest in psychology learn little more than Freuds classics. This leads to a lack of any knowledge of a number of major contributions made to psychology, such as Reichs, which are essential reading in order to fully understand psychoanalysis, its current contradictions, and its current class standpoint. Were these contributions more widely known, the so-called reformed Freudian postulates would be completely undermined and their reactionary implications would be exposed. Reichs most well-known work is The Sexual Revolution, published in Vienna in 1930. His scientific products have a much broader scope than Freuds, including important works such as: The Function of Orgasm, The Irruption of Coercive Sexual Morale, The Individual and the State, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, and Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich was an active member of the International Psychoanalytic Society (IPS), which had been founded by Freud. At the time of his first publishing (of The Function of Orgasm) he was widely acknowledged as the most gifted of all Freuds disciples. But even within that very work were, in essence, all of those elements of thought which were to clash with Freud during his second period. Reich agreed with Freud that sexual development was the fundamental origin of mental disorder. Together, they advocated the following positions: that most psychological activity was ruled by subconscious processes; that children quickly develop an active sexuality; that childrens sexual energy is the cause of most psychological developments; that infant sexuality is subsequently repressed and that this has major consequences for mental health; that morality does not derive from any supernatural being or set of rules, but that it is the product of imposed repressions against the sexuality of individuals as they progress in age from a child, to a teenager and finally to an adult. Reich went on, seeking to develop these ideas and to cohere them with concrete findings. He explored and exposed the relationships between sexual life and bourgeois morality, then proceeded to address in the same fashion the connection between bourgeois morality itself and the social and economic structures that produced and influenced it. Reich wrote that bourgeois sexual repression and its subconscious influences were the main causes of neuroses. He advanced the idea that a sexual life that was free from feelings of guilt would be the best therapy to treat those neuroses. He concluded by stating that such a liberation from shame and repression could only be realized through a non-authoritarian morality, which in turn would only come from an economic system that had been able to overcome and abolish repression. However, Freud was soon to alter the content of his thoughts, and in the process he would break with those ideas that Reich agreed with Freud upon and had taken as his starting point. In 1926, in the work, The Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiousness, Freud claimed that, ...[it is] anxiousness that produces repression and not, as I believed in the past, that repression produces anxiousness... This was a turn of 180 degrees. Freuds new theory claimed that anxiousness (sexual anxiety) was something endogenous, from within the individual psyche. Thus, Freud no longer considered it to be the by-product of external, social conditions. All external, objective, environmental factors were simply dropped from Freuds analyses. Freuds new body of ideas became a vehicle for all those theories that maintain that all human faults are inherent within the physical being of men and women (for example, the idea that there is a gene that causes criminality). This is in stark contradiction to the materialist conceptio
[Marxism-Thaxis] Cloning in capitalist America
The so-called "ethical issue" is not whether or not cloning should occur, and progress: it should, but whether it should exist as capitalist capitalist commodity production, exploitation of both the new life-form and the 'customer'. Lil Joe === Cloned Cat Sale Generates Ethics Debate By Paul Elias The Associated Press Thursday, December 23, 2004; 12:09 AM SAN FRANCISCO -- The first cloned-to-order pet sold in the United States is named Little Nicky, a 9-week-old kitten delivered to a Texas woman saddened by the loss of a cat she had owned for 17 years. The kitten cost its owner $50,000 and was created from DNA from her beloved cat, named Nicky, who died last year. "He is identical. His personality is the same," the owner, Julie, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. Although she agreed to be photographed with her cat, she asked that her last name and hometown not be disclosed because she said she fears being targeted by groups opposed to cloning. Yet while Little Nicky, who was delivered two weeks ago, frolics in his new home, the kitten's creation and sale has reignited fierce ethical and scientific debate over cloning technology, which is rapidly advancing. The company that created Little Nicky, Sausalito-based Genetic Savings and Clone, said it hopes by May to have produced the world's first cloned dog -- a much more lucrative market than cats. While it is based in the San Francisco Bay area, the company's cloning work will be done at its new lab in Madison, Wis. Commercial interests already are cloning prized cattle for about $20,000 each, and scientists have cloned mice, rabbits, goats, pigs, horses -- and even the endangered banteng, a wild bull that is found mostly in Indonesia. Several research teams around the world, meanwhile, are racing to create the first cloned monkey. Aside from human cloning, which has been achieved only at the microscopic embryo stage, no cloning project has fueled more debate than the marketing plans of Genetic Savings and Clone. "It's morally problematic and a little reprehensible," said David Magnus, co-director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University. "For $50,000, she could have provided homes for a lot of strays." Animals rights activists complain that new feline production systems aren't needed because thousands of stray cats are euthanized each year for want of homes. Lou Hawthorne, Genetic Savings and Clone's chief executive, said his company purchases thousands of ovaries from spay clinics across the country. It extracts the eggs, which are combined with the genetic material from the animals to be cloned. Critics also complain that the technology is available only to the wealthy, that using it to create house pets is frivolous and that customers grieving over lost pets have unrealistic expectations of what they're buying. In fact, the first cat cloned in 2001 had a different coat from its genetic donor, underscoring that environment and other biological variables make it impossible to exactly duplicate animals. "The thing that many people do not realize is that the cloned cat is not the same as the original," said Bonnie Beaver, a Texas A&M animal behaviorist who heads the American Veterinary Medical Association, which has no position on the issue. "It has a different personality. It has different life experiences. They want Fluffy, but it's not Fluffy." Scientists also warn that cloned animals suffer from more health problems than their traditionally bred peers and that cloning is still a very inexact science. It takes many gruesome failures to produce just a single clone. Genetic Savings and Clone said its new cloning technique, developed by animal cloning pioneer James Robl has improved survival rates, health and appearance. The new technique seeks to condense and transfer only the donor's genetic material to a surrogate's egg instead of an entire cell nucleus. Between 15 percent and 45 percent of cloned cats born alive die within the first 30 days, Hawthorne said. But he said that range is consistent with natural births, depending on the breed of cat. Austin, Texas-based ViaGen Inc., which has cloned hundreds of cows, pigs and goats, also is experimenting with the new cloning technique. "The jury is still out, but the research shows it to be promising," company president Sara Davis said. "The technology is improving all the time." Genetic Savings and Clone has been behind the creation of at least five cats since 2001, including the first one created. It hopes to deliver as many as five more clones to customers who have paid the company's $50,000 fee. By the end of next year, it hopes to have cloned as many as 50 cats. The company has yet to turn a profit. © 2004 The Associated Press http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21226-2004Dec23
[Marxism-Thaxis] RE: How do we get the power to make real change?
Other than saying we need a strategy, unless I missed it, there is no strategy proposed. Saying that we need a strategy, and [correctly] critiquing the workers, socialist organizations for activism without having a strategy for assuming state power, does not explain, or present a plan (strategy) for actually achieving state power. Maybe I missed it, comrades, but how precisely do we move from protest against capitalism, and its state, to becoming the state - revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat - working class as ruling class with its proletarian government legislating the transfer of the productive forces and financial institutions from the private property of capitalist to the public property of the proletariat? I have presented a strategy, that you may or may not agree with (without effecting our class solidarity as comrades, comrade) e.g. see http://www.laborpartypraxis.org/ The point in this post, and my comments is not to draw sectarian lines of demarcation, but to generate a discussion in the trade unions, the Labor Party, and socialist organizations regarding the transition from protest activism to a concrete, empirically measurable strategy-movement by workers to win the battle of democracy, thus to at once negate the subordinate position of wage labor to capital, that is manifest in the economic, social and political subordination of the proletariat to the capitalist class and state. In science, there is no such thing as a failed experiment. Negation is just as much affirmation as negation - that is, analyzing what the prediction failed actualization is negating the error, as negation of negation engendered positive knowledge explaining the failure. So, similarly, neither I am egotistically wedded to my suggested strategy. But, it is a strategy suggesting procedures by which in the struggle for power the American working class can negate its status of object, exploited labor power by capitalists and politically manipulated by bourgeois class parties, emerging from itself in itself into subject, or class consciously a class for itself. I recognize the League as revolutionary in the vanguard, because it has in any case raised the strategic question that, if taken up by other labor and socialist groups will advance the workers and socialist (and anarchists) from activism to a class-conscious struggle for power. Lil Joe -- How do we get the power to make real change? How do we get the power to make real change? Americans (and others) have been protesting, striking, and demonstrating a bunch of people during the last 10 years. But what has it gotten us? The people who are being crushed by this system, and that includes most of us, need a government that will take responsibility for the well-being of the people. How are we going to get it? We have to have real political power to bring about the reforms we seek. To gain power we have to have a strategy, and that strategy has to revolve around ending the poverty that is spreading throughout our country. There were the protests against welfare "reform" in the late 90s. There were the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999. There have been all sorts of strikes, marches, and anti-globalization demonstrations in this country and elsewhere in the last few years. And this past summer a half-million people jammed the streets of New York during the Republican National Convention, protesting the growth of poverty, the destruction of civil liberties, the war, and environmental degradation, among other things. Jobs, pensions, wages, health care, the right to organize, the growth of the prison population, police brutality, homelessness, the rights of immigrant workers, the death penalty you name it, people have been organizing around it and demonstrating, striking and marching over it. Most of us are either being crushed by this system or are just getting by and are a paycheck away from being out in the street. The corporate-dominated government has turned its back on the people. We know what kind of change is needed. We know that in the end, we need a government that will take as its main responsibility guaranteeing the well-being of the people decent food, clothing, housing, health care, education and everything else we need to live full and cultured lives. This is our right as human beings. How are we going to get that government? The strikes, marches and demonstrations should continue, but they will accomplish nothing unless they are tied to a strategy. We cannot bring about the reforms we seek unless we have the political power to do so. We, the people, have to have a strategy for achieving political power. Then the government will truly be our government, and it will do our bidding. What is the strategy for
[Marxism-Thaxis] Question of the future
"The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity.*Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. (Marx) http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm -Original Message- From: Lil Joe [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, December 19, 2004 1:36 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Africa-Politics] RE: [ChatAfriK] Re: [abujaNig] Re: [GENOCIDE IN DAFUR ] Sudan What would I like to see? A more answerable question would be: What am I fighting for? A world of socialized global harmony of human interests, wherein the strife of One verses Other, in a "war of all against all", has been transcended by public social ownership of the productive forces ending commodity production, wage-labor and economic competition in which quality food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and so on is the right of every individual member of a society in which the all rounded, free development of each is the free development of all -- enabling a stateless society to emerge - without class distinctions or national borders - or even racial continental distinctions, as class and property in the productive forces would have been abolished, and with it the end of national boarders, armies, police, prisons and of all authoritarian hierarchal institutions. A world in which tanks will be displaced by tractors and all nuclear arsenals destroyed. What am I fighting for? A world in which every advance in science, technology and non-polluting natural power and perpetual universal education would continually reduce socially necessary labor time on one hand, and the chains of life-time economic divisions of labor on the other in that the perpetual reduction of socially necessary labor time required to reproduce the productive forces as well as consumer goods and services, to say ten hours a week per person, in a society in which everyone has mastered science, technology, medicine, and so on would mean that a person could perform social service ten hours per day per one week doing physics or astronomy, work in the community kitchen the next, perform the services of a doctor surgeon the next, do sanitation collection the next, and so on and on, and have the rest of the week free to play. Lil Joe -Original Message- From: DAVI JOSEPH [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, December 19, 2004 9:38 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Africa-Politics] RE: [ChatAfriK] Re: [abujaNig] Re: [GENOCIDE IN DAFUR ] Sudan Lil Joe, What would like to see global African do to better their lot in theis world. What is your vision for the people? Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT Yahoo! Groups Links a.. To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Africa-Politics/ b.. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] c.. Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] FW: Workers of the world are uniting
Workers of the world are uniting By Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (UK) Financial Times - December 7, 2004 http://news.ft.com/cms/s/414b186c-47f4-11d9-a0fd-0e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1. html The world trade union movement is poised to follow the lead of transnational companies, by extending its reach and throwing off the shackles of national boundaries. Unions are about to go global. It will come as news to some employers - and a shock to some of the anti-globalisers - but trade unions are in favour of globalisation. Most of the world's trade union movements are meeting this week in Japan to discuss an epoch-making strategy called "Globalising Solidarity". By the end of this week, we may well have ended 50 years of division in world trade unionism, abandoned a creativity-stifling global bureaucracy and refocused our core business on campaigning and recruitment. In recent years, trade unions have sometimes looked, and felt, outdated and sluggish, unable to respond as business "delocalises" and the free movement of capital and jobs makes it possible for companies to race for the bottom in terms of wages, employment conditions and questions of health and safety. Some have called this the "Wal-Mart-isation" of the workplace. Unions have made academic statements and sent symbolic deputations to address global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Labour Organisation and the World Trade Organisation. Bureaucrat has spoken unto bureaucrat while transnational corporations have spread around the globe, revolutionising world trade. Some of this is overstated. Despite comparatively little progress in the US, Wal-Mart has been dragged to negotiating tables from Canada to China by UNI, the global union federation for private service sector unions. Global union campaigns to encourage ethical sourcing for goods have been linked to this year's Athens Olympics, with the purpose of spreading decent labour standards right along the global supply chain. The campaign will be resurrected for the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006, the soccer World Cups in Germany and South Africa, and the Olympics in China. The Trades Union Congress is already discussing the issue with the 2012 London Olympics bid. The global trade union movement has learnt from the tactics of non- governmental organisations and is working more closely with them on corporate social responsibility. We increasingly recognise the power of consumers, shareholders and pension funds. This week's world congress of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) could take the bold next step. The ICFTU is the largest trade union confederation in the world, with 250 affiliates in 152 countries representing 148m trade union members. It was created in 1949 at the start of the cold war but has been split since then. The breakaway communist- backed confederation formed at the time is fading. This week's congress may decide to merge the two remaining global organisations - the ICFTU itself and the World Confederation of Labour, originally a Christian body. Such a merger would create a single free trade union movement around the world, from Australia to Zimbabwe, united by a common vision of social globalisation that works for people rather than the other way around. But, as so many companies have found out, mergers are not enough. The new global union federation would need to refocus on its core function. Its unique selling proposition would be the ability to mobilise a total of 174m members and attract more. In this way, global businesses, world institutions and governments would take the organisation seriously and would have to negotiate and reach agreements. Old committee structures, conferences and paperwork must go. In their place must come the ability to target key companies, sectors and campaigns. Guy Ryder, the ICFTU's popular and thoughtful general secretary, has had his work cut out securing agreement from often- embattled unions to give up the security of their bureaucracy. But he has the support of the TUC, the DGB in Germany, the AFL-CIO in the US, Cosatu in South Africa and many more. Each of these bodies, with their proud traditions, knows it cannot continue to champion the interests of its members if it does not operate internationally. Trade unions in every developed country face the challenge of delocalisation. We must not re-erect the barriers of protectionism but we must protect the livelihoods of workers at both ends of the delocalisation equation. British unions have done a lot in the financial services sector to ensure retraining at home and better wages in places such as India. We could do a lot more if our international organisations were focused on helping unions address the organising and bargaining challenges that delocalisation presents. But how much more could we achieve if employers faced the same union when they arrived in Mumbai as they did when they deserted Macclesfie
[Marxism-Thaxis] RE: [reparations and Black succession] AN OPEN LETTER TO MINISTER LOUIS FARRAKHAN
Ansari, Are you suggesting the American ruling class (capitalists) and United States government of the bureaucratic military state would yield significant portions of its territory -- say, the industrial East-Coast, and/or the industrial Midwest, or California, to African Americans? This is where Black worker's are concentrated. Do you honestly believe that the American capitalists and state will yield its industrial states, the productive forces and financial institutions in these areas to the Black working-class simply because the African Americans vote for succession? And the UN says so? Notwithstanding significant UN opposition, America invaded, and now brutally occupy Iraq. Americans are not even willing to give Iraq to the Iraqis, and must be forced out by armed struggle. It is not possible for African Americans, who are but 10-12% of the American population to wage armed struggle and win a war against the US armed forces seeking succession. You see what's happening in Fallujah, and in Iraq there are tens of millions of Iraqis supporting, if not participating in the armed resistance. A 'race war' in America would result of mass slaughter of African Americans, a single nuclear bomb on Detroit for instance. Nor should we seek 'race war', which in reality is not only not an option, but Black folk don't want it. We are not suicidal. Black Americans are primarily working class, and it is with other American workers that Blacks must unite, based on common class objectives. While only 10-12% of the American population, Blacks are 30%of organized labor. The 'common objective' ought to be the formulation of an American labor party based financially on trade unions, and socially in the working class as a whole, from which the Black as well as White capitalists, and members of the Democratic as well as the Republican party, are excluded. The common objective of a working class party has to be the winning of the battle of democracy, legislating a working class agenda -- up to and including the expropriation of capitalist class property, the productive forces and financial institutions. By uniting the class, without regard to race, gender, religion or ethnicity, winning the battle of democracy means becoming the majority in the House of Representatives, thus legislating the transfer of the productive forces and financial institutions from the private property of capitalists to the public property of the working class. The issue of racial reperations will thus become mute, since public ownership of the productive forces, with workers self-management of industry and agriculture will have as its economic objective the elemination of capitalist commodity production and wage labor, thus ending markets and money. A Labor dominated House of Representatives must become the government - abolishing the Senate, Presidency and Supreme Court, and crushing the existing bureaucratic-military state, abolishing the Pentagon and standing army. Of course the capitalists, and the military officer corp will not give up without a fight. But, having won the battle of Democracy, the labor dominated House of Representatives would be in the political position, and have objective moral authority to call on the working class rank and file of the armed forces to mutiny on the side of the House of Representatives. Lil Joe ps: check out http://www.laborpartypraxis.org/ -Original Message- From: Ansari Mustafa [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2004 11:59 AM Subject: [Africa-Politics] Re: [unioNews] AN OPEN LETTER TO MINISTER LOUIS FARRAKHAN As-Salaam-Alaikum, Minister Louis Farrakhan and Minister Al-Arkam I join in the discussion and the call for unity of Minister Al-Arkam. I too am respectfully oppossed to another march, simply because the next day we are in the same position. Instead I would suggest a strategy that takes us from servitude and oppression to liberation called a "Plebiscite". I do so because it is apparent that we have the same goal in mind, which is a territorial inter-succession from the U.S. Accordingly, the strategy of a UN monitored 'democratic' vote in all 50 states will take us from A to B. The processes and the result of the vote will 'unify' any difference[If any] that we have in approach. As you know the Muslims [Point 4 of what the Muslim wants] for his brother and himself has been for over 40 years these types of self-controlled territories. Likewise, the African Indians have long sought these type of territories. Similarly the Africans in America who are Tri-Racial and indigenous are entitled to these lands as reparative tithes. In this regards, I join Minister Al-Arkam and Silas Muhammad to urge you most respectfully to join us in proceeding out of America to the UN. I do so out of no secret or hidden agenda of my own to undermine your undying efforts to bring our people togethe
[Marxism-Thaxis] Workers of the world are uniting
Workers of the world are uniting By Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (UK) Financial Times - December 7, 2004 http://news.ft.com/cms/s/414b186c-47f4-11d9-a0fd-0e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1. html The world trade union movement is poised to follow the lead of transnational companies, by extending its reach and throwing off the shackles of national boundaries. Unions are about to go global. It will come as news to some employers - and a shock to some of the anti-globalisers - but trade unions are in favour of globalisation. Most of the world's trade union movements are meeting this week in Japan to discuss an epoch-making strategy called "Globalising Solidarity". By the end of this week, we may well have ended 50 years of division in world trade unionism, abandoned a creativity-stifling global bureaucracy and refocused our core business on campaigning and recruitment. In recent years, trade unions have sometimes looked, and felt, outdated and sluggish, unable to respond as business "delocalises" and the free movement of capital and jobs makes it possible for companies to race for the bottom in terms of wages, employment conditions and questions of health and safety. Some have called this the "Wal-Mart-isation" of the workplace. Unions have made academic statements and sent symbolic deputations to address global institutions such as the World Bank, the International Labour Organisation and the World Trade Organisation. Bureaucrat has spoken unto bureaucrat while transnational corporations have spread around the globe, revolutionising world trade. Some of this is overstated. Despite comparatively little progress in the US, Wal-Mart has been dragged to negotiating tables from Canada to China by UNI, the global union federation for private service sector unions. Global union campaigns to encourage ethical sourcing for goods have been linked to this year's Athens Olympics, with the purpose of spreading decent labour standards right along the global supply chain. The campaign will be resurrected for the Turin Winter Olympics in 2006, the soccer World Cups in Germany and South Africa, and the Olympics in China. The Trades Union Congress is already discussing the issue with the 2012 London Olympics bid. The global trade union movement has learnt from the tactics of non- governmental organisations and is working more closely with them on corporate social responsibility. We increasingly recognise the power of consumers, shareholders and pension funds. This week's world congress of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) could take the bold next step. The ICFTU is the largest trade union confederation in the world, with 250 affiliates in 152 countries representing 148m trade union members. It was created in 1949 at the start of the cold war but has been split since then. The breakaway communist- backed confederation formed at the time is fading. This week's congress may decide to merge the two remaining global organisations - the ICFTU itself and the World Confederation of Labour, originally a Christian body. Such a merger would create a single free trade union movement around the world, from Australia to Zimbabwe, united by a common vision of social globalisation that works for people rather than the other way around. But, as so many companies have found out, mergers are not enough. The new global union federation would need to refocus on its core function. Its unique selling proposition would be the ability to mobilise a total of 174m members and attract more. In this way, global businesses, world institutions and governments would take the organisation seriously and would have to negotiate and reach agreements. Old committee structures, conferences and paperwork must go. In their place must come the ability to target key companies, sectors and campaigns. Guy Ryder, the ICFTU's popular and thoughtful general secretary, has had his work cut out securing agreement from often- embattled unions to give up the security of their bureaucracy. But he has the support of the TUC, the DGB in Germany, the AFL-CIO in the US, Cosatu in South Africa and many more. Each of these bodies, with their proud traditions, knows it cannot continue to champion the interests of its members if it does not operate internationally. Trade unions in every developed country face the challenge of delocalisation. We must not re-erect the barriers of protectionism but we must protect the livelihoods of workers at both ends of the delocalisation equation. British unions have done a lot in the financial services sector to ensure retraining at home and better wages in places such as India. We could do a lot more if our international organisations were focused on helping unions address the organising and bargaining challenges that delocalisation presents. But how much more could we achieve if employers faced the same union when they arrived in Mumbai as they did when they deserted Macclesfie
[Marxism-Thaxis] Sandinista's win local elections
SandinistaIntroductory Comments by Aduku Addea and Lil Joe
Sandinista's win local elections
The Reuters LA TIMES article, below categorizes the Sandinistas as a "left"
organization. This is a misleading appellation. In the American press, the
term "Left" and "leftist" is a vague reference to a broad spectrum including
anyone from the Democratic Leadership Council of the Democratic Party
(Clinton, Gore, Lieberman) and the Democrat's Blacks and "progressives" (the
CBC, Jesse Jackson, Michael Moore) here in the USA; to Blaire, Jospan,
Schroeder &C ("third way") of Europe and Chavez and Lulu in Latin America.
The political and social history of the Sandistinas in Nicaragua and the
Farabundo Marti Liberation Front in El Salvador are in the same mold as
Cuban guerillas that fought in the company of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara
were. They are socialists and communists. They engaged in an intense
political struggle, which culminated in armed struggle against the Samosa
regime. After the victory over the Samosa regime they were embroiled in a
protracted struggle against US military intervention, and were subsequently
defeated and forced to call elections that brought the Quislings of US
imperialism to power, in a situation reminiscent of Latortue in Haiti and
Allawi in Iraq in the present context.
The experience of the New Jewel Movement in Grenada is also one of
socialists coming to power in the same Caribbean/Meso-American region who
were similarly overthrown by US military forces.
The return of the Sandinistas to ascendancy in participatory politics is a
direct consequence of the comprehensive failure of the liberalization and
free market policies instituted by the regimes that succeeded the
Sandinistas. It is an indication of the deepening social and economic
crisis, which has gripped Latin America and the Caribbean. If the
Sandinistas are going to attempt the route to power via electoral politics
they have to pay close attention to the lessons from Grenada and begin from
the outset to build organizational structures for sustained struggle against
the backlash from the bourgeois and military elements. Electoral victory is
merely the prelude to the real struggle. A picture of what is to come in
Nicaragua bears a direct resemblance to the class wars that is taking place
in Haiti.
What is taking place in socio-political struggles in Nicaragua is in a
significant manner connected to and influenced by the struggles of the
Palestinians and Iraqis whose brave resistance is causing US and Israeli
forces to become bogged down in unwanted trench warfare. The military
conflict in Iraq is having seismic consequences on the world scale. The
downtrodden workers and peasants are reawakening.
We dispense with all the rubbish about "the left", as presented in the
American media. It is in fact a Socialist workers and peasants movement
directed at class power, the creation of a workers and peasants state! This
is most important. From the position of political power, whether won on the
battlefields in civil war or by elections (that may in fact lead to civil
war engendered by a capitalist class rebellion) are issues of strategy
rather than of principle.
The economic emancipation of the working class is the task of the working
classes themselves; this economic emancipation is the objective, to which
every political movement is subordinate as means. Just as guerrilla warfare
in civil wars is class politics with bloodshed so electoral politics is
class warfare without bloodshed.
The workers and peasants that voted for Sandinistas know they are voting in
their class interests in class war insomuch as in the 70s and 80s the
Sandinistas were identified as a Marxist lead Socialist party.
In this important distinction, the Sandinistas history is that of a
revolutionary, socialist workers movement as distinct from the present
bourgeois nationalist, Bonapartist regimes of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and
Brazil's Luis Inacio Lula da Silva. This is only to establish the history of
the movement in Nicaragua. It is not to say, however, that the Sandinistas
are the same in this their second regime as in the first keeping in mind
the differences in the first and second
Manley governments (in Jamaica) in response to changed conditions. It can be
said definitively, though, that the Sandinistas are not of the ilk of the
leftist in the USA.
latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-nica9nov09,1,7431212.sto
ry?coll=la-headlines-world
>From Reuters
November 9, 2004
MANAGUA, Nicaragua Nicaragua's leftist opposition
Sandinista party, which fought a civil war with U.S.-
backed rebels when it ruled in the 1980s, made strong
gains in weekend elections, taking control of almost
all major cities.
Results released Monday showed the Sandinistas handing
a heavy defeat to the ruling party, w
[Marxism-Thaxis] Documentary Indicts U.S. as Co-Defendant with Saddam
Our media will not show what is being seen in France, Canada, Japan and Australia - From FranceNew documentary indicts US as co-defendant with Saddam By Gina Doggett Agence France-Presse PARIS - What if Saddam Hussein were to have a genuinely fair trial? That is the central question of a hard-hitting documentary to be aired on French television Tuesday. Michel Despratx of France's Canal Plus television teamed with independent Canadian filmmaker Barry Lando to produce "The Trial of Saddam Hussein, the Trial You'll Never See." The 43-minute film begins with frank and graphic highlights of Saddam's brutal reign. But it soon delves into a history of collusion going back to the cataclysmic Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when Washington, fully aware that Saddam was using mustard and nerve gas against Iranian civilians, calculated that it was better to keep backing him as the lesser of two evils. "There are your options. Neither one palatable," says retired Air Force Captain Rick Fontana in the film. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is shown in a clip from Iraqi television shaking hands with Saddam in 1983 when he was President Ronald Reagan's special representative for the Middle East. Shown the clip 20 years later, Rumsfeld muses: "Where did you get this video? ... Isn't that interesting? There I am." Copies of the documentary have been ordered by television outlets in Canada, Japan and Australia, but "American stations are not interested," Despratx told AFP. One of the most notorious episodes of Saddam's rule was the gassing of 5,000 Kurds in northern Halabja, an atrocity which drew little international condemnation. In the heat of the Iran-Iraq war, news programmes mentioned it without naming Saddam, leaving open the suggestion that the Iranians were responsible. "That was the diplomatic language of the time," said former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas. "The West closed its eyes a little bit... Iraq was a strategic country for the balance of the region," adds Peter Galbraith, top adviser to the Senate foreign relations committee at the time. "Nobody wanted to upset Saddam Hussein, and if Kurds getting gassed was something that would cause troubles, neither the Reagan nor the Bush administration wanted to hear a word about it." Another part of the film deals with the numerous companies which supplied Saddam with chemical weapons. "Our estimation is that Germany supplied far more than anyone else to Iraq's chemical weapons programme, but the French certainly were important suppliers," says Gary Milhollin, an expert on arms proliferation. The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait provides another scathing indictment of the US collusion with Saddam. The film shows a meeting between then-US Ambassador April Glaspie and Saddam eight days before the invasion in which she assures him that Washington will take "no position in the event of any border conflict between Iraq and Kuwait." Four months later, the United States and its allies unleashed the first Gulf War, removing Saddam from Kuwait but leaving him in Baghdad to dispense new terror to his people, killing 300,000 Shiites who rose up against him at the encouragement of the first President George Bush, broadcast repeatedly on Iraq Radio. In the north, the Kurds also rose up, only to be crushed once again. Galbraith says in the film: "Having called for the uprising the Bush administration then decided they didn't want it to succeed." The damaging consequences of 12 years of international sanctions against Iraq, during which at least half a million children under five died of disease, according to the UN childrens fund (UNICEF), are also examined in the film. The deliberate destruction of Iraq's water system during the war led to outbreaks of typhoid and other waterborne diseases, and the embargo prevented Iraq from importing the parts needed to repair the system, the film reveals. Tuesday, October 26, 2004 -- Post: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]; Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]; Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] List Owner: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Disclaimer: Please note that views and opposing views expressed in Africa-Politics forum are the rights of individual contributors. Mutual respect for people's views is the corner stone of our forums. Freedom of speech and expression is our guiding principle. -- To Subscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Africa-Politics is a division of AfriK Network Groups a network of Email-based forums that are professionally managed by Fastrac Systems a subsidiary of FASTRAC Corporation LLC based in Silver Spring, MD, U.S.A. Please visit http://www.ChatAfriK.com to join our Web-based forums and take the advantage of our other internet services. Please help invite your friends and peers around the world to join us. We thank you for your patronage. Martin Akind
[Marxism-Thaxis] Commentary on the Bush/Kerry Presidential Debate (Part II)
Correction Re Commentary on the Bush/Kerry Presidential Debate (Part I): = This is a continuation of the Comments posted on the Bush/Kerry debate, yesterday. I need however to correct/ clarify a couple things accidentally posted in yesterday's post: Where I wrote -- "The war in Iraq is not in a war of conquest to make Middle Asia safe of American oil companies and provide contracts to Halliburton to rebuild the countries that American troops destroyed." This was an obviously typographical error. What I meant to write is that: The war in Iraq is in a war of conquest to make Middle Asia safe of American oil companies, and provide contracts to the Halliburton's to rebuild countries that American troops destroyed. Lil Joe Today's Post: Commentary on the Bush/Kerry Presidential Debate (Part II) by Lil Joe Lehrer: Senator Kerry, 90 seconds. Kerry: The president just talked about Iraq as a center of the war on terror. Iraq was not even close to the center of the war on terror before the president invaded it. The president made the judgment to divert forces from under Gen. Tommy Franks from Afghanistan before the Congress even approved it, to begin to prepare to go to war in Iraq. Lil Joe's comment: There is some truth to this. It is not to be forgotten, that the so-called War on Terror is in actuality a war in Middle Asia/North Africa, in part to solidify US control of the oil regions in that part of the world, but also to defeat armies and regimes that threaten Israeli military supremacy in the region as well. Thus, Israel wants the US to invade and occupy not only Iraq and Afghanistan but Iran and Syria as well. Kerry: And he rushed to war in Iraq without a plan to win the peace. Now that is not the judgment that a president of the United States ought to make. You don't take America to war unless you have a plan to win the peace. You don't send troops to war without the body armor that they need. Lil Joe's comment: It is significant that Kerry mentions "win the peace", and in connection with it "body armor". "Win the peace"! Doublethink! By "win the peace", Kerry means the same as Bush says more honestly: "win the war". By win the peace Kerry means suppress the resistance: "The morning after his encounter with the President, he took up just this issue even more emphatically, responding to Bush criticisms by saying: 'Well, Mr. President, nobody's talking about leaving, nobody's talking about wilting and wavering. We're talking about winning and getting the job done right.' " http://www.progressivetrail.org/articles/041004Engelhardt.shtml?mail=04 Thus, "getting the job done", like "win the peace" is Newspeak euphemism for suppress the resistance, thus the "job" is the job of American troops is to kill Iraqis. Thus, the only real difference between Bush and Kerry on the issue of war and repression in Iraq is the rhetoric. What the American labor movement and left, tied to the Democratic Party, want to hear from Kerry is his promise of Peace in the Middle East, withdrawing American troops from the Iraqi "quagmire". This delusion is necessary for them to justify campaigning for the Democratic Party to win the Presidency. What American imperialists and Zionists recognize, however, is that Kerry is telling them that "peace", and therefore pullout will be achievable only after the conquest of Iraq, by American soldiers, has succeeded in suppressing the resistance. The American labor movement and leftist individuals and organizations that are supporting the Kerry bid for Presidency are, inadvertently or consciously, by campaigning for Kerry are in actuality supporting US imperialism in its wars of conquests in Middle Asia. Kerry: I've met kids in Ohio, parents in Wisconsin, places, Iowa, where they're going out on the Internet to get the state-of-the-art body gear to send to their kids. Some of them got them for birthday presents. I think that's wrong. Humvees, 10,000 out of 12,000 Humvees that are over there aren't armored. And you go visit some of those kids in the hospitals today who were maimed because they don't have the armament. Lil Joe's comment: Anecdotes don't substitute for logical arguments based on empirical data, parables about personal encounters with unnamed "kids in Ohio" and "parents in Wisconsin" purchasing "state-of-the-art body gear to send to their kids" as birthday presents being "wrong" is irrelevant demagogic rhetoric. This demagogy does not hide the fact that it was, in part due to Kerry, Edwards and other Democrats in Congress voting for the war that these American "kids" (soldiers!) are in harms way in Iraq. Had the Democrats in Congress, includ
[Marxism-Thaxis] Commentary on the Bush/Kerry Presidential Debate (Part I)
Commentary on the Bush/Kerry Presidential Debate (Part I) By Lil Joe _ Lehrer: Good evening from the University of Miami Convocation Center in Coral Gables, Fla. I'm Jim Lehrer of The News Hour on PBS, and I welcome you to the first of the 2004 presidential debates between President George W. Bush, the Republican nominee, and Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee. These debates are sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates. Tonight's will last 90 minutes following detailed rules of engagement worked out by representatives of the candidates. I have agreed to enforce their rules on them. The umbrella topic is foreign policy and homeland security, but the specific subjects were chosen by me, the questions were composed by me, the candidates have not been told what they are nor has anyone else. Good evening, Mr. President, Senator Kerry. As determined by a coin toss, the first question goes to you, Senator Kerry. You have two minutes. Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States? Kerry: Yes, I do. But before I answer further, let me thank you for moderating. I want to thank the University of Miami for hosting us. And I know the president will join me in welcoming all of Florida to this debate. You've been through the roughest weeks anybody could imagine. Our hearts go out to you, and we admire your pluck and perseverance. I can make America safer than President Bush has made us. And I believe President Bush and I both love our country equally, but we just have a different set of convictions about how you make America safe. I believe America is safest and strongest when we are leading the world and when we are leading strong alliances. I'll never give a veto to any country over our security, but I also know how to lead those alliances. This president has left them in shatters across the globe, and we're now 90 percent of the casualties in Iraq and 90 percent of the costs. I think that's wrong, and I think we can do better. I have a better plan for homeland security. I have a better plan to be able to fight the war on terror by strengthening our military, strengthening our intelligence, by going after the financing more authoritatively, by doing what we need to do to rebuild the alliances, by reaching out to the Muslim world, which the president has almost not done, and beginning to isolate the radical Islamic Muslims, not have them isolate the United States of America. I know I can do a better job in Iraq where I have a plan to have a summit with all of the allies, something this president has not yet achieved, not yet been able to do to bring people to the table. We can do a better job of training the Iraqi forces to defend themselves and I know that we can do a better job of preparing for elections. All of these and especially homeland security, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Lehrer: Ninety-second rebuttal. Bush: I too thank the University of Miami and say our prayers are with the good people of this state who've suffered a lot. Sept. 11 changed how America must look at the world. And since that day our nation has been on a multi-pronged strategy to keep our country safer. We've pursued Al Qaeda wherever Al Qaeda tries to hide. Seventy-five percent of known Al Qaeda leaders have been brought to justice. The rest of them know we're after them. We've upheld the doctrine that said if you harbor a terrorist you're equally as guilty as the terrorist - the Taliban no longer in power, 10 million people have registered to vote in Afghanistan in the upcoming presidential election. In Iraq we saw a threat and we realized that after Sept. 11 we must take threats seriously before they fully materialize. Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell. America and the world are safer for it. We continue to pursue our policy of disrupting those who proliferate weapons of mass destruction. Libya has disarmed. The A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice. And as well we're pursuing a strategy of freedom around the world. Because I understand free nations will reject terror. Free nations will answer the hopes and aspirations of their people. Free nations will help us achieve the peace we all want. Lil Joe Comment: This format is itself defective, in that it by limiting the answer to questions to two minutes engender quantity as the determining factor of quality, what Americans call "substance". But, only in passing. The question was itself jingoistic and disingenuous propaganda, in that it assumes as evident that which the debaters should have been asked to prove -- that is whether or not 9/11 was a "terrorist attack"! The issue is not the type the attack assumed, but the reasons behind it: What motivated 19 men to sacrifice their lives in guerrilla attacks on American economic, political and military tar
[Marxism-Thaxis] Article on Chavez
Introduction to an Article on Chavez by Lil Joe [EMAIL PROTECTED] What is absent from the article by Gott, below, is an economic analysis of relations of production in, and therefore class formations of Venezuela, and their mutually exclusive class interests, and thus political combat between them. Gott's article superficially dividing Venezuela's society into "rich and poor" is without content, politically hollow rhetoric. Saying there is an opposition of "rich and poor" explains nothing. There has always been, since the origin of private property and exchange "rich and poor" -- e.g. wealthy political elites and priestly castes and poor farmers and workers in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt; wealthy patricians and poor plebeians in Rome; rich aristocrats and poor peasants in Feudal Europe. And so on into rich capitalists, entertainers and politicians and poor proletarians, farmers, and unemployed classes in contemporary U.S. In Venezuela the growing lumpinproletariat is increasing from the failing businesses of the petty-bourgeoisie, migrants from the countryside, as well as increasing unemployed workers, making the urban poor 60% of the Venezuelan population. The lumpinproletariat historically plays a role in revolutions when swept up into the revolutionary fever -- joining the proletarian sections of sans culottes in the bourgeois-democratic French Revolution; but also the opposite e.g. in Italy and Germany joining forces with the fascists and nazis against proletarian revolutions. Unlike the bourgeoisie and proletariat, whose positions in production and production relation's cements each into a class in opposition to the other, the destitute lumpinproletariat is each man and women must hustle for himself or herself. It is this destitute lumpinproletariat that is Chavez social base. Their loyalty is based on what the Chavez government of the state can provide them in terms of material benefits. It therefore makes perfect sense that he is taking profits from oil to provide the Venezuelan lumpinproletariat with bread and circus! This is only a brief indication of the kind of class analysis of Venezuela that is needed. The "progressives" in the United States and Social-democrat leftists in Europe are enthralled with Chavez. But, they go too far when they classify him as a "revolutionary", because revolution is an act of violence whereby once class takes the productive forces from another, thereby destroying the existing economic order and radically changing the mode and relations of production. One would expect that Richard Gott would have told us not only that Chavez ran for office "armed with little more than revolutionary rhetoric and a moderate social-democratic programme", but what he has achieved in this "revolution". In Venezuela only a sweeping, radical proletarian revolution can win the trade union rank in file into the Revolution, breaking them from the union bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie. By sweeping and radical I mean a worker's state power turning the industries, transportation and banking sectors over to armed factory committees and agriculture over to armed peasants associations, and fully integrating Black and Indian workers and peasants into the revolutionary economy as workers and peasants. This would bring the Venezuelan working-class including the rank and file of the trade union opposition into the socialist revolution. As it now stands the trade unions are opposed to the anti-labor elements in the "Chavez revolution", including wanting to Peron-like bring the trade unions under government control if not management. This has resulted in trade unionists forming an unholy alliance with the bourgeoisie in street demonstrations against the Chavez government. Thus, both the bourgeoisie and U.S. operatives against the government are manipulating the unions. Yet, Chavez's government has not even completely nationalized the economy, but in actuality leaving the major productive forces as private property of the foreign investors and the native bourgeoisie. The oil industry was already nationalized as a sector, but it is also so in Mexico, Iraq, Libya and other 3rd world oil based economies. In a capitalist country, where the means of production and finance are the property of the bourgeoisie, nationalized industries such as rail, coal and oil only serves the bourgeoisie by making the workers share the costs (taxation) and the bourgeoisie benefit by gains. Venezuela under Chavez, economically and his rhetoric aside is no different than any other capitalist 3rd world country with nationalized sectors. Nationalizations, the creation of state-monopoly capitalism are only the first stage in communistic proletarian revolutions. Bourgeois regimes also nationalize key industrial sectors. Proletarian revolutions require the working-c
[Marxism-Thaxis] Discussing Sudan #2
Discussing Sudan #2 by Lil Joe [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Anglo-American aggressions and occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Israeli pogroms in Palestine are on the verge of extending into Africa, Sudan. British and American politicians and media propagandists are presently galvanizing hostility to the "Arab" government of Sudan. We are examining why this is so. It context of their murderous history and current policies in Middle Asia and North Africa it is obviously not because they give a damn about the tragedy in Sudan but are opportunistically exploiting this tragedy. Rather, before a war is waged, the American people are brought on board Propaganda campaigns to demonize individuals in the government of the country in its sights as a tyrant, dictator, and extremist, a madman and a monster has always been the role of the U.S. politicians and its media. As the Zionist state of American and European Jewish settler-colonists as such are rejected by the peoples of the Middle Asia/North Africa region, the Zionist state of Israel is finding it more and more impossible to terrorize a region populated by a hundred million Muslims and Arabs. Israel has been finding it more the necessary to turn to the United States to fight on its and its own behalf in the region. But, this can be sold to the American public only by first, or at least at the same time, demonizing the Arab (if not all) Muslims. This is especially important with respect to Arab and Muslim leaders of the frontline states that are resisting regional Israeli and U.S. domination and reign of terror by brutal genocidal occupations. Sudan's political commitment to Palestinian liberation organizations and of the resistance movements in Palestinian on one hand, and its [Sudan's] political opposition to the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq on the other, has resulted in five decades of American funding and Arming Israel's interventions against the Sudanese government. However, American -- together with British -- politicians and propagandist have a lack of credibility in the world, and even in their own countries in consequence of the lies and slander delivered through the medias, and by Cook and in particular Colin Powell to the U.N. Thus the British and American government's strategy of demonizing Sudan's government as "genocidal racist Arabs", has been handed over to the so-called NGOs such as "Human Rights Watch" and Amnesty International on one hand, and the African-American Democrats of the so-called Congressional Black Caucus on the other. The so-called "NGOs" are tax exempt and to that extent are indirectly government funded. To articulate their opposition to the Sudan government as "humane", and even from compassion for "Black folk", the Democratic Party has assigned its Congressional Blacks to form an alliance with Republican members of Congress and fundamentalist preachers to excise the war in Sudan from its Middle Asian/North African context of genocidal pogroms on Arab peoples. In connection with their murderous voting history regarding U.S. Middle Asia and North Africa policies it is obvious that the Democrat's Congressional Black Causes' show staging of anti-Arab Sudan protests is not because they give a damn about the tragedy in Sudan but are opportunistically exploiting this tragedy. Sudan, the same as Iraq has provided safe haven for Palestinian liberation organizations, and political support to the intifada. The United States government, while using "protection of the Blacks" as an altruistic ideological ploy to demonize the Land of the Black's leadership as "Arabs", the real deal is to take out yet another Palestinian ally against Zionist occupation. What is amazing is how so many people who daily witness Israeli occupation troops genocidal pogroms in West Bank and Gaza, and the bloody American occupation of Iraq can believe the demagogic compassionate. The term Sudan is translated "Land of the Blacks". In Gale Daggs' Comments on Sudan she pointed out: All the people of Sudan are practically the same skin color although in the North there maybe more variation in skin colors than in other parts of Sudan due to Arab invasion about the 8th century. Although there are many languages in Sudan, Arabic is spoken in all parts of the country. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laborpartypraxis/message/6681 The conflicts in Sudan are not consequence of racism of Arabs, but economic based ethnic conflicts. Why Khartoum wants a war in Darfur Friday July 30th, 2004. Ali Ali-Dinar, The Parliamentary Brief July 2004 -- Since the early 1970s, Darfur has been affected by waves of climatic changes which have forced some groups to migrate. Zaghawa moved from their homeland (Dar Zaghawa) to settle in the lands of the Fur, Arabs,
[Marxism-Thaxis] FW: Essay on Imperialism, Capitalism and Class Struggle Politics
Preface I wrote this is an Essay originally to distinguish Marxian economic theory of capitalism and its self-expansion engendering competition between national capitals, resulting in automation, unemployment, declining rates of average profits, surplus capital, surplus population and war; and contrasting this to Lenin's theory of imperialism as monopoly capitalism, colonialism and war. Marxian economic locates the basic problems in capitalist commodity production by wage labor in production, where labor is objectified and workers are exploited whereas Leninist economics locate the dynamics in the markets focusing on prices. Marxian economics therefore focuses on the industrial proletariat expropriations of the productive forces -- that is workers in industrialized technologically advanced democracies winning the battle of democracy and legislating the transfer of productive forces from the private ownership of capitalists to public property of workers, ending commodity production and wage-labor, whereas the Leninists focus on the predominately peasant based less developed 3rd world countries fighting against "imperialism", as the so-called "main contradiction". However, as dialectical reasoning engenders its own logic the piece took on it's own life. The restatements of Marxism economic critiques and critique of Lenin's is still in the piece, originally titled "Imperialism and War", but has become subordinate to the arguments for proletarian class politics and revolution in industrialized capitalist democracies. Lil Joe -- Introduction: Modern productive forces and advanced technology is daily creating a uniform international working-class. Presently, it is a global class in-itself -- that is, workers or proletarians are a multi-ethnic cosmopolitan class of property-less individuals that everywhere must sell their labor power to ascertain the wherewithal (money) to purchase means of subsistence. However, in the more advanced industrial capitalist democracies in Western Europe the political praxis of sharpening class struggle is engendering what is becoming class-conscious, a class for-itself. By "class for-itself" I understand self-organized economic units, merging in the formation of a class based, self-organized and self-financed independent political organization engaged in struggles to win state power, to by that political power transfer the productive forces from the private property of capitalists managed in the interests of capitalist profitability, to public property managed by the workers themselves, in the interest of humanity. The proletariat is based on wage labor, exploited by capital. By the transfer of the productive forces from private capitalists to public property with production and distribution oriented to reproduction of humanity, the relationship of wage-labor and capital will be abolished and thereupon the abolition of class structures throughout society. Today the Argentine and the Haitian proletariat, and the Zimbabwean peasants are in the frontier barricades of the world revolution of workers and toilers. there they lack the material economic conditions, the numerical dominance of a huge industrial proletariat necessary to carry through a working-class, communist revolutionary expropriation of the productive forces. The American workers have the industrial and numerical capacity to lead this world-communistic revolution, but lack the class-consciousness, and political independence required to transform potentiality of a class in-itself into the revolutionary actuality of a self-moving revolutionary class for-itself. It is the European proletariat, in particular the German, British, French and Italian industrial workers that have the numbers, and the class-consciousness to carry through expropriations of the property of the European bourgeoisie. The European proletariat also has the history, and presently, the class political independence, socialist, labor, and communist parties that have won the battle of democracy in their respective countries. Though the French, British, German, Italian and more recently Spanish workers have, in their respective countries, voted in Labor Party, Socialist and Communist Party governments, objectively, and consciously voting for socialist expropriations of the productive forces, once in power, these parties refuse to legislate the expropriation of and transferring these productive forces from the private property of capitalists to the public property of organized labor. The crisis in the socialist and communist worker's movement is how to break the mass base of the labor, socialist and communist parties from their conservative leadership. The workers must clean themselves in the crucible of proletarian praxis -- by practical-critical, revolutionizing practice overthrow the chai
[Marxism-Thaxis] RE: Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 7, Issue 1
Brilliant! The U.S. defeat in Fallujah (posted by Jose G. Perez on Marxmail) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain With the withdrawal of American marines from their most advanced positions in the city of Fallujah, the United States is recognizing its first great defeat of the Iraq War. Late in March, U.S. Marines, which had recently taken over the Fallujah area from a withdrawing army unit, staged a provocative raid into the City, which had been largely left alone for months by the U.S. commanders due to lack of forces. This was part of an overall escalation of aggressive actions by the U.S. occupation, including the banning of an Islamic paper and a kangaroo puppet court indictment of the Shia cleric that paper represented. What the United States forces were attempting to do was to retake the political-military offensive against the growing insurgency basing itself on what it imagined was a strengthened political position based on the agreement of Iraqi collaborationists to the rules for a quisling "sovereign" government after June 30. This, in turn, would set the stage for consolidating U.S. domination under "sovereign" control. At the end of March, in part in reaction to this raid, insurgent forces ambushed and the population --especially the youth--then lynched four heavily armed ostensible U.S. soldiers of fortune, who, for some reason that's not been explained, were driving through what is essentially a town where Iraqi anti-occupation partisans operated freely. At least three of the four American operatives were experienced graduates of the regular U.S. special forces. This means they were well-trained --and as likely as not experienced-- in counter-insurgency and operating behind enemy lines. That they simply decided to take a joy ride through Fallujah is unthinkable. The explanation that best fits what they were doing is that they were CIA or other intelligence officers on a recognizance or operational mission using "security contractor" status as cover. (The case of the captured Italians appears to be similar. Supposedly, they were driving to Jordan through no-man's land in the middle of the night, a "cover" story that doesn't stand the giggle test.) On April 5, the Marines started an attack on Fallujah, but met very strong resistance from a well-led, well-trained partisan force. Even with reinforcements and including "heavier" units, the Marines were unable to make much of a dent in the city's defenses despite ferocious Marine fire that killed hundreds of civilians. At the same time, the U.S. faced simultaneous popular uprisings in a half dozen other major population centers. Both in Fallujah and elsewhere, the U.S. trained Iraqi police and military collapsed and dispersed without resisting the popular uprising. The sole exception that has been named were Kurd forces who have been collaborating with the CIA for more than a decade. Anti-U.S. forces were able to consolidate their control in two cities, Fallujah and Najaf. Unable to defeat the rebels militarily or to accept the high political cost of many thousand Iraqi civilian casualties from continuing to try through direct assault, the marines then laid siege to Fallujah. In Najaf, which lies to the South, the U.S. faced additional complications. This part of the country was under the control of U.S. allies who have no intention of letting their troops go much beyond traffic-cop duty. To fight the insurgents, the U.S. thus had to deploy its own forces to Najaf, and they met a well-coordinated campaign of harassment and sabotage of communications lines, which slowed their progress. The actual siege of Fallujah lasted for about three weeks. The U.S. variously described the situation as a suspension of its offensive military operations or even a cease fire agreement (to which the other side was not a party!), but it was in fact an attempt at a siege, a well recognized offensive military operation. It seems during this siege the U.S. forces also took very significant casualties. How many U.S. troops were involved it is impossible to know -- the number that has been mentioned in one or another dispatch by the better war correspondents is 3,000. CNN reported yesterday that, of the 130 or so combat deaths the U.S. had in April, more than half were in Fallujah. This means at least 70 dead. Assuming the normal wounded-to-killed ratio in Iraq (between 5-to-1 and 7-to-1, depending on whether you include those who supposedly did not die in combat but accidents, etc.), this would mean total casualties in the 400-650 range. Anything close to even the lower figure means that quite likely, a number of platoons and companies were eliminated as effective military units and had to be replaced or reconstituted. The popular insurrections and especially the resistance in Fallujah have broken the back of the specific forms the U.S. had given its political project in Iraq. The multi-party c
[Marxism-Thaxis] FW: [laborpartypraxis] Haiti and Class Struggle, by Connie White and Lil Joe
March 3, 2004 Haiti and Class Struggle by Connie White and Lil Joe The masses of Haitian workers and peasants have not been duped. Certainly not the class conscious workers who are witnessing and analyzing what is being reported about Haiti in the media. "Former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide said Monday he was forced to leave Haiti in a 'coup d'etat' by the United States. 'I was told that to avoid bloodshed I'd better leave,' he said in an interview on CNN. (March 1, 2004, CNN.com - http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/Americas/03/01/aristide.claim) The Associated Press reports that Aristide complained of being forced to leave Haiti, and said that "[A]gents were telling me that if I dont leave they would start shooting and killing in a matter of time." (Eliott C. McLaughlin, Associated Press, March 1, 2004) A coup d'etat is indigenous to the country in which one faction of the State (its government) illegally and unconstitutionally displaces another -- be it a civilian coup d'etat backed by the military officer corps, or by the officer corps itself. In September 1991, there was a coup d'etat in Haiti -- Aristide, who was legally elected to manage the government of the Haitian State, was overthrown. The civilian government in Haiti was displaced by a junta government. As in most coup d'etat's, following the coup d'etat in Haiti in 1991, the bureaucratic- military State structurally remained the same with the same civilian State bureaucracy and military officer corps. Aristide's initial successes in early 1990 and Presidential campaign brought hope to workers and peasants in Haiti. For the first time, they openly entered into the political life of the country -- they started to participate in voting, workers' organizations and associations were organized. The consequence of those workers and peasants engaging in self- organization politicized them in their class interests. This self-organization of the Haitian working class is what frightened the Haitian bourgeoisie and U.S. imperialism, not Aristide the individual. The result was a coup d'etat months after Aristide's initial electoral victory. "On September 30, 1991, when the Haitian military violently overthrew the democratic government. Aristide was forced into exile, and the military unleashed an unprecedented campaign of terror and violence taking the lives of more that 5000 Haitians over the next three years, hundreds of thousands were forced into hiding, and tens of thousands more fled their homeland by boat. (Haiti.org; Profile of H.E. Mr. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, President of the Republic of Haiti, at http://www.haiti.org/aristide-bio.htm) It was not until the junta in Haiti had suppressed the workers and peasants that the Haitian bourgeoisie, and U.S. imperialism, sought to placate Haitian workers and peasants by returning Aristide to power -- three years after the coup d'etat. Even if Aristide wanted to undertake radical economic reform -- which should only mean factory expropriations by the working class, and land expropriations by the peasantry -- he would not have been able to achieve it because the workers' and peasants' organizations had been destroyed by the junta. The junta became self-centered and refused to leave government. Subsequently, the Haitian bourgeoisie and transnational corporations -- represented by U.S. imperialism -- found it necessary to have the U.S. President Bill Clinton deploy American troops to Haiti to force the junta to stand down. Aristide was restored to the Presidency by a U.S. invasion. The Aristide government was now militarily and, thus, politically dependent upon U.S. imperialism. The government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide was reinstated by U.S. troops in 1994 after the coup d'etat. Aristide disbanded the military, assumedly so they could not again accomplish a coup d'etat against him. His "special bodies of armed men" was concretized in the police force. It's interesting to note that recently, in the face of the rebelling Haitian population, the "special bodies of armed men," i.e., the police in Haiti "munitinied" -- this time they refused to kill the armed Haitian population. We ask the question: what is the difference between the quisling government in, let's say, Iraq, and the quisling government in Haiti that was lead by Jean-Bertrand Aristide? The logic being presented today by the so-called "Left" regarding Jean-Bertrand Aristide is inconsistent -- to wit: when the U.S. installs someone it likes, that is good. But, when the U.S. installs someone it does not like, that is evil imperialism. The underlying premise in accepting Clinton's installation of Aristide is to support the U.S. political strategy of installing governments that are friendly to U.S. economic and/or political interests
[Marxism-Thaxis] RE: Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 5, Issue 3
I think that Sartre made very important contributions to phenomenology (Being and Nothing) but more particularly in Critique of Dialectical Reasoning. He, perhaps prior to others, was the first to popularize in Marxism the concept of praxis qua practical-revolutionary activity. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 11:00 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 5, Issue 3 Send Marxism-Thaxis mailing list submissions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can reach the person managing the list at [EMAIL PROTECTED] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Marxism-Thaxis digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Sartre (Chris Burford) -- Message: 1 Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 07:55:34 - From: "Chris Burford" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre To: "Forum for the discussion of theoretical issues raised by Karl Marx andthe thinkers he inspired" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" I need to review a clinical psychiatric book that draws theoretical inspiration from some of Sartre's formulas about subject and object. I am writing to ask for advice on what reservations are there about Sartre's philosophical approach. I feel uneasy about him, despite his left wing claims, and I cannot remember why. I would appreciate comments that are philosophical rather than political for this purpose. Many thanks Chris Burford -- ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis End of Marxism-Thaxis Digest, Vol 5, Issue 3 ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
